Column: 'Blogged Out: Third Party Enhancements, Gold Farming'

In another of today's main features, regular columnist Jim Rossignol presents this week's 'Blogged Out', a news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week, Rossignol investigates weblog posts about the necessity of third-party communication software for competitive online group play in MMOs. In this extract, Rossignol explains how even games with built-in voice communication capability benefit from third-party software: "Battleground Europe, Eve Online, and even games like Battlefield 2, in which voice-comms have already been integrated, all end up benefiting from the array of features provided by Teamspeak. This app allows the management of multiple secure channels, with the option for ‘broadcast’ so that commanders can relay orders to multiple groups and ‘command channels’, so that the leaders of various groups can chat amongst themselves without confusing the majority of players. Perhaps this doesn’t add to the ‘fiction’ of the game, but in experiences which are essentially competitive, this kind of instant, versatile communication has become mandatory." You can now read the full Gamasutra column on the subject, including a look at a very detailed explanation of "gold farming" (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).