Ethics in game design was a hot topic at this year's GDC Online. Free-to-play is, of course, on everyone's mind, and one panel in particular stood in sharp contrast to the steady stream of positivity surrounding the model in most quarters.

The sit-down featured a handful of developers including representatives from Amazon, Bobber Interactive, and Immersyve. "This whole concept of freemium play, in my opinion, is the most radical form of entertainment socialism since Obama got elected," said Bobber's Scott Dodson. "You've got a whole bunch of one-percenters paying for a bunch of freeloaders."

Senior Amazon designer Nik Davidson likened the industry to a gold rush and also poked fun at the supposition that big spenders are acting responsibly. "We like to think that the ones spending vast sums on these games are sons of Dubai oligarchs, but we have the data to prove that they're not, and that they probably can't afford to spend what they're spending," Davidson said. "We're saying our market is suckers -- we're going to cast a net that catches as many mentally ill people as we can!"

Immersyve's Scott Rigby chimed in as well. "What do we call our best customers these days? I'm not sure I'd want to be called a whale by anybody. Sticky is not, generally, a good quality. I think we have this subtle language of control for our customers, and when paired with our ability to collect data, it raises some interesting ethical questions," he said.

Earlier this week, Massively RIFT columnist Karen Bryan expressed frustration over the seemingly inevitable MMO expansion problem: gear resets. We expect new gear along with our new content, but a complete gear reset, she argued, "renders all previous raid content irrelevant." Everything you earned before an expansion may as well never have happened because you can top that gear with a new crop of easymode quests. And the realization that a gear-grind is mostly for naught can have a ripple effect on a game as disillusioned players give up on acquiring it (or bail out of the game completely).

The Daily Grind crew has discussed gear resets in relation to raid progression before, but even games without raiding face this problem. If a game has any kind of scaling gear or levels, then the addition of new content, like an expansion, is bound to generate growing pains. So where do you stand? Are you sick of gear resets, of having to effectively start over at the dawn of every expansion? Or do you see gear resets as a good thing, as a way to bridge the gear divide between players and re-experience what you loved about the game originally?

And since you're going to tell us anyway, here's a bonus question: Which MMOs have successfully avoided this problem and how?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

The boys and girls of Linden Lab are expanding their operation. Rapidly expanding, as it turns out. The Second Life studio announced that it has not one, not two, not three, but four titles scheduled for release in November.

We've already heard about the first, which is the Minecraft-wannabe Patterns, but the others are just now being revealed. The second is the iPad-only (for now) Creatorverse, which allows users to draw shapes, have them interact via physics, and then share them on the cloud. The final two are Dio, a room creator, and Versu, a storytelling toolset.

Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble affirmed that Second Life will remain important to the studio, but it will need to make room for all of the new children coming into the family.

War of the Immortals' newest expansion is only a couple of weeks away from joining forces with the live game, according to Perfect World Entertainment. The expansion, called War of the Immortals: Titan's Fury, now has an October 30th release date.

Titan's Fury's key feature is a pair of instances -- Titan's Temple and the Titan Dungeon -- that will be unlike anything players have seen to date. The expansion also adds new zones, daily events, pets, and gear. There's a little something in it for both solo- and group-oriented players, says Product Manager Thang Phan.

We've got the trailer for Titan's Fury sitting pretty behind the jump, so why don't you go give it a look-see and let us know if you'll be booting this title back up for the latest and greatest?

[Source: Perfect World Entertainment press release]

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As I head to GDC Online for its final hurrah in Austin, I can't help but think about the many panels each year that talk about things like monetization, marketing, and mechanics, and I wonder whether the industry somehow veered off course. Because the developers are speaking to one another, you usually get a much more candid look at what goes on behind the curtain, and lately it reminds me of Jurassic Park.

There's a scene in the film where Ian Malcom questions the rationale behind cloning extinct species of dinosaurs and then building a theme park to make a fortune. As he points out, you spent so much time figuring out whether you could that you didn't stop to think whether you should. In other words, the ethical questions of Jurassic Park weren't addressed until the last boat left the dock and Newman had corrupted the system and was hopelessly lost in the jungle with a shaving cream can of dino DNA.

When it comes to MMOs, there are ethical questions that the industry needs to consider, and some of them are questions that MMO guilds also need to address. In this week's Guild Counsel, we'll look at the ethics of gaming in MMOs, before there's a Jurassic Park catastrophe.

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After recently winning four GDC Online awards earlier this week, BioWare rides the enthusiasm train a bit longer by releasing new content on the public test server today.

Game Update 1.5 introduces us to Section X, a fresh area to explore on the prison world of Belsavis. You can also earn the final pieces of the Dread Guard gear set in the new Operation: Explosive Conflict. And of course, what update wouldn't be complete without the addition of a new buddy? HK-51 is an assassination droid companion available to those who explore the derelict ship wreckage beneath the icy surface of Belsavis.

Take note that character cloning and full support are not available with this update, so BioWare encourages all players to use the Public Test Server forum with any questions or concerns you may have with the new content.

Free-to-play. That single word elicits some strong emotions when uttered in the MMO gaming community, emotions generating declarations of genre fidelity to spurts of vitriol. It's definitely a love/hate hot topic. And according to market trends presented at GDC Online 2012, free-to-play is not going anywhere. Not only has F2P got its foot in the market share's door, but it's kicked that door down and is moving in.

During the presentation, titled Free-to-Play Market Trends and Metrics, Dr. Joost van Dreunen explored the recent market performance of the free-to-play genre and shared predictions about the future. As Managing Director at Superdata Research (a company that specializes in research on entertainment media and consumer technologies), van Dreunen has a wealth of market data at his disposal. He also teaches a course in media theory in games at NYU and will be adding economics for game developers next term. These are his thoughts on the state of free-to-play today and in the future.

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DUST 514 Executive Producer Jonathan Lander is in it for the long haul, as is his team. Lander said that CCP has a five-year roadmap for the upcoming console MMOFPS that includes expansions and enough "crazy ideas" to last for 20 years.

"The whole way that we're doing our development process is so that we can push out expansions on a regular basis," Lander said. "We're not going to ship a unit and then in six months it's off the shelves and people have stopped playing it."

Lander said the team's been working closely with Sony to overcome technical challenges and make sure that it's as stable and accessible as its EVE Online counterpart.

DUST 514 is currently exclusive to Sony's PlayStation 3. Of course, the big unknown is what will happen to that exclusivity if DUST 514 outlives the console's lifespan.

Earlier this year EVE Online players wondered what had become of Nathan Richardsson. The former CCP executive producer (known in internet spaceship circles as CCP Oveur) quietly disappeared after having been a major presence at multiple Fan Fests and in the online community since 2004.

Now we know that Richardsson jumped ship to sign on with Trion, where he is currently serving as both the Vice President of Development and as the Executive Producer on Defiance. "Defiance is the future of entertainment, and the collaboration between Trion and Syfy means you have two powerhouses blazing a trail that will fundamentally change the way both gamers and viewers consume entertainment," Richardsson says of the third-person shooter and its television series tie-in. "It's amazingly ambitious and exactly the kind of immense challenge that I've been looking for."

[Source: Trion press release]

I'm a big fan of e-sports, but League of Legends is currently one of the worst e-sports to garner a major scene. This isn't because the game is bad, though some aspects of LoL's Classic gameplay are bad for e-sports. It is universally because most LoL tournaments are poorly run and organized. A badly run tournament can ruin everything, regardless of how good (or bad) the game being played is.

I would expect more from Riot Games, which creates and publishes League of Legends and which has a vested interest in fostering competition for the game. However, the studio seems to have learned absolutely nothing from very successful e-sports tournaments such as the Evolution Fighting Championships, the GOMTV Star League, and OGN's The Champions. All of these tournaments have better seeding structure and better venues, which contribute to a better overall event.

Why can't Riot learn from these very successful events?

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But the talk actually went beyond the notion of free-to-play and into the larger picture of how SOE is reinventing its games to include more emergent gameplay and take advantage of new trends in media. Read on for a broad look at the past decade of trends in the industry and a glimpse of what the future holds for SOE titles.

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Funcom is a lot of things, but quitter isn't one of them. The company and its flagship The Secret World title have been through the proverbial poostorm in recent weeks, but the devs are doing their damnedest to come out swinging. What in tarnation am I talking about? Joel Bylos' state-of-the-game letter from yesterday, of course.

The newly minted Game Director dumped a wall o' text on us that hinted at a couple of exciting developments in store for everyone's favorite horror/conspiracy MMO. Let's chat them up after the cut.

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When SOE announced that EverQuest's 19th expansion would be titled Rain of Fear, I instantly found myself tripping over the name. I shouldn't have -- it's a few simple words that are first round picks for spelling contests -- but it defied the traditional naming conventions for MMO expansions. Many people I talked to kept wanting to write "reign" instead because "rain" seemed like a deliberate misspelling by some intern in Smedley's empire.

Homophones aside, Rain of Fear is hardly the worst expansion title I've ever seen. The industry has had its share of bad names, from the confusing to the downright unpronounceable. Sure, we get used to these titles, and perhaps it's nit-picky to lug them out at such a late point in many of their lifespans, but petty is my middle name. My first name is Tom. And these are 10 poorly named expansions. Deal with it.

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Wednesday night saw the Game Developers Choice Online awards being handed out to MMO, social, mobile, and free-to-play games. Star Wars: The Old Republic came away with the awards for best online game design, best online visual arts, best online technology, and best new online game. Riot Games won for best live game, the audience award, and best community relations for League of Legends.

Raph Koster was officially recognized with an online game legend award, and World of Warcraft received a hall of fame award. Blizzard also scored with Diablo III, receiving an award for having the best audio for an online game. The award for best social network game went to Draw Something, and thatgamecompany won an online innovation award for Journey.

Massively sent two plucky game journalists -- Beau Hindman and Karen Bryan -- to Austin, Texas, for this year's GDC Online, where they'll be reporting back on MMO trends, community theory, old favorites, and new classics. Stay tuned for even more highlights from the show!

Last week, we announced that we are closing down Massively's forums. What forums, you ask? Yeah, unfortunately, that was exactly the point. The forums were always a bit too adjacent to the site, and in the wake of the success of our newfangled comment system, we'd prefer to focus on publishing articles and engaging readers right here in the comments on the site, rather than on a neglected off-site portal. I'm genuinely sorry, but I hope the few remaining, stalwart forumgoers will migrate over and help make our comments an even more interesting place to be. In return, we'll try to crack down harder on the comment trolls who are hell-bent on killing the buzz. Believe me, they annoy us as much as they annoy you, especially when we're babysitting them on a Friday night.

But this is Ask Massively, the meta column where you ask us weird questions and we give you weird answers. So what else did you wonder about this week?

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Sandboxes get a lot of flak in today's themepark-dominated MMO industry. That said, sandbox developers who do it right will be laughing all the way to bank, according to CCP senior designer Matthew Woodward.

Woodward recently gave a talk at GDC Online titled The Other White Meat: Design Architecture for Sandbox Games. The presentation focused on the three pillars used by the firm to power its long-running EVE Online MMORPG. Woodward stressed social aspects, goals and goal-driven players, and most importantly, emergent gameplay.

"The big win is that emergence is cheap. A lot of emergent gameplay discussion is about the One Big Moment. In EVE, the big heist that happened six years ago, in Ultima Online, the assassination of Lord British," Woodward explained. "If you do this well, people will play your game forever. People will pay for it forever."

Massively sent two plucky game journalists -- Beau Hindman and Karen Bryan -- to Austin, Texas, for this year's GDC Online, where they'll be reporting back on MMO trends, community theory, old favorites, and new classics. Stay tuned for even more highlights from the show!

Age of Wushu's sporting a new trailer at this week's GDC Online convention, and the clip features nearly three minutes' worth of wall-scaling, roof-running, kung-fu-fighting fun. If you can take your eyes off the aerial hijinks for a moment or two, you'll also get a glimpse of AoW's gorgeous environments, which run the gamut from snowy mountainscapes to sunlit gorges and idyllic ancient Chinese villages.

Age of Wushu is a free-to-play sandbox title currently scheduled for a North American release in May of 2013. See the trailer in its entirety after the cut.

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Creative Director Matthew Higby and Senior Art Director Tramell Isaac are back with the sixth episode of PlanetSide 2 Command Center, everyone's favorite show about the adventures of a wacky MMO. On tap for this episode is an update on the beta, the reveal of Esamir, a video featuring the Heavy Assault class, some fan movies, an interview with a concept artist, news about SOE Live, and... fan spam.

Higby says that the team just did a full wipe in the beta due to the sheer amount of changes and improvements that SOE made. He also said that the population cap has been increased for this next step.

Isaac invites SOE Live attendees to participate in the $10,000 PlanetSide 2 tournament. While online registrations for it are closed, players can sign up in person at the event.

Check out episode six after the break!

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Female Xadaganians in Allods Online are in for a treat come patch 3.05. The devs recognized that the characters didn't look up to snuff compared to the other races and genders and thus have devoted some time to giving them (yes) a makeover.

Are we in an '80s romcom montage or what?

The makeover for the women includes a more detailed character model, improved animations, an additional face, and more hairstyles. The team is also tweaking hair models so that locks of hair will now be seen falling from inside of whatever helm that character is wearing.

To promote the Xadaganian makeover, gPotato released a video diary starring actress Nataliya Zemtsova. Zemtsova was used for the motion capture and voiceovers of the new models and is apparently amazed that you can assign a character a name. Check it out after the jump!

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