I played a large amount Wizard 101, which was recently updated with the Grizzleheim update. Not only is there a new region, which branches the usual leveling path, but there are a whole slew of core mechanics that were just added.
The first, and in my opinion biggest, core improvement is the Bazaar. The Bazaar acts as a trader depot where the NPC will buy just about every item (some have the “No Auction” tag) for gold, and if it has an item in stock it will sell it back. Guild Wars uses this type of NPC-controlled market for materials, for an example of another MMO that uses this mechanic. It is a great system, and much needed in a game where items could not be traded in any way between players on separate accounts.
There are two issues. The issue that I am still on the fence with is in regards to the economic model used to determine buy price and sell price. The system is built so that the NPC gets a huge turnaround profit so as to get rid of gold stockpiles, but that is not the thing that concerns me. The Bazaar window has a numerical counter that shows how many of a particular item are in stock. This counter caps at 100, and I am not sure what that means. Will price be more severely affected as things are sold when the Bazaar already has 100 of them in stock? Or, is it merely a faux consumer gauge? The counter ending at 100 items in stock seems awfully low in a game where there are over 1,000,000 registered users.
Continue reading ‘On the W101 Update’
I am still happily playing the ultra-casual Wizard 101 MMO as my mainstay. I wanted to follow-up from my earlier thoughts. Currently my level 20 Storm wizard is right in the middle of the Kroktopia setting. I think I have spent about $20 on crowns, using them just to buy the content zones. The difficulty in gameplay increased somewhat as now I am fighting two creatures per battle. I do actually have to time some pulls so that I can fight one mob for a few turns before the other comes to join it. The battles are still quite fun, but mostly soloing, I do have to be more careful of my tactics.
All the benefits of my earlier post are still shining strongly, but by far the best is the “public quest”-like nature of the entire game. I have become extremely accepting of hopping in to others’ battles and them hopping in to mine. It’s such a nice change from “it’s mine, I tagged it”-style gameplay. Granted there are some downsides like the possibility of a player joining, adding mobs, and then running away. However, I have not experienced any form of griefing yet. I do hope that future “AAA” MMOs have a similar shared experience with questing and mob killing… all the time. The sense of a shared goal, even when soloing, is empowering. No longer am I looking at other players with a Gollum-like sneer hoping they don’t ask me to help with their quest I have finished ages ago.
Another thing that really surprises me is my newfound love for barbie-dolling my home. My wife thinks this is absolutely hilarious. But, I am a boss farming maniac just to get an eyeball in a jar or a cyclops statue. Right now I have been saving like Scrooge in order to get the big Kroktopia home. I haven’t played the test server, and I am unsure as to whether the new Bazaar will allow market trade of home items. If anyone knows, I would like your thoughts on the Bazaar.
I did have one big problem. I did not understand how to use treasure cards or discards. I do now, and my A-game has skyrocketed. Before that there were plenty of matches where my hand was horribly skewed to cards I did not need, and unbeknownst to me, I could have discarded the whole lot. I think KingsIsle should consider putting in a short quest to teach these two pretty critical mechanics. Maybe I just completely missed the teacher popup tell me what to do. I have seen from the forums that players were having trouble figuring out how to trash some treasure cards they didn’t want.
Anyway, I think I have figured out most the mechanics (except initiative), and I am fairly certain that this is going to remain my main MMO through the hot summer nights.
–Ravious
there, your body matches your brain
Time for a lore lesson. Guild Wars 2 occurs 250 years beyond the happenings in Guild Wars 1. In between this time, a lot will undoubtedly happen in Tyria (and beyond). I would guess that we will learn a lot of the changes in-game. ArenaNet likes to leave a lot of crumbs so lore-happy fans can piece together things like civilizations, cultures, metaphysics, history, etc. They are also releasing three novels via a deal with Pocket Books that will give vignettes of the changes that occurred across a quarter millennium. Continue reading ‘Guild Wars Book Titles’
I am not sure what I think about this. 38 Studios has a dream team of creative minds. R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane alone could create an Arcadia beyond most mere mortal’s dreams. Add in all their concept artists, game designers, and even coders (they have imaginations too!), and of course a great world is going to be created.
That being said, I feel like a bipolarized consumer of intellectual property (”IP”) when it comes to MMOs and offspring media. Continue reading ‘IP Onslaught’
Describing Aion as “WoW with wings” caused one commenter to conduct a whole review and ranking system comparing, in his opinion, which MMO was most similar to Aion. As was to be expected, it was differentiated from World of Warcraft at every possible instance. Comparing an new MMO to World of Warcraft is a pretty common occurrence throughout the MMO blogosphere and game forums. It is damn near the MMO locus. Yet, there is much to differentiate even Runes of Magic ffrom World of Warcraft. So what does WoW-like mean? Continue reading ‘Like WoW’
An MMO for what ails me.
I have been quiet lately, partly because MMOs were on the downside of the cycle and partly because I am holding a baby during my “free time.” Games like Peggle and Nitrome’s Ice Breaker held reign. Until, I decided to re-try Wizard 101.
My initial foray in to Wizard 101 was as a tourist. I was already having a blast in Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars, and Wizard 101 was, at the time, just a weekend getaway. I liked what I saw, and I really wanted to support their “crowns” business model, which lets players buy zones of content for $1-3/each forever. However, it was not up to par with gameplay with the more complex MMOs I was already playing.
Now, it is the MMO I play. All the little things that Kings Isle has done to make it casual are all things that I need for MMOs right now. Continue reading ‘W101 Brew’
ArenaNet’s Community Managers have been very busy as of late (well always, but this is business we can see). Their two big pushes this late Spring have been with the alternative gaming communities: Twitter and Facebook. ArenaNet has had accounts there for quite some time, but the push has been trying to make them very active. The Community Managers are hoping for 1000 fans on Facebook (as of writing this it is at 894). Continue reading ‘Facebook ArenaNet’
Players take breaks from MMOs. Some are short, and there is no reason to stop subscribing or to uninstall. Others are more on the sabbatical nature. The latter is usually accompanied by some sort of burnout, boredom, or other negative feeling resulting in a far longer break than the usual refresh.
There are reasons to return, and the biggest are usually the game changing, world-expanding expansions. But, I don’t want to talk about those because their very nature is set to get players to return. I want to talk about the free content updates and maintenance updates. Continue reading ‘Reason to Return’
With my time returning to World of Warcraft, I have come to the same conclusion, independently, that much of the blogosphere seems to already know: the thing that will kill World of Warcraft is World of Warcraft. Their hubris will be their downfall. This will be, unfortunately and as hopelessly optimistic as I was in starting this, my last degree of WoW.
My biggest worry when re-entering World of Warcraft after having not played it for three years was the feeling of playing catch up the entire time. I am a very casual player. I like to get in grind mode occasionally for loot or leveling, but I also like to explore both areas and quests. I had plenty to explore in World of Warcraft. However, I would be exploring mostly alone. I saw people here and there on both my blood elf in the blood elf starting zone and death knight in the outlands, but it was almost awkward. It was as if we did not really expect to see each other there, and secretly did not want to. It felt kind of like meeting an old high school buddy at the mall.
On global chat and guild chat, I continually saw the nightly events for some raid (mostly max-level Ulduar), but I never saw anything for Outlands. I tried to get a group for “ramps,” some early dungeon in the Outlands. After 15 minutes on a Friday night, I managed to get one other death knight in my party. I could not take this type of gameplay any longer. It actually destroyed my will to play MMOs for a weekend.
This is how WoW will eat itself. Players just starting or returning and 20 levels behind will hit a lonely cliff face. At the top they will hear something of a party, but the climb is long. This is not something a developer should want. If anything a returning player should be surrounded with activity. Continue reading ‘WoW will eat itself’
This is relevant to my interests. I liked Dungeons and Dragons Online enough, but like so many other MMOs, it was just not worth the subscription to me. Now Turbine is offering a new business model that seems to borrow a lot from Wizards101, which is a fantastic thing. My favorite business model is by far the “buy content packs” that Guild Wars, Wizards101, and lifetime Lord of the Rings Online players have. It seems that Turbine will offer “convenience items” as well, but they are quick to premptively reply that the best items come from playing. I am not as happy about “convenience items,” but I see it as a necessary evil when converting a subscription-based game in to a “buy content packs” type of game. Can’t stop progress.
–Ravious
j’ai creusé la terre, j’ai découpé la lune