Author: Ravious

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Happy State of Grind

Last weekend I dug away at a repeatable quest for Guild Wars Wintersday Redux, which ends this weekend with a finale for those having hat problems during Wintersday 2009.  The quest is a fun one called Snowball Dominance, where the denizens of the Eye of the North go outside for a massive snowball fight.  Players can bring one other person along.  The quest can be a bit challenging for casual players that stroll in to the chaos, but with a few “exploits,” like waiting for the scrum to finish by standing outside of agro range on the left side then mopping up the remaining mobs, it becomes manageable.

Of course for farmers there is a different tactic.  Take a necromancer Hero, and run it into the middle of the enemy group before they turn red.  Pop Holiday Blues (AoE well degen), Snow Fort (temporary invincibility), and Snowcone (heal) to ball up the mobs.  The mobs waste their good skills on the sacrifice, and players and the AI allies can easily take out the clumped up enemies.  The rewards are very good for something that can be run in under 2 minutes. Continue reading Happy State of Grind

Persistence Addict

Hello, my name is Ravious, and I am a persistence addict.  I try and play other games.  The one’s sitting solely on my hard drive.  The ones with no boundaries.  They are great games that I ignore.  But, to me, they are meaningless trifles when I can etch my accomplishments into a monolithic server farm one dead rat at a time.

The latest to fall was King’s Bounty: Armored Princess.  It was a truly excellent game for the hour or so I played. It was also pretty much free.  I know that I will enjoy it more if I play it more, but its pleasure is passing.  Any lonely accomplishment I will gain will be between, myself, and my Steam wall.  The game already lets me cheat by giving me a dragon anyway. Continue reading Persistence Addict

LOTRO Volume 3 – First Motes

The first official tidbits on the upcoming Volume 3 for Lord of the Rings Online was released yesterday.  Volume 3 is named Allies of the King, with Book I: Oath of the Rangers, and it hints at the martial mobilization of zones we know and love.  There are going to be some crafting updates.  Complete solo-ization of Volume 1, and some updates to a few current skirmishes we have, making them raidable.

The best part is a new skirmish, which will be part of Vol. 3, Bk. 1 called the Depths of Nurz Ghashu, which takes place in the Rift that many loved during pre-Mines of Moria times.  Unfortunately I picked up Lord of the Rings Online only a few months before Mines of Moria was launched, and I never made it to the Rift.  (Though I did make it to Helegrod – the 24-man raid - amazingly enough.)

It does not seem like we will be getting a new zone, like Dunland, this time around.  The start of Volume 3 uses a lot of old content, which is not a bad thing.  Recycling old content just requires a balance between the old and new.  Developers will want to polish the great memories, discard the yucky ones, and then add a touch of new.  A new drop would suffice, or new mechanics as the case is for the new skirmish in an old dungeon instance.

The best part is that Turbine can escape the timeless existence of their old content.  We already see this in a snowy Bree ransacked by villainous curs in the two Bree skirmishes, but this is a future story.  I want to see my effects have consequences.  Let’s pretend I did kill Thaurlach the Balrog in the Rift.  The best I could hope for was some quest text thanking me and suggesting that the threat is now lessened and the Rift is in disarray.  Now, Turbine has a chance to show me what happened after that brave group of 12 assaulted the Rift. (Also maybe give another way to give Eldgang rep. Hint. Hint.)

–Ravious
we have to go back, kate

Five Bars to Mordor

Sammath Gul is the new 6-man dungeon in Lord of the Rings Online Siege of Mirkwood.  Overall, its a well designed dungeon.  The main mechanic deals with the dreaded bone piles.  If a player steps in a bone pile placed all around the dungeon, a couple mobs pop out.  They are easy enough to deal with even if a couple piles are disturbed, but when players are already embattled with the trash mobs things can start to get tough.  The third (final) boss is Gorothul, the sorcerer of Mordor that shook things up in Moria.  The fight takes place in front of enormous glass windows where two Nazgul on felbeasts watch the fight.  And, there are bone piles.

The fight begins with one of my now favorite boss cinematics.  Gorothul basically phones home to big-daddy Sauron, and has a brief discussion about the players’ fates.  The Lidless Eye appears, giving players immense dread, and Gorothul, you know, casually mentions that some Free Peoples are standing in front of him.  I have to say that I was very impressed with the voice acting and dialogue in what could have been a very cheesy setup.  Of course, Sauron commands Gorothul to end the players, and Gorothul responds with a resolved ‘as you wish.’  The fight begins but for the first 30 seconds or so the dread from having Sauron’s eye on the players has to wear off.

I have to say that I have been thoroughly impressed with all the cinematics in Siege of Mirkwood.  The flow of each scene and the emotions presented are usually spot on.  The one mechanic I am getting sick of, though, is the use of the cut-scene stun(especially in the prisoner trade scene).  It’s very anti-heroic when the Enemy has a win-button.  It’s even worse when a silly dwarf breaks the fourth wall and asks what “trickery” the cut-scene stun is.  I’d prefer that either they take camera control away (like Turbine did in the last book of Volume 1) or just freeze my character.  I understand that important things are happening, and I can deal with the loss of character control for that scene.  It’d be much better than my heroic character swaying in the wind like a drunk hobbit that just ate three fermented cherry pies.

–Ravious
the feeling’s irresistible and that’s how we movin’

A Lesser Evil

Answer this question right now, which is worse – gold farmers or cheaters?  They might belong to the same coin of the disease that hurts our favorite MMOs, but they attack it from wholly different sides.  The answer, for me, is not self-evident.  Sure, if I were the Ultra Decision Maker with infinite resources I would press my magic button and both problems would be dealt with by my happy MIT graduate programmers.  But, developers don’t live in that world.  They live in a world where the target is always moving, always trying to outsmart, and there is never enough time to line up the scope for a perfect kill.  So which is worse when you have the development time for one bullet?

Continue reading A Lesser Evil

Baptismal Learning Curve

Via Chocobo at RPG.net:

Funny story that predates LFD: When I first did Old Kingdom, as a healer, the tank asked if we all knew the fight. I said, “No, what should I know?” He said, “You’ll find out when it happens,” then he charged in.

Reminds me of a TV Trope… like Wanted where its The Only Way They Will Learn.  Hopefully Chocobo also shot the wings off of flies.

–Ravious
Welcome… to the Fraternity

Love Thy CM

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day!  Thank you to all of the CM’s that we hound mercilessly.  I do not envy your job of having to walk the line between the screaming yang of your fans and the cutthroat yin of your bosses and marketing, but you do it day in and day out.  Thank you for supporting us gamers, and being our advocate when we need it most even though we don’t see most of the work you do.  Thank you for being our friends when you could easily wall us out for non-gaming related activities.  Thank you for sticking with us through our worst when our rabid bile gets caught in our throats and you hold our hair while we grace the porcelain seat with o… well you get the idea.  Thank you, community managers.

–Ravious
two score and five we came alive

Three Guild Wars Things

Mondes Persistants was able to interview the Guild Wars Live Team, and there are some pretty interesting answers (HT: Fril Estelin @ Guild Wars Guru) .  The most interesting answer to a pretty common question regarding future content additions / events was:

Yes, we have a lot of ideas on our minds, probably more than we will be able to implement. We love the game and always try to come up with new things we hope players will enjoy. Who knows, maybe players will bear witness to some of the cataclysmic events that transform Tyria prior to Guild Wars 2?

ArenaNet keeps mildly hinting at using Guild Wars as a platform to introduce some Guild Wars 2 lore, but that is an overly candid response to an easily shunted question.  We know that skill balance is a top priority, but we haven’t heard anything about upcoming features or content. Hopefully after the dust from the skill balances clears, the Live Team can preview what else they are working on.

The second is that the popular Guild Wars fansite Guild Wars Guru was hacked, and the hacker was able to obtain some personal information.  Read about it here, but the bottom line is to change your passwords to Guild Wars Guru and Guild Wars 2 Guru (and Auction Site).  I would also watch any other sites / games where you combo your email, username, and/or current Guru password.

The third is I have to say with one of my last controversial posts on Guild Wars, I had the weirdest pingback ever.  We are breaking grounds with the MMO genre people! (And go River Rats!)

–Ravious
remember two things

Guild Wars Holy Trinity

The holy trinity is well known.  The DPS fight the mobs with damage.  The Healer fights the damage from the mobs.  And, the Tank fights the agro from the DPS and Healer.  In World of Warcraft the formula is pretty well set for easy gameplay.  Lord of the Rings gets a bit hazier with their use of hybrid classes, range tanking, and tank swapping, but for the most part it follows the doctrine of the holy trinity.

Guild Wars came very close to shirking the entire thing.  Agro does not really exist like it does in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online.  Each battle with PvE mobs is reminiscent of a PvP battle.  Players have 8 bodies against the team of enemies to kill.  Because PvE can feel so much like PvP (especially in comparison to the stark contrast of PvE/PvP in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online), ArenaNet moved away from the holy trinity to a more enlightened trinity: the three lines.

Continue reading Guild Wars Holy Trinity

YAMMOB

A new MMO blog is up and running over at GameMonkey.  I know the writer personally (as personal as we get in our internet ways), and as the writer is a gamer and developer, the articles will have an unabashedly clear viewpoint from which to criticize and comment.  There should be some very good, possibly controversial posts on our favorite game genre.

–Ravious
but first take care of head