Author: Ravious

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Run, Run Candy Corn Man

I played a bit of Guild Wars last night to finally ease myself in to the Halloween spirit after shaking the Borderlands dust off my mouse for a night.  The servers are alive with Costume Brawl and mat farming, but there is a new addition to this year’s festivities.  The Guild Wars Live Team created a quest chain depicting changes in the Underworld… where you play as a candy corn humanoid. Continue reading Run, Run Candy Corn Man

Darkness in my Soul

I have seen the Abyss, and it is Pixie Hollow.  My wife told me last night that she and my 3 year old daughter, Claire, were playing together as much as my 6 month old permitted them to.  Claire does not yet have the capabilities to control a mouse (she just likes the scroll-button, scroll buttons, oh yeah, like that heart attack… what), but I have been teaching her to move with WASD and jump off talens in Lord of the Rings Online.  I digress.  Last night I farmed mats for Claire while she slept playing a faerie she randomly named Coconut Rainbowmist.  I am not sure whether this was a triumphant stepstone towards creating a gamer family or something else.  I got points with the wife for actually gaming, which is an activity where I usually cash them in.  Still there is a foreboding presence in my soul that I cannot shake.  Maybe I hit upon some patterned node too complex for my mortal mind to comprehend.  I can’t wait to return to my own niche tonight.

–Ravious
all laid aside disguise but you

Borderlands Bulletpoints

Actually just for Bonedead, it will be a numbered list.  Heretoforth:

  1. It is very much in some large venn-diagram with MMOs, but the face of its father is squarely in an FPS.  It has kill ten rats quests, pick ten flowers quests, and quest chains.
  2. It would be an MMO if persistence was irrelevant.  Up to 4 players can play at any time, but one player owns the persistent world.  All players will still advance their own quests, achievements, etc.
  3. The gun-porn loot pinata is crucial.  The more people playing the better the loot.  Solo players might get bored pretty quickly.  If opening up an MMO loot pinata does not give you some twinge of serotonin, this game might not be for you.
  4. PC users have to deal with opening ports. GAH!
  5. The graphics are great even at low settings.  I’ll take cell-shaded stylized graphics over hyper-realism anyday.
  6. The level disparity is ridiculous.  The game punishes players for going much above their level, but anything below the level gets popped pretty easily.  I’ve also heard that grouping up with a higher leveled friend equals advancement city.
  7. Did I tell you about the magical gun-porn loot pinata that can give you a shotgun that shoots rockets!?
  8. The story is good, in that, there is just more reason to use the brand new guns that dropped out of the vending machines and puke piles to put more bullets in to enemies.  It doesn’t pretend to be any heavier/complex than the actual game is.
  9. The classes are generally good, but some seem a lot slower due to the cooldown on each class’s one skill.  I am sure it is balanced on some level, but it doesn’t feel that way when I have to wait nearly two minutes to use mine every time while my Siren friend pops hers every half-minute.
  10. For Bonedead especially, Nine Toes has three balls.

–Ravious
and that’s why we call it a “zoo”

Ignoring the Approaching Diku Gate

The foreboding Gygaxian DIKU gate is imminently approaching in Lord of the Rings Online.  We are given until December 1, 2009 for the Mines of Moria iteration.  Then, the Siege of Mirkwood power levels are deployed.  Following the usual formula, your hard earned gear is washed away as more powerful boars and spiders resist laugh at your feeble Morian might.  At least on my server, it seems, no one cares.

I just bought a new ring at the sizeable price of 4 gold.  I didn’t need the ring per se, but at a 33% discount from the usual market price it felt like I was making a good decision.  My stats were buffed the usual 2%, and I had another teal to adorn my indigo-hued Captain.  People are still buying my black dye, and my top tier morale potions seem to sell within the hour.  Shouldn’t we all know that within a month all of this will be for naught?

People are still working on radiance gear in the Moria instance cluster, the Watcher and Turtle are weekly runs for many, and generally the heroes fighting the denizens of the deep are unaware of the war-hippies’ plans to attack Southern Mirkwood.  Maybe all at once the cultural focus will shift from advancement to preparation.  Open beta perhaps?  Until then, ignorance is bliss.

–Ravious
a child said, what is grass

Guild Wars Sealed Deck

Last night, ArenaNet launched a pretty hefty update for Guild Wars.  The update prepared for the annual Halloween bash, my favorite annual MMO event, with Costume Brawl, Mad King Thorn and new Halloween-only quests in the Underworld (where it’s rumored players become actual candy servants of the Mad King).  The weightiest heft in the update was by far the removal of Hero Battles and Team Arenas counterbalanced by the addition of the Codex Arena.

The Codex Arena is a 4-player sealed deck arena with 3-simple rules.  First, each profession will only get to use 20 randomly chosen skills each day, 5 of which will be elite.  These random skills will be the same for all players.  Second, players can only use elite skills from their primary profession (a welcome addition, in my opinion).  Finally, the team of four has to have four different primary professions.  No four Warrior/Monk teams allowed.

The Codex Arena I think will be a great addition to Guild Wars PvP.  My one holdback is the “activation energy” to play.  If the skills change every day how much time is going to be spent creating a team versus actually playing?  My hope is that the elite PvP’ers will create some sort of quick and dirty template (likely they already have) where a team makes one melee, one healer, one harasser, and then something else so jobs can be given out to individual teammates.  I still think that new sealed skills every day might be too high of a turnaround, but I am guessing the Guild Wars Live Team is going to keep a close eye on their new baby.  Things like the amount of skills each day and the skill turnover rate should be easy to adjust.  Either way, it looks like it is going to be a great addition to the Guild Wars PvP gametypes.

–Ravious
imperiled in every single battle

The 2% MMO

The one thing I hate in DIKU-style MMOs more than grinding, more than the level cap gear-reset, more than content gating is quite simply bonuses.  I hate bonuses because there is such a delicate balance between the growing player stats and mobs stats up the leveling food chain that the bonuses have to appear to be insignificant.

Take one of the best crafted jewelries in Lord of the Rings Online right now, the glowing aureate band.  It has a bunch of strong stat and morale bumps, along with a stepchild bonus to parry rating.  +124 parry rating is about the equivalent of 0.33% more parry chance.  That means that statistically speaking a player will parry 1 out of every 300 attacks made against him or her.  It seems petty.  Was adding the additional parry rating the item dev’s attempt at a joke? Continue reading The 2% MMO

Dyed-in-the-Wool MMO Health

I like alternative ways to rate things, and it is especially needed for Lord of the Rings Online because Turbine (a privately held company, mind you) does not and will not release subscriber information unless they want to.  My new alternative benchmark for peering behind Turbine’s iron curtain of server populations involves black dye.  Continue reading Dyed-in-the-Wool MMO Health

Bye Bye Bad PvP

Regina at ArenaNet released news that Guild Wars Team Arenas and Hero Battles will be removed this week.  If you want a bit of crappy nostalgia or some quick, ill-gained rewards from the much despised “red resigns” way to play Hero Battles better do it quick.  I say good riddance and bring on the awesome of sealed deck.  At the beginning of the month, ArenaNet said that sealed deck has all of its basic functionality in place but it needs to go through bug fixing/QA and polish.  Hopefully we get a dev diary on the much anticipated feature soon.

–Ravious
the levy was dry

Reverse Ad-Libs

Elder Game is one of my favorite MMO blogs, and each post is worth its weight in gold (especially at about 12 a year).  Eric gave me a morning chuckle hypothesizing the creation of Champions Online’s profanity filter such that the filter started attacking NPC text.  When NPCs are saying stuff like ““put that $#@*^!& a pine box”  what do you think the normal MMO player replaces with the censored text?  I think that would be a fantastic April Fool’s joke for an online game.  Create a “censor bot” that replaces a few words in every NPC’s text with the comically stylized cussing text.  It just sucks, especially in Champions Online’s case (according to Eric), when it is not really a joke.

–Ravious
#$%!!@#%

A DLC Too Far

Borderlands is an online game I am keenly interested in.  Keen enough that I already bought it on Steam for a 10% discount.  In my morning tweets I saw Gearbox write that DLC (“downloadable content”) was already coming for the unreleased game (Borderlands drops 10/26).  Not only was it DLC, it was DLC that players had to buy!  My immediate thought was outrage.  How dare they?  To ask for more money before I even got to play the game I paid for was a slap in the face.  (The last 5-words, in a perfect world, would be written in a self-debasing sarcasm font.)

After looking at the neat DLC pictures of a zombie isle, I had another idea.  Gearbox devs were the good guys here.  They were letting me, the customer know, the specifics of their business plan before people shelled out for the game.  Players that were interested in Borderlands as a service would now have a more concrete understanding of things to come.  MMOs are definitely a service, and so many times we buy the initial offering without having a good understanding of the specifics of the bargain.  How often will we get content updates? How about paid-expansions and their cost?  What exactly does our subscription fee cover? A lot of times it is pure faith in the developer.

Now Gearbox’s DLC has the bonus that it is likely completely optional for Borderlands, but in our DIKU-world, MMO players don’t realistically have that option of choice.  The expansions either raise the level cap, gear cap, or just simply add in new must-haves.  It’s a siren’s song, and stuffing your ears with cotton might mean all your online friends leave you behind.  So it is nice, despite my initial outrage, to have a company show their hand for the customer’s benefit well before they “need” to. 

–Ravious
who’s your favorite Other