Suzina

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Need before Greed

Today I joined a pickup group for the Forges with my Runekeeper. It was a pretty good group. We all kept re-doing the instance so that each person in the group could get the desired item at the end. Most of the time, the person who just won the roll says “thanks for the group” and leaves. So I felt pretty good about the group.

One of our members was a Lore-master who would always switch to their level 48 Captain for the last chest. They had asked if this was OK before starting, and our leader had told him it was fine. It was on our fourth run that a second age Captain’s weapon dropped. The leader of the group gave it to the level 60 Captain in the group without putting it up for a roll.

He said, “I think you’ll agree that this should go to the other Captain, because you can’t use it yet.”

I could hardly believe my eyes. The whole point of our Lore-master attending was so that he could bring his level 48 into the group and roll for the equipment. He was getting his equipment ahead of time so that he’d already have good gear when he reached a higher level. The level 48 Captain just said that he couldn’t argue with a group leader, and left the group. Then he logged off.

Continue reading Need before Greed

Gated communities

People complain a lot about the “gear gating” in Lotro. If you want to fight the new boss, you have to get the gear from the previous raids. We just want to experience the content, even if we can’t beat it with a PUG group.

When I think of it, isn’t almost everything in an MMO gated in one way or another? You can’t do everything in the game right from the get-go. If you want to fight that boss at all, you’re going to need to level up. If you want to get access to the zone he’s in, you’re going to have to do the last quest in a chain of quests that grant access to Moria. If you want to do that quest, you have to do all the pre-quests.

MMOs are all about gated content. You can’t meet Boba Fett until you do all the pre-quests. You can’t try the Battle of Lothlorien until you’ve earned enough reputation points. You can’t wear the cool armor until you get the drop. You can’t fly the cool ship until you save up the cash. You can’t summon the cool monsters until you do the quests to get them, and that’s only after you do the quests to become a summoner and all the leveling needed to start the quests. You can’t ride a chocobo, a horse, or a boat unless you’ve done the quests and have the needed level.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t completely hate gating. It’s necessary in a way. If I play Mega Man, I expect that I’m going to have to beat cut-man if I want to gear-up to kill made-entirely-of-paper man. And I know I need to beat every level and every mini-boss before I kill the last boss. But those are solo challenges.

I’m not expected to wait for a group of other mega men and women so that we can take down cutman. When the boss dies in Mega-man, I’m not typing /roll hoping that I get to be the one who wins the gun I need to fight the next boss. And the length of the levels doesn’t exceed an hour.

Gating of some kind is good. I like that story quest 1 leads to story quest 2. But gear gating with rare-drops, long instances, stupidly difficult bosses, or horrible grinds isn’t fun. It’s frustrating.

Race at my own pace

In Lotro I now have two max level characters. This is good. One would think this would give me more flexibility when looking to fill an open slot for the new raid. But it doesn’t.

I still don’t have the last two pieces of radiance gear I need to enter the new raid. The entire time I was leveling up my Runekeeper, I kept an eye on the global LFF channel to see if there were any groups forming for the pieces I needed. When you think of it, it’s rather ridiculous to think that it’s far easier to max out a new character than it is to get the tier-1 raiding gear. The EU servers went down tonight for the new raids, and I’m afraid that neither of my max level characters can enter the new raid.

I don’t mind the idea of doing some requirements first before getting into the new content, but those requirements shouldn’t be such a major pain to accomplish. I can’t say for sure, as I haven’t experienced the book 8 raid, but I doubt that every boss in there is tougher than the hard-mode challenge faced at the end of Dark Delving or 16th Hall. If only I had obtained my radiance gear before they fixed the exploits like everyone else!

I’m not alone, of course. All my friends who came over from Star Wars Galaxies don’t have the necessary armor either. We came much too late for the Rift, and just a little too late to get the gear we needed to see the Watcher and Book 8. If they were all 60, we could probably make our way through the radiance gear instances without exploiting them. They’re great players, and we conquered the SWG content together.

I’m now faced with a choice. Either I can try to catch up with the new content or I can wait for my friends to catch up with me.

Enjoy the Maze

A behavioral scientist is a type of psychologist who spends a lot of time putting rats through mazes. Sometimes it’s a big maze, sometimes it’s a very small and simple maze. The one thing they all have in common is the cheese at the end.

The rats behave consistently. They move through the maze as fast as they can to get to the cheese. That’s just natural reward seeking behavior. Every rat we test is always going to get to the cheese as fast as they can. At no point do the rats ever slow down and just enjoy the maze.

Yet, our MMOs keep asking us to enjoy our maze. In the case of Lotro’s summer-festival maze, they mean it literally. But I wouldn’t be going through that maze were it not for the reward. I could get a new wall-paper for my house or a new fish-slap emote!

Our video game masters don’t want us reaching the end of the maze and getting full too quickly… so they ask us to slow down. We don’t. So they make the maze longer. They tilt the maze so that we’re struggling to go uphill to get to our cheese. Bastards! Why couldn’t they just make our maze more complicated and puzzle-driven? Then at least I’d feel smart when I beat the other rats there. Feeling smart is an especially nice little piece of cheese.

Really, if they wanted me to slow down, all they have to do is drop little bits of cheese all throughout the maze. Then I’d actually have something to stop and enjoy.

The Old Republic: Space and Voice

In a recent interview, the developers over at Bioware mentioned that any good star wars mmo would have a “space experience”.

Threads on the SWTOR boards declared, “Spare confirmed!” and people there are discussing possible ship-types and asking each other whether characters should have abilities that affect their ship or whether space-combat should be fully twitch-based. Of course… those questions assume that space combat will be mainly twitch-based and that there will be combat in space to begin with.

In their single player KOTOR games, the “space experience” amounted to having all your companions stored on a space and the occasional turret-based minigame. The closest you came to piloting your ship was when you selected a destination from a menu. Is there any reason to believe this isn’t the kind of space experience the developers are talking about?

The same interview promises that every line of NPC dialog will be voice acted. This is great news, but there’s no reason to believe they will implement it differently than they did in KOTOR. In Kotor, much the dialog was spoken by species other than humans. Most of the time, this amounted to a Wookie npc speaking in the same recycled track of “rarr, Rarr, rarr” over and over with subtitles. The gibberish sounds were so familiar that when you saw a Twi’lek speak something other than Twi’lek, you sat up and said, “This quest must be important!”

Is there any reason to believe we’ll meet a Hutt in SWTOR who speaks something other than Huttese? I imagine the important NPCs are likley to speak in common, and all the rest will speak the same gibberish lines. It’s just too much of a financial investment for them to make all voice dialog unique.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for SWTOR. Like everyone else on the SWTOR boards, I can be caught day-dreaming about the possibilities of what the perfect MMO might be. But at a certain point, we have to stop asking whether it will just be “be Everquest in space”, and start asking “Will it be KOTOR with friends?”

Exar Kun vs 16th Hall

I’ve been jumping into every group for the 16th Hall that I could get. I still need the token from there. This is the instance I talked about screwing up earlier. The one where my pet killed a small bug and I wasted hours of people’s lives. Well, since that time I’ve become much better as a player. I’ve spent so many hours trying to clear this damn instance that I know it like the back of my hand.

I felt so overwhelmed the first time. Now I know not just my own role, but what everyone else should be doing as well. Tonight was the second night in the row of attempting the 16th hall. We got to the end, and this time, our guardian was lack-luster. He was anonymous, which I immediately take to mean, “Don’t look at me, my equipment sucks”. Sure enough, his equipment and traits sucked. Every time we went into the boss fight, he was dead within 30 seconds and I ended up tanking the boss every time we went in. In my head a voice was nagging, “I wear light armor, I’m a lore-master, I shouldn’t be tanking this boss every time.”

It reminds me of Exar Kun in Star Wars Galaxies. Yes, the Exar Kun instance. It’s the toughest instance in the game. I knew every strategy in every room in that place. But I needed tanks who could do their job, and commandos who could run the elements successfully. One day, in the last room of Exar Kun, there was this commando guy and I needed him to tank something

When the fight started, the commando was nowhere near his assigned position. So where did the boss he was supposed to be tanking go? To me, the medic. This left me doing several people’s jobs at once. With each of the four bosses, I was involved in some way. I was attacking the Promised with everything I had, while ping-pong tanking both the Lingering and the Embraced. And while all of this was going on, I was hovering my mouse over the Unquenchable every 3 seconds to see which element that boss was vulnerable to and calling it out over voice chat. All of this I was doing while spamming my group-heals.

Again, a voice in my head was saying, “I’m the medic… I shouldn’t be tanking anything. I shouldn’t have to call the elements for the person who’s job it is to run them.”

I can learn an instance well, given enough times in it. But you know what? I’m only going to see an instance that many times if it’s incredibly difficult to get together a team capable of doing it successfully. It’s the same in 16th hall. Our hunter was fantastic. Our minstrel was great. And I like to think that I performed admirably. But that’s only half a team. So we were destined to fail. Three hours down the drain.

The funny thing is… the more I compare this to Exar Kun, the better I feel about it. I have fond memories of the journey from being one of the people who sucked at instances to one of the most popular group leaders on our server. When I think of it like that, the idea of dying in this instance over and over doesn’t feel so bad. Eventually, we found the people we needed to do a competent job, befriended them, and got them into the instances.

When our failed run had ended and the group broke up, our minstrel sent me a tell. He wanted to know if he could add me and my alts to his friend’s list so that he could call on me for future runs….

Ahh…. good times.

Hostile Takeover

Another person from my SWG guild has joined us in Lotro. Although not all have actually continued playing, that’s the 6th person from our old guild to follow us over. Each of these people have been admitted to our current kinship. In the kinship’s teamspeak server, we often out-number the original crew. It’s beginning to feel like we are slowly taking over the guild we joined.

It’s not that any of us are officers… we don’t get to decide rules or anything. But the topics of conversation and the mood of the kinship is influenced by the conversations we have with each other. For the veteran players, the game is stale, old, and far too much of a grind. For us the game is complicated, new and exciting. We’ve actually contemplated creating our own separate kinship. In fact, we did. But we only put our alts in it for now. It’s something to fall back on if our current kinship doesn’t work out.

Even if we are not officially a separate kinship, we clearly act like one. We group with each other and help each other out. We talk to each other about old times and send each other crafted goods. We are all so close-knit. We started playing this game at the same time, and we started playing our last MMO together at roughly the same time. By contrast, most of the other people in the kinship started playing Lotro two years ago.

Will we ever feel this closeness to the veteran players of our kinship? I don’t know… but I honestly doubt it.

Out-dated content

Today my husband and I joined a guild mate in an instance called Carn Dum. This used to be the place to go, before they raised the level cap. We joined a few hours after they started and stayed for two or three bosses over the course of two hours. Earlier in the week, we joined a kinship group of level 60’s who were going through the rift for the heck of it. Like Carn-Dum, it was once the thing to do… but now the glorious rift-armor is out-dated. A week before that, I went through Helegrod in a 24-person loremaster raid. Yes, it was a raid of pure loremasters just for the heck of it.

It’s mind boggling to think of how much content Lotro has which is now out-dated and pointless. I’m looking forward to them raising the level cap so that I can play something other than the same-old instances… but I also know that such an action will immediately make all the rare rewards I’m working towards a full 10 levels below the quest-rewards of the new content.

Why couldn’t the instances and their rewards level with me? I’d love to see the Rift and Carn-Dum balanced for level 60s. And it’d be nice if the rewards from the rift could be traded in for something more appropriate for level 60s. It doesn’t have to be the best armor in the game… go ahead and let the new content have that. But god, I get tired of the same old instances and I hate to think that new stuff will always out-date old stuff.

SWTOR – Guessing at release dates

I love guessing games, and that’s what keeps me thinking about SWTOR (Prounced Sweator according to Yivvits and Mr Bubble). This time I’m guessing at the targeted release date. Developers like to say a game will come out “when it’s done”. After all, that’s what Blizzard says and look how well it worked for them! But I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t have a particular quarter or holiday season targeted at this point. So when is it? Their site updates hold the clues.

You know Bioware has it all planned out. Their online comic book, their revealing of classes, their revealing of planets, and their updates are all ticking down to release time.

Nal Hutta was announced the 2nd Friday in February. Bounty Hunter was announced the 3rd Friday in March. Ord Mantel was announced second Friday in April. Then Trooper was announced the second Friday in May. It alternates between a planet and a class each month.

This is why Smuggler hasn’t been announced officially even though it’s been unofficially announced as a class. We just had trooper announced last month, and they prefer to alternate between planets and class announcements. If anything, with such a fantastic E3 trailer, they could stand to skip this months’ announcement and let people continue to talk about it’s awesomeness till July.

So lets assume they continue to alternate between the remaining 6 classes in their announcement schedule… That gives them 12 months to reveal 6 classes and brings us to E3 2010. At this point, with all classes and planets revealed, it’s time for a playable demo and an announcement of a release date. At this point the team makes a decision, “Can we get this out in time for Christmas?” If things are going well, and the answer is yes, then the closed beta begins to prepare for it’s debut on shelves the day after Thanksgiving: the last Friday of November.

Separate Games in Games

If you’ve played SWG, you know space and ground are separate. There’s a divide there. When you earn space-xp, it doesn’t help you very much on the ground and vise-versa. In Lotro it’s the same story for creep play and freep play. Nothing you do with your elf feels like it has anything to do with your orc.

When I think about all the different kinds of xp to work on in games, such as crafting xp, entertainer xp, and faction/reputation points, I think there’s a similar feeling of separation. It’s like having a large number of games and mini-games smashed into one big game.

On the other hand you could have a world like EVE. In EVE there is no xp per se, just Isk (Money). Whatever you’re working on, you’re working on Isk. Could you imagine if all the fantasy MMOs and Sci-Fi MMOs out there only had the gathering of cash as the sole form of advancement?

Having a lot of different kinds of xp or different games to play in one MMO makes for a lot of variety. On the one hand, doing vastly different activities to advance different things makes for a lot of variety. Sometimes you can be working on two or three things at once (XP / Cash / Quest rewards) and it feels extremely satisfying. On the other hand, if you get really excited about something like PVP or Space-xp, it feels like that’s the only thing that’s in the game. Everything else is just a diversion with rewards that don’t influence your “real” game.