Author: Suzina

Suzina is a 27 year old who usally plays the same MMOs as her husband. Games played: UO, EQ2, FFXI, SWG, LOTRO.
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Group Size

Star Wars Galaxies started out with a 20 person group as the default. Early on, this could mean a group of 20 people running around on a planet ganking alien beasts that would take several minutes to solo. Sometimes, this meant gathering outside a place with tough-mobs like Fort-Tusken and killing everything that came out of there. There were even multiple 20-person groups there sometimes. This made you feel like a small part of an army. But you know what? You felt powerful because the group is powerful. You were a very small part of a very powerful force.

Five years later, Jedi’s had a boss unique to them and them alone. In order to obtain the best cloak in the game, each Jedi was forced to face two bosses solo. Anyone could stand and watch the Jedi fight these bosses, but no one could help. Unless a player read strategies ahead of time, they would fail both fights. Even when someone knew of strategies that worked for fighting these bosses, it was still a difficult set of fights. Complaints from players on the forums about the absurd difficulty of the fights only served to make the eventual victory more sweet. You felt powerful because you knew you had become skilled as a player.

Feeling skilled and feeling powerful. Can these two feelings exist in the same combat scenario? To me it seems they are at odds. The larger the group becomes, the greater the diffusion of responsibility a player feels. Too big a group, with a role shared by too many others in the group (like DPS in a raid) and I feel as though I don’t matter at all.

The Old Republic Classes

Ever since the announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic, there has been a lot of speculation as to what classes would be included. So far the Republic Trooper and Sith-serving Bounty Hunter classes have been officially announced. Republic Smugglers, Jedi, and Sith have not received an official announcement, but are known to be part of the line up. That leaves three classes not accounted for.

Opposite the Smuggler, I would not be surprised to see a spy, criminal or scoundrel. This is because I see the Smuggler as being either a utility-class with special abilities other than DPS, tanking and healing, or else the smuggler could be a stealth-based DPS class. Something along the lines of a spy would make sense from a balance point of view.

But that still leaves two open slots: One who works for the Republic and one who works for the Sith. To round out the holy tanking/DPS/healing trinity, the final classes would have to be some kind of healer. But who’s to say that SWTOR is going to include a dedicated healing class? With the addition of NPC companions following you around, it could be the case that each character has their own personal healer that they have to level up and depend on. That would free up the two slots to allow SWTOR to have players play something more iconic than a role normally filled by droids in the movies.

If that’s the case, what iconic professions are left? Mandalorian? Officer? Droid? Senator? Moisture farmer? Lets be honest, there isn’t any obvious choice.

But then, perhaps my count is wrong. Perhaps I’m wrong to assume there will be only one force-sensitive Jedi class and one force-sensitive Sith class. People are expecting 3 sub-classes for Jedi and 3 sub-classes for Sith, but that hasn’t been confirmed. For all we know, there may be no sub-classes. We may see each side have a Jedi-healer and a Jedi-warrior

Maybe that’s why they have yet to officially announce the 2 most obvious class selection options… because it’s actually 4 classes.

Lotro Dev chat for June

As I type this, I’m currently sitting in a chat room for the Lotro developer chat for June 3rd.  The last dev chat was pretty flat with hardly any new info.  Questions were along the lines of, “What’s it like to work on the set?”  and “Where do you get inspiration for art?”  You know… fluff.

So far, questions in this chat seem to be more specific.  Questions seem to focus on the Legendary Item system and the radiance requirements of the new raid.  My question was “Any possibility to have a quest (like the rift) to switch a legacy on a Legendary Item?”  My question was quickly typed and kinda crappyily written, because I was litterally fighting with a group in a quest called Defending Dori while typing it.  I had already said I’d do the quest, yet wanted to participate in the chat, so I decided to multi-task!   … Yes… I’m even so much of a multi-tasker that I’m reading the dev-chat while typing this blog.  It boggles the mind.

Continue reading Lotro Dev chat for June

Storytelling

I just got back from a four day camping trip with my folks, my brother, my sister, and my husband.  The day before I left, my husband and I stayed up all night questing and burning off the blue ‘bonus xp’ from our alts.  Sleep-deprived, we hit the road.  As soon as we were rolling, my sister suggested we play a pen-and-paper RPG on the way. What a refreshing experience this turned out to be!

We didn’t take any RPG books or character sheets.  We ended up just making up various character bio’s and linking them all together by saying each person’s character was sucked through a dimensional rift to the same place in Rifts Earth where they had to team up to fight the various demons that also came through the rift.

We didn’t have any dice, so I made up a coin based combat system based on the change I had in my pocket.  On a combat roll, I might toss a nickle, dime and penny into the cup-holder next to me.  A heads meant damage was dealt (in the amount of the coin’s worth) while a tails meant a miss.  To keep track of hit-points, I just wrote down everybody’s name with “100 hp” next to their name.  As combat went on, I’d scratch out or erase and re-write their health amounts.  Combat was surprisingly both challenging and satisfying for everyone.

What kept us laughing our asses off and screaming wildly was the story we created.  I let the players do whatever they wanted, and they did some crazy things.  Whenever they went someplace new, I made up something new for them to encounter there.  They fought terminators and kid-napped psychics.  They time traveled and killed a flying spaghetti monster.  At one point, one of the characters became a triple amputee with machine guns grafted onto her stubs.  At another point, the entire party of adventurers were bit by vampires and forced to serve their glorious vampire lord for a hundred years.

We may have spent more time talking about what happened to our characters than we did actually playing our characters.  At times we laughed so hard that our sides hurt and we had to try thinking unfunny thoughts just to breathe.  In short, it was awesome.

Once you get away from the dice and the rulesets, pen and paper RPGs are story-telling games.  I have a hard time recreating that feeling in an MMO.  Sure, I may talk about ‘The time the tank died’ and my medic had to finish tanking until the end of the battle, but it’s not quite the same.  If a developer was so inclined to make an MMO be heavy on storytelling, would it even be possible?

Light Themes

You know, MMO’s aren’t particulary good at theming.

Take the medic class in Star Wars Galaxies.  Sure, when the game launched you could be a doctor and sit at the hospital doing doctor things, but today’s medic is more combat oriented.  The purpose of having a medic to take into groups is clearly driven by the tried-and-tested gameplay mechanic of having a healer in a group along with a tank and someone to deal out the damage.  The medic as it stands today, doesn’t really resemble any kind of medical professional, either in reality or in Star Wars.

This medic class can instantly heal a person who’s running and shooting with a “bacta bomb” or heal an entire group of people in mid-combat with a “bacta spray”.  Playing a medic doesn’t feel like playing a medic.  It feels like playing an MMO healer with skills like “group heal” and “single-target heal”.

To be fair, playing a healer in fantasy MMOs doesn’t fair much better.  You know if you pick a priest in a game that you won’t be doing much praying.  You won’t have to attend church or give any sermons.  You’re going to run around clicking buttons that make your friend’s health-meter go up.

Continue reading Light Themes

Wish list

Today on the Lotro USA boards, a developer asked “What would make you want to log in?  I’ll stay afterhours to build it”  He makes quests, deeds, and areas, so he asked that suggestions be limited to something he could actually do.

I’ve been watching the thread grow all morning.  Unfortunately, I play on the European version of the game, so I can’t post on the American forums, but it’s quite interesting.  How do you say what you want in a quest with just a forum post?  I want content that has a good reward, that is fun to play, that feels good… I want content that doesn’t suck.

It’s easy for me to nit-pick individual game mechanics like a DOT in PVP being removable, or a particular class being overpowered.  But when it comes to world-building, it’s like art.  It’s like trying to describe what kind of painting I’d like.

A tale of two groups

A few days ago, I was in the 16th Hall.  We were trying to do it in Hard-Mode.  This meant that after a couple of hours of making our way to the last boss in this area, we were going to have to kill the last boss without killing any of the tiny weak little bugs.

Along the way, I accidentally rolled on (and won) a coin for some armor that wasn’t for my class.  I felt like crap about that.  I also accidentally sent my pet to attack an orc I didn’t mean to.  It dragged a whole bunch of orcs back towards us and killed the entire group.  I lied and said my pet had some path-finding issues.  I feel bad about lying, but I felt really emberrassed about killing the group too.

In the final room, we died to the boss the first two times without doing much damage on the boss.  We weren’t doing so well.  On the third time, I set my pet to attack my target instead of passive.  I figured “I’m not going to be attacking any bugs, so this way it’ll attack the boss when I attack it and the mushrooms when I attack those”.  During the fight, our tank was being chased by the bugs.  I threw an AOE debuff on the bugs to keep them from hurting the tank so much.  It was a non-damaging de-buff, but my pet took this to mean I was attacking the bugs.  It flew over to the bug and killed one in a single hit.

We failed hard-mode.  Everyone saw in chat that it was my fault.  The group broke up with a lot of angry people.  I felt like quitting Lotro.  It was awful.  That night, I kept thinking about how good I was in SWG at leading groups through the instances, and how awful a player I am in Lotro.   I found it hard to sleep after that.

That was one group.  Last night I joined another pick-up group.  This pick-up group was for the Turtle raid.  They wanted a loremaster for the power-regen abilities.  I changed my traits and equipment in preperation for the raid.  I had the best food, the best scrolls, and I even used destiny points to purchase temporary buffs.

We fought it and everyone started dying towards the end.  I was the last person standing.  This was mainly because when I died, my eagle brought be back to life.  When this happened, the DOT started over on its timer, and I could survive fairly well.  There was me and a hunter alive when it was at 10k.  I was healing the hunter and giving him power, but the hunter got too close and died when the turtle was at 3k.

It was just me and the turtle.  I was running from it and dotting it.  I typed while I was running around that I was going to solo the turtle.  My health was near empty.  My pots were on cooldown.  The acid damage was ticking away and I was slowly dying.

Everyone was talking in raid chat.  “Kill it!  Kill it!” and “Why are you runing?!?”

Of course, no one questioned my tactics when the turtle finally died to my hand.  I stood triumphant.  Eleven players could only lay on the ground and watch me fight.  I rez’d their minstrels and soon they were all on their feet and celebrating.  The raid leader was even clapping for me and /cheering me.  It didn’t matter to me that there wasn’t anything for a loremaster in the chest at the end.  I had saved the entire raid.

I couldn’t sleep after that.  I’ve been replaying that moment in my head all night and into the morning.  It’s 6:00am now and I still haven’t been to bed.  God… that felt good.  No… it feels good.  For the rest of my character’s life, I’ll remember when she got the killing blow on that turtle.

Lotro’s Book 8 Details

Turbine released the notes for their next update today.  Here’s some interesting bits:

1. The over-powered black arrow DoT I mentioned recently is going to be curable.  Yes!

2. The RK isn’t the only one getting nerfed.  Minstrels (who can currently out dps a hunter if they trait for dps) are going to be getting a DPS nerf.  Champs will see a decrease in tanking ability while in fervor.

3. The legendary item drops will be changing to a barter system.  Currently, the big ol’ Mr. Turtle raid drops a lot of first-age spears, and sometimes other first-age weapons too.  He’s now going to drop coins that you have to collect to trade in for the first-age of your choice.    This means everyone will always roll on the first-age coin (because hey, I could always use another first-age with better legacies right?).

4. Many patch notes which are ambiguous.  I mean, what does “Changes to The Lost One in the 16th Hall.” really mean?

For the full notes click Here

Runekeeper Nerf Details

The Devs over at LOTRO took time to talk about the widely anticipated Runekeeper nerf.  Posters on the boards have been crying for a RK nerf ever since Book 7 went live.  Even posters who are not actually calling for a nerf are effectively asking for one when they brag about feats such as 12 runekeepers finishing the turtle raid in a exactly 64 seconds.

So is Turbine going to nerf runekeeper healing or runekeeper DPS?

When turbine discussed the details of the nerf, it appears the healing will remain strong.  DPS and power-consumption will see changes however.  Some specific RK skills will have their damage reduced, or effectiveness limited in Book 8, and all RK damage skills past level 30 will see an increase in power cost.

It’s too early to tell how this will actually play out.  If Turbine implements a nerf to tactical damage at the same time as nerfing RK, the net effect could be a massive nerf to DPS.  Yet if Turbine doens’t go far enough, we could still have the same old complaints.

Friday Feature

SWG used to have something called a “Friday Feature”.  They would show a tiny piece of something from a future update, or highlight some aspect of the game.  The Friday Feature was sometimes just a list of statistics, and sometimes it was just a rehashing of information already on the forums, but it was always there, and it always kept me thinking about SWG on Fridays.  Even though I’ve stopped playing SWG, I still keep checking the web page each Friday to see if anything new has been added to the game.

The Friday Feature was really a great way of getting a share of my head-space.  The more I think of a game, the more likely I am to go back and play it, or try it for the first time.  All the controversy with Darkfall actually had me in their store on multiple occassions to try and buy the game.  News stories about an EVE corporation leader scamming his friends actually contributed to my husband downloading the trial.  He even went on to purchase EVE.

By contrast, Final Fantasy XI was terrible about letting American players know what to be thinking about.  I can’t speak for their Japanese players, but Americans had no clue what was new in the game until it was already out.  Blogs and forums help fill the void, but there’s nothing like hearing from the horse’s mouth tid-bits about what’s coming next.