Author: Zubon

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Banhammer

As I write this, Mythic has a “Banhammer” image saying, “4051 banned for selling gold.” If that is accounts, that is $202,550 in Warhammer boxes. I know that retailers, publishers, etc. see a lot of that money, but it should be enough to pay for whoever is tracking down and banning spammers.

Frankly, I am not worried about people buying or selling gold, or the fine services offering level 40 in 8 days for $240. Just stop sending me poorly spelled tells about it. Seriously, you are pasting text; someone needs to write coherent English ONCE.

: Zubon

Edit: also, what are you spending this gold on? The only time I did not have enough money for something is when I bought new skills and renown gear all at once on a low-level character, before remembering to sell my vendor trash. I bought my mount at 16 and had cash to spare. Can there be that much on the auction house?

Architect Mechanics

City of Heroes has moved the mission editor to Issue 14 in 2009. Issue 13 will be adding all the content that was missing from Issue 12: they are finishing up Cimerora and the Midnight Squad. Because releasing incomplete content and getting to it 5 months later is acceptable on a four year old game with a direct competitor in development. *ahem* The delay on “create your own mission” is so that they can include “create your own villain” for it.

That aside, evolution in the genre:

The Leveling Pact: A new innovation to MMOs, this groundbreaking system allows you and a buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your buddy plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like “Extreme Sidekicking.”

Multi-Builds: Another innovation to City of Heroes, we are delivering the ability to have two different build-outs of each character, including which powers are selected and which Enhancements are slotted. This will now be possible for characters who want to take advantage of it. By visiting any Trainer you can switch the entire build of your character to an alternate one. You can use this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE. It’s up to you.

Multi-builds are straightforward and a great idea for all of us who do not want to be forced between PvE/PvP, healing/damage, solo/group, etc. Leveling pacts, however, are … interesting. They explain that you split xp, no matter which character earns it, and you are in that pact for life. I like it as a way to make sure you do not out-level your friend. Their initial plan is for two characters, and if it does not destroy things, more. Because it can be hard to arrange having everyone on at once.

: Zubon

Update: you can leave the leveling pact, but you cannot get another after level 5.

The Captain

Captains are the most under-rated class in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. They are the most hybridized class I have seen in any game, and they still work. We are used to seeing broken hybrids, either brokenly powerful (and therefore overshadowing the classes they are hybridizing) or too weak (so just wait until you get the first-best for whatever your gap is). Captains, while rarely required for a successful group, contribute meaningfully in any role they can fill, without over-shadowing the original class.

Captains are melee buffers, a rare decision to make. Beyond being The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢’s primary buff class, a Captain is also an off-tank, secondary healer, secondary DPS, pet class, and teleporter. They also have a little ranged DPS. They are the go-to class for in-combat rezes and curing fear effects.

Beyond the usual damage and tanking that you expect from meleers, Captains bring to the table some bonuses not found on other classes. Whenever an enemy hits the ground, good things happen (like healing). They can mark targets for more damage or for life leech. Banners and buffs add massively to your morale. With the critical hit buff, my Hunter clears 25%. Their late-game buff is the mighty In Defense of Middle Earth, which adds +50 to everything for everyone. That is huge when stats cap at 500. They also have the ultimate in survivability: when Last Stand is active, the Captain cannot die.

Hybrids and buffers are hard to sell in most games, difficult to make or play well. Props to Turbine for a viable hybrid melee buffer.

: Zubon

In the spirit of Shiny Happy Week, we encourage only happy comments about good things on this post. Saying nice things about other games under the heading, “You know who else does that well?” is allowed.

Is Yahtzee Happy?

I know that I complain a lot about the games I play. Complaining is kind of what we do here in the blogosphere. And then there is Yahtzee. Yahtzee is the popular video blogger who likes Portal, Psychonauts, Guitar Hero, and cursing whilst wearing a hat. That seems to be all the joy that he receives from gaming. When he does give praise, it usually comes in the form of, “I like this part of the game; if only it were not wrapped in in the flaming, feces-covered corpses of a thousand dead puppies who all had their eyes gouged out by the falling horns of unicorns that were decapitated by evil monkey pirates, who were in turn raped to death by the even more evil developers of this festeringly putrid game.”

Only it sounds better in his accent.

: Zubon

Kind of hard to argue with the webcomics comment. It has pretty much been like that since hitting First and Ten.

Engineer at Level 10

Pretty much the same as ranged DPS anywhere, but I like the turrets and multiple, stacking, instant-cast damage over time (DoT) abilities.

The Engineer’s big class feature is the turret. You get three options: long-range, short-range AE, and medium-range grenade turret. I have not been using that last one much, although I might toy with it. It fires the fastest, with an occasional AE. The short-range one is a flamethrower, although sadly the graphics are fireballs rather than a huge cone of fire unless it gets a good roll. None of these are as game-changing as I might have hoped; the extra damage is nice, and it occasionally pulls adds off you, but most of your offense comes from you. This is not the Lugian Tactician.

Continue reading Engineer at Level 10

Realm Balance

Hypothesis: There are far more players interested in RvR on Destruction than Order.

Expected outcomes: Order scenario queues are trivial, while Destruction scenario queues are lengthy. Open-world RvR will be dominated by Destruction. At lower tiers, when scenarios are the dominant method of gaining renown, Order will have an advantage; they will have more practice in each scenario and RvR generally, along with higher renown rank. Leveling will be faster on Order, if you use scenarios to level. In the long run, Destruction will dominate most servers in tier 4, because they will have more active players in RvR in the open world.

Data point: I spent more than an hour in a queue on Destruction, perhaps two hours, without getting into a scenario. I have never waited five minutes on the Order side. After waiting the one to two hours on Destruction, I switched to order, ran seven to ten scenarios in quick succession, and gained two levels.

Corollary: There may be more people interested in Destruction generally. It is the evil faction, really evil not just Horde, and it is a naturally attractive element to the hardcore PvP population in a game that promotes itself as the PvP alternative to WoW. Carebears are more likely to want to be pretty elves with white lions than heavily scarred goblins with biologically improbably squigs.

: Zubon

True to Comic Books

Many comic book writers, artists, and publishers are truly lousy at keeping deadlines. I recall the early days of Image, with about two comics that managed to publish monthly. This proud tradition continues today, with monthly comics that publish five times a year and quarterly comics that will someday get their second issues. Others take the “fast, good, or quick: pick two” approach, consistently arriving on time, under budget, and guess about the quality.

The City of Heroes developers are aware that yesterday marked four months since their last Issue. That was the major update where two evenings was enough time to finish all the new content available without making new alts.

So if you noticed that I have not been posting much about City of Heroes, that would be why.

The funny thing is, the game is supposed to have been getting increased attention since the NCSoft acquisition. Maybe it is taking longer than expected to train the new hires, or maybe they are re-writing half the game. They did, however, find resources for two new microtransactions options: rent a rocket pack for all characters for a month ($5) and the Cyborg pack with costume pieces, emotes, and a Self-Destruct power ($10). Is it still “micro” at $10? The Cyborg bits are, at any rate, a permanent account upgrade.

: Zubon

What We Did Wednesday Night

a herd of CoWs I made my Shaman the night before retail release. After leveling a bit and connecting with the guild for some public quests and RvR scenarios, we decided to hit open world RvR. By the half-way point, we had a full warband. Smile for the camera, guys!

The night before the game went live, we had almost filled a 75-person Ventrilo server. I am not used to being part of a large guild. It is kind of nice. I have many voices to learn. I may go insane trying to match name to character name (across multiple alts) to blog name.

: Zubon

Lifetimes in Needless Clicks

Warhammer seems to have decided that players need to scroll through and clickwrap-sign one useless, unread document per login, rather than two. This is intended to be a fig leaf for court action, despite Mr. Jacobs’s explicit statement that they do not expect players to read it every time. I will leave you to Lum for discussion and commentary, including links to meta-drama (what the blogosphere is all about).

Instead, I was curious about how many lifespans will be consumed by this click-through that will never benefit anyone, except the legal bloggers who explain why that argument did not work in court. The original stated plan was to waste thirty seconds per player per day (see the link), so the new plan is fifteen. There may be some plus or minus for a variety of factors, but I am going to hand-wave that away and assume it is a wash. You skip some days, you crash a lot some days, your graphics card is choking today, whatever. Fifteen seconds per player per day: how long until that consumes an entire lifespan?

Or, since this is the blogosphere, Mythic, how many people have you killed today?!!!?!

Life expectancy in the United States is 77.8 years. With eight hours of sleep per day, the average waking lifespan is 77.8*365.25*16*60*60= 1,636,787,520 seconds. Dividing by 15, it will take 109,119,168 player-days to have an entire lifespan spent scrolling and clicking. If Warhammer is a modest success with 100,000 subscriptions, this will consume one lifespan every three years. Warhammer has shipped 1.5 million units, which would take 72 days to consume a lifespan, so the time included with those boxes will get us almost half-way to the first one.

I like the “1/3 years/100,000 subscribers” calculation. That seems easy to multiply. If Warhammer gets 300,000 subscribers, it wastes an entire human lifespan per year on the scroll-and-click-through.

You can also argue about MMOs in general wasting human lifespans.

: Zubon

I know I have a post somewhere about how many lifespans a bug taking x minutes/player/day would consume, but my search fu is failing my tonight. Sleepy.