Category: Wizard101

This past weekend I have been going through the final hub of Kroktopia in Wizard 101.  Being a Storm Wizard, this is actually more of a challenge than the fire-based hub and ice-based hub.  I like it though.  The “epic” storyline in Wizard 101 is mostly linear, and I was hitting through Karanahn Barracks, which if I recall correctly, had one storyline quest in it and maybe five other quests.  It cost me $1.83 to play this zone if I buy 2500 crowns at a time (the cost drops to $1.22 if I buy $80 worth of crowns at a time).

The preceding three-zones (Well of Spirits, Ahnic Family Tomb, and Djeserit Family Tomb) cost me $1.83 for all three, and included three or four times the amount of quests as Karanahn Barracks.  I finished everything I could in the Barracks, to then have to buy another zone Karanahn Palace to continue the story for, again, $1.83.  Karanahn Palace is a dungeon instance, so right away it feels like there will be less than a quest zone because the dungeon instances in Wizard 101 are insulated with their own quest chains, etc.  So, I knew that once I completed the Palace, once, it would be time to move on.  Except for alts, it was likely I would never return to the Palace.  I also had to refill my crowns in order to buy Karanahn Palace, and instead I just signed off and played other games for the rest of the weekend.

Continue reading Pay-By-Zone Pitfalls

I must credit Wizard 101 for having the best pricing model of any MMO. There are no close competitors. First, you have two options: monthly subscription or pay by the area. The former includes not only the standard discount for multi-month subscriptions, but also a family plan for multiple accounts. You have probably heard about this from other reviews, but if you want to play with your kids, you get a per-account price only slightly higher than the per-month fee on a year-long subscription. This seems like a much better offer than a zebra mount.

The pay-by-zone option is what I always thought D&D Online should have been using: buy the dungeons like you would buy pen-and-paper modules. You buy crowns (500-750 per dollar, depending on how many you buy at once), and you can use those to buy zones or for some microtransactions I haven’t explored. $10 gets you the full Wizard City plus a little of Krokotopia. $80 gets you lifetime access to the entire game, with some change left over. If you thought the Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ $200 lifetime subscription option was awesome, how can you beat that? About $20 of that $80 is Grizzleheim, a five-zone “world”; I will let others argue about whether that should be considered a regular update or a first expansion pack. (Pay-by-zone does not pair up with the family account thing.)

Oh, and there’s a non-time-limited free trial.

I have been noticing game cards at the gas station lately, and I see that Wizard 101 has them as well. And they come with an exclusive bonus pet, that’s nice. If you were considering dropping $10 to try a month or the rest of Wizard City, this is probably your better option. Hmm, maybe I will swing by 7-11 sometime and give the rest of Wizard City a shot.

: Zubon

Over the past couple of nights, I have run through all the free content in Wizard 101 (my apologies for not asking for a referral beforehand). Is this pretty much what the entire game is like? There are a few buffs, heals, shields, pets, etc., but most of the time is spent with attacks that have a summon animation. There are some tactical options, but mostly it is hitting an attack and waiting out the 5-10 second animation that you have now seen a couple dozen times. Most things drop in a few attacks, absent the fizzles, so it is slightly more than the standard MMO 1-2-1, but it takes 30 seconds for those few clicks.

My problem might be falling in that age range between playing Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh and having kids who play Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Even a few years of playing Magic: the Gathering will not banish the stigma of “what those annoying adolescents were doing just after I stopped being an annoying adolescent.”

: Zubon

Going off my short burst play tangent, last night I had another great experience in Wizard 101.  Below the Krokosphinx there is a hub that leads to four other areas.  However, in that area is a boss named Grumish Greataxe.  Grumish can only be summoned by players that have completed a quest chain, but once summoned anybody can join.

I signed on excited to get to the third and final hub in Kroktopia, but people were fighting Grumish.  So, I joined them because joining a boss fight can only make things better for all.  We beat him pretty good, and I got to flex my mighty-Potter pythons with lightning versus the myth boss (lightning beats myth, fire beats ice, etc.).  During the time we smacked the minotaur around a small crowd had gathered, and people in the crowd were rearing to take the boss on as well.  So, I joined again.  Then again.  I never made it to the next hub.

It was just a blast to fight this boss with a rotating group of other people knowing that I could leave at anytime between fights without anyone batting an eye.  While there is good and bad to the transient nature of grouping in Wizard 101, the emergence of this pick-up style play will rarely happen in a more traditional MMO.  I think the only other time I was this excited to just play with people at a whim was in the early days of Warhammer Online where public quests were actually populated.

I hope that true pick-up play will occur more often in the MMOs of the future.

–Ravious
a burrahobbit?

I saw from afar a fellow student battling the undead, re-risen, or newly awakened crocodile warriors in the tombs beneath the Krokosphinx.  I was not quite sure what they were.  The genus of the creature was lost on me during lectures.  All I knew was that they turned to sand when I threw lighting at their faces.  A newt-looking Mander had asked me to defeat a few more of the Kroks, and my classmate was trying to defeat the same Kroks.  I scampered up to his battle circle, re-tooling my spell deck on the fly.  He turned  his head toward me with a grim nod.  More of the enemy would soon be joining us.

After the protracted battle involving the summoning of all manner of magical creatures, the Kroks dissolved to sand, filling the rocky cracks in the floor.  There were a few small pieces of fulgurite from all the lightning strikes I inflicted, but I pretended not to notice for the life wizard’s sake.  That was it.  The briefest of glances, the quickest of handshakes, and a tactical retreat in to the shadows of sidewalks ended our grouping.  I may meet up with him again for another painless transaction.  I can only hope the other world’s I walk will soon have means for the transient gathering requiring merely the nod of camaraderie.

–Ravious
in the end it became a triumphal march

I played a large amount Wizard 101, which was recently updated with the Grizzleheim update.  Not only is there a new region, which branches the usual leveling path, but there are a whole slew of core mechanics that were just added.

The first, and in my opinion biggest, core improvement is the Bazaar.  The Bazaar acts as a trader depot where the NPC will buy just about every item (some have the “No Auction” tag) for gold, and if it has an item in stock it will sell it back.  Guild Wars uses this type of NPC-controlled market for materials, for an example of another MMO that uses this mechanic.  It is a great system, and much needed in a game where items could not be traded in any way between players on separate accounts.

There are two issues.  The issue that I am still on the fence with is in regards to the economic model used to determine buy price and sell price.  The system is built so that the NPC gets a huge turnaround profit so as to get rid of gold stockpiles, but that is not the thing that concerns me.  The Bazaar window has a numerical counter that shows how many of a particular item are in stock.  This counter caps at 100, and I am not sure what that means.  Will price be more severely affected as things are sold when the Bazaar already has 100 of them in stock?  Or, is it merely a faux consumer gauge?  The counter ending at 100 items in stock seems awfully low in a game where there are over 1,000,000 registered users.

Continue reading On the W101 Update

I am still happily playing the ultra-casual Wizard 101 MMO as my mainstay.  I wanted to follow-up from my earlier thoughts.  Currently my level 20 Storm wizard is right in the middle of the Kroktopia setting.  I think I have spent about $20 on crowns, using them just to buy the content zones.  The difficulty in gameplay increased somewhat as now I am fighting two creatures per battle.  I do actually have to time some pulls so that I can fight one mob for a few turns before the other comes to join it.  The battles are still quite fun, but mostly soloing, I do have to be more careful of my tactics.

All the benefits of my earlier post are still shining strongly, but by far the best is the “public quest”-like nature of the entire game.  I have become extremely accepting of hopping in to others’ battles and them hopping in to mine.  It’s such a nice change from “it’s mine, I tagged it”-style gameplay.  Granted there are some downsides like the possibility of a player joining, adding mobs, and then running away.  However, I have not experienced any form of griefing yet.  I do hope that future “AAA” MMOs have a similar shared experience with questing and mob killing… all the time.  The sense of a shared goal, even when soloing, is empowering.  No longer am I looking at other players with a Gollum-like sneer hoping they don’t ask me to help with their quest I have finished ages ago.

Another thing that really surprises me is my newfound love for barbie-dolling my home.  My wife thinks this is absolutely hilarious.  But, I am a boss farming maniac just to get an eyeball in a jar or a cyclops statue.  Right now I have been saving like Scrooge in order to get the big Kroktopia home.  I haven’t played the test server, and I am unsure as to whether the new Bazaar will allow market trade of home items.  If anyone knows, I would like your thoughts on the Bazaar.

I did have one big problem.  I did not understand how to use treasure cards or discards.  I do now, and my A-game has skyrocketed.  Before that there were plenty of matches where my hand was horribly skewed to cards I did not need, and unbeknownst to me, I could have discarded the whole lot.  I think KingsIsle should consider putting in a short quest to teach these two pretty critical mechanics.  Maybe I just completely missed the teacher popup tell me what to do.  I have seen from the forums that players were having trouble figuring out how to trash some treasure cards they didn’t want.

Anyway, I think I have figured out most the mechanics (except initiative), and I am fairly certain that this is going to remain my main MMO through the hot summer nights.

–Ravious
there, your body matches your brain

An MMO for what ails me.

I have been quiet lately, partly because MMOs were on the downside of the cycle and partly because I am holding a baby during my “free time.”  Games like Peggle and Nitrome’s Ice Breaker held reign.  Until, I decided to re-try Wizard 101.

My initial foray in to Wizard 101 was as a tourist.  I was already having a blast in Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars, and Wizard 101 was, at the time, just a weekend getaway.  I liked what I saw, and I really wanted to support their “crowns” business model, which lets players buy zones of content for $1-3/each forever.  However, it was not up to par with gameplay with the more complex MMOs I was already playing.

Now, it is the MMO I play.  All the little things that Kings Isle has done to make it casual are all things that I need for MMOs right now.  Continue reading W101 Brew