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Five Bars to Mordor

Sammath Gul is the new 6-man dungeon in Lord of the Rings Online Siege of Mirkwood.  Overall, its a well designed dungeon.  The main mechanic deals with the dreaded bone piles.  If a player steps in a bone pile placed all around the dungeon, a couple mobs pop out.  They are easy enough to deal with even if a couple piles are disturbed, but when players are already embattled with the trash mobs things can start to get tough.  The third (final) boss is Gorothul, the sorcerer of Mordor that shook things up in Moria.  The fight takes place in front of enormous glass windows where two Nazgul on felbeasts watch the fight.  And, there are bone piles.

The fight begins with one of my now favorite boss cinematics.  Gorothul basically phones home to big-daddy Sauron, and has a brief discussion about the players’ fates.  The Lidless Eye appears, giving players immense dread, and Gorothul, you know, casually mentions that some Free Peoples are standing in front of him.  I have to say that I was very impressed with the voice acting and dialogue in what could have been a very cheesy setup.  Of course, Sauron commands Gorothul to end the players, and Gorothul responds with a resolved ‘as you wish.’  The fight begins but for the first 30 seconds or so the dread from having Sauron’s eye on the players has to wear off.

I have to say that I have been thoroughly impressed with all the cinematics in Siege of Mirkwood.  The flow of each scene and the emotions presented are usually spot on.  The one mechanic I am getting sick of, though, is the use of the cut-scene stun(especially in the prisoner trade scene).  It’s very anti-heroic when the Enemy has a win-button.  It’s even worse when a silly dwarf breaks the fourth wall and asks what “trickery” the cut-scene stun is.  I’d prefer that either they take camera control away (like Turbine did in the last book of Volume 1) or just freeze my character.  I understand that important things are happening, and I can deal with the loss of character control for that scene.  It’d be much better than my heroic character swaying in the wind like a drunk hobbit that just ate three fermented cherry pies.

–Ravious
the feeling’s irresistible and that’s how we movin’

A Lesser Evil

Answer this question right now, which is worse – gold farmers or cheaters?  They might belong to the same coin of the disease that hurts our favorite MMOs, but they attack it from wholly different sides.  The answer, for me, is not self-evident.  Sure, if I were the Ultra Decision Maker with infinite resources I would press my magic button and both problems would be dealt with by my happy MIT graduate programmers.  But, developers don’t live in that world.  They live in a world where the target is always moving, always trying to outsmart, and there is never enough time to line up the scope for a perfect kill.  So which is worse when you have the development time for one bullet?

Continue reading A Lesser Evil

STO: Beta Events

Today was the last day of beta for Star Trek Online. For the last day of beta, the developers gave the fanboys a chance to play what they were asking for.

A lot of PVP fanboys were asking for open-world PVP. That was part of the event. Klingons could fly all the way to the starting location for humans and attack enemy players as they loaded in. Unfortunately for the Klingons, there are far less of them than there are of Federation players, so once they loaded into the zone, they found themselves to be the ones being spawn-camped. I heard Klingons complaining that they were dead before they could move. I heard federation players complaining that killing the same Klingon player over and over at the spawn-point was boring. For all the requests I read on message boards about wanting open-world PVP in STO, I only heard complaints from both sides in zone chat today.

A few Star Trek fanboys were complaining that the Borg in the game were too weak. In the tv-show, one Borg cube destroyed an entire fleet of ships. In Star Trek Online, you easily kill dozens of Borg on your own during the tutorial. During today’s last-day event, the Borg were everywhere. They spawned in the earth spacedock by the dozen. Individual Borg-drones one-shotted Klingon and Federation players alike. In space encounters, no fleet of players could hope to take out a single Borg-cube. The reaction to the Borg invasion was less negative, but I doubt even Star Trek fanboys would enjoy being one-shotted in the starting area once the game launched.

So why is Cryptic giving players in open-beta a chance to test things that won’t be in the game? Partially, this kind of event is a chance to celebrate the end of beta. But also, this gives Cryptic a chance to show what things would be like if they actually did something like this during launch. In Champions Online, their last-day of beta event in Millennium city was a slide-show for most people. The Borg invasion and open world PVP showed that some ideas fans have are more fun as concepts than they are in-game.

Baptismal Learning Curve

Via Chocobo at RPG.net:

Funny story that predates LFD: When I first did Old Kingdom, as a healer, the tank asked if we all knew the fight. I said, “No, what should I know?” He said, “You’ll find out when it happens,” then he charged in.

Reminds me of a TV Trope… like Wanted where its The Only Way They Will Learn.  Hopefully Chocobo also shot the wings off of flies.

–Ravious
Welcome… to the Fraternity

Blogging, As Seen in 1968

From His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem:

The inflation of the printed word has been caused, no doubt, by the exponential increase in the number of those writing, but in equal degree by editorial policies. In the childhood of our civilization only select, well-educated individuals were able to read and write, and much the same criterion held after the invention of printing; and even if the works of imbeciles were published (which, I suppose, is impossible to avoid completely), their total number was not astronomical, as it is today. Today, in the flood of garbage, valuable publications must go under, because it is easier to find one worthwhile book among ten worthless than a thousand among a million. …

… It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of imposters, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?

We will note that similar complaints against the masses have abounded since before the printed word, back when any danged fool thought he was the next Sophocles. I am mollified in the pointless narcissism of blogging every book I read by the Victorian tendency to do something very similar in print, so as to circulate with their friends what they were reading and what they all thought about it. The Victorians were strong in introspection but had terrible latency.

: Zubon

Love Thy CM

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day!  Thank you to all of the CM’s that we hound mercilessly.  I do not envy your job of having to walk the line between the screaming yang of your fans and the cutthroat yin of your bosses and marketing, but you do it day in and day out.  Thank you for supporting us gamers, and being our advocate when we need it most even though we don’t see most of the work you do.  Thank you for being our friends when you could easily wall us out for non-gaming related activities.  Thank you for sticking with us through our worst when our rabid bile gets caught in our throats and you hold our hair while we grace the porcelain seat with o… well you get the idea.  Thank you, community managers.

–Ravious
two score and five we came alive