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On the W101 Update

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

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.

Password Security Fail

Oops! There was a problem with the following:
-Please note that your password should be 5 to 8 characters long and is case-sensitive.
-Retype Password can not be greater than 8 characters.

I should have tested all the other password security features that it rejects. Bonuses for international characters and punctuation! At least it does not explicitly restrict you to English words.
Oh, and Reader’s Digest is giving away some Kindles, which is where I found that friendly error.

: Zubon

More W101 On Tap

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

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.

Downtime = Weight Gain?

I have lost five pounds since getting into Team Fortress 2. Many of you are familiar with gamer diet, wherein you get a new game and forget to eat while you play for hours at a time, but I have been actively applying this to dropping some weight. First, willpower is a limited resource, and freeing myself to binge on one thing saves my resources to avoid binging on another. Second, my major effort is reducing calories, a good portion of which comes from eating only when hungry, rather than from boredom or habit. With a constantly active FPS, I do not have time to be bored or wander off for food. In an MMO, a ten-minute horse ride is a great time to go make a sandwich; in a FPS, a ten-second respawn time is all that separates you from a control point that is still in play. With no snacks at the desk, I have no caloric threats until we get back to the original point of gamer diet: look up from the game and realize it is time for bed.

Who has time to be hungry when there is an entire BLU team to set on fire?

: Zubon

Guild Wars Book Titles

Time for a lore lesson.  Guild Wars 2 occurs 250 years beyond the happenings in Guild Wars 1.  In between this time, a lot will undoubtedly happen in Tyria (and beyond).  I would guess that we will learn a lot of the changes in-game.  ArenaNet likes to leave a lot of crumbs so lore-happy fans can piece together things like civilizations, cultures, metaphysics, history, etc.  They are also releasing three novels via a deal with Pocket Books that will give vignettes of the changes that occurred across a quarter millennium. Continue reading Guild Wars Book Titles

IP Onslaught

I am not sure what I think about this.  38 Studios has a dream team of creative minds.  R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane alone could create an Arcadia beyond most mere mortal’s dreams.  Add in all their concept artists, game designers, and even coders (they have imaginations too!), and of course a great world is going to be created.

That being said, I feel like a bipolarized consumer of intellectual property (“IP”) when it comes to MMOs and offspring media.  Continue reading IP Onslaught

Reader Critique Requested: Toytown Tower Defense

Having noticed that our readers include a great many fans of tower defense games, the maker of Toytown Tower Defense asked for feedback on why his game might not have been well received. Or let’s put that in less polite terms: it is rated just below 3.5 on Kongregate, when some real garbage clears 4. Let’s get some reviews in the comments, something more substantial and useful than the Twitter-like comments on Kongregate. Try it before my ensuing comments bias your impressions. Continue reading Reader Critique Requested: Toytown Tower Defense