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Exar Kun vs 16th Hall

I’ve been jumping into every group for the 16th Hall that I could get. I still need the token from there. This is the instance I talked about screwing up earlier. The one where my pet killed a small bug and I wasted hours of people’s lives. Well, since that time I’ve become much better as a player. I’ve spent so many hours trying to clear this damn instance that I know it like the back of my hand.

I felt so overwhelmed the first time. Now I know not just my own role, but what everyone else should be doing as well. Tonight was the second night in the row of attempting the 16th hall. We got to the end, and this time, our guardian was lack-luster. He was anonymous, which I immediately take to mean, “Don’t look at me, my equipment sucks”. Sure enough, his equipment and traits sucked. Every time we went into the boss fight, he was dead within 30 seconds and I ended up tanking the boss every time we went in. In my head a voice was nagging, “I wear light armor, I’m a lore-master, I shouldn’t be tanking this boss every time.”

It reminds me of Exar Kun in Star Wars Galaxies. Yes, the Exar Kun instance. It’s the toughest instance in the game. I knew every strategy in every room in that place. But I needed tanks who could do their job, and commandos who could run the elements successfully. One day, in the last room of Exar Kun, there was this commando guy and I needed him to tank something

When the fight started, the commando was nowhere near his assigned position. So where did the boss he was supposed to be tanking go? To me, the medic. This left me doing several people’s jobs at once. With each of the four bosses, I was involved in some way. I was attacking the Promised with everything I had, while ping-pong tanking both the Lingering and the Embraced. And while all of this was going on, I was hovering my mouse over the Unquenchable every 3 seconds to see which element that boss was vulnerable to and calling it out over voice chat. All of this I was doing while spamming my group-heals.

Again, a voice in my head was saying, “I’m the medic… I shouldn’t be tanking anything. I shouldn’t have to call the elements for the person who’s job it is to run them.”

I can learn an instance well, given enough times in it. But you know what? I’m only going to see an instance that many times if it’s incredibly difficult to get together a team capable of doing it successfully. It’s the same in 16th hall. Our hunter was fantastic. Our minstrel was great. And I like to think that I performed admirably. But that’s only half a team. So we were destined to fail. Three hours down the drain.

The funny thing is… the more I compare this to Exar Kun, the better I feel about it. I have fond memories of the journey from being one of the people who sucked at instances to one of the most popular group leaders on our server. When I think of it like that, the idea of dying in this instance over and over doesn’t feel so bad. Eventually, we found the people we needed to do a competent job, befriended them, and got them into the instances.

When our failed run had ended and the group broke up, our minstrel sent me a tell. He wanted to know if he could add me and my alts to his friend’s list so that he could call on me for future runs….

Ahh…. good times.

Zubon, Behind the Curve

I have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 this week. This leaves me with little to talk about, unless we want to delve into specifics of maps or what classes appeal to our playstyles. Also, welcome to 2007. That’s not as bad as I thought, since I did not realize it was new when I got it as a part of the Orange Box. I have been thinking of going through the classic games that I missed, then talking about them a decade later. That might feel a bit like saying, “Have you heard about this ‘Pac-Man’? It’s a really neat, maze-based game in the classic arcade style!” But I should play through KOTOR and Planescape: Torment sometime. Yeah, I know. I’ve never played any of the Ultima games either, and only two Final Fantasies (and not even VII). So, while I am on MMO hiatus, I may be talking about some truly random stuff.

: Zubon

Facebook ArenaNet

ArenaNet’s Community Managers have been very busy as of late (well always, but this is business we can see).  Their two big pushes this late Spring have been with the alternative gaming communities: Twitter and Facebook.  ArenaNet has had accounts there for quite some time, but the push has been trying to make them very active.  The Community Managers are hoping for 1000 fans on Facebook (as of writing this it is at 894). Continue reading Facebook ArenaNet

Drift 1: Loss of Context

The game will introduce a mechanic to you early on, something perhaps unusual but reasonable in context. Over time, the game will expand from its simpler beginnings. By then, you will be so used to the mechanic that you will rarely pause to notice that it makes absolutely no sense in its new or expanded context.

Example: The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ uses “morale” instead of health. You don’t die, you just get too disheartened to continue, and you must rally. Sure, goblin spears to the ribs hurt, but you can keep fighting so long as your morale does not flag. A Minstrel’s songs raise your spirits, and you carry on. Then you start meeting trolls, the sort that would crush your skull and limbs with their giant clubs and rocks. You could conceivably rally through a few broken ribs. Then you get to poisoned water that instantly drains all your “morale.” Insta-death from morale drain? Then you get to lava flows, where you burn to death and your armor melts. Life is just a song away!

Example: pills in Left 4 Dead. Reasonable for ignoring scattered cuts and bruises, and then someone starts carving a hole in your chest.

I wanted to use Katamari Damacy as an example, when you start rolling up clouds as if they were huge sheets of plywood and fire that still burns, but Katamari Damacy is sufficiently insane to defy logic anyway. Instead, tell us your favorite example from your current game. Telling riddles to wolves? Backstabbing buildings? Tripping gelatinous cubes?

: Zubon

Reason to Return

Players take breaks from MMOs.  Some are short, and there is no reason to stop subscribing or to uninstall.  Others are more on the sabbatical nature.  The latter is usually accompanied by some sort of burnout, boredom, or other negative feeling resulting in a far longer break than the usual refresh.

There are reasons to return, and the biggest are usually the game changing, world-expanding expansions.  But, I don’t want to talk about those because their very nature is set to get players to return.  I want to talk about the free content updates and maintenance updates. Continue reading Reason to Return

Hostile Takeover

Another person from my SWG guild has joined us in Lotro. Although not all have actually continued playing, that’s the 6th person from our old guild to follow us over. Each of these people have been admitted to our current kinship. In the kinship’s teamspeak server, we often out-number the original crew. It’s beginning to feel like we are slowly taking over the guild we joined.

It’s not that any of us are officers… we don’t get to decide rules or anything. But the topics of conversation and the mood of the kinship is influenced by the conversations we have with each other. For the veteran players, the game is stale, old, and far too much of a grind. For us the game is complicated, new and exciting. We’ve actually contemplated creating our own separate kinship. In fact, we did. But we only put our alts in it for now. It’s something to fall back on if our current kinship doesn’t work out.

Even if we are not officially a separate kinship, we clearly act like one. We group with each other and help each other out. We talk to each other about old times and send each other crafted goods. We are all so close-knit. We started playing this game at the same time, and we started playing our last MMO together at roughly the same time. By contrast, most of the other people in the kinship started playing Lotro two years ago.

Will we ever feel this closeness to the veteran players of our kinship? I don’t know… but I honestly doubt it.

Time to Cap

Commenter Alucian states:

unlike other MMOs, Blizzard actually scales xp needed to level and gained from quests with the current number of levels to max. They ensure it takes the same amount of time to get from 1-endgame whatever the max level may be.

This is an interesting notion to me, one I have not considered because I have been through only one level cap increase (CoX does not count) in my ten MMO years (old old old). Every time you increase the level cap, you can change the rate of experience accumulation so that time to cap is unchanged.

Would you wait a few months after the new expansion to do so? On one hand, you don’t want existing players to feel like their “work” has been “cheapened.” On the other hand, the expansion will not be terribly helpful in recruiting new players if they see months between them and that shiny new expansion. There is also the scaling o, that. Many games seem to want the last ten levels to take as long as all the levels before them, or the expansion to take as long as the old “late levels.” You would need to halve the old late levels’ leveling time to make the new time-to-cap fit, with the new late levels taking as long as the old late levels did.

If you keep re-scaling experience, and your level cap keeps rising, you eventually will have players leveling by walking near the newbie zones. Alternately, your time to level through later expansions would be increasingly short, although that might not be an entirely bad thing. If you do not keep re-scaling experience, you start seeing a dizzying distance from level 1 to the cap, particularly if you obey that principle of how long the last 10 levels should take. You could keep that time constant, so 1-40 takes 120 hours, 40-50 takes 120 hours, 50-60 takes 120 hours, etc. I think it would quickly become insane with the “50-60 takes 240 hours, 60-70 takes 480 hours…” interpretation.

: Zubon

Of Alliances and Meaningful PvP

While I’m mostly between MMOs, I am trying Evony [Update], from one of the many ads you may have seen. It resembles Travian in many ways, including the faster pace once fighting starts. I was not sure if I wanted that, what with the whole “job” thing versus a server potentially filled with people who have nothing better to do on summer vacation. Thus came a simple plan: I joined the second-meanest alliance on a newly formed server. Attacking me now risks the wrath of about 400 other people who have nothing better to do than crush every red flag in the area.

This weekend showed an interesting example of that. Looking in around lunch time, there was a discussion of some fellow who had attacked an alliance member and been rude in mailed discussions. He had a strong defensive position with two large castles next to each other, each with thousands of troops and traps, along some friends nearby. “Bring it on” must have seemed like a reasonable thing for him to say, especially when some of us (like me) were over an hour’s travel away from the fight. And then he was attacked something like 100 times that afternoon, until there was nothing but a flat bit of ground.

This is a problem that has been noted for PvP games: once a customer has only a flat bit of ground, it is hard to get more money from him unless he has such a need for vengeance that he vows to RMT his way to victory. When winning means driving someone from the game, that cannot be good for the company, worse if a large alliance gives up and quits en masse.

On the other side, I played Team Fortress on some random servers this weekend. I had a good time, discovering that I really liked the Heavy, which is good since my two favorite classes do not have their achievement/item packs yet. Here, when someone dies, he comes back 11 seconds later with no penalties at all. After a pair of snipers trade deaths three or four times in a minute, I begin to wonder about the point of it all.

: Zubon

WoW will eat itself

With my time returning to World of Warcraft, I have come to the same conclusion, independently, that much of the blogosphere seems to already know: the thing that will kill World of Warcraft is World of Warcraft.  Their hubris will be their downfall.  This will be, unfortunately and as hopelessly optimistic as I was in starting this, my last degree of WoW.

My biggest worry when re-entering World of Warcraft after having not played it for three years was the feeling of playing catch up the entire time.  I am a very casual player.  I like to get in grind mode occasionally for loot or leveling, but I also like to explore both areas and quests.   I had plenty to explore in World of Warcraft.  However, I would be exploring mostly alone.  I saw people here and there on both my blood elf in the blood elf starting zone and death knight in the outlands, but it was almost awkward.  It was as if we did not really expect to see each other there, and secretly did not want to.  It felt kind of like meeting an old high school buddy at the mall.

On global chat and guild chat, I continually saw the nightly events for some raid (mostly max-level Ulduar), but I never saw anything for Outlands.  I tried to get a group for “ramps,” some early dungeon in the Outlands.  After 15 minutes on a Friday night, I managed to get one other death knight in my party.  I could not take this type of gameplay any longer.  It actually destroyed my will to play MMOs for a weekend.

This is how WoW will eat itself.  Players just starting or returning and 20 levels behind will hit a lonely cliff face.  At the top they will hear something of a party, but the climb is long.  This is not something a developer should want.  If anything a returning player should be surrounded with activity. Continue reading WoW will eat itself

Out-dated content

Today my husband and I joined a guild mate in an instance called Carn Dum. This used to be the place to go, before they raised the level cap. We joined a few hours after they started and stayed for two or three bosses over the course of two hours. Earlier in the week, we joined a kinship group of level 60’s who were going through the rift for the heck of it. Like Carn-Dum, it was once the thing to do… but now the glorious rift-armor is out-dated. A week before that, I went through Helegrod in a 24-person loremaster raid. Yes, it was a raid of pure loremasters just for the heck of it.

It’s mind boggling to think of how much content Lotro has which is now out-dated and pointless. I’m looking forward to them raising the level cap so that I can play something other than the same-old instances… but I also know that such an action will immediately make all the rare rewards I’m working towards a full 10 levels below the quest-rewards of the new content.

Why couldn’t the instances and their rewards level with me? I’d love to see the Rift and Carn-Dum balanced for level 60s. And it’d be nice if the rewards from the rift could be traded in for something more appropriate for level 60s. It doesn’t have to be the best armor in the game… go ahead and let the new content have that. But god, I get tired of the same old instances and I hate to think that new stuff will always out-date old stuff.