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An Issue For Alts

I have played through all the new Issue 12 content you can with an existing hero. It is a long evening of play: a story arc to unlock the Midnighter’s Club, reading things in the Midnighter’s Club, a new task force, look at architecture on the new island, a few missions that are all about reading backstory, and a contact with endless template missions. The new gameplay is pretty much that task force. The new enemy group has fewer than a dozen enemies in it, so you mostly fight the same three minions, one lieutenant, and one boss until you hit an elite boss or three. The last mission includes “defeat 300” of these, so you will be on that map for a while. The guys in my supergroup want that Oracle costume for all their female characters.

This is a time for new characters. I have one more villain story arc to try, then the remaining new content is the villain epic archetype. There are some new powers to try, but most of Power Proliferation is porting existing powers to different archetypes. I can’t knock that, as we had a hoot rampaging with low-level characters using the proliferated powers, but it is a new way of hitting old content. Oh, and I should poke around the redecorated Hollows more, although we hit the zone on our new characters.

Issue 11 recycled old content via flashbacks. Issue 12 recycles old content via new characters. I am hoping that Issue 13 has more new content, although I am not expecting it until October. We are somewhat slower than the stated plan of three new issues per year, although I suppose we could count 11.5 as a significant update. It just feels like Turbine puts out this much content every month or two for its games.

: Zubon

Age of Conan – Early Impressions

I got my hands on a copy of Age of Conan a lot earlier than I had planned on buying my own, so I went ahead and installed it. The following are my first impressions from playing through the very first area on my way towards the town of Tortage. You’ll have to excuse the scattershot topic jumping.

It seems all the male faces are portraying the “less than a full deck” look. I had to play a female instead because of that. Really, are nipples *that* important to the game? One of the first cut scenes used a generic character to represent mine, that bothered me. Can we get some *more* splash screens to click past during log in? Where is the log out option so I can switch characters? I don’t want to exit the game and then log in again. I found a helmet and put it on, did not like it so I chose the “don’t show helmet” option and it took off my hair too (update: I’m told this bug was actually the result of changing into and out of the demon form – I did both around the same time). I crashed at log out most of the time and once when I tried to get a screenshot. I don’t really have any opinions on the user interface. It didn’t get in the way of me doing what I needed to do, so I guess that is good enough for now.

The scenery is lush and amazing (keep in mind this was just in the single player area so far). The male characters run funny. I had a few of those bloody critical kill blows but the only way I could tell is because blood splashed on my screen. My character blocked the view of the big moves. Combat is fun so far, a little different – but nothing amazing about it. It makes you pay more attention, which is good. The world (again, intro solo area impressions only) makes me feel walled in, restricted to certain areas. Does not feel like a seamless world, which is an important thing for the explorer in me. The hints might be helpful but I went out of my way to get them off the screen and did not read them.

Class choices seem very interesting. I tried a Herald of Xotli and a Ranger. The Herald of Xotli could turn into a demon, which is always a cool thing. When I was the Ranger I needed to switch from bow to sword frequently. The key to do that is “Shift + R”. G15 keyboard to the rescue. The sound your character makes when you find something is silly. “Aha!”. I found a broken bottle on the beach, picked it up, and used it as a weapon – cool. I seemed to level up really fast.

It looks like the launch was quite solid and I’m impressed. If you like Conan, this appears to be a big win. There is a lot more to the game I’d like to discover and so I will continue to play it as my second game for now. Congratulations to Funcom for fixing the multitudes of problems I was hearing about from beta testers. I will post more as I get time to play.

– Ethic

CoX Issue 12: live

Patch Notes

Highlights include villain epic archetypes, powerset proliferation, a new zone, and many quality of life improvements. They are also starting to sell extra character slots, and you get two free for “a while.” I had to re-subscribe for the anniversary badge, because I am weak.

The amount of new content is limited, but there are many ways to re-experience the old content. We were having fun tonight with a team of Fire Scrappers and Plant Controllers. If you want a free trial or welcome back code (15 free days with purchase of a month, must have been gone for 90), mention it in the comments and I will send it to the e-mail address you list.

: Zubon

Full disclosure: if I send you a code and you spend money, I get some free time. If you have a friend who plays, have him send you a code and he will get the free time.

Age of Conan Launched

According to Funcom, the collector’s edition of Age of Conan has sold out completely and 700,000 regular boxes have been shipped to retail store shelves worldwide.

Since there is a Best Buy store next door, please talk amongst yourselves while I run over and get a status check.

I’m back! They had 19 copies on the shelf in the normal video game area – second shelf from the bottom. They also had a special table set up with another 15 copies. Interestingly, there was also 4 copies of the collector’s edition available to purchase on that table. I guess they aren’t all sold out after all.

Looks like a pretty good presentation for Funcom, but will they sell? Time will tell.

– Ethic

Job Prospects: Poor

Jay Moore had the opening speech at IMGDC, and it included a point I think many people need: getting a sustainable job in the gaming industry is hard.

Many people want a job making games, which is great if you are an executive. No matter how low the salary, how many hours, or how poor of working conditions, people will apply. As fast as you burn through employees, more will be graduating with minimal training and dreams of making the next WoW or Halo. Elder Game hypothesizes that MMOs could be a refuge from this, because they need survivors to run the live game, but much of the industry is self-cannibalizing. Every highly caffeinated 20-something in perpetual crunch mode makes it that much harder for you to make a career.

That ignores the little problem of revenue. 90% of everything is crud, and there is a good chance your game will not break even. Not you, you did a great job, but those other guys screwed up, or management destroyed it, or the market was not ready for your product, or you got lost in a big release month. However it happens, sustainable applies not just to your ability to survive the job but for the job to keep existing.

With high labor supply and limited demand, the pay is low, the jobs are few, and your players will complain about you at least as much as you complain about the current developers. You face a fickle market where faked screenshots and bribed magazines can trump good gameplay. But you do get to have your dream job.

: Zubon

Effective Slowdown Technique

Ethic already posted about fishing in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. Its implementation smoothly and brilliantly slows advancement as you get further along, effectively creating a leveling curve from a system that looks like a simple 1-200 scale. The key is this: you never lose the ability to catch small fish.

When you start out, you have a half-dozen things that you can catch: weeds, rusty dagger, goldfish, giant goldfish, two-pound salmon, ball of gunk. On that list, three are trash, two are rare trophy fish, and one is the oh-so-common goldfish. I don’t know the real ratio, but let’s say early fishing without bait is 50-50 fish to trash. You get a point for each fish you catch, so 10 spins of the reel and you are at 6 (from your free 1).

You are now too experienced for goldfish to be worth anything. They are effectively gray. Conveniently, minnows are now available, along with trophy minnows, quickly followed by bitterlings, and so on. New fish become available every few points, and only the latest few fish (and their trophy versions) give you a new point of fishing. By the time you pass 100, you can catch two dozen different things. You cannot prevent this by seeking high-level ponds; every body of water is the same, from lakes to puddles. This is nice if you want to catch dace for the low-level cooking recipe, but it means that you want two empty packs when you pull out your reel for the fishing “late game.”

: Zubon

Tobold on Time to Cap

This is a good post, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but the most important point to me is what do you spend your time doing in-game? And is it fun?

If you expect your players to spend most of their time at the level cap, the post-cap game is rather important, ya know? If most WoW players are at the cap, those raids and/or the PvP better be lots of fun, or else hitting the cap is a suggestion that people quit playing your game. Maybe alts are lots of fun; that’s how we roll in City of Heroes.

That is not a suggestion that you make time-to-cap take longer. If the leveling game is fun, people will make alts to keep playing it. They will keep running your quests for the fun, even without experience points. If not, a longer time-to-cap is bad because it means less fun in your game, although really it means throw away your entire game, because we already have dozens of level-based MMOs, some of which are pretty good.

I’ll rephrase that last point: if your game is 250 hours to the level cap, make sure your game has at least 250 hours of leveling fun, and 1000 would be better so that people can play some alts. If your game is 2000 hours to the level cap (hello classic EQ) … I’m betting there was not 2000 hours of fun, so let’s move on. Once you have players at the level cap, you need enough hours of fun there to keep them playing. And no, taking the same amount of fun and trying to stretch it out by lowering xp/encounter or making you re-run each part until it is not fun does not work: that just increases global suck.

: Zubon

TOS Violation as Federal Crime

Lori Drew has been indicted for using MySpace. If you haven’t heard of the case, she allegedly created a false profile as a teenage boy, started an online relationship with a neighbor girl, then drove her to suicide. I turn to Orin Kerr for the gamer-relevant part:

To understand this case, you need to understand the government’s theory. The indictment is not charging Drew with harassment. Nor are they charging her with homicide. Rather, the government’s theory in this case is that Drew criminally trespassed onto MySpace’s server by using MySpace in a way that violated MySpace’s Terms of Service (TOS).

Here’s the idea. The TOS required Drew to provide accurate registration information, not to harass or harm other people, and not to promote conduct that was abusive. She didn’t comply with these terms, the theory goes, so she was criminally trespassing onto MySpace’s computer when she was logging into her account. The indictment turns this into a federal felony conspiracy charge by arguing that she did this in concert with others to obtain information and to further tortious conduct — intentional infliction of emotional distress — violating the felony provisions of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2).

In other words, logging on while violating the TOS is the same thing as hacking the servers. Further bad behavior makes it a felony. As a legal theory, Prof. Kerr suggests, this is not a winner. But if it is, your MMO can not only ban goldfarmers/spammers but also put them in federal prison. And that also applies to people who were banned for abusive language, since this case is explicitly about violating the TOS to inflict emotional damage.

: Zubon