Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Table Games

Which perfectly matches the table the girls made me earlier:




I love my girls, they're awesome.

These Shoes Are Made for Whomping

My loving wife made me the perfect summer PVP shoes:

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

It's the Economy, Stupid

Star Wars, The Old Republic (SWTOR) is in closed beta, and sometime in the next six months will be released to the public. As of right now, the game has got great buzz and people are anticipating another great product release from Bioware, but this isn't going to be your standard MMO.

For the standard, you must use World of Warcraft. Not because it's the first or best, but because it is the most played. Millions of players have played it as their first and only MMO, with a population that dwarfed EverQuest and other predecessors. Because of it's ubiquitousness, anything that comes after it will be compared to WoW: The AOL of MMOs.

SWTOR is a story-heavy MMO. It wants your choices to matter, and it wants to make your character's abilities change based on the decisions you make. There will be prescribed amounts of 'light' and 'dark' force points you earn based on these decisions, and the only way to do this will be through making clear choices during scripted events.

So a large part of character development will feel like a choose-your-own-adventure book. If you decide to spare the life of an attacker, go to pare 35. If you choose to execute him with your light saber, go to page 114. The characters are also heavily voiced, meaning lots of cut scenes, and lots of the game enjoyment will be cinematic and not actively engaging. Add into this that we're told that your companions will do most of your actual crafting for you, even while you're offline, and where does that leave us if we derive enjoyment from participating in the economy?

How much of the economy will be player-driven? What will material availability be like? How will trade skills progress over time, and how useful will they be for manufacturing items used in combat? We're not getting a lot of answers right now, but given how much hand holding Bioware is planning for character development, I'd wager the tradeskills/professions aspect of the game is going to be thin, or at least heavily diluted.

Bioware has given us a few hints on what to expect.
  • You will be able to make weapons & armor that is equivalent to gear required to start raid content.
  • You will be able to 'brand' items so people know who made them.
  • Becoming highly skilled in a craft requires more than materials, it will require time invested (no powerleveling tradeskills).
  • Crafting will include quests, that take anywhere from minutes to hours.
  • Gathering is done by your companions to free you for other activity.
  • Crafting will reward both the casual crafter and the very dedicated crafter.
This sounds very promising, and mostly what I want to hear, as a player who thoroughly enjoys crafting. I'd love to be the guy who is the "very best in the galaxy" at making laser pistols, and have people hunt me down to craft items for them, because they saw an awesome one I made with my 'brand' on it. And I should enjoy making them because they're hard, not easy. The market shouldn't be saturated with them, and the best items I make that took weeks to research and develop shouldn't be replaced in ten minutes by a heroic PUG trying to knock over bosses for a few credits.

That is what drives the economy, more than anything else. If you don't need to build, you don't need to buy materials. If you don't need to buy, you don't need to sell. If you don't need to sell, you don't need to gather - and now two-thirds of the skills are broken. WoW started strong, but missed the boat. At the very high-end of content there is room for both raid rewards and crafting rewards, and they should require an equal amount of effort.

Here's an example. Let's say your guild knocks over a boss and loots his pockets for a MegaBlade, and in your crafting system you know of a pattern that exists for a MechaBlade, which has equal abilities. If your raid has 8 people in it and it takes them 3 hours of playtime each to raid and loot the MegaBlade, it should take 24 hours of playtime (not offline NPC crafting time) to craft one MechaBlade.

The raiders will say "but we worked to gear ourselves up to tackle this content, so it's a harder effort." To that the crafter replies that they spent weeks (months?) leveling up their tradeskill to the point that they can learn the difficult recipe. It should be no different; the ability to acquire gear should be dependent mostly on time invested. If either method is significantly easier than the other, people will abandon the lesser one altogether in favor of the easy one.

And as new raid content is introduced to provide progressive challenges, crafting should mimic it equally. I mean, think about it. How in the hell do the bad guys always get the best weapons and equipment, and why are they in their pockets? If they have a MegaBlade in their pocket why didn't they take it out and stab me with it? It doesn't make sense. And if I were living in a practical universe, and I wanted to acquire the best Blaster I could find, would I fly to Alderaan and look up the best engineer on the planet, or would I go out into the wild and kill space boars randomly until I find one crammed up its ass?

At the beginning, WoW's crafting and economy made sense. When raiding began it was harder than it is now, and the best craftables were comparable to the best 5-man blues. There were some very rare epics, and there were epic questlines to craft epic items. There was room for both in the expanding WoW universe. Soon however, the recipe fell apart. When they improved access to raid content for players, they forgot to compensate crafting with equal attention and it was relegated to a series of hoops you jumped through to gain a combat buff, and little else. Most serious players these days craft only for the raid buffs - if they raid - or only gather and sell materials - if they don't.

The net result is that the gold being pumped into the system doesn't cycle through crafting costs, and gold sinks have to be added constantly to prevent inflation. Now in Cataclysm, those inflation-fighting measures are failing, and the economy is failing with it. Unless WoW addresses (see: completely revamps) tradeskills, the game's economy will implode. And in WoW's case it's a game-wide issue, since wealth is transferable in significant amounts across any realm at any time.

The newest Bind-on-Equip items from Firelands raids are selling for tens of thousands of gold in the auction house, and people are buying them at those prices, because gold is so plentiful, and there are no crafting alternatives that come remotely close. So crafting begins to feel worthless for the crafter, useless for WoW as a way to control the economy, inflation runs rampant, and everyone is a billionare with nothing worth buying.

Some things make sense, and some don't - here's hoping that Bioware learns from Blizzard's mistakes and the economy in TOR makes sense.

Friday, July 15, 2011

What the Hell

Ok, this guy was just freaky.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Photoshopping

One of my favorite pastimes is photoshopping. Basically it's a peer-vote competition to make the most creative and funny picture out of an original image provided to everyone. My favorite forum for doing this is on Fark, where there's a wide viewership and lots of good competition daily.

Just for fun, here's today's submissions.

Original:


Photoshop:


Original:

Photoshop:

Monday, July 11, 2011

Players of the Last Alt

One more time around the block as they say. One last character reroll, on the Horde side, for old time sake before we give up WarCraft (again) and play SWTOR this fall.

We've decided to farm up a bunch of heirlooms and mail them to level 1 horde alts to level up together. I got a jump start - and need to stop for a day or so - and got my hunter up to level 25 in about 6 hours played. I'm playing an orc hunter with the heirloom helm, shoulders, chest, bow, and dual daggers, with everything enchanted. I've been purposely trying to take it slow so I don't jump out ahead of everyone else, but it's almost impossible.

I figured battlegrounds would be a good way to waste time with little xp, but because of the heirlooms and the guild bonus (we joined a L20 guild) when we win a Warsong Gulch match I end up getting almost a whole level of XP! Crazy.

I'm still doing my firelands dailies on my paladin, and this is just for fun and filling spare time. Skinning & leatherworking are my professions, and I've already got ~100 in fishing, cooking, and first aid. Seriously, I must be bored. When will we get our TOR release date?

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Star Wars: The Phantom Beta

Apparently there is a lot of information out there about Star Wars. Somehow, I'm not getting any of it. There is one very helpful summary post on the SWTOR forums that TheDarkKnight provided summarizing all the leaked information to date (and it's on the site, so you know it's true and non-NDA threatening). But in spite of reading it a few times and searching for other sources, I'm not getting the answers I need about SWTOR.

Check that - the answers I want, not need. And I don't think anyone will provide the answers I'm looking for. I have questions about classes, crafting, combat, world exploration, NPCs, ships, and lots of things. But what I want to know most of all is if I'll like it.

Yeah, no one can tell me that, but I could find out really easily if I had a chance to play the Beta. When I got into the Cataclysm beta for WoW it reassured to me that there was a lot of new and interesting content (especially for re-rollers and casuals, like me) and that purchasing it was going to be a certainty. I thought I wanted to get into the beta to learn about the crafting and zones and what the quickest path to prosperity was, but I discovered that the only thing that gratified me was seeing that there was new content to explore.

I participated in beta the way a person should. I did quests, discovered and reported bugs (Town-In-A-Box, etc.) and tried lots of different things to explore the fringe edges of the game. It was fun. But then I logged out after only a couple of days and didn't go back, because I wanted to save the content for when it went live. I had my answer, I liked it.

Am I going to like SWTOR? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone will be able to answer that for me. I need to know what combat is like. I need to know if I will be relying on macros and keyboard tricks to survive in PvP. I need to know if the interface is built for clickers. I need to know if the content is forgiving enough to support people no matter what choices they make. I need to be able to drive the game with one hand and the sound off for periods of time, because I refuse to ignore the family while I play: The game is in the background, not the family.

Nobody can tell me these things in a forum post or even a youtube video (which would be a violation of the NDA right now). Nobody, however eloquent, can describe in enough detail what I will find annoying, what I can deal with, and what I will really enjoy. The only way I can get these answers is by trying the game myself. If I weren't already promising to a group of friends that I'm playing SWTOR at launch, I would be hesitant to buy it. Not because of the content or quality of the game, but because of the interest, interface and comfort of play.

I don't play games much for the "enthralling story and lore." I'll take whatever storyline they give me, and enjoy it enough. The make or break however is the feeling that without keyboard smashing and just a combination of normal reflexes and intelligent strategy that I can survive most of my obstacles and PvP encounters. If I can't, if it requires overly complicated techniques and focus, then it's going to have an uphill battle winning my admiration and spare time.

So I've been entered in the beta for a long time now, and I've had an account on the SWTOR site for almost two years, but I'm not getting in the beta, and my questions are going unanswered.

Will I buy it? Yeah. I promised I would.

Will I like it? We'll see.