The guild mentioned in the previous post disintegrated due to leadership failures. Another one I tried after that was pretty much the same. The one I'm in now is a great group of people, it's very well organized, and is successful and growing.
It's not a retro guild, but it has a different trick - level caps. Currently we're at a L60 level cap, meaning that we can't level past that until the cap is lifted (about two weeks, from level 45). Some people might think that going from level 45 to 60 in two weeks would be just enough time, but for us more experienced players it takes no time at all. There's at least 20 of us now who are at the cap with a week and a half to go.
But being unable to level (you are required to turn your xp off so as to not hit L61) doesn't mean that there isn't anything to do. In some battlegroups having your xp capped doesn't interfere with your ability to join battlegrounds because there are a lot of people who lock xp at your level - ours isn't one of these groups, unfortunately. If this is important for your reroll, do some research first to see which battlegroups are the most active.
But in spite of not being able to level and not being able to pvp, there is a whole bunch of stuff to do. Many of us are preparing our gear by hunting down BoE pieces or doing enough Hellfire quests to get quest rewards (without xp) to upgrade our gear at L60 as much as possible. There are a lot of good enchants available, and the average player can get their stamina above 5000 (12 or more for tanks) to group up and do old-world raids with.
Our guild has a preliminary date set for tonight for Molten Core, with BlackWing Lair to follow sometime after. Our main tank is a Death Knight with about 12.5k health. I'm playing a rogue, and I'm decked out in full L60 PvP gear with the HWL daggers. I don't usually run anything but subtlety, but I'm considering working on an assassination or compat spec for raids.
But aside from the main focuses, a funny thing happens when you work with level caps. First of all, everyone gets hit with the "just don't have time right now" real life bug from time to time. If you're not able to keep up this week, relax. Next week you can put in some time and catch up easily. If you like to "race" to the cap you'll have several chances to compete, in the different content expansions. If you need all the time you can get to level, there's plenty.
And then there's the really cool benefits. If you have extra time on your hands you can flush out your character. Do professions, achievements, exploration, role playing, and grouping with your guildies. There's lots of incentive for people to be online, but nothing on the schedule that maximizes their time, so people have time to chat on vent, get to know each other, and on a pvp server, prowl around in groups looking for fights.
I've done some pvp runs and they're fun, although we're limited at the moment because any terrible player at 60 can wipe us all out pretty easily. What I've decided to do that takes up most of my time is to pursue the Loremaster achievement. Between Loremaster and Battlemaster, those are the two achievements in the game that I can really respect because they require dedication and persistence, and mean something. There's always The Insane title, but there's a reason why it's called The Insane, and I don't think it really has the worth of the effort required to get it.
Last night I finished the Eastern Kingdoms portion of the Loremaster achievement. This morning I finished up the Bloodmyst Isle Quests portion of Kalimdor, and it was easily the worst zone I've done so far. This content was built during the Burning Crusade, and it's quite creative, but at the time it was made there wasn't the same incentive to streamline the questing process for ease of play, and the quests have you jump all over the zone, and a few times you're making trips back and forth to the same place, sometimes across the water. Not fun.
It's not much easier to do at level 60 either, since a lot of the quests have drops you need to collect, and there is no flying on Bloodmyst Isle, so you're running everywhere. It was painful, and I had to hunt down hidden questgivers and dropped items that started quests, and barely scratched out the minimum 50 quests needed for that zone. If I had done Bloodmyst first I probably wouldn't have continued with the achievement, it was just terrible.
But with that one behind me I'm sure the rest will get easier - and more interesting, since the Cataclysm has touched virtually every zone and created new things to see and do. And when the level cap goes up in two weeks I can continue with Outland, and I know that there's content out there that I haven't touched in at least 5 years - and possibly not at all. Good times! And some day I'll be able to walk around Stormwind with my Loremaster title, proclaiming to everyone that I've been there, and done that.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Nudged back into the game
I wanted to play WoW again. I bought my two-month time card, and logged into my account, looked at all my characters, and logged out again.
A couple days later, I logged on to my 85 mage, ran around doing some archeology, and logged out again.
It was about two weeks before I found a real reason to log in. Someone had advertised a reroll guild, a casual bring-your-own-fun guild of people leveling for the fresh atmosphere of it. I decided that I'd never finished my tauren shadow priest, and started rolling with them. I picked up a good name (Lighthorn) and trotted out to pasture in Mulgore on the Frostwolf server, a horde-heavy PvP realm.
So far so good: I've been ganked twice, the people are nice, the economy is healthy, and leveling the priest is nowhere near as painful as it was back in vanilla. I might actually make it to 85. We'll see.
A couple days later, I logged on to my 85 mage, ran around doing some archeology, and logged out again.
It was about two weeks before I found a real reason to log in. Someone had advertised a reroll guild, a casual bring-your-own-fun guild of people leveling for the fresh atmosphere of it. I decided that I'd never finished my tauren shadow priest, and started rolling with them. I picked up a good name (Lighthorn) and trotted out to pasture in Mulgore on the Frostwolf server, a horde-heavy PvP realm.
So far so good: I've been ganked twice, the people are nice, the economy is healthy, and leveling the priest is nowhere near as painful as it was back in vanilla. I might actually make it to 85. We'll see.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Seen a few games
So in the past six months or so I've been taking a hiatus from World of WarCraft, and played RIFT, Star Wars the Old Republic, and League of Legends. It sounds a bit like a mismatch - two MMOs and a free to play PvP matchup game. Only one of the three has captured my interest, however.
Frankly, I'm tired of MMOs and their formula. Make a character. Do some quests to learn the lore. Acquire weapons and armor. Craft some things that are mostly useless. Get to max level. Group together to kill large enemies. Acquire more weapons and armor. Rinse. Repeat.
The PvP in most MMOs is trashy at best. You go in with the same character you use in PvE, with the same abilities designed to fight monsters, and use them against players. It almost always fails. The key to good PvP is pretty simple:
1. Quick response time. It doesn't matter what abilities I have if I can't access them quickly by keystroke, without moving my hands around on the keyboard to find them. And when I click an ability, it better happen now. Not three seconds from now, not when some graphic or collision is done being calculated, but now. Right now. Having a cooldown to prevent spamming an ability must in no way prevent, inhibit, or make difficult my ability to use it once. Your UI needs to be as responsive as a typewriter, or you fail.
2. Even odds going in. What should separate me from winning or losing should be my intelligence, experience, and expertise in the combat arena, not the acquisition of gear, points, race/class selection, or anything else outside the arena. Victory should be skill based, not based on time invested or long-term PvE choices. It is up to the game to figure out how to make it even, it's not my responsibility. My job is to have fun, and keep sticking quarters into the machine. Why do MMOs think they are immune to this requirement?
3. No formulas, no macros. There should not be a single best method to victory. Everything chosen should have a counter, every path should lead to both victory and disaster, depending on the player's ability to predict, adapt, and think. Being the fastest person to press the Q key isn't sufficient to be called good PvP - using strategy and multiple abilities in the best circumstances are what good PvP is about. No 3rd-party addons allowed - everyone uses the same UI, and your UI should be smart and simple.
SO WarCraft fails due to continual imbalances. RIFT fails due to formulas, imbalances, and response time. SWTOR is nastily unresponsive, and their are flagrant class imbalances that go unaddressed League of Legends has them all beat - every game is a fresh start with and against a different batch of players, and every game is a sum of the experiences in that match only. When you win or lose, you pretty much start over. Over time you can buy runes, but they do only a little bit in terms of helping your abilities. What you do in game affects the outcome of the game the most.
And I'm sick of MMOs not giving me what I want. I want to create things, not just destroy them. I'm less interested in killing raptors or enemy soldiers than I am in building a trading post or changing the politics and economy of a region. Combat isn't nearly as fun as you think it is. Focus more on the reason we do things, and less on the repetitive nature of doing them. Give me a reason to think. Occupy my creative mind, not just my reactive one.
There aren't any MMOs that do this. Minecraft is probably the closest, and it's almost a parody of an MMO. It's certainly heavy on the creation, but it completely lacks a reactive environment.
So another set of games go by, and I still don't have what I want. I guess I'll keep playing LoL until something really satisfying comes along. Something like SimCity, but open-ended and multiplayer. What SWTOR could have been... give me a universe to explore. Give me endless space to settle, and infinite variation to play with. With a simple, competitive PvP system.
Is that too much to ask for?
Frankly, I'm tired of MMOs and their formula. Make a character. Do some quests to learn the lore. Acquire weapons and armor. Craft some things that are mostly useless. Get to max level. Group together to kill large enemies. Acquire more weapons and armor. Rinse. Repeat.
The PvP in most MMOs is trashy at best. You go in with the same character you use in PvE, with the same abilities designed to fight monsters, and use them against players. It almost always fails. The key to good PvP is pretty simple:
1. Quick response time. It doesn't matter what abilities I have if I can't access them quickly by keystroke, without moving my hands around on the keyboard to find them. And when I click an ability, it better happen now. Not three seconds from now, not when some graphic or collision is done being calculated, but now. Right now. Having a cooldown to prevent spamming an ability must in no way prevent, inhibit, or make difficult my ability to use it once. Your UI needs to be as responsive as a typewriter, or you fail.
2. Even odds going in. What should separate me from winning or losing should be my intelligence, experience, and expertise in the combat arena, not the acquisition of gear, points, race/class selection, or anything else outside the arena. Victory should be skill based, not based on time invested or long-term PvE choices. It is up to the game to figure out how to make it even, it's not my responsibility. My job is to have fun, and keep sticking quarters into the machine. Why do MMOs think they are immune to this requirement?
3. No formulas, no macros. There should not be a single best method to victory. Everything chosen should have a counter, every path should lead to both victory and disaster, depending on the player's ability to predict, adapt, and think. Being the fastest person to press the Q key isn't sufficient to be called good PvP - using strategy and multiple abilities in the best circumstances are what good PvP is about. No 3rd-party addons allowed - everyone uses the same UI, and your UI should be smart and simple.
SO WarCraft fails due to continual imbalances. RIFT fails due to formulas, imbalances, and response time. SWTOR is nastily unresponsive, and their are flagrant class imbalances that go unaddressed League of Legends has them all beat - every game is a fresh start with and against a different batch of players, and every game is a sum of the experiences in that match only. When you win or lose, you pretty much start over. Over time you can buy runes, but they do only a little bit in terms of helping your abilities. What you do in game affects the outcome of the game the most.
And I'm sick of MMOs not giving me what I want. I want to create things, not just destroy them. I'm less interested in killing raptors or enemy soldiers than I am in building a trading post or changing the politics and economy of a region. Combat isn't nearly as fun as you think it is. Focus more on the reason we do things, and less on the repetitive nature of doing them. Give me a reason to think. Occupy my creative mind, not just my reactive one.
There aren't any MMOs that do this. Minecraft is probably the closest, and it's almost a parody of an MMO. It's certainly heavy on the creation, but it completely lacks a reactive environment.
So another set of games go by, and I still don't have what I want. I guess I'll keep playing LoL until something really satisfying comes along. Something like SimCity, but open-ended and multiplayer. What SWTOR could have been... give me a universe to explore. Give me endless space to settle, and infinite variation to play with. With a simple, competitive PvP system.
Is that too much to ask for?
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Table Games
Which perfectly matches the table the girls made me earlier:
I love my girls, they're awesome.
I love my girls, they're awesome.
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.
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.
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.
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
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