When Runes of Magic updated it’s title system, it came with a new user interface and some new functionality. One of the new things you could do is check the names of quests you could complete to gain new titles. Now I am a bit of a completist, so I will do many quests no matter how unimportant and worthless their rewards may be. When I suddenly saw a dozen quests I hadn’t done, I got to work.

One quest, Archery Supplies, wasn’t even visible, there was no stereotypical ! above the Ashlar npc, no indication that it was there, or that there would be the follow up quest, Pacification of the Ancient Guardians. I didn’t know where to find it, just that the title listed it as existing. Fortunately there are such things as getbuffed.com and runesdb.com, and although they aren’t perfect, I found the npc.

I had a similar situation with Admission of Guilt, after having finished a quest at level 35 or so, there was no indication of any follow up, any way to tell that I should speak with the npc. In fact, I simply left after completing the previous quest in the chain. Only to return several months later to talk to the same npc, receive a quest from him, talk to him and then turn in the quest to the exact same npc.

I finished the quests I could find, and moved on with the usual RoM routine, until I came back to RoM after an absence and discovered the even newer title updates. Titles now add health, 5 per title, and there were many new titles, finishing out the incomplete sets and zones that were left out previously. Of course, there were again around a dozen quests I hadn’t done.

Some of these quests had similar problems, simply no indication that you should speak to an npc to get the quest. 3 of these quests stood out though, as they had no starting npc listed on the databases, and I had no clue how to start them.

By stroke of luck I was talking to an old guildie who we were trying to lure back to the guild in vent. I mentioned I was trying to figure out The Broken Diary, and he immediately knew what I was talking about.

“It’s on the ground”
“It’s what?”
“You click on this buried chest half buried in the ground”
“makes sense”
“There’s another one by Karzak Camp, same thing”
“Now that is excellent game design”

Lets get this part over with. On the map, A Broken Diary is on the “a” in Fallen. Interrupted Task is north of the “p” in Camp by the side of the road. A Mother’s Wish is on the southern most sand dune island in Ravenfell, east of the word “team”.

3 quests where you simply click on a completely undetectable object in the ground. Literally tiny in some cases, I’ve rode past on my mount all of these locations dozens of times and never noticed them.

Finally making big, obvious, cliched, completely unoriginal exclamation marks over the heads of npc’s makes giant loads of sense.

No, not the play-by-mail game of the 80s and 90s (and if you know what I’m talking about, many props!). Rather, Syp’s thrown down the gauntlet to EQ2 players to give him 5 ways in which EQ2 is better than WoW. Since both games launched at almost the same time 5 years ago, it’s a good challenge.

I’m not generally a fan of numbered lists but this one does interest me, not in any spirit of WoW-bashing but more to examine why I’ve spent more time in EQ2 than in any other game since Asheron’s Call, my first MMO. We originally played it for a year in 2005-2006, then left for greener pastures. I don’t recall wanting to leave the game as such, I think it was more the lure of greener, shinier things “over there” — including various betas like Vanguard. I returned to EQ2 in April this year and have been playing it consistently ever since. The only game that’s lured me away for any length of time has been Dragon Age, and even that is on hold until I decide I’m willing to drag Kaitou’s bored backside through the end of the Fade section.

For the benefit of those new to this blog, you need to know the following about my playstyle to understand how I judge games: I am a crafter who adventures as a hobby; if it’s shiny, it must be picked up, no matter the danger; if it’s harvestable, ditto. I avoid raid-type stuff at all costs, primarily because I’m not motivated by the item-treadmill reward such raids offer, but also because I find them (much like other people view crafting) to be a rather tedious waste of time better spent doing something else. The only exceptions to my item-disinterest include anything that can be used to decorate a house or anything silly that can be used to decorate a player.

Snow White and the Shard of Love (I'm the dwarf on the far right)

So, the list, per Ysh.

1. Crafting. While the process itself is as repetitive and ultimately tedious (for many) as in any other MMO, the “sphere” of crafting, to intentionally borrow from Vanguard, really is independent from adventuring in EQ2. You don’t need to be a level 50 adventurer in order to be a level anything crafter, which was something that turned me off WoW both times I’ve played it. Crafting is the core of my gameplay, not the side-dish. There are many other things that fit into this category, like the plethora of crafter quests that are constantly being added to, that make EQ2 one of the few games that genuinely understand and cater to the crafting playerbase — not the adventuring playerbase that also happens to craft when they can’t get a group.

2. Guild Halls. Quite a few games have guild halls now, but not many of them offer the communal amenities EQ2’s guilds & halls can offer to their guild-based communities. Aside from being very grand buildings with tons of decoration options, guild halls can offer bankers, brokers (think auction house), crafting stations, adventuring/crafting writ givers, and a ton of other stuff that’s normally found in the outside world. The downside is that guild halls have become the social hubs of the game, emptying out city areas that were already underpopulated due to the weird partitioned way in which the two primary capital cities were originally designed. On the other hand, however, most guild halls are at least partly open to the public which means they can become genuine alternative meeting places.

3. Housing. Most other EQ2 players will mention this, I suspect, because it’s one of the most glaring lacks in WoW. If you like housing and you’re playing WoW, you’re SOL, to pile on the TLAs. Aside from the fact that it’s at least offered in EQ2, it also comes in eleventy-zillion different flavours — each city has its own distinct housing look and several different room-counts and layouts to choose from. In Freeport and Qeynos houses you can actually change the texture of walls, floors and ceilings. Furniture can be dropped freeform and moved as you please — there’s no x-axis rotation (as there is now in SWG), but you can resize, move stuff up/down, and rotate on at least one axis, all of which is a lot better than simply being given hooks to hang things on, as in LOTRO. (As an aside, that LOTRO system is one Turbine used in Asheron’s Call housing back in 2001 — time for a change, guys!)

4. Mentoring. Unlike many games, WoW still doesn’t have a system to allow players of disparate levels to play together. That said, since WoW’s focus is now entirely on getting people to max level as fast as possible, it would be silly for them to include any such system, but that speaks to a fundamental difference between the two. EQ2’s levelling used to be really slow, compared to WoW, even back in the vanilla days; the curve has been flattened quite a bit in the intervening five years, but EQ2’s motto is not, and hopefully never will be, “The Game Begins at 80.” This always jarred me in WoW, was one of the things (along with … well, #1-3 above) that turned me off the game, and is I think one of the major contributors to the bad side of raid-based gaming — you know, elitist jerks and gear snobs. (Who are starting to come out of the woodwork in EQ2 as it starts to focus more and more on raiding. Oh, EQ2, step off this path before you become Brown-WoW!) Now in EQ2 you can mentor yourself down for no reason other than that you want to be a lower level again for a while, which reopens up a ton of previously greyed-out content — and trust me, there’s a LOT of content in EQ2.

5. It’s not a Theme Park. It’s not entirely a sandbox either, but one of the things many people who try EQ2 often end up saying is “I didn’t know what to do or where to start!” This is a frequent sandbox-type issue, and actually EQ2 has become a little friendlier to new players over the years, but it certainly doesn’t put you on rails and send you out along the Ride To 80, even today. For the type of player I am this is a definite plus rather than a weakness, because once you get past that head-spinning stage you end up faced with tons of possibilities whenever you log on. It doesn’t always come down to the only choice being adventuring — and I know that’s not the only choice in WoW, but since so much of everything is tied to one’s adventuring level and since the game is by design slanted towards chomping through content, then adventuring and chomping through content sort of end up being most people’s default choice. Fighting stuff is very rarely my activity of choice in any game, and in EQ2 there’s still always more to do than I have time to do it in — which is exactly what I want from an MMO.

I could mention guilds as levellable entities, collections, appearance slots (so that you don’t have to look quite as ridiculous as you do in WoW), art style (it’s on the brown extreme but it’s learning to be more chromatic)… but I won’t, since we only get 5 slots. Go add your own to the comments here or to Syp’s.

Other bloggers to have joined this meme-in-the-making include Stropp, whom I may have had a hand in luring to EQ2 in the first place.  /halo. See also this Elder Game article kindly linked to by one of Syp’s commenters, since it’s an oldish post; good read!

Last but not least, Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it today in the US.

Square Enix boss Yoichi Wada has some startling revelations about the video game industry. Unfortunately he’s a couple of years late. Speaking with MCV, Wada speaks of a complete change to how we play our games, with the possibility of making consoles obsolete. He believes in as little as ten years time, sever-powered, streaming games and those that are digitally distributed will replace disc-based formats. We almost have that now with PSN, XBLA and Steam but Wada also thinks that the hardware we play those on won’t be needed as everything will be run on some distant server hooked into our TVs. He added that Sony and Microsoft, in his opinion, have altered their ways for such a shift and Square Enix are doing the same by concentrating on social and browser based games. Let’s not forger the MMO that will be Final Fantasy XIV which SE are paying particular interest in how successful the beta in 2010 will be.

There’s no doubt about a change from disc to digital distribution with Sony trying out that very method thanks to the PSPgo which, for whatever reason, is failing. That suggests this change may be longer than Wada’s “ten years time” as the platform holders figure out the best way of initiating such a shift. It is difficult to imagine either Sony or Microsoft relinquishing their grip on the video game industry by allowing another format to play their games – similar to the idea that one day there’ll be only one console even though the market and platforms are more diverse than they’ve ever been.

Kotaku recently went and asked why people play or don’t play World of Warcraft.

Here is some asshat’s reason for not playing WoW:

Playing a game like WoW consumes so much time and all WoW players that I know play for hours on end everyday. There isn’t enough time for me to have a social life, go to college, get enough, sleep, and play WoW the way they seem to.

College? Pfft. Loser.

Then there’s the guy who says he’d rather spend time with his girlfriend. Please.

On the other end, there is Casey Lynch, some stranger I don’t know, who said he/she  (hard to tell) plays because:

“Explaining why I play WoW is like explaining why I like to go out and eat pizza, drink beer and hang out with my friends all night. Obviously, because it’s hella fun to me. And come to think of it, when I play, I’m usually eating pizza, drinking beer and hanging out with my friends all night, except we’re wired into Vent and running Naxx instead of carousing at our favorite pub.”

Why do I play? The lootz!

Also, take the above with a grain of salt, please.

IGN has recently posted a developer dairy by Star Trek Online Visual Effects Lead (VFX) Artist Michael Cavallaro. The new diary talks about the visual design for Star Trek Online and what he and his team faced in developing the Star Trek universe. Given that the Star Trek Franchise stretches over forty years and 11 movies and incomposes visual styles from the low budgets on TOS in the 1960’s to J.J. Abrams slick high budget reboot of 2009 you can imagine the difficulties of fusing it all together into one style that pleased all the fans.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             ” The effects changed from series to series and from movie to movie, and of course you have the J.J. Abrams version, which is different than all of them. If there is one thing we learned from Abrams it is if you make it cool enough, the fans will like it. “  said Cavallaro  ” The first step in visualizing an effect is to meet with the design team to see exactly what something does, when it’s used and how much damage it inflicts. From there we scour old episodes and movies to find all the reference for that particular effect. Sometimes we have several versions and sometimes it just doesn’t exist. In the case of different versions from different time periods, we try to find the most iconic one to build off of and give it a modern look. For new effects, we work closely with the Art Lead and Concept Team to make sure that what we are creating looks and feels like it is Star Trek IP. It’s kinda cool to think that a future Star Trek movie or TV show might use something we created as canon ”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Judging from what I have seen so far Michael and his team have done a Great job the game looks better than I was anticipating  when Star Trek Online was first announced. To read the full article go to Michael Cavallaro’s dev blog hosted on IGN.

In Runes of Magic, you can do 10 daily quests every day. These quests give you 10 (usually) phirius tokens each, experience, gold, and talent points. Due to the lack of quests for leveling your primary all the way to 55, let alone your secondary, it’s mandatory to do these dailies. That’s by far not the only benefit though, because after reaching 55 on both sides you will most certainly need to gain Talent Points. This is the best way to do so. Some amount of gold is gained by doing your dailies, but a greater gain in wealth are the phirius tokens, which can be used to buy things in the phirius shop.

As you might expect this takes up a lot of time. People buy daily quest items on the Auction House, find the fastest possible way to do dailies, or spend an hour farming up the items themselves every single day.

Which brings us to the Hunter dailies. Although there are daily quests that offer more xp, tp, and gold, “Killing the Hunter” in Aotulia Volcano has become the daily quest. The key is that there is no drop to pick up. 12 kills and the quest is done. That means you can raid it with as many people as you want and it will go pretty fast. The Deadwood Hunters are not difficult kills, and fortunately there is a circle route you can take that allows you not to aggro a bunch of different mobs.

Instead of fighting over mobs for their potential drop, you work together to kill Hunters as efficiently as possible. A good run takes about 3 minutes. A half hour instead of an hour farming mobs.

Now with any group activity, obviously there are going to be problems. It strikes me as amazing though, how unofficial rules pop up, and most of all, how much I agree with those rules. Like in this thread.

2. Kill the worms on your own time. While you are in a deadwood hunter raid, your only concern are the dinos. I don’t want to start an argument on who gets the meats so to be fair, lets take them out of the equation. Done correctly, you won’t get agro from any worm.

People go out of their way to collect meats from Swallow Walkers, another daily quest. There’s only one Swallow truly in the way and hard to avoid, yet every single raid on the hunters, anywhere between 1 and 4 get killed. It’s selfish and slows the entire group down.

Essentially all the rules listed above, and I’m sure I could add a few, trickle down to 3 things. Don’t be greedy. Don’t be lazy. Use common sense. Kind of reminds me of George Carlin talking about the ten commandments.

After five years, it’s hard to imagine a world without World of Warcraft. Released Nov. 23, 2004, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game has set the standard for the genre.

More than 11.5 million players from around the world, from all walks of life, spend hours a day in the world of Azeroth. They embark on epic adventures, battle other players or just hang out. And each of them pays developer Blizzard Entertainment $15 per month for the privilege.

Players create characters and develop them over time, forging relationships with other gamers and going on quests to gain experience or loot. Whether they play with strangers, friends or alone, Warcraft’s polished virtual world proves easy to get into and hard to get out of.

Though the game’s success has spawned dozens of imitators, not one has posed a serious threat to Blizzard’s dominance. But perhaps the best praise for WoW is that other game designers love to play it. Among its devotees are Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and BioShock creative director Ken Levine.

“It’s the game I’ve played more than any other,” Levine told Wired.com. “It’s an aesthetic masterpiece…. So much of the world tells a story when you look at it.”

Most videogames wear out their welcome after a few months. But Blizzard’s stewardship of its persistent world — filled with orcs and trolls, humans and dwarves — has been so successful that the game shows no signs of slowing, even a half-decade on.

Amazingly, World of Warcraft almost didn’t happen. The world’s most popular MMORPG has its roots in real-time strategy games Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. In 1998, while half of a Blizzard development team was assigned to work on Warcraft III, the other half ended up working on a game that was canceled.

With nothing to do, the team members looked at the games they were playing the most at the time — massively multiplayer online games like Sony’s EverQuest and Electronic Arts’ Ultima Online. At the time, both games topped out at around 200,000 subscribers each, and Blizzard thought it could do better by making a virtual world that was more accessible to newbies.

“We felt there was such an opportunity in that genre, and that Warcraft was such a great universe for a game like that,” said Blizzard’s Rob Pardo, the first lead designer on WoW. “We started talking about it, getting excited about it, and we decided to make it.”

Pardo aimed for the sky: 1 million subscribers, which would have made his game far and away the most popular MMO of all time.

WoW passed that milestone in a matter of months. “We were off by about an order of magnitude,” he said.

Pardo, now an executive VP at Blizzard, said he never thought that Warcraft’s world could go on for five years. “When you look historically at what other MMOs have done, by the time you hit the five-year mark, you’ve already hit your peak,” he said. “With World of Warcraft, people are like, ‘I’ve been playing this game for five years, and I still love it.’”

BioShock’s Levine, who played WoW’s beta version more than five years ago, says he still devotes several hours to the game every week.

“I just love being in that world,” he said. “When you go into [the city] Stormwind, you go across the bridge and see all those giant statues of the heroes, that sells the space. It’s over the top, it’s huge and you know what you’re getting into.”

The fastidiously detailed underwater dystopia of BioShock was influenced by WoW’s grandeur, Levine said: “Any project where you need to sell people on a space in a videogame, you can learn something from World of Warcraft.”

WoW has been a double-edged sword for the MMO genre, said Pardo. On the one hand, its massive popularity across demographic lines has brought the MMO out of the basement and into the mainstream: “You start hearing moms at a grocery store talk about it,” he said.

On the other hand, even though WoW is attracting competition, its huge popularity and loyal fan base isn’t leaving many consumers for other games in the genre. First-person shooter fans will buy Halo, Modern Warfare and Borderlands for $60 a pop, but MMO players won’t pony up $15 per month to delve into three different virtual worlds.

Of the three major fantasy MMOs released last year that stood the best chance of combating WoW — Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea and Warhammer Online — all have had to merge their gameplay servers because there weren’t enough adventurers to go around.

And the list of MMOs that have shut down completely is long. Many of these shuttered games had big licenses or pedigrees behind them: Tabula Rasa, The Matrix Online, The Sims Online and Myst Online.

Where WoW goes from here depends on what its army of 11.5 million players want, Pardo says. Blizzard’s goal is to continue to appease its players with new upgrades and remain a few steps ahead of the competition. It will release an expansion next year called Cataclysm, which Pardo says will revamp the entire game world.

Pardo is bullish on the game’s future. “WoW is going to be a bigger world five years from now,” he said.

Whether it’s still around in 2014, making it through the first half-decade is an incredible achievement, says Levine. “You (rarely) have something that lasts that long, is that well loved and that frequently played — I mean, what other game does anyone have a five-year relationship with and constantly play?” he says. “Outside of Bejeweled.”

Wow…..

-zerosyphon

Starting on Thursday, November 27th at 10 AM (Pacific) – Cryptic Studios will be ‘hosting’ a Free Weekend period of play time. During this time anyone can sign up and play the game for free until November 30th at 10 AM (Pacific). So if you want to try an adventure out in Millenium City, but don’t want to have any strings attached, dive right into the free play. I see this as a sign that maybe the game isn’t quite where Cryptic had hoped it would be, this is the second free play period in the space of about 2 months.

Head on over to the Champions Online website to learn how to get going with this free period.

Arenanet has already released a book of Guild Wars 2 concept art. The game itself is supposedly being released in early 2011, with perhaps a short beta at the end of 2010. Why so far ahead of the games release? I’m guessing it’s to capitalize on the freshness of the art, as most of it has been released over the internet anyway. Most of Arenanets artists tend to release their art on websites such as Conceptart.org, or submit it to competitions like Spectrum. As I recall they’ve won several awards this way.

You can buy it here.

In the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online expansion – Siege of Mirkwood – Turbine is revisiting the Lone Lands and giving the area some much needed love. Developer Orion talked about the upcoming changes to this zone in his most recent Developer Diary, and I am going to give you all my views today.

The Lone Lands have always been a sort of ‘Red Headed Step Child’ in the game, there exist some serious disconnects between Epic Quest lines here, and the area itself had some amazingly crazy difficulty jumps (Being sent amongst a bunch of elites in a Group Quest area to complete a Single Player quest for example). Some great questing moments have happened here though, I am willing to bet that any LotRO player will be able to tell you memories of their first time Retaking Weathertop, or their first venture over the Last Bridge that crosses between the last of the ‘Settled Lands’ and the ‘Wilds’ of the Trollshaws (If you remember The Hobbit you will certainly remember the bridge).

The Last Bridge

The Siege of Mirkwood update will be changing the difficulty of getting into the Epic Quest parts in the Lone Lands and will introduce a new faction to facilitate this:

With the release of Siege of Mirkwood, all players following the Epic storyline will find that Gandalf now sends them to Saeradan to enlist the aid of the Rangers, to assist with finding another of Gandalf’s order. After making their way to Saeradan, players will find that he will now offer them a free ride to Candaith’s camp in the shadow of Weathertop. Be careful and watch out for any folk in need of assistance on the ride to Candaith! Once at his camp, players follow Candaith’s tale through the battle at the peak of Weathertop and learn of a new faction within the Lone-lands, the Eglain. (This is discussed further in the diary.)

Weathertop will also be receiving a make-over – players will now have the option of playing it as a Solo character, or playing it as a Group [the original method]:

To ensure that we continue forward with the same practices that we attempted to utilize in the Bree-land revamp, there will now be two versions of Weathertop. There is the group version, which remains unchanged, and a new solo version that will enable players to assail the great hill alone against the forces of the White Hand.

This is a pretty good idea in my eyes – it means that more people will be able to experience the great story line in that quest, though part of me is sad that so many quests are going in this direction. While forced grouping isn’t really my thing, some of my best memories come from working through a challenging area with a good Fellowship at my back.

As I mentioned above, and quoted, there is a new faction that will come into play in the Lone Lands – the Eglain. People who have already done quests there know who these people are, they are the broody folks in Ost Guruth who don’t have much trust for outsiders. In Mirkwood, these folks will be added to the Reputation system – anyone who has completed quests in the past for them will retro-actively receive reputation points for those quests, and there will be new quests added for more reputation. At different levels of reputation you will be able to get some nifty gear, including a set of jewlery. Gaining reputation up to Friendly should be as easy as just doing the quests in the area, and more can be obtained by purchasable profession quests.

Garth Agarwen (GA to most) will also be receiving a face lift – which is great because finding folks willing to take the time to run that area could eat up entire play sessions alone. GA has always been a thorn in the Lone Lands experience, the difficulty of dealing with all Elite mobs is just a bit much for many people – especially with how long that particular quest chain is. More on the changes to GA in a following post (as the changes tie in to another update coming with the expansion).

Many more changes to the region will be included in the expansion, most of them I see as being awesome. One of those little nice changes is the reduction of the Goblin Elite mobs to solo-able signature goblins in the central Lone Lands area, the annoying spiders in that area have received the same face lift thankfully (that could be one tough couple of levels dealing with those quests).

Overall the upcoming changes to the Lone Lands are something I am looking forward to experiencing – LL could be a frustrating place to do quests if you were not high enough to move on to the next area yet. North Downs will be receiving a similar update in a future expansion, so the lower levels will become much more easily manageable as time goes on. Orion puts it very well at the end of the developer diary:

The Lone-lands has undergone a massive overhaul and should prove to be a good option for players looking to level from 22-32. In our next update, we plan to continue the revamp effort focusing on the second of the level 22-32 areas in the North Downs. This revamp will target areas from Trestlebridge to the Fields of Fornost, then east toward Kingsfell stopping short of Esteldín, Orthrikar and Meluinen.

Read the entire Developer Diary discussed in this post here.

Stay tuned for a post on the GA changes, and what changes to the game as a whole are related to those updates!

~Branadoc

Yesterday I shouted at the hardcore complaining that casuals are ruining the game for them. Mojeaux quite rightly commented that it’s normal that my limitations (time) will dictate  what I can and cannot do in a MMOrpg. After all if I only put 15 minutes of play a week I should not expect to be able to do the big raids. This got me thinking a lot and even lost some sleep as I was writing and rewriting this post. I have no less than 6 posts half-written because of this!

There’s a problem right now in most MMOrpgs, the nerfing of content to make it more  accessible to the “casual” crowd. Most companies have figured out that making the game easier and less grindy = more subscribers = more money. And a lot of hardcore players, and some casuals are horrified that their beloved game is becoming easier and trivial. Encounters that took weeks to master are now taken down in a single night by a half asleep noob.

I believe the root of the problem is bad game design but first let’s look at 5 types of  gamers you will encounter in MMOs.

Poseur hardcore: These guys are hardcore only to show off and show the more casuals that they are better than them. They are the ones clamoring for exclusive content because it reinforce their superiority over others. They probably have sad lives but at this point I don’t care.  I simply cannot stand this attitude.

True hardcore: These guys are in it for the challenge. For them the whole point is to do  the most insane and crazy stuff. They want difficulty for the sense of fulfilment they get for doing the hardest stuff in the game. The constant nerfing of content is killing them since they feel it lessens what they accomplished.

Casual hardcore: The group I’d consider myself part of now. We’re pretty much the same as the “true hardcore” except we want to be able to do the content at our own pace. We are not interested in the content being nerfed since we want the same accomplishment as the hardcore. The nerfing is killing us too.

Casual: These people are mostly doing their own stuff. Most of the time you barely notice they are there and they don’t disturb the game. They want mainly to be able to experience different content but are not interested in completing it. When it comes to raiding they want a raid where they can go but have no need for the whole raiding experience. A simple entry raid or two is enough to entertain them.

Poseur casual: And they are here again! Same as the “poseur hardcore” but for some reason they can’t get into raiding. So they’ll amass rare pets and mounts and make a point of  showing them off to you. They are the ones clamoring for ever easier raids since they panic at the idea that someone might have a mount they don’t.

See something interesting here? Besides the 2 poseur groups the three other ones can live together easily. None of them want content nerfed, and the casuals just want to do it at their own pace. There’s nothing in there that lessens the hardcore since everyone has to do it the same way. In fact, if it was not for the nerfs the 10/25 raids of WoW would  work perfectly for everyone. Tiered difficulty where everyone can move along according to their schedule. We had that in BC and it worked wonderfully. 

Testing a player organisational skills, bad game design

I wanted to talk again about time management but I realized it goes deeper that this. Try to remember if you can Everquest of Vanilla WoW when we needed 40 peoples to raid. Back then the main difficulty to raid was not the encounters but rather how good you where at finding the right guild, fitting enough time in your schedule and finding 39 other people of the right classes.

According to the game designers raiding is supposed to be about working as a team and mastering difficult encounters. Organisational skills are part of the equation of working as a team but they went overboard with this. In an effort to make things difficult the only way they figured out was this, requiring a lot of people and time. So to raid you needed to be able to sit in front of your computer for extended period and find other people who tought like you.

And it was rightly pointed out as a bad idea. At some point down the road Blizzard realised that to be difficult an encounter didn’t need to be about organisational skills but could be about the actual difficulty and complexity of the encounter, as they did in BC.

The answer?

The answer is really simple. They simply need to keep the experience the same and stop nerfing stuff or providing shortcuts. In short, make the raids take less organisation is fine, but keep them the same for all. This way I may take 6 months to complete something  a hardcore player did in 1 but everyone had the same challenge and experience.

We nearly had it perfect back in BC, they need to go back to that model and keep the 10/25  man scheme of Wotlk and we’re good!

Activision Blizzard is getting sued, and the filer is none other than the infamous Erik Estavillo. Estavillo has previously filed law suits against Microsoft; Sony and Nintendo, for various reasons, all of them rejected.

The issue this time is Estavillo’s claim that the game progression in World of Warcraft is deliberately set at a low pace, to make sure that playes stay longer in the game and pay their monthyly fee. Estavillo especially makes a point of his character’s walking speed, for some reason.

I wonder if anybody really had any doubts that this is part of the game design. Of course Blizzard designed the game to keep players hooked. Anything else would be terrible game design and a complete mockery of the marketing department.

Obviously, Estavillo is also a complete video game addict, relying heavily on video games for the little ongoing happiness he has left in his life.

Sad story, no doubt about it. Perhaps he should see a psychiatrist?

“Tomorrow you’ll be able to watch the future of Aion movie from the official Aion website or our Youtube page. *Spoiler Alert* It’s awersome!” Esas fueron las palabras con las que Andrew Beegle nos dejó a todos espectantes de ver que era eso tan “alucinante” como dice el mismo.

Pues bien no era ni más ni menos que un espectacular vídeo de casi 9 minutos de duración donde nos presentaban el espectacular futuro que le están preparando a Aion.

Entre esas mejoras que podemos ver en el video se encuentras a destacar las siguientes (os recomiendo ver el video antes de seguir leyendo, ya que os va a Spoilear):

• Mejora de Gráficos. Sobretodo en el apartado de luces y texturas, por lo que podemos deducir que muy posiblemente vaya a implementar el DirectX 10.
• Presentación de Nuevas Zonas. Con sus respectivos monstruos y jefazos.
  
• Cambios Climáticos. Y no sólo se conforman conque llueva, nieve o hayan temporales de arena, sino que eso cambiará los escenarios y se verán encharcados, nevados, etc..
• Nuevas Habilidades. No se puede apreciar mucho, pero lo que si se puede ver claramente es un SpiritMaster invocando 3 lobos y un asesino que salta y agarra a otro PJ que estaba volando para lanzarlo al suelo, unas minas que van apareciendo en el aire, una multiexplosión y lo que parece ser una especie de propulsión durante un corto periodo de tiempo para avalanzarnos en el aire, tanto con alas como sin ellas.
• Zonas de Agua. En las que podremos navegar, nadar, bucear y buscar ciudades submarinas para hacer nuevas misiones.
• Sistema de Housing. Podremos tener nuestra propia casa y decorarla, tanto por fuera como por dentro. Además, depende de donde pongas la casa, será de un tipo u otro. Aún no se ha dicho nada de Casas de clan. Y al final del video podemos ver un asedio a estas ciudades, o al menos esa es la impresión que me da.
• Monturas. Bonitas monturas que tendremos que domar para obtenerlas, al menos algunas de ellas. Y lo mejor de todo, que algunas monturas son para más de 1 persona y podremos llevar a amigos subidos en nuestras monturas.
• Nuevas Armas. Entre ellas podemos ver un bastón que se transforma en un látigo, una ballesta ligera de mano, una lanza y un escudo que se transforma en un guantelete gigante y sirve para agarrar a distancia. Y también podemos ver que al final , que es lo que me hace pensar que en vez de armas nuevas, muy posiblemente sean Skills nuevas de clases avanzadas o simplemente Skills nuevas para las clases ya existentes.
• Cambios en el sistema de Combate. Podemos apreciar un mago pegando cuerpo a cuerpo con los puños y haciendo combos marciales, un gladiador cogiendo al enemigo con su arma (eso ya lo hacen) y lanzarlo contra otro enemigo, combate desde montura, etc.
• Asedios a ciudades. No está muy claro lo que se llega a ver, pero muy posiblemente se podrán asediar las ciudades en donde la gente crea sus casas.

Bueno, sólo me queda recordar que actualmente el Aion se encuentra en la versión 1.5.1.4, aunque están probando el próximo parche de contenido que será el 1.6; y este video que acabamos de ver es para la versión 3.0. Vamos, que antes de que todo esto llegue aún nos queda la expansión 2.0 y todos los parches de contenido que vayan a hacer ellos por enmedio del camino.
Lo que sí es seguro es que 2010 será el año en el que el Aion tendrá muchos nuevos contenidos y grandes actualizaciones.

Saludos a todos!! ^^

Mobly has had loads of fun the last couple of days, even though he’s died 3 times giving him 144K EXP debt, and spending the majority of his time mining ore and gathering herbs to sell in the auction house.

I had a small debacle, caused by nasty curiousity and a moment of weakness.  I tried buying diamonds on a legal third party site, found out they only worked for US(I’m on Eu), then tried buying them through the main RoM site via paypal.  I thought I was spending my current paypal balance and didn’t bother to check the fine print and see that they only took direct bank transfers.  I’m still a bit confused on this.  Did I inadvertantly tell paypal to do that?  Well, the transfer came back refused which rings up a 40 dollar surcharge on my bank account.   Lovely.  40 dollars down the drain, all for being careless and not taking my time.

This is my first time buying diamonds after playing RoM for a year.  I thought I’d go ahead and get at least 1 mount for 1 of my characters.  Then immediately after this debacle, RoM announces a Moa Charity Mount that is just so very uber looking.

In the end, I’ve used this time to readjust my plans.  The charity mount is available for 199 diamonds until Dec. 28th.  From now until then I am going to continue to work hard in game to earn the diamonds for a mount, but I am also going to buy diamonds or the charity mount.  I want to actually spend money as they’ve hooked me with donating 4.50US toward a childrens charity, and if I only earn the diamonds in-game, I feel I haven’t really donated.  Nice move RoM.

I have plenty of alts, so I will continue my laborias mining to get another mount, or maybe even two if I’m ambitious enough.  Both ways I think will make me feel good.  I like having that warm feeling of a reward in both circumstances.

Oh, I almost forgot, the moment of weakness part.  I had earned 71 diamonds in-game and when I decided to buy the mount, I also was in-game and saw the very cool contract for a mud house.  I thought “Oh Abernacky NEEDS that as he is sort of a dwarfish type fellow”, so I spent the 50 diamonds on it.

Now I have 21 diamonds, and a 40 dollar charge on my bank statement:P

I haven’t been leveling any of my alts either, but I’ve come to a better conclusion on how to Tweak Abernacky.  I want to get him to level 22 and have all his available skills maxed out.  This is hard as you earn TP along with EXP.  Well I don’t know why I haven’t been considering Talent Charms.  They let you store TP and then deliver it to your character.  The only problem is that they may be bound.  They are nice for earning TP on Your main class, then giving the TP to your secondary class.  If I find that I can earn the TP on one character to deliver to another character, I’m set.  But this sounds too good to be true.  I’ll find out.

~ Zacharius Zetch, 4th day of the 33rd year.

I have made it along with Balizi through the Shadowed Forest. He does not see the bounty of the land before him. I will make my capitol here upon this citadel before the greater mountains. Zamilidor, I will call it. Balizi will be leaving through the pass and into the desert in the morning. His disband from our group only leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

~ Illani Dan E’ri the first Stwalart

And so they met in the desert 10 years after their departure. Each had prospered on his own side of the valley, and each had conquest in their eyes. As they came together for their first meet in those ten long years,  Zacharius slew Balizi with a dagger. And so the bloody conflict engulfed the desert. And the two nations became mortal enemies. Before that battle in the desert each faction was left without a leader, for Zacharius died of thirst wandering the desert a misfortune of the gods some called it.

Shortly after two leaders emerged bearing new banners of war,  Queen Salth’iri of the Black Roses and Darmurian of The Sacred Swords. Salth’iri was a emmissary of the countries to the far east beyond the sea. She in the best interest of making Zamilidor and it’s countries colonies of the Taborean Empire began to lead under the banner of a Black Rose. A symbol of a darker time in the Taborean Empire.

Darmurian was one of the most loyal knights under Balizi and during the original conflict fought off Zacharius and his men. He emerged taking Balizi’s Sword and carrying it back to Kerotor garnering the respect of it’s citizens.

And both…met 12 years later, under different circumstances they met…me.

I decided to go ahead and jump face first into this game and after seeing this newly released trailer I am interested tons. I can’t wait to see what they do with this.

This is the first Aion trailer I’ve seen that actually impressed me. Suddenly it’s easier to figure out why the majority of the top players in my Runes of Magic Guild left for Aion.

After the first month or so of it’s release, I kept seeing posts and comments on blogs about how Aion was a sinking ship, with people ditching their subscriptions due to whatever reason, grind mostly. Hard to gauge subscription numbers from pure anecdotal reports but it didn’t sound good.

Essentially that trailer features updates, and by the looks of it, some awesome ones like player housing. If NCSoft can reduce their grind and get people into a cycle of resubscribing for impressive additions to the game, maybe they’re not in as much trouble as they appear.

That said, I wonder how long before we in my RoM guild can pull back our old members. If they get sick of the grind, they can always come back, after all, it’s free-to-play.

Thanks to Sinnir

¿Alguien se ha preguntado porque no tenemos MMO en Wii?, realmente creo que a más de uno le gusta este genero y estaria bien en la consola de Nintendo, pero lo que no sabiamos hasta entonces es que pros y contras tendría, y si es que se podría realizar en Wii.

Bien, el veterano Jeff Strain ha hecho unas declaraciones muy interesantes, en las que muestra su interes por un MMO con el mando de Wii, ¿entonces porqué no es posible?, según Strain Wii no tiene el hardware adecuado, no olvidemos que este tipo es un crack en este tipo de juegos y ha participado en proyectos de Blizzard y otros grandes de la industria de los MMO.

“Tengo que decirte que las posibilidades de crear un MMO en torno al control de Wii son simplemente asombrosas. Se podría hacer mucho con ello”

Además añade:

“Simplemente el hardware de Wii no está a la altura para mostrar el tipo de presentación de los MMO que los aficionados de PC esperan ver”.

Ya sabemos por propias declaraciones de Treyarch que Wii, en cuanto a infraestrucutra tiene limitaciones, aún así esperemos que se siga mejorando y se siga explotando mejor, lo cual seria otro reto.

Sobre los gráficos, no creo que sean lo más importante en un MMO,  la mayoria de esos juegos no buscan un deleite visual, aún así no sabemos cuan limitado sea Wii en este aspecto(para un MMO claro).

Marconintendo