- The Old Republic has 1.7 million new accounts since they went F2P. Subs are steady at 550 thousand or so, but profits are up for the game.
- WoW lost 1.3 million subs since Q4 2012. The bleeding has been most prevalent in Asia, but all regions lost subs.
- RIFT just announced it's going F2P. Not sure about the details yet, but they are going F2P June 12th.
- Neverwinter has generated a huge amount of interest, but you knew that, right?
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
A Few Newsflashes
I was writing something else but here are a few pieces of news from around the Blogosphere:
Friday, May 10, 2013
The Hardest Thing.....
I figured I'd end this Friday with a few musings on MMOs, all beginning with the words "The hardest thing..."
Feel free to add your own!
***
The hardest thing about playing a Rogue is learning when not to do anything. If you're used to playing a tank or DPS who rushes into the fray, a Rogue is a huge change of pace. You can't simply jump in, because you're too squishy. Everybody knows you can do monster damage on a single hit, so they all gang up on you. You sometimes have to wait, let the mob go by, and then catch the lone person left behind.
***
The hardest thing about playing on the Sith Empire side is that it messes with your morals. Like the agent on Balmorra who wants you to set up IEDs to deliberately kill children.
***
The hardest thing about playing the new Neverwinter MMO is that I feel I should be using a gamepad. (More on that in another post.)
***
The hardest thing about playing LOTRO is the UI. I don't know why, but the screen buttons and whatnot just feel so.... busy.
***
The hardest thing I've ever done in an MMO is tank. Trusting somebody to keep you upright is not easy, particularly when you've seen a lot of bad pugs.
***
The hardest thing in a battleground seems to be getting that last 2% of health on that enemy you're fighting down to zero. I swear, if I had a dollar for each time I came thisclose to finishing someone off and they still managed to escape....
***
The hardest thing about playing a mage is resisting the urge to run in and blast everyone with a Cone of Cold.
***
The hardest thing about playing Age of Conan is realizing that mobs are much tougher than you find in other MMOs. Usually you remember this after they ganged up on you and you're back at the graveyard.
***
The hardest thing about Star Trek Online is that all of the NPCs --your crew and others-- all seem to look alike. They have the same general look in the eyes and mouth, and after a while they all start to blend together.
***
The hardest thing about trade chat is resisting the urge to reach through the computer screen and headbutting the idiot who just said a racist/sexist/disgusting thing for the tenth time.
***
The hardest thing about Mists of Pandaria has to be hearing for the five thousandth time "Oh, you mean this is just like Kung Fu Panda!"
Although seeing the four hundredth permutation of "Po" or "Kung Fu" or "PooPoo Platter" as a toon's name comes close.
***
The hardest thing about watching my kids play MMOs is resisting the urge to toss them out of the chair and "help". They don't need my help, and if I keep telling myself that, I'll finally start to believe it.
***
The hardest thing about MMO blogging is that I always --and I do mean always-- find a grammatical or factual error right after I press Publish. The author Michelle Sagara once said in a post of her own that she has the same problem, so I don't feel too bad. But still, it is annoying.
***
The hardest thing about guilds is watching them implode, and realizing there's nothing you can do about it.
***
The hardest thing about WoW mounts is that damn White Polar Bear mount. I still haven't gotten that sucker to drop.
***
The hardest thing about MMO friends is that there's never enough time to merely hang with them.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Did Somebody Get the License of that Truck?
I'd thought the L75-L79 BG range was the worst for leveling via BGs. The Cata gear entering in at L77-L78 skewed the BG fairly heavily toward the top end of the BG, even more so than the average leveling BG due to the compressed nature of an entire expac to five levels. Having gone through that range twice now, once with a Lock in Cata and now on my Rogue in Mists, I figured I knew what I was talking about.
Seems that I was wrong.
When my Rogue hit L80 and entered into this BG field, with Blizz's internal adjustments my health was about 52-53k. I saw L84s with 84-90k health, and figured it wasn't too bad all things considering. I knew I'd have to run through either Vashj'ir or Hyjal to get enough Cata gear to compensate for losing most of my old Wrath and BoA gear*, although I had enough Honor farmed to get some good L270 PvP gear.
Things just looked better than the L75-L79 range, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Mists was in sight.
The first few battlegrounds I got into --Isle of Conquest, Eye of the Storm, and Warsong Gulch-- I was able to contribute to. I wasn't a terror out there, as I wasn't high enough level or had enough gear, but I held my own and wasn't a drag on the teams. Well, let's be realistic here: Children's Week bringing in a lot of unskilled PvPers helped me considerably.
Then came last night.
I was in an IoC battleground, and we'd quickly stormed the Horde Keep. I and two other people held back to defend the Keep while the rest went after Overlord Agmar. A lone Warlock showed up and gave battle, which even though Locks are much improved over the Cata version**, a Hunter, Druid and Rogue (me) should have no trouble dispatching him.
He blew through us in 20 seconds.
"What the hell was that?" I asked as we were waiting by the Spirit Guide.
"Did you see him?" the Druid added as we ran back to the Keep. "He had 180k health!"
"All I knew is that he one-shotted me and I had 66k!"
We made it back to the Keep and were joined by two more toons. It didn't help, as it took the Lock a mere 25 seconds to dispatch us all.
"Skip D-ing the Horde Keep," a DK said. "Just run in and kill the boss!"
"No kidding," I grumbled. "The Lock is more powerful than the boss!"
Needless to say, the Lock all by himself managed to win IoC for the Horde.
I was still shaking my head over this when I got into an Arathi Basin run. While the Horde didn't have a 180k health Lock roaming around, they had about half of their team over 100k.
"This is ridiculous," a DK said. "I might be able to take on one of them, but not a whole side. Just go ahead and let them 5 cap so we can get this over with."
"So Blizz didn't close that loophole in the gear that they started with Cata?"
"No, they didn't. What makes it worse is that while they can't queue up for it, a toon can be invited into a group running a Mists dungeon so they can get Mists blue gear. You've got guilds running their twinks through multiple runs just to get tricked out."
"And I thought L75-79 was bad. At least I didn't get one-shotted there."
"Yeah, the gear inflation isn't linear between Wrath Cata and MoP."
Well, it looks like my prediction about the BG issues back in Cata has come to pass in Mists. If Blizz isn't going to allow toons to migrate straight to Cata and Mists from L78 and L83 respectively, they ought to move the low end Cata and Mists gear to a requirement of L80 and L85. While the gear discrepancy is bad enough between Wrath and Cata, the non-linear nature of gear inflation has made it progressively worse between Cata and Mists. And while Blizz attempted to level things out a bit by raising the health level of the new L80s in battlegrounds, the L84s with access to blue Mists gear far outstrip any manual intervention Blizz accomplished.
I'm not going to hold my breath on any corrections any time soon, because this is the second expac that Blizz has let this go; obviously, they gain more by leaving things as they were than actually fixing this discrepancy. But from where I sit, this is just as bad as how weak Warlocks were in Cata. And we know how Blizz addressed that, don't we?
*I ended up with two Toxidunk Daggers due to the generosity of a fellow Rogue on the Ysera server, who saw I was at L78 and in AV at the time. The Rogue didn't want any gold, he just wanted to give the daggers to someone who was going to use them in BGs. Who said that Rogues were disreputable people, anyway? ;-)
**Apologies to Cynwise, but I felt like an old man griping that "I leveled a Lock via BGs when it was HARD, back in Cata, and all these young whippersnappers don't know what it's like to be Rogue chow!"
Seems that I was wrong.
When my Rogue hit L80 and entered into this BG field, with Blizz's internal adjustments my health was about 52-53k. I saw L84s with 84-90k health, and figured it wasn't too bad all things considering. I knew I'd have to run through either Vashj'ir or Hyjal to get enough Cata gear to compensate for losing most of my old Wrath and BoA gear*, although I had enough Honor farmed to get some good L270 PvP gear.
Things just looked better than the L75-L79 range, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Mists was in sight.
The first few battlegrounds I got into --Isle of Conquest, Eye of the Storm, and Warsong Gulch-- I was able to contribute to. I wasn't a terror out there, as I wasn't high enough level or had enough gear, but I held my own and wasn't a drag on the teams. Well, let's be realistic here: Children's Week bringing in a lot of unskilled PvPers helped me considerably.
Then came last night.
I was in an IoC battleground, and we'd quickly stormed the Horde Keep. I and two other people held back to defend the Keep while the rest went after Overlord Agmar. A lone Warlock showed up and gave battle, which even though Locks are much improved over the Cata version**, a Hunter, Druid and Rogue (me) should have no trouble dispatching him.
He blew through us in 20 seconds.
"What the hell was that?" I asked as we were waiting by the Spirit Guide.
"Did you see him?" the Druid added as we ran back to the Keep. "He had 180k health!"
"All I knew is that he one-shotted me and I had 66k!"
We made it back to the Keep and were joined by two more toons. It didn't help, as it took the Lock a mere 25 seconds to dispatch us all.
"Skip D-ing the Horde Keep," a DK said. "Just run in and kill the boss!"
"No kidding," I grumbled. "The Lock is more powerful than the boss!"
Needless to say, the Lock all by himself managed to win IoC for the Horde.
I was still shaking my head over this when I got into an Arathi Basin run. While the Horde didn't have a 180k health Lock roaming around, they had about half of their team over 100k.
"This is ridiculous," a DK said. "I might be able to take on one of them, but not a whole side. Just go ahead and let them 5 cap so we can get this over with."
"So Blizz didn't close that loophole in the gear that they started with Cata?"
"No, they didn't. What makes it worse is that while they can't queue up for it, a toon can be invited into a group running a Mists dungeon so they can get Mists blue gear. You've got guilds running their twinks through multiple runs just to get tricked out."
"And I thought L75-79 was bad. At least I didn't get one-shotted there."
"Yeah, the gear inflation isn't linear between Wrath Cata and MoP."
Well, it looks like my prediction about the BG issues back in Cata has come to pass in Mists. If Blizz isn't going to allow toons to migrate straight to Cata and Mists from L78 and L83 respectively, they ought to move the low end Cata and Mists gear to a requirement of L80 and L85. While the gear discrepancy is bad enough between Wrath and Cata, the non-linear nature of gear inflation has made it progressively worse between Cata and Mists. And while Blizz attempted to level things out a bit by raising the health level of the new L80s in battlegrounds, the L84s with access to blue Mists gear far outstrip any manual intervention Blizz accomplished.
I'm not going to hold my breath on any corrections any time soon, because this is the second expac that Blizz has let this go; obviously, they gain more by leaving things as they were than actually fixing this discrepancy. But from where I sit, this is just as bad as how weak Warlocks were in Cata. And we know how Blizz addressed that, don't we?
*I ended up with two Toxidunk Daggers due to the generosity of a fellow Rogue on the Ysera server, who saw I was at L78 and in AV at the time. The Rogue didn't want any gold, he just wanted to give the daggers to someone who was going to use them in BGs. Who said that Rogues were disreputable people, anyway? ;-)
**Apologies to Cynwise, but I felt like an old man griping that "I leveled a Lock via BGs when it was HARD, back in Cata, and all these young whippersnappers don't know what it's like to be Rogue chow!"
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