Same as it Ever Was

I've not had a big enough chunk of free time to pull off an instance run (SWTOR or LOTRO) in ages, but this past week I actually had a few hours to myself without having to go anywhere or do anything*, so the siren song of running a SWTOR instance proved too irresistible.

Rather than learning a new (for me) instance, I figured that I ought to ease back into instance running with some of the original SWTOR instances: Hammer Station, Athiss, and Mandalorian Raiders. Why those three? Well, they are my favorites of the original instances (with the possible exception of False Emperor), and they are also the three I'm most familiar with. Even with the leveling adjustment put in place, I figured that these three instances ought to be the Azjol-Nerub of SWTOR**: once you learn them, it's a fairly quick and painless run.

Unless, of course, you're dealing with an all DPS group.

(Guess what groups I got?)

Now, to be fair, the Hammer Station run was pretty straightforward with a standard Tank/Healer/DPS/DPS group configuration, and we pretty much blitzed through the entire instance. Not exactly at the same level as a classic Azjol-Nerub run, but we finished in about 15-20 minutes, and that included me getting stuck on the other side of the meteorite cannon while everybody else took out some more trash before the final boss.

***

But Mandalorian Raiders came next, and the run consisted of all DPS.

My prior experiences in the "Fun With Mandos" instance with an all DPS group meant that the toughest boss to take out was the Houndmaster, the first boss, and this group proved that in spades. The Houndmaster hits too hard for a standard DPS to handle without utilizing Tanking abilities or having a Healer in tow, and to compound the problem we had people attempting to down the Houndmaster instead of the hounds first. After the third wipe, somebody asked in chat "Why can't we down this guy?"

"We don't have a healer," the Jedi Sentinel tanking the Houndmaster replied.

The Jedi Sage we had in our group wrote something incoherent in group chat, and then said "I'll do it, but remember to move in the right direction. Got it?"

"Of course."

This time we managed to down the boss properly, with the Sage's healing supplemented by the healing stations around the boss fight.

After that, the Mandalorian Raiders instance proceeded much quicker, with the only hiccup being the Sentinel who thought it a good idea to jump onto the downward descending platform in the section leading to the final boss. As you can guess, he finally caught up to the platform in time to die due to falling damage.

"Rez me!' he cried.

"I'm trying, but I can't select you," I replied. "How the hell did you manage that one?"

"I'm talented. Hee hee hee."

I grumbled something as the Sage rezzed him.

***

Athiss was a different beast entirely.

I knew I was in for an interesting time when we kept having people reject the instance before we finally got a full group.*** Then while a few of us jumped down into the ruins and healed up, a Jedi Sentinel sliced the elevator...

And jumped down anyway.

"Hoo boy," I thought. "I hope that was just an accident."

But by the time we got to the first boss, I could see clearly that it wasn't an accident. That same Sentinel pulled one too many mobs for a pure DPS to tank, and we wiped on the trash. Then we nearly wiped on that first boss, even though that's actually kind of hard to do with four DPS burning down that boss quickly.

But things seemed to settle down a bit when we plowed through the next several rounds of trash, until we got to the Beast of Vodal Kresh. There, we wiped repeatedly on that boss because a) people weren't using the healing stations (twice), b) people (including myself once) got knocked off into the level below and the trash below aggroed****, and c) nobody could hold aggro well enough against Ye Olde Beast.

Sometime after the fourth wipe the other Jedi Sentinel who'd been acting as the tank --all the while spewing invective in group chat-- ragequit. I took that as my cue to leave as well, since it had become obvious that this particular group simply wasn't going to get past the Beast of Vodal Kresh.

I then decided to hang around my starship for a while and relax, letting some 30 minutes pass by reading the codex and checking on college basketball scores.# I figured that 1/2 hour was time enough for me to not run into any of those three players again, and queued up for Athiss once more.

And I got an all DPS group. Again.

This time, however, the run went without incident. I'd not call it smooth, as Prophet of Vodal Kresh took a lot longer to kill off than I prefer,## but nobody died and nobody complained in group chat. It had been a long time since an instance ending in silence

***

After those instances, I decided that I'm not going to venture into any of the post-Vanilla instances for a while. First, I need to get up to speed on a rotation for my Shadow, as I constantly felt a bit slow compared to everybody else##, and second, I think I'd need to study the instances before simply being dropped into them. The instance running crowd is as I remembered it: with few exceptions, people are of the GO-GO-GO variety. One scolded me for not skipping the dialogue sections, but I wanted to tell that person that SWTOR is great because of the dialog, not in spite of it. If people do that to me on a new (to me) instance, there's likely to be some pissed off group members. In my WoW days, delays were frequently given as a reason for a votekick --which I'd often reject unless it was someone who went AFK for no good reason-- and I don't feel like reliving those days again.





*This included house chores such as laundry or dishes or cooking. I'm still not sure how I managed to get this free time this week, but hey, I'll take it.

**That ought to take old WoW players back to the good old days of Wrath of the Lich King. By the time Wrath came to an end, a random pug could pull off an A-Z run in about 10-12 minutes flat. Sure, being overgeared for the instance helped, but once you knew the fights it was a rare occasion to see a wipe in A-Z. Even Utgarde Keep couldn't match that one.

***Of all DPS, naturally.

****In my defense I knew about the knockback quite well, but I was speeding to a healing station that was still open when I got knocked down.

#My alma mater won, so I was happy.

##One player decided to start hitting the balls of fire rather than the Prophet, which meant one less DPS on the Prophet.

###I'm sure lag has something to do with it, as I was playing on a European server.

EVE Online Adds to F2P

I've said before that I'm not that likely to play EVE Online, but I do keep an ear to the ground whenever major updates happen. And this week's particular update has expanded the capability of F2P players within EVE.

Battlecruisers and battleships, the mainstays of the large fleets, are now available to F2P players. While that by itself is impressive, in order to not cripple a F2P player by giving them a ship without the skills to operate it effectively CCP has expanded the skillset of F2P players as well.

It all adds up to a big expansion of F2P players' capabilities within EVE Online.

It's a great win for F2P players, but I have to wonder as to the reasoning behind the move. Maybe they CCP has data that shows that they get a high rate of F2P to subscription movement, and by adding capabilities to F2P CCP hopes to entice more people to subscribe. Or maybe they're looking at simply shoring up the number of people logging into EVE on a given day. But if nothing else, these changes do make the F2P option for EVE more appealing.

I guess we'll see how this shakes out in the months to come.

That White Noise Can Get Pretty Loud at Times

One interesting item about vanishing for a couple of weeks is that I've had a chance to look at what the blog's stats look like with the blog in a steady state.

And I'll let it be said now that the number of real reads --or those that I consider actual, live people reading content-- runs around 25-75 people per average blog entry. Sure, there's the occasional spike of interest if someone from a far more populous site links to a post*, but given that I've never tried to promote the blog in any real way**, a steady readership of 25-75 isn't too bad.

The bot traffic, however, can be almost bizarre at times.

It has to be due to all of those Walking Bombs
in Gnomeregan. Those things used to give
me nightmares. From WoW-Wiki.

As of this moment, PC has had about 945 pageviews this past seven days, and almost all of them were bot or spam related. Quite a few of them are search bots that go through every single page on PC, but there are quite a few bizarre sources in the list.

I'm not going to post them here, per se, because I don't want to somehow summon more of them via speaking their name like Voldemort, but when you see pageviews coming from places such as Dermatology Times, you know that something weird is going on. I've actually clicked on a few that looked at first blush like legitimate blogs with Wordpress or Blogger URLs, but then you find out that those blogs (if they ever existed) had long since been taken over by hackers.

Then there are the ones, that while they are legitimate sites, you don't typically expect to show up in a referral list for Parallel Context. Such as the UK website for Elle. Or an Intel software website. Or a blog about the Great American Songbook.

***

Once in a while, an old post catches new life and shows up in the weekly stats. The Two Sides of a Coin series --about the similarities between Blood Elves and Draenei-- that I did back in 2011 periodically makes an appearance, as does the 2010 post about how I was mistaken for a female player during a run of Magister's Terrace in I Think I Misplaced my Ovaries. And Soul's 2010 post about How to Effectively Tank the Lich King was a favorite long after Cataclysm dropped.***

But for the post part, PC never developed into a hot blog that people had to read to keep up with their latest MMO fix. And I'm fine with that, because MMOs aren't the "it" thing right now anyway.

So if you don't mind me, I'll hang around with my friends, the bots, and open a beer while waiting for SWTOR to load. I think I need to get an Athiss run before I go to bed.

This place never gets old. Neither does
WoW's Halls of Lightning.
From swtor-wikia.com.

*The single greatest spike in readership for an individual post came from a link from WoW Insider, back when a) they existed as WoW Insider, and b) when they used to highlight interesting posts from the blogosphere. Both of those days are long past. Even then, the spike was about 1300 users in December 2011 for Part 2 of my Two Sides to a Coin series. I've a cousin who wrote for a site that deals with eSports and console games, and they frequently get that many visitors per hour.

**As I've mentioned way too many times on PC to count, I've never signed up for Twitter, and I don't promote the blog via Facebook or Google+. I've likened this as my way of shouting into the wind without much worry about causing a hurricane a half a world away.

***It once showed up on the front page of Google search results for "tanking the Lich King". Soul was very proud of that.


EtA: Corrected a couple of grammatical errors.

I Blame the Holidays

Well, the US Thanksgiving season has come and gone, and with that a visit from the oldest Mini-Red for 9 days.* I provided the transportation, as her university is 130 mi/209 km away, and as is the grand American tradition for college students returning home for holidays, she brought her laundry along.

And her laptop. And a desire to get back into playing LOTRO and SWTOR.

She tried playing in some spare time while she was away, but she discovered that the dorm's network is really bad because it's simply overwhelmed with connections.** When she needs a stable connection for her classwork, she retreats to the music building to work; but she doesn't goof off when she's there.

Not that I consider MMOs goofing off per se, since I do write about them, but I understand and admire her dedication to her classwork. When I was in college *mumbledy mumble* years ago, I played the original Bards Tale, Ultima IV and V, the original Sim City/Sim Earth, and various Infocom games in my spare time. Not to mention games designed for the VAX system, such as Angband or Star Trader, or our Saturday afternoon D&D game.

Still, her ability to login to SWTOR at home (after it updated, naturally) was a nice bonus to her visit. We didn't team up for anything, but she spent a lot of time puttering around an old Assassin of hers, and reacquainting herself with the game.

Perhaps it was her class selection that provided me with inspiration, but I started playing an old Jedi Shadow that I'd created on The Red Eclipse but allowed to languish once I got to Coruscant. She was one of two toons I had that I was forced to make a name change --I think I got really lucky-- and I made a minimal tweak and logged into a zone surrounded by Black Sun thugs.

I'd forgotten how much fun having a Trandoshian around as a companion can be.

Due to this toon being in a rest area for a couple of years as well as the XP bonus that was going on, I was outleveling planets a chapter away. That felt really odd, but on the flip side I wasn't getting gear for my actual level from questing, so between that and the artificial level suppression it kept my toon in line (sort of).

But I think that this time I'm going to keep Qyzen around as my companion, since a) I've never followed his story all the way through, and b) companions aren't limited in their role anymore. (I didn't need a tank when playing as a Shadow, I needed a healer. And now Qyzen can do that too.)

Still, it felt good to kick off the rust and go questing in SWTOR and get a Hammer Station random instance in. Now, over the Mini-Reds' Winter Break, I'm looking forward to getting back into some MMO playing I've not done in months.





*So if you're wondering where the blog vanished to, now you know.

**Being a geek, I noted a network connector in her common room and brought up a relatively inexpensive hub for her to use, because I knew that cinder block walls and WiFi don't mix well. Even then, the network connection is poor, simply due to the overwhelming use. The night before I picked her up, most of her fellow students had already left for home, and the network finally became usable. (Surprise!)

Adios, Marvel Heroes

If there was an MMO that I'd played over the past several years that was going to be the first to shut down, odds are good that I'd not have guessed it was Marvel Heroes.

Gazillion released the game as a steaming hot mess, but they diligently cleaned it up and made it a bright spot in the MMO world, particularly that they were at an intersection point between all of the Marvel characters, including Squirrel Girl, the new Ms. Marvel, Luke Cage, and all of the big properties (Avengers and X-Men and Fantastic Four).

But apparently things were not good in Gazillion land. You can read about the accusations of sexual misconduct, missed updates and events, and other items here over at Massively OP's article.

The game shuts down on December 31st.

But knowing Disney, they likely have a new software developer of choice. (I've read that Square Enix is likely it, but you never know with Disney.)