Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Cusp of the Weekend

Well, that didn't take long.

Somewhere in the middle of Kun-lai Summit my rogue dinged 90 without a single piece of heirloom gear on her (that was still active, anyway; I kept the Inherited Insignia of the Alliance just because).

This was the quickest I'd leveled to max level in a new expac area, and if I'd have been a non-stealthie class I'd have finished even sooner because I avoided a lot of mobs while out questing.  By comparison, I dinged L80 in Storm Peaks on Q, and L85 in Twilight Highlands on Neve and Tom.

And while it's going to be nice for questing, PvP just got a big punch in the gut.

I mean, really.  Most of my gear is in the L414 range; what do you think would happen if I got into WSG with that gear iL?

I considered running scenarios and/or instances, but really, they didn't appeal to me.  I didn't feel like dragging down a scenario with my (relative lack of) DPS, and while instances might work, if I'm going to be spending time getting badges I might as well get Honor instead.  Okay, I have to be honest:  I queued for an instance long enough to see the DPS wait time for a normal was 45 minutes, and decided I'd much rather get two BGs in before a single instance popped.

That said, just any old BG won't do if you're not geared up for it.  A rule of thumb of mine is that the more the players on a side, the lesss impact a single player will have.  Therefore, for an undergeared toon, my best bet is to stick to the 40 man BGs and ride on some coattails.

Oh hai, Vann!  Nice to see you!

***

It feels weird walking around Neverwinter.

The last time I was in the Jewel of the North was in the video game Neverwinter Nights, back before D&D 4E and the Spellplague.  Even though she is dead now, I keep expecting to see Lady Aribeth, Paladin of Tyr, wandering around the Protector's Enclave.

I also expect --as a Cleric-- to be managing my available spells and keeping an eye on balancing healing with utility.  But in Neverwinter, based as it is on D&D 4E, all of that is out the window.  Neverwinter is far closer to a Diablo-esque game than a traditional MMO in terms of gameplay.  The commands alone feel better suited to a gamepad than a keyboard.

Still, it is an addictive game, and I recognize the Forgotten Realms lingo in the NPCs you meet.

***

Kids and MMOs, Part Whatever:

I called the kids down to dinner last night, and as she sat down my youngest got a funny look on her face.

"What's up?" I asked.

"I didn't park my Smuggler before coming down.  She was in Black Sun territory."

I headed for the stairs.  "I'll take care of it."

After moving her toon into a corner, I returned to the table.  "Kiddo," I began, "Why is your Smuggler wearing a dress?"

"Um....."

"You realize you put on gear meant for a counselor, right?"

"Oh, so THAT's why she looked weird!"

An Embarrassment Of Riches

I was thinking about this last night, when I was goofing around on several MMOs.  While I'm sure that some will disagree, it seems that right at this point in time we've got a lot of really good MMOs that we can sample and play as much as we like.

From MMOs based on known properties (ranging from Star Wars to Conan to D&D) all the way to new designs such as The Secret World, it seems that we're in the middle of an MMO F2P/B2P explosion.  Yes, the basic MMO design hasn't changed too much since the EQ and early WoW days, but how it's implemented and for what property has.

As much as some people want to complain about how the F2P and B2P games make their money*, the fact that they not only are able to survive but put out new content has to be heartening.  Look at a game such as Age of Conan:  after a huge launch, it was pretty much written off and/or left for dead after the glitches and the "Tortage vs. the rest of the game" experience.  However, it just finished it's fifth anniversary after having spent the past few years as F2P.  The Old Republic suffered from the "nothing to do" syndrome after a toon reached max level**, but after it went F2P Bioware has not only provided new updates and content but has seen a stabilization in subs and a rise in players.

The F2P/B2P models aren't panaceas, and I'm not altogether certain they are the wave of the future, but what these two models do provide is choice.  Don't think WoW or Rift is brutal enough?  Go try adventuring in Hyborea for a while.  Need more Cthulhu?  There's an entire game devoted to that feeling of dread and despair (The Secret World).  Tired of killing Sith?  There's a Klingon D7 with your name on it.  Or maybe you want the feel of returning to an old haunt like the Forgotten Realms?  Or an even older haunt like The Shire?  Or maybe you just want to be an angel for a little while, such as in Aion.***

And that's not even touching games such as Guild Wars 2 (and the upcoming Wildstar).

I think it's pretty safe to say that I'd have burned out on MMOs in general if there weren't such a variety to play with these days.  It can cause problems for me when I get into an instance or a battleground, but in general I really enjoy the variety of worlds to play in.  My only regret is that I can't pay these companies more for their work (budget, you know).  But I do what I can.

Is it too much to have someone look at the old Darklands video game and create an MMO based on that?  Now THAT would be cool.




*I was thinking of the Ten Ton Hammer article on how much they hate the lock boxes for Star Trek Online, but the reality is that those lock boxes and those announcements in-game are no worse than seeing hundreds of sparkle ponies in WoW.

**As well as a lack of grouping tools, etc., that players had become accustomed to.  Remember, even Blizzard tried to mix things up in Cata by having players find the entrance to the instances before they were allowed to queue for them, but what happened was that players would simply avoid the instances they didn't like (/cough Stonecore /cough).

***Now that I think about it, an MMO based on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series would be pretty cool.  My kids are presently working on an RPG for Percy Jackson using the Savage Worlds system and the Super Powers Companion books as a starting point, and I'm sure they're not the only ones out there who have had that idea.

Oh, This is Gonna Hurt....

I was working on the Red Crane Temple area of Karasang Wilds with Anduin in tow* when I ran into yet another gearcheck wall:  the two mini-bosses in the separate wings of the temple.  What was more annoying this time was that I was properly equipped with as much green and blue quest gear as would be expected as someone attempting this.  If it weren't for the ads that show up when the sha bosses are halfway down I don't think there'd be as much a problem, but those ads force me to use up all of my CDs, and then I'm just a sitting duck in leather gear** trying to build up combo points.

I'd been chatting with Vidyala from Manalicious in-game, and hearing of my latest wipe offered to help.  (I'd forgotten about CRZ capability in Pandaria; it's there, lurking beneath the surface.)  I gratefully accepted her offer, and when her Mage Millya winged in, I crept around and assaulted the first mini-boss.  Two zaps from Vid and the mini-boss was a smoldering heap.

"Holy crap!" I said.

Vid laughed.  "You're still L88," she pointed out.

"Yeah, but..." then I noticed her health bar.  "You're more than twice my health!"

"Did I ever tell you about the time I tanked Elegon?"

"Yeah, but...  Wow."  I knew that she was on the current raiding tier, but this discrepancy was almost as much as the discrepancy between a fresh L85 and a Mists-geared L89 in a battleground.

We circled around to the other mini-boss --she flew and I crept over-- and repeated the fireworks.

"All I can think about is how it's going to hurt when I ding L90 and get into a BG," I said, awed, as I thanked her for the assist.

Even now, I can see myself as a smudge on the ground, with the "L2P Noob!" ringing in my pointy ears.  Just when you thought you made it to the top of the mountain....




*I'm already sick of that kid.  For a Mists release, he sure seems to be fighting with the punch of a Wrath-era toon.  I find even Corso (the Smuggler companion on TOR) less annoying than Anduin.

**With a conspicuous opening right between the breasts.  Reminds me of the old Female Armor Sucks comedy skit that Collegehumor put out a while back.  Yes, go watch it through the link; it's a classic.

Hellooooo! Anybody home??

Such was my feeling working my way through Pandaria.

I'm already on my third zone, Krasarang Wilds, having completed the first two.*  While I know two things --cross realm zones are turned off for Pandaria and I've already passed one of the big "dailies" hubs at the Tillers area-- I'm still surprised at how few toons are out and about in Pandaria itself.  I've seen more toons in Hellfire Peninsula than in the first three Pandaria zones, and that's kind of scary.

There's obviously players out there, as Cynwise demonstrated in his class distribution post, but wherever they are, it's not in Panda-land.

I am not going to jump to conclusions here, but I suspect that people like me who took their time to level a new toon are outliers, and most of the utility in the new zones is already spent.  As the "game starts at max level" people will tell you, that's not a surprise.  But think of all the effort it took to generate the data in those new zones, and you'll understand why I'm more than a bit concerned about the future of WoW.

Just like in Cataclysm, Blizzard expended a lot of effort to create new content (and a new continent), but the usefulness of that content evaporated once the big wave made it to L90.  I suppose you could make the argument that 2 years of development was useful for the majority of players up until patch 5.1 dropped, only a few months worth of playtime.  That's not exactly fair, but the dearth of characters out in Pandaria feed the perception that Blizzard would be better off spending time devising new raids and BGs.  (And pets.)

For those people (like me) who have complained about Blizzard's use of the WoW novels and short stories to advance the lore rather than develop it in-game, this is a pretty damning result.  If you were a bean counter at Blizzard, which would give you more bang for the buck:  a novel or in-game content?   And what's more, if you knew the in-game content would be tossed aside at the earliest opportunity, where would you put your development dollars at?

It's a shame, really, because when Blizz' development staff take themselves and their topic seriously they can create some really good content.




*Given my current leveling rate, supplemented by BGs, I'll be at max level by the time I'm finished with Kun-Lai Summit.  That's great for entering the Dread Wastes, but for a BG-er, that's going to be painful.

There's Klingons on the Starboard Bow, Starboard Bow, Starboard Bow

McCoy:  Go?  Where are we going?
Kirk:  [gestures at the console] Where they went.
[Saavik punches in the coordinates to the transporter console and steps onto the pad]
McCoy:  What if they went nowhere?
Kirk:  Then this will be your big chance to get away from it all.
--from Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan


This is an overdue post, since I'd been playing the game for well over six months now, but I thought I'd use a quote from The Original Series movies to sum up my feelings of Star Trek Online.

When you think that you've got the MMO style down pat, a game throws you for a bit of a curve.  STO is definitely not the same MMO that you're used to seeing.  Oh, there's a toon that is the center of your universe --whether it be Federation, Klingon, or Romulan*-- but the gameplay is a bit different than the standard theme park MMOs out there.

For starters, there's your starship.  Yes, you get to captain your own starship, and judging by the plethora of starships that hang around the Sol Starbase, the starship you pilot is the e-peen of STO.  to be honest, I felt pretty humbled in my tiny Centaur Class starter ship being surrounded by all of these other ships.

Unlike The Old Republic, your starship is integral to the game.  In fact, you could say that's the difference between the two games in a nutshell:  The Old Republic is a Space Opera about you as a character, while Star Trek Online is about you as a starship captain.

STO is set in the Next Gen universe, and the Romulans home planet of Romulus has exploded.  (Sound familiar to you reboot fans?)  The Klingon Empire decided it was time for a land grab** and broke its alliance with the Federation to expand its territory.  Therefore, the stage was set for two factions:  Federation and Klingon.  STO added the Romulan faction within the past few weeks to spice things up, but I think it's too early to tell how things are going.

The Federation's intro questline starts you off with needing to beam down to a planet's surface to save some colonists from the Borg.  (What, you thought they weren't going to be here?)  You're introduced to movement and fighting as a leader of an away team, and then you're beamed back onto the ship where the captain didn't survive an attack.  You're in charge, so you learn a bit about how your ship moves, interacts, and attacks/defends in space while teaming up with a lot of other ships to beat off the Borg.

Now, that all sounds like pretty standard MMO fare, but things begin to deviate a bit when you report in to Starfleet.  You're given command of your first ship and you have your first officer as a member of your staff, but you quickly find out that quests are designed differently in STO than the traditional theme park model.  The standard model is to daisy chain a series of quests together, forming a questline, but in STO a single quest may or may not spawn subquests --which are required, which is different than the Bonus quests in TOR-- and the single quest itself is in reality several quests all wrapped together.  STO pretty much eliminated the quest turn-in format by going with one long quest instead.

And that's just the format.

There are several different types of STO quests:  the straight ahead "talk to someone and acquire a quest" variety, the "Admiral hails you and assigns you a quest" type, the random "world boss" incursion type (like, say, the Borg popped up in a region of space and all ships available in the quadrant are summoned to fight them off), the PvP variety (which appears when you get close to a PvP area), and "explore strange new worlds" variety, which you're never sure what you're going to get.

That last quest type is a new idea, and it caters to the Star Trek universe.

As any old time trekkie will tell you, the whole point of the Enterprise being out there was to explore uncharted space.  There are specific regions in the galactic map where a player can go and investigate various anomalies out in space.***  Sometimes these anomalies yield planets and other adventures, sometimes they're pretty mundane.  At first I thought these areas were like the materials rich areas in Age of Conan, but I quickly learned that you can have plenty of adventures exploring.  Oh, and some of those adventures can last as long as, say, a full clear of Stratholme in WoW.

A lot of quests will strictly be limited to you interacting with things on your starship, but other ones will have you beaming down as head of an away team of up to five people.  Your officers will accompany you if you want them to, but any extra slots are filled with the traditional Red Shirt cannon fodder.  By the way, you can equip your officers with good equipment too, much like the companions in TOR.****

Fights, encounters, and other interactions with the world will yield skill points, and you train by turning in those skill points for better skill rankings.  Yes, you do have levels too, and that governs your rank and what ships you can captain (and what skills you can train), but skill training itself is vitally important.  Make sure you train as much as you can.

As a starship captain, you also have to take care of your crew.  While you don't have companion stories like you do in TOR --the difference in focus between the two MMOs again-- you train your crew, make sure they are properly geared, and when the time comes, you can promote them too.  I presume at some point they may leave your ship, and if that happens you have other officer candidates to choose from.*****

This only scratches the surface of the game itself, because it can be as complex as you want it to be.  Sure, when a fight is happening you turn into a button masher, but the rest of the game is pretty expansive.

The game is very true to the Star Trek universe, and for those trekkies who want to play around in an MMO, STO is very much built for them.  Yes, I'd have preferred TOS myself, but going with Next Gen made sense because more people are used to the Next Gen universe.  There's also that little matter of TOS being boxed in the timeline by both ST:E and Next Gen, so if STO wants to expand the Trek universe, it can by going with Next Gen.

The space graphics are great, and the planetary graphics are good too --on a par with TOR-- but the toon facial graphics are, well, very similar.  The faces all have a similar, distinctive look, and while it's not bad per se, that sameness can get to you after a while.  And I also have to admit that I expect my crew to come and talk to me from time to time, but this isn't TOR.

STO's biggest positive is that it remains true to the Trek universe but allows you inside to feel like you're really a part of your faction.  The Leonard Nimoy vocal commentary is a big win too.

It's yet another F2P offering out there, and one worth a look if you want to scratch that Star Trek itch.





*Romulans are a brand new third faction to the STO MMO.  I haven't made a Romulan character yet, so I can't say much more than that.  However, you can't miss all the Romulan ships out and about in space.

**Or whatever you'd call it in space.  Territory grab sounds so.... sanitized.

***Examining anomalies themselves is like farming mats in most other MMOs, but with a twist.  You're given a set amount of time to match the waveform that pops up on screen, and if you do you get bonus materials.  You can in turn use those materials to craft items.  There's an entire questline associated with Memory Alpha to learn how to craft items.

****Both you and your officers can train as well, and you'd better take advantage of that opportunity as much as you can.

*****I haven't gotten that far enough in the game to find out, but for the character that I expect to leave for her own command I've already got her replacement in the pipeline.  (EtA:  This doesn't happen unless you dismiss your officers.  See the comment below.)

Where Did I Put Those Training Wheels?

I have PvP on my brain.

Seriously.

After having spent the past two weeks running Battlegrounds (or doing questing in various MMOs), I queued for a Old Republic flashpoint.  Since I'd leveled my first toon strictly via questing and the occasional heroic, I've been taking some time on these alts to explore the different flashpoints in the game.  Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but since I'd been playing a Rogue for such a straight stretch, I had to change my expectations.

Unfortunately, I didn't change them enough.

I got into the Collicoid War Game flashpoint, which was new to me, and I ended up spending part of the first phase of the game as a keyboard turner.  For some reason my brain thought move = both mouse buttons, whereas on the turret it is move = right mouse button.  When I kept hitting both mouse buttons, I kept getting kicked out of the turret.  That was very nearly a disaster, as the collicoids closed to a dangerous level before I finally started blasting them to pieces.

Okay, that was a new flashpoint mistake.  I could deal with that.

But what I couldn't deal with was that I kept pulling aggro.

I mean, I'm not on my glass cannon gunslinger, merely my Commando running DPS.  I've finally got a rotation down for the Hutt expac changes, but I know that Commandos don't hit quite that hard.  The only thing I could figure was that I was being too efficient with my rotation, which is an artifact of PvP.  You know, the "OMG! OMG!  Quick-quick-quick-hurry-hurry-hurry gotta-DPS-this-Druid-down-before-he-heals-and.....  OH NO A LOCK!  Dump the DoTs and Vanish!!  Hurry Hurry Hurry!"

Yeah, right.  You try doing that in Eye of the Storm.

Spacing out my rotation helped, but it didn't really prepare me for the puzzle part of the flashpoint.  "Over here!" became my name, synonymous with "Over here, Ki!" and "Ki!  Not there, here!  To my right!"  Of course, I had no idea which toon was saying that until I clicked to find the right one.  And then, on the last fight which was a boss fight transforming into another boss fight (think the middle boss transitioning into The Black Knight in Trial of the Champion and you've got the idea), everybody was frantically telling me to move to the middle.

What for, I wondered as I ran up.

Then, WHAM!  The last droid boss dropped in.

Oh.  That's why.

Still, nobody died due to my klutziness.  Except me, who moved over to try to push an elite off a platform and ended up getting blasted off myself.  "Those droids do that," the tank said as I respawned back at the beginning.  

"I noticed that."

By the end of the flashpoint I'd slowed down my rotation enough that I didn't pull aggro* from the rest of the bosses.  But I think I need to do a bit more PvE group content to balance out this PvP attitude I've got going.

Okay, one more and then I shut it down for the night.

*Except for my very first shot at the final boss, which I'd deliberately waited before dropping a Grav Round on it, and of course the boss turns and smacks me.  "Oh, for pete's sake, I only hit it once!" I said in party chat, which elicited laughter.

I Love the Smell of Gyrocopters in the Morning...

At the end of an Isle of Conquest battleground, my Rogue dinged 85.  I looked around the entrance to Uldum, decided there was no reason to stick around, and I went back to Stormwind to begin my expedition to the Orient Pandaria.

Having ignored most of the Beta and being baffled by most people's commentary on their own blogs (Mogu, Schmogu), I figured I was going in as blind as you could be without actually being a complete noob to WoW.  Also, I decided this would be a good duplication of my previous attempt in Cataclysm, the "Convoy to L85"*, but with my iL at 280 I assumed this would be a bit rougher of a transition.**

I flew up to the Skyfire, landed, and we were off.

About five minutes into the intro questline, I had one overwhelming thought:  why are we still playing WoW with swords and axes and bows?  WoW has gone full steampunk with Mists, and the old paradigm has become obsolete.  It's so steampunk, both gyrocopter sequences --the one you pilot as well as the one where you tag certain places in the Horde stronghold for air strikes-- felt like something out of Apocalypse Now.

Throughout the entire SI:7 portion of Jade Forest, the comparisons with Vietnam grew stronger, with the Alliance and Horde's arming of the indigenous populations echoing the Soviets and U.S. arming the Vietnamese.***

And then, things just collapsed.

We were back to the traditional WoW environment of kill ten rats, sly names with a nod to popular culture, and quest writing similar to any other expac.  It's almost as if Blizzard went up to the edge, looked over the precipice, and decided to play it safe and go back to the tried and true.  With the exception of the graphics and voice actors, if you were to drop the Pandaria quests into another expac you'd not tell the difference.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense:  WoW is what it is, and putting an Asian veneer over it isn't going to change the core of the game.  Just like how I could tell Aion was Korean in origin by the quest text****, I could tell that this was WoW by the quest text.

Still, my first observation stands:  why are we using bows and swords and axes in a game that has become dominated by "magic tech" and steampunk?  I can understand a Rogue's use of daggers in an assassin's role, but the Paladin, Warrior, and Hunter seem obsolete in the tech that you see in WoW.  The magic oriented classes --Druid, Shaman, Priest, Warlock, and Mage-- have more utility in the New WoW Order than the melee based classes.

From a historical perspective, once one group makes a major technological leap in warfare, other groups quickly follow suit or they get steamrolled over.  When the musket was introduced and the concept of interchangeable parts introduced, all of the major powers of the day almost instantly switched to this new tech.  Blizzard went in this direction with the entire opening and SI:7 sequences, yet pulled back from the obvious conclusion of modifying the classes to accommodate new arms and tactics.  Yes, the game would have been radically changed forever had they gone through with those sort of changes, but it remains that Blizzard seems to have wanted the flash and bang of the new stuff without the natural conclusion that those changes would have wrought.

Unless, of course, Titan is really WoW Steampunk.




*Use the label to find the old posts on that adventure; I examined the transition from Wrath to Cata as a pair of fresh L80s --Neve and Tomakan-- without the benefit of having run a single Wrath raid or heroic instance.  For fun, I added Q into the mix just to compare the difference in Hyjal from someone with T10 gear vs. Wrath greens.

**Oh, I guess you're curious how my severely undergeared Rogue handled the intro zones.  It was much slower going than the transition to Cata, and the first boss, Ga'trul, proved to be a true gear check.  I'd be doing well enough until he converted to Sha form, and then I'd end up wiping.  In the end I had to go back and blow some of my Honor and Justice points to get enough gear to allow me to knock that warlock out.  Once I got past Ga'trul, however, the road was much smoother than I expected.

***You could also insert any Nineteenth Century European power here, particularly during colonial expansion.

****If there's one thing that makes me hesitate about Guild Wars 2, it's that I didn't like the tone of the quest text from Aion.  If the same company, NCSoft, makes both games, it stands to reason that I won't like feel of GW2 as well.