I know that on first glance the price for hiring and their upkeep cost seems prohibitive – 5P to hire and 50G an hour upkeep at level 80+ though it does scale with level – but it’s really not. In the month+ that they’ve been out I’ve pretty much had one up on all of my characters and I’ve still banked well over 200p just from selling loot to the merchant – not even trying to broker spells and such anymore. You’re much more likely to get a chest drop with a Merc since you’re technically in a group so you tend to get a lot more high value loot to sell.

So if you’re interested here’s a list of the various classes and where to find them:

• Qeynos Harbor :  Wizard, Paladin, Troubador, Swashbuckler, Templar, Monk
• Freeport: Warlock, Assassin, Brigand, Dirge, Inquisitor, Guardian
• Neriak: Shadowknight, Necromancer
• Gorowyn: Berserker, Defiler (no cure on abilities)
• Kelethin: Ranger, Warden
• Halas: Conjurer, Mystic

Classes no merc available: Beastlord, Bruiser, Fury, Coercer, Illusionist

In Qeynos they’re in Fish’s in Qeynos Harbor, easy enough to sneak in the backdoor if you’re evil. The only one that might prove a problem to hire is the Pally since he’s standing outside.

In Freeport they’re at the tavern in – I believe it’s East FP – it’s right on the water and there is a bell that drops you on the back porch. Again, easy enough to get into if you’re good and want to try one of those classes.

In Gorowyn they’re right up the first ramp from the lower level and of course the Sarnak don’t care about alignment as much.

In Halas they’re in one of the wooden roofed buildings – not the stone ones – that look like great halls and, much like Gorowyn, the guards will ignore you.

In Kelethin they’re in Josalyns Pub and, again, the guards here ignore you.

In Neriak they’re just past the first gate at the entrance from Darklight Woods. These are the two that will be toughest to get if you’re not evil since that gate is guarded by 2 level 85 epic x 2 raid mobs. It can be done if you have an evil friend that’s either a Conjurer with call of hero or has the call of veteran vet reward token. They just need to summon you to the area over by the forge and you should be able to hail them. Be careful though there is another x2 guard inside the tower that they’re standing outside of. If you need help getting to one of these try to hook up with Lore or myself and we’ll get someone over there to summon you.

The good news is that if you replace the merc with a different one for whatever reason they’ll be available in either Qeynos or Freeport depending on your alignment should you want to hire them back. This means you only have to do the whole sneak around thing once. If you do it at low enough level they’re even relatively cheap at 5s per hire at level 20. You could take a new character around and hire them all so that they’ll all be available as you level if you wanted. At higher levels this could be costly at 5p per hire but, as I said, you tend to make up the cash pretty quick (I know this probably won’t work for Reyder since he tends to squeeze every copper so hard that the guards have a warrant out for him for assault on Antonia’s likeness).

(Crossposted from Revellers.GnomeDepot.Net)

So, first my overview of the game play experience. I know that much of this has been posted elsewhere but I think it’s important to put down what I saw while playing so you can see why I’ve formed the opinions that I have.

Character Creation:

Character creation is much like that of CoX, you pick your starting power set and then you design your character. Unlike CoX you can either pick a pre-designed, I’ll call it template, character or you can go completely off on your own to choose your two starting powers. I like the idea of being able to build exactly the character I want but even in my short time messing about I saw a couple of ways to gimp yourself, though I have to admit I didn’t see any blatantly overpowered combos. The templates are nice as they give you a good starting point and pointers as to how to advance the character to create one of the standard MMO archetypes.

As you would expect from the team that brought us CoX the actual character creation choices are mind boggling. If you can’t find the look you’re looking for you probably missed a tab/drop down or you really need to seek professional help. Again, this is what I would expect the CoX character builder to look like if they were to re-design it from the ground up, nothing ground breaking but a nice evolution.

Tutorial:

Again much like CoX, once you’ve completed your hero you’re tossed into a tutorial zone with an emergency in progress complete with sirens wailing and fires raging. The evolution here is that it opens with a cut scene of a group of cops calling for backup and the response giving you a bit of the story of exactly what the heck is happening here.

The first parts of the tutorial are standard fare; how to move, quests, combat, loot, retrieve the item etc. All the stuff someone new to the genre would need to know but that us old fogey’s know by heart. Still it’s good to go through it so you can pick up on any quirks to the particular game. They even introduce you to the quest chain mechanic, talk to A and do his quests until he sends you to B etc. The best part of this was that there was actually a coherent story behind doing all of these quests, you even end up going to help the cop that was calling for backup in the opening scene.

The tutorial also introduces you to the first mechanic that isn’t an evolution of something from CoX, the “Public Quest” (PQ) pioneered by WAR. The one improvement that I noticed is that the PQ’s here run whether or not there are any PC’s around so if you come to the game 6 months from now you’ll still be able to complete the quest because the NPC’s in the area will help you. I’m not sure if that holds at higher levels but I truly hope it does.

After completing the first PQ you get sent into your first true instance (though I should point out that pretty much every zone is instanced so that they can control the number of players in a given zone – thank you EQ2 but most players won’t realize that). In this instance you hook up with Defender, who is one of the “named” NPC’s much like Statesman in CoX, and help him take out a boss mob which then allows you to put an end to the invasion that is the whole story of the tutorial zone.

When you exit the instance you have another cool moment where all the NPC’s and soldiers line up and salute you for helping save the city. Unfortunately a hero’s work is never done so there are two other NPC’s waiting for you to send you off to your next hotspot. Again, nice evolution here, you get to pick your second area from either a snowy Canada or a desert region. Having only played through the Canada version I can’t say for sure but I certainly hope that the story is much different for each area even if the results are the same.

From 5 to 10:

This leads me directly to the first big evolution from CoX for me – the story driven game play. Sure CoX had quest lines and story arcs but you could miss them or ignore them and, frankly, they weren’t all that inventive. I got to the Canadian area just after another disaster hit and everyone in the region that offered quests offered quests to do with this one story. Sure some of them were tangential but they were all caused by the story event. This is not just a quest hub with everyone having their own agenda of kill 10 X or fetch the foozle quests, they’re all related. This made the area feel more like a coherent whole. This whole thing is also why I ended up playing until 11:30 on Saturday night when I had intended to knock off around 10:00. I wanted to just finish this story real quick.

The other thing I noticed in getting through this first story arc was that leveling is extremely fast. I started the tutorial around 7:30 on Saturday night and had made 5 by the time I finished it about 45 minutes later (it took me this long because I ran the PQ about 5 times trying to get the high score). By the time I finished the second zone at around 11:30 I was already 10 and I had easily spent 30 minutes or more playing around with different travel powers trying to settle on one I liked. I’m not sure if the leveling will slow down post 10 but if it doesn’t I can see myself being capped within 6 months and I’m a notoriously slow leveler. Unless it slows down drastically I wouldn’t be surprised to see many people hitting the cap within the first 30 days. If it does slow down that drastically I can also see many others getting frustrated.

The next big evolution was the ability to respec at will, at least to a degree. Much like CoX every level brings with it some sort of points that you can spend at a trainer to purchase either new powers or abilities or improvements of some sort. The improvement is that you can go back to the trainer and unlearn skills then repurchase them. This means that if you want to try out something completely off the wall you can do so without fear of gimping yourself. Just buy it, take it out into the world and see how it plays, if it works cool if not, unlearn it and try something else. There is supposedly a limit as to how many things you can unlearn but I certainly hadn’t hit it by level 10.

As I said, you come out of the tutorial at level 5 and since you haven’t seen a trainer up until this point you’re encouraged to go see them right away, I should mention that the trainers are in their own instance. It’s important to see them, not only so you can pickup a new power but also because at level 5 you get your travel power. Again, in an evolution of travel in CoX you have your basic Flight, Super Speed, Super Jump and Teleport abilities but there are several variations of most of them so you can pick one that fits your view of your character. This is where I first found the respec ability the most handy. I was able to try out all of the different travel powers and see how they played and which worked best for how I played my character.

Again in this zone there is a PQ, though unlike in the tutorial this one isn’t required to advance the story. Still I think I helped on it about 3 times since I was in the area killing other stuff and they counted towards those quests as well. There was also a named fight that you had to trigger and I got crushed the first time I tried it solo, mainly because I wasn’t expecting him to spawn where he did. When I went back for my second try there were a couple of others there and I got a group invite almost as soon as I showed up. We took the named down in about 5 seconds, the leader made sure everyone got the update and then we all went our separate ways. I think he could have been soloed no problem but still killing him once and letting 5 people get their update is a much nicer way to go.

This area ended with another instance and another boss fight, this time solo, or grouped if you happen to bring one. It was a tough fight but I managed it and even while it was happening I could see ways I could make it easier which is important to me. I don’t mind losing a fight if I can easily see what I can do with MY character to improve my odds. I hate realizing that the only way to beat the encounter is to do it exactly like the devs want me to. Finishing off that instance dinged me to 10 and sent me back out into the same zone but with the previous emergency over, so it looked different, and some new bad guys moving in.

Final Impressions:

As I said, I don’t really see anything revolutionary here but you can see that this is the team that brought you CoX taking the lessons learned from that game and rolling in some features from some other games and creating a new and improved CoX. If you’re looking for a WoW killer, well you really need to just stop and realize that WoW was a perfect storm that will likely never be repeated and the only way it will die is if Blizzard kills it – and not by making a World of Starcraft but by just driving all their players away.

I didn’t really touch on the combat mechanics but there is some interesting stuff there as well and even the minimal amount of time I’ve spent with the skill tree system shows a lot of depth there. Replay-ability will come down to whether or not they can expand the offerings beyond the two current second areas. I’m not sure how many times I want to play through the tutorial or even the same quest series afterwards.

Will CO steal players from CoX? Some, those that are looking for the new shiny, but for those invested in the community and their characters there isn’t enough to overcome that.

Now the big questions:

Is it worth a pre-order? If you’re looking for a new comic book game that improves upon the CoX experience and throws in some stuff from other games it might be.

Is it worth the 6 month early subscriber? If the above applies and a superhero game is your cup of tea and you wouldn’t mind an early look at Star Trek then yes.

What about the lifetime? This one is tougher for me. I’m a big proponent of MMO’s trying different pricing models and I really like the idea of a lifetime subscription. I bit on the LoTRO lifetime and even though I haven’t played it a ton I haven’t regretted it. It’s nice know that it’s always there waiting for me. The problem I have with CO is first Bill Roper, I know he’s not the head honcho this time around but he’s done this before and that game died after a year. Secondly it’s actually Cryptic. I know they made CoX which is still going but lets face it they sold it off and walked away. What happens if they do that again, would my lifetime sub be honored by the new company? I don’t know all the details of why they walked away, maybe NCSoft pressured them or something but they have to partner with a publisher and who’s to say Atari won’t do the same thing in a year and then where would I be? Still, for me this is the perfect type of game for this model. It’s not a game that is likely to become my primary game, Lore isn’t really into the whole superhero thing and while there is crafting it’s not all that compelling for her and there’s really only so much of it I can play. Still, if I had the lifetime I can see myself dipping into it for a change of pace every now and then. My one piece of advice to Cryptic, and even to Turbine with LoTRO, is to make the lifetime available at anytime. Why wouldn’t you want to have a shot at that money 6 months from now just as much as you want it now.

Questions? I’ll be glad to answer them either in the comments or on Twitter – I’m Sisca there.

This weekend I decided that what I needed was a change of scenery and since both Champions Online and Fallen Earth had open “betas” I figured I’d give them look. I plan on writing a more detailed post on each of them later but here’s my one line review.

Champions: City of Heroes 2.0 or maybe CoX evolved and that’s not a bad thing.

Fallen Earth: The love child of Fallout 3 and Eve with a crafting system that I find very compelling.

More later – the iPhone is ok for short posts but not so much for longer writing.

The first session we attended on Saturday was the premier of EverCracked, the Jace Hall documentary about the creation of EQ. I can strongly recommend that you grab a copy of this when it comes available it as hilarious as well as an interesting look at the people behind the game.

Next up was the Mechanics panel:

• There will be a major changes coming for ore/gems as well as tinkerers and transmuters, I believe this will be in GU53 but it may be after that. First of all they are changing which spells use what. The spells/combat arts will come from the gem nodes with the softmetal being used for Fighter/Scout and the gem being used for Priest Mage. The ore will now be used only for armor and weapon crafting and it’s not clear but I’m assuming that the loams will just be used for potions and tinkering. The other major change is that they’re moving the gem nodes onto their own spawn table so that they’re no longer sharing a spawn with the ore nodes – so if you harvest a gem another gem will spawn.
• After the change you’ll be able to be both a tinkerer and a transmuter on the same character. This is being done because Domino would like to move the majority of the adornment stuff to the transmuter and off of the various other tradeskillers. This will allow you to do adornments and tinkering no matter what your tradeskill class.
• The expansion will also see more tradeskill quests added, including more Far Seas quests. Domino also mentioned that she’s working on making the Odus tradeskill faction be more quest oriented than grindy as the Kunark faction was.
• No new spells will be added with the expansion you’ll just get upgrades to existing lines.
• Some spell effects, for example haste, are already approaching 100% so spells with those effects may get an additional effect added instead of just increasing the amount of haste.
• There won’t be a new AA tree but the Archetype and Class trees will be extended downward.
• The Class tree will be reorganized to look more like the Shadows tree from TSO to make it easier to extended and follow.
• Any new AA abilities will be innate and will trigger off of combos instead of requiring more room on your hotbar to use.
• Combining effects such as ranged crit and melee crit into just a crit effect. Along with this they are adjusting the crit multiplierers for the core job of the class. This will allow you to use a wider variety of weapons and armor as it will only have +Crit on it and your multiplier will make it appropriate for your class. In other words a piece of armor with +Crit on it will provide a bonus to both ranged and melee crit but a Ranger would get a bigger bonus to ranged while the Berserker will get the bonus to melee. This is especially helpful with jewelry.
• They would like to consolidate buffs where it makes sense, especially self only buffs. It doesn’t make sense for you to have to cast 3 different buffs on yourself when you could just cast one and be done with it. Standing around a buffing is NOT what they consider a fun part of the game.
• New items (and possibly retrofitted to older items as time permits) will have a rated value. This value will decrease as your level increases beyond the level of the item. This probably won’t play much of a factor until post level 50. This will encourage you to upgrade to newer gear as you level and it will also allow you to clearly see that a new piece of gear is better than your existing.

Class Balancing:
My notes are not as strong on this section for several reasons, mainly I was busy trying to follow what was going on and also, most of this stuff really only applies to raiders so I didn’t fully understand some of it as that’s not my interest.

Priest Balancing:

• Balance heals vs amount of health players have. Some of the heals are extremely weak for well geared players.
• Make sure every priest has the tools to do the job of main healer so that raids don’t feel they HAVE to have a plate healer.
• Evaluate the stun heals so that priests feel involved. These are useful spells that heal a large number of HP but stun the priest for a time basically taking them out of the fight. This isn’t fun so they want to come up with a different trade off that will keep the priest involved in the fight while still making them think about when to use the spell so they’re not just hitting it as fast as it refreshes.
• Improve heal over time for the druids. As it is on a raid the druid HoT sits behind the shamans ward and the clerics reactive heal so that by the time it actually triggers there is little for it to do. As such druids aren’t sought after for raid healers. What they’re looking at is saving the heal if the tick comes and the player isn’t damaged. Then on the next tick if the player is damaged they will get 2 ticks worth of healing. If the spell wears off without using all of its healing they’re looking at having that healing jump to another member of the group.

Rogue/Summoner:

• They want the rogue and summoner to work together for debuffing. The rogues will debuff melee while the summoners will debuff spells.
• They’re also looking at improving the scout pet for summoners so that they can actually stand in close to AoE mobs and survive long enough to be useful.
• Dumbfire pets ill be come a damage/debuff based attack spell and no longer a pet. I’m sure if you ask nicely you could get them to at least keep the pet spell effect for it but I don’t know

Bard/Chanter:

• Adjust key buffs to make group buffs raid wide so raids don’t feel the need to have multiple bards and enchanters just to keep each group buffed. This is part of trying to make all classes wanted on a raid, they need to free up spots for those other classes and not have 8 of 24 spots taken up by 2 archetypes.
• Also looking to allow limited casting of unique buffs (those you can only cast on 1 person at a time) being castable on 1 person per group on a raid.
• With these changes they’re also looking to balance support vs DPS. Again, this is trying to make all of the classes useful on a raid.

Fighter:

• Adjust taunt and hate gain.
• Consolidate block & deflection.
• Brawlers gain a clear advantage to the avoidance proxy buffs since they are the masters of avoidance.
• Improve the desireability of defensive stance.
• Balance defense and damage.

Sentinals Fate:

• There is a plan for the Mythical even though you’ll be outleveling it. They’re going to be adjusting effects so that you’ll want to use it even though there will be better weapons available. My take was that they’ll be adjusting it so that you’ll want to hang on to it for certain encounters.
• This will wrap up the Void story line and introduce a new villain
• It will also explain the change in the Erudites more fully.
• They will be adding to the Ratonga lore as well.
• The Hole will be coming back as a contested dungeon, the players seemed to really like this idea.
• There will also be a return of contested raid mobs, again the raiders really seemed to like this change.
]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/29/fan-faire-day-2-in-review/feed/ 3 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-day-1-in-review/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-day-1-in-review/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:59:52 +0000 Sisca http://www.gnomedepot.net/?p=136 We only managed to take in a couple of sessions today but, between them and the announcements from the keynote tonight there’s going to be a lot of new stuff coming for SoE games. I’m just going to go through my note book and give you the stuff that I remembered to write down along with some impressions.

The first session we made it to was a what’s in store for Legends of Norrath session. The big news was they’re coming out with a new expansion that will be the final part of the trilogy that started with the Ethernauts expansion. The goal of this trilogy was to provide some of the back story for what was going on in EQ2 with TSO so if you’re interested in the lore it might be worth it for you to play through the scenarios to get the story. They also mentioned that there would be 2 new loot cards, 1 each for EQ and EQ2. The EQ2 loot card will be a new frost themed mount that seemed to be on par stat wise with the mounts you can get from Lava. Looks wise it reminded me of the invite-a-friend horse but with a frost/ice skin. For EQ the loot card is a dragon illusion and they mean a real dragon – you know giant lizard with wings type of thing. I didn’t catch the stats but come on you can fly around as a dragon!

Next up was a session on how quests are built in EQ2. See Lore’s post below for most of the details. I will say that, having worked with Hero Engine – the engine being used in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – their design tool looked extremely flexible but it’s that flexibility that can allow the bugs to creep in. This is especially true the more complex the quest gets. They showed the dialog tree for the tradeskill tutorial and it looked like a plate of spaghetti with all of the interconnections between the nodes.

Next up was the EQ2 game mechanics session. Again Lore talks about that below but I’ll rehash my notes. First up they announced Achievements. As part of the achievement system they’re revamping the journal window to be side by side to allow a better display of information. They’re also revamping the Persona window so that they can show he info from achievements. Achievements will be things like kill 10,000 rats – much like the slayer quests of today which will be retroactively added to your achievements. There will also be exploration and tradeskill based achievements as well as potentially Class specific achievements such as heal 100 people. Achievements can also be “meta”. The example given was a test one called “Love the Humans but hate the Goblins” which you got if you completed both the “Hug 100 Humans” and the “Kill 100 Goblins” achievements. None of these will give you anything game changing. They’ll mostly be titles if anything though I do think they might consider adding a house item for some things. They did say that there are no plans for giving a buff like rewards such as you get from the Lore & Legend series. These are supposed to be about bragging rights and not something that you feel you need to do to make your character better. Oh, and I’ve heard several people mention that EQ2 isn’t WoW or that they stole this from WoW etc. Remember WoW took this from XBox Live and they did it for a reason, players love it. The good news is if it’s not your cup of tea there’s nothing that say you have to participate other than by accidently completing an achievement. Oh, and the best news is that these are per account not per character since the idea is to show the achievements of the player. This means that if you get the kill 10,000 orcs achievement you only have to do it once. So, yes, it’s possible you’ll see a level 1 running around with a title that indicates he’s slain every raid boss in Kunark but so what, the player behind that level 1 earned that title.

The second big announcement was the Auto-Mentoring system that Lore described below. The interesting part was the idea of putting together a group of people and all auto-mentoring down to say 30 and doing one of the lower level raids. Since level 80′s mentored down to 30 are going to be way over powered that group could do 2x raid encounters and possibly even 4x. This will allow you to complete those encounters at the appropriate level.

Bullet points that I gathered from the keynote tonight:

• At launch the Station Cash system only had about 5% of the players use it in both EQ and EQ2. Now about 20% of EQ players make use of it and 30% of EQ2 players.
• A new Station Cash feature will be the partnership with HP to deliver art prints of the in game artwork to your home. They plan on having the ability to buy prints of many of the current in game paintings in July and in the near future add the ability for you to get a print of your character as well.
• Another addition to Station Cash will be the ability to do an automated server transfer for $25. This should go live in 2 weeks.
• They should announce 4 Million registered users for FreeRealms next week.
• FreeRealms is adding full progression for both Demolition Derby and Race driver professions. This will include quests and equipment. Also adding the ability to customize your car so putting in garages as well.
• New soccer mini game is coming as well. It’s no FIFA but it looked like a decent arcade soccer game.
• FreeRealms TCG is adding a Card Creator system that will allow you to create a card featuring your avatar. You’ll then be able to get 10 copies of he physical card, each with a claim code, that you can give away to your friends so they can use your card in the digital game as well as the physical game.
• SW:G will be adding some user generated content as well. The Star Wars chronicle system will allow you to create player quests that feature the Iconic characters such as Luke and Vader.
• Everyone was expecting the EQ2 expansion was going to be Vellious, boy were we off base. Looks like it’s going to be Odus instead. Hopefully they’ve done something to improve lighting in Tox Forrest but other than that I’m looking forward to checking out Stonebrunt again. Wonder if The Hole is still there.

Any questions please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try and answer them.

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-day-1-in-review/feed/ 3 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/29/learn-2-play/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/29/learn-2-play/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:36:04 +0000 Sisca http://www.gnomedepot.net/?p=131 Yesterday in my Twitter feed (@sisca if you want to follow me) and I saw this from @spouseaggro:

Silly Far-Stretched Comparison of the Week: “..Free Realms looks and feels like an overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW..”

To be clear this was a quote from some blogger and not the opinion of the fine folks over at Spouse Aggro

That got me thinking and then this morning I was reading through the comments over on Broken Toys post about the game and it kind of congealed.

For all of you out there that are trying to compare this to WoW – or whatever your favorite flavor of the month is – I just have one thing to say…

LEARN 2 PLAY!

You know like you did when you were a kid.

No, really. Put your achiever, must get to max level and get the uber gear mindset back on the shelf and just go out and learn how to play again.

I’ve got 2 young nieces, 7 & 9, their parents don’t really like them watching TV and they tend to regulate how much time and what they can do on the computer. They don’t seem to mind that much though because they have more dolls and horses and such than you can shake a stick at. They even have a small tent setup in an otherwise unusable area of their house that is filled with these dolls and such that they call their cloud castle. They spend hours playing together, making up stories or acting out stories from their books. They also spend time competing, racing each other, playing soccer etc.

I can see them playing Free Realms now and jumping from job to job, game to game, achiever to explorer to socializer.

If you really think that this is just a “overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW” then this game is not for you! This game is only for the truly hardcore PLAYer’s that really understand how to go into a world and make it their own and to do so for nothing more than the FUN of it.

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/29/learn-2-play/feed/ 2 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:53:43 +0000 Sisca http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/ FINALLY!



Almost 4 1/2 years after launch and I’ve got my first max level character. In fact this is my first max level character in 10 years of playing MMO’s.

Even scarier is that the next day:



Acsis only took me almost 3 years to cap.

Shortly after that Lore also managed to ding 80, I’m not sure what her played time is but I did manage to snag a screen shot of her ding



I also managed to get Sisca to 80 in Alchemy over the weekend so now I just need to get Acsis 10 more levels of Tailoring and I’ll go from 10 years of no characters at any level cap to 2 characters with both tradeskills and adventuring levels capped.

We also started doing the daily quest for Void Shards and managed to get the first 2 pieces and by the end of the week we’ll have the third. I think our next goal is to get Lore’s mage caught up and I wouldn’t mind getting my ranger leveled so we have a scout class to give us some versatility. I’d also like to spend some time mentoring guildies to see if we can put together a group and maybe start in on some of the TSO instances. I also want to get the crafting epic done with Sisca and Acsis is about halfway through the harvesting cloak so he’d like to finish that off as well.

So still plenty left to do and I haven’t even started in on my other 12 alts

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/feed/ 3 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/02/14/grinding-levels/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/02/14/grinding-levels/#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:41:09 +0000 Sisca
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/sisca/gnomedepot.net/wp-content/plugins/AutoMeta/autometa.php on line 300
http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/02/14/grinding-levels/ I think it all started a couple of weeks back with Tom Chick explaining why MMO’s are Broken which was basically a re-hash of every “Why this game suxors” post on every MMO forum out there. The next day Trembling Hand jumped on the bandwagon. Scott Jennings over on Broken Toys tried to explain to both of them that first, MMO <> WoW, and secondly, while most MMO’s are fantasy based, they’re not developed in Fantasy Land.

As I said earlier, all of this is stuff that those of us that have been playing these games awhile have heard thousands of times and Scott pretty much nailed the response that we’ve all hashed out over the years. However, yesterday a friend of mine, Pentane, linked this Scientific American article on the Expert Mind. I highly recommend it for all you armchair game designers – even you real world designers will find it interesting but I’m guessing quite a few of you have already read it or some of the books that have been written from those studies. Also yesterday, Psychochild, posted the first in a series of articles on How to Replace Levels.

These two articles combined got me thinking about the whole levels in MMO’s debate again but in a slightly different way and I came up with a kind of challenge – design a multiplayer that doesn’t have levels of some sort.

The trick here is to think of a “level” as a game mechanic that meets the criteria in Psychochild’s post. In other words anything that is used to mark Achievement, provide others Information or help with Pacing through your game world is considered a level. So far I’ve only come up with one way that it can be done and while I think the game might have some interest it would be a decidedly niche game and I wouldn’t want to propose it in today’s market.

First for all the EvE players that are already pounding out the response that EvE doesn’t have levels, go back and re-read the definition, this goes for all of you “skill-tree” fans. A skill-tree is just customized leveling. It might be a more entertaining system but it’s still a level based system.

Don’t think so? Take a person that’s been playing EvE for a month and their associated skill points (for the sake of argument lets assume they’re really good at understanding the system and spent those points optimally) and pit them against someone that’s been playing EvE for a year and their associated skill points. Odds are it would be no contest. I’m not an EvE player but I have to imagine that while it might be possible for a new player to make a beeline for 0.0 space, in reality there is a minimum skill set needed to have fun in 0.0 space.

Yes, there’s the factor of “player skill” that comes into that equation. Someone that’s been playing a year understands the tools at their disposal much better than the new player so even if you put them in the exact same ships with the exact same equipment the more experienced player should win. And this brings us to the Scientific American article.

Go back and re-read that, they’re talking about chess, the ultimate skill based game right? Even chess has levels, it’s right there on the first page of the article:

The results are ratings that predict the outcomes of games with remarkable reliability. If player A outrates player B by 200 points, then A will on average beat B 75 percent of the time. This prediction holds true whether the players are top-ranked or merely ordinary. Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster who has a rating of 2812, will win 75 percent of his games against the 100th-ranked grandmaster, Jan Timman of the Netherlands, who has a rating of 2616. Similarly, a U.S. tournament player rated 1200 (about the median) will win 75 percent of the time against someone rated 1000 (about the 40th percentile). Ratings allow psychologists to assess expertise by performance rather than reputation and to track changes in a given player’s skill over the course of his or her career.

So Kasparov is a level 2812 chess player and Timman is level 2616. These rankings definitely meet Psychochilds criteria for a level, they’re used to mark Achievement and provide others Information about your abilities. In a way they also serve to provide Pacing for chess tournaments in that you should normally be matched against an appropriately skilled opponent at the outset. Competing in a tournament will mean that you’ll eventually end up matched against someone higher level than you which will provide you an opportunity to increase your level should you win.

There are other similarities between the world of Chess and MMO’s. For example the real way most players improve their skill is not by competing in tournaments but in the endless studying of other, better players, and their tournament games. Sounds a lot like grinding for levels to me. Of course, for someone like me, it’d be really cool if I could level my character just by watching a video of more experienced players defeating, or better yet being defeated by, a raid. I’m not sure how you’d code that but it’d be cool.

So if most skill based systems are out what about a “sandbox” game? Remember we’re talking about multiplayer here so give me a good example of a “sandbox” game. The only one I can come up with is Second Life and, let’s be honest here, there is no game in SL. Still I’m willing to give it to you, so why aren’t people like Tom Chick and Mr. Trembling Hand and all of the commenters saying “Levels Suck” flocking to SL? Oh yeah, no game.

I know, I just know, someone is going to throw the GTA series out there. First of all let me reiterate that we’re talking Massively Multiplayer games here. Taking mechanics from a single player experience and throwing them into this realm is going to create more problems than it solves but if you can explain, in detail, how you can create a fun MMO version of GTA I’m all ears, and so is EA and Rockstar and THQ and every other major publisher/developer out there. Also, I’m not 100% convinced that GTA doesn’t have some element of leveling in it but I really haven’t played it enough to say for sure.

I guess the real question is whether or not there is any way to meet those three design goals of levels and overcome what appears to be the main objection to levels – the inability of players to play with their friends whenever they want regardless of the differences created by the levels. Because to be honest without meeting those design goals do you really have a game? If there is nothing to mark your Achievement what’s the point? If I can buy the game, create a character and slay the dragon in the first evening (Pacing) then am I likely to come back tomorrow? Of the three I really think the only one you can afford to slack on is information. Yes it’s nice to be able to know what the abilities of my group mates are just by looking at the UI, but it’s not that big a deal for me to have to ask them how they play their character.

As I said earlier I think I’ve come up with exactly one system that can do that so far, it would definitely make for a niche game and I’m not 100% sure I can make it fun and “sticky” without adding some sort of leveling component in there.

So the challenge is out there. Come up with a system that doesn’t use some sort of “level” component AND would be fun to play in a multiplayer environment.

I’m going to work on refining my idea and maybe I’ll post it later this week to let everyone else rip apart.

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/02/14/grinding-levels/feed/ 3 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/12/14/bountiful-harvest/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/12/14/bountiful-harvest/#comments Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:53:07 +0000 Sisca
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/sisca/gnomedepot.net/wp-content/plugins/AutoMeta/autometa.php on line 300
http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/12/14/bountiful-harvest/ Just after Thanksgiving I decided that my next EQ2 goal was to get Sisca and Acsis to 75. This would open up almost all of the game to me and put 80 well within reach. Last weekend Sisca, Acsis and Lore all managed to hit the target as well as ding their 100th AA. So, Sunday evening I was casting about for something new to focus on and for some strange reason I decided that I just had to start in on the quest for the Cloak of the Harvesters.

I knew that this was a long quest that involved harvesting in every tier but I actually enjoy harvesting and, being 75, only tier 8 would have me harvesting in zones with agro mobs. How hard can it be, right?

It started off simply enough, go to any tier 1 zone and bring me back 10 or so of multiple items from the various nodes. This took me longer than I thought it would mainly because shrubs were almost non-existent – right, who’d a thunk it since it wasn’t that long ago that you could zone into T1 or T2 and find nothing but shrubs up. Next up was T2, I had Acsis port us over to Antonica and we were able to complete everything but the fishing without even getting out of site of the spires.

Next up T3 and this is where it started to get complicated. He wanted you to harvest equal quantities of the same items from both Thundering Steppes and Nek Forest. TS was no big deal, I know several good harvesting spots for all of the various nodes there but Nek has never been one of my favorite zones so I haven’t spent a ton of time there. Still I managed to find an area that I could run back and forth through and get most of the harvests, except for dens. T4 was a repeat of T3 except he wanted stuff from Zek and Enchanted Lands. Again, easy enough and, being 75, I went deeper in to both zones to leave the easier to get to harvest for the lower levels.

For T5 it was off to Rivervale and Feerot. Much like Nek Forest, Feerot has never been one of my favorite zones so I decided to put that off. I know Rivervale, I’ve harvested in Rivervale even when it was still green, this should be a snap. Two hours later I was finished with everything except DENS. In that entire time I had seen maybe 10 dens tops and you didn’t just need 20 or so of the pelts but also 20 or so of EACH type of meat from the dens. Frustrated, I gave it up for the night and started thinking about finding something else to focus on.

The next night Lore had her Paladin, Serrenial, working on the quest and she was up to Rivervale as well. She said she was seeing quite a few dens up if I wanted to come over and finish that off. I decided to tempt fate and head over there one more time but this time with just Sisca, Acsis would have to wait to get his cloak. It still took me about an hour to finish off the dens but apparently having Serrenial in the zone is what it takes to actually trigger the bloody dens spawning. Next up was Feerot and after my experience in Rivervale I have to admit I was dreading this since just moving around and seeing in there can be frustrating. I headed in and picked a direction and just started running as best I could in that maze until I came around a corner and ran into wall of dens, probably 6 of them all in a row, put there I’m sure just to taunt me after Rivervale. This led me to a little area around a pond that I could circle and harvest non-stop so I had everything except for fish – no fish in the pond just those strange snake things – within an hour. I pulled up the map, found the nearest river and headed off to finish up my fishing.

After the hell that was Rivervale and T5 I was dreading T6 but it was back to being simple, head to Sinking Sands and clear cut the zone. Next up was T7 and Kingdom of Sky was in for the slash and burn treatment. Finally T8 and off to Kunark where stuff is still green/blue and agro. Funnily enough it took me less time to do Kunark than it did to finish even Nek Forest much less the bloody, stinking, cesspit that is Rivervale.

So back to the brat…err eager young man…that started the quest for a final turn in. Oh, yeah he’s been working on your reward but his tailor friend is finishing it and she just needs you to bring her a Mantrap Root – oh just a simple T8 rare that’s really rare. Luckily I had one from one of the tradeskill missions, I’ve never actually harvested one of the things. Give her this rare prize and viola…

 

This is what a weeks worth of harvesting will get you.

 

Oh and if you’re wondering the helm is:

 

One of the quest rewards for the new Frostfell quests.

And now it’s off to Frostfell and running quests to get tokens so I can buy all the shiney new stuff from the broker.

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/12/14/bountiful-harvest/feed/ 1 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/#comments Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:42:23 +0000 Sisca
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/sisca/gnomedepot.net/wp-content/plugins/AutoMeta/autometa.php on line 300
http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/ Friday night Lore had to babysit a server upgrade so she wasn’t really going to be able to devote her full attention to gaming but she did want to get some play time in. We decided this would be a perfect opportunity to check out the new tradeskill instances from TSO. She could craft and if something needed her attention it wouldn’t be a big deal for her to stop for a few minutes.

Since she hadn’t really gotten any of her other tradeskillers through the introductory quest line in the Moors she brought along Serrenial, her 80 Provisioner. This matched up well with Sisca, 67 Alchemist (Sage line), and Acsis, 52 Tailor (Outfitter line), giving us coverage of all 3 of the base skill lines. So off we went to isle of Mara.

Apparently the Gnomes in Steamfont were having an issue and could use the help of some skilled crafters so Acsis fired up a portal and we headed off to see what we could do to help. When we arrived at Gnomeland Security we spent several minutes running around looking for someone to direct us before we realized that there was a new doorway that led to an underground research workshop. Zoning in there we saw this giant dragonbot on a rampage tearing up the place. Talking to the foreman revealed that they had built the dragonbot to help defeat the bot that had gone haywire and driven them out of Ak’Anon all those years ago but, again, something had gone wrong and he was malfunctioning. Not to worry though, they had a cunning plan! They would just build a bigger and more powerful bot to beat up the bot that they had built to beat up the first bot. Gnomish logic. Oh well they were willing pay good money, they were providing all the raws and I had a druid to get me the hell out if it all went horribly pear shaped.

The crafting part was fairly straightforward. There are 4 phases to the build, and if you do them one phase at a time you can watch the construction happen. Each phase need 3 each of 9 different items, 1 item per tradeskill class. So, even if you have a full group of 6 someone will still have to do combines for items outside of their primary skill set. With our little band of 3 that meant that 2/3rds of the combines were going to be outside our comfort zone. All of the items needed come from a special recipe book that they also provide so you really don’t need to bring anything. Though I would strongly recommend bringing any tradeskill stat boosting items you have, those out of class combines will really make you work for it.

A couple of hours later we had finally managed to get all of the pieces together and the gnomes went to work building their killer bot killer bot while we sat back and watched. Once he was completed he quickly waded in and actually attacked the other bot instead of turning on the gnomes like all their other creations.

Cue Robot Wars theme music



In case you were thinking of trying to take him out yourself

  Victory!

The good news is that once our guy had beaten the dracobot he just stood there and allowed us to loot. Awfully nice of him.



Each of us also got a token that we can collect and use to spend on various tradeskill focused items, including mounts that up your harvesting skills, at a merchant in Mara.

All in all it was an entertaining way to spend an evening and, for tradeskillers at least, it resulted in some nice rewards without actually having to kill a single mob. When you combine these quests with the dailies in the moors and the other various tradeskill focused items that were added with this expansion I think that all tradeskillers need to get together and buy Domino a really nice dinner at the next Fan Faire.

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/feed/ 2