Punch Out

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The little one decided to sleep all night, so I got some time in tonight.  I finally had the chance to finish up all the quests in Four Valleys, which was quite an adventure.
WoW Insect ColossusChen Stormstout and I ended up in the Brewery taking on some neat mini bosses.  One I needed to knock barrels over his head to slow him down, another I needed to AE the entire zone to get started and the final one I had to periodically run over bubbles to drop the boss’ shield.  I rather enjoyed that portion as you had to pay attention and I was finally NOT OUTSIDE.

The final quest is related to the picture above.  Once you finish all the quests in both Karasang and Four Winds, you end up on the west side of the zone, fighting a massive insect invasion.  That big blue guy, a colossus appropriately, knocks down the wall and insects plow over.  These guys hit like trucks, I died on the first multi-pull, so I had to change strategies.  You end up with a group of guys you’ve been talking to since you landed on the island and take down some more mini bosses before finally heading for the big guy.

Well before this though, you have a sub quest to practice your martial arts – namely chopping blocks with your fists.  It’s a fun quest with an interesting mechanic.  Once you get to this big guy, like 50 quests later, you get shot into his stomach.  Inside, you use this same block chopping mini-game to kill him from the inside.  Which I must admit is cool in notion (a bit less in practice, since you know, inside the stomach and all).

I was quite pleased with the end of this zone quest.  There were a lot of ups and downs along the way but as a story arc, I’ll remember it for a while.

Progress, Perhaps

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So here’s a picture of my monk giving this Hozen a massage.  A 100 fist massage.WoW Monk Fists

Last night the little one decided to drink for about 4 hours.  Due to that, I got to play on a raft for a bit and punch some monkeys around.  If it wasn’t monkey, it was sharks.  Or cats.  Lots of cats.

Previous expansions, there was a reason for  being a mass murderer.  Sure, you attacked boars and bears and beasts but for the most part, it was humanoids.  And they were out to kill you.  In Panda land, I find myself more often than not, killing mass patches of wildlife, just to collect a pile of feathers for some monk’s collection.  The sheer amount of birds I’ve killed is staggering.  I lasso them, I take their eggs, I take their feathers, I take their flesh.  What’s with this bird slaughter?

A bit like the previous post, Hemet and pandas have something in common it seems.  A hatred of anything that moves and can’t talk.

That being said, I did see a couple quests against the Sha.  HP Lovecraft slimeballs of hatred.  But 5 quests in the 60 (or more) per zone is more like a side quest.  I spent more time collecting items to build a raft, go out to see, kill sharks and hunt treasure than I did fighting a guy 30 feet tall made of slime.

So I’m done with the Jade Forest and Karasang Wilds.  I’m back in Four Winds to finish the story, with only a couple steps into level 88.  I did 2.5 zones (or so) in 3 levels, with 4 zones to go.  Wonder what will happen at 90.

The Myth of Auctions

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I am a stupid min-maxer when it comes to money.  My wife can attest to that, certainly.  This remains true within the MMO space.  In most games, I will select the reward that gives me the most money or best reward for long term use.  WoW even had add-ons to show you which reward was worth the most gold, which is pretty useless in Panda-land, since you only ever get 1 reward.

There’s a joke in my circle of friends that I do everything with spreadsheets.  Chalk that up to my real world job of analytics I guess, but my in-game antics follow the same method.  I have spreadsheets for WoW, RIFT and TOR.  One page has all my base mats, the other pages are the crafted mats I can make and their sale price.  I calculate their cost, minus their sale and get a profit.

In TOR, this number was usually negative, sometimes massively so.  It’s the reason everyone takes Slicing after all.  RIFT is a bit different in that practically anything you can make at max level makes money.  This is mostly due to a smaller subset of players crafting.  WoW is the outlier here and it feels like I’m competing against China.

Multiple reasons here.  First, is that there are really only 4 skills that make anything useful for players – enchanting, inscription, food and alchemy.  Every other crafting skill is basically useless after the first month.  Second, and linked to the first, with only 4 skills to use and players having access to 3 of them at any time, there’s a pile of competition out there.  Finally, within a given skill set, there are maybe a half dozen items worth making, at most a dozen.  Not exactly a lot of choice here!  Plus, we’re in the first month, so people are still levelling rather than buying.

I use mods to do my spreadsheet work and find profits.  I also use them to find items to buy and help post.  I don’t see why anyone would ever do this manually.  Still, the profit levels are horrible.  My jewelcrafter has yet to make a single gem that sells for more than the crafting cost.  Inscription is barely making a cent.  I’ve run both daily (for about 10 minutes total) and make about 300g a day.  My monk however, has made over 7000 gold going from 85 to 87.  Hmmm.

I remember in Lich King where I made an attempt at breaking 100k from the auction house alone.  The Tundra Mammoth at 10K was a lot back then!   Took about a month to train the skills and get the tools, but I did it.  Now I’m kind of wondering where the money is going in the game.  If crafters aren’t making money, then the farmers are.  People as a whole have more money (way more) than every before and there just doesn’t seem to be a place to spend it.   From levelling alone, you should be able to buy all your glyphs, all your flight training, mounts and train up a crafting skill or two to max level – with cash left over.

Guess the time of min-maxing the AH is pretty much over for me.

Well That Didn't Go As Planned

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My littlest one took over 2 hours to take her bottle last night, so I didn’t really get a chance to do much with the Monk other than some Nesingwary quests.  Which I’ll talk about briefly.  Hah!

In the original incarnation of WoW there was a place called Stranglethorn Vale.  It was huge.  Dying was a major pain in the butt as you’d have to cross 5 minutes of land to have a chance to find your body.  Usually in a bad spot, and you’d die again.  I played on a PvP server for a bit and this zone made me quit that idea after being ganked for the 5th time.  Anyways, STV as it was called, had a camp with Nesingwary – a hunter. He and his crew sent you around to kill various wildlife – cats, crocs, raptors.  All told, there were ~20 quests in the chain and it finished with 4 elite kills.  Everyone grouped for those.

BC had him come around in Nagrand for some more killing.  Again, a ton of quests, way too much blood.  LK had him in Sholazar Basin with a few less quests within his sphere but more like the leader of a small town.  In Cataclysm, he was an NPC in a quest in Hyjal but didn’t offer any real interaction.  The real change was STV becoming tolerable.

Anyhow, Hemet’s murderous ways are back in Pandaria and way more like STV than should be healthy.  He (and his cronies) sends you to kill some mushu, stags, cats and foxes.  The catch is that these buggers are a combination of any of the following: a) in groups, b) invisible, c) low spawning, d) in the middle of other hostile enemies.

What would normally be a 2-3 minute quest turns into a 20 minute murder-fest of crazy proportions.  Seriously, the area should be called “fields of slaughter” for the masses of corpses strewn around.  Side note – I pull out my Shaman skinner for this zone.  He just stands in one spot, skins like mad, makes profits.

People think that the Lich King or Deathwing were massive killers but I stand by the idea that Hemet Nesingwary is responsible for more deaths than any other character in WoW.

Hemet Most Wanted

The New Curve

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I finally hit 85 with my Monk the other day, which means that Pandaria is open to me.  Let’s meta first.  Monks have a daily quest that gives a 1 hour buff for 50% exp boost.  Every 10 levels (it seemed) the quest became available again and refreshed the buff plus added another hour.  I had full heirloom gear plus accepted a random level 25 guild invite, giving me something like 70% experience boost.  I also created the monk and waited a day, to get some rested experience (monks rested exp lasts twice as long as other races).  So take all of that in and I was sitting at nearly 350% experience boost for the first 60 levels.

I rather enjoyed the “new” 1-58 portion.  It linear, granted, but the stories were much better.  Especially in the underused zones.  Punching Deathwing in the face or riding a motorcycle with a babe into the moon is pretty funny.  58-68 is the Outland stuff.  I barely entered Terrokar (3rd zone) before I happily left.  There’s one town in that zone, when I first entered, had a solid 10 quest givers hungering for me to help them.  It was like  Christmas Tree had lit up.  Next up was Northrend.  I did one starting zone, then the game quests pushed me through 2 zones in a flash, with me ending up in Zul’Drak.  The experience gain here was crazy.   I missed some of the more involved quests, like the one where you blow up the zombies with an abomination.  Cataclysm is still behind a level 80 wall but once in, you only need 2 zones (out of 5).  Now this is linear questing!  I chose Hyjal to avoid the 3d mess of transport in water-world.  The story here is pretty cool and getting to take on massive bosses (with the help of other bosses) is awesome.  Fighting Ragnaros is a massive letdown though, as you’re just a gopher.  “Slay these bugs while I hit this massive wall of fire”.  Like they couldn’t kill them with a blink?

Deepholm is next, which is my favorite of all Cataclysm zones.  WoW has a penchant for keeping all single player zones above ground and all dungeons underground.  I guess people like the feeling of an “open” zone.  Well, this is a massive cave under the Maelstrom, full of fairly rich lore that hasn’t yet been abused. I remember the original WoW and the first dungeon patched in – Mauradon.  I played that with friends a whole bunch of times, it was a blast since it was an open dungeon.  I found Theradras to be a damn cool idea as a boss.  Earth elementals, to that point, were a collection of random rocks.  They remained that way until Cataclysm (while Fire and Water were used in Molten Core).  Deathwing lived underground for millenia.   Why only 1 zone?  Bah!

Level 85 opens the Pandaria stuff.  I zone in, get on a helicopopter and start nuking some things. 2-3 quests later, I’ve killed some horde bad guys then this massive wall of gunk comes alive.  I’m 1 zone through and I’ve never seen another horde enemy.  I thought this was the Horde vs. Alliance expansion pack?

Anyhoot, I’m having fun.  The quest structure is a lot better.  I get sent all over the map to discover new zones and enemies.  Some are silly (the SI:7 quests), some are somewhat serious and others are just strange (stomping bookworms).  A few times though, I’ve run around without any quests in my log and no direction.  That was the most fun I’ve had to be honest.  I haven’t really “explored” WoW since Vanilla and having to get off the rails for a bit felt good.  I had to cross half the zone before I found the next breadcrumb quest.

I have leveled 3 characters to 85, 2 more to 80 and 3 to 60 over the years.  If I were to rate the leveling curve experience thusfar, I would go with Pandaria > 1-60 (post-Cataclysm > Lich King > Cataclysm >1-60 (pre-Cataclysm)>>> Burning Crusade.  The 1-60 (pre-Cataclysm) isn’t really fair since the game wasn’t even a themepark back then – at least not by today’s standards.

The next few posts will probably cover my experiences from 85-90. It’s an interesting ride.

Hope

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Crappy painting skills aside, here’s a graph explaining my point of view of good MMOs.

A really awesome MMO isn’t about single player experience (TOR comes to mind) and a really good MMO isn’t only about group content (EQ for the most part).  MMOs are awesome when both of those interesect.

Back to EQ for a second.  People are going to clamour that EQ was a great game and in some parts it was.  It did drop subs like a brick once WoW and EQ2 came out though, so there were obviously some issues with it and they mostly surrounded the group aspect.  What EQ did right was find the balance between personal story/responsibility and group content.  Meaningingful consequences to your actions (such as faction gain/loss) affected not only your group’s ability to progress (gated content) but also your ability to progress (say enter a city without being KoS).

WoW Vanilla did this too, to a degree.  It opened up the intersection of the two parties and really rewarded group play while keeping the single player aspect alive.  You could do something meaningful in 30 minutes.  This simply has never been the case in EQ.  WoW today however, focuses much more on the single player aspect.  LFD/LFR are all for the “what about me” generation, with quick rewards.  If you don’t like it, leave ’em and try another one.  Guild levels don’t provide any type of group reward.  Enter any city without a guild and you’ll get 100 invites an hour to a 25 guild.

The success of the next great MMO will be about finding the balance of group content and single player content.  Hopefully the ship can right itself.

RIFT Readies for its Expansion

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We’re a couple weeks away from Storm Legion, RIFT’s first expansion.  Patch 1.11 (yes, 11 content patches since the launch, WoW rarely got past 3) is out and is prepping all the souls for the new expansion.

I have a 50 Cleric as a main, a 50 Warrior as well, a mid range Mage and a low level Rogue.  I had a decent set of builds for the first 2, opting for a healing/tanking set for the Cleric.  I really liked the flow of tanking with a Cleric but there were some rather serious limitations at launch – namely spell resist.  There have been a lot of balancing patches, a few with rather large re-writes to skills but the overall balance between everyone is pretty good, considering the thousands of combinations possible.

1.11 is pretty much re-writing every skill tree though.  You still spend 51 points (until the cap is lifted in the expansion) but there are plenty of new things to pick from.  As a general rule, the game is moving away from the RNG issues it had before, into a more streamlined stacking buff mechanic.  The changes for classes are so large, that each class has it’s own post,  typically 5-6 pages long of changes.  Wilhelm goes over some of the player perspective points.

Let me contrast this with WoW for a second.  My Rogue has the exact same playstyle as before.  Poison the daggers, build CP to keep Slice and Dice running, finish with Envenom/Rupture.  My Shaman has the same priority.  Flame Shock on, Lava Burst, Shock Burst at 7+ stacks, Lightning Bolt.  The only class with a real change is Warlocks.  There’s just a distinct lack of choice now.

Back to RIFT.  I like how the devs are taking their builds to task. I like how they listen to player feedback and promote players to moderate positions.  I like the forums as they generally are not cess-pools of vitriol.  Players seem to do a great job of self-moderating and the bad apples are rooted out fairly quickly.  I like the feature set for the next expansion – especially player housing.

I think the thing I like the most about RIFT is the clear amount of fun you can have when a system is made by people who genuinely understand their market and aren’t hopping on some hype train.

Good Old Games

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I am an avid PC gamer, have been for nearly 30 years now.  I remember programming in basic.  I remember getting Quest for Glory 1 (called Hero’s Quest back then) for Christmas one year and playing that game for nearly a year straight.  I remember Dune 2, one of the first RTS games.  Civ, XCom, Commander Keen…  there were some absolutely amazing games back then when the ground was still being broken.  Then, as with all markets, someone saw an opportunity to make cash and the whole free-ware wave came in.  Crappy games, filled with viruses, for under 5$ each.  Consoles (the NES and SNES for sure) came around and gave you some very simple multiplayer games. The PC lost it’s way forward during the 90s, with only some sporadic content worth mention.  That being said, the games worth mentioning are the cornerstones for gaming today.

Steam keeps me going with my current game catalog.  I can find friends, play pretty much any game on it and access games from any computer.  There are a few tweaks I would like to see (like me playing XCOM while my wife plays Plants vs Zombies on the same account) but in the larger picture, Steam has done to consoles what consoles did to PCs 20 years ago.  Made them practically irrelevant.

One hiccup Steam has, and it’s by no means a killer, is that older games don’t get a fair shake due to the nature of the online platform.  Good Old Games can hook me up with that. I picked up the Baldur’s Gate series for 9$.  Interplay games are in a “pay what you feel” sale right now.  I got Stonekeep for 3$.  There are hundreds of games from the late 80s to late 90s available – some even from later.

A few neat points.  First, the cost is low.  I don’t think I’ve seen a game over 10$.  Second, there’s an integrated client to download everything about a game, even the manuals.  Often times, games had some obscure clue in the manual to prevent piracy or to actually help you finish the game.  Third and related to the previous, there’s no DRM.  There’s no always on, there’s no PC limit, nothing.  You bought it, you own it.  Which is damn cool.

I realize this sounds more like a sale pitch but my point is that there are amazing games out there that many people have never played.  Trying some of these out, you can see how games today have used those ideas and improved upon them.

Knight of the Old Republic Free

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See what I did there?  We’re a couple months away from SWTOR going F2P but we have more info about it now!

You get absolutely everything good about the game for free.  The story, the classes, the companions, the art.  You get what is arguably the best Star Wars game in 10 years for absolutely zero dollars.

What you do pay for is the MMO portion, the part that is pretty bad.  You pay for quick travel, you pay for purple item, you pay for bag space, you pay for crafting, you pay for PvP, you pay for dungeons, you pay for raids.  We don’t know how much, but it’s more than zero.

There’s still missing details on what exactly gets unlocked for the P2P players.  I personally cannot see why people would pay cash for a great game with crappy MMO components piece meal.  Either people will sub or they will play for free.  Hopefully we get more details down the road.

That being said, for anyone who has not had the change, KOTOR3 will be launching in a couple months.  FOR FREE.

Themepark Levels

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There’s a growing trend for themeparks to avoid the idea of character levels.  Ultima Online has this same mechanic and it was one of the first out of the gate.  EQ came along and took the D&D model of levels and that seems to have somehow become the themepark standard.  There’s a bit of a shift now though.  TSW has no direct levels tied to the character, simply levels tied to skill useage.  GW2 uses levels but doesn’t gate content behind it, it simply levels the content around you (a-la Oblivion I guess).

TOR certainly has a disconnect between leveling and story.  The “openess” of previous BioWare games (minus DA2, ugh) was apparently cut on the floor in order to allow players to stay together.  Other than the personal stories, which account for maybe 10% of all content, there was nothing keeping you on a planet past the artificial level barrier.  RIFT has the same mechanic for moving forward but you can easily move down levels with the mentoring ability.

WoW is the odd one out.  Keen covers some points and there are some good counterpoints. You can argue that content and levels are two separate items.  I do understand the gating mechanic of levels in a game with 100 buttons.  If I gave you all of them to start, you’d have no idea how to play.  If I gave you everything to start, then you’d burn out on raids/dungeons.  The actual content is pretty decent but how do you pace content reward? There are over 10,000 quests in the game.  That’s a ridiculous number.

If themeparks were to remove levels, you’d still need some gating mechanism to extend playtime and get people used to systems.  If I bought a level 90 Druid it would take me a couple hours to gear them up to heroic dungeon levels. If I played a Druid from 1-90, it would take me a few weeks to get to the same place (if not more).

That being said, how in the world Blizzard thinks than John Smith is going to pick up WoW today and go through 90 levels to play with their friends is ridiculous.  I’m leveling a monk in full heirloom gear (45% exp boost), with 20% from the guild bonus and with 50% from the daily monk quest.  I’ve been leveling for 5 days now, having 7 years of experience in the game too, and I’m still not even finished the LK content.  I still need to do Cataclysm and then MoP.  Once I’m there, the content from 1-89 is practically irrelevant.

Real themeparks are about all the rides.  Sure, there are rides where you have to be “this tall” to get on, but I don’t know of any that say “you’re too tall”.  Rift makes previous content relevant through artifacts, quests, achievements, pets and mentoring. WoW makes previous content relevant through achievements (x quests complete) and pet battles.  WoW’s dungeons and raids previous to an expansion pack (say Stonecore) are 100% empty.

It would certainly be fun to have access to all dungeons at max level and at an optional scaleable level.