I bowed out of the Star Trek Online open beta pretty much as soon as I pre-ordered the game. I burn out pretty easily and didn’t want to grow a character only to have to start all over again.

So I haven’t been writing about the game, or even paying a lot of attention to it. Early access snuck up on me and I missed the initial rush and all the snark-inducing issues that launches always have. Tonight I finally got around to logging in. I spent some time making an “Unknown Race” and then ran through the tutorial. Then spent a lot more time messing with customizing the look of my ship.

Well, if I’m going to be totally honest, the very first thing I did was just sit and listen to the Star Trek intro music. That really takes me back.

I’m looking forward to playing STO at my own lackadaisical pace. I had been planning to play with a bunch of Twitter people, but honestly life right now (and for the indefinite future) doesn’t allow me to play any game seriously enough to ‘keep up’ with friends, and trying to would just be frustrating. Well, again, if I’m going to be totally honest I should say that gaming isn’t important enough to me right now that I’m willing to play that much. (And there’s a PS3 title coming out next week that’s going to distract me, too.)

I had fun tonight. The game ran great, tutorial wasn’t overly crowded. I’m a little disappointed on the options for head coverings for the Unknown Race options but otherwise creating my race was really fun. Wrote a little bio and everything. I’m paying attention to things more than I did in beta, and Leonard Nimoy’s narration blows away Zach Quinto’s, at least for someone who’s been watching Trek since the original series was in 1st run (granted I was really young, but I have a brother who was a teenager at the time).

Here’s my engineering officer. Full name: John Doe. Nickname: Chance. Species: Unknown. I was going for a vaguely reptilian feel, without making him an out and out lizard. And if you haven’t seen the game, don’t judge it too harshly from these shots. A lot of bump-mapping seems to be lost in the screen shot processing or something. In game his emblem and his belt gear look much more 3D.

I spent a lot of time playing LOTRO this weekend. For the first half I was playing my baby Rune Keeper (who hit 26) and having some fun but after a while I got the urge to see some new sights, so I switched back to my Champion “main” who, you’ll be amused to hear, is level 41. Yes, I’ve been playing since launch (though he wasn’t my first character), and yes, he is my highest level.

I’ve been avoiding playing him though. Every time I do, I feel like I’m treading water and not making any progress. I’d play for a few hours and it would seem like the exp bar hadn’t moved. I remembered my Champion being really fun, so what happened?

Finally tonight it dawned on me. I wasn’t playing LOTRO. LOTRO was playing me. When the Yule Festival hit I started hanging out around Bree to do daily quests to get tokens and my horse. After that I rode up to the North Downs and started chipping away at those quests. I have a ton of Fellowship Quests that were green or even gray, but I was trying to solo them. That meant they’d take a long time, and often I’d fail. Even if I didn’t, the experience I got for the quest wasn’t much, and the experience I got for killing baddies along the way was even less.

So why was I doing them? Because I have this freaky A-B-C personality. I don’t like jumping around in a sequence so I always find myself trying to complete my lowest level quests no matter what. Even though I was having no fun, I felt compelled to try to finish these quests. In effect, LOTRO was controlling me, rather than the other way around (OK really my own neuroses were controlling me, via the structure of LOTRO).

Tonight I finally shook myself loose from that mentality and headed to Evendim, an area that has lots of solo quests that are light blue. I immediately started finding the joy in LOTRO again, which is why I’m writing this post when I should be in bed.

I’m sharing this mostly for my future self. Maybe the next time I let a personality quirk start sucking the fun out of a game I’ll come back and re-read this post. These are games we’re playing. We should play them in such a way that they’re fun for us. Not the way someone says we’re “supposed” to play, nor should we approach them like they’re a chore to be dealt with. If you’re playing and not having fun, go find something else to do in your game. And if there isn’t anything else, then just take a break.

Now all that said, I’m really going to miss out on a lot of content if I skip all the Fellowship Quests (with the skirmish system we can all level to max without doing Fellowship Quests if we choose to). But I’m not a big fan of PUGs. So I’m thinking it might be time to find a Kinship on Landroval. But I’m not sure there’s a Kinship out there that I’d be comfortable in. Nor am I sure it’s the right time to be looking for a Kinship with Star Trek Online a few weeks out. I figure I’ll be playing that one pretty heavy when it launches, and LOTRO will go unplayed for a month or two (the beauty of a Lifetime Sub).

Side-tracking and late night blathering at this point so I’ll just stop. But future me (and dear readers), don’t make the mistake I made. Don’t do in-game things that you *should* do. Do in-game things that you *want* to do and that are fun!

So Cryptic announced its Lifetime Subscription offer for Star Trek Online. The cost is ~$240 USD and you have to pre-order to take advantage of it, and order the sub by Feb. 1st (prior to launch), or so I’ve heard. They’re also offering a 1-year sub for ~$120 USD and again, you have to pre-order if you want to go that route. Both deals give you 2 extra character slots, and the lifer lets you play as a Borg.

Now let me establish a baseline. I am someone who considers Lifetime Sub offers. I’ve done 3 so far. One was a disaster (Hellgate:London ~$140 USD), one was a very very smart decision (LOTRO ~$200 USD) and one the jury is still out on (Champions Online ~$200 USD). Yes, I do like Champions Online, but haven’t played it much recently due to health issues, then Dragon Age: Origins, then LOTRO Siege of Mirkwood, then health issues again, and now STO Open Beta. And yet that’s kind of the point of why I like Lifetime subs. I don’t feel any ‘guilt’ if I go for long periods without playing. I’m not saying that’s logical (in fact it’s quite the contrary) but it is how I feel. I can just log in without renewing a sub and then feeling committed to playing for 30 days.

Anyway, so now I have the Star Trek Online Lifetime Offer to consider. I have pre-ordered the game so I’m eligible, so that won’t factor into my decision.

PROS

• It fits in nicely with my other Lifetimes. 1 fantasy MMO, 1 superhero MMO, and 1 space MMO. That kinda feels like a nice distribution.
• ST:Online doesn’t feel like a game I’d play as my ‘main’ MMO. Lifetime subs are a good fit (to me) for casual games that I want to dip into on an ongoing basis.

CONS

• The eggs-in-on-basket issue. If Cryptic goes belly up, two of my Lifetimes go poof.
• The lack of appreciation for customer loyalty. I would’ve liked to see Cryptic give CO Lifers some kind of discount. All things being equal, a player with Lifetime subs to both CO and STO is going to be less of a resource drain than 2 individual players, one of whom had a Lifetime sub to CO and the other who has a Lifetime sub to STO. So why not give the loyal Cryptic customer a break?
• Price: Why is this more than the CO Lifetime Sub?
• Most importantly, the game itself. It isn’t clear to me how they’ll sustain interest in STO over the long term. Space combat is the most interesting aspect to the game (to me) but every battlefield is going to look pretty much the same. I guess they could add variety in away team missions, but I don’t see those as the strong point of STO.

So as much as I do like the ’security’ of having a Lifetime Sub to an MMO, I think I’ll be passing this time. I’d like to understand why Cryptic feels this sub has a higher value that the CO sub. And I’d like to have more of an idea of what the future plans for the game are. What will it look like in 16 months (assuming a $15/month sub fee, it’d take 16 months of being subscribed before the Lifetime started to pay off)? I have absolutely no clue what direction they want to take the game in (if anyone reading this can through me some links to educate me, I’d appreciate it).

And like so many others have said, the whole idea of having to buy a long term subscription before you’ve played the launched version of the game seems pretty sketchy.

We’ve come to a time in the MMO genre’s lifespan where players expect and anticipate an “open beta” period. If an MMO developer doesn’t hold an open beta, we assume they’ve got something to hide. If an open beta period is too short we snark about the developer not really caring about our opinions because they haven’t left time to react to them.

The problem is that most of us players aren’t really beta testing; we’re sampling. We want to get into the open beta so we can play for free for a few weeks in order to determine if we want to buy the game when it launches (in some cases we’re playing for free with no intention whatsoever of buying the game). And the problem that follows is that we’re judging the game when it isn’t at its best.

This post is of course a direct result of the Star Trek Online open beta debacle going on right now. Cryptic has invited lots and lots of players into the open beta and the game is really suffering for it. On the one hand, I’m sure Cryptic is gathering a ton of data about where the net-code needs more polish and how much hardware they’re going to have to have on-hand to ensure a smooth launch. So that’s good.

But the bad news is that players are trying to play and having a horrific experience. I was actually laughing at how awful the lag and rubber-banding was when I created my first open beta character, but I’d played in closed beta so didn’t really need the tutorials, and I know this behavior wasn’t typical for the game. It ran much better in closed beta and I, being ever the optimist (HA!), am assuming it’ll run much better after launch, too.

But Joe Gamer, for whom this is the only STO experience he’ll know before deciding whether or not to part with his cash, probably isn’t laughing. From the onerous process of downloading the client to troubles logging in to not being able to move once you get logged in, the open beta experience is strongly urging him to cancel his pre-order and give STO a pass. And he’s telling his friends, who aren’t in the open beta, how bad the experience has been, so they’re canceling their pre-orders as well.

Now I’m not here to defend STO. I have pre-ordered but almost against my better judgement. But my issues aren’t with lag and performance so much as they are with the design of the game. I will say that you shouldn’t base your final judgement of the game on the horrible, broken performance of the open beta.

So what can game developers do? I don’t think they can completely fix the problem, but what would help is to offer trial accounts from Day 1. Let people sample, for free, the final, launched game. That would cut down on the number of beta testers who treat open beta like a preview program. This solution comes with the downside of a less robust stress test, of course. I suppose designers have to weigh the benefits of a good stress test against the lost sales of people getting fed up with the performance of the game in a crowded open beta.

You only get one chance to make a first impression though. I’ll speak heresy and suggest that a really bad open beta might do more harm to a game than a rocky few days at launch. Once a customer has handed over his $50 he’s apt to put up with a rough patch and keep checking back in until things get better (assuming that happens in days, not weeks). There’s nothing to keep a beta-tester around and once they walk away from your game, they’re probably never going to come back.

Surprisingly exactly zero people who know me, I’ve caved and pre-ordered Star Trek Online.

So with all my doubts, why would I do this? Because people I like are pre-ordering and I’d like to play now when they’re playing rather then try it later when they’ve potentially moved on (even if the game is better 6-12 months after release, which I assume it will be). Classic peer pressure!

I’m generally (more non-news incoming) a solo player, but STO space combat is much more fun in groups, even if they’re auto-formed PUGs. So again, I’d rather play early while population is dense than fly around an empty low level universe a year on.

I still don’t think it’s the kind of game that’ll hook me long-term, but I’m just buying it like I would a single player game, assuming I’ll play for a month or two and then move on.

If you take a strand of spaghetti and boil it for an hour, it’ll still be more firm than my willpower when it comes to sampling MMOs. I really thought I was past that, but as soon as my order was placed I just started grinning. New adventures await!

And as a worst case situation, I’ll be able to bitch about the game from a place of hands-on experience. How’s that for making lemonade out of lemons?

Listen, I’m old enough that I watched Star Trek when it was in first run. I’m talking the original series, ok? And I’ve watched all the other series, even Enterprise (which I enjoyed very much, thank you).

I don’t give a flying fig about The Force… I want phasers set to stun and a full spread of photon torpedoes.

The very first computer game I *ever* played was a Star Trek game. It was played on a tty connected via an 110 bps acoustic modem (you dialed the other side, waited for the screech of the modem then jammed the phone’s handset into a couple of rubber cups on the back of the teletype) to a PDP-10 running at Stony Brook University. The tty at my high school had no display…everything was printed on paper.

In short, I LOVE ME SOME STAR TREK!

And yet when I played the Star Trek Online beta, I came away disappointed. The away missions felt pretty generic to me. The non-combat missions that some have really enjoyed were, to me, fun to play through once, but as an altaholic I can see them getting really tedious the 2nd, 3rd and 4th time you do them since they’re basically dialog trees.

Space combat was fun but felt extremely derivative of every other Star Trek computer game I’ve played. It’s about energy management (shifting power to a certain quadrant of shields, and concentrating fire on one quadrant of the enemy) and pumping as much firepower as you can into the enemy. It’s fun…for a few hours. But over the hundreds of hours one puts into an MMO? I just don’t see it staying fun.

So, as much as I really really want to love the game, I had pretty much written it off. But then people whose opinions I value started pre-ordering. And they have me second guessing myself.

Now that open beta is here, and the NDA has dropped, I’m really looking forward to hearing what these people have to say about Star Trek Online. I’m fervently hoping that I just missed something during closed beta, which is entirely possible since the beta was only open maybe twice a week and I didn’t get in very often due to my schedule.

One awesome feature I do want to point out though, is “Open Groups.” While in your ship, you spend a lot of time in ‘warp space’ where there’s no combat, but then you have to (of course) drop out of warp to do battle. When you do you essentially enter a public instance…it might just be a random sector of space but often it’ll be a star system. If someone else is there, you can kind of ‘auto-group’ with them to do whatever mission is going on in that system. Being the anti-social prick that I am, this means I can get into a battle with other players and enjoy that experience without ever saying a word to them.

And space battles are much, MUCH more interesting and fun when its more than just you in your single ship.

Anyway, let’s go bloggers! Tell us about your STO beta experience!

[Update: Tipa is blogging at Warp 9! Check out her Star Trek Online posts.]

I don’t hide that fact that I have a rather unusual MMO playing style. Did you know that my LOTRO “main” was level 33 a year ago, and is level 40 today. At this rate it’ll probably take me another 5 years to get him to cap, assuming Turbine continues to bump up the cap every 12-18 months.

Anyway, my characters always act as a kind of hive-mind, particularly in terms of crafting. And my woodworker finally got to where he needed some yew, but I didn’t have a character that could collect it. I had a level 8 or so Rune Keeper/Explorer collecting dust, so I decided to level him up to where he could get the woodworker some yew.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. He’s level 23 now. He went through the revamped Ered Luin, which I liked a lot more than I used to. Then he moved on to BreeTown. The new Bree experience is very, very much improved over the way things used to be. You’re shuttled logically from quest hub to quest hub. At one point the ‘quest path’ branches, with one branch heading into the Barrows and the other going north up the Greenway. Which ever one you pick, you’ll be kept in a fairly small area for nice chunks of time, with quest difficulty flowing smoothly.

I headed up the Greenway and did a bunch there. You go from a cabin just north of Bree to Thornley’s Work Site to that ranger outside his cottage across the road from Thornley’s to the Old Greenway Fort to Hengstacer Farm (the horse farm). All of these are now solo quests (no more LFG to do Breaking Alliances, yay!) At this point my Epic Quest to go talk to Tom Bombadil had gone green, so I recalled to Bree and headed out to see old Tom.

As you enter the Barrows you’ll find a corpse. It starts a quest that leads you to the Old Barrows road that runs between the Barrows and Bombadil’s house. On that road is a camp of expedition survivors who’ll give you all the low level Barrow quests. These were all green by the time I got there. They then pass you off to Dead Man’s Peak (?) farther south in the Barrows, where the rest of the expedition is hiding. I haven’t gone there yet.

Bonus points to Turbine for putting a traveling merchant at Thornley’s Work Site and at this came on the Old Barrows road. You can sell your vendor trash there, but you can’t repair for some reason.

The Old Forest is less annoying now. Those mobile trees and their root friends are no longer aggro, and they either die easier or the Rune Keeper is really powerful. But I’m still going to have to use a map to find all the flowers in there.

I realize that this is all old news, but if like me you’ve been hesitant about creating a new alt because of all the rather tedious running back and forth in Breeland, fear no more. Leveling through Bree is a BREEze (ha! I slay me) these days.

It’s that time again. Another year ending, a new one beginning. Time to reflect, or at least catalog, the past 12 months.

Before I wrote this post, I had to go back and skim what I’d written in the past year. I really couldn’t remember what I’d played, at least in the MMO space, and that gives me pause. Are MMOs just “empty calories” for me these days? And if so, aren’t there more productive ways to spend my time?

Before I get too maudlin, let’s recap the year.

In January my time with Warhammer was winding down. I was coasting on a free (I think) EQ2 renewal, dabbling in LOTRO, Vanguard and Fusion Fall (I’d totally forgotten that one!). Oh and I tried Runes of Magic for the first (but not last) time. But the game I was most excited by was Mount & Blade, a single player game.

In February I quit Warhammer (a 60 day time card ran out; I’m not sure I’d played for a while) and was playing Too Human on the 360. I started my for-pay blog at IT World, which has really colored my life since then. I spend a LOT of time following tech news now and rarely have much time for gaming during the week.

March was about Chronicles of Spellborn. Another I’d forgotten! I’m actually looking forward to checking it out again once it gets sufficiently relaunched as a free to play title.

April saw the launch of Free Realms, which I played quite enthusiastically for a while, despite being well out of the intended age bracket. I also got engrossed in Rune Factory Frontier on the Wii and wrote a series of semi-in character posts about it. Silly fun but a very time consuming game.

May was more Free Realms, plus I started working out via EA Active. Doing that made me feel so much better but it cut my days even shorter. I need more hours in the day! I also started and quickly abandoned Sacred 2 on the XBox 360, declaring my intent to get back to it soon (I’ve yet to do so).

In June I foolishly bought a Wii Motion Plus bundle with Tiger Woods Golf for the Wii, plus Grand Slam Tennis. Those were fun for about two weeks.

In July I started my like/hate relationship with Aion via their sketchy beta system. Happily for me, the hate grew and the like faded and I never bought the game. I still have a 60 day NCSoft timecard gathering dust (got it on sale for $20 in anticipation of Aion). Aion may have been the first major MMO release that I totally skipped and it really broke a money wasting, frustration inducing cycle, I think.

August was Champions Online, first beta and then release towards the end of the month (I think?). I made some lifelong enemies fighting about Cryptic’s weird lifetime/6 month membership policies. That’s OK, I can always use a few more enemies! Unlike many, I really enjoyed Champions, but Fallen Earth was calling to me too. A tiny dev trying to make it among giants. Who doesn’t love an underdog?

So September was about Fallen Earth, until injury struck. I did something to my arm (exactly what was never determined) and using a computer was very painful for the next few months, severely curtailing PC gaming of any kind. In some ways that too broke a cycle. I turned to Need For Speed:Shift on the PS3 and Halo: ODST on the 360 for solace. And my interest in Dragon Age: Origin ramped up. As a result I was added to the ‘press’ list for DA:O which led to many preview-ish posts over the next months.

October saw almost no PC gaming, although towards the end of the month I started playing Torchlight since it was so mouse-oriented (my injury was to my non-mousing arm). I finished ODST & played through Brutal Legend on the 360, and moved on to Demon’s Souls on the PS3.

November was all about Dragon Age: Origins, until the end of the month when I started to get excited for Siege of Mirkwood. That, and my arm finally getting “better” (though it still isn’t completely healed) led me back to LOTRO.

And finally December. What PC gaming I’ve done has been LOTRO and a bit of the Star Trek:Online beta.

So that’s my year. Nothing really stands out all that much in the MMO space. Gaming in general hasn’t felt all that captivating for the past month or so; I’ve been more inclined to watch movies or read books than game. I think to some extent MMOs have ruined me for single player games, but now MMOs don’t feel very compelling either.

A few big changes in my attitude: I’m not signing up for every beta that comes along any more (I got into Star Trek Online via Champions, not because I actively applied). I think in some part heavy beta testing is what started my burnout. Nothing highlights the overall meaninglessness of pumping hundreds of hours into an MMO than having all that progress wiped out when a game comes out of beta.

My EQ2 account was reactivated over the holidays (thanks Sony) and I got as far as updating the client but never actually logged in. I’ve got my Champions Lifetime account, and I’ve reinstalled Guild Wars, but haven’t played either of those either. LOTRO seems to be enough for me right now, and I’m playing that more like an economic strategy game, growing alts to support each other’s crafting rather than chasing levels.

My greatest joy these days seems to come from casually chatting with folks on Twitter. I’m happy reading about what other people are doing, and don’t feel all that motivated to do it myself. I of course live with a huge MMO nerd and take a lot of joy from watching her delight in the games she plays (EQ2 & Free Realms).

2010 is starting with me hungering for a new challenge and itching to build something, or create something. I’m trying to be patient, waiting for these urges to jell to a point where I have a clear direction. In the meanwhile I’ll be wasting time on stupid Facebook games, chattering on Twitter, and messing about in LOTRO.

Here’s wishing you and yours a healthy, prosperous new year. I’m hoping for no more layoffs, the abolishment of living paycheck to paycheck and the economy starting to grow again. And thanks for keeping Dragonchasers in your RSS feed; I know it isn’t much of a blog these days.

In the past two weeks I’ve had two go-rounds with the tech support departments of two MMO companies, and both leave much to be desired.

Case 1: Turbine

On Sunday, December 6th, I tried to log a particular character into LOTRO and found that I could not. I got a message saying the character was still being saved. I tried rebooting and the problem persisted. Other characters could log in fine, so I logged an alt in and accessed the in-game help. I opened a ticket explaining the problem and asking for help. I continued playing around on the alt for an hour or two and then logged off.

I didn’t get back in game for a few days. When I did, I found a response to my in-game ticket, saying in-game support couldn’t help and I needed to go to the Turbine website and file a tech support ticket there. Before I did that, I searched the knowledge base, and found my problem listed. However the “solution” to the problem was just a link to the tech support forums. Searching Turbine’s forums is virtually impossible; they’re using a very poor forum package with extremely weak search capabilities and a ridiculously long ‘cooldown’ between searches (20 seconds). So when you search and find no results, you have to wait 20 seconds before you can search again. The search also doesn’t recognize phrases, it only searches on words. So it takes a lot of trial and error to find just the right words to search on that the search engine won’t spit back as too common, and in between each try you have to twiddle your thumbs waiting for the anti-spam cooldown to timeout.

Luckily someone on Twitter suggested I use Google to search the Turbine forums, bypassing their forum engine’s search altogether. I found many people who’d encountered the same problem I had, and the only official solution came from “Sapience” (Rick Heaton) telling people they needed to file a ticket in-game to get this cleared up!! Now his response was quite old, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and figured things had changed, because remember I’d done just that and been told in-game support couldn’t help.

So off I went to file an out-of-game support ticket. Upon submitting the ticket I was informed that responses usually take 1 to 2 WEEKS!!!!! That is beyond an unacceptable timeframe to get support for a service you’re paying a monthly subscription for. [Full disclosure: I'm a lifetime member so I'm not actually paying a subscription, but many players do].

As it turns out, on Saturday the 12th, my character became unstuck and I could log him in. However, I never got a response to the ticket I entered, so I have no idea if the problem was fixed deliberately or as a side-effect of some other server work being done.

I love Turbine’s games, and I semi-know and like some of their staff via Twitter. I hate to knock on the company but their tech support department *needs* to be improved. Maybe management needs to devote more resources to the tech support department. A 1-2 week turn-around suggests to me that the tech support team is severely under-manned.

I also noted, via Google searching, that they nuke a *lot* of threads in their forums, which means users can’t learn from each other’s experiences. I clicked on link after link to forum threads about my problem, only to find they’d been removed. So I have no idea if the players ever came up with a reliable solution to the problem.

Case 2: NCSoft

Today NCSoft sent out an email talking about their Wintersday Celebration and inviting players to come back. I installed the client (and props to them for offering it on their website so I didn’t have to go rummaging through the closet looking for CDs). I have 2 Guild Wars accounts: one with access to the original game, the other with access to Guild Wars, Factions and Nightfall. The first account logged in with no problems but when I tried to access the other, I got a pop up saying that the account “…may have been accessed by an unauthorized individual” and the account was locked. “please contact Support and one of our representatives will assist you.”

So I guess the account was hacked? OK, don’t care, just want to play. This isn’t a bank account, after all, it’s a stupid game.

I head to NCSoft’s tech support page. Fill out all the info, including my email address. Get to page two and it wants me to create an account. Fill in all that info and I get a message saying that email is already registered. Can’t go forward. I hit back, copy the description of my problem so I don’t have to type it in again, and click the Login button at the top of the page. This brings me to the account “NCsoft Account Management.” So yay, I’m logged in. I click on the Support tab and it takes me back to the form I started at…and I’m logged out again.

Click login, I go back to Account Management. Click support, and I’m logged out. For giggles I fill the form out again, hit page two and it asks me to create an account. Try to do so and it tells me I already have an account registered to this email. Well duh, I know, I was just logged into it.

I’m a web developer, so maybe this kind of shoddy, half-assed, craptacular website coding makes me crazier than it does other people.

In the end, I send them an email. 15 minutes later I get an email saying “An account was automatically created for you but you can’t login until your password has been set.” I have no idea what account they’re talking about; I have an NCSoft Master account, a Guild Wars account, and now a Guild Wars support account? Maybe? I click the link, set a password, and the email I’d sent in has been converted to a support ticket. Huh?

Finally I figure out how to use their tech support page. There are three tabs in the body of the page: Answers, Ask a Question, and My Stuff. When Answers fail, the next logical step is to go to Ask a Question. That’s wrong. If you go to My Stuff first, you’ll be able to create a Tech Support account, or log in if you already have one. Once you set up your account, then presumably you can go to Ask a Question and get help. Under no circumstances should you ever use the LOGIN button at the top of every page, because that is logging you into your NCSoft Account, not your NCSoft Support Account. I think?

This shouldn’t be so hard!!

C’mon, MMO publishers!! Start treating your customers with some respect. Start treating them like…well, like valued customers. We’re paying your salaries, after all!!

/rant off

As everyone knows, today was the launch of LOTRO’s latest expansion, The Siege of Mirkwood.

I ran the patcher while I was at work, so everything was good to go when I got home. I wasted no time heading to a Skirmish Camp to get the Skirmish Tutorial quest, then headed back to Evendim to get the drops I needed for said quest while knocking out some ‘kill those dudes who think they’re wolves” (I’m pretty sure that’s how Tolkien described them) quests.

Drop rate wasn’t too bad and I finished 2 quests at the same time. Then I Mapped back to Esteldin and ran through the tutorial, which is pretty much unchanged from when I did my brief report from the preview.

Then finally it was time to start Skirmishes for real. There were two open to me to solo at level 40, one taking place in Noglond and the other on Weathertop. I’d done the Weathertop one in the preview so I went off to Noglond. My soldier was traited as an herbalist and I was feeling pretty confident.

And I died. And died. And died another 4 or 5 times. It was *much* harder than Weathertop during the preview. I did “win” the Skirmish, but my repair costs were about 200 silver from doing it (and I earned 70-ish silver as a quest reward). The problem was my soldier was being a terrible healer, which wasn’t something I saw in the preview.

I took the Marks I’d earned and re-invested them in my Soldier’s Herbalist traits, then headed to Weathertop. I did much, much better there, winning without any deaths, and my healer was doing a good job of healing. Then I did the same skirmish again, and noticed at one point my healer stopped healing and the ranger in the skirmish stopped fighting. And I died.

I’m wondering if that’s what happened in Noglond? I’d have 10% health, my soldier would have full energy, we’d be between waves of enemies and… no heals.

So I’m going to write that off to launch day lag and not worry too much about it.

Skirmishes are awfully fun though! And tense! You get a few short breaks in them but mostly it’s constant fighting for 15-20 minutes. I don’t think I could handle more than 3 a night; I was too stressed out (not to mention out of potions…but DC commenter Grid was nice enough to help me out with that problem).

By the end of the night I’d lost about 100 silver, gained about half a level, completed a couple of Skirmish traits, bumped my soldier to a level 3 herbalist, and most of her skills to level 4 and I have all kinds of special marks and bits and bobs that I can trade in to the Skirmish NPCs for rewards. I decided to wait until things quieted down a bit before I went shopping. It was getting way late for me, and the skirmish camps were mobbed.

All in all, an awesome first night of Skirmishes. My only concern is that I’m just going to out-level all my questing content doing these things! Aside from the potential lag issue I mentioned, the servers seemed stable, but wow, were there a lot of folks playing! No queue for me, but I’m east coast; maybe I got in ahead of any queues.

Congrats to Turbine for what looks to be a great expansion! If I never get to Mirkwood I’ll still be happy with the Skirmish system!

Gah! I hate the weekend before an MMO expansion releases!

In just a few short days I’ll be able to experience all kinds of new content and game system changes, so I get totally pumped to play the game (LOTRO in this case, and the expansion is Siege of Mirkwood). But suddenly the “old” non-expanded game seems a bit tattered and worn. If there’s some specific thing I want or need to finish before the expansion launches, I’m fine, but otherwise it just feels like killing time before the new shinies arrive.

Mind you, this is all in my head this time out. The old content won’t really feel tattered and worn once Mirkwood launches. And it isn’t like I’m at the level cap and ready to charge into the forest. Hardly. I haven’t even been to Moria!

But I did preview the expansion and already have some Skirmish-earned armor picked out and I just want to get working on earning it NOW. I’m ready to start my quest to enable Skirmishes.

I feel like a kid waiting for Santa to arrive!

Over the weekend I went through the two current DLC packs for Dragon Age: Origins. I didn’t really plan it, it just happened that I liberated the Warden’s Keep on Saturday and got Shale into my party on Sunday. It got me thinking about the cost of DLC.

The Stone Prisoner (which adds potential party member Shale) costs $15 while Warden’s Keep costs $7. The upcoming Return to Ostagar will cost $5.

Some folks think these prices are too high, while others consider them fair. I can kind of see both sides of the argument. When I’m determining value in a game, I basically break it down into a cost/hour number.

So in support of the pricing, if I spend $5-$7 for a piece of DLC and it entertains me for an evening, that seems ok. Going to a movie is going to cost me a lot more than that. Going to a meal still more. I could get a Starbuck’s Latte for $5, or I could spend an evening going through this content.

Looking at it another way, though, how does that $5 compare to the entire game? Dragon Age (PC) lists for $50 and has what? 60 hours of gameplay? (I’m guessing..I haven’t finished yet.) For ease of use let’s assume it’s a 50 hour game. So that’s $1/hour. Does the Warden’s Keep contain the 7 hours of content it would need to match the value of the main game? No, it doesn’t. Of course there’s more than just the adventure of recovering the Keep from the forces of evil. You also get some unique items and some storage space. Putting a dollar value on that is tough.

The Stone Prisoner is even harder to gauge. From Bioware’s point of view I can see why they’d price it so high. It’s another NPC in the game, with new art assets and animations, new (and considerable) voice talent, and both the quest to free Shale and his NPC quest. Plus potentially more voice acting from the other actors to react to Shale (guessing here too…I don’t use him).

So I can understand how this content was costly to produce. But I’m not sure that’s going to matter to most gamers. Will they get 15 hours out of Shale? Rescuing him is pretty fast (maybe an hour). I don’t know how elaborate his personal quest is, but neither does the potential buyer.

Bioware has promised 2 years worth of DLC for Dragon Age: Origins but (as far as I know) they haven’t really gone into detail about what that DLC will be. Will the story be extended or will it all be “side story” stuff? Will we see more NPC companions?

If the Stone Prisoner costs $15, how much would a short add-on campaign that’ll last you a few evenings cost? Twice as much? $30? Over half the price of the game? That seems crazy.

Maybe Shale was priced high just to drive customers to one of CE or Deluxe versions? The Collector’s Edition is $60, so it costs less than buying the standard edition + the Stone Prisoner DLC.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what we get with Return to Ostagar. $5 seems like a good price for a chunk of DLC. If I spending an evening having fun playing through Ostagar, I’ll feel like I got my money’s worth.

How about you? Where’s your comfort zone when it comes to paying for DLC? I’ve used Dragon Age: Origins to illustrate this post, but feel free to comment on DLC costs in general.

Giant Bomb’s Brad Shoemaker stands around in a basement talking to Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer about Torchlight and plans for the Torchlight MMO.

[SOURCE]

I realize I kind of skimmed over the whole skirmish trait system in my last post. Here’s more detail.

You’ll talk to a Skirmish Captain to organize your traits. Here’s an empty trait panel — it’ll feel pretty familiar to any LOTRO player:

And here’s my “full” panel, tricked out for a healing companion:

You’ll see there are slots that I need to unlock as I advance, same as with normal traits.

The top trait row, Attribute, basically sets the ‘class’ for your soldier. Right now I have two choices, Warrior (essentially a Champion) which I got via the tutorial, and Herbalist (a healer) which I bought with Skirmish Marks. You put a Role Attribute trait in slot 1 of this row; I’m as yet unsure what goes into the other slots in this row. I couldn’t slot both Herbalist and Warrior. There are some cosmetic traits; maybe those go in the other slots? If you want your Companion to be a hobbit-lad, for instance, you can buy that feature with skirmish marks. Maybe someone can fill in the gaps here.

Here’re the pop-ups for the two Roles I currently have:
   

If you notice the red text at the bottom of the Warrior Role, it’s because I had the Herbalist Role slotted when I took the screen shot.

Next two rows are Skills and Training. I’m honestly not clear on what the difference between the two is. As a reward for completing the Skirmish Tutorial, I took “Herbalist Education” which gave me a bunch of herbalist traits; two each of Skills and Training. (Note I had to buy the Herbalist role in order to put these to use).

Skills:
   

Training:
   

The last row is for Personal traits which directly impact your character. I only have one of these to show off:

Changing skirmish traits costs silver, same as changing normal traits does.

And that’s as far as I’ve taken this. I was going to do some more experimenting but the Skirmish Join panel says I’ve exceeded the max number of skirmishes I can take part in this week!! I assume that’s a bug (since I only fought in 1 skirmish), but it does indicate that there are systems in place for preventing you from doing nothing but grinding skirmishes all day.

Obviously this is all new to me and I can’t say how I’ll feel about the system come springtime, but for now I’m pretty excited. Hopefully there’ll be lots of traits to unlock and/or purchase which will give the player many options for customizing exactly the kind of companion he or she will be taking into battle.

After all the problems that players ran into last Tuesday during the Siege of Mirkwood Preview/Stress Test, Turbine decided to open Bullroarer (the test server) to all players again this weekend. I jumped on tonight and sure enough, Skirmishes were working like a charm.

I wasted no time in going through the Skirmish Tutorial, which comes in two parts. In part 1 you begin outside the south gate of Bree, and have to liberate the gate, then the Auction House, and then Bill Ferny’s house. But before you do that, the Second Watcher gives you a Horn you can use to summon help. The horn is a skill, not an inventory item, and it basically summons your soldier, who at this point is a kind of generic man-at-arms.

Once you have him at the ready, off you go to take on a few pretty easy fights, and soon enough you will have liberated south Bree. Part two of the tutorial is the defense of the Prancing Pony. Before you begin this battle, you can talk to a couple of NPCs. One sells you a soldier trait, and the other is a Skirmish Bard which lets you slot that trait. You get a Warrior Trait, so buy it (for free), slot it (for free as well) and then summon a soldier, who’ll now be a Tier 1 Warrior.

This is a defensive battle as you fight off three waves of mobs. Skirmish mobs don’t drop much; at least I saw no random loot. If they do drop something it’ll either be a temporary item that gives you a buff (use it or lose it; it disappears at the end of the skirmish) or coin and some kind of Skirmish Mark.

This is a fun little battle. It’s really neat seeing Bree under a heavy snowfall. The challenge rating isn’t very high but this *is* the tutorial after all. After you’ve completed it, you’ll travel back to the Skirmish Camp (by the way, I should point out that I took the Skirmish Tutorial outside of Bree but you can take it from any Skirmish Camp; I’m not sure if other camps send you into different tutorial skirmishes) where you’ll finally finish the tutorial, opening up the Skirmish System as well as the Skirmish Vendors.

And wow, do those vendors have some nice stuff. Everything from rare crafting materials (shards and such) to armor or weapons for general use, to new Traits for your soldier, to house items and cosmetic items for your soldier. You buy all this stuff using Skirmish Marks.

I opted to buy an Herbalist Trait for my soldier. Once I slotted this trait, plus some skill traits, I had a capable healer to follow me around in a skirmish (I was playing a Champion so a healer seemed a natural choice).

It was time to try my first “real” skirmish, and I picked a Solo Level 40, Tier 1 skirmish on Weathertop. Gandalf’s battle with the Nine has drawn evil things to this place, and you have to aid the Ranger stationed there in protecting the area. I don’t want to go into too many details because half the fun is experiencing these things first hand.

I will, however, say that it was an awful lot of fun for me. And I’ll rile the haters up by saying it was particularly fun for someone who always solos. Between the Ranger (who aids you) and my healer minion, I had half a fellowship, which meant for once I could use all those Champion skills that are generally pointless when soloing (Challenges/Taunts) or that I never use due to shortness of solo battles (lots of the AoE melee attacks).

There are Lieutenant mobs that show up now and then, and some of them were pretty epic, at least to someone level 40. And there was (simple) stuff to do beyond just fighting.

The rewards for completing the skirmish were pretty generous. Maybe too generous. 75 silvers and between the tutorial and this one skirmish I had enough Skirmish Marks to buy a piece of heavy armor or a weapon better than what I was using. 75 silver is more than I pay for a week’s rent on my cottage! So 1 skirmish = weekly rent with some left over to spend on wine and wenches? Sign me up!

Siege of Mirkwood launches on Dec. 1st and I’m sure by Dec. 2nd people will be whining about “grinding marks” because, let’s face it, MMO players are a whiny bunch. And if you’re some kind of crazy completionist and want to buy everything you can as soon as you can, then yup, you’re going to be doing a LOT of skirmishes because there is a *ton* of stuff to buy. Maybe its time to get some counseling for that OCD!

But the system should be a dream for ‘normal’ players. I love that there’s good stuff to buy after just doing a couple battles, but there’re also some really nice, very expensive items that will take some time to obtain. Setting and achieving personal goals adds so much to these games, at least for me. I’m really looking forward to playing “for keeps” once Mirkwood launches. This (I assume) is just the beginning of what they’ll do with this system.

I have a few images from the tutorials. I was so engrossed in the one ‘real’ skirmish I took part in that I forgot to take any shots!

[Update: Oh, I forgot to mention this. When I reported on Tuesday's Preview Program I said the combat changes made my Champion look like he was going into convulsions at times. I did not see this effect last night, so perhaps the problem Tuesday night was due to lag (which was awful for me when I was playing).]