Month: October 2008

MMO Longevity

Posted on by Nimgimli

There’s been some talk around the blog-o-sphere about how bloggers don’t stick with any one game “long enough” (whatever that means) and I can’t deny that I’m as guilty as anyone of “game grazing.” I admit it, I get bored pretty easily.

Tonight I logged into LOTRO and did a few quests, said “Hey” to the guild, and refreshed my muscle memory on how to play the game. I did it mostly because I didn’t want to get booted out of my guild kinship, which has a policy of removing long dormant characters.

As I rambled around the hills of the North Downs I was enjoying the scenery and it struck me that MMOs don’t age like they used to. If you played EQ and then Asheron’s Call and then Dark Age of Camelot you’ll remember that once you moved on to a new game, it was hard to go back to the old one. Graphically games got dated really quickly (not just MMOs, all PC games) and the game mechanics that so many poo-poo as being ‘derivative’ today were just being layered into 3D MMOs. (UO was its own beast and still is, honestly.) I’m not saying it *never* happened, just that it was relatively uncommon to go back to an “old” MMO and stick with it. It just felt dated if you did so.

But that’s no longer true. WoW and EQ2 both came out almost 4 years ago (November 2004) and neither of them look dated today. People can and do go back to these games all the time. Warhammer and Age of Conan don’t look that much better, really. This is subjective and you can argue details, but overall if you took screenshots of WoW and War and put them side by side, you wouldn’t immediately say “Oh, this one is four years older than that one.” Same with AoC and EQ2. (I’m making these comparisons because WoW and WAR both go for a stylized, low requirements kind of design, and EQ2 and AoC both go for a more “realistic”, give us more GPU cycles kind of design.) If you look at screenshots of the Bioware/Lucasarts Old Republic MMO you won’t think “Whoa, that’s what the next gen of MMOs is going to look like!” The game looks fine, but it definitely isn’t the ‘order-of-magnitude’ jump in graphics quality that we used to see from year to year.

This is great news for those of us who are easily bored (as well as those of us who can’t afford to upgrade their systems very often. I remember a time when I’d buy a new gaming PC every 6-9 months!). I slipped into LOTRO like it was a comfortable old coat. Granted I’ve only been away for a month, but I’m pretty sure I could slip back into WoW fairly easily too, and I guess it’s been a year or so since I last played that. Going back to something like Tabula Rasa would be a bit more challenging, but I could (and might) do it. I wouldn’t log in and grimace at the low polygon models or the chunky controls.

I don’t have a big point to this long ramble, except that I find it all very relaxing. I don’t feel like I have to rush through MMOs anymore. Next month I’ll be exploring both the EQ2 and LOTRO expansions, so I might pause my Warhammer subscription while I’m doing so (I don’t want to be in a position where I’m paying 3 monthly subs!). But it’ll be nice to know that I’m doing just that: pausing, not quitting. Because as long as the servers are running, I can go back any time and pick right up where I left off. The game won’t look dated and probably it’ll be better than it is now.

MMOs, like wine, improve over time. At least until finally, far in the future, they turn to vinegar. In MMO terms, the servers go dark. I don’t think that’ll be happening to any of the “big” MMOs any time soon, though.

After Chronicles of Spellborn ships later this fall, it looks like we’ll have a bit of a drought when it comes to new MMOs. That’ll be a perfect time to go back and re-visit and re-enjoy some old friends.

BlogRolling

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I played Rock Band 2 until my hands were cramping, my back was aching (I was playing slouched back on the couch, coffee-house style!) and my eyes could focus on nothing other than note charts. It was a blast! But…not much to say about it other than… IT WAS A BLAST!!!

Anyway…

I’m making some changes to the blogroll here at Dragonchasers. “War Bloggers” is now “Gamer Blogs” since I’ve found so many quality blogs that aren’t really war-oriented and I want to start including them. Plus the reality is that so few of us dedicate our blogs to one game. This way I can link to places like Construed and have it “fit.”

If you’re not on there and want to be, drop a comment. My criteria for inclusion on my blogroll are pretty hazy but generally: 1) if you have Dragonchasers on your blog roll, I’ll almost certainly include you unless your blog is actively offensive to me (not very likely). 2) If I read you regularly, I’ll include you as a “public service” for other Dragonchasers readers because I think you rock. 3) If you’re a frequent commenter, I’ll include you as an indication of what great taste in blogs you have. 🙂 Plus I probably read you as well…I often follow links from commenters to check out your blogs.

I do want to keep the length of the list manageable, so I’ll be going through and cleaning things out every so often. But if you’re linking to me, I won’t remove you. We must all appease the Google.

Mark Jacobs Interview at Ten Ton Hammer

Posted on by Nimgimli

Oh, that sweet crooner Mark Jacobs. Look at what he said when asked about the new RvR Influence System:

I know for sure that it’s not going to be designed to encourage people to play scenarios.

Good news to those of us in the Anti Scenario Society [ASS]. We ASSes are sick to death of worlds being empty cuz everyone is sitting in a Scenario Queue. If you’re not an ASS, then don’t fret, Jacobs says they won’t nerf Scenarios, just make OpenRvR better. Hopefully good enough that you’ll leave the queue and come out and try to smack some ASSes around.

Anyway, read the full review here.

Rock Band the Second

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last year I was introduced to the whole ‘plastic instruments games’ genre as dominated these days by Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I’d sniffed haughtily and declared them “silly” many times before taking the plunge and, of course, having the time of my life playing. But as with everything else I get involved with, the infatuation passed. I kept downloading any freebie songs and things like that, but never got around to playing them.

Today the PS3 version of Rock Band 2 came out (I play these games on my PS3…I have a 360 but don’t trust the hardware very much, having had to send mine back for repair twice already). We were out and about doing chores and stopped for lunch and I had a beer which lubricated my purse strings enough that before I knew it, I’d picked it up, even though there was no budget for it. 🙁

Tonight I booted it up and the joy came flooding back in, buyer’s remorse flew out the window, and that silly grin reappeared on my face. I almost always play alone, and one of the nice things about Rock Band 2 is that they included some RB1 “band only” features for solo players in #2. Instead of flat playlists to work through, you now have the “world tour” where you have to earn money and gain fans and fames enough to work your way to bigger and bigger venues. It makes the game feel more like a game, which I like. But you can still set up your own sets and play those if you like.

There’s a Battle of the Bands feature which lets you match scores against other (basically anonymous) bands, and then there’s a series of challenges… basically a whole lot “more” than what RB 1 had.

Make no mistake, the basic mechanics are the same (why mess with a good thing, right?). The presentation is sharper and things like guitar solos seem more tailored to the music that’s playing. I spent the $5 to get an “Import License” for the RB 1 songs, which do take up 1.5 gigs of space (that would be a big deal on my 360 but the PS3 has a 60 gig hard drive).

There’s still a few things I’d like to see: I’d like to create characters to fill out the rest of my band, for instance, and I don’t *think* you can do that right now. I mean just for aesthetics. I hate it when my lead guitarist is all decked out in punk-ish threads and ends up in a Gwar-themed band, for instance. Actually it’d be pretty cool if you could play any character in a band at different times, now that I think about it. But I think the “band leader” always has to be present.

Also when you create your own sets, there can be some weirdness. I had some rock dude singing Belinda Carlisle’s vocals in “We Got the Beat” during one set. But since the band doesn’t change across the songs in a set, I guess that’s as much my fault as the game’s. And really this is nit-picky stuff.

I played for like two hours so this is NOT a review of the game. But my initial reaction has been really positive. If you enjoyed Rock Band I can’t see any reason why you won’t love Rock Band 2 as well. And if you’ve never tried one of these games, well, time’s awasting. They’re an awfully good time. Just be careful who is around. Apparently I sang every lyric of “Psycho Killer” while I was playing through it, loud enough to be heard by others. Much teasing ensued.

When I was younger music was a *huge* part of my life (as it is for many young people) but the older I got, the less I listened. What I love about Rock Band and Guitar Hero is that it gets me back to listening to music (while “playing” it) and in fact often hearing it in new ways. Yeah, they’re “toy” instruments but still these games feel like they have a bit more meaning than your typical shoot-em-up.

Melee DPS in War: Huh! What are they good for?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Absolutely nothin!

OK, that’s not literally true but I needed to say it to invoke the classic song. You young’uns will just have to trust me.

Anyway I spent the weekend alt-hopping, and I’m growing increasingly disillusioned with melee DPS classes in Warhammer Online for doing RvR (they do great at PvE). I’m writing this post so people can tell me how stupid I am and convince me that melee DPS is deadly when handled right.

Over the past couple of days I’ve played a healer, tank and melee DPS on both sides of the fight. Healers are hard to kill and, well, heal. Tanks are hard to kill and do plenty of damage. Melee DPS drop if you look at them wrong and do plenty of damage, assuming no one looks at them wrong. (None of this includes Range DPS…I haven’t been playing them.)

The problem boils down to survivability. Melee DPS armor isn’t anthing to crow about, so you really need external help to stay alive. Healers tend not to heal DPS classes for a couple of valid reasons: 1) Healers are busy keeping themselves and the Tanks alive & 2) Melee DPS takes damage so damned quickly that it’s almost impossible to keep them up unless the healer is laser-focused on 1 particular melee DPS. Plus some healers seem to have an inherent disdain for melee dps since all they do is “smash buttons to do damage”.

Before you react too strongly to that last paragraph I say again, I’ve been playing a healer on and off the past few days, and I too didn’t heal the melee DPS after a few tries. It just wasn’t efficient to do so. By the time they draw the attention of the other side and start taking damage, they’re as good as dead. You can’t dump healing on them fast enough to keep them up unless you ignore everyone else.

Tanks seem to be plenty good at busting through enemy lines and laying the smack down on their healers & ranged DPS. A tank with a pack full of potions can stay up for a long time even without heals; have a healer drop a HoT on him now and then and it’ll take sustained attention from 3 or 4 enemies to bring him down. And his damage is good, too.

To test all this I’ve been playing Scenarios (which, btw, reaffirmed my dislike of them and the people that play them, each of whom is apparently the single person on their team who knows how2play!), so I have a “scorecard” to check. I’ve won some, lost some, playing as Order, playing as Destruction. My Tank consistently ranked near the top of the charts for my side in terms of Damage Done, and near the bottom in terms of deaths. My Melee DPS was the inverse, often topping the charts in number of deaths and being near the bottom in damage done. It’s hard to do damage when you spend most of the scenario face down in the mud.

All of this experimentation was done in Tier 1, so hopefully things change. The classes I played were a Rune Priest, Ironbreaker and Marauder (and I play a Witch Hunter as my ‘main’). It’s possible I picked the best tank and the worst melee dps, or something equally odd to skew my experience. In particular when playing Order I’ve had some bad Witch Elf experiences, and I think that has to do with their short-term stealth maybe?

I’d love to hear from other melee DPS players. Has it been rough for you, or do you do ok? There were literally times with that Marauder that I was killed before I even reached the back ranks of the baddies. They saw me incoming, I got a face full spells and was respawning before I knew what had hit me (literally). I played a high level Marauder in beta and I know they get that freaky tentacle that’ll yank an enemy TO you rather than you trying to charge through enemy lines, so maybe that’s the basic Marauder M.O.?

Minor authorization problems, big customer support issues

Posted on by Nimgimli

Longest blog post title ever…

Anyway last night lots ‘o folks had trouble logging into Warhammer for a while. For some, persistence was the key to getting past an “Invalid Password” message coming up even after we were logged in, with our passwords, which just worked. Um, invalid? Anyway for others, we just had to wait for the IT doodes at Mythic to reboot the Authorization Server.

It sucked but stuff happens, yes?

However before I realized it was a widespread problem, I thought my account was borked. So I attempted to open a support ticket. First thing I learned is that the account I use to manage my Warhammer Online game account is useless for opening support tickets with EA. I needed an EA account for that.

So I created one and…huh, apparently I already have one, as my email is in use. So I hit the “Forgotten Password” button and was assured my password would be mailed to me. Uh-uh. 15 or so hours later, still no email (and yeah, I checked the spam folder).

So I created one again. Nice thing about using gmail… you can put a . anywhere in front of the @ sign and systems like EA’s will consider it a “new” email but Gmail won’t. So I finally got an account set up, and opened a ticket.

I got a response at 1:24 am local time, though the response itself was time stamped 10:24 pm. The email was (and I’m sure this will shock you) a canned response about password management that urged players *not* to use special characters in their password! (As a web developer this killed me a little inside.)

Anyway, I’ll paste the whole email below.

Overall response time wasn’t too bad, but the response itself indicates no communication between the IT guys and the Support guys. What I *should* have gotten was an email saying “We apologize, our authorization servers were experiencing technical difficulties this evening, you should now be able to log in normally.” rather than sending the poor schlub user on a wild goose chase of trying to figure out what s/he did wrong.

Also, the Herald should’ve been updated during the problem. The Server Status page shows only gameplay servers, which were all up. Maybe Mythic needs to add Patcher and Authorization Servers to that page?

Anyway, credit for a reasonable turn around time but everything else was handled poorly. Let’s hope someone learned something during this event (honestly there have been very few issues like this so the customer service chain probably hasn’t had as much in-the-field testing as one might expect by Launch+1 month).

Here’s the pertinent part of the email. Note the lack of formatting between Q’s & A’s and no indication that the rep actually read and understood the issue. They do, towards the end, mention servers being down but then direct you to a page where all the servers showed as Up during the problem.

Greetings,

Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.

If you are having problems using your account name and password, here are some common problems, and solutions that we have encountered.

Are there any general rules on entering my new account information before I submit my information?

There are no rules persay, but it is always best to make sure you use Alpha & Numerical characters ONLY, when creating an account name and password. Refrain from using any special symbols or characters as it will make it easier for “you”, the user, to remember these in the future.

I am getting the message “Your password is incorrect”. What can be the problem and what can I do to correct this issue?

Please double check and perform the following, to assist you:

* Passwords are case sensitive, please note how you entered this info in your new account section.
* Make sure you check to see if your CAPS LOCK button is on or off. .
* Account names cannot be longer then 18 characters in length or you may have problems logging into the game. .
* If your account name and password are repeatedly coming up incorrect, try typing them up in a notepad document and compare it against the account information to rule out any keyboard malfunctions.

Also,
There can be one possibility where the servers are down and so you are getting incorrect password error. The server status can be located at the below mentioned link.

http://realmwar.warhammeronline.com/realmwar/ServerStatus.war

If you have any questions about this material or have any additional questions about your issue, please let us know. Take care.

Sincerely,

EARep Hagan
Player Relations
Electronic Arts

Regional Chat is a double edged sword.

Posted on by Nimgimli

As we all know, Mythic added a regional chat channel to Warhammer Online a few days ago. Last night was my first experience paying any attention to it. I was on an unguilded alt so wasn’t watching my “Guild Chat” tab.

There’s good news and there’s bad news.

The bad news is pretty much what you’d expect. I didn’t actually see any Chuck Norris jokes, but there was plenty of pointless ‘spam’ chatter. Some idiot randomly saying “poopiekickkick!” for instance. Yes, thank you very much for sharing and reminding me that a quarter of the people playing these games are mentally about 5 years old, no matter what their chronological age.

And then there are names. Names are a big deal with me. I really don’t like names that deliberately break the ‘tone’ of the game. No, I don’t report names (at least not on a non-RP server) unless they’re deliberately offensive/obscene, but I do avoid people with names that I, (as judge, jury and executioner), deem “stupid”. In a bind and need help, but have the name Azzblaster? I’ll watch you die rather than help you. At least on my alts. If I’m on a guilded character, I have the reputation of the guild to think about and so suppress my vengeful side.

Thing is, I’m old and my eyes are bad, so generally I don’t notice names in the “3D World” unless someone is standing right next to me. When someone runs by me, chances are I won’t be able to make out their name before they’re gone. So before regional chat was put in, I only really noted names when I was grouped with someone. But now, my chat box is full of names like Jeffyweffy (a dwarf, no less) and Graphic. Actually Graphic isn’t so bad now but you know when he gets a last name it’s going to be Violence or Secs or something equally stupid.

On the positive side, at one point Destruction took control of Nordland/Norsca. (Weird, I thought everyone on Destruction/Averheim was Tier 4 already!) Almost immediately, over Regional Chat, someone asked if we were going to take control back, and a few others replied with (I paraphrase) “Hell yeah we are!” And that brightened my mood considerably. (Now if only taking control back were as simple as capturing Battlefield Objectives, but that’s a whole different post.)

If Regional Chat helps OpenRvR get a bit more attention from the players, then I guess I can clench my jaw when “MyDiaperIsFull” starts yelling “Change Me!” over the chat channel. /ignore is for more than just gold sellers, I guess.

Peggle Whisperer

Posted on by Nimgimli

I had a crappy day at work today, came home pissed off at the world for no reason I could put my finger on. Went to log into Warhammer and the authorization servers seem to be … unhappy. By the time I futzed around enough to get myself logged in, I didn’t feel like playing. Putzed around on my Warrior Priest alt a bit and logged.

Sitting in front of the computer thinking what to do and fired up Peggle for a minute.

A few hours later, I “finished” the game (meaning I got through all the levels in Adventure Mode.

I still don’t know why I was so angry, but I know I’m not any more. Sometimes you just need a silly relaxing game to take the edge off.

I am…the Peggle Whisperer.

Of course, I didn’t get high score… hmm, maybe its time to start over… 🙂

Easily influenced

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night you got a rant. Now you get uncomfortable naval-gazing….

That’s right, its the introspection post! Woot!

A couple of nights ago I went tearing through Tier 2 with CoWs and others and had an absolute blast playing. Since then I haven’t had any significant time to play. But I’ve been following blogs and some boards and this whole scenario issue has been eating at me.

And before ya know it, I’m ranting about everyone playing scenarios and no one doing OpenRvR when *the last time I played* all we did was OpenRvR. Granted most of Destruction didn’t get the memo but it was still fun to be in a big group (that wasn’t playing a scenario) taking down objectives.

I dunno why I let myself get caught up in the negativity. I think it has a lot to do with being frustrated because I want to play but can’t. So already my brain is headed down the road to snarky and when there’s other snarky brains headed in the same direction, mine just joins the warband and the snark breeds.

Before I do any more commenting on Warhammer, I’m going to wait until I find some time to put a few solid hours in. Get the joy back. Pretty much every time I log into Warhammer, I have a good time. Often I have a great time.

Maybe I’ll get to play tonight. I’ll definitely get the chance tomorrow. Blessed weekend, come to me!!!