Month: December 2008

Back to the Burning Seas

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as threatened, I patched my client and headed back to the Burning Seas.

The avatar combat still looks terrible. The actual combat system seems interesting on paper (I’d forgotten all about it) but it just feels so clunky and broken… blech. The naval combat is still pretty fun and interesting, but I had forgotten how long a battle can take (15 minutes, easily). At sea, the game is breathtakingly gorgeous and I’d forgotten all about that, too.

But what really surprised me was the community. I knew I’d be lost so I logged in as a level 3 pirate on the Blackbeard server (all my characters were on closed servers so I had to move them all first). Now granted, pirate faction + Blackbeard server is probably the worse combo I could have picked but.. wow. Close your eyes and imagine how terrible an MMO community can be. Got that mental image? OK, it was worse than that. I logged into hearing one person with a big mouth being attacked by a dozen others in the “nation” chat channel, with insults about his genitals, bathroom habits, parents, etc, etc. Every immature, moronic insult you can imagine, they were using on this guy (who was giving as good as he got, to be sure).

I did end up talking to one person after I asked if, in fact, the game has just devolved to talking shit at each other. This person offered me a helping hand and told me that the economic game was “broken” so players mostly traded directly.

So let’s see:

1) Avatar combat: still awful
2) Ship combat: still fun
3) Community: Wretched, awful, terrible, vile, disgusting, horrible
4) Economic game: apparently broken

Yeah, I’ll be playing this a lot. /sarcasm I might actually try another faction on another server, and I do thank the single decent soul in the Pirate Nation channel on Blackbeard and very much hope I just caught the game on a bad day, for his/her sake.

I really wish someone could take the naval combat game out of Pirates of the Burning Seas and put it into something better, because that really is fun (assuming you have the time to put into it). And I readily grant that I’m being terribly unfair saying all these mean things about the community based on an hour spent in it.

But I can’t help but think its time for this one to be put to bed.

Pirates of the Burnings Seas

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night as I was logging into EQ2 to do a bit ‘o crafting, I noticed that my Pirates of the Burning Seas account was active for the next 12 days. How weird is it that Sony re-activates accounts without any notification (unless it got lost to a spam filter)?

I’m sort of tempted to update my client just to take a peek in to see what improvements they’ve made to that game. In retrospect, my reaction to POTBS was a foreshadowing of my reaction to Warhammer. I enjoyed it until I’d got bored with the thin PvE content, did a bit of PvP, then left. Actually PvP in POTBS was a lot more hardcore than it is in Warhammer since you could lose your ship if you got ‘sunk’ enough times. More like EVE in that way.

I love the ambiance of naval combat in POTBS, but really the glory in ship to ship battle in the age of sail comes from fleet battles, not the one-vs-several battles that were offered in PvE, which looked great but quickly became routine. You could do small fleet battles in PvP but I just don’t have the heart to risk a few weeks of wheeling and dealing to get a ship built, only to lose it forever in a night’s play. Had I built the game, I would’ve had the players controlling a handful of ships, adding more as they leveled up.

The land combat, the swashbuckling, was terrible in POTBS. They keep promising to give that an overhaul but I’m not sure if they’ve done so yet. And the land environments were all cookie-cutter. When you entered your first town it was fun to explore, but then you’d travel down the coast to the next port and find that the town layout there was exactly the same. *yawn*

But there was a very rich economic component, and I’m still loving Nile Online. The problem here in POTBS was that the ultimate goal of the economic game was buying ships for PvP. Adding some kind of properties you could buy — a mansion or something — could make the game interesting from a purely economic point of view.

Maybe some of these changes have been made. It might be worth just taking a peek to see how the game is looking these days. I’m sure Bildo would be 100% behind me playing another MMO!!! 🙂

PvP vs PvE

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I’ve been pondering the PvP (or RvR, if you prefer) vs PvE question, as it applies to my own play styles. Specifically after others pointed out (accurately) that PvP requires player skill to do well at. For every PvP encounter, one human wins, one human loses. In RvR, one group of humans win, one group of humans lose, but assuming the encounters are balanced, 50% of the players are going to lose every encounter.

But what is player skill in this context? I think that’s where things start to rub me wrong. If I’m playing Team Fortress, my win/loss record depends almost entirely on player skill (the only other variable being lag). In an MMO there are other factors; namely your character and gear stats. So if what you’re looking for is a chance to prove that your skills are better than the next guy’s, why not play something that relies only on player skill?

Now, I’m the first to admit I’m a dinosaur. I had the “Chainmail” rule-set from which the first edition of D&D sprang. To me, these are still ROLE-PLAYING Games, and I embrace and enjoy the ‘spreadsheet’ factors involved in them. When I get into an RvR or PvP battle, and the opponent is “bunny hopping” around so I constantly get “You must be facing your target” or “Your target is out of range” over and over, I’ll happily admit he’s a better key-puncher than I am, but to me, that’s not why I play these games and frankly that’s not fun for me. When I read a fantasy novel, the opponents aren’t rapidly circle-strafing each other and leaping behind each other like frenzied crickets. They’re looking each other in the eye and using their sword-fighting skills and strength to try to overcome each other. Until an MMORPG can capture that feeling, I can’t see myself giving up PvE. Because yeah, a Mob is in my ways a puzzle to figure out, but at least fighting them feels more Arthur/Robin Hood/Conan/Arragorn-esque than spinning in place trying to keep an eye on an opponent with limitless energy. (I’d love to see an MMO give each character an energy level that drains constantly while fighting, and drains really quickly when jumping or running sideways {aka circle-strafing} during a fight. Heavier armor could make energy drain faster, so you could opt for light armor and be very nimble/mobile, or a real tank that basically has to stand there and trade blows.)

Or to look at things from a purely gameplay point of view, my roots are in turn-based strategy games. When I play single-player RPGs, I vastly prefer ones with turn-based combat systems. I take joy out of understanding my characters strengths and weaknesses, and his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, and using my brain to win the encounter, not my eye-hand coordination (which, as I approach the half-century mark, grow weaker every year). I’ll happily grant the hypocrisy in that statement… stopping to think about what kind of attack to use next isn’t very Arthurian, either. Which is why MMO PvE battles are kind of the sweet spot. You know your character’s skills, and after a few encounters you understand what your enemies weak points are, and now you can use that knowledge to watch the flow of battle and quickly react, based on knowledge more than on how adeptly you can punch in commands.

Hmm, again, just kind of thinking out loud. I apologize if I send mixed signals in this blog, sometimes saying one thing, sometimes another. But I don’t compose these posts ahead of time. Writing them is my way of exploring my own thoughts on these topics, and sometimes it takes me a few tries to really understand why I react to things the way I do.

An evening with the CoW WoWs

Posted on by Nimgimli

I ended up spending most of the weekend in EQ2 with the significant other, but last night I jumped back into World of Warcraft. I was still running solo, taking my shaman from level 9 to 11. I’m not so used to Bloodmyst Isle that I can stack quests efficiently or I probably would’ve made a bit more progress.

I’m *loving* being in the WoW branch of the Casualties of War guild, more so (sorry CoWs!) than I ever did in the Warhammer branch. I feel much more connected to my guildies by dint, I think, of achievements. I know that sounds odd, but people are constantly getting these achievements (which I admit, I poo-pooed pretty strongly before I started playing again) and each one garners a round of “congrats!” and these in turn often spawn some chit-chat via blessed, quiet, text.

Honestly I’m very comfortable soloing in MMOs, which I know sounds really bizarre to some people (“Why not just play a single player game!?”) but with a single player game, you get what’s in the box and never anything more, whereas MMOs are living systems, always changing and growing. So being more or less alone on Bloodmyst Isle isn’t bothering me a bit, but it IS nice to have a guild to trade items with, to chat a bit with, to give and take support from. CoW WoW is currently what I’d call a mid-sized guild… plenty of people on, but not so many that you get lost in the crowd.

The only tiny fly in the ointment is that Rexxar isn’t an RP server, but you can’t have everything. Most of the guildies chose reasonable names (my main reason for preferring RP servers is naming conventions), and only one person has gone with something that really makes me cringe (have I mentioned that I’m an MMO Name Snob?), but that name is so bad I assume the person will end up getting it reported and have to change it. I’d report it if I wasn’t a guildie, but I do have some sense of loyalty. 🙂

But yeah, that’s a teeny, tiny fly. Otherwise, it’s been nothing but good feelings and good times logging into WoW again. And Winter’s Veil starts in a couple of weeks. I love Blizzard’s events!!

Remember, Casualties of War is still recruiting!