Category: MMO

In defense of new players

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was going to let this WoW discussion go but then Spinks described my humor post as “whining” and got me all riled up again. 🙂 Apparently the first commandment of MMO blogging is “Thou Shalt Not Question Anything Blizzard Does.”

I do admit that one of my problems is mixing twitter and blogs, though. I’ll be having a conversation on Twitter and it’ll inspire a blog post and without the context of twitter the blog post can seem a little unbalanced. For instance on Twitter I’ve been urging people to try out the new WoW starter areas for the lore and storylines. I don’t think I’ve said here on the blog that you should do that: so now I have. The actual gameplay is very bland and unchallenging but in between the gameplay there’s a lot of narrative and spectacle that can be very enjoyable. You can easily burn through this on a 10-Day Free pass or a Scroll of Resurrection and I do believe it is worth seeing.

But let me roll up my sleeves and get back to pissing off the WoW Devoted out there.

A lot of the pushback on my concerns about the new low-level experience is that it wasn’t made for me, it was made for new players coming into the game.

Well I have a lot to say about that.

First of all, I just mentioned the lore and the narrative. Well guess what? Those will mean *nothing* to someone brand new to WoW. The reason I enjoy them is that I have a vague sense of what has been going on in the world of Warcraft. So when I hear about the return of Malfurion Stormblade or whoever, even though I can’t remember the name enough to spell it right, he’s at least familiar to me. When the story goes on about the Night Elves losing their immortality…that means something to me from playing the ‘old’ WoW. A brand new player is going to be totally lost. A hardcore WoW player (which I am not) who is very familiar with the lore will revel in this content.

So my conclusion is that this new low-level experience is intended, at least in one aspect, to give the veterans something new.

Second issue is that Blizzard needed to make things easier for new players because the old system was too hard. The astonishing arrogance of this statement boggles me. Essentially the WoW vets are saying “Well of course WE were smart and clever enough to learn it, but those people out there who don’t yet play WoW are much too moronic to figure out such a complex game without extensive hand-holding.”

This is bullshit. Someone mentioned that 70% of people who try WoW never get to level 10, the implication being that this new, easier newbie experience will reduce that statistic. Well guess what? 70% of the people who try Farmville never get to level 10 either (I made that stat up but I feel confident the percentage is pretty high). If Zynga made Farmville easier (somehow?) would that stat go down? I doubt it. It isn’t that Farmville is too hard, that’s for sure. And y’know what? Low level WoW isn’t that hard either. It never has been.

Maybe 70% of the people who try the game just get bored? Or don’t see the appeal? Or maybe it isn’t exciting enough.

I’m thinking of the much maligned ‘casual’ player coming to WoW from Diner Dash where she (I dunno why the casual gamer is always assumed to be a woman but I’m going with it for now) has had a constant progression of challenge as she advanced through levels. Her brain is in overdrive as she constantly scans the game board and the mouse dances under her fingers as she guides Flo back and forth at breakneck pace to keep the customers happy.

Now someone convinces her to log into $15/month WoW where she finds she is mostly a passive observer. It’s pretty and kind of interesting but she doesn’t really DO very much. Combat is slow paced and no matter how nimble her mind and fingers are, she can’t speed it up.

Now, you and I know that things will get very very different later on in her WoW career, but she doesn’t know that. As far as she is concerned, after playing for 4-5 hours, WoW is kind of an interactive storybook. That she has to pay $15/month to play. So she goes back to her more exciting casual games.

In a recent post Spinks said “Maybe you have even forgotten what it was like to panic every time a mob attacked you, freak out any time you thought you might be lost, and not really understand how the genre works yet.”

She may as well have said “Maybe you have even forgotten what it was like to have fun playing an MMO.” Panic from being attacked, freaking out at getting lost? Not understanding every number and nuance of the world? Hell yes, sign me the heck up, PLEASE! That sounds wonderfully fun to me. Robbing new players of that fun seems downright criminal.

Anyway… I think I’ve vented my spleen on this now. I’m not quitting my return to WoW over the new player experience or anything and I still have Cataclysm pre-ordered (Collector’s Edition, even). But, as with so many other games, when I see what I perceive as a design flaw, I’m going to talk about it. WoW doesn’t get a Free Pass just because Blizzard made it.

I love the spectacle of the new player experience. I just think that, if anything, Blizzard will lose MORE new players with this new system since they hold the player’s hand too firmly and for too long. Most players (I think anyway) want some excitement in their games. They want to feel a sense of risk/reward. Take away the risk and it just feels boring. Remember as far as these new players know, this is the entire WoW experience.

Currently my new Druid is level 18 or 19 and still spamming 2-3 skills over and over again. Even when I deliberately ‘broke’ a quest (I left an instanced area prematurely) and got jumped by 4 mobs I wasn’t in any real danger, though I did have to self-heal. By doing just the quests you’re hand fed, you’re constantly 4 levels above the trash mobs and 2 above the named mobs. I don’t think at this point a new player would be learning very much. I *am* very interested to see how the game transitions from this hand-holding phase to “OK now you can go and make your own choices.” I hope they do it well.

Sure, give new players 2-3 hours of hand holding to get them started, but by the time the player has put in 5 hours (for normal people this is 2-3 evenings of play) they should start getting a sense of what the real gameplay is all about. At least, I think so.

When WoW subs shoot up to 22 million you can all say you told me so. 🙂

LOTRO – Hacked!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I went to log into LOTRO yesterday to see the new changes in the latest patch. I was able to log in to the launcher but my account was listed as BANNED.

Dammit!

After talking to friends, I learned that my characters, all of them, were last seen online on Oct 30th. I last played on September 19th. I know that’s pretty accurate because a) Raptr says that’s the last time I played and b) September 19th is Talk Like A Pirate Day and I’d logged in to see the LOTRO event built around that “holiday.”

Anyway, I put in a ticket last night but after poking through the forums learned that the backlog on those tickets is as much as 2 weeks! I decided to call instead, but by this time it was after phone support hours had shut down.

So today I called up. My hold time was essentially zero and I talked to a very pleasant gentleman by the name of Eric who looked up my account and told me what I’d already assumed…they’d detected what looked like a 3rd party accessing my account (I assume they do this via IP address??) and had locked the account to minimize damage.

He told me it’d take about an hour to re-activate the account, and once I logged in I should check each character and see what, if anything, is missing from them. Then I should open a ticket, one for each character, and they’ll see what they can do about getting me my stuff back.

I’d purchased a big chunk of LOTRO points when the game went free-to-play and had never spent many of them, and was worried about those. Eric told me they’d probably still be there since they aren’t transferrable, nor is the stuff you can buy with them, so hackers don’t generally bother with them. I hope that’s true.

I’ve already resigned myself to logging in to find a bunch of naked characters. If that happens, and if I can’t get my stuff restored, I’ve decided I’ll just RP my way through it. There’s something kind of fun (well, I’ll admit I’m looking for the silver lining here) about having a fresh start and picking myself up by my boot straps, so to speak. Mind you, I didn’t have any really epic gear on any of my characters so this attitude is a lot easier for me than it’d be for people with maxed out characters will really good gear. But I can roleplay being robbed, stripped of all my gear, and left for dead.

I’m kind of kicking myself over this. My password on that account was old and honestly not great. It was just two words strung together; these days my passwords are always pretty complex with numbers and punctuation marks. I just never got around to changing the LOTRO one.

To recap though, and I’m assuming the account will be unlocked by the time I get home (and I already changed the password), I’m not impressed by the turn-around time for submitted tickets (2 weeks, if that’s accurate, is way too long) but I am very impressed by phone support. No hold time, a no-fuss solution to my problem and a cordial customer service person. You really can’t ask for much more than that.

[Update: I got home and logged in with no problems. I checked my highest level character and as far as I can tell he still has everything he had the last time I played him. 2 gold or so in coin, a few shards, all his gear, vault still filled with junk. And my LOTRO points seem to all be there.

Not that I’m complaining but… why bother to hack an account and then not take anything off it? I wonder if they used my account as a kind of ‘middle man’ or something? ]

Next Gen WoW

Posted on by Nimgimli

Good news! Last night I made the final tweaks to my time machine and traveled 5 years into the future where I got a chance to watch you play the next WoW Expansion: WoW: Epic Thrills! I wanted to report back on how Blizzard will do a great job of streamlining the experience and getting rid of all the parts of gaming that we all hate.

So you start the game and pick a race, then a class. This would feel pretty familiar to today’s gamers except there isn’t a lot of description. You’re just prompted to pick something that looks cool. Then you log into the game for the first time.

You’ll see your character standing in rags with a splintered 2×4 as a weapon. There’s an NPC to one side with a huge ! over his head and behind him is a wall on which a movie is playing. In the movie you can see a village with all its people going about their business. The graphics are amazing.

If you don’t do anything the NPC starts waving his hands saying “CLICK ME! CLICK ME!” Once you click on him he tells you a story about this village and how it is being attacked by bandits. You have to kill 5 bandits! The movie changes, showing bandits descending on the village, and suddenly 5 bandits pop into existence in front of you. “CLICK ON THEM!” the NPC yells so you click on one and your character swings his 2×4. The bandit screams and crumbles to the ground. You click on the next bandit, your character swings, he crumbles. You quickly click on the remaining 3 and all die. “BOSS INCOMING!” the NPC yells and suddenly a slightly larger Bandit appears before you. You click on him, your character swings and the boss dies.

Fireworks go off. “QUEST COMPLETE!” appears on the screen and the NPC says “You leveled up! You’ve learned Thorns. Thorns is a defensive spell that protects you from harm. Oh, and here is your reward.” The NPC taps his staff on the ground and your character changes. Now he is wearing better clothes and carrying a dagger. The NPC has a new ! over his head, so you click on him.

The NPC goes into a spiel about how the villagers will freeze to death because the bandits stole all their clothes. Their only hope is bear hides. The movie changes to show a woodland scene. The NPC tells you that you have to kill 10 bears.

Suddenly 10 bears appear before you. You click on it and your character thrusts with his knife and the bear dies. Yay! But Bear #2 bites at you! You notice a Green Health Bar drop a bit and the NPC yells “You lost some health, but your Thorns damage the bear!” and Bear #2 dies.

At that point, in the real world the phone rings. You pick it up to talk to a telemarketer. You watch the screen as Bears 3, 4 and 5 bite you and die from your Thorns spell. Bear #6 bites you and dies too, but at the same time he kills you. A huge green button with the word “GO!” on it appears on screen. You click it and your character stands up with his health bar full again. Bears 7, 8, 9, & 10 bite you, reducing your health, and die from your defensive spell.

“QUEST COMPLETE! You gained a new level! You learn FIREBALL!” the NPC yells. Your health bar fills up. When he taps his staff this time, a shield appears in your hand and shoulderpads grow out of your shoulders. The NPC has a ! over his head.

You click him and he says “The villagers need food. Hunt some deer!” The woodland scene continues to play on the screen and 10 deer teleport into the room. You’re off the phone so can focus again. You click the first dear and your avatar stabs it. It dies. You click the second deer and your avatar shoots a fireball at it. It dies. Click deer #3, another fireball, another dead deer. Click deer #4 and it’s a stab again, and another dead deer. You quickly click the remaining 6 deer and the NPC yells “SPEED BONUS!” and suddenly there’s a decorative butterfly fluttering around your avatar’s head.

As the 10th deer dies the NPC yells “QUEST COMPLETE! You gained a new level! You learned Hack!” His next quest has you fighting 8 tigers to get their teeth to make daggers to arm the villagers. The woodland scene is replaced by a jungle scene. When the tigers appear and you click on them you sometimes swing you dagger overhead and yell “Hack!” when you attack. Other times its a thrust and others still, a fireball.

The NPC pauses the action and says “In WoW 2.0 you don’t have to worry about what skill to use…we take care of that for you!” You pause a moment and a tiger bites you and you die. The big green GO button pops up and you click it and continue where you left off. This fight has a Boss Tiger at the end. You click it and your avatar does a crazy cool combo attack that consists of a fireball followed by a hack. “QUEST COMPLETE!” yells the NPC. “You’ve gained a level. Only 196 to go!”

And then my time machine pulled me back to the present. But I can’t wait for this version of WoW to arrive. I loved how you could do everything with 1 mouse button. There was no pesky moving hither and yon, or inventory or stats to worry about. No painful death penalty. No having to figure out what skill or spell to use next. I mean, these are COMPUTER games, right? Why should WE have to make all these decisions when the computer can do it for us!? Let it keep track of the numbers, right? We just want to click on stuff.

I read that the internal code name for the next generation of WoW is: Bubblewrap.

WoW is starting out ever easy

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as I mentioned in my last post, I started a new character yesterday. He’s now level 15 or 16 and holy smokes, World of Warcraft is holding my hand to the point where I’m feeling molested.

Now to be fair, level 15 or 16 is maybe 5-6 hours of playtime? My /played is around 8 hours but I have a habit of walking away from the computer and leaving my dude sitting around while I take the dog for a half hour walk or something. So I’m guessing 5-6 hours of actual game time. Maybe 6.5.

The new player experience really couldn’t be much easier. Everything you’re asked to do is carefully laid out for you. You’ll never have to make a decision for yourself when questing. At the most I’ve had 4 quests in my log (if you don’t count a couple of Harvest Day Event quests) and usually it has been 1 or 2. They’ve always been carefully grouped together so I got to an area, kill 10 rats (1 quest) and picking up 6 widgets (2nd quest) and killing a named mob (3rd quest). An arrow on the mini-map shows you what direction to go. In the case of a named mob, he shows up on the map as a skull so you know exactly where he is. Anything you need to collect has huge sparklies that you can see from far, far away.

Once you complete one grouping of 2-3 quests in a location you’re led by the nose to the next NPC who’ll give you 2-3 quests in the next highly specific location. (Sometimes it’s a cluster of NPCs). So far I’ve found exactly 1 quest that was ‘off the beaten path’ a bit.

If the area you have to do quests at is more than a few seconds run away, there’ll be a temporary (and on rails) mount available to take you to where you need to go. When you level up, pop up announcements tell you if there are new skills available at your trainer (who, btw, appears on your mini-map) and reminds you if you have a talent point to spend.

Speaking of talents. When you hit ten you have to pick one ‘branch’ of the talent tree to go down. That’s the first real decision you’ll make in the game after picking your class (you’ll be locked out of the other two for a while once you choose). Once you do that, you’ll have 3 talents to choose from, so that’s another decision, but as of right now I’ve maxed one of the 3 talents and am working on a 2nd and still haven’t unlocked the next tier of talents.

The level of difficulty so far has been near 0. I’ve died once or twice from not paying attention (you tend to zone out pretty quickly – like once I was poisoned and never noticed since I was watching TV while I played) but always it’s been a few seconds away from a graveyard. Health and mana regenerate like crazy so I’ve never needed to eat anything or use bandages or anything like that. Granted as a druid I can heal myself, so that probably has a lot to do with it. That poison (corruption, actually) might’ve been a much bigger deal for a non-healing class.

Now, I’ve been sortof enjoying myself just because the lore is quasi-new and I’ve been enjoying seeing how the world changes, but I would NOT want to level a 2nd Night Elf because the actual gameplay is about as compelling and mentally stimulating as playing solitaire.

Hopefully by level 20 or so things will start to branch out, but damn, this is the longest tutorial I’ve ever played through.

Back to WoW again!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Someday I should count how many blog posts I have that are titled “Back to WoW.”

But here I go again! But c’mon, how could I resist? My history of WoW is long and at times intimate. I have a friend who works at Blizzard who got me into the Friends and Family Alpha long, long ago, and I played the heck out of WoW for the first couple years it was out. That was before it was hugely mainstream and everyone was expected to have exactly the right gear and play their classes exactly the right way — back then we played to have fun. Crazy, huh?

But the world of Azeroth became more or less real to me in some ways. I mean the locations. There are (or were) places in that world that invoked specific memories. So how could I not go back to see what’s changed?

The last time I went back was just a few months ago when, for reasons I no longer recall, I ran out and purchased the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and rolled a death knight. In 2 months of subscribing I played enough to get that death knight to level 58. That’s what? 2-3 hours of play? So that was a good investment of cash, eh? About $70 between the expansion and 2 months of sub.

So today I renewed and rolled a Night Elf Druid. Yup, starting from scratch (for now anyway). I dunno how many of the differences I’m seeing are from the Cataclysm patch, but they’re interesting to me (even if I’m not sure I agree with all of them). The Level 1-5 area for the Night Elves has been super-streamlined and you get through it in about 6-7 quests, some of which take seconds to do. Vast swaths of that area now go untouched. That’s great for vets but I’m not sure if it won’t be a bit overwhelming for newcomers, if any exist.

Owners of the WoW Collector’s Edition now get all three pets instead of having to pick one. 🙂

Here’s a really odd change (and I’m sure you can turn this off). Mobs only have names floating over their head if you have a quest to kill them. That’s really bizarre, but I have to admit it makes it super-easy to find the things you need to kill. Just look for anything with a neon sign over its noggin.

I do have Cataclysm pre-ordered but I almost wonder why. My highest level character is 60 (the cap when I last played with any kind of regularity) so the extra levels aren’t of much interest. I guess I’ll get access to the two new races but beyond that…it seems like most of the changes that come with Cataclysm, at least the ones that pertain to lower level characters, are included with the freebie patch.

We’ll see, I guess. I imagine I could have fun playing a Worgen for a little while..

Perpetuum

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’d been watching the enthusiastic Perpetuum tweets and blog postings of some of my Twitter friends with interest when what should arrive in my in-box but a code to give the game a try. Thanks to Perpetuum’s PR team for this opportunity to test their game for free.

In Perpetuum you’re trying to harvest resources on a distance planet that is occupied by a race of robots. Rather than send humans to the planet, scientists have discovered how to beam a person’s consciousness into one of the robots on the planet. Basically we’ve become the body snatchers in this game.

What that means in practice is that your in-game avatar is a robot, but you can hop between different robots once you have access to more. You do have a ‘human’ avatar but it’s basically just a face in a window now and then. Think of it like EVE Online. In fact thinking of the game like EVE Online only planetside will help you wrap your head around Perpetuum a lot more easily than my describing it all.

Perpetuum is a big game. You’re not going to just log in and play. There’s a steep learning curve and a heck of a lot going on and within a few minutes of starting to play your interface will be a mass of windows. This gets better as you become familiar with the UI and start tucking frequently used windows into permanent locations, and again, if you’ve played a lot of EVE this’ll be much more comfortable to you than if you’re coming from a level-based fantasy MMO.

There are a few key differences from EVE that immediately jump out at you. First, you have direct, WASD control of your robot (as one option…you can also lock on a target and ‘approach’ it or double click a spot on the terrain to go there). Second, while Experience Points accumulate in real time (like in EVE), rather than queuing up skills these EP’s just go into a pool that you can then spend at your leisure. This means you don’t have to spend your out-of-game life worrying about whether or not you have enough in-game skills queued.

But like EVE, this is a huge sandbox of a game. You decide what you want to do. Be an industrialist? A fighter? A crafter? A bit of all three? Work the markets? Steal (some of the terrain is PvE, some is open PvP) etc etc.

I didn’t get very far in Perpetuum so I’ll stop talking game mechanics now and refer you to Scopique, Stargrace and Sara Pickell for more specifics. Blue Kae is playing too but hasn’t blogged about it (yet). I really look forward to reading the Perpetuum stories that these people will share as they continue to play.

But Perpetuum just isn’t a good fit for me. First, everyone tells me not to bother trying to solo, and I’m definitely a solo player, more so now than ever. Second, it’s the kind of game where you have to spend a lot of time researching what’s going on: where the best market prices are, how to find a blueprint for robot Y, and things of that nature (I’m being vague because I’m basing this on the stories of others; I honestly didn’t get far enough for this to be an issue.). I no longer want to spend that kind of time on a game. When I get a little time to spend on gaming, I want to spend it playing, not researching.

Basically Perpetuum is a game for hardcore MMO players. By ‘hardcore’ I mean people for whom MMOs are their primary leisure activity. I used to be a hardcore player, but now MMOs are just one of the many things I do and I’m not willing to cut down on reading blogs/twitter, or playing with the dog, or watching movies or reading books, or even playing single player games, in order to devote more time to one specific MMO like this.

That’s NOT a knock on the game; in fact Perpetuum makes me long for the days when I had 15-20 hours a week to spend playing games: I love the theme of the game and, as I mentioned, I’m enjoying the game vicariously through reading my hardcore gaming friends who’re playing. I just don’t think it’s a game where you can do well by logging in for 30 minutes on Monday, an hour on Thursday and then 2 hours Saturday afternoon. It feels like the kind of game that’s going to want pretty regular attention: you want to be part of a corporation, keep tabs on deals on the market and so forth.

One last thing worth mentioning is the price. Perpetuum costs $10/month, and nothing else. There’s no client to buy. So if you’re curious (and didn’t get a code from a friend) you’re only risking $10 to give it a try. If you like deep, rich sci-fi games and MMOs, and you have time, I urge you to give it a go.

Now I have a challenge for game designers out there: is it possible to build a big sandbox game like Perpetuum (or EVE) and offer enough roles in it that hardcore gamers anxious to totally immerse themselves in the politics and economics and deep in-game technology can be satisfied, but casual gamers can also play and have a much narrower, but still satisfying, role?

FFXIV – Another free month

Posted on by Nimgimli

So a new post at the Final Fantasy XIV Lodestone says that Square-Enix is giving subscribers to the game another 30 days of free trial.

However I haven’t seen this mentioned at any of the gaming blogs, and in particular Massively has been mum on the topic, which has me second-guessing my understanding of what’s going on. Or maybe I’m just reading the wrong blogs.

The post is dated today and specifies that it applies to “All users who registered a FINAL FANTASY XIV service account and purchased a character by November 19, 2010.” so unless I’m missing a loophole it means that everyone is getting another 30 days, gratis.

November 25th is the tentative release date of the next big batch of improvements (details here) and maybe S-E just wants everyone to see where the game is going…I dunno.

I’m happy though. Now I can keep dabbling for another 30 days without spending any additional cash. So yay!

To MMO or not to MMO; that is the question

Posted on by Nimgimli

First of all, I wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts on my “Age & Blogging” post. I’m going to keep that topic here but I’ve kind of paralyzed myself now… so many people chimed in that I feel like I have to come out with a strong post to start off the series! LOL But it’s slowly been forming in my head, so please bear with me.

But for today I’m back to gaming and wanted to share a dilemma. Square-Enix sent me an email this morning warning that my free trial period to FF XIV is about to end. First of all, a big kudos to them for drawing my attention to this fact. I can’t tell you have often I’ve forgotten to cancel MMOs I’ve stopped playing and then had them auto-renew: money out the window.

I like FF XIV and as I mentioned here before, I bought Crysta to pay for a month of subscribing (this was before S-E gave us an extra 30 free days). So I’m set to pay my way…

Except ever since we brought the puppy Lola home, I haven’t really touched any MMOs. Life was busy before she joined our household and she makes it busier (though generally in a good way). This past weekend I had some free time and I could’ve logged in, but instead she and I (and Angela, on Saturday) went for a couple of long walks in the nearby state park.

When I do have some time for gaming I’m never quite sure if it’s going to be for 10 minutes or an hour. So logging into an MMO feels too time-consuming. I want to play something I can jump into and have fun with in the first few minutes of firing up the game.

Now that Lola is getting into some patterns of behavior that ‘chaos’ in my day is easing somewhat and I could probably go back to MMOs, but now there are all these single player games that I’m interested in. (I mentioned on Google Buzz that I have a bad habit of buying too many games when I have no time to play…as if buying a new game could somehow scratch the itch of wanting to play.) So I have Fable 3 and the rest of Undead Nightmare in Red Dead Redemption and Rock Band 3 w/Keytar and The Shoot for PS3 Move and Amazon had a great deal on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West… all of that purchased in the last month or so. And of course Minecraft.

So it makes no sense to spend my Crysta on a month of FF XIV now; I have all these single player games that I splashed out for, after all. But on the other hand I don’t want the game to vanish while I’m waiting to find time to play it. That happens to me all too frequently. Gone are the days when one can assume an MMO will be there when you find time to get back to it. Today it’s play it now or accept the fact that you may never play it again.

Smart money is on canceling FF XIV and if I get an MMO itch, going to LOTRO or DDO or something… a game where I don’t need a monthly sub, so if I play for 20 minutes/week I won’t be wasting cash. But man, when I was playing FF XIV I was *loving* it. But it also occupied all my time…it’s a time-sink of a game, unlike more typical ‘bite-sized experience’ MMOs that we see today.

I’ve got a couple more days to ponder this decision… but I really think I’m in the mood to play a game that has an ending, just to get some stuff off my plate. Here’s hoping FF XIV will stick around long enough for me to find time to go back to it!

Chainmail appears (FF XIV)

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of the fun (for me anyway) things about getting in at the start of an MMO with a player-based economy is watching the economy advance.

For the first week or so of FF XIV everyone was wearing their starter gear (which can serve you well for quite some time). Then as the crafters got better at their, uh, crafts, that started to change. First you saw bandanas and various hats and masks. Then you saw an influx of cowls, giving FF XIV an Assassin’s Creed vibe for a while.

The other day I noticed fighting-types had begun to wear plate helms with their leather or cloth armor.

And last night I noticed chainmail for the first time. Now I missed a couple days of play due to being busy, so I probably missed the gradual adoption of it, but, particularly with those hulking Roegadyn, the sparkle and shimmer of a coat of chainmail was hard not to notice.

So far, at least, gear in FF XIV isn’t fantastical like it is in some MMOs. But the game looks so good that even something as ‘basic’ as a suit of chainmail just seems magical the first time you see it. There’s so much detail to the world…it’s just jaw dropping at times.

Of course, dumbass me forgot to take any screenshots!!! LOL

I bought Crysta (FF XIV)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well, yesterday I took the plunge and used PayPal to buy 2000 Crysta to pay for my FF XIV account with. For those playing along at home, that’s $20 worth. It still bugs me that if I cancel after that month I’ll have left-over credit, but it doesn’t bug me enough that I’m not going to play, and I’m more comfortable with buying Crysta via PayPal then I am with signing up my credit card to that ClickandBuy system. Plus this way if I get distracted and stop playing I won’t auto-renew since I won’t have enough Crysta.

The expected hate has arrived in spades and I’m trying my best to avoid it. A lot of it is coming for common garden variety trolls, but even thoughtful people seem unable to parse the idea that there are people who are genuinely enjoying FF XIV. People whose opinions I usually respect, like Justin Olivetti (you may know him as Sypster) are jumping on the anti-FFXIV bandwagon, saying I’m getting the feeling people are defending a really bad game in FF14 because it’s Final Fantasy — would they put up with this elsewhere? (via Twitter).

People said the same thing about LOTRO when it launched: that only reason people liked it was because they were Tolkien fans.

So these people (the trolls I mean) who don’t like the game take every opportunity they can to mock it or trash it, of course. It’s as if the existence of a game they don’t like offends them in some way.

Maybe FF XIV is a really bad game for Justin. That doesn’t mean it’s a really bad game for everyone. I’m having fun and it doesn’t have anything to do with it being Final Fantasy. I’ve finished exactly 1 FF game in my life (X) and I didn’t like FF XI much at all. What I do like about it is the freedom it gives you. You can be any class, and you can (slowly) respec at will; so far the only real limits have had to do with inventory capacity.

Does it have some horribly broken parts? Absolutely. Virtually every MMO launches with something broken. FF XIV maybe more than most games; if you’re looking for polish then give it some time before trying it. Actually I strongly urge almost everyone to wait until there’s a free trial to give it a shot anyway. Most modern MMO players aren’t going to like it because it is very different in a lot of ways.

But it also has something that’s pretty rare these days: a rich crafting system and player-driven economy. If you love your monsters to be loot pi�atas you’re going to be *miserable* in FF XIV. Virtually everything is player-crafted. Seriously. So if you want to made a grey leather item (a leathercrafter skill), you need grey leather, right? To make grey leather you combine a sheepskin (combat drop), some willow chips (carpentry, comes from a willow log obtained by a botanist) for tanning, and grey leather dye. To get grey leather dye (alchemy) you combine linseed oil with some slate-grey bugs (yech) that you may find while mining. You get the linseed oil by harvesting flax (botany).

If that process sounds appealing to you, then you might be a FF XIV candidate. This kind of stuff tickles the hell out of me. It’ll drive most casual MMO players batshit crazy. You can do all of those steps yourself if you want to level all the jobs, or you can trade/buy sub-components from other players. Some sub-components can be purchased from NPCs, but most of them can only be obtained via player-crafting. Sadly one of the horribly broken systems is buying and selling, so a lot of dealing is done the old fashioned way…by talking to other players *gasp!* There’s a first pass at a revamp of the bazaar system coming soon but I suspect they’re going to need more than one before they’re done.

If you aren’t interested in crafting, then again, this is probably not your game. There’s such a heavy emphasis on crafting that you’d be missing more than half the game if you didn’t partake.

Y’know what else is funny? Remember everyone screaming bloody hell about the fatigue system? No one who is playing is complaining about that now, because it’s almost impossible to hit the limits. Ditto insta-travel. The teleport system uses “anima” which regenerates over time, another fact people were freaked about before launch. Well it turns out you start with 100 anima and short ‘ports use 4, so you could do 25 short-distance teleports in a row before running out. I don’t know why you’d want to do that.

I don’t know if longer teleports cost more; I assume they do but I’m not sure how much. No one seems to be complaining that they’re running out of anima, though.

I’ve been playing with a controller lately, which is a godsend given that Minecraft borked my shoulder (I have an on-again, off-again problem with my left shoulder…maybe bursitis or something). It’s a very comfortable game to play.

Anyway, I played last night until about 2 am and was up at 8 am to play more; I can’t remember the last time an MMO hooked me like that. Today I finally did the big road trip to the other starting cities to tag the stones there so I can teleport around. There’s a ferry ride along the way that was just stunning (though I’m sure I’ll never take it again since it did take about 5 minutes). I don’t know if it’s always like this, but when I took it night had fallen and there was wild thunder and lightning storm; some of the best weather I’ve ever seen in a game. When Limsa Lominsa finally loomed out of the darkness looking like some ancient broken volcano, lightning forking down around it, it literally gave me chills.

So yeah, I love this game. I might hit a road block and lose interest next month, this afternoon or in two years. Who knows? But for now I’m enjoying myself and am contemplating a second account for two-boxing. I’m really looking forward to seeing what improvements and additions Square-Enix adds over the coming months and years.

Oh, one last thing…for all the hate, the game seems to be plenty populated. At least the Besaid server is. So I’m not the only one enjoying myself.

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