Category: MMO

To every MMO, churn, churn, churn…

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you don’t get the title, go here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4

Anyway, lately there’s been a bit of buzz in the gaming social network realm about people canceling their Wildstar accounts. I guess enough people did this and shared it to cause a spike in curiosity about why “everyone” is quitting (and I put that in quotes because of COURSE not everyone is quitting).

I don’t know why people are surprised by the exodus (is that too strong a word?) from Wildstar. What would be really surprising is if a new ‘hot’ game hit the market, “everyone” (that word again!) signed up and stuck with it. A surge of interest followed by a drifting away is normal for a new MMOs these days.

And why not? There are a TON of great games out there and more coming every day. And one of the basic truths about our species is that we’re curious. We’re always looking for something new to investigate. Why did “everyone” (now it’s just getting funny, right?) run out and see Guardians of the Galaxy as soon as it hit theaters? Because it’s better when it’s new! Why? There’s no reason why. It’d be the same movie next week but it wouldn’t be new! If you don’t like movies you can make the same analogy with a new restaurant, music…whatever you’re into. Many of us are excited when something new in an area of interest we enjoy comes along.

So we flocked to Wildstar. Hell I played it and I didn’t like the beta. But I played it because it was new! (Granted I only lasted two weeks.)

The point being, playing an MMO seriously requires dedication to that one game and means more or less ignoring the multitude of other awesome games available. Who wants to do that? So we play the new MMO hardcore for a few weeks, then get a little distracted and start to play it more casually. Then since we’re playing casually we either run out of things to do or stop making progress, at which point we think about that $15/month fee and decide it isn’t worth it. So we quit. And of course we announce that we’ve quit, though why we do that is the subject of another post (once I figure it out). We rarely announce that we’re quitting free-to-play games but I guess that act of hitting “Cancel” on our sub feels more concrete than just drifting quietly away from a free-to-play game.

But what about the people who stick around? Well I don’t know, really, since I’m never the one who sticks around. But I have a theory. The people that stick to that one game are the people who are more socialite than gamer. They play MMOs because they enjoy the company of other players and they have a group of friends that play. I know my one time of playing an MMO seriously was vanilla WoW when I was unemployed and living alone and a little bit lonely and I’d log in and start chatting and laughing with my friends and the game hardly even mattered. The game was just the glue that kind of held us together… it was busy work to give us an excuse to spend all night chatting.

I think that’s part of why so many people go back to WoW. [Sidenote: World of Warcraft saw a drop of nearly 1M players in three months, says Activision Blizzard] WoW is like the universal language of MMOs. “Everyone” (ha!) has played it so getting friends to go back isn’t difficult, and WoW has been rolling along for so long that it’s comfortable and easy to slide back into. Because after hot new things, what we like most are well worn, comfortable things. I’ll posit a theory that most of the people who go back to WoW are social gamers; as a dedicated solo player I never feel the slightest urge to go back.

What’s hastening the churn even more these days, I think, is that after bouncing from game to game for so long, and losing track of friends with each bounce, we’re seeing clumps of players gathering together on voice chat servers just to gab even while they’re playing different games. So we’re starting to lose that “Well I’m not really feeling this game but all my friends are here so I’ll stay” stickiness. (After all it’s not like we often actually play together even when we’re in the same game.) So maybe you’re playing WoW and Jane is playing Wildstar and John is playing FF XIV and I’m actually just watching TV, but we’re still all chatting. Basically we’re heading back towards AOL chatrooms only this time using voice.

So that’s my theory as to why “everyone” is leaving Wildstar. It’s just the natural order of things. There’re too many options for gamers to ignore, and socializers don’t really need to be in the same game any more, and the reason “everyone” starting playing in the first place is because “everyone” loves the smell of a shiny new game and all our friends were going to play. Plus there was HYPE!

The good news for Wildstar and every other MMO publisher is that we gamers travel in herds and 6 months from now Wildstar will be the Flavor of the Month because they’ll announce something new to catch our attention, and we’ll all head back in there for another 6 weeks. And of course there are still the folks that fall outside the quote marks of my everyones and who have found a second home in Wildstar (and probably an active guild of friends) and who will be long-term dedicated customers. Every MMO that’s still around has that group of people (else the game wouldn’t still be around) but they don’t all jump on Twitter once a week to announce they are still playing, so we don’t notice them.

Free To Play: Gateway drug to a full-blown gambling addiction

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you’ve never known anyone with a gambling addiction you probably don’t think it’s anything serious, but it is. People get so addicted to gambling that they destroy their own lives. It’s a serious issue for people with compulsive personalities.

So what does that have to do with video games? I’m concerned with the increasing use of gambling mechanics in these games. I’m going to use Firefall as an example but many games have similar mechanics which boil down to spending actual money on a chance to get a good prize.

In a blog post Firefall devs teased this cool glider.

CobaltPhoenix

How do you get it? It is an “Epic Reward” that comes from a Red Bean Reward Token. These are tokens you get when you purchase Red Beans in an amount above $20. Of course, just because you have a Red Bean Token doesn’t mean you’ll get that glider. You have a CHANCE to get it. How much of a chance? Since Firefall’s gambling system isn’t regulated they don’t have to tell us. Maybe it’s a 1 in 10 chance. Maybe its 1 in a million.

The bright side is that you DO get the Red Beans you purchase, so in this case the Token is like throwing your business card into a fishbowl at the local deli in order to get a chance at winning a free lunch.

Then there’re these wings:

Celestial
So how do you get these? From Gold Tokens. Gold Tokens are purchased with Red Beans, which in turn are purchased with hard real-life currency. How much do they cost? Well that’s hard to say since Firefall devs try to obfuscate the cost of Red Beans as much as possible. For one example, $20 gets you 168 beans (technically 160 plus 8 bonus beans) which means a bean is 11.9 cents (the more you buy at once, the cheaper they are by a slight amount. Spend $100 and the’re 10.4 cents). A Gold Token costs 30 beans which works out to $3.57.

So you pay your $3.57, pull the arm of the slot machine and get… something crappy. OK spend another $3.57 and try again. Nope, not that time either. What are your chances of getting these wings? Once again, no one but Red5 knows. They don’t have to tell you. I’m going to assume it’s 1 in 4,000,000,000.

Oh, and just to add to the pressure, both of these items are only available for a limited time, so if you really want one, maybe skip making your car payment this month and buy more beans. You can always catch up next month, right? As long as no cool new items are introduced.

samurai_hatOf course you do get something. Unlike ‘traditional’ gambling, everyone is a winner. Of virtual goods that don’t cost the company anything to give you. And much of what you win is the same stuff you could earn by playing the game for 10 minutes. I won this cool (?) samurai helm that I can’t really even see. In my case I bought $20 worth of beans that got me a token which gave me a chance to win the first item above. Instead what I won was 2 Gold Tokens, both of which gave me a chance to win the second item above. It wasn’t my lucky day, though. I got the helm and some other stuff that made such an impression that I’ve already forgotten what it was.

If you DO get what you want, that’s awesome! That’s teaching you a valuable lesson: that gambling is the road to success! This is an especially useful lesson for younger players.

Of course, defenders of gaming will point out that many states have a lottery that is no better. I agree and I don’t think state lotteries are a positive thing. But a)they are at least regulated so you know what your chances are and b)at least part of the money you piss away on them goes to improving conditions for others: school improvements, better highways, or whatever. I think usually that money goes towards public schools.

The odds in these free-to-play gambling systems (and again, Firefall is just one example) all favor the house, and in an MMO the house is the publisher. I’d really like to see these systems go away and have less suspect systems replace them. Just sell items at a fair price and make your money the honest way. Inserting gambling systems into your game just makes you look shifty.

Firefall: When is a launch not a launch?

Posted on by Nimgimli

At long last Firefall is launching. I’m not sure exactly how long this game has been in development, but I remember it was playable at the first PAX East which was 4 (?) years ago. The game launches for everyone on July 29th.

In this case, “launch” apparently means “we’ll remove the beta tag and make it available on Steam” and that’s about all.

After all this time in beta and all the huge changes the game has gone through (including one that just happened) I was pretty astonished to learn that they weren’t wiping the slate clean for launch. But they aren’t. That means if you log in on launch day for the first time you’re going to be WAY behind.

To add to that chasm, many (maybe all?) beta testers got in to ‘early access’ yesterday, on the 15th. That’s a two week head-start on any new players that come into the game when it is officially open to all comers.

Now just to be clear, old characters have been changed in some ways. I’d tell you exactly how but it’s been so long since I played the game that it seemed new to me when I logged in, except I was level 8 (or more precisely, my battleframe was level 8) and had an inventory full of stuff and a wallet full of credits.

Now folks who’ve been playing the beta are fine with this. I mean they’ve been playing the beta for YEARS so I can understand why they wouldn’t want their progress wiped. Some have also spent money and of course Red5 can’t just delete things players have spent real money on.

This isn’t the first game that has sold stuff in its cash shop ahead of launch though. Usually what happens is that at launch you get all your store currency credits refunded. After launch you can spend them again on the same stuff, or on different stuff.

So why does this all matter? In a lot of ways it doesn’t. I suppose it means new players should stay away from PvP until they’ve caught up, but there’s plenty of PvE stuff for them to do with their fellow, level-appropriate new players. My biggest concern is the auction houses. Firefall is supposed to have a “robust” player economy but when your brand new players are dumped into a game chock full of filthy-rich long-term beta testers they aren’t going to be able to buy anything on the auction house.

Imagine logging in for the first time on July 29th with the goal of becoming a crafter who supplies other players with gear. Fat chance of that since there’ll be hundreds of players who have already done the (in-game mechanic) research and who can farm materials much faster than you can.

Firefall isn’t the first game to roll open beta into launch with no wipe and in fact the practice is becoming more and more common. I’m singling it out mostly because it has been in beta for such an incredibly long time that the gap between the old-time beta player characters and the new “Hey I saw this new game on Steam” characters is going to be HUGE.

And compounding that, somewhat, is the fact that you only get 1 character slot. That means that if you’re a beta player and want a fresh start (maybe to re-learn how to play) you have to really commit to it by deleting your old character, thus placing yourself in the ghetto that Red5 has created for its new players that will start the game far, far behind on July 29th.

Dchaser~Jul-15-2014~New Eden~1~p1

MMO Dabbling: Guild Wars 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

borked_from_ birthLast week I mentioned how Divinity: Original Sin’s miserly dolling out of levels had me itching to jump into an MMO to level up! After flopping around a bit I’ve settled on Guild Wars 2 as my ‘dabble in’ MMO (for now).

I left Guild Wars 2 mostly because of their event system. For holiday events as well as their Living World stuff, I felt like the developers expected me to schedule my life around playing a game since the opportunities were of such a short duration and (for the Living World stuff) once you missed it, it was gone for good. That’s kinda my “I don’t believe in the game’s principles” reason why I left.

The other reason I left was a self-inflicted wound. (This wasn’t really obvious to me until this weekend when I went back.) I was trying to do crafting and my crafting alt needed these rare low-level drops. In order to maximize my chance for getting those, I was doing nothing but the low-level zones, trying to get 100% completion in each one before moving on to the other. So I was in my 30’s but doing level 1-15 zones (downscaled) and ignoring the “My Story” narrative stuff. I remember being adamant that I wouldn’t buy the materials I needed from the Auction House because that was ‘cheating.’ What evs, me-from-the-past!

Anyway back to the present. With Living World Season 2 the Guild Wars team is doing things differently. While it’s still probably most rewarding to do the season 2 content as it arrives, you will be able to replay it after the fact. That was enough to snag my interest. If I fault a game developer for doing things one way, and then they change things, I feel like it’s only fair that you give them another chance.

The first thing I did was log into my Guardian, who was sitting at level 40. Holy smokes, lots of things have changed (and/or been forgotten by me) since I last played. Currencies are all now account-wide (I think that’s new?) as are dye unlocks. There’s a new wardrobe system and transmute ‘charges’ are also account-wide, and there’s a magic find stat that, again, is now account wide. I had a bunch of inventory stuff that had been converted and in general my bags, both character and bank, were STUFFED full of stuff I didn’t know what to do with.

So I logged right back out and created a new character, a Necromancer. LOL With empty bags and a light heart, I started to play as a noob and immediately started having fun. Rather than chase map completion I was leveling just enough to take on the next chapter of my story at an even level. When I had questions I turned to twitter and got a ton of good advice from friends.

After 7 or 8 levels I was ready to face the Guardian again. I spent a good chunk of time over the weekend clearing out inventory, salvaging a ton of stuff, crafting up extra bags for my alts (I have, um, 7 characters, only 1 above level 15) and even deleting stuff (I had character-bound stuff for characters I’d deleted clogging up my bank.)

Finally I had things under control and headed out to see the world. And my goodness how things have changed! Lion’s Arch has been destroyed. Divinity’s Reach is in good shape with some beautiful new buildings. What caused all this? I had no idea, I wasn’t paying attention while all this was going on and now I regret it. Happily for me, a friend wrote up a recap. Unhappily for you, it’s not in a public post so I can’t share it. 🙁 But you can read the Wiki for a less entertaining version of the story.

I looked up my guardian’s “My Story” and read through the recap to remind myself what was going on, then set about moving it forward. I’m doing level 30 “My Story” content on my level 40 character; that’s how long things have been neglected. Over the course of the weekend I leveled from 40 to 43. I unlocked (just by logging in) the first part of Season 2 but I need to get to 80 before I can take part, but at least I’ll be able to play through a ‘recap’ when I get there.

The only fly in the ointment is my class. Compared to playing the Necromancer, the Guardian feels a little dull. He has high survivability (for now at least) and he’s probably a lot of fun in groups since so many of his skills benefit group members. But playing solo he feels kind of routine and scaled down like he is I can win most 1-on-1 battles by putting his first skill on auto-attack. I’m hoping he’ll get more interesting as I get close to content that is of my true level, and maybe start encountering other players.

He IS fun to play when trying to solo events and other situations were many enemies are incoming at once. I’m guessing I’ll see more such situations as I advance.

I feel like I’m over that “oh crap, how does this all work” hump that you so often encounter when going back to a game after a long time away. I’m having fun, at least for now. We’ll see how long it lasts this time, but hey it’s not costing me anything to play. In fact I kind of feel like I should buy some gems just to support the game since the last time I spent a dime on it was at launch. Opening another bank bag slot wouldn’t be a terrible idea…

Also, I’d forgotten Eir and her totally functional armor. Oh Eir, you’re so dreamy!!!

gw005

The Elder Scrolls Online — you can’t go home again

Posted on by Nimgimli

I think it was Divinity: Original Sin that rekindled my desire to play MMOs. I don’t know what it is about “leveling” that I find so appealing but damn, I love to do it! D:OS has leveling but they’re so miserly in dishing out new levels that it was creating an itch that needed scratching. So where can a person scratch the leveling itch? Pretty much any MMO.

But which one? I’ve been dabbling all week. Re-installed both The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 and dipped my toes in. Last night I went back to The Elder Scrolls Online. I loved this game just a short time ago, but then I had something bad happen to me and had to wrestle with customer support over it. I got my issue resolved but it took a few weeks. Between that and the failed experiment of playing Wildstar my TESO cadence had been shattered.

Part of the resolution of my problem was that Zenimax gifted me an additional month of access, so I’m paid up for something like 60 days of TESO at this point (I’d signed up for the 3 month plan). I figured if I was paying for it I should play it, right?

I logged in and my immediate reaction was joy. I love how realistic TESO is. I love that everyone isn’t wearing technicolor armor fighting bright pink killer teddy bears or whatever. I love the lack of sophomoric humor. I popped open my quest journal and spent some time remembering what I’d been doing. The nice thing about TESO’s limited number of active skills was that I hadn’t forgotten how to play yet (when I go back to EQ2 I spend about 2 hours just remembering what all my 30 or so skills do).

Within just a few minutes I was back out there fighting bad guys. Rolling out of danger, hitting them with a life siphon, then charging back in to send them flying. Combat in TESO just feels SO good. When you stagger an opponent and then wind up for a powerful hit that just knocks them flat it feels SO…DAMNED…GOOD!

But that joy didn’t last. After about an hour I felt like I’d had enough. Somehow the game just wasn’t the same for me, and I’m not sure why. The little annoyances (like managing inventory) were bothering me more than they used to. Combat started to feel rote, quests were feeling stale, and then I started thinking about spamming zone chat with LFG shouts to do the next dungeon and… I just logged out.

When I was in my 20’s and still living in my home town I spent a lot of time in bars. I had my favorites where I knew the bartenders and ‘the gang’ and walking in after a bad day was just uplifting.

A few years after I’d moved out of the area I went back to my home town and visited some of those same bars, and at first it was awesome. Lots of the same bartenders, lots of the same gang, warm welcomes from all. But I never stayed long. Nothing had changed really, except me. I wasn’t ‘connected’ to that world any more, I guess.

I feel the same way about The Elder Scrolls Online I guess. I no longer feel connected to what’s going on. I’ve been away too long. I do think I could re-connect if I just focused on playing for a few days but I’m not really ready to seriously commit to an MMO right now. I just want to dabble. I’m still playing Dragon Age: Origins on the PS3, and once the weekend comes I’ll be back into Divinity (that’s not a weeknight game…it plays too slowly to try to enjoy it in hour-long sessions), and next week the Destiny beta starts up and I’ll be playing that.

It’s a shame to let 60 days of game time run down without playing but that might be what I do, and it’s another good reason not to subscribe to an MMO unless you’re wholly committed to it. (To be fair, I’d convinced myself I WAS wholly committed to TESO when I subscribed.) I think I’ll go back to ‘dabbling’ in Guild Wars 2. Why is that better? I think because I’ve been away so long that it feels ‘new’ and I’m having to re-learn its systems. Sometimes I think I get more enjoyment out of learning about a game than I do from actually playing the game. Maybe that’s way I start so many and finish so few.

Free-to-play and the loss of player leverage

Posted on by Nimgimli

The other day the devs of a free-to-play game I enjoy made a decision that I was pretty uncomfortable with. I’m not going to go into specifics because this isn’t a post about that specific situation.

But as I sat there fuming about this asinine (in my mind anyway) decision, I started to think about what I could do to convey my displeasure. And do you know what I came up with? Not a thing that would make any difference.

I mean sure I could rant here or rant on Twitter and it might make me feel a little better, but since I’m not an Internet Super-Ego it wouldn’t really have any impact on what the company was doing.

The only real leverage we gamers have is to vote with our dollars, and even then it’s pretty trivial. We can stop subscribing to a game and/or vow not to buy the next game from that publisher.

But this was a free-to-play game. I didn’t even have that tiny leverage. The only thing I could really do is stop playing and deprive them of one player, and I’m pretty comfortable saying they’d never notice that difference amidst the background noise of the constant churn that Free-to-play games ‘enjoy.’ I guess I could vow to never buy anything from their cash shop but that would just mean I was like most of the other players (in any Free-to-play game the majority of players never spend money).

In short, I felt (still feel, really) helpless and frustrated.

Co-incidentally, not too long ago I also had an issue with a subscription-based game. In THAT situation, I had leverage, used it, and got my situation resolved. The company wanted my business. I mattered to them. That alone was enough to make me feel more forgiving towards them, to be honest. Being heard, being made to feel like you matter…that’s important, at least to me.

When was the last time a Free-to-Play game really made you feel like you matter? Probably the last time they were having a cash-shop promotion.

There’s an upside to paying our way. Sure it’s nice to get things for free, but free also means giving up what little leverage we as gamers have.

Wildstar level 15

Posted on by Nimgimli

Bart.140608.110447
So I made a promise to myself to play Wildstar exclusively until I hit level 15 just to give it a chance, and this morning I made it. So now what? Will I keep playing or am I done?

I’d hoped to be able to decide but honestly I’m still on the fence. I guess the truth is I’m leaning more and more towards sticking around but I haven’t fallen off onto the “Wildstar is awesome” side just yet. If I had nothing else going on then I’d definitely be subscribing but I have to decide if I like it more than Landmark, ESO and ArcheAge, basically. Clearly trying to play 4 MMOs is ridiculous.

This weekend I’ve spent messing around with my house a little. Housing doesn’t grab me as much as I hoped, but I have a relic mine and a farm on my housing plot and they’re both handy. I also added a crafting station so I have all the ingredients I need to make medi-packs and stuff without leaving home. I think I’ll buy a house, though. The freebie pre-order house is, IMO, stupid looking. (It’s a fat round spaceship that looks like it came from a kid’s cartoon.)

Meanwhile out in the world I helped take down what I guess was a zone boss. All I know is someone said in zone chat “Everyone come to StemDragon!” and then a chorus of “WTH is StemDragon?” Turns out it’s a big dragon-beast with somewhere over a million HP. I ran there to help and it was pretty fun, though really just a matter of spamming attacks along with 15-20 other players. For my trouble I got an Achievement which is nice I guess.

A lot of the content I’m moving through now is pretty group-desired. You can solo your way through but you have to have a care not to aggro too many mobs, or even a single mob that is heroic. The good news is you can just organically join other players when doing this content. It makes things both easier/faster and more fun and so far the community seems prone to helping each other which is kind of awesome. So over and over I find myself traveling with another player or two and while we don’t talk or Group we help each other along.

One of the types of Settler missions is gathering materials for an NPC builder to build some structure. I’ve been doing these and moving on, pretty much ignoring the ‘construction site’ since to finish the quest you only have to contribute a fraction of the materials needed for the site to be completed. This morning I decided to stick around and after I finished the quest I kept gathering materials until the project was done. Along the way I was also harvesting relics and crops plus killing lots of mobs so I got the benefit of that too.

In this case the completed project was a de-probing center (shown in the image at the top of this post). In this area of the world an alien race has been abducting people and using probes on them. Then they’re returned with the probes still inserted. (This gives you a good feel for the style of humor in Wildstar.) Once the de-probing center is built you can take a quest to remove the probes from some patients. It was a really quick quest…took under a minute. The de-probing center also has a vendor. I’m not sure if another class could enhance it or not. I’ve done some things as a settler that are “Step 1” of a project and require a Scientist or a Soldier to do Step 2, but I’ve never had anyone on-hand to do step 2 so I’m not really sure how all that works.

I’ve been pretty grumpy about the Lore in Wildstar but I have to say that now some of the story questlines are getting more interesting. I still don’t bother reading the books and files you find but if instead of working ‘horizontally’ and doing every level 10 task and quest before moving on to level 11 tasks and quests, you grab a story quest and just follow the series and ignore distractions, they can be a lot more interesting. One I enjoyed started with having to sober up some dude in a bar and took me all over the place and finally into a kind of secret base. Fun stuff!

So that’s all the good stuff. I don’t have a lot of bad stuff honestly. There’re still bugged quests and the game UI goes wonky often, though generally a quick /reloadui fixes things. I get terrible lag spikes now and then and random disconnects but frankly these are the kinds of things I expect from a newly launched game.

I think at this point the one thing missing is a large group of people to play with. I’m in a guild but seem to keep different hours from most of the members. Last night when I was playing there were only 5 people online; this morning I was the only only one! This is during the free month and I’m really concerned about what will happen when subs kick in. It’s hard not to compare this to ESO when during the first few weeks there’d usually be 20+ people from the guild online. As far as I could tell, each of the 5 was doing his or her own thing and no one was talking in chat except for me and Chris. So if I’m going to keep playing I’ll probably quit this guild and go in search of something bigger.

I don’t think Wildstar is a good solo game; it’s just not how it was designed. I mean you CAN solo but everything is more fun with more people in this one. I’m really happy playing ESO solo; I’m really invested in the story and the lives of the NPCs and all of that. Wildstar though is all about ACTION and jumping around like crazy during combat and generally the more the merrier. If I’m alone in an area for too long just fighting by myself I tend to get bored and log out. Happily just the addition of random players helps to stave that off.

Bart.140607.233312

Wildstar update – level 14

Posted on by Nimgimli

some_hatLast Sunday I was at level 10 in Wildstar and determined to play it exclusively until I got to level 15, at which point I’d make a decision about whether or not I was going to add it to my roster of games. Level 15!? Bah! I’m a lightweight! Both Scopique & Scarybooster are committing to a year of only playing Wildstar. Apparently the game is scratching a major itch for both of these gentleman.

I’m still aiming at 15. Last night just before signing off I hit 14 (I don’t get a lot of time for gaming during the week). I have to say I’m enjoying it more than I was but I’m still on the fence. I have managed to ‘let go’ when it comes to the lore and I’ve stopped reading all the books and files because frankly most of them aren’t worth the time it takes. For every file that gives you info about the world there are 4 that are just intended to be funny or something.

A lot of the quests still feel pretty mundane but I have now gotten the chance to do some that have a bit of a twist. It’s a sad reflection on the state of MMO gaming when adding timed button presses or a mini game of “Simon” to a quest solution feels like a refreshing twist, but well…that’s the genre. MMO players, myself included, are so desperate for variety that adding a super-simple mini-game gets us excited.

Over the course of the week I’ve started to better understand character building and as I’d suspected, the more I understand it, the more interesting it becomes. I’ve started to veer my Engineer from the “Assault” (DPS) path to the Tank path.

Combat has become more challenging, at least at times, which has added to my interest in the game as well. Up to level 10 you can pretty much sleep walk through combat without any fear of death, at least if you’re an engineer. I can’t speak to other classes; remember the Engie has 2 robot pets to help him out.

Following the Settler path continues to be good fun and I still feel good when I can spawn a Taxi Stand (or some other boon) for other players.

Speaking of other players, I had one bad experience with the community on Dominion-Evindra so far, but plenty of good ones. I turned off the Advice channel but have left on Zone. There’re too many bugged quests in the zone I’m in and it’s nice to see players helping players when it comes to identifying gameplay problems. I’ve joined a few PUGs and they’ve been civil as well. In fact my PUG experience has been good enough that I’ve been offering to help people complete quests that I’ve already completed, just to try to be an asset to the community and make some new friends.

I joined the Alliance of Awesome guild but so far it’s been pretty quiet. I have the feeling I might play later than everyone else, or maybe it’s just that everyone is on voice chat. I’m not sure it’s going to be the right fit for me but I’m giving it time.

At level 12 or so I unlocked crafting but I haven’t done too much with it, though I have been gathering things. For both Farming and Relic Hunting you ‘gather’ by shooting something in the world. Since my guns have a fire zone that is wide and long, invariably I aggro mobs while I’m trying to gather, which leads to some chaotically fun moments of trying to dodge some beastie while I shoot the crystals off a relic. And sometimes the relic gets up and starts running around for a few moments before vanishing. I suspect I’ll get some goody if I can ever kill it before it poofs but so far no luck.

So as I say, still on the fence but enjoying the game more than I was at 10. I do feel like I suffer from “quest fatigue” pretty often. Any given area just seems to have endless quests that keep you in one spot killing variants of the same mobs for far too long. But I’m also out-leveling quests so maybe I’m not supposed to take them all.

Tonight I’ll see about doing the quest that gives you a house. Everyone seems to LOVE the housing in Wildstar and it might be the hook that keeps me around. I enjoy the housing in EQ2 but honestly aside from crafting there’s not a lot to DO in an EQ2 house, but in Wildstar it sounds like houses can be outfitted with a variety of activities. I also have a secret hope that Angela sees the housing and wants to play; having her interested in the game would go a long way towards keeping me interested as well.

I guess I’ll probably hit 15 this weekend some time and then I’ll have to decide if I want to press on or if I’d rather focus more on ESO, ArcheAge, Landmark, or single player games. My plate is pretty full and if a game isn’t really doing it for me there’s no sense in trying to force it. I know at the least I’ll celebrate 15 by taking a break and getting back into Watch Dogs! But last night I was playing Wildstar and glanced at the clock and it was after midnight and I realized I’d completely lost track of time. That’s generally a good sign for me. So maybe Wildstar is working its way into my heart.

Here I am again, Wildstar Level 10

Posted on by Nimgimli

bartWildstar’s Early Access kicked off this weekend and a lot of my friends are apparently having the time of their lives. Me, I’m stuck in the level 10 blues.

I was in the beta of Wildstar for a few months and honestly the game never hooked me. The only reason I’m playing is because I got a good deal from Green Man Gaming and so many of my friends were excited I figured what the heck. In Beta I never got very far on any single character; I think I topped out at level 12. With character after character I’d get bored and drift away.

But when I played The Elder Scrolls Online in beta it never hooked me either, and I love that game now that I’m playing ‘for real’ and was hoping the same would be true for Wildstar. So far that isn’t the case.

The thing that changed ESO for me was the lore. During beta I ignored it and at launch I embraced it. With every random scroll and book I read a little bit more about the world and history of Tamriel was uncovered. I loved it! LOVED IT. I tried the same thing with Wildstar which also has lots of book and files to read but… most of them are just kind of random and an attempt to get a chuckle out of you. I’m not finding the lore here to be very interesting at all.

That actually extends to the quests which seem really shallow most of the time. I know at least one person who loves Wildstar and who uses an add-on that automatically skips quest text and just accepts the quest. That’s one person but I think it illustrates something. Wildstar is 100% game, 0% virtual world. Which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for.

It’s also intended to be pretty funny. Most of the jokes fall flat with me, but that’s a personal thing. I know people that find it hilarious. I admittedly have a very narrow sense of humor though, and I am not generally drawn to humor.

So that leaves basic gameplay, and y’know combat is pretty fun and it’s the one thing keeping me playing. It’s very kinetic and (assuming you’re not just mopping up trash) requires you to keep moving. You also tend to take on groups of mobs which I always enjoy. I am getting really sick of hearing “DOUBLE KILL!” “TRIPLE KILL!” “SUPER KILL!!!!” constantly though. That got old back when Unreal Tournament did it in the last century. Actually I should check the settings to see if I can turn that off.

Character building is pretty deep and I think there my problem is a lack of understanding. My level 10 character has 6 slots on his hot bar. He potentially has I think 8 or 9 skills, but I haven’t purchased them all. I figured why spend money if I can’t slot it anyway. Then he earns Amp points which go into a skill wheel and do things like +1% critical chance or +2 assault power. Amp points feel super tweaky to me and I find it hard to care about them at this point. Finally there are ability points that let you power up your skills. Skills come in 3 trees (for my class, engineer) and I’m not entirely sure why. But I know there’s a Support tree and some things power up Support skills, but not Assault skills, so that’s part of the reason. But under Support I have robots and I’m not sure if their actions are considered support or not.

Bottom line, if I want to play this game at all seriously I need to research character development.

And then there is questing. Wildstar is old school when it comes to questing. You find a hub, take about 78 quests (slight exaggeration) that are all a derivative of ‘activate a glowy object’ or ‘kill a thing,’ then you head out into the world. None of the quests make enough of an impression for me to remember them so I just randomly run around and activate anything I see that is activate-able, and kill anything with an icon over it’s head. After a while of doing this maybe a quest gets completed and I turn it in.

Eventually the number of quests remaining gets manageable and you can start to focus what you’re doing. And finally you’ll complete a quest that sends you to the next hub where you repeat the process. Personally I get really bored of each area well before I’m sent along to the next.

More interesting are Paths, or at least my Path which is Settler. As a Settler you pick up random materials in the world and can then build vending machines that offer free buffs to anyone. Doing this both increases your Settler experience and helps other players and it’s so far the most fun aspect of Wildstar for me, though there are aspects of it that I’m finding confusing and that I’m still working out.

There are also Challenges that pop up when you’re out in the world. I hated these in beta since they were super-disruptive to me, but now I’ve learned I can restart them from my quest log. So when I first get a challenge I ignore it until I’m ready to do it, then I start again. What’s nice about Challenges is that they can be pretty Challenging. I’ve had to try some of them 3 or 4 times before beating them. (Questing so far has not been challenging aside from the issue of competing for resources with other players…I’ve died once when I tried to solo Wildstar’s version of a heroic mob.)

So there you have it. Back to level 10, pretty damned bored, and thinking I should go play Elder Scrolls Online or Watch Dogs or just read a book. I THINK there’s a lot more to Wildstar once I get past these low levels. I know both mounts and housing open up not too far past where I am. I did just unlock crafting but I’m not sure I care about that, this time out.

To be clear, a LOT of my friends are ga-ga over-the-moon-in-love with Wildstar, so my issues with it are clearly just that: MY issues with it. I’m going to try to drive through this dead zone that I’m in and get to where the good stuff happens. If I find MMO gold, I’ll send word.

A month of Elder Scrolls Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

statueActually I guess it’s been 5 weeks of playing now, but ‘month’ makes for a better headline. In any event I’ve been playing #TESO for a while now and still really digging it. There’ve been maybe 2 days in those 5 weeks when I didn’t log in, and those weren’t by choice but by necessity.

I’ve seen a lot of hate directed at the game but I don’t understand it; I guess we all want different things from our MMOs. I want a world that feels real, looks real, and has combat that feels great and #TESO gives me all that. Some of the criticism I’ve seen is just based on the imaginations of the haters. For instance I’ve heard complaints about the ‘wall of text’ in quests. Quests are always delivered via a few lines of dialog (see image below). There ARE books you find that are very text-dense but if you don’t want to read them you don’t have to. Just opening them will give you any perk they may offer. But hey, haters gonna hate, right?

I think most of the critics, when it comes right down to it, may be put off by the pace of the game, which can be pretty sedate at times. Particularly folks who are beta-testing the frenetic Wildstar (the pace of which, frankly, exhausts me but I’ll still try it). If Wildstar is the Animaniacs of MMOs, #TESO is the Masterpiece Theater. The rest are people who just don’t like that an online game set in Tamriel exists; they’re the uninformed gamers who think #TESO somehow replaced the next iteration of the single player Elder Scrolls saga (It did not; a new team was put together to create #TESO and the single player Elder Scrolls team is hard at work on the sequel to Skyrim.)

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Anyway, ain’t no one got time for dealing with the haters; let’s move on.

My ‘main’ in #TESO is only level 19 (Raptr says I’ve spent 84 hours playing). He has finally ‘finished’ the first major zone (Glenumbra, in his case). I thought I’d finished it last week when his natural progression led him to the next zone, but I checked my Achievements and saw that he’d missed a ton of Skyshards so I retraced my steps to Glenumbra and in the course of tracking those down, found entire villages I’d missed, as well as many mini-dungeons and heroic creature camps. Not to mention that there’s a public dungeon in Daggerfall! Who knew?

Back-tracking actually wound up being a lot of fun; since I was over-leveled I lent a lot of aid to folks trying to take down difficult content. Some of these camps can be tough and can require 3 or more characters of appropriate level to conquer (and even over-level I couldn’t solo some of them) but me and a level-appropriate character did OK. The Public Dungeon was a lot of fun as well; I can’t wait to find more of those. I did Spindleclutch once (the zone’s instanced dungeon) with a PUG that turned out to be a good group of players. In fact in all my time playing the only negative experience I’ve has is from gold spammers and once, someone ran past me to snag a runestone I was going after (but had to kill a mob to get to). Overall it’s been a very positive experience.

All in all I’m having a blast. But there is one issue that has started to impact my enjoyment and it is mostly self-inflicted: alts and crafting. I’d read somewhere that 1 character couldn’t do all the crafting skills (I’m no longer convinced this is true) and of course I had to try them all because I have a crafting compulsion. So I created 2 alts; one to do blacksmithing and alchemy, one to do woodworking and enchanting. My ‘main’ does clothing and provisioning.

#TESO is a little unusual in that your bank is 100% shared between all your characters. On paper at least, this makes it easy to have crafting alts. My main gathers iron, wood, runestones and reagants as he adventures and then tosses them in the bank for the alts to use. He also tosses in gear for the other characters to deconstruct in order to advance. The problem is that your bank inventory space is fixed; when you roll up an alt it doesn’t get any bigger (you can spend in-game coin to expand it but that gets expensive fast). In practice, if you’re a crafting hoarder your bank will fill up really quickly and in my case, I spend a LOT of time logging in and out, shuffling inventory from one character to the bank and then to another characters.

What I need to do is summon the intestinal fortitude to just jettison all this junk (provisioning supplies in particular, and anything I can simply purchase) and maybe abandon all but 1 tradeskill. Then I can spend more time playing and less time shuffling inventory. I’d actually like to play my Woodworker/Enchanter since she’s in a different faction and is an interesting class (Templar) but her personal inventory is stuffed full of Runestones.

Anyway like I said, self-inflicted but if Zenimax decided to give us some kind of ‘reagant bag’ or ‘provisioning bag’ that gave us some extra space to hold these materials, I wouldn’t complain.

Back to the good stuff. Before I back-tracked to Glenumba I started to encounter ‘open world groups’ of PvE foes. I’d heard we’d eventually start encountering groups of enemies but didn’t realize what that meant. I mean encountering more than one mob isn’t all that unusual, right? But what it means is groups of enemies that actually work together. The first time I encountered one of these groups I got my arse handed to me. I went back and tried again and the same thing happened, so I decided maybe I needed to level more.

But as I walked past this pesky group one more time I realized the problem was me, not my character. And I stopped to actually think about the encounter. And so I tried it again. In this case it was a healer, a mage-type and a melee dude (roughly). So rather than just charging in, I hit the mage with my Agony Stun, then charged the healer. Knocked him on his ass and followed up with a life siphon to keep him hurting and me healthy. The melee guy I just kept blocking for now, raining blows on the healer until he succumbed. By then the stun had worn off the mage and he was working up to some kind of nasty spell, but the direct application of my shield to his face put an end to that, and a couple of assassin blades in his liver ended him, leaving just me and the melee dude. 1 on 1 he was no match for me and a few moments later I was walking away with a fistful of gold.

After that I started looking at what I was facing before I charged in, and every fight became a satisfying win or a defeat I learned something from. It’s going to be so hard to go back to an MMO where you just run through the same ‘rotation’ over and over in every open world fight and only in dungeons do you get interesting encounters.

I’m looking forward to doing more exploring of Tamriel. I still haven’t set foot in the PvP zone, and I’ve heard great things about that. I have no idea how many more PvE zones are ahead of me in my journey to level 50, but bring ’em on!

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