Yeah, it’s been a couple of weeks

I haven’t actually been doing any online gaming in the interval — travel, illness, more travel, holidays, just not been in a gaming sort of mood.

Margie has been plugging away solo in both systems in the interval, though. Her Hobbit thief is up to 26.

My play drought might be shifting, though. Margie and I did some LotRO last night (let me say, I think Weathertop is faboo, visually), and I’m feeling a yen for some CoX building up in me (esp. to do some of the new I12 power combos and see what they’ve done in the Hollows — except that I12 isn’t in beta yet).

Chatting with Margie yesterday, she opined that one of the frustrations she finds is that you really need to stop active adventuring about an hour before you need to get away from the keyboard — since it take that long to (a) get someplace safe, (b) check mail, (c) hit up contacts you need to hit up, (d) sell stuff that you want to sell (to get things out of your pack, and to earn enough to spend on needful activities), (e) craft stuff you need to craft (to get things out of your pack), (f) put things up for auction that you’ve acquired or crafted (again, to get things out of your pack and to earn vital money).

While the same is true to a lesser degree in CoX (Wentworths can easily be a half hour visit every session), it’s less so because (a) you don’t really have to craft in CoX if you don’t want to, and (b) encumbrance / pack overflow is far less of an issue in CoX than in LotRO.

And, yeah, that is a bit annoying.

More as I ponder it.

 

LotRO – In Dwimmerdelf …

Volume II of LotRO is coming this Fall — Mines of Moria.

Speak Friend, and Enter – Moria, called Khazad-dûm by the dwarves, was their capital and the grandest of cities. This enormous underground cavern in north-western Middle-earth, comprises an immense network of tunnels, chambers, mines and huge halls that run beneath and ultimately through the Misty Mountains. For the first time, players of The Lord of the Rings Online will enter this ancient city which has served as the foundation for the modern-day dungeon-crawling adventures to battle the hordes of goblins and the Nameless of the Deep and journey through hundreds of new quests within six new kinds of stunning environments.

 

Cooooool … new quests, new environments, new niftiness.

The Epic Continues! — The Mines of Moria represents the beginning of Volume II of The Lord of the Rings Online. Players can experience six new books as part of this update and participate in the release of Durin’s Bane, battle the Watcher, aid Galadriel and more!

 

Sounds keen!

Increased Level Cap — Players will be able advance their characters up to level 60, gaining access to new traits, virtues, skills and class quests. The crafting system will also expand, giving players the ability to craft even more powerful items.

 

 

Increased level cap good!

Discover Two New Classes — The Rune-keeper and the Warden, the first new classes to be introduced since the launch of the game, allow players to build exciting and powerful new characters in The Lord of the Rings Online in diverse new ways.

 

Interesting. Not clear (by name) what they new classes do, actually. But new classes are a good way to enable replayability, even of the older content.

Forge Legendary Items – The Mines of Moria will introduce Turbine’s new item advancement system to The Lord of the Rings Online. Players will be able to forge weapons and class-related equipment and evolve them to build a legacy the likes of Bilbo’s Sting and Gandalf’s Glamdring. These legendary weapons will level-up along with the player, allowing customization by advancing the item’s virtues, adding runic legacies, modifying its titles and forming fables.

 

Oh, spiffy. I love the idea of items that level up with you.

I’m new enough to the game to not quite understand why this is a new “volume” / “expansion” vs. being another “Book.”

There’s also some contest site to learn more and unlock this and that.   I will have to look at it.

CoX – More Issue 12 stuff

After the previous post … looking at the Official I12 Post:

JOIN THE MIDNIGHT SQUAD (LEVELS 10 – 20)
The clandestine organization of mystics, scholars and mages, known only as the Midnight Squad, seeks to rebuild its numbers since the devastating assault of the Rikti Invasion. The Midnighters hold a secret that could bring the alien assault to an end, but without the help of the Heroes of Paragon City™ it will remain Lost forever.

 

Sounds like some origin-based lovey-love, as well as new content. Cool. I wonder if similar origin-based bits will creep into future issues.

NEW ROMAN-STYLE ZONE MAPS (LEVELS 35 – 50)
The Midnighters hold many secrets within their walls, including a highly coveted Ouroboros crystal, enabling them to travel to the far reaches of time. There is a familiar threat in an ancient land and the Midnighters need the help of both Heroes and Villains to stop it. Players step foot upon the ancient land of the Roman Cimeroran Peninsula, where they battle deadly creatures, defend an ancient city and ultimately come face to face with the enemy of time itself. Throughout this journey players uncover the mysteries of power and the origins that guide them today.

 

Hmmm. Would have rather had something that was contemporaneous (where’s my moonbase?!), but new content is basically cool.

UNLOCK ROMAN-STYLE ARMOR COSTUMES
Through their accomplishments, players unlock the new Roman themed armor costume set.

 

Honestly, I’ve never been fond of “exclusive” costume bits. I simply cannot justify it, story-wise (the cape bits, at least, they made an effort at, but why can’t any Level 1 schmuck have a Roman helmet?). There may be a story element here, and it’s better than some other ways they’ve played with the mechanic, but I’m still no approving.

Villain Epic Archetypes

Infiltrate the Arachnos organization from within! Upon reaching level 50, Villains unlock two new Epic Archetypes; Wolf Spiders and Blood Widows. They have their own unique storyline and missions, power combinations and costume sets. Branching powersets allow the Wolf Spider to specialize as either a Bane Spider or Crab Spider and the Blood Widow chooses from the Fortunata and Night Widow branches. Each brings with it unique costumes for your Arachnos duties, as well as your newfound role as a Destined One.

 

Coolness. Not that I’ve ever brought a villain to 50 (or ever am likely to), but a nice way to handle it.

Powerset Proliferation

Using his newly built Resonance Manipulator, the Villain scientist known as Dr. Brainstorm™ has discovered a way to alter the energy strands which connect every Hero and Villain to their powers. This discovery has not only opened the door to new powers for his fellow Villains in the Rogue Isles™, but has also done the same for the Heroes of Paragon City ™! Specifically, new characters of almost every Hero and Villain archetype gain access to an additional primary and secondary powerset that they didn’t have access to previously. Details to come!

 

Huzzah! Mix-n-match powers! Or, at least, no arbitrary “we want villains to feel special” / “we haven’t playtested it yet” excuses for not sharing the power love. 
Hollows Zone “Gameplay Makeover”

Significant changes have been made to the Hollows zone to make it more fun! NPC encounters have been rebalanced, including new spawns, new villain groups, mission door improvements, and a mobile hospital has been added to the entrance of the zone. Additionally, Meg Mason, a new contact, has been added to give out repeatable missions.

 

As the zone nearly everyone spends time in — and everyone finds something to be annoyed with — I applaud the improvements to the Hollows. Especially the “mobile hospital,” thus saving wear and tear on the pavement (though dying was often a convenient way to get back to level).

Major Gameplay Improvements

   * Eight configurable new power trays let players customize their User Interface by placing them anywhere on the screen.
 

 

Cool. I’ve gotten crowded with only 3 visible — and having even more means being able to put (for example) all your standard toggle powers in one spot, your travel powers elsewhere, your combat powers somewhere else. Goodness.

   * Contact display redesign: Contacts are now listed separately as Active and Inactive, and players can sort contacts by a range of criteria including Name, Zone, and Level Range.

 

Excellent. The contact list was always kind of a mish-mosh.

   * Inspiration Conversion: Right click an inspiration to convert three of that kind into any one inspiration of another kind.

 

Especially if it’s available at any time, this could be a god-send sometimes.

   * Level Up Boost: Upon reaching enough XP to level up (at all levels), one of each type of large inspiration is immediately cast upon your character, and health and endurance bars are immediately filled.

 

Which makes leveling mid-combat all the more keen!

   * Chat improvements: Right click on character names in chat window to ignore, add to friends list, invite to team, etc. Drag any item (enhancement, inspiration, salvage, etc.) into the chat window so that you and others can click a hotlink to view the complete info box.

 

Not sure what the latter provides, but the former is a nice touch.

   * More Real Numbers: Players can now display stats on powers before they choose them enabling more informed power selection and new temporary powers allow players to display enemy stats.

 

For those who like them, More Numbers Are Good.

Overall — thumbs up.

CoX – Issue 12 random stuff

I have been away from this blog for a bit — between business travel and illness and all that — so I’ve missed out on all the CoX Issue 12 fun. I’ll be looking at it in more detail, but Margie’s been feeding me some fun tidbits:

  • CoV post-50 stuff — not Kheldians but Spiders …
  • Awesomeness on Level-Up — HP/End return to max, plus Inspiration drops. Ding!
  • Trading in Inspirations.
  • More power cross-overs: Axe Brutes! Plant Controllers! Storm Corrupters! Psi Blasters! Cool!
  • Full deployment of all ten power trays — not just three at a time — and in whatever configuration (horizontal, vertical, etc.) you want.

And, the Best Bit of All Time: a hospital in the Hollows! Yay!

More (systematic) info as I actually catch up with some of my CoX reading.

The game’s afoot

The good news? Nobody’s spending time clucking their tongues and worrying about how nerdy, obsessed, and emotionally immature Dungeons & Dragons players are. That’s because tabletop D&D is passé.

Instead, it seems, now everyone’s spending time clucking their tongues and worrying about how nerdy, obsessed, and emotionally immature MMO players are. As in the view of the newly released film, Second Skin.

But my take was that the film–which focuses mainly on three distinct stories, a gamer who is so deeply addicted to World of Warcraft that he loses almost everything in his life; a household of gamers who spend almost every waking, non-working hour playing; and a couple in the early stages of a relationship that bloomed in EverQuest II–depicts these people as largely dysfunctional, out of touch with the world around them and not very capable of dealing with that world.

Of course, that’s an extreme view of the film, and I know for a fact that many in the audience saw it very differently. I overheard many saying afterwards that they thought the film was uplifting and a positive, realistic look at these games and the people who play them.

I just don’t agree. For me, part of the problem may have something to do with the fact that I’ve been writing about virtual worlds and online games regularly for more than four years. As a result, much of the underlying context of the film was not even a little bit new to me. And so I think I may have been looking more at the way the film’s subjects were portrayed than many of the audience members who, I surmised, were largely new to this topic.

I could have that totally backwards, of course. Perhaps they were mostly hard-core WoW players who saw themselves in the film’s subjects. I’m not sure.

But I guess I was a little upset because I think many people are looking at this film as a definitive view on what online games and virtual worlds are, and I simply felt it was far too narrow a view.

 

At least nobody’s ranting about how World of Warcraft is actually a Satanic plot. Well, not yet.

 

One billion dollars? WoW!

If you have a cool billion lying around (are you listening, Bill Gates?), maybe you, too, could compete with World of Warcraft.

If Activision were to create an MMO, it would require an initial investment of $500 million to $1 billion just to compete on an even footing with World of Warcraft, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told a group of investors on Tuesday.

Kotick sees the immense investment necessary to enter the marketspace as the key reason why companies like Microsoft, EA and Sony had all failed in trying to compete with Blizzard, and as more than enough reason why Activision’s choice to join forces with Blizzard was the smart thing to do.

“There didn’t seem a likelihood that even a well-managed company like Activision would have the prospect for profit any time soon in this category,” Kotick said, referring to the MMO market.

 

Which is kind of a goofy way to look at it.  It assumes that you want to compete with WoW, or get as large of a market share. There are certainly lots of small coffee houses that are quite content with how they are doing, even if they aren’t as big as Starbucks. And while WoW is by far and away the biggest MMORPG — not everyone wants to play it, meaning there is probably an audience out there for MMOs other than WoW (and requiring less than $1 billion to be profitable).

I mean, all kudos to the Blizzard folks for their success, and to Activision for tying themselves to it “on the cheap” by merging with Vivendi — but I think it’s a bit self-serving to say essentially that there’s only room for one MMORPG on the market.

LotRO: Fellowshipment

Played a few hours of LotRO last night with our elf Huntesses and a Captain/Minstrel duo that Doyce and Kate were running. Amazing how, in non-scaled missions, having twice the members, a melee guy (plus pet), ranged-attack folks who get to attack at range, and a healer/buffer, can make a difference in mission success …

Plus it was fun hearing a musical coda to each battle.

Cleared some brigand and barrow missions which would have been tough on our own (as we’d already discovered on one mish). And it was fun to do some more group stuff. Thanks, guys — let’s do it again some time soon.

LotRO: Getting the hang of things

Been sort of slowly getting into the groove of LotRO, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, learning how much crafting / auctioning drives me nuts and how much just adds some change to my pocket. Becoming comfortable with death defeat and figuring out how much we can bite off to chew and all that.

Our Loremaster duo is up to 13, which is where our original Cap/Champ pair were when we got tired of them. I feel like the LMs are a lot more enjoyable (in a game with excessive running around, ranged attacks are da bomb). Our Hunter duo is at 19 now, and doing well, too (see previous note).

Margie is doing a fair amount of solo play; I occasionally get on for that, but it’s really about fourth on my list of things to burn my spare time.

I remain fairly happy with the game — not obsessive, but it makes for a pleasant passtime to leaven the TV schedule (or vice-versa).

 

CoX: Statesman Speaks

Jack Emmert, the erstwhile Statesman, gives a “post mortem” of sorts to where Cryptic went “right” and “wrong” with CoX (the game is, of course, very much alive, just not in his hands any more).

He was surprisingly frank, starting things off with a list of CoH‘s strengths and weaknesses. For strengths, he cited character customization, fun moment to moment game play, Flight/Superspeed/Superjump, plenty of character slots, no loot. For weaknesses, he told the crowd about how the game had few goals outside of leveling, its lack of PvP, the repetitiveness of the instances, the lack of an end-game, the lack of guild mechanics, no loot.

[…] So what has Cryptic learned from this crazy process? They need to consider player nature — and launch a fully-featured game, rather than planning to add to it later; by which time their potential players will already be doing something else. They need to ensure that their systems (technology) are easy to update — because MMOs are ever-evolving games. If they don’t update their content, they’ll die out. They need to experiment with min/maxing like crazy during product development — push the game to every possible extreme, because players will. It’s a lot easier to nerf something before the players get a chance to see it.

 

(via Doyce)

No Marvel, but Champs?

I’d heard rumors (and saw that it was being discussed at the CoX boards), but it took Les to point me to something that confirmed that the long-planned Marvel MMORPG has been canceled — though it’s not clear whether it was because of development troubles or if Microsoft decided that MMORPGs were not a likely profitable venture. He also points to word that Cryptic is instead (swapping out the costumes?) doing a Champions MMORPG. 

I never played Champions, but I do think there’s room for another superheroes MMO (heck, if there can be umpteen zillion fantasy MMOs …). I hope it’s successful, and not just an attempt to recoup losses (and code) from the Marvel cancellation.

LotRO – Making life easier

Finally read through the Release Notes for Book 12, and discovered something I’d not read before.

  • Many Fellowship and Small Fellowship quests downgraded in difficulty to be Solo or Small Fellowship.
  • Several Instance and Escort quests reviewed and modified to be less difficult for solo players

    •  

    • Reading on, I saw that — as Margie had noticed last night when we finally went back to do it — the “Rescue by Moonlight” (rescue Avorthal from the boat in Khelondim, I believe it is) mission is among them (it’s now classifiable as doing by a solo level). “Hey,” she said, “they’re showing up as Normals, not Elites.”

    We rocked.

    Other nice QoL in the new Book is an option in the UI to “Always Loot All.” It makes the visibility of looted treasure a bit less — no icons, just text in the General tab — but it certainly speeds thing up.

    Other things worth noting (or that I’m taking particular note of):

    1. Reorg of the costume screen to support the new costume slot options — but with nice new buttons to allow toggling bits on and off.
    2. You can ranged auto-attack while moving (just at a hit minus). Hunters can move slightly further with reduced focus cost (1 focus per 3 seconds instead of per 1 second).
    3. Hunter melee skills damage up. yay! 
    4. Lots of Scholar recipes moved from Loot to Novice Scholar trainers. Hrm. Oh, and there are now difference sizes of Glass Phial (which I noticed inadvertently the other night).
    5. Lots of stat increases on quest reward items.

    Thirty-odd pages of release notes (though a lot of that is long lists of items). Worth reading if you’re a player.

    “The quintessential modern parental dilemma”

    Or so Kottke calls this query: What do you do with the kids when mommy and daddy need to meet up with their WoW guild to do raids? 

    Well, now months later I’m finally level 60 and my husband and I are both in the same guild. I’ll be starting my raids with them this week actually. The problem? We have two small children who need to eat dinner and raids start at 5pm. Ack! How are we going to make dinner?! There are no problems with the kids running around playing and such while we raid. They’re already used to that, they play in the computer room and we can get them things that they need (you know, cups of juice, snacks, what have you) when we have breaks. Before it was easy because if I was running an instance and in the middle of combat my husband might be in a a space between pulls where he could safely go afk for 30 seconds you know. But now we’ll be on the same schedule essentially. We both play support classes too (he’s a holy priest, I’m a resto druid) so the guild ideally would want us to both be in a forty man raid. It’s not like we can easily switch off any raid nights other than say, ZG and AQ20 runs.

    It’s more of a logistics problem than a real stressor. It’s just that it hadn’t really occured to me when I joined his guild that eventually we’d both be raiding on the same nights and thus on the same schedule game-wise. For tonight, since dinner is already thawed out, I’m just planning on eating with the kids at 4pm (about two hours earlier than our normal dinnertime) and letting them snack when they get hungry later one. We’ll make a plate for my husband (who doesn’t usually get home from work until just about invite time) to heat up and that will take care of tonight. But what about the rest of the week? The rest of the time I’m raiding. I suspect that it will be me who shows up to fewer raids, because I’m the mama after all and that’s who the kids often want. Ack, who’d of thunk that the social problems of parenthood in America would follow me into Azeroth 😮

     

    I’d try and figure out how sympathetic I am based how seriously I think the writer is actually taking the problem.

    This is something that Margie and I had to manage with Katherine more than once. And, y’know, you just suck it up (and always remember where the bottom line priority is — hint, it’s not with the Guild/SG/TF). There are things you can do to work around it, as the writer notes. But things will happen, and you need to be able to hop away from the keyboard to deal with everything from unplanned boo-boos to scheduled night-night time. And if what you’re doing and planning regularly interferes with your home life with them — maybe some reevaluation of the gaming schedule is in order.

    On the other hand, I think it’s perfectly fine to split the “who deals with the kids tonight” duties, regardless of what the kids “want” — that’s something they have to suck up. 🙂

     

    Jogging about Eriador

    Took the Elfgirls off to the Lone-Lands. One of the things I love about LotRO is just the richness of the terrain. In LotR, we catch just glimpses, the major stopping points and places of battle and the camps where dialog occurs. Part of that is that Tolkien portrayed much of the North as desolate wasteland after the fall of Arnor, but part is just the result of any novel — you don’t see what you don’t need to see.

    Here, instead, off east of Bree, we have a semi-ruined inn, the fringes of a society being slowly pushed back by incursions of goblins. We have the remains of a fortress (complete with a “Minas” name), and backstory, and a combination of both the epic and the mundane, hints of what’s happening in the big picture even as we help Joe Yokel reestablish his supply chain back go Bree.

    We went to the Forsaken Inn simply to close off a quest, but it’s hard not to click on all those shiny ring contacts, and, hey, we can do these three or four things all together without any trouble, right, and that would let us do this and that, and, wait, they want us to also go back and collect …

    So we visited Minas Eriol a couple of times, only getting defeated once. We’ve learned to go slow and steady, and Hunters rock in terms of being able to (usually) pick the field of combat, which is fine until the little goblin bastards repop on top of you. 

    If I have a criticism of the evening, it’s the necessity to allocate time at the end of the evening to go sell, level, auction, craft, etc. That’s true in CoX, too, of course — even moreso since the auction houses opened — but it seems moreso here. That said, I am sort of working my way to a sweet spot with what I want to be bothered with, and what I don’t. (Margie’s comment, dragging herself up to bed a bit after I was up there, was that she either had to spend an hour doing all the logiistics/management stuff at the end, or spend an hour in bed thinking about what she was going to do when she got back on next).

    Overall, a good time. And beginning to think, parenthetically, of the whole Kinship schtick, and to what degree I might have an interest in our characters getting involved in something a bit bigger than the two of us. There would certainly be times when it would be convenient, or a break from our (very effective and enjoyable) duoing.

     

    Let’s run the numbers

    Gasp! Horrors! 

    Once upon a time, the “real numbers” behind CoX were ultra-top-secret, hidden and masked and obfuscated from the players. The fear was that it would rob the game of a certain mystique, turning it into number-crunching and min-maxing and …

    … but, wait, that happened anyway. People who wanted numbers did incessent trial-and-error and published their results and compared them and came up with numbers that even the Devs had to admit were pretty close — when they weren’t, eventually, correcting them. People who weren’t into numbers didn’t have to bother with them; people who were, could get a lot of the information — but never definitively.

    In the new Test Patch, there are some new tools for seeing (gasp!) real numbers. Spiffy.

    Well, we basically integrated some “tools” into the in-game U.I. which display the numbers behind the game’s combats systems. The Combat Attributes Window lists all the important attributes of the player and shows their current value. It also shows the source and contribution of buffs. The Combat Monitor Window is a lightweight window that can unobtrusively be left up all the time (unlike the Combat Attributes Window), so you can watch selected buffs change during combat. Additionally, more information can be found through buff icons that show their actual effects on the player, and in the combat log where hit rolls have been added.

     

    I don’t recall the name of the tool, but there were some external monitors that used to run in parallel to CoX that would show these sorts of buff infos. As far as I can tell, that’s now fully obsolete.

    Yes, perhaps some of the “romance” of “this is a big buff” vs “this is a small buff” is lost — but given that we’re already getting things that say “this adds 3% to the X,” it’ll be nice to know what “X” actually is. And it should also (if it works right) help debugging of the system as well …

     

    I suggest a new stragegy, Artoo — frag the Comm Officer

    Rikti Comm Officers, of course, spawn Portals, whence issue a number of Rikti soldiers of an higher level. Portals stay open for 2 minutes before “dying,” during which more soldiers continue to arrive. COs are Minions, as are the spawns, and until now, you’ve gotten XP from the COs and big XP from the Portals — you don’t get XP from the spawned soldiers, so that people don’t “farm” Portals for XP (gakking each soldier as they arrive).

    Some people attack COs right away, so that they don’t pull up the Portals — but Margie and I have usually found that the Portals are incredibly good eats, and a few of the higher-level soldiers manageable, So the trick is attack folks around the CO (e.g., the Guardian, or the Lieut on the team), then gang-bang the Portal as soon as it goes up, usually limiting the soldiers to only a couple.

    Alas, it appears that with the Rikti War Zone, a new exploit was born. People were going in, triggering the Portals, then doing one dinky attack aon them and scramming. When the Portal collapsed / unspawned / “died” in 2 minutes, they were the only ones to have done damage, so they got all the credit. This would only work in an outdoor zone (to allow running) that didn’t need clearing, and where there are a lot of Rikti. I.e., the RWZ.

    So … up on Test today, a new twist. Portals (sob) no longer give XP. Instead, the COs willl, though remaining Minion-level, give Lieut XP. So there’s no point in letting Portals come up (or in taking them down if you can avoid them once up). Just frag the COs first.

    Pity. I expect the net XP from Rikti teams will down from this, and the excitement as well. 

    Ding-Ding!

    Dinged Torchielle and Hildegard to 50 this afternoon. Woot!

     

     

    Torchielle was probably my second character (after Velvet, before Psi-clone) that was a long-term success. Hildegard was a tank that Margie created to duo with her some time afterward. The two of them are a laugh riot — heavy-duty tanky-taunts combined with AoE damagey goodness. Great duo.

    A little bit of closure there …

    Meanwhile, back in Paragon City

    Had a yen to hop back into CoX this afternoon (not surprisingly … downloads of patches …)

    So aside from this being a Double XP weekend, what’s up with this whole “XP Curve Smoothing” thing?

    Quoth Positron:

    Well, the leveling speed “curve” looked like a jagged mountain slope more than a smooth line. There were some levels in City of Heroes and City of Villains that just took players longer to get through. This was due to a variety of reasons, mostly in the realm of available mission content. We have tried to add new content in those areas over the past few updates, but a stronger hand was needed in some of the real problem areas. We went in and, through data mining, determined how long characters “lived” (existed) at any given level. This pointed out exactly where our problem areas were and exactly how we could address them. In addition we did a near global increase to the XP earned for defeating enemies. This will have everyone leveling faster than previous issues.

     

    That’s actually pretty spiffy. Not just the leveling-faster thing, but the idea of using data mining to load balance experience gathering. There are definitely certain levels — based both on content and on certain power set / archetype plateaus — that go more slowly, and this sounds like a way ot smooth them out.