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rsday march 10 2011 catering to subscribers and f2p in ddo while all of this rift stuff has been going on ddo had its fifth birthday party the shindig introduced a new pirate themed world event featuring an original quest in which players lead a party of comic npc kobold miners in search of crystals and adventure i didn t really feel like taking the time this weekend so i logged in for long enough to redeem my pirate hat voucher and stick it in my bags for future upgrading the sheer amount of work that went into this event makes its eventual return pretty much certain judging from the coverage on ddocast and ddo cocktail hour there are a few interesting things about this event as tipa observed this is still a free to play game and the event was accordingly designed to invite cash store purchases i don t know if it was mandatory to pay to play but it certainly sounds like the podcasters spent some turbine points on the festivities perhaps more troubling the ddo store recently got cosmetic armor skins that could be applied over lackluster armor to improve its appearances predictably people were underwhelmed by the appearances of the event armor unlike the mabar event last fall this event added a scaling quest the kobold mining event that actually awards exp for the most part ddo does not hand out exp just for killing mobs indiscriminately so this was a welcomed change the last point is potentially interesting and problematic because a big part of the premium business model is that non subscribers need to pay for level appropriate content to obtain the exp needed to reach the cap to the extent that players are able to get in without paying which i can t judge because i didn t try having an event that awards exp at any and all levels could cost turbine a lot of money as a result this particular bit of fun and unique content will need to be locked away in the vault only to emerge when the sales of festival goodies outweigh the potential losses in sales of leveling content beyond this specific event the content scaling issue impacts turbine in each and every patch longtime subscribers generally want new content that scales for their high or max level characters newer players often have a need for more low to mid level content though really the low levels are pretty well covered at this point one suggested solution has been to have content that is more flexible on level ranges and now we finally have a quest that can scale from level 1 to level 25 but it can t stay in the game without breaking the business model it s going to be interesting to see whether attempting to run two business models at once has painted turbine into a corner on this issue posted by green armadillo at 6 14 pm 8 comments labels business models ddo wednesday march 9 2011 bowling with ferrel and friends yesterday a group of guardians from byriel us made a run at the ancient wardstones of scarlet gorge the team included ferrel of epic slant and his guild iniquity my home in telara along with massively s karen bryan and her guild revelry and honor it was a great example of what i called mmo bowling earlier this week not knowing that i d be along for such a ride just a day later my high elf cleric telhamat is currently level 25 which is on the low end for quests in the zone and i d never set foot in the place before this also meant that i did not have the teleport point so i had to ride in from gloamwood and blunder around a zone with higher level mobs and a fully greyed out map looking for the raid this turned out to be good preparation for the actual event there are supposedly 9 wardstones in the zone which will summon a raid boss once per day if the same faction controls all of them we did not really know where most of these locations were as a result we had a raid team of about three dozen guardians running amok back and forth across the zone trying to wall jump our way up cliffs rift is much more permissive on this front than most mmo s i ve played and possibly inadvertently wiping out one or more defiant quest hubs that we mistakenly believed were mobs guarding a wardstone i assume that is how most of us ended up flagged for pvp overall we killed a couple mobs here and there i stopped to loot the occasional harvesting node while our leaders tried to figure out wardstone locations on youtube and we probably gave the local defiant population a decent scare things would probably have gotten more hairy on a pvp server but i m guessing that you have to make more of an affirmative effort to make a nuisance of yourself before the other faction actually mounts significant resistance in a mid level zone on a pve server we never did find the final wardstone and we re not sure if that s because we couldn t locate it or because it does not spawn if the boss has already been killed that day there was no in game indication either way on this point despite this seeming lack of win i had a good time and got to uncover the map of the zone amidst the good natured mayhem judging from the reactions on vent it sounded like everyone else had the same experience perhaps the zone event could have been designed more transparently but it was a perfectly good activity for an evening with the guild posted by green armadillo at 9 09 pm 1 comments labels my characters pvd rift monday march 7 2011 mmo s as bowling writing about larisa s recent guild dilemma tobold asks is the purpose of raiding to play with your friends whatever the content is you can reach with those friends or is the purpose of raiding to reach the top regardless of how many friends you need to ditch on the way this dilemma goes beyond merely the highest levels of raiding difficulty because of their social roots modern mmo s straddle a divide between providing an activity that is fun because of the company you keep and an entertainment medium that is expected to be entertaining in its own right mmo s as bowling at the risk of drawing an analogy about an era i largely did not participate in i d suggest that the old school mmo is kind of like going bowling a modern mmo player might complain that bowling is a poorly designed game when you go out with some of your buddies you can expect to spend the majority of the evening either waiting for the machine to return your ball or waiting for the other players to bowl the thing is all that downtime becomes part of the point the game becomes an activity that you do to provide an occasion to spend time chatting with friends likewise us newcomers look at the things that eq1 vets say made the game harder and dismiss them as merely time consuming rather than difficult again this comes from a different perspective to a fan of the game spending up to 40 minutes mostly afk for boat travel in ffxi might merely be an opportunity to chat with your linkshell or they might find it as intolerable as i did i didn t stick around long enough to find out the price of entertainment the conflict is that mmo s are shifting from an activity into more of a game because that s where the money is a game that s only fun if you re playing it in a group with your friends works if the majority of players and spending 3 hours per night every night or specific scheduled nights etc it doesn t work if players show up for infrequent sporadic hours and rarely have the opportunity to play with friends from allowing players to solo to the level cap to implementing automated group finders for pvp and dungeons to offering open groups and public quests to encourage players to drop in for non instanced group content studios have worked hard to make sure that you can play the game and therefore choose to pay for the game without having friends on the same schedule this change makes it feasible to spend tens of millions developing the modern mmo but it also impacts just about every aspect of the game itself far too many of the mmo genre s basic tropes don t stand on their own merits if you re not spending the time joking about them with your friends all of which brings us back to larisa s dilemma in the new more entertainment driven model players who might have spent their time hanging out in mid level groups in a game like eq1 are suddenly thrust into wow s hardest tier of content for wow in particular the need to get new players friends and alts up to par quickly has created a bowling alley with multiple lanes per group and instantly returning bowling balls for people who were enjoying the wait this change is not a good thing posted by green armadillo at 6 24 pm 4 comments labels pvd pve wow rift progression curve notes my rift cleric hit level 24 over the weekend but i ve side tracked a bit working on some alts a level 12 mage with outfitter and a brand new level 7 rogue a few observations after seeing how blizzard did cataclysm i m really glad to have the exp curve set in a way that allows me to do stuff like rifts without outleveling the zone i m in i might skip the last hub or two of gloamwood when i get that far but that s more because the zone somehow hasn t caught my attention it s pretty but i ve seen dark and gloomy many times before as i noted in my first launch impressions getting all the souls for a class in the extremely low levels feels like an odd progression choice by the mid 20 s my pure soul builds are already nearing the top branches of their soul trees there are still a few more abilities to be gained from the roots and many abilities scale with the total points spent in that soul up to 51 if you go back and take everything including the stuff you didn t want the first time the good news is that i can now look at a 10 12 point base in another tree without doing too much damage to my intended main focus so this opens up options but it is starting to feel like progress is slowing down of all the cleric builds i ve tried the 20 shaman 10 justicar build seems to be the most effective i don t have much for ranged which can be a problem in rifts with bouncing aggro but i do good damage and i can solo a single elite mob or multiple non elites through self healing on the downside it s starting to bore me because it s getting a bit easy which is part of why i m trying the other classes suddenly overall things are still fun and it still looks like i have a decent amount of game ahead of me posted by green armadillo at 6 36 am 6 comments labels my characters pvd rift saturday march 5 2011 crafting for npc s in rift mmo economies often have an odd trait where finished crafted items are worth less than the materials it cost to make them because so many players are flooding the market with stuff they made for the skill points a non crafter can win by using the auction house to craft their stack of ore into a weapon and walk away with a tidy profit in rift s case though there were so many stacks of soft leather on my local auction house that it was a borderline call whether to risk the deposit fee for the chance at selling marginally over vendor price so i took my mage alt and turned them into an outfitter basics of rift crafting outfitters like eq2 tailors do cloth and leather armor along with bags cloth drops from humanoids and leather is skinned from mobs using butchering also sometimes yields bones which i haven t needed yet this leaves you with an empty third slot which i m using for mining on the alt while my main remains a triple gatherer runecrafting rift s equivalent of wow s enchanting profession is another common choice since it does not require a gathering profession once you get the materials the actual making of items is like we have in wow or lotro stand by the tool e g a loom click the button watch the progress bar there are optional enhancement items which drop from rifts and are used to add an additional stat to the item you re crafting crafting the base item cannot fail but the attempt to add the enhancement might if this happens the enhancement item is destroyed but you do not lose the other materials so you ll always be able to make the base gear if you run out of enhancement items or give up sinking the skillup items interestingly rift offers two ways to dispose of the crafted items you make for skill points first my outfitter can salvage armor including stuff i just crafted for some crafting materials and a special salvaged cloth leather that is used in some side recipes second there is a daily quest for each tier of crafting where you turn in some number of a basic crafted item in exchange for small amounts of exp and special tokens that are used at recipe vendors in your capital city these crafting quests appear to be the only way to earn these tokens and the higher level recipes cost hundreds of them so dedicated crafters are going to want to do these as often as possible in principle this should create a natural sink of these materials out of the economy in fact that might be the problem with the soft leather the outfitter dailies don t use any of it you might even be able to craft these items for skill points and sell them on the auction house if you don t want the tokens for yourself to high level crafters who want to get their tokens quickly unfortunately i don t see a huge reason why it s important for me to do my own crafting it s useful to have a low level outfitter on my account just so my future alts well 1 2 more since i now already have two of the four callings can ship their cloth over in exchange for bags that convenience aside it doesn t look like there are self only perks or significant amounts of crafter only content as in eq2 i m not convinced that it s worth the trouble compared to farming for the auction house posted by green armadillo at 10 46 am 2 comments labels economy rift friday march 4 2011 building blocks for classes i ve started up a low level mage alt in rift to see how it compares to the dps caster version of my existing cleric one of the things that really strikes me about the system is how you build your own class from three souls for example six points in the elementalist tree gives a fledgling mage a tanking pet a damage shield and an ability that basically removes out of combat mana regen downtime by draining your charge bar built up as you cast spells sort of like a warrior s rage bar in other games you can stick these types of capabilities into your character like building blocks ensuring that you have the basics that you need to play before advancing into a tree that you really wanted to focus on the results can be remarkable i was not so impressed with the caster clerics initially then i respecced and added some points in the justicar soul justicars get low levels of self healing to begin with but investing 10 points enhances that baseline self healing to significant levels suddenly my caster priest was noticeably more durable than any caster i ve ever played before combining medium heavy armor with significant amounts of self healing just from my dps spells rift is not the only game to offer customization options building a multi clas...
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