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able as a favor unlock think reputation or faction reward but there will not be enough quests in the game to obtain the required favor until the next patch which will presumably come 2 3 months after the class rolls out non subscribers should be relatively accustomed to this aspect of the ddo business model but this marks the first time that subscribers will be forced to spend turbine points for access to a major character building feature double edged popularity one one level i m not sure how many stones should be thrown in this situation both games are still delivering far more content to players than they were before their changeovers and the premium options in both games allow players far greater flexibility to get by for less than 10 15 per month i would still prefer to pay a developer when they actually deliver something worth paying for rather than paying a monthly fee whether or not they ve done anything to earn it other than not kicking me off of the servers that said i think these two stories illustrate a shared flaw in the premium model used by both games and one of my earliest observations of the ddo model for a player who doesn t spend money on cosmetics and consumables turbine s monthly revenue will only drop each and every month as that player permanently unlocks the features they want and lives without the features they don t want this bargain is precisely the feature that makes the turbine premium model so popular with players but it leaves turbine getting less and less money for the same amount of work as the playerbase matures in this context it makes sense that turbine would be interested in some combination of higher prices and less content unfortunately for turbine players may not cooperate and the flexibility of the models give players unprecedented leeway not to pay for stuff that isn t worth the price tag posted by green armadillo at 7 48 pm 5 comments labels business models ddo lotro pvd thursday august 18 2011 vacation news roundup i m still on blog vacation for another week and a half but i ve noticed a few tidbits that i felt like commenting on anyway comments remain moderated though i expect to be able to approve them over the next few days disliking the fourth pillar spinks rundown of the swtor classes mentioned a detail that i hadn t considered apparently george lucas is continuing to maintain that jedi cannot get married without turning to the dark side this makes me less interested in the game not because i really had my heart set on cyborz with my npc s but because the notorious forbidden love story from the second star wars prequel was not the one part of the star wars universe that i ve been dying to re live in an mmo setting specifics of this particular case aside i see a potential issue with the fourth pillar approach here if you are going to put the story front and center it becomes a bigger issue if players dislike the story you are trying to tell moreover i would imagine that jedi who romance their npc s are going to be the majority of players the former because of the lore and the latter because that s what you do in bioware games if the gameplay impact of being a republic faction jedi with dark side status turns out to be disadvantageous to game mechanics bioware will have some unhappy customers wow 4 3 update this week we re hearing details of wow s patch 4 3 the mega patch will include the now industry standard cosmetic gear option that blizzard has been resisting for about five years now there s a new storage system that will save blizzard disk space by having a vendor who will create a new copy of item number whatever upon request rather than storing all the details of your existing item e g enchant crafted by what bank slot it is located in there will be new five mans which was basically expected the one thing that i find surprising is that the patch will feature the deathwing raid and therefore will presumably serve as the cataclysm finale i had expected this to be bumped to next year to shorten the window between deathwing and the expansion now believed to be pandaria while it s not uncommon for the last raid of a wow expansion to sit for 9 12 months cataclysm is already somewhat widely viewed as a failure and nothing from this list sounds especially game changing unless blizzard can finally deliver a wow expansion in 18 months instead of 23 24 2012 may not be kind to the wow subscription count reinventing warhammer werit has the details of the free to play warhammer spinoff my view on this project echoes tobold s back in 2008 i genuinely enjoyed warhammer s instanced rvr scenarios but generally found that the pve game these battles were attached to did not compare favorably to the many other options out there on paper ditching the pve game allows mythic to focus on balance while opening up the door to more exotic races classes heroes etc that might have been harder to fit into a holy trinity pve game however as tobold suggests this revamp almost certainly guarantees that i will never pay for the existing version of the game again overall it s been an interesting week we ll see if next week follows suit posted by green armadillo at 10 19 pm 4 comments labels battle of the war mmorpg s star wars warhammer wow wednesday august 10 2011 pvd on summer break public service announcement pvd is going on end of summer break for the back half of august between vacation and various miscellany i don t see a ton of time for either gaming or blogging about gaming in the next 2 3 weeks perhaps i could have found time to sneak in a post or two but it s easier all around for me to close up shop and not worry about deadlines i should be back in time to wrap up pax and laugh about how incorrect my incorrect predictions really were hint the main ddo prediction got blown out of the water this week and even my blizzcon predictions for october are looking shot comments will stay open until i actually hit the road and i may or may not get in another post before the end of the week while i m actually gone all comments will be moderated for approval after i get back have a good rest of summer and i ll see you all around the beginning of september posted by green armadillo at 6 54 pm 3 comments labels housekeeping sunday august 7 2011 eq2 dungeon tokens testing need versus greed lyriana s slow and steady journey through the instances of velious is continuing and i m learning a bit more about the endgame armor system than i knew when i had my first piece crafted soe has made some unusual choices when it comes to having items crafted from account bound group dungeon drops the system seems to be working but it also blurs the lines between the traditional forms of need and greed verifying need a tier three armor recipe as detailed in feldon s guide to velious armor there are three tiers of class specific armor that can be crafted using tokens from the current expansion s single group six players dungeons all of these have in common the primal velium shard which will be familiar to players who are familiar with dungeon currencies in other games your typical dungeon run awards somewhere between 3 5 shards which are account bound as is most dungeon loot in eq2 so that players with multiple level 90 s can be flexible in which character they bring and your typical piece of loot from the first two tiers will set you back between 20 33 shards while the third tier wants as many as 45 in tiers 1 and 2 finding a crafter to turn your shards into armor saves you 5 8 shards off of the vendor price and also excuses you from any faction requirements on the vendor because you are going to need to farm up shards no matter what and because the shards can also be used for higher tiers or adornments eq2 s version of enchantments most players head straight for the second tier i ve very seldom seen anyone advertise that they re crafting the tier one stuff in tier two also known as the ry gorr armor because the npc vendor is part of the ry gorr orc faction the player must supplement the shards with a polished gem the rough gems which are account bound drop in regular instances and are rolled as regular loot however as i learned when i went to get my first piece of armor you can trade these items once a crafter has polished them perhaps in part to protect players from being screwed by the random number generator and the prospect that the gem will be a six way roll if it does drop this means that we have a standard need before greed dungeon drop that sells for over a hundred plat on the broker in principle you could inspect the players who roll need to determine whether they already have the piece of armor that can be crafted with that gem or better then again is it legitimate to roll need because you can sell that gem for the plat you need to buy the gem for the piece you don t have yet when you have no way of knowing whether the other rollers are doing the same the situation in the third tier gets even more complicated instead of gems the tier three armor costs the standard velium shards plus ore that is obtained by disenchanting regular loot items that drop in those dungeons in the tier one and two dungeons i typically don t even roll greed on stuff my character doesn t intend to use because someone else might at least have an alt that will use the account bound gear in the third tier i would need to obtain some of those drops to get the ore for my own armor and again there s no good way to tell whether someone is rolling need for the gear for the ore for the cash to exchange for other ore or just straight up for the cash good idea on the one hand i see where soe is coming from with this system for the slots where i can have class specific armor crafted it s very rare that i m going to want a generic dungeon drop and that does reduce the system to a pure token grind that said i don t know that i m entirely comfortable with what this model does to the incentives in loot rolling especially with cross server grouping coming to the game possibly later this month overall the problem is a shortcoming of the genre wide need before greed mechanic rather than anything specific about eq2 s armor system i m just not sure it s a good idea to have a system that tests community agreement of what constitutes need versus greed posted by green armadillo at 2 01 pm 0 comments labels eq2 my characters pvd social thursday august 4 2011 pondering pandaria mmo champion reports that mists of pandaria is extremely likely the next wow expansion while some folks are unconvinced i m inclined to trust the mmo champion track record hindsight is always easier than foresight my best guess would be nowhere near the mark but this makes a lot of sense in hindsight regardless of the success or failure of cataclysm s world revamp which peppered with a few new zones in previously blank areas of map the more traditional model with a new continent makes sense as a follow up if pandaria does turn out to be located on a previously unknown south seas island it is a logical battleground for an invasion by azshara and the naga there are relatively few other combinations of location and antagonist that players have heard of especially through the vashj ir storyline in cataclysm and that are not similar to past foes the burning legion again or yet another dragon aspect gone evil there are a few obstacles blizzard has to deal with if this is the expansion panda haters are going to hate and panda lovers aren t going to be happy unless the race is playable for both factions as rohan suggests which would be a first that said i see no niche for a brewmaster class even if blizzard does want to take the pr hit for marketing drunken cartoon pandas in a game that kids play which might mean no new class wow expansions have always included either new races or a new class and blizzard had previously suggested that two new races every expansion would be tough due to art requirements one new neutral race mitigates that concern by halving the art requirements even if two panda factions require alliance and horde colors there s also the issue of china which was rumored to have prompted the removal of the pandaren as the alliance race for the 2007 burning crusade expansion six months ago i would have guessed that blizzard no longer cared about china due to the likelihood that the government would refuse to approve the next expansion no matter what its contents however after a rocky period that saw wow china shut down outright and the wrath expansion delayed by nearly two years blizzard seems to have finally mended relations cataclysm reportedly hit china a mere seven months late i don t have a good answer for this question other than that blizzard apparently thinks they can do something involving pandaren perhaps the chinese version of the expansion will have all the pandas find replaced with worgen in the end my guess is that pandas much like eq2 beastlords will arrive because people want to see them yes some people will argue that this is wow jumping the shark but others have been asking for the pandaren at every blizzcon since the first by the time you re talking about a seven year old mmo your target audience really should be your current playerbase very few players who have stuck with the game through cataclysm are going to walk off because they think pandaren are a joke while players who have already made the decision to leave are free to mock the move as validating their departure sounds like as good a choice as blizzard could make under the circumstances posted by green armadillo at 7 23 pm 11 comments labels baseless speculation blizzcon business models pvd wow wednesday august 3 2011 a visit to tatooine i recently had the opportunity to take that star wars mmo people are talking about for a spin though i can t say that this was anywhere near the top of my priorities list i decided to bite it was a limited time offer that not a lot of people will get there were something like eight character classes to choose from but i didn t have that much trouble picking one given that this was not a character that is going to be around forever with respect to everyone who gets excited about bounty hunters smugglers and stormtrooper equivalents seriously if i m going to spend an hour in a star wars mmo i m going to pick jedi a couple appearance customization choices later and farwel stawag far e wel l sta r wa rs g alaxies see what i did with those links an ithorian jedi was ready to zone in an eye trunk my jedi has i ve never played swg before and i don t expect that i ever would have were it not for the coincidence of upgrading to a station pass shortly before the game s final billing cycle as it was i figured it was worth an hour of my time to take a quick look at the game before lucas pulls the plug if for no other reason than in case i decide i d like to tourist the game s final world galaxy events i m never going to know what this game was like before its notorious new game...
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