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s cataclysm expansion were not fun because they were too difficult the blizzard response that content should possess non zero challenge was as accurate as it was irrelevant customers were dissatisfied with the level of fun they were having with the results of the design not the quality of the design itself today blizzard argues that various non raid activities such as daily quests and running the looking for raid difficulty in pick up groups are optional for raiding because only the very top difficulty setting is balanced so tightly as to assume that players have the best gear available i like to call this the pants optional argument no mmo i am aware of has a mandatory requirement that characters wear pants but very few players opt to go pantless the choice technically exists but is largely uninteresting as there is almost always no benefit to going without pants and the player would then be obligated to upgrade the rest of their gear to off set the stats from the missing leggings more to the point every bit by which you exceed the theoretical minimum requirement gives the player and the group of 9 24 friends they are raiding with that much more margin for error to help secure victory we could sit here and argue the academic semantic merits all day but this misses the point for the same reason blizzard s 2011 defense of the game s difficulty missed the point if paying customers feel like they are obligated to do something that they do not believe is fun it does not matter if the customer is theoretically incorrect lecturing the customer on why they are incorrect not as good at playing the game as people who are beating the content with the minimum gear and need to find new friends with lower expectations however accurate all of these statements may be is not a good business strategy the structural issues with cataclysm as an expansion probably would not have gone away had the game s initial cadre of heroic dungeons launched with lower difficulty and shorter completion times even so it was an inauspicious start to what turned into the game s least successful era to date if blizzard continues to build a game whose core endgame mechanic is upgrading character performance through acquisition of better gear and continues to require non raid content for access to upgrades that raid players want pandaria may not be off to any better of a start there have been several eras of wow in which certain tanking classes were obligated to intentionally lower their mitigation when attempting content that was significantly below their gear level because their classes were dependent on taking sufficient quantities of damage in order to generate resources several players i knew would remove their characters pants in this scenario because it was the quickest and most humorous way to accomplish this posted by green armadillo at 10 11 pm 8 comments labels pvd pve social wow monday july 23 2012 back at the lotro cap my champion hit level 75 in lotro which brings me back to the level cap albeit for a relatively brief time i finished the main story from the isengard launch but plenty of content remains including the entire great river zone and large portions of the sidequests of isengard not much new to report here but one minor quirk because turbine s model offers free players access to the current level cap exterior zones and epic story it is important that i finish this content now rather than after the expansion there s no option not to purchase the new level cap and therefore no option not to advance beyond it until i ve run out of content ah well at least it s been a good ride thus far posted by green armadillo at 11 41 pm 2 comments labels lotro my characters pvd pve tuesday april 17 2012 tor trial thoughts swtor s patch 1 2 finally landed last week and i finally took the game for a spin a few thoughts on the experience arriving four months after the game s launch and playing the game through the 15 levels of the trial getting in for a game that seems to want new players they appear to be trying everything except what all the other subscription titles and most non subscription titles are doing the one week trial requires a referral and does not offer any benefit to the person who sent sent you said anyone who does not have someone to refer them needs to wait for fixed weekend events which are shorter than the referral trial while i guess i can see an advantage to making the community seem more populated by concentrating newbies into specific weekends this process feels convoluted compared to basically all the other mmo s out there fortunately hunting for someone willing to send an invite also allowed me to get a head start on the first and hardest irrevocable choice in the game picking a server this turned out to be easier than i anticipated as basically everyone i asked suggested the rp pve server sanctum of the exalted home of the republic mercy corps and numerous bloggers trooping anyway i signed into the game and rolled up a cyborg trooper named aldebaran in keeping with my custom this is a location from star trek online the sector in which deep space k 7 resides in eta erdani block i ve previously said that i don t see why this class is even in the game compared to han solo smuggler boba fett bounty hunter and people with lightsabers four of the eight classes it wasn t clear to me why anyone would choose to be a cannon fodder stormtrooper setting that concern to the side appears to have been a good call i ve found a fun story and if anything perhaps it s easier to reconcile being one player amongst hundreds as a trooper than it would be as a jedi given that so much of the movie lore revolves around a handful of force users changing the course of the galaxy lore aside this class is also one of the most unique i ve played in mmo s the trooper s resource are energy cells for their weapons which regenerate over time but at a slower rate as they are depleted you can burst if you need to but there will be a longterm penalty to doing so the really unusual part though is that this is not your squishy ranged class in fact i selected the vanguard advanced class which allows me to function as a full fledged tank with damage reduction and short to medium ranged skills meanwhile many of my abilities can be cast on the run rather than channeled making it feel much more dynamic than your standard stand and nuke class overall several big pluses firing on the enemy note also my companion s mighty invisible gun looks like he s killing foes via ranged pelvic thrust the business bioware made some headlines last week with an odd promotion a free month of game time for everyone who had already reached level fifty an offer that was later extended to accounts that had hit legacy level 6 in a move to appease alt o holics azuriel has a good take on this odd move it was pitched as a reward for loyalty by players but it actually demonstrates the opposite sentiment from bioware cold calculation that something needs to be done to hold players who are hitting the end of the road from leaving and disrupting their communities during about half of the trial week i have gotten a character to the trial cap currently level 15 and also reached the permitted levels in three crew skills slicing for cash bioanalysis and biochem for potions i could probably do the same on a second character but i d rather continue to advance my main and unlock the legacy system first so i can receive exp and perks for my future alts i see relatively little way in which bioware would lose by making this an unlimited level capped trial yes someone could in principle play all the newbie planets but all of these are just the first chapters of stories that successful players will want to continue overall my outlook on the game so far remains the same while i think this game is less vulnerable to churn than most mmo s because players will be tempted to come back to play additional stories i m already seeing where the focus on story may harm replay value in a very brief visit to the beta last winter i played through level 6 or so on ord mantell as a smuggler my trooper had different class quests but the same sidequests and i already felt like i d been there and watched these cutscenes before even though it was months ago legacy perks may help by offering the chance to skip more of the content on subsequent playthroughs but this will also reduce the amount of additional subscription time that followup characters will require this game is not in trouble yet but i definitely can t blame them for being proactive in attempting to keep it from getting there posted by green armadillo at 9 39 pm 4 comments labels my characters pve star wars sunday march 25 2012 pre f2p early aion impressions i had an evening with no immediate plans last week and aion has been on my list of things to investigate now that it s going free to play since xaxziminrax asked nicely i decided to give the game an early look obviously i can t comment on the new and somewhat nebulous business model but at least i won t be stuck in an overcrowded newbie area trying to figure out where to put my hotbuttons rolling a daeva blue dude on the right is the standard look for asmodians the green girl is what i rolled up aion has precisely two races elyosians and asmodians for the two player factions however these races have a surprising degree of customization height body type and color are all up for grabs if you want a large or small character the result is actually much more robust in terms of appearance options than we have in some games that offer more races but much less customization i also seem to recall someone mentioning back when the game launched that going small was actually an advantage in pvp because it made your character hard to see go figure the game has four basic classes that branch into a total of eight subclasses while i concede that mmo s in general don t do the best job in helping the player make an informed class choice this one felt especially lacking because it s not apparent what your subclass choices will do before you ve even tried your main class the usual subclasses include a tank a healer two melee dps the non tank warrior and the stealth rogue two kiting dps a mage and the archery rogue all of which i promptly ruled out for lack of interest this left me with two options the chanter and the spiritmaster my brain suggested the chanter the hybrid cleric option which offers some healing buffs and off tanking i frequently pick this type of class because i m willing to trade off some dps for more versatility and variety my gut told me to do something different which left the pet based mage class i don t think i ve ever actually used a pet class as my main in an mmo but somehow this one felt like the right call killing asmodian rats once i zoned in what i found was about as standard of a solo mmo experience as you can get the usual array of hotbars and linear quest progression push the player through their first 9 levels there are a few tweaks to the usual if you click to loot an object on the ground such as a harvesting node or quest item and fail to pick it up you can click it again and the loot window will pop up instantly unfortunately you need this feature frequently as it seems very easy to accidentally interrupt spellcasts looting and other such activities as with the character models the intro zone is generally rather pretty and there is at least occasionally some creative creature design for instance there are mobs called snufflers which are mini armadillo s with elephant snouts the green armadillo approves even if some of these had to die for one of the many standard critter kill quests there s also the now standard map that shows quest objectives identifies what mobs drop items you need etc it may be worth noting that some of these features were new and innovative at the time aion launched with them the only other thing that stood out during my first 9 levels was the game s combo system as i gained levels my main dps spells picked up chain upgrades if i cast the fireball equivalent twice in a row the second will be an instant cast attack that also adds a magic debuff the frostbolt equivalent snares on the first cast and applies a knockback if comboed these secondary effects have cooldowns attached to them but i could see some interesting tactical decisions in when to apply a combo versus continuing to cast your most damaging spell there s also some sort of a ui talking about default combos which suggests that i might eventually be given more choice strategy in how to use this system ascending and beyond wings of a daeva as seen in a story quest when you hit one exp shy of level 10 which appears carefully tuned to require all of the quests in the newbie area unless you go grinding your progress stops until you can complete the ascension questline through this process you pick your subclass with only one quest panel s worth of text from an npc to explain what you re getting earn your wings and travel to your faction s main city here are the usual amenities including auction houses bankers and weird cat creatures with sunglasses who you can pay to expand your inventory i m reasonably aware that there is a lot i have yet to learn about the game including what exactly my new fire elemental does whether how i can use the wings etc so far however what i ve seen is a bland and underwhelming solo quest grind that has little to recommend it over all the other options in the crowded marketplace i can definitely see how this game struggled under the old subscription model and it will be interesting to see whether f2p can revive it the inventory expansion fox cat thing posted by green armadillo at 12 14 pm 2 comments labels aion business models my characters pvd pve monday march 12 2012 scroll of resurrection game vs world while i was struggling with internet access issues last week blizzard announced that they d gone ahead and implemented that crazy idea eq2 s david georgeson kicked around last year a free boost to level 80 but only as a promotion for lapsed subscribers mmo melting pot has two posts rounding up the blog reaction so far and even this list only scratches the surface the conflict this debate emphasizes the split between mmo s as games versus mmo s as worlds as a game the correct answer to the question can i play with my friends is always yes by contrast the very structure of the persistent online world is full of no answers to that question wrong server faction no wrong class no wrong spec group role no wrong level no not enough gear no don t own enough expansions no not located in the right location back in the days when traveling across the world could take all night no for the players who primarily see the mmo as a world all of these answers are the entire reason to play the game what is the point of playing a game where everything you have worked so hard for will be given away for free as t...