10 Reasons Fans Will Love STO

According to kotaku.com that is.

Or not.  They just give you those screen shots.  So go look at them, and then check out my own personal answer key for the screenshots below.  I’d love to see your answers too.

Its easy – just open the link above in a new tab, click pick number 1, look at the picture, and then swap tabs back here for The Reason.  Got it?  Good…spoilers after the break…

Alganon “Review”

I’ve been putting this off.

Mostly because I just don’t have a whole lot to say.

I played the beta, talked about my errors with other players, found they had already been reported.  I tried all the classes – all four of them.  I tried all the races – all two of them.  I, like many before me, noted that there is nothing original in the game.

And that seems to be the debate – in liberally sampling from the genre to create a kinda of “MMO – Alganon Remix” – did the creators do something good, or something bad?

From the business side of things – we just don’t know yet.  Clearly the strategy is obvious – to be successful yourself, imitate others as closely as possible.  Pepsi is like Coke.  Of course there is differences, but – they are still much alike.  Same with Pibb and Dr. Pepper.  Sprite and Sierra Mist.  Chaos Mage and Dwarf Engineer.  Blood Elves and Sephiroth.  You get the point.  So, the Alganon people might be on to something.

But MMO’s are complex creatures, and there is more to the game than the business side.  Was Alganon fun?  Not even remotely.  The highest I leveled anywhere was 5.  With a human ranger type.  The only thing original about the class was that I got access to an HoT early on.  And the weapon graphics looked cool.   Crafting was point, click, and wait.  And there were very few recipes.  On the bright side, I actually wore some crafted armor early on because the quest rewards overlapped badly – I got new weapon after new weapon – but no helm or cloak or anything.

That said – there was nothing really *bad* about the game either.  It didn’t crash, the quests were plentiful and the mobs were of good density and respawn rate and challenge.  The starter areas were laid out well.  About the only thing I can complain about was combat and mob distance.  Often my ranger would shoot once and then move over to her sword/axe combo immediately, hitting even while the mob was still far off.  And I could still use my ranged abilities inside combat with no penalty, muss, or fuss – the melee/missile switch is automatic and consumes no time.

Good and bad, the overwhelming sense of deja vu gets to you very quickly.  Alganon may have done tooo good of a job of imitating other MMO’s (and not just WoW btw).  They may have been shooting for Pepsi, but I think what they got was New Coke.  The lack of classes and races reinforces this – you get the bare bones vanilla of tank, ranged dps, melee dps, and healer.  And the races as well - human and night elf….err, whatever they are.

Ultimately its just sad – because the innovations Alganon does bring to the table – the study system, the idea of player “families” (with their own sets of quests and targeted rewards) – are pretty nifty.  Here’s to hoping that somebody (a good, strong dev perhaps?) takes those parts of Alganon that are good and elevates them into the spotlight. 

Otherwise, when people want vanilla MMO – back to WoW they will go.

Might and Magic Returns

So this is a little bit of a plug, but…if you were a fan of the Might and Magic series of games (not the heroes TBS, but the originals RPGs) then head over to GOG – Good Old Games.  They have released alll the games 1 through 6 bundled together for $10 as a digital download, configured and mated with Dosbox to play under XP and Vista.  I have to give them kudos for what they do – bringing these games back into our lives is a fantastic thing.  Check out the rest of the site too.  (I have hit one or two snafu’s in the gameplay process – ie, in 4 they forgot to pull out the old “look up a word in the manual” copyright protection), but their troubleshooting boards are on top of everything, so if your stuck take a look)

How exactly does one kill slime with a sword?

The games are truly some of the legens in CRPG gaming.  I’ve been playing Clouds of Xeen and find it just as immersive and awesome as Oblivion has been for me over the last week.   Van Canegham and crew were clearly world class designers.  Which makes me just that much more excited about the rumors surrounding his current project that will bring him out of a hiatus that has lasted way too long. 

Heroes of Telara, in case you haven’t been following, is hanging its hat on creating a dynamic game world.    I like that they have a focal point and are wrapping the game around offering something that so many of us have wanted.  If anyone can pull it off, the form New World Computing genius can.  All of the M&M games had dynamic worlds.  Decisions you made closed off some areas and opened others.  Even the most basic of choices, like male/female impacted the games as early as the first of the series back in the 1986.  In later games, players joined some factions only to alienate others, built castles for themselves, and were able to venture down good/evil divides in game play.   Shades of what we will find in Telara in the near future?  Who knows.

Until then, I’m busy clearing out the Dwarf Mines.  Seems the Mad Dwarf Clan has taken over down there, and there’s the promise of gold and experience for young adventurers chosen to save the world.  And its been far too long since a game has offered me something as brilliantly simple as that.

Fallen Earth “Review”

(ETA: I *know* I hit PrntScr a number of times in the two weeks, but the folder is empty.  Whether this a bug in the game, or some version of user error, I don’t know.  In any case, my apologies.)

With all the hullabaloo in the last year over review processes and what constitutes a review, I’m hoping the quotes keep me out of trouble.   Nevertheless, this IS my review of my time in Fallen Earth, if you have a problem with it, just save yourself some heartache and move on.  The review comes in four parts: The Good (what I liked), The Bad (what I didn’t like), The Ugly (what needs work), and The Tilt (the x factor, stuff that doesn’t fit elsewhere).  Ready or not, here we go:

The Good

For all the supposed bugs and problems, once I was in the game itself, it was an incredibly stable platform.   I crashed only twice in two weeks, and once was due to my internet connection going down.  Compared to other games, this is great (I still disconnect once a night minimum from EVE – “socket closed” my foot…) and a good start.  The tutorial does what it should do – guiding you through the basics of the game and letting you practice.  The storyline was an added bonus I thought – it meshes well with the rest of the game.

Speaking of storyline, the lore and the atmosphere are fantastic.  It easily gives a solid vibe thats a mix of Wild West and Mad Max, and that is not a bad combo for post-apoc at all.  Contributing to this is the sheer amount of stuff you can find, use, and create in the game.  Kudos to the developers for not creating this smorgasbord, and then artificially limiting it by making some items clearly better than others.   People were using everything from closet rods to rusty dress sabres to golf clubs as melee weapons.  Armor is not quite as robust, but there are still several options available.

Quest hubs are easy to find and not overwhelming in their sheer number of arcs and tasks.  In the three areas I visited, the tasks were spread out 360 from the township, allowing for a good flow of traffic and keeping any one place from getting to crowded – many games don’t even attempt this basic design philosophy.  Quest rewards and drops themselves are good, I found myself equipping and using a mixture of both to good effect.  And as a sideline to this – transportation done right.  No instantly jumping across the entire play area, and fast travel has economic and logistic limitations beyond a “once and done” ridiculously high cost for a mount. 

 

The Bad

This can be summed up in two words:  Crafting and Economy.  Crafting consists of picking a recipe, hitting a button, which sends it to a queue with a timer.  The timer can be shortened if you stand around an area where a workshop is.  But since you can’t do anything else in that space, other than perhaps to chat or sell off extra stuff, your best bet is to head right back out into the big bad world and keep collecting things.  The only time the workspace benefits you is for long time items when you log off.  The crafting queue keeps rolling even if you are offline, much like EVE’s manufacturing slots – which is fine for a factory building a starship, but is a little hokey when you think about grilling your chicken salad while offing radiated mutants.  The queue also holds up to 25 items, further encouraging the queue and go mentality.  Even more vexing for crafters – every single crafting skill is based off of one attribute – Intelligence (with a minor bump from Perception).   Since your attributes govern your max for tradeskills, that means that you might as well throw some bullets in the queue with your chicken salad, because as a crafter, you are equally good at producing both.  It may be that at higher levels, the sheer time of the recipes limits your specialization – but devs should never underestimate the amount of time players are willing to waste on a game.

This ties directly to the economy.  Unless you are a hardcore PvP player, its well worth the invested points to bump your Intelligence so that you can produce your own gear rather than buying it.  The vendors sell the same items you can make, often for a huge markup over the cost of the materials – which are literally lying around on the ground for you to pick up, free of cost.  Since crafting requires no time investment seperate from adventuring,  even if you hate crafting, its not a burden at all to max it out.  Particularly if you plan to use gas powered vehicles (so you can make your own fuel) or guns (so you can make your own bullets).  There’s alot of speculation about what this does to the economy in crafting.  The only check and balance in place is that you can buy any mat from the right vendor for a set price.  So the auction house prices for mats will never inflate, tied to that max number as they are.  I’m guessing that they are betting that players will pay money to acquire particular items now as opposed to waiting a few hours, days, or weeks to craft the item (and yes, some items take that long).

 

The Ugly

While the game is stable, or at least was to me, there are a number of irritating bugs - items you should be able to craft not updating correctly with your skill, requiring a re-log.  Running to a harvesting node on the map, only to find that its bugged and no longer works.

A new type of quest – a tracking quest – is being tried out in the game, which basically involves traveling a bunch of way points before hitting the quest goal or target.  This is beyond irritating, especially since more than one that I did led me in a circle back to nearly where I began – and that was one where I was following a blood trail.  Apparently he was delirious enough from the blood loss to cross back and forth over the same area (ie, the enemy camp) several times.

That great variety of gear?  Yeah, that doesn’t exist with transportation or with ranged weapons.  Until you hit the second tier of areas, the only thing you will be wielding is zip guns or crossbows.  Apparently regular bows no longer exist.  Or throwing weapons.  And no one has thought to go back to muskets and arbesques yet. 

Combat is vaguely SW:G-esque.  You can zoom in with a scope on someones head, but why bother, when its not going to do any more or less damage then hitting them in the torso would, and it takes alot more time to aim and you have less of a chance of hitting your target when they start moving.  Switching between first and third person takes some getting used to, but isnt bad.  Switching weapons though, is a nightmare.  Only equip what you plan to use, would be my advice.  If you want to carry other stuff, fine, just lleave it in your pack.  Other than aiming and shooting, you can use the occasional skill.  At level six, having finished one crafter starting town, one combat starting town, and one support starting town, I had one skill for melee, one for pistols, and none for rifles.  Its not a bad thing necessarily though – its a tried and true system, and combat involves a lot of duck and weave movement, so trying to track whack-a-mole buttons is tough.  Still, its missing something.

The six factions are so badly stereotyped its almost impossible to empathize with any of them.  Its basically the treehuggers, the barbarians, the scientists, the military, the do-gooders, and the merchants.  And I must be missing something somewhere.  The best gear is supposed to  be faction gear – ie, the barbarians (ChotA) have the best melee weapons, etc.  And to gain faction with one group means losing twice as much with the opposing factions.  Which means your group/guild/gang/whatever will eventually be KoS in each others home towns…how is that supposed to work exactly?

 

The Tilt

With all that, I’d love to tell you that FE sucks and you should go do a different game.  But I can’t.  Its just too darn fun.   There is something great about the game itself that transends alot of the individual elements.  Some of it was visual – at level 6, I at least *looked* like a badass mofo.   Some of it is the character potential – the MMO market is ready to go classless, and this game is a great example of that.  I know its harder to balance, but seriously, its time for someone to get it done and get it done right.  One of the things FE is supposedly implementing to help with gimped characters is remapping – only this remapping will be done slowly – over the course of a week or two.  This keeps PvP from going nuts, but still allows for a surprise – pull your best healer off the line for a week and watch your opponents surprise when the meet him next!   And it promoted experimentation within reason – a big, big deal.  Players will play what they want, secure that they can make corrections or tweeks later, but few people will go out of their way to try outragious combos because it will suck away their play time.

And then too, is the setting.  This is a truly unique game right now, and it has a nice niche that will hopefully allow it to survive until it finds its footing.  The community is helpful and has their big-boy pants on, which is nice.  Part of this charm may fade too – the game truly feels post-apocalyptic right now, but as more and more player guides and maps and such come out, it will lose some of that mystique, and losing that will hurt this game more than it would say, your stock fantasy adventure. 

Final Tilt:  This is a game developed by a smaller company, and is a labor of love.  As a result, they listen to feedback (GM’s are on and vocal 24/7), are actively improving the game’s mechanics and content.  Given who they are, what they have accomplished here is that much greater.  Its worth buying the game even if you don’t keep going beyond the first month, because it rewards the gaming community in the long term to encourage this sort of approach and dedication to game making.

So, get to it.

 

TL;DR Version:  A flawed, but fun game, with a bright future ahead of it.  Give it a try.

What Drives Gamers Nuts

Follow, if you will, the sequence of events here, especially those highlighted in RED:

SilverElf4,You have been added as part of the last wave of Alganon beta testers before its launch on October 31, 2009. Your MyAlganon account “SilverElf4″ has been upgraded to have immediate beta access. You don’t even need a beta key! Simply login to your MyAlganon.com account and click the “Beta” button to get instructions on how to download the client. Once you are finished downloading, installing and patching the beta client use your MyAlganon login account name and password to login and play the Alganon beta.

******************************* 

Greetings,

 

I received my invitation to the last round of Beta testing before launch and was very excited.  I have downloaded the client from http://www.myalganon.com but when I run the client and put in my account name and password, it tells me that the information is invalid and will not download the installer.

 

I’m not sure what to do.  I used the same account name and password as I used to access the page with the beta client as supplied in the email.

******************************

Hi, 
 
In regards to your issue of not being able to download the client, we’d like for you do try and manually re-enter your beta key again on MyAlganon. To do this go to you profile page, scroll over My Account and select Enter Key. Right now, this will take you to a purchase page, so you need to click the “Already Purchased Alganon? Click Here to enter your game key” link found just about the Billing Information section. Enter you key and try downloading the installer again. Let us know if this works for you, and if not let us know and we’ll go from there. 
 
Regards, 
 
[censored]
CSGM 
Alganon 

 

Yeah…so I forwarded that original email.  That was about 30 hours ago…still no response.   Contrast this with Fallen Earth, who hit me up with multiple emails back and forth within 24 hours.  My issue is now resolved and I played the game last night (more on that in a later post).   Meanwhile, Alganon, who issued me this invite on Saturday, has emailed me once in 4 days, and has not resolved my issue, and indeed seems to have revealed a deeper issue. 

My only real question is – how does this happen?  Is this a case of game developer specific “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” syndrome?  Different departments not talking to each other, etc?  Does that also explain the poor response time as well?

Fallen Earth: What kind of game is this exactly?

One of these things is not like the others.

 

Snagged one of the free 15 day trial keys for Fallen Earth today.  My brother bought the game at the beginning of the week and has been loving it and gave me a head’s up.  As its been patching today I had a few minutes to skim the patch notes.  And I begin to wonder exactly what kind of game this is…

How exactly would one equip….nevermind, just…nevermind…

The Ghost of a Game

One of the great oddities of MMO’s that we are perhaps only just now experiencing is this – what happens when an MMO dies?

SOE created a Matrix Online scrapbook of sorts in memoriarium.

The Shadowbane site is gone it seems, but the Wiki lives on, preserving the lore and information of the world.  (What a grand PnP RPG setting that would make!)

But one game I’ve come across several times now, and only just realized this week that it was dead.  Kaput.  Belly Up, Servers Down.

Dark and Light.

I don’t know much about the game other than what I have been able to glean from Wikipedia and some random news archives, but basically the game suffered from poor developer communication and in house business partner fighting, and was thus dead before it was really ever unveiled.

Of course, other games have suffered like this and yet still continue to stumble onwards.

Hello? Oh God, where is everyone? Everyone's lost but me...

But what is amazing about Dark and Light’s site is that there is no announcement, news release, or indication that the game is completely and totally dead.  You could navigate the site, read all about it, even download the client, only to find that it would repeatedly fail to connect.  And then you might check the forums and poke around a bit and then notice that its actually…you know, dead.

Apparently you can still play around solo in the demo world, but the game is so buggy even that might not happen.  I’m tempted to do it anyway though.  God knows why.  I mean, I like exploring, but that would be sick and twisted right.  To download a dead game’s client just to ride around in the dead world solo.  Alone.   Nobody in their right mind would do that right?  Right?

…I need some kind of an intervention don’t I?

A Real Life MMO

We were on vacation this weekend (kids on a two week fall break) and we took them to the revamped Stone Mountain Park  in Atlanta, GA.    This is probably going to be a long post so the tl;dr version is  this:  I spent time in a kid’s play area that was designed like an MMO, and it blew my mind.

A few years ago, Stone Mountain was taken over by the same company that runs Knott’s Berry Farm over in CA.  As a result, it took on less of a camping/refuge atmosphere and became more of a theme/amusement park area.  One of the things installed was the Great Barn.  Its a giant indoor funhouse, four stories up in the middle, with numerous different activities inside.  And as I sat and watched my kids and my neighbors kids (who had joined us on the mini-vacation) play, I began to see things with my trained gamer’s eye.   The whole blasted thing was one giant MMO.

Okay, we have four people but do we have all four gamer archetypes present?

When kids came in, they were stopped in an initial area where they could create their “farmer,” and get a special wristband that would track their progress in the different activities.  Can we say Achiever anyone?  In the center great room on the bottom floor, visible from just about everywhere, was an electronic sign proclaiming the top ten scoring farmers from each age group.  In that same great room, the “starter area” for the game, there are hundreds of balls (“fruit”) lying around in several different colors.  Farmers can spend time here gathering fruit for the activities, and the wise ones will grab a bag to extend their capacity (I didn’t get a chance to count the number of slots).  Farmers might also explore side rooms for additional fruit and bags, take them from other players, or perhaps speak with those leaving the game area to gather additional capacity.  Thus we complete the first echoes of Bartle underpinnings.

This fruit Economy as it were, is more complex than it might seem.  There are a finite number of fruits in the game, they are required for all the activities, save some of the explorer ones (ahem, slides, climbing nets, and side rooms).  Expended fruit, through a complex system of tubes, vacuums, and nets, are channeled back down to the bottom floor room out in the open and also in less visible caches around the side rooms.  Some of those side rooms are netted and hallwayed off from the main room, providing quiet areas for Socializing via benches and even through exchange of said caches to interested players.  Some Mini Games exist here in the form of small slides and riders for younger players or those who prefer to play alone for a while.  Killers can peg one another endlessly, as well as trying to defend themselves from the veteran players on the second Tier above.

But Dad, its hard to be an Achiever with all these Killers around!

Once one has completed the games and activities on the first floor, and gathered enough fruit for their liking, they may proceed to the second Tier of challenges and activities, either through Challenges such as climbing cargo nets, or via the Rapid Transport System..er stairs, at the back of the room, conecting to the Quest Hub (lobby) of each Tier (floor).  On the second floor, one engage Killer instincts by Bombing players on the first floor, completing Challenges involving expending various color combinations of fruit to gain Achievement points, or engage in the running gun battle with air guns that use the fruit as ammunition on two opposing sides above the open air great room below.  This second floor also allows for Socilization and Trading as farmers find that they need different fruit colors or different skills or even additional players (one challenge involves a crank system that requires cooperation) to play.  Some of the less assertive farmers simply go between the floors carrying loads of fruit for other players, especially those locked in battle (Crafting and Player Driven Economy at its best).  After completing a challenge, if you desire, just scan your bracelet, receiving the points and perhaps a prestigious place on the big board instantly.  Some of these challenges are again hidden in side rooms, requiring Explorers to hunt them down and use them or share their location with others.

On the third level, players are treated to a more hard core version of the PVP battles below, as it is harder to obtain ammunition, and there are less available guns for the players to utilize.  Moreover, slides dropping one down to the starter areas below are clogged not only with PvPers looking for more ammo, but also less hardcore players just looking to enjoy the ride!   Many community service managers are in attendence, regulating the flow on the slides to prevent jams and aiding players who are lost or have a problem.   There are also a few challenge type games here that can be played solo for the biggest point scores, but require more fruit and more complex expenditures of that fruit or more demanding hand-eye coordination to complete them.

A final, smaller area seemed to be available for those who wanted to complete their tour of the entire facility, but carrying my weighty bag of fruit and my one year old, I found that even since their was no Rapid Transport System to that level, I was not able to go there.   Thus it was completed – those with family obligations or too tied to their material goods would find themselves unable to participate in the true end game and…whatever it was that it had to offer.

My kids played for probably two hours in the area, finally giving up only when it closed down and we headed for the famous laser show.  Caretakers/Devs emerged to arrange the balls and bags in strategic positions, helping to reset the economy to accomodate the new batch of players that would arrive in the morning. 

Are we trapped?

As we left, and I continued to marvel at what I saw with a gamer’s eye, I had one  final terrifying thought…what if I had it all backwards.  What if, instead of building a play area for kids, designed like an MMO, instead the MMO’s that you and I played were designed like kids play areas.  Perhaps in the final say, we are not only being treated like children, but we love it so much, we keep coming back to the same Barns, day after day, not really expecting or hoping for improvement, content in the channeled reality with which we are presented.

$22 A Month Subscriptions?

My wife called in last night to fight over a $20 service fee we had been charged for our account dropping too low (it hadn’t – our account minimum is calculated using savings and checking, not just checking…morons) and also noticed next to my $14.95 monthly gaming fee to EVE that there was a $2 or so “International Service Charge” attached  to it.  Round two on the phone started, and ended with Wachovia refusing to take that one off, claiming that they were withing their rights to charge us extra for having to exchange currencies, and that they were surprised it was so low - the lady claimed the charge should have been more like $7 a month, and would be so in the future.

Now, we’ve already established that Wachovia is capable of deploying morons – and actually, I’ve known that for some time because of other issues I’ve had.  So I’m not entirely sure I have been told the gospel truth here, so I did some digging.

*Real* ISK.

First of all, I found out that ISK doesn’t stand for Interstellar Space Kredit.  It stands for “Iceland Krona” in the international banking scene.  And that Wachovia charges a 3% international service fee for converting currency.  So I did some quick math:

$14.95 x 1.03 = $15.40 -$14.95 = $.45 in service fees.

Nowhere near $2 or $7 either one.

Add to this my confusion over CCP itself.  While they are originated in Iceland, they also have offices here in America, and so I’m not sure what kind of exchanging needs to go on at all.  And in their FAQ page, while they list all sorts of additional charges that one might get hit with, one for converting currency is not on the list.  And costs are listed not only in Euros, but also in USD, along with this sentence:

Prices are listed in Euros and US dollars. You can use the services of Yahoo Finance to convert the US dollar/Euros to your local currency.

Bold is mine.  This would seem to indicate that CCP accepts two kinds of currency – Euros and US Dollars.  So what is going on here?  Well…I have two weeks until my sub is up.  And I have at least one unpleasent conversation with Wachovia that will be taking place.  I do have some options though. 

At the very least I will be switching banks.  I cannot tolerate incompetence and/or swindling.  The economy is too bad to reward companies that fail in the most basic avenues of knowing their own policies and customer service.  I may also switch my sub over to Discover, though I don’t  know yet what their policies are either.  Hopefully this will not mean EVE costing me $22 a month to play.  I enjoy the game, but…

Anyone else out there ever have this problem?

Anyway, expect an extra post this week so I can regale you with the insanely underhanded way in which I won my first ever Twilight Imperium game.  And no, I didn’t cheat…

Limiting Factors

I’ve been facing this thought alot, not just in the game, but in life as well.  Whenever one sets a goal and reaches out to achieve it – whether that be in life, in career, as an individual, as a corporation, in a game like EVE, or EQ2, or in real life, there are always Avenues for Advancement.

These Avenues for Advancement are the ways and means by which one achieves the goal, right?  Focusing on games (duh, its a blog about games…), you will have several Avenues of Advancement – you will have to move forward along the paths of: level, equipment, guild.  You’ll need level to be able to access and effectively engage those dungeons, bosses, or quests.  This also applies to EVE, though those avenues would be renamed: skills, isk, corporation – you need these to access various corners of the sandbox.

Now for some people, some of those avenues are harder to advance than others.  For the casual player, perhaps all of them are hard to advance – unless one has a regular group of friends IRL, or otherwise.  For the hardcore player in EQ2, leveling might be a snap, and by extension as they level, it becomes easier to acquire better equipment.  In EVE, the skill advancement is mostley an even playing surface, but even there isk can influence skill – by use of implants and remapping.

By now you are seeing that these things are by their very nature intertwined.  And so when one sets specific goals along avenues of advancement, the connections between these things can be a help – or a hindrence.  Where those things are a hindrence, they slow advancement along the avenue – and this is what I call, as the title of this post alludes to – Limiting Factors.

When I was playing Everquest II not too long ago, I ran into a wall – I had hit the mid 30’s with my Necromancer, and was enjoying time with him, sometimes solo, sometimes with two other people.  But slowly those two other people drifted away.  I never found a new guild to be a part of, and as a result, I started playing my almost exclusively solo.  This is fine for awhile, but after awhile, even playing a pet class, to really get into the meat of a game like EQ2, you need to be playing with other people.  I tried a few pickup groups and even a new guild, but never found a home.  So when AoC showed up at Target on clearence for a few bucks – and my brother asked me to try it with him…I went.  My Limiting Factor was social networking.  It was the lowest stave in the barrel.  The barrel will only hold as much as the shortest piece of wood bound within it, no matter how tall the rest of the barrel is.

In EVE, I run across this all the time – but the interesting thing is that the Limiting Factor changes from goal to goal and project to project.  When I wanted to fly an interceptor – money was the barrier – being able to afford to lose a 15-20m isk ship.  When I later wanted to set a goal for Black Ops, skill became the Limiting Factor – as a new player, I would have to cripple my basic skill training and wait six months or more to be able to fly one.  Currently in our corp, the limiting factor is again social in nature – we have three dedicated, regular players, who can come up with plenty of isk, at least for our current empire operations – but we can’t seem to get recruits on board with the corp.

While on the topic – I do not include amont limiting factors those that occur within oneself, outside the game.  Being on vacation, or emotionally unavailable for a week are not really Limiting Factors.  Neither is play time – since really it acts as a meta factor that complicates all the Avenues of Advancement.

The goal of course, is to find ways to expand the Limiting Factor, releasing the choke point in the process, and moving one forward a little easier into their chosen Avenue of Advancement.  Each problem has its own way of doing this.  And sometimes the game itself offers up a way to loosen that constriction – this was the original purpose of “rest xp” in MMO’s.  In the same way, though on a commercial side, they exist purely for profit potential, the reality of RMT transactions is that they provide a way to do the same.  In EVE Online, one of the veteran pilots in my former corp encouraged us to sell a 60day GTC – the initial influx of money would cover and fittings we needed and alleviate any fears we had about ship loss in fleet ops – it removed a limiting factor in PvP and ensured less Limiting Factors in other endeavors we would seek to undertake.

Whatever your Limiting Factors may be at the moment, its a good idea to share those with guild or corp mates, and even post it out in the open (such as I sometimes do on this blog!) to see who might be willing to weigh in on the topic or offer advice on how to handle it.  It behooves them to do this of course (mmmoooooo, go CoW’s!) because in doing so they relieve your tension and frustration and help you to remain in the game and contributing to your experience as a gamer.

In other words, whatever you may have heard from other sources, for long term viability in MMO’s – it pays to be nice.