Max Levels, Time Played, and Just What Is Loyalty?

So I managed to, for the second time, to max level in an MMORPG.  Meet Vice Admiral Gharrett…or at least, his backside as he dings 50:

 

Oooh, shiny.

 

And, with all the hubub about SWTOR’s loyalty rewards for those people who have totally played the game the way Bioware told you not to (yes, this smells of EA, not BW), I had some questions myself.  I did some checking of time played.  Hitting 50 in STO took me almost exactly 100 hours.  Of course this time was broken up and spread out, but there you have it.

In SWTOR on the other hand, I have invest 93 hours into my main, and I just dinged 31.  Incidentally, I’d show you a screenshot, but as it turns out, amond the myriad of things still bugged 4 months in is the screenshot function (sometimes it captures, sometimes it doesn’t).   I’d say I’ve put in another 50 or so hours with my alt and various piddly starter characters, which means my playing time on average has been about an hour a day.

At that rate, I most certainly am not a “loyal customer” (at least, according to EA/BW).  And all those shiny new fun goodies in the Legacy system?  Well they mostly revolve around items either required you to be 50 (another 100 hours or so?) or costing in the 500k to 1m range in credits (I currently have about 50k to my name).

In other words, 1.2 did nothing for me.  It fixed none of the bugs I was struggling with, it added no new content for me, and did nothing to enrich my game experience.  But that makes sense if I am not a loyal customer.

 

So what does that mean?  It means that I have to vote with my wallet.  When my six month sub is up in June – what am I going to do?  Keep paying for a buggy game with a snail-paced development cycle?  Keep paying for a game that considers me a second class citizen?  I don’t know.  I do have lots of friends (and family) playing, so as long as they want to play, I will too, but that’s about as far as my loyalty extends at this point.

 

So maybe EA/BW is right after all.  But its hard to think of it as anything other than a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Catching Up

So I’ve been a busy boy, between stuff at work and a week out of town and the stomach bug.  So lets do a little recap roundup shall we?

 

TOR – I have both my characters in the mid-20′s now.  I grind out about a level a week, which is pretty normal for me.   I just hit Tattoine for the first time last night and it felt…weird.   Landing on Tatooine as an Imperial Agent just felt so *not* Star Wars.  In fact, the whole Empire thing is starting to wear on me a bit.  I may have to let one of those two Imp characters lay idle for a bit so I can scratch the Republic itch.  I will wait until update 1.2 though – the Legacy system means that my Republic alts, all at level 10 on another server are basically useless to me.  And I am not running through Tython for the umpteenth time without Sprint if I can help it.

 

World of Tanks – I’ve spent the last week doing my runs on the Test Server, which has been a breath of fresh air.  The Russian players are actually quite nice, and much more skilled than their American counterparts.  I have wondered lately if I was just bad at WoT or if the teams were so bad it was hard to excel, and its definitely the latter.  In all the matches I’ve played on the test server, I’ve only once seen the team deploy poorly, without watching the map.  As one EU player said after a match, “we didn’t get beat because we made bad choices, we just got beat because they were better than us.”  I don’t get many of those matches on the regular server.   Much as patch 1.2 for TOR will turn it into what it should have been at launch, patch 7.2 will certainly do for WoT.  The new tanks are excellent, and the graphical and game updates are all well done.  The M18 Hellcat is almost all that we wanted it to be (it can’t quite hit 89 kph, and the option of the 105mm howitzer is missing).  Time to learn some Russian and make an account on their server I think.

 

Sandbox Vistas – I’ve shelved this for the time being.  The remaining options just don’t appeal to me all that much, and the announcement that Dawntide was shutting down, while somewhat expected, was ultimately very disheartening.  At this point, unless I get the itch to try Ryzom or Wurm, I’ll probably just keep a keen and interested eye on ArchAge instead.

 

Star Trek Online – Yeah, I know.  But a friend has been begging me to run some missions with him since it went F2P, and I was just a few points shy of my Akira and Nebula.  So I logged in last night and did one mission.  And I have a few things to say:  one is – who killed the graphics?  Its like a whole new engine in there, and it looks like crap, even with all the settings dialed up to max – which, by the way, is something I could not do with the original game.  Balancing that out though – praise the Alpha Quadrant, they actually fixed ground combat to make it manageable, and the skill system to make it less of a headache of WTH, and changed the progression to the point I breathed a sigh of relief.   I did one mission to finish up the jump from 19 to 20.  That same amount of skill points would have required me to do 3-4 missions when I was in the game before.   So now its time to claim that long awaited Akira and learn about that whole “duty officer” thing.  Its like the bizarre crossbreeding of TOR’s companions with your Bridge Officers and a far future version of Pokemon.  I feel like I have to catch them all!

 

And decide if I want to shell out some real bucks for that Nebula.

TOR Criticized for Being Too Realistic

A quote from Tobold, via Rowan Blaze:

“There is a sort of intellectual honesty about the evilness of the Empire, while the Republic comes over as the people who would like to be the good guys, but never really manage.”

So basically, what we are angsty about is the fact that TOR models the political and moral dichotomies present in reality too well for our taste.  We’d like our Axis a little more evil and our Allies a little more squeaky clean.

Look, this is not to point a finger, I’ve seen this reposted in lots of places from lots of people, not to mention the chatter in my own guild and on the forums.  It is simply to say that I’m not sure what people were expecting.   I had assumed we would delve into the Empire to find some of the evil was mostly a result bureaucratic or apathetic tendencies.  To quote an old movie:  ”Very few people can be totally ruthless. It isn’t easy; it takes more strength than you might believe. ”   Likewise, I had assumed that under the  guise of altruistic motives and ra-ra patriotism, we would find that the Republic was ultimately tarnished.

(Ironically, from the Empire side, this is exactly what Darth Bane noticed, /facepalmed, and created the Rule of Two for.)

As for me, I’m satisfied.  Bioware did a great job of fleshing out two imperfect civilizations, and leaving room for all of us to navigate the waters of rebellion and heroism, good and evil.  If anything, they did too good a job – my brother’s Sith Warrior had to purchase a new lightsaber this week.  Turns out he enjoyed a storyline too much, and the end result was light side points he hadn’t counted it.  Which mean that his current lightsaber was no longer usable.  In other words – what he planned for his character met reality, and the result was a less than efficient character development.

Hey wait a second…a storyline so powerful it makes us change the conceptions of our character.  Weren’t we begging for that?

Congrat’s Bioware, you trolled us hard, on a whole new plane of existence.

Coming Up For Air

With a post like that you’d think I’d be about to unveil my level 30 Jedi Guardian or something.  Sadly, no.  I have not had nearly the playtime this week that I had hoped to have had.  Heck, I even took Tuesday off work.  But there’s just too much going on in the holiday season here, I’ve had to lower my expectations.

 

You and me both, big guy.

 

(On a side note, I wonder what this means for the player base divide.  The hardcore players will cap even faster with the holidays around, while the casual players will be moving even slower…)

However, I did manage to accomplish my most basic and vague head-start goal:  Dear Emperor, please let me get off the starter planets.  And so it has been.  I have three characters clear of the morass of the first planets and with any luck will have one more done before Tuesday hits.

Just to give you the lay of the land there, I currently have a Sorcerer who will be healing for the little trio of family I play with, an Operative who will be my primary character  for guild activities, and a Sentinel for some casual solo/Republic play.

And of course, I was very excited to learn that my guild, Beskar, had been placed on the same server as the Republic Mercy Corps, meaning I will, by good fortune, be able to cross paths or at least glowsticks with GC and Rowan.

Speaking of expectations, launch has so far been the stable, queue laden thing I thought it would be.  My serious concerns – mostly revolving around graphics, were in fact handled, if in a bit of a minimalistic manner.   We did get a toggle for shadows, which helped, and its obvious that the textures got one final pass before launch.

There though, still a number of bugs revolving around guild chat and the UI, mob quirks, and the one creepy conversation bug where everyone’s eyes disapppear – which is almost as freaky as it is in Event Horizon, only with less nudity involved.

 

Bob, do we need to have another talk about keeping your eye contact above chest level?

 

Of course there were also some unexpected surprises in that region too.  As it turns out, there is actually such a thing as hot Jedi chicks, and just to help you control the urge to go Google that right now with safe search off, I’ll conclude this post with proof of that.

Basically, she has to keep a droid for a companion. Nobody else can handle the sexual tension.

How Well Will the SWTOR Launch Go? That Depends on How Tolerant You Are.

So in roughly 21 hours, the most anticipated MMO of the last [insert ridiculous hyberbole] will take its first baby steps into its launch.  Right off the bat, I applaud them by doing the sane thing and adding two days to the rolling start, to keep daily increase to the load more manageable.   And if you are worried about the stability of the servers and lag, don’t be.   I experienced very little in the way of technical difficulties when it came to ping or server crashes.   The only significant issue was the server queues, which regularly ventured into the 1 hour+ territory.   Hence my applauding the more gradual rolling start.

However, there are a number of other issues that will tax the launch experience and may leave a sour taste in people’s mouth.  Especially if they did not get a chance to peek behind the curtain of the TOR beta for themselves.

 

Like this, for example.

 

Yep, that is the level 50 endgame PvP Armor for the Sith Warrior.  With textures set to High.  Now, I’m not a graphics guy, at all (I still play the old Might and Magic games and think they look just fine), but that is on the borderline between making me throw up and making my eyes bleed.  This game has been in development for six years, with the best staff money could buy, and that’s the best they can do?  And its not just aesthetics either.

One of the first things you should do in TOR is turn all of the options for shadows OFF.  In the earlier rounds of beta, I could run it with every option maxed out, and get 30-40 fps.  If I turned shadows off.  If I didn’t, I got between 2-20 fps, depending on whether I was inside or outside.  And to be honest, even that may not help you.   In the last round of beta, there was a graphical “update” and I had to turn everything down to low to make the game playable *anywhere*.

I have been watching the launcher/patcher, and there have been small updates everyday.  My grandest hope for launch is that they fix this.  I do not want this game to be a pixelated mess when I play it, and there is no excuse for it being one.

 

And then there is this...

 

That being a stand in representative for all the promised features that will not be in at launch.  Which is all the more critically laughable given just how insanely uptight BioWare has been about the “We won’t comment or talk about it until its ready.”   Apparently, “ready” does not include actually testing the feature on your playerbase.  More on that later.

The official reason for Color Match not being in the game is that it reduces the diversity of graphical looks for armor.   One, that ranks among the most (captain) obvious statements I’ve ever heard.   Of course it does.  There is no way to fix that.  That’s the price you pay for that system.  This is why almost every MMO has gone to using a dye system, because, you know, that actually *increases* the graphical diversity.

But don’t let the stupidity lull you into complacency.  The real reason the lack of diversity is an issue in TOR is because there is already a lack of diversity. Remember all those interviews about the hundreds of armor sets in the game?  Not even close.  There are perhaps ten armor sets per class residing in the game right now.   Remember that level 50 PvP armor above?  Yeah, there are actually *6* sets of level 50 PvP armor.  Sort of.

 

This totally counts as six different armor sets.

 

Not bad for a game that’s been in development for six years right?  Good thing they pushed this game back six months a year to work on polish and making everything perfect, right?

 

Now I get that I’m harping on graphics, and I am, but that’s not all.  There is also the laundry list a mile long of unfixed bugs and known issues that were still present in the game when beta ended 8 days ago.

Things like:  ”ATI video cards may experience some graphical inconsistencies such as blank icons, blank character portraits, or flickering shadows. These may supersede the other issues listed here.”  Incidentally, I’d love to hear back from anyone with ATI cards.  I have one, and I have this issue, among others, obviously.  This has the potential to impact half the playerbase, and absolutely nothing was done about it at any time throughout beta.

Or the infamous “Login Bug.”  After you have been playing your character awhile, you may log out on your own volition, or get DC’d, and come back later to find that you can’t access your character.  At all.  It will try to load it, but fail.  Players found a workaround in that they could “unfreeze” a character by making a new character.  This was rough, especially if you had already used all the character slots on your server.   Someone eventually found you could create a character on any server and get the same result, which gave everyone some breathing room, but here’s the kicker:  I don’t know anyone who avoided this bug in beta.  It was pretty much universal – and yet BioWare never even publicly aknowledged that it was a bug or that they were working on it.  It never appeared in the list of known issues, and no official workaround was ever offered.

Of course, there were also the humorous things.  Players, in protest, began to report that chairs were not interact-able objects in the game as a “bug.”  BioWare’s response was to list it as a non-issue, stating:  ”Some chairs and benches cannot be interacted with.”  Some is actually – all.  I have heard that you’re captains chair in the ship is usable now, which puts TOR about six months ahead of STO on the development curve.  Not that that is anything to brag about.

 

TOR: Winning the arm(chair)s race.

 

So you may read this post and think all of that is fine, and that you can live with it.   And honestly?  I can too.  But it frustrates me to no end.  I mentioned earlier about BioWare’s policy of not talking about things until they were “ready.”  I think all of us in our right mind believed that meant that these features actually, you know, worked.  In real life.  Instead, BioWare was talking about things as soon as they were done with them on the drawing board. 

Perhaps because of this, it has come as a shock to those of us who came into testing later to learn that just over a year ago, there was no testing being done.  Yep, that’s right.  TOR was advertising a launch 4-6 months from when they first began beta testing.   After testing 3 months, there was apparently an “oh s—” moment, because then launch was backed up another 4 months.  But apparently it wasn’t enough of a n “oh s—” moment because then it was back up another 2 months.  And apparently that didn’t do the trick either, so it was backed up for another….well, we will never know the answer to that one, because EA stepped in at the point and told them they could have 1 more month, and that was it.

Now that process in and of itself is not disturbing.  Games get backed up all the time, and this is a first time MMO developer.  What is disturbing is that BioWare does not seem to be learning from its mistakes.  Player feedback is undervalued, testing cycles are taking longer than they should, and there is a clear refusal to look beyond their four walls to learn from mistakes that other MMO’s have made.   The latter has admittedly been a mixed bag – bringing us some innovations we have not otherwise seen in MMO’s, such as the Mod system in place for weapons and armor, and some of the innovations in crafting, as well as the stubborn clinging to storyline as the grand central feature.  But at times it crosses the fence from being a good creativity jolt to being a sort of unassailable dogma.   At some point in the midst of an ongoing issue, BioWare is going to have to look to its peers for support and solutions.   You can’t innovate everything, all the time.

 

Anyway, I ramble on.  In conclusion – launch is probably going to be fine overall.  It will try the patience of people like me who know there are things out there that aren’t being handled as well as  they could be, and that could create issues in retaining subscribers further down the line.   But I, like you, will be perched over my computer tomorrow at 7:00am CST, waiting for that grey play button to go gold.

Well, that didn’t take long.

I got my first SWTOR fishing attempt today.  Do I get a prize for that or something?

SWTOR Beta: Impressions a la Holonet

As with Rift,  I can’t – won’t – do a review until the game itself it out.  But I can and should now give you my impressions of the game, while the getting is hot.  And I think I may have a little extra insight, because I’ve been in the game for more than just a weekend or two.  Dig?

So this will follow the outline that BioWare themselves gave us via the Holonet, so I can comment on each of the things that BioWare themselves wants us to look at in this game.  In doing so, I think I hit everything you will want to know as well, while steering clear of the same-old, same-old.

First off, though, a word about BioWare:

BioWare is that really smart kid you know off that can make homework disappear, handle advanced equations, never takes notes, and trips frequently over his own shoelaces.  There are some things that they do that are really visionary and are game-changers.   For example, when everyone asked what the TOR endgame was, BioWare said “roll another character.”  And we raged and banged our heads on the wall and everything else.  But now I think many of us are eating humble pie.  I most recently got a trooper to level 11 (I am capping myself to that general level in Beta, for a lot of reasons), partly because this is a class I had zero interest in.  By the time I finished the starter world story arc, I realized that I would play a character whose only ability was Paper/Rock/Scissors just so I could unravel the rest of the story line.  Yes, BioWare is causing us all to go home and rethink our (MMO) lives (see what I did there?).

But this same company BioWare, for all its brilliance has also done some ultra dumb stuff.  Like originally wanting to have Jedi “Wizards” in the game.  And thinking that a tunnel shooter was going to cut it.  And forbidding us from playing really awesome aliens – even though the alien characters have been fully modeled and rendered already and there is no reason not to.  And thinking that they can put out one new build a month and have the game ready in time.  And talking about how we won’t need appearance slots because they have this totally awesome new system to let us a keep the same look for all 50 levels(!)…that only works on rare items (that you won’t get for the first 10 levels…). And limiting what weapons we can and can not carry, because while every John Doe NPC trooper in the game wields a vibrosword for close combat, there is no way in hell that your Trooper will ever touch one.

Blasters Only. No Melee Allowed.

So thank you BioWare, for providing us with a cool product.  Now tie your F-ing shoes, before I cancel my preorder from sheer frustration.

Advanced Classes.  Bioware just may be the first MMO ever to get this down right.  The Might and Magic franchise had some hits and misses with it (but mostly hits), and Everquest II tried it and apparently failed miserably (by the time I got into the game, the feature was gone).   But here it works and works well.  It allows the classes more survivability at lower levels by breaking molds – ranged characters still have a few short range whacks, and vice versa, and gives you time to really figure out just *how* you want to play the class.  And admirable attempts have been made and are being made to keep good balance in the game.   The only really worry here is that BioWare is already flirting with PvP more than it should, and without fail, where developers have made changes to silence the QQ crying of PvPers, there follows shortly thereafter a draft in the room because of the exodus of RP and PvE players.

There is also a nice incentive to try all the advanced classes, using both sides.  The mirror system, paired with the fact that stories are told by class and not advanced class, means that you could play a dual-wielding Jedi Knight on one side, and then get an all new story while keeping the mechanics fresh by hopping over and playing a Sith Juggernaut.  I believe the word I’m looking for here is synchronicity, and TOR has it.  Speaking of which, I’d tell you what my favorite classes are, but I don’t have one.  I love them all, even the ones I didn’t think I’d be playing.   My only standout point would be this:  using cover takes a good 10-12 levels to get use to,and to learn how to use to its full potential.  And when not to use to its full potential. So don’t give up on it at first, because it takes some time to really appreciate what it offers.

Companions.  Its a pet.  I don’t care what BioWare attempts to do to spin this one.   Its a pet.  That said – I don’t have any problem with it.  Hell, most Rift builds have a pet these days.  Why not push the envelope and make lots of pets for us all to collect…hey wait a minute…

Still, a great idea.  And gaining affection is not too onerous.  I still feel like I can play the character as I want to play them, and not worry too much about “picking the right answer” as I often did in the original KotOR series.  Plus, it really lets you play around with them, as they do gain abilities as you go, and can often function in more than one role.  T7 for example, the first Jedi Knight companion, starts out with a tanking stance, but around level 11, gains a DPS stance as well.  I do wish there was more interaction here, but its a nice side-quest/mini-game vibe that I will definitely be looking into, as your affection rating unlocks quests and conversations with the companion.

Crew Skills.  Its not the best system ever invented.  And its very confusing at times to know what you should be picking with any given skill.  Bu its nice in that it can tempt even non-crafters with some fun interaction and missions.  And it is complex and varied enough to reward deep crafters and give them lots of reasons to interact and make the best that they can make.  Basically, while you still have to make a ton of any given item to level up, BioWare took the edge off of that grind by making the breakdown process of those items the way to earn the rare schematics.  So if you are into making heavy armor belts, make enough of them, and you will learn to make a better one.  And eventually, a best one.  Perhaps the coolest is the Biochem investiture, which eventually allows you to unlock medkits that are reusable!   But this also means that crafters will tend to specialize – there is only so much money and time, so if you want to learn to make really awesome gloves, you may have to forgo really awesome boots.  This is great for the economy, and for crafters.

Flashpoints.  I can’t say enough good things about these.  Remember back in the day, when you would gather your friends, some soda and snacks, and run an old school pen and paper RPG?  And the GM would have that adventure book and put your through a scenario?  This feels exactly like that.  And BioWare is no slouch GM either.  You get some nice story touches, some solid loot, and some fun tactical gameplay.  And you can run them again and again if you like, to farm loot, social points, light side/dark side points…the whole nine yards.  Heck, go back with a companion ten levels later and try it solo if you like.   Basically, yeah, its dungeons…but dungeons never felt so good…

The rest of the stuff – Guilds, Operations, Warzones, and Space Combat, I have no tried yet.  I will be playing some Warzones and try to get some Guild information together in the next go around.  However, because of my self-imposed restrictions, I probably will not be in a position to comment on Operations.  Space Combat is a  toss up, but I have a feeling you will see something on it in the next week as well.

That’s all for now.  If things are quiet, its either because I’m playing and having a great time, or I’m so pissed that the egghead is double-checking his advanced history assignment while the basic math assignment lies untouched gathering dust.  ::sigh::

TOR Gets A Release Date

Quietest train I ever heard.

Only thing I can say is that this has EA written all over it. Stephen Reid losing his mind in the release date speculation thread less than a week before the grand announcement? Not likely.

BW wanted to move back into 2012, EA said “hell no” and this was the compromise. A compromise that presents its own set of challenges.

One is logistics. UPS, FedEX, USPS…all logjammed with presents a few days before Christmas – and now we are going to add 500k+ (1m+? 2m+?) units of TOR to the load? Yeah, good luck with getting your box on time.

Two is support. You want those first couple of weeks to be spotless. You need a full team on hand to handle all the crap that crops up. But you are not going to have that.

And that is where BioWare’s lack of experience in this process will come back to bite them in the hindquarters. Because of their refusal to work with their customer base, listen to appropriate feedback, and at times combatative (even belligerent) attitude about “their” game (and they are quite insistent about that, despite years of industry evidence otherwise…I’m lookin’ at you Brad McQuaid) – all of that combines to give the customer base little trust of BioWare as a developer. Blizzard, Trion, and other successful companies have earned themselves some breathing room because of their track record and their ability to stay on top of things. As I saw someone noting this week, Blizzard can wreck and entire character class and people will yell, but they won’t leave (or they will leave and come back). Trion can wreck something and have a solution in place 48 hours later, and people have come to know and trust that.

Does anyone trust BioWare at this point?

I get that we were shooting for the “holiday season” but we are so deep up in the nose of the holiday season that not even a Neti Pot of the Ancients +5 is gonna dislodge us.

Wow.

 

So, we are (finally) getting an announcement about and comprehensive FAQ regarding Beta Testing weekends…

 

a)  After one has already happened

b) After you’ve decided to put them on indefinite hiatus

c) After you reveal (inadvertently?) that you don’t patch the client but require clean installs with every update

 

and, for good measure, after you…

 

d) Admit that the first one was a failure

 

Two thumbs up Bioware.  You have really outdone yourselves this time.  I haven’t seen anyone do this awesome a hack job on themselves since Alganon imploded in a disturbingly catastrophic manner.  For a company that swears up and down that they dead set against giving bad or incorrect information and releasing a quality product, you are doing a great job at failing the former and making people twitchingly nervous about the latter.

 

I was going to insert an epic fail demotivator, but I couldn’t find one epic enough.

 

Great Quote

Credit where credit is due.  I have blasted TOR on numerous occasions, but they do get some things right, and they do have some smart people working for them.  Case in point:  Emmanuel Lusinchi…

 

“We find that any strategy game is interesting when people choose a role…and need to fulfill that role for the other players.  So not everyone is just doing damage.  But as a player, your class has a huge spectrum of what it can do.”

 

First of all, lets just call it right here:  he is absolutely right.  If the unholy trinity of MMO’s ever does disappear, there will be something needed to replace it.  And that is due to the underlying principle that Mr. Lusinchi gets that I think many developers don’t seem to understand:  MMO’s are at their heart a strategy game.

 

That said…it’s really time to change that trinity thing.  Seriously.