I kinda just creeped across the line last week without a whole lot of fanfare.  And then it was this week before I had enough cash to train the crew and buy the ammo (end game ammo is *expensive*).    I chose the US line for the speed of the heavies, allowing me to redeploy early and often to meet changes in the battle line, and also because the US is home to the best gun in the game, the 155mm T7.  Matching the highest damage output with the best penetration available means basically one thing:  it is rare that one of my shells is deflected or I hear the disappointing “dink” sound of a shell that doesn’t get through the enemies armor.

Its also a good choice because of the upcoming changes in the .7.2 patch.  Essentially, the top two American tanks will change.  The old tier 9, the T34, will be moved to a premium tank and anyone with one of those bad boys gets it for free.  I have one so I will be getting one, and of course from here on out, it will be my primary bread winner.

This tank though, the T30, will move to become the new top tier of the US tank destroyer “b” (turreted) line.  So owners of it will keep this max tier TD and also get a copy of the new tier 10 heavy that will replace it, the T110.  With that change, I will have a max tier tank in every category except artillery…which to be honest, I’m not much interested in.

In fact, there is little I’m interested in now, having accomplished this.  I intend to dink around with some low levels, but in truth, I’m waiting mostly for historical matches and I’ve also begun looking into active Clans in the ongoing Clan Wars metagame that accompanies World of Tanks.  Basically, my ignore list from random matches is so long, its depressing.  I’m ready, not so much for challenging foes, but for teammates who actually do basic things like: look at the map, understand simple tactics, and who know how to use their tank to its fullest affect.

Anyway, I’m laid up with a knee injury at the moment (apparently playing indoor soccer on a basketball court can lead to injuries…who knew?) so my gaming interest and ability is limited.  That said, I have a few more words to say about TOR and hope to have them up later this week.

Til then…happy gaming!

“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.

1) FunCom will be FunCom…they will release a conceptually brilliant game long before it is ready, and oblivious to whether or not they have enabled their target audience to consume it (think system requirements re: AoC at its launch).

2) Guild Wars will ship to much acclaim and joy, and find its niche…and then promptly fall off the radar, as people complete is PvE campaign in the course of a week and are left with nothing but hardcore PvP or the next $50 box drop.

3) World of Warplanes Beta will come winging our way at some point during the year.  My guess is that it will not be nearly the success that World of Tanks has been.  Primarily because the inclusion of joystick support indicates that the basic keyboard controls are going to be awkward, and lets face it, that’s what most people use.  Again..that whole “know your target audience” mentality.

And then there is stuff that is less obvious.  And that is the stuff that I will really judge myself on predicting, because its a little tougher.

1) Dawntide may not survive another year.  After previously announcing plans for a launch and unveiling payment plans, Dawntide had to do a quick E-brake 180 when they lost funding.  They reaquired funding almost immidiately, and promised an updated release date within three weeks time.  Two months later, the big news was instead that the whole world was coming down for a complete redesign/regraphic-ing (is that a word?).  That smacks of desperation or fear, one of the two.  One of the GM’s in the forum is on record as saying he believes a new launch will come late in the year, perhaps around August, but there is simply no  good way to tell at this point.

On the other hand,  I could be wrong.  The redesign of the world could indicate an influx of funding allowing them to modernize and fully realize the game.  And in this case, I truly hope I’m wrong.  The innovations present in the game are wonderful, and I’d like to see it make some inroads.

2) Sony will find a new flagship.  They have to, right?  I’m shocked that Everquest 3  took so long to get off the ground, even in whispered rumor form.  To be the advance they want it to be will require a full development cycle, which means we are looking at another 4 years probably before it hits.  So part B is this: I fully expect Sony to pick up distribution rights to ArchAge Online.  They have shown no qualms about bringing other people’s developments into their fold (Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea).  Pairing this with a PlanetSide 2 launch would mean fresh blood in the Sci Fi and Fantasy domains.  That’s not to say that ArchAge comes out way in 2012, but I think it will find a home in this time period (call that part C if you will)

3)  Titan will lose its codename and we will began to get some information on it.  Quite frankly, my belief is that if you’ve been holding it in your backpocket for over four years, without even giving a hint of what it is, its just as likely rotten eggs as it is a hit.   But I’ll be curious to see what’s been rattling around in the heads of Blizzard and whether or not this is the time to unveil it.

In the most and least categories:

My most anticipated game is…I don’t have one.  Honestly, I don’t.  I’d say Secret World, but I’m pretty sure its gonna flop like a drunk noob off the high dive platform.  I’m honestly not excited about anything that is to come this year.  So, I guess the challenge is to see what does finally get me excited.

My least anticipated game is…Guild Wars 2.  I’m glad that everyone is nuts over it, but I honestly do not see the draw.  The art direction in the first one and from what I’ve seen in this one, is ugly to my eye.  Guild Wars is honestly the only game I’ve quit playing because I wanted to claw my eyeballs out just looking at the screen.  Does that make me weird?  You bet it does.

The game everyone is excited about that will actually be horrible…that’s gotta be WildStar.  It looks like Champions Online’s graphically impaired World of Warcraft wannabe offspring.  Reminds me a bit of Alganon, which, as we all know, had great success in the MMO world.

Dual of the mini Mecha MMO’s.  Which will win my affection:  Hawken or Mechwarrior Online?  Personally I’m leaning Mechwarrior myself, but the decision to continue a timeline that was already beyond salvage is humorous.  And I could see it being neither.  When I think mecha I think strategic.  I do not think super-action fest.  Which is what both of these games seem like they may be, at first blush.  Which means that the dark horse alternate candidate in this race may actually be the wildly-innacurately name Gratuitous Tank Battles.  Which is actually Gratuitous Mecha Battles…that also happen to have some Tanks in them.   Seriously…are we that desperate to cash in on the World of Tanks fanbase?

1.  We will finally get some news about the World of Darkness MMO from CCP /White Wolf…lets add a part B  to this that reinforces my point - we won’t see a beta for this in 2011.

Not only was there absolutely no more information, the website I linked was not updated at all, and so we clearly did not see a beta for it either.  CCP’s struggles this year have been well documented.   As a gamer, former Atlanta resident, and guy who pulled every card he could trying to get in the door at White Wolf years and years ago, it saddens me to see that company down in the dirt, and its IP virtually untouched.  And its a huge loss for CCP, in a time when wizards and werewolves and vampires and such have never been more popular or mainstream.   I’m not surprised the MMO is not out, but I am shocked that no move has  been made to profit from the IP.  Heck, even a half lame Facebook game would have generated some revenue at this point.  +1 for me.

2.   2011 will show a decline in the number of WoW subscriptions.

On target.  A 2 million subber drop.  This was of course, part of a series of posts and thoughts that Cataclysm would be, not a giant failure, but simply the high water mark of the game.  And so far that has been very true.  +1 for me.

3.  Star Wars: The Old Republic will launch in April.

Missed it by a mile.  But we all knew that.  A month or so after writing this we got the unofficial word that TOR was definitely not delayed, since no release had ever been announced.  And the thread with the spring release date disappeared into the ether.  With all we know now, no amount of cash recoup by launching early would have saved the game if they had launched in April.  In fact, there’s good evidence that the game was nowhere close to being done at that point.  TOR has had a reasonably successful launch and (so far) first month, but its hard to shake the feeling that for a project in development for six years, with the resources they had at their fingertips, that it falls short of what it could have been.

4.  Vanguard will go F2P.  Okay, this is more of a hope than a prediction…I think that the addition of DCUO to the Station lineup will probably help make this possible.

You can maybe score this one as a halfway.  The success of DCUO’s transition to F2P, as well as EQII, have Sony clearly interested in investing a bit in Vanguard.  New updates are incoming, and the general feeling is that its only a matter of time before the game transitions.  But…it didn’t happen in 2011, so no love for me.

5.  Cryptic Studios will finally reveal what this is.  Because its copyright 2007, and it makes me itch.

Not only did they not reveal what it is, they basically went belly up and the concept art, and indeed the entire website, that the link pointed to last year, no longer exist.  I still believe it was a deal with Chaosium to produce an official Cthulhu MMO, for a number of reasons.  At this point though, its likely that we will never know.

So there you go, 2 out of 5 again.  I am nothing if not consistent…at least as far as my predictions are concerned.  On to the other 2011 thoughts I had:

My most anticipated release was a toss up between Rift and TOR.  I opted to pass on the Rift release, only for the one reason that I had played it so much in Beta that I was tuckered out.  I came into it a few months later and it became the first, and so far only, MMO that I have ever capped in.  Unless you count WoT.  TOR’s launch I was there for in the sense that I had a preorder and was in from day one.  But in truth, I have played precious little of it due to real life complications.  My highest character sits still at level 18.  So I guess it really was a toss up after all.

My least anticipated release was DCUO and that was pretty much true.  I am already 100% on board with what my least anticipated will be for next year too.  Seems I have a keener eye for what I don’t like than what I do like.  But you may have already noticed that about me.

My most desired Beta was TOR.  I got in, but so late in the process I really hate to count it as being in Beta.  :-p

My most desired industry change was to create something between F2P and $15 a month.   Thought there have been some nice transitions in the last year, I’m still waiting for that change.  The truth is that most of the F2P models leave out the part of the game that would make it fun for me (ability to have alts, housing, flexibility in character building) and so I never explore the F2P option, so they never have a chance to sell me on other things.  As successful as F2P has been…it missed the boat somewhere along the line.

Tomorrow I’ll take a look at 2012 and what is to come.

World of Tanks, of course, gave us a tank.  Well, will give us a tank when they finally get update .7.1 up and running here in North America.  Even cooler is that its a tank that I had wanted to buy anyway:  the British Mark VII Tetrarch!

Coming Soon (TM) to a Battlefield Near You

Eve Online, perhaps reflecting the nature of commercial Christmas here in America (ie, EARLY) , was giving presents to active accounts or resubs, so long as you claimed your gift by the 21st of December.  You know, before anyone could buy you a Time Code or something.  The gifts were so good, I almost took them up on the 60-day resub option just to stock my hanger.  Choices included actual real, functional, in game ships (unlike years past), cleverly named groupings of high quality ammunition/fuel/items, or even Aurum, their version of in game money.   All in all, a huge step up for them from previous gifts.

BY THE 21st! OR IT WILL SPOIL!

But perhaps the most generous one that I encountered was from Iron Grip: Marauders.  In true seasonal fashion, unlike CCP, IG:M gave out Advent gifts every day of Advent.  Technically you had to have Gems, their real world currency buy in, to open the gift packs, but since they also give you a couple of gems at each level up, I was actually able to open most of them without actually having spent money on the game.  And the gifts in the packs were very generous and in every case worth far more than what you paid to open them.  I have now four licensed premium units that I would otherwise not have access to, as well as heaping mounds of gold and iron (their in game currency).   Then they also dropped a New Years gift pack.  And on top of that, they were giving a 20% discount on their Gem buying options.  They said this would end on January 2nd, but as of this morning, the deal still exists, and I suspect it will continue through Epiphany (Jan. 6th) given how they have celebrated the season thus far.

Do not shake. Live ordinance is present.

Also, in an unintentional effort to make this blog more sexy, I have to point out that IG:M also gifted its players with Christmas Elves of a more adult fashion.  I’ll post the most appropriately attired here, which should serve as an indicator of how the rest of the elves were clothed (or not clothed).

Twelve Days of Cleavage

Astute readers will not this indicates a change in stance from previous posts…and I don’t mean regarding sexiness – get your head out of the gutter.

So, all in all, I was impressed with what I saw out there.  My real question for next year is if we will see companies step up their generosity again, giving similar tangible gifts next year, or if this was a one time deal, a rare year where everyone was feeling generous…or perhaps just feeling some market pressure.  Either way, we, the players, came out the winners.

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.

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.

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::

Anyway, I was checking out The Ancient Gaming Noobs 2011 MMO hindsight post and followed the linkage to BioBreak’s “Six Steps SOE Needs To Take…OR ELSE” post.  And it was really good.  And so I recommend it to you and I have a few comments.

My first comment is that on Syp’s list, it looks like SOE has already taken steps towards two of them.  # 3 (Do F2P right) is apparently on the horizon, as every indication is that Vanguard will finally go F2P in the coming year – and with new content to boot.  But the key here is that they seem to be ramping up into it rather than doing it yesterday.  And I think it will be a great move.  Vanguard still looks very pretty, and at this point, is now playable on many, many, many more systems than it was playable on when it was launched…what, almost 5 years ago?  And there is a host of untapped content there.  Not to mention some of the conventions that we now expect (healers who melee to heal) are ones that Vanguard helped pioneer.  Plus, flying mounts are already in the game.  And #4 on the list (Keep experimenting with EQ) is also a go, with EQ getting its new expansion and an overhaul of the UI to bring it into (almost) modern paradigms.  Speaking of which – that may be one thing that gets *me* to try EQ again.  I’ve romped around in the original Norrath a grand total of two months, despite many months of Station Passes over the years, mainly because I had difficulty doing anything other than wandering around, killing the occasional rabbit (it could be said that this is not far from the original game’s content…).

My second comment is that, while I wholly agree with #5 (Acquire an Existing Franchise), I’m not sure what they have to choose from.  To plug a favorite here, ArchAge is still looking for a North American publisher…but do you want to acquire a triple A fantasy MMO when that is what you are currently developing yourself?  Should SOE buy out the troubled EVE Online (at least then crazy changes to the game would be less unexpected, right)?  The Repopulation, when you are almost done with PlanetSide 2? What other options are there?

My final comment is that I wholly disagree with #6 (Corner the Kids Market).  My son is six, and has played the tar out of Clone Wars Adventures.  And do you know what he is eyeballing now?  The Old Republic.  I had to fight him for playing time on the Beta Weekend.  Yeah, I know, I thought that was too young myself, until I remembered that at age seven, I was comfortably ensconced in my dad’s swivel chair, at his desk, “engaging in tactical level combat on the Russian Front.”   The problem is that IP’s are static, for the most part, but kids are dynamic – that is, they grow up.

What SOE really needs is to pioneer an intermediate step between Free Realms and WoW.  I know we all think WoW is simple – and it is – but that is knowledge earned after many years of MMO inundation that our kids don’t have.  I played a lot of tactical combat, and it was fun, but to be blunt, I sucked at the game.  The only time I ever won was when I used the editing button to swap my stack of 9 T-26‘s for a stack of 9 IS-3‘s…in a mid-war campaign.  For the curious, yes, my dad was pissed…and he still almost won.

Seems legit.

So what if instead we looked at something even more simple.  Something without using a full set of multiple toolbars.  Something where the entire game could be played with just the mouse and WASD.   My son is doing fine in starter areas because he can right click to use the base attack – but after a few levels, everything falls apart because he has to leave WASD to find 1-whatever, and then jump back again.  Left click = talk or attack depending on the mobs status.  Right click is your block (tanks) or special move (heal).  Both buttons at once charges your special meter, or is a third attack?  Leave out the “W” and make “S” for forward movement.  Adopt Guild War’s paradigm of only 20 levels, with each expansion being a self contained storyline.

In any case, cool stuff.  H/T to Bio Break / Syp.