Catching Up

Lots of newsworthy events this week.

Minecraft Beta 1.4 is out and has cookies and wolves. Beds will now your spawn point too. This will be great for going on long distance exploration where I can setup a base camp and not have to worry about getting killed and going all the way back to the original spawn point of the world.

Cryptic brought the Foundry online. The launch seems to have gone smoothly, and players are busily remaking old mission from the beta on Tribble as well as making new missions. The Delta Flyer crafting mission is also up and involves a daily mission to scan anomalies in a shuttle.

Rift’s patch 1.1 is out and adds a ton of fixes plus the River of Souls event. One of the great quality of life updates is separating the cool down on potions by type, so now I don’t have to worry about throwing an explosive philter and locking myself out of using a healing potion for the next two minutes.

One the Xbox side of things, there’s new DLC for Mass Effect 2, apparently this is the last bit of content before Mass Effect 3 comes out. I can’t image the new content tops lair of the Shadow Broker, but anything the puts me back in the ME universe is good fun.

Lots of stuff for me to play this weekend, too bad it’s not a three day holiday weekend.

Oh Yeah, I have Roles

Rift has required me to think a bit differently about the characters I play.

In most games, I pick a class and roll a character. That combination combines in my head as I play and my character ends up developing a personality and backstory of which the class is an integral part. Even in Champions, which doesn’t have a class system, I usually have a build or theme in mind for a character which becomes a part of that character’s identity.

So coming to Rift, I had the same mindset where I identified my Mage character with his initial Soul, which was Stormcaller. This kept me from really getting the Soul/Role system.

What finally clued me in to it was watching a Cleric steamroll a mob camp that I’d been carefully working around the edges of with my Mage. I’m not sure what soul combination the player was using but they were at least using Druid since there was a Fae trailing along healing them. I watched the player run into the center of the camp and gather up five mobs and proceed to melee the whole group while their pet healed them. As a Mage, there was no way I could do that. Or at least not as a Stormcaller. I had been trying to pick off mobs from the edges of the camp so I could clear a path to a named mob I needed for a quest, so of course I was a little upset when this Cleric came charging in, but that turned to jealousy while I watched him clear the camp and survive.

Then the light bulb came on. I could do that to, even if not exactly the same way.

My original role has most of its points in Stormcaller, with a few points in Dominator for better crowd control duration and a few in Elementalist for the basic pet and a convert charge to mana ability. I still had two roles unlocked that I hadn’t done anything with, and it dawned on me that I had tons of other options I could try out to see if I could find a more survivable solo PvE build.

I just had to mentally separate my character from the build I had been using from levels 1 to 40-something.

As I mentioned during my first try at this, I initially put almost all of my points in Elementalist. That build was much more survivable (after I remembered to train up all the new abilities I’d unlocked), but depending so heavily on my pet was not as much fun as slinging lightning.

What I really needed to do was see if I could split my points between Stormcaller and Elementalist enough that I could get the Greater Earth Elemental tanking pet and still keep my beloved Lightning Storm from the Stormcaller soul. Turns out it was much easier to split that way than I expected. I ended up with a new build split 33/22 between Stormcaller and Elementalist (with 3 points in Dominator). I was able to get deep enough into both soul trees to get all of the abilities I wanted, largely because I found I’d put a lot of points into Stormcaller water spells which I don’t use much. Honestly, when I originally leveled, I got to the point where I was just putting points into Stormcaller out of habit and a fuzzy goal of trying to get to the 51 point spell.

This new build is a lot more fun. Now don’t have to drink after or use potions in every fight, I can handle multiple adds, and I’m no longer suffering from Cleric-envy.

The thing I just have to remember is my character is a Mage not a Stormcaller. I’ve got three builds I can setup for different purposes and there’s a four one I can unlock once I have the platinum.

By the way, learning a new build is something else that I’ve had to get used to doing. I put a healing build using Chloromancer and Warlock build together and realized I’d need groups to practice on. I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to take it into a dungeon until I knew better what I was doing. Maybe a guild run would be okay, but jumping into open Rift groups seemed like a better route. There’s a lot more of those around, they’re mostly open groups, and there’s usually a lot going on, especially on the big invasion bosses, so that any screw ups would involve a minimum amount of hassle.

Interest and Incentive

After the Cloaked Intentions Featured Episodes finished most of my interest in playing STO faded. I did manage to log in enough to finish the FE on both alts, but felt like more of a chore to do than a joy. At least to login and get started, I always have fun once I’m actually playing. It just seems to take a lot to overcome the gravitational force that the Rift icon exerts on my mouse pointer.

Saturday though, I had no problems playing for a couple of hours. I logged in to do the shuttle daily as I work towards crafting my very own Delta Flier (daily has to be done ten times and each time requires twelve anomalies scanned). But after I’d finished, I ended up running quite a few other missions and taking a tour of Longasc’s TOS ship interior.

A quick side note: Cryptic did an amazing job with the TOS interior. I’m not much of a TOS fan really, I used to watch the occasional rerun growing up but it wasn’t until TNG that I became a fan.

So where did this resurgent interest in playing STO come from? I bought the Enterprise Owners Manual on Friday from a Borders that’s going out of business. Reading it peaked my Trek interest and motivated me to play. The same thing happens after watching one of the movies or TV episodes or reading the novels. I guess that’s one of the benefits of using an existing IP. Just imagine if there was a new TV series. Even if it wasn’t tied directly to the game, I can imagine a lot of fans logging in to play after watching episodes just because they want to stay in the Trek universe longer.

It’s old news now, but in the latest Engineering Report, Dan Stahl stated the teams intent to change their schedule and possibly staff up more in order to do nine or ten Featured Episodes a year instead of five like they previously planned. I’d say that’s ah excellent indicator of how popular the FE’s are and how much interest in the game they generate. Hopefully the STO team is given the resources to make it so.

Foundry!!!!!!!!!

Today’s is supposed to be the big day! Foundry day! According to Dan Stahl, the Foundry has been on Holodeck (the live server) in internal testing for a few days. I’ve been keeping an eye in the Dev Tracker over the weekend and this morning but no mention of when it’s supposed to be activated. Of course Cryptic is a few timezones behind me, so their Monday hasn’t really started yet.

I haven’t said much about the Foundry, but I am looking forward to making some missions. I played with the Foundry a bit on Tribble a few months ago, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time there only to have to recreate missions on Holodeck. I’m also excited to see some of the great content that people have been producing on Tribble get remade on Holodeck and played by a wider audience.

Update: I heard on Twitter from @StarbaseUGC that the Foundry goes live at 10 AM PDT (which is GMT-7).

Update 2: As of 1:18 EDT (GMT-4) Foundry is live! Hopefully it’s a smooth and easy day for the STO servers. Dan Stahl has posted an FAQ.

DAW: Notch and Mojang

I wanted to wrap up my Developer Appreciation Week posts by sending a heart felt thanks to Markus “Notch” Persson and the rest of the team at Mojang: Daniel Frisk, Daniel Kaplan, Jakob Porser, Jens Bergensten, Junkboy, Carl Manneh, and Tobias Mollstam.

Notch started out developing Minecraft as a one-man shop. Like most developers he was not too concerned about the business aspects of things and very open about his sales and what he was working on. When Minecraft’s popularity exploded, he didn’t change that. He started a company and hired a small staff to help. This is the point where Notch could easily have pulled back from the community but hasn’t.

The entire Mojang team is on Twitter, check out Daniel Kaplan’s Mojang list to see the public company discussions. Notch still keeps up on his blog, although he did have to turn off comments (no loss there given some of the commenters that I read), and the stats page is still ticking off registered users and sales. He’s shown up on Reddit a few times, and is active with the Minecraft player community on Twitter. Just last week, I highlighted some posts from Jens about wolves, and several recent features like beds and cake have come about from interactions with the player community.

As much as I enjoy playing Minecraft, seeing how Markus has handled his success has been nearly as interesting. Go watch the twenty minute short documentary if you want to see what I mean.

Thanks Notch!

DAW: The Star Trek Online Team

Today’s appreciation goes out to the entire Star Trek Online team at Cryptic Studios.

Of all of the MMOs I’ve played, past and present, I can’t think of any that hold a candle to Daniel Stahl’s team when it comes to communication and engagement with the community and transparency into the development process. The amount of engagement by the designers and developers has truly been impressive, and has been a major part of the growing success of the game.

Every month there’s an Ask Cryptic post answering community questions. There’s the Executive Producer’s Engineering Report where we get a detailed look at what issues are in testing, what’s being investigated, what’s in development, and what’s in the design stages. There’s a deployment calendar showing launch windows for new content and features.

Beyond the regular structured feedback, there are a dozen posts nearly every weekday from the team. Some of that is from the Community Management team, but there’s a lot more activity from the designers and developers than I’ve seen for any other game I’ve played. There are usually daily posts from Stahl, Gozer, Heretic, Zeronius Rex, Mapolis, and Captain Logan, not to mention the community wranglers Wishstone and Stormshade.

Even outside of the company’s own communication channels, the STO team has been very generous with their time doing interviews with many of the podcasts dedicated to the game.

So, I huge thank you’s to the entire team for all of the work they’ve into the game and for all of the time and energy they’ve invested with the player community. I for one am very very grateful.

DAW: Trion

Thanks Trion!

I want to kick of Developer Appreciation Week by thanking all of the programmers, artists, and designers at Trion that worked their butts off for the last few years to bring us Rift. Thanks to all of you for showing gamers what happens when a developer get’s enough time and money to do things right. I hope you’re all enjoying some time off, kicking back with a beer or three, and recharging those mental batteries.

 

Author’s Note: So…. communication… um yeah.  I should, may, probably will get back to my theme tomorrow, but it ain’t happening tonight. See I thought I had an idea that I wanted to use regarding Trion and Rift, but as I sat down tonight and started working I realized that what I actually wanted to say wasn’t what I thought I was going to say yesterday. I got a little frustrated and thought about skipping it altogether, but that’s stupid and goes a bit against the spirit of what this week’s about. Instead, I decided to just go with it.

DAW Theme is Communication

Before I start with my Developer Appreciation Week posts tomorrow, I wanted to mention this year’s theme: communication.

In my opinion, it’s one of the things that makes a good game great, and it’s not something that a lot of developers excel at. So I think it’s important to highlight some developers (I have three in mind) that have impressed me with their ability to communicate and respond to players.

For more on DAW check out Scary’s site.

Rift Weekend

It was a productive weekend for me, at least in Rift. Kae reached level 40 and splurged on a new mount, the Nimble Silver Eldritch Steed, which gives a nice 90% increase to movement. It looks like a very uncomfortable to ride though and sounds a little clanky too.

I also finally got around to trying out some alternate roles. My main build so far has been a Stormcaller/Dominator/Elementalist with nearly all of the points in Stormcaller. It’s been a lot of fun, but I’ve been feeling like I’m missing out on a part of the game by not trying out some other roles.

Since I’ve mostly been soloing lately, I decided to start easy and try out an alternate soloing build, so I focused most of my points on Elementalist. I added Dominator to that with just a few points to buff up Transmogrify (I love being able to turn mobs into squirrels) and Pyromancer with zero points. Once I had my action bars set, I headed out and proceeded to get killed multiple times.

At first I was thinking that maybe Elementalist was just gimped, then I noticed that the Greater Earth Elemental I summoned was lower level than the Lesser Earth Elemental that I normally use in my Stormcaller build. Doh! So… I went back to Meridian and trained up the new skills I’d acquired.

The second attempt to try out my Elementalist build worked much better, go figure, and I used it for a couple hours of leveling before I switched back to my original build. Even though it worked well and was a little more survivable than my usual build, I don’t think I’ll keep it. It just wasn’t as much fun for me to play that way.

Fortunately, I just have to spend a little gold and I can reset that role and try something else. I’m generally not a fan of the Necromancer class, but I was thinking of looking into the Warlock soul. I’ve heard it combines well with Chrolomancer for a healing build, which is something I really need to look into for running dungeons and Warfronts.