Naming, Roses and Earthsea

It doesn’t look like I’ll ever get around to writing up all of the notes I took on Star Wars: The Old Republic, even though it’s way late for a review anyway. I’ve cancelled my subscription and even though it doesn’t expire until August, I doubt I’ll bother logging in because my character died.

So he’s not technically dead, as in deleted or lost, but I lost both my character’s name and legacy name in the recent server merges (because let’s be honest, that’s what they are). Now, I’m sure at least half if not more of you are thinking so what, and that’s probably because you agree with Shakespeare. I don’t, at least not for proper names. I’ve always thought Ursula Le Guin and Pat Rothfuss had it right. Names matter. I realize a large number of people couldn’t care less, log into just about any MMO and spend half an hour in a major social area if you don’t believe me. But I get highly invested in a characters name in both stories and games.

Honestly, I really shouldn’t have bothered with the character transfer from Sanctum to Ebon Hawk. I should have stayed on the dwindling server and finished my class quests (which I’d left sitting for a month or two) and not worried about it. I assumed though that I would eventually want to join up with friends a be a bit more social eventually, so I might as well get it over with. Had I known that BioWare was condensing six PvE-RP servers into one I would’ve realized the chances of keeping the name Kae or legacy Bluestar were infinitesimal. Hindsight, blah blah.

The end result though is that after doing the super quick transfer, I logged in and had to change my character’s name. After seventeen attempts I found a variation on Kae that wasn’t taken, although by that point I didn’t really care. When I tried to set my legacy name back and got the message that it was taken, I decided I was done. Melodramatic? Probably, but it was a completely honest reaction and has stuck with me days later.

It’s ironic that the very process which will hopefully revitalize the game, has completely killed my interest in it. Even more so since BioWare seemed to have some really interesting stuff planned for the next release.

So rather than returning to my Jedi Guardian, Kaevn Blank, I’ve headed back to Star Trek Online for my science fiction fix. Cryptic get’s a lot of heat, sometimes deserved and sometimes not, over their business practices, but I really like the way they’ve done their server architecture. Like with CCP’s EVE, there’s only one server/world/shard for STO. Even better names only have to be unique for my account handle and account handles can hidden in chat (I don’t think they ever display on-screen).

Very impressive, Trion.

While I was a disappointed in Rift’s PvP news (totally because of my own uninformed assumptions), I’m excited about today’s announcement of the Storm Legion expansion. Specifically the part where they mention 10 more levels, one new soul for each Calling, and tripling the size of the map.

Despite my best intentions, I always lose interest in a game once I hit level cap. There are a few games where I continue on, Star Trek Online is one of the few where I continue to play for content, both Cryptic-made and  Foundry. Back in January, I was sure I wouldn’t be returning to Telara, but now I imagine I’ll be spending a bit more time there when this expansion releases. I have to hand it to Trion, they really do an amazing job of releasing content. They make all of the other studios look lazy by comparison.

MMO free weekend.

I did something over the weekend I haven’t done in a while. I played no MMOs. I did played several hours of the Torchlight 2 beta, but I spent a lot of my gaming time reading gamebooks. I played through Tin Man Games’ Gamebook Adventures 1: An Assassin in Orlandes and started on Michael J. Ward’s Destiny Quest: The Legion of Shadow.

Torchlight 2

Torchlight 2 was lots of fun. I think they’ve improved quite a bit over the sequel, but it’s been years since I played it so my memory if the first game is fuzzy. There seems to be more customization for your character and there’s definitely more for your character’s pet. Combat still feels great, and advancement is open enough that each of the four classes can be played very differently.

I played about five hours as an Embermage and another four as an Outsider and had a blast with both. Luckily the beta “weekend” runs through Tuesday, so I’ll get some more time to play tonight. I plan try out the Engineer so I can see what a melee focus is like.

Gamebooks

My gamebook kick started with an email about my hard backed copy of the Destiny Quest Book 1 re-release by Gollancz. That got me to pick up the original self-published edition that I have, and that got me wanting to read (or should I say play?) some during lunch breaks last week. DQ1 is a bit massive to haul around with me, plus it’s signed by the author, so I’d rather not get it too worn out or drip ketchup on it. Instead, I checked on the Android market and found that Tin Man Games has started porting their game books from iOS to Android, so I bought their first book, An Assassin in Orlandes (store link).

Assassin is more of a classic style gamebook. Its a linear story but still interesting and fun, and it is also much easier to come to a bad end or die. Dieing while reading a gamebook in an app has been a new experience. With paper gamebooks, I usually go back a section when I come to a bad end. It is cheating, but it saves me time and hassle from starting over and making all of the sale choices again until I get back to the spot I wanted to be in. Fortunately, Tin Man Games accommodates this a little bit by allowing multiple modes and offering bookmarks.

In the Classic mode, you’re allowed three bookmarks which you can return to at any point. You can’t move a bookmark though, so once one is placed that’s it. Bookworm mode is identical to Classic as far as character creation, but you’re allowed ten bookmarks. The only difference is finishing the book on Classic unlocks the ability to cheat on dice rolls (which is nice for exploring all of the plot branches). There’s also a Beginner mode forward readers new to the genre. It allows ten bookmarks and also changes the character creation process to allow for more powerful characters.

Assassin was well worth the $4.99 for their app. Of course that might seem expensive for an app, but that’s what a paper version would cost, and the app adds the convenience of tracking combat and inventory for you, which I think is well worth it. Tin Man Games has app added in some extras. There’s a nice map, some additional background info on the setting, and even achievements.

I’ve already picked up Gamebook Adventures Volume 2, The Siege of the Necromancer (store link). Tin Man has eight gamebooks so far for iOS, hopefully there rest come to Android as well.

Locked Boxes

So yesterday Massively did what they should have done instead of their pseudo-news post regarding STO developer Borticus’  comments on lock boxes, and published an editorial in their regular Perfect Ten column and that focused on lock boxes. While I’m not a fan of lock boxes myself, I can see where market realities make them a necessary evil, but it’s most definitely a slippery slope.

Anyway, as Justin says in his article, lock boxes are gambling. You are paying real and/or in-game (varying by MMO) money for a chance to win a prize. That’s no different from a slot machine in Vegas, buying a state lottery ticket, or buying a raffle ticket at a school fundraiser. But like many other activities, gambling itself isn’t wrong, it’s that it can be abused.

I take issue with Justin’s second point though, where he mentions that the house always wins. This is the point where I think lock boxes diverge from other examples of gambling, since it’s not costing the developer anything to “pay out” like it is a casino. I also don’t see any sinister intentions behind not publishing odds. Truthfully, I don’t think developers know with any certainty what the odds are on winning a particular item from a lock box. Random number generators can be a little goofy at times, and I guarantee if they did post odds that there would be lot’s of players double checking those odds and raising a ruckus if their results were at all different.

I also disagree with his comment about feeling like deleting a lock box was a waste. I have the opposite reaction. I enjoy deleting lock boxes in Star Trek Online because I know I won’t be opening them, the Exchange is saturated with them so they don’t sell, and they take up valuable inventory space.

I do agree that the legality issue is in its early days, and hopefully the practice doesn’t get any games banned from some countries. Like F2P itself, I think lock boxes are a trend that’s going to be around for a while and if you can’t ignore or tolerate them, then you’ll need to take a break and wait for the direction of the industry to shift again.

Lock boxes are tacky, but in my opinion they are more jarring to see in Lord of the Rings Online than STO. Fair or not, Middle-earth is a more serious setting in my mind and I have less tolerance for commercialism in it than I do with STO or any other MMO. But even as tacky as they are, I don’t see lock boxes as tarnishing the F2P model. Personally, I find Turbine’s habit of putting items in their store to fix not-fun gameplay mechanics rather than actually fixing them much more tarnishing than lock box keys. I can ignore and delete boxes after all, but it’s much harder to ignore the progressively ridiculous number X of monsters I have to slay for deed Y.

As far as public sentiment and private actions, I think it’s really a wash. It’s the same reason why no one can really gauge the overall reaction to the end of Mass Effect 3. Unhappy people are motivated to be vocal, and happy people have moved on. Lot’s of MMO players claim to hate lock boxes and post daily on forums about how much they hate them. But forum goers are a small percentage of players in any game, and I would bet money that a size-able number of those haters still buy keys and open boxes. In the end, all a developer has to go on is their metrics. They know how many accounts they have, how many players that have on a nightly basis, how many boxes are dropping, how many keys are being purchased, and how many boxes are being opened. Apparently those numbers point to lock boxes being worthwhile, otherwise they’d be gone.

Honestly, I’ve gotten bored with the entire topic and its surrounding drama. It’s been beaten to death and nothing new’s been added to the conversation recently except for one thing. Lock boxes are only one step removed from RMT. So far MMO developers have been pretty careful to make sure that money only flows into the system, and I assume that’s to avoid government regulation and taxation (not/never been/don’t want to be a lawyer so I could be wrong). Blizzard though has started to experiment with that in Diablo 3, and I’m sure if that goes well then we’ll see the practice tried out in MMOs as well.

New Rift PvP is not what I was expecting.

When I first heard the news that Trion was adding three faction PvP, my assumption was that they were adding a third faction to the game à la Dark Age of Camelot. The reality is quite a bit different. I’m disappointed, but it’s really my own fault. I think it’s because of the recent Elder Scrolls Online news combined with Trion’s reputation for putting out insanely large and rapid content updates. The silver lining though, is now I’m not as tempted to resubscribe to Rift.

Basically, they’re adding a new PvP map based on Stillmoor where you join up with one of three factions. Each faction comes from an alternate version of Telara, and each has a different philosophy of the purpose of Ascended. It’s a three-way battle over control points between the Ram (believing the Ascended should rule), the Lion (see the Ascended as protectors), and the Raven (think the Ascended should ascend further). It actually does sound interesting, but it’s not enough of a draw for me to go back to the game at the moment.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

While reading through my RSS feeds this evening a title caught my eye from Massively:

Star Trek Online dev unconcerned with losing global playability for the sake of lock boxes

Uh, what? That sounded incredibly out of character for any of the developers from the STO team, so of course I clicked through to read the whole thing, and then I covered my face with my hand and sighed.

Basically, Jeremy Randall (Borticus) was chatting with some players on the Jupiter Force fleet forums (of which he’s a member as well, or was before he joined Cryptic, I assume he still is) about the lock boxes and what might happen if some countries decided they’re illegal. Jeremy’s opinion was that STO would become unplayable in those countries rather than lose the boxes, because the revenue from them is apparently that good.

It was immediately apparent to me that this is just Jeremy’s opinion being expressed in a discussion among friends. It’s not news. Were this in a press release or on the official forums, then it would be news. Had someone at Massively wanted to use this as fodder for an editorial that would’ve been valid. But it wasn’t posted in an editorial, it was posted as a news item, and that is crap in my opinion. Plus, the wording of the title and the flippant tone of the article (as well as the appended update) make the whole thing feel like link bait to me (and I really considered removing the link above at this point).

What really irritates me is now either the Jupiter Force forums will go closed for fleet members only, or Jeremy will no longer be able to take off his developer hat when chatting with friends. Both of those outcomes suck. The Star Trek Online team is among the most communicative of any MMO live team that I’ve seen, and I really hate to see events that make that seem like bad policy.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should, or that you have to.

Glad I’m not playing Diablo 3.

Diablo 3 launched today to the excitement of many. I mentioned over the weekend that I wasn’t interested in it but was expecting to feel left out. Well, I’d forgotten about the always online DRM that Blizzard was building into the game. Despite the fact that you can play Diablo 3 completely single-player, you can’t actually play it offline. In effect Blizzard launched a single-player MMO today (an SPO?) and had the usually MMO launch issues, namely overwhelmed servers.

So instead of there being a deafening silence on Twitter as everyone was engrossed in playing, or having to read tons of messages about how amazing the game is, instead I was reading complaints about lag, server timeouts, and error numbers. It really reminded me of the original launch of WoW more than seven years ago, and made me wonder why Blizzard wasn’t able to prepare better. After all, surely if any game developer has the experience and resources to handle a massive launch it should be Blizzard. Right?

Personally, even were I interested in the game, I still wouldn’t be playing it as I really dislike the trend DRM is taking at the moment. At least Valve has built Steam to allow for offline play, surely Blizzard could manage something similar if they cared to. Or maybe it’s Activision that doesn’t care?

Either way, I hope that things calm down soon for those of you who want to play, so you can get in and get some quality time in-game.

Odd man out.

It seems like there’s regularly a game of the week/month that everyone is excited about and playing. My friends lists in Raptr, Steam, and Xbox will all show people playing the same title.

Usually when this happens, even if it’s a game I’ve not had any previous interest in, I’ll start to get interested or curious and often end up getting it. This sometimes turns out well, Skyrim, and sometimes turns out poorly, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (because I’ll bring it up any chance I get, I guess). Most recently, seeing how much fun a few MMO focused friends who were are in varying stages of MMO burnout were having playing Tera, got me to buy the game and give it a shot despite my apathy-bordering-on-dislike for the art style.

The Secret World is another game that I’ve had zero interest in, both because of the setting and the fact that I’ve never Funcom launch a game well. This weekend was apparently the first beta test after the NDA dropped because I started seeing a lot of Twitter messages and blog posts about it. Oddly though, it’s had zero impact on my interest level, so I think I’m safe (except I probably just Murphied myself).

The other up and coming game is Diablo 3. I barely played the original game and never bothered with the sequel. For whatever reason I was just never hooked on it, in the mid 9o’s I was much more interested in the Age of Empires series. Happily, despite nearly everyone who plays games that I know planning to play this, I’ve still had zero interest.

I do feel a little bit left out, but really it’s a blessing. I’m neck deep in games I already own or pay subscriptions for that I should be playing instead.

So anyone else skipping either of these titles?

Elder Scrolls Online

It the announcement that’s been the talk of the Internet over the last week. A lot of people are surprised, which surprises me. The Elder Scrolls (TES) is an RPG, so it’s not surprising to me that Bethesda and ZeniMax Media Group are interested in moving the franchise into the MMO space. There are subscription fees calling after all.

Of course ZeniMax Online has it’s work cutout for it. Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind are massive open world RPGs with large modding communities and point-n-click combat. None of which works well in an MMO, or at least hasn’t yet. Plus, ZeniMax Online has apparently been working on TES Online since 2007. This means that they’ve probably not been able to incorporate the things that Skyrim did so well into their designs. Even more important, a lot of the recent innovations in story telling (SWTOR) or combat (GW2/Tera) or dynamic events (Rift) are likely not part of the design.

Still, it’s hard to tell much for certain yet since there’s very little official information out there. The few things I’ve watched or read mention pretty standard combat (which is disappointing) but three faction PvP which is excellent and makes me think of Dark Age of Camelot.

At this point I’m just curious. It’s way too soon to be worried or excited about TESO, but it looks like May and June are going to be full of news and videos about the game, so we should see soon if The Elder Scrolls Online is worth adding to my list of games to watch.