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: 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.

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.

Interested After All

It isn’t as if I’ve been ignoring LotRO-related news, I still read the same blogs and listen to the same podcasts, but somehow I had very little interest in the coming Update, Echoes of the Dead, until I read the patch notes. I think it’s because I kept hearing about talk of the new instances and raid cluster which I didn’t care about and nothing about the Book 3 update. Guess I missed that Dev diary.

I wonder if Brynulf is locked out of his house in Bree…

Still Rifting

Aside from my culinary adventures, my Kelari Defiant Mage, Kae of Faeblight, has been progressing very nicely. He’s level 38 (with the level cap at 50) with a played time of 3 days, 15 hours, and 20 minutes. Like I said, I’ve been playing an unhealthy amount. I’ve been dabbling in the Warfront PvP, running some dungeon instances, but mostly exploring the world and the PvE content.

Two things I’ve realized since I hit the mid-game: one is how much bigger the world feels now that I’ve gotten out of Freemarch and then Stonefield, and the second is how attached I’ve become to Telara. I picked up the trade paperback of the comic book to get an offline lore infusion and been enjoying what I pick up from quests and cutscenes in the game. The most emotional reaction I’ve had to the game so far though has been Scarwood.

After Stonefield, Defiants move into the Scarlet Gorge which is a grand red canyon and the quests there have a bit of a western flavor to them. Beautiful in it’s own way, but not quite to my tastes like the highland valley of Stonefield was. Once I got into the low thirties I headed further north into Scarwood.

Scarwood is an ugly and depressing place. When I first entered the area I was dismayed by the massive stumps and industrial devastation. On the plus side, my reaction made me realize how much of a connection I’ve built with the setting.

There’s a zone-wide rift event that involves elves from the Plane of Life invading with the goal of returning the forest to it’s former glory. My first impulse was to cheer them on, regardless of the cost in Defiant and Guardian lives.

Scarwood is well named for the gigantic stumps that litter the ground, it must’ve been a truly magnificent forest. Check out Kae standing at the base of one of the Scarwood stumps for an idea of the scale of these trees.

Honeymoon Phase?

It could just be because the game is new and shiny, but I was wandering around Stonefield last night and glanced at the bottom of the screen to see how much XP I had before my next level. The bar was only a quarter full and I was confused because I thought I was much further along than that. Then I noticed a 25 below my character’s portrait and checked my Soul window to verify that I had indeed leveled and just hadn’t realized it.

It’s not like the level up animation is hard to miss either, I wonder what I was so engrossed in that I didn’t notice it.

Call and Raise

So now that I’m excited about Rift, I’m commiting to it a bit more.

Originally I bought the digital edition directly from Trion and signed up for a three month subscription. I figured three months would be enough to ride out the initial wave of excitement and by then I would’ve lost interest. Now that I’m excited about the game, I’m rethinking things.

I’m not planning to go all in like Tipa has and commit to Rift as my primary game for the year, but I did switch to the six month subscription and paid $10 for the digital collector’s edition to get the additional bag space. The turtle mount I may use for alts, but Kae already has a Rock Vaiyuu and I find the two-headed turtle hideous.

Other Devs Should Steal This

Like the area looting, Trion’s add another nice little feature that I think other MMO developers should borrow. Click the little stack-o-coins button at the bottom of your vendor window and watch all your grey vendor trash items vanish at once.

 

Gorgeous

Defiants spend their first twentyish levels (once they go back in time) in Freemarch. It is a fairly large area, very pretty and interesting, but it’s not gorgeous. Or maybe it was gorgeous when I first saw it in beta, but in the headstart I’ve not paid much attention to the environment. At least until I made my way into Stonefield.

Actually, looking at it now I don’t think the screenshot does it justice. The motion of the clouds and rain and the sense of space are both missing and were a big part of the sense of awe I had when I first come upon this view.