I didn’t start doing panoramic screenshots until after I’d finished questing in the Droughtlands. A story quest I was following sent me back to Harlan’s Lament, though and I took the opportunity to get a nice shot of Lantern Hook and Shimmersand’s Flatyard.
(click on the image for a full-size version)
Today was an oddly busy news day for a Friday.
Champions Online
I’ve been wondering for weeks now if Poz was still running the Champions Team over at Cryptic. He hadn’t posted on the forums in weeks and the level of communication from the team had really deteriorated. So, I wasn’t surprised by this announcement that Poz hitting the pause button. The thing that’s odd about the news is it’s half written like Poz is on vacation and half like he’s left the company. Rob Overmeyer is taking over, which is also not a surprise since he did the excellent follow-up Ask Cryptic for April.
Besides the (possibly temporary) change in management, Cryptic also posted a new Costumes and Concepts page. The Champions team is going to use this page to give players a peak at upcoming costume designs and get feedback. I really like this idea and hope they keep it up to date. Costumes are a major part of the superhero genre, and the more Cryptic can add to the game the better. Plus. it opens more lines of communication between the development team and the players, and I’m all for increased communication.
Star Trek Online
The other half of Cryptic’s been busy too.
The Breen Featured Episode rerun is underway and offers players who missed out the first time a chance to get the Breen Bridge Officer. The team’s also added a new equipment set, so player’s who’ve already been through the FE have some incentive to go back. I really like the idea of reruns while we’re waiting on Season 4 to come out, of course I’d like new FE’s better but this will help pass the time a bit.
Besides the reruns, Cryptic released a massive Ask Cryptic for May. Fifty good questions and nice detailed answers by Executive Producer Dan Stahl. Here’s some of the highlights, although you should still go read it yourself:
One other thing I wanted to mention. It feels like the team has a big content change coming related to the Borg. Stahl mentioned that they were getting a graphical and mechanic overall like the Romulans got in FE3. He also mentioned that the Undine would be back but not before the Borg “make their move” which he hinted could happen before FE4. Lastly, Stahl answered a question about the Gorn Rebellion by mentioning it depends on whether or not their homeworld get’s assimilated.
I also feel like I should mention that Cryptic announced the winning design for the Enterprise-F. Apparently there was some voting done by the community a while back and the fan-favorite isn’t even on the Runners Up list. This of course has resulted in a fifty (when I wrote this) page thread full of nerd rage, trolling, and pleas for sanity. I don’t recommend reading them, except to check out Stahl’s follow up posts here, here, and here. Personally, I like the winning design more than the one some of the community is upset about.
Rift
Finally, I wanted to highlight a post on the forums by Producer Scott Hartsman regarding character names on RP servers. I generally don’t look at the Rift forums outside of the dev tracker, so I’m not informed at all on the “excitement” Scott’s referring to. I’m inferring from his post though, that there’s been some kind of drama over character names. Which doesn’t surprise me much. Were the server not marked as RP in the launcher, I’d have no idea based on the high number of immersion jarring character names I see running around. I try to keep an open mind about it, but I’m pleased to see Trion talking about clarifying what the naming policy is on RP servers. I’ll be even more pleased (and a little shocked) if they’re enforced.
While I haven’t given up on finishing all of the story quests with my Mage, Kae, I did need to take a break since I’ve gotten into a part that requires high-end gear which I don’t have yet and I was starting to feel a little bored with logging in to do dailies and then look around for dungeon instances. So I decided to work on my stable of alts.
Once I got all three out of the starter instance, I then went back and started working on getting each one to twenty. For right now, at least, I’m trying to keep all three within a few levels of one another. This is partly so I can keep all of the content straight and partly so I don’t pick a favorite and let the others languish.
Rotating through three different Callings is interesting, especially since I have two roles setup on the Rogue, so it’s more like playing four different classes. The Rogue seems to chew through content much faster, followed by the Cleric and then the Warrior. Still, the Warrior is a lot of fun to play, the sound effects when swinging a two-handed hammer are very satisfying.
Right now, playing alts is keeping me motivated to login every night and keeping the game fun. I would like to get all three to 50, but I’m not quite ready to make that a goal. I’ve never level capped more than one character in a game, because I’m usually so attached to my main that I don’t spend the time on alts. While I still consider Kae my main, I’m not sure that I’m as attached to him as I am my main’s in other games. Maybe it’s the role/soul system? Since I can switch the style of play at the touch of a button, there’s a part of the character’s identity that’s more fluid in Rift than it is in other games.
Unlike GC, I’m looking forward to getting my alts into Stonefield. Freemarch is nice but I find it a bit bland as far as the landscape goes.
After doing a few dailies with my Mage, I decided to take a break from level 50 and switch to my Cleric alt, Kaeji. He was only level 8 and fresh out of the time machine from the desolate future.
While I was running about in Freemarch, I noticed a conversation going on in zone chat. Someone was asking what RP stood for, and that led into some talk about whether or not it was polite to RP outside of private channels. Keep in mind, this is on Faeblight which is a PvE RP server. Let me repeat that: an RP server.
I don’t roll on a PvP server and complain about ganking. That’s kind of the point of rolling on that server type. Why oh why do people roll characters on RP servers (of which there aren’t many) and then complain about RP happening in public channels?
Of course the fellow who was asking about RP obviously didn’t know what he was getting into. But one of the other people who chimed in referred to public RP as exhibitionism, and he seemed to know enough about MMO’s to know better than to role on an RP server and not expect to see some. Why he decided to make his home on Faeblight, I’ll never understand.
I complained earlier about the poor level of communication on the part of Cryptic’s Champions team, especially as compared the the level of communication that the Star Trek team maintains. There was apparently enough community feedback that they did an Ask Cryptic, Part 2. This one is much better.
First, the post is explicit that the questions are being answered by Producer Rob Overmeyer, so that whole vague anonymous feeling from the original post is gone. Second, the answers are informative and detailed without losing the humor from the original post. Not to mention there’s just more of them.
Besides the second Ask Cryptic, there’s also a State of the Game for April. Also done by Rob, it does has some crossover with the Ask Cryptic, enough so that Rob is planning to start doing alternating months for the posts.
I’m feeling lukewarm about the upcoming Resistance Adventure Pack. I had issues with Serpent Lantern and I haven’t even attempted Demon Flame. My hope when Adventure Packs were originally announced was that they were nice multi-mission story arcs, but they ended up being mini-dungeons complete with boss fights. It just occurred to my that STO’s Featured Episodes were actually what I’d had in mind for AP’s.
The two things I’m really looking forward to are the Golden Age and Pulp Comics costume sets. Even though they’re C-store items, I’ve got enough Atari Points from my stipend to get at least one for free.
Besides more costume options, I am curious about the Hideouts coming in July although I can’t imagine getting a lot of use out of it once the initial novelty wears off. I’m also interested in seeing what the team does with their AP replacement, Comic Series. It sounds much more like the FE’s that they were inspired by, and even though a lot of challenge focused players probably won’t like it, I hope they drop the boss fights. I’m just interested in experiencing more stories, not snapping my keyboard in half in frustration.
As I do sometimes in real life, in MMOs I like to climb mountains to see the view from the top. This is a view from a peak just north of the Iron Pine Peak pass that leads into Stillmoor. To the left is the Icewatch Outpost that leads into Iron Pine Peak and in the distance at the far right is Greenscale’s Blight.
(click on the image for the full-size version)
I am as excited today about Rift as I was disappointed on Saturday, and it has nothing to do with the mea culpa event gift that showed up in my in-game mailbox. Although some lucky people did better than a 20-slot bag like what I got (on all four of my characters).
Nope, it’s the absolutely massive 1.2 patch that’s on the test server now. There’s a ton of changes but here’s the ones that’ve gotten me the most fired up (delivered Anjin-style):
Patch 1.2 has some new content and a lot of quality-of-life improvements, my only complaint right now is that it’s on PTS and not the live server.
Update: Just in case you don’t usually read Massively, be sure to go check out Justin’s interview with Scott Hartsman. Lots of good information about Trion’s plans and some of the new content like the Slivers.
Cryptic’s been starting to address some of the grinding missions in the Foundry by un-publishing some and in some cases revoking some players’ Foundry access, see Wishtone’s post for an excellent summary. I like that they’re policing the published missions, and I originally though revoking player access is a bit heavy handed until I saw Wishstone’s post which implies that only players who were republishing removed missions were affected. She doesn’t say, but I assume that it’s a temporary measure until fixes are applied to Tribble and Holodeck.
Speaking of which the first patches to remove the exploitive mechanics that are now on Tribble:
Ship explosions will now only effect a maximum of 5 targets.
Apparently some of the missions that allowed players to level quickly relied on spawning a ton of ships on top of you and then blowing up as a result of the warp core breach from your own ship dieing. Â Someone further down in the thread asks if this is related to Foundry exploit missions and Salami_Inferno, the associate producer, confirms that it is.
I’m very please to see them addressing these issues. I hope that some of the suggestions regarding adding categories and tags to missions to help with searching will get implemented quickly as well.
Trion committed their first real misstep this weekend. The big River of Souls world event started with a big two week ramp up  and ended with a single event that lasted less than an hour on Saturday afternoon. Phase two was a single instance of multiple bosses spawning in each zone followed by phase three which was in-game cutscene introducing the new raid instance.
I am completely disappointed.
I spent quite a bit of time with the dailies and looking into the lore behind Alsbeth, the River of Souls, and the Plane of Death. I was also at the level cap early, which never happens. So I was really looking forward into experiencing the event. Unfortunately I was out of town doing family stuff this weekend, so I wasn’t even one of the people stuck in an eight hour queue. Originally, I wasn’t to worried about missing anything. I figured that the event would a least last the weekend and I’d be able to login on Sunday evening and catch up with a little work. It never occurred to me that the event would only run once, since the entire build up phase was repeating rift invasions.
This event was especially frustrating because of Trion’s history of good decisions until now. They did a great job of running their betas. They had a smooth launch, if not perfect, and they impressed me with how well they handled their account security problems a few weeks ago. So given all of that, why did they think it was a good idea to follow up a huge two weeks long (even if it was only planned to be one) build up with a short one hour (or less on some servers) one time only event? It just doesn’t make sense.
By Saturday night, Scott Hartsman has a follow up post where he tries to do some damage control. Like Trion’s done before with other issues, they’re giving out from free items and awarding the event achievements to everyone who’s a subscriber. That’s a nice way of saying sorry. For me though it wasn’t about the loot, it was about getting to be online and experience the content, and that’s gone. To put it another way, getting a t-shirt from Disney World is nice but I’d much rather ride Space Mountain.
Reading through Scott’s post, he talks about how their ambition got the better of them, but I don’t agree with that. The event itself sounds like it was fine, the problem was that it only happened once. The queues and the lag were all a consequence of motivating the entire population of every server to login at the same time, which was exacerbated by bringing the servers down shortly before the event and compressing the login rush even further. Â Had the even been scheduled to happen every two to three hours during the course of the weekend, I don’t think they would’ve had nearly the same problems. There still would’ve been the issue with Phase Three only taking place in Stillmoor which locks out any players under level 45 or so, but at least two-thirds of the event would’ve been accessible.
I still logged in Sunday evening and had some fun. I’m not upset or planning to quit over this, but I don’t see myself investing quite as much time or interest in the next event. They’re saying the right things now, but I need to see if they can follow that with actions.
Even though Rift has been dominating my playing time lately, I still follow the STO news pretty closely and there’s been lots of interesting news recently about Star Trek Online.
The April Engineering Report came out today. A lot of what Stahl talks about in the report we already knew a bit about from the Ask Cryptic earlier this month. Still there’s tons of interesting information, although I’m a little disappointed that there’s no mention of the warp and nacelle animation issues on the Vice Admiral science ship refits. Such a small thing, but so very very irritating.
Besides the Engineering Report, Dan was also on Episode 77 of Stoked. If you have any interest in the Foundry, I highly recommend giving it a listen. Dan gives some stats on how many missions have been started, published, and completed. He also does a shoutout for the top three rated authors.
There was also a detailed dev post regarding the Duty Roster system that’s being added with Season Four. The short version is we’re getting a Duty Officers (Doffs) which we’ll be able to send on assignments to do offline things for us like crafting or missions for rewards. Some of the Doffs will also provide special passive abilities (similar to how some Accolades give passive bonuses, I think). This is just the initial feature, it’s going to be expanded later with the ability to assign Department Heads and a First Officer.
It’s not all sunshine and roses though, I saw this via Longasc on Twitter:
oh cool, people start playing the #STO Foundry… Vice Admiral in 11h was not enough, now it’s possible in 2h!
I suppose it was only a matter of time for someone to figure out how to tweak a Foundry mission to help level characters faster. I’d thought based on what I saw on Tribble that Cryptic had managed to correct for some of the problems that COH’s Mission Architect ran into, but never underestimate the ability or inclination for some players to optimize the fun out of any game. Of course, the real test of the Foundry now is how the player community reacts to these missions and what, if anything, Cryptic does to the Foundry to keep these kinds of missions from being created. Interesting times ahead.
