Will RMT make SOE’s Station Access a relic of the past?
Last year, Massively’s Michael Zenke interviewed SOE’s John Smedley about, among other things, the future of SOE’s all-inclusive Station Access plan:
John Smedley: Sure. I don’t mind this being public. We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price. We have two problems, though. One: we have third parties involved in this. LucasArts, for example, will have to buy off on this, as would others. Second is the less obvious one: Promising future stuff is the meat of the problem. We haven’t found the right way to word things yet. To be honest other priorities have gotten in the way. That’s what we want to offer people.
In the past year, Flying Lab’s “Pirates of the Burning Sea” was added to Station Access, but none of the things mentioned were ever mentioned after this. We EQ and EQ2 players STILL have to sign up for the Station Players Advanced Character plan — at a buck per month per feature — to see detailed information about our own characters.
With RMT for sure being a big part of upcoming MMOs The Agency and Free Realms, and given that both those and DC Universe Online will also be released on the PS3, where monthly subscription plans are unknown, it really looks like the business model for SOE’s MMOs is moving away from the monthly subscription plan.
If having the Station Access won’t give you any sort of benefit to the newer MMOs, what is the reason to keep it, aside from currently actively playing three or more SOE subscription-based games?
Assuring Station Access subscribers that their monthly investment in SOE games will be valuable going forward should be a top priority. Otherwise, players in these cash-strapped times will be looking at their expenses, and wondering if they really are getting $30 worth of gaming from their subscription.
EQ2: You’ve Got Mail!
I don’t know why I missed this HUGE sculpture in the gnomish bit of the Moors of Ykesha before. So like, NOW you know where the mailbox is… from ORBIT.
I wish they did the same thing for the location of the druid ring. People kept trying to lead me to it. “It’s right next to the landing pad!” “From the cannon?” “No, just where you get off the boat!” I run around for about ten minutes. “Is it the wizard spires?” “No, but it’s near them.” “Yay! Okay!” Five minutes later. “Okay, this druid ring. Does it look like other druid rings, or is it like a pipe in the ground or something?” “No, it looks EXACTLY like all the other druid rings! It’s right next to where you get off the boat! Just go down a little and THERE IT IS!”
More running around. I load up the EQ2 Wiki. It has the locs of all the druid rings — EXCEPT this one! It’s a friggin’ CONSPIRACY!
So I start taking the “down” bit to heart, and start circling the landing pad. Cliff. Cliff. Cliff. Certain death. Cliff. Monster. Cliff. Oh look, here comes a ledge. Complete with druid ring.
Duh. I can’t imagine I could have possibly sounder thicker over guild chat.
I didn’t spend all night sounding like a trickster god had struck me blind and the only cure was at the druid ring. I had just gotten back from driving my son back to school in Rhode Island, and was poking around the City of Heroes holiday stuff while totally forgetting about the rice I had steaming in the cooker. “Why am I hungry?” I thought, as I sent my ninja army chasing down another group of angry snowmen in Cap du Diablo. “Didn’t I cook some rice?”
Cook, yes. Eat, no.
I got a tell on XFire inviting me along on tonight’s Daily Double, and nothing was going to stop me! I’d never been to this zone before. It went so fast that I’m not sure I’ve been there yet 
This was the bouncy one where someone bounces and catches balls of magical energy. I ran out of arrows halfway through that fight — those nights in Veeshan’s Peak go through arrows like anything, and I’d forgotten to restock.
The moment I got into game, the same guild that I’ve been raiding VP with asked me along again to clear further in. I declined, I had more important business, but it was nice to see I had a raid slot. Mythical is so close!
So that was fun. Afterward, I logged to do some housework and ended up watching movies on the PS3 as I copied some shows there from my computer. Next time someone visits, they will be ambushed by Blackpool 
It would be really nice if the PS3 preserved my folders, though. I did some virtual house cleaning as well. I cleaned up the mess in the Nostalgia guild hall basement. I’m a failure at decorating. I know what I want to do but I don’t know how to do it and it just comes out all wrong. I’ll try to figure out something in the privacy of my own apartment.
I was playing City of Heroes because I am about to cancel my account. Money is incredibly tight these days and I have to cut corners where I can. But I thought I would get a couple more play sessions in before I canceled and deleted all the files except the patcher. I’ll probably cancel EverQuest as well, and drop the Station Pass for my main account, leaving me with only EQ2. It seems SOE is bringing out their new MMOs under a non-subscription model, so the Station Pass will become less and less valuable. If The Agency and Free Realms and DC Universe Online move toward RMT business models, what good is Station Pass? It’s double dipping, and I’m not a fan of that.
I also organized those blog posts I’ve done comics for, as well as the old Crimson Eternity comics, and made them easier to get to, should you want to see them all for some reason. I was kinda surprised to see I’d been doing the CE comics, some of them, since I’d been blogging. I thought I finished doing those before the blog, but it turns out it wasn’t as long ago as I remember that I was raiding in CE. It seems like ages. Anyway, the “My Comics” link in the sidebar will have them all.
EQ2: The gladdest/saddest sight in Veeshan’s Peak
I’d worked so long on the Spellborn comic — way longer than I thought, it took forever to come up with the story and then I had to go back and make tedious reshoots to fill in the plot and a long time in Photoshop to make it look like Mercy and Erisa were in the same place at the same time — that I thought I would reward myself with some EverQuest II time. I don’t play enough of my favorite game and anyway, if Stargrace needed some help with her Templar epic, she says she won’t ask for help even if I have set Xfire to explicitly invite people to bug me, so I’d be on line anyway.
She was busy doing something; I grabbed the TSO Daily Double quest and went looking for group, but the same folks who brought me to Veeshan’s Peak a couple of weeks ago asked if I’d like to come along again.
Duh! I’d LOVE to!
Back on the menu were the Elder guy and Druushk. Last time, there were plenty of mages. This time, plenty of scouts, so we had to fiddle with the strategy a little bit, but he died, and I got a nice upgrade to my Shard of Hate sword out of it. I love the looks of the sword, but the only stat it has is a + to STR, a stat I have already capped. The new short spear has +INT and +WIS, so more damage and more resists… good stuff. It looks kinda like a unicorn horn. Or a knitting needle… if you make your knitting needles from unicorn horns. I’m just going to have to go with that last, because I am, after all, a tailor. A knitting needle made from a unicorn’s horn would be just the sort of thing an evil seamstress like myself might have. To get all stabby with.
After, we fought our way up to Druushk. He’s the gatekeeper and blocks further progress into the dungeon, and is also the final raid mob for many classes mythical epics — including mine.
Each time we pulled Druushk he’d get a little closer to dying. 15%. *1%*! That one was stupid. D. was just about to die, and we were all gratsing ourselves, when one person died, which boosted D.’s health. And then another. And then it was a wipe.
1%! And no Inquisitor in the raid! I bet if I wanted to go Inq again, I’d be raiding whenever i liked. Though her gear is cruddy. And she hasn’t even got her fabled epic (hasn’t even started on it).
Next pull, D. died. VERY happy. She dropped lots of loot, and people were excitedly getting their epic updates.
I ran into the back room for mine — and there it was! The mystical harp! If I looted that, I could hand it to that Ice Maiden I last met a year ago and walk away with a very glowy axe! Maybe the game would recognize that I’d killed the Leviathan a couple of times, but before they added the epics!
But… though I could see the harp, I couldn’t touch it or carry it away.
I’d killed Druushk, but my epic was as far away as ever.
Well, not really. If I can finagle my way into a Leviathan raid, I now know I can be raiding with people who can *kill Druushk!*.
The unicorn horn knitting needle, btw, may plainly be seen at my side. It doesn’t really look like much.
The raid force meets again Tuesday to take on Nexona. And they do raid Leviathan. So, goal for me: Keep on being available for raids and work toward my Mythical. It’s not something I really need, I’m not a raider, but it’s something I would enjoy having just for the having.
Character design in Spellborn
Erisa, a spellcaster. Her name is an inside joke
I said this morning that you almost need to be an artist to make a character in Spellborn. I’ve played with the character creator for an hour or so and a little longer in the game itself, and I believe that is true — but with a catch. You almost need to be an artist to make a character in Spellborn… that looks good in the character selection screen.
In the game itself, the characters are so small and the action so intent on keeping the Reticule aligned and the Skill Deck and the whole game world so dim and desaturated that really… the characters tend to blend together.
Many character creators these days are pages of sliders for every physical dimension. Spellborn’s gives you selections. You paint your character first in broad strokes; limited selection of bodies — six human and two non-human — then add tattoos and age lines, then the under clothing, then the armor, then the weapons, most of which can be colored. By the end, you have a character mostly unique, but still, somewhat the same as all the others. After all, every character draws their look from the same pool of gear you got yours.
Still, you can make some cool characters
 Stout Henry. Heavy human male model. Little armor, blunt weapons. |
 Tipa. Heavy human female. She looks as if she’s been swinging a sword her whole life. |
 Willowy human female. |
 Holyoke. Non-human female. |
 The Incredible Holk. Yeah, I wanted to see if I could make a comic book character. Huge human male. |
 Thin human male. If you work at it, you can make some cool looking characters. THIS guy could tell some stories. |
I played Tipa a bit last night, but I wasn’t really catching on to how to play a rogue. I feel I should be strafing or jumping around more, but my fingers aren’t that nimble. Or I am TOTALLY missing the easy way of dodging incoming attacks and keeping the reticule centered on the target and watching the skill deck roll and … because, omg, isn’t that enough?
Oh yeah, and the rapidly shrinking red bar that represents my health.
So, tonight I played Erisa, the spell caster. She’s an albino with glowing red eyes, and she wields a sword which was forged a hundred million years ago by the… She’s no relation to you-know-who. Really.
When I finished dinged 2 (finally!), I didn’t want to just toss all my new, shiny skill points straight into Mind because, could that be bad? I know that the subclasses you get depend upon putting some points in another attribute, so would that really be the best for me?
That’s when I opened up the Skill Deck and the Skill Library and started going through the icons and noticed something… Hey, these things go together like pieces of a very small puzzle.
So, follow along on that diagram up above. If I start with that Life Tap — that’s a Mind spell. It boosts the power of Mind damage spells for 12 seconds and gives you a little heal whenever you damage a monster with a spell. The skill deck rolls to the first rank, I hit the Mind spell there does severe damage — boosted by the Tap — AND boosts Mind! Skill deck rolls back to the second row, Slash there is a Mind based melee attack, which has just had its power boosted! It rolls back to the first row, where if the Mind spell is ready, can cast that again, or hit Hack to roll the skill deck back to the second row so I can recast Tap and keep the heals coming…
So that’s really cool. It all fits together.
Is Spellborn going to win the coveted New Shiny award? Well, not until it becomes available in the US. I don’t really want to get TOO invested in a game when it’s only a matter of time before the people at Frogster decide to cut off all us people outside of, basically, Nederland, Germany, France, and possibly Belgium.
A look back at 2008
2008 has been an absolutely amazing year for MMOs, and my personal progress through them.
Last year at this time, I’d just found the absolutely most perfect EQ2 guild — they were great raiders, loved grouping, and were fantastic people besides. With Clan of Shadows, I managed to do every flagging raid for Ruins of Kunark and was ready to step in and do my best to help the guild as they conquered Veeshan’s Peak. It wasn’t to be; I didn’t make the full membership vote. It wasn’t even close. That disappointment, along with other things to fill my evenings, eventually led to the end of raiding. Without raiding, though, I didn’t have much incentive to log in anymore. I tried to make things work with another guild, Delusions of Grandeur, but it just wasn’t CoS. I guess if I couldn’t make it in CoS, I didn’t want to settle for a lesser guild.
I started poking around back on EverQuest. I really missed my characters there. Not raiding, so much, but the friends, community and camaraderie that makes EQ unique. A lot of people commented that they’d love to play through EQ again, if they didn’t have to do it alone. So I thought we might do together what we’d never do alone, and along with ten or so fellow former EQ players, started Nostalgia the Guild on the Luclin server. NtG peaked in mid-summer when we got to dragon killing level and put the hurt on two of the three bosses of the original EQ, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox. (We never killed the third, Phinegal Atropos, as a guild). SOE’s summer Living Legacy program had the unexpected side effect of boosting the power of our armor and weapons to raid levels, and a lot of things became possible with very few people. Although fairly diminished, NtG still meets Fridays to explore Old Norrath.
Stargrace took the Nostalgia idea and brought it forward 500 years to the devastated Norrath of EverQuest II. I eventually transferred half my characters from Befallen to Najena to join the guild there. I’m getting the urge to raid and group again, so I may be moving some of them back to Befallen… the loneliness of a server I have no history with dooms me to pickup groups with players I have never met and will never meet again. Nostalgia EQ2’s two active members aren’t enough to build a group or a raid… so there’s not much to do unless I want to do it alone. I hate playing by myself.
In February, I restarted my Neopets account with the sole goal of reaching and beating level 100 of their Shapeshifter mini-game. Shapeshifter starts out as the kind of brain twister that is fun to solve, but quickly goes well beyond the bounds of anything that can be solved by unaided humans in a normal lifetime. So this supposed kids game is really a test of your ability to develop an algorithm that can solve an enormous non-directed decision tree before the Sun goes nova. With help and encouragement from other solvers, I developed a Python program I called Shifter that could solve the hardest levels in no more than a day, and often far faster. On April 1st, 2008, I solved the last puzzle and was the Neopets Shapeshifter Champion for the entire month.
February also started my short-lived affair with Pirates of the Burning Sea. My son wanted to give it a try, so I bought a copy for him, intending to buy a copy for myself if I liked it. He grew bored with it. I liked it a lot, and made a character on his account, got up to a fairly decent level and was getting my free trading skills up, working through the storyline, and getting involved in some really exciting battles at sea.
It was on Station Pass, too! This was somewhat of a killer, actually. My son is not on the Station Pass, so I would have had to start paying for one or pay the PotBS subscription fee to keep playing, all the time I could be playing it for nothing extra if I just had my own account.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to start all over again, or pay to buy another copy of the game, so I just let it lapse. There were plenty of issues, but the game had amazing character and ship customization, absolutely gorgeous and tense battles, and I even liked the story. Sailing back and forth on the Caribbean though, not so much. Having to depend on a wide variety of people to make goods, definitely not so much. I wanted to play, but I just didn’t have the time or the money.
I felt sure that by the end of the year, I’d be totally engulfed in the one sure-fire hit MMO of the year, Flagship Studio’s Mythos. I’ve played a lot of Diablo clones, and even some, like Cronous, that try and take the action RPG into the MMO realm, but none had nailed it like Mythos. Even before they expanded the heavily instanced Overworld into a more world-like map with zoning only for cities and dungeons, I felt they had made perhaps the ultimate casual MMO… Rumors of money trouble inside Flagship turned out to be truth, and over a tumultuous weekend, Hellgate: London, their other title, was taken by their Asian publishing partner, and Mythos was dead.
I would like to be playing Mythos right now.
In March, a major new chapter of my life began when I was hired to blog about breaking MMO news for Massively.com. The pressure of writing so many articles, keeping a full time job, trying to keep Nostalgia rolling, and raiding in EQ2 eventually left me unable to do any of these things well. I put my full time job first, where it had to be, and focused on real life issues, like getting my son enrolled in college and figuring out how to pay for it (answer: I didn’t. I am broke all the time now 
). My Massively adventure ended after an ill-fated trip to the SOE Fan Faire put me in massive (sorry) debt, and my job was cut down to doing EQ2 guides, a task for which I was incredibly unsuited, since I was hardly playing EQ2 at all at that point (which continues to this day), and I’d never written a guide to anything in my life Massively and I parted ways in September.
I went back to writing just for West Karana, where I planned to change the direction of the blog from just chronicling my adventures in mainstream MMOs to seeking out, playing and being an advocate for lesser known MMOs.
It’s not that I don’t like the AAA, high budget, huge marketing department MMOs. I just find them too similar to each other. So many players look eagerly to a new MMO to banish the blahs they feel with the game they currently play. They play the new MMO for awhile, discover that it’s essentially the same as the game they already played, and pronounce the entire genre dead.
I was looking through MMORPG.com’s list of games, and some of them looked totally, wildly different from anything I had ever played. Somewhere in those hundreds of games would have to be dozens that went in a new direction.
Oh yeah, there were. BUNCHES!
In early July, I discovered Wizard 101, probably via Massively. This was an entire MMO built around a wildly kooky collectible card game. I was absolutely and utterly hooked. This was the sort of thing I’d been looking for — an MMO that was just entirely out of left field. It was superficially a kid’s game but quickly turned into a game requiring strategy and teamwork and great skill in deck building. I played until they turned out the beta lights, took a couple week’s break, then started right in on the live game.
If anyone wanted to dip their toes into MMO gaming, I wouldn’t give them a copy of EverQuest II or World of Warcraft. I’d sit them down in front of Wizard 101, right where the Headmaster of Ravenwood School of Wizardry is giving a test to see what sort of wizard you are. It’s not Hogwart’s by another name. It’s something new, unique and fun. Wizard 101 was one of the breakout hits of 2008, and I expect wonderful things from it in 2009.
My on-again, off-again relationship with City of Villains flipped “on” again for awhile in July and August. I love the idea of a super-hero, comic book game, and I like what NCsoft has done with the game since they acquired it from Cryptic, and the character creator is unparalleled, but… the repetitive gameplay just can’t keep me for long. I started to get into their crafting system, but after awhile I just stopped logging in. I’m still subscribed, for now, because I am waiting for the mission designer coming in Issue 14 or 15. I want to see what that is like.
Spore owned my gaming time for a few weeks in September. I really wanted to like the game and very much enjoyed building new creatures, vehicles and space ships. I just didn’t get into the space game that is the majority of the time spent playing — you breeze through the other portions in an hour or less. It still has a place on my hard drive.
Recently, I’ve chucked pretty much every game into the back seat in order to play Dream of Mirror Online. I played this game briefly earlier in the year, and it made a very good impression, but the huge number of games out at that time pushed it away before I’d gotten to level 10, where the jobs, and the game itself, open up. As I played it, I couldn’t help remembering the last game that made me feel this way — the original EverQuest. I began to notice a lot of similarities between the games — death penalties, slow leveling, an emphasis on community over leveling, wide open zones and dungeons — it was EverQuest! A Taiwanese game company had managed, somehow, to meld EQ’s gameplay and community with the Asian anime-flavored, cinematic games. Absolutely stunned me, and I am having a lot of fun playing it.
Honorable mentions: Guild Wars — I want to play this more. Why don’t I? I don’t know! Probably because I hate playing alone. Florensia — another Asian import. I loved the fact that it had a cool land game AND a pirate-themed sea game, but it reminded me of DOMO so much, I figured I’d just play DOMO (good call). Vanguard — even though it runs crappy on my machine, I still pick it up now and again, and it still has a spot on my hard drive. Spellborn — this was intended to be a major part of my fall gaming, but it has been pushed to next year. I still have high hopes for the game, if not for the publisher’s commitment to the title.
2008 was a very intense year for MMO gaming, full of tales of intrigue and adventure — and that’s just the marketing departments! Some of this year’s biggest releases — WoW’s expansion, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online — I just could not find time for. 2009 isn’t looking as intense as 2008, but it might well be SOE’s time to shine if they can get The Agency and Free Realms out the door. Champions Online is also scheduled for the year, and perhaps DC Universe Online as well, giving NCsoft’s City of Heroes a run for its money and market share. News of Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic should keep people thirsting for more space-themed adventure in 2010. And, Spellborn!
Happy holidays, fellow gamers
DOMO Mission night
You don’t lose xp when you die in one of Dream of Mirror Online’s missions, which is very nice of the devs, because, who’d do them then? We died A LOT. It was mission night in the “Deadly Gods” guild, and we went all over the Mirror Worlds, advancing the plot lines that take you through the game.
First, though… I got my alchemy to 10 (FINALLY! And with plenty of powders left over, too!), and made my Hunting Knife. It took two tries, but I had enough blue powder for three, so I wasn’t worried. I had to level up the dagger in order to upgrade it, and that was just about the time I got invited to a Male Bird of Paradise group in the Phoenix Tower. There was a lower level thief in the team, so I figured I’d get to use my AE abilities.
Nope. I was asked to pull. So I did. Soon, another group came by and set up shop on the other side of the room. There’s plenty of spawns in the room, so I wasn’t worried, but they were aggressive pullers.
REALLY aggressive. Sometimes they’d even AE the mobs I was luring back to my group and yank them to theirs. Many times I’d stand toe-to-toe with their puller, wrestling for the mob. They were ALL OVER our side of the room. Super frustrating. By the time the group broke up, though, I had dinged 26 and was 3/4 of the way through to 27. Not bad, and since my Thief goal is to get to 30 before dropping back to another job, likely Musician, I am progressing really well.
Itziar wanted me to stop by after the group to get a picture, because I was to blame for the new DOMO addiction. I’d talked to Itziar lots, but we’d never actually met, so I was thrilled to get together for a photo-op in Eversun city.
A sylph. A dirty, no good, rotten sylph. They’re too GOOD to touch the ground or to hold their weapons.
Well. This is the modern era. I will allow myself to be seen with sylphs. CERTAIN sylphs.
I meditated awhile, then headed to the Inn Basement to try and pilfer a Chef’s Knife recipe from a Caskmaster for Gameiro, but no luck there. While doing my best to make those wisecracking barrels shut their boozy faces, the guild invited me to come along on some plot missions.
Well, duh Of course I’d come.
The first mission took place in the Pandora’s Box mirror world, from a mirror deep inside Neptune’s Tower. Our job was to defeat one of the great animal spirits that were turning beasts against people, the Great Northern Turtle Spirit. Defeating him is as close to a raid as anything in DOMO.
It didn’t end well. In fact, we didn’t even scratch him before we all died. So that one goes on the back burner until we’re all 40 or so.
We did the Black Widow one, another one I can’t remember the name of, and my mission, against the Crossbone Swordsman.
I got to be the star of my own little movie It seemed I was usually just out of the frame for the cinematics to everyone else’s movies, totally a spear carrier in someone else’s film. But this one was all about me. When the movie ended and the fight began, the swordsman only had a chance to use his AE 50% HP attack once before he died.
After that, it was off to the Farrell Family Crypt to defeat Octavius, one of the good guys from another mission. One of the earliest decisions you make in DOMO is to choose sides in the battle of people vs the beasts — you can choose to kill all monsters, or choose to try and bridge the yawning chasm between beast and person. I chose the latter. So in the missions, friends in one person’s mission can be enemies in another.
Such was the case with Octavius, an NPC who looked so much like Goku from Dragonball Z that whenever he’d show, the team chat would be filled with “HIS POWER IS OVER 9000!” and such.
He’d been the hero in the previous mission, holding off hordes of the evil Empire Guard by himself while those members of the team who survived the initial assault (not me) peeled one after another of the guards off and killed them.
In the Farrell Crypt fight, he was the enemy, and when he hit, we hurt bad afterward. The first three or so times we tried this, we had no Doctor, and hence no healing. And then a Doctor joined the guild Two tries later, we finally had Octavius and his two evil spiders dead.
By then it was very late, I had to go. It was a fun night in DOMO, though.
And I finally made my Hunting Knife (squeeee!)
Crayon Physics Deluxe & DOMO Christmas
Ripped right from the refrigerator door, Crayon Physics Deluxe answers the age-old question, “What if those drawings I made in kindergarten were REAL? And I had to guide a ball around them to collide with stars for points?”
The developer has just released the beta/demo, so it’s only the first two worlds and a partially functional level editor, but it’s cool to think of inventive ways to bring your drawings to life as incredible, crudely-drawn, machines.
Level editor? Sure, I couldn’t resist making one of my own.
What music student has never been felt trapped on a staff! Will you trickle down the triplet? Sneak past the hemi-demi-semiquaver? Out-ferment the fermata? (Okay, I forgot to put the fermata in…). One glissando too many, and you could find yourself dropping straight into the bass line… and nobody wants that.
Crayon-based physics puzzle fun. Love it. The full game should be coming out fairly soon… I hope.
After all the meditation I did yesterday, I was only able to get my alchemy in Dream of Mirror Online up one more point, to 9. Just one more to go. I thought that by buying a slightly better kind of incense that I would be conjuring up some blue fragments, but nope, all red. I seriously can’t imagine the sort of effort it’s going to take to get alchemy from 10 to 15 or 20.
Itziar clued me in to DOMO’s Casino Night, where you buy tokens to use in slot machines in the hopes of winning snowballs which you can use to purchase stuff from snowman vendors. I dropped a couple thousand gold into those machines, winning me loads and loads of steaming … prizes … and all I could afford from the snowball vendors was some sort of pet saddle which won’t work on my pet. So, pretty pointless.
They brought DOMO down last night to add in the holiday decorations. When it came up again, winter was everywhere! I don’t know about you, but I’m right in the middle of REAL winter right here. I even got my car stuck in a snowdrift last night. So, mostly in my video games, I want to see warm things.
Anyway.
Gameiro is working on alchemy too, so he’s going to build his forestry up, which will make light armor crafting a lot easier. For some reason, that takes a lot of wood.
I also finally finished downloading and patching that other game, so I played that some while waiting for DOMO to come back up. It’s… full of really, really small text.
DOMO: Level 25, but Alchemy is hard :(
Taking on the Giant Butterfly outside the bandit camp in Copperhorn Mountain
Nobody is as impatient at my slow progress through Dream of Mirror Online as I am. I wanted this weekend to be all about the Alchemy. I lost my Alchemy levels (as well as Thief level 24) in the Great Rollback Disaster, and I wanted to make that all back, but mostly the Alchemy.
I have this grand design for my weapon upgrades. I REALLY want to make my own level 20 weapon. The bonuses for a crafted Hunting Knife made with Excellent-grade materials make it a FAR better bargain than the one you can buy from a vendor. Plus, its Earth bonus damage would make it a great companion to my level 23 Damp Knife, which carries a Water bonus.
The only thing standing between me and my new dagger is gaining level 10 in Alchemy. Any player can craft things up to level 9. To make the dagger, I’d have to allocate Commoner points to extend my Alchemy cap to level 19, and also extend my Meditation skill to 19, as the recipe takes Blue Powder, which cannot be gathered by anything less. I was lucky to get a Commoner’s Spring from doing the Drill Sergeant quest in Swan Lake Basin, which gave me five points to allocate, and I got another Commoner point from handing a refined Dino Oil to an NPC in Copperhorn Mountain. Dino Oil is refined from 20 Dried Lizards found off the many and various lizards of Copperhorn Mountain; and so I spent most of Sunday lurking about there.
I came across the Sandstone Lady Bug after turning in my Dino Oil for a Commoner Spring
There’s no better way to really get to know a place in DOMO than by getting the zone’s kill quests. The kill quests for Copperhorn Mountain are given by the Darkdale Destroyer, just up the stairs as you enter Darkdale. The mobs are, on the whole, WAY easier than the mobs in Placid Plains, and about the same level. There were lots of people there. I got a group fairly quickly and we ground out the kills — altogether fewer kills needed than in the Placid Plains quests. If you’re level 18-23, coming here might be a better idea than heading straight to the Plains. Though I did get an excellent group there the other night… I guess it always is all about the groups.
Many, many lizards, plants, moths and hedgehogs later, I hunted down the two bosses in the zone, slaughtered them, and earned the title of Darkdale Destroyer. The Darkdale Village Elder wouldn’t offer me the quest to unlock the local dungeon, so it seemed (having gotten 24 back along the way) a good idea to try and clear out some older quests and perhaps reach 25.
Trying (and failing) to solo the Treasure Map instance in the Eversun Inn Basement
I’d captured one of the Copperhorn lizards in a mirror, and my pet had hit 18 and gained a very cool magic armor buff, and I was higher level, too, so I thought that maybe this time I’d be able to take on the treasure chest at the deepest part of the Inn Basement dungeon.
Twenty minutes later, when the instance timer ran out, both Teddy and the lizard would be dead, and I’d be just a sliver of health away from joining them.
Itziar suggested I get a cask group and ask them to help. Well, I would have, but there were no cask groups around when I entered the instance. Soon, though, one showed up, and I got myself invited in. After we cleared the platform of casks, in we went (and there was another person who also needed it, so it was all good).
With friends to help, the Treasure Map instance went much better
My usual solo tactic was to do as much damage as I could without dying, run off, rest and heal, then rush back in and repeat. This tactic was too slow to win. Tanking the mobs with a level 15-24 group didn’t look like it would work too well either, but we managed to finish off the chest, the goo that came after it, and the four adds it summoned. It was a close and narrow thing, but we finally got that done and got a huge amount of experience from it.
I stayed in the group for awhile, pulling and doing some AEing. When the healer (lv 15) complained she wasn’t getting much xp with me in the group, I asked to be allowed to stay just for 10% more xp so I could reach level 25. She said okay, I leveled, gave my thanks, and headed out.
Itziar tells me the pink line joining us means this sprite and I feel a love connection. Um. I don’t think so!
I’d made back my level amd gotten another, but my alchemy was still in trouble. Crafting items with the stuff I’d harvested before the rollback had earned me alchemy level 8; when I redid those same steps after, I’d only gotten to 7. I did herding for awhile to get some more down, and made 8 on my first combine. I then did some meditation for awhile and afterward made some Iron Axes, level 18 weapons for Mercenaries from a level 8 recipe, but didn’t manage to hit 9 again.
So, today while at work: Meditate for some more Red Powders, and keep making weapons until I hit the Holy Grail of level 10. Then use advanced meditation to obtain some Blue Powders, make my Hunting Knife, do some kill quests to level it up, then upgrade it to a level 25 dagger.
That should be enough for one night…
Wizard 101: Killing me softly with your spells
High level players gathered at the duel masters
Wizard 101’s surprise announcement of a full PvP Arena system to accompany the PvE-focused excitement of the next world, Dragonspyre, early next year shocked and electrified the community. It’s one thing to beat easy and predictable computer opponents in the W101 game of magical cards. Battling human players is a whole different story. You can’t truly say you’re a master wizard until you can beat human opponents.
Can Wizard 101 deliver both a kid friendly game and also satisfying PvP?
About to lose a 1v1 duel
Dueling has always been in the game; one of the first quests you get in Wizard 101 takes you to the Arena to learn the finer points of battling with cards. The new Arena system builds on the old one. You still go to the Arena, but instead of heading down the stairs and into the Arena, you speak with one of the two guards on duty. Tweedle Dee (the one on the left) matches people up for ranked missions, from individual 1v1 duels to 4v4 grand mêlées, and lets you peek in on duels and battles in progress.
Tweedle Dum (on the right) sets you up for practice duels. Unlike the ranked missions, battling here won’t change your ranking. Here, though, you can just play for fun or wager on the outcome of duels. When you tell someone to put their money where their mouth is, Tweedle Dum is the man to see to let you work it out on the hot sands of the dueling ground.
Filling up the team for a 4v4 battle
Unfortunately for PvP anyway, there is no smack talking on the dueling fields. And since there is no team-specific chat, casually suggesting to your group that everyone focus on the Life wizard on the other team is going to be clearly heard by the other side, who likely have different ideas of what to do with their main healer. This makes it hard to coordinate attacks among team mates. All you can do is hope your team mates figure out what you’re doing and follow along.
Us vs Them on the killing fields of the Arena
Not that there’s terribly much variation. In 1v1 duels, wizards tend to use very short decks that focus on multiplying a specific attack to end the duel in spectacular 3000+ damage fashion. My very first duel, I was killed by a necromancer who had two traps on me, two blades hovering over him, and I just couldn’t find my myth/death shield fast enough to blunt the blow. I knew darn well what was coming, but I couldn’t avoid it, and learned my lesson.
In duels, shields are your best friends.
The larger 3v3 and 4v4 fights are all about the group damage spells. You’ll never kill the other team by focusing on just one; the others will just heal them, as everyone has heal spells either in their deck or their sideboards. Massive group damage is the only way to keep people worrying about themselves and not about helping out their team mates.
My evil twin. I so totally killed her in battle
There is something truly satisfying about surviving an arena match full of people who likely are better geared and higher level than yourself. I’ve never seen so many level 50 people as I have seen today. It’s been virtually impossible for Johnny-come-latelies such as myself, who took my own sweet time leveling, to level past the mid-40s since KingsIsle removed the experience for repeating instances.
Comparing PvP (left) and PvE (right) gear
MMO PvP has always suffered the twin Achilles heels of level and gear imbalance. W101 is not particularly a level-focused game, except as far as the level and quality of the spells you have in your deck. You can, after all, just buy those cards at the various card vendors, so even a level 1 wizard can (potentially) cast the most damaging spell in the game if they have the treasure card for it.
Gear is also not an issue, since every single person — without exception — that I fought today was outfitted either completely in RMT gear (which you can buy with vast amounts of in-game gold if you don’t want to pay real bucks for the stuff), or in a combination of RMT and Oni gear (as I am).
RMT gear gives you good resists across the board, improves the damage of every spell you cast, improves your chance of getting power pips, and all around, is just good stuff to have in a duel.
Diego, the horse guy who instructs new wizards in the art of the Arena, also sells special PvP-oriented gear that can be bought only with Arena tickets. You get 3 of these tickets for losing a ranked Arena battle, and 10 for winning one. If you are the world’s best player and win every one of your Arena duels, then just 105 of them later, you can afford the above robe, roughly comparable to the robe I won from the Jade Oni, pre-Oni loot nerf.
Neither robe at all compares with the RMT robe, though. Both the PvP robe and the Oni robe only boost Life damage and resists, where RMT robes improve ALL resists and ALL damage, and toss in a spell to boot.
Balancing PvP gear is a tough job no matter what the game. Here in W101, they have chosen to balance their PvP gear according to the best PvE gear of the same rank; but few duelers at max level won’t have the RMT armor, which dwarfs both the PvP and PvE gear. I imagine KingsIsle still has some PvP gear balancing to do; either to make it easier to obtain, or markedly superior to the RMT armor, or possessing some special attacks that are only useful in duels. As it is now, folks will just use the RMT armor.
Once you have queued up for a match, you can go about your business and you’ll be ported to the Arena when your teams are ready to battle. This doesn’t seem to work while in minigames, though, which is too bad, since they have a fun new minigame I was having a good time with today.
The lack of guilds or clans has been somewhat eased by having the teams you form persist from battle to battle, which is a nice touch — but I would still really prefer to have a guild or a clan so we could discuss fights and strategies without the rest of the world listening in.
As a Life wizard, there is no way I can match the sheer damage output of other classes, but I can definitely make it very tough for an opposing team to take my team down. I would definitely prefer, then, to stick with 3v3 or 4v4 fights where my particular powers can shine. 1v1 duels are fun, though… but it often comes down to keeping shields up and heals going. Almost all the duelists I met today were extremely well prepared for battle, with tightly focused short decks and sideboards full of useful cards.
Duels are not something you can sleepwalk through, and that is likely the best reason of all to join the fight.
EQ: Exploring the Depths of Darkhollow
Depths of Darkhollow, EverQuest’s tenth expansion was set in the vast underground series of caverns of Underdark Darkhollow, a vast series of caverns beneath Norrath inhabited by the remains of the Illithid Illisin empire and the upstart, warring factions of the Wurine (werewolves). It continued the previous Dragons of Norrath expansion’s effort to reposition EverQuest back to its Norrath-centered fantasy roots after two large expansions, Gates of Discord and its follow-up, Omens of War, took players off Norrath and into the middle of an alien invasion. After all, where could you go when you’d just killed off all the gods of Norrath in Planes of Power?
EverQuest found the answer in Dungeons and Dragons’ tales of the Underdark, the mystic realm far beneath the surface world.
That’s where we found ourselves last night, in Stoneroot Falls. The zone is named after the the huge falls that get their source ultimately in the river that cuts through Nektulos Forest.
Tarfu and Elryndal were on when I got on. We’d decided last week to head to Stoneroot, the 65-70 hot zone, to get some experience after a few weeks bopping around in the Planes of Power. To be honest, though, I didn’t feel the experience in Stoneroot was all that better than it was in the Plane of Fire. It was, though, someplace new.
Coldheat logged on before we headed out, so my cleric mercenary got the night off, a big relief to her, I’m sure I felt kinda bad for Coldheat, though.
I’d hated Stoneroot Falls when I played a cleric. It’s a zone full of ramps, water, and crazy shifts in elevation. It is very, very hard to get around in the zone without invisibility and levitation, neither of which were easy to come by for a cleric. Invis potions cost 13 plat a shot in PoK, and levitation — for a PST player in an EST guild, it was unusual to be able to grab a SoE from a ranger or druid before everyone headed out to the zone. The Buried Sea expansion would fix this with guild banners, but that was still in the future.
Deep Orcs in the second section of Stoneroot, not far from the secret entrance to Dreadspire Keep, seemed best for our level on tracking, and we headed that way.
We pretty much made, and wiped on the first pull. Oops.
On the way back, Coldheat died and Elry and Tarfu got pinned down by continual adds in the water. We eventually got it together and let Elry pull with pacify.
We settled down to a good, three+ hour grind after that. I dinged 68, Coldheat got level 64, Tarfu made like twelve AAs (used a potion) and I think Elry said he had over six.
I’m now either at or just beyond the level of my first serious character, my druid Etha. Closing in on my rogue, also named Tipa, who’s 70, and within sight of my highest level character, the level 75 cleric Brita. Still 17 levels from the current cap, though.
I’m hoping we can do some of the easier Darkhollow missions sometime. There were some which were just crazy hard, but others were fun and had great loot.
It was a really fun night. It was great to talk to Lazarretto, who is having fun in his new guild and has started up his own EQ-focused blog, Complete Heal, which everyone should check out
