So what's been happening...
Diablo 3...Didn't last as long as I'd hoped, lets be honest. The myriad issues have been widely documented so no real need to go into them too much here. I ultimately lost the desire to finish Inferno with the feeling of playing the game becoming indistinguishable from a bot and leveling alts was too repetitive in the end.
With both a Monk and Barbarian around the mid 30s slogging through Nightmare in order to do Hell in order to do Inferno felt like a chore in to be undertaken before the good stuff. Hardcore mode was a bit of a non-starter with the way my characters would nearly always die upon its first encountering an enemy each session due to the game freezing as everything belatedly loaded from Blizzard's servers. There was nothing to do about this and the game is clearly quite badly optimised in this regard. I could go on about the Auction House (its not pvp or pve its pv-ah) the immersion breaking disconnect between what happens on screen visually and the hit detection, the laughable storyline, Bliz admitting that there's no endgame, Inferno mob affixes (immune? the last bastion of the creatively bankrupt dev) the underwhelming loot yadda yadda...
Lets say it was a disappointment. However looking at my characters i seem to have a good 150hrs of time played so from that respect i must have got my money's worth and like any single player game, once you've had your fun its time to move on.
So it didn't bridge the gap to Guild Wars 2 sadly. I pre-ordered rather than pre-purchased as paying to beta test is not something i personally want to support as acceptable practice. I'm sort of old-fashioned in imagining that beta is beta rather than an extended product showcase cough, SW:TOR cough... Also although is frustrating to wait i'd rather not spoil too much of the content for myself beforehand.
The way i'm determined to play the game is to take my time with it, slowly discover everything and explore. No need to rush to max level. Also if its a 'three monther' that's just fine. Its free to play and three months will be more than i got from D3 for the cost of the box price.
In the meantime for my gaming fixes the Steam Summer sale conveniently started and provided me with Portal 2 for £4 and Trine 2 for £3 both of which are of course very good and worth a bit of blogging about separately.
I also rescued my Wow account and reconnected it to Battlenet and took advantage of the 7 day free Cataclysm trial to mess around with a few alts. I'm in two minds whether to buy a month's sub for to carry me over to GW2 I don't really fancy buying both expansions at this point in time though having left Wow previously shortly before Cata hit.
I suppose i should also say what happened to Eve and Rift so that this blog's stories connect up.
Lastly and obviously can't say too much about this due to the NDA i got in to the End of Nations closed beta this weekend. Having missed playing a good RTS not going by the name of Starcraft really since the days of Total Annihilation this caught my interest as its published by Trion (although developed by Petroglyph) and although no longer playing Rift i have no bad words to say about them and would happily recommend Rift to others. I downloaded and patched up and had a quick play of the tutorial and will endevour to play some more over the weekend. As mentioned above I will indeed attempt to beta test it ;)
Anyway, there you go... a gaming life. I don't think i'm a natural blogger which explains the frequency of postings. I don't feel the need to form and expound an opinion on every issue of the day, i much prefer to read other's. But now and then i have a few half formed opinions buzzing around that i would like to write down and formulate so i think this is basically how this blog will go. Its a cathartic thing.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
On Eve, again
I've dipped in and out of Eve over the years. My most successful attempt to 'get into' the game occured last year where i dabbled in several different features, learned an awful lot and finally felt like i was over the 'hump' .
I set myself a challenge to make the game free to play. Eve is a subscription based MMO, but it uses a 'plex' system where players can buy game time with in-world ISK. This Pilot's License Extension can also be traded on the markets like any other product and thus has steady but fluctuating value. Current prices are around 5-600million isk.
Players both buy the plex with real world money and trade it for isk, as well as buy plexes with isk instead of using real world money and the system suits both those who are time rich but real world money poor and those monetarily rich in real life, lacking the time to invest in Eve but still desirous get most out of their gaming experience.
Given my goal, you might be thinking a legimate question right now, If i don't want to pay a sub, and want to make it instead free to play and all my efforts are towards that end, would it not be simpler to not play at all?
Well, i guess that was my conclusion when i stopped playing before. But i think this also happened for other more important reasons than the game not being interesting and fun in and of itself. Making isk in Eve is a measure of success for most players. Even if your primary focus is pvp, to be successful in that you have to fund your activities somehow. And i believe that it takes a lot of skill and craft to make pvp profitable on its own. Many players fund their pvp sorties with mission running, ratting, industry etc and see this as a good trade off for their fun.
For me, i have less interest in pvp, so defining my success by the amount of isk i can make feels like a legimate goal and being rich enough to buy plex with isk rather than real world money is a signifier of achieving this.
In my dabbles of yesteryear I didn't really commit to any one project and i think that contributed to letting my sub lapse before achieving my goal. My most successful endeavors probably came from tech 1 level production, namely heavy missiles. It was easy to produce the missiles with a reasonable margin by shopping around locally for ores, putting sell orders in Jita, then reinvesting the proceeds, producing larger and larger batches of missiles.
I attempted to use multiple production lines and to refine the number of runs (a two week run left too much money tied up in product) but i didn't really achieve a satisfactory equilibrium. I was also aware that there was more money in tech 2 production but only briefly dabbled again tech 2 blueprint invention and research.
One of the limitations was also the time spent hunting for cheaper ore and fitting the whole logistics around how much would fit into my hauler. For instance, inevitably the weight of ore needed to make the number of missiles that filled my hauler was greater than its capacity.
I will probably use this again as a secondary income source, especially as my production skills are mostly all maxed out at level 5, but i have recently discovered Planetary Interaction and decided that this will be my focus towards achieving the isk/month that will buy my first plex. The numbers have been plugged in, alts have been coerced, skill trained and created and i believe PI will provide enough passive income as well as occupying a satisfactory middle ground between the paranoid ennui of mining and the investment heaviness of Manufacturing.
And PI and how i fare with it will be the subject of my next post.
I set myself a challenge to make the game free to play. Eve is a subscription based MMO, but it uses a 'plex' system where players can buy game time with in-world ISK. This Pilot's License Extension can also be traded on the markets like any other product and thus has steady but fluctuating value. Current prices are around 5-600million isk.
Players both buy the plex with real world money and trade it for isk, as well as buy plexes with isk instead of using real world money and the system suits both those who are time rich but real world money poor and those monetarily rich in real life, lacking the time to invest in Eve but still desirous get most out of their gaming experience.
Given my goal, you might be thinking a legimate question right now, If i don't want to pay a sub, and want to make it instead free to play and all my efforts are towards that end, would it not be simpler to not play at all?
Well, i guess that was my conclusion when i stopped playing before. But i think this also happened for other more important reasons than the game not being interesting and fun in and of itself. Making isk in Eve is a measure of success for most players. Even if your primary focus is pvp, to be successful in that you have to fund your activities somehow. And i believe that it takes a lot of skill and craft to make pvp profitable on its own. Many players fund their pvp sorties with mission running, ratting, industry etc and see this as a good trade off for their fun.
For me, i have less interest in pvp, so defining my success by the amount of isk i can make feels like a legimate goal and being rich enough to buy plex with isk rather than real world money is a signifier of achieving this.
In my dabbles of yesteryear I didn't really commit to any one project and i think that contributed to letting my sub lapse before achieving my goal. My most successful endeavors probably came from tech 1 level production, namely heavy missiles. It was easy to produce the missiles with a reasonable margin by shopping around locally for ores, putting sell orders in Jita, then reinvesting the proceeds, producing larger and larger batches of missiles.
I attempted to use multiple production lines and to refine the number of runs (a two week run left too much money tied up in product) but i didn't really achieve a satisfactory equilibrium. I was also aware that there was more money in tech 2 production but only briefly dabbled again tech 2 blueprint invention and research.
One of the limitations was also the time spent hunting for cheaper ore and fitting the whole logistics around how much would fit into my hauler. For instance, inevitably the weight of ore needed to make the number of missiles that filled my hauler was greater than its capacity.
I will probably use this again as a secondary income source, especially as my production skills are mostly all maxed out at level 5, but i have recently discovered Planetary Interaction and decided that this will be my focus towards achieving the isk/month that will buy my first plex. The numbers have been plugged in, alts have been coerced, skill trained and created and i believe PI will provide enough passive income as well as occupying a satisfactory middle ground between the paranoid ennui of mining and the investment heaviness of Manufacturing.
And PI and how i fare with it will be the subject of my next post.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Vlog 1.0 and being a Mercenary.
Sooo what have i been up to?
Well, usually i see reason to blog through my own experience rather than weighing in with my own view on the issue of the day in the blogosphere, (the reason why i'll never been a prolific blogger i guess) and recently there's just not been much to say. I suppose contentment breeds complacency other something...
Having tried and failed to enjoy Sw:ToR, Rift satiated my MMO needs and i've felt no desire to resub.
I've applied, along with 1 million + others to the Guild Wars 2 closed beta. The recent press closed beta and the videos i've seen from it do look amazing and its gone back to the game i'm most looking forward to this year.
I can see a large proportion of Rift's PVP playerbase leaving to play GW2's World v. World, server vs. server pvp system. With its ongoing struggle, actions achieving consequences that last beyond one instanced warfront and sieges, weapons and all the other goodies Rift player's have been asking from Trion, well its enough to turn even me into a hardcore pvper.
Talking of PVP patch 1.7 reorganised Rift's PVP ranks into 1-40 instead of 1-8 (remind anyone of a certain Galaxy far, far away?), pushed the level of the first pvp set up, implemented some bolstering, attempted to group warfronts into brackets where possible and most controversially introduced the 'mercenary' concept.
Now Rift's matchmaking system for warfronts will, if one side lacks players, place some players from one faction on the opposing faction's team. This is not an opt in or out system which is where most of the controversy arises with many forum threads from irate players stating that should they be merced, they would make no effort, would afk or take the deserter debuff rather than play for the filthy Defiant/Guardian (Delete as appropriate) faction scum.
I can see some RP reasons for this, especially on RP servers and for anyone who takes their RP seriously i think they have some valid objections. However i believe Trion have looked at their metrics and concluded that any opt out could become too widespread and would negate the effect of the mercenary system on queue times, which they (and i) believe are what matters to players most.
And queue times have gone down, there is no doubt of that. What's more there is the added bonus, and bonus is the right word i think, of being able to pew pew down players from your own faction. Maybe its just me, but I know no level 50 Guardian players by name. Maybe i don't pvp enough to recognise regular opposition players, but i do know of a fair amount of Defiant players on my server, either by reputation or some interaction and the chance to focus them down has been great fun. This system also of course could find you fighting your own guildies too, bringing added spice to the warfront for sure.
So I think everyone will have their own view on the mercenary system based on what's most important to them. For me, faction RP and lore don't really feature heavily in my enjoyment of Rift. To say the lore is weak is not true, its just simply easily avoidable. Its there if you want to get into it.
In the end, i just want to get straight to throwing fireballs in other players faces and get my daily warfront done and if queues are <1minute, then thats all good for me.
Well, usually i see reason to blog through my own experience rather than weighing in with my own view on the issue of the day in the blogosphere, (the reason why i'll never been a prolific blogger i guess) and recently there's just not been much to say. I suppose contentment breeds complacency other something...
Having tried and failed to enjoy Sw:ToR, Rift satiated my MMO needs and i've felt no desire to resub.
I've applied, along with 1 million + others to the Guild Wars 2 closed beta. The recent press closed beta and the videos i've seen from it do look amazing and its gone back to the game i'm most looking forward to this year.
I can see a large proportion of Rift's PVP playerbase leaving to play GW2's World v. World, server vs. server pvp system. With its ongoing struggle, actions achieving consequences that last beyond one instanced warfront and sieges, weapons and all the other goodies Rift player's have been asking from Trion, well its enough to turn even me into a hardcore pvper.
Talking of PVP patch 1.7 reorganised Rift's PVP ranks into 1-40 instead of 1-8 (remind anyone of a certain Galaxy far, far away?), pushed the level of the first pvp set up, implemented some bolstering, attempted to group warfronts into brackets where possible and most controversially introduced the 'mercenary' concept.
Now Rift's matchmaking system for warfronts will, if one side lacks players, place some players from one faction on the opposing faction's team. This is not an opt in or out system which is where most of the controversy arises with many forum threads from irate players stating that should they be merced, they would make no effort, would afk or take the deserter debuff rather than play for the filthy Defiant/Guardian (Delete as appropriate) faction scum.
I can see some RP reasons for this, especially on RP servers and for anyone who takes their RP seriously i think they have some valid objections. However i believe Trion have looked at their metrics and concluded that any opt out could become too widespread and would negate the effect of the mercenary system on queue times, which they (and i) believe are what matters to players most.
And queue times have gone down, there is no doubt of that. What's more there is the added bonus, and bonus is the right word i think, of being able to pew pew down players from your own faction. Maybe its just me, but I know no level 50 Guardian players by name. Maybe i don't pvp enough to recognise regular opposition players, but i do know of a fair amount of Defiant players on my server, either by reputation or some interaction and the chance to focus them down has been great fun. This system also of course could find you fighting your own guildies too, bringing added spice to the warfront for sure.
So I think everyone will have their own view on the mercenary system based on what's most important to them. For me, faction RP and lore don't really feature heavily in my enjoyment of Rift. To say the lore is weak is not true, its just simply easily avoidable. Its there if you want to get into it.
In the end, i just want to get straight to throwing fireballs in other players faces and get my daily warfront done and if queues are <1minute, then thats all good for me.
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