Friday 11 March 2011

The other half is killing people.

Hmm.... What to blog about?

I could write about recently taking two characters to 20, and how I did some PvP along the way. How I levelled my crafting professions, making negative money, yet coming out ahead. Somehow. How I've reconnected with some friends whom I haven't played with since around Burning Crusade's release, and how much fun I'm having just chilling out with them. Having my old main off-tank [if that makes sense] tank for me again is a joy that brings back old times. But all that happened in Rift, and I'm not quite ready for another "omg less than three rift" post.

I could write about levelling Leeloo. Or archaeology levelling in general. Or my massive obsession with solving every artifact ion my DK so that I can go back to Vashj'ir and Hyjal to experience the quests that I haven't touched since Cataclysm's release night. An obsession that has left me flying across the world [of Warcraft{!}] at level 85 and still mostly in my ICC10 gear [with a trinket upgrade, and a few sidegrades]. But I haven't even logged in in about a week.

I could write about writing. Blog writing specifically, and how it has changed - even in this short a time - the way I think about writing things down. How I pace some of writing so that it's regular, but not too regular, and how a 'schedule slip' such as this one - even though i don't have an actual schedule - gives me feelings of guilt. About the phrases that I use in writing repeatedly, that I never really noticed until I started doing this. About how many of my friends blog. But I've been poking away at that post for a couple weeks now and I've made very little headway on it.

I could write about how much I love the guild I'm in, and the friends within it that I made both prior to and after joining it. And how cool it was to actually meet some of my guildies. How they were such a wonderful breath of fresh air after leaving my old raiding guild, even when I'm at my most bitchy, people-hating-est. But I just did.

I could write about the circumstances that lead to me leaving my old raiding guild and how much of a blow to my fragile self-esteem that whole situation actually was. How, despite my current guild note reading, "Be gentle. He's fragile." bothering me to no end, how accurate ti actually is, thus me not causing [too much of] a fuss about it. But that's a can of worms I'm not comfortable opening up in such an ... open ... place as this. Nevermind the fact that some of the people from that old raiding guild happen to read this.

I could write about five paragraphs about what I'm not going to write about, when I already knew what I was going to write about before I pulled up the page to write this. Write, write, write. I've used the word too much, it's starting to look odd to me now. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the word again. I'm going to write about goblins. Specifically, my severe racism against them.

In the years that I've gamed, I've had a go at more than a few games in the MMO genre. I've played Everquest, WoW, EQ2 briefly, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online, Champions wait for it Online, City of Heroes/Villains, Aion, DDO, Rift, WoW, even some of those free-to-play Chinese ones that were rubbish to play, but hey! they were free. But the very first MMO I played - excluding a 3 day trial of EQ that I loved, but couldn't upgrade to because that was a decade ago and I didn't even have one credit card, nevermind the multiple that I have now {as well as the associated debt} - was Final Fantasy XI. Anybody who's ever played that game can probably already see where this is going, but I'm going to meander and get sidetracked along the - ooh! shiny! - way.


I started playing that game for a multitude of reasons. I liked the franchise, for one. Final Fantasy was the 3rd game - excluding Mario 1 / Duck Hunt - I played on the NES [Mario 3 and Legend of Zelda were the other two] and I'd played every FF game since. I'd even played Vagrant Story. I've since missed some along the way - FF Tactics Advance 2, Dissida, Kingdom Hearts [Yes it counts. No, I still haven't played it. I've also never seen any of the Godfather movies. I probably never will either.] - but I've still played a decent chunk of the franchise. Haven't always finished them, but I don't finish a lot of games I play, for various reasons. Regardless, it was a Final Fantasy game. More importantly, it was a Final Fantasy MMO, and that brief trial of EverQuest was enough of a taste of MMOs that I was craving more. And most importantly of all, it was a Final Fantasy MMO that a friend of mine played. I could give him the money to pay for my subscription [it was a bit more complicated than that, but that was the gist of it]. And before I got my own account, he let me make a character to fool around with, to see if I liked it.

Looking back on the game now, it's a marvel at just how bad the game actually is.Terrible account management and downright obtuse billing. No real questing per se [there are quests and missions, but they didn't give you any xp, and rarely did you get a tangible reward, let alone a useful one]. A broken economy. There was a limit to how many auctions you could put up, and all bidding on auctions was done semi-blind. You could look at the price history of any item, and see that the average price was, say 500 gil, but you wouldn't know if the ones currently up were actually for sale at a 1 or a 10'000 gil price until you actually bid on them. Want to increase your carrying capacity from 50 slots to 55? Do a wallet-braking quest. 55 to 60 slots? Even more wallet-busting.

While there are some interesting things, like linkshells/pearls which allow to essentially be in multiple guilds at once - though only talk in one at any given point - and the job system, which effectively cures altitis, it's all implemented in the game in such a way that, after the fact [and during the fact for a lot of people], that makes you think Square-Enix actually hates their players. This is incredibly apparent when you get down to the crux of any MMO; levelling your character. Levelling 1-10 you do so, and while you'll die here and there, it's definitely doable. Levels 10-15 you can do solo, but it's safer to duo that level gap with a friend. It's not safe, you understand, just safer. Levels 15 all the way to the level caps [fianl cap at 75, but artificial caps at 50, and every five levels after] you'll be grouping.There's no way around this. If you want XP, you have to group. If you're lucky, you're levelling one of the core classes that every group needs, but that doesn't mean things will be easier. A lot of the time, logging on for the sole purpose of levelling, either entails a long string of bad groups, sitting on your ass in town trying to put together your group for an hour, or sitting on your ass in town all night waiting for a group that needs a whatever.

Once you're in a levelling group, things don't get any easier. While FFXI was hardly the first MMO to include an experience point debt - EQ did it for one, and then compounded it with making you run back to your corpse naked to get your gear back - it is the only MMO I've played where it's felt so much like a giant neon in the sky that reads, "FUCK YOU". You lose 10% of the experience needed for your next level if you die. Need 25'000 xp to reach level 17 and die? You've just lost 2'500 xp. And if you had only accrued  2'200 xp, you've just de-leveled. And unless you've managed to get a great group [assuming you've managed to get a group at all], some time during your levelling you will die. And don't think for a second that after you've levelled to 75 you've avoided the hateful grind that is 'true' levelling in this game, and just have to worry about keeping a de-level protection buffer up here and there. Thanks to the subjob system, you'll have to level at least one other job to 37, and depending on what that job is, probably another to 18..

Every monster in the game, just to remind you how Square-Enix feels about their player-base [I'm falsely attributing here, but it doesn't feel false], is a complete and utter bastard. There's a monster type called Rarabs. They're essentially Rottweiler-sized kangaroo rats. And they will kick your ass. At some point in the game you will get killed by essentially an oversized rabid bunny. No joke. Also no joke, one of the most personally gratifying things for me when I tried WoW while still playing FFXI was seeing a bunny in the game, and punching it in the face. I ran around the Valley of Trials for at least an hour just killing critters. Once you start levelling in groups though, you tend to stay away from fighting them unless you're at risk of losing your EXP Chain [you string together the killing of higher level mobs by killing them quickly enough and you start to get bonus experience; EXP Chains are at the core of every decent levelling group], because they're not worth the hassle. A group of heroic adventures avoid bunnies, because they're more work than they're worth.

Levels 15-20 are done in a zone called Valkurm Dunes. A lot of people call it Valkurm Hell. Or just Hell. It's a zone packed to the tits with groups, often competing with each other for pulls, often full of people who've just discovered the sign in the sky - the FUCK YOU sign - and are new to grouping, and always full of people 'training' mobs to the zone edges because they aggroed something either they or their group can't handle. Your levelling bread-and-butter in this zone are dragonflies, crabs, and goblins. Goblins in FFXI can be both a blessing and a curse for your levelling group. Goblins have two abilities that have a bearing on your group levelling situation. They probably have more, but these are the only two that matters. The first is a big ol' massive stab - I can't remember what it's called but it works out to pretty much being kicked in the groin with spiky boots, while being elbowed in the face. With spiky bits. If you're lucky, that hits your group's tank. If you're lucky, your tank survives it. If you're me, it hits you. And you die. And you delevel. The second is called Bomb Toss, and this is the one that can be a blessing. At any point in the fight, the gobbo might pull out a bomb and toss it [an ability called Bomb Toss involving tossing a bomb!? What is this madness] The toss can go one of two ways. The goblin can mess up his through and drop the bomb at his feet which will kill him. Or he'll throw it properly, and the bomb will do AoE damage - that usually kills somebody. Usually me.

Dying is a part of any MMO. You learn from your mistakes and move on, right? But no monster in any other game has killed me as much as the goblins in FFXI. Goblins my group were fighting killed me. Goblins somebody else's group were fighting killed me. Goblins chasing me across the zone killed me. Goblins chasing somebody else across the zone killed me. Goblins. Killed. Me. A. Lot. And every time I died - often with the joy of joys that is a de-level - was that much longer I had to be in zone that was overpopulated in both goblins and morons. In the entire time I played FFXI, I had one good group in Valkurm, and they were Japanese so that was frustrating from the language barrier standpoint [pro-tip SE, if you have to learn another language just to accomplish anything, you're doing it wrong. {and yes, I'm aware of the auto-translate tool's presence. You're aware that it was a flawed piece of shit, that often made working with the Japanese players harder, right?}] But you learn from your mistakes and move on, right?

So once I'd had a taste of what an MMO could be - and this was Vanilla WoW, so this wasn't even necessarily what an MMO should be, just what it could be - I left it behind like a Prom baby. And I realize that that is an incredibly tasteless simile, but it's the most apt one for how I felt about FFXI when I quit. I've been playing WoW off-and-on for six-ish years now. I've had my ups and downs with the game in that time, but generally I've enjoyed myself. But when I came, I - to put it mildly - didn't like goblins. I still don't like goblins, even though WoW's goblins are nothing like FFXI's goblins. FFXI ruined goblins for me forever. In every game ever.

So now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Thursday 3 March 2011

Faluzure begins casting Wall of Text

I've mentioned this before, but I've been spending a lot of time lately playing Rift. I've been enjoying myself quite a bit, but I don't think it will replace WoW for me. The only games [according to Steam] that I've logged nearly the same amount of hours as I have for WoW are EvE Online, and Mass Effect, and I've quit [and restarted] EvE more often than George Jetson got fired. And other MMOs that I've enjoyed this much have included Aion and DC Universe Online, and I don't play either of those any more. Even when I quit, I always come back to WoW. There's a reason it has the nickname "World of Warcrack". But Rift started to get me thinking about WoW.

A lot of MMOs get compared to WoW, either during development or after release, often unfavourably. Such is the curse of publishing an MMO in the aftermath of the titan that is World of Warcraft. But Rift, doesn't suffer in the shadow of Blizzard-Activision. At least, not in my opinion. In fact, in quite a lot of ways, Trion Worlds did things better. I'm of the opinion that WoW could stand to learn some things from Rift. Yes, you read that right.

Before I get started here, it does bear mentioning that the launch of Rift has been by far the smoothest launch for an MMO I've seen. The list of MMOs that I've been present for the launch of consists Aion, Champion's Online, DCUO, and Star Trek Online. There's been a few issues here and there, and one of the crafting professions is temporarily disabled due to player exploits, but it's been pretty smooth. No server crashes, no inability to log in, nothing. Part of this, I think is that they gave online reviewers access to the beta and, here's the thing, paid attention to what they said. Game reviewers colour a lot of people's views [or at least help them decide if they're on the fence] on a game, so it's important that any issues that a reviewer mentions - assuming it's fixable, of course - get fixed. Preferably before release. Prior to release, there was a patch that dealt with a few minor things in the PvE aspect, and a couple things that were explicitly mentioned in the BFF Report PvP review.

Let's start with one of the most obvious things that WoW could stand to learn from Rift's example. WoW's base UI is pretty simplistic,though they've taken some measures recently to improve on it [the new guild interface for example], and I know that they still have to consider older machines when they do any changes. The computers that could run WoW at launch can still run WoW, though with a lot of the settings turned down. But when you get right down to it, if you want to do more than change the scale of your whole UI or add a couple bars, you have to branch out to addons. And that's fine. My roommate raids comfortably with pretty much the default UI; he has mods, but from what I've seen they're more along the lines of Omen and Gatherer, and maybe Grid.

Rift's UI, straight out of the box, is pretty good. Everything's placed in a pretty logical function, raid frames darken or brighten depending on you're being relative range to the players in the raid. And it's customizable in-game. Not to the extent that is possible with mods in WoW, but that's not the point. Aside from your generic scaling of the entire UI, there's a menu option to re-arrange your UI. Want your minimap to be in the middle of your screen, just above your hotbars? Done. Want your quest tracker and group/raid frames to switch locations? Done. Don't want to see your pet frame or pet action bars at all? Done. And each element can have it's own unique scale and transparency. But now that you've done that to your liking for one character, you'll have to set it all up manually on any future characters, right? Wrong.

Any future characters you make on the same shard [read "server"], whether they're of the same faction or not can import the settings you've put together from any other. And not just UI positions either. You could import your UI from ToonA, your keybindings from ToonB, and your macros from ToonC, if you so desired. That piecemeal approach only works for characters on the same shard, but handily there's a way to import the whole thing [or just the UI placement, I'm not sure] for characters on other shards. There's slash commands. Just log in to the one character and type "/exportui name" and log on to the other and type "/importui name" That's it. And this is in the default game, at launch. Rift doesn't have addons [Yet. The developers aren't opposed to them, to my knowledge.]

There's a few other things that add a great deal to the convenience and ease of gameplay, but they're minor enough that I'm only really going to gloss over them. From your bag bar, it's possible to search your bags if you know the name [or even part of it] of what you're looking for. When at a vendor, your available cash is on their pane, so you don't have to glance down [or up, depending on your UI placement ;p] at your bags to see if you can afford to buy that new sword. Next to your gold display on the vendor window is a little button, that when pressed automatically sells all your vendor trash, leaving all your consumables, crafting materials, gear, etc unscathed. AoE looting. Let's say, you've managed to aggro a whole bunch of mobs, and then successfully kill them all. You're now surrounded by corpses to loot. Normally you'd have to loot them individually, but in Rift, if multiple corpses are in a specific radius of the corpse you loot, you loot them all, simultaneously.

Multiple crafting professions [I'd say all the non-gather ones, but I've only tried weaponsmithing, armoursmithing, runecrafting and outfitting so far] have the ability to break down items for crafting materials. Runecrafting works much like enchanting in WoW, in that you break down [or you would, if it wasn't disabled right now due to player exploits] greens and make runes that can put minor enchantments on specific slots of gear. If you're an armoursmith, you can break down pieces of armour for some metal bars and skins [as well as scraps, which can be combined into salvaged parts which, I'm told can be used in higher-level crafting]. Same deal with weaponsmithing, only you're breaking down weapons, instead of armour. These last things are hardly new approaches to crafting in an MMO, but it does stand to reason that a weaponsmith should be able to figure out how to get something usable out of an axe that is no longer useful, etc.

And finally, public grouping. This one gets it's own paragraph because it ties into a major thing I want to touch on. Public grouping, works like this. Any time you come upon somebody killing something you need to kill for a quest, you can click them, and click a little button on top of their portrait and instantly you're in a group together, and you both get credit. This is handy for normal questing, which is mostly done solo. But the public grouping system [which, if you're curious, you can toggle on your own portrait to private so that people can't randomly group you if you're feeeling anti-social {or douche-baggy}] works just a bit differently for the titular Rifts. When you're near a rift, and at least one other person is too, at the top of your screen [again, assuming basic ui positioning] there's a button labelled "Join Public Group". You click that, and then then you're in a group together, and - assuming the other person is at the rift for the same reason you are - you work together the help close it. This is extremely helpful, especially at some of the larger rifts or during invasions, when there's thirty some-odd people there, all busy making stuff dead or alive depending on their calling/souls [class/specs].

The titular Rifts, as they should be in a game called RIFT, are major points of the game. If it helps, [and it certainly helps me, in terms of describing them] they're like the pre-Cata elemental invasions, only they're everywhere. Some are minor rifts, that you can close all by yourself. Some are major rifts, where you'll need help. And every now and then there's invasions. Four or five major rifts and about a dozen minor ones open up at the same time, and start sending troops to outlying towns to conquer them. If you close all those major and minor rifts in time, a boss spawns. The reward system for closing rifts is interesting too. It kind of works like honour points in WoW. There's a specific currency used to buy stuff [gear, recipes, rift-related powers {one reinforces a wardstone in a town, which helps prevent that town from being captured}], and you acquire that currency by closing rifts. The amount of currency [and other minor rewards] you get for closing a rift, though are based on your contribution. You're going to get a bunch of the lower tier currency and a few of the higher tier ones if you're healing the group, or if you help kill the boss spawn. You might get a few of the low tier currency if you arrive when the boss is at 5% and help from there. And you'll get nothing if you stand around in the group doing nothing.

The Rifts also provide something that I, at least, have found lacking in WoW in a long time. Feeling heroic. Ask yourself this: When's the last time you did something in WoW, where you felt like a Big. Damn. Hero? For me, barring the rescue of lowbies from their certain death here and there, it was back in vanilla, when I killed Nefarion for the very first time. That was a long time ago. A lot of the time in WoW, I just feel like a glorified delivery boy, bringing So-and-so twenty bear asses, or at best, a mercenary, killing a boss for phat lewtz. Closing a rift, makes me feel good. Helping defend a town from an invasion? Makes me feel heroic.

And finally [again], a sense of humour. Now this is one thing that WoW doesn't lack. Blizzard-Activision are more than willing to make a joke. The gnome-killing fireball quest in Uldum, being a quest-giver in Hillsbrad, the inclusion of the hunter NPC that walks up and down the road from Orgrimmar to Razor Hill, by the name of "Tednug", and his pet cat, "Scratchfever". But a lot of other MMOs out there seem to have lost their sense of humour somewhere during development. This is just one example [the only one I've encountered so far, but I'm sure there's more]: When you kill a critter, you get a one minute debuff, essentially calling you a terrible person for just killing that rat/cat/deer/whatever. However, every now and then, when you kill one it's lootable. And that loot? Is a tear. With a tooltip with flavour text along the lines of "That coyote was someone's mother" or "I hope you're proud of yourself". And those tears can be collected for an Artifact set [I've not completed an artifact set yet, so I have no idea what the reward for doing so is]. The Artifact set itself, has flavour text that reads, "You're such a mighty warrior, aren't you?"

All in all, I've been enjoying myself in Rift, and I still enjoy playing WoW, but Blizzard-Activision could certainly learn a few things from Trion Worlds.

Oh, and if you're curious to see the BFF Reports on Rift, here are the links. Because no post by me is complete if it doesn't have any links!
First report
PvP report
Dungeon Guide report

Wednesday 2 March 2011

Assistant Professor Leeloodallas, Multipass!

That's right folks, it's time for another quin-level Leeloo update.

This section of levelling took way longer than it should have. Partly because I haven't been playing much, and partly because I apparently received a blow to the head and decided to go back to the Eastern Kingdoms after I dinged 34. I know what I said earlier, and it's still true; Eastern Kingdoms is a horrible continent to level archaeology on if you're horde and can't fly yet.

However, I was getting bored of things over on Kalimdor, and I was hoping that grabbing all the flightpaths in between each digsite would make things easier on EK as well as add some variety. I'm not too sure that I've accomplished the former as digsites in Redridge still entail running from Searing Gorge through mobs several levels above me, bu it definitely added variety. I've been dying in all kinds of new [to Leeloo] and interesting locales.

Truthfully though, aside from the grabbing of flightpaths in Eastern Kingdoms I haven't died all that much, which is a bit surprising considering how poorly geared Leeloo is. Aside from the three initial pieces of heirloom gear that I started this challenge with [Stained Shadowcraft Tunic, Spaulders and the Venerable Mass of McGowan with Crusader], her gear is kind of rubbish. The auction house at 30 had a complete dearth of useful gear, and at 35 what little there was that was an upgrade had exorbitant prices. 50g for some new pants? Bugger that for a lark.

I've also come to the conclusion that this would be a lot harder if Leeloo was anything but what she is, a druid. There are other classes that would do better, in terms of survivability like a hunter or a paladin, but survivability plus ease of travel? Druid hands [paws?] down. If you're thinking to yourself that at level 20, it wouldn't make a difference at all, but I've not bought any Riding skill yet. I'm not even sure I've been able to afford it yet, except at the time of my visit to Orgrimmar upon hitting 35. But the thing is, I've talented for a faster cat form, glyphed for a faster aquatic form, and if I'm outdoors I have travel form. These are hardly the top of the class, as it were, in the realm of faster travel, but they're constant, and relatively cheap.

I'm still bleeding money like a hemophiliac, though. The double-gathering is bringing in tidy sums of money, of course, but that money, as I mentioned when I started this silly venture, is being held elsewhere. Thankfully, my higher level gains has opened up both new zones to dig in, as well as better quality relics. Now the ones I'm solving for don't just vendor for 1g; sometimes they vendor for *gasp* 2g. So upon dinging 35, I was actually sitting on a mountainous sum of 15g - which I then promptly spent on training  my druid [I didn't train at 34 due to not needing the newly unlocked abilities] and her profession skills. Mining and herbalism set me back 9g.

Finally, as the title of this post implies, Leeloo got herself some archaeology achievements and is now the proud owner of a Druid and Priest Statue Set as well as the title "Assistant Professor". That title has actually saved my life now, believe it or not. I was at a digsite in ... I honestly can't remember where, but there were nagas everywhere and it wasn't Darkshore. There was also a boss-level [boss-level, not ??-level] naga there that aggroed me despite me trying my very best to avoid her. She hit me twice fo 200-odd damage apiece when I was saved by a fellow archaeologist, a blood elf priest. After solidly thwapping the naga, and me thanking her, she let me know that she only saved me because of my title. Misplaced reasoning aside, that was pretty nice.

And now... Screenshots!