Snapshot of a Year

Today is Lyriana's first birthday. I happen to know this because EQ2 actually records characters' date of birth, along with other stats, and because I happen to remember the circumstances under which I decided to roll her up (dealing with WoW's sorry excuse for a Valentine's event last year). What exactly have I accomplished in that year?



Apparently there are stats for that too. I gained 80 levels of Dirge, 80 levels of Adventurer, and 141 AA's. I killed over 9000 foes, completed more than 1100 quests, learned 3400 recipes (crafting 3300 items in the process) and have dealt 5,000+ damage in a single hit.

It appears that players can expect this level of snapshot detail of our careers henceforth - the idea of social networking type pages for each of our characters is basically a standard feature at this point. I don't know if that's good or bad. At least it manages to be interesting.

Blizzard EQ2 Jarsath Marathon

Washington got hit with yet another pair of blizzards over the last week (it's officially the worst winter ever in DC), so it's time to dust off my silly pun about a blizzard encouraging an EQ2 marathon once again.



Based on my limited experience in the expansion beta, I concluded that I was not going to need all of the existing content I had yet to complete to supplement the solo content of Odus en route to 90. As a result, I decided to finish off Jarsath at level 80 for the alternate advancement experience. The beta pre-made characters started off at 150 AA, and I was able to reach 140 through my various meanderings, so it was probably a good thing that I took the time to catch up a bit.

The main solo goal of the zone is to complete lengthy quest chains for three separate factions. Capping out that many reputation bars sounds intimidating, but all of the reputations hit their maximum just from completing all of the solo quests. The reward is a hammer that teleports you to the zone when you use it as a weapon. Why is this teleport in the form of a hammer in general, and/or an equippable weapon in particular? Perhaps some developer finds it amusing if someone forgets to unequip the thing and accidentally uses it to teleport out of a dungeon, I dunno.

I also visited an older dungeon called Unrest - apparently a remake of an EQ1 zone - with some guildies. The place was well crafted and pretty rewarding (I got an entire AA's worth of experience from the named kills), but it also had a moderately high amount of trash and a bunch of puzzles that I can't imagine would still be novel if you were running the place repeatedly. Given that class set helms and chest pieces drop off of the bosses, I'm guessing that running it repeatedly is exactly what players did back when the level cap was 70. Ah well, to each their own, I suppose.

When I wasn't killing stuff for AA, I took a bit of time to reorganize my UI and hotbars. I'm going to get a few new abilities, and I really needed to move and re-size some hotbars in order to make that work without eating up my entire screen. (I currently have a total of 17 buffs on my buff-happy Dirge, and I'm going to get a few more in the expansion and/or as I gain AA's.) It's amazing how many settings there are that I would have loved to have known about, but didn't set when I started playing because I was too new to know what they were for.

My last real goal for the pre-expansion rush is to learn the language of the dragons (which is needed for the new Mythical buff quest) and generally clear out space in my quest log for new and exciting areas I have yet to visit. As part of this quest, I had to go into the evil-aligned city of Freeport anyway, so I decided to complete the evil side of the expansion launch world event. What would a good-aligned Fae like Lyriana want with the title "Champion of (the Evil Overlord) D'Lere"? Given that I do technically play on an RP server, this seemed like a bit of a stretch. But what if Lyriana had an undercover disguise as an evil Dark Elf?



It's the little places like this where EQ2 gets me to actually think about my character and the storyline that really stick out in my memory in the long run.

Cryptic And Additional Fee Brinkmanship

Two weeks ago, Cryptic announced plans to charge for Champions Online patch content that sounded suspiciously like "sorely needed content that wasn't finished in time for retail launch" (September 2009). Yesterday, they reversed this decision.

As Syp points out that we've seen this kind of reversal of unpopular decisions in the past. The example that stands out in my mind was a pre-release interview in which EA suggested that Warhammer might be worthy of a monthly fee higher than $15. The market apparently wasn't prepared to tolerate a game that appeared so similar to WoW coming in at a higher monthly fee than WoW. Likewise, Cryptic seems to have learned that the market is not yet prepared to tolerate paying for missing content so soon after a game launch.

Though I get Syp's point about giving companies the benefit of the doubt as they try to change for the better, I don't see that much cause for celebration here. Imagine that you went to the movies and, 2/3 of the way through the film, the theater manager comes out and says that the ending of the film wasn't included in your ticket price. Is anyone really supposed to feel better about going back to that theater if they later decide that they are going to show the ending of the movie anyway because they care about their customers? Cryptic announced plans to charge more because it intended to charge more, and there should be no doubt that it will make the attempt again in the coming months.

More to the point, it appears that there is no reason for companies who are considering higher and/or additional fees NOT to engage in this sort of brinkmanship in the future. People who choose not to forgive Cryptic for even making the threat would not have paid the additional fees in any case. In short, we can expect many more of this type of incident until someone finally succeeds in moving market expectations to the point where they can get away with it.

What the WoW Valentine's Holiday Really Needed

A limited-time daily quest boss with a rare mount is apparently just what Blizzard thinks the WoW Valentine's event needed.

In all seriousness, they've apparently revamped the entire event into a token based system after last year's debacle - Lyriana, my level 80 EQ2 character, was literally born during an evening I spent logging into WoW exactly once an hour to hit on the city guards. All of those achievements (even the once rare "perma-peedle" pet) are now guaranteed token drops, presuming the event is long enough to collect enough of them.

Of course, removing the RNG from most of the event doesn't necessarily change the complaint I raised about the easter holiday, in which Blizzard continues to design limited-time world events around a minimum amount of time investment they are hoping to get out of players. Did they get it right this time around? Not my problem, I've been there and done that.

Best of luck to anyone trying it this year, it can't possibly have gotten worse.

EQ2: Sentinel's Fate Beta Report

The NDA on the EQ2 expansion (launching in less than two weeks) has finally dropped. Here's what I've learned from some rooting around in the beta.

ALL YOUR GEAR MAY BE USELESS.
Base stats have changed to ensure that each class is primarily interested in two stats; stamina for HP and a primary stat (STR for fighters, AGI for scouts, INT for mages, and WIS for priests). ALL of your abilities scale to your primary stat, regardless of whether they are physical or spells. AGI and WIS are still nominally used for physical avoidance and spell resistance respectively, while STR still determines carrying capacity.

The good news is that it will be much easier for classes with both physical and spell-based attacks to gear up, as you will no longer be chasing both STR and INT, and all of your crit chances etc have now been unified. The bad news is that this means all the gear in the game needed to be re-itemized (and SOE will almost certainly miss a few spots in the launch rush). It also means that lots of crafted gear is now only good for a single archetype, and the one they picked may not be the class you happen to be.

If you are a priest or a scout, you are especially likely to be wearing a stat (STR, INT, or both) that you no longer need. Regardless, check all of your gear carefully when the patch happens, to make sure that it still does what you want it to.

More Gear Progression
Of course, all of this gear will eventually become irrelevant as part of a gear reset anyway. For reference, here are the DPS ratings of some weapons:

• Level 72 Mastercrafted weapon: 75.4 Rating
  
• Level 79 Legendary (looted from the Crypt of Agony): 84.5 Rating
  
• Level 87 TSF Treasured Quest Reward: 94.5 Rating
  
• Lyriana's Shiny new Fabled Epic Weapon: 95.8 Rating

Why, you might ask, did I bother to complete the quest knowing that? Well, there's a new quest that will allow players to trade in their epic weapon (either Fabled or the raid-quality Mythical) for a permanent self-buff that provides the unique benefits of the Mythical Weapon (which had become class-defining for many classes). It's worth doing the quest if you can get a group for it, even if it will only get easier as you level.

The Delay of New Halas
In case you have yet to hear, New Halas didn't get done in time for the expansion launch (which means we also are not getting the Thundering Steppes revamp). Both are slated for the next GU. Given that SOE is forcing players to go to a physical retail store if they want the expansion during its first week of release in an attempt to get stores to stock more copies and attract new players, I'm not clear on why it makes sense to fail to finish the new player content before the expansion arrives.

On the plus side, there are apparently some much-needed new quests in the KOS zones, which are currently pretty sparse on solo content. I literally canceled my account and went off play other things for a few months because that stretch of levels was so painful. In one zone, a row of buckets with notes tacked to them that say "collect hides from nearby mobs and deposit here" are what passes for solo quest content - they couldn't even be bothered to write two lines of dialog for an NPC to request the hides in person. I'd been half resigned to stopping any future alts at level 60 rather than deal with KOS again, so this is a very welcome change.

Revamping AA's
The game's AA trees have gotten the traditional revamp, complete with a new "branch" of sorts at the bottom of your class and subclass trees. These AA's, which become available at level 81 with 70 AA's spent in the tree, tend to enhance existing AA abilities, and there's a new endline for each.

The other huge change in this department is that they removed the entire row of nigh useless stat boost AA's from the class trees. After spending the first point, as you do currently, you are free to spend your next five picking up all five combat arts if you're so inclined. This is a pretty big deal for fighters and melee priests, who don't have a ton of attacks in their spellbooks, and can also help if one of your attacks has a useful secondary effect. For example, the Dirge STR line attack can block the next AOE attack aimed at your group from hitting you - this may not have been worth five AA's with the old prerequisite, but it's certainly worth one.

Welcome to Odus
Given my extremely limited time these days, it didn't make a lot of sense for me to sink large amounts of time into leveling on a temporary beta server. (I did, however, take advantage of the level 80 pre-mades to test drive some potential alts, carefully not mentioning that I had done so on beta servers when I wrote it up for the blog. ;)) Based on the time I did spend exploring, the expansion is very pretty (see EQ Traders, EQ2 Wire, and EQ2 Zam for official previews).

Structurally, it's very similar to Kunark - the two overland zones of Odus are about the same as any two zones from ROK, both in terms of landmass (there are auto-flightpoints) and number of quest hubs. Each of these areas seem to have their own local rep grinds to go with the new content. It also looks like there are a bunch of tradeskill quests and factions to go around, which could mean less reliance on grinding city rush order writs for craft exp.

Actually Playing the Expansion
In terms of how it actually plays, I copied Lyriana over and found that she fared about as well against level 82 expansion mobs as she does against level 82 non-expansion mobs, so the power curve looks relatively consistent (compared to the atrocious jump between KOS and ROK when you hit the 68-70 range). The exp per kill and per quest completion seem about consistent with what the current level 80 quests give out, and I also snagged around 2 AA's just running around as fast as my little Fae wings would carry me, picking up discovery exp all the while.

The catch is that these two zones are all that solo players have to work with. I don't fault SOE for that decision, because full-sized group play is comparatively more important in EQ2 than WoW or LOTRO, but it does mean that you go from having about six zones to level in during the 70-80 range and only a third as many for the next ten levels.

This is not necessarily a crisis for new level 80's like Lyriana, since there was a lot of content that I did not use en route to 80. My plan is to go to the Moors, a zone from the TSO expansion that I barely touched en route to 80, when the level cap increases. I can then self-mentor back down to level 80 when I'm ready to hit Odus. Solo players who have already cleared out all of the solo quests in the current game might have a harder time of it, but I suppose that problem will get better as more content is added over time.

Bottom Line
It does not look like there's any reason for players who are not yet level 80 to run out and buy the expansion for full price on launch day. This is NOT because SOE has been neglecting lowbies, but rather because they appear to have decided to give away all of the low level features as part of the game update when the expansion launches. (If you have yet to purchase the game, I'd strongly advise you to wait until the revised all-in-one pack arrives so that you don't have to pay more if you eventually move on to higher levels.)

For everyone else, this expansion seems to deliver the traditional additions at the traditional price. If you're happy with the current game, you're probably going to be happy with the expansion, and that seems to mean that SOE has done their job.

Charging for AH Access Vs Charging For Races

Of all of the possible issues with WoW's offline auctions, the added cost is the one that bothers me the least.

Overall, this does not sound like a feature that is going to pay for itself by driving additional subscriptions. (There might be a few econ-minded players who might pay just to play the AH game, I'm just guessing that we're talking about hundreds rather than millions of players.) If, for the sake of argument, we accept that this feature is an improvement to the game (the far bigger issue in this particular case), an additional fee is the only way to make it happen.

By contrast, we have the latest from Star Trek Online, which, on launch day, turns out to be charging for access to races. Klingons are fully implemented as their own faction, but unlocking Klingons who have defected to the Federation will cost players $1.50. Unlocking the Ferengi, who were apparently implemented in beta but not included with either faction, will cost $0.50.

Both types of characters were regulars on the TV shows, so there was clearly going to be some demand to play these races. Rolling up a new alt can actually keep a player occupied for long enough to bring in more subscription dollars. Meanwhile, Cryptic seems to have designed the game system specifically to make the addition of new races relatively easy. This should not have been a feature that needed to end up in the cash shop with a separate price tag in order to make implementing it viable, unless it ended up as a headline feature of a larger paid expansion.

In the end, players have a choice. Those of us who don't feel like playing those characters (or aren't willing to pay even a dollar to do so), don't have to pay. People who distrust the business model sufficiently can choose to skip STO outright. (Between the pre-order races and the new paid zone in Champions Online, players who fear the nickel and dime effect have plenty of reason to stay far far away.)

The catch, of course, is that the vote to quit the game is more of an all-or-nothing decision for both sides. Relatively few players are going to quit rather than try a new alt because they're morally opposed to the $0.50 to unlock the Ferengi. If, on the other hand, the player has used up all of their included character slots, AND would have to pay for additional races in any case, the total bill might add up to a large enough number to make players reconsider. If Cryptic is simply hoping that they already took that player for all they were worth by locking them into a long-term pre-release subscription, they might be in for a very harsh landing in the word of mouth department.

Implications of Out-of-game Access to the Game World

Blizzard has announced plans to allow players to "access the Auction House directly through the Armory website or Armory App". This changes a number of things:

1. Expect the inevitable local news story about someone who lost their job for playing the WoW AH at work. This isn't Blizzard's fault, or necessarily a reason not to implement the feature, but it's yet another chapter in the addiction narrative that all of us are pretty tired of hearing by now.

2. There will be an additional fee for this feature, and, in fairness, I'm prepared to believe that developing it will cost Blizzard some additional money. We're going to be having players accessing the same AH via two separate clients, and that's got to be an interesting database question. There is, however, a certain irony here. EQ2 had its armory-equivalent at launch, but for a fee. Then Blizzard added the Armory for free. Last month, SOE dropped the fee for the EQ2 site. And now Blizzard will be charging. We've come full circle.

3. My guess is that this feature will REQUIRE the use of an authenticator. Inviting players to check the AH from additional computers and (insecure) wireless networks only increases the odds of someone typing their password into a compromised environment. It's also nigh inevitable that the gold scammers will announce an improved Auctioneer program that just so happens to need your password so it can log into the Armory site and make money for you while you're offline. Finally, my understanding of the iPhone is that it cannot multi-task, and therefore the armory AH app would have to be integrated with the mobile authenticator app to be used on an authenticated account.

4. It's looking like Blizzard is trying to build Battle.net into its own version of Facebook. The Armory now has a non-optional Facebook-like feed of your activities in WoW. The new system will have cross-game chat for WoW, SC II and Diablo III, if said ever actually come out. And now WoW players will be day-trading the auction house. All of this means that players will be spending more time logged into Blizzard products, giving Blizzard a powerful advertising platform to leverage.

5. Oh yeah, and this is a fundamental shift on access to the virtual world from the offline one.

Consequences of Increased Connectivity
Historically, MMORPG's have been pretty reluctant to allow players access to the world by any means other than actually logging into the world. Cooldowns and timers tick away regardless of whether the player is logged in or not. Bargains may be posted on the AH at this very moment, where only alert online bargain hunters will have a chance to snag them. The latter, obviously, is no more.

Beyond the logistical concerns - will auctioneer bots run wild in the absence of the more restrictive environment enforced by the "Warden" security system on the WoW client? - this path is potentially genre changing.

On the plus side, it would be nice to be able to sign off with full bags and deal with the basic vendor/save/auction triage sometime at your leisure before your next play session. The next question would be whether this opens the door to other activities, such as instructing your character to take auto-travel routes while you're offline, so that you don't have to spend gaming time on AFK-travel. How about clicking the "transmute" button the moment the cooldown expires, an activity that would take all of 5 seconds to complete if you were able to log into the game?

That said, it is very easy to create a scenario where failure to check in on your characters on a regular basis places the player at a disadvantage. Even the AH utility starts us down that road - you might be way better off buying or selling during hours when you don't currently play the game, based on how the daily supply and demand curves work. The option to check in on the game at times when you can't normally could ultimately create pressure - real or perceived - to do so. This pressure will only increase as our games get more and more connected to the outside world, a trend which Blizzard neither started nor finished here.

In the end, this technology is neither good nor evil, but it probably will be used for a bit of each.