Another one bites the subscription dust

Last Updated on Wednesday, 15 May 2013 11:49 Written by Kadomi Wednesday, 15 May 2013 02:00

The big news yesterday was something I had somewhat expected ever since Scott Hartsman left Trion Worlds in January:

Over the years I have mentioned multiple times that I find Rift one of the nicest MMO experiences out there. I was a subscriber for 9 months after release, and went back on a trial basis last year. It’s a great, highly polished game with tons of interesting features and cool classes. Unfortunately the playing experience is maybe a bit too close to WoW and so I never really went back full-time. When I read about the F2P transition next month my first thought was ‘Wow, how awesome is that?’ It means that a ‘WoW tourist’ like me will have the opportunity to go back whenever I please, without any pressure, and without any obvious restrictions that would make it unpalatable to me – like say, SWTOR’s reduced amount of action bars, come on. Of course that’s easy for me to say. I am not a current subscriber, and some of those might feel entirely different about the transition, like Liore, whose opinion I value greatly. She is bummed, and probably for good reason. Non-cosmetic gear for sale in a cash shop smells like pay to win to me. On the other hand, if it’s solely catch-up gear so people can start raiding with their friends, maybe not so bad. I guess only time will tell, but as always, I wish Trion Worlds well, because ultimately, they always struck me as a good publisher who worked hard on making Rift very polished, with an incredibly high pace of new content delivery. Come June 12, I will likely download the client once again and dip my toes in. I always thought chloromancers were nifty.

In WoW news

No 5.3 this week means I can mostly just putter around again. This coming week I will purchase the last piece of DPS gear for Yatalai with VP, and then I am done with that. I don’t have the energy to do the valor grind for tanking gear and instead will use any future VP for upgrades. With an ilevel of 509, I am chafing at the bit to be rid of my next to last piece of gear from T14, my Shoulderpads of Misshapen Life. I predict another week of me blowing two Mogu Runes on Iron Qon and Tortos in LFR to replace the shoulders, to get…gold. I have heard complaints about the loot system a lot, and because I have been a lucky beeyatch it’s never bothered me, but T15 is not very kind to me. Double-gold, all the time. Lame!

As I was valor-capped by yesterday, I decided to work on Raiding with Leashes some more. Gluth was a disappointment again, but I burned him down in no time. He was my only problem boss in my first solo Naxx attempts (aside from those two annoying guys before Thaddius), so I was pretty pleased with that. From there I decided I would try my luck with Blackwing Lair. According to forums, Razorgore is sooooo ez-mode, and everyone who can’t solo this a lesser player. Well, don’t let it be said I am that. Three wipes later, I started considering myself a lesser player. Most of the adds aggroed onto Razorgore, and when I hadn’t even cleared half of the eggs, he would die. Incidentally, so would I. Our raid leader Savitr was online, and confused about why the adds didn’t latch onto me. He recommended dismissing Razorgore instead of having it drop off. What can I say? That did the trick. Once I dismissed him, all of his friends ran over to me, I took control again, and once there were too many adds again, I dismissed again. Success!

Of course I’ll have to do it again next week, because neither Razorgore, nor Broodlord Lashlayer coughed up any pets. At least I got Chrominius!

I spent the rest of the day playing the little disc priest who could. She’s now level 57, and Outland is looming ever closer. As much as I love TBC it pains me to say that at the thought of Outland, I am bored already.

The Godmother won at WoW blog posts yesterday. Her post about attunements of old made me very nostalgic for them. It reminded me of the Onyxia chain for horde. It was a flipping pain in the arse, it was for sure. It was also one of the most satisfying experiences I had in the game. I fondly remember turning Rend’s head in to Thrall. I felt like a hero. I don’t feel like a hero today, even though Wrathion has me jumping through crazy hoops. Yet, I do not know if this same feeling can ever be brought back to a more modern WoW audience. We’ve all been spoiled by the game.

Two people, what to play?

I like board games. I really do. I love opening new boxes, and the prettier a game, the happier it makes me. Board game nights are always highlights for me. My SO LOVES board games. She’s excellent at just about any board game. The only board game she didn’t fully warm up to was Dominion, which is a shame, I like it a lot. If she could, my SO would play board games every night. Did I mention she’s good? She’s really good. This means for 2-player games, she usually dominates every game so hard that I find little enjoyment in them. She’s a top-notch programmer, her mind works completely different from mine. When it comes to games, she’s a Vulcan, cold logic, and the goal to crush her opponents.

So I come looking for help, Interwebz. If anyone who reads this knows any really cool 2-player games, please leave a comment. Somewhere out there must be the game where I won’t be crushed every single time I play with her. Right? We enjoy Kingdom Builder, but I don’t like it as a 2-player game. Qwirkle didn’t work at all, because she’s like a friggin’ computer when it comes to it. She actually wrote an AJAX-version with computer opponents and multiplayer support in her spare time. The Settlers of Catan card game is good, but it takes an eternity to play.

Must look harder. Last night we played Yahtzee, and that’s at least a game we can play without me wanting to flip tables.

Tonight we’re going to the circus. I haven’t been to the circus in like a million years. Seriously, since my childhood. I hope it’s going to be good. I am skipping raid night for it, so it better be good!

The strange case of SWTOR F2P

Last Updated on Monday, 13 August 2012 05:13 Written by Kadomi Monday, 13 August 2012 05:13

Like many others, I quit SWTOR a while back, I think it was in May. My SO and I had played less and less because she had other commitments or interests, like her MUSH or her horse. I never really wanted to play much without her. For me, there was something missing from the game, this addictive rush, the compelling play that makes you sit at work longing to be able to play, or makes you research the game outside the game. When we played, it wasn’t unfun, we always enjoyed it. It also was a game where you couldn’t just login for 30 minutes and knock out some quests. If we’d logged off on the Imperial Fleet, getting to a planet would take like 15 minutes before we could get started.

While I am listing things that weren’t so great about SWTOR, it is that my experience in TSW has made it obvious that outside of the class stories, the questing fell short. You had a ton of rather generic Kill Ten Rats quests that were slightly improved by voice acting, but often translated into some sort of drudgery. As example, I like to list Nar Shadaa, a planet we generally both hated beyond the class story. Booooring. I think every SWTOR player I know has at least one planet they don’t want to touch with a ten-foot-pole.

But aside from the not always brilliant sidequests, you had a solid game. A game that I still uphold is the best duo experience you can have. From the conversation system, to flashpoints, to heroic quests: two players and their companions make for a fantastic group that can really have a lot of fun. TSW fails terribly in that respect, with it’s considerable amount of solo instances, where solo really means solo.

When we quit, we both said that we would go back once the game goes F2P. It had been talked about often enough that this seemed like a likely option. I happily would put some money down for unlocks and go back to the game. When their F2P announcement came, I was rather excited, and got even more so when I read their comparison chart.

The full comparison between subscription and F2P

Full access to the story for 50 levels? Really? Inarguably, the reason that people play SWTOR, to experience the class story. They’re giving that away for free. Wow. My previous experience with F2P was mostly in LotRO, and I fully expected SWTOR to adopt a similar model, to do as well as LotRO. In LotRO you have access to all zones, but you only get quests in the race starting zones + Breeland. They might have made more quests available by now, but that was what they had when F2P started. LotRO is grindy enough as it is, so the first thing I purchased were quest-packs for three additional zones, and a mount. They had regular sales, so it was easy to snatch them up.

I think a similar model would have worked great for SWTOR as well. Give F2P access to Act I of the class stories, pay money to buy more Acts. Give Sith players access to Korriban and Dromund Kaas, buy planet packs for further quests. Sell mounts. Sell bagspace, sell bankspace, etc. The way SWTOR is set up makes it pretty easy to adopt an F2P model.

Instead, they went with free questing, and are selling their operations and unlimited warzones and space missions as the non-F2P perk. I am sorry, but the disconnect between actual players and publisher seems vast. Can they even see the other side? I have not once heard that SWTOR operations are what keeps people subscribed to the game. Sure, there are raiders, but what’s universally been praised was their famous story pillar, something no MMO had done before to such an extent.

As a result, wherever I read blogs, people state that they don’t understand this F2P model, or that they’re unsubbing, because what they enjoy most will soon be free. Problematic. This announcement probably made them lose more paying players than can be balanced out by the rush of non-paying customers they’ll have. Mikro at SWTOR Life posted an analysis of the earnings call, and it doesn’t paint an encouraging picture, at all. Between all the Bioware layoffs, the non-faith inspiring earnings call, and now there are rumours that Dr. Greg Zeschuk is leaving Bioware. Where’s the light at the end of the tunnel, to keep current subscribers hopeful that they’re not paying for a dying product, but for a product that will still receive updates?

I am worried for Bioware. I am worrying that I might never get to see Dragon Age 3, which would make me very very sad.

Other noteworthy opinions about the strange F2P model EA/Bioware is adopting here:

• F2P: SWTOR, You’re Doing it Wrong at Siha Games!
• The Better part is Free – Tobold’s Blog
• The Old Republic goes F2P – Blessing of Kings

SWTOR: the best duo experience ever

Last Updated on Thursday, 5 January 2012 03:43 Written by Kadomi Thursday, 5 January 2012 03:43

s dedicated Bioware fangirl, there was no way I could not give SWTOR a shot. I had signed up for the beta early last year, and of course never made it in until that final beta stress test weekend. But that’s cool. I don’t begrudge the lack of beta times. In fact, I am not a huge fan of getting invested in a beta as a way of experiencing content. It just means you’re done with the content that much earlier. I really wonder how Blizzard will handle their biggest beta test ever for Mists of Pandaria, with all the one-year package folks. But I digress.

The beta weekend was actually quite lovely. I ran into no technical issues at all, and got to experience a most wonderful thing: my SO being actually interested. She’d quit WoW in 2009, right after killing Yogg-Saron, being bored with the game in general. Since then, she’s never shown any interest in WoW again, and well, can’t say I blame her. It’s not become more interesting since Ulduar days, I fear. But here she was, being very interested in the beta, and so I let her have the reins of my computer. She enjoyed it so much that she decided we’d be giving each other SWTOR for Christmas. WIN!

We both had early access, though only like two days headstart or so. Because of insane server queue times on The Red Eclipse we changed our plans of rolling there, and instead rolled Empire characters on Nightmare Lands, to join Spinks and a few other bloggers in her guild. As my SO and I are duoing together, and she’s far more casual than I am, we’re taking it really slow, but you know what? It’s fine. This means we’ll hit 50 around the time Bioware will have patched in more content already. I can’t quite understand people rushing to endgame at the moment, because from the get-go it was clear to me that endgame and content will be the achilles heel of SWTOR.

Let me introduce you to Yvadis. Chiss, with the coolest mohawk since Kadomi, absolutely dedicated to the Empire to the point of being a bootlicker, sarcastic and slightly mean to everyone else. Ruthless and cold-hearted when on missions. The only folks she gets along with are Kaliyo, her companion who is very like-minded aside from the devoted Empire service, and Chanta, the goody-two-shoes bounty hunter she’s hanging with. See what I did there? The thing is, the way you do quests and your class story in SWTOR, unless you’re the kind of player who spacebars through conversations, you are bound to have your character develop a personality, and see it in characters you play with. Chanta the bounty hunter is not really in it for the killing, she’s in it for the money, so she will use any chance to be paid off. She probably cringes at every dark side roll Yvadis wins, just like I facepalm when the light side wins.

On Hutta we quested our separate ways and only did heroic quests together, but since Hutta, we’ve been a team. She’s a DPS Powertech, I am a healing Operative. It pleases me to no end that healing means Yvadis shoots injection needles at folks. That’s just something she would enjoy, hell yeah. I thought healing would be odd without magic/force, but it’s not. It’s quite clever. Lots of little probes, injections, all very technical. I like it. Can’t say I like the Operative’s energy system because sometimes I go from 100% to nothing in no time, and sometimes it feels like my energy supply is endless, but I guess that depends on the encounter.

Can you imagine questing together in Cataclysm? I can’t. It’s mindlessly easy as a solo player. One of the disappointments of Cataclysm is that playing alts is not that much fun anymore, because of the quests on rails system, and the overall difficulty curve. I would say it’s rare to die while questing between 1-60. That’s where SWTOR is coming in so wonderfully for us. Questing as duo is viable. We did outlevel the last quests on Dromund Kaas, leaving the planet at level 18, but inbetween I can’t say it was like we facerolled it. We had good challenging fun.

I declared SWTOR as the best duo experience ever and I stand by that. Black Talon is a flashpoint best done by two people, and it’s here that the game first blew our minds. Mine at least. An incredibly tight story, fun encounters, close calls, and the right amount of time needed to finish it. We were slow, so maybe 45 minutes to an hour? Good fun. I really loved the multi-conversations, the fun of having your decision shape the story (hahaha, my dark side roll to shoot the captain won). I understand that future flashpoints are not as good, but that’s fine. I hope Bioware is aware of the concerns and will add more similar FPs to this though.

On Dromund Kaas, the second planet you hit as Empire character, there are plenty of heroic quests. In WoW of yore it would have been called an elite quest. For those kids who don’t remember them, back in the day WoW had elite mobs that required groups to kill them. They were one by one patched out of the game. I think the only group quest of Cataclysm I recall is the arena one in the Twilight Highlands. You might know the Hogger jokes, but maybe not the times where you wiped on Hogger over and over, with a whole camp of angry gnolls chasing you. Ah, those were the days.

In SWTOR, every planet has heroic quests, from the first world you start on to the end. Some are Heroic 2+, some are designated as Heroic 4. Four is the default partysize in SWTOR. The heroic quests are totally optional, offer nice rewards and can be repeated daily. They’re fun! Some of them end in real boss encounters, like Friends of Old. That one was actually fairly involved. First you had to kill some champion mobs to get Thermal Detonators, then head on over and destroy 3 landing shuttles. Once the shuttles were down, you had to enter the main building and kill the Sith behind the operation, and her apprentices. Basically three different quests, but the objectives update as soon as you are done with one part. This was a heroic 4 quest and we duo’d it, with our companions Kaliyo, my pocket tank, and Mako, her pocket healer. The last fight was a close call, as I wasn’t able to keep Kaliyo up, but a very satisfying kill.

I understand heroic quests are not for everyone. They’re not for dedicated soloists. But they’re also currently not for people who feel that groups can only be handled with an LFD-style tool. Sure, LFD is convenient. It also destroys community. I have always keenly felt this since Wrath of the Lich King, and Vidyala’s post in her blog really resonated with me. I enjoy seeing people look for groups in general chat, and I have seen plenty of groups actually doing the heroic missions in groups. I don’t know if it takes a turn for the worse on later planets but up to Balmorra I haven’t seen any issues so far. Go out there and meet people. Don’t call SWTOR a single-player game and then demand an LFD tool. I have seen all those fingers pointed. I find the WoW leveling game much more a single-player game than SWTOR. You can easily spend 1-85 without ever speaking a word to any other player.

The other cool thing about duoing together is that I get to experience the bounty hunter story as well. Only as spectator, but I come along to her story quests and she comes along to mine. Sure, it spoils the main story for me if I want to play a bounty hunter, and replayability is one of SWTOR’s issues, but at the moment, I am enjoying it.

I would definitely recommend SWTOR to anyone who is looking to play the game with a friend or significant other. SWTOR is my fourth major MMO, and between WoW, LotRO, Rift and SWTOR, I feel it’s definitely the best for duo or small group play. With the right companions, you can turn into a potent four-man group that can tackle champion mobs easily and earn your blue rewards for it. We sure kill every champion mob that crosses our path. It’s a game that has great strengths, but of course also flaws that I will address in later posts, but it’s definitely a satisfying two-player experience. Questing together is good fun, you can assist each other in your class quests and definitely kick some serious ass in the 2-4 people heroic quests. I hope to find out if you can successfully do 4 people Flashpoints as duo as well, but for now at level 19, Hammer Station is still kicking our butts.

Before I finish, let me show you this amazing version of Yvadis that I won in a Twitter contest. DiscoPriest, the amazing artist behind Disciplinary Action, Maps for Tanks and Space Cadet Comic, made this for me based on the screenshot I posted earlier. How cool is that? If you are interested in one of those for yourself as commission, follow the easy instructions that Stop provided in his blog. You also get to admire his art there that he commissioned. Can’t pimp those icons often enough. A lucky winner is me.