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I logged into Star Trek Online for the first time two nights back and made my way through the first set of missions.

The introductory mission featuring combat with the Borg felt almost deceptively easy, but understandably so. Given a choice between an easy introductory tutorial and a trial by fire for new players it’s easy to see why Cryptic opted for the gentle introduction. The novelty if space combat and the fun of blasting Borg with a phaser more than made up for the lack of difficulty, but a small part of me worried about the rest of the game being a similar cakewalk.

That worry grew as I went out on the first real mission in the game. It was a simple exploration mission straight out of an episode of Star Trek or the mission log of an old Wing Commander game. Starfleet sent me to visit four star systems and check for any trouble.

The first system I visited involved escorting a damaged mining vessel back to its base. The second involved beaming down to a planet and solving some dispute on a diplomacy mission, which translates to walking around and talking to a few characters.

That’s all talking and no killing, for those of you keeping score at home. That mission was a definite and pleasant surprise given the MMO trappings and speaks volumes to me concerning the great potential offered in the game if they keep doing more Star Trek-feeling things like that instead of opting for a generic MMO with Star Trek graphics. But it was still incredibly easy to complete given the lack of talking.

The third mission was where things started getting interesting. I entered a star system to discover it had been taken over by Orion pilots or some such nonsense, and Starfleet wanted me to introduce them to Federation space on the business end of a phaser and some photon torpedoes. Easy enough, right?

Except that I found myself being bombarded by neverending waves of escort ships and battlecruisers that were really giving my poor little ship a pounding. I was able to defeat the first group of escorts easily enough and outrun the battlecruiser so that I could move in to destroy the shipping platform that was the real objective of the mission, but by the time I got around to destroying the platforms a second fleet had closed in on my ship. And when I turned around I was maneuvering straight into the waiting crosshairs of that first battlecruiser that I’d escaped from.

There’s no death penalty in the game at this point, but simple gamer’s stubbornness left me beating a retreat for open space to retry the mission the next day. I was also happy that there was at least a small difficulty curve and something to provide a challenge so early in the main body of the game.

Then I tried the mission again the next day and realized that the three battlegroups were in there because I’d joined the instance with two other players who had just warped out. The second time I tried completing the mission was with a group that didn’t leave immediately, and we were able to mop the system up with little effort and breeze through the quest in about ten minutes. And as I thought about this it dawned on me that the night before I’d managed to destroy half of a battlegroup that was intended to be fought off by two or three players all by my lonesome.

Star Trek Online is a blast to play, but these experiences don’t leave me with much confidence about the difficulty curve in the early game. Only time and more playing will show if things improve at all.

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Note: If you’re coming to this page looking for information about the performance of the G72 in World of Warcraft then this second post dealing with that in particular might be of interest.

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the passing of my old Dell Inspiron laptop that I purchased back in 2007 to get me through grad school. The little guy still works fine for the most part aside from taking a little longer to load now than he did back when he was new, but the old adage of “Groves giveth and Gates taketh away” continues to affect the computer market.

The main problem was the graphics card. The little 128MB workhorse that came with my Inspiron was more than enough to play World of Warcraft, the only game I was playing at the time, but in the two and a half intervening years I’ve gone from being able to run WoW on maximum settings to barely ticking by with everything turned down. I’ve also been wanting to try out Star Trek Online and the graphics card was the one weak link when I ran a stress test to see if my old computer could handle it.

After a bit of searching and consulting with my brother (who spends far more time researching graphics cards than I would ever care to) I decided on an Asus G72 from Best Buy. The price was just right at $999. The G72 only has a dual core processor, but it’s a high end dual core with a screaming clock speed. Right now it seems that few games and programs are designed to utilize dual core let alone quad core, and I think that at this point it’s still a better choice to get a faster clock speed on a dual core than to saddle yourself with a slower clock speed and smaller front side bus on an equivalent quad.

And the graphics card, the GX260M, is a kickass little card for what I paid for the system. I could go on about onboard memory, clock speed, and all that technical stuff, but at the end of the day I’m able to run Warcraft and Star Trek Online at 1600×900 resolution with all of the settings turned up to the maximum and a steady 50-60FPS in heavily populated areas and battlegrounds.

Being able to see Dalaran from atop Icecrown Citadel is something I was never able to do on my old machine, and looking to the other side of Arathi Basin and seeing the fighting clearly on that side isn’t something that I’ve seen since my old desktop gaming machine went belly up a couple years back.

So now that I have a laptop capable of handline Star Trek Online you can expect some coverage of that game to go along with the World of Warcraft coverage that you already enjoy. But more on that in another post dedicated to the game.

And in the meantime, if you’re looking for a decent gaming laptop for the price then the G72 is a nice little deal right now. I get the impression that Best Buy might be lowering the price to clear it out and make way for a new quad-core model, but I haven’t found anything concrete on that. Either way, it’s still an excellent little gaming machine for that price.

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We’re getting ready for another content patch in everyone’s favorite real life replacement. That’s right folks, the PTR is waking from its long slumber after being repeatedly run into the ground by everyone working to test the Icecrown Citadel experience just in time for a minor content patch that introduces some major changes in the game as the dev team starts clearing the path for everyone’s favorite apocalyptic dragon in Cataclysm.

“But Andrew,” you might be asking yourself right now, “what do these new patch notes offer for me?” And I’m glad you asked that completely genuine rhetorical question, because I’m about to summarize the shit out of these patch notes for you so that you don’t have to waste your valuable screwing-around-at-work time reading through all of the upcoming changes to your evening part-time job just so you can see if they finally fixed your totally underpowered Death Knight.

Do you like PvP? Well then you might be interested in some of the sweeping changes they’re making to the system to make way for yet another revamped honor system in Cataclysm. Honestly, if I had a thousand gold for every time they threw out one PvP system and grafted on another then I’d have more cash than a gold farmer who’s been chugging Red Bull for the past week.

1. The honor given per kill has been increased by 100%. Experience gained from honor kills has been reduced by 50%. If you did well in math back in school then you’ll already know that this means the amount of XP per honorable kill is staying the same.
2. Oh, and they’re also nerfing the honor you get from Wintergrasp by 50%.
3. So basically after all of that adjusting there’s a net gain of 0 honor for serious PvPers. Go Blizzard.
4. They’re adding a new Battleground Finder that will work the same way as the current Dungeon Finder. Daily BG quests will be removed and replaced with rewards for completing Random Battlegrounds similar to the rewards given for the current Random Dungeon system.
5. Battleground Marks of Honor are going away for good.
6. The sliding scale of advantage in Wintergrasp is being changed so that whichever faction has lost two consecutive games in a row is going to get a bigger buff to help them retake the place.

Do you like dungeons? Well Blizzard is giving you some love too. Like you thought they wouldn’t. Everyone knows that Blizzard loves their PvE players and that us PvPers are the redheaded stepchildren they love to ignore.

1. You can skip the Culling of Strat introduction provided you’ve done the dungeon and seen it at least once before. Thank FSM for that change.
2. The Dungeon Finder Deserter debuff has been increased to 30 minutes from 15 minutes. So no dropping from bad groups without harsh consequences.
3. Anyone in a party can requeue their group now.
4. Players must now provide a reason for kicking someone from a random dungeon group.
5. Players have to use the dungeon finder to access world bosses from now on.
6. Parties will now always be arranged as Tank>Healer>DPS>DPS>DPS in the party unit frames.
7. Players will now be given a reason why they can’t Need on an item in dungeons.

That covers all of the major news coming through in 3.3.3 so far. As always I’ll be keeping an eye on things and adding updates either in the Morning Blues report or in its own post if the news is big enough to warrant it. The complete patch notes are available for your reading pleasure after the cut.

continue reading…

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1. [GUIDE] Cataclysm Info! – UPDATE – 21/02/10

This is an excellent post that was stickied by a blue over in the WoW Europe forums that consolidates everything that we know so far about Cataclysm. Worth a read if you don’t know much about the new expansion, but beware spoilers.

2. Please do not ruin this

Ghostcrawler says: It’s not an issue of players behaving themselves so that they can have nice things. It’s a *good* thing for the game, when players figure out ways to break classes or abilities so that we can fix them.

3. How’d this game go from Wailing Caverns to…

The OP went back and ran one of the older dungeons for the first time and wondered why Blizzard got away from the old sprawling dungeon design. Anyone who played in vanilla WoW remembers spending hours trying to clear long dungeons. The old design is a stark contrast to the more compact experience offered in today’s dungeons.

The word from on high in this post is that Blizzard has no plans to revisit that old sprawling dungeon design mainly because most people didn’t have time to sink hours into a leveling dungeon. I can definitely understand the sentiment. In the context of Warcraft’s launch these long dungeons made sense. Leveling to 60 was the endgame back then. Blizzard expected most players to spend at least a few months working their way to the level cap and there wasn’t much in the way of level 60 content at the time.

Now that the endgame is firmly established and all about people getting newer shinier pieces of gear so they can tackle more and more difficult challenges in Icecrown or the Arena it makes sense to make it easier for people to get that gear and progress. Some hardcore raiders seem to remember the days of endless 40-man raids with fondness, but I think those types are either masochists or looking back on the old game with rose-colored glasses. Long dungeons might look pretty, but they sucked in terms of a game experience.

4. Plush pets…Really Blizzard?

There are no plans at this time to separate the real-world plush pets from their in-game counterparts. Welcome to the brave new world of Blizzard Webkinz.

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We get some odd search terms leading people to the site. I could just chuckle while scrolling through Analytics and move on, but then it occurred to me that I could have more fun sharing some of the better searches with you, the reader, and milking a few posts out of it.

Today’s search term was “worst mmo decade.” My guess is that some industrious spider has already crawled my Games of the Decade entry on Dark Age of Camelot yesterday and that’s what led the poor searcher to the site.

I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for in that article. Just in case you ever come back to Insert Credits, the worst MMO of the past decade was Lineage II followed closely by Aion. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is probably Korean.

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Dark Age of Camelot is a terrible game when viewed in retrospect. Released in 2001, it was part of the second wave of MMOs that came out in the awkward adolescense well after Ultima Online and Everquest carved out the genre but well before World of Warcraft brought it into the mainstream. So Dark Age of Camelot is very much the product of the prevailing MMO design philosophy of the time: a repetitive and often punishing grind to the level cap followed by another grind to more ephemeral caps like Realm Ranks or Master Levels with none of the design savvy and friendly interface trappings that make the MMO grind tolerable and fun in World of Warcraft.

At this point you might be thinking to yourself that it’s unfair to compare a game that debuted in 2001 to a genre and industry paradigm shifter like World of Warcraft, and if we were talking about any other genre I would be inclined to agree. But it’s different with MMOs. So many people have been brought into the MMO fold by World of Warcraft compared to the small number of people who played before Blizzard’s juggernaut that most gamers simply have no conception of how bad it used to be. How can you expect the average MMO player today to understand the unforgiving difficulty curve in the genre circa 1997-2003 when the average MMO player started playing World of Warcraft around the time Burning Crusade hit and thinks that having to run halfway across a zone to reach a quest objective is an example of unfairly arduous game design?

Let me tell you about a typical night spent in Dark Age of Camelot and maybe finding Mankrik’s wife won’t seem so bad in comparison.

My friends all played Midgard, a frosty realm that drew heavily on Norse mythology, on a small roleplaying server. After reading through the manual and talking with friends I decided to play a dwarf Healer, a pure utility class that had no offensive capability whatsoever. I could heal people, I could give them the best health and mana buffs in the game, and I could stop entire groups of enemies in their tracks with stun and mesmerization spells, but I absolutely could not kill anything on my own with anything approaching efficiency.

I’d like you to pause and let that sink in for a moment. If you were playing the Healer the right way with group utility in mind then there were no offensive abilities available to you. Sure there was one of three trees that coul buff you to the point that autoattack would do enough damage to elevate you slightly above useless in solo play, but that specialization would also render you almost completely useless in a group. At the level cap you would become nothing more than a buffbot with a human behind the wheel who could occasionally provide ghetto backup heals if a group leader was desperate.

And respeccing wasn’t as simple as making a small payment. Oh no. Instead, respeccing in Dark Age of Camelot was an event that required getting together with 20-50 of your friends and raiding a top level dungeon in the hopes that:

1. You had enough people with you to drop the needed monsters.

2. A “respec stone” – an in-game drop tha allowed you to change your spec – would drop.

3. The respec stone was a multi-line stone that would allow you to change your entire spec rather than an inferior single-line respec stone that only gave you your points back in one tree.

4. No one else wanted that respec stone if it dropped.

5. You’re able to get it over other takers.

6. You’re able to somehow get enough single-line respecs to reconfigure the three talent trees available to you since they were a lot more likely to drop.

7. You didn’t put a single point out of place, because then you were well and truly screwed.

8.You could convince all of you friends to run you through a PvE dungeon multiple times in a game where the endgame focus was set clearly on PvP when you inevitably didn’t get the respec stones that you needed the first time.

So the upshot of all that is that if you were a Healer and you wanted to have any utility at the level cap then you needed to go with a spec that made you completely useless for killing monsters. And this is in a game where the most efficient way of reaching the level cap wasn’t questing, but going out and whacking monsters until you dinged. Oh, and you lost experience every time you died, meaning you could potentially lose an entire level’s worth of experience if you did accidentally find yourself going toe to toe with a monster.

It was a good idea to run with groups if you wanted to play a Healer.

A typical night for me in Dark Age of Camelot usually involved logging on and spamming the local population center in the Shrouded Isles expansion for anyone willing to go out and kill something. Thankfully a Healer having no offensive abilities was tempered somewhat by the fact that eeryone wanted to have a Healer in their group and would bend over backwards to accomodate you. Once your group was formed (and groups in Dark Age went up to eight so it could take a little longer to find multiple support classes for a full group) then you would go out into the world and find a spot to kill stuff until you leveled.

Dungeons were a favorite spot for people to kill stuff ad infinitum, but even there a critical and annoying design flaw reared its ugly head. Dungeons in Dark Age of Camelot weren’t instanced. Anyone could go in and kill monsters that you were killing. And in Dark Age anyone who hit a monster got a cut of the experience making it possible for griefers and greedy levelers to completely ruin a leveling expedition for your group by stealing kills or training mobs onto you. All of those things were against the game rules, of course, but Mythic decided that it would be easier to have their toothless CSRs handle the problem rather than patching the issues out of the game forever.

Basically Dark Age of Camelot was a pile of the worst MMO design decisions of the pre-Warcraft era with an interesting PvP system dangled as the sole carrot at the end of a very big stick to keep people interested until they hit the level cap. And despite all of these glaring design flaws I still logged in regularly during my first year of college to partake of the grind.

I think that the novelty of playing in a persistent world for the first time with a group of high school friends who had scattered to the winds was the main thing that kept me coming back to Dark Age of Camelot. Now I’m so burnt out on the genre that I can’t even log into WoW to run a dungeon without getting antsy and thinking of all the things I could be doing other than killing digital monsters for gear that will be rendered obsolete by the next expansion, but for a time the MMO had a hold on me that precluded all other games. And that hold started with Dark Age.

They say that you always remember your first time, even if the experience was clumsy and everything that has come since is better thanks to experience. Dark Age will always hold a special place in my heart as my introduction to the MMO, even if you couldn’t pay me to play it today.

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In Games of the Decade I take a look back over the rare games published between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2009 that hooked me to the point that I played them to completion (in the case of single player games) or that I played far too much (in the case of MMOs).

The ’00s (I’m partial to reading that as “the aughts”) wasn’t the decade that first brought us MMOGs, but it is the decade where they finally broke into the mainstream. So it’s only appropriate that the first game on my Games of the Decade list should be an MMO, even if it’s an MMO that you probably haven’t heard of, that practically no one plays today, and that completely eschews the sword and sorcery fantasy trappings that has defined almost every other MMO to date.

Instead Jumpgate puts you into the cockpit of a spaceship belonging to one of three alien factions vying for supremacy in a galaxy map connected by jumpgates that allow for instant travel over stellar distances and connect various sectors for players to explore. Adding to the fun is the game’s realistic space physics which are a refreshing change from other more arcadey spaceflight simulators that came before. You might not understand the relation between mass and force in a vacuum when you start Jumpgate, but you’ll quickly gain a renewed interest in basic Newtonian interactions after smacking into the broadside of a spacestation few times and repeatedly losing all of your stuff.

And that renewed interest will pay off in the long run, because Jumpgate is also unique amongst MMOs in that skill definitely counts for more than gear. Sure there are the usual genre trappings of levels, experience, and better “gear” in the form of newer more powerful spaceships with hardpoints from end to end that can be outfitted with equipment guaranteed to give your enemies a one-way trip into the cold vacuum, but none of that will mean a thing if you’re no good at actually piloting the ship. Better equipment will only carry you so far in Jumpgate.  If you lack the skill to finesse your craft through the game’s unique physics or a basic understanding of the differences between weapon types then all that fancy stuff will just be so much fodder for space pirates and flux.

And don’t doubt for a moment that space is full of things that want to make you dead. The sectors surrounding each race’s home planets are considered safe zones, but that just means that players who kill you will incur a bounty and flux – the cephalopod themed creatures that act as the PVE monsters in Jumpgate – are all of lower levels but still quite capable of killing you if you aren’t careful. You’ll probably be fine as long as you remember that the Jumpgate galaxy is a cold and unforgiving place that is trying its best to kill you and take all of your expensive (and usually uninsured or underinsured) equipment.

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Jumpgate is an addicting game that borrows the best mechanics from MMOs and older spaceflight sims to create an excellent synthesis. The game provides quests under the guise of missions that can be picked up at a spacestation and completed for experience and monetary rewards. There are a limited number of mission types that will seem familiar to MMO veterans such as kill quests, escort missions, scouting, or returning materials, but transposing these familiar quest tropes onto a space simulator breathes new life into them and makes them interesting enough to propel players through the levels. NetDevil also offers an upgrade to level 25 (half the level cap) for a modest fee if you feel like you have the game mechanics down and want to skip straight to blasting people and monsters with some of the more interesting and powerful ships.

With all of these interesting spaceflight sim takes on the MMO it’s really a pity that Jumpgate didn’t garner more attention when it first launched back in 2001. NetDevil had issues with the first publisher and went to a digital-only distribution scheme at a time when online-only sales hadn’t really been tested. The short shelf life coupled with a reliance on word-of-mouth meant that the game never had a large following compared to most other MMOs. By the time I tried it out in 2003 nearly two years after the game launched the galaxy was already starting to feel a little sparse. When I came back a few years later in between bouts of World of Warcraft the galaxy felt like a ghost town and the graphics engine was definitely starting to show its age.

But there is still hope for fans of Jumpgate and spaceflight simulator junkies in general. NetDevil has had a much-hyped sequel, Jumpgate Evolution, in development for a couple of years now. With updated graphics, a more aggressive advertising push, a PC gaming market that has adjusted to digital distribution, and a fresh helping of the gameplay that made the first Jumpgate so addicting, I’m hoping that the next incarnation of the series will soon be working its way into my list of the best games for the next decade.

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So Blizzard has added a panda pet and a lich pet to World of Warcraft.  The catch?  The only way to get the pets is by plunking down $10 of your hard-earned real world cash to get them.

I’d like to point out that I totally called this two years ago in a satirical article on Daily Gaming News.  This isn’t the first time that a parody piece I wrote on that site has come true and I seriously doubt it’ll be the last.

The funniest part of the whole business?  At the time the DGN picked up by a few legitimate news sites and repeated as a real news story, and even discussed on The Instance podcast (episode 61, specifically) where they decided it couldn’t possibly be true.  Their reasoning?  “Blizzard would never do something like that.”  Oh Blizzard.

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Aion has hit store shelves and the buzz juggernaut is going full tilt. The marketing people at NCSoft have wisely state that they’re shooting for a healthy second in the MMO market behind Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, but that healthy dose of realism hasn’t quite gotten through to gamers or the gaming media who are breathlessly christening Aion with the oft bestowed but never fulfilled title of “Warcraft Killer.”

Take the following conversation that I had a few days ago with a fellow Warcraft player who planne on leaving for Aion as soon as it hit the shelves:

Fangirl: I’m so sick of grinding rep. Can’t wait for Aion.

Me: Wait, you’re moving to a Korean MMO to escape grinding?

Fangirl: Aion isn’t a Korean MMO.

Me: Yeah, it is. And it’s going to be a grindtastic slog with prettier graphics.

Fangirl: It isn’t Korean. It’s made by NCSoft.

Me: …NCSoft is based in Korea, and based on their past efforts in Lineage I’m not holding my breath on this one.

Fangirl: Still, NCSoft listens to their customers. They’re much better than Blizzard.

Me: Really? A quick glance at their Wikipedia page shows that they have an F with the Better Business Bureau for ignoring customer complaints.

Fangirl: Well I think that people who haven’t played the game should shut the hell up until they’ve played the game and given it a chance.

Me: But no one has played the game. It’s being released next week.

Fangirl: Shut up.

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Blizzard poster Bornakk has posted a clarification regarding the undocumented changes to Alterac Valley in patch 3.2.2 yesterday:

With the launch of patch 3.2.2 today there have been some changes to the Alterac Valley battleground and we wanted to clarify what exactly has been done.

Level 80 characters now have their own bracket and there is a separate bracket for characters that are levels 70 to 79. This change was originally planned for patch 3.3 but it was accidently applied to the current patch 3.2.2. As we had already intended to make this change so that players who are leveling play together and players who are at the level cap play together, we will be keeping the bracket setup this way, but the level of the bosses in the brackets below level 80 will be reduced to compensate.

The most interesting thing about Bornakk’s post is that the changes were “accidentally” applied. You really have to wonder what’s going on at Blizzard HQ when a major change like this, for good or bad, just slips into the game without a chance for testing, reaction, or commentary from the playerbase. A good number of players are understandably upset that AV is now a less viable leveling alternative to running the same tired old quests, and people at level 80 are miffed that there are now far fewer battles available in what was once the honor cash cow of the Battlegrounds system.

The changes to the brackets are probably for the best in the long run, but putting them in with no warning definitely wasn’t the way to implement it. I normally don’t have many bad things to say about Blizzard, but they really dropped the ball on this one.

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