Just testing, really. Have set up a Flickr account, and I plan to create a new blog for LOTRO.
The ultimate hope is that I'll have a nice record of my time in LOTRO when it comes time for me to leave. Something better than RoD's unkempt copy of umpteen unsorted text logs anyhow.
Whether I'll get bored and choose to abandon it once Conan comes out, or stay on until they finish all the books up to the point Frodo shoves in the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom...well, we'll see. Depends on both games, really. And how CoX performs in the future too.
I really like LOTRO for the way it rewards solo exploration currently. I am a mapper/explorer at heart and I can putter around to my heart's content doing this kind of stuff. So a photo atlas cum diary of my various characters' journeys across the lands of Middle-Earth sound like a perfect way to enhance my game.
Cos I sure wouldn't want to get caught up in any mad leveling/questing/raid frenzies. (Which people are already doing. Chapter 11? Sheesh, I'm barely on Chapter 5 and I'm sidetreking all over the place.)
On the bright side, I have a lot more deeds and places marked on my map and I can direct people to things they are clueless about. Which kinda suits my chosen player role as random trivia collector fine. :)
I wouldn't wanna get wikipedia obsessive about noting down quests, though. I'll leave that to someone else. I just find the idea of an atlas / map of area names (including hidden ones) appealing. That and a visual record of the beautiful sights of the land.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
LOTRO - The Secret Room of Cats
Friday, April 20, 2007
PUG: The OCD Tanker
I took a break from LOTRO (review will come when the open beta ends) to work on Codex 13. I am trying to get her into the 30s so I can PvP with her. I do find PvP interesting, I just can't make myself wake up at the equivalent of EST 8pm that all the events seem to be set at (like the Guardian War series). Presumbably, Freedom will be somewhat active even in the funky hours that I play in. I am also planning to level a thermal corrupter called "Chief Instigator".
With my flag up, I almost immediately got invited into a team. It was a solid team with one flaw: the tank was obsessed the pulling to a corner tactic. He even had a bind for it "pulling to here".
At various points I pointed out that he did not have to pull. He could just do the tanky thing of jumping in. There were, after all, two defenders and two controllers on the team. He seemed terrified of just jumping in though.
He said: "It's faster this way"... nuh uh. It isn't. By the time you've dragged everything into your corner, the team could have just plowed through everything.
He said; "My defence is better when mobs crowd around me" ... nuh uh. You have two fortitudes on you, an ice slick on the bottom of you, and freezing rain on top of you. Do you really think you are somehow squeezing 14 mobs on top of you? Gaaaah!
I felt like making a snarky comment about whether we should just wait at the entrance while he herds them up -- and is he going to burn them down himself too? But nobody would have understood the reference anyway. They weren't around during the fire-tanker era. If they were, they might think twice about being meek lambs to that OCD tanker.
With my flag up, I almost immediately got invited into a team. It was a solid team with one flaw: the tank was obsessed the pulling to a corner tactic. He even had a bind for it "pulling to here".
At various points I pointed out that he did not have to pull. He could just do the tanky thing of jumping in. There were, after all, two defenders and two controllers on the team. He seemed terrified of just jumping in though.
He said: "It's faster this way"... nuh uh. It isn't. By the time you've dragged everything into your corner, the team could have just plowed through everything.
He said; "My defence is better when mobs crowd around me" ... nuh uh. You have two fortitudes on you, an ice slick on the bottom of you, and freezing rain on top of you. Do you really think you are somehow squeezing 14 mobs on top of you? Gaaaah!
I felt like making a snarky comment about whether we should just wait at the entrance while he herds them up -- and is he going to burn them down himself too? But nobody would have understood the reference anyway. They weren't around during the fire-tanker era. If they were, they might think twice about being meek lambs to that OCD tanker.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Fun is Subjective
Prior warning: This may turn out to be a long and meandering post. Yes, even more longwinded than I usually am.
I find that I must write this. To half-refute a biased post on the City of Heroes forum that our darling Statesman replied to, and hence alerted anyone who checks the Dev Digest. And to work away at a nagging ache in my brain that still can't really understand WHY.
Why what? Why I find myself currently deriving more enjoyment from the much-derided unoriginal and uninnovative LOTRO than the supposedly more "fun" and innovative CoX.
I suppose the short answer would be: Subjectivity. Or perhaps Perspective/Mindset. Novelty/Change. (More on the individual words later.)
Emotionally, I still can't come to terms with it. A part of my mind is screaming, "This is so not-new! This is lowest-common-denominator and a carbon copy clone of WoW and GW and Auto-Assault and CoX and practically every other MMO in the market! How can you be getting kicks out of this?"
The other part just shrugs. I know a portion of this part is the obsessive-compulsive part that can get jollies watching ProgressQuest (no joke), so I'm unsurprised that the addictive timesinky nature of standard MMO tropes has sunk its hook into it. If that was all, I'd be thrusting crucifixes at LOTRO and abjuring it to stay "Back, foul fiend, back whence you came!"
Thing is, this other portion is in the midst of threads of thought that read exactly like this post – wandering uncertainly between the boundary lines of Rationalization and Truth.
The obvious answer to why I am currently enjoying LOTRO more is simple. It's new. It's a change. It's something novel. I've essentially been playing CoX day in day out for more than two years (27 months veteran time and counting...) So for an Explorer, seeing and learning new shtuff always has a magnetic appeal. No surprise there. Since the beginning of time, I've gotten kicks out of visiting other non-SMAUG MUDs just to see how different they were and to learn and appreciate new game systems/rules.
Yet there's a bit more to the story than that. There's something personally enticing about the spice mix of LOTRO that other games didn't have. For example:
Auto-Assault was cute. The setting was pretty innovative and different to look at. The quests were terribly linear though and consisted of just driving from town to town doing errands or killing stuff. There was also a crafting minigame but the difficulty of accessing crafting stations and collecting enough gear to craft was off-putting. Difficulty level for the rest of the game? Pretty darned easy. No death penalty to speak of, mindless go-here-go-there-follow-the-arrows, an occassional tough/unique mission, and a map that zoomed you from place to place as needed. Ultimately impersonal – your avatar was a car, even though you could customize it tons. Greatest part of it was the intro videos of the three different races. Worth $15 subscription? No. I gauged it at $10 at most, for a solo singleplayer game / sidetrek amusement for a few months. Did they offer that? Nope. Sorry, buh-bye AA.
Conversely, DDO was worth the entrance fee and the free month. I think I paid for 3 months more than that, which was a bit over what it was worth to me, but well, I can't really begrudge them that. The setting was so-so. If they had used the Forgotten Realms and threw in some celebrities treated with respect, I might still be there... Dunno. My main turn-off with DDO was that everything was too reliant on a team. I'm one of those weirdos who require solo activities in an MMO. Partially due to timezone (you try putting together a team at 6.30am EST *grumbles*), and partially due to personality (introverts need time alone, dammit. Stop hugging me so closely.) and partially due to a desire for distance and annonymity (DDO players were addicted to voice chatting for some reason, and I felt distinctly uncomfortable with the thought of revealing my -female- -Asian- voice to pickup groups.) If I didn't team, I had nothing to do but run around in town for hours or play one or two beginner's dungeons which were a major struggle for a solo cleric.
I hear they eventually caved in and added a lot more solo-capable dungeons in later updates. Still, the latest updates only went up to lvl 6. At the heart of it, DDO is a game designed for a close-working team like a family or a set of RL friends or an online guild community already familiar with each other. Fair enough. After playing it for a while, I learned more about my own preferences. I had some fairly fun experiences with pickup groups that made it worth the entrance fee, and I sated this compelling desire to play a melee/buff cleric in the vein of a RoD Juliana.
Guild Wars probably lasted the longest. It was soloable (with henchmen) for the greater part of its PvE game. I made it to the level cap and a bit beyond before I got absolutely stuck on a main story chapter that I couldn't complete solo OR teamed. None of the l33t groups wanted a concept ranger/monk missing dozens of "essential" skills like me, you see, and the pickups were generally more clueless than I (having attempted a run through the mission about 50 times alone with henchies.) Before that, the quests were relatively enjoyable, even if failure and the death penalty was frustrating. Map exploration was interesting, but the furthest reaches were difficult for someone not really minded to calculate the last nitty gritty out of one's skill choices. In the end, the endgame wasn't compelling enough. PvP just wasn't my cup of tea, the population were mostly leetspeak pvpers or hardcore farmers that were bound to outcompete any casuals, the game design was tilting towards accomodating this wildly competitive crowd – which would completely screw up any casual play via hyperinflation and ultra-elite equipment and special skills. Altitis wasn't very possible, and item sharing/storage/management was proving to be a pain with the small inventory slots. So I lost interest.
Theoretically, it's still replayable. All I need to do is crank it up and let it update. Graphics-wise, it was pretty, but it didn't personally appeal. Hence why I'm still sitting on Nightfall and Factions and letting the price fall before I invest in it. Just no magical appeal that would make it worth the current cost.
Ditto WoW. Cartoony graphics. Non-personally appealing setting. Quests with soulless writing that failed to disguise the errands for what they were. Click and watch a character autoattack at low levels. As popular with the mainstream as the Diablo phenomenon was. Endgame with absolutely no potential appeal. Disgusting download options for the preview and bad handling of the public. Not exactly the best start for a game, or much hope for the future (balance and nerf-wise) either. And did you say that you have to QUEUE up to for the priviledge to log in to this horrorshow? Sorry, just not for me.
Strangely enough, I have a bit more faith in Turbine (and NCSoft) from past track record than I have in Sony or Blizzard.
I feel that LOTRO has a lot of polish on top of its unoriginal skeleton. With the exception of its highly annoying minimap, many other things are customizable and there's a depth to the game that has an attractive lull after the simplicity and adrenaline-rush of CoX. (And no, I'm not giving up the excitement of CoX – some days you just wanna SMASH, but some days...you long for the nostalgia of a world like RoD.)
And therein lies the answer to the appeal of LOTRO to me. It reminds me a great deal of RoD. But an improved version.
The classes may not be absolutely balanced or original, but all of them can apparently solo. (Up to lvl 15 anyhow. The monster play lvl 50 orc was quite capable of hitting mobs solo too though.) That's a mark in favor.
At first, the spoiled me went "Geesh, why am I running across half the continent and jogging endlessly?" But then, I ask myself, why would I want a clone of CoX when CoX is doing the speedy casual thing perfectly well? There must be a design decision for why the map is limited, the forced jogging and the quests with no waypoint illuminating the direction to run to next.
And I realized that jogging around in LOTRO reminded me a great deal of Morrowind and Oblivion and to a lesser extent of Guild Wars. It celebrates immersion and world exploration. Yes, it's a timesink. But it's only annoying if you want to get to the end and don't enjoy the journey, right? You can stop to enjoy the scenery, hunt a few random mobs, harvest appropriate resources and stumble across cool secret spots. The repetition and sometimes frustrated wandering back and forth wastes time, yes, but also forces you to remember visual directions and construct a mental map of everything in relation to each other. Kinda RoD-like, isn't it? (I actually drew up a map of old RoD once, just sketching in everything according to my mental map.) It's generally satisfactory when you manage to solve a quest by yourself (like a riddle or a puzzle game) but when you're one step shy of commiting suicide, there are thankfully walkthroughs/maps online. In a way, it's even more fair (in that it gives you a chance at it) than the totally random and mostly unclued badge system of CoX wherein you have to rely on external websites to figure out wtf to do in the first place.
LOTRO is also Oblivion-style open in its goals. If you try and faithfully follow every quest as you get them, that's a short recipe to insanity. Eventually you have to prioritize, to choose one thread to follow and close. You could dedicate a day or two to improving your crafting. Or go mob hunting / harvesting resources for money. Or kill mobs in the vein of CoX's badging for deeds and titles.
Does it have its flaws? Of course! The flaws in this sort of game system going multiplayer have long been derided. How do you speak of immersion when you see a dozen players lining up to take turns to kill a mob (though I'm pleasantly surprised that 'tapping' has enforced politeness and limited kill stealing to a mild annoyance instead of something warranting a mud-like 'murder x' command), or see twenty players crowded around one workbench (with a pet BEAR on it too) scattering umpteen seeds around? And let us not speak of the ubiquitous gold farmers and their nuisance tells...
I suppose in the end, it is your mindset and reaction to it that counts. Whether you consider these things mildly funny and dismiss them like fairy mist or homicidally annoying and take personal offence at it.
For my part, as long as I can still see the solo road to progress, I don't care if others are that much ahead of me. Only when I am forced to rely on the vagaries of others, do I start chaffing at the frustration. I oddly enjoy the chatter of OOC. It's like chat and ask of RoD. You can play alone but still 'together' with other people. And amusingly, because the quest solutions are so obscure, there are people asking for help a good deal of the time, and it promotes a certain kind of social interaction / chatter. Which you learn from, even while staying mostly silent and lurking.
I find a lot of the design of LOTRO constructed to promote a certain amount of spontaneous social interaction. Whether it's just meeting in the same places because you're after the same quest, or passing by and stopping to listen to someone playing his musical instrument on the town street, the opportunities are there, just like in RoD. Side benefits of a persistent world with not too much instancing, I suppose. It's pretty RP friendly in design and I'm tempted to go to Landroval and check out the unofficial RP server at some point.
Right now I even find crafting (farming in particular) mildly relaxing. So far, you're still not -forced- to do it like the brewing of heals. So it's entirely voluntary. And I discovered that you can actually set the number of recipes to craft and it will automatically tick down by itself, so you can alt-tab off and go do other things... Like catching up on a lot of reading (online and offline) and -writing-! It's also not impossible to achieve. It took me a day (perhaps 5-6 hours) to master tier 1 and get partway into tier 2 farming. Then another day (of 5 hours) to master tier 3 and start what everyone else is doing (before they go and nerf it) – Sweet Galenas farming. I find it mildly relaxing at the moment, because it's choice.
I generally can't alt-tab out when I play CoX. It's too intense. But stopping everything to just read websites is kinda like stopping everything to stare at the TV. One can occupy hands while watching TV, and in the same way, I can craft while I catch up with everything else that I really ought to be doing on the computer besides just blindly playing CoX and gaining xp. Not much different from farming pvp warburg missions and watching DVDs either, come to think of it. *coughs*
In the end, I think it's about moderation. Balance in all things. Too much CoX ain't good. Neither is too much of any MMO. The moment one starts to think about pleveling, or overdoing farming or herding or any repetitive activity, one should ask oneself what one is getting out of it. It should never become a chore, because that's the death knell of any game. Only do as much of it as remains fun, and switch to something else when it palls.
I find that I must write this. To half-refute a biased post on the City of Heroes forum that our darling Statesman replied to, and hence alerted anyone who checks the Dev Digest. And to work away at a nagging ache in my brain that still can't really understand WHY.
Why what? Why I find myself currently deriving more enjoyment from the much-derided unoriginal and uninnovative LOTRO than the supposedly more "fun" and innovative CoX.
I suppose the short answer would be: Subjectivity. Or perhaps Perspective/Mindset. Novelty/Change. (More on the individual words later.)
Emotionally, I still can't come to terms with it. A part of my mind is screaming, "This is so not-new! This is lowest-common-denominator and a carbon copy clone of WoW and GW and Auto-Assault and CoX and practically every other MMO in the market! How can you be getting kicks out of this?"
The other part just shrugs. I know a portion of this part is the obsessive-compulsive part that can get jollies watching ProgressQuest (no joke), so I'm unsurprised that the addictive timesinky nature of standard MMO tropes has sunk its hook into it. If that was all, I'd be thrusting crucifixes at LOTRO and abjuring it to stay "Back, foul fiend, back whence you came!"
Thing is, this other portion is in the midst of threads of thought that read exactly like this post – wandering uncertainly between the boundary lines of Rationalization and Truth.
The obvious answer to why I am currently enjoying LOTRO more is simple. It's new. It's a change. It's something novel. I've essentially been playing CoX day in day out for more than two years (27 months veteran time and counting...) So for an Explorer, seeing and learning new shtuff always has a magnetic appeal. No surprise there. Since the beginning of time, I've gotten kicks out of visiting other non-SMAUG MUDs just to see how different they were and to learn and appreciate new game systems/rules.
Yet there's a bit more to the story than that. There's something personally enticing about the spice mix of LOTRO that other games didn't have. For example:
Auto-Assault was cute. The setting was pretty innovative and different to look at. The quests were terribly linear though and consisted of just driving from town to town doing errands or killing stuff. There was also a crafting minigame but the difficulty of accessing crafting stations and collecting enough gear to craft was off-putting. Difficulty level for the rest of the game? Pretty darned easy. No death penalty to speak of, mindless go-here-go-there-follow-the-arrows, an occassional tough/unique mission, and a map that zoomed you from place to place as needed. Ultimately impersonal – your avatar was a car, even though you could customize it tons. Greatest part of it was the intro videos of the three different races. Worth $15 subscription? No. I gauged it at $10 at most, for a solo singleplayer game / sidetrek amusement for a few months. Did they offer that? Nope. Sorry, buh-bye AA.
Conversely, DDO was worth the entrance fee and the free month. I think I paid for 3 months more than that, which was a bit over what it was worth to me, but well, I can't really begrudge them that. The setting was so-so. If they had used the Forgotten Realms and threw in some celebrities treated with respect, I might still be there... Dunno. My main turn-off with DDO was that everything was too reliant on a team. I'm one of those weirdos who require solo activities in an MMO. Partially due to timezone (you try putting together a team at 6.30am EST *grumbles*), and partially due to personality (introverts need time alone, dammit. Stop hugging me so closely.) and partially due to a desire for distance and annonymity (DDO players were addicted to voice chatting for some reason, and I felt distinctly uncomfortable with the thought of revealing my -female- -Asian- voice to pickup groups.) If I didn't team, I had nothing to do but run around in town for hours or play one or two beginner's dungeons which were a major struggle for a solo cleric.
I hear they eventually caved in and added a lot more solo-capable dungeons in later updates. Still, the latest updates only went up to lvl 6. At the heart of it, DDO is a game designed for a close-working team like a family or a set of RL friends or an online guild community already familiar with each other. Fair enough. After playing it for a while, I learned more about my own preferences. I had some fairly fun experiences with pickup groups that made it worth the entrance fee, and I sated this compelling desire to play a melee/buff cleric in the vein of a RoD Juliana.
Guild Wars probably lasted the longest. It was soloable (with henchmen) for the greater part of its PvE game. I made it to the level cap and a bit beyond before I got absolutely stuck on a main story chapter that I couldn't complete solo OR teamed. None of the l33t groups wanted a concept ranger/monk missing dozens of "essential" skills like me, you see, and the pickups were generally more clueless than I (having attempted a run through the mission about 50 times alone with henchies.) Before that, the quests were relatively enjoyable, even if failure and the death penalty was frustrating. Map exploration was interesting, but the furthest reaches were difficult for someone not really minded to calculate the last nitty gritty out of one's skill choices. In the end, the endgame wasn't compelling enough. PvP just wasn't my cup of tea, the population were mostly leetspeak pvpers or hardcore farmers that were bound to outcompete any casuals, the game design was tilting towards accomodating this wildly competitive crowd – which would completely screw up any casual play via hyperinflation and ultra-elite equipment and special skills. Altitis wasn't very possible, and item sharing/storage/management was proving to be a pain with the small inventory slots. So I lost interest.
Theoretically, it's still replayable. All I need to do is crank it up and let it update. Graphics-wise, it was pretty, but it didn't personally appeal. Hence why I'm still sitting on Nightfall and Factions and letting the price fall before I invest in it. Just no magical appeal that would make it worth the current cost.
Ditto WoW. Cartoony graphics. Non-personally appealing setting. Quests with soulless writing that failed to disguise the errands for what they were. Click and watch a character autoattack at low levels. As popular with the mainstream as the Diablo phenomenon was. Endgame with absolutely no potential appeal. Disgusting download options for the preview and bad handling of the public. Not exactly the best start for a game, or much hope for the future (balance and nerf-wise) either. And did you say that you have to QUEUE up to for the priviledge to log in to this horrorshow? Sorry, just not for me.
Strangely enough, I have a bit more faith in Turbine (and NCSoft) from past track record than I have in Sony or Blizzard.
I feel that LOTRO has a lot of polish on top of its unoriginal skeleton. With the exception of its highly annoying minimap, many other things are customizable and there's a depth to the game that has an attractive lull after the simplicity and adrenaline-rush of CoX. (And no, I'm not giving up the excitement of CoX – some days you just wanna SMASH, but some days...you long for the nostalgia of a world like RoD.)
And therein lies the answer to the appeal of LOTRO to me. It reminds me a great deal of RoD. But an improved version.
The classes may not be absolutely balanced or original, but all of them can apparently solo. (Up to lvl 15 anyhow. The monster play lvl 50 orc was quite capable of hitting mobs solo too though.) That's a mark in favor.
At first, the spoiled me went "Geesh, why am I running across half the continent and jogging endlessly?" But then, I ask myself, why would I want a clone of CoX when CoX is doing the speedy casual thing perfectly well? There must be a design decision for why the map is limited, the forced jogging and the quests with no waypoint illuminating the direction to run to next.
And I realized that jogging around in LOTRO reminded me a great deal of Morrowind and Oblivion and to a lesser extent of Guild Wars. It celebrates immersion and world exploration. Yes, it's a timesink. But it's only annoying if you want to get to the end and don't enjoy the journey, right? You can stop to enjoy the scenery, hunt a few random mobs, harvest appropriate resources and stumble across cool secret spots. The repetition and sometimes frustrated wandering back and forth wastes time, yes, but also forces you to remember visual directions and construct a mental map of everything in relation to each other. Kinda RoD-like, isn't it? (I actually drew up a map of old RoD once, just sketching in everything according to my mental map.) It's generally satisfactory when you manage to solve a quest by yourself (like a riddle or a puzzle game) but when you're one step shy of commiting suicide, there are thankfully walkthroughs/maps online. In a way, it's even more fair (in that it gives you a chance at it) than the totally random and mostly unclued badge system of CoX wherein you have to rely on external websites to figure out wtf to do in the first place.
LOTRO is also Oblivion-style open in its goals. If you try and faithfully follow every quest as you get them, that's a short recipe to insanity. Eventually you have to prioritize, to choose one thread to follow and close. You could dedicate a day or two to improving your crafting. Or go mob hunting / harvesting resources for money. Or kill mobs in the vein of CoX's badging for deeds and titles.
Does it have its flaws? Of course! The flaws in this sort of game system going multiplayer have long been derided. How do you speak of immersion when you see a dozen players lining up to take turns to kill a mob (though I'm pleasantly surprised that 'tapping' has enforced politeness and limited kill stealing to a mild annoyance instead of something warranting a mud-like 'murder x' command), or see twenty players crowded around one workbench (with a pet BEAR on it too) scattering umpteen seeds around? And let us not speak of the ubiquitous gold farmers and their nuisance tells...
I suppose in the end, it is your mindset and reaction to it that counts. Whether you consider these things mildly funny and dismiss them like fairy mist or homicidally annoying and take personal offence at it.
For my part, as long as I can still see the solo road to progress, I don't care if others are that much ahead of me. Only when I am forced to rely on the vagaries of others, do I start chaffing at the frustration. I oddly enjoy the chatter of OOC. It's like chat and ask of RoD. You can play alone but still 'together' with other people. And amusingly, because the quest solutions are so obscure, there are people asking for help a good deal of the time, and it promotes a certain kind of social interaction / chatter. Which you learn from, even while staying mostly silent and lurking.
I find a lot of the design of LOTRO constructed to promote a certain amount of spontaneous social interaction. Whether it's just meeting in the same places because you're after the same quest, or passing by and stopping to listen to someone playing his musical instrument on the town street, the opportunities are there, just like in RoD. Side benefits of a persistent world with not too much instancing, I suppose. It's pretty RP friendly in design and I'm tempted to go to Landroval and check out the unofficial RP server at some point.
Right now I even find crafting (farming in particular) mildly relaxing. So far, you're still not -forced- to do it like the brewing of heals. So it's entirely voluntary. And I discovered that you can actually set the number of recipes to craft and it will automatically tick down by itself, so you can alt-tab off and go do other things... Like catching up on a lot of reading (online and offline) and -writing-! It's also not impossible to achieve. It took me a day (perhaps 5-6 hours) to master tier 1 and get partway into tier 2 farming. Then another day (of 5 hours) to master tier 3 and start what everyone else is doing (before they go and nerf it) – Sweet Galenas farming. I find it mildly relaxing at the moment, because it's choice.
I generally can't alt-tab out when I play CoX. It's too intense. But stopping everything to just read websites is kinda like stopping everything to stare at the TV. One can occupy hands while watching TV, and in the same way, I can craft while I catch up with everything else that I really ought to be doing on the computer besides just blindly playing CoX and gaining xp. Not much different from farming pvp warburg missions and watching DVDs either, come to think of it. *coughs*
In the end, I think it's about moderation. Balance in all things. Too much CoX ain't good. Neither is too much of any MMO. The moment one starts to think about pleveling, or overdoing farming or herding or any repetitive activity, one should ask oneself what one is getting out of it. It should never become a chore, because that's the death knell of any game. Only do as much of it as remains fun, and switch to something else when it palls.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
PuG: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I am still of the opinion that the empathy set is bad for the game.
The Good
I was on a good team last night on my Ill/Emp lowbie. It was a good team in that it actually managed to go through most of the Julius arc without massive casualties. All the time though, I felt that Empathy is a pretty screwed up set.
Yes, Fort is good, AB is good. But the set is distinctively built in a wacky way with three heals and a rez set as the first four powers. You spent your early levels just healing and healing people. This is, of course, the norm for most MMOs, but CoX should do better.
We had a fire tank who wanted to tank, amazingly enough, so he did the jump into mobs thing while the rad, two empaths, and kinetics helped him stay upright and the blasters killed things. It was a very (MMO cliche) textbook of doing things, and it worked. Then his girlfriend came home and he left.
The next thing you know, the kinetics defender decided he was going to tank, told us to heal him, and went off charging into mobs firing off irradiate. Despite what people exaggerate on the boards, a fire tank is much sturdier than a squishy. There is some difference between having a load of hitpoints and innate resists, and having low hitpoints and no resists. You can't heal someone who dies while absorb pain is getting there... i.e. in the .2s human reaction + .5s network + .x animation time ~ 1sec.
After a few goes of that the rest of the team took matters in own hands and did the simultaneous debuff/rain powers/zerg (after a bit of deceive) business before the nutty kin defender could suicide in. When the aggro is spread amongst everyone, it's easier to keep people alive.
The Bad
It's amazing how empathy can just prop up bad players.
Earth/TA... the fun thing was, I discovered I can ignite oil slick with volcanic gasses! I ran around Eden burning down packs of green minions, but the xp was honestly not great. It was fun though, to see Devouring earth go up in flames. (Burn the salad down! Burn!)
Then I got recruited to a respec team. Warning bells went off when one of my teammates went "do we have enough healers?". The tank went "only one", and that guy decided to log onto their earth/emp.
Somehow, I ended up at the lowest on the team, and I told the team leader I could not control +5s. The earth/emp, who was +1 to me, thought everything was dandy though. There was a "pure empath" defender (level 50 who exempted), so I thought: well, at least we have tons of healing, which tends to make up for bad play.
Phew, turned out that the mobs were just +3. Through the next few missions, the earth/emp started gloating and boasting that she could hold level 38s all day...
While constantly spamming immobs on top of earthquake and oil slick -- even her own earthquake. I didn't know immobing mobs on top of quicksand constituted of "holding". Thank goodness the (invul) tank was actually seriously about tanking and spammed taunt.
Finally in the reactor, when she boasted yet again about her control powers, I made a snarky reply about being so great at holding mobs that she immobed on top of earthquake. To which she insisted that she had earthquake slotted with SOs for acc debuff.
That is like saying smoke in Fire Control will suddenly debuff mobs into kittens if you slot it with SOs! The set is "Earth Control", not "Dark Miasma" or "Radiation Emission", yah? I told her that a percentage of a minute number is still a minute number, but she insisted it worked fine for her and continued spamming immobs in an almost vindictive fashion.
Every time she immobed, I noticed one (or two) of the scrappers would take a HUGE hit in their hitpoints. But that was ok, the "pure empath" or the earth/emp would just spam some heals and heal them up. No wonder it worked fine for her!
Empathy, enabler of awful playstyle and ignorance. Though you have to admit, part of the fault lies in Cryptic's refusal to release numbers. I used wonder if I should slot debuffs into earthquake (or smoke, smoke grenade, flash arrow) too. Bah, by the time you factor in level-scaling the debuff would be non-existent against +3s.
Then the waves come. I don't know why I can debuff and control a group while the spines scrapper AoEs them to death, while mobs beat up the another scrapper and earth controller (with the supposedly superior team secondary of empathy) near the reactor. Surrrre it works fine. It works better if you negate your own earthquake.
What can I say, having the "pure empath" sure was useful at any rate. Although he had this weird habit of floating right next to the tanker when the tanker was pulling, which resulted in tons of freak grenades being dumped on his head as well. But hey, huge heals, auto-aura, not problemo.
The Ugly
Back to the Ill/Emp. Does the presence of an empath makes people decide to take leave of their senses, doing crazy suicidal things because the empath will just heal it up? A scrapper (ex-blaster) in my virtue SG seems to think an SR scrapper on DOs = an ice tank on SOs. He keeps jumping into full team spawns of CoT (with death mages, spectral lords, gag -- those things hurt) to spine burst. The subsequent fallout basically has me spamming absorb pain on him through sonics shields provided by a defender. If you're taking so much damage a few seconds after AP and HO raise you back to full, you go back to the low red (through shields and base SR defenses), you are definitely taking too much damage.
There's a limited recharge on my heals and I certainly wasn't going to AP myself to death, so people just end up dying.
Absorb Pain -- the power pisses me off. I should never have taken it. I was spending my time on the CoT mission with my hp plummeting at every spawn (and hoping nothing hits me because I can't heal myself) trying to keep someone else alive.
The Good
I was on a good team last night on my Ill/Emp lowbie. It was a good team in that it actually managed to go through most of the Julius arc without massive casualties. All the time though, I felt that Empathy is a pretty screwed up set.
Yes, Fort is good, AB is good. But the set is distinctively built in a wacky way with three heals and a rez set as the first four powers. You spent your early levels just healing and healing people. This is, of course, the norm for most MMOs, but CoX should do better.
We had a fire tank who wanted to tank, amazingly enough, so he did the jump into mobs thing while the rad, two empaths, and kinetics helped him stay upright and the blasters killed things. It was a very (MMO cliche) textbook of doing things, and it worked. Then his girlfriend came home and he left.
The next thing you know, the kinetics defender decided he was going to tank, told us to heal him, and went off charging into mobs firing off irradiate. Despite what people exaggerate on the boards, a fire tank is much sturdier than a squishy. There is some difference between having a load of hitpoints and innate resists, and having low hitpoints and no resists. You can't heal someone who dies while absorb pain is getting there... i.e. in the .2s human reaction + .5s network + .x animation time ~ 1sec.
After a few goes of that the rest of the team took matters in own hands and did the simultaneous debuff/rain powers/zerg (after a bit of deceive) business before the nutty kin defender could suicide in. When the aggro is spread amongst everyone, it's easier to keep people alive.
The Bad
It's amazing how empathy can just prop up bad players.
Earth/TA... the fun thing was, I discovered I can ignite oil slick with volcanic gasses! I ran around Eden burning down packs of green minions, but the xp was honestly not great. It was fun though, to see Devouring earth go up in flames. (Burn the salad down! Burn!)
Then I got recruited to a respec team. Warning bells went off when one of my teammates went "do we have enough healers?". The tank went "only one", and that guy decided to log onto their earth/emp.
Somehow, I ended up at the lowest on the team, and I told the team leader I could not control +5s. The earth/emp, who was +1 to me, thought everything was dandy though. There was a "pure empath" defender (level 50 who exempted), so I thought: well, at least we have tons of healing, which tends to make up for bad play.
Phew, turned out that the mobs were just +3. Through the next few missions, the earth/emp started gloating and boasting that she could hold level 38s all day...
While constantly spamming immobs on top of earthquake and oil slick -- even her own earthquake. I didn't know immobing mobs on top of quicksand constituted of "holding". Thank goodness the (invul) tank was actually seriously about tanking and spammed taunt.
Finally in the reactor, when she boasted yet again about her control powers, I made a snarky reply about being so great at holding mobs that she immobed on top of earthquake. To which she insisted that she had earthquake slotted with SOs for acc debuff.
That is like saying smoke in Fire Control will suddenly debuff mobs into kittens if you slot it with SOs! The set is "Earth Control", not "Dark Miasma" or "Radiation Emission", yah? I told her that a percentage of a minute number is still a minute number, but she insisted it worked fine for her and continued spamming immobs in an almost vindictive fashion.
Every time she immobed, I noticed one (or two) of the scrappers would take a HUGE hit in their hitpoints. But that was ok, the "pure empath" or the earth/emp would just spam some heals and heal them up. No wonder it worked fine for her!
Empathy, enabler of awful playstyle and ignorance. Though you have to admit, part of the fault lies in Cryptic's refusal to release numbers. I used wonder if I should slot debuffs into earthquake (or smoke, smoke grenade, flash arrow) too. Bah, by the time you factor in level-scaling the debuff would be non-existent against +3s.
Then the waves come. I don't know why I can debuff and control a group while the spines scrapper AoEs them to death, while mobs beat up the another scrapper and earth controller (with the supposedly superior team secondary of empathy) near the reactor. Surrrre it works fine. It works better if you negate your own earthquake.
What can I say, having the "pure empath" sure was useful at any rate. Although he had this weird habit of floating right next to the tanker when the tanker was pulling, which resulted in tons of freak grenades being dumped on his head as well. But hey, huge heals, auto-aura, not problemo.
The Ugly
Back to the Ill/Emp. Does the presence of an empath makes people decide to take leave of their senses, doing crazy suicidal things because the empath will just heal it up? A scrapper (ex-blaster) in my virtue SG seems to think an SR scrapper on DOs = an ice tank on SOs. He keeps jumping into full team spawns of CoT (with death mages, spectral lords, gag -- those things hurt) to spine burst. The subsequent fallout basically has me spamming absorb pain on him through sonics shields provided by a defender. If you're taking so much damage a few seconds after AP and HO raise you back to full, you go back to the low red (through shields and base SR defenses), you are definitely taking too much damage.
There's a limited recharge on my heals and I certainly wasn't going to AP myself to death, so people just end up dying.
Absorb Pain -- the power pisses me off. I should never have taken it. I was spending my time on the CoT mission with my hp plummeting at every spawn (and hoping nothing hits me because I can't heal myself) trying to keep someone else alive.