While going though the daily RSS feeds I came across a post about alternative payment for MMO subscriptions. The poster “C.K.” has noticed a problem I have myself been dealing with over the years. Namely that some of us don’t really have the time, or motivation, to play for a month at a time and really get ours moneys worth of game time.

Currently there exists basically two types of payment models for MMOs: Subscription and micro-payments. And subscriptions basically buys you access to the servers for a specific period of time, no matter if you actually use it or not. And that is then the problem. If you don’t really feel you get enough out time you are likely to simply cancel your subscription. And with a subscription cancelled the chance of returning to the game becomes very slim (at least for me).

While it is a logical conclusion that a pay-as-you-go sort of plan might work in your scenario, it would fundamentally undermine the first two M’s in MMORPG. If you had to pay for each minute in-game, most people would constantly be thinking of getting the most of that minute, making it much less likely they would have any sort of patience with waiting for or helping other players.

Personally I solved the issue by simply getting a lifetime subscription for Lord of the Rings Online. I have had the same issue many times. But for me it was never truly about the actual money “wasted”. Instead it is more about paying for something I don’t use.

Having a lifetime subscription isn’t likely saving me any money, but it completely removes the consideration of putting money into the game on a continual basis. And allows me to take time off the game and then come back with no real hurdles in place.

Actually I made a server community site, along the way, in hope of finding the right kinship: The Unofficial Laurelin Community Site it is called. But it’s usage is somewhat limited to people who are already on the official Laurelin forums. And as usual the wider server community is hard to inform about/lure into new sites like that.

But I do have 3 active characters in the game. My hunter is now at level 47 and I have the minstrel I play when my friend is online (he’s not been at all in 2008 yet) and finally my, relatively, new captain that is up at level 33 now.

In Other News
Not much else is happening. I got invited into one beta I kind of play from time to time. But it seems too much like everything else for me to really put a lot of time into it. And of course I could not really talk about it anyway.

Oh and then I just installed a new gallery on this site. Finally I found an integration of Gallery 2.x for Xoops and I am now working to get my entire backlog of screen shots into it. Not a whole lot of ‘new’ stuff there. But it is the world of LotRO as I have seen it

As it happens bol.com apparently has a rule about sending games (or possibly expensive games?) out of the country. The strange thing about it was that it seems they are not fully aware of this themselves. So when my first order has been returned to them, due to the addressing error, I asked them what to do and was told to reorder. Okay no worries I did – only to have my order cancelled with the formerly mentioned reasoning. That seemed a bit odd to me since my order had already been shipped once. So I wrote a message to them about this and I was then told they couldn’t reactivate the order and I should order again (seemed like an cookie-cutter answer since it was pretty much what I had gotten after my first failed delivery). But in any event I ordered again and the package was sent.

I checked the order page all day and then pretty late in the evening, before the status had changed to ’sent’ (or ‘Verzonden’ as they say it in Holland) I pressed the cancel button by mistake, “NOOOOOOOOO!” I thought and almost gave up. But as luck would have it I apparently pressed the button too late. And even tho I got a mail that they would do everything to stop the order the status was changed to sent next morning. A word of caution btw. bol.com does not subscribe to the notion of having confirmation dialogs for something like a cancel button. So if you press the button you get no second chances (except “reorder because they cannot reactive the order” I suspect).

But finally last tuesday the game arrived. The box was a bit of a letdown. It had been slightly damaged in the shipping. But whatever. It’s not like I am gonna put it on a shelf and look on it anyway. The included map is a bit of a letdown too. Vanguard shipped with a, not very nice, cloth map. Seems LotRO make due with a, somewhat boring, paper version. The game manual is pretty nicely bound as a hardcover book tho. And sadly it seems I didn’t win a trip to Tubine or a Zune (not that I would want the latter) as there was no ring in my package. But the in-game collectors edition cloak is pretty nice. Haven’t entered the key for the extra cloak I got from bol.com yet. But the one screenshot I have found looks pretty nice too.

A couple of the extras of the collectors edition was not in the package. The leather armband I should get in a couple of weeks from Codemasters as it didn’t make it in time for package production. And the mini-guide I will only get as a PDF… And I wonder what is keeping it. I registered for those things last week. Hmmm…

But on to the game.

Having played a bit in the beta I pretty much knew what to expect from the start of the game. So I wasn’t exactly blown away by the initial game experience. The graphics looks pretty good and it runs well. I am not sure everyone agrees with me. But I personally think the graphics of DDO and LotRO is at least on par with anything else out there in the MMO-sphere. And it looks better that most other games I have played recently. I simply can’t see how people can claim games like Vanguard has nice graphics when Tubine is making engines like this.

As for the actual game mechanics there is nothing wildly new except maybe lack of things we have gotten used to. Some good, some will need to be added sooner or later.

Choosing a race and a class might pose a bit of a problem. I know it does for me. I am partial to elven characters with the possibility of playing as ‘man’. Hobbits and dwarves is just really my cup of tea. But in Middle-Earth the (hu)man race is a bit boring, while the other races all seem to have their strong characteristics. So i am mainly playing as an Elf.

That in turn limits my options on classes. Not that it matters too much as none of the classes really speak too much to me. It all fits pretty well with the Tolkien lore I suppose. There are no flamboyant magic – except for the Wizards who are, of course, higher beings and are not a playable class/race. Instead there is more subtle ones like the lore-master and minstrel. But even the minstrel is described in a very down to earth fashion. And the rest of the classes seems refreshingly “realistic” where swords are swords and attacks with them is just technique and not super-magic-combo-action. It also helps that you do not have hit-points – instead you have “moral”. It works much in the same way. But you never truly ‘die’. Instead you retreat as you are defeated. A nice workaround of established Middle-Earth lore where you die when you die.

Also the graphic style is more “realistic”. Armor and weapons are largely made in a fashion that fits with something that COULD maybe be true. Even tho I think sometimes my characters wear a little too much purple for my taste. I suppose I will be able to fix that with some dye once I move along in the game. And maybe some of the one hand weapons are a bit on the heavy side.

The game-play in itself is very much standard-MMO maybe with a bit extra emphasis placed on your personal story. This is one of those things I always hate. The current game time is before the books start. In the shire the party tree is being prepared and Strider is apparently spending his time in Bree tasking hordes of dwarf, elf, hobbit and men with the same tasks. It’s is a tricky problem to get over in an largely automated game world. But it just don’t feel right that in a MMO I am supposed to be the only real hero when I can clearly see 20 people standing around me speaking with the same guy and moving in the same directing afterwards.

The actual flow of the game is that you have one core story you play, I am at the prolog part so far. And then there are a number of side quests in the same region. So far it seems most of the story (epic) quests happen in instances that is pretty much the zone, you are already in, tailored to the given quest. I suppose that works pretty well. But I wouldn’t mind seeing some truly different and amazing places in instances. Since you pretty quickly become familiar with the zone you are in.

One of the ‘unique’ things in the game is a concept called deeds. I think I have seen something similar before, but can’t think of where. In any event the idea is you have a separate task/reward system outside of the quests. So for instance you can get a title by killing a number of wolves in an area. And if you kill even more you get a trait that can be applied to your character for some small benefits. The cool part is they are not visible in your deeds book until you triggering them. So for the wolves thing you would kill a wolf and you will be told you are working on this deed.

Other deeds are more subtle. For instance you get titles as you progress in levels without dying. So for instance at level 5 you will be told you now have a title for not dying for the first five levels. And so on at level 10 and 14 with more coming further ahead. Once you have died once with your character you can no longer gain any more of those. This can be extremely addictive if you have a bit too much time on your hands and is a hopeless perfectionist. In the first week I have redone and made new characters several times because I died. And I have loose the will to play a specific character once it’s died once. I suppose it is a hurdle I need to work past if I want to get further in the game. But oddly enough I have not been quite as bothered, as I usually am, about doing the same stuff over when I have started over.

Crafting is hardly worth mentioning. Most of it works pretty much like WoW where you have gathering and making professions. You can choose between a number of ‘vocations’ that is essentially three separate trade-skills strung together. Usually so you end up having to rely on someone else to make something out of the stuff you gather. Or the other way around. The only one that really seems interesting so far is, oddly, the farming profession. As I just read something about you being able to crossbreed strains and make new plants. From what I understand the number of outcomes are, however, preset. But it is something I am going to have to investigate.

In the end crafting is more or less pointless tho. Like other mainstream games the crafted items are not nearly as useful as looted ones or quest rewards. So you end up with being able to equip yourself with basic equipment until you can win something better. Only a couple of the professions seems to have any market value. Cooks make food that buffs you and reduce downtime. And scholars make other buff scrolls, potions and the ever popular dyes for the fashion conscious.

The UI of the game is also very much standard. It has what you would need. It’s nice enough and supports custom skins. It is not, however, very customizable. Windows and panels cannot be resized. And skins can only change the graphics, not the window sizes. That leaves us, who have a large display, with some small windows that does not show nearly as much information as we would like. One of the UI team members have said (over on LotRO Interface) that they are planning to add resizable windows at some point. And also that much later they want to make something like what WoW has. But they can’t just go do it because it is the same engine they are running DDO on.

Also, as usual, the UI is plagued by bad design. I seriously do not understand who designs these MMO UIs. But they must all have a degree in bad user interface. One of the worse things is the multitude of multi-tabbed windows. Common among them is a number of top level tabs in the top of the window. And then tabs in the bottom that change content inside of that tab. Trouble being there is no real visual clue what does what. And worse it seems a lot of people miss the ones in the bottom, leading to a lot of questions on the advice channel in-game.

My biggest concern with the game is the potential to run dry on content very quickly. Already now I see level-maxed characters running around and the game has been out a month! Personally after a week I have a couple of level 15 characters. And I have been wasting several days remaking some of them. While there are always the “hardcore” players around who just race through. It is a worrying thought that I may be through the game-story inside of a month with only the content updates to look forward to. One is coming in June but if you are already maxed in levels. How fun is it going to be if not all new content is made for top level characters?

So would I recommend the game to my friends? Maybe. I’d have to stress I can’t see it as a long term game. But for some short sighted fun it seems to do the job. The client is fairly stable and it runs well on the systems I have tried it on. And in general I have not experienced any glaring, deal breaking, faults in my first week.

First let’s deal with Blizzard. Earlier this month they told the public that on May 19th they would announce their new game. Of course that sparked off a whole bunch of more or less likely rumors. The best example was a Diablo MMO. Yeah that seems likely. The makers of the biggest MMO around is going to make another MMO to compete with themselves AND put it in the same general genre. I mean Diablo is an arcadeish fantasy RPG. Pretty much what WoW is just with MMO added.

I swear I have no idea why people even coming to the conclusion that Blizzard would make another MMO. They pretty much own the market as it is with no real sign of it slowing down. So why would they go out and spend time and effort to then essentially compete with themselves? Sure a StarCraft MMO would be a different setting. But looking at the Blizzard lineup I don’t exactly see much promise of doing anything major revolutionary. Sure they make good solid genre games. But I can’t think of anything major they did that changed the world before. But maybe that is just because we have become too accustomed to the changes by now?

Of course more reasonable suggestions was made. Not surprisingly StartCraft II was thrown around along with a Diablo III. I am not sure what exactly Diablo can do in the gaming industry anymore unless the concept is changed a lot. But if they could do it with Warcraft I suppose Diablo could be retooled as well.

I think to no-ones big surprise it turned that indeed it is time for StarCraft II. It’s going to be fun to see since the RTS genre seems to get smaller and smaller compared to the ever dominant FPS and the growing MMO counter-parts.

But with the big news of the week over lets turn to my favorite soap right now: Vanguard.

Rumors have been flying around for ages. I guess ever since SoE took over as being the co-publisher. It was never much of a secret that Sigil was in a bit of a hard place at securing finances for making a game that could live up to The Vision of Brad McQuaid. After four years of work the game was finally forced out to the waiting masses and it turned out it wasn’t really ready at all.

Sure some people seems to enjoy it. But some people enjoy the weirdest things. And when it comes down to it MMOs is mostly about the social aspects anyway. So even if the game stinks you can keep people paying if they hook up with some nice people in it..

But in any event it seems that last week it finally hit. SoE bought Vanguard and Sigil was closed down. The fallout seemed to start immediately with disgruntled, former, employees informing sites like F13.net that they had all been asked to come outside and had then been informed they where all fired. And that some of them would be rehired by SoE.

Shortly after an interview with one of those people was posted in F13 with lots of sharp remarks about how poorly Sigil was managed. I specifically noticed two interesting remark that made a lot of sense to me. Apparently the final game had mostly been put together in the last 15 months. And he claimed that their internal tools where really poor because the top guys didn’t think they where that important.

It is not that much of a surprise that stuff was made late in the game, so to speak. Diplomacy, in it’s current form, wasn’t really fully added until late in open beta. And is receiving a major rework as we speak (I understand the system is more or less in place. with a lot of content needed to be redone for it to be fully in place). But that pretty much all of the game is not more that 15 months old, to para-phrase something that may be an exaggeration, seems to sit well with me considering the overall quality-feel of the game.

More important the lack of good internal tools makes it hard to do a lot of content and tweaking rapidly. If it is indeed true it would mean a programmer would have to do something a lot of the time things are changed. Or at least that more time is spend doing simple changes instead of the designers being creative.

Of course the biggest point of that interview was that it seemed top-management simply didn’t listen to people further down the food chain. No point in many comments on that. Hiring people you are going to ignore is just plain stupid.

Shortly after the same site posted an interview with a remorseful Brad. Not a lot to say about that except that at least it seems he knows he shouldn’t be management. Maybe a major problem here is that he still took the role instead of spending some of those millions of dollars on a qualified CEO to manage the company. But considering we likely haven’t head the last from the man with The Vision. Maybe he will know that for his next project. Let me be the first one to suggest Vigil as company name. Maybe that will remind them not to just let things flow.

From my perspective it’s going to be interesting to see how the situation is going to turn out for the game. SoE has promised to fix the technical things that are wrong with it – without pulling an ‘NGE’. I guess we will see how that will turn out. I know I will personally wait a month or two before I will consider trying it out again. Just to see what happens first.

So life goes on with nothing new to play. As I am writing this I am waiting for Rappelz to complete updating just to try something new. I can’t say I am looking forward to yet another “free” game that sells in-game stuff for actual money. But as always I allow myself to be positively surprised.

Also the one month anniversary day for my third tour of duty in PlanetSide. Last time I wrote something here I was going to find an outfit to play with. And soon after I stumbled across someone from AoJ who got me invited into the outfit he is playing with. Well actually he contacted me when he noticed my name in-game (presumably one of the many times it showed up in the wrong end of a ’someone was killed by someone’ message). So I ended up in the biggest Terran Republic outfit of the Werner server: Outcasters. Likely I wouldn’t have needed to actually getting an invite, since they seem to sign anyone up. But it helps to fit in when you actually know someone, if only a little.

I think I played with the Outcasters, last time I played PlanetSide, but left for some reason and instead joined MoX. This time around it seems like a good deal tho. While not exactly the most structured people around they do usually have an outfit platoon running. And usually someone who has a clue will be in charge too. And of cause being on TeamSpeak does help making the experience better than some random platoon. Even if often most of the commands end up being given in-game anyway. Since not everyone is on TS.

Still it is soon time to see if I want to spend money on PlanetSide. I doubt SOE will grant me with another month of free game time once this month is over. But right now I have nothing else I am paying to play. And I do have some good times from time to time. So odds are pretty good I will do at least one more month.

But something does loom on the horizon. I have a weak spot for limited editions of stuff. And today the temptation became too much. I had to have it even if I am not sure I wanna play the game. The precious item I am speaking of is the Lord of the Rings Online – Collector’s Edition. I finally broke out my trusty VISA and bought it the Dutch online store bol.com. Turns out it was cheaper place to buy it and I didn’t even need to call on a native to figure out the store. Still at a price of 249.99€ it is no bargain even if everyone else have jacked up the price after the game launched.

The upside of buying this edition is I can look forward to another game I can play really casually. The box includes a lifetime subscription. So I won’t have to consider if I want to continue spending cash on it. Instead I can just log in when I feel like and not feel bad for wasting cash on a subscription I am not using… I already wasted the cash in one go. Water under the bridge now =)

In any event I was sitting around on 9th of April with no real games to play and a whole week more of vacation time. Choices where slim, either I got myself a life or I needed to find something to suppress the real world with quickly. Initially I considered getting a SOE Station Access subscription. It would grant me access to both PlanetSide and Vanguard (and all the other SOE games I have previously played). But with the new prices it is double that of a normal subscription. And I can’t really see myself playing any of the other games enough to justify that, even if it is small change we are talking about.

But as chance would have it I downloaded the PlanetSide Reserves client so I wouldn’t have to install from my original CDs and then patch all the way to the current build. Just playing around while considering the subscription I installed and fired up PlanetSide and logged in… For whatever reason it accepted my credentials and gave me one free month?!?!? So Station Access idea scrapped. PlanetSide is on for the next month for free!

One of the things I like about simple twitch games like PlanetSide is that the game is you are your own opponent. Sure in this game there are maybe 200 people trying to kill you. But most of the time it’s your own damned fault if you die. You are not good enough and you should work on that. That is very different to MMORPGs where your progress is measured in skill level and cash. And usually it just takes time and patience to get both. Something it is hard for me to compete in unless I want to start cheating. Sure your actual skill in twitch games gets better as you play more. But just spending 100 hours in the game does not mean you are better than someone who spend 50. It’s all about you! Unfortunately I suffer from chronic bad timing. I’ll sit around with nothing happening around my. Then when I decide to move it will be the exact time someone comes around a corner, with a shotgun out, and I’ll run directly into them… Usually that leads me to having a kill/death ratio around 1:3 or 1:4. So I’m happy when I can do one that is around 1:1.

One of the interesting things about PlanetSide is that the game mechanics are changes quite often. Sure the core game is still the same. But a lot of changes and additions are introduced. Last time I went back was when they introduced the Battle Frame Robotics (BFRs). Of course I left soon after having actually gotten the certification to use them because I didn’t like driving them. But lately they added some further advancements for engineers.

The new engineering types are quite interesting. So far I have been playing as Assault Engineer. It’s quite tricky because the main benefits of it is you can build cloaking devices and gun turrets in the field. The cloaking devices double as ammo dispensers when charged. Both are hard to place on useful positions tho. Neither can be placed in enemy spheres of influence (SOI – an area around buildings and bases). And most fights happen in those really. It was quite useful when we where defending in a game of Rabbit Hunting tho. Since rabbits can’t go into SOIs either. Hopefully I’ll get a Battle Rank more soon so I can get Fortification Engineering too.

Of course some things never change. Since the first time I played the game was supposed to add things like Outfit base ownership. They added outfit points a long time ago to allow outfits to buy things for themselves. But so far there is nothing to spend it on. Just now they are considering it again as stated in the latest Developer Uplink post.

After a couple of days of PlanetSide I am starting to remember why I stopped playing it the last two times tho. The primary reason is, as often seems the case in MMOs, that teamwork is not a great deal of the mindset of the player-base. Literally I have been standing looking at a vehicle facility looking at over 20 people pull out one-seater. The fun thing is that this was just after the commanders of the battle told everyone to travel together to get to somewhere ASAP. Of the few who did pull out something that someone else could be in one picked up a mate while the two or three others simply took off alone… Guess we are not big on car-pooling here.

Of course in most MMOs you really want to join a guild (or outfit as they are called in PS). But it is always a hassle finding a good one that actually includes new members in anything. Most of my experiences is either you get more or less ignored, no matter how active you try to be, or you get included because there are nobody else around. The latter case meaning we are undermanned and don’t really do much as a guild anyway. I suppose I’ll have to give it a try sooner rather than later. Not something I am looking too much forward to tho. Disappointment always looms right around the corner.

Also some of the weapons annoy me. Especially just last night I was in the caves and I must say that especially one really gets on my nerves. I am presuming it is the Phoenix from the New Conglomerate (since those where who we where fighting). Sure indirect fire is part of the game. But constantly having AMS’es and my Avenger guns taken out by rockets from people who around a corner got really frustrating. Especially since we have no chance of getting to them with even indirect tank shells (they go over stuff. But not around corners). But then I always get the feeling that the Terran Republic is either underpowered or just not generally filled with players who are not exactly of the best quality. I suppose I personally pull the empire towards the latter.

In other news:
Of course on the Vanguard side things are changing too. And obviously just after I stopped playing they figured it would be a good time to start developing one of the changes I have been a strong supporter for. I am not sure if anyone else seriously pushed for it on VGTact (the official Vanguard Diplomacy forums) but I doubt it was directly based on my comments. No matter how it came along they have finally decided that 5-9 cards in a play deck simply isn’t enough for any real game-play. So coming soon it seems they greatly increases the numbers of cards a diplomat is going to be using.

This, of course, annoys me a great deal. The nerve of them to go with MY suggestions after I left! Hehe. Well I can’t say it will make me spend cash on the game again. But maybe I’ll have to spend one of my ten buddy keys to try out the new system once it’s in. Shouldn’t take a lot of time to make a character and try it out. I am not really sure it changes much tho. Each parley is just going to take longer and the progression curve in diplomacy hasn’t been changed much. Well they made the first bit a little quicker it seems. But the change stops about where my character is at now. So it won’t mean much for my main.

New betas are coming up too. The Chronicles of Spellborn should be right around the corner. Seems I didn’t get into the last phase of the closed one. But open beta is already overdue. So I suppose it can’t be long now. Age of Conan should be accepting first batch soon too. I’m feeling confident there. Only around 100.000 people signed up and I didn’t add any additional reason to select me. So I’ll be in for sure!

1. I found out it didn’t seem I was going to like the game anytime soon since I don’t enjoy any of the content
2. Age of Judgement (the guild I was playing with) closed down in Vanguard due to lack of interest.
3. I was charged for the second month (I had misunderstood what I had three free months of. Turns out it was the vgplayers site).

After those events I decided it seems I was paying for a glorified chat channel where I only really talked with one person. Any popular instant messenger will do that for free!

I did flounder around a little with remaining members of AoJ and joined some random guild. And it turned out to be as fun as most other random guilds I have been in: as in it wasn’t. Lots of members that did little together.

So I cancelled my subscription… Or I tried to and found out it didn’t work so I made a support request on it. That worked! I figured I’d try to motivate myself to play and see if I could find something enjoyable. But so far my appearances has become scarce, to say it at least. But with vacation time coming up next week I can maybe to one last stab at seeing if it is worth keeping a presence in that game.

In other news I finally was entered into a beta a couple of weeks ago. It is one I have been accepted to participate in for over 5 months so I can’t say I was very motivated to do much for. And I’ll just say that so far I have not been positively surprised by how they handle people who are actually playing the beta either. I guess community and information management just isn’t a strong trait with these guys. And from looking at the game it seems like it would take a miracle for the game in itself to become any serious contender in the already stuffed MMO market.

Since I also cancelled my WoW subscription again (the guy I was playing with didn’t have time) I have a bit of a hole in my MMO participation sheet. A beta I am not too interested in is all I have to show right now. I’m so far out I am considering Entropia Universe and PlanetSide again! Open beta of The Cronicles of Spellborne should be soonish tho. So with a bit of luck I can move into trying that before I do something stupid.

Yeah as I mentioned before so I got into Vanguard in the “open beta” though my Fileplanet subscription and it was quickly apparent that the game wasn’t really done. I am not sure what it is with this genre of games… 4 years of development and they still need to add stuff in on last days before launch.

Vanguard has this “three spheres” thing going for it – in it’s marketing anyway. I already mentioned the idea is that you can play just one, two or all three and still have fun. Spheres one and two are the obvious ones as in: xp-by-killing-mobs-and-doing-quests and crafting-by-well-crafting. The latter is one of the “new” features of the game and is called Diplomacy.

Adventuring Sphere (the killing mob one) does not really offer much new. I am not sure what new feature could really get introduced in a system that is basically all about getting XP from killing stuff. There is a couple of nice surprises like the Bard songbook where you ‘compose’ your own songs from fragments of various buffs. But I suspect it will quickly become known what combinations is useful in what settings. It’s not like it has a lot of options anyway. Some games establish quite a nice flow in XP/quest grinding and helps the player along to figure out where to go next… Vanguard don’t.

Crafting Sphere looked promising at first glance. You can build ships and houses! Cool!!! Well…. After grinding to level 10 I am loosing my will to live real quick. The actual implementation of crafting has some ups and down. Crafting is almost always a grinders game. And games have to battle the obvious attraction to simply macro this process. This leads to some rather interesting implementations that even have the potential to become a game in itself. It is obviously therefor they decided to market crafting as a separate sphere of Vanguard.

So how did they do? Well first off it seems like they took a good look at EQ2 before they made this. EQ2 is a highly time-based system where you battle to overcome complications while balancing quality and progress. In EQ2 it quickly becomes trivial to make high quality items. But it does take a bit of time. The Vanguard system has some of the same qualities but with time replaced with an action point pool. The idea is simply that you need to finish your product before you run out of points and with the best quality rating possible. Added to that are the complications that spice it up a bit.

One of the neater things about crafting in this game is that you get more options as you improve your skills. So once you get a bit up in level you can specifically work more on quality, speed through the process or some combination thereof. Not a bad idea as you get to choose what sub-skills you want to improve and can therefor work towards where you think you need more options. And you get some concrete feeling of improving in your craft instead of just reading off your level number.

Okay so it sounds like a pretty good system so far and I’d agree it indeed has some potential. But then what does not have potential if altered enough? There is a number of issues as I see it. First off the complications can do a number of things if you do not fix them. Reduce quality, reduce progress or make actions more expensive. So basically they all make sure you need to spend more action points. Problem is that so far it seems very random when you get complications and how many you get. Oddly enough the order seems mostly static.

This does not mix very well with how the crafting is set up. Basically you have 4 steps. The first and last are not worth mentioning since they do very little. But the second and third ones is where most of the action points are spend. These steps will amount to a total of three actual steps. Either second step will have two steps or the third one will. And here comes the problem: only one of those steps is any good at building quality – at least at my level. This creates a huge problem when you want consistent results. You can be in a situation where you need to build quality in the second step and then end up spending too many points to finish the product because you get too many complications. Or you will get all the quality eaten up by complications because you does not have enough points left to fix them.

Now this can be excused to some extend. Making grade A (aka the best) quality shouldn’t be easy. But it does basically reduce crafting into a grind of crafting quests (called Work Orders). The reason for this is two-fold. On one side you do not get a lot of XP from actually crafting items for yourself. Instead you will ‘master’ your recipe after a go or two on it and not gain more XP if you make it again. And second at least at my current level there is very few recipes. From level 7 to 10 there hasn’t been any. But apparently on level 11 you get to choose your specialization and get new ones again. Second reason is that doing Work Orders you mainly seem to get XP from handing them in. Quality of the objects you make only seem to affect the additional reward. If you do not complete all the requested items of a Work Order you will loose some of the XP reward. So if you want to get anywhere you can just sit back. Get some Work Orders and quickly grind through them without caring about quality or complications. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.

Maybe it changes on higher levels. But GOD DAMN it is boring so far!!!

On to diplomacy. Ohhhh… Something new and exciting in the genre. Finally! Yeah… maybe not so much.

Basically the Diplomacy Sphere consists of a simplistic collector card game. A bit like Magic The Gathering I suppose (I never played that game myself. But I tried a couple similar games). And it suffers from a myriad of issues. Many of them likely due to the fact that it seems the game wasn’t really implemented into the game-world until the last couple of weeks before release. When I first entered the open beta it wasn’t there at all or maybe only at select cities.

As said the game is very simple. You have a deck of cards and you select 5 of them as your “strategy”. These are the cards you can play when you “parley” (aka play the diplomacy game). Each card has a score for how much favor you get from playing it. It may have a cost and it may give your opponent some points to spend on playing his cards. The cost points are called expressions and are split into 4 types (Demand, Reason, Inspire and Flattery) and each race has a primary one that most of their cards are based on. Apparently classes do too but I haven’t noticed this much to be honest. So when you play the game you will see an indicator that goes from 10 points in opponents favor to 10 points in yours. On this is a marker where the favor currently is. The number on your cards will move the indicator towards you the number of points it’s marked with. You also see how many times you have to finish a round with the indicator in your favor to win and how many the NPC needs to have it on his side for you to loose. These numbers are based on a base number and the difference between you and your opponents diplomacy score. They – of course – go down as the battle rages on to show how close you are to winning (or loosing).

The initial gaming experience of Diplomacy is alright. It’s a bit like adventuring where you do quests and get reward items. This was hugely frustrating in open beta because once it was added most of the quests where broken in some way but it finally got working all the way through. But for release they decided to break it again (at least for High Elves) and for the couple of days we where blocked from completing the initial quest line and get our horse. But after that the sphere quiets down somewhat. Apart from the ‘Civic Diplomacy’ tutorial I have found no more quest lines so far. So doing Civic Diplomacy becomes the way of progression. The tragic thing about that is that the NPCs are so predictable that there are already rough step-by-step guides how to grind diplomacy. What targets to play, what strategy to select and what order to play them in. Not exactly a lot of challenge if this can be done inside of a week of the game being released.

The obvious response to this would be making the play style of the NPCs more dynamic. Shuffle their cards a bit. But this would be even worse! With only 5 cards to play in a parley session it is almost impossible to respond to unexpected things. Trial and error is pretty much the only one you can be expected to beat opponents. If the opponent does not feed you the needed expression points you cannot play your own heavy hitters. And cards that does not cost anything to play usually gives the opponent a bunch of expression points. With just 5 cards you need pack a strategy specifically for one scenario.

So in my opinion the Diplomacy sphere needs to be seriously changed to be any challenge of player skill. The only real option they have with the current game is to deal the NPCs better cards. And that will only lead to an extremely frustrating experience.

So in summery:
Diplomacy Sphere is a grind? CHECK!
Crafting Sphere is a grind? CHECK!
Adventuring Sphere is a grind? Well.. Maybe. Not sure yet. But it is not really anything new. And it has no real flow that makes it much fun.

But what can I do. I have 90 days of game time with my collectors edition of the game. And with a bit of hope I will start playing with the guild (AoJ) sometime soon. Maybe that will make it fun or at least worthwhile. Time will tell.

Okay so it seemed to be an invite to a stress-test the coming weekend. But the mail did say something about the account will stay open if I use it then. Pretty cool even if it does somewhat expand on ‘currently played games’ since I am currently playing Vanguard ‘open’ beta too. And in a – presumably – not so distant future I should be in yet another beta… Well I have mentioned that one before since it’s been more that two months since I was accepted into it. But there is now talk about slowly letting in the people selected. So perhaps I will be testing that soon too. And finally I figured out how to get into the Myst Online open beta.

If this keeps up I won’t have time for the day job =)

On the Vanguard front I’ve been playing on and off for about two weeks now. But it is a bit of a strange game in some areas. It’s not that is a particular tough game to play. But it does take a lot of times to do most things in it. Other first impressions are that there is no doubt these guys also made EQ. The graphics are similar. While some people rave about them – don’t fanboys always? – I think they are somewhat bland and nothing new. Not I’m running in 1920×1200 on just one GeForce 7950GT (other one is in for replacement – again) so I can’t really turn up to the max for playing. But even doing that don’t really seem to display graphics like other games that are supposed to come out. Frankly I think WoW does a better job even if they have ‘cheated’ and made ‘blocky’ part of their cute/friendly cartoonish style.

The UI layout looks a lot like the default WoW one (”If it works…” I suppose). And at least they didn’t take the EQ2 one. What I don’t understand is that they seem to not have gotten the memo that people like intuitive UIs with good information layouts as opposed to small – static sized – windows that show half the info of what you might want to see. I suppose it can’t get any bigger on 1024×768. But it is not like there is a HUGE marked on that resolution anyway. And too many of their windows just waste a lot of space on nothing useful.

The class selection is, like EQ2, put into a 4×4 grid meaning there are four variations on four different ‘generic classes’ (defensive tank, offensive tank, healer and nuker). While the classes are not a direct EQ2 rip-off. The underlying idea definitely is.

The races look familiar too. I suppose it is hard to come up with new fantasy genre races anyway. But most of the EQ lore animal-people are back with new names. Elves have the same three types. But that is really more something of a given in the genre.

The game is supposed to have three separated progression lines – or ’spheres’ – to play on, each independent of the others. I am not sure I would see it quite like that. I mean progression axis are ‘Adventurer, ‘Crafter, ‘Harvester’ and ‘Diplomat’. The first one is the usual stuff about killing mobs and leveling up your fighting skills. The second is supposed to be crafting. But harvesting is just as independent as crafting. Sure crafting is more involving, but they are still separate… Guess ‘four spheres’ didn’t work for the marketing people. The fourth is diplomacy.

Crafting seems to be the most innovative in the game – at least in implementation. They have gone hardcore on it and made it almost completely resistant to macroing. I mean of course it COULD be macroed. But the effort required to do so would be more than most people would be willing to waste their time doing… But if it gets big enough I am sure there will be someone who will do it anyway. The nice thing about crafting is it seems to be actually worthwhile. Most games have it one of two ways: “Crafted items are pointless because loot will always be better” – like WoW – or “You won’t want anything that wasn’t crafted because those are just pointless trinkets put in the game to make sure you are never without at least SOME gear”.

I am not quite sure where Vanguard lands on this. I know that there is better loot than what I have seen crafted (not a whole lot). But even simple crafted items have bonuses on them too. But how can you beat a game where you can make anything from handles to boats and houses? Not too likely you will loot a house on a dungeon raid. Now is it? At least I really really hope it won’t happen. Apart from the dreaded ‘potential’ crafting it is – like most other things – hampered by an almost impossibly bad set of UI windows to manage it in. And a good addition of several screens showing the same info and looks the same. But don’t show the same details… Well done! Call up Apple and get some UI lessons (before they sell out the last shreds of consistent UI design people).

Now diplomacy is a novel idea. It’s basically a bit like social XP in Dark and Light except here it is a simple card game versus completely inept NPCs. It is a little odd that this part is considered a sphere when harvesting isn’t. It’s not much more involving. But I guess it IS build a bit more into the game… or will be… whatever. One of the problems with this is that while the game is simple it has simply not been worked a lot on. At the beginning of the beta the High Elves capital didn’t have any of it at all. It was only added last week. And consistently it has been broken somewhere in the initial quest line ever since. Each new patch released fixes something only to allow players to progress a couple of steps – if we are lucky – and get stranded again. The carrot here is that we get the first horse free as a reward from this quest line.

As said diplomacy isn’t very hard. It is a basic card game in the line of all those collector games like Magic The Gathering. You build a deck of cards and select what five you want to play any given session with. In the beginning you only have 6 cards that you had no choice in. You then get a couple of quest rewards with where you can choose between a couple of cards. But you are still not able to build a very flexible deck. And this becomes a problem when you suddenly meet an NPC that only have cards that never benefit you while anything you deal benefits him. Unless this happens the NPC AI is too simplistic to be any real challenge. And some of them are outright broken so badly that you can easily beat much more ’skilled’ opponents. As I see it diplomacy is a gimmick. It will only be used because it is supposedly what allows you to influence towns – and possibly build your own. But that might be a rumor. And for now you can’t even duel against other players. So making it a meta-game for the Magic addicts isn’t really what it is about either.

Frankly I have not all that great hopes for Vanguard. While the last weeks show the developers can hack together something in a hurry. I am somewhat puzzled what they have spend the last years doing. Several areas are supposed to get major overhauls soon. Some of the ’spheres’ are badly broken and half implemented. And at least one class is getting a lot of changes… It’s two weeks before launch guys. Why didn’t you do this earlier? Also it is clear that the ’seamless movement’ isn’t quite as seamless. It is very obvious when you are moving from one ‘chunk’ (aka server/cluster) to another… at least the fact you freeze up for around 30 seconds (and sometimes longer) is a nice little hint.

But Age of Judgement is going to play it. And maybe some of the people from SDA too. So I have pre-ordered the collectors edition – I am a sucker for those things. In the end it’s only money. And perhaps the people I play with can make it worth while. But enough about Vanguard for now.

The other game is somewhat better implemented. I cannot say much about it – with the NDA and all. But it does seem remarkable stable and solid for the stage it is in. I can’t remember if I have seen a release date for it yet. But I am relatively confident it is not supposed to be out for a couple of months at least. But while ’stable’ and ’solid’ are nice properties of a MMO. It is not what make games fun. And from my current time spend in the game I am not impressed. There is hardly anything new in it. And maybe I am just dumb. But it quickly becomes rather hard to figure out what people actually want you to do in quests. Or rather, how you are supposed to go about doing it. Oh well… I get bored of it after playing less than an hour. So I doubt I will spend a lot of time doing that. But I supposed I gotta milk the opportunity to try it out before release so I can see if I would want to pay for it. Who knows? It may improve!

I also tried out the Myst Online experience a bit. I’ve been a fan of the series but I can’t really see the point of this installation. Basically they moved the the single player experience online and added a bit of interaction with other players. And that SEEMS to be it. There is no real social interaction encouragement as part of the gameplay. So people are just milling around solving the ever increasing number of ages. All this while speaking with friends and helping each other figuring them out. I donno… It’s not what I want out of an MMO. And I LIKE that Myst games have historically had a set story that played with the vision Rand Miller had for the world he created. I can’t see how this can be anything but a step away from that, a bit like Lord of the Rings Online really. I heard there is going to be a new book tho. I think I’ll just read that one.

Of course there is always WoW to fall back on. Can’t really see myself buying the expansion with my current involvement in it. And it is not like it really offers any radical changes to the brain dead endgame of the thing. So I’ll just trot along and see what happens on that front. Blizzard is supposedly already in gear for an expansion for next year tho. Wonder if that will liven things up. While there are some interesting games coming this year. I doubt anyone will knock Blizzard off the throne anytime soon. It’s becoming like the Counter-Strike of MMOs: Lots of people are playing it because it don’t require all that much skill or hardware. But you can still become a ‘big guy’ doing it.

Well perhaps the Lord of the Rings MMO can threaten it a bit. But WoW don’t live on brand recognition alone I think…

2006 ended with a bit of a revisit of WoW and a final dismissal of EQ2 – neither of them really planned. First a good friend of mine asked me to play WoW with him. It was a bit odd since he has never played that kind of games. But since he had started a trial of WoW I figured it might be fun to join him and start all over on that again. This time around it is on a very casual basis since my friend has only limited time to play. But it’s all good. I’m not really into doing hard core WoW gaming anyway. Now if he had only created his character on my old server and in the right faction… Ah well. Guess that level 60 warlock will have to just sit there then.

It does give me a chance to try out some new things tho. I have never really played a healer before. So I decided this was as good a time as any. So I rolled a priest to complement his warrior. Well… Before I knew what race/class he was I made a hunter that I am playing a bit too and that’s a bit of a change from anything I usually play too.

Quitting of EQ2 was even more random. Basically my account was closed for some reason (might have been due to my credit card having been replaced I suppose) without any notice or emails about it. I can’t even find any explanation on my The Station account pages. But as it turns out the timing is pretty good. I just quietly quit a guild – the Secret Keepers – before I went on holidays vacation. And I wasn’t really having much fun playing the game… It felt too much of a chore to me.

The reason I quit the guild was really to because while they seemed like nice people I never really did anything with them. I never actually quested with ANY of them. And only occasionally got a bit of help on tricky quests I was trying to solo. Now I could possibly have gotten more help with stuff. But I am not really looking for people to power level me. I want to play the game and experience the content. Especially in a game with very little end game content. And I don’t personally think constantly raiding the same dungeons is ‘content’. And even more annoying they never seemed to talk much. At least not in game. For hours the only things on the guild channel would be greetings, congratulations and goodbyes. Any attempt to talk to people would die real quick. Not really my idea of a community.

But this year also promises a couple of new games I am looking forward to to trying out. I’ve started to list them in the ‘Upcoming Games’ block on the front page of the site. But let’s just list them anyway since they might change over time…

‘Age of Conan’ is looking to be a really dark and violent PvP-centered game. PvP games have always had my interest. But I need a reason to do PvP and not just having the act of PvPing being the center. I can do that in plenty of games that are not persistent worlds just fine already. And I generally feel those games does a better job of letting player skill being the factor that decide who is the winner. So I am looking forward to seeing what ‘Age of Conan’ will do in this regard.

‘Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising’ and ‘The Chronicles of Spellborn’ both looks to just be interesting by how they are different from most other games. Spellborn seems to attempt something completely different with how fighting and using powers work. Also it’s a new contender in the market. That is always something to look for.

‘Gods & Heroes’ on the other hand is changing the genre in other ways. Apart from having chosen the mythical Rome as it’s setting – as opposed to the actual one – it tries to give players their own little army to help out in fighting. While the graphics look nice and the setting of the game is refreshing I am really looking forward to how they implement the minions. They are on one side claiming it is make it easier to build a well balanced group. But on the other hand they say the minions are not a replacement for players. As always I am interested in how they balance solo play content with the need to work with other players. ‘Gods & Heroes’ also makes a lot of promises of things to come… But that isn’t exactly news. We’ll see if they do better with that than some of the others that has played the same game.

‘Vanguard: Saga of Heroes’ I don’t really have much to say about. It looks to be placed squarely in the mainstream section of the genre. I am mainly looking to play it with people from the guild I joined in Dark & Light. But also I am hoping it will be a fun game to just play. And as always playing with pleasant people goes a long way to help that along. But at least it seems I get to play a bit of beta of this game through my Fileplanet subscription. I always was against paying to get to download demos and other promotional materials at reasonable speeds. But they ARE good at making deals so their subscribers get access to betas. So in the end I suppose it has been worth it.

A couple more are worth mentioning: Myst Online, Lord of the Rings and Tabular Rosa. I am not really sure any of them are ones I would really play seriously. LotR is mostly to see how badly they transfered the strict IP control of the Tolkien family into a functional MMO. Myst is a bit of the same. It’s been some nice adventure/puzzle games. But as an MMO I am wondering what you will be doing. I haven’t tried Uru so I am not really sure what to expect at all. And finally Tabular Rosa looks like a PvE first person shooter MMO. A bit of an odd setup but I would like to find a sci-fi MMO to play sometime. So I suppose I’ll have to give it a go too.

But anyway. Games are a bit slow right now. I am still waiting for another beta to start besides Vanguard. I’ve been accepted for some months now. But it seems they had to implement some changes. So maybe I will have some time to work on this site a bit. I’ve been playing with making a module for Xoops to better manage the info around all of my various gaming personas over the years. And also I have been looking at changing the design so it is a bit more pleasant to the eye. Too bad graphical design work isn’t exactly one of my stronger talents. But since this site is mainly for myself. I suppose it only really matters to me.