Server Restrictions and the Sense of Community
With just over one week since Aion's launch, Rynala and I hit level 23 last night. The server queues have not been a problem. We are usually able to get into the game before the queues hit. Disconnects are very infrequent. The server has went down a couple times this week but it was the first week so I guess that is to be expected. (How sad is it we just take these things as expected for MMOs?)
I have been seeing Aion getting a lot of flak from bloggers about the server queues but as I said before, I would much rather have queues for the first month than empty servers/server closures for the rest of the life cycle. Everyone knows the population will dip-be it a little or a lot-after the first month.
Tobold seems to think that we need to do away with the traditional server model of selecting a server and then putting characters on that one server. I would have to say I disagree to a point. I know games like Wizard101 and FreeRealms do not have your characters hardlocked to a server but I think the hardlocking gives a sense of community.
With your characters being locked to a server, you grow to know the other people on that server. You know who to trust, who to hunt, who to sell to and who to buy from. You know who the good guilds and who the trash guilds are. You can make a name for yourself on the server. Even with thousands of people on a server, you will still commonly run into the same people. If you break that down, now if you want to hunt a guild for PvP you will have no luck because this guild could be hiding on one of many different servers. Perhaps you want to go capture a fortress in a certain area... well if one side is defending too well one server, you could just switch to a different one and beat those people into submission. It would be a fundimental breakdown of any community building aspects of the game.
It reminds me of when cross server battlegrounds were implemented into World of Warcraft. I remember getting in the queue for a battleground and often facing some of the same people. Yes, it could get repetitive, but it also made you care more about it. Now, when you go into a cross server battleground, you are lucking to see one other random person from your server. That sense of "PvP community" is gone.
I like having a strong server community. Breaking down server boundaries diminishes that community. For a casual player not involved in server politics, I could see it not being that big of deal but for everyone else, it is somewhat nice to build up that e-reputation.
Problems with Permadeath
Sorry for the late Friday post. I got tied up at work and did not get a chance to post this when I would have liked.
Syp wrote a post today contemplating permadeath within MMORPGs - not necessarily MMOs with the permadeath feature but instead people holding themselves to a permadeath standard. Syp's focus is Dungeons and Dragons Online and the various "permadeath guilds" within that game.
Permadeath is an interesting concept to me. I love playing NetHack and that game is all about permadeath. People get killed on hundreds of characters before they ever "ascend" and beat the game. I have spent many years of my life playing pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons so I have a laundry list of characters that have died permanently in random and often gruesome ways.
For me, MMOs and permadeath do not mix and unless MMO design changes drastically with a "permadeath-based game" (which I think would be awesome, by the way), the two will stay mutually exclusive. Within your average MMO, there are multiple design elements which I feel get in the way of permadeath.
Roguelikes are mostly random. Within Nethack, aside from a few key levels, a majority of the game is random level design with random monsters and items placed on those levels. MMOs do not have that random element to them. Going through the starting area of almost any MMO is going to be the exact same experience every time.
A further problem with the style of roleplaying permadeath in DDO is that you as a player already know what the game is going to be throwing at you. In tabletop Dungeons and Dragons permadeath works because you are not retelling the same story to each character. Your character may die half way through the campaign and you pick up a new character, but you do not replay the first half of the campaign with the new character. With MMOs, every subsequent character benefits from the knowledge of the previous character. Oh you died to the two zombies hiding around that corner on one character? Well on the next character you know to avoid that corner because there are two zombies there.
Another thing that hampers permadeath in MMOs is that most MMOs nowadays expect you to die... and die often. There are multiple quest in World of Warcraft that require you to die in order to complete them. And between raids, battlegrounds, and world PvP, your character is going to die and die often.
If MMOs did have permadeath options, the rest of the game would have to become trivial. Roguelikes work with permadeath because if you die, you only lost a couple hours of game time. Games rarely last more than five to eight hours max. Today's MMOs last thousands of hours. I would almost expect the game to require a style similar to Darkfall where gear and other items are not that hard to replace.
While permadeath is a fun thing to think about, I really do not believe it has any place in current MMOs. I do think it would be interesting to see an MMO built from the ground up with permadeath as a feature (maybe not mandatory, but a feature nonetheless) but as for now, I think games are not conducive to that style of gameplay.
Aion, Its Queues, and How to Fix Player Run Shops
Aion is out and has massive queues. That is the news across the web. Are queues good? Is the small selection of servers bad? Are player run shops the cause? What can be do to fix these problems?
While I hate queues, I can understand why NCSoft is doing this. If you look at Warhammer Online's situation, you see they launched with a huge selection of servers and most were empty within a month. Yes, queues suck and there no doubt be a lot of foot stomping about this. But, almost every MMO that is out sees a drop in players after the first month of release. I would much rather have to deal with queues for the first month then have to deal with empty servers for the rest of my play time. My bet is NCSoft is monitoring the situation and after the first month they will open new servers if the situation requires.
One of the main complaints is player run shops. It is not that the shops themselves are bad, but it is that players are misusing them. If you have a player run shop open, you do not get logged out. Ever. No matter if people are buying anything from you or not. And thus, you have people taking a piece of vendor trash and sitting in a corner with their player run shop listing the item for millions of Kinah. No one will ever buy the item from them so they will never get logged out. You have people sitting in a corner for hours while they sleep, while they work, while they go to school, holding up a server slot that no one else can take.
So the questions becomes: how should NCSoft fix this situation? I do not think the removal of player run shops is the answer. They are a unique way of doing business and can be useful. Perhaps, there should be a timer on unproductive shops. I have no problem with shops that are actually moving merchandise because they are properly using the system. Those that abuse the system do not want their merchandise to sell because if everything sells, their shop will close and they will get logged out.
I think the best answer would be to have a one hour productivity timer. From the time you set up your shop, you would have one hour to make a sale. If no sale was made in that time you would be logged out. If you did make a sale, your timer would reset and you would have another hour to make a sale.
This system would come with its own assortment of benefits and flaws. People just idling in a corner would get booted after an hour, freeing up slots for others. Prices in productive shops would have to remain competitive because if you are not competitive, you will not be making sales. On the other hand, someone could set up like a shop pact with a friend and have the friend stop by every forty five minutes or so and purchase something from their shop to keep them logged in. While this could happen, I think it would be rare and the one hour timer would get rid of most of the problem.
Other than the queue, Aion has been a complete blast. It has been a pretty solid launch. There was about a half hour of bad lag last night, but it was the first Rynala and I have encountered. We are working to level our mains together and as of last night we reached level thirteen. She is playing a gladiator and I am playing a cleric. I also leveled a spiritmaster alt to level ten yesterday.
With the official launch today, I am excited to see the future of this game and I remain hopeful of its success.
Grizzleheim Gallantry
Grizzleheim is another world in Wizard101 that Rynala and I recently finished. It is also a zone in contention for my favorite in game (an honor currently held by Krokotopia). The world is split up into four main zones as well as a multitude of dungeons. The zones are gated by level. The first two can be done at level 20, the third at 30, and the final at level 40.
Grizzleheim is the Norse world of bears, wolves, and ravens. KingsIsle does a great job taking Norse lore and weaving it into a simpler story perfect for a younger audience and yet still refreshing for an older crowd.
The world is not connected to the main Malistaire story of Wizard101 but has an equally compelling story arc to it. You are initially sent to the world to hopefully open up trade relations with the land. In order to have council with the king, you must first prove yourself as a warrior and a hero. After accomplishing some basic tasks and proving yourself, you are sent to investigate the why one of the local Thanes has become increasingly war like and allied themselves with some evil bears. In the end, it turns out that the original Thane was kidnapped and replaced by a raven in disguise and that the ravens are trying to start a war between the bears of the land and the warrior wolves. In the final zone, the main goal of the ravens is revealed and leads to an exciting conclusion and the most difficult boss battle in the game.
One of the first things I noticed is that the later areas of Grizzleheim are not easy. Rynala and I to this day have had no problem two-manning everything in the main storyline. At level 22 we were easily able to two-man the Sunken City in Wizard City and nothing in any of the other worlds has provided much difficulty (except Kensington Park which we still have not touched yet). When you can first go to Grizzleheim at 20, the two zones you can go to provide some challenge, but nothing unbeatable. At level 30 and 40, the zones and dungeons they send you to are brutal.
At level 30, you are sent to Nidavellir, a three-winged dungeon filled with Grendals. Your goal is to defeat the head grendal in the center dungeon. The two flanking dungeons are optional, but if you do not defeat the bosses in the side dungeons they will join the final boss of the central dungeon. Each one of these final bosses has 8000 health with which is an incredible amount after being used to facing bosses with 3000-4000 health. In the left most dungeon, you are forced to face a boss of each element before fighting the final boss and in the right most dungeon, you are forced to navigate a labyrinth to get to the final boss. When tackling these dungeons, make sure to set aside a nice big block of time because they will take awhile if you go in with a few people. I expect that these dungeons would be fairly easy with 3-4 people, but with just the two of us it turned out to be very stressful.
Nothing could prepare me for what we would face at the end of Ravenscar, the final zone. Your final boss is in fact four bosses in one encounter. Each boss has about 4500 health. With two people, this was nearly impossible at level 40. I am assuming KingsIsle expects you to be around level 45 or go in with a full group of four because all of the loot these bosses drop is level 45 loot.
The encounter consists of four ravens: one life, one death, one fire and one storm. 4500 health is not an extreme amount of health. It is the fact that these bosses all pump out high damage is what makes this encounter so challenging. The fire, the storm, and the death bosses all do AOE attacks frequently and even just only healing and letting Rynala do all the damage, we kept dying in this fight. Eventually we figured out a strategy of focus firing the fire boss down first, then the storm boss, then the death boss and ending with the life boss. With the two of us, it took a great deal of luck but after about eight times dying on the encounter we were able to beat it. It was hands down the most satisfying experience in the game for me so far. At a later time, we went in with two others to try the encounter with a full party and did not have any difficulty. A warning: with just two people in the fight when we did beat them, the fight still took over 45 minutes to finish. Take that World of Warcraft! And you thought some of your boss fights were long! Even at the max level of 50, I do not think the final Ravenscar battle will ever be soloable. The four bosses together can easily put out over 3000-4000 damage in one turn and that will kill anyone.
Grizzleheim overall was a refreshing experience. The lore was interesting, the world was beautiful, and the fights were difficult. If you do not want to bang your head against the wall, either go there greatly over the level or go with a full party of four.
NCSoft Drops GameGuard for Aion Launch
Greetings!
As we draw closer to tomorrow I wanted to give everyone a brief update on the progress of our live version. We are excited to announce that we will be serving out the final update for you to patch within the next few hours. You will be able to use this version for both our Preselection and our Head Start. We are very excited with our final product and think that you will be as well! Below are the release notes for the patch you will see later today:
- Aion now features all three languages French, German and English. To select your language simply right click on Aion within your launcher and go to Properties->Language Options. Please select which languages you wish to download and which you wish Aion to display.
- After analyzing our open beta test results Aion will not feature GameGuard at launch. We will however continue to pursue ways to effectively utilize GameGuard within Aion in the future. Right now we're focused on providing players with the best possible Aion experience.
- The level cap is now level 50 (previously 45).
- Players will be able to reserve 2 character names during Preselection and create 8 characters in total once Head Start begins and beyond.
- Channels will be set to 10 instances for the beginning 2 zones of each faction. Please note that these will be lowered as characters progress and spread throughout Atreia.
Xaen
Aion Producer
It is nice to see NCSoft listening to the concerns of the players and responding properly. I know many people that could not login to beta due to GameGuard and many more that just refused to even try Aion due to GameGuard.
Post Beta Aion Impressions
Back when NCSoft was running closed beta weekends for Aion, Rynala and I played a little and enjoyed it greatly. Since it was only for the weekends, we did not spend too much time with our characters. We only ever got up past ascension to see if we enjoyed it.
We then downloaded and played the game a bit on the Chinese servers. With Rynala playing a Gladiator and myself playing a Cleric, we got up to about level 15 or so. The problem with both of these is that they were not the most recent versions of the game. Both servers were running the game at version 1.0. Korea was currently up to version 1.3 (version 1.3 would be renamed 1.5 for the North American release). For open beta this past week, NCSoft was running the game with version 1.5 and all the bells and whistles that came along with it.
The first couple days of beta were plagued with server and GameGuard problems so I did not even try to log in. Around Wednesday, I started an Elyos scout and played around a bit. The changes since 1.0 were minimal at low level since the patches mostly added more mid to high level quests, numerous dungeons, and content at the level cap. Either way, the experience was still a blast and I am anxiously awaiting release next week. In the mean time, I decided to list a breakdown of all the major features I like and all the major features I do not like or wish would be implemented.
Likes:
No Mods - I know this is probably one thing many people will not like about the game but I think it is a great feature. I have come to loathe mods. It came to a point in WoW where you cannot play anymore without mods. Be it raiding, pvp, crafting, trading, whatever. Unless you use mods, you are not competitive. Without mods, everyone is able to be on the same footing and we are all able to avoid the headaches of patch date mod updates.
Character Creation - The Aion character creator is hands down the most advanced I have seen in an MMO. The amount of customization is ridiculous. After playing around with Aion's character generator, it really makes the flaws shine out of other games. Plus, the variety of characters you see is hysterical. It gets tiresome to see everyone looking perfect and like a beautiful model. You can make some truly hideous looking characters. While some people may complain about not having different races, with the character creator, you can make just about any race you can think of.
Crafting Experience - I enjoy crafting. I usually always like crafting in games. One of the problems I have though is that crafting will often slow down my leveling pace if I focus on it. So getting experience from crafting is a boon for me. While leveling this weekend, one of my guildmates was talking about he got half way through level 24 just from crafting. While experience from crafting is not as fast as questing and killing, it is better than nothing.
Crafting Limits - Or better said: the lack of limits on crafting. With Patch 1.5, you are able to take all crafting professions from 1 to 399, but you can only take two to the 450 crafting cap. Taking a crafting skill to 399 will get you majority of the good things useful from your character all the way to the level cap. The 400-450 crafting content is just the highly specialized top of the line gear for the most part. The gear you craft from 400-450 seems only slightly inferior to the best gear of the game, but will take a mighty effort to craft it.
Crafting Usefulness - Crafting is useless in World of Warcraft until you reach the level cap. When you craft gear, you have usually already greatly outleveled it. From what I have seen in Aion, if you focus on just one or two crafting skills, you can craft pretty easily as you level. If you want to focus on every crafting skill, that might slow you down a good bit.
Trade Contracts - You can level your crafting from 1 to 399 without ever leaving the crafting district... that is if you have enough Kinah. Trade contracts are repeatable quests that provide you with the major crafting mats and only require you to buy the general crafting reagents that are purchasable from the nearby supplier NPC. The rewards are certain amounts of random crafting reagents or sometimes recipes. While it does get a little costly to constantly buy reagents, it means you never have to farm for materials unless you want to craft something for yourself and your crafting never gets left behind because you did not find enough resource nodes in the world.
Dislikes:
Chat Customization - You can create custom tabs and channels, but for some reason if you are in a private channel it will not save that setting if you log on, forcing you to rejoin the channel every time you play. I am not sure if this is a bug or intentional but hopefully it gets fixed. You can also not change the background opacity of the chat box. I do not like having no background to the chat box as it makes the text harder to read. I always keep a black background in games so this is a stark difference to me.
Interface Settings Between Characters - There are a lot of settings you can change but they do not save between characters. So for every new character you create, you have to redo all of your key-bindings and settings.
For the most part, my dislikes are fairly minor and often cosmetic things. Both the chat customization and interface settings changes could be easily patched in.
For those of you that have played, what are your major likes and dislikes?
An Army of Russian Wizards
Mord and I played Wizard 101 a lot last weekend and finally reached the last world, the Dragonspyre. It looks awesomely dark compared to the other worlds. The tallest of the towers in the city has a gigantic dragon sitting at the top, menacing down at you. Running around doing quests reminds me a bit of running around Icecrown Citadel in that you're running along very high walls between towers instead of the ground for half the time. So far from our quests, it seems like Dragonspyre, which is now in ruins, used to be a very militant city. It's also funny because the characters' voices all sound Russian.
If I had to rank the worlds before Dragonspyre from most enjoyable to least, I'd rank them as follows:
Krokotopia
Grizzleheim
Mooshu
Wizard City
Marleybone--had some terrible quest chains
The only thing I didn't like about Grizzleheim was that it seemed to give little experience. We had to leave for extended periods of time to quest elsewhere because we hadn't reached the level requirement to unlock certain areas. Then again, I don't know if that is because we played the worlds in a different order than the designers had intended.
I also want to mention another small thing that Mord and I both really like about the game. For every new explorable area, there is a different map, and on every map are different drawings containing the same male and female wizard plus some characters you can expect to meet in that area. For instance, Marleybone had us fight literal cat burglars; thus, we would see cat burglars on most of the maps for Marleybone, but notice the expressions on the characters at the bottom right of this map:
Drawings on the maps and even the character, backpack, and spell deck menus make the game even more enjoyable. Here's another one:
MooShu Meditations
I have actually been fairly busy in gaming lately. Rynala and I both had a long weekend and we spent majority of it Wizard101. We have really spent a ludicrous amount of time in that game and I am still greatly enjoying it. Someday in the future when I have very young kids, I hope there is an MMO as great as Wizard101 for me to play with them.
We finished up MooShu, Grizzleheim and are now two areas deep in Dragonspire. Mooshu was a nice change from Marleybone. While there may be some fans of Marleybone (*coughTipacough*), I am not one of them and MooShu was refreshing enough to make me forget about my pain and suffering in Marleybone.
MooShu is the land of barnyard animals. Led by the Emperor, the denizens of MooShu worship the great Moodah. The theme is a mixture of Asian cultures with Japanese Samurai, or MooShu Samoorai, and Japanese Oni demons taking the forefront. After stealing the Krokonomicon from the Marleybone museum, the Death Professor Malistaire came to claim the key to the Dragonspire Academy from the Emperor of MooShu. When the Emperor declined, Malistaire wounded him and stole the key. Wounded, the Emperor slipped into a coma and was weakened in mind, body and spirit. Without the Emperor to lead the lands, radical sects rebelled and demons started sewing seeds of destruction in the land.
I have always been a big fan of Asian history as well as lore so MooShu was quite the treat. The enemies you face are mainly ninja pigs, Samoorai cows and horse bandits. Eventually you face the Onis which are giant demons in the form of elephants. Some of my favorite parts of MooShu were reading the lorebooks and the different boss fights. Kingsisle did a great job taking true Japanese history and rewriting it to this fictional world. People who know a lot of history will notices immediately when they face enemies named Kagemoosha and Katsumori.
A lot of the questlines are quite exciting too. One questline has you traveling through a burial site and catacombs to open a door to the spirit world so you can face an evil spirit on the other side. It is exciting experiences like this that keep me coming back for more with Wizard101. Rynala and have been playing pretty consistently for the last month and a half now and we will probably finish up Dragonspire right in time for Aion. While I probably will not replay through the game right away, I can see myself coming back in six months or so for another play through.
Right now, however, I just wish I had a young cousin or someone who I could take through the worlds and open up to MMOs.
Why Can’t Healers Be Awesome?
Why is it that healers have this stigma that they are not awesome? This sigma is often enforced by players as well as game developers. For me it is something that is most noticeable in Wizard 101 but has a presence within other games as well.
Within Wizard 101, my healing spells consist of a yellow and green pixie, a unicorn, a satyr that plays a flute while dancing, a dryad shaped like a tree and a giant hand that floats out of the sky to point at a player. My offensive spells are a tiny fiddle playing imp, a leprechaun that throws money, a tree, a female angel in flowing white robes and a centaur. Regina has skeletons, pirates, vampires, wraiths, and banshees. Other people have sharks, godzillas, trolls, krakens, blindfolded angels dealing out judgements, ice wyverns, evil snowmen, helephants, and hydras. It is no wonder no one ever wants to play a healer.