Massively Multiplayer Online Dungeon Crawler
Tobold, Gevlon, Spinks have all been talking about challenge lately. Tobold brought up a New York Times article that talked about the difference between hardcore and casual marathon runners. Gevlon finally understood that most hardcore do not really care about a challenge but just want to flaunt their e-peen but he disagrees with content nerfing because he is in the minority that actually play games for the challenge. Spinks on the other hand just analyzes how the free access to information has made the hardcore consider only twitch challenges as valuable challenges as any information on strategies, secret locations or quests can be readily found online.
Playing Torchlight has got me thinking about the random nature of the game. It also makes me wonder what the feasibility would be of random dungeons within MMORPGs. I wonder what something like Diablo or Torchlight would be on a mass scale.
The overworld would remain static but if all dungeons and dungeon loot were randomized, it would go far to keep the game interesting. You could still have some static dungeons. Extreme lore dungeons could remain static, but there are a lot of dungeons that do not have extreme ties to lore and could just be randomized instead.
In WoW, for instance, places like Drak'tharon keep could remain static but places like Utgarde Pinnacle or Halls of Stone could be randomized. You could also have generic dungeons in areas that were randomized. There could be a 5man random dungeon in Grizzly Hills where you fight a furbolg tribe. Every time you went in, the dungeon map would be different.
One of the reasons I always liked Violet Hold (aside from it being just one room and located within a city) was how the first two bosses could be any of six. I just wonder what the feasibility of this would be on a wider scale.
I do not know about you all, but I know I would play a massively multiplayer online dungeon crawler.
Torchlight Fever
I had never even heard about Torchlight before last night. I was a little bored last night and seeking something different for some gaming. I just needed a little interlude from all my current games. I booted up Steam to try to find a game to play, whether it be something I owned or purchasing something new. I was actually going to look into Borderlands when I saw the front page of the Steam store advertising Torchlight for only $20.
I checked my main resources (Wikipedia and GamersWithJobs) to find out about this game pre-purchase. I found the link to a GiantBomb gameplay video of Torchlight on the GamersWithJobs forums. They basically said it was the most Diablo game since Diablo.
Torchlight has an interesting history to its development. It was created by Runic Games, company formed by a group of people that were formerly working on the Action RPG game Mythos under Flagship Studios. Many of the team members worked on the Diablo series at Blizzard North before they worked for Flagship. The composer for Torchlight is also the same composer for the Diablo series. Once Flagship tanked and Mythos was canceled, the team went and formed Runic Studios and made Torchlight in under 11 months. There is also a free to play MMO being created set in the same world as Torchlight and is set to come out in about two years.
The game is set in a mining town next to a giant mountain and deep mine in a steampunk-esque (yes, this made me squeal with delight) setting. The town is built on a rich vein of Ember, a mysterious ore that gives people magical power. In the mines, evil has risen and you must go fight it. The game has three class: the melee-brawler Destroyer, the steampunk spellcaster Alchemist and the ranged/rogue city guardsman Vanquisher. During character creation you get to have a pet dog or cat.
The animal companion is awesome. Your pet can learn spells, has its own inventory, and can go back to town to sell items while you still progress through the dungeon.
For a game that I had no idea existed before today I, like many others, am very enthusiastic about playing through it. Apparently the main storyline is about 12 hours long and after you beat the game once, you have access to an "infinite dungeon". The general consensus about the game is that you should not start playing if you have anything you plan to do within a couple hours as the time will quickly vanish and this game may end up being more Diablo than Diablo 3 will be.
If you do not buy this game, you are doing a disservice to humanity. C'mon it is only $20... you know you want to!
Dealing with Aion’s Bots and Gold Spammers
Today a new patch was deployed to the Aion servers and I cannot say I really agree with the major change in it:
1.5.0.11 Client Update
* All chat channels now have a level 10 restriction, both to join and participate
* Whispering now has a level 10 restriction,
* Players can receive whispers but cannot respond below level 10
* Players cannot send in game mail until level 10
* Players under 10 can still receive in game mail
* Players cannot search for ’who’ in game until level 10
* Players are now limited at the amount of in game mail you can send per hour
* If players exceed this limit, they will not be able to send mail. There is currently no message saying players have exceeded your limit
There was already a level five restriction set in place on channels and whispers, but now it was extended to level ten. I do not quite see how this is going to do anything to curb the gold spam. Now instead of waiting one hour to gold spam, they will have to wait three hours.
Currently, I do not think the gold spam is actually that terrible. It is not nonexistent, but it is nowhere near the "scrolling chat log" we had last week. The real problem currently is the botting situation. I am only level 31 and I have seen numerous bots all over the place. And with talking to some guildies, apparently there are sections in high level zones where you cannot get a single kill on a mob in because the place is so over-farmed by bots.
It makes me wonder: is it really that hard to deal with botters and spammers?
There are only about 12 US servers for the game. If you hired even just six people to monitor these servers every day, you could eliminate all these problems. Just have a GM sitting in chats and as soon as someone gold spams, immediately IP ban them. Have a GM teleport to any reported botters and observe them and immediately IP ban them. If I was a GM, I could easily get rid of 100+ bots an hour.
Instead, we see the same bots there day after day. If there was one person hired to monitor each server or even one person for every two servers, you could destroy the botting population in no time. Why has this not been done? Is it really that hard to deal with botters?
A MUDdy Beginning
After compiling the list for the previous post last night, I started thinking about my history in multiplayer online gaming before coming to MMORPGs.
Now I want to preface this by saying that as I kid I never had a chance to experience tabletop gaming like Dungeons and Dragons. It was not a matter of not being interested but more of a matter of growing up in northern Idaho and living in small towns (often with a population of less than a thousand people). I never had any exposure to people playing D&D or other table top games.
I think this might have been one of the main reasons I turned to online gaming. I have talked about before how much I thrive on player interaction and online gaming was a great outlet when living on a farm in a small town. My younger brother, on the other hand, just invented imaginary friends.
We got our first computer around 1996. I was nine years old. We did not get internet until around 1998. Around this time, one of my mother's friends got deep into computer gaming and started playing The Realm. At the time, I did not know anything about it and it seemed like it was "too adult" for me. My first online multiplayer game came in the form of Castle Infinity.
Castle Infinity was a game aimed at a younger generation. There were no stats or currency. You would simply explore, collect weapons like "missile toe" or "Gorgonzola Cheese" to defeat enemies, or hang out and chat with people. There were various instances you could do with people in order to collect new body parts for your character. Leaderboards were in the games for such things as "miles traveled" or "monsters killed". It was a very social experience and opened me up to online gaming.
I played there for a very long time and eventually one of my friends there introduced me to a game called "Aardwolf". It was my first time playing a MUD. Unfortunately, I hit MUDs while they were on the decline but I still got quite a few years of enjoyment from them. The DIKU style of the game only held my interest for so long before I searched for greener pastures (which is surprising seeing how the DIKU MMOs of today are what I mostly play).
Another friend of mine from Castle Infinity introduced me to a game called CoreMUD. The community here was a much smaller, tighter community, but the game blew my mind. Where Aardwolf was very much a stock DIKU game in most areas, Core was handcrafted from the ground up. Whereas Aardwolf often had 300+ players on at any given time, Core had 20-30 at most times. Set on a mining colony in the future, you could go labor in the mines, do unique epic storyline quests, work at the player-run stores, or just socialize and roleplay. Core was my first introduction to deep roleplaying. There would often be GM-run events with epic things such as alien invasions or simple things such as games of laser tag. This was just about the year 2000 and I was 13 at the time. No matter what games I went on to play, I would always return to Core.
Other MUDs I tried included Realms of the Dragon and Achaea: Dreams of Divine Lands. Both games had very unique features that I really enjoyed.
Achaea had almost a turn based combat system. In most games, you would simply type "kill rat" to attack the rat. In Achaea, if I recall correctly, you actually had to enter the command "hit" for each swing. While it seems cumbersome it was actually quite fun. Achaea was also a game of political intrigue. When I played there were three main factions. These factions were not hard-coded but instead something players had split up into. Each faction had a capitol city as well as a player-run government. Players would be elected to positions and engage in war/peace talks with other factions as well as set the "social rules" for the society. The "imms" (immortals or GMs) of the game were all very active and played as the role of the world's gods. The world evolved and felt alive. When the GM playing the god Gaea quit the staff, it was roleplayed that the god died and from there the forest shriveled and attacked players for a few weeks.
Realms of the Dragon was not quite as complex as Achaea but was very fun as well. The game had many different classes and very rigid social structures. You would start out as just a member of your race and venture forth to join a guild (class). You had loyalties to your class and your race. I often played a Drow Shadowthief. It was amusing because Drow were not newbie-friendly. Drow were hostile to even those within their own race and thus newbies often would become discouraged by the hard lifestyle. Shadowthieves would hide in the shadows to backstab and steal from other players. You could steal anything you wanted from another player though certain things would almost always get you caught.
There were many other MUDs/MUSHes I played through the years though I can only remember a handful of them (as many I did not play for more than a few weeks or a month). There was a Lord of the Rings MUSH where I roleplayed a Rider of Rohan, a Final Fantasy 8 MUSH where I was a restaurant owner in Deling City, and countless more.
I occasionally stop by CoreMUD to see if anyone is active and rarely find more than one or two people online and they are mostly idling admin. For the past five or six years, Core has pretty much de-evolved from a game to a chatroom to an empty chatroom. This is sad because the community there used to be fantastic.
All this MUD nostalgia makes me long for years long past. Games today are too busy. I will take a good MUD over any of today's games any day of the week. 
MMOs I Have Played – Pass It On
Taken from Trembling Hand, I thought this would be an interesting retrospective on my gaming.
How many MMOs have you played? How long did you spend in each one? Which did you enjoy the most?
They're the questions I asked myself the other day, and it resulted in the interesting list below (remind me: why do I still play MMOs, when I haven't enjoyed any of the recent crop?). I figured I'd also throw it open to the MMO blogging community and ask what MMOs have you played?
MMO -- months played -- star rating out of five*
- A Tale In The Desert -- 1 -- ***
- Aion -- 3 -- *****
- Cabal Online -- .25 -- *
- Chronicles of Spellborn -- .5 -- *
- City of Heroes -- 6 -- ***
- Dungeons and Dragons Online -- 1 -- **
- Earth and Beyond -- 5 -- ***
- Free Realms -- .5 -- *
- Guild Wars -- 6 -- ****
- Kingdom of Loathing -- 4 -- ****
- Lord of the Rings Online -- 6 -- ****
- Maple Story -- 3 -- ****
- Megami Tensai Online: IMAGINE -- .5 -- **
- Planetside -- 2 -- ***
- Pirates of the Burning Sea -- .5 -- **
- RF Online -- .5 -- *
- Rose Online -- 1 -- **
- Runes of Magic -- 1 -- **
- Tabula Rasa -- .5 -- *
- Warhammer Online -- .5 -- **
- Wizard101 -- 3 -- *****
- World of Warcraft -- 60 -- *****
*Star rating is an entirely subjective measure of how much you liked it at the time, not how much you'd enjoy playing it today.
Taking It Slow
I have really been taking it slow with video games lately and I have really been enjoying it. I am not playing video games less, but instead I am just taking my time to smell the roses. It is refreshing to not be moving at a breakneck speed in a game.
A lot of people were complaining that Brutal Legend was only about 6 hours long, and it is if you speed through the story on the easiest difficulty and never do any of the side missions or exploring. If you take the game at a bit of a slower pace and just explore you can easily put over 15 hours into it. I am about 70% done with the game and I have put in over 12 hours myself. What is the satisfaction people get in speeding to the end?
It is the same way in Aion. People try to race to the level cap and then complain when they burn out. I can understand it a little more in Aion since the faster you level, the more you have an advantage against those that are not leveling so fast, but maybe I am just losing my competitive edge. I just do not care how I stack against the other players. I am there to enjoy the game for myself at a slower speed and that is just what I am doing.
As for now, Rynala and I are currently level 31 in Aion. We probably will not hit level 50 for at least another two months. We have been working on crafting a lot. My cooking is at 399 and my armorsmithing is at 399. Her weaponsmithing is at 399 and her handicrafting is at 199. On another note, spam is virtually non-existent now in the game. Spam messages come few and far between. It seems like NCSoft is cleaning up the place quickly.
Brutally Awesome
I picked up Brütal Legend this week and am having a blast with it. While it is not a perfect game, the story, the writing, and the metal outshine all possible flaws. Highly recommended!
Whistling While You Work (or Craft)
Crafting! Crafting! Crafting! That is how I spent my weekend. Rynala was out of town visiting her sister so I spent my time crafting in Aion. In the end, I still got over half of a level of experience from it.
Now raising your crafting is not hard. It just takes time and money. A LOT of time and a LOT of money. Now when I say that it takes a lot of money, that is relatively speaking. You can take any or all of your crafting skills to 399 without specialization. With specialization you can go to 450, but you can only specialize in two of the six professions. Getting your skill to 399 will let you craft items all the way to level 50. The items craft-able from 400-450 are your high end-game level items. It is incredibly expensive to gain a specialization so it is not something to be expected until your late 30s or early 40s.
This weekend, I took my Armorsmithing skill from 150 to 299 and my cooking skill from 20 to 230. This cost over a million kinah. I am estimating it will cost roughly another three million kinah to take each of those skills to 399.
In the grand scheme of things, four million kinah is not a lot of money. It is a lot of money for a level 28 character like myself, but 1000 gold is a lot of money for a level 30 character in WoW. The difference between raising your crafting in Aion and raising your crafting WoW is that you can raise your crafting in Aion without having to rely on the market or gathering skills.
In WoW, you have to either get a gathering profession to gather the materials or buy them off the auction house to get your skill-ups. In Aion, you can either craft items using gathered materials or you can do work orders. If at level 80 in WoW, you wanted to learn a new profession from 1 to 450 it would be obscenely expensive for even a level 80 character. It would cost thousands of gold. Millions of Kinah may sound like a lot, but it is really not in Aion.
Work orders are seemingly the most efficient way to level up your crafting. I have been over work orders before, but starting from your first skill point you can pick up the work orders, craft what they ask for and get rewarded. They provide the main materials for the crafted item, then you just need to buy the smaller reagents from the material goods vendor nearby. The amount of reagents and reagent prices get higher as you progress deeper into the skill, but still it is much more efficient than trying to craft hundreds and thousands of items. Each work order you turn in rewards you with a small amount of reagents or one of the unique recipes for the skill. Most of the times, the recipe rewards are high quality recipes that you cannot buy from the vendor, allowing you to craft really nice items. You also often start collecting multiple of the recipes from doing so many work orders most of the recipes can fetch a fine price on the auction house.
The only downside to crafting is that it takes time. Lots of time. I spent an obscene amount of time on crafting this weekend and I am nowhere near maxxed on those two professions. I was a bit behind on the podcasts I listened to and I was able to catch fully up. I listened to three episodes of the Bugle, four Gamers with Jobs Conference Calls, three episodes of Shut Up, We're Talking, as well as watch a handful of Netflix movies.
Raising crafting is a great thing for if you have two monitors, a TV for a book in the room. I know a lot of people cannot take the tedium, but for some reason I am very addicted to it. My favorite part is the experience gains. They are not as much as going out and farming monsters, but it is still a decent flow.
A Job System for WoW
I like my main character in WoW. I have a ton of reputations maxxed out and a lot of achievements done. I do not want to have to re-accomplish all of that with a new character. Personally, I think it would be nice to have a "job change" system in WoW.
Now I am not talking about a permanent change of class, but instead a Final Fantasy-esque multi-classing of sorts. I would love if once you reached level 80 (or 85 for Cataclysm), you could pay for a "class slot". You would pick which class and be able to switch to a level 1 version of that class. The switch might have a one hour cool down, but does not necessarily need a cool down at all. It would work somewhat like the multi-spec in that when you switch you would start with no mana or energy.
Anyway, with that level 1 character all the quests in the game would be available for accomplishment even if you had accomplished them before. The only difference would be that if you had previously accomplished them on your main class, you would no longer gain reputation from the quest if the quest granted any. These re-opened quests could only be accepted, accomplished and turned in on your "leveling class". I could not create a mage secondary, accept a bunch of quests, switch to my paladin, complete the quests, and then switch back to my mage to turn them in.
Once you leveled your "leveling class" to max level, you could buy another slot. There would be no limit to how many of the classes you could level to max on one character. In essence, you could have on character that at will could switch to any of the classes at max level. The only restriction would be that you could only have one class in the leveling process at a time. You could not just get your character to max level and then buy nine class slots on the character at once.
This would probably take a great deal of work to implement, but I think it would be a great boon for the game. I know a great deal of people who have leveled multiple alts to max level but hate having to regrind all the reputations on those character and I agree that you should not have to. Another benefit would be for finding instance groups. A lot of times, I would want to run an instance on one character because I needed loot for that character, but with this system I could say "Okay, I will switch to my paladin and heal this instance, but if this piece of loot drops, I want a chance to roll on it for my mage."
Sure it might cause some loot bickering, but I think the benefits far out-way the negatives.
Early October Update
I have been quite busy as of lately and as such, my blog has unfortunately been collecting a little dust. Class and work have been busy, I have been playing some Aion, and as of last week I totaled my car and am in the process of buying a new one.
Rynala and I are currently level 26 in Aion. We have been playing quite a bit. I have really been enjoying the game, but at this point I think she is even more in love with the game than I am. We are leveling at what I consider a decent pace. It is nowhere near as fast as WoW but it is not mind numbingly slow (though I know some others would disagree). A lot of the people in the guild are in their 30s now, but I do not feel far behind as there are multitudes of people at every level. Nothing beats being around at the start of a new game. Sure, there may be server crashes within the start of a new game and occasionally some bugs, but the feeling of being on that frontier is awesome.
Crafting in this game is completely addicting and yet can be so utterly infuriating. I do not know why I love it so much when the crafting system is not really unique in any way. I am currently up to 205 armorsmithing and that is the only crafting skill I really have been working on. Even now, I am constantly broke from crafting so there is no way I could be working on maximizing two professions at this time.
One of the nice things about crafting (with armorsmithing at least) is 99% of the gear is actually useful and worth making. There are occasional random recipes that take materials from specific mobs, but the majority of the standard recipes are great for actual use. Every five levels, you can make two new sets of plate and chain. One set is the white set that can crit and make a green (high quality) set. The other set is a green quality set (with stats slightly higher than the crit-green set), that can crit and make a blue set (VERY high quality). It is unlikely you will be able to afford constantly making yourself a crit-blue set every five levels, but there is no reason you should not be able to make yourself a full crit-green set. The materials for the crit-blue set are really out of the question. But, there is an upside to this. Once you reach the level cap and have excess money, you should be able to afford making full blue sets for your alts every five levels. This will help to improve their leveling by a decent bit.
Rynala and I had our first foray into the Abyss this weekend. We only looks around and did a couple simple quests. Not much to do in there at level 25 as you cannot really contribute much to keep sieges. Either way, I remain excited to get higher in level. I hope to hit around level 30 by the end of this weekend. I am in no major rush to get to level cap, but I am anxious and excited for it.