Guild Wars Journal

Bored of reading my WoW journal? Head over to Martin's teeny tiny place and read his Guild Wars Journal instead. I must say these MSN spaces have some neat features.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:23 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Cost Estimate

Are MMORPG expensive? Pretty much depends how you calculate it. This is what playing World of Warcraft costs me, personally, on a yearly basis:

First of all, to play I need a computer. In my household I'm buying a new computer every 2 years, in the $2000 price category. But that is to cover the needs of two people, me and my wife. I get the new computer, my wife gets the 2 year old computer because she plays less, and the 4 year old computer we give away. So for the computer cost I count $2000 for 4 years, or $500 per year. That is probably somewhere middle of the range, a friend is just buying a $1000 computer which will probably last him 4 years as well for half the cost, while I'm sure that other people spend twice as much as I do to always have the latest and greatest in hardware.

Second thing I need is broadband internet access, with a flat rate monthly fee. Don't play a MMORPG on any sort of internet connection which is paid by the minute / hour, that gets hellishly expensive rather fast. My 3 MBit ADSL connection plus ISP costs me $50 per month, or $600 per year.

Then I need to buy the MMORPG, World of Warcraft or any other, and pay it's monthly fee. The monthly fee for WoW is $14.99 if you pay month by month, but gets as low as $12.99 if you pay for six months in advance. If I want to annualize the cost, I also have to think about buying about one expansion per year. So lets summarize the game cost for the initial purchase, expansion sets, plus monthly fee, to an annual cost of about $200.

Summing it up, $500 for computer, $600 for internet, $200 for MMORPG, and I'm paying $1,300 per year for playing WoW.

Whether that is expensive, depends on what you compare it with. It is $1,300 more expensive than watching the paint dry, but it also is more entertaining, at least most of the time. If you want to have a computer anyway, want to have the internet to download porn and pirated music educational information and entertainment, and buy about 10 computer games per year, you end up paying about $300 more than if you just played one MMORPG. I consider WoW excellent value for my money, because it occupies me many more hours than an average single-player game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments

 
WoW Journal - 30-May-2005

My WoW playing is slowing down a bit. Not that I am losing interest, it is more an issue of Real Life ® intruding. I'm pretty busy at work at the moment, and while I still play a lot on the weekends, I also do other things, like going swimming. Hey, it was over 30 degrees Celsius in Brussels this weekend, hot for May.

When I'm playing, I still have a lot of fun. It it nice how the different character classes each have their distinctive style, each offering new tactics to explore. I'd never had thought I would have so much fun with a pet class, but my warlock is the character I'm playing most often right now. The only grey cloud on the horizon is the realization that there *is* a limit. World of Warcraft gameplay and fun is very much driven by quests. There are a lot of quests, over 4,000, but the number isn't unlimited. You can play about 4 characters, 2 Horde, 2 Alliance, before you have basically covered all the zones. With my Alliance warlock I have a distinctive feeling of "Oh, I can't go there, I already did that zone with my night elf druid.". Still, I'm playing a lot, and I'm already playing for many months, so I can't complain that WoW is lacking content. But I sure would buy an expansion set when it comes out, although surprisingly none was announced during E3. I just hope that this is only because Blizzard doesn't need the E3 hype. A WoW expansion for christmas would be nice, and it would probably sell a million times, easy money for Blizzard.

Raslebol, my troll warrior, went to Uldaman in a group of 3, the other two being from my D&D group. We had little problem to get to the end of the dungeon, and the second half was still green to me, and the xp weren't all that bad. But at the end, the big boss fight is extremely tough, and we couldn't win it. We need a group of five for that. Afterwards I did some minor quests, which led me to Winterspring. While killing chimera there, I dinged 56. I went to Ogrimmar to train, but at these high levels you don't get any new skills any more, you just get higher ranks in old skills.

I switched to Kyroc, my undead priest, and played him just enough to use up a part of his rest xp bonus. I belatedly did his level 10 class quest, but the reward was nothing to write home about, some not-so-useful spell I don't even remember. If any class needs some love from the developers, it is the priest. Least fun, in my opinion, and least popular by any sort of census you take. And half of the priests around are played by people who just play one for the greater good of the guild, not because they particularly enjoy it. Speccing the priest full shadow helps a bit, if later for the guild you want a healing specialist, you can still change. Well, Kyroc is level 14 now, and the plan is to level him only on rest xp, through occasional play time.

So as I said, I spent most of the time since the last journal entry playing Honey, the gnome warlock. I got her up to level 27 now. And the mid-20's are fun, because there are so many instances to do at those levels. I did the deadmines for the Staff of Westfall, but just two days later we did Blackfathom Deeps. And while my druid on the US-servers had to do BFD six times before he found the Rod of the Sleepwalker, Honey got that staff on the first try. Plus the quest for killing Lord Kelris gives a blue wand, so she has two very good blue weapons now. Of course she doesn't rely much on weapons, she has her spells and pets.

One interesting aspect of playing a warlock is the curses, because you have to chose, you can only put one type of curse on any one enemy. I have three of them now: one to do damage, one to decrease damage done, and one to decrease spellcasting speed. And while I first used the damaging curse of pain a lot, I now often use the curse of weakness. Makes a big difference to the damage received. I didn't have the opportunity to try the third curse, but it should be good against spellcasters.

I also got the opportunity to test out my different demons. The imp you get at the start isn't very good, he is kind of an emergency solution if you find yourself out of soul shards. The voidwalker is my favorite demon, because after upgrading him with talents he can taunt mobs of me rather reliably. Using the DamageMeters addon, his disadvantage becomes noticeable, he isn't dealing much damage. Of all the damage done in a typical combat using the voidwalker, only one quarter is coming from the pet. The third demon, the succubus, is dealing much more damage, pretty much 50:50 damage split between warlock and pet in a typical combat. But she is as fragile as my warlock, and dies easily. She has the seduction skill to entrance one humanoid enemy, but while she is doing that, she is doing nothing else. And doing the Stormwind prison with two paladins I noticed that a voidwalker's tanking does a better job of handling adds than the succubus' seduction. So right now the plan is to keep using the voidwalker for the hard fights, while whenever I have to kill lower level mobs quickly, I go for the succubus.

One thing I'm not really sure about with my warlock is the utility of damage addition items. I tailored myself shadow gloves, which add "up to 9" to my shadow spells damage. That would be up to 10% more damage on my shadow bolts. But I'm not sure if it also works on my Corruption DOT spell. And I've seen other gloves for the same level, same armor class, which give +5 on intelligence and +5 on stamina, and I'm not sure if those aren't better. On the fire side I have a dagger which adds fire damage, plus the Orb of Soran'uk, a warlock quest item to hold in the left hand, which also adds to fire and shadow damage, as well as having a heal-over-time. Not that I'm using fire spells all that much, except for the immolation dot. Both the direct damage fire spell, and the fire rain, deal good amounts of damage, but tend to make monsters extremely angry at me, which then usually gets me killed. I must admit that I use the fire rain occasionally anyway, because it is so much fun to be able to rain destruction on several mobs at once.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
E3 coverage

E3 is over, thank God. And that about covers it.

The only interesting tidbit of information I gleamed from all the E3 coverage was that Guild Wars sold 250,000 copies in its first week. Not quite up there with WoW, but definitely a success. The remaining E3 coverage was all about games you can't buy. I know no other industry which goes through such lengths to promote products that won't come out for quite a while, most of them either in 6 months for christmas or even next year and beyond.

A good number of the games presented at E3 will never come out at all. The great majority of them will come out, but will have significantly changed in the process. Last time Tabula Rasa was presented it was a fantasy game, today it is a Sci-Fi game, and who knows if and as what it will be released.

I can not understand the huge horde of so-called journalists descending upon E3 and writing so much hot air about it. Most of the time the only material available about the announced games is a couple of screenshots and a trailer. I would be ashamed if I based my game reviews here on just having seen the trailer, game trailers usually have nothing at all to do with the actual gameplay. The WoW trailer is very nice, but all it tells you about the game is that it is a fantasy game with different races battling each other.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:41 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 24-May-2005

Switching from politicians to the discussion of slimes and oozes, an easy transition. :)

The quests in WoW are generally quite well done. But yesterday I hit a pair of annoying quests in Undercity, asking me to kill slimes and oozes in Felwood and Un'goro. No problem. But the slimes and oozes only drop unrefined samples, and then you still need to go to Undercity and for each sample click through several windows to see if the unrefined sample contains the pure sample you need for the quest. I gathered 21 unrefined samples in both locations. From the Felwood stack I only needed 16 before I reached the 5 pure samples I needed for the quest. From the Un'goro batch I reached 4 pure samples after 10 unrefined samples, but then none of the remaining 11 samples yielded the 5th sample for completion.

Pretty annoying to have to go back to Un'goro, gather another batch of samples, and hope that one of them contains the last pure sample I need. Especially since Un'goro and Undercity are on two different continents and it isn't especially fast to travel between them. And all that for a handful of silver, not the most attractive quest. I wouldn't have done it if I wouldn't have needed herbs from Un'goro and Felwood. Un'goro is the only place I know that has Mountain Silversage, while Felwood is the best place I know for Plaguebloom.

I don't know why, but all slimes and oozes, from the lowest level up to the highest, have the same lousy loot. Debris like extinguished torches, decomposed boots, and slimy ichor, worth only a handful of copper pieces. Killing oozes and slimes all evening long yielded barely enough loot to pay for the repair costs. I think I should avoid this type of monster in the future.

After the oozes I went to Stranglethorn Vale and the Swamp of Sorrows to kill crabs. Collecting tender crab meat for a cooking recipe which yields food with a +12 stamina and spirit bonus. Unfortunately the crabs were distributed widely all over the beach, and the drop rate is only about 1 in 3. So I was running a lot, and spent a lot of time to kill grey monsters, and ended up with just 13 portions of food.

All in all a not very productive playing session. But the advantage was that none of these activities was actually hard to do, I was just playing around a bit after a hard day at work.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:58 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Politics

This is not a political blog. But sometimes there are political events worth commenting. And a politicial voluntarily giving up power for the better of his country is certainly an event rare enough to report. The politician in question is the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Germany, being a federal republic, has two houses of parliament, the national parliament controlled by Gerhard Schröder's party, the SPD, and the federal assembly controlled by the opposition party, the CDU. While both parties agree that Germany is in an economic mess and reforms are necessary, the opposition is blocking any measure proposed by the government, just so that the government won't get any credit for it. On Sunday the SPD lost another federal election, in what used to be their core state, giving the CDU even more blocking powers. It is pretty obvious that Germany is ungovernable under these conditions.

Now most politicians would have plodded on regardless, clinging to power until the next general election in autumn 2006, achieving nothing. But Gerhard Schröder announced that he doesn't want to do that, and that he will arrange for general elections a year early, autumn 2005. He is doing that in spite of the fact that he is almost guaranteed to lose this early election. I'm taking my virtual hat off to him. Even if he has to cut some constitutional corners to arrive there.

The opposition doesn't have much better ideas than the government party, but at least they will control both houses for a while, and be able to do *something*. And instead of judging the SPD on how little they can do while blocked in the federal assembly, Germany will be able to judge the CDU on what they can do while they have nearly unlimited power. As it was the CDU who is responsible for the reunification, which was politically good, but causes the current economic mess, it is quite appropriate to let them handle it. And while the early election has been called "political suicide" for Gerhard Schröder, I think that in the short term it will be better for the country, and in the long term it will even be better for the SPD.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:49 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Real Money Trade (RMT)

The MMORPG glossary is gaining one more acronym, RMT, for real money trade. This is the buying and selling of virtual items for real world dollars. Surprisingly the discussion stemming from SOE entering into the RMT market as broker hasn't ended, and the issue is still hotly debated in places like Terranova and Grimwell.com. Lots of people are predicting the end of the world, because RMT sullies the purity of virtual worlds, and would by that infection destroy them.

Now I'm certainly aware of the negative sides of RMT. And I probably have more experience in fully RMT enabled games than most people discussing them, because I played Magic the Gathering Online for years. In MtGO over the years I spent over $3,000 for virtual items, most of this going directly to the game company. And I didn't recuperate any of this money; I still own, no, make that "have usage rights of", my huge library of virtual cards. If I sold them in bulk, I wouldn't get much for them. If I sold them card by card, I could probably get most of my money back, but it would take me hundreds of hours, which I don't want to spend. So I'm waiting for MtGO v3.0 to come out end of 2005, which maybe improves the game enough for me to come back to it.

MtGO taught me two valuable lessons about RMT: a) It works. People are quite willing to spend a lot more than $15 per month on an online game. As long as the game is good, and they feel that the additional money is getting them some advantage in the game, they will buy. b) The problem with people selling virtual goods for money is often only a lack of transparency. The market area being rather chaotic, MtGO offers huge opportunies for profiteering by buying low and selling high, up to the point of scamming. If there was an auction house of FFXI / WoW style, where the current going rate for cards was clearly shown, there would be less problems.

For MMORPGs I don't see how they would be destroyed by RMT. First of all RMT isn't new, it just crawled out from below the rock it was hiding under before. All games lived with it perfectly well. Game companies have done some token efforts to ban a handful of players they caught on EBay. But they never dared to sue companies like IGE which quite openly sell virtual currency and items for all games. On MMORPG sites which have enabled Google ads, half of the ads are for such companies. So if RMT really destroyed games, the games would have gone under long ago.

The more likely prediction is that RMT will make MMORPGs more popular, not less. RMT already exists because there is demand from the players for it. It is hard to imagine a company going under because it fulfilled a demand from their customers, thereby taking away business from a black market. They just need to look at the example of MtGO and make the whole affair as transparent as possible, to avoid people "playing the system" to their financial advantage.

Some people are highly afraid that in the future game companies will sell you things directly, and not just brokering trade between players as the Sony Exchange does. They certainly will. Probably not virtual gold, although even that wouldn't make a difference; virtual gold is already created out of thin air by "farmers", and a programmer creating it wouldn't make a difference. But game companies will certainly try to sell you status objects, things that look good but have little or no effect of the virtual world. Actually I already bought one. And in WoW, no less. I paid $20 more for the collectors edition, so all my characters start with an extra non-combat pet, my choice of panda cub, mini diablo, or zergling. That certainly made some other players jealous, but I don't think they quit the game because of it.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:09 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 23-May-2005

A sunny weekend resulted in me spending Saturday at a barbecue instead of in front of a screen. But I still got to play Friday and Saturday evening and all Sunday. Friday I had borrowed the French WoW CD's from one of my D&D friends, and I managed to install it in addition to the English client. Took some registry tweaking, but I managed to get both versions running. Makes communication with my French speaking friends and guild easier. While it is possible to play with the English client on the French servers, that has several disadvantages. You are blocked out of the public chat channels, you still see everything in English and don't know how things are called in French if you want to talk about them, and if you link items in chat, people see them in English and don't understand.

I don't recommend playing on French servers if you want to learn French. If you think that English speakers are butchering their language in online games, using "u" for "you" and so on, you haven't seen nothing yet. French spelling is highly difficult, and correctly spelled the words are a lot longer than in English. So there is a lot more opportunity to brutally abbreviate the spelling, and write things in a phonetical shorthand, which has nothing to do with real French orthography. And you need to know a lot of spoken French before you are able to understand somebody exclaiming "pt1!".

Saturday was a dud. I managed to reach level 22 with Honey, the gnome warlock, and arranged to go to the Deathmines in the evening. But just when we reached Moonbrook, my internet connection collapsed. Some problem on the ISP side. After I couldn't reconnect for some time, I abandoned the idea, and called it a day.

Sunday I decided to play Raslebol, the troll warrior again. Due to holidays and the new character, Raslebol had accumulated the maximum rest xp bonus. So on Sunday I went from being just at the start of level 54 to dinging 55, and making about a third of the way into the next level. And I still have a third of a level bonus xp. 18 days and 6 hours played, and level 60 only 5 dings away.

Sunday morning I was soloing, doing quests in the Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge. There is a hilarious quest in Searing Gorge about a dwarf who got locked into an outhouse, and is now desperate for revenge ... and for 15 silk cloth, of which he is reluctant to reveal what he needs them for. :)

Sunday afternoon I was in groups most of the time. With two level 50 guys, a druid and a warrior, I made a quick tour of Zul'Farrak, where we managed to do both the big battle event, and slaying Gahz'rilla. Then ina another group of 3, with two guild mates level 54, I went first to the Hinterlands, summoned an impressively huge spider god, and stormed an Inca style troll temple full of elites. We passed the altar where the mallet of Zul'Farrak (needed for summoning Gahz'rilla) can be finished, but as I hadn't done the first step, that didn't help me. But we got the ancient egg, which is needed to summon another god in the Sunken Temple. We then tried to do Maraudon with the same group of 3, teleporting into the middle with my staff and moving towards the end, but that turned out to be too hard, and we got wiped.

Sunday evening my guild did a raid, and I opted out, not really seeing the use of raiding a difficult dungeon for little xp, no quest advancement, and just a tiny chance of finding some good loot. So while I was standing in Ogrimmar wondering what to do next, somebody was looking for a 5th group member for the Sunken Temple in the Swamp of Sorrows. As I just had gotten the egg for a quest there, and already had two other quests from there in my journal, I joined them. Communication was difficult, I think they were all Italian, but the dungeon was fun enough. One quest I got partly done, one quest we finished, and the third quest I messed up. I used the egg to summon the god while most of the others were standing back. What I didn't know was that there were portcullis slamming down, and so three of the group members were locked out of the fight, and obviously we couldn't win with just two of us. Then one of the group members wanted to go to the cinema and see Episode 3, and the group disbanded. Well, I got to know the Sunken Temple a bit, it was a cool enough place, and I have to return anyway, as I didn't even have all the quests for there.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 19-May-2005

My work schedule collided badly with the changed WoW maintenance schedule. Wednesday I had the morning free, but had to work in the evening and only came home after 10. Unfortunately Wednesday morning from 5 to 11 is new European maintenance time. Cynic as I am I suspect that is because some of the Friday patches had problems, and then kept messing up the weekends. So now we patch only one day after the US, which has it's advantages and disadvantages. Anyway, the WoW servers being down, I played GuildWars instead. But somehow that isn't quite the same.

My WoW warlock is now level 20, and got her third demon. Haven't had the opportunity to test the demon yet. Right now I'm camping the auction house, trying to get heavy leather and silk. The silk I managed, but I constantly get outbid on the heavy leather. With the silk and the leather I want to make silk bags, and sell them at a profit. I desperately need the money, each level 20 spell costs 20 silver, and there are a lot of them. Plus there are important grimoires to buy for my demons, like Torment Rank 2, the voidwalkers taunt, and those cost 20 silver too.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:44 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - 17-May-2005

I might have exaggerated a bit with WoW this weekend. I came home a bit earlier on Friday, and then Monday was a public holiday here, so I had three-and-a-half days of long weekend. In that period I played 40 hours, and leveled my new warlock from zero to just an inch away from level 20. Plus got her tailoring skill up to 150. The idea is to level her a bit further, to 22, and then stop until everybody from my D&D group is at that level. Then we can go adventuring together, doing elite quests and dungeons.

I am normally not a big fan of pet classes, but that is an old prejudice from Everquest, where bad pet pathing often caused more trouble than good. The WoW warlock is great fun to play. And part of that fun is that he plays so much differently from my warrior. Monsters that my warrior used to hate, because of them being runners, don't cause the warlock any problem. While the mindless harvester golems in Westfall, which wouldn't pose any challenge to a warrior, are extremely difficult to kill with a warlock, being immune to the voidwalkers taunt, and to my fear spell. The warrior doesn't have any problems if he is ambushed by several lower level monsters, but sometimes has troubles killing single mobs 3 levels above him. The warlock can barely handle 2 lower level mobs at the same time (by perma-fearing one and hoping he doesn't bring more friends), but defeats a single mob 3 levels above him with relative ease.

The skinning / tailoring profession combination is working out well. Business in light leather picked up, I sold lots of stacks at 14 silver each. That money helped me level my tailoring to 150, so now I'm able to make 10-slot silk bags. With silk donated by my guild, plus heavy leather from the auction house, I was able to kit myself out completely with 10-slot bags. That is highly useful for a warlock, as I'm "losing" one bag, because I have to keep a reserve of soul shards.

And I'm not missing alchemy much with this character. Health stones replace healing potions, the underwater breathing spell replaces the water breathing potions, the armor buff spell replaces the defense potions, and so on. If you have lots of utility spells, you don't need as many utility potions. And the warlock has lots of useful utility spells, he can even resurrect himself or others, he just has to decide on who to put the soulstone before that character dies. Soulstone on the group paladin is great, because he resurrects instantly with some hitpoints, a good amount of mana, and his hate cleared, so he can basically continue fighting as if nothing happened. And if he dies last, he can rez when the mobs are gone and then rez the others.

The warlock is my first character using a macro. Simple affair of turning on attack mode, sending the pet to attack, and casting the first dot spell, all with one button press. Either I start the attack with that macro, or I first use another spell or my wand to pull, and then use the macro. Afterwards I cast the remaining dots, and then either add some shadow bolts, or for easier mobs to preserve mana just use my weapons. Finish off with drain soul if I need more soul shards. And I usually end up with full health, nearly full mana, and the voidwalker is fit for the next fight quickly with his self-healing spell. Only if the mob is 3 levels higher than me, or I get an add, I need to use fear. Fear is always risky, because the fleeing mob might well run into a group of other mobs and come back with more friends than I bargained for.

Honey, the gnome warlock, didn't stay much in her native lands. After hitting level 6 in the gnome/dwarf newbie zone, she moved over to the human lands, as I had played there less than in the dwarven area. I only returned to Loch Modan when I was short of level 15ish quests. But mostly I did all the quests in Elwynn Forest, and all the quests in Westfall, and now started with Redridge Mountains. In Westfall I still need to do the Deadmines, but that will be with the my D&D friends, when everybody is at least level 20.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Higher Math

Just a short thought on how tricky math can be in World of Warcraft. Some numbers in WoW are given in percent. For example there are talents that improve a stat by some percent. If you have 100 stamina and take the talent that improves stamina by 3%, you have 103 stamina afterwards. Easy.

But looking at this you would think that talents that improve something by 1% or 2% aren't really worth it. And there you might be wrong. Because sometimes the WoW percentages are calculated differently, additive. For examply warriors have a talent that improves their chance for a critical hit by 1% per point spent. But the original chance to land a critical hit is also a percentage, around 5%. And if you take the talent, that chance goes up to 6%. So in effect the improvement is 20%, not 1%.

Now my problem is that my new Warlock, level 18, just put talent points into "Suppression". Each point "reduces the chance for enemies to resist your Affliction spells by 2%". And I have no idea how that is calculated. When I max the skill out, I get 10% reduction in resistance. If the enemy has 20% chance to resist normally, how much does he have afterwards? 18% or 10%? I don't know, and I don't even see how I could find out.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:13 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
WoW Journal - 15-May-2005

Another weekend, another character. While I have been extremely disciplined in sticking to leveling Raslebol to 54, this weekend I played a new character. And that on a new server, so I couldn't even twink. That is because the fifth guy in my D&D group has started playing World of Warcraft, and so the others all created characters on a French server, Khaz Modan, to play together. The four guys are level 12 to 21, so I joined them on that server and am trying to catch up.

We are playing Alliance, and the others have 2 paladin, a rogue, and a mage. I *should* have played a healer, if I had wanted maximum efficiency. But I already played an Alliance druid, and wasn't feeling like another low level priest next to Kyroc. So I went for something completely different, being in a silly mood, and created a cute, female gnome warlock, with pink hair. I named her Honey, but in retrospect I should have thought of "Dotty" instead. Because I found that the warlock is the master of DOT (damage over time) spells.

I have no idea why warlocks are not more popular. Okay, the soul shards are a hassle. But with some experience of advanced tactics from other MMORPG, the WoW warlock is a powerhouse. He makes the EQ necro look like a wimp. I easily solo mobs three levels above me, as long as I don't get any adds. Starting from level 10 you get the Voidwalker demon, who is the perfect tank, taunting the mobs off you, and being rather tough to kill. And even at these low levels you already have three DOT spells. Three DOTs, one attacking pet, plus whatever shadowbolts or life-draining channeling spells you put on the mob let his hitpoints drop like a stone. And then you can still cast fear on him, and fear-kite him, so he doesn't deal any damage at all.

Most warlocks seem to put their talent points into Affliction, but my first 8 points go into Demonology, to maximize Improved Voidwalker. Only then will I start putting points into Affliction, totally ignoring the Destruction branch. Hey, I'm not a mage, you need to know what your class is all about.

After playing Friday evening, and all Saturday long, Honey is now level 16. I was a bit disappointed by the spells you get at level 16. Horribly expensive, and no help at all in combat. You only get Underwater Breathing, which is only useful in rare underwater fights, and rank 2 of Life Tap, which converts health into mana. I must be missing something with that Life Tap spell, I never used it yet. Relying more on DOTs and the pet means I don't use that much mana.

My main problem is lack of money. Khaz Modan is a young server, there aren't any level 60 yet. So people aren't paying lots of money for equipment and crafting resources for their twinks. I took skinning just to sell the leather, and tailoring to make myself armor and bags. But the tailoring up to now is eating up more money than it is saving or earning, and the light leather I get up to now from skinning isn't making me rich. And the spells plus the grimoires you need to buy for your pets cost a lot of money. Well, maybe I should stop killing stuff which is above me in level and farm greens for some hours.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:03 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Runetotem Census

I took a census on Runetotem yesterday evening at around 6 pm. This is a snapshot, not a cumulative census, because I believe that a series of snapshots is more likely to give a realistic picture of what people actually experience in the game.

Alliance:

1062 players, of which 85 (8%) are level 60.

15% dwarves, 9% gnomes, 40% humans, 35% night elves. A rather uneven distribution.

10% druids, 17% hunters, 11% mages, 7% priests, 10% rogues, 8% warlocks, 17% warriors, and 17% paladins.

Horde:

476 players, of which 66 (13%) are level 60. Hopelessly outnumbered by over 2:1.

22% orc, 27% tauren, 18% troll, 31% undead. A lot more balanced.

9% druids, 15% hunters, 9% mages, 5% priests, 11% rogues, 10% warlocks, 22% warriors, and 14% shaman.

Priests are the least popular class on both sides, probably because they are extremely hard to solo, and soloing is one of the main advantages of playing WoW over other MMORPGs. Warriors are the most popular class on both sides, which makes you think that they can't be as bad as they often claim. Hunters are next in popularity, because pet classes are usually good for soloing. The other pet class, warlocks, is a lot less popular, because managing shards is too annoying.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:41 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 13-May-2005

While typing the heading I noticed that it's Friday the 13th. Hope you're not superstitious. :)

I finally made some progress again with my troll warrior Raslebol. Some level 60 guild mates helped me to kill Blazerunner, the level 55 elite fire elemental in Un'Goro crater, so I finally finished the Legend of Zelda cameo quest series. I got Link(en)'s sword and boomerang as a reward. The sword is worse than my Thrash Blade, and the boomerang is a trinket of minor usefulness. I can use it for pulling, but only every 3 minutes.

I headed for the Hinterlands to get another quest series done. Problem is that I have to find the item which starts the quest first. The quest series in question is one where you find OOX distress beacons in Tanaris, Feralas, and Hinterlands. Each beacon starts a quest where you need to escort a mechanical chicken through half the zone, being constantly ambushed by different monsters. I already did the Tanaris and Feralas part, but I haven't found the Hinterlands beacon yet. It's a rare, random drop from all mobs in that zone. I spent one hour or so in the slime cave, killing slimes and collecting ghost mushrooms for alchemy. But the beacon didn't drop, and the loot from the slimes is worth a lot less than the loot of other mobs of that level. Have to try other mobs in that area.

But meanwhile some guild mates of mine logged on and told me that they had acquired the mallet of Zul'Farak. As I still had 3 quests open there, including killing Gah'zilla, who is summoned with the mallet, we formed a group and did a complete tour of Zul'Farak. That is one of my favorite instances, it has lots of cool events, some decent loot, and isn't too big. I finished all 3 of my quests there, got some green items (to be sent for disenchanting to my priest), and with the quest reward xp just managed to hit level 54. And I still got a complete level worth of rest xp bonus for the long weekend (Monday is a holiday here). The only problem is that one of the quests still has a follow-up step, summoning and killing another level 55 elite mob, Shadra the Spider God. Guess I need to ask the level 60's of my guild again.

I'll end this post with a funny link I found on Terranova, to the Star Wars Episode 3 l33t trailer. That is the regular episode 3 trailer, subtitled to "translate" the text into MMORPG speak, casting the Sith as exploiters using hacks to win. Obi-wan: "We go pwned!!!". Yoda: "A dirty haXXor that Anakin punk is.".
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Guild Wars Review

My review comes in two sub-sections. The first is more descriptive, how the game works. The second is my personal opinion. As the latter is highly subjective, I'm encouraging you to comment.

Guild Wars game mechanics

Beginning my review at the start, Guild Wars is easy enough to install. The game comes on 2 CDs, which you install, and then run the game. As in all MMORPG, you first need to hit a button to create an account. But as Guild Wars does not have a monthly fee, you only need to enter the code, which you get by scratching the silver area on the back of the first CD cover.

After logging on, you are greeted by a screen presenting the two possible methods of character creation: You can create a level 1 role-playing character, who will develop in the PvE part of the game, or you can create a level 20 PvP-only character. At the start the PvP character can only be one of a limited amount of templates, but once you unlock skills with your role-playing characters, you can create a customized PvP characters with the skills you found.

If you create a role-playing character, it is probably helpful to think of him as going through four distinct phases in his life: The character starts in a newbie area in the city of Ascalon before the "searing" cataclysm. You can leave this newbie area as early as level 3, by going through a series of primary quests. But I'd recommend to do all the quests in this area, and only leave once you are about level 7, as you won't be able to get back to here.

Leaving the newbie area you can watch the "searing" cut-scene, and find yourself two years later in the same area, which is now notably more hostile, due to the destruction that happened. In this second phase of the game your main goal is to finish a series of 14 missions, which will open access to all PvE areas of the game, and also enable your role-playing character to participate in the PvP part of the game. Each mission area has a lobby, in which players gather to find groups, and the instanced mission area itself. This part of the game is very much forcing you to group. While it is theoretically possible to solo the missions, or do them with the help of NPC henchmen, that would be extremely hard to do.

Once you reached the end of the missions campaign, you should be level 20, which is the maximum level in this game, and your life will switch back and forth between the third and the fourth phase: PvP combat in the different arenas, and searching all the PvE areas repeatedly for rare skill drops.

Apart from the very different "flow" of your characters career, Guild Wars plays much like any other MMORPG. You create a character, and get the choice of 6 different professions at the start. You don't get to choose a race, all characters are human, but you can modify the look of your character with four sliders. During the game you get to pick a secondary profession, which makes a total of 30 possible combinations.

Both your primary and your secondary profession give you access to some skills. Skills are lined up on a hotkey bar, and like in any other MMORPG combat consists of an auto-attack, plus you hitting the hotkey buttons for added effects. Most skills cost some amount of energy, which slowly regenerates. Some skills cost "adrenalin", which builds up during melee combat, but isn't as well shown as the energy.

Soon you will have more than the 8 skills which fit on the bar, and from then on you will be forced to chose between them while in a city. While you are outside of the city, in any combat zone, you are stuck with the 8 skills you chose. If you want to switch to another set of skills, you will need to return to the city, which is a simple matter of clicking on the city's icon on the map. Choosing the right combination of skills for the adventure to come is an art. The longer you play, the more skills you find, and the more varied is your choice. This makes it possible to still have some sort of character development after you hit the low maximum level of 20.

Unlike other MMORPGs every player of Guild Wars is playing in the same world, you never need to chose a server. This is achieved by heavy instancing. Every zone in which combat takes place is instanced for only you, your group, and the enemy group in the case of PvP zones. You will never meet a stranger while fighting monsters in the wilderness. Players only meet in cities and mission lobbies, but even those exist in many copies, as many as necessary to limit the population in each of them. Players are also segregated by the version of the game they bought, US, European, or Korean, but they can meet in international zones. And there are special PvP modes which pit the different continents against each other. As Guild Wars seems to be selling quite well, there are hundreds of thousands of players on this one world, and you rarely meet the same stranger twice. But if you meet nice people, you can put them on your friends list, and form a guild with them.

The user interface and controls of Guild Wars have its peculiarities. By default you can either move with the classical WASD keys, or by left-clicking on the ground with the mouse. But as you also left-click to attack and to interact with objects, any misclick will have you running somewhere where you didn't want to go. Fortunately click-movement can be turned off. Another big annoyance is that the landscape is full of invisible walls, which aren't always easy to predict. Some greenery you can walk through, other will block your way. Seemingly tiny ledges can pose an insurmountable obstacle. And there is collision detection with other characters, monsters, and NPC henchmen, so in the worst case you can find yourself trapped between an invisible corner and the henchman who followed you there, and he will take his time before letting you pass.

Guild Wars has some interesting features, but they are badly documented. The manual isn't all that helpful, and the newbie area doesn't offer much information in the form of tutorials. I had a hard time to find out how to enable the several weapon set slots, which allow you to switch for example quickly from ranged to melee weapon. If I hadn't already participated in two beta events, I would never have found out how exactly crafting works, and how the merchants work. Customizing your weapon to give 20% more damage, or trading special loot items for equipment at a collector are nice features, but you need to stumble upon the right NPC by chance to find out about them. It helps if you run around with the left ALT key pressed, which will show the NPC names all the time.

There are no tradeskills in Guild Wars. Instead you visit a crafter, hand him the resources he needs and some money, and he will craft the item you want for you. Resources are found rarely directly as loot. Most of the time you will need to use a salvage kit (which you have to buy) on the items you find, which will transform them into appropriate resources: A sword transforms into iron, a staff into wood, and so on. Different professions use different resources for their armor, for example warriors need lots of iron, but no cloth. So some sort of resource trade is of mutual benefit.

For trading resources Guild Wars has a very innovative system. There is no such thing as an auction house, but there are NPC merchants who buy and sell resources. The innovative thing is that these merchants only sell the resources they bought, they are carrying a stock of whatever players sold them. And the price varies in function of the amount in stock. If the stock is low, you can sell them your resources at a good price, but buying from them is expensive. But if they are swimming in a particular resource, they only offer a tiny sum to buy more, and sell the resource for a much more reasonable price.

My Opinion

Guild Wars is a difficult game to review, because it stretches the limits of the MMORPG genre. At its very core, Guild Wars is a squad-based tactical combat game. Around this core is applied a thin layer of MMORPG. The core is an excellent game, the best PvP experience I ever had. The MMORPG layer is good enough. But if you buy Guild Wars only for its PvE part, you will probably find that this game doesn’t have enough content, and risk being disappointed.

There is an inherent conflict between the PvE part and the PvP part of any MMORPG that offers both of them. The basic idea of PvE is getting stronger by fighting monsters; but that results in different players having characters of different strengths, which is bad for PvP, because it gives the player who did more PvE an unfair advantage. Guild Wars solves this conflict by making the “getting stronger” part of the game extremely short, and even allowing you to bypass it completely, by creating a PvP-only character of maximum level. All the characters participating in PvP are thus equally strong, and the PvP battles are set up in a manner that also assures numerical equality. This results in a very enjoyable, and very fair, PvP experience, in which a team’s success is determined by skill and cooperation.

The downside of this is, that the interest of the PvE part of the game is reduced to collecting more skills that don’t make your character stronger, but only more varied. All skills are supposed to be equally strong, and you can only have 8 of them available in any battle. Acquiring more skills by PvE only gives you more options when choosing the 8 skills for your next battle. The world is a lot smaller than that of any other major MMORPG, and you will need to visit all the places several times before you find all the rare drop skills. How can you afford to make a MMORPG without a monthly fee? By creating not more than one month worth of content.

So whether I can recommend Guild Wars to you, or not, depends strongly on what exactly you are looking for. If you are looking mainly for a good PvP game, this one is definitely one to try. But if character development is your main goal, Guild Wars will probably feel short and void of purpose. Only the fact that there is no monthly fee might make it worth buying for a PvE fan. Later you will have the opportunity to buy more content in the form of expansion sets.

If you buy Guild Wars for the PvP, you should be aware that this isn’t necessarily a game for casual players. Because PvP is based on team cooperation and skill, achieving success will require a lot of organization and dedication. A team that trained together and is using some sort of voice-over-ip software to communicate with headphones will mercilessly slaughter a random group of casual players. There is a reason why this game is called Guild Wars, the lone warrior won’t score a lot of wins here.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
WiFi musings

On my way back home yesterday I had some time at the train station in Paris, and tried to connect to the local WiFi hotspot. Worked, but just like the hotel it landed me on a screen asking me to pay for access. This one wanted 10 Euro ($13) for 1 hour of internet access. I would need to be really desperate to pay that.

The only good thing is that in Belgium I'm using Belgacom as my internet provider, and that allows me to use their hotspots for free, until end of September. And as Belgacom is the former monopoly telephone company, it has the most hotspots in the country.

But in the long run I hope that hotels and the like in Europe are going to offer free WiFi as customer service, just like some hotels in the US already do. 10 Euro for an hour or two is simply too much. I can't believe they get all that much business with that sort of prices.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:12 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Puzzle Pirates goes retail

Puzzle Pirates will soon be available in stores, published by Ubisoft. It doesn't seem as if they added any puzzles since I played the download-only version a year ago, which is a pity. But for a while Puzzle Pirates is fun enough, and having it on the shelves of game stores can only help.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:27 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Mobile Gaming

My laptop passed the "mobile gaming" test, and I was able to play WoW with it on a WiFi connection in a hotel room. But the experience wasn't all sunshine. First thing I noticed was that the laptop is quite heavy, once I had to carry it across town. In a small bag with just the things you need for one night, and some work documents, the Dell Inspiron 6000 is adding a lot to the weight. I think it weights about 4 kg with all the extras (second battery, charger, mouse).

The second bad surprise was that the hotel I was staying in did have WiFi access, but not *free* WiFi access. I had to pay 10 Euro ($13) for 2 hours of internet, which I consider to be too much. I paid up anyway, because I wanted to see if it works.

Finally I got everything working, and WoW running, but the hotel WiFi internet access is a lot slower than my home WiFi.

Still, I prefer having 2 hours of internet access in a lonely hotel room to just reading a book or watching TV. I just need to check out the hotel websites next time and see if anybody is offering free internet. I'm pretty sure the hotel in Ohio I was in March had that.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:00 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 9-May-2005

Back from the holidays, and back to playing WoW on a desktop computer with ADSL connection. My apologies for the lack of updates, but with all that traveling I simply didn't have time to play. And I got a bunch of short business trips lined up for the next two weeks, which means even less time to play. But I'll take my laptop and test it's "mobile gaming" powers. :)

Saturday afternoon I log on with Raslebol, and am eager to make some xp, so I don't hit the cap of my rest bonus. I ask for a group in guild chat, and find that there is a group without tank heading for Maraudon. Great, even if that isn't my favorite dungeon. I head there immediately, forgetting to pack the staff which teleports the group into the middle of the dungeon. Doesn't matter, the others haven't got any of the Maraudon quests done, and need to walk all of it anyway. The mobs in the area before the instance gate are too low to give xp to a level 53, but once inside the experience points start rolling.

Maraudon is a huge dungeon consisting of several branches. The pre-instance zone has two different gates into the instance, leading to different branches, the orange zone and the purple zone. These two branches meet in the middle, leading to the final, biggest, green zone branch. If you kill the boss mobs of the two entry branches, you get two parts of the staff which allows you to teleport right into the middle.

So we took the purple zone entrance, and easily killed Lord Vyletongue for the diamond part of the staff. Then we continued and reached the middle of the dungeon. But then the rogue and the mage had to leave. But with me (warrior), a priest, and a shaman, we decided to continue into the orange branch, to get the second part from Noxxion. Doing this with three people is hard, especially the barbed lashers are nasty. But of course dividing the xp by only 3 left more of them for each of us, so we weren't all that unhappy. We managed to get up to Noxxion, a big water elemental boss mob. Unfortunately he had some nasty tricks up his sleeve, splitting up into several smaller elementals occasionally, then flowing together again. We simply couldn't handle him and got wiped so badly, that we decided to do it another day with a full group.

So I logged off, and installed GuildWars. Not that I was terribly eager to play it, but the game had arrived by mail during my holidays, and I'm planning to post a review here, so I needed to test it. I played all Sunday long, so I got enough material for at least a "first impressions" piece later this week. It's a good squad based, tactical combat PvP game, but a bit light on the PvE MMORPG side. More later.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 4-May-2005

I’m still on holiday, thus still playing WoW only about one hour per day, and that on the laptop and 56k modem. So I haven’t done much in game. But one thing I had to do *now*, because it is a special event of which I’m not sure when it ends: Children’s Week. This is a series of quests in which you travel to several places to show them to some orphan. Not really an escort quest, because the orphan doesn’t need to accompany you on the way, you get some whistle with which to summon him when you arrive, that makes the quest very easy to do. No items or monetary reward gained, but a bit of faction and about 4,000 xp. Not much for my level 53 warrior, but a good amount for my level 12 priest, just for running around.

I do like special events, like the Grandfather Winter event on the US servers at Christmas, but this one was a bit weak. Hard to find, as the event starter doesn’t even have an exclamation mark over his head, you need to find the orphan matron and ask her about the event before the quests start. I only remembered having the announcement of the event in half a sentence in the patch notes. And while showing a poor orphan around is heart-warming, it was a lot duller than the Christmas treats. Just another quest series, with a weak reward, unless, like in the Christmas event, there is some reward coming by mail later. The only reason I did it twice was that it was easy xp for my priest, who could use them.

In happier news, I successfully tested my laptop’s capabilities as mobile DVD-player. In a shop here I stumbled upon half-forgotten memories: The complete first season of an 80’s TV series, Sledge Hammer, in 22 episodes, on 4 DVDs. At the time, his motto of “trust me, I know what I’m doing” (when he was about to do something especially stupid), was one of our often quoted running gags. And the thing is still funny, if a bit dated. I watched the first DVD on my laptop without attaching the power supply, and found out that one battery is good for about 3 hours of DVD watching, at highest screen brightness and using the built-in speakers at normal loudness, no ear-phones. That is quite good, watching a DVD is one of the most power-consuming things you can do on a laptop, although playing online 3D games is probably pretty similar.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:57 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - 1-May-2005

Sunday morning, and I head with Raslebol over to the Hinterlands to gather Sungrass and other herbs, before too many other people log on and have the same idea. Herbalism is a skill best performed when there are the least other players online. While I’m there, I do a tour through the slime cave, where lots of level 46 to 48 green slime monsters are guarding rare ghost mushrooms. I kill a lot of those slimes in the process, and as I got tons of rest xp bonus, I ding 53 in the process.

Sounds like a rather normal and boring WoW session. But I’m very excited how well all of this went, because I was playing on my laptop, using the built-in 56k modem on a normal telephone line. Sure, my framerate is around 30 fps instead of 60 fps, and I got around 200 ms of lag. But I can play smoothly enough, even in combat. Mobile WoW gaming works!

While playing I notice that the last patch has changed how the troll berzerking skill works. Previously you could only use it when you were below 25% health. So I didn’t use it very often, because when I was that low in health, I was usually dead a few seconds later. In normal combat when nothing goes wrong I rarely drop down that low. But since the patch the condition to use berzerking has changed: You now can use it every time you get hit with a critical hit. I don’t know how often monsters land critical hits, but it should be anywhere between 5% and 10%, if they don’t work completely different than me. That means every 10 to 20 hits I take, I can use the berzerking hotkey to buff me. And as a tank I get hit a lot. Great!

But well, I'm on holiday, and the sun is shining, so I'd rather do other things than playing online. But its good to know that it works for rainy days away from home.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:02 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments