I haven't actually set foot in Ulduar yet. I have my warlock copied over to the PTR, but have been furiously leveling the priest in an effort to get her to 80, and onto the PTR. The warlock is fun, but I've kinda really hit a groove with the priest, and want to try a raid with her. So I haven't even logged onto the PTR yet, but was talking to a druid in a PUG 5 man last night that apparently has. The conversation was a little amusing, in the way it played out...
I wish I had screenshotted it, or had one of those chat log chache things, but the general gist of things is good enough to get the point across, so here goes the dramatic re-enactment:
Ixo: you guys copied any toons over to the PTR yet?
Warrior: wats tht?
DK: I have my druid on the pvp, ally on a diff server
Ixo: Public Test Realm, lets you try out patches before they hit live. Ulduar is up on it now, you can test it out
Warrior: o
DK: yeah, my druid is 5/5 Valorous
Ixo: yeah, I got my t7 lock over on the pvp, but haven't even logged it yet, trying to level this priest ;)
DK: yeah. it's pretty hard. 2nd boss two shotted my drood, bastard hit me for like 20k! XD
Ixo: lol, that's what I like to hear! people have been QQing about naxx being too easy, good to see a tough raid in the works
Warrior: can u gys summon? afk a few min
DK: yeah, I don't think anyone is going to beat Ulduar until it gets nerfed, that place is crazy
Okay... so. First, while this DK was obviously a PUG, and I can't vouch for his druid, he was mentioning maly, running sarth 3d, and basically having naxx on farm (which unto itself is pretty whatever). So he's a raider. That's established. But the PTR has been live for... what... a week now? And there he is, already talking about a nerf. He wasn't a jackass, and we actually ran a few dungeons last night as a 5 man. He DPSed one run, then when the tank had to bail, he had absolutely no issues switching to a tanking role for the next run. That alone gets huge points in my book, as most DPS will instantly quit a PUG if the T word is brought up.
This is obviously only one guy, too, but it's pretty representative of the problem with WoW, when taking a sample of one person out of the millions who play: Naxx is too easy, we want something harder. But if we die, it needs to be made easier. This is an endless cycle, and no one is to blame for 'the cake walk that is Naxx right now' but us as players. This is what we want. We love to complain about it, but it's what we asked for. BT was too inaccessible. Hyjal was too annoying if you wiped on Archimonde and had to reclear the entire event to try him again.
There's no tidy resolution at the end of this post, except to say I REALLY hope Blizzard punishes the players with Ulduar for a good month AT LEAST. Even saying 'for a good month' just sounds pathetic. I'd prefer an impossible dungeon that never gets beat, and to taste the sweet sweet tears of 'teh hardcores' for a while. Make the fights completely unbeatable, and when people cry, just IGNORE them. Don't put any blue posts out at all, except for one, 35 days later, being like 'oh, hmm? we thought naxx was too easy? cry moar plx? kthxbai?'
<3
Friday, February 27, 2009
Nerf Ulduar?!
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Creative Use of Game Mechanics
Killed Ursoc in Grizzly Hills last night with creative use of the Alt and F4 keys:
Log the priest, invite someone (anyone) to party. Alt-F4 (not "logout" or you automatically leave the party), log back in as the warlock and get that person to invite them to the party. That random person can leave the party now...
You now have a party comprised of your lower and higher level alts. The quest for Ursoc requires you get an NPC to assist you, and he won't start the quest unless you have it in your log. Okay. Alt-F4 again, and get back on the priest. Start the quest. Alt-F4, back on the lock. Kill the big bad guy, or get him to about 10% with a full set of DoTs rolling. Alt-F4, relog the priest.
In this manner, you can actually still see your higher level alt 'finishing' the fight if you relog fast enough. The warlock itself is sitting there DCed, but the voidwalker is going strong, and the dots are still rolling. Boss dies. Sprinkle your magic Ursoc Dust on the corpse. Collect loot. Vendor it.
;)
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Arugal Lives!
Last night I found a questchain involving Argual out in Grizzly Hills! I think Shadowfang Keep is one of my favorite instances of all time, and have mentioned it more than once on the blog here. The pacing of the dungeon itself is almost perfect. Start at the door, work your way to the cell where the deathguard lets you out to the courtyard. You have the option of tackling the horses in the stables at a chance for a bag (which isn't as big a deal now as it was long ago, but still), then battle your way either thru the kitchen, or up the ramp to the right. Through that area, and along the ramparts, then into the tower proper, where it's up and up and up, sqauring off against Fenrus, the Hound Master, and then Argual himself.
All of the fights in the dungeon are basic tank and spank affairs, with nothing really special about any of them except for Argual himself, who teleports around the room, and mind controls party members. The atmopshere of the dungeon itself is awesome, and I love the whole 'ghosts, wolves, and wolfmen' theme. Even the neighboring town (Pyrewood Village?) has an awesome twist to it, that the inhabitants change based on the time of day. During the day they're normal humanoids, and at night time they turn into wolfmen. This is the only example I can think of in all of WoW where the time of day in the real world affects gameplay. Animal Forest on the Gamecube and Wii made extensive use of this feature, where you would have to perform certain tasks at 10pm or whatever, but WoW users would just cry and complain if that kind of limitation was in place.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Green Flight Encounter
The last write up had a tree fight taking place in my dungeon's 'garden', an area I previously had reserved for this encounter that I'm typing up here. This is another very loose idea, and I'll go back later to really polish it up. Most of what I'm doing by posting these on the blog instead of just typing them up in Word offline is looking for feedback. I'm not on a development team, but being on a team is what I imagine to be the most influential part of encounter deisgn. Someone has a rough idea, they throw it out, and other members pick it apart, or offer up variations on the basic principle. In this way, the encounter changes over time, and settles into something everyone in the room agrees could be fun or challenging. Then you need to prototype it in-game, and the process (I would imagine) begins anew. I doubt someone just crapped out the Tempest Keep Kael encounter on their Blackberry on the way to work one day. Maybe they did, though. ;)
The same garden. It's hexagonally shaped, and has a gentle sloping rise in the middle. The Tree and this encounter don't rely on interacting with the environment. Maybe I can try and brainstorm something that does, so I can place various shrubs or such around the area to spuce it up a bit. For now, just imagine lush green garden enclosed in a hexagonal wall. This area branches off of the last 'boss tower' in my map layout (yes, that 3d layout still needs work). In my image to the right there, the garden has no ceiling, but I think it would be a good idea to have a latticework dome covering it, so people can't see what boss is waiting for them until they actually pass thru the garden threshold and take a look inside. Then again, it might be kind of cool to zone into the instance and see off in the distance a slumbering dragon awaiting you later, or a huge tree sprouting up in the middle of it. Then again again, this kind of thing affects PUGs, where people are like "ah crap, it's the dumb tree this week; he drops healer crap, I'm outta here after the Library". Then again again again, maybe it would be good for PUGs because people could spam trade looking for more, and include that the dragon is up this week, even thought they haven't unlocked that tower yet, which encourages people to join to bang it out. Stuff like that still needs to be fully addressed.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Raid Encounter: The... Uhh...Tree Guy
I drive a different way home than I used to. It favors following the water from Yorishima back to Tamashima, instead of cutting through town on main roads like I used to do. It's a more winding path, and there's no other cars or any stoplights. It's not some huge commute, and only takes about 20 minutes. I used to work for some private company in Japan that had me driving 2 hours in each direction to teach a 30 minute class on Monday evenings. I love driving, but ugh. The current commute is a good little drive for just thinking about random crap on the way to or from school, and I'm trying to force myself to come up with encounters and stuff on the drive home each day. For the last week or so, I've been stuck on some tree type boss, so here's me typing it up, in an effort to get it out, and hope my brain can move on to something else.
The Setting:
A lush, enclosed, garden area. My castle layout has one such area off to the side of the final bosses tower, but I kinda already have a Green Dragonflight encounter for that zone, but this one may be better or not... I'll type up the dragon one later, and see which one sounds better in the end. Oooh! Maybe the garden area will have a random boss found there like the Opera event in Kara? I like that idea way better. Hmm...
Anyway. It's a garden area, and the center is dominated by a huge oak-type tree. It's big, in full bloom, and has long branches reaching high up. The floor of the garden is also very grassy, lots of little flower doodads etc.
At this point, there needs to be some lore mechanic, or some *reason* why we're going in there to fuck the place up. I imagine an altar of some sort that the raid channels, or some well we throw poison into... something of that sort that taints the garden and begins the encounter. Perhaps it's a quest item dropped from the Alchemist boss or something. There's a hook here to fill a bit of story out is the main point, though.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Ulduar and Vehicles
Another hot topic, recently, given that Blizzard has given a sneak peek at Ulduar on the European WoW site. I'm sure you've all read that link, but maybe what you haven't read is a little blue snippet that followed the instantaneous QQing that followed the announcement:
Actually, the effectiveness of the vehicles in the Flame Leviathan fight changes depending on the quality of the gear. So someone in full Naxxramas epics (or Ulduar epics!) will have an easier time than someone in greens.
I'm gonna give a quick rundown on a few points, and you'll either agree or disagree. Just gonna throw them out there. Hell, I'll even number them.
1) Vehicles - I've stated before that I think it's interesting when people are suddenly presented with new abilities. By the time you've leveled to 80 as a boomkin (entangling roots, wrath, wrath, wrath, moonfire, repeat 2,000,000 x), you're sick of your trash rotation, and vehicles are an interesting way of breaking up the monotony. I used this same justification in my Baron encounter, when someone bitten by a bat becomes a vampire tank for the next phase. I think it's why priests really enjoy using mind control, or even (to a lesser extent) why mages enjoy spellstealing a buff they wouldn't normally have access to. It creates something new and interesting that you can do with your class for a limited window of time. No issues there, really.
THAT SAID, I think it has a place in somewhere like Wintergrasp, or quest chains like in Dragonblight, where you grab a vehicle and mash around for 5 minutes or so, then return to that character that you spent a billion hours leveling to 80. Then again, the Wintergrasp justification is probably only because I'm not some hardcore PvPer. I'm sure the same argument would me made in reverse for someone who values their PvP time more (i.e. "put them in dungeons, just keep them out of my PvP").
I can appreciate all of this. I also think Blizzard is trying their hardest to deliver unique and interesting play mechanics. However, let's take it to a hypothetical extreme. Ulduar is supposed to be the first 'serious' raid of the expansion. How do you think the community would react if suddenly there was a new arena where you drove motorcycles around shooting flamethrowers on oil slicks? Don't just move on to the next sentence, really THINK about that for a while.
It would be ridiculous, but that's exactly what they're doing to raiders.
Okay, anyway... on this blog I try and not complain about shit unless I offer up a valid counterpoint, so here's my take on vehicles in Ulduar as they're currently implemented:
Every time you decide to run Ulduar (which is going ot be pretty often, I imagine), the entire instance STARTS with this 'event'. Every time. At first I can imagine it won't be so bad, and might even be kinda fun. People will complain that it homogenizes every class -- everyone becomes the 'pilot' class with the exact same abilities -- but eventually they'll figure out the encounter and beat it. Big deal. But they have to do this every single time they start Ulduar for the week. I think at the very least, this should have been a wing unto itself, that later becomes some optional thing. There's a reason nobody runs Occulus, but along comes Ulduar saying "run Occulus first real quick, and then we'll let you in". THAT is my issue with it. I'm hoping that 'real quick' part applies, because if it was some timed event that took 25-30 minutes every time, I can imagine a lot of "start the event, I'm gonna go take a shit"-ing in Vent. The chess event in Kara is a good tradeoff, because it was a little pee break before the showdown with Prince. Ulduar should have taken a tip from that, and made it the final stretch before the final final showdown in Ulduar.
2) Gear scales the damage output of said vehicles. This is just nuts, and is obviously in response to the Occulus thing, again. Since everyone from my level 1 bank alt to my 80 warlock in t7 operates EXACTLY the same in Occulus, they're trying to give you some benefit for being geared to the teeth (or not). So... Hm. Let's think about this. Vehicle encounters could be argued as actual skill tests, where your gear doesn't come into play --never mind that we leveled priests and rogues on the way to 80, not motorcycles, so there goes the 'skill at playing your class' argument out the window. Okay, so maybe it's just a 'given this certain situation, how do you react? skill' kind of thing. Okay, but now suddenly that argument is shot down when you allow someone to brute force their way through it with superior gear. I think an 80 is going to have a hard time dying in Scarlet Monastery, no matter what class they are, and even if they're only wearing pants. The skill there just isn't required, because you can just ram your face into everything over and over and they eventually all die.
Sooo.... You can't just outgear it, you need to think! But you can think less the better your gear is!
The other ramification to this is that it has to be based on iLevels alone, since how else would they determine how to scale it? Base your vehicle crit chance on your actual crit? What about healers or classes that value spirit over stamina? How can this possibly work out? On my priest, up until I hit 75 last night, I was wearing the Heroic Magister's Terrace trinket because it was a nice compliment to my healing set, even if it was a lower iLevel than other gear I had come across. Will we be stockpiling an "iLevel set" of gear to throw on for this fight now? How lame is that? Obviously it won't be a huge issue, since usually higher iLevel items are better pieces of gear, but that's hardly a universal statement. It depends entirely on talent synergy and class. Even race could be argued, since Draeni have extra chance to hit, and can afford to sacrifice that on an item to balance that out. So if I decide to wear that lower iLevel trinket, I'll need to bring along some whatever trinket in bag. So basically, for my healing priest, The Shadow Panther Figurine (iLevel 125) becomes a better item than my Vial (iLevel 115). GG.
As always, I'll hold final judgment until I see it in action, but there just seems to be a few conflicting messages at play here, as well as a few WTFs thrown in for good measure.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Idle Hands
Last night I respecced back to Discipline. 52-2-11 or something at the moment (check the armory link to the right). I was full shadow for a few days, but it just felt lame. I hate the purple see thru aspect, feel like shadow is 'faking it', and I was drinking all the time. Disc leaves me full mana, like, always. I was holy for a while back, too, but since sticking with Disc for a while I'm really enjoying it.
Plus I want to heal some more.
I've been writing some stuff on healing, and felt like if my armory showed I was shadow I'd be talking out of my ass (tip: I do that anyway). I'm still having a really hard time just knuckling down and doing quests, though. I keep doing ANYTHING other than gaining XP. Fishing, cooking, making moonshroud/spellweave/ebon cloths, transmuting Life to Fire. Doing my Northrend Alchemy Reasearch things to learn new elixirs every three days. I'm 85% thru 74 with a bank full of level 75 trinkets (alch stone) and 76-80 cloth tailor crafted gear. Once I hit 80 I'll have a ton of shit to wear, but I just can't find the inspiration to do it.
For a while I joined up with a guild called BLEED. They were actually really nice people, and I initially hooked up with them after going on a few TK pugs straight to Kael where the loot was kept on grouploot the whole time. The GM wanted to 'get a few phoenixes on the server', and I found it noble to keep the loot set open, in this day and age of ninjas and paranoid master looters. In the end, though, my schedule in Japan kept rearing its ugly head, and I eventually left on good terms, saying I may look them up again in May when I get back to the states. My 'old' guild is all but dead (Tragedy posts here on the blog, but has cancelled his account effective March 3rd).
I've got this mission to bumrush Irvine, and to do so I feel like I shouldn't fall out of touch with the game at large. At the same time, I've got this feeling like I know all there is to know about WoW already. That's a slippery slope, and came up in art classes when I was at the Academy in San Francisco. The instructors kept walking around the room asking why we were focusing so hard on the paper in front of us instead of looking at the model in front of the class. People think they KNOW what a nose looks like, and they tend to draw the one inside their mind rather than the one attached to the person's face in front of the class. If you lose touch with what you're trying to brainstorm ideas for (questing, raiding), then you form assumptions on the idea as it sits in your mind, and not how it actually plays out.
I should probably just xfer my preist to an oceanic realm and pick up a guild there. Healers are always in demand, it's mostly just finding a like-minded group of people to click with. Then, when I get back to the states in May, I can xfer the whole lot to somewhere else. Cho'gall was only my choice because that's where Trag and the crew played, but they've all since stopped playing or gone their separate ways.
I basically need to shake this rut and just bury myself online for a few solid days and hit 80.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Passive Decursing
I could have sworn I had covered this somewhere else, but I can't find it, and I was hinting at it in another post or two. So if you've already heard this, it's really nothing new. If you haven't yet, then it's brand new and will rock your fucking socks off! Give 'em a taste KG! Alright...
Passive Decursing, a.k.a Decursing Passively.
This is a short one, since it's a pretty simple concept.
Druids can abolish poisons and remove curses. Why not just make these skills passive, and a 10 yard aura surrounding the druid automatically cleanses said ailments? The poison can tick for a second, giving rogues a chance to mutilate, or it could just make poisons not work against druids (bear with me here a sec, I hear you).
The point is that these 'tools' suck, and using them in raids is boring. It's bad design to make a decurse heavy fight, but it's done (time and time again, hell I have a few I made), because the tool is THERE, and to not use it is a wasted opportunity. Having fights poison heavy gives poison cleaners something useful to do, even if it's just clicking boring little boxes in their UI. Nobody likes decursing, but they do it because they have to.
Here's the alternative: Mages are able to decurse. Let's just say curses don't work on them. Yes, warlocks get pissed but we'll get to that. During Lucifron, when he bombs the raid with curses, everyone runs to the mage, and stands near him for a tick (or is standing near him already, gasp!) and cleanses themselves. This opens a whole new avenue for careful raid positioning (which I think is fun), and forces more reactionary play, instead of 'zzz push that button 8 times'.
In PvP, this would suck, and the skills could remain for PvP use. Wow, skills that work differently in PvP than PvE? What? No Way! Obviously if a warlock is trying to DoT up a mage, they're screwed, but it frees up superfluous button mashing in PvE, which is a good thing.
As it stands:
Cure Poison - Druid, Shaman
Remove Curse - Druid, Mage
Cure Disease - Priest, Shaman
Cleanse (all) - Paly
This could be adjusted to give more classes access to these skills (rogues being poison immune would make sense, as well as warlocks being immune to curses, DKs being immune to diseases, etc)
This is a really rough idea, just throwing it out on a post of it's own, so comments about it can collect in one section.
Gimme some feedback. I think the PvE/PvP separation is the lamest part, but only because I've played a warrior, and felt like the reasoning behind taunt not working --that it would take control away from the player, like stuns, sheeps, fears, blinds, saps, hexes, blah, blah, and blah, don't-- is lame.
Healing: Let's Get Rid of Unit Frames
Ixo's lost his mind. Unit frames are such an integral part of the UI that getting rid of them would be like eliminating action bars! Yeah, I got rid of that already, too. This is taking it from a healer's perspective, and seems to be a hot topic these days. Stylish Corpse wants to get rid of the 'holy trinity' altogether, and Melf_Himself has a post up over on Word of Shadow lamenting the fact that healing in the 'traditional sense' was a) touch range (not castable across the room), and b) usually done after a fight. Mitigation was king, and if you lived through an encounter, you got to heal afterwards. Heals now are spammy, but I don't really have an issue with that.
I have an issue with being pigeonholed into a corner of the screen, while everyone else is ooohing and ahhhing at the phase 3 transition.
This entire post is basically an exploration of an idea I've had in the back of my head for a while, and that solidified (a tiny bit) in my post at the end of the Stylish Corpse link above. While Melf has a point with 'ranged heals' and the spamming of heals, this is just where the game has gone. DPS no longer needs to worry about casting thier nuke once a day, they do it every global cooldown. Combat is faster and freer, and that's fine with me. If I could only jump once every 37 minutes in Super Mario, that game would be a drag. I like jumping. Penance is a fun spell. HoTs are meant to be spread around. Whatever.
The thing we want to move away from is having healers stuck looking at this:
...instead of this:
or --let's at least be realistic, no one sees Gruul's face-- this:
As long as the way to determine who needs a heal is a tiny little green bar in the corner of the screen, that's where those whose job it is to make 'full green bars' will park their eyes. This is the problem we wish to solve. So let's get rid of them. Throw them out, remove the hooks in LUA that allow for a consolidated raid UI (so that Grid and Healbot break as well, or nothing changes), and start fresh.
But how? Here's my idea:
We want healers looking at the raid. Do you even know what your tank looks like? I mean really? Not that his unit frame has a brownish color for his name (he's a warrior!), but what he actually LOOKS like? Let's find out, and actually keep an eye on him! I propose giving healers a 'focus' button that, when held down, will display misty auras around players in the raid. These auras are colored based on their health pool.
No aura (or perhaps white?) = 100%
Blue = 99-80%
Green = 75-66%
Yellow = 65-50%
Orange = 49-33%
Red = 33-20%
Pulsing Red = Brink of Death (under 20%)
This focus button would need to be playtested to see how it works in given situations. I like the idea that you hold it down and look for someone to heal, then target them, let go, and cast your heal (i.e. can't heal while it's held down). Target frames are still there. If you always have your one tank targetted, then you can just sit back and spam heals, but for spot healing it becomes a more active... well, activity. Suddenly being in a good position (while always important before, yes) is now crucial. You're actively out in the field looking around and running as you focus. Healing becomes as frenetic as DPSing.
If the 'holding down focus' thing is too lame ("I'm ALWAYS focusing, make it passive!"), then maybe it's a toggle type thing. You activate it whenever you want to, and can dismiss it by right clicking the buff. Thinking more about it, that's probably a better way of doing it. Making it an always-on passive class ability would be annoying for classes that don't use it, though. Shadow priests and ret pallies won't need it up, for example.
Targeting becomes an issue, but it's a sacrifice to be made for liberating ourselves from the bottom left hand corner of the screen. We need to be actively choosing our targets during a fight, or tab targeting friendly players. This is the one big issue I see, but it all just lends itself (again) to being actively aware of your immediate area. Stand nearby those you intend to heal, not just "within 30 yards". Tell the DPS to not just lump up in a cluster if they expect to get healed.
When you think about it, during every pull DPS isn't presented with an easy to click grid of all available enemies. They either need to use their cursor, or tab target around the pack until they find that one mob with the X on it's head. Tab once - no that's the sheep - twice - no that's the next target - once more - okay, let 'er rip. Or just target the tank, and assist his target (the better solution). Giving healers a similar way of acquiring targets would free them from the box, and force them to get involved.
The point is that this would be such a radical change of pace that people would need to adjust. It couldn't happen overnight, and I honestly think it isn't anything that could be applied to WoW now (after the fact) without causing a huge fit of crying and complaining. It's more like something they should have done from the beginning, or could incorporate into the new game, as a paradigm shift for how healing gets done.
Plus, how awesome would it be for healers to say to the DPS "Yeah, it must suck that all you get to look at all fight long is that little bar in Omen. You should roll a healer if you want to see what's happening in the fight." ;)
Sunday, February 15, 2009
So I Shot Some Kid in the Face Today
Jesus fucking drama, Batman. Here's a protip for all you aspiring Japanese English Teachers in the audience: don't teach classes alone. I think it's actually a law over here to have a Japanese teacher present for every class with a foreigner (they don't want us to pull a quickie rape on the 7 year olds), but generally the Japanese teachers are way more busy than we are, and I'm usually like "whatever, I can handle the 4th graders alone". So today I shot some little fucker in the face.
GG me.
Here's the scenario (and wow, I'm really tempted to type this up as a raid encounter now). Got to work. Did nothing all day from 8-11:45 (well, typed up the Attunement thing). Fourth period rolls around, and I have a class. Fifth grade class, right before lunch. I did the Hello song, and Greeting Time, and Today's Aim (Locations! Where are you going? I'm going to the zoo!). Got ready for game time, which was a basic Concentration game. Find two cards that are the same, you can go again.
Now. I have the cards all separated beforehand, and they come up and get two sets of cards, or form groups and I throw the cards across the classroom to them. I tend to be pretty kinetic during my lessons, and am always running around or being silly, trying to get kids to enjoy the lesson. There's rubber bands holding the cards together (THE SMOKING GUN!). Today, some of the kids were siting in a circle playing, but two boys were joking around and shooting the rubber bands around. This is nothing new. One flew out of the group as I was walking around, and I grabbed it and shot it back into the group. No big deal, it hit someones leg or something. They shoot it back at me, it hits me in the body, I pick it back up and prepare to shoot it back.
This whole exchange is like 5 seconds long. I'm patrolling around the class listening to kids using the vocabulary, and this little thing happens.
So I'm getting ready to shoot it back, and the kids puts his hands in the air laughing, and says DON'T SHOOT! I shoot, aiming for his body, but it hits him in the face; on the cheek. He grabs his cheek and I think "oh shit!" and immediately go serious mode like "(oh fuck) are you okay? did I hit you in the eye? Dai jou buu? Honto ni... anata no me wa dai jou buu desu ka? Sensei warui, gomen nasai!" He's laughing, his friends are laughing at him, everyone is telling me he's fine. But I'm still sitting there (a little freaked out) to make sure he's okay. Everything looks fine, and I can actually see the red mark on his cheek (but thankfully not his eye) where it hit. Okay. Enough excitement for the day, let's wrap class up.
I gather the cards up and we all sing the Goodbye Song, then I'm back to being alone in the english room. Whatever.
Lunch comes and goes, and nothing. Even the teacher whose class it was sees me in the hallway and tells me thanks for teaching the class alone, and I prepare for my fifth period class with the fourth graders (who will also be taught alone). But that gets cancelled at the last second, and here comes the principal to have some in depth discussion while I'm making hot cocoa in the kitchen. She's all freaked out, and going on and on in Japanese that I can't understand about some situation. I finally realize she's talking about "the shooting" and I'm like Jesus Fucking Christ. What the fuck? The kid was fine, he's a fifth grader, I made sure he was okay. Yes I know it was a bad judgement call in retrospect, but wtf.
Here's the thing: in Japan, if someone gets a papercut, they need to notify the parents on the phone right away. Anything requiring more than a wet cotton swab to handle gets Code Blue 911-ed to the parents cel phones, and they in turn pitch a fit about... whatever.
Now here's the part that drives it all home. The princiapal is still goign off, I have a cup full of unstirred hot cocoa sitting in a bunch of hot water, and she's miming this whole 'hands in the air don't shoot thing' and telling me that the kid was BEGGING ME NOT TO SHOOT HIM, and that I then proceeded to shoot him in the face with a rubber band.
I can imagine the entire conversation playing out:
Seriously. How it even goes from 'everything is fine, I'm okay' to even coming up again after that is the biggest mystery. I normally applaud the fact that Japan still has honest-to-god PLAYGROUNDS made of shit like wood and concrete, instead of 6 inch high styrofoam and goosedown junglegyms. They slap each other around during recess, but I swear to god: Japanese boys are the biggest lot of sissies I've ever known. Some of them are cool little dudes, but for the most part, they cry and complain about everything, all the time, always. I was honestly surprised the kid in question didn't start crying the instant the shooting all went down, but when he didn't I just chalked it up to good luck. The girls are about 50x more resilient, but I guess that's probably just the 'girls mature faster than boys' thing.
Show me on the doll where he shot you Junpei.
(crying) I begged him not to, but then he... he jammed his big white american penis in my eye over and over! wauughhh! (sobbing out of control now) I cried and begged for mercy, but he just laughed and did it harder. My sister... is she still... is she in the kindergarten?
My God..! DISPATCH ANOTHER UNIT TO THE YOUCHIEN, WE MAY STILL BE IN TIME TO SAVE HIBIKI-CHAN!
(cut to a shot of the burnt down youchien, dead children everywhere, me cackling maniacally, shooting rubberbands from out of broken windows) YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE, MUHAHAHAHHA! (pew pew)
So, yeah.
It eventually came up that I think they were suggesting that *I* should be the one to call this kids parents to explain the situation to them, at which point I actually barked out a laugh once I realized what she was saying. Like one of those mono syllable caught-off-guard-HA laughs that just come out unexpectedly. I told them I apologized to the kid many times, and that it was an accident, and promptly proceeded to walk past the little crowd forming and sit down at my desk to print up Sea Animal cards (and whip this up in between feeding sheets in the printer).
GG Japan. My cocoa tastes like shit.
Going home soon... this semester seriously can't end fast enough.
Let's Talk Attunements
The A Word. Attunements. Some people love them, others hate them. The ones who love them are generally those that have done them, and the ones who hate them are those that haven't (yet), or can't (ever). I have no problem with attunements, but there need to be a few guidelines in place to make the best of them. They can actually be a huge 'plot point' in the game that would otherwise be ignored, as long as the point is building plot... and not just making someone jump through 12 hoops.
WoW has had a pretty colorful lot of attunements, and some ranged from 'totally feasible' to 'facepalm frustrating'. Memorable moments include trying to attune for Onyxia, and having PUGs roll need on the one or two drops of blood from Drakkisath. This was back when loot dropped and everyone actually discussed what to do next, mind you, but frustrating nonetheless. Of course, back then, UBRS was what you ran if you weren't in MC, but yeah. I digress. Let's take a step back and really think about this for a second.
An attunement is a cock block, for lack of a better term. You can't even zone in to Dungeon 54g without being attuned first. Some come in the form of a Key, and only require one party member to be attuned. Others require the whole raid (or party) to have completed some quest chain before they can zone in. Places like Karazhan used to be the latter, but now have switched to the former. Now someone needs the key to Kara, but anyone with the key can be the designated 'door bitch', standing outside and letting everyone in. That in and of itself is a huge failing of the system (as if anyone runs Kara anymore, lol?). Even moreso, anyone wishing to try and solo Karazhan without the key can just die on the front doorstep (by slooowly having the ghosts there beat on their naked body), and then rez inside-the-gate-but-not-inside-the-portal. So... suicide defeats Kara's attunement altogether.
I'm seeing conflicting design principles at work, here.
More recently, though, attunements have been dropped from the game altogether. I'm not going to turn this into a Casual vs Hardcore thing; to me it's more of a Timesink vs Having Fun thing in the end. No one wants to be forced to run 20 dungeons in order to run dungeon number 21. Especially not when you just joined a guild, they're inviting you to dungeon 21, and you have to decline and try and PUG numbers 1 - 20 alone. That sucks. I can totally understand where the players and Blizzard are coming from on this front.
BUT!
Making attunements obsolete is silly. You can still have them, just make them fun or interesting unto themselves, and the problem solves itself. Yes, you may have to decline the raid invite right now, but this time tomorrow you'll be able to accept, and not because you found 87 PUGs for:
(for Karazhan):
...and all of this is for the 10 man entry level raid in Burning Crusade. To even set foot inside! That this system was axed makes perfect sense to me.
Serpentshrine Cavern required a heroic Slave Pens run, then the killing of Gruul and Nightbane (which required attunement for Kara, but you weren't going to SSC with Kara gear anyway, so yeah).
Tempest Keep required a (decently lengthed) quest chain in SMV, and then three heroic runs (Shattered Halls, Slab, Arc), all which had their OWN attunements to even get keyed for the regular versions of, plus rep grinds required to enter them on heroic mode.
After getting in both of those, you would kill their end bosses (no easy feat), and were granted access into Hyjal.
Black Temple had you killing the first boss in Hyjal, as well as a bunch of huge separate questlines.
So yeah. That was BC. In Vanilla WoW, we had Onyxia's attunement, MC, BWL, and getting a key made for UBRS (which to this day I've never done), among others. There's been this overarching theme to WoW that in order to get to the good part, you needed to do a bunch of crap first.
Fast forward to now, where a lot of this has been dropped. It began at the end of BC, when they realized the same thing was happening to a huge chunk of their content that happened to Naxxolicious in Vanilla WoW. They slaved over hot mouse pointers all this time to create elite high end content for the raiders to enjoy, but not every person could be fucked to complete 25787 quests in order to zone in and try fighting the bosses. The content was being wasted.
Look at this chart, this is how you actually got attuned for BT:
Anyone in their right mind that looks at that just rolls their eyes and laughs (or cries?). The fact that the little circles don't even show the required quests needed to move from circle one to two makes it even worse. Those that actually DID this did not support the game. They played it, yes, but when people talk about WoW, and throw the 11 million number around, they aren't referring to those people. It was such a tiny fraction of the playerbase that it didn't matter.
All I'm trying to get it here is that I get it. And if you honestly don't, then you aren't playing a game when you log in to WoW. You're trying to kill yourself with WoW. Death by stomach ulcer. That's you. You are not the target demographic. Again, for simplicities sake I'm not going to go into the QQing over this. I fully understand why they did this. If you don't (or more likely, are trying to argue why what they did was wrong), then me explaining piecharts isn't going to sway you.
And yet! I still stand by the fact that attunements as a design tool are a huge *idea* that shouldn't be ignored. You can explore the lore of the area, and hint at something as yet unseen, but require diligent effort on the raid's behalf to unlock it. I think things like the attunement for Nightbane is just about perfect. You're already in Kara, and you finally kill the last boss. Malchezzar grans you entry to that raid's bonus boss. In my previously mentioned Black Dragonflight encounter, or my still unpublished Green one, I feel like those are the best ways to go about that. Either by having the last boss grant access, or (even better) by having a random drop that you collect 100 of and forge a key from. I particularly like the latter, but there's a few problems with it. One being that it requires farming of the instance, but in a raid environment, that's what people do. We don't need to pretend they don't... that's a pretty core gameplay mechanic. The repeated beating of the same content is something that just happens in MMOs. By having the item (when it drops) lootable by everyone in the raid (and the item being soulbound), you build up an individual attunement for your character. It appeases the crowd that thinks you shouldn't be able to just join a PUG and kill Nightbane your first time in Kara, and it allows people to progress each time they zone in to an instance.
What are a few other ideas we could do with this? Make it so instead of being granted "the Nightbane key", you earn one "Dungeon Z Bonus Key", and have the dungeon contain three Bonus Boss Doors. You can choose which boss to unlock for that raid ID, and next week you could unlock something else instead. As you farmed the instance, you would earn enough for two bonus keys, until eventually you could clear the entire place when you had enough to open all three doors in one reset (which would unlock a final one!). This isn't so much attunement as just gating access to various encounters, and spacing it out. Nihilum doesn't zone in and kill your expansion in 27 minutes, because they need to pace themselves, same as everyone else. There's always more encounters to be squeezed out of the same dungeon. Say you hate Karazhan, though, and have moved on to Boopy Joopy Castle. That's cool, grats. You don't need Tier 4 anymore, but there were people that only raided Kara the entire BC era, because they could only scrounge ten people up, or it was a good difficulty for them. Or they just farmed badges. Give them a reason to keep going back, or at least something new once in a while when they do.
Things like the opening of Sunwell gates used this mechanic to sread content out over a longer period of time. That or the opening of the AQ gates... server wide events that had everyone pitching in to "attune the server". That's a cool idea, but I never really took part in these events, because it all felt so abstract. While I'm sure there were hardcore raiders standing around making runecloth bandages all day to contribute to the war effort (for AQ), I would just check on the webpage from time to time and see how far along we were.
One thing I'd love to see would be guildwide attunements. Give people a reason to contribute to the guild itself, and a reason to stick around after it's done. You could have items that would bind to the guildbank once placed inside, and once enough were in the gbank, the GM could right click it to form a key. Officers would take a one use copy of this key with them to unlock a dungeon for that weeks ID, and only people with your guild tag could zone in to that ID. I dunno, this is just random brainstorming at this point.
The point of all this is that I think soloable quest chains relating to the dungeon's lore are not a horrible thing, though. If you aren't attuned, you still can't accept the invite I mentioned oh so long ago. But if you start now, and go do the chain, you can be ready for the next invite. I think that's an important motivator go get people out and playing the game. If it's a common chain, more people are pitching in and making groups to knock that chain out even faster, but grouping shouldn't be a strict requirement... no running dungeon 3, 4, and 5 to enter 6. That just feels like you're being herded thru the velvet ropes at the bank. A simple quest or chain shows that you want to be granted access, and are willing to take the time to do it, and allows you to shed light on important characters you'll meet inside the dungeon.
I'm running out of time this morning, and need to prep for a class in a few minutes, but I'm going to try and brainstorm up a few ideas for my own dungeon, and how I can handle an attunement for certain parts of it, if not the whole thing.
More later...
Friday, February 13, 2009
OK, I Tried EVE Some More
This post is officially 5 beers and a bit of Sake deep, but I felt I owed it to the community(!) to come clean after playing a bit more EVE. If I just go to sleep, I won't bother posting this later and it needs to be said (dammit!). I tried EVE agin tonight, and actually became more and more frustrated with it, until I saw in chat that you get a BETTER SHIP (zomg!) and better quest givers after having completed the tutorial. I did the tutorial beofre, a long time ago, but apparently forgot this little nugget of love.
So I made another toon. Ixobelle is dead, but "Ixo Belle" lives on! Doing the tutorial was actually really helpful (imagine that). Remember last post where I said it would be sweet to have a little co-pilot instead of being dumped in space alone? Yeah, that's the tutorial. I'm a noob for having not given it the full treatment the 1st time around, so sue me.
Turns out that basic things like 'warping to quest location X two jumps away' (which gave me such a hard time before) can be achived by just right clicking anywhere in empty space, and scrolling down the drop menu to where you choose the mission you're on, and do a 'go there now!' kinda thing. You still have to activate autopilot, but it all makes MUCH MORE SENSE after the tutorial.
Yes, the robo-chick voiceover is still pretty annoying. 'You need to mine some feldspar to continue. Go mine some feldspar. There's a feldspar asteroid right over there, dipshit, not sure what you're waiitng for, but I'm a robo-chick, and I have all of eternity to wait. No it's cool. Take your time, fleshheap.' etc etc.
Anyway, yeah. maybe more hangover posts to come in the morning, but there's also this 'foreigner tax awareness' seminar I need to get to, so ... maybe the followup will have to wait.
But it'll probably be coming EVE-NTUALLY (lol c wat i did ther?), which is more than I would have said about five hours ago. ;)
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Re: Dickbaggery
I've been wanting to use the word Dickbag here on the blog since Cronoo posted it in a comment, and I found it hilarious. But I couldn't really find a good use for it. It's not exactly a word you weave into everyday conversations, so I held onto it, and figured when the time was ripe I'd break it out.
I may have reached that point, and feel I can safely say that Gevlon "the Greedy Goblin" is a huge Dickbag.
Dickbaggery is nothing new, and has been around for as long as dicks have had bags attached to them. It certainly predates the internet, at any rate. The internet is a wonderful new avenue for spreading dickbaggery, though, and the convenience with which one can dickbag safely from their own home is allowing dickbags worldwide to attain new levels of pro-dick-tivity (see wut i did ther?).
Gevlon originally had a regular blog about making money in WoW, but it seems like the more attention it gets, the more it's become less about making gold, and more about how to maximize dickbaggery in general. His dickbagging posts seem to be the ones that generate the most interest, which saddens me as a human. One could say OH BUT IXO, PERHAPS YOU'RE JUST JEALOUS OF HIS TRAFFIX?, but I can honestly say that that isn't the case at all. I'm sure there are plenty of Pro-Nazi websites that get way more traffic than both of our blogs combined, but that doesn't influence me at all. It's just a horrifically shallow way to drum up traffic. Eminem probably owes 80% of his fame to the fact that he's not afraid to say the word "faggot" on a mic, and that alone generates followers (which also saddens me). I actually think Eminem is a really talented rapper (I like rap, so sue me), but a huge portion of his songs are just garbage trying to provoke controversy. But there's no such thing as bad publicity, or so they say. That, and the fact that Eminem is white, in an industry dominated by blacks. He stands out. But, sadly, being a dickbag in WoW doesn't make you a unique snowflake.
Likewise, it feels like 90% of Gevlon's posts are trying to provoke a response. We have a word for that on the intertubes: 'trolling'.
My own blog serves a few specific purposes: I discovered that I enjoyed the act of writing after writing for 2 years at NotAddicted, and wanted to continue to do so here, and more recently I'm trying to brainstorm general points for how the MMO genre can be improved upon, or think up encounters of my own design. Gevlon's blog basically amounts to the mission statement of: "There is no point to playing WoW unless you're making gold, and if you have to crap on everyone from Valley of Trials to your Naxx raidmates to do so, it's totally justified when you open your backpack and see those monies."
Not only is he the best player in all of WoW, he's completely justified in kicking anyone not up to his standards of play from any group, raid, or guild he's in, because there's no reason he should have to suffer through raiding with anyone less than 100% awesome. Once he's fully decked in epics from head to toe, wasting any time with those not decked in epics is a monumental waste of his time, and he shouldn't be expected to contribute back to their gearing. While I'm sure he spawned in the newbie zone wearing full iLevel 213 purples, and was able to solo all content from RFC to 3drake Sarth, he is in a unique position. The rest of us need to play with other people to raid, and realize that when we earn a piece of gear, it's thanks to the cooperation of the other 24 in the raid for being there. Bailing out of a guild the instant you get your own loot, or flatly refusing to bring your main that others helped to gear to raids afterwards: Dickbaggery.
I don't have an issue with telling random people who stand at the mailbox in org begging for gold to fuck off, but when it comes to guildmates? There's a line to be drawn. This is where we see eye to eye. When you give someone a guild invite, and they immediately jump on a level 9 asking for runs thru RFC, I'll roll my eyes or just not respond. But if it's someone I've played with for over a year, and they want to explore another class or something, I have no issues boosting them, because I know it will come back around, or EVEN IF IT DOESN'T, they're my friend. Gevlon has probably never been in a guild or known anyone in game for over a year though, and so perhaps that's where the dickbaggery comes from. Maybe he wasn't held enough as a child? Great, now I'm being a dickbag and making it personal.
The point is this, and it's a pretty short and simple one: If you want to be a dickbag, do it in KoTOR. You get NPC teammates that you can Force Choke and generally crap all over. Nobody REAL is affected by your dickbaggery, though. I have an easy time avoiding your blog, I just don't read it. But when the blogs that I do read reference your dickbaggery (or even worse, go further to say YOU KNOW HE'S GOT A POINT) I feel like the World of Warcraft dies a little bit more.
I'm not foolish enough to think that PUGs all give each other group hugs after wipes or give little pep talks before boss fights, but actively going out of your way to shit on other players because they haven't attained the same level of gear you have (on the shoulders of others that you promptly crapped on minutes later)?
Dick Baggery.
Grats on that. Have fun with your... oh. You're unguilded.
Hm.
So Yeah, I Played Some EVE...
Two nights ago I gave EVE a spin for a good hour or two. I had initially sat down to just check it out, and ended up playing longer than I had anticipated. Contrary to how that may sound, this isn't a post saying how awesome it was. Actually it's kind of the opposite, and I apologize in advance to all the EVE heads in the audience. In a span of 90 minutes or so, I completed the first two "missions" given to me by my tutorial agent.
Note: Blogger just took a shit all over my post, and I lost a good 5 or 6 paragraphs, right before it decided to "AUTOSAVE" for me. Thanks, assholes! I'm going to leave it here just because it really felt like this is what I wanted to say:mission="" fly="" location="" zap="" pirate="" loot="" intelligence="" his="" cargo="" let="" me="" back="" even="" first="" downloaded="" day="" went="" only="" took="" full="" world="" eve="" texture="" aren="" mountains="" shape="" herbs="" drop="" ships="" look="" re="" takes="" place="" y="" lot="" terrain="" since="" dl="" isn="" 68="" certainly="" not="" turn="" nose="" at="" small="" download="" 6="" gigs="" up="" running="" short="" amount="" but="" into="" launching="" m="" trying="" remember="" this="" off="" top="" honestly="" don="" care="" few="" steps="" wasn="" t="" rogue="" which="" also="" kind="" bad="" chicks="" because="" they="" awesome="" slave="" brassiere="" thing="" happening="" intro="" sort="" something="" soldier="" techie="" porn="" star="" chose="" make="" everything="" easier="" common="" introductory="" most="" rpgs="" whatever="" is="" brute="" force="" melee="" once="" get="" grasp="" basic="" go="" elegant="" clothie="" higher="" damage="" output="" suffers="" beat="" doubted="" researching="" bpos="" titan="" vessels="" 14="" so="" figured="" shoot="" as="" d="" be="" doing="" favor="" by="" focusing="" combat="" personality="" trait="" team="" background="" where="" character="" came="" former="" did="" work="" hard="" all="" these="" choices="" had="" no="" idea="" what="" any="" stat="" bonuses="" granting="" myself="" meant="" weird="" base="" spatial="" mixed="" traditional="" stats="" like="" charisma="" always="" tried="" choose="" one="" said="" bullets="" hurt="" more="" if="" then="" there="" flying="" space="" expected="" to="" have="" tan="" shoebox="" my="" initial="" was="" actually="" pretty="" impressed="" with="" how="" cool="" reaper="" i="" just="" flew="" around="" zooming="" on="" from="" different="" angles="" for="" a="" good="" 5="" minutes="" or="" s="" got="" some="" solar="" panel="" things="" that="" you="" can="" see="" distant="" stars="" thru="" and="" it="" blocks="" out="" hdr="" lighting="" when="" wing="" passes="" in="" front="" of="" the="" spaceships="" are=""
This was all as my post was entirely finished, and I was putting pictures in place as the final step before publishing it. It all has to do with the fact I split my posts after the teaser, and that's basically some black hat haxxors as far as they're concerned, so yeah. Fuck you, Blogger. Nothing is lamer than typing something, and liking it, then having to type it again and trying to remember everything you just wrote an hour ago. All the humor drains out of it, and it becomes some half assed recap of the main points.
Anyway, what I was trying to say at this point, which was way at the beginning of my post, and I GET TO TYPE ALL OVER AGAIN, went something like this:
Before I even get to the missions, let's talk about the part that takes place before any of that. EVE weighs in at a healthy 1.6 gigs, because it takes place in Space. There are no mountains to texture or herbs to plant on said textured mountains, so the download itself is pretty small. That's a good thing. I'm not some snob who will base the quality of a game on the size of the download (some people actually do this, it's ridiculous). Space is pretty empty for the most part though, and in the game you feel very disconnected from everything else. That's probably by design.
Anyway, before you even GET to space, you get to watch some cool intro movie showing how mankind ended up in space, and why the game is called EVE in the first place, and then you're dumped into this crazy arcane character creator. I'm trying to remember the process off the top of my head, and I didn't even understand half of it while it was happening, so I'm probably going to gloss over some stuff here. So sue me.
I basically chose the 'space slave chicks' faction out of the four choices, because they had some awesome 'space slave chick brassiere' thing happening in the intro movie. At that point, I had chosen my 'race' and was presented with what I imagine were class choices. Things like soldier, engineer, or space tramp. I went with soldier, under the assumption that shooting at things would be my primary focus during a 14 day trial. I doubted very much I would be training 3 month long skills, or researching advanced schematics for titan class vessels. Usually, in RPGs, the 'melee grunt' class is the easiest to pick up and play; as you begin to get a better grasp of how the game works, you can go back and roll a mage or engineer. Something that puts more focus on finesse, instead of standing there taking blows to the head while you swing an axe. The next choice had me choosing a player trait (loner, leader, follower), and a further choice asked for my background (liberated slave, factory worker, door to door dildo salesperson). All of these choices had ramifications in stats I didn't understand in the slightest. Things like Spatial Awareness and Memory, mixed in with more traditional stats like Charisma or Intellect. I then had 5 bonus points to spend as I pleased, but I kept getting the feeling I was doing it wrong. I imagined a future where I became heavily invested in EVE, and would kick myself in ass every day for putting those 2 points in Cognisance instead of Intermaritial Premonition. WHAT A FOOL I WAS!
Anyway. I basically just tried to put points in anything that was like "your guns hurt more", and just said fuck it. Finally I was out in space, and sitting in my new Reaper. The Reaper itself is the starter ship, and while I fully expected to be given an empty refrigerator box to fly around with, I was pleasantly surprised by how cool my first ship looked. It had some solar panel wing things that were like polarized sunglass lenses, and if i panned the camera around to look at a distant sun, then moved my wings in front of it, the HDR lighting would be blocked out, but I could still see the star through my wing. Dunno how to explain it, but it was really cool. Dude, it's friggin space, and space is inherently cool. I spent a good 5 minutes just zooming in and out and rotating the camera around my new ship. Checking out my new hot ass in the mirror, basically.
(Resume original post; fuck you very much, Blogger)
At this point, the tutorial was trying really hard to get my attention, and I skipped it, because I vaguely remembered having done it before. I seem to remember that it was one of those mind numbing ones that are like SCROLL YOUR MOUSE WHEEL IN AND OUT TO ZOOM THE CAMERA, LET'S DO IT TOGETHER 5 TIMES. YOU AREN'T DOING IT RIGHT. NO. IN AND OUT. NO. IT'S COOL, I CAN WAIT.
I began pushing buttons on my keyboard, and realized that typing any letter would begin entering text into the chat channel. Then I'd hit escape and it would bring up the 'options' menu. Having QHHBBCG just sitting in the chat window waiting for me to hit Enter to push it out into space made me a bit crazy, so I'd just Backspace and clear the chatbox, or just throw it out there, to the confusion of everyone else in chat. Everything is done by clicking or right-clicking, and maybe a few hotkeys like F1 or something. It's a different interface. I can dig it.
I made it to the space station (wow! cool!) pretty easily, and fumbled around in the interface for a bit and wound up with my first 'quest'. At this point things got a little weird. Quest descriptions include hyperlinks to locations, they're like webpages almost. You can click the link, and bring up the location on your map, check the solar system surrounding it, find out the socio political climate of the local regime, find out whether 76% of the inhabitants prefer waffles or pancakes, and which pokemon is this star system's mascot. It's a LOT of information. Clicking on anything else actually brings up the EVE FUCKING KNOWLEDGE BASE.
Now, I'm not sure how many of you guys do IT shit for a living, but when I see a "knowledge base" come up on my screen, I flash back to troubleshooting a bullshit install of Groupwise 5.5 on our Novell server back at Document Solutions, or figuring out how to make a Windows NT4 server communicate with the SuSE Linux Samba server on the production floor. I don't think "Happy Space Pirates Pew Pew". That's just me, though.
It was seriously just information overload, and it came right after the mysterious character creator, where I was positive I had picked all the 'wrong' choices. There's a reason when you roll an orc in WoW, the first thing you see after the intro movie is another orc with a big exclamation point over his head, and the first thing he tells you to do is 'swing yur ax at da pigs over dere'. There's no in depth number crunching on glancing blows versus level 73 raid bosses, or calculating haste rating versus spell crit for Warlocks with 3 points in Backdraft. All that shit is relevant eventually, but for a level 1 noob, that information would just make the game seem overtly obtuse.
Anyway, one thing I realized is that I could right click these links in my quest log, and choose "drive my ship there". My ship blasted through warp space or whatever, and I found my space pirate waiting to be killed. Right click the bad guy, and just watch while I pew pew until he was dead. Then I had to open my cargo hold and drag the quest item from his cargo hold into mine, then open my quest log and warpdrive back home. This is the dynamic for travel. It's fine. No one wants to sit there holding W to 'drive' thru space for 5 minutes to reach the other side of the solar system, and is actually pretty much on par with how I would imagine space travel is going to be in the future. But basically (again, comparing it to WoW, sorry sorry) it was like I started in Ogrimmar, was given a quest to go kill a Zehvra in Ratchet, and took the taxi right to the spot. Got off the flight path, killed the Zehvra, looted its hoof, and jumped back on the flight to Ogrimmar.
The followup quest had me going further out than the local star system to deliver the item... the quests themselves feel very familiar. Go kill Mob Z and loot item X. Bring it back to me. Okay, now take said item to the druid at Town P in Zone H. Don't get me wrong; EVEs quests don't suck, they're the same as every other MMO quest. I'm not really bashing it here, just giving an example.
So quest number two had me deliver the item to someone else two jumps away. Now here is where I got lost for a good 20 minutes, because try as I might, I couldn't right click and warp there anymore. I was able to bring it up on my map, and see it was two jumps away, and could even right click the destination and check pokemon mascot stats, average rainfall, and gross GNP of single latino farmers living in beige duplexes. Where there used to be a "warp here" option, it was now "set destination". Okay! It's set, now.... go! Nothing. Okay, let me try again. Set destination. Robo chick voiceover: I can't set the destination more than once. Ok! Unset destination, and.... set it again! Destination set. And..... go! Hmm. okay, fuckit. I'll fly there.
Chatbox: wwwwwwwwwww
Grrr.
I finally realized in my random clicking that right clicking on my ship in space (after undocked from the space station) has an autopilot option. Robo chick: Autopilot engaged. Woo! Two jumps, and two minutes later, I'm at the destination, and trying to figure out how to give the book to the dude here. Space stations aren't like towns where you walk around and interact with stuff, they're like applications... like Photoshop, where you drop down the "people and places" menu, and click "brush size" to select your cargo bay. Another ten minutes and noob asking asking around in chat, and I realized I left the book back at Space Station 1. Ok! Open my quest log, set destination! Undock! Autopilot go! Get the book! Open the quest log! Set destination! Autopilot! Woo!
It wasn't the first time I've left the quest item in my bank, but it was the first time the item was placed in the bank by the game instead of me. It just seems weird, but meh... again, level 1 orc in Durotar: you don't even realize there's a bank in the game until you've done a good 15 or 20 quests, and have passed all the way from Valley of Trials, to Razor Hill, alllll the way to the great big space station of Ogrimmar.
At this point I was getting ready to log out, but remembered that in EVE, skills are learned in real time, and logging out without setting something to 'go' was a huge waste of real time. So I poked around, and was again confronted by how little I knew about... like, everything. What should I train? Mining level 2? Hybrid small class pulse beam railguns level 4? By going 'soldier', I already had a bunch of weapon skills. Way more than I needed, and would probably ever be able to use in a 14 day trial. My ship itself had a few slots open where I could plunk some guns or armor down, but I had zero idea what any of them did. In the auction house, I browsed 'guns', not knowing which would be equipable on my ship anyway. Was my ship a paladin, incapable of wielding a staff? What if I trained librams on my rogue? Lol? I ended up settling on "sharpshooter", which just increased my accuracy at long ranges, regardless of weapon type. It was a 6 hour train, and would be done before I woke up the next day. Um, okay. Some of the other options took 6 days to train, and some 1 hour. I felt like 6 hours was a good balance, but the joke's on me, since I might never log back in again.
In all, one of the more exciting elements of EVE is the interpersonal relationships built, but there's really no way to experience that in a 14 day trial. You can read about Goonswarm backstabbing BoB for 80 gazillion ISK, but you aren't going to be participating in shit like that for a good 3 years if you started playing today. It almost feels like they should give out a 3 month trial, and by then you feel honestly invested in your ship and corporation, and are convinced that subscribing is the way to go. At that point, too, you'd probably subscribe for a year at least. At the end of a 14 day day trial, you MIGHT subscribe for a month, but in my case, it's not likely.
So yeah. That's EVE. From a "space game" standpoint, it has a lot going for it. If you're into knowledgebases and ever wished you could fly Microsoft Excel to the farthest reaches of the universe, you have your game. I guess I'm not the target demographic, as my gaming tastes fall somewhere to the right of "reading wikipedia" but fall woefully short of "ZOMG HALO 5: Teh Teabaginator" at the far end of the scale. Once I'm fully invested in a game, I might find a lore article on Wowwiki to be interesting (hell, I've read like 5 or 6 of the World of Warcraft books), and can fully nerd out on DPS spreadsheets, but this is after having played the game for 4+ years. Being confronted by so much at such an early stage was more of a turn off than a glimpse at exciting possibilities.
Crimson Starfire over at Word of Shadow recently had a chance to play CoH all weekend with his girlfriend. He mentions a point in the past where he tried to get her to play WoW, and while at first she found it fun to just run around Darnassus or whatever herbing Silverleaf, he was trying to dump too much of end game mentality on her. Let's hurry up and get to the good part! That was a huge turn off for her, and drove her away from the game. By taking it slow with CoH, they had a good time, and weren't overwhelmed by the finer details. It all comes back to the Valley of trials in WoW for me. Give me an axe (the Reaper was a very cool first impression), but instead of sending me to Dalaran to pick up my first mission, let's just have a co-pilot on board and a few missions already in my journal. We can explore this little corner of the universe together, and once I get my feet wet, I can dump them off on the nearest asteroid and blow that popsicle stand for something bigger and better.
