EvE Online: Choose your own adventure

I had originally planned this to be a test drive article, seeing what I could get out of Space-em-up MMO EvE online in a day of play. However after starting a trial account and doing my first day I got the feeling that to base my experience of EvE on a day’s worth of play would do it a disservice (more than it would other MMOs). This is a game that invites you in for the long-haul and rewards you as such.

Space is definitely pretty, beat that lens flare JJ Abrams 

Right from the word go the game challenges you to find your own way to play it. The tutorial missions go over the very basics (how to mine, scan and fight), fit you out with a few ships and take you through the process of flying in space. After that you are left to your own devices, to the point that in any section of space another player is free to attack you (although there is an interstellar police force who will seek vengeance on your behalf).

After those first missions it really is up to you what you do, but finding some way of making ISK (the game’s currency) is something of a prerequisite to conducting activities in the more dangerous areas of space (known as low-sec and null-sec). To fit your ship out with anything more than the basic equipment you need a source of income and that is where one of EvE’s most famous features comes in to play…. The Economy!

EvE’s Economy is primarily player driven and so almost anything that you buy you are buying from a player (the same goes for selling). This allows players to carve out almost any niche they want in order to make money within the game. There are corporations (player run organisations, similar to guilds in other games) and players who make their money buying goods in systems where the price is low and freighting them to systems with a higher price. There are miners who look at what minerals are needed where and then go off hunting for them. There are even a large number of pirate organisations who dog some of the more profitable routes in order to hijack those cargo or minerals.

In addition to ISK the other limiting factor on what you are capable of is skills you have because in order to use any ship or piece of equipment you need to have the correct skill trained. The skills themselves start off basic (mining, salvaging, trade etc.) but then allow you to train more complex skills (for example a refining skill for a particular ore type). The skills themselves improve not by use, but by passive training, you add a skill to your que and it will take a given time before you go up to the next skill level. The skills themselves train in real time, even when you are offline and given there are skills which take 20+ days to train this is a good thing.

This is one of the more intimidating aspects of the game, it does not hold your hand, you need to put a bit of thought in to what you actually want to do right from the off. Fortunately there are always people in the rookie help channel who are willing to share their expertise. Following getting my pretty destroyer blown up during a level 1 combat mission I got some solid advice and an EvE friend out of just asking what went wrong.

 That man is small, that ship is far away!

While EvE’s subs numbers a less than that of other MMOs there really is a strong sense of community, born out of an understanding that you cannot really charge in and expect everything to be alright. Everyone there has made mistakes similar to my destroyer incident and most people are pleased to share their knowledge on what they think works best.

As for me, I am going to stick with EvE and give a proper summary at the end of my 14-day trail. Although I don’t think that will spell the end of my adventures in eve!

Raid Rage: Do we really have the right?

Having previously stated that no-one talks in looking for raid I now have to revise this opinion and not for the better. My LFR group has just wiped for the 3^rd time on Megaera and (since the first wipe) the instance chat has been filled with a lot of vitriol directed at one of the tanks for not knowing their job.

‘FFS’ and ‘OMG ur crap’ are flying left, right and centre, and, in the time it takes for the raid to vent its collective spleen, I began to think about the whole situation. I understand that there is a degree of frustration in dying, suddenly that quick and easy run of ours has become not so quick and easy, but is that sufficient reason to repeatedly insult the tank?

To give a bit of background after the first wipe one of the two tanks admitted that they had not done this fight before and so were not 100% sure on what to do. This elicited such knowledgeable responses and ‘leave the raid’ and ‘go read a guide’ before the other tank tells them to focus on the blue head (we are fighting a hydra monster, complete with multiplying heads) and then switch, when the group shifts its focus.

SO the second fight does indeed go on for longer, but when we switch to another ahead the learner tank switches to the wrong head, cue wipe and further tirades of abuse. I am not exactly sure how the tank was supposed to know which of the two other heads was the right one (given it starts with 3). I have a look at those people giving the tank grief, find that all of them are performing the damage role (the same role as me and 16 others in the raid of 25) and begin to wonder whether they have ever tried to tank a raid.

The damage class within raids are the hammer to the tanks anvil, dishing out punishment to all comers. However (within LFR at least) it’s the easiest role to fulfil, providing your gear is suitably high and you copy what the other damage people are doing you can get by without too much trouble. In fact you can die at the beginning of a boss fight and get resurrected at the end without too much comment, other than the occasional jibe at how much of a ‘noob’ you are. For when you are damage you are important collectively, but not necessarily individually.

However tanking is a completely different ball-game; you are one of two in a 25-person group and if you die or make a wrong move the raid often wipes (dies). A good tank can make a heck of a difference within a raid, but these good tanks have to come from somewhere and try each raid for the first time. I guess I felt that members of the raid were being unfair to that particular tank and that maybe more constructive advice could have been given. Again it goes back to this idea that a raid should be more than the sum of its parts, it should be people working together to overcome a challenge, even if part of that challenge is that a person in a critical role has not done a particular raid before. I think that if between the first and second wipe someone had explained to the tank exactly how the fight went down and at what point they should be on what head it could have gone differently.

Therein lies the problem of which I’ll happily admit being part of, if I knew the fight then I could fill that role, but I don’t. To be frank I have gotten lazy in LFR, I know that as a damage role I can pick one of the other 16 damage dealers and copy their attack patterns if I am not sure. So maybe that’s the solution, maybe we should all try to be familiar with the parts each of the roles (healer, tank and damage) should play within each boss fight, then when someone who is uncertain is stepping up for the first time we can be there to support.

Don’t get me wrong, not every raid goes down like the above, but when it does stick by the player (whatever role they may be) and give them constructive advice on what they need to do. At the same time there will always be those who rush in and ignore whatever advice is offered by anyone and there is definitely scope for kicking them, but everyone deserves a chance.

Wasteland 2 versus Take That

Back in the old days it was all isometrics, random encounters and big choices!

Nostalgia, ‘the good ol days’, the ‘when I was young’ time, call it what you will, no matter who you are I reckon that there are some days or periods in your life that you would love to revisit and relive, but with all that you know now. It seems that for a number of us this would include playing some of the old computer games we used to love because ‘they don’t make ‘em like that anymore’ and now thanks to kickstarter it looks like they might start ‘making ‘em like that’ again, but where will this road take us? 

I am nostalgic, one of the strongest memories I have to this day is the first time I booted up Fallout 2 and heard those epic words ‘war, war never changes’, I can also clearly remember marvelling the sheer number of discs that the original Baldur’s Gate came on. It’s therefore no surprise that I own the Baldur’s Gate enhanced edition and was excited to see the progress being made on Wasteland 2, in many ways the precursor to the fallout series. However as I watched the latest video on the game, which looks brilliant by the way, and heard them talk about the exciting features of the game I found myself asking ‘well what’s actually new’? Don’t get me wrong, in many ways a big part of my craves a new top down RPG to be that new fallout 2 with up to date graphics and will almost certainly buy it on that basis alone, however part of me wants something more.

It is around this point that the analogy that titles this piece began to form within my head and yeah at first glance it looks a bit weird, particularly if you hate Take That! Now when they were first formed Take That were THE boy band in many ways and were incredibly successful. So the distress caused by Robbie leaving and then the splitting of the band were only to be expected, for the sake proving a point we are ignoring boyzone here! When the band reformed, they did not do it in order to do a greatest hits tour of their old material, they had become a new entity. Yes they did perform a lot of old favourites, but the focus was on the new material which reflected the change within the band themselves from a boy band to a man band. The new songs they performed resonated with old and new fans alike, building on what each of them had learned from their time apart. It would have been easier to just do that greatest hits tour and give the public exactly what it wanted, however they chose to give fans something they didn’t even realise they were lacking.

I guess that’s my one concern with Wasteland 2, I don’t just want a greatest hits of their previous material. Yes, I do want it to have that feel which satisfies my nostalgia, but I want them to show me something different (although I’ll admit it I am not sure exactly what I want). In their kickstarter video they mention that there will be weighty moral choices, well that’s cool but sort of par for the post-apocalyptic course (see the decision about megaton in fallout 3). I am particularly interested to see how they execute this, I want to have to agonise over the ‘correct’ choice (and those who it will affect) and want to see constant reminders of my choice and its impact.

So that’s the gauntlet in front of Wasteland 2, don’t just give us an updated fallout 2, surprise us, amaze us and show us something new that will have a future generation looking back and saying ‘they don’t make ‘em’ like that anymore!’

Crafting in WoW: See you at 80!

For me, one of the most important aspects of any online game is the crafting system (if there is one). There is nothing quite like the feeling of being able to gather up materials and put them together to create some awesome gear. I love to be able to look at something, say ‘I made that’ and then beat someone over the head with it.

What do you mean I cannot make anything useful!

This is why when I started playing World of Warcraft for the first time (back in the days before even the first expansion) it blew my mind. In the offline RPGs I had being playing previously there was maybe a castle to upgrade or bits of a sword to collect, but never had I seen such a crafting tree. 

When my first ever character set out in to Azeroth determined to be a tailor I was excited with the possibilities. The cloth I needed seemed to drop often enough that I always seemed to make something level appropriate and useful. Back then there was no dungeon finder and so (for someone who did not know many other players) the great loot from the dungeons was often off-limits.

So when I returned to Azeroth this summer with my panda monk, I looked forward to being decked out in some brilliant home-made leather (at least for a while). However, for a game that has revamped zone and introduced new classes, the structure of the crafting system appears unchanged (at the lower end of the spectrum). In fact, now that the levelling speed has been increased, you often find yourself leaving a zone before you have reached the skinning level required for the mobs in the next one. Also there seems to be a mismatch between the mobs that drop the required leather and the level requirements for the item created. For example Dusky Leather Armor required 10 Heavy Leather and has a level requirement of 30, from wow-professions (an excellent professions guide) I know that the yetis in Feralas are my best source, but these are 5 levels above the required level for the item. So by the time I am capable of taking them down in sufficient numbers the item itself that I set out to make is obsolete.

Then there is the dungeon finder, back in the old days it was hard to get a group together for a dungeon (particularly if you did not have an active guild) and so it was quite hard for players to get the dungeon rewards (which often contained some really good gear). Now that all you need to do is que and wait for a group to form people can run the dungeons repeatedly and quickly, thus they are easily able to get gear which is superior to that which can be crafted. I am not saying the dungeon finder is a bad thing, it has allowed me to experience parts of the game I would not be able to otherwise, but it would be nice to see them make changes to the crafting system to make it feel more relevant earlier on. Maybe there could be more recipes dropping in those earlier dungeons or a special dungeon resource that can be used to craft amazing lower-level gear.

I am by no means saying that the crafting system is bad; once you get out of vanilla and outlands it seems to find its stride again. However I would love to feel that sense of achievement I feel when crafting an item with my max level paladin, when I am crafting something for my mid-level monk. I don’t want to be grinding my crafting skill through to level 70-80 in order for it to become relevant. That said, its time for me to go farm fel scales, see you later (a lot later!).

I am going to outland, I may be some time.

Is there anybody out there: My first World of Warcraft Raid

This is it, the big one! I know the skills I should be using, the features of each of the bosses and the average level of my items has just tripped over the minimum requirement for my first ever World of Warcraft raid; The Guardians of the Mogu’Shan!

These large scale instances have always been for me the light at the end of WoW’s long levelling tunnel. That’s not to say I have not enjoyed levelling, I have, but these instances are what everybody talks about; the unique boss fights, the inevitable wipe and the amazing drops and so it was with a lot of anticipation that I clicked the enter raid button presented by the ‘looking for raid’ feature.

I am using the ‘looking for raid’(LFR) feature because my tiny guild does not have enough level 90s to field a full 25-person raid team and so I am grouped with other randoms and given a minor increase in stats to account for the fact that we have never worked as a team before. In addition the bosses themselves are also slightly easier and so if you are being a purist about this I guess you could consider it be the diet-coke of the raiding world. I am also playing a damage role, meaning that my job is to cause as much damage as humanly possible, without becoming such a big target that the boss attacks me instead of one of the two tanks (whose job it is to maintain the attention of bosses and baddies at all times!) or requiring too much attention from the healers in the group. I assumed, given the scale of it, that our raid leader would do a quick ‘hello, this is the plan..’ before we set off, however I was wrong……

It's a shame there is no Karaoke in this pub. 'All by myself!!!!!!'

The first thing I noticed on entering the raid was how quiet the raid chat was, once a handful of ‘hellos’ we just seemed to charge forward without so much as a by your leave. The instance itself felt suitably epic, with its giant elegantly decorated rooms and the instance itself felt like it had a greater tie to the story than some of the dungeons I did in order to gear up for the instance. With little or no communication we tore through the monsters leading up to the first boss (Three stone dogs) and yes we did pause, but only so that, without saying a word, people could cast their stat boosting spells and recharge their mana/health. The fight itself felt impressive and I felt a certain pleasure in delivering the killing blow on one of the dogs myself, this was further enhanced when one of them dropped a piece of gear I could use. Again we charged onwards to the next boss, again a short pause followed by a quick, but intense boss fight. It was about this time that my slightly slow brain seemed to realise something, the majority of other people seemed to know exactly what to do and when.

The people in this LFR did not need to talk to anyone because most of them already knew how each fight played out and how they could fulfil their role most effectively. The LFR system rewards its users with valor points for each raid completed, which is then used to buy/upgrade high level gear and so of course people are going to run the same raids day in, day out!

With the final boss down and without so much as a goodbye the group disbanded and I was left to think about what I had just experienced. Yes, I had fought some really cool boss fights, but I still felt like something was missing, I entered the raid wanting to be part of a team that worked together to take down incredible foes and instead it felt like multiple individuals attacking the same target. Then 

I understood that that was not the point of LFR, LFR serves to provide access to end game content, so that people like me (whose guilds cannot field a raid team) are not cut out completely from a major aspect of the game and on that score it succeeds. However I have now realised that I need more than that from my raids, I want to be a part of a team and so, given my guild has about 5 active members, I think it might be time to look for some new friends to play with.

Even attacks one the world bosses are pretty silent!

What have been your large-scale instance experiences in MMOs in general? Which MMO do you think has the best end game material? I’d love to hear your thoughts.