Canada Day Resolutions For 2012

Another half year has gone by, and Canada's national holiday remains well positioned for a mid-year look at my New Year's Resolutions.  Let's see how things have gone.

WoW (Pre-Pandaria)

• Complete quests of Cataclysm: I'm still not finished with Hyjal, Twilight Highlands, or Firelands on my main - I tend to work on dailies first, and there are enough dailies that I haven't gotten around to these.
• Finish out armor set from 4.3 heroics
• Use the raid finder to kill Deathwing
• Cap out TBC-era dungeon reputations: Most of these rep's stalled out at Revered when the content was new.  Two expansions later, these heroics are quick and easy rep farming.

These have gone remarkable as predicted.  As of now, I have completed the quests of Hyjal and Twilight Highlands, I have beaten the raid finder, and five-man dungeons hold no more loot for me.  I have not yet completed the Firelands storyline, primarily because it's gated by daily quests.  I also have a way to go with both Therazane and Wildhammer factions.  Overall, if the sun sets on the Cataclysm era, I won't have many regrets in terms of goals.

Pandaria, on the other hand, seems poised to arrive no earlier than late August and possibly as late as October, with Blizzard's announcement that the expansion cinematic will be unveiled on August 16th.  Not exactly what I was hoping to hear, though I suppose I should have known better to hope that Blizzard could manage an expansion in a "mere" 20 months. Meanwhile, I suppose I might as well go on the record now and predict that the 5.0 PTR will hit within a few days of the 28 August Guild Wars 2 launch, since that's how Blizzard always does it. 


LOTRO

• Reach the new level cap on my main (currently 67 of 75)
• Don't feel obliged to "save" content for future level cap increases

LOTRO is an odd duck out this year.  I'm currently at level 70, halfway though the new levels for the Isengard expansion even though I'm only just barely into its content.  I would really like to finish the remaining content before the next expansion so that I'm not once again forced to choose between skipping high quality content and outleveling the new stuff.   Unfortunately, LOTRO never quite seems to make it to the top of my plate.  I plan to work on this one sometime over the summer.


Rift

• Finally reach the level cap
• Investigate the endgame

I did reach the level cap, but I continue to find the game's solo content (and especially the dailies) underwhelming.  The lore has failed to make any impression on me, and solo combat feels like it drags out - probably intentional so that the second and further players in a leveling group actually have something to do.  As an aside, I'd rate this game as probably the best out there if you're spending most of your time in a group (small or raid) of folks you know, but unfortunately that's not me.

I'd say that the monthly fee is what is holding me back, but I've actually got a time card in my back pocket and I haven't even been tempted to use it.  Perhaps with the new expansion?

EQ2

• Enjoy world events on my main without having to subscribe
• Try to complete current dungeon content
• Betray to the evil side to see content, collect houses, perhaps try the Troubadour

This entire heading was somewhat blindsided by the surprise decision to raise the level cap in April's game update.  As far as I can tell, this is the new content that wasn't ready in time to be included in the "optional" expansion last fall - it feels quite a bit like it was balanced for players who have access to "optional" mercenaries.  Fortunately, I was able to abuse the triple station cash + SC store sale loophole to pick up the expansion and six months worth of game time (a loophole they have finally closed, albeit with typical poor communication) for $20.  Sometime between now and November I'd like to reach the new cap and also betray over to the evil side to test drive troubadour (probably betraying back to good and Dirge before the gold time runs out). 


DCUO

• Gear my main up for DLC content
• Work on one or more alts to see the other storylines

After hitting the level cap, this game has largely fallen off my plate.  The focus of the game is grinding group content for gear, and, unlike most MMO's, SOE has thus far stuck with strict tiering requirements.  New DLC content continues to strictly require gear from the old instances - even the solo content in the DLC I paid for can't be accessed without grinding gear in PUGs that frankly don't want players like myself in their groups.  Oh well, at least I can spend my SC in SOE's other offerings.  

SWTOR

• Play one or more storylines

So far, so good, Trooper story complete, Sith Warrior in progress. I will almost certainly do the Agent story next, since that's a well-regarded plot that covers an additional class buff archetype, allows the Chiss race, and would also let me try a class that can heal.  I could hypothetically chart a course through all eight class stories, but I'm not inclined to go quickly, with new legacy options potentially opening up over time.

Star Trek Online

• "By the time the dust settles, there will probably be at least a dozen major MMO's I haven't played that originally launched as subscription games - I could literally try a different one every month for 2012."

I'm nowhere near a dozen, but I have one in Star Trek Online. Ironically, the main reason why I tried it when I did was because of an anniversary promo for an Odyssey-class cruiser that I eventually cashed in and christened the U.S. Faydwer.  I'm definitely spending much less time in game now, but there were enough unique things about this game that I'm glad I took the time to try it out.

Other MMO's
DDO is perennially in this category, because I'm still sitting just shy of level 8 on my highest level character.  Everyone gets a free respec as part of the new expansion, but there are also a fair number of things that got blown up - changes to hit and spell mechanics, with more changes to the entire enhancement system yet to come.  DDO is very unforgiving when it comes to respecs - for the most part they are cash store only - so I'm inclined to wait and see what happens with the enhancement revamp before I mess with any characters, new or old.

I've also spent about an evening each in Aion, EQ1, and the Secret World Beta.  I haven't really played Runes of Magic, in which I have a mid-level character and which now offers a new race with new classes.  I will probably try Mechwarrior Online when it goes live for the free-to-play masses. Vanguard is going free to play, though I didn't exactly stick with it when I paid for access last year. 

Beyond all of that, I hesitate to predict what other MMO's I may or may not try over the year.  I have a fair number of clients for free to play games that I have yet to try installed on my computer.  I'm not chomping at the bit to be first in line for either Secret World or Guild Wars 2.  The bottom line continues to be that any new game is really going to have to fight for more than a one night trial on my current schedule.

PS3
So far, I've finished off Assassin's Creed II, Arkham City (though I enjoyed this enough to try it again on the higher "new game plus" difficulty, which allows use of all the bat-gadgets from the beginning), and a chunk of the Tomb Raider trilogy.  The push for Uncharted 3... did not end so well.  Other games on my playlist include Infamous 2, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, followed by Revelations (and eventually followed by ACIII), and perhaps FFXIII-2.

PC Building
I did indeed build my first desktop gaming PC this winter.   Overall, it's been a pretty big success so far.  I am still running with an old graphics card salvaged from my old desktop, primarily because it doesn't seem to have any problems with any of the games I'm playing.  I'm in wait-and-see mode on the nVidia GTX 660/660Ti, which will supposedly blow the current mid-range cards out of the water - or at least drive their prices down dramatically, such that I could snag an upper-mid-range card.  I'd be in more of a hurry on this front except that I just am not finding that I need the increased performance on any games that I play. 

The Blog
I published 84 posts in the first half of the year, which continues a bit of a downward trend.  I haven't hit 15 posts in a month since February.  Part of that trend may be that I stuck with both STO and SWTOR beyond the points in either game where I have significant new things to say about them on a near-daily basis.  Part of it is longer posts like this one.  And part is life - a trend that I don't expect to change (in fact, quite the contrary).

In any case, thank you for reading, happy Canada Day to our neighbors in the True North, Strong and Free, and here's to the rest of the year!

Guide to Moving/Copying MMO Client Installs

As I've been setting up and testing the new computer, one of the questions I ran into is how to avoid re-downloading the 100+ GB of MMO clients I had installed on my old machine.  I tried Googling the question of how to move/copy an MMO installation and got very incomplete/fragmentary information which varied by game.  I decided it would be quicker to break out the portable hard drive and test for myself.

All testing was done on a fresh 64-bit Windows 7 install.  I was able to log into a character on every game except where noted below.  This is presented for informational use only, and PVD takes no responsibility for any technical support or performance issues.

World of Warcraft

• Game Version: Cataclysm Patch 4.3
• Files copied: Entire WoW directory (28.3 GB, including screenshots and UI mods)
• File to launch: Launcher
• Comments: No issues, game immediately launched as if it had always been there.

Lord of the Rings Online

• Game Version: Rise of Isengard, Update 5
• Files Copied: Entire Directory (14.3 GB)
• File to launch:  Turbine Launcher
• Comments: The first time I tried to log in, the launcher crashed just after selecting my server.  Undeterred, I tried again, and got in fine.  I'm pretty sure I remember the same thing happening on my other machine the last time I did a clean install. 

Dungeons and Dragons Online

• Game Version: Update 12
• Files Copied: Entire Directory (6.46 GB)
• File to launch:  Turbine Launcher
• Comments: Same issue as LOTRO, probably unsurprising since both are the same engine.  Second login attempt went fine

Runes of Magic

• Game Version: 4.0.6
• Files Copied: Entire Directory (10 GB)
• File to launch:  Runes of Magic
• Comments: No issues - real relief to have this one installed fully patched, because their patcher is a very slow and painful process.  

EQ2 (streaming client)

• Game Version: Game Update 62 (Age of Discovery launch update)
• Files Copied:EQ2/assetcache folder (14.2 GB)
• File to launch:  Launchpad
• Comments: I did this one by downloading the installer for the streaming client, installing it, and then closing the downloader.  I then added the assetcache folder to the new install.  This folder contains all of the fixed data about content (e.g. textures, music, etc).  After copying this over, I re-launched the downloader and let it mop up what was left, which was under one GB.  No issues.  

DCUO

• Game Version: Game Update 8
• Files Copied: Entire Directory (17.7 GB)
• File to launch:  Launchpad
• Comments: This time I encountered an issue - the launchpad took my login and downloaded the updates, but I did not have any version of DirectX installed on the machine and was not able to launch the client.  I downloaded the DCUO installer from the DCUO website, and it offered the option to "repair" an existing installation (rather than install a new one or uninstall an existing one).  I selected this option, it downloaded the missing DirectX, and the game launched smoothly with extremely limited download time.

Rift

• Game Version: Don't remember, probably 1.5 or 1.6.
• Files Copied: Entire Directory (~10 GB)
• File to launch:  RiftPatchLive
• Comments: I initially tried running the "Rift" executable before I got DCUO up and running and received the same error message for missing DirectX.  Apparently DCUO installed a version that Rift was happy with because the game launched without issue.   It's entirely possible that Trion also offers a repair tool that could have rescued this issue, I just happened to have done DCUO's first. 
  
  Update: I initially copied this to Program Files on my SSD for faster loading, but noticed that screenshots were not saving, apparently because Windows does not want the client writing to the program directory.  I moved the game to Users/Public/Games and the problem was resolved.  

SWTOR (see note)

• Game Version: Thanksgiving Beta Weekend
• Files Copied: Entire Directory (18.5 GB)
• File to launch:  Launcher
• Comments: I don't actually own an SWTOR account yet, so I don't know for sure whether this works.  The patcher patched itself and gives me a login screen, but I can't download the updates (or log in, obviously).  This entry is included primarily because people often find posts like this through Google months after they've been written - I will edit this once I actually have a SWTOR account to verify that it works, but I do not anticipate issues. 

Conclusions I've heard conflicting things about whether MMO clients could be copied without issues, but it appears that the modern MMO patcher is able to recreate whatever it needs to function (e.g. registry keys) if deposited in a new location with minimal issues.  This has a few practical implications:

• If you're moving from a still-functioning older machine to a new one ,you can move the data over via a portable hard drive, network sharing, or whatever other means are at your disposal.  You could probably even use multiple DVD-R's for clients that won't fit on one disc, as long as you can break it up and reassemble it correctly.   
• If you are using an SSD that has room for some, but not all of your MMO's and you do not play all of them every month, it is possible to copy over your current favorite, and send it back to the data drive the next time your subscription lapses.
• If you have just the one hard drive (with enough empty space available to duplicate the clients you want to copy) and you need to reinstall Windows for whatever reason, you could, in principle, create a new partition and send your clients (and/or other files, though I would definitely back up anything that can't be easily re-downloaded given time) into that area for temporary storage.  Then you can format the original system partition, reinstall windows, recover the files, and remove the partition. 

Breaking news?  Probably not, but it was useful for me, so perhaps it will be useful for someone else out there.

New Year's Resolutions for 2012

Having detailed what I did (and what it cost) for last year, it's once again time to look ahead to the new year.  The year ahead has a blessing and a curse; there are many games I would like to play, and I can already tell that there won't be time for all of them. 

WoW (Pre-Pandaria)

• Complete quests of Cataclysm: I'm still not finished with Hyjal, Twilight Highlands, or Firelands on my main - I tend to work on dailies first, and there are enough dailies that I haven't gotten around to these.
• Finish out armor set from 4.3 heroics
• Use the raid finder to kill Deathwing
• Cap out TBC-era dungeon reputations: Most of these rep's stalled out at Revered when the content was new.  Two expansions later, these heroics are quick and easy rep farming.

The picture with Pandaria will depend a bit on how it shapes up and when it arrives.  I will very likely level my main to the new cap and complete the new dungeons the requisite once each.  I will also likely level the requisite Pandaren Monk through the newbie zone, but I haven't felt any pressing unmet need for more WoW alts and I don't know that the newest additions will change that.  If Pandaria arrives before my annual pass runs out in October, I may do more work on the new expansion's endgame.

LOTRO

• Reach the new level cap on my main (currently 67 of 75)
• Don't feel obliged to "save" content for future level cap increases

I had a bad experience with LOTRO's original launch - though it took me several months to get into the 40's, it took Turbine about a year to produce enough content to make leveling to the original cap a pleasant experience for solo players.  Since then, I've been very nervous about completing content at the level cap, for fear that the next expansion would be similarly lacking in sources of exp.

Fortunately, Turbine's actions since have proved my fears unfounded - even if some future expansion does launch without enough solo quests, there are now enough forms of repeatable content, such as daily quests and skirmishes, to make up the missing exp if needed.

Rift

• Finally reach the level cap
• Investigate the endgame

Rift spent most of 2011 as the best MMO that just never reached the top of my to-do list month after month.  While I respect the reasoning behind Trion's pro-subscription stance, the need to set aside a month at a time to focus on this game like it was still 2010 is definitely hurting this game's appeal in the crowded marketplace.  I would gladly pay by the day or the week, but this game is not sufficiently better than its competition for me to be excited about setting aside an entire month to play it.

In any case, Trion is supposedly going to give me 3 days of game time as compensation for their servers being hacked, which will get me to the game's level cap.  From there, it will be a question of how much I like what I see.

EQ2

• Enjoy world events on my main without having to subscribe
• Try to complete current dungeon content
• Betray to the evil side to see content, collect houses, perhaps try the Troubadour

The good news is that I no longer need to use a throw-away EQ2X alt to see holiday and world event content in this game, now that I can have year around access to my main. The bad news is that my progress kind of screeched to a halt due to Velious' highly regimented dungeon progression, and attempting to deal with the plat cap for non-subscribers is not going to make this easier.   

Will new dungeons continue to ramp up in difficulty, even though the current ones are already unpopular for PUG's?  Will there be new solo content?  Or will they tune all future content to require the use of NPC mercenaries, and thus the purchase of the AOD expansion, much as all solo quest rewards are now "legendary" quality to require the purchase of gear unlock tokens? 

One project that I am seriously considering is taking my main and having her betray over to the evil faction to see the revised Freeport content, collect some houses in the evil cities (you don't lose houses when you switch sides, though you will be kill-on-sight with the local guards as appropriate), etc.  This might also be an opportunity to take the Troubadour class for a spin, though doing so may or may not require a paid class unlock.  I've never been interested in sticking with alts in EQ2 to date, so I might as well take my main over to see what the rest of the content looks like. 

DCUO

• Gear my main up for DLC content
• Work on one or more alts to see the other storylines

Ironically, my challenges with DCUO are similar to what I'm facing in EQ2.  The currency cap is not friendly to non-subscribers, and will likely keep me out of the game's more challenging content.  This, in turn, affects my ability to gear up to qualify for the content that I actually am willing/able to run (and pay for).

SWTOR

• Play one or more storylines

So, I hear there's some game that's like an MMO about Star Wars or something?  :)

Seriously, my current computer situation (more on this in a minute) has me holding off on SWTOR, but I fully expect to pick up this game and spend some time working on the various storylines in 2012. I had originally figured that I would play a Sith Inquisitor based on the theory that I can play a guy with a gun in any number of other gameworlds.  However, I ended up really liking both the personalities and the gameplay for both the Smuggler and the Imperial Agent.

Other MMO's
So now I'm on my seventh subheading without having covered DDO or Runes of Magic (both of which I have spent money on in the past).  Lineage 2 just went free to play in North America, and Aion became the first major MMO I'm aware of in which the European market beat the North American to a non-subscription switch (which I assume will force the US servers to follow suit, if that was not already planned).  By the time the dust settles, there will probably be at least a dozen major MMO's I haven't played that originally launched as subscription games - I could literally try a different one every month for 2012.

I don't think I'm going to go to that extreme, but it raises a point about how tough the current marketplace is for new entrants. Not only must version 1 of your new game be competitive with version 7 of the competition's, but your game has a $50 buy in and a subscription while their's has no buy-in.  In my case, even the time to download the client (and the hard drive space to store yet another one!) and try a new game for a night or two is starting to approach prohibitive. 

PS3
Games on my Christmas loot haul include Uncharted 3, Arkham City, and the Metal Gear Solid trilogy.  I have yet to finish Assassin's Creed 2, and it has two sequels out that will be somewhere on my playlist.  Other games on my wish list include Infamous 2, Tomb Raider Trilogy (and the new one if/when it arrives), and possibly FFXIII-2.  The discerning reader will note that only two of those are not currently released - my time crunch on the console is as bad as on the PC (though at least on the console showing up a year or three late means paying dramatically less for the games).

Computer Building
I am thoroughly dissatisfied with my Alienware M11x (original revision), which has had a number of problems.

• First, the hinge broke when the machine was less than three months old - Dell replaced this because it was a well-documented issue, but it was an inconvenient situation for a week or two until this could be resolved.  
• Then the power cord plug started slipping out of the back of the system, which left the machine unexpectedly shutting down for lack of power when I thought it was plugged in.  
• Then the battery, which has a 12-month warranty - went completely dead at the 14 month mark.  (This is also a commonly reported issue with the machine.)  Now I own a "portable" 11 inch laptop that has to be tethered to an outlet, unless I want to throw good money after bad by spending $200-300 on a new battery for a $700 machine.   
• On top of all of that, I apparently did not comprehend exactly how slow the processor was in all the hype about how the machine would run this that and the other thing - even overclocked (which Dell will not guarantee will work) the specs are below the minimums for Rift and SWTOR. 

Anyway, it's time for a new machine, and I'm finally steeling myself up to build a computer.  I find the first step or so - the one where you can physically ruin a $300 processor - intimidating, but the difference in cost and quality makes this a skill I really should have in the long run.  I will most likely build something in the $800-1000 range with an i5 and a single graphics card (possibly a cheaper placeholder so I can spend more on components that are harder to replace later).  I'd love to have an SSD, and it seems like there is something to be said for avoiding current hard drive shortages, but I do need a fair amount of storage due to the number of games I play.

In any case, I'm sure I'll be writing more about this topic once I actually go through the process.

The Blog
This will be post number 185 for the year, which is the lowest postcount I've had since I started the blog partway through 2008.  There are several drivers for this - I'm doing less work on the blog over the weekends, I'm writing longer posts, and I'm not feeling obliged to post something just to bump the update time on the RSS feed.  Overall, though, the current schedule - where I do 2-3 posts during the week and maybe a post on the weekend - seems to be working.
In any case, there's going to be plenty to do - and write about - in the coming year.  Happy New Year, and I look forward to hearing from all of you in 2012!

2011 MMO Expenditures and Accomplishments

I'm never quite sure how to handle my New Year's/Canada Day resolution wrap-up for the year - realistically most of them are blown by July in any case, and the discussion invariably bleeds into what I'm planning for next year.  This year I'm going to try something different and focus solely on the past; what I spent on each title I played, and what I got for my money.  

For the sake of my sanity, I have chosen to bill content/currency purchases (expansions or free to play content packs) in the year that I actually paid for them (even though I may continue to consume it in future years), and to track subscription time in the year it was actually used (rather than paid for).  Games are listed in the order in which the accomplishments appeared in my twitter feed.  


WoW: $54.40

• Completed a tour of the newbie zones post-Cataclysm
• Advanced my mage the last level to 85, completed all Heroic dungeons (both Cataclysm launch and patch additions) at least once, still working on rep and gear but qualified for the looking for raid finder.
• Advanced warrior from level 82 to level 85, completed all of the holidays through mid-summer to obtain my second violet protodrake
• Actually healed some PUG 5-mans on a mid-level priest alt.

With Cataclysm launching in December 2010, I had just paid for the expansion and was on the tail end of a 90 day subscription at the beginning of January (approx $8.40 for 18 days).  I paid $30 for two months of time (around world events in late April and late June).

I signed up for the annual pass in late October - I'm choosing to account this as $16 for two months this year, with $60 for DIII and $80 for 10 months both applied to next year's budget.  This will either be a bargain or a budget buster depending on how much use I get out of it.  So far, I'm not spending nearly as much time per month under the discounted annual plan as I was when it was costing me $15, but I'm enjoying that time more because I don't feel that I have to force myself to grind day in and day out to maximize the value of the $15 one-month subscription. 

Rift: $48

• Playtested a bunch of alts during the paid beta phases
• Settled on Cleric, leveled from 1 to 48 (and 3/4).  
• Leveled alts to the 10-19 range on the other three callings.
• Actually healed some PUG's using the dungeon finder

I paid $48 for a digital collector's edition back in January, and have not paid since.  Note that this included access to the paid portions of the "closed" beta, as well as three extended retrial weekends.  

LOTRO: $20 in cash and $10 in gift card (which I value less than cash)

• Comleted solo-ified Volume II
• Currently working on Enedwaith and associated book of Volume III

I paid $20 for the Black Friday sale Isengard bundle, which came with 1000 TP's.   I wouldn't have paid $10 for 1000 TP's and a cosmetic outfit, but the half off sale made this a $5 upgrade.  I also turned a $10 gift card at a brick and mortar store into a 750 TP card (which is a terrible exchange rate, but the store had nothing else I wanted for $10).  I've used some of the TP for the Enedwaith quest pack, a second milestone destination, and the 30 minute milestone cooldown reduction for my main, which are collectively definitely worth the price of the points I paid for them.    

My remaining LOTRO playtime was in content that I paid to unlock via expansion purchases in 2009.

EQ2: $85

• Completed Lyriana's enervated mythical
• Advanced from 191 AA's to 267
• Beat first seven dungeons in the Velious progression, obtained about half of my T2 armor   

I paid $45 for three months of game time, and $40 for the DOV expansion.  I also received 45 days of compensation time for the hacking debacle (cost: my identify, dun dun dun).  Up until December, I occasionally used a silver EQ2X account (purchased last year with promotional Station Cash balances that I didn't pay for) that I occasionally used for world events or limited-time quests.

I was expecting to spend about $20+ to unlock my character after the free to play switchover, but SOE's decision to grandfather in existing characters meant that I only had to pay to unlock my current gear, which I was able to do out of my remaining promotional SC balance.  That said, I did decline to purchase the year's second expansion box, along with the $20 paid add-on race that arrived with Velious.  This game would have been exceptionally expensive for someone who actually stayed with it the full time and paid full price for stuff as it was released, were it not for all the freebies for being hacked and for changing the business model.. 
 
Runes of Magic: $15

• Advanced from 30 Druid/30 Rogue to 57 Druid/53 Warden/50 Rogue
• Test drove a bunch of alts into the 20/20/20 range

I spent $15 on diamond currency.  I purchased a mount and some daily quest tickets, and I have just over $5 left. 

Vanguard: $5

• Escaped the generic Isle of Dawn
• Leveled character to 11 Disciple/10 crafter/12 Diplomat

Spent $5 to upgrade my EQ2 subscription to Station Access for one month so I could extend my Vanguard free trial by a bit. 

DCUO: $10

• Reached level 30 on a hero, completed solo campaign
• Experimented with some alts on both factions, platforms 

I spent $10 in the December's triple Station Cash sale for 3000 SC and immediately spent 999 SC on the Lightning Strikes DLC pack, which unlocked the new powerset and upgraded my account to Premium.  I'd been considering paying the full $10 for the pack anyway, so it became an absolute no-brainer with an extra 2000 SC.

Note that some of this balance may eventually get spent on EQ2 instead of DCUO, such is the perk of SOE's unified account system.  I will also tip my hat to SOE for allowing players to purchase currency in any increment of $5, without getting hit with funky/punitive exchange rates. 

DDO: $0
No additional expenditures this year.  I spent $100 in 2010, and spent about $70 of that on unlocking the content and character options I continue to use sporadically.
 
Kingdom of Loathing: $0
No additional money spent, I did sink something like $20-30 in this game back in 2007-2008 or so.

PS3/PSP

• Beat Portal 2 ($35)
• Beat Infamous 1 (PSN hacking debacle freebie)
• Beat Uncharted 1 (Christmas present in 2010)
• Currently working on Assassin's Creed 2 ($10)
• Currently working on Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (PSP, Christmas 2011 present)

These obviously really MMO purchases, and aren't included in the totals below, I just record them for the sake of perspective. 

Grand Total

All told, I spent basically $240, not counting the $10 gift card, the PS3 games or the $140 committed to Blizzard products next year.  (Nor, I suppose, do I count the amount of patience and attention it takes to await and grab some of the more substantial deals I got this year.)  When you consider that a single subscription MMO with a $40 expansion box and $15 in monthly fees will run you $220 annually, that's really not bad for what I'm getting for my money.

Speaking more generally, 2011 was the year when I actually learned to take advantage of non-subscription gaming models.  I spent a fair amount of time in non-subscription games in 2010, but I continued to play them the way I would approach a subscription game - focusing on one game at a time, playing it until I had completed everything I was aiming for and moving on.  As increasing numbers of games that I wanted to play anyway are offering more flexible options, I'm routinely logging into 3-5 games per week, and on rare occasions even per day.

Ironically, this hasn't blown my costs through the roof the way I wondered that it might when I started tracking what I was spending this year.  The "all-inclusive" subscription model has never included either the initial account nor the paid expansion boxes.  I'm definitely spending more on content than I was - and sometimes I'm putting up with irritating restrictions because I don't feel like paying to remove them - but I'm not then turning around and paying again to continue accessing the content I have paid to unlock.  I may or may not be paying more, but I'm certainly getting a lot more.

Looking ahead to next year, my totals will almost certainly be higher - if you budget the payments to Blizzard and likely boxes for both SWTOR and Pandaria, I already have about as much in total MMO expenses for next year as I did for this year.  Several of the non-subscription games I paid into this year may not require additional funds next year (in particular, EQ2 should be way down), but the fact that I'm already down for $60 on DIII - more than I spent on all but one MMO I played this year - is already looming as the potential difference between the budgets.  Guess we'll find out how this goes next year.

F2P Assault on the Hard Drive

Yesterday, I posted a full run-down of five separate free to play games that are currently installed on my computer: LOTRO, DDO, EQ2X, Runes of Magic, and now DCUO.

In addition to these, I have clients for WoW (annual pass subscription), EQ2 Live (yes, this requires a separate full client install) and Rift (the latter two of which I do not want to uninstall because I want to be able to patch up quickly for free retrial weekends).

The net result of all these clients, all of which I could potentially use on short notice, is that my hard drive is 77% full and climbing rapidly.  Already gone from the hard drives of this and my previous machines are various games that I'm not actively playing, including Age of Conan (tried sometime last year pre-F2P, did not feel any particular desire to return), City of Heroes (tried back in 2007 or so), FFXI, Guild Wars, Torchlight, Warhammer, Free Realms, Vanguard, and Star Wars Galaxies (soon to be a moot point).  This does not include betas or test server clients (none of which I currently have.) 

In addition to all of the above, my post and the following comments identified half a dozen high quality F2P or formerly paid games that I have never played in any form, including: Champions Online, soon Star Trek Online, Fallen Earth, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Allods, and Wizard 101.  (Honorable mention to the soon to be closed Lego Universe.)  I'm sure there are plenty I've missed in that number, feel free to post shout-outs in the comments. 

A year or two back, I remember someone mentioning on a podcast that they had installed an MMO to an external hard drive and thinking that this was a weird call.  Now I'm vaguely considering whether I should add an external drive (perhaps SSD?) to my Christmas list, as hard drive capacity is about to become a limiting factor in my ability to try additional games.

Is anyone else's hard drive buckling under all the MMO clients, now that it is increasingly both possible and desirable to have so many at your disposal?  Any suggestions on creative or high quality external storage solutions? 

A Lesson In Pay To Win

I spent most of the last few evenings working on Runes of Magic's triple exp weekend.  (Yes, the high end exp curve is set in a way that you can literally triple exp awards.)

My primary class (Druid) had been sitting at level 53 for some time while I worked on my secondaries (first Rogue, then Warden).  As I pushed on past level 55 - occasionally called the start of the real game due to increased exp requirements and steeper gear curves - I decided I was willing to spend $5 to see what the game is like for the pay-to-win crowd. 

What I got for my money was disappointing, and the way in which Frogster delivered it makes me seriously question whether I should trust them with my money in the future. 

Note the exp curve - 5.3 million exp for level 50, 11.6 million exp for level 53, and 25.5 million exp for level 57.  Exp gains for content do not increase nearly so quickly.

A Bad Purchasing Experience
I had about $5 in diamonds left on my account from a sale last summer, in which I had deliberately left myself a bit of spending money.  That money had not been spent since for lack of anything that I wanted to spend it on.  Other than permanent mounts, the entire contents of the cash shop are either time-limited rentals (e.g. storage) that don't make sense for infrequent players or pay-to-win consumables. 

The one thing that would genuinely improve my quality of life would be permanently expanded storage.  I'd willingly pay $5-10 to buy an extra tab outright.  Unfortunately, the only way to obtain permanent storage tabs is to gamble - you purchase a lottery ticket called a Gasha with diamonds (that cost real money) and you get some consumables along with an undisclosed chance of obtaining the item you want (in this case, a backpack).  My back of envelope math based on the forum thread about this weekend's gashas puts the drop rate around 10-15%.  Readers with an understanding of probability can probably see how this can end very poorly.

Despite a semester of statistics in grad school, I decided that I was willing to spend precisely $5.50 - the existing credit on my account plus a chunk of an additional $5, which would leave me with enough diamonds to buy a horse for an alt later - on some daily quest tickets with the low chance of getting a backpack.  Frogster's touted new payment provider ended up muddling this plan, by taking something like 36-48 hours after my purchase to deliver the diamonds. 

This delay, allegedly for a manual review for fraud, is unacceptable in a business model that routinely runs sales for a single day at a time.  This particular sale was still going when the diamonds finally arrived, but Frogster's EULA and Customer Service are very clear that there are no refunds given for situations in which their payment provider fails to deliver the promised currency before the end of the sale.  Effectively, they can deliver your pizza two days after you wanted to eat dinner, and you still have to pay for it because they eventually delivered you something you can use later. 

I had heard rumors of similar issues with delivery in the past, but I did not have issues over the summer (when I paid through a third party provider, Zeevex).  If these are the terms of doing business with Frogster America, there is a very good chance that I have done my last business with them. 

What I got
So, I ended up stopping at 3 daily quest ticket gashas, which turned into four daily quest reset tickets and (as is predictable) no backpack in exchange for roughly $4.12.  I redeemed three of these over the course of the weekend, obtaining as much exp as I could have earned by doing ten dailies per day for nine days straight (or some smaller number of quests over a longer period). 

The ROM exp curve heavily biases quest completion over mob kills, in part because there is no stopping players from grinding mobs.  I don't tend to play ROM every day, and I have routinely ended a play session with two or more days' worth of backlogged daily quests to turn in.  Where daily quest tickets suddenly become very valuable is when exp is tripled for one weekend only.  With each level 50 daily in Xaviera suddenly awarding over 750K experience, the three tickets that I used during the weekend translated into at least one level for my Druid, just as she hits the point where the exp curve starts to get really steep.   

Butterfly raid

As an aside, there was a very interesting subculture with these dailies.  Though the content is soloable, the quests can be completed in a raid group.  This becomes necessary because there are not enough spawns to go around.  The result was that all weekend long there were one or more raid groups farming butterflies in Xaviera, presumably burning daily quest tickets all the while.  (Some players were financing this habit by looking for players to gift them tickets in exchange for gold.) 

Unfortunately, I have to rate the actual gameplay experience as a disappointment.  For one long weekend, the rate of advancement in high level ROM was accelerated to a rate that I would consider reasonably fun.  I would gladly pay some amount of money to have that same experience on days that aren't triple exp bonus weekend.  I'm less impressed by the opportunity to spend $4 to spend more time stomping solo butterflies in a raid group for unreasonably large amounts of exp towards an even more unreasonable exp curve. 

What I did instead

Out of a small army of alts, I was able to find a female character who is actually wearing something that passes for clothing.

In the mean time, I ran a fair amount of the non-repeatable content on my main, advancing from 53 Druid/50 Warden/50 Rogue to 57 D/53 Wd/50 R on the remaining quests of Xaviera and the Weeping Coast.  This was fun. 

I also leveled five different alts, most of which had been parked around 10/10/0 from when I was trying out classes, to 25/25/25.  Coast of Opportunity is very good for this on bonus weekend - I'd say it took about 60-90 minutes per alt, a bit longer for the one alt I rolled up from scratch.  This was fun, and it positions me to test drive a ton of dual class elite skills I haven't had access to previously, as I try to see which one, if any, I'd like to stick with for another long term character. 

(Interestingly, permanent mounts have actually been reduced in price since last I checked, perhaps because it is the one thing in the cash shop that you really should have for all characters.  Because I spent fewer diamonds than I had planned thanks to the payment provider snafu, I can probably buy horses for two different alts the next time there's a sale, if I'm so inclined.) 

All of these things were reasonably fun, and ironically did not cost me any real world money.

The Irony of Pay to Win
The end result of this deal is that I basically purchased 1-2 levels' worth of exp. I don't look at my character as tainted or feel that this transaction was morally wrong.  It also clearly is not imbalancing to the game, to the extent that grinding the dailies was so popular. 

Even so, I'm extremely unlikely to ever do this again.  Not because I'm ticked at the company for customer service issues or because of moral outrage on behalf of the purity of the game.  The problem I have with pay to win is that, to the extent that the game is fun to play, paying to get out of playing the game is pointless.  On the flip side, to the extent that the game is NOT fun to play, paying to win is equally pointless. 

50/50/50 ROM Class Updates

Earlier this week, I hit 50 on my two "secondary" classes in Runes of Magic, Warden and Rogue.  Combined with my Druid levels (53), this means that I can finally have all of the 50/50 dual class elite skills for all three combinations.  (These previously required a lengthy group quest, but are now awarded by easy repeatable quest certificates as part of the game's accelerated catch-up zone.)  Here's what the six pairings do:

1. Druid/Rogue (D/R): My original class pairing, this one is a DPS caster that uses the Rogue energy bar for spells.  This leaves your mana bar free for self-heals (slightly debuffed by your shadow damage form) and utility.  I really like how this class plays, finding this combination was a big part of what got me to stick around in ROM.
   
2. Druid/Warden (D/Wd): This class is a hybrid-ish healer that also has some buff abilities, including a highly coveted buff to base magic damage levels.  Unfortunately, this pairing is nigh unusable because most of my skill points on my Druid are sunk into DPS abilities (in particular D/R elites, which I can't even use as D/Wd).
   
3. Rogue/Druid (R/D): This was the pairing I had to take originally in order to be allowed to play D/R, because you had to get the Rogue levels somehow.  It's great at low levels when mobs die quickly and then you can heal the damage from a mana bar you don't use in combat.  Unfortunately, at higher levels mobs live longer and deal more damage.  Though Rogues do get to wear leather armor, the Druid casters actually feel more durable with cloth plus a shield and self-heals.  Because the R/D wants melee stats, the self-heals aren't going to be impressive enough to increase survivability or offset the reduced DPS for not having a more offensive secondary.
   
4. Rogue/Warden (R/Wd): This build is a bit of a glass cannon of melee DPS, but it's a ton of fun.  Rogue energy regen is balanced assuming that you will be able to supplement your damage from your subclass (which the R/D cannot, since their general and elite skills are heals and buffs).  The Warden fits the bill perfectly, with a full blue mana bar to power additional melee attacks.  The 50/50 elite skill actually spawns a pair of Warden pets to do extra DPS for 15 seconds.  Unfortunately, there is very little in the way of survival, which hurts in a game that still boasts a healthy exp penalty on death.
   
5. Warden/Rogue (Wd/R): This is an offensive Warden pairing that can burn mana very quickly for major damage, or throttle back and rely on the Rogue energy bar for more sustained DPS.  This was definitely the way to go for levels 1-32, as the Rogue secondary allows you to dual wield.  After level 32, Wardens can use 2H weapons, and their abilities are a bit more geared towards that approach. 
   
6. Warden/Druid (Wd/D): This is a more hybrid approach to the Warden.  At low levels, the class is borderline painful to play because Wardens already burn through mana very quickly, and adding Druid spells only exacerbates this weakness.  Once you hit the mid-30's, things turn around very quickly. 
   
   To compensate for not being able to spam attacks, Wd/D's get a buff at 30/30 that turns their already impressive 2H autoattacks into massive magic-assisted strikes at no ongoing mana cost.  At 35/35, a newly revised elite skill turns one of the general purpose Warden melee attacks into a substantial AOE heal.  This allows me to choose the most offense-oriented pet/buff combinations (generally sacrificing the support Nature Crystal for more crit and then letting the Rogue-like Oak Walker add to my DPS), knowing that I still have my general purpose Druid heal available if needed.  The Nature Crystal, which provides buffs and cannot aggro (or be killed by) mobs is also a good choice in groups. 

Overall, the two pairings I enjoy the most are the D/R and the Wd/D.  I may or may not continue to level the Rogue, but I don't feel a ton of pressure to do so since I'm not planning to do much with the Wd/R and additional Rogue levels aren't going to upgrade skills I actually use on the D/R pairing.  The big issue is gear. 

My three classes span three of ROM's four armor types, and theoretically the Druid could use separate armor for DPS or healing (if I were playing D/Wd, which I'm not planning to thanks to the skill and gearing issues).  They also all want different weapons, which are the single slot (or slots) that has the biggest effect on DPS/healing levels.  Some gear can be shared, but the game supposedly gets increasingly gear dependent at higher levels (which I am going to hit very shortly). 

One one level, I do respect the idea of having players spend effort to specialize their characters.  I also think that the new third class option is still a huge improvement, since it gives more options to avoid a specific pairing that you do not enjoy (like the R/D).  Unfortunately, this all may mean that I'm going from six choices, half of which I enjoy, to maybe one that remains playable in a few levels.  It would be nice if there were some more middle ground. 

Opportunity Coast Bypass

My first two trips into the mid-30's in Runes of Magic took a year and half a dozen zones.  My third trip has taken 4 nights in a single zone, the new Coast of Opportunity. 

As part of adding a third class to the game, Runewaker had to offer some way for characters who had already completed the low level content while leveling their first two classes to get their new class off the ground.  Adding half again the current leveling content in the game wasn't really a viable option. 

The Coast of Opportunity was an interesting compromise - it's a zone where each individual quest is about as hard as a level appropriate quest elsewhere in the game, but with dramatically increased exp and gear rewards.  Where a player might get a level and a mildly usable piece of green-quality gear from a series of quests in the original content, a single foray into the new area might award an entire level and one or more pieces of blue gear.  Repeatable quests offer the training certificates needed to unlock your elite dual class skills far more easily than farming the old turn-ins (which are less reasonable now that each character can have up to six sets of elite skills).  

The system isn't entirely for the faint of heart - I'm earning skill Training Points faster than I can figure out what to spend them on, unlocking new skills left and right, and juggling my two secondary jobs on my fledgling Warden.  That said, the system works - I went in with two usable higher level classes, and I will emerge with three.  The old content remains in the game for players who want to experience it, with no need for massive nerfs to difficulty or exp curves. 

Overall, it's an interesting approach compared to the more traditional leveling content revamp/nerf as games age.  Instead of spending cost-prohibitive amounts of time actually removing old content from the game, the developer has simply allowed those who want to bypass it to do so.  It's still more elegant than outright starting characters at higher levels (e.g. WoW's Death Knights), and it doesn't really harm the previously existing experience for people who actually enjoyed it, the way that WoW's Cataclysm has.

I wonder if the hypothetical Pandaren starting area that may or may not be announced at Blizzcon will take this approach?  

Fewer Choices, More Impact

I was debating what to play last night, and Blue Kae suggested that I try logging into different games until something stuck.  The winner was Runes of Magic, where I finally got around to picking up my third class.

Halanna and her Oak Walker

Expanded options
Until the most recent Chapter update, Runes of Magic characters were effectively two classes in one - my character spent most of her time on her Druid/Rogue (a shadow DPS caster) and a bit of her time on her Rogue/Druid (a normal stabby rogue with moderate self-healing but poor DPS).  Under the new system, characters can still only use two classes at once, but you are now choosing from a list of three instead of a list of two, which means six class pairings.

I opted to pick up the Warden, a generally melee-based pet class.  Paired with the Rogue, the Warden is a dual-wielding (or 2-handed fighter if you prefer) flurry of blades, with additional damage skills powered by the rogue energy bar (a trait it shares with the Druid/Rogue, which was what really sold me on this pairing in the first place).  Paired with the Druid, the Warden gets a nice heal and some buffs, but noticeably lower DPS.

(I haven't used the Warden as a secondary yet because it still needs to be leveled.  Rogue/Warden will likely have the same offense for survival trade-off compared to the Rogue/Druid.  The Druid/Warden could be good for buffs and off-heals, but I won't really be able to use it that way because all of my skill upgrades have been spent on damage spells, and there is currently no dual-spec option for skills.) 

It's not everyday that the list of stuff that is broken is "everything".  (I'm only slightly bitter that I took several exp death penalties before giving up for the night because "everything" includes "emergency health potions".) 

Limited Flexibility encourages tradeoffs
As a solo player, it would definitely be easier to play if there was more of a compromise position where I could have some of each.  My first impression was that it was almost like a Rift soul tree with only three points to spend - two on my primary class and one on one of the two secondaries - when I'd prefer to spend one point on each of the three.

As I've gotten into the system, though, I actually find it interesting. Wardens have three basic pets - the Spirit of the Oak (a giant plant tanking pet), the nature crystal (a passive buff pet - specialty of the Warden/Druid), and the Oak Walker (a melee DPS pet.  (Warden/Scouts get a fourth pet, a Centaur archer.)  As you get to higher levels, you can have one pet active and a buff from "sacrificing" one of the other pets.  This means that I can make trade-offs between DPS and survivability per fight if needed. 

Sacrificing the tank grants me a massive boost to armor, which lets me off-tank mobs while the oak walker stabs them to death (very quickly) - on the Warden/Rogue, I'm finding that faster kills and improved durability more than outweigh the downside of tanking mobs myself.  The other two pet buffs grant offensive bonuses, so my Warden/Druid may be able to run more aggressively, knowing she has healing when she needs it.  (That said, the Warden/Druid ends up relying a bit more on autoattacks than I prefer, as Wardens abilities burn mana very quickly, even if you aren't also using the same bar for your secondary/elite skills.) 

Overall, I suppose the bottom line is that sometimes more limitations isn't a bad thing, if they present you with interesting tradeoffs and choices that are worth considering.

What I'm Working On: Runes of Magic

Runes of Magic is a game that I sign into every other week or so when I remember, run a daily or two, and sign out.  Probably the biggest decision I've been pondering is which class to take as a third option to accompany my Druid/Rogue. 

The optimal min-max solution would be to go with either a scout or a warrior, as either class can be used as a secondary class with the Druid to heal, and in some combination with the Rogue to do DPS (melee as a Warrior/Rogue or Rogue/Warrior, ranged as a Scout/Rogue).  The more I've considered this approach, the less interested I am in pursuing it. 

The primary role of the character as I'm currently playing it is to do ranged caster DPS on the Druid/Rogue combination, and try to somehow scrape together the bare minimum Rogue levels needed for stats, skills (and Elite skills), etc.  In principle, given indefinite time, I could earn enough TP to allow the Druid to also pursue healing with the alternate subclass, but it's really not likely that I'm going to invest the time needed to make that happen. 

Instead, I'm strongly inclined towards picking up the Warden, a melee pet class (when used as a primary) that contributes mana-based melee attacks when used as a secondary.  I've always enjoyed pet classes where the player fights alongside the pet, rather than hiding behind it.  I would have the option of leveling as either Warden/Druid (allowing the Warden to heal herself, rather than just her pet) or as Warden/Rogue with more DPS and the option of dual wielding.  It's possible that I will enjoy Rogue/Warden more than I enjoy Rogue/Druid (a melee class that just feels lackluster because its other half does not melee), or that the Rogue will continue to be something I level as much as I have to. 

If I ever attempted endgame, I suppose this would leave me as a character that does two flavors of DPS (ranged on the Druid/Rogue, melee on either combination of Rogue and Warden).  That said, as I wrote about Rift, I'd rather have two roles that I enjoy - even if they don't earn me group invites - than many roles that are useful on paper but that don't make me want to log in to use them. 

ROM Gear Lessons For Diablo III's Auction House

Much of the discussion of Blizzard's controversial decision to allow player-to-player item sales for real money in Diablo III has focused on the tired "pay to win" argument.  Like Ferrel, Keen, Rohan, and others, I'm not so interested in this side of the equation because how other players obtain their gear does not affect me directly.  I'm more concerned about the indirect effects of putting the developer in the business of making money when players replace their gear. 

Runes of Magic Gear Upgrades
The best example from my current experience is Runes of Magic and its cash store gear upgrades.  While both models do allow players to get what they want in-game with some (possibly prohibitive) amount of time investment, I would argue that the presence of gear boosts in the cash shop means that Runewaker/Frogster see more revenue specifically when new gear is added to the game, much as DIII's auction fees will almost certainly provide more revenue for Blizzard when new gear is added to the game.  Any MMO expects to make money off of new content somehow (box sales, renewed subscriptions, item shops), but this approach biases the payment model towards additions that replace players' gear.

If you look at ROM's content history, you'd see what my model predicts - compared to traditional subscription games, the ROM level cap has increased far more frequently, but with fewer additional levels at each increase, allowing players to park and farm up new gear at each new level range before the cap rises again.  There are benefits to this model - players get content more frequently, and all of the new content gets used while it is the current level cap, where games that raise the cap by 10 levels at a time often end up with underutilized content in the middle of that level range.   However, you also see insane vertical progression, with all the problems that this entails - my level 53 Druid has fewer than 3,000 HP in solo gear, while the Druid Encyclopedia recommends 5K-15K for dungeons in my level range. 

Moreover, you will also see dramatic swings in relative class balance.  The recently concluded Chapter 3 era saw Scouts topping the DPS charts by as much as 3-fold, while the talk in Chapter 4 is that Rogues are the new scouts, just as the game added a third class slot to let those disgruntled Scouts take up Rogue-ing.  Every game has class balance issues and flavor of the month builds.  Not every game makes more money when players replace their gear, and nothing makes ROM players replace their gear faster than changing archetypes outright. 

The Post DIII Era
Bobby Kotick's comments about exploiting his franchises aside, I don't expect that Blizzard would take this in a direction that immediately ruins a flagship product.  You can't sell virtual goods to people who aren't playing your game, and a game that's balanced assuming that players are fully decked out in the rarest of the low drop rate gear from the cash auction house will drive players away.  We can probably expect extremely rare items powerful enough to affect game balance, especially on higher difficulty levels, but that was a feature of the original game anyway. 

If anything, I think a fair number of would-be-Gevlons will waste a lot of time and real world money on posting fees - and, gods help them, attempts to buy low and sell high - as demand to get real cash for DIII loot outstrips willingness to pay real cash for all but the rarest of DIII loot.  That said, I think the longterm effects of having publishers demand the revenue from this feature will only worsen the vertical progression issues that are already causing huge problems in MMO's. 

Also, as Stabs points out, the legal implications are potentially staggering.  Can you sue a ninja looter?  How long before someone decides to test the EULA in court by suing Blizzard for a nerf or server crash that cost them real money?  Can Blizzard flag accounts to ensure that the rare drops go to people with a proven history of selling them, rather than keeping the loot and depriving Blizzard of their auction fees on an item that might not drop again for weeks?  Would they have to disclose it if they do so?  Is this system effectively online poker with the killing of monsters substituted for the random drawing of cards?

Though I don't think that pay to win is the direct problem, I think Scott Jennings is right when he says that this will take games in a direction that is bad for players, but that we've already lost the battle against it because the market will tolerate the new model.  It's not the apocalypse, but it's also not a good day for online gaming. 

Mob to Quest Exp Ratios

One of the things that was really striking to me during the recent Rift retrial was the ratio of exp per mob kill to exp per quest completion. 

At level 38, I was getting about 800 exp per kill with rested bonus (400 if/when I ran out) and about 3600-3800 exp for turning in your average quest.  For the traditional kill ten rats quest, this means that a third of my exp came from the quest reward, a third from the mob kills, and a third from rested exp (a mechanic that I think is out-dated, but that's another discussion).  Sometimes, you might get 2-3 quests in the same camp of mobs that you can complete simultaneously, which makes the situation a bit more favorable to the questing, but factor in travel times and Rift is a game where you can actually level faster by grinding mobs (especially with a good AOE farming build), rather than questing. 

On the opposite extreme sits Runes of Magic, which I jumped into over the weekend for a double exp event.  At level 52, a mob kill was ringing in at maybe 300-400 exp (doubled for the weekend event), and quest completions are worth closer to 80,000-90,000 (i.e. 200 mob kills per quest complete, as compared to 10).  This steep curve exists in part because the free-to-play ROM has a cash store item for resetting the daily quest limit, and therefore does not want players bypassing quests. 

(Interestingly, there's an argument to be made that bonuses to item drop rates are actually more significant than bonuses to mob kill exp, because the latter is such a small part of your progress, while the former gets you daily quest items that can be turned in for much larger awards when your cap permits.) 

Where to peg this ratio is an interesting decision.  In some ways, mob kill exp is almost incidental to other forms of gameplay - whether you're questing, harvesting, or just trying to cross the road, you will probably kill some mobs somewhere along the way.  In that context, though, it seems especially odd for Rift - which was intended to showcase spontaneous rift and invasion content - to weight the incidental kill so heavily. 

There's a balance to be struck between rewarding players for doing this content with a nice exp boost (though honestly I didn't find that I got much exp for minor rifts or even zone invasions) and not pushing them out of the level range for the quests they're working on.  Then again, Trion will have some unhappy players if the coming AAXP mechanic strongly favors grinding non-elite mobs over daily quests, rifts, or other things that players actually do at level 50. 

Counterproductive Death Penalties

The prolific Nils has a few things to say about MMO death penalties.  At the risk of trivializing all that work, there's one idea I want to focus on (which Nils himself pullquotes) - the concept that an ideal penalty is an effective deterrent without actually harming the player or the game experience in the long run.  It's a great idea, but one that I think is tough to implement in practice.

I've argued in the past that basically all death penalties that anyone has implemented in an MMO, whether gold, exp loss, gear decay, or even permadeath, can be described as a loss of the time it will take to get back to the state you were at before your untimely demise (whether that means killing a few mobs or re-rolling from level 1).  In principle, developers could tack on a monetary component - for example, branding all future characters on the account with the scarlet noob label, so that the player would have to pay for a new account to escape their reputation - but I suspect that this option would not be tolerated by the overwhelming majority of the market.

An Example in ROM
Of the MMO's I play, the harshest death penalty is probably in Runes of Magic, where you suffer 5% of your next level in exp debt.  A third of this amount is forgiven if you loot your tombstone, which does not expire, even if you log off and don't come back for months, so there's no irresponsible pressure to stay logged in to collect it at that moment.  Assuming that you did not die due to a bug or a quest spawning an elite mob on top of you with no warning, the system is fair, and only requires the player to continue doing something that they enjoy doing anyway (obtaining exp).  The problem is that the system is telling me that I should play the game in an overly cautious manner that ultimately makes the game less fun.

At the moment, my level 52 druid is looking at about 9 million exp for her next level, which means a bit over 300K per death in debt, assuming that I recover my tombstone before dying again.  A typical daily quest is going to award somewhere from 40-70K exp, so I'm looking at a full day's worth of daily quests to pay off the debt.  (Another option is to join a guild with a library in its castle, which forgives about 100K/hour of AFK time at my level, if you have something else to do in another window or offline while you wait.)  The message is clear - stick to easy stuff with zero chance of failure or spend hours of time paying for your ambition.

As I've said repeatedly since I've revisited ROM, there are times when no risk, low rewards gameplay is vaguely amusing.  The real fun, though, is pushing the envelope to see what exactly I can pull off.  In general, at 52 I can beat level 47 elites and I can't beat level 48 elites, but there's no way to be sure unless I try.  If I do try and I'm wrong, I'm out 300K exp and faced with a choice of whether I want to risk doubling my losses.  If I don't try until I've gained a few more levels, it's likely that the eventual victory will end up not being all that challenging. 

The bottom line is that I do less of what I enjoy about the game because of the penalty structure, and I ultimately spend less time playing the game as a result. 

Canada Day Resolutions For 2011

It's July 1st, which means it is once again time to hono(u)r our neighbors to the north with PVD's annual Canada Day Resolutions.  How have my New Years' Resolutions been going so far?  What's on deck for the rest of the year? 

WoW Resolutions

• Get both my Gnome mage (currently 84) and my Tauren warrior (82) up to the new level cap of 85. 
  My mage came up just short of hitting the milestone this year for reasons I've discussed. 
• Complete every normal and heroic 5-man at least once on both high level characters.     
• Explore some of the revamped old world on new alts.
  Currently, I'm a bit over halfway through a tour of the newbie (1-12) zones with a small army of new alts.  My favorite lowbie specs right now are Subtlety Rogue, Survival Hunter, Destruction Warlock, and Discipline Priest.  It's possibly telling that none of those are traditional leveling specs, which tend to make life too easy.

The mage made it to the cap in early February, though I was in no hurry to get there.  The warrior hit the cap last week.  I have beaten all of the normal dungeons on the mage, but I'm nowhere near through the heroics, much less the two bonus heroics that arrived this spring.  I will probably finish this on my mage next month, and I'm not sure if I'm going to bother on the warrior or not.  As to the alt tour, I did finish the level 1-12 newbie zones, but the low difficulty of playing the game as intended really sapped my interest in continuing with this project.

Revised Resolutions are:

• Finish the heroics (including new ones) on the mage.
• Check out the new daily campaign in 4.2.

DDO/LOTRO Resolutions

• Actually get a character into the mid-high levels.  [DDO]
• Complete the Vol 3 Book 2 content in Enedwaith (added during the F2P switch)[LOTRO]
• Await Isengard [LOTRO]

Fail.  I've barely logged into DDO this year.  I did spend some time in LOTRO because they made the missing chunks of Volume II soloable, but I still haven't quite caught up to the present.  That said, I've also not paid anything for either game this year, and they're both waiting for whenever I want to sign in.  LOTRO does have its expansion coming this fall, and I'm sure I will play it eventually, but this may or may not be at launch depending on what else I'm up to in October.  Revised resolution is to take both games at whatever pace I feel like, which is basically unfailable. 

EQ2 Live/Extended

• Write fewer news posts about the EQ2 business model.
• Either find a Velious bargain or skip the expansion entirely

I haven't completely steered clear of the EQ2 business model, which is still mind-boggling at times, but I think I've done a better job of not over-covering minor changes, especially on the EQ2X side.   Ironically, I think I would actually pay less money under the F2P model, but I'm not prepared to take a one way trip away from my new server (after LDL finally merged with Crushbone in February).  Despite my expectations, I actually picked up Velious and have enjoyed it.  In general, I log in when I have a full evening to spend on a PUG dungeon run, and I've been saving the solo content so that I will have something to do while I look.  Overall, it's been going pretty well so far. 

Revised Resolutions:

• Wrap up the Velious solo timelines, including any new content as it arrives.  
• Complete each heroic dungeon at least once (I've currently finished the first six, leaving the three KD zones and the new ones in Drunder), and try to finish up the major dungeon questlines.  

Runes of Magic

At the start of the year, I had no plans to return to ROM.  Probably the biggest thing I did to improve my experience was to stop worrying about keeping my secondary class up to date.  Focusing on the druid side, which is the side that I really enjoy anyway, literally halves the grind, and the result is a level that I can enjoy as a pleasant non-subscription diversion. 
Revised Resolutions:

• Advance towards the level cap on the druid (or as close as I can get before the grind and/or the need for gear kills it)
• Pick my third class (probably either Warden or Warrior, leaning Warden if they improve it in upcoming patches) and take some of the additional options for a spin.
  

PS3 Resolutions

The original plan here was to sightsee in DCUO and pick up some misc single player games.  Unfortunately, the more I've heard about DCUO - including today's half-hearted introduction of a cash shop - the less impressed I am.  I may eventually pick this up on the PC if the price gets low enough, now that the station pass upgrade costs only $5 more for EQ2 subscribers.  On the single player side, I've beaten Portal 2 and Infamous, and now I'm working on Assassin's Creed 2.


Rift Resolutions

I had planned to take a pass on the launch rush, but relatively reasonable pricing ultimately tipped me in favor of signing up at launch.  I let my sub lapse at the 30 day mark, I haven't been back, and I can't really articulate a rational reason why; I just didn't feel like sticking with the game over the other options.  Though the launch went exceptionally well by all MMO standards, there were some rough edges that got balanced out, for better or worse, over the last few months.  I figure that the game that I will eventually return to will be better than the one I declined to pay for back in April, so there's no hurry, especially with how quickly Trion releases new patches.

Revised Resolution:

• Get to level 50 on my Cleric, PUG some dungeons to see how the experience compares with WoW and EQ2.  

Other MMO's

At the top of the year, I said that I'd consider Vanguard and STO if they went free to play.  The buzz on Vanguard has since gotten interesting enough that I will likely take it for a free trial spin, even though no business model change is in sight.  I remain not so interested in SWTOR or GW2 because I didn't care so much for their predecessors, and I don't feel like there have been enough hard details about TERA for me to say much about the game. 

The other game I'm vaguely curious about is Allods, which a lot of people seemed to enjoy until they discovered that the publisher intended to make money on the product, and which is supposedly adding its own take on dual/multi-classing.  That said, time is really the limiting factor in trying any MMO's I'm not currently playing, and I'm just not sure that Allods or anything else is going to fit in the calendar.

The Blog
As I predicted, I'm limping along at around three posts per week due to limited gaming/blogging time.  Some weeks, I've had so little time that I realize it's been several days since I posted anything.  Others, I've got something to talk about every day.  It's not ideal, but it's what I've got for now.

As always, thanks to my readers for sticking around, and we'll see how these resolutions fare in six months.

Earning My ROM Wings

I hit two milestones in Runes of Magic over the weekend - level 45 in my secondary class, unlocking a new 45/45 elite skill for my main, and 6000 Phirius Tokens, allowing me to purchase a pair of wings from the item shop.

Shiny wings have a shiny on-use ability

What are wings?
As a pure non-subscription item shop game that does basically nothing to force players to pay during solo leveling, ROM has to make its money somewhere.  The high end gear system appears to be one of the main money-makers.  There are large numbers of consumable item shop purchases that can be used to enhance players' gear, dramatically increasing its stats to a degree that goes far beyond what other MMO's offer through enchantments/adornments/runes/etc.  Some of these items are available for Phirius tokens - you get 10 per daily quest completed and can complete 10 daily quests per day - but the prices are such that I'd imagine any serious player is going to need to move faster than this system allows. 

Items that can be equipped in players' back slot - typically wings, though some are flowers or floating swords that follow you around - are exclusive to the item store.  These items have no stats by default, but they do represent another gear slot that can be enhanced, including a permanent bonus to exp and drop rates that is almost never found outside of temporary item store consumables. 

An example pair of fully-upgraded wings on the auction house, compared to my brand new statless version.

Pricing the wings
It's somewhat difficult to determine what wings are actually worth, because they are not included in the permanent stock of the diamond shop (the currency that you get directly for spending real money).  Typically you'll see wings go on sale once or twice a month for 3-5 days at a time for prices running around 150-300 diamonds ($7.50-$15 at non-sale exchange rates, price usually includes some items to get started on enhancing the wings as part of a bundle). 

Fortunately, there are a few other options.  There is a cash store item that allows players to unbind soulbound equipment and place it on the auction house, so you can pay gold for someone else's wings (which they hopefully are not getting rid of simply because they made poor choices in building them).  Another option, the route I took, is to plunk down 6000 of the Phirius daily quest tokens - 600 dailies/60 days worth. 

I would not do that many daily quests just to save a few bucks.  Fortunately, I didn't have to, as daily quests are a part of ROM characters regular progression, especially if you have a secondary class that you'd like to level without actively playing it.  The long-term goal of farming up the tokens over the year or so I've been playing the game was a good little nudge towards taking care of daily quests that the game expects me to be doing anyway.

I don't know how far I'm going to get in terms of upgrading the things with Nebula jewels and whatnot (I will be very cautious about putting regular stats on them, since I don't want to get stuck with bad stats), but I suppose that's a medium to long term goal for future Phirius tokens.  There isn't really that much else I need in that section of the item shop right now, other than maybe an additional storage chest for my house, but in the mean time at least I've got a pair of good-looking wings to show for my efforts.  

Fortunately, the shiny ball of energy between the wings doesn't interfere with the massive shadow energy from my shadow attacks - which, incidentally, were buffed significantly in this week's patch.

G&H, ROM, and Station Access

I don't often do posts of random odds and ends, but that's what I've got today.

• I got some comments from the Gods and Heroes Team on my post about my brief visit to the game's beta.  I chose to play the game as a level one player would experience it at that point in the beta.  Massively's Beau Hindman went the opposite route, accepting a higher level character so he could get a better sense of the game's high end potential.  It hadn't occurred to me that you could get non-human minions, and that does indeed sound amusing.  In a few short weeks, we'll find out whether players are prepared to accept the possibly rough-around-the-edges experience in order to get at the more interesting potential at higher levels. 
  
  
• It was another bonus weekend in Runes of Magic - triple exp AND TP this time - and I got in a few levels on my Druid (who is now 52 Druid/43 Rogue).  I've cleared out the solo quests of Dust Devil and I'm part of the way through Ravenfell.  I'm also slowly working on getting the Rogue side up to 45 so I can add the 45/45 Elite skill to my spellbook, since it has a marginally useful passive benefit.  (The 50/50 requires a questline that I am unlikely to complete anytime soon.) 
  
  
• Sony also announced a cut in the price of the Station Pass, which now costs $20/month.  One can only speculate that relatively few players are actually using the service at the old price (and it's possible that many are/were EQ2 players who are only paying for the upgrade to rent extra character slots back when you could not purchase them). For me, that means $5/month for any second game in addition to EQ2, which makes some of the other options in the SOE stable more interesting. 
  
  I wanted to play DCUO on the PS3, but the PC version is so much cheaper - $40 for the box to start with and then effectively $5/month with this Station deal compared to $50 for the PS3 box and the full $15/month on the PSN - that PC version is starting to look like a no-brainer by comparison. 
  
  There's also the curiously en vogue Vanguard.  I've been feeling under-challenged by solo games of late, so it's possible that a game that's aimed more at small groups would actually be refreshing.  I would definitely play Vanguard differently than other MMO's - I don't think the game is going anywhere, but you can't be certain given how much population has dwindled, so my willingness to tolerate any less-fun segments of the game as an "investment" to get at more interesting high level content would be basically nil.  That said, for a low enough price point and some bonus blog topics, it might be worthwhile.  (Incidentally, does anyone know whether Station Access holders need to pay for an account key, or can you just download the client and go?) 
  

 And that's today in odds and ends here at PVD.

Bringing Endgame To Leveling

I've been busy offline of late, which has meant short play sessions, and Runes of Magic daily quests have been beating out games where I'm actually paying a subscription for this limited time.  It's not exactly accurate to call ROM's dailies "grindy" because they're literally grind - you're in for easily 150-200 mob kills if you want to max out your daily allowance.  Moreover, if you're not supplementing your exp with dungeons or bonus exp weekends, you will have to do some amount of daily quest grinding to get the exp to keep leveling even one of your two classes. 

Quest designers these days build MMO leveling curves with the assumption that having solo players ever run out of non-repeatable quest content is a cardinal sin.  So why am I not only tolerating this mechanic in ROM but actively choosing it over other games that also offer daily quests?  At the end of the day, complaining about grinding in ROM is like complaining about shooting people in a first person shooter - if you don't like it, you're playing the wrong game, and I won't hesitate to leave my ROM dailies unfinished if I'm not in the mood or I have the chance to do something more interesting. 

In their Dev watercooler this week, Blizzard talks about the challenge of selling solo players on transitioning from one-time story-based leveling content to repeatable daily quest grinds at level 85.  One seemingly obvious solution that does not appear to be on the table is the one that ROM already has.  Instead of trying to transition players after months of playtime, offer the same experience - in this case, grinding daily quests for fun, profit, and exp - from the earliest stage possible.  That way, you can focus your development efforts on making that one type of gameplay as appealing as possible.

Blizzard appears to have chosen to go the other direction.  Based in part on beta feedback asking for more quests, they appear to have concluded they could sell more copies by covering the grind-like aspects of the genre behind a constant but unsustainable change of scenery after every 10 killed rat-equivalents.  The good news is that 11+ million players appear to agree, opening their wallets each and every month and handing over their local currency to choose Blizzard's product over the competition.  The bad news is that the content has to run out sometime, and the transition is that much harder because of the choice (which most other studios have copied) not to prepare customers for the change. 

ROM Exp Curve Post-40

Last weekend was another double exp event in Runes of Magic.  My character entered at 40 Druid/41 Rogue and came out the other side at 47 Druid/42 Rogue. I've learned several things from my trek into the 40's. 

How to stop worrying and ignore the Rogue
Your two classes in ROM have separate exp bars, and it's your choice how you choose to deal with this.  You can attempt to level each class separately, which becomes more and more grindy as content starts to get low at higher levels, or you can park one of the classes and use it to turn in daily quest items farmed up by the other. 

The pairing I really enjoy in the game is the Druid/Rogue, which is a DPS caster with a focus on DOT's and a primary nuke spell fueled by the Rogue's energy bar (a relatively unusual mechanic in an MMO).   By contrast, the Rogue/Druid side of the house was a very good combination at lower levels (it's a rogue that can heal itself) but has become more and more frustrating as my levels advance. 

Rogue energy regenerates at a slower rate than you see in other games because players are intended to use attacks from their secondary class (i.e. Warrior rage, Warden or Knight mana-based melee, etc) to fill the gaps in their rotation.  The Druid side of this particular pairing does not contribute any attacks that are useful in melee gear, so I find myself in combat taking hits and waiting for the energy bar to regenerate.  Anyway, I looked ahead and the 45/45 Elite Skill for the Druid side is not a high priority and the 50/50 Elite is only usable in groups, so I decided to park the Rogue side and wait for daily quest exp to push that bar along. 

Perhaps this will change when I can pick up my third class if I take something that plays well with the Rogue, perhaps not.  If not, I'll get by somehow. 

Cash or Grind
The other thing that's really noticeable is that with double exp, the amount of experience from doing regular quests (and dailies that are sitting next to regular quests) is enough to level a single class.  At the normal exp rate, it looks like I'm either going to have to do extra grinding of daily quests or pay for exp potions. 

I'm not necessarily opposed to paying - my guesstimate is that this will run me about a dollar a night.  Then again, I'm also not necessarily opposed to grinding a bit.  I'm not always in the mood to log in and slaughter 150 mobs in rapid succession, but some days that's the level of brainpower I'm willing to spend.  Otherwise I might sign on for long enough to do 10 trivial dailies to collect my daily tokens at best (or not at all).  Or I might just wait until the next bonus exp weekend. 

In a system where I pay for the amount I play (if I pay at all), rather than a fixed monthly subscription, I'm okay with this.  It'll be interesting to see if this whole excursion grinds to a halt as I get beyond the launch level cap and into content that was balanced around superior gear (which I am unlikely to either earn or pay for), but ROM remains a nice secondary MMO in the mean time.