Early 4.1 PUG Impressions

I hadn't bothered to do much dungeon running in Cataclysm because of the lengthy queue times - an hour in the queue plus at least that long to clear the dungeon when the expansion was still new was longer than I could commit to.  In the two months or so I spent away from Azeroth, the situation has changes substantially. 

In the regular five mans, it does not appear that the touted "call to arms" feature is active on my server, perhaps because the queue times are already very reasonable.  My guess is that the non-heroic level 85 5-man experience is now very tightly focused.  At Cataclysm's launch, your level 85 in the queue for a normal 5-man had a 40% chance of being tossed into a level 82 dungeon that offered you almost no possible benefit.  At some point between then and now, the list was narrowed to just the three normal dungeons that are actually level 85. 

The bad news is that there isn't much variety.  The good news is that you can gear up and move on very quickly - I completed each dungeon once, with an extra run through Grim Batol, and I was at the gear threshold to LFG heroics.  Maybe this tier is now much less over-crowded with DPS now that the majority of endgame players are already 85 and in heroics, compared to when everyone was leveling. 

When I queued for a random heroic (T1, the new ones are at a higher tier), both tanks and healers had the "call to arms" bonus and queue times were indeed back down to reasonable levels.  I'm not sure that Call To Arms can be credited with this - when I've encountered players who said they haven't done much tanking or healing and asked whether they were trying it for the loot, they had never even heard of the system before.  Perhaps overall gear inflation and greater familiarity with the encounters is making the dungeons more palatable once again. 

You're still looking at about an hour and a half to two hours counting queue times to run a dungeon, which is twice as long as it took in Wrath and long enough that I can't necessarily get a dungeon run in every evening that I would like to run one.  That said, the compromise between difficulty and time is much more tolerable, especially since gear inflation in the next patch will likely speed things up further. 

Revenge of the Creepy Bunny Ears

Taking a bow after downing yet another world event

It's Noblegarden time in Azeroth, and I've got an alt who is now most of the way to the holiday Proto-Drake, so it was off to give the holiday a whirl.  It hasn't changed much since its 2009 debut, though this time I got relatively lucky with item drops out of the eggs - don't know if drop rates were changed or what, but I looted darned near to the minimum possible after obtaining all of the required items including the minipet out of random eggs.  

The only thing that kept this from being a one night event were the seemingly low populations on US-Quel'dorei, where my horde characters live.  There's an achievement for slapping bunny ears on female characters (only level 18+ mind you) that has gotten substantially harder now that the majority of both factions aren't hanging out in the neutral city of Dalaran.  In particular, female dwarves seem to be very hard to find.  

I thought this achievement was at least somewhat creepy the first time around - there is at least a possibility that a female character is actually being played by a female player who might not appreciate a crowd of guys looking to tag them with a Playboy bunny reference.  Without a neutral city to work with, further stalking measures were necessary this year.  

I ended up camping the Stormwind auction house in ghost form for about two hours (spread over two evenings) before finally finding a female Dwarf who didn't already have a pair of ears on her head.  (Following one who already had ears until they expired was not an option because my life expectancy upon reviving was not long enough to wait out the timers.)  There's also a macro on WoWhead for determining the race and gender of characters, since you often can't tell under the armor.  Overall, I could probably have signed up for a free trial account and leveled a female dwarf alt to 18 during the time I spent looking.  

Oh well, guess it serves me right for taking part in this particular WoW holiday ritual.  Next up, the dreaded Children's Week.

Camping the AH for a female dwarf.

EQ2 Destiny of Velious Month 1 Impressions

I have never played the original Everquest, and this is both an advantage and a disadvantage for EQ2's take on the continent of Velious.  On the one hand, I lack the context for events that are based off of the original game, which I would imagine have more meaning for those who actually played it.  On the other hand, I don't need to be offended when the new version is inconsistent with the old (or at least my memory of the same), and I can still recognize that the lore has the polished sense of having more behind it than the paragraph in the quest journal, even if I don't know all of it. 

Perhaps this opportunity to judge the expansion on its own merits is ironically the best approach to the new content.

Expansion Content
The adventuring content in last year's Sentinel's Fate expansion really suffered from SOE's decision to increase the level cap by 10 levels without the content available to support that many levels.  As a result, the new content had absurd quest hubs where you got nine quest completes for killing seven mobs, because there was no other way to hand out that much exp in that little content. 

DOV did not increase the level cap, and, with that constraint removed from content design, the new outdoor solo content returns to the higher level of quality from pre-TSF expansions like ROK and TSO. I'm pretty much done with Great Divide now, and it looks like there's a fair amount of content to do in the next zone. 

I've also spent a fair amount of time in dungeons, having completed four of the expansion's nine heroic single group dungeons.  A big part of this is because I'm fortunate enough to have picked a class that plays like a DPS but gets group invites like a tank.  I'll also concede that the content is occasionally buggy - especially when it comes to giving everyone in a group credit for certain updates, but sometimes with more serious issues as well - but I've had a decent time despite this.  It's very uncommon for original, high quality solo content to become something that I do to kill time while looking for a group, but that's exactly where I've ended up in EQ2.

New Features
I've written about the new flying mounts, and I remain unconvinced that player controlled flight is a good idea in this type of game, but at least they're well implemented and people seem to like them. 

The other big new mechanic is Norrath's take on the public quest. On the plus side, these things do give players a reason to group up in the open world.  Unfortunately, I can't really recommend them.  Instead of offering a fixed challenge (like Warhamer) or a scaling one (like Rift), this version simply starts out at raid difficulty and fails as many times as is needed until the number of players present are able to defeat it.  With a large enough group, victory becomes a certain, if laggy, proposition.

It's not a horrible diversion, the best loot is a bit beyond what you can get in solo quests, and you are also guaranteed a gem worth a daily quest's worth of rep with the faction of your choice, which allows you to do PQ's in place of other ways of pursuing rep.  That said, I can't imagine that this version of PQ's is going to convince anyone to pick EQ2 over Rift, and one has to speculate that this was part of SOE's motivation in implementing it.

The Business Model
I don't really enjoy writing about SOE's usually inscrutable business decisions, and this expansion hasn't done that much to change this. 

• They released a new race at a separate (and large) charge from the $40 expansion box, which are already the most frequent fees of that size amongst major recent MMO's.  
• The game's most populous server is the separate free to play server, with a population that is predictably and horribly skewed towards low level characters of free races and classes - last time I did a /who all 90 dirge on Freeport during prime time, there were only 6 online (compared to 40+ on Crushbone) which can't be fun for trying to get a group together. 
• All the trivial solo quest rewards have been upgraded from "treasured" to "legendary" quality (think if WoW removed greens and had only blue items) because non-subscribers in EQ2X have to pay per the item to unlock these.  Ironically, it's cheaper to play the game as a raider than a non-raider, because a raider gets their best in slot item and keeps it for months, while solo gear may last for only the next quest chain.  

Then, there was the much-publicized public brainstorming session in which the producer suggested giving out level 90 characters as a "winback" bonus to returning subscribers, and the internets exploded.  The thing that didn't get talked about was what they actually did - wait for six weeks after the expansion launch to ensure that returning players like myself had already bought our expansion boxes before announcing a promotion for former players that included a week of free time and $15 worth of station cash (which can be used to buy future expansion boxes). 

SOE either did not know or did not care how this would look to people who came back voluntarily.  Likewise, the idea that some existing players might want to jump on the free level 90 alt bandwagon supposedly did not even occur to Smokejumper (unless he was fishing for this request to claim that there's demand for level 90 premades in the game's cash store). 

There's a line between smart price discrimination and making your existing customers feel that you value potential customers over current ones, and repeated incidents like this over the past year have left many current players feeling that the line has been crossed.  If you're selling a single player game and never expecting another dime from your customers, that's your prerogative, but it's less advisable in a genre where you're asking for more money each and every month. 

Outlook
What I've seen of Velious so far is a definite upgrade from last year's effort, though that says as much about the poor quality of TSF as about DOV.  SOE has now kicked off a publicity campaign promising to deliver the remaining content of the Velious story arc - which many of us feared would be put off to a future paid expansion - as regular content updates.  After last year, they haven't exactly earned the benefit of the doubt, but the three new instances in next month's patch are a decent enough start. 

Overall, I'm not sure how to recommend this expansion.  On the one hand, it's good quality content that I've enjoyed playing so far, and expect to get at least another month out of.  On the other, the expansion is completely useless until you've reached level 86+, and the bugs that I've seen in the early content are apparently nothing compared to the issues in the high end game, where mandatory progression bosses are still routinely removed from the game for weeks at a time due to bugs and where veterans are strongly displeased with both class balance and itemization.  It's never a good sign when your strongest advocates are all off playing Rift, and that's precisely where many of EQ2's strongest former partisans are now found. 

Seeing Ferrel, Jaye, Feldon, Starseeker, et al in Rift over EQ2 is seems as odd as Otter/Frog romance.

At the end of the day, I suppose my best advice if you're on the fence is to wait and see how the promised changes play out.  Who knows, there might even be a free level 90 character or other exclusive discount offers available if you just hold out a bit longer - perhaps not in the game's best interest, but this is a bed of their own making. 

(P.S. I picked up something like 17-18 AA's during the last month, but I'm still at only 209 out of the current cap of 300.  This is a problem, because raiding guilds expect 250+ AA's, and the rate that I've been earning them at is not sustainable once you run out of non-repeatable awards for quests and first-time boss kills.  I'll be out of content AND even geared for raiding well before I hit the 250 mark.)

Weekly Dungeon Quest One-Upmanship

One of the dangers of taking a similar feature from a competing game is that your version 1.0 may be up against the original game's 3.0 by the time you get it out the door.  Well, whatever else you want to say about Rift, Trion has become one of the fastest studios out there when it comes to fixing this sort of complaint.

The case of the dungeon quests
Case in point, Trion significantly reduced the "plaque" currency awards for its max level expert dungeons shortly after launch.  To compensate, they increased the award from the daily dungeon quests - in theory, infrequent players would now have more of a chance to catch up, while players who grind out multiple dungeons per day would take longer.

One of the issues with this approach is that each day's quest is use-it-or-lose-it.  If you run only three dungeons per week, but all three are on Saturday because that's your free evening, you only collect the bonus once.  If you sign on one evening and you choose to do something else that keeps you from getting around to your daily dungeon run - perhaps helping a friend, visiting a world event, etc - there's no way to "make up" the missed plaque stipend, it's simply an opportunity lost.

The competition over at Blizzard, which has had these types of quests for years, decided to make their token grind a little more friendly by changing the daily dungeon quest into a quest that can be repeated seven times per week (as part of patch 4.1, supposedly hitting WoW servers on Tuesday).  By comparison, Trion's emphasis on the daily version felt out-dated.  So they're fixing it.  By two weeks from now.

The sharp-eyed folks at Rift Junkies caught an interesting detail from a Massively interview on Friday - Rift will now allow you to "bank" up to seven day's worth of quests to complete at your leisure.  I prefer this version to WoW's not-yet-released variation, because it is much more flexible in letting you work off your backlog at a reasonable pace.

Improved competition?
Beyond Trion's impressively fast reaction time, I'm hopeful to see this kind of competition in the future.  Blizzard has been free in the past to let changes like this take months on end, with routine gaps of six months between patches, because there hasn't been anyone who could be seriously thought of as competition.  Everyone else has felt free to let their patch cycles drop to quarterly at best because that's the bar set by the industry leader.  While it's still a bit early, it's certainly looking like Trion may make a real run at forcing developers to pick up the pace a bit, which would be a win for players everywhere. 

P.S. Unfortunately, like WoW's system, Trion is offering a large currency award to convince players who no longer need Tier 1 Expert dungeons to continue running them daily.  I maintain that this is a misguided approach to filling groups that harms the quality of the experience for all concerned, for reasons I've discussed previously.