Further Trials of Telon

I've been continuing my unlikely trial of Vanguard and I'm definitely seeing some things that I like, but also some things that I don't.  A few comments at the two week mark, which would probably be the end of the line for me if I had to pay the full $15/month to continue:

• Vanguard is not afraid to kick the solo player's rear.  My Disciple is supposedly one of the tougher solo classes out there, but I've died in quests as early as level 5 because quests will not hesitate to swarm players with additional mobs.  On the good side, it's nice to be challenged, and this increased difficulty can help encourage players to actually group while leveling.  On the downside, even when making rapid progress I've occasionally been ganked by rapidly respawning mobs, which could start to get frustrating when the death penalty (exp?) kicks in at level 11.
   
• Interestingly, Vanguard does not appear to be that hardcore about travel.  I'm supposedly going to have access to a mount shortly after I get out of the newbie Isle.  There are also flying mount rentals - in lieu of the AFK-autobird, players can rent a gryphon with a five minute duration.  Arriving safely and within the time limit remain the player's responsibility.  There also appears to be some sort of teleport system, though I can't use it yet.  Whatever the case, I think they've got a good balance between trivial travel (like we see in WoW these days) and prohibitive travel (where you might not be able to do what you planned to solely because it would take you all night to get there). 

  

  Even the newbie zone has rental flying mounts.

• I'm really enjoying the non-combat questing options; Vanguard offers both crafting and diplomacy quests, and it's always refreshing to see a game where not every problem is solved with a sword.  That said, neither is perfect.  The Diplomacy minigame is just involved enough to keep me focused on the actual gameplay, and away from the text panel where the actual conversation is going on.  I'm also often struggling to actually find the NPC's I'm supposed to talk to, which is by design but which also gets old. 
  
  The crafting is better, though I definitely feel that there's a lot I'm learning by trial and error.  Unfortunately, one of those things is that I appear to have chosen the wrong specialization, Blacksmith, under the mistaken impression that my Disciple wore heavy armor.  I'm probably going to stick it out to crafting level 10 as a blacksmith to complete the newbie storyline and then either start over with writs on the outside or leave the crafting to the profesionals.
  
  
• The quest system is definitely more like what we had back in 2009 than today.  Questgivers do have punctuation over their heads, but their locations are not automatically tracked on the minimap.  Instead of brightly lit highlights of exactly what to kill on each point of the map, players can expect a compass heading to the correct general area at best, and sometimes no guidance at all.  On the less fortunate side, quest items on the ground are often small and hard to see.  I suppose this contributes indirectly to difficulty, since you may be around longer looking for stuff and therefore have to fight more mobs, but overall you're fighting the camera more than the mobs.

I haven't gotten off the newbie island yet, and I've heard that I'm going to have to find a group in order to do so, which could turn into a deal-killer.  In some ways it's encouraging that I did not make it to the end of the trial area, albeit with detours into Rift and Runes of Magic, within two weeks.  Then again, I still haven't seen enough of the game to be sure that I want to invest money - and more importantly time - in it, which is a problem when that's precisely what I have to do to learn more. 

Fortunately for my little goblin, I was heading back to EQ2 Norrath anyway, and I decided that I could somehow eke $5 worth of entertainment out of upgrading that subscription to the SOE-wide Station Pass.  My guess is that quality of life for solo players will start to outweigh the novelty of a new, old-school open world to explore, but I'd like to at least get off the darned island before I make that call. 

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. 

Limiting Preorders to Limit Queues

Both Gordon @ We Fly Spitfires and the Sypster see a conspiracy to create artificial demand in EA's alleged decision to limit pre-orders of SWTOR.  Syp writes:

"BioWare’s position is that this is somehow to limit the number of people for early access, but yeah, it doesn’t hold water.  There’s no reason to limit supplies of digital products unless you seriously cannot facilitate all the players for it (which I doubt since the same game’s going to have to facilitate the same number of people at some point) or you want to increase demand."

In fairness, marketing departments never met a controversy they didn't like, but there is a legitimate reason to limit pre-orders: ensuring that your server team knows how many servers to bring up on headstart launch day. 

When the marketing department offers access to headstart day as a bonus for paid pre-orders, they create an expectation that pre-order customers will actually be able to access the servers on pre-order day.  The problem is that headstart day is the one day in the entire life of the game when absolutely everyone online will be stuck in the same zone or handful of zones for newbies.  For this reason, games that use the traditional server model routinely set lower population caps for that first day. 

(Games where everyone logs into one server and then gets sorted out into as many copies of the newbie zone as are needed do not have this problem - I'm not sure which model SWTOR uses.) 

Players who opted to pay in advance for the pre-order rather than waiting to see the reviews understandably feel that they are not receiving the access they paid for when they find themselves waiting for hours behind hundreds of players in the queue.  Thus, word of mouth goes negative, and in many cases the game ends up with too many servers as the team adds more than they need in response.

In fact, I can think of one major, successful MMO launch that offered a paid headstart but that did not end up with the incorrect number of servers as a result - LOTRO.  The reason was a deadline; players got to keep their characters from open beta, but only if they pre-ordered. Thus, Turbine had the luxury of knowing precisely how many servers they needed, and never had to merge a single server. 

If EA is making a mistake here, it is probably that their cap is too high, assuming that there is a real cap to begin with and that they don't lift it altogether in response to the controversy. 

Rift Re-Trial At 40

I made good use of the Rift Re-trial week, advancing my Cleric from 36 to 40 with most of the quests of Moonshade Highlands as well as the portions of the world event I could get at.  Overall, it was a good experience that leaves me reasonably convinced that I could enjoy another month or more in Telara... but not in a huge hurry to take that trip right this minute. 

Soul Survival
At Magson's suggestion, I respeced the Cabalist build I'd been experimenting with into the famous AOE-grinding Inquisitor/Justicar.  I agree that the Inquisitor is obviously more powerful and effective - I pulled multiple mobs, somehow failed to Vex enough, died, ran back, and still leveled way faster in this build than any other I've tried because the build literally kills four mobs as fast as it kills one.  I actually had a lot more fun playing the less powerful Cabalist, perhaps precisely because it felt weaker.  This is the downside to the highly flexible soul system - some builds will simply be objectively better than others, leaving the player to choose between interesting and effective. 

Aside: part of the increased leveling speed may have been due to the encouragement to kill more mobs just because I could.  At my level, a mob kill with rested exp was awarding around 800 XP, while a quest completion was worth upper 3000's.  Where I previously tried to pull carefully to minimize time spent in combat with extraneous mobs, with this build they were simply free exp and cash. 

I did finally pick up the cash to purchase my fourth role slot, which means that I can now tank, heal, nuke-DPS or stab-DPS on the same single character, if I ever wanted to.  I don't know that I'll ever want to tank, but I suppose it's good to have the option.  My guess is that my four specs after my next round of respecs will end up being:
- Nuke: Cabalist/12 Justicar/ remainder Sentinel
- Melee: Druid/12 Justicar/remainder Shaman (or possibly 31+ Druid/12 Justicar/14+ Shaman)
- Healer: 31+ Purifier/12 Inquisitor/Warden (amount of Warden TBD, I like to have either 12 Inq or 8 Cab for mana regen abilities, and the other stuff I get for Inq feels more interesting)
- Tank: Full Justicar, most off-tree points to Shaman, undecided on a third soul

Unfortunately, the soul system has left me feeling that I'd happily trade in eight reasonably well implemented, versatile and effective options that I'm not that excited about for one option that I really get excited to play, as I have in LOTRO, WoW (twice over), ROM, and EQ2.  If Rift's 32 souls were instead 32 classes and I had to pick just one, it likely would not be any of the eight Cleric souls.  Because I chose a calling, rather than a class, I've ended up in an odd situation in which the healer is probably the most interesting of my four roles; not the best fit when my schedule keeps me primarily confined to solo play, with only the occasional zone invasion where it is actually useful to switch over from a hybrid DPS role that can off-heal into a real healer. 

Four Roles: I can has them.

Roads Diverge
The challenge for Trion is that it's a crowded marketplace.  The month of WoW I picked up to finish the proto-drake and my second level 85 lasts for another day or so.  I've got some more Vanguard trial time, which will likely determine whether I sub up for EQ2 alone or pay for the Station upgrade to juggle both games.  I'm in no huge hurry to LOTRO right now, but there is an expansion arriving at some point in the fall, and there are other games that I'm also not paying a sub for. 

Then there's Rift, a high quality, well-polished game that's quietly getting better with more features almost every month, but somehow always seems to come up number 2 or 3 in my queue.  Ironically, the steady stream of patches encourages me to wait - if I'm going to pay for just one more month of Rift this year, it might as well be December when they've added the most updates, such as the possibly ill-advised AA system. 

That said, I am reasonably impressed with what I'm seeing.  The world event seems well implemented, and I was able to celebrate my new level with an epic level 40 necklace that has passive water-breathing as a side perk - this souvenir will probably stay in my bags for the life of the character to deal with those pesky swimming quests.  I got to hang out with Ferrel and Iniquity for a few days, and I got to see some pretty sights.  One of these days, I'll be in the mood for more Rift, and I don't expect to be disappointed when that day comes. 

A crossroads for now, and a quick peek at the next zone on my tour wishlist.