- Disliking the fourth pillar
Spinks' rundown of the SWTOR classes mentioned a detail that I hadn't considered. Apparently, George Lucas is continuing to maintain that Jedi cannot get married without turning to the dark side. This makes me less interested in the game - not because I really had my heart set on cyborz with my NPC's, but because the notorious forbidden love story from the second Star Wars prequel was not the one part of the Star Wars Universe that I've been dying to re-live in an MMO setting.
Specifics of this particular case aside, I see a potential issue with the "fourth pillar" approach here. If you are going to put the story front and center, it becomes a bigger issue if players dislike the story you are trying to tell. Moreover, I would imagine that Jedi who romance their NPC's are going to be the majority of players - the former because of the lore and the latter because that's what you do in Bioware games. If the gameplay impact of being a Republic-faction Jedi with Dark Side status turns out to be disadvantageous to game mechanics, Bioware will have some unhappy customers. - WoW 4.3 update
This week, we're hearing details of WoW's patch 4.3. The mega-patch will include the now industry-standard cosmetic gear option that Blizzard has been resisting for about five years now. There's a new storage system that will save Blizzard disk space by having a vendor who will create a new copy of item number whatever upon request, rather than storing all the details of your existing item (e.g. enchant, crafted by, what bank slot it is located in). There will be new five-mans, which was basically expected.
The one thing that I find surprising is that the patch will feature the Deathwing raid, and therefore will presumably serve as the Cataclysm finale. I had expected this to be bumped to next year to shorten the window between Deathwing and the expansion now believed to be Pandaria. While it's not uncommon for the last raid of a WoW expansion to sit for 9-12 months, Cataclysm is already somewhat widely viewed as a failure and nothing from this list sounds especially game-changing. Unless Blizzard can finally deliver a WoW expansion in 18 months instead of 23-24, 2012 may not be kind to the WoW subscription count.
- Reinventing Warhammer
Werit has the details of the free to play Warhammer spinoff. My view on this project echoes Tobold's. Back in 2008, I genuinely enjoyed Warhammer's instanced "RVR" scenarios but generally found that the PVE game these battles were attached to did not compare favorably to the many other options out there. On paper, ditching the PVE game allows Mythic to focus on balance, while opening up the door to more exotic races/classes/heroes/etc that might have been harder to fit into a holy trinity PVE game.
However, as Tobold suggests, this revamp almost certainly guarantees that I will never pay for the existing version of the game again.
Vacation News Roundup
I'm still on blog vacation for another week and a half, but I've noticed a few tidbits that I felt like commenting on anyway. Comments remain moderated, though I expect to be able to approve them over the next few days.
PVD On Summer Break
Public service announcement: PVD is going on end of summer break for the back half of August. Between vacation and various miscellany, I don't see a ton of time for either gaming or blogging about gaming in the next 2-3 weeks. Perhaps I could have found time to sneak in a post or two, but it's easier all around for me to close up shop and not worry about "deadlines". I should be back in time to wrap up PAX and laugh about how incorrect my incorrect predictions really were (hint: the main DDO prediction got blown out of the water this week, and even my Blizzcon predictions for October are looking shot).
Comments will stay open until I actually hit the road, and I may or may not get in another post before the end of the week. While I'm actually gone, all comments will be moderated for approval after I get back. Have a good rest of summer, and I'll see you all around the beginning of September!
Comments will stay open until I actually hit the road, and I may or may not get in another post before the end of the week. While I'm actually gone, all comments will be moderated for approval after I get back. Have a good rest of summer, and I'll see you all around the beginning of September!
Church Arsonist Pleads Guilty, But You'll Never Guess Why He Did It
Having been in the church insurance business I know there are a variety of people out there with grudges against churches that can actually provoke them to try and burn the building. However, this one is unusual even for that crowd:
A Huntington Beach man pleaded guilty Tuesday to arson and other charges for setting three fires at an Irvine church and attempting to set a fourth.And here comes the reason for his arsonist rage:
Izad Chavoshan, 32, faces a sentence from Superior Court Judge Craig E. Robison on Aug. 19 ranging from probation to 20 years in prison.
Chavoshan pleaded guilty to three counts of arson, one count of attempted arson and a hate crime sentencing enhancement. He also has a prior strike conviction for criminal threats in 1998.
Prosecutors contended that Chavoshan drove to the Orange County Church of Christ in Irvine on three nights between Oct. 15, 2009, and Oct. 19, 2009, moved trash cans to the front of the church and set them on fire. Church employees reported the fires to Irvine police, who monitored the church Oct. 21, 2009.
Chavoshan returned to the church on that night and repeatedly threw a trash can at the glass portion of the front doors, according to a news release from the Orange County District Attorney's Office. He then removed a pack of matches from his pocket, lighted a piece of paper and attempted to push it between the closed church doors, prosecutors said.
He was arrested at the scene.
Prosecutors said Chavoshan was disgruntled with the church's teachings against masturbation.Well, he'll have plenty of opportunity to contemplate that issue in the state prison.
EQ2 Dungeon Tokens Testing Need Versus Greed
Lyriana's slow and steady journey through the instances of Velious is continuing, and I'm learning a bit more about the endgame armor system than I knew when I had my first piece crafted. SOE has made some unusual choices when it comes to having items crafted from account bound group dungeon drops. The system seems to be working, but it also blurs the lines between the traditional forms of need and greed.
Verifying Need
As detailed in Feldon's guide to Velious armor, there are three tiers of class-specific armor that can be crafted using tokens from the current expansion's single group (six players) dungeons. All of these have in common the Primal Velium Shard, which will be familiar to players who are familiar with dungeon currencies in other games. Your typical dungeon run awards somewhere between 3-5 shards, which are account-bound (as is most dungeon loot in EQ2, so that players with multiple level 90's can be flexible in which character they bring), and your typical piece of loot from the first two tiers will set you back between 20-33 shards, while the third tier wants as many as 45.
(In tiers 1 and 2, finding a crafter to turn your shards into armor saves you 5-8 shards off of the vendor price, and also excuses you from any faction requirements on the vendor. Because you are going to need to farm up shards no matter what, and because the shards can also be used for higher tiers or "adornments" - EQ2's version of enchantments - most players head straight for the second tier; I've very seldom seen anyone advertise that they're crafting the tier one stuff.)
In tier two, also known as the Ry'Gorr armor because the NPC vendor is part of the Ry'Gorr orc faction, the player must supplement the shards with a polished gem. The rough gems, which are account-bound, drop in regular instances and are rolled as regular loot. However, as I learned when I went to get my first piece of armor, you can trade these items once a crafter has polished them - perhaps in part to protect players from being screwed by the random number generator (and the prospect that the gem will be a six-way roll if it does drop).
This means that we have a standard need before greed dungeon drop that sells for over a hundred plat on the broker. In principle, you could inspect the players who roll need to determine whether they already have the piece of armor that can be crafted with that gem (or better). Then again, is it legitimate to roll need because you can sell that gem for the plat you need to buy the gem for the piece you don't have yet, when you have no way of knowing whether the other rollers are doing the same?
The situation in the third tier gets even more complicated. Instead of gems, the tier three armor costs the standard velium shards plus ore that is obtained by disenchanting regular loot items that drop in those dungeons. In the tier one and two dungeons, I typically don't even roll greed on stuff my character doesn't intend to use, because someone else might at least have an alt that will use the account-bound gear. In the third tier, I would need to obtain some of those drops to get the ore for my own armor, and, again, there's no good way to tell whether someone is rolling need for the gear, for the ore, for the cash to exchange for other ore, or just straight up for the cash.
Good idea?
On the one hand, I see where SOE is coming from with this system. For the slots where I can have class-specific armor crafted, it's very rare that I'm going to want a generic dungeon drop, and that does reduce the system to a pure token grind. That said, I don't know that I'm entirely comfortable with what this model does to the incentives in loot rolling, especially with cross-server grouping coming to the game possibly later this month.
Overall, the problem is a shortcoming of the genre-wide need before greed mechanic, rather than anything specific about EQ2's armor system. I'm just not sure it's a good idea to have a system that tests community agreement of what constitutes need versus greed.
Verifying Need
 |
| A tier three armor recipe |
(In tiers 1 and 2, finding a crafter to turn your shards into armor saves you 5-8 shards off of the vendor price, and also excuses you from any faction requirements on the vendor. Because you are going to need to farm up shards no matter what, and because the shards can also be used for higher tiers or "adornments" - EQ2's version of enchantments - most players head straight for the second tier; I've very seldom seen anyone advertise that they're crafting the tier one stuff.)
In tier two, also known as the Ry'Gorr armor because the NPC vendor is part of the Ry'Gorr orc faction, the player must supplement the shards with a polished gem. The rough gems, which are account-bound, drop in regular instances and are rolled as regular loot. However, as I learned when I went to get my first piece of armor, you can trade these items once a crafter has polished them - perhaps in part to protect players from being screwed by the random number generator (and the prospect that the gem will be a six-way roll if it does drop).
This means that we have a standard need before greed dungeon drop that sells for over a hundred plat on the broker. In principle, you could inspect the players who roll need to determine whether they already have the piece of armor that can be crafted with that gem (or better). Then again, is it legitimate to roll need because you can sell that gem for the plat you need to buy the gem for the piece you don't have yet, when you have no way of knowing whether the other rollers are doing the same?
The situation in the third tier gets even more complicated. Instead of gems, the tier three armor costs the standard velium shards plus ore that is obtained by disenchanting regular loot items that drop in those dungeons. In the tier one and two dungeons, I typically don't even roll greed on stuff my character doesn't intend to use, because someone else might at least have an alt that will use the account-bound gear. In the third tier, I would need to obtain some of those drops to get the ore for my own armor, and, again, there's no good way to tell whether someone is rolling need for the gear, for the ore, for the cash to exchange for other ore, or just straight up for the cash.
Good idea?
On the one hand, I see where SOE is coming from with this system. For the slots where I can have class-specific armor crafted, it's very rare that I'm going to want a generic dungeon drop, and that does reduce the system to a pure token grind. That said, I don't know that I'm entirely comfortable with what this model does to the incentives in loot rolling, especially with cross-server grouping coming to the game possibly later this month.
Overall, the problem is a shortcoming of the genre-wide need before greed mechanic, rather than anything specific about EQ2's armor system. I'm just not sure it's a good idea to have a system that tests community agreement of what constitutes need versus greed.
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