A Tale of Two Captains

Narilya, my Klingon Defense Force captain in Star Trek Online, hit level 50 today.  Given how I've spent my time in game, I've taken to joking about how impressed I am with the cosmetic ships and the ship/ground combat minigames attached to the vessel that I use to fly my duty officers around the galaxy looking for missions.  (The joke is that said "minigames" are actually the entire game of Star Trek Online as it existed prior to the most recent patch.) 

That said, as I've spent more time with the system, its flaws are beginning to show through.  Much as I enjoy it and find it unique, comparing the progress of these two characters has made me feel like my main is not getting all that much for a vastly greater time investment.   

The Federation Main
Vice Admiral Green Armadillo has made a lot of progress though the duty ranks, with a minimum of rank two in every commendation category, one rank 3 complete, and half a dozen more closing on that number.  I have completed around 2/3 of the assignment chains in the game (21 chains complete, 13 in various stages of progress, and only one chain that I'm aware of but have yet to encounter).  

In order to reach this this plateau, the Faydwer routinely makes 2-3 circuits around the Galaxy daily, in search of the best missions its crew can complete.  Earlier on, this process would take around 30-40 minutes, though it has started to take less time now that I have improved travel options and less need to travel to destinations where I've already completed the main missions.  Typically, my priorities are:

• Missions that advance assignment chains.   
• Missions that recruit more duty officers.  Sometimes I'll pass on one if I'm really close to hitting a milestone somewhere else, but in general these are the longterm investment that keeps the quality of the crew expanding.  
• Missions that award better than normal commendation advancement.  Typically these occur less frequently, require additional/more specific officers, or in some cases cash/commodity items to begin.  
• Other priorities, which vary.  If there's a sector reset looming, I might take the shortest missions available so they will be complete and out of my log when the new missions come up.  If I'm close to the next rank in a commendation category, I might focus on that.  Earlier in the leveling curve, I made an effort to advance crafting, while now I'm more likely to use excess slots on Gamma quadrant commodities (which tend to be used in the better-than-average and/or story missions).  

As a result of all these efforts, the DOFF crew of the USS Faydwer includes 180 officers (including the active duty folks - I paid 580 Cryptic points to boost the cap on this character by 100 from the default 100).   Of these, 14 are "very rare", 27 are "rare", and over 100 are "uncommon" (33 are "common" and I wasn't bored enough to count the greens).  I have 2-4 of most specializations, with larger numbers in some of the more frequently used callings (for example, 11 security officers, only one of which is common quality). With this contingent is pretty rare that I'm NOT able to put together an assignment team with at least a 75% chance of success. 

Stats on the crew of the Faydwer - note that you can temporarily have more than 20 assignments due to injured crew in sickbay, which appear on your "in progress" list and award some medical commendation xp but do not count as real assignments. 

The Klingon Alt
As a Klingon faction character, Lieutenant General Narilya started out at level 20, but my Federation main actually had the far greater head start because he had several weeks to collect duty officers while earning the required 25 levels to unlock Klingon play.  Additionally, as an alt, this character was always a lower priority. 

For the majority of her career, Narilya's ships never went more than a lightyear away from the Klingon homeworld of Qo'nos.  I simply logged in with her for maybe 5-10 minutes to accept any missions her more limited crew was able to complete.  This often meant low quality missions with less impressive rewards, and higher failure chances due to a lower quality crew. 

With fewer trips to the locations where missions occur, this character has never completed an assignment chain, or even gotten more than two steps into one.  Her commendation ranks sit at mostly 1's and 2's (though a few of the 2's are surprisingly far along because those mission types were more common on the Klingon side). 

(The IKS Kunark, which is capped at 100 reserve officers plus the 10 active slots, currently has a contingent of 97.  This includes only one "very rare" officer, from the DS9 questline and 7 rare officers, though the majority of the crew - 60-some - are uncommon quality.  It may be worth noting that the Klingons offer frequent and profitable rewards for executing white quality officers, which definitely helps with staying under the cap.) 

The Smaller Gap
Despite this massive different in time investment, the rewards weren't as different as one might expect.  The way the duty exp curve is set up does not award anywhere near the premium that one might expect for lengthy missions.  A common mission that takes 20 hours may only award as much exp as an uncommon mission that takes two hours. 

By logging in and taking a bunch of short duration missions, Narilya sometimes completed more missions in an individual day than Green Armadillo could, with most of his slots tied up in 20 hour story missions.  In her five minute session, Narilya would pick up 10 missions, while her Federation counterpart might spend 30 minutes looking for the most profitable use of his last two slots. 

Meanwhile, the dramatic difference in the size and quality of the respective crew is mitigated by the cap on active assignments.  Any given task requires from 1-5 duty officers, and you are limited to 20 no matter how large your crew is.  The Faydwer generally has 50 or so out doing stuff, while the Kunark generally has 30-40 officers on assignment, and generally cannot take multiple copies of lucrative missions, such as military offensives, for lack of personnel, but both ultimately cap out at the same number of assignments. 

There is definitely a difference in rate of advancement -  both characters have been able to advance at a rate of nearly a level per day if I really focused on running missions for regular exp, while Narilya's cruise control approach netted more like a level every 2-3 days.  My main also has way more money - around 20 million energy credits - due to obtaining stuff that he can sell on the exchange, along with higher quality officers for his active duty slots and more transwarp teleports earned through diplomacy.  It just seems that the difference isn't that satisfying given the vastly different effort I'm investing on one character over the other.

Looking forward
One thing that will be very interesting to watch is whether Cryptic adds the ability to obtain additional assignment slots to the store.  This would be a popular seller, as it's an oft-requested feature and it would allow more dedicated players to leverage their larger and more skilled crew (and, in turn, encourage players to pay to get a larger crew).  However, it also poses a challenge to the rate of advancement - already players are arguing, for better or worse, that this system awards too much exp too quickly (especially if you actually combine it with playing the traditional game).   

Meanwhile, some of the changes they are making seem to further diminish the value of focusing on the Duty system, by increasing the variety of missions available to the five minute captain.  A patch last week added mission NPC's to the interior of player ships.  The NPC's now always offer certain basic missions (which no longer take up slots on the exterior mission list), and can also provide extra options for the captain who does want to duck in for five minutes, fill up their log, and not think about the system again for a while.  At the moment, the bad news is that this requires zoning into each deck of your ship and running around, but this will soon be moved to an "intercom" button on the department head UI. 

Overall, as they flesh the system out more and make it more accessible, it's beginning to feel more like a minigame than a game in itself.  In some ways, this is a good thing, to the extent that it encourages focus on what they still view as the core game. 

That said, I was focusing on getting the second character to level 50 while the one month of subscription time I paid for was live, to take advantage of subscriber unlocks.  The issue for Cryptic is that I probably won't turn around and spend the excess time playing STO's regular missions.  Instead, I'll log in to my main for the requisite 10 minutes every day or two and then go play something else that rewards me more proportionally for my time investment. 

The Finances of Exp Curves

Tobold argues that, because there is no such thing as a single absolute optimal rate of advancement that works for all players of a given MMO, it's somehow impossible for studios to tweak the curve in favor of cash store purchases.  I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of this discussion, but I think Tobold's philosophical focus on the absolute misses the pragmatic consequences of RELATIVE rates of advancement. 

As Tobold writes, the pace of leveling is much less important than whether players enjoy doing whatever it is they are asked to do as they level.  Many of the current problems in the genre are caused by developers' continued insistence of using the primarily solo leveling game as a prerequisite for group-based endgame activities.  This turns a segment of the game that is the entire experience for many customers into a menial grind that stands between other customers and actually playing the game with their friends. 

Even so, developers have financial incentives that are influenced by how they set their advancement curve, and I would argue that the consequences of getting the curve wrong vary based on the business model.  Regardless of business model, no developer wants advancement to be too fast, as every model out there ultimately makes more money if players stick with the game.  On the opposite extreme, however, the incentives are very different.

• In a subscription game where any added transactions do not affect the rate of advancement, the goal is to satisfy as many of the customers as possible.  As Tobold says, this is an impossible task, but the developer will have to strike some sort of balance between losing income from players who get to cap too quickly versus being branded overly grindy.  For many players, merely describing the slower rates of advancement often observed in games developed for the Asian market is the beginning and the end of their interest in the game. 
  
• In a subscription game that also offers faster advancement, however, that loss of income begins to be offset by sales of experience potions and other means of accelerated progression.
  
• At the furthest extreme, a model where there is no recurring subscription, only sales of theoretically optional stuff like exp potions, there is very little marginal loss of income due to being thought of as "too grindy" because 90% of players aren't paying a dime to begin with.  Yes, you might drive off some players who might have otherwise have bought mounts and costumes, but your primary demographic is the market that will pay to have exp boosts up and running as close to full time as possible.  In other words, your lost income if a big spender decides they don't need to buy potions because the curve isn't grindy enough is much greater than your lost income from driving off significant numbers of less dedicated players with a grind.

None of this depends on arriving at the theoretical ideal rate of advancement that Tobold seems to have gotten hung up on.  The question is not "what should the the exp curve be" but "should the curve be slower than it is now".  As the proportion of a game's revenue that comes from exp boosts increases, the financial incentives will increasingly make the answer to that question "yes". 

This does not mean that every game that sells some form of exp boost is doomed to be a grindfest.  In fact, I'd argue that selling max level characters might actually improve the leveling game for those who want to play it.  However, as I noted a bit ago, the direction of a game developed by a for profit entity is never completely separate from how they make their money. 

The Shattering of 2014

Blizzard's press blitz approach to last week's info dump certainly got them some headlines, but it also ran the risk of having interesting bits slip through the cracks.  I was listening to last week's episode of All Things Azeroth when one such bit struck me - apologies to those of you who undoubtedly noticed and blogged this last week.

For those who haven't been following, one of the announcements was that wildly unpopular Horde Warchief Garrosh Hellscream would be the final raid boss of the Pandaria era.  Setting aside the absurdity of having a two faction game in which the two factions always agree on who needs to be stopped next even when the target is the LEADER of one of the two factions, this raises an interesting question - are we going to be due for another massive revamp of the game's entire leveling content in 2014?

Pandaria's final patch would presumably arrive no sooner than late 2013, and presumably the ill-fated Hellscream would get to keep his seat while players line up to depose him.  By 2014's expansion, the early questlines of the Shattering, in which, for example, Sylvanas and Garrosh discuss the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Lich King, will be three years out of date.  Will Blizzard want this to be the first thing new visitors to Azeroth encounter?  However, how can they tackle this problem without having the scope creep out of control in the way Cataclysm did, resulting in a far more extensive overhaul than Blizzard had anticipated?

In some ways, the peril of having made WoW's story so timely is that the new content will go out of date that much faster.  I suppose it would be innovative if Blizzard did replace all the content in the game every 3-4 years to keep up with the lore, but that does not sound like a sustainable effort. 

Pre-F2P Early Aion Impressions

I had an evening with no immediate plans last week, and Aion has been on my list of things to investigate now that it's going free to play.  Since Xaxziminrax asked nicely, I decided to give the game an early look.  Obviously, I can't comment on the new (and somewhat nebulous) business model, but at least I won't be stuck in an overcrowded newbie area trying to figure out where to put my hotbuttons.

Rolling a Daeva

Blue dude on the right is the standard look for Asmodians, the green girl is what I rolled up.

Aion has precisely two races, Elyosians and Asmodians, for the two player factions. However, these races have a surprising degree of customization - height, body type, and color are all up for grabs if you want a large or small character.  The result is actually much more robust in terms of appearance options than we have in some games that offer more races but much less customization.  I also seem to recall someone mentioning back when the game launched that going small was actually an advantage in PVP because it made your character hard to see, go figure. 

The game has four basic classes that branch into a total of eight subclasses. While I concede that MMO's in general don't do the best job in helping the player make an informed class choice, this one felt especially lacking because it's not apparent what your subclass choices will do before you've even tried your main class.  The usual subclasses include a tank, a healer, two melee DPS (the non-tank warrior and the stealth rogue), two kiting DPS (a mage and the archery rogue), all of which I promptly ruled out for lack of interest.  This left me with two options - the Chanter and the Spiritmaster.

My brain suggested the Chanter - the hybrid cleric option, which offers some healing, buffs, and off-tanking.  I frequently pick this type of class because I'm willing to trade off some DPS for more versatility and variety.  My gut told me to do something different, which left the pet-based mage class.  I don't think I've ever actually used a pet class as my main in an MMO, but somehow this one felt like the right call. 

Killing Asmodian Rats



Once I zoned in, what I found was about as standard of a solo MMO experience as you can get.  The usual array of hotbars and linear quest progression push the player through their first 9 levels.  There are a few tweaks to the usual - if you click to loot an object on the ground, such as a harvesting node or quest item, and fail to pick it up, you can click it again and the loot window will pop up instantly.  Unfortunately, you need this feature frequently, as it seems very easy to accidentally interrupt spellcasts, looting, and other such activities.

As with the character models, the intro zone is generally rather pretty, and there is at least occasionally some creative creature design.  For instance, there are mobs called Snufflers, which are mini-armadillo's with elephant snouts.  The Green Armadillo approves, even if some of these had to die for one of the many standard critter kill quests.

There's also the now standard map that shows quest objectives, identifies what mobs drop items you need, etc.  It may be worth noting that some of these features were new and innovative at the time Aion launched with them.
 
The only other thing that stood out during my first 9 levels was the game's combo system.  As I gained levels, my main DPS spells picked up chain upgrades.  If I cast the fireball-equivalent twice in a row, the second will be an instant cast attack that also adds a magic debuff.  The frostbolt-equivalent snares on the first cast and applies a knockback if comboed.  These secondary effects have cooldowns attached to them, but I could see some interesting tactical decisions in when to apply a combo versus continuing to cast your most damaging spell.  There's also some sort of a UI talking about default combos, which suggests that I might eventually be given more choice/strategy in how to use this system. 

Ascending and beyond

Wings of a Daeva, as seen in a story quest

When you hit one exp shy of level 10, which appears carefully tuned to require all of the quests in the newbie area unless you go grinding, your progress stops until you can complete the ascension questline.  Through this process, you pick your subclass - with only one quest panel's worth of text from an NPC to explain what you're getting - earn your wings, and travel to your faction's main city.  Here are the usual amenities, including auction houses, bankers, and weird cat creatures with sunglasses who you can pay to expand your inventory. 

I'm reasonably aware that there is a lot I have yet to learn about the game, including what exactly my new fire elemental does, whether/how I can use the wings, etc.  So far, however, what I've seen is a bland and underwhelming solo quest grind that has little to recommend it over all the other options in the crowded marketplace.  I can definitely see how this game struggled under the old subscription model, and it will be interesting to see whether F2P can revive it. 

The inventory expansion fox-cat-thing.