I was reading a post over at We Fly Spitfires and felt the urge to comment. This isn’t something I do often on foreign soil, but it’s been known to happen. It’s not for any particular reason, mind you, I just rarely see the effort involved in making the lurker->community member transition to be a useful one. But that whole dynamic is another post entirely. I actually like reading Gordon’s stuff as we have similar sensibilities when it comes to MMOs. We Fly Spitfires is one of the few gaming blogs that I deign to add into my “Gaming” folder in ye olde Firefox toolbar.
At any rate, my flow of thoughts on his Old Republic review turned into a fairly lengthy rebuttal, so instead of dropping a deuce on someone’s front lawn I thought it would be more appropriate to post here and let the magic of trackbacks do their thing. Direct quotes are quoted, although things are fairly out of order. You can read his full review here. My rebuttal starts with a cold open regarding launch in general. Check it out after the fold…
The Old Republic launches in just a few hours. What little time I’ve had free this holiday season has been spent furiously sabering in the headstart to get a jump on things. The guild is humming along nicely, so if’n you’re so inclined drop by and have a look.
The web-based guild program seems to be a great success for easing people into the process. We didn’t have to scramble for the 5k credits or run people all over creation quick-like to get our guild name on some arbitrary server. Everyone who was in the web guild was immediately prompted to join with their new character and the server selection screen handily notes our deployment server. For those keeping score, we landed on Shii-Cho.
The game itself is not without it’s bugs, but in my estimation it’s launching at the same level of polish and quality as WoW did way back. I accept that as a fairly beginning. Time will tell if they can really make this thing work, but I have to believe the BioWare is all-in on this title.
How easy it is to lose track of time. One finds oneself “getting by” doing only the things that are right in front of them. That’s been my year in a nutshell.
In the current economic climate I’m tremendously thankful that I’ve got a great job doing work I really care about, but the simple reality is the time available for indulgences like this site is pretty limited. I had planned to move the site off DreamHost and onto another provider, but after investigating a few popular ones I just couldn’t see a driving reason. It doesn’t seem like anyone out there can escape criticisms that make my frustrations with DH seem meaningless – or at least meaningless when combined with the effort required to move a site wholesale.
Anywho…
The big news coming down the road is the launch of Old Republic in mid-December. I’m cautiously optimistic. At this point I’m honestly more worried about pulling enough people away from WoW to be fun and have access to 100% of the content. Rift couldn’t hold people, it was fairly foolish to think otherwise. Live and learn, I guess.
It’s probably worth mentioning that yes, I am a TINY bit interested in playing a Monk in WoW. I loved my Monk in EQ and I have yet to play a good game that “got monks right”. I don’t think WoW will either, at least not the way I want, but I bet it’ll get close. They’re promising a TON of character animation (and a host of new ones for existing classes/races) so they may have something.
It’s still WoW, though. That doesn’t change. In … 90 (Jesus!) levels it’ll be back to the same stuff that I don’t really enjoy anymore just like now. The Diablo 3 for free thing on a year pass subscription is certainly interesting though. You’re effectively getting a really expensive copy of Diablo and a year to play (or not play) WoW. Or reverse that, I guess. Meh? I didn’t really plan on buying D3 to begin with…
Still alive and wicked busy. My company is slightly understaffed as business is, as they say, “booming”. When I’m not working on work I’m working on play, with the BenevolenceSuicide Kings app taking the bulk of my non-work-non-gaming time these days. It’s hectic and oftentimes frustrating, but it’s the good kind. The kind you want to experience.
A few items to note just in case I don’t make it back around here anytime soon -
Tron Legacy was an average movie. The soundtrack by Daft Punk is excellent. You’ll see it pop up on my last.fm scrobble feed often. Note: I liked the movie, I’m just under no illusions that it was, at best, average.
The Golden Globe noms alternate between terrible and FUCK! THAT IS TERRIBLE!
I’m moving my parents from an old XP box to a new Mac Mini this spring. I need a shower.
The Steam holiday sale has ruined me. I’ve added frightening number of titles since mid-December. There are a few I’m really looking forward to playing, but the ones that are taking up the bulk of my time right now are DeathSpank and Recettear. DeathSpank is a Torchlight/Diablo/whatever style title intended to be a parody and Recettear is a JRPG. YMMV.
I’ve been playing Spreadsheeeeeeets iiiiiiin Spaaaaaaace Eve again. But that won’t last long, I’d wager.
Cataclysm is out. I’m not playing. WoW is done for me. I went back, briefly, but by the end of the 2nd month it just felt like I was playing because I was supposed to play. There was no joy in Mudville. Here’s hoping 2011 snags me an Old Republic invite post-haste.
I guess that’s all the update I can muster for now. Toodles.
Star Trek Online lasted 3 months, including the freebie. I’m not annoyed that I wasted money on the “digital deluxe” edition or even that I wasted that particular chunk of gaming time. Cryptic, as an organization, clearly has a lot of work to do in their testing/design infrastructure before they can compete with the AAA crowd. Art? Top notch. Seriously. Look at my last post for reference. I LOVED flying around the universe in my Defiant. The “experience” of just tooling around in space with my gorgeous little ship was just plain nerdy fun.
The problem was that the Defiant is an escort-class ship. Escort ships, especially those flown by “tactical” captains were imbalanced. When they were putting the game together apparently no one thought the players would ever chain together every single buff/debuff they had for a full-speed alpha-strike. Cue the forum QQ and the inevitable nerfbat lashed out crippling virtually every aspect of the escort playbook. They attempted to offset these massive DPS changes by making escorts slightly more robust. So now you have tiny ships with crap shields, crap hulls and cannons that have about the same effectiveness as those little party poppers you give the kids on the 4th. Cruiser captains (the new king shit invincible douchenozzles) rejoiced.
I’m not a PvP guy. Under the right conditions I have enjoyed it, but I don’t play games FOR the PvP, nor do I generally leave games because of PvP. Star Trek Online is unfortunately far too shallow of a game to disengage yourself from PvP or the effects of “balancing for PvP” have on the rest of the game. In WoW there are clearly abilities and class synergies that are designed to be used in PvP. They have limited or no effective use unless you’re trying to smite that fucking druid who keeps running around the damned pillar. While some would consider this a weak or inelegant design it does allow the balance team to tweak certain PvP configurations up/down without harming PvE viability and vice-versa.
STO ain’t got that. Almost every ability you have is multi-purpose. Of the slew of abilities I possessed as a Rank 9 captain (5 short of the cap) maybe 3 were “designed” for PvP or PvE and had no use outside of that bubble. Long story short – PvE was NOT fun after my cannons stopped hurting things. I logged out in disgust after a particularly brutal pasting in a mission and checked my account status. It was due to expire the next day.
Yoink!
I’ll try and get some pictures up, but that may be a trick as the folder they were housed in got destructificated. This just in: Dropbox is fucking awesome. I know, I know, you already knew it was awesome, but sometimes you have to reiterate!
Anywho, on to bigger and better things. Since then I’ve had some sort of mental health problem that renders me incapable of passing up a sale on Steam. I just finished my first Mass Effect 2 game – very nice.
Aion, for those of you living under a large, Tauren-shaped rock, is the latest MMO from NCsoft. Originally released in the Asian markets a year ago the North American launch begins with the expanded 1.5 release. Titled “Shadow of the Belaur” the birds-eye highlights are a significant boost in content from the original including 12 new instances, the Dredgion PvPvE battleground and an additional 10 levels tacked on to the cap.
In the interests of effective time-management (HA!) let me take a moment to point at the review score in the corner. I gave the game a five. Neither positive nor negative, but right in between. In the last week I’ve read more than a few Aion reviews and if I mash them all together I’m not sure they deliver a single nugget of useful information. Reviewers seem to be deathly afraid of actually talking about the game. They seem content to regurgitate press info or something they saw on Wikipedia, as if that could in any way assist a potential game-buyer in making an informed decision. If that’s what you’re looking for you can give this review a pass. My goal, dear reader, is to tell you about Aion. Launch Aion to be precise. Together we shall explore what is and what could be, the pitfalls and possibilities, so that in the end you will be more than capable of deciding if it’s worth 50 of your hard-earned simoleons. Read the rest of this entry »
Just a quick note for all you folks running WordPress blogs. There is apparently a hack in-the-wild that can lead to a site compromise. There’s no patch as of yet, but it does seem to be “under control” per some of the news I’ve seen.
Regardless, I wiped out 99% of the user accounts in the system as a precaution. Basically any username/mail address I didn’t immediately recognize as legit got the axe. If that included you and you are a human being with eye-holes and whatnot take heart that it was not an intentional slight. Just re-create your account and it’ll be right as rain.
While you’re at it, feel free to post a comment. Or don’t.
I’m very curious as to what the infection vector for this is, as after 48 hours NO ONE seems the have a fucking clue – least of all WordPress. That in and of itself is curious, if a bit frightening. They are rarely at a loss for words when something like this comes up. The silence, as they say, is deafening.
edit:
It seems that WordPress is side-stepping the issue today with a general statement on file permissions. The implication is that the host screwed up and it has nothing to do with WP directly. But that doesn’t seem to fit given some of information out there. Are general users safe? Are they not safe? This kind of ambiguity absolutely KILLS me when I encounter it professionally. Accept blame if it’s due and fix the problem OR state emphatically that there is no problem. Either way the steps are easy:
Yeah, so I’ve been playing STO quite a lotta little bit lately. It’s actually pretty fun once you learn to ignore the parts that, well, aren’t. Like crafting. Jesus H Christ on a crutch is the crafting bad.
More on STO later, maybe, but for now enjoy a couple vids I snapped in XFire. Yes, it’s only a LC1, I rerolled after discovering that Engineering is not my forte so fuck off, k?
This one is me flitting about a +1 Battleship. I failboated 2 attack runs in this video, but the result was still an easy kill. Much like WoW, you have to get to the Commander (or beyond) tier before fights start really becoming dangerous.
Here is me vs 3 gimp frigates. Zero challenge in this one but I still managed to failboat 1 attack pass by firing off a spread. Mentally I was going for the clump AE setup, but I used it from the wrong side of combat and only managed to hit 1 target. He took some damage, but it was a poor use of the combo.
I may cap more vids as time goes on. Obviously I’ll take time to make them good later so just consider this a proof-of-concept. The one is shot at “half” resolution and the other at full. I can’t really tell if there was a discernible FPS loss, so kudos to the XFire crew for the tech. Both were shot with full audio @ 25fps.
First off let’s get the disclaimer out-of-the-way. I’m fairly new to Aion, having only participated in the last two closed beta events. These tests required a legacy invitation from an earlier event or a confirmed pre-order key. Based on my experience I can say that the closed environment was able to produce a superior quality of play and an honest feeling of cooperation among those involved. The players in the CB events genuinely seemed to care about making the game more fun and even *GASP* finding/fixing the odd bug or three. Never a question was uttered without a helpful response. Communications between players were limited to useful information or the occasional humorous quip. As one progressed into the adolescent/elder (read: PvP) game and associated zones discussions of strategy or attack alerts were the norm. Read the rest of this entry »
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