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 »
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 »
Yeah, so … no updates or something for a while. “IRL.” It happens. Lots of things to discuss, not a lot of time. That, too, happens.
I canceled my World of Warcraft account a couple months ago – more on that later. I have a standing copy of Aion, which has been quite fun so far. More on that later as well.
Are we sensing a pattern?
I’ve been reading a couple books of late, both I find fascinating. One is a collection of “Aesop’s Fables” and the other is a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species (6th edition). Both have been genuinely illuminating. Many of the colorful aphorisms we drown in every day date back far, far earlier than I realized. It’s interesting that many of these sayings I’ve heard attributed to biblical passages when the true origins dated back to the oral storytellers a millennium or so before quill was ever put to papyrus. As for Origin? Wow. Let’s just say I’ve never met anyone who articulated what he was actually saying. Most people, in fact, get it wrong. Exposure to this material would have been handy 15 years ago. Thanks again, public education.
In other news, I’m car shopping. What a nightmare. I think I have it whittled down to a couple solid choices. I’m past considering the wishlist vehicles and focusing in on solid price/performance comparisons. A couple more test-drives and I should be able to pull the trigger. Knowing myself as I do that may take months.
After much anticipation Blizzard has opened the StarCraft II Beta opt-in. In the beta test you will get an opportunity to provide your feedback on the overall experience, including units, maps, aesthetics, and more. We would also appreciate reports on any bugs you may encounter during your game-play experience.
We will be selecting account holders of Battle.net and World of Warcraft accounts who opted-in at random to participate in the much anticipated StarCraft II Beta. To opt-in for the beta test go to the opt-in page found here. Please be prepared to enter the current retail World of Warcraft or Battle.net account name and password you use. To be eligible to participate in the beta tests, you must have a valid retail World of Warcraft or Battle.net account active and in good standing as of July 17, 2009.
Needles to say my in was opted post-haste. Ever since WoW I’ve been keeping my eyes off most beta stuffs. Preferring to see completed (or laughably launched) products before I deign to open the purse-strings. I’ve stayed as far away from Old Republic to avoid clouding my judgment. The most I’ve visited so far is to check on beta status and nab a few swanky wallpapers.
After 2 days of battling the 1st Ulduar boss (the instance server) we finally managed to get IN the damned zone with 20-some. Flame Leviathan was a blast and, like most guilds, dropped it on our first run.
For the last couple hours of the day today the leadership and I had been discussing what to do about the legendary du jour if and when our first fragment dropped. Some things were discussed, not really things I liked, but it was a good discussion to have. My parting shot before I left work was “think about it over the weekend, we’ll vote on Monday”. I guess my assumption was that we’d get, at most, 2 bosses down tonight and that there’s no possible way we’d see this rare item.
“Ooops?”
So we had a quick meeting and voted on the course of action we thought best for the time being. not really something I was looking for, but such is life in a republic… or reasonable facsimile thereof.
Regardless, a big G-rats to my homeskillet Liandroa on his first fragment. Only 29 more to go!
I keep guild drama off the front page most days, but sometimes it’s cathartic to just vent. I’m pretty sure no one from my guild actually reads these pages so the risk is pretty minimal.
The core players in my guild have been around a long time, some going back years into EQ raiding on Prexus. In that type of mix of old/new players and grudges YEARS in the making, it’s a wonder we don’t have more angsty bullshit than we do… *knock on wood*
A few months a back we gained a couple players who were with us in the beginning on Stormrage. They left to join the #1 and #2 power guilds on the server and did the whole hardcore thing for a couple years. Their departure caused a few ruffled feathers. These guys are pretty caustic individuals. I don’t mean that in a bad way – I find their demeanor to be absolutely hilarious. But I’m not a 6-year-old-girl, either. I can take a hit and give it right back when the need arises.
What gets them in trouble is that they have no issues telling people the plain truth no matter how ugly it might be. Again, I’m a big fan of honesty. If you don’t say what you mean how can anyone take you seriously? So combine old grudges with their no-holds-barred truth-telling and you have the pack of dogs with bees in their mouths that I’ve got now. Tank A told tank B that he was frustrated with the quality of tank B’s tanking. Tank B threw a hissy and bailed on the raid all the while going batshit crazy in private about how he won’t put up with that shit and why weren’t we supporting him. It was a fun night, lemee tells ya. Tank B still isn’t raiding after two weeks, but he’s apparently found time to pug 25s and run some sort of clandestine 10-man operation. What can you do, really? My initial solution of throwing them both in a burlap bag and chucking it off the side of a boat was a non-starter.
Getting pissed off at other people for inexplicable reasons just bugs the shit out of me. Seriously. What the fuck is the point? Anywho, here’s a helpful life lesson from me to you – don’t be that guy. Just don’t.
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