Free to play imagined and reality

Rohan of Blessing of Kings has a post linking to and discussing another blog post by Klepsacovic. Rohan discusses and expands on Klepsacovic’s post about the disconnect between the apparent imagined version of the free to play model and the reality most companies in this MMO space are probably using.

I’ll agree that I’ve seen Rohan’s “forum rhetoric” many times, this phrase refers to forum posts wherein players do basic calculations to guess how much money the free to play playerbase might be spending on the game. Usually these posts appear when players are debating the profitability of the model or comparing free to play with subscription.

I’ve said before that I’m likely to be willing to invest some money in permanent unlocks in a free to play game to ‘support it’ as I play.  I’ve followed this pattern in EQ2, and Guild Wars 2 (extra shared vault space) and more recently with SWTOR. In this last game I have bought cartel coins a couple of times for specific one-off purchases (3rd crafting slot for all characters and the starter kit with piloting and speeder for two leveling alts).

I steer clear of the consumable purchases though, and especially anything remotely resembling gambling. I really dislike the trend of mixed-model games  that encourage you to take out a subscription but then keep nagging you to spend even more. It seems devs aren’t happy with the limited number of these ‘whale’ spenders they have in-game. Such efforts make me considerably less likely to subscribe to a game or even stay playing it however. The rampant ‘commercialisation’ of LOTRO has rather turned me off that game.

SWTOR: Imperial trio progress

The latest session of our Imperial trio involved us closing in on the end of the Dromund Kaas mission arc and some heroic ‘fun’. I’ve said before that I love the group content in SWTOR and overall heroic 4′s are good for us to do in a trio + Mako.

However the last two sessions of SWTOR that I’ve played (Imp and Jedi duo) we’ve been unlucky enough to have an item collection mission bug out on us. This time around it was the heroic 4 mission, Friends of Old, that went wrong. Tank and I completed collecting the three thingummies with a 100% drop rate from the designated target creature type. Our Sith sorceror healer was inexplicably missing one. We went on to slay another 4 or 5 of them (with the attendant groups of gold elites of course), still no drop. So we had to reset the mission for that character and redo another three groups.

Other than that, it was a good session overall. I have a new meta game to play – on any creature that doesn’t die super fast to our collective power (gold or gold-silver), I try to time a Rail Shot to finish it with style.

Memories of UT2004

Playing a pyrotech (dps powertech bounty hunter), I’m left wishing my Jedi guardian had as many potential area threat abilities. What I do lack is any kind of decent crowd control or way to drop threat if I accidentally grab aggro.

Without including specific spoilers, I am loving playing this particular group mix. As a sarcastic bounty hunter I get to be irreverent about the Sith Lords’ domination of the Empire and to drop some nice one-liners. My delight over NPCs recognising that we’re doing missions as a group hasn’t worn off either; it’s not limited to the odd “you all” either, NPCs do have nicely scripted reactions to this.

Weekend mixed bag

Amidst study and travel to see family, I did manage to squeeze in a few gaming sessions. Our Imperial leveling trio played again, our Juggernaut tank’s problems with heroic zone mobs having excessive stuns chimes rather well with the latest tanking experiences of Shintar. I’ll post more about that session tomorrow.

I also had read the shock news that the EU PVE server Icewatch was being locked and turned into a ‘test realm’. This meant I wanted to get my main Rift character, a cleric, transferred off ASAP. Despite the chaotic population swell of this early F2P conversion period, I managed to login after patching and quickly moved him back to Argent, my original home server (EU RP). I wasn’t tempted to play beyond doing that move, other than receiving the ‘Patron’ rewards that come from my 12 month playtime.

Finally I had the chance to meet with family members who also play Guild Wars 2. We rarely play at the same times so dungeon groups have been few and far between, but talking out of game about our favourite classes and zones did up our enthusiasm for the game another notch.  I’m quietly optimistic we’ll get to do a few more dungeon runs or maybe even a guild challenge sometime soon.

The simple things: User Interface elements I like

I was thinking recently that no single MMO gets everything right about its User Interface. As I play my way through various MMOs I’ve naturally ended up comparing what is done well and not so well. I’ll focus on the positive in this post and just cherry pick a few features I really like.

Guild Wars 2: two-click mail system
I have to say I love the intuitive minutiae of the Guild Wars 2 mail system. You can right click an item in your inventory to mail it as an attachment, that right there is good, but add in that if you have a party member targeted when you do this right click action then both the item attachment and the recipient are pre-filled and you have a beautiful two-click simplicity. This makes it very easy to share items with friends!

Rift: AoE looting
Many games have copied this feature, but the first MMO I played with this was Rift. Once you’ve experienced area looting it is *very* annoying to go back to frantic clicking after battles. All games should have this feature, after all what value does clicking individual opponents corpses after a fight really bring to the game experience? As an aside I’ve recently read that Guild Wars 2 should be getting this feature, so no more mashing the ‘F’ key while running madly around a battlefield!

LOTRO: party-friendly quest log
One of my biggest bugbears in any MMO is a user interface that doesn’t support easy grouping for normal questing (not just dungeons!). LOTRO, way back in 2009 when I first tried the game, already had advanced quest log features to display if other group members had the same quests or if they were on an earlier or later stage of a quest chain. That’s a lot of very useful information in this quest-heavy game.

SWTOR: loot ‘pillars’
Although some might think this feature affects immersion; I really appreciate the very clear markers for unclaimed items dropped by opponents in SWTOR. The yellow ‘pillar’ for mission item loot is especially useful. Sparkles of various kinds can’t really compare to a colour-coded beacon – they even add a bit of excitement to general gameplay by hinting when an especially rare or valuable item drops!

Neverwinter: auto-hide UI on screenshot option
This is an interesting option that I’ve not seen before. The default screenshot key auto-hides the UI for all screenshots, that’s a big convenience feature for a screenshot-addict like me. Better still you can bind additional key combos to take screenshots with UI intact. I usually want to take screenshots without the UI showing for my blog so this is a nice feature to have.

Guild Wars 2: crafting materials management
Personally I think the “right-click deposit” idea for crafting materials in Guild Wars 2 was sheer genius. Coupled with the auto-sorted (and pretty generous) shared account vault and I’m one happy crafter in this game. All my characters can easily tell what materials are available to them at a moment’s notice. Even better I never have to resort to mailing materials between characters just to do some crafting!

This isn’t an exhaustive list, just the top features I could think of while writing this. Some features, like full-on customisation of UI elements, are shared across several games so I’ve left them off of this post.

Beyond my picks above, do you have any favourite UI features from a MMO?

GW2: Dragon Bash thoughts

Last night our Asura duo explored the Dragon Bash festival:

DIY dragon statues; not up to Asura crafting standards…

There seemed to be a lot of humans and big humans … I mean Norn, stood around like gaping loons in the main plaza. Everyone was asking “how long, how many minutes”, yet the few I asked didn’t even know what they were waiting for!

Such frivolity in the face of adversity, humans are intriguing!

The city is festooned with crudely made dragon-shaped balloons. I found them irritating, however they are easily popped. Strangely they contain confectionery, it is (as I would expect for human tastes) overly sweetened however and I will not be sampling any more. Thankfully there is a merchant who wants to exchange goods for them, clearly he is a fool.

Amusing .. at first

The vendor sells fireworks, however they are poorly made and would not survive travel once unboxed. So there are fireworks being set off near the vendor at all moments. Some ear protectors would be a good marketing ploy for this ‘festival’! 

A giant holo-projector

The giant holo projection of the dragon is what I expect of human exuberant celebration, however this holo-projector intrigues me. Clearly it is Asura magi-tech, but its scale and complexity tugs at memories, I fear I have an idea who might be behind this tech and that it may hold secrets…

So far I was surprisingly impressed by the festival – on face value it could be a copy-paste job of other festivals. There’s out in the world objects that spawn fights, there’s a PVP arena, there’s a new currency to collect. But the achievement list for the event shows (spoilers!) that there will be some story attached too, and it has me interested!

FFXIV: FATE system

I’ve found via Uriah Nool‘s blog that there’s now a dev blog showcasing the FATE scaling event system for the revamp of Final Fantasy XIV. This looks pretty interesting to me as I’m a fan of public quests as implemented in games like Rift and Guild Wars 2.

I played FFXIV briefly in its version 1.0 incarnation. In the end the battle against the user interface was too much for my moderate level of patience. The crafting was certainly interesting though and the world had a tonne of unique character and charm. So I’m watching warily for the remake to see what has improved or been added. The game, when it relaunches, could well be worth trying out I think. The FATE system certainly has raised my level of interested a few notches.

SWTOR: mobile tanking

A good session of Jedi-duo fun last night. In particular I discovered the joys of new-found Guardian mobility. This session we were running missions near Dreviad Outpost and later Outpost Solara.

One of the missions involved killing some Sandpeople sharpshooters that were based up on the high overhanging cliffs of the canyon. Up there I got to make spectacular use of my just-learned force push ability.

Tharan, you’re blocking the picture!

Yes, punting Sandpeople off of high cliffs is rather amusing! That wasn’t the best trick though. Even better was my daredevil use of force leap to jump across the chasm to engage sharpshooters on the other side!

I did this a few times successfully; it is such fun to be able to use movement abilities like this with such freedom. I’m sure in WoW and Rift the equivalent abilities would either fail with a ‘no path to target’ error or you’d just fall short (or down!). Thumbs up to the SWTOR engine for permitting this.

*looking smug*

I also have started practicing force push + force leap as a combo since force push instantly refreshes force leap. I have to say having these two abilities, whether used separately or in combination, has made guardian tanking feel more mobile and active.