Tag Archives: Rift

Do The Damn Objectives (aka How To Make Me Not Hate You In PVP)

Posted on February 25, 2012 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

This post was originally going to be about something else, but then I played a match of Library of the Runemasters where the other team made a massive comeback, and it was entirely my teams fault.

Now, admittedly, I could of been a more tanky spec so my relic holding lasted longer. But when the whole team is just derping around in the middle of the map and not even trying, my rage is mostly focused at them being stupid.

Let me sum up my simple rules for PvP:

  1. DO THE OBJECTIVE
  2. THERE IS NO TWO, DO THE OBJECTIVE
  3. IN CASES YOU THINK 2 DOESN’T APPLY TO YOU, SEE 1

Now obviously there are times at which “distracting the other team” is an objective. However, considering these rules are focused more towards the lowest common denominator of people, I’m inclined to keep them elegantly simple and focused on not letting them skirt around it with their exceptions.

catch(Exception e){
    System.out.println("No, do the fucking objective, no exceptions.");
}

I like to keep it simple, eh? Anyway, to be more specific, let’s talk about Arathi Basin. It’s got some good examples of times to break the rules (the primary one being “fight on the flags” there).

If you’re up 4:1 or so, suddenly if you can solo hold-up a couple of players for 30-60 seconds on a road somewhere? You do that. I won’t rage. I might be like “okay guys, maybe it’s worth not leaving the squishy mage all alone on a point” when everyone decides to run away for some reason, but a roaming player or two being a pain in the other team’s behind? Nah, no problem there.

You should be happy that I tend not to PVP as a healer. Nobody would be deserving of my heals because fuck healing idiots not doing objectives.

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Domination is a Thing I Guess

Posted on February 6, 2012 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

So, this week I’m going to talk about ‘domination-style’ game modes. In these, you capture and hold points on a map to accrue points. The winner is the first team to obtain a certain number of points.

To start this off, let us talk about Arathi Basin. A 5-point map, this gamemode has been frustrating people since 1.7

This BG is the yardstick to which I measure all other Domination style battlegrounds. A fairly simple map, a good number of flags relative to the number of players, and generous flag-turning mechanics, lead to this BG being one where a good offense almost always pays off.

While I have (jokingly) refereed to Arathi as “the worst BG of all time” there’s a reason it’s so popular, and that is that you always feel in the race. The scaling of resources gained to bases owned means that a lucky 5-cap can turn the game around (although these are incredibly fragile, which is probably a good thing). Battle for Gilneas on the other hand, feels somewhat less… I’m not quite sure what it is. The most obvious changes are the number of Flags (3 opposed to 5) and Players (10 opposed to 15), and the map does a better job of restricting infomation about incoming players with lots of line of sight blocking doodas and terrain (which you can’t really see from the map here), opposed to the relatively wide open terrain of Arathi.

My personal problem with 3 point domination is as follows. Once you hold 2 points, you can usually turtle your way to a win fairly easily. If the other team pushes very hard, you send players from your other flag to smash their flag. Generally speaking the tide of battle is much harder to turn in a 3 flag scenario. This is also my main problem with Civil War in SWTOR. The other thing that is the case in TOR is that flag turnaround is very short once taken, and the damage dealt to the enemy ship appears to scale linearly. This means once you get 100 points behind, you’ve probably lost the match with 10-20 minutes to go.

In addition to my general distaste for TOR’s PvP mechanics (I’m not sure, it never feels ‘fun’ to attack in TOR, it’s hard to say), this makes for a painful experience. Generally speaking, Civil War games are the ones that make me want to Queue dodge the most, as they’re long (at least they feel long) and always painful.

Before we finish up fully, I’ll also make a brief word on Rift’s domination Warfront, The Codex. I don’t play it very often, so I don’t have that much to say on it, but it feels a bit better than either of the 3 point offerings (I believe it has 4), in addition to Rift having some nice PvP in general (unfortunately the best WFs don’t have equivalents in other games, but I might do a post on just them at some stage soon)

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Binary Versus Continuious Rewards

Posted on December 31, 2011 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

So, I was playing TOR and got the idea for a post exploring various reward structures used in games. Specifically, we’re going to look at reward systems that operate in a binary fashion, specifically, you either have it or you don’t, and ‘continuous’ systems, which mete out rewards in a more steady fashion.

Unrelated, but I need to break this up a little bit, haha ^^;;

The simplest example of a binary reward is a feat from the 3rd  (or later) edition of Dungeons and Dragons. You either have them or not (so they have binary (2) states), and they are all bought at a constant rate of 1 magic feat point.

A simple example of continuous rewards is leveling up. Everything you do (kill) gives experience points, which as you accumulate, increase your strength. You can’t skip levels, the progression is a straight line, like a traintrack or something.

A more relevant example would be, for instance, gear. In most MMOs, the primary source of gear is through killing bosses and taking the gear from their corpse. With gear, you either have it or you do not. While you can have intermediate items, they are essentially separate from your obtaining of the final item.

Gear, of course, also has other ways to be given out. For instance, the highly common badge systems that has been in place in WoW since the Burning Crusade, and both TOR and Rift have had it at launch. Even here, the gear itself has binary states, even if it is earned in a more gradual manner. It presents an interesting set of decisions. Do you buy every gradual upgrade, or just save your tokens for the good stuff?

Crystalsong is pretty. This is a super old screenshot.

Some games gate the good gear behind lots of different currencies. Blizzard have the most elegant system at the moment, with their fluid point system. Although it took them plenty of iterations to get to that stage.

I for one, prefer the single currency with obscene inflation (see Burning Crusade), as it gives everyone a chance to get the good stuff with a bit of time and effort. It also makes it possible to twink people up by running them the higher tier content to let them swim in tokens.

The ‘every tier of gear gets a new token’ system I find annoying, as it leads to lots of gating that makes gearing up nigh impossible. It’s inelegant, and frustrating.

Blizzard’s “upper tier” and “lower tier” currency system, where the current content rewards points just for it’s gear, and everything else grants lower tier points is quite elegant, and is a good compromise between letting the raiders have their fancy exclusive gear, and letting the rest of us stay in touch.

Almost always, rewards themselves have specific states. Even leveling you have ‘tiers’ of XP at which you get to level up, which is when your power actually increases. In some cases, however, the reward scales as you gain whatever it is you gain. Usually these have an ebb and flow to them, much more like power ups than the rewards that have been discussed thus far.

Rage probably bears a mention here as a good example of a fluid system. It starts empty, you fill it up by getting hit in the face // hitting things in the face, and you spend it to hit things in the face hard. Of course, you don’t get stronger by having lots of rage. Although that would be nice, I’m sure. It would also make rage an even more interesting mechanic.

Come to think of it, there aren’t many mechanics that work like that that come to mind… well, I’m sure I’ll think of one 20 minutes after I post this, haha. >>;;

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How I Play MMOs

Posted on October 10, 2011 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

Okay, I want thinking about stuff on the twitters, and came the the realization that in every MMO I’ve ever played, I have a very similar strategy.

It’s a horrible strategy, and I’d really probably be better off not wasting my time with MMOs, but I love them, despite never liking that 2nd M at all.

So, the first thing is character creation – specifically here, I tend to pick the ‘Magic User’ class. I like playing magi, I think they’re cool. This isn’t a problem yet, but soon enough, you’ll see this is a horrible choice. >>;;

So I enter the game – and I start to level. Solo. As covered in this post I’m not exactly crash hot on doing dungeons, and as they’re not required, I happily ignore them. Usually I have a pretty slow pace of leveling (not because I’m particularly slow, just because I’m trying to make the fun parts last as long as possible), and I’m usually not even half-way to the level cap before the vast majority of players have started on endgame content (meaning simply at-cap content, probably instances preparing for raids).

Once I’ve made my way to the level cap, the game changes somewhat. I lose my goal. At the level cap, I’ll do the following tasks:

  • Explore the world (or as much as possible for a solo character)
  • Solo low-level dungeons (if possible – playing a mage makes this double hard, BTW)
  • Maybe PvP or something?
  • Buy several months or more of subscription for a game that I barely play.

Now, the obvious answer would be “hey, asshole, get over your stupid fears and do some fucking group content”.

I… I don’t like that idea. I mean, even when I have friends or I’m in a guild or whatever, it’s hard for me to initiate group content (as usually due to the tiered nature of end-game content, I need to do things that are completely useless to these other players). This means that I don’t/can’t get geared enough to actually get to the stage where I can do content with said friends/guild (that they want to do).

It’s a pretty painful cycle, but it doesn’t get me down, much. A lot of this level-cap stuff comes directly from my experiences with Cataclysm, but also applies to other games I’ve played. Specifically what happened with Cata was that I was a week late to 85 (it took me 10 days instead of 3-5), and everyone was into Heroics before I had a chance to start working on the horrible 85 normals. And they didn’t want to go back. So then I kept paying for a year despite not playing or doing any group content at all, ever.

Anyway, it’s looking at behavior like this that makes me wonder why I’m considering ordering ToR – and considering how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a copy of that game (because EA/Bioware actually don’t want people to play it – I must admit that it makes me think their game probably is terrible), I’m thinking I’ll import a boxed copy, as the idea of downloading a 30+ GB client makes my Internet connection cry tears of blood. (Stupid download allowances…)

Anyway, my wide range of concerns about ToR is probably another post or 3 worth of content, and it’s not like anyone from Bioware is going to read this anyway! (Let us be honest here – I don’t expect anyone from Blizzard, or Trion, or Riot or Bioware or Valve or anyone else to read this blog – why would they care about my opinions?) (Not that I don’t want people to read the blog… but you know, pessimism and all that jazz – also the wide amounts of feedback I get totally help me think that I’m reaching a wide audience (I’m not trying to guilt trip you into commenting))

Well, whatever. The next part of the “Games I Play” series should be up relatively soon. Like, tomorrow or maybe later today, but don’t count on that. (I still have to do an MMO entry for that, don’t I? Well, it can wait till later in the series)

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20DoB 16 & 17: Missing Favorites

Posted on September 20, 2011 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

Today is a very introspective day, as far as topics are concerned. (I would of posted it yesterday, but I was busy playing with my new figures (1/8 GSC Hanekawa Tsubasa, and Nendoroid Makise Kurisu) and freaking out because of a thunderstorm)

(Note: I plan to grab some screenshots for this a bit later, but I figured I should post in now anyway)

We have “Things You Miss (post Cata)” and “Your Favorite Spot (in or outside of game)”.

Obviously, the first choice for things I miss and my favorite spot is my favorite spot I miss. Duh. I really miss being able to go hide at the lighthouse in Quel’thalas. It was a nice, relaxing place, that was a bitch to get to. Nowdays, there is a big invisible wall stopping you from getting up there.

That being said, I miss a lot of things in the post-Cataclysm Azeroth. Every zone that’s changed, I miss at least a little bit. Of particular note is Azshara, which has been thrown to the wolves goblins, and is considerably less cool than it used to be.

I miss the old leveling flow, just because I knew it so well. I miss being able to skip quests in zones… there are a lot of things I “miss”.

Anywho, lets get onto the more fun topic of favorite places.

I -really- like Crystalsong. Such a pretty, pretty zone, and so very, very unused. Actually, I like a lot of the Northrend zones. They are, for the most part, very pretty. It’s sad that the least pretty zones are the ones where players spent the most time (Icecrown, Dragonblight, and to a lesser degree Storm Peaks and Wintergrasp).

Another obvious choice in WoW is Nagrand. Everyone loves Nagrand. So pretty, good quests, and home to the best mounts in the game (Talbuks, everyone loves Talbuks), of all time. Ever. Even Rift’s cool mechanical horses aren’t as cool as Talbuks.

Other good zones from Burning Crusade are Netherstorm (It’s purple, and in space, what more could you want?) and Eversong Woods (so pretty, so very very autumnal and pretty).

Cataclysm has pretty boring new zones, really. Hyjal is okay but not super pretty, Vash’jir is pretty but just a horrible zone, Deepholm is somehow even more lame than Vash, Uldum has great quests but is basically just a big desert, and Twilight Highlands is infested by nightmare fuel (the rest of it’s pretty nice though).

I guess Cata did have Kezan, but you’d struggle to spend an hour there, really.

Let’s move on to other games. Rift is an easy choice, because I’ve been playing more of it than I’d care to admit. Rift has zones that run the gambit between boring and less-boring, but it does have some very pretty vistas. Mainly because you can walk almost everywhere. The world feels much more… complete, than the Zones of WoW at most times. Mainly because mountain climbing is not only completely valid, but it is encouraged, with all of the Cairns at stupid high places, for instance.

While I’ve not been to every zone in Telara yet (Not been to the 46-50 zones yet), I can say that the zones that are probably the nicest are firstly, the Lake Of Solace (which is a bit of a silly answer, as it is just a big lake, with nothing much in it), and then Moonshade Highlands (which I always want to refer to as “Moonshae” for some reason), which is geographically pretty simple, but is a pretty nice zone. Iron Pine Peak is nice too, but ‘SNOW EVERYWHERE’ in a huge ass zone is a bit tiring after a while.

There are a lot of very pretty games, and I’m much too lazy to think of and/or name them all. The only other really good game I’ve been playing much of recently is Minecraft (1.8 worlds are super pretty), and it’s not like I can specifically be like “that area is cool” in a game that is all procedurally generated.

Next Time: FFFFF-Fashion?

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Rift 1.1 Patch: First Impressions

Posted on April 3, 2011 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

Now, patch-analysis has never been my strong suit, and considering how disinterested I am in Rift (I’ve only played it for 10 hours since that last post, and probably sub-30 overall) this post seems kinda silly.

However, Rift’s 1.1 patch, dubbed ‘River of Souls’ for the new Raid that presumably will unlock later in the patch’s life cycle.

For now, it is mostly a balance patch (not that I noticed, because I hadn’t played the game for weeks) with a ‘World Event’. This event has it’s own interface in the game’s UI (which I should probably cover in another post – short version, it’s not-moddable) which shows that it is comprised of three phases.

The current phase (I think the term they use is ‘Stage’ – whatever), is the first, which is basically comprised of a bunch of NPCs turning up and offering a bunch of daily quests. These are, as far as I can tell, the same for all characters from 1-50. They comprise of the following:

  • Close 3 (non-grey con1) Death Rifts.
  • Defeat a (non-grey con) ‘River of Souls’ Death Invasion.
  • Fight some level 10 enemies around the capital city of your team.
  • Blow up some minor ‘River of Souls’ Death Invasion mobs.

There might be another one that I’m forgetting, but that’s about it. These give you a special currency (which is held in your bags, not your currency tab, annoyingly) which you can turn in for a number of Purple (item colors are the same as in WoW, as far as I can tell) rings for various level ranges (low, 30, 40 & 50), a choice of 3 different companion pets (which I will get on principle), and two other vanity items that were less alluring. Still gotta get them all, though.

This currency is also rewarded for closing ‘River of Souls’ Rifts and defeating the Invasions they spawn (although in lesser quantities) which means that the rewards are basically farmable, which I plan to do when I can catch a break and actually do it (why am I writing this when I could be farming?).

Nothing else of note has been added yet, but we’ll see. Or not, I’m pretty lazy. :3

  1. You do remember what a grey-con is, right? If not, then they’re just mobs that are so much lower level than you, that they no longer grant any experience. ↩

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Rerolling so soon?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

Yeah, kinda rolled a new character in Rift today, with the intention of making her my ‘main’. Moved away from the PvP server (which was only because it was the only place without a queue, so yeah), and moved towards the Mage class/archetype.

She’s only level 5, and I’m not in a mad rush to get her back on the leveling pace, because I just generally don’t care that much (how surprising, coming from the guy who took a year to get from 1-70 when he first started playing WoW (Arcane Mage leveling – not so great in retrospect, but I wouldn’t change it for the world)), but you know, yeah, whatever, man.

The important thing to note, personally, is the way Rift has given each Archetype (as I call them, as I figure ‘class’ is more like a ‘soul’ in Rift), and how both Rogues and Mages get 1 Healing soul (Rogues also get a Tanking soul, but I didn’t try that out), Clerics have several healing souls, that are a bit more traditional, and Fighters have no healing souls, because they are boring (:P)

This means I can be a cross-class Fire Mage (Pyromancer) / Affliction Warlock (Warlock) (also has self-heals on some of it’s DoTs) / Weird Healer (Chloromancer). This is kinda awesome.

Anyway, this has somewhat postponed me getting to new zones, to comment on how they are in the ‘giving me fun places to explore’, which is the main reason I like so many games that have been often called shit. (Also why Cata is simultaneously awesome (lots of ‘new’ things to explore) and horrible (all my old favorite places are no more))

Anyway, expect another Rift post around the weekend, I don’t know. Real life is continuing to be annoying in regards to giving me enough time to fit in study, let alone playing videogames, so yeah. Thanks, birthdays (other people’s) and optometry.

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Real Life Strikes Back

Posted on February 27, 2011 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

Yes, unfortunately, I’ve been a bit busy over the last couple of days. I’ve not really played enough Rift to warrant an entire post about it, but I guess I can give a quick talk about what I have done, and then talk about some other games I’ve been playing recently, or something.

Warfronts are Rift’s version of Battleground style PvP. Starting at level 10, you can open up the queue interface (I believe that the default keybind is ‘i’), and queue for one.

At level 10-19, I only had access to one Warfront, which was called ‘The Black Garden’, or ‘Dark Garden’ or something like that. If you have ever played the ‘Oddball’ gamemode from Halo, you’ll be familiar with the basic idea of this warfront. Basically, there is a flag (or ‘Shard’) in the middle of the map. You pick it up, and periodically score points for your team, however, you also take ever-increasing amounts of damage over time, in addition to being the obvious target for the other team. You also get points for killing enemy players. First team to 500 wins.

Now I really enjoyed this, and with the Bard (which is the ‘Support’ or Healing soul for the Rogue class) being based around using HoTs and dealing damage to heal (I have two ways to heal people, one is a ~30 second HoT effect, that heals 40ish damage every 3 seconds, and the other is 20ish% of the damage I deal from one of my other abilities), this works quite well. I personally scored about 250 points for my team in one big go, then the damage spikes got too big for me to heal through.

So, if you’re playing Rift, I certainly suggest jumping into and trying them out, and it’s not like you need to worry about people with 80k Resil coming in and taking no damage from your attacks, as I doubt anyone has earned enough favor (Honor) to buy the PvP souls yet (they cost about 10k, from memory, favor is gained at a rate that is probably closer to BC/LK era Honor gains than Cata ones).

Now, I’ve also been making a bit more progress through full-clearing Dragon Age again, in preparation for Dragon Age 2 on the 10th. Not sure if I’ll make it in time, but we will see. Probably will be able to manage, and worst case I go in without playing through Awakenings and the DLC (Golems and Witch Hunt, the ‘canonical’ ones), although that is non-desirable.

Anyway, referring back to the title, university starts up tomorrow, so I technically have less time to play than I have had for a while. Still, the first few weeks of semester are fairly chilled, so I should still be able to hit my goal of 2 or 3 posts a week fairly easily.

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First Impressions: Rift

Posted on February 25, 2011 by TwilliK by TwilliK | Leave a comment

I’ve spent much of today (probably 4 or 5 hours, at a guess?) playing the Head Start of Rift, the new MMO by Trion, who have done… nothing else at all, it seems.

Not that I want to sterotype, but honestly, the first thing I really thought of when I was playing Rift was Guild Wars. Now, the games really aren’t all that similar at all, but there is something about the UI which made me think of GW for some reason (it’s the styling of the buttons, I’m fairly sure).

Rift is obviously and instantly compared to WoW, because, despite the idiots in the global chat channels saying otherwise (Tip: Leave the 1-9 chat channel, it’s full of shit. You may want to leave the zone channel as well) Rift is incredibly indebted to WoW in the way that every MMO kinda is.

  • Souls? Like more interesting Talent Trees (but from pre-Cata).
  • Warfronts are the Battlegrounds that are so common in modern MMOs.
  • Money is divided into 3 denominations (Silver-Gold-Plat, just to be different, I’m sure), with an additional currency for PvP.
  • There are two warring factions, and they are totally never, ever, going to become Bros.

The painfully boring parts of the experience out of the way, it’s time to talk about the best part of the game, the titular rifts. These pop up all over the place, and are really impressive graphically. There are fixed places for rifts to appear, but there are enough of them that it really doesn’t make too much of a difference, and I doubt we would of noticed except for the fact that everyone in the whole faction was in this one zone, more or less.

When you participate in a rift, or an invasion party (which are like mobile mini-bosses that like to 1 shot things),  you get a special currency (that has 3 distinct types, which do not seem to be mixed – you either have 1 Blue or 0 Blue, not 1 Blue or 100 Green (the three types are ‘Green’, ‘Blue’, and ‘Purple’, which follow WoW’s rarity coloring in rarity). These can be traded in for gear, but nothing particularly interesting at my current, low, level (12).

How good the rewards you get is determined by a ‘Contribution Meter’, which basically tracks how much damage you deal (or take, for tanks?) or healing you heal, presumably in relation to the rest of the group.

You also gain ‘infamy’ (reputation) and XP from closing Rifts (in addition to XP from killing the enemies), which is a nice boost.

The other type of rift event is the Invasions, which are a horrible clusterfuck of fail at the moment. This is largely because the players in general were just a little bit too low for the first couple of Invasions that occurred, I’m thinking, although with enough committed players you can do a really good job of holding these guys off.

Invasions are a real zone wide effort. For the one that I’ve experienced several times in the starter (5-20?) zone, the idea is that you have to close 8 or so rifts, and defeat 30-odd (27?) Invasion Groups (or more, as Invasion Rifts seem to spawn more groups over time), without letting the NPCs take a number of strategic wards or something.

These are really enjoyable to do. I would guess that we had somewhere in the region of 40 players (2 full raids) defending this point, then pushing out to defeat the boss that popped up at the end. It really did feel quite epic, although considering I’d already seen several failed defenses earlier in the day (the big thing I noticed was that the playerbase, despite huge warnings popping up on the screen, were quite slow to react to Invasions), it’s impact was somewhat lessened.

Graphically, Rift is one of those games where it is ‘technically pretty’, but the art style itself doesn’t exactly make things look ‘amazing’. That being said, the rifts are awesome (only seen Dark and Water ones so far, but they are both really cool looking), and the player models aren’t hideous. Screenshots don’t really do the game justice, as it is the animations that make the game feel considerably more ‘fancy’, the art itself is mostly just kinda soso.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a shot of Selite the Dark Elf I don’t actually remember the name of the race, as they all have stupid and random names on the Defiant (Technology and Atheism team) side. At least they are kinda cool, unlike the Guardians, who are kinda lame.

She also is a rogue, because this is on a PvP server and I was intending to reroll. Unsure now.

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