Update on the future of Sigil and Vanguard coming soon…

It’s all ultimately good news, but complicated enough to justify one of my verbose postings :)  I should have my first Sigil/Vanguard update up tomorrow and then look for regular updates as to the future of the game here and on the affiliate sites (probably weekly or so, depending on what’s going on).  I will post here first and then immediately copy the post to a set of the Vanguard affiliate sites.

thanks,

-Brad 

Tomorrow is the second anniversary of the release of Prophecies, and the first anniversary for Factions. As such, there’s going to be birthday-stuff all weekend long. Yay cake!

What better way to celebrate a birthday than with an outdoor party complete with games, races, and contests to reward both the lucky and skilled among us. Back by popular request, the good citizens of Shing Jea Monastery will re-open their ever-enjoyable Boardwalk—to those who have access to Shing Jea, of course—for the birthday celebration. Whether you seek to increase your Luck or just kick back and have a good time, the games of chance along the Shing Jea Boardwalk will certainly have what you’re looking for.

In addition to the mini-games on the Shing Jea Boardwalk, you will also be able to compete at the Dragon Arena and race at the Rollerbeetle Track. These special PvP events will be accessible from Shing Jea Monastery and from the Great Temple of Balthazar. They’re sure to be fun for your whole family… of characters.

This time of year must be good for MMOGs, because City of Heroes’ third anniversary is right around now too. NCSoft’s Mike Crouch sent over some interesting stats about the game:

During the first three years of the game, more than 24 million characters have been created in City of Heroes and City of Villains with more than 102,000 of those characters reaching level 50, the game’s top tier. The game is also renowned for its ease of cooperative role-playing, resulting in the creation of more than 654,000 super groups, and the building of more than 66,000 super group bases.

Additionally, NCsoft has determined that of the 24 million characters created:

* 27 percent of the hero characters created were blasters, making it the most popular hero archetype.
* 26 percent of the villain characters created were Masterminds, making it the most popular villain.
* 32 percent of the characters with travel powers chose flight, followed by super jump at 28 percent, super speed at 25 percent and teleport at 14 percent.

Fueling the game’s economy is the more than 3 trillion influence (the game’s currency) in circulation, which will play an important part of the new crafting system and auction houses being added with the upcoming release of “Issue 9: Breakthrough,” the game’s next content expansion.

Simon asked me to point out that the GDC Austin call for submissions will be closing soon.

The topics which a prospective speaker can address must fall within one of the event’s established tracks – for MMOs/online games (with four sub-tracks for business and management, community and marketing, design, and technlogy and services), as well as audio for games and writing for games. In addition, the event will include a new People’s Choice track featuring the sessions community members want to see most, and all proposals that do not fit into one of the other three tracks will be offered for voting on the People’s Choice voting website. The deadline for submissions is Monday, April 30, 2007.

Brent and I (mostly Brent) has submitted a suggestion about MMOG blogs … be interesting to see how that turns out. All you smarty-pants devs, go put an iron in the fire. I know I want to hear about your stuff.

Okay. Now that I’ve written about how hunky dory LOTRO is, I have to put down some snark. I even got a very nice note from one of the Edelman folks (hi!) who were nice enough to send me a gratis copy. I was originally planning on buying a copy; now I guess I can lay that out on Guitar Hero II for the 360 instead. ;)

Just the same, I do have a couple of snarks I have to get out of my system.

• Quest balance. While the ‘group quests’ have all very much been right on the money (essentially undoable by solo, very pleasant in a group), I’ve found several ostensibly soloable quests that are too challenging for one avatar. I’m specifically thinking of the one where you help the idiot hobbits trying to knock the satchel out of the tree near Tuckborough. It’s slated as a level 7 quest, and the bees (the first critters you have to protect the hobbit from) are doable at that level. However, then you’re faced with a pair of bears; one is level 10 and the other is level 9. The first level I tried the quest at was 9, and I got creamed. Several times. Same at level 10. I waited until I hit 12 to take them on again, and used up a bunch of food and consumables before doing so. I *bearly* (no pun) squeaked past those bastards with a sliver of health left. I know I’m just a Minstrel, and I’m sure that more front-line folks probably have a better time of it, but I haven’t had any other problems like this with a solo-specified outing. Additionally, I’ve come across several other characters trying the quest that needed bacon-saving. I was happy to oblige, but if that quest is tuned for a group it should say so.
• Bugs. I have noticed several pinchers that made it through the Beta process. Nothing too major, but it’s a little annoying to see nonetheless. The “Honey-Bears” quest over near the aforementioned tree is the most consistent one I’ve seen. The bears spawn up near the top of a hill, and you have to protect Bolo Beekeeper-guy from the marauding ursines. The problem is they do this drop-from-the-sky routine, flickering in and out of existence. You have to run to the top of the hill and aggro them in order to get them to stay put. This quest *is* doable solo, but Bolo helps a lot on that front. By aggroing at the top of the hill you get a lot of damage that might otherwise have been spread around. That ‘drop from the sky’ bug is around a lot; while it makes some kind of sense for the spiders over by Overhill, wolves, bears, and slugs make a lot less sense. As a final wtf I spent about half an hour last night helping a guy get unstuck from the corner of a building, which he somehow managed to teleport himself into facing the wrong direction. IE: he saw his interface, but darkness beyond. /stuck wasn’t working, and we eventually resorted to my telling him which way he was facing and walking him into a building instance. When he turned around and left the instance, his sight was restored. For the most part, LOTRO has been such a smooth experience that these things stand out more than they would have otherwise, but they do bear mentioning.
• Quest Design. STOP SENDING ME BACK TO MICHEL DELVING. The Shire is actually a really small place once you step back and get a better view, but the constant run around back and forth gets old after a while. I think things got a lot better once I’d made my way to the eastern portion of the area (past the Frog swamps and into Scary). The quest that bugged me specifically was the spiders in Nob’s Bole one, where you eventually help the walking tree. I went from Tuckborough to Overhill several times; as I said, not a long trip. The repetition, though, was frustrating. I like feeling a sense of progression from my quests. A leads to B leads to C. We can go back to B, but then I should go on to C and D after that. The spider quest was more like A, B, C, B, A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C. This may have been part of their familiarization process for the Shire (and the game’s design philosophy, which I’ll get to below), but it started to get irksome during a long play session earlier this week. As a note, I should say that the frustration led to a really nice payoff. Escorting the walking tree was a blast, and the rewards for the quest were pretty good. Oh, additionally: escort missions are actually really cool in this game. I normally hate them, but all the escorts I’ve done so far have been for folks buff enough to either hold their own in a fight or stay alive well after I thought they should have. Low irritation that way, and it leads to my empathizing with the NPCs.

I have a few other snarks, but they’re really minor. (Why a slug-killer Title but no bear killer?) As I looked out across the Photorealistic landscape earlier today, an element of LOTRO’s design came to mind that I wanted to mention in this post that’s otherwise about negative elements. That element: familiarity.

Because The Shire and Bree-land are places we’ve all read about in books and seen in movies, we have expectations hung on them. Turbine has met those expectations by making them interesting places to explore and (unlike almost every other game I can think of) given the places a character of their own. While I complain about backtracking and one of the other mmogbloggers kvetched about the standardness of the quest design, it adds up in a way that I haven’t seen in other games. For example: I don’t give a flying fuck about Elwynn forest. I know the RPers on Argent Dawn just looooved Goldshire, but I couldn’t wait to get out of that place. Ditto with Westfall, Loch Modan, or almost any other zone you could mention. The only zone I’d say I connected with were Dun Morogh (shorties represent!) and Duskwood. I love the quest lines in Duskwood, play em’ every time. With LOTRO, though, the personality of the Shire has been etched into every little nugget of lore you stumble over. The pie-running, mailbag-delivering, goblin-killing, and slug squishing is all secondary to imparting the innocent and carefree nature of the Hobbit lifestyle to the player. Bree and environs similarly seems fairly over-run with character and nuance. I don’t know how much all this junk is going to impact me on a third or fourth play through, but my first two characters (my alt is a human champion) have definitely given me a sense of these areas; they’ve made an impression.

An aside: Every time I come up on Weathertop, I have to stop and just stare. It’s … absolutely perfect. Damn this game is beautiful.

EQ2 yesterday was enjoyable, as always, but a bit frustrating. Despite assurances that we’re in the right level range for Nektropos across the interwebs, (one level 35 character, three level 34 characters), we got our asses handed to us.

The entire evening was spent trying to work on the sisters of Nektropos castle. Following the wisdom of several folkses, we tried to start with Sheila. Several times. Every time, we found our tank getting smashed for about as much per shot as my big heal (with an achingly long reset) does at a time. It’s all heat damage, and his heat mitigation is apparently not all that great. Still, we’ve yet to face something this serious before and so I’m inclined to think something’s hinky here. She’s level 35, and despite the one level difference we were all on top of our game last night.

Even still, there was little to nothing we could do and eventually gave up trying to get past her. It was especially annoying when her aggro radius extended up the stairs and she jumped our Wizard for no reason that we could particularly see. Feh. After several ass-handings, we decided to do some grinding on the golems that are strewn all about Castle Nek’s second floor.

That was the part we had fun at, and even managed to kill Elicia. Why she was just hanging around on the battlements confuses me, but whatchagonnado. This is what I don’t get, also: she was the same level as her sister, and was certainly a challenge for my healing capabilities. Just the same, we managed to bring her down without weeping, moaning, or gnashing of teeth. Wth?

While we were grinding on the golems, we played with the promised-by-Mr.-Hartsman quest sharing feature. It worked quite well, I thought. I’m looking forward to having a UI that has a ’share quest’ button so I can participate. :) Stupid custom uis. I love that this was included, and Brian (our SK tank) was pleased by the savable graphics/options settings.

I’ll be honest; we were discouraged. The plan for next week is to go do the access quests for Zek and Enchanted lands, and come back to the sisters later. Unless anyone can offer up a reason why we suck so bad, I’m not sure ‘later’ will ever come.

But that’s okay … we really did have a good time. Such a good time, in fact, that we talked again about standardizing on expansions. I have been researching Zek and Enchanted lands, and it looks like once we’re up into the 40s we really want to be heading to the Desert of Flames zones to continue leveling. My cohorts were open to discussion of Echoes of Faydwer as a purchase, and we may even explore the depths of Splitpaw at some point. All very exciting.

I’m well and truly cheesed: I really want to do the Faydark when we get to the appropriate levels. :) Here’s hoping we keep the enthusiasm momentum from the last few weeks going as we move forward.

Just in case you play non-Massive games: 1847 8180 6109

Pika Pi!

You may have seen Schlid’s post over on F13, bringing up the possibility that Affinity Media (Allakhazam) has sold IGE to Jon Yantis. A brief thread on the subject seems to indicate folks aren’t super-interested at the moment.

Well, someone at Allakhazam has (anonymously and through intermediaries, via telegraph stations) let me know that indeed IGE has been sold to Yantis. If Brock Pierce wants legitimacy, I guess this is one way to do it.

Update: Allakhazam makes it official on the site’s boards.