Thought for the Day - Aria Giovanni

Too much jibber-jabber, time for some visual relief.

On the Subject of Pick-Up Groups

Seren Gibson

I happened to see yet another post lamenting the "quality" of PUGs on a Guild Wars forum and as usual it descended into the usual, elitist, "I'm better than everyone else in the PUG" wank. Many elements of what follows are specific to Guild Wars, but I'm sure you'll agree that the general sentiment applies to any PUG situation.

When I see someone suggesting that all PUGs are shit, I immediately assume that that person was actually the weak link. Maybe they've spent too long in PvP or ruthlessly-efficient guild teams to understand that PUG'ing requires a different attitude and play style that doesn't suit everyone. Some people don't enjoy it, and admittedly it can be frustrating when you encounter the occasional, inevitable leechers and losers.

But it can also be immensely satisfying. It's like adding an element of organic, human randomness to what is otherwise a massively-predictable and quantifiable affair. If you can't handle the added difficulty that a PUG can provide, perhaps you really aren't quite as good as you think you are. If none of the PUGs you joined were successful, remember that YOU were the common factor.
Getting worked up and claiming your group-mates are noobs because they're not running builds that you're familiar with or personally endorse just makes you the idiot. Build-fascism increased dramatically after A-Net added code to let players ping their skill bars to the group chat. For me, people running unconventional builds that I'm not familiar with but which they're probably quite comfortable with, is half the fun. Oh, you beat a mission using tried-and-tested builds and tactics listed on some website? Good for you.

Making the decision that you're not going to PUG is fine, everyone has their own preference and there's no doubt that a static group of friends, or a guild group or similar that is experienced as a team will always be more efficient and probably more successful in a statistical sense than some random group of waifs and strays that has never played together before, and might never again. Just don't confuse bad PUGs with you being bad at PUG'ing.

I remember one particular occasion in Hell's Precipice, the final mission in GW: Prophecies. At the time I was working through that chapter on my Assassin after I got sick of all the 'sin hate in Factions. I happened to get in a well-balanced group with a couple of human monks, and I think just a single henchman to make up the numbers and off we went on a mission + bonus run. Fast-forward to Rurik, and after capping him both monks and our tank quit out, because it turned out that's all they were there for.
Instead of crying like little bitches, the rest of us forged on to the Lich and miraculously managed to complete the mission. With no monks, me as main tank on an assassin of all things, and a team of only 4 real, random people.
Another time, on an Aurora Glade bonus run, I think it was 4 real people including a real monk, and a hench tank for luck, when the monk decided we were obviously noobs for going in without a real tank and quit out just as we were entering the mission. Needless to say we were successful, with just 2 eles and me on my necro running the crystals.
Similarly I've ended up tanking on all sorts of characters as necessary, or running a group with my necro because our designated runner couldn't manage it. Those sorts of situations are far more satisfying than simply beating an encounter by the book. For me, it adds a lot to the immersion when you go into a situation "as is", without going out of your way to spec the team. Of course Guild Wars isn't especially immersive as these games go but the concept of optimising your build for a mission implies that you know what you're up against. Of course that's usually true because you're unlikely to be the first to attempt it even if it's your first time, but even the first groups to be successful will probably experience failures and wipes the first time(s) through which just brings us back to the idea of "learning" an encounter rather than beating it through the application of genuine skill.

The fact is you need to be adaptable to be successful in a PUG. It's a whole different discipline than running a highly-trained team who has done the encounter any number of times before. You can't complain that there are people with different levels of experience, you have to take it for granted. I would like to see that being important in all situations, but sadly everything is just too stripped-down and formulaic in current games.

The forum thread turned into a back-and-forth over whether monks should take a rez. In my personal (and therefore correct) opinion the monk should always be the last to die in any encounter, because a dead monk can't heal anyone. And the last person alive should always have a rez because otherwise you might as well just quit.
In a PUG, with the essentially random collection of builds and experience on hand, being ready for anything means being ready to rez. I think a monk should always have a hard rez in a PUG. And there's not really any excuse for anyone in the team not having at the very least a signet for heat-of-battle situations where the monk should be spending their time and energy keeping the remaining players alive. It's not about maximising your damage output or running some build you saw on GuildWiki, it's about being able to cope with and ultimately survive as many awkward situations as possible. You might be a caster who is used to going balls-out for damage output but in a PUG you have some responsibility not to overburden the rest of the team, especially if it's not comprised of the ideal configuration of healers/nukers/tanks.
It's something that really puts me off raiding, because that really does come down to learning how to beat the encounter using some optimised group build. Because everything's so predictable. "At 40% health this boss will use such-and-such a skill". Then if you fail, it's off to the damage logs to see who wasn't pulling their weight. There's no room for "oh shit, where did they come from?". Or "He wasn't there last time!". And yet players continue to delude themselves that learning an encounter somehow passes for some sort of "skill".

What you do in a guild group, or in some well-documented high-end encounter, is up to you. But don't assume that your low regard for PUGs will be interpreted as you having some sort of exceptional ability, because I for one have greater respect for players who are willing and able to succeed in any situation, not just the ones where they've stacked the odds in their own favour.

Conan Watch #4

Pamela David

So a few more hours played, a few more random insights gained.
My "main" character is now level 35, and starting to hit group-oriented content. As usual I'm lagging behind the main wave of power-levelers, many of whom are already at the level 80 cap. The idiots. It sounds like there are some gaps in questing content at higher levels and that it requires a bit of grind to advance, but that's something the devs have already acknowledged, and I suspect some of those holes will have been plugged by the time I get there. Which is a big advantage of adopting a more leisurely pace. Let the hardcore be the testers. It's what they should have been doing during the actual beta tests rather than trying to get a head start on everyone else.

What's interesting is that the 80's haven't been spending their time complaining about the lack of high-end content so much because they've been busy power-farming lower-level areas for money and gear. So when the devs recently implemented what seems to be an anti-gold-farming measure where bosses that are too far below your level actually scale to your level and are no longer farmable, the roar of disapproval in the official forums was deafening.
I'm all for the nerf, of course. Stick to level-appropriate content and you'll be fine. It only hurts people who are exploiting areas or power-leveling their noob mates. Those sorts of people have been bleating about how it "reduces content", means you can't complete every single quest because you out-level them too quickly, or even more laughably, "it's up to me how I want to play the game".
It only reduces content that isn't appropriate for your level. Awww, so you can't farm it and make big money for zero effort? Good, because then neither can the gold farmers. Out-leveled the quests? That's a shame, but there's no rule that says you must be able to complete every quest in the game on a single character. Maybe you should have done that group quest in an appropriate-level group rather than assuming you could simply level past it then go back at your leisure and then sleepwalk it solo.
"It's up to me how I want to play the game". That sentiment, which I'm paraphrasing from actual, real posts on the official forums and not just making up, blows my mind. It's not up to you at all, it's up to the developers. They designed the game, they decide what is and isn't acceptable. It's not up to some jumped-up little fuckwit who has played a dozen MMOs and has come to think they're some sort of elite player who knows better than the developers. Threaten to quit the game in protest? Or, as one moron put it "move on". Yeah? Move on to what? In any case, fuck off, no one will miss you.

What's sadly amusing is how I've come to appreciate some of Vanguard's mechanics now that there's something shiny and new to compare them with. Firstly there was the realisation that in a highly-zoned world such as in AoC, sailing will never be a practical reality. That was one of several advantages to Vanguard's unified, open world design. And yes I know chunking was buggy as hell but that's what happens when a game is programmed by educationally-challenged monkeys. AoC has little in the way of coastlines, certainly not complete oceans surrounding continents, and while there are lots of rivers they're often interrupted by waterfalls or other features that would make sailing impractical. I think more involved sailing, including fishing and maybe some exploration could be something that would tempt me back to Vanguard.

More recently I've started "gathering", or "harvesting" as it was known in Vanguard. Harvesting was actually one of my favourite pass times in Vanguard, and was again enhanced by the large open world where there were any number of areas you might never visit in the course of questing. This meant you could often charge off into the wilds and discover your own little harvesting heaven off the beaten track. Exploration was an integral part of harvesting, assuming you didn't just use one of the map mods or some web guide to lead you to the prime spots.
AoC, in contrast, tends not to have any "dead space" on it's maps, because everything is much more compact and enclosed.
Critically, Vanguard's implementation of rare and ultra-rare harvesting nodes was like a devastatingly addictive drug. "I would quit, but maybe the next node will be a rare!". Maybe the next node... maybe the next node. I would harvest a circuit and wait until every node was a common before leaving, just to be on the safe side.
I've only just started gathering so I'm not sure how rarity will come into play, but there are certainly fewer nodes than in Vanguard and more often that not you'll find one that's virtually exhausted rather than primed and ready for action. In AoC they seem to have health bars that are depleted as you gather and then gradually recover over time. In Vanguard you find a node, harvest it and it vanishes, only reappearing at 100% capacity after some given respawn time.
In AoC you can gather every type of resource. In Vanguard you are limited to choosing 2 per character. I prefer Vanguard's method because it means you'll never be entirely self-sufficient on a single character. It seems to me that that's better for the economy although admittedly it's fairly painless to level up a character in a given discipline. I know I had everything max'ed out except skinning (because I never had a high enough level character to take down the high-tier skinnable creatures).
Yet another factor in Vanguard's favour was gear. There was (is, I suppose) a whole inventory page specifically dedicated to harvesting gear. Better gear, often obtained from player crafters, could be used to improve harvesting yields. This includes clothing, and the actual tools. And your tools had to be a sufficient level for the tier of resource you were harvesting. Improved yields might look slight, but at the high end where ultra-rare resources were extortionately expensive it could make a massive difference. In AoC, the gear is non-existent, or at least so it seems. "Use" a gathering node and your axe or whatever is just magic'd out of thin air on demand.
Finally, Vanguard had a system where you get higher yields if you harvest as a group. Not by a factor of the number of harvesters, but certainly you'd get more from a given node as a group than you would alone and again at the high end it could make a serious difference, even split two or three ways. It was quite common to find myself working a given circuit and see someone else doing the same, and we'd end up grouping and splitting the resources because that way you're both better off than if you work in competition. It was a subtle mechanic, but a social one too.
So it doesn't appear as if I will achieve the same satisfaction from gathering in AoC that I did from harvesting, which is a shame. And it sounds like crafting, which I never bothered with in Vanguard because it was even more grind-tastic than adventuring, is suffering some teething troubles. But you can't even start crafting until you hit level 40 I think, and at my casual rate of play that's still a week or two away.

Thought for the Day - Eva Wyrwal

Conan Watch #3

Jennifer Lamiraqui

So it's been a while, mostly because I've been preoccupied with my secret plans for the global eradication of organised religion, but I've managed to squeeze in a few hours of AoC here and there.
Getting straight to the point, overall I'm slightly disappointed to report that it's not the enormous abomination that I was expecting. In fact it has a certain fun factor, but at the same time it really doesn't bring anything new to the genre.
One of the most important aspects of any MMO is obviously character design options. AoC features a combination of Guild Wars-style preset face textures and hair colours with various pointless sliders to control facial distortions and body proportions. The strange thing is, it's very difficult to achieve any sort of distintive style, and all characters essentially end up looking the same within a given racial group. On the plus side, at least the characters you can create look quite nice. Naturally I'm referring to female characters with nice, big boobs.
Talking of boobs, so far the promise of "adult" content has failed to materialise. There are nipples, which are sure to shock and outrage all the idiots that will no doubt read about AoC and start calling for it to be banned. Unfortunately, the most I've seen of nipples so far is when the game engine fails to construct an NPC model quickly enough when it transitions to a cutscene, and the character model is topless for a fraction of a second. In terms of gratuitous violence, there really isn't anything outrageous or even new. It seems to rely on the simple fact that the character models are more naturalistic than cartoony alternatives like WoW or LotRO for any sense of maturity or grittiness. Dead bodies hanging from trees are all very well, but they get old quite quickly. The combat is no more bloody or gratuitous than any other RPG.
Of course combat features the infamous directional attacks and shields. Well, melee combat does, it makes no difference to casters which are exactly the same as in every other MMO ever made. It's a shame they couldn't come up with something analogous for the casting classes. Not that physical combat is exactly revolutionary itself, but it is admittedly slightly more involving than other games. It's a clever way around the problem of latency, which is pretty much the reason why all MMOs feature combat designed to not require extreme time-sensitivity like "twitch" shooters. When you've got hundreds, maybe thousands of simultaneous players and pings measured in tenths of seconds rather than milliseconds you can't have systems that require rapid reactions and inputs. Guild Wars gets around the problem and allows real-time interrupts because there are only a small number of players in any given instance. "Proper" MMOs have to make do with the likes of chains and combos, and AoC is no exception.
Speaking of instances, the AoC "world" is a bit odd. It's a combination of shared instances and player-specific instances, and shared world areas are split into on-demand instances to keep population levels manageable. A bit like the outposts in Guild Wars, but actual world zones rather than just hubs. What doesn't work for me is the design of the zones and how they relate to each other. Maybe I've been spoiled by Vanguard's genuinely open world but having to talk to NPCs to get transported to neighbouring zones is horrible and really breaks the continuity of the world. There are some traditional gates and cave entrances etc, but it doesn't feel at all coherent and just heightens the feeling of disconnected instances.
Being able to climb, in addition to walking, running and swimming, is a nice touch, although the implementation is a bit lame and the use of an attribute to determine your climbing skill, simply by giving ladders a specific level, is a bit poor. Also, the UI keeps telling you "you can climb here!" even when the ladder is too advanced for you which is irritating.
The UI is shit. It's as if you took Vanguard's shitty UI and then "optimised" it for consoles. So lots of big chunky icons that don't trigger if your mouse moves even a single pixel between button-down and button-up. Really amateurish.
So far leveling appears to be quite speedy. After 6 months of Vanguard I had two level 30 characters, and a few in the teens. After just three of four sessions of AoC my big-breasted "Priest of Mitra" is already 28 (and a half). Of course the level cap is higher in AoC (80, compared with Vanguard's 50) so it probably evens out later on, but it does feel like it's designed to offer an exaggerated sense of achievement. Even in the mid-twenties I was gaining whole levels just by turning in a handful of quests.
Unlike Vanguard, AoC offers an "alternate advancement" system where you can spend points on "feats", which are arranged into trees and offer extra attributes and abilities. Fair enough, I don't have a problem with that.
Overall the game is quite pretty, but not that pretty. It suffers from the same bowl-shaped zones as every other RPG except Vanguard, with mountains surrounding almost all zones (the exceptions being the ones with coastline). A lot of the finer character details are lost because you tend to spend most of the time zoomed out. Spell effects are nothing special.
The game eventually promises the likes of mounts and player cities, but I'm a long way from any of that so I can't comment on it either way. Even though harvesting is supposed to become available at level 20, I think you don't actually get access to training until much later. I have no idea how crafting works.
In conclusion, so far I'm not finding the game to be the pile of steaming shit that I was expecting. It feels almost like a "proper" MMO version of Guild Wars, which is both good and bad. It'll be interesting to see how GW2 compares when that finally appears.
The launch seemed to go quite smoothly. Already the lower-level areas seem to be thinning out while at the same time it's not rare to see some characters running around at level 40+. Obviously there's been a rush of power-players who are sprinting to the level cap, no doubt so they can start complaining about the lack of end-game content, just like in every other MMO. The idiots.

On the Subject of EB Games / Gamestop

Katherine McPhee

Fucking EB Games. For some reason a month or so ago I had a momentary lapse in rationality and pre-ordered GRID on ebgames.com. Having bought games on that site for several years now it has become something of an automatic response to the game-buying impulse. For a good while I had nothing but positive experiences, even though the bricks and mortar stores have long had a quite poor reputation, but in the last year or so the online alternative has really gone to shit. Three times now I've had orders get stuck in "verifying" hell when I've used exactly the same payment and address details that I've used successfully any number of times previously. In fact AoC was one of them. Now I go to check the GRID order status, two days after the game's release, expecting to see "shipped", only to find it still "verifying". And no word from customer service about what the problem is.
So I cancelled the order.
Actually, the reason I cancelled it was mostly because it turns out GRID is available on Steam. I should have thought of that before going to EB in the first place but there you go. The EB/Gamestop (as far as I can tell it's just two different skins on the same website) order was supposed to come with a T-shirt but fuck that, they had their chance and they blew it. Five minutes after cancelling the order, GRID is downloading on Steam with no hassle, no shitty disc-checks, and the promise of automatic updates.
Not to mention I couldn't even cancel the fucking EB order in Firefox because the cancellation window just stalled so I had to suffer the indignity of firing up IE, adding insult to injury.
Fuck you, EB/Gamestop, I look forward to your inevitable demise.