All was good for about, oh, a month.  Then people got bored and went back to WoW.  Eventually, I did too.  And when that happened – after damn near the same thing happening with Aion – I swore that I would never get sucked into a new MMO again.

Well, from time to time Trion offers ‘free play weekends’ to try to get some of us old players back.  They had scheduled another one from January 19th through the 22nd, so I decided to make sure I knew my password and had the Rift authenticator working, and – surprise – it wasn’t.

I contacted Trion support, and they fixed me up.  They fixed me up good.  Not only did they correct my problem with the authenticator, but they also give me seventeen days of game time.  Seventeen.

What else was I going to do?  I couldn’t ignore seventeen days of free game time.  So I decided to really give it another shot.

And I love it.  I really do.

My primary problems with the game before was that I didn’t have anyone to hang out with/rp with – and I didn’t understand things like how their crafting systems worked, or their item enchantment systems.  So this time – I went out looking for a decent rp-based guild, and found one on Faeblight.  It may not be very busy, but there always seems to be someone on, and that alone makes a big difference.  It’s nice to be able to ask a question and actually get a response, without having to go to /trade or /general.

As much as I want to get Star Wars and be a Jedi and be awesome and kill Ewoks and shit, I’m actually having fun in Rift again.  And that may push back jumping into Star Wars by at least a few months now – which could be a good thing.  By then, my friends that play Star Wars will have decided whether to leave or not – and maybe the cost for the game will have dropped to something sane (like 19.99, instead of 59.99).

It was a largely uneventful flight.  The A320 is easy to fly, as long as you keep on top of the MCDU.  Traffic was light, and there was no ATC to screw me up as I came into Denver.

One of my pet peeves as a pilot on VATSIM is the spotty ATC.  I like flying with ATC, but I get so frustrated when I have to guess coming into an airport which runway I’ll be landing on, and then set up the FMC for that runway, just to have ‘Approach’ sign-on and tell me that I’ll be landing on the other side of the airport.  I know in the real-world, pilots know heading out of the gate where they’ll be landing on the other end – and if that changes, they find out well before they start their descent.   It just makes it difficult to have to deal with the change all at once, as you’re trying to gracefully bring down a hundred thousand pounds of metal.

I’ve flown between KDEN and KPHX at least a dozen times this last year.  The only other city pair that comes close it KMCI and KDEN.  As a pilot for US Airways, I’m limited to their hub cities – which are Phoenix, Charlotte and Philly.  Those are good cities, but a number of the routes between them are three to four hours long.  When I fly, I really don’t want to take that long away from everything else I’m doing, so I look for a quick flight instead – which ends up being KDEN – KPHX for US Airways and KMCI – KDEN for Southwest.

Happy Landings!

Flight: US Airways 486, KPHX – KDEN
Route: SILOW1.RSK HBU.POWDR7

Aircraft: Airbus A320 (iFDG / PSS Merge)
Paint: Legacy US Airways (Black)

Block Time: 1:44

What a difference a year makes.

MMO’s

I’m still playing Warcraft.  In fact, I’ve signed up for the ‘I’ll play for the next year, I promise’ program.  In return, Blizz gave me a new mount, and promises access to the next expac beta.

I have, however, mostly retired from raiding.  Raiding had moved from being a (mostly) fun challenge to being a (mostly) infuriating chore.  Really, I hated it.  I hated it on my Resto Druid.  I hated it on my Mage.  I’d try to psyche myself up for it – but within about ten minutes I’d be pissed and trying to find a way to get out.

Part of it is the guild.  I hate to say it, but it’s true.  We’ve got the oddest assortment of drama-queens, “serious” raiders with huge e-peens, and plain old fuck-ups.  Despite the best effort of the Raid Leads and our incredibly patient GM – focus would usually go out the window after about the first minute. Sorry, but I have better things to do than listen folks go on about how well they know the fight (then fuck up right off the bat and blame everyone else) or listen to one of our healers get drunk and wonder why the tank she’s supposed to be keeping alive keeps dying.

Part of it is my patience.  I don’t have any left, I don’t think (see the last sentence above).  Back in the day, I was content (mostly) to sit and wipe repeated on the same boss in the name of trying to get progression.  Now – I can tolerate maybe two wipes, then I’m done.  Especially if the aforementioned fuck-ups are, you know, fucking up and not paying attention.

Part of it is my life.  Things outside Warcraft are pretty damn frustrating and stressful, so I just don’t need to face that in my primary recreational outlet.

So – I ended up transferring everyone (but my mage) over to Moon Guard and joined an all-night elf heavy-rp guild.  That went great for a while.  Now, I’m second-guessing my decision.  If I had the funds, I’d probably transfer my resto druid back.  I’ve made some friends on her, but really – the guild has a BILLION resto druids – and my attempts at getting her into any significant rp has failed.  Repeatedly.

With the advent of Cross-Realm Raiding, I may actually be able to have my RP and my Raiding – at the same time.  We’ll see.

I just got two free weeks back in Rift, thanks to a well-timed customer service call.  Problem is – it’s been so long that I don’t remember how to play my mage there, and I have no idea how to complete this quest (or the zone) so I can move on.

Color me confused and lost there, and without any social/community support – I don’t see myself really getting back into the game.

Yes, by the way, I really want to play Star Wars – but I really need to find a way to purchase it first.

Star Trek Online, now that it is finally Free-to-Play, has grown into a good game.  However, it is almost the same problem I face in Rift: I’m simply lost.  I don’t know which gear to equip.  I don’t know what the specs are, or even which questions to ask about the spec. I don’t know the professions, or why I need to level them – and things just seem very overly complicated.

I know that some of my friends play, but I’ve never been able to find them – so I mostly just cruise around alone.  As with Rift, unless I break into the social/community scene, I don’t think I’ll do more than just poke around at the game.

No promises on regular updates, but now that you’re (mostly) caught up with what’s going on in the MMO world – and as this is mostly an MMO blog – I’ll try to do better than once a year.

Elune Adore!

At that point, they still had quite a long way to go – if I recall correctly.

Well, for Christmas, I received a copy of Star Trek: Online, so I hopped back into the Trek Universe.  After a year, has it improved any?

I’d have to say “Yes”.  Kinda.

One of my big complaints a year ago was the lack of immersion.  That there was no place to really role play.  That has been fixed, for the most part.  There are off-duty costumes available now, and you have more of a ship that you can walk around if you so choose (Engineering, Sickbay, the Lounge, Captain’s Quarters, the Bridge and a Ready Room now, vs just the Bridge a year ago).

You can beam down to Vulcan, or Risa, or any number of worlds and just wander around if you like, so it does feel more like Star Trek now.

The missions have a bit more variety than what they used to.  There are still the ‘warp into system, kill aliens, beam down, kill more aliens, then back into orbit to kill yet more aliens’ quests – but they’re also incorporating quests where you have to talk to NPCs and pay attention to what they have to say.  One rather innovative quests finds your character having to figure out how to make a cure for a virus that you and your crew have been exposed to.

Compare to World of Warcraft, it still lacks in a number of important places:

It just doesn’t run as smooth.  Maybe that’s my PC, but maybe it’s the engine that Cryptic uses.  I suspect the engine.

There isn’t nearly as strong a sense of ‘community’ as there is one a Warcraft server.  Maybe that’s because there is only one ST:O server… maybe it’s because of the nature of the game… but it seems much more a single-player game that you play in a multi-player environment, than an MMO.  As an example, I’ve spent the last week looking for a ‘Fleet’ in Star Trek: Online to join.  I have not yet found one, though I think I’ve finally got leads on a couple.

I can’t imagine having to spend a week looking for a ‘Guild’ in Warcraft.  You’ve pratically got to beat off guild invites by about level 10.

And this may be a little thing, but when you click on NPC’s to talk to them, they don’t move.  They don’t look at you.  They don’t make any emotes.  If they have something to say, you get their portrait in a window, like you are talking to them from the ready room of your ship.  It can be disconcerting to be talking to the Admiral’s image, and you are standing in front of him in his office.

I think, in the end, that there is a desire to “not be Warcraft”.  While I appreciate the thought, I think that MMO Developers are taking that too far in many cases.  Warcraft is a good game because it works, and because Blizzard isn’t shy about ‘borrowing’ concepts from other MMO’s.  I’d much rather have a game that works really well, even if it looks a little like Warcraft.

Because, heck, in the end what I really want is ‘World of Warcraft’ in space.  Star Trek: Online is not that.  But it is fun to play.

I found out that two of my good friends reactivated their accounts, so I followed suit and re-rolled a character.  That was a month ago.

After playing for another month, I have to say that the game really doesn’t feel any different, sadly.

• Groups were still hard to find.
• There was no RP at all to speak of.
• 100% of any communication I saw in game was pretty much just ‘Barrens Chat’ type Chuck Norris-ish stuff.
• You didn’t have to grind as much – but you still had to grind a lot more than you should.
• The profession system is still poorly designed and seems to be nothing more than a time-sink.

In the end, I decided to let Aion go again.  This time, at least, it wasn’t a financial concern.  Instead, it was a time concern.  I found myself confused and trying to figure out why I was playing two MMO’s in the same genre.  Sure, Aion is not Warcraft, but they’re both still Fantasy World MMO’s.  I already spend enough time in my computer chair for Warcraft – I just couldn’t justify doubling that just to have a viable character in Aion as well.

Will I return to Aion again?  Maybe.  But not for a while.  For now, one MMO is enough for me.

Four of us from Impossibilium needed the daily random heroic, so we grouped up and hit the ‘Dungeon Finder’.  Almost all of us were on alts, so while our performance wouldn’t be the best, we knew we’d make it through.  All we needed to look for was a healer.

Well, we got one.  A resto druid.  This guy was a tool.  About 1/3rd of way through the run, this guy – who somehow ended up as ‘Party Leader’ – posted the recount DPS results.  As expected, most of us were below where we should be – I was on my hunter and overall had only done about 1250 DPS or so.  He was posting that, instead of asking ‘Hey, what’s up with your DPS?’

So I asked, via Party Chat: “…and what was the point of posting that?”

He responded with: “Don’t even get smart with me.”

I fired back with: “If you don’t like it, you know where the ‘leave party’ button is.”

He came back with: “STFU Pussy”.

I was tempted to ask “…Or what?” but clearly his “Or What” would have been to try to kick me (which wouldn’t have worked, as my guildmates had my back).

Then he proceeded to not heal me for the rest of the run.  We discussed kicking him just before the last boss, but I’m glad we didn’t.  I wouldn’t want to stoop down to his leave of douch-baggery.

If you are in a run, and have problems with the DPS output, then I think the *correct* way to handle the situation is to ask what’s going on.  Posting Recount, then jumping to “STFU Pussy”, to me, really doesn’t seem to be the optimal way of handling it.

It seems, though, that I am running into more ‘elitists’ like that in PUGs.  Not to that level, maybe, but there are more now then there used to be.

Anyway, I mentioned that the ‘Dungeon Finder’ is both the best and worst thing that Blizzard has put into the game.

It is the best, simply because it has made running heroics almost comically easy.  Before, trying to get a PUG together was like pulling teeth, and if you missed a guild Heroic run, then you were generally out of luck.  Now, if you wanted, you can usually chain run a half-dozen in a night without even trying hard.

It is the worst, though, because in some ways it has made Warcraft into one big gaming lobby.  Sure, you can run around and quest or farm still – and RP if you so desire – but for the most part you hop in game to get into either…

* The Heroic Queue
* The PvP Queue
* A Raid

…and each of those take out back out of the Warcraft shared environment.  It’s far better, still, than the old battle.net game lobby where you’d just wait and chat – but in effect it is become the same thing, just with a 3D interface that you can run around in.

Don’t get me wrong – Warcraft, as a whole, is a better game because of the ‘Dungeon Finder’ tool.  This is just one down-side of it that I’ve observed.

That, and running into the occasional idiot that believes that ‘STFU Pussy’ is a valid avenue for reasonable discourse.

Well, turning my video setting to the lowest setting fixed that (and improved performance) and I sat back to enjoy it.

Once you get past the tightly-scripted tutorial missions and to earth, things do open up quite a bit. You can take your Starship pretty much anyplace you’d like to go. I explored the Regulus and Sirius sector maps, and even made it down to Deep Space K7. There were plenty of quests missions to keep me busy, and lots of Klingon’s floating around waiting to attack my ship for when I got tired of the missions.

I really like the mechanic they’re using for ‘interstellar’ or ‘warp’ navigation – it feels appropriately ‘Trek-ish’ and conveys a sense of the distance you’re covering.

Before I jump into criticism, I’d like to say that I really do like it. I see it as a good foundation that Cryptic will be able to build on. I still can’t afford to rush out and get the Pre-order (though I’d like to) – but I will put it on my Birthday list.

I’d also like to point out that our 10-year old loves it. I lost my computer for about half the weekend because he was busy playing.

Ok. The quests missions. They get repetitious. Really repetitious. Sure, the story behind the mission is changing – but they tend to fall into the following pattern:

* Go to system. Engage the enemy in orbit about 5 times. You may, or may not, have to scan/retrieve objects that are in orbit. Afterwards, you’ll either be done – or you’ll have to beam down into a ground mission that involves running about a location and engaging about 5 squads enemy ground forces. You may, or may not, have to scan/retrieve objects/people that are scattered throughout the location.

There. You’ve now done about 98% of the missions available through Lt. (Grade 7). My pending missions all pretty much look the same.

Don’t get me wrong – repetition is part of life in an MMO. In Warcraft things can get really, really repetitious as well. You’ve got your ‘gather’ quests, then you’ve got your ‘kill’ quests. Sometimes, they combine the two. But you can, if you really want to, take a break and go kill things in the wild and just grind experience that way. You can step away from leveling all together and focus on crafting, or cooking, or first aid. You can go someplace and RP.

You can’t really do that in the STO Beta. I haven’t seen any crafting at all in the game (though the exchange has a category for ‘Recipes’ so, hopefully, there will be). Short of the Wandering Klingon patrols, you can’t just go someplace and grind experience. And even those don’t really reward a lot of XP per kill – most of your Experience comes just from completing missions. Regarding going someplace to just RP for a bit – well, I’ll touch on that in a second.

Hopefully, when the full game is released, they’ll be additional missions added. Right now, when I see the words ‘Patrol Pico (Go to the Pico System)’ I know that when I come out of warp, I’ll see floating clouds of enemy ships that I’ll have to destroy. And that’s cool – but if that is all you’re doing, it gets tired quickly.

JC already made a point of this, but I wanted to reinforce it. “Anonymity + The Internet = Dickwad”. That applies to Trek and Trek Fandom, and REALLY applies to MMO’s in general. For every player/ship I saw with a good name combination there would about a dozen with totally stupid, in some cases totally inappropriate, names. I know from previous experience that if someone wants to name a character, say ‘Captain Hubba’ of the ‘USS Bubba’ – there isn’t a way to stop them. And trying to talk them out of it will just encourage them to do more… and will earn you a ‘Jeez, relax – it’s only a game.’ Not much can be done about it. Cryptic could force a ‘name approval’ mechanic, but I think that would flood their GM’s. Just wanted to mention it. People will be immature, and not much can be done ’bout it.

Back to going someplace to just RP for a bit. I know that STO isn’t a Sandbox game. Not really. But… I’d really like to be able to orbit and beam down to more planets. Sure, it would have been a lot more work – but a few locations that I would have pushed if I were part of the design team would have been San Francisco (Starfleet Academy). Vulcan. Farpoint. Bajor. Just someplace other than a spacedock (or a mission-specific location) where you can run around as a person. Heck, you could put special trainers there – or unique merchants – that’d make it a place you’d want to go.

For that matter, it’d be kinda cool to have more ‘generic Planet locations’ that you could just visit outside of a mission. Not a game-breaker – but something that would have been cool to see. It’d give it another dimension. For me, I’d like to be able to run about as my character and interact with things at places other than the Earth Spacedock and Deep Space K7.

Still, a good start – it has me mostly hooked, and it’ll be interesting to revisit it in six months (hopefully with better hardware) and see how it looks then.

There is a good deal there to like. I like the graphics, and the immersion into the Trek universe. The missions really do flow well together and feel much more like an episode than an MMO. It is entertaining to play, and I think that it’ll do well.

That said, I have some criticism as well.

There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of freedom – it almost felt too scripted. To be honest, I didn’t feel like I was playing an MMORPG as much as it felt like I was playing a new version of ‘Star Trek: Elite Force’.

I guess what I was looking for was a ‘sandbox’ universe. Where they’d set up the Alpha Quadrant, and you can choose to either join the federation, be part of a starship and explore – or pick up a trading route outside Starfleet jurisdiction – or who knows what.

In World of Warcraft, if I want to log in, and run my level 1 character to Darnassus (or Stormwind, or Ironforge) and sit back and just RP for a bit, the game doesn’t care. I feel that in Star Trek Online, you don’t really have that opportunity. There was a pressure (at least in the starting area) to keep things moving.

To be fair – maybe once you get out of the starting area and to earth, maybe you have your choice of missions. Maybe you can take your ship and just go explore some distant quadrent of the galaxy. Maybe it is still highly scripted – I dunno.

Beyond that, I was kind of hoping to have a group of friends all on the same Starship. Instead, you’re on your own starship, with up to three AI characters acting as your crew. The AI crew members even accompany you on Away Team missions. Again, this is something I’d expect in a single player game, not so much in an MMORPG. I’ll admit, they probably made the right decision for ease and enjoyment of game-play, but really – I think it’d be fun to be able to be ‘standing’ on the bridge of the ‘White Star’ with My Character, Laura’s Charater and Paul’s Character all working to get the ship from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, or working together to solve a problem.

I minor thing, perhaps – but still – you’ve gotta dream, right?

Bugs:

Once I completed the ‘Starting Area’ missions, I was ordered back to Earth. The ‘Sol System’ load screen came up, and after thirty minutes I decided that it wasn’t just a delay built into the game and needed to ‘end-task’ it. I tried again, and it hung at the same place on the ‘Sol System’ load screen. I suspect it is a problem on my end. I’ll give it another shot later tonight.

In the end, for what it is, it is good. It isn’t World of Warcraft, which can be refreshing – for the most part. However, I do miss that freedom to run about and to move at your own pace that Warcraft seems to have embraced.

From a technical standpoint, my machine really can just *barely* handle it. I’ve got everything turned down and I’m getting about 5-10fps (I say about, because I haven’t figured out how to monitor FPS). Honestly, I didn’t think it would run at all – so that was a pleasant surprise.

Is it something I’m going to run out and order/pre-order/put on my birthday list? Nope.

I just can’t afford it right now. I don’t have the time for another MMORPG. For me, Warcraft is still more fun. I don’t have the money to pay for another game – and really, if I was going to play I’d have to upgrade my gaming workstation to a dual-core and I *really* don’t have the money for that.

Will I get it someday? Sure – it really is fun. But it’ll probably be a year or so down the road, once they’ve had time to let the game mature some – and I’ve had time to update my system.

The ‘Open Beta’ is now up and running.  Yes, I have a beta key.  Yes, I’ve already activated it.  No, I haven’t played yet.

The main reason I haven’t played yet is because I haven’t been able to download the beta client yet.  I have to say, Cryptic Studios has really fallen down on this.  If you’ve spent the money to pre-order it, you can get it off Steam.  If not, then you’re relegated to ‘FilePlanet’ or BitTorrent or Cryptic’s own STO downloader.  My experience so far:

FilePlanet: Pay us $6.00 per month, or wait a few hours just to *start* downloading (just to be relegated to the ‘low bandwidth’ connection).
BitTorrent: 1d 20hours (at best) last night.
Cryptic’s Tool: 0 bytes downloaded.

I may seem frustrated about it here, but I’m really not.  I’m really apathetic about it.  It’ll download or it won’t – I’m good either way.  I’m just pointing out that if you want to entice the masses to play your really, really cool game – then you’ll want to damn near push the client down their throat.  Making them pay FilePlanet or way a couple of days to download it isn’t doing so.  Sure, it’ll eat up bandwidth and incur server costs – call it ‘Marketing’ and move on.

Anyway.  I seem to have been burned by happened in Aion (getting all caught up in the open beta excitement, then doing the headstart, then going on about how cool it was just to have it flame out at level 20 and have all my friends bail back over to WoW…).  Either that, or the problems with STARFLEET have just sapped my desire to do more than I have to with anything Star Trek.

Maybe part of it is knowing that 90% of the players from STARFLEET that I’ll encounter in STO are people that I’d really, frankly, rather not hang out with.  Of the people that I know that are playing, I can think of two (off the top of my head) that I’d like to run around with.  Sure, more of my friends may be playing – but if they are I haven’t heard.

Do I want to see STO?  Yes, I do.  Am I going to be pay for it?  Nope.  Not right now.  I’d like to take advantage of the open beta to at least see if it’ll be worth it someday.  Right now, I know that it lays beyond the capability of my PC to run it.  It lays beyond the capability of my budget to pay for it.  And, at any rate, my interest is academic at this point.

My archives for my RP backstory notes are even worse.  Poor Glithander has little snippets written about him in Word, in OpenOffice – there are a few text files – there are geneology notes and outlines in an old ActionOutline (back when ActionOutline was free…).  And that’s just in one folder.  Now multiply that.

Why is this popping up near the top of the flotsam and jetsam that make up my mind now?  Probably because I’ve been really into roleplaying the last couple of days.  I haven’t really done any yet, mind you – but I’ve been stretching out those muscles – remembering where I left the characters (IC’ly) and what they’ve been up to since then.

Thus far, it’s been a pretty productive (and creative) couple of days.  In the, what, year… year and half… since I last RP’d on Glithander, I figure that he’s been busy sitting in a Theramore jail for piracy.  I was looking at taking the story there anyway, so why not.  Why was he in jail?  Well, figuring that out is part of the fun, right?

Kely has always been a problem child for me.  She’s young – but really, when your race is immortal – what does that mean?  Age is kinda useless, right?  I mean, seriously – she has an older brother, and using real-life as an example, he would have been born about 6000 BC.  That’s prior to any of the modern civilizations (Egypt, Babylon, China, you name it.)  That’s a heck of a difference in age.  But, probably not uncommon when you start talking about taking millenia to grow up.

Still, as a human, it can be hard to force your mind around that kind of concept.   Personally, I figure they don’t even keep track.  You’re either a kid, a young adult (until you prove otherwise) then just an adult.  Who cares how long it takes?

Amerya hasn’t gotten that much attention, to be honest.  But there, there wasn’t that much outstanding from her story.  She had pretty much settled down in Darnassus and was happy there.  She had her family, and had come to grips with that drama… we were definitely in the ‘waiting for the next crisis’ mode with her.

So yes, I’d like to try to get a coherent document written about them.  Get all the bits and pieces sorted out and in one place.  I think that they deserve it – especially Glithander.  There is a lot about what he’s already been through (ICly) that I really need to get down before it is completely lost.

Which leads me to a question, dear reader – I’ve set up ‘About…’ sections for each of them, with what I’m using as their current RSP description in-game.  I’d like to write up a backstory/biography – but how much information should I include there?  There are some things about Glithander, for example, that not even he knows (ICly) yet, although I’ve had to plot them out in my head.  Would it be right to give it away here – or should I follow the RSP guidelines and keep it to ‘publicly’ available information?