The Great Repairs Debate

So, remember that I posted a little while back about the latest bug fix in SWTOR that is causing such an uproar with the player base due to costing more credits in repair bills?

Well I have been watching the forums with great interest, particularly this thread which has reached 1058 posts at the time of writing this blog entry. It’s a thread of crying, moaning, threatening by players to unsub to the game and people defending bioware about the change that patch 1.7 brought to the game. I’m not going to bore people by repeating the reasons for this change since it’s in an earlier post so I’ll just skip to my point of this post.

As a result of the changes, people are reporting ridiculous repair costs on the forums,  ranging from what I consider to be normal to downright stupid values, and saying that it has to stop or they will leave the game. Before I get into discussing that, I’ll share something that I did earlier to test out the prices.

I took three of my level cap toons, each wearing various levels of gear. I repaired before leaving the base then went and died on each of them, recording the prices of the repair bills.

Gear Progression in SWTOR runs as follows:

Green – Blue – Purple – Tionese – Columi – Rakata – Black Hole – Campaign

– Dread Guard

The only exception to this flow is Orange customisable gear, which you can add ANY modifications to, effectively increasing it’s potency to any of the above levels.

Here are my results.

Daemridu / Sith Inquisitor / Full Columi with Rakata implants and earpiece = 10,143 credits

Zubra / Bounty Hunter / Full Tionese, including implants and earpiece = 6,117 credits

Bleadwyn / Marauder / Full Orange (level 50 blue mods) with Blue level 50 implants and earpiece = 2,808 credits

Unsurprisingly the higher spec gear costs more to repair, even though it is only light armour. What did surprise me though was just how little it cost me to repair on Bleadwyn, considering she’s not that far off the spec of Zubra. Obviously other people have opinions on repair costs but I don’t mind paying 10k per death on my main character considering I can easily make 600,000 credits in about two hours running daily quests.

Anyway, now I’ve said that I want to get to the real reason for this post. How people are reacting. I see a lot of people threatening to quit and un-subscribing over this matter (at least I think they are, forums are not the best place for truth after all) which just smacks of entitlement to me. They are really thinking that unsubscribing over a matter of in game money, which is not hard to come by, is going to make Bioware take action any faster that what they are? Do they not realise that when a game goes f2p, subscribers are the least of their worries because they pay a fixed rate each month. The real bread and butter of the game is the f2p and preferred players who will buy cartel coins on a regular basis, quite often spending more than they would for a subscription each month.

If they do in fact unsub, they are not doing the game any good by doing so. The less players in the game, the less likely the bugs and issues will be addressed so by protesting in this manner, they are in fact harming the game than making it better. I’ve heard all the talk of “I’m a casual player and don’t have time to grind for credits” but that doesn’t wash with me. Killing a group of four enemies at level 50 will often result in gains of over 3k credits. This can occur just during general game play and doesn’t require grinding and you’ll make a significant amount of money. Crafting also generates money as does playing warzones and doing space missions. From looking at the thread above, it just seems to be the people who do nothing but end game raids that are complaining, yet the people who actually play everything the game offers are having no problems making up for the increase that this fix has brought to us.

Well I guess playing through a few space missions a day isn’t hardcore enough for some people.

Are Turbine telling the truth?

With Turbines servers being down for over 50 hours and with no idea when players like myself will once again be able to click the enter Middle Earth button. I begin to ask myself what if the servers don’t come up. What will that mean?

Well for someone like me it will mean that I should have left LOTRO when I said I was going to leave, which for those of you who don’t know was just after I bought the Riders of Rohan. That would have meant that I would not have gotten to level 85, grinding Hybolt and the crafting instances. But then again even though I feel as if I should have left the game back then, I actually did play the expansion and do everything. I maybe didn’t quite get my monies worth but I still play the game today.

With updates every few hours which basically say “We are working on it, the game will be with you as soon as it’s ready.” Does Turbine need to do better? With conspiracy theories spreading like wildfire around the forums (to which I myself participated blaming the dwarves for digging too deep because sorry it’s always a dwarf) does Turbine need to step back and explain why it is taking so long? My answer is yes! The players will respect you for keeping them in the picture and it saves the play based getting angry.

Turbine should have learned by now. With it being almost six years since LOTRO launched. With changes impacting us all and Turbine continue to make the same mistakes. Maybe we are the silly ones for putting up with their complete lack of good customer service, but while I play other games and see the distinct comparison I begin to wonder how I put up with it. From being afraid to say anything on the official forums about lag before the delete button gets pressed I wonder how this community, including myself is enjoying being trampled on.

I do wish that this game was run by any other company; even Blizzard is looking appealing to me at the moment. I am beginning to remember why I wanted to leave LOTRO and Turbine behind i.e. the complete lack of communication as well as the communistic ruling on the forums. What can I do but sit here shaking my head. Should I give up a game and a main character I love just because it is run by the worst gaming company I have ever encountered? I just checked the Facebook page of The Lord of The Rings Online for any update and what I saw was again another message saying the same thing they have been since 8am (GMT) yesterday.

I do not want to just seem hateful in this post and I know a lot of people are working hard to fix the problem. But old memories come back to me such as;

• The free to play denial.
• Leaving Codemasters behind but denying it.
• The lag. This was all the I.P’s fault.
• The deletion of anything on the forums relating to someone asking for information on when the game is going to be fixed.

So what would happen if Turbine decided it wasn’t worth the manpower to fix it and LOTRO, DDO and Asheron’s Call all got deleted? Well nothing, as you would not have a legal leg to stand on. All thanks to the terms and conditions. So it could be “Au revoir  Middle Earth” with not so much as an explanation.

Now isn’t that itself just something to freak out over?

Written by Emma McHugh

When bug fixes are bad…

Star wars The Old Republic has always been a game that rewards you greatly for success and only penalises you a little for failure. It’s a game which it’s incredibly easy to make a vast sum of money in while just generally playing, never mind selling crafting resources and playing the GTN but as discovered recently, that has been a bug in the game since update 1.2, which was deployed 8 months ago.

 

Repair bills are a necessary part of playing an mmo as they do a few things.

1. The stop players from being able to stock-pile HUGE sums of cash.

2. They take money out of the in-game economy, helping to keep prices down on the GTN.

 

Before patch 1.2 was released, repair bills were virtually non existent due to a bug which meant that items were only being priced for repair by their shell level, and not the mods and enhancements held within the shell. Essentially you could wear level 10 orange modifiable armour with rating 124 or above enhancements and mods (Tionese level +) at end game and suffer pretty much no repair costs during a raid wipe. This was noticed and deemed to be unfair as wearing high spec gear should not cost the same as level 10 stuff at level 10 so the repairs sytem was modified with patch 1.2 to include the mods in the repair costs, or at least they thought that it did. Turns out that it didn’t.. and only included the armouring modification.

People did see an increase in their repair costs, especially at level 50 running end game content but it was still not WAI and the people at Bioware failed to pick up on this so people have been running around wiping on ops or hm fp’s and not incurring the real costs of those wipes.

This has now been noticed and fixed with the 1.7 patch and people are going CRAZY on the official forums because what was once a 30k full ops repair bill has turned into a 300,000+ repair bill. There has even been reports of a guild who wiped at least 10 times on Denova Nightmare Mode and incurred 2 million+ repair bills EACH!!!

Now, money is not hard to make in SWTOR, at all. My Bounty Hunter has approx 3 million credits on him right now, although I can’t gain access to that due to not being subbed any more but my point is that it is VERY easy to make money. You can make 400k+ per day if you want to run all the daily quests, which takes approx 2-3 hours. Playing the GTN can also be VERY fruitful with lucky drops and selling crafting materials but the degree in which the repair bills have drastically increased over the last few days is just shocking. I guess you could view that as because we’ve been used to playing with a bugged system up until now and that finally suffering the true costs is shocking us.

Maybe if the repair costs had been right from the start then people wouldn’t be spending vast sums on the GTN because they have “Spare Cash” laying around. Maybe we wouldn’t be spending stupid amounts on new alts to give them a minuscule advantage at low level (I have spent 500k+ on new level 10 characters in the past) and we would be more careful with our in-game cash.

 

As a level 50 player, I have many was which I can earn enough cash for running ops and for repair bills BUT the people that I really feel for are the f2p players who have a currency cap of 200k. With leveling repair bills been recorded of up to 30k on a single death, 200k won’t last very long at all. While I would normally say “That’s a drawback of being f2p ad they should consider at least going up to preferred status”, even I have to admit that the new “Fix” is punishing people to a much higher degree than anticipated. Maybe if this had been WAI from the start, the f2p cash cap would be higher but the real shame is that because they are f2p, they can’t post on the forums and discuss this matter.

 

So while it’s good that Bioware are fixing bugs, they need to reduce the repair costs once again.

Extended downtimes, terms of service and player reactions.

As with all computer based systems or websites, sometimes they have to come down to be fixed/updated or for general tuning up to make them run effectively. This has gone on since as long as I can remember and is very much embedded in the online gaming culture, particularly with the MMO genre of games.
Servers are taken down and patches are applied to the game servers which allow players to download and play the latest build with all the new loot and bug fixes but I’m sure you understand the concept of patching a game so I’ll just skip over the rest of it for your benefit.

Turbine, host and owner of the Lord of The Rings Online (or LOTRO) announced more than a week ago that on Wednesday the 13th of Febuary that they would be taking down their servers for back-end system maintenance, which would last twelve hours then the servers would come back up and everything would be fine.This was to occur on not just LOTRO servers but for all of Turbines online games (Dungeons and Dragons Online and Asheron’s Call) and is perfectly understandable and acceptable although as always with mmo games, some people did voice strong opinions against such measures as it would cut into their game time.  However, what these people failed to read was that in the terms of service for LOTRO, which you must agree to in order to play the game, There is a section which states..

“Turbine may change, modify, suspend, or discontinue any aspect of the Game at any time. Turbine may also impose limits on certain features or restrict your access to parts or all of the Game without notice or liability.”  

 

Which is exactly what Turbine have done. they have suspended the game so they can do this essential work on their back-end servers, but as always people will complain.

 

Anyway, I’m getting a little off-track here.

 

This period was later postponed until Thursday the 14th of Febuary (Valentines Day) which seemed to please a lot of people as they would be spending this time with their loved ones but once again, people complained and asked for compensation for losing game time.

After the period started, it was quickly extended to twenty-four hours of downtime and that things were going fine, despite this news. However, approx four hours before this was due to finish the player base was informed via twitter that they would not make the twenty-four hour deadline and did not have an ETA for the servers coming back up, which is still within their rights to do. The player base, of course has erupted into acts of stupid posting and rage aimed towards the LOTROcommunity team, whom has absolutely no say in how the servers are maintained and are only there to relay the messages onto the players.

 

This beggars the question, do people even read the terms of service before they ever sign up to playing a game or do they just click “I Accept” and go on in ignorance of the actual conditions which you agree to partake in the product that the company has contracted you to.

 

Should people who don’t read and understand the Terms of Service automatically have their contracts voided and be banned from the game? Isn’t agreeing to and signing a contract, which is what you do when you click on “I Accept“, without first reading and understanding it not cause for dismissal from the contract?

Or are Turbine going easy on the players so they keep paying them?

Movie Review: TBK AFK (2013, English Subtitles)

I am a great believer in good quality documentaries and today I came across news of a newly released documentary, fresh from the Berlin film festival .

 

TPB AFK tells the tale of The Pirate Bay and mainly features video footage and excerpts from the legal trials of the three co-founding members of the well known internet peer to peer file sharing website. Filmed by Simon Klose, the 82 minute long documentary was produced following a kick-start campaign to pay for a professional video editor. The documentary premiered at the  Berlin Film Festival and was later announced by the tbkafk.tv website to be fully available for download via torrent file, which is kind of fitting considering the subject matter.

 

If you are interested in the dark side of the internet and legal dramas then this documentary will be right up your alley. So far on the IMDB website, the documentary has been given a fantastic 10 out of 10 from 36 users. The movie database and review site summarises it as “Viva la piracy! An intellectual freedoms documentary based around the interpersonal triumphs, and defeats of the three main characters against the largest industry in the known universe. The media industry.”

 

TPB AFK is available to; watch in trailer form, watch online entirely (Via youtube links), download via torrent (20k+ seeders) or watch on tbkafk.tv for $10. You can also pre-order a boxed DVD version for $23 if you wish to add this to your collection of documentaries. So far the movie has made approx $32,000 via paid views and pre-orders but total number of views is hard to get since “TPB doesn’t keep torrent stats.”

 

I highly recommend viewing this documentary, even if just to get a different view point on media sharing and the consequences of large corporations mingling into free speech online.

 

 John Gibson 

Where has my holy trinity gone?

This time last year it seemed that nothing could pull me away from Lord of the Rings online, apart from the odd day playing SWTOR (which I still play to this day).  I was nothing but happy with this MMO. I would spend hours grinding reputation, crafting, levelling characters, raiding, talking to the friends I played with. It seemed that nothing could take me out that game. Nothing could tease me away from it. I was one hundred per cent not interested in any other game. Until the lag made it impossible for me to do these things that I love, but that is for another thread. I began looking and speaking to my fellow gamers. I began to pay complete attention toGuild Wars 2. It looked awesome! I couldn’t believe how blinded by LOTRO I was, people had tried to show me how great it was but I just wouldn’t listen. I brought out the credit card and paid for two copies that day. The beta weekend had just started so when people where playing I was downloading the client on two PC’s.  I never played until the next day and what I saw just baffled me to begin with. Everything was just so different from your generic MMO clone. Now don’t get me wrong I had not just played LOTRO and SWTOR up until this point, but I had also tried GW, Aion, Rift, DDO, and had a brief 12 hour shot of WoW. The first experience of this game smashed them all out of the ballpark.

This experience made me look around me. I wanted to experience it all. I did not want generic clones, or the holy trinity. I wanted to see what I was missing, see the game’s that I was not paying my full attention too. LOTRO’s lag issues though frustrating was the best thing to happen to my gaming life. I started paying more attention to SWTOR, with the storyline and space combat grabbing my attention and seeming new and shiny. I wanted to never be blinded by one singular MMO again. I was not content with open tapping, everyone receiving loot, open world environment, crafting changes, voice acting, space missions, and the ability to play a character how you wish.

So I heard about The Secret World going pay once play forever. I’d looked at this when it launched and thought it looked brilliant. But I did not want to pay for a subscription, especially when I had just bought GW2 which had no subscription attached to it.  The big appeal to me here is that I can role one character and be whatever role I want. I was an altaholic, always bringing up alts so we’d have the correct balance in raids. Do not get me wrong, I am not moaning about it. I was not held at gun point with someone screaming in my ears, “LEVEL A LORE-MASTER… HURRY UP!”.  I enjoyed it. But this game made me think that I would never need an alt because I could just level up every weapon within the game. Also there are no physical levels, you level up within your secret faction, be in Dragon, Templar or Illuminati. It is also an open world environment, with loot sharing and open tapping.  It is also set right now, so things that are global phenomenon’s such as Gangnam style are actually within this game. Its real world setting also seemed like a big change for me, and I enjoy wandering around London and using Google maps to see if it really does look like it does within the game.

So now with the MMO genre smashing down the very bounds that once made them all similar but with different settings what do you think? Do you feel saddened that all new MMO’s seem to be moving away from the bounds that once held them? Do you hope that new games to come are different from their counterparts or do you wish they’d all just stop bring out stuff that seems shiny and new but in your eyes is just a distraction from grinding end game until the new patch comes out? With even LOTRO jumping onto the open world environment train what will be next for MMO’s within the next year to come. 2012 changed my gaming life, let’s hope 2013 adds to my experience and the open world environment will not become the new generic clone.

Written by Emma McHugh

Reputation Grinding and Faction Systems

Reputation Grinding…

 

 

With the next SWTOR patch introducing a Galactic Reputation system into the game, I have found myself pondering over my past gaming experiences of faction reputation and if it is a good idea to include such systems into games.

Lets get back to basics here. Reputation systems are a way in which the developers can increase content via a grind system which makes players achieve points towards ranks and eventually rewards by making them repeat certain content or via grinding mobs for drops.

This system has been used in many games and through personal experience of the system in LOTRO, I can say with an honest heart that it’s not one of my favourite things to do. Throughout my past and present gaming, grinding is not something I like to do. I can admit that it is sometimes a necessary task, in order to get that extra 50 morale via a trait you grind for, or in order to wear a specific item of armour or even cosmetic clothing but for me it just takes away from the fun of the game by taking up my time doing repetitive content.

I remember back playing LOTRO when the game was first released and in order to gain reputation with certain factions you ended up having to kill mobs for hours, hoping for item drops which you could then trade in for reputation points with the appropriate faction. The rewards for gaining maximum reputation were good, well at least some of them were but I know a lot of people who did it just because they are addicted to completion and just HAD to have that reputation bar full for each and every faction in the game. With LOTRO getting older and adding more content, the number of factions grew to a point where it was just getting stupid. The latest expansion pack contains four new factions, taking the total in the game to twenty-six. Sure, you may think that by the time the newest expansion arrived that most players would have all the other factions already completed, thus reducing the grind to just four further factions but the kicker is that these factions have to be gained on every single character you create, if you want to have full completion on all of them.

That is just insane in my opinion.

Thankfully those good people at Bioware have taken the new Galactic reputation system and tied it in with your legacy, meaning that you only have to gain the required reputation for each faction once. by making this account wide, they have greatly reduced the perceived grind requirement to just one character.

Another good part is that they have also tied it in with daily repeatable quests which you can run at level 50 on specific planets and also to general heroic quests which are scattered around on all the planets in the game, although at the moment of this going live only Voss and Belsavis heroic missions will count towards their factions. Hopefully more will be added into the game at a later point.

A friend of mine said something while discussing this on a post on our guild forums which fits the SWTOR system perfectly in comparison to the LOTRO  system.

“One grind to rule them all.”

About FTW

Welcome everyone to a new blog.

Before I go into any sort of specifics, I just thought I would introduce myself and give you some background as to what I like to do with my spare time and possibly what I will be writing about and my direction I’m hoping to take this new project into.

 Well I guess the easiest thing to do will be to introduce myself so here goes. My name is John Gibson and I am twenty nine years old. I am a carer for people with dementia during the day and at night time I can often be found in any one of a few mmorpg’s or watching TV and movies.

 Gaming wise I started out playing mmorpg’s in 2006 with World of Warcraft, which I spent a total of two years playing. I then left WoW and moved over to The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) which I played for five and a half years before finally leaving that and venturing to pastures new, namely Starwars The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2, which I both still play today.

Although I don’t play WoW or LOTRO any more, I still like to keep abreast of the news and updates from both games so I can talk about them with my friends and comment on them when I feel the need and desire to.

Apart from mmorpg’s, I also play single player games a lot. Titles include the Dead Space series, Battlefield 3, the Mass Effect franchise and Dragon Age.

 

When it comes to movies, my tastes are a little more diverse than they are with my games I like to play. I am a huge fan of sci-fi and horror movies but also enjoy a good murder mystery or drama movie. Some of my favourite movies are the Alien series, American History X, Silent Hill and Rocky I and II.

When it comes to Television I have a huge taste for American shows although I do like some shows from here in the United Kingdom. As with movies, I have a wide taste of  shows I love to watch, ranging from the political like Question Time and This Week, to The Wire and Homeland.

As for this blog and it’s purpose, well I guess it’s a place for me to talk about the issues which I find to be important and to spark debate and conversation with like-minded people or even people who totally disagree with me on the subjects. The topics, I’m hoping to make varied and not to specifically focus on any one thing but there probably will be times where it may look like All I want to talk about is one thing. To help combat this I’m hoping to be getting a few guest writers involved and to be posting some of their work every now and again. They may have a different take on a subject than I do but it’s always good to have more than one opinion on any subject.

 Well I guess that’s enough for now on my hopes for this venture.

 I’m always happy to receive any comments on any work that I post so feel free to do so.

 John Gibson