level-curve
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Flameseeker Chronicles: Your Guild Wars 2 mileage will vary
There's been a good deal of talk, here in the early days, about the level and experience curve in Guild Wars 2. A great many people are tackling the game in a great many ways, which leads to a tremendous variety in folks' perception of the leveling curve. There are a few of ways that your experience gain might not match up to your desired or expected level. These ways mostly deal with feeling underleveled for storyline content and zone progression. As I said, everyone's moving through the game differently: Some folks made a point to run around major cities right of the bat to tuck a few safe levels under their belts, while others made a beeline for personal story content, and others still (and I count myself in this category) are stumbling this way and that through content with all the focus and willpower of a drunken goldfish.
Lost Pages of Taborea: Level 62 growing pains
Halloween has stubbornly refused to leave the land of Candara and is relentlessly holding monster parades around the clock. While it may be boring some, other persistent folk are probably stock-piling enough candy to make it all the way to next Halloween. So while we conveniently ignore the Pumpkin Prince, I want look ahead to the coming new zone. I've been steadily finding great content on the Runes of Magic forum, and the new level-cap increase is a hot subject right now. When chapter 3 rolled out, we knew we'd be seeing the maximum level raised to 60, but this new one wasn't expected, especially not so soon. This new level cap will take us into Limo Desert and to level 62. That means at least one new dungeon, new quests and most likely new armor. There's more than a few in the Runes of Magic community, including CM Swag, who have voiced their opinions both for and against another raise in levels so soon. Let's take a look at the situation that this presents, and I'll give my opinion on the new level cap.%Gallery-108554%
Final Fantasy XIV sends the November update live
Everyone in the US got to spend the day gorging on turkey and pie, but Final Fantasy XIV players got to gorge themselves on something else -- a large patch. The far-reaching November version update has gone live as of yesterday evening, bringing with it a host of updates and improvements to help bring the game up to speed in both content and accessibility. While the patch notes focus on enhancing the play experience, the improvements should be well-received by many players. Among the more significant gameplay changes are the movement of skill points to an end-of-combat reward in the same manner as experience points and the reduction of points needed for ranks 11 through 31. The UI response time has been improved, and the widgets of the interface have been changed around to make the game more accessible and responsive. Synthesis materials have been altered, inventory space has increased, and the high-quality drops that once clogged inventories are being streamlined. All of the details can be found in the patch notes, a veritable feast of good news for Final Fantasy XIV players from a very appropriate day.
The Mog Log: The natives are restless
Allow me a little bit of woolgathering. When I started working for Massively, it was October of last year, and Final Fantasy XIV had just been announced as the official title for the game code-named "Rapture" and unofficially codenamed "the sequel to Final Fantasy XI" by everyone else who had seen a single screenshot. About four days after you read this, the game is going to be officially live for players around the world willing to shell out an extra bit of cash for various doodads and a headstart. This is kind of baffling. Objectively, you know that the game is getting close to release, but it's not made real until the release is right at your doorstep. So before I go too far off the deep end and start thinking about things like the franchise having started when I was four, let's move on to the discussions coming out of the impending launch. And really, do come back next week when Final Fantasy XIV comes out, as I'm sure we'll have plenty of things on launch day. (Very sure, in fact.)
The metagame and its importance to MMOs
What is the metagame? It can mean a lot of different things depending on context, but all of the meanings share the sense that the metagame is not the game itself, but something above and affecting the game as a whole. In a casual game of poker, the metagame could be as simple as one of the players having an exceedingly poor poker face which makes betting that much easier. On a more complex scale, you have things such as the entire Band of Brothers incident on EVE Online, which has been called by some as what amounts to a forum war that was fought out over the space of the game. That's a Terrible Idea recently had a post regarding the problem of MMOs as "serious" games due to how they interact with the entire concept of the metagame. As the post outlines, you're first cut out from the endgame by the leveling game, which is changing the variables of the game itself, and when you finally reach the end of the curve most of the strategy involves memorizing specific character builds and raid strategies. The metagame, in this case defined as "the process of strategizing and conceptualizing out of the game," thrives on the viability of different strategies and the necessity of discussion. While there are certainly sites devoted to this sort of theoretical work, they frequently involve simply boiling everything down to a single optimal setup. Take a look at the article (and, if needed, the supplementary piece on terminology), as it's interesting for anyone with an affection for the genre and its overall development.
Attribute systems have -10 to Intelligence
As a gamer who was holding a controller long before I'd ever even heard of a D20, the attribute systems that seem to be standard in the world of RPGs were always a little foreign and foreboding. The idea of Strength and Dexterity were easy enough to grasp, but what the heck did Constitution mean? And for that matter, what's the difference between Wisdom and Intelligence? Even as an adult, the attribute system in a game like World of Warcraft is a bit strange to me. They give general descriptions on the website and in the game's manual, but when you start throwing in things like crit chances, the five second rule, and attack power, it all becomes a dense, tangled mess.On his blog, Brian Green ponders whether such a system can't be simplified in a way that would encourage a deeper understanding for players who don't take their games so seriously that they've got their gear progression mapped out in Excel. His first suggestion is to sweep away derived stats, or more accurately, JUST have derived stats, and ignore the base stats that influence them. Seems reasonable enough, if a bit more long-winded. His second suggestion is to take away the level curve, making stats behave the same regardless of the player level. It's an interesting idea in the abstract, but one wonders whether developers, and indeed the players they're developing these games for, are ready to put in such a radically different system.
