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The Daily Grind: Do you fill out MMO cancellation surveys?
I cancelled my Star Wars: The Old Republic subscription this week. Given my history with the game I'm sure it's only temporary, but for now I got what I needed out of the 12x event and I'm off to greener pastures. I told BioWare as much in the post-cancel survey thing, too, but I seriously doubt it'll be removing the gear grind just for me! What about you, Massively readers? Do you think cancellation surveys are a formality? Do you fill them out? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
PvP and the barrier to entry
I was very disappointed when the Trial of the Gladiator ended up not making it as a PvP mode. I get all the objections to it (Olivia raises a handful of them here) but for my money, the biggest reason I stopped PvPing seriously way back in The Burning Crusade and never started up again is twofold - the introduction of Arenas and the rise of PvP gear. For me, PvP (especially back when I ran the ladder) was all about going into a battleground, solo, and seeing what happened. Many times I got stomped so hard that I barely knew what my name was, other times we'd have a great game. After the ladder went away, I PvP'd even more because I was using the gear in PvE content - this was back before resilience even existed - and I wore some of that gear all the way to 70, as you can see in my mismatched set above. Even in BC, when resilience first took off and arenas were introduced, I often PvP'd to supplement my PvE gearing, or even to replace it on alts that didn't raid. But the more stratified PvP and PvE became, and the more gearing intensive PvP became, the harder it became to even do things like random BG's without first acquiring a full set of PvP gear. The barriers got taller and taller, and I was less and less interested in jumping over them. I understand why this all happened - dedicated PvPers wanted a separate experience, free from the need to PvE at all. PvE players didn't like that sometimes the best route to getting gear was to run battlegrounds. Even now, with some 550 PvP items dropping from the Celestials, people are upset that there are PvP items that are better for them than PvE items. But for me, the solo PvPer, arenas and the stratification of WoW's PvP and PvE games became too great for me to keep participating. Even now that I'm PvPing more often, I'm only doing so at the end of the expansion, when I could buy a set of good PvP gear for justice points so I don't have to go into BG's without any PvP power and get steamrolled.
Hyperspace Beacon: SWTOR Update 1.6 PvP progression
Lead Designer Damion Schubert made an interesting statement during the last Star Wars: The Old Republic livestream. He proclaimed that although the designers don't want to completely eliminate vertical progression, the stats between the upper tiers of PvP armor will begin to flatten out. As many of you are aware, I am not a fan of vertical progression in MMOs overall, especially in PvP. I have issued many gripes and even stood on a soapbox proclaiming how it's bad. It's not that I don't want players to have a sense of gain as they play the game, but a purely vertical progression system (in which stats only ever get bigger) invites the dreaded power creep. And as I said on my soapbox, power creep is not good for players or designers. So when Schubert talked about flattening out stats, I was excited. Finally, SWTOR is stepping away from a vertical progression system! Update 1.6 brings multiple changes to PvP specifically. The new warzone, Ancient Hypergates, is probably the biggest. But for today, the most important change is the elimination of the Battlemaster tier of PvP gear and the introduction of Elite War Hero gear. What does this do to the overall feel of PvP, and are these changes enough to soften the heart of the MMO gamer?
Hyperspace Beacon: One step forward...
You might notice that the Hyperspace Beacon changed its face a bit. That's because I'm reporting from the Guild Summit in Austin, Texas -- BioWare's headquarters. Over 250 guilds and fan sites were invited to not only see the team's plans for Star Wars: The Old Republic but also voice their ideas for what they want from the game. Of course, a game carrying the Star Wars name appeals to a large diverse group of people, and not just because of the Star Wars IP; BioWare has created a name for itself with incredible story-driven games like Mass Effect 3, which released this morning. Among the pre-summit discussion was the question of whether and how much BioWare leans on the Star Wars IP for the success of the game. The consensus among the guild leaders I spoke to was an interesting and surprising one: Although BioWare certainly leaned on Star Wars for the story elements of the game, the lack of huge success for the most recent LucasArts games suggests that the Star Wars IP actually leaned on BioWare's reputation. When I jumped into Q&A with the guild leaders, I half-expected a bunch of over-enthusiastic fanboys. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, although they were fans, those invited to this summit were very level-headed and oftentimes critical of the game's development. Thankfully, during the course of the summit, the developers were equally willing to address these concerns.
SOE tweaking EQII's dungeon finder mechanics
Once upon a time, EverQuest II's dungeon finder was a hot-button issue. Some players wanted it, others predicted the doom of grouping, the game, and life as we know it if the feature got implemented. Fast forward a few months and now the dungeon finder is hardly used aside from guildless mid-level players looking for a quick PUG crawl. Sony Online Entertainment has announced a couple of tweaks designed to incentivize the mechanic, and EQ2Wire has the relevant developer quotes as well as a bit of commentary on the process. In a nutshell, SOE is adding contested dungeons and daily rewards into the mix. While this may result in a temporary upswing in dungeon finder interest, it doesn't address the primary reason veteran and high-level players shun the mechanic. The system still won't take player gear into account when forming parties, so it is therefore quite useless when gear-dependent content -- like any of the dungeons from the Destiny of Velious expansion -- is the goal.
NCsoft extends Aion abyss point event
Aion's recent For War and Glory event hit something of a technical snag yesterday, and as compensation for the resulting server maintenance period, NCsoft is gifting daevas with an additional week of festivities. Originally, the abyss point event was supposed to conclude on April 27th. Now, Aion players will be happy to know that they can keep scarfing down bonus AP from monsters in the Abyss and Silentera Canyon all the way up to May 4th, which should put a dent in the considerable grind required to obtain endgame gear. The event also halves the AP loss from PvP encounters in the aforementioned areas, so get out there and kill your fellow daevas for fun and profit (or at least, less of a loss). Full details are available at the official Aion website.
NCsoft aiming for Aion 2.5 test at the end of April
Aion's 2.5 update has been a long time coming. We first heard tell of the patch in early January and are happy to report that NCsoft is looking to take the wraps off the new content via the game's test servers in the next few weeks. In a new interview at the official UK Aion website, producer Sean Neil and brand manager Dominic Wai take turns answering player-generated questions relating to the new patch, which Neil says should be "on our player test servers (PTS) at the end of April or beginning of May." What, exactly, does 2.5 bring to the world of Atreia? Quite a lot, actually, and whether you're talking about the extensive graphical overhaul or the new Empyrean Crucible and Esoterrace dungeon instances, chances are there will be something interesting in the update for every daeva. Getting to endgame should be less of a chore as well, and while Aion still possesses one of the more daunting gear grinds in the genre, NCsoft is introducing a mentoring system in 2.5 that allows "new players [to] level up quicker with the help of a friend."
Ask Massively: Solve all your problems with chainsaws edition
We don't really want to solve all our problems with violence. It's just that violence solves problems so quickly and efficiently that it's kind of silly. With a sufficiently large lever, Aristotle believed he could move the world, but I say with a sufficiently large chainsaw you could probably solve all of your problems in such a way that they would never need to be solved again. Although most state and local authorities might take some issue with this approach. And it's hard to feel a sense of fulfillment just by chainsawing everything in your path. So maybe we can't solve everything with violence after all. This week's questions both speak to problems that don't allow the option -- the persistent bugbears of gear grinds and slow connections. Click past the break for this week's answers, and if you have your own questions, you can leave them in the comments or send them to ask@massively.com. Or chainsaw them into a tree and send us a picture. Chainsaws are pretty awesome.
