1. It’s time to redesign the character models.

I love Kit above every other game character that I have spent endless hours with. But when I look at her awkward spade-shaped hands and triangular fingers, it really bothers me. Mouths are bad. Male characters are creepy and ugly – most of them seem to have harelips, and they all look kind of pissed off and constipated, as though they’re in need of a good poo. I could never play one. Blood elf males are better facially, but still suffer from the grotesquely overwide shoulders. Human models are boring, and human females are saddled with the worst dance in the game. It just won’t do!

Now, everything doesn’t have to be as beautiful as, say, Aion. I quite like the look of the towns and outdoor environments, and the very stylised Warcraft art direction works for me. But please, please, please – redo the avatars.

2. The older armor and weapons need an update.

I get the starting out in rags and gradually acquiring better gear thing, that’s fine. But again, the older textures are really showing their age. They’re so low-res that you just get a vague impression of broadly-sketched in texture. Give me more modern textures, where the cloth looks like cloth, and metal actually looks like metal. Newer high-level armor sets are fine, a lot of work has gone into those. But the really old textures are pathetic.

When interviewed, the developers and designers at Blizzard are pretty honest about not really knowing what, exactly, give Warcraft the magic that it has, that indefinable quality of “fun”. And I would never wish anything to detract from that. But surely, better character models would only increase pleasure in the game, without diverging too much from the look and feel of the environment.

That said, though, I am having an enormous amount of fun running around with my blocky, floppy-footed troll hunter with the vacant, somewhat retarded face. She’s smarter than she looks…and a lot more fun. :)

P. has been playing Star Trek Online, having discovered Klingon pvp. Our computer rooms are on the top floor of the house, with a connecting door so we can yell at each other. It’s rather nice. Quite often we play together, when we’re playing the same games. When we’re not, then we go off and do our own thing. We always have something to talk about, and have an outlet for our geekiness (gaming is something that I mostly just don’t talk about at work, aside from casual references).

The cats have their favourite spots around the rooms. Occasionally they insist on quality time, usually by sitting in front of the computer screens, being obstructive. My room is dark blue, filled with a wall of books, several computers, a squashy reading chair and lamp, and a poster of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow.

This is my homespace, this is where I relax. Where the sound of space battles meets clashing blades, where the air smells of my favourite Nag Champa, where we can call to each other from our separate universes.

On some characters (not all, just some) I experience very low fps (9-12) and drawn-out, stuttering sound – to the point where the game is unplayable. I’ve tried everything:

• Full reformat and reinstall of my operating system
• Full download and fresh reinstall of Warcraft
• Playing without any addons at all
• Updated all drivers, including scary motherboard drivers

At this point, I’m out of options. :( It’s possible the powersupply isn’t powering the graphics card sufficiently, but aside from that I’ve no idea. It’s a decent spec, with a good graphics card and a lot of RAM. Frustrating in the extreme.

I joined SINGLE ABSTRACT NOUN, and they’re a very social, literate group of gamers – I highly recommend stopping by and saying hi if you can. I’ll be the one getting killed because of my terrible lag. :D

EDIT: And after weeks of frustration, and not one but THREE support tickets, I seem to have fixed it. (Please don’t let me have jinxed it by saying that!) For some reason, enabling 3D sound fixes the low framerate. Thank all the gods for Teh Internets and the ONE PERSON IN THE ENTIRE WORLD who had the same problem and posted how they fixed it. One. Person. Bless you.

As Tamarind says in the post, one of the rules is that you “Leave your wowcock in the stand by the door”. It doesn’t get much better than that. That’s pretty much why I stopped raiding, and then stopped playing my mains…I was so sick of having to list achievements, and playing the “my gearscore is bigger than yours” type of games, that it just wasn’t fun any more.

And it’s on a roleplay server! That is so tempting. I miss RP servers. I may have to reactivate my account and join them. :)

Allods Online, as I’m sure you have all read, has fixed their cash shop prices and I think shocked everyone by their fairness – they really did make some reasonably substantial cuts in the laughable original prices. They’re still more expensive than the Russian shop, of course, but they’re better. Fear of Death will evidently still roll out in a future patch, which still gets my panties in a bunch. It’s a nasty mechanic and I hate being held hostage by a game mechanic like that – even if the price is more palatable now.

Like many other people, I’ll support a game that I like. I’ll buy things. I don’t like the venality, or the mistrust of the customer base, or whatever you would call it – the logic that says that we’re all a bunch of cheap bastards so they need to force us to pay. If that is your opinion, just make it a subscription game. But let me feel good about buying fripperies and mounts and xp potions.

Well, it’s now 5:00, and it’s time to go home. To play, most probably. :) Thank goodness for escapism.

Due to deciding that I didn’t want to raid anymore, I’ve fallen out of step with my guild, and feel like a stranger there most of the time. My Horde paladin has a bizarre problem with low framerate and sound stuttering, which makes her unplayable. She’s the only one on the account who is affected…addons, no addons, removing all the usual things, clean install of WoW, nothing helps. Customer service just sends me form letters telling me to delete my WTF and Cache folders and delete addons, which I’ve done. Since she’s the only one that I’m currently playing, it’s a bit frustrating.

I’m currently spending time in Allods, still playing a tiny bit of Star Trek Online, and I’ve re-subscribed to EVE Online, so I think I might cancel temporarily. I don’t know why it should feel like the end of an era…but I’ve made so many friends there, and I have many good memories going all the way back to Vanilla WoW and Molten Core, BWL, and so on.

Perhaps we always feel sad about moving on, and putting old, much-loved toys away in the closet.

]]> http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/02/eve-online-intro/feed/ 0 http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/02/boo-2/ http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/02/boo-2/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:32:19 +0000 Ravven http://www.ravven.com/blog/?p=2307 I played a bit of Allods last night, but had little patience with the things that I’ve previously ignored: the Russian players insisting on filling zone chat with Cyrillic, the sad little boys with potty mouths, the scarcity of quest items or mobs. Tonight it bothered me, and honestly it’s because of the whole cash shop issue – it’s tarnished my love of the game that they created, and that is a shame. I logged after fifteen minutes or so, and watched a movie instead.

I don’t have a problem with sensible microtransactions. I’ve paid Blizzard for innumerable server transfers, name changes, faction transfers, etc. I bought the Pandaren pet for a gift this Christmas. I would have paid for several of the extremely cool looking mounts in Runes of Magic – the price wasn’t bad for a mount, and they were gorgeous. Cash shops that offer potions for increased XP wouldn’t bother me. Epic gear would, along with potions that wildly increased your stats – that creates an unlevel playing field. Fear of Death in Allods would cost you an extraordinary amount over a month if you were doing instances (which evidently are difficult to do with no deaths). If you can’t afford the perfume, you have a several hour downtime while you wait for your stats to come back. This would make endgame PvE content impossible.

In the end, it’s about respect. The attitude of “we’re going to sit back and see what kind of response there is to these prices” is disrespectful. I am not an idiot, nor am I some cash cow that will happily cough up an estimated $50-$70 per month to play your game. There is no game in the world that would be worth that, AAA titles included. I certainly won’t pay it for Allods.

This kind of article doesn’t help. It’s not about bags. I could care less if there are convenience or vanity items in the shop with astronomical prices, which the devs have put there just to see if anyone buys them. It affects my gameplay not in the slightest. Sitting out for a couple of hours after a death, however, does. Surely that would be obvious to anyone.

All of this makes me think of Aion, actually. Goodwill is invaluable for any business, and it is especially important to MMOs. I loved Aion so much, and if they fixed the gameplay/grind issues I would be resubscribed in a flash. If I didn’t hate NCSoft so much. They had zero respect for their players. For ages they gave goldsellers free rein, and there are probably areas populated only by botters to this very day. Anything they did to Aion would be coloured (for me) by the bad feeling that I have for the company.

Boo sucks to gPotato. Shame on you.

I have no problems with a sensible cash shop for a f2p game. As Potshot said about Runes of Magic:  After a very brief evening exploring this game, I can say that regardless of whether I expected to play more than a casual month in this game, I’d be willing to throw down for the FREAKING $10 HORSE.  Hell, I feel like sending those guys $10 just because they made a game that didn’t piss me off and make me feel like they stole precious time from my life never to be recovered (let alone the box price…).  Seriously, horse = Alexander Hamilton = Truth. Amen.

Commentary and explanation about the Allods cash shop storm:

Keen and Graev: Bringing you up to speed on Allods Online’s Launch Debacle

Bio Break: Blog Rage vs. The Army of Allods

Heartless Gamer: Forget about the Allods Online cash shop, this is dumb for any business model

West Karana: Allods Online: Workers of the World

Please, don’t piss me off. Don’t throw away all of that good will engendered by your very fun and polished game due to insanity/greed/stupidity. Don’t make me leave. :(

There are some very cool kind of post-revolution Russian shops and things. All signs are in Russian. That didn’t bother me, but the griefers speaking in Russian kind of did. (A post to come on how trying to ruin a fairly nice general chat channel is equivalent to griefing, and how we should never forget that we are all representatives of our respective countries.)

After doing Dead Soul (the first kind of mini-boss on League side), we left for the city on a stunning ship, sailing through the Astral. As the silhouette of the city came into view, I admit I was squeeing…just a little bit.  :)

It’s the mark of success in a f2p game that you can have that feeling. That “omg, that is so cool!” squee feeling. Applause to Allods Online.

All in all, a very fun weekend.