I got Deceived by Paul S. Kemp at the same time as Revan, so I guess it should be no surprise that I have a couple of things to say about that book as well. (Though in case you are wondering, a Fatal Alliance review won't be coming up any time soon.)
The book starts with the sacking of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and then follows the fates of three main characters during the days right afterwards: Darth Malgus, Jedi Aryn Leneer and the smuggler Zeerid Korr. The writing felt slightly more sophisticated to me than Revan's, except for the occasional strained metaphor sneaking in here and there.
On average it seems that Deceived has received better reviews than Revan, but I got roughly equal enjoyment out of both books. Deceived has some moments that stand out in your memory more than anything in Revan did (to me at least), but it also has passages that outright bored me, such as the 20-odd-page move-by-move re-narration of the "Deceived" cinematic game trailer. In the end it pretty much evens out.
Also, like in Revan, I found that once again the Sith actually made for the much more compelling character. You get some absolutely fascinating insights into the mind and background of Darth Malgus, and he goes through a very compelling character arc. I had to laugh a bit when it was revealed that for all his power he's not actually very good at Sith politics - not something that I ever expected, but it certainly explains a lot.
Comparatively, the Jedi and the smuggler fell relatively flat for me, the smuggler in particular. Their characters are mostly reduced to being focused on the one thing they care about more than anything else (Zeerid on his daughter, Aryn on her revenge), and where Malgus finds himself forced to re-evaluate his priorities, the other two just keep going on and on about the same thing without any significant development. While they are faced with physical obstacles, they always end up overcoming them quite easily. Aryn has a revelation at the very end but it comes too suddenly and randomly to be truly convincing, and the end of Zeerid's story just left me with a slight feeling of discomfort, not being quite sure what the point of it was.
The way the book ties in with the game is slightly less obvious than it was in Revan (for example Aryn Leneer isn't obviously a Guardian or a Sentinel, as she uses abilities from both), but it still caused me a fair amount of d'oh moments. For example it took me until about halfway through the book to realise that T7 was the same T7 as in the game. And until Malgus mentioned that a trooper had once set off a grenade in his face, I never even realised that that was him in the "Hope" cinematic. It's all tied together in so many ways...
17/07/2012
13/07/2012
Don't worry, it's only a simulation!
If you had to place The Old Republic on a slider that had sandbox / world on one end and themepark / game on the other, it would be very firmly on the "game" end. However, just because your MMO is very "gamey" that doesn't mean that it needs to completely ignore the world aspect. One thing I love about SWTOR is that I always get the feeling that the designers really love the universe they are working in and want it to make sense.
The latest example of this is that with 1.3, all warzones have now become enabled for same faction PvP to reduce queue times and address faction imbalances on individual servers. When WoW introduced same faction battlegrounds for rated play, I doubt that anyone even stopped to consider for a moment whether they could come up with some sort of in-game reason for Horde players to be hitting each other over the head in Arathi Basin instead of the Alliance.
Bioware is very different in this regard though, and they've tried hard to maintain consistency in the newly changed warzones by explaining the same faction PvP as simply being a simulation. A fairly flimsy excuse I admit, but at least they are trying. This meant both new voiceovers for Voidstar and Civil War for both factions, as well as subtle alterations to the animations: for example the ships in Civil War don't actually come crashing down at the end of the game if it was a same faction match (since it was just pretend).
I haven't heard the new Imperial voiceovers yet, but I quite like the ones they've added for Republic. I couldn't help but smile when the Civil War simulation analyst told my team that there would be "no shenanigans" on his watch. The Voidstar is even funnier, as the droid that does the commenting is pretty much a massive carebear and says things like "isn't this fun" or "everyone's a winner at heart" (if you lose). It almost makes me feel like he's trolling me; it's pretty hilarious! My only gripe with him is that he doesn't actually sound like a droid as his voice is missing that metallic resonance that droid voices usually have. I'm not sure whether that was some kind of oversight or intentional.
Either way I really appreciate the flavour that these little touches add to each warzone, instead of them being simply an opportunity for players to hit each other over the head for no reason.
The latest example of this is that with 1.3, all warzones have now become enabled for same faction PvP to reduce queue times and address faction imbalances on individual servers. When WoW introduced same faction battlegrounds for rated play, I doubt that anyone even stopped to consider for a moment whether they could come up with some sort of in-game reason for Horde players to be hitting each other over the head in Arathi Basin instead of the Alliance.
Bioware is very different in this regard though, and they've tried hard to maintain consistency in the newly changed warzones by explaining the same faction PvP as simply being a simulation. A fairly flimsy excuse I admit, but at least they are trying. This meant both new voiceovers for Voidstar and Civil War for both factions, as well as subtle alterations to the animations: for example the ships in Civil War don't actually come crashing down at the end of the game if it was a same faction match (since it was just pretend).
I haven't heard the new Imperial voiceovers yet, but I quite like the ones they've added for Republic. I couldn't help but smile when the Civil War simulation analyst told my team that there would be "no shenanigans" on his watch. The Voidstar is even funnier, as the droid that does the commenting is pretty much a massive carebear and says things like "isn't this fun" or "everyone's a winner at heart" (if you lose). It almost makes me feel like he's trolling me; it's pretty hilarious! My only gripe with him is that he doesn't actually sound like a droid as his voice is missing that metallic resonance that droid voices usually have. I'm not sure whether that was some kind of oversight or intentional.
Either way I really appreciate the flavour that these little touches add to each warzone, instead of them being simply an opportunity for players to hit each other over the head for no reason.
11/07/2012
Late night adventures on Balmorra
Two nights ago I was questing on Balmorra with my bounty hunter, specifically working my way through the Okara Droid Factory. This was my third time playing through that area so I had a good idea where everything was by now, except for one thing that remained a bit of a mystery to me: two elevator shafts that led to heroic areas according to the map, but I'd never actually been given a quest to go there.
Feeling confident and curious, I decided to have a bit of a nose around and see whether there was anything interesting down there. I immediately felt rewarded for my exploration when an [Area 4] quest popped up for me as soon as I descended on the first elevator. Since I've generally found area quests to be a bit easier than regular heroics and being a Powertech with a healing companion makes you very powerful at low levels, I decided to see whether I could solo any of it.
I managed to down the first two pulls without too much difficulty, but when I turned around after finishing the last mob I suddenly found myself face to face with an inquisitor and a juggernaut. They immediately threw me a group invite, and this turned out to be a very lucky coincidence for me as I'm pretty sure that there's no way I would have been able to solo some of the later pulls.
We didn't talk much but our progress was very smooth, as the juggernaut and I took turns tanking the elite and champion mobs while quickly burning down the weak and strong ones. Meanwhile the inquisitor crowd controlled, threw lightning around and dispensed heals where necessary. It struck me that since the story for the mission was very thin, we were effectively simply grinding mobs as a group - and it was very profitable for me too, as my bounty hunter is a scavenger and (what with everything in the factory being droids) could salvage crafting materials from pretty much every single mob we killed. I think Bioware has a pretty good grip on when to deliver a great story and when to let it take a step backwards to simply let the player enjoy playing with other people.
Once we were done, we headed straight for the other elevator, and lo and behold, at the bottom of this one another [Area 4] quest awaited. I only had a brief glimpse at the map to take in the objectives and decided to simply follow the other two guys' lead, which meant that it took until we were about halfway through the area for me to notice that we weren't actually on the same step of the mission. Apparently the two Sith had come down here before, had already completed the first step and had thus moved straight on to the ones afterwards. I felt pretty bad when I stopped and asked whether they would mind going back and getting me caught up, but while there was a bit of hesitation at first, nobody complained and in the end we did it. Since everything respawned pretty quickly, it took us bloody forever to go back and forth again through the entire complex.
When we were finally done, the inquisitor suddenly asked whether I had picked up the local datacron. I said that I didn't even know there was one, but that I wasn't too bothered. I felt that I had already "stolen" enough of their time with all the backtracking we had to do during the second mission and didn't want to impose any further, but the inquisitor happily led us back to the first heroic area, we fought our way through half of it again, and then jumped down some hole towards the datacron. My heart was in my throat for a moment when I saw all the pipes around me, as I've previously established that I suck at pipe-jumping, but fortunately this was more a case of falling down on two pipes in a row instead of jumping, which I just about managed.
I always try to be nice to people who need help or don't know what they are doing, but that night it was interesting to be in the role of the clueless newbie for a change and experience other people giving me a gentle leg up. I should really be used to how nice people in this game are by now, but WoW's pug culture has clearly left a very deep impression with me.
Feeling confident and curious, I decided to have a bit of a nose around and see whether there was anything interesting down there. I immediately felt rewarded for my exploration when an [Area 4] quest popped up for me as soon as I descended on the first elevator. Since I've generally found area quests to be a bit easier than regular heroics and being a Powertech with a healing companion makes you very powerful at low levels, I decided to see whether I could solo any of it.
I managed to down the first two pulls without too much difficulty, but when I turned around after finishing the last mob I suddenly found myself face to face with an inquisitor and a juggernaut. They immediately threw me a group invite, and this turned out to be a very lucky coincidence for me as I'm pretty sure that there's no way I would have been able to solo some of the later pulls.
We didn't talk much but our progress was very smooth, as the juggernaut and I took turns tanking the elite and champion mobs while quickly burning down the weak and strong ones. Meanwhile the inquisitor crowd controlled, threw lightning around and dispensed heals where necessary. It struck me that since the story for the mission was very thin, we were effectively simply grinding mobs as a group - and it was very profitable for me too, as my bounty hunter is a scavenger and (what with everything in the factory being droids) could salvage crafting materials from pretty much every single mob we killed. I think Bioware has a pretty good grip on when to deliver a great story and when to let it take a step backwards to simply let the player enjoy playing with other people.
Once we were done, we headed straight for the other elevator, and lo and behold, at the bottom of this one another [Area 4] quest awaited. I only had a brief glimpse at the map to take in the objectives and decided to simply follow the other two guys' lead, which meant that it took until we were about halfway through the area for me to notice that we weren't actually on the same step of the mission. Apparently the two Sith had come down here before, had already completed the first step and had thus moved straight on to the ones afterwards. I felt pretty bad when I stopped and asked whether they would mind going back and getting me caught up, but while there was a bit of hesitation at first, nobody complained and in the end we did it. Since everything respawned pretty quickly, it took us bloody forever to go back and forth again through the entire complex.
When we were finally done, the inquisitor suddenly asked whether I had picked up the local datacron. I said that I didn't even know there was one, but that I wasn't too bothered. I felt that I had already "stolen" enough of their time with all the backtracking we had to do during the second mission and didn't want to impose any further, but the inquisitor happily led us back to the first heroic area, we fought our way through half of it again, and then jumped down some hole towards the datacron. My heart was in my throat for a moment when I saw all the pipes around me, as I've previously established that I suck at pipe-jumping, but fortunately this was more a case of falling down on two pipes in a row instead of jumping, which I just about managed.
I always try to be nice to people who need help or don't know what they are doing, but that night it was interesting to be in the role of the clueless newbie for a change and experience other people giving me a gentle leg up. I should really be used to how nice people in this game are by now, but WoW's pug culture has clearly left a very deep impression with me.
09/07/2012
Book Review: Revan
It's been a while since I last read a video game tie-in, but during the last couple of days I've had a chance to read Revan by Drew Karpyshyn.
It's set about three hundred years before The Old Republic, and like the title implies it focuses on Revan. He shares about equal page time with Lord Scourge however, a character featured in the Jedi knight class story, and there's a lot of background on the Sith Emperor as well. In a nutshell, the book tells the story of how all these characters end up in the positions they are in when you meet them in the game.
As I've mentioned multiple times before, I never played either of the KOTOR games, but even so it was quite obvious to me that the book relies heavily on the story foundation set by those two games. Apparently some KOTOR fans were rather unhappy with how this turned out, as their in-game experiences didn't match what has now been declared official canon. Supposedly some things were retconned as well. Personally I was unburdened by such emotional baggage however, and coming at it purely from a SWTOR perspective I was happy to be provided with some background for characters and events featured in the game.
The writing is fluid and fast-paced, and I soon had trouble putting the book down as I wanted to see where it was all going. Scourge in particular was a fascinating character to me: powerful and power-hungry, ambitious and paranoid. That's not to say that Revan himself was boring to read about, but relatively speaking I found Scourge to have the more interesting personality.
The book also ties in very tightly with the game without being cheesy. Seasoned players will recognise familiar locations here and there (such as the Nexus Room Cantina in Kaas City), and many of the fighting moves described during the combat sequences are reminiscent of actual in-game abilities. There's even a small reference to the player character.
Like any good tie-in should be (/cough), it's completely optional reading. Even if you've never heard of Revan before by the time you encounter his name in the game, everything relevant will be explained as you go along. However, if you'd like to know more about how he ends up where he does, or almost more importantly how the Emperor has ended up where he is, I can heartily recommend this book to fill in all the gaps.
It's set about three hundred years before The Old Republic, and like the title implies it focuses on Revan. He shares about equal page time with Lord Scourge however, a character featured in the Jedi knight class story, and there's a lot of background on the Sith Emperor as well. In a nutshell, the book tells the story of how all these characters end up in the positions they are in when you meet them in the game.
As I've mentioned multiple times before, I never played either of the KOTOR games, but even so it was quite obvious to me that the book relies heavily on the story foundation set by those two games. Apparently some KOTOR fans were rather unhappy with how this turned out, as their in-game experiences didn't match what has now been declared official canon. Supposedly some things were retconned as well. Personally I was unburdened by such emotional baggage however, and coming at it purely from a SWTOR perspective I was happy to be provided with some background for characters and events featured in the game.
The writing is fluid and fast-paced, and I soon had trouble putting the book down as I wanted to see where it was all going. Scourge in particular was a fascinating character to me: powerful and power-hungry, ambitious and paranoid. That's not to say that Revan himself was boring to read about, but relatively speaking I found Scourge to have the more interesting personality.
The book also ties in very tightly with the game without being cheesy. Seasoned players will recognise familiar locations here and there (such as the Nexus Room Cantina in Kaas City), and many of the fighting moves described during the combat sequences are reminiscent of actual in-game abilities. There's even a small reference to the player character.
Like any good tie-in should be (/cough), it's completely optional reading. Even if you've never heard of Revan before by the time you encounter his name in the game, everything relevant will be explained as you go along. However, if you'd like to know more about how he ends up where he does, or almost more importantly how the Emperor has ended up where he is, I can heartily recommend this book to fill in all the gaps.
07/07/2012
Referring A Friend
A good friend from WoW has been interested in trying out The Old Republic for a while, but unfortunately his old computer wasn't up for it when the game first launched. I was delighted when he e-mailed me the other day to let me know that he had finally upgraded his PC and was ready to give it a whirl.
I was simply happy about the prospect of having him around, but a guildie pointed out that I might as well make use of Bioware's refer a friend feature, especially as they are finally implementing a reward for successful referrals.
As it turned out, using the system was quite hard in our particular case. First off, there is currently a bug that will prevent you from referring a friend if they already have an account with EA and ticked the box to not receive any "promotional" material. So I had to get my friend to untick that... except that he couldn't log into his account(s) because he couldn't remember making them! Resetting the password didn't really seem to work either. After a lot of digging through old e-mails he found that one of the accounts associated with his e-mail addresses was actually an old Ultima Online account and managed to access it again, so I could finally send him the referral mail. Soon another gaudy speeder shall be mine! To be honest I think my friend should be the one to get something though, considering the hassle he had to go through to be referred. Bioware really shouldn't make it this hard for people to play their game.
Once he got into the game though, we had a very good time. He rolled up a trooper and did Ord Mantell on his own, just to team up with a gunslinger alt of mine on the fleet. We ran the Esseles together and then spent the entirety of Friday evening questing on Coruscant. It really can't be overstated how great this game is for small group play, as the design manages to hit that sweet spot where it's perfectly possible to solo and have an enjoyable experience, but playing with a friend is simply so much better.
The group conversations make for some of the best fun ("God, there that goodie-two-shoes goes offering our services for free again... why can I never win those rolls?!"), and being able to duo most of the heroics is great too. We felt really challenged when we tackled our first four-man heroic with no healer and wiped several times on the last guy. Eventually we went back out to gain another level and wait for our cooldowns to come back up, and when we came back to it later we just about managed it with my tanking companion surviving with only a sliver of health left.
It was also interesting to see some of the small quality of life changes that Bioware made to the lower levels. They might have been announced in the patch notes somewhere, but I have to admit that I never read the whole lot... most notably all the final stage bosses for the bonus quests on Coruscant are now summoned by clicking on something, which was a nice change from endlessly having to wait around for respawns like I sometimes had to do during previous playthroughs.
The only thing I didn't like was discovering that all the security chests on the Esseles had disappeared, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks to when WoW removed all of its dungeon chests. However, at the moment the jury is still out on whether this was actually an intentional change or whether it is some kind of bug.
I was simply happy about the prospect of having him around, but a guildie pointed out that I might as well make use of Bioware's refer a friend feature, especially as they are finally implementing a reward for successful referrals.
As it turned out, using the system was quite hard in our particular case. First off, there is currently a bug that will prevent you from referring a friend if they already have an account with EA and ticked the box to not receive any "promotional" material. So I had to get my friend to untick that... except that he couldn't log into his account(s) because he couldn't remember making them! Resetting the password didn't really seem to work either. After a lot of digging through old e-mails he found that one of the accounts associated with his e-mail addresses was actually an old Ultima Online account and managed to access it again, so I could finally send him the referral mail. Soon another gaudy speeder shall be mine! To be honest I think my friend should be the one to get something though, considering the hassle he had to go through to be referred. Bioware really shouldn't make it this hard for people to play their game.
Once he got into the game though, we had a very good time. He rolled up a trooper and did Ord Mantell on his own, just to team up with a gunslinger alt of mine on the fleet. We ran the Esseles together and then spent the entirety of Friday evening questing on Coruscant. It really can't be overstated how great this game is for small group play, as the design manages to hit that sweet spot where it's perfectly possible to solo and have an enjoyable experience, but playing with a friend is simply so much better.
The group conversations make for some of the best fun ("God, there that goodie-two-shoes goes offering our services for free again... why can I never win those rolls?!"), and being able to duo most of the heroics is great too. We felt really challenged when we tackled our first four-man heroic with no healer and wiped several times on the last guy. Eventually we went back out to gain another level and wait for our cooldowns to come back up, and when we came back to it later we just about managed it with my tanking companion surviving with only a sliver of health left.
It was also interesting to see some of the small quality of life changes that Bioware made to the lower levels. They might have been announced in the patch notes somewhere, but I have to admit that I never read the whole lot... most notably all the final stage bosses for the bonus quests on Coruscant are now summoned by clicking on something, which was a nice change from endlessly having to wait around for respawns like I sometimes had to do during previous playthroughs.
The only thing I didn't like was discovering that all the security chests on the Esseles had disappeared, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks to when WoW removed all of its dungeon chests. However, at the moment the jury is still out on whether this was actually an intentional change or whether it is some kind of bug.
03/07/2012
Doing Eternity Vault through the group finder
I wrote about my experiences using the group finder to run flashpoints about a week ago. I've been in a couple more runs since then and they've all been pleasant experiences, with no exceptions. However, I was still curious how well the new tool would work for operations.
A couple of guildies queued up for a random operation a couple of days ago, but got bored and went off to do something else after a while when a raid failed to materialise. To be fair, the group at the time consisted of four damage dealers and a healer, meaning that it lacked another healer and two tanks. Looking for the most sought-after roles only was never going to yield quick results.
On Sunday we tried again, this time with a full flashpoint group, so that the tool would only have to match us with another group like ours and we'd be golden. We got an ops group instantly!
The tl;dr version is that it was fun and not dissimilar to the EV pug that I participated in before the server transfers and introduction of the group finder. People asked to have the loot rules clarified in advance to avoid accidental ninja-ing and were no less courteous just because the group had been formed automatically. As an aside, I'm not sure why Bioware got rid of the old loot system for story mode; you'd think that would be perfect for group finder pugs now...
The group finder blessed us with four players of extremely varying experience: The second healer was a Sage who had clearly done it all before and was both competent and friendly. The dps Guardian we got had no experience with EV whatsoever, but he was very enthusiastic, chatty and followed instructions well. He also told us that he thought that my guildies and I were great people, unlike certain others who had apparently ridiculed him for his gear and called him a noob. Bless him.
The second damage dealer, a gunslinger, was slightly undergeared as he was mostly wearing greens, but he seemed to know which buttons to push. I took note of the fact that he deployed his damage reduction shield at appropriate times. He was also very quiet however (though he did respond to instructions and so on), and a bit slow when it came to things like target switching. The most curious thing about him was that he always responded to ready checks with "1". We couldn't figure out where that came from, but shrugged it off as a funny quirk.
The undisputed star of the show however was our pug tank, to whom I shall refer as "Checkers" in this post (not his actual character name). He was slightly undergeared, but more importantly totally clueless about operations and many other things. We knew that we were in for a ride when immediately upon group formation, he asked how to get to the operation and we had to actually tell him to press the "travel now" button.
When he died on the first boss, he released and somehow managed to get lost.
"How do I get back in?"
"Erm, there should be a purple portal right next to where you respawned, don't you see it?"
"Nope lol."
In the end I had to go back out and fetch him, as he had wandered off into the middle of the Gav Daragon somewhere.
On the second boss he showed us that he knew that tanking was about having aggro, as he insisted on taunting Gharj off the main tank over and over again, resulting in people having to dive for cover whenever the boss suddenly ran over to the ranged group. Checkers also tried to heroically tank all the adds on a sinking island, but a rescue managed to get him to safety before he could die this time.
As we approached the Ancient Pylons, multiple people demanded in chat that nobody should push any buttons, using ALL CAPS for emphasis. Can you guess what Checkers did as soon as he got the chance? If your answer was "push the button", you'd be correct. Fortunately we muddled though the fight successfully, even if our party got overwhelmed by ackleys at the end (after completing).
On the Council we immediately had people placing bets that Checkers wouldn't be able to kill his mob, but he surprised us all by pulling it off (repeatedly as it turned out) and surviving with just a sliver of health left. We did fail the fight however as our gunslinger couldn't kill his opponent - in fact he barely managed to shave off half the guy's health before the timer ran out, and no, he didn't have the debuff. After another failed attempt we had our overgeared guild tank swap targets with him and after that we managed to complete the encounter.
As we were starting to explain the Soa fight, Checkers suddenly left the group and went offline. We were sad. I admit that we had been having a bit of a laugh about his antics on Mumble, but we also thought that he was adorable in his own way and I had been happy to answer all his questions. He had also given no indication of being unhappy with the run; in fact he had said that he was loving it. A guildie quipped that maybe Checkers' mum had pulled the plug on him, but considering that he did come across as pretty young and disappeared at exactly ten o'clock, that joke might not have been too far off the truth.
Anyway, we requeued for another tank but there wasn't anyone in the queue. Our ops leader suggested that the dps Guardian should change his role to tank on the tool so that it would pull another dps in, seeing how Soa only really requires one tank anyway. Unfortunately the group finder wouldn't let us requeue for replacements at all after that however. I strongly suspect that something went screwy, considering that our gunslinger suddenly had a healer icon next to his name as well.
Since we couldn't get an eighth now as the group finder doesn't allow manual invites for automatically formed parties, we ended up seven-manning Soa - wiped a few times but got him down in the end and everyone was happy. We gave the remaining puggers the address of our guild website just in case they were interested - I don't expect any of them to pop in, but I do hope that we'll be able to use the group finder as a recruitment tool in the long run.
A couple of guildies queued up for a random operation a couple of days ago, but got bored and went off to do something else after a while when a raid failed to materialise. To be fair, the group at the time consisted of four damage dealers and a healer, meaning that it lacked another healer and two tanks. Looking for the most sought-after roles only was never going to yield quick results.
On Sunday we tried again, this time with a full flashpoint group, so that the tool would only have to match us with another group like ours and we'd be golden. We got an ops group instantly!
The tl;dr version is that it was fun and not dissimilar to the EV pug that I participated in before the server transfers and introduction of the group finder. People asked to have the loot rules clarified in advance to avoid accidental ninja-ing and were no less courteous just because the group had been formed automatically. As an aside, I'm not sure why Bioware got rid of the old loot system for story mode; you'd think that would be perfect for group finder pugs now...
The group finder blessed us with four players of extremely varying experience: The second healer was a Sage who had clearly done it all before and was both competent and friendly. The dps Guardian we got had no experience with EV whatsoever, but he was very enthusiastic, chatty and followed instructions well. He also told us that he thought that my guildies and I were great people, unlike certain others who had apparently ridiculed him for his gear and called him a noob. Bless him.
The second damage dealer, a gunslinger, was slightly undergeared as he was mostly wearing greens, but he seemed to know which buttons to push. I took note of the fact that he deployed his damage reduction shield at appropriate times. He was also very quiet however (though he did respond to instructions and so on), and a bit slow when it came to things like target switching. The most curious thing about him was that he always responded to ready checks with "1". We couldn't figure out where that came from, but shrugged it off as a funny quirk.
The undisputed star of the show however was our pug tank, to whom I shall refer as "Checkers" in this post (not his actual character name). He was slightly undergeared, but more importantly totally clueless about operations and many other things. We knew that we were in for a ride when immediately upon group formation, he asked how to get to the operation and we had to actually tell him to press the "travel now" button.
When he died on the first boss, he released and somehow managed to get lost.
"How do I get back in?"
"Erm, there should be a purple portal right next to where you respawned, don't you see it?"
"Nope lol."
In the end I had to go back out and fetch him, as he had wandered off into the middle of the Gav Daragon somewhere.
On the second boss he showed us that he knew that tanking was about having aggro, as he insisted on taunting Gharj off the main tank over and over again, resulting in people having to dive for cover whenever the boss suddenly ran over to the ranged group. Checkers also tried to heroically tank all the adds on a sinking island, but a rescue managed to get him to safety before he could die this time.
As we approached the Ancient Pylons, multiple people demanded in chat that nobody should push any buttons, using ALL CAPS for emphasis. Can you guess what Checkers did as soon as he got the chance? If your answer was "push the button", you'd be correct. Fortunately we muddled though the fight successfully, even if our party got overwhelmed by ackleys at the end (after completing).
On the Council we immediately had people placing bets that Checkers wouldn't be able to kill his mob, but he surprised us all by pulling it off (repeatedly as it turned out) and surviving with just a sliver of health left. We did fail the fight however as our gunslinger couldn't kill his opponent - in fact he barely managed to shave off half the guy's health before the timer ran out, and no, he didn't have the debuff. After another failed attempt we had our overgeared guild tank swap targets with him and after that we managed to complete the encounter.
As we were starting to explain the Soa fight, Checkers suddenly left the group and went offline. We were sad. I admit that we had been having a bit of a laugh about his antics on Mumble, but we also thought that he was adorable in his own way and I had been happy to answer all his questions. He had also given no indication of being unhappy with the run; in fact he had said that he was loving it. A guildie quipped that maybe Checkers' mum had pulled the plug on him, but considering that he did come across as pretty young and disappeared at exactly ten o'clock, that joke might not have been too far off the truth.
Anyway, we requeued for another tank but there wasn't anyone in the queue. Our ops leader suggested that the dps Guardian should change his role to tank on the tool so that it would pull another dps in, seeing how Soa only really requires one tank anyway. Unfortunately the group finder wouldn't let us requeue for replacements at all after that however. I strongly suspect that something went screwy, considering that our gunslinger suddenly had a healer icon next to his name as well.
Since we couldn't get an eighth now as the group finder doesn't allow manual invites for automatically formed parties, we ended up seven-manning Soa - wiped a few times but got him down in the end and everyone was happy. We gave the remaining puggers the address of our guild website just in case they were interested - I don't expect any of them to pop in, but I do hope that we'll be able to use the group finder as a recruitment tool in the long run.
30/06/2012
Day 6: Environments
This is the sixth post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.
I bet you thought that I had given up on this! I haven't, but all the hullabaloo about server transfers was too distracing for me to write about anything else really. However, now that things are slowly getting back to normal, let's talk environments.
One criticism of the game that I've seen a few times is that it supposedly doesn't have good graphics. Personally I don't see that at all, but then I also feel that I haven't actually encountered a game with genuinely bad graphics in many years. That's not to say that I like all modern video game graphics to an equal extent, but my like or dislike isn't so much based on their supposed quality as it is about overall style and maybe nitpicking on details such as that I don't like the look of certain animations in some games (also refer to this Extra Credits episode).
The Old Republic has won me over in every respect here, as I love the slightly cartoony style (I really don't care for attempts at photorealism in games), I adore most of the animations (seriously, I could just watch Jedi knights jump around all day and I'd be happy), and overall the art direction very much follows the aesthetics of the films by focusing on interesting character designs placed in front of gorgeous backdrops.
My favourite operation from a visual point of view is still Eternity Vault. Nothing says "Star Wars" like huge, gaping chasms without safety rails! Also, the place just generally feels enormous, even though the area you actually play in is of limited size.
For a bit of contrast, within the same operation we have this scene, taken during a raid break. Here the little details actually work quite well - I loved the look of those glowy mushrooms. Too bad I rarely get to pay attention to them while we plough through trash mobs.
One thing I still don't do nearly often enough is look up. I thought that Quesh had pretty much no redeeming features until I went there with my agent and my companion Vector prompted me to look up with a comment about the redness of the sky. Dude! I can't believe I never noticed! I now try to pay more attention to my companions' prompts, as they encourage me to stop for a little while to appreciate the scenery (even if I'm itching to get to the next part of my class quest).
Mako has been very good at this on Dromund Kaas in particular. Until she made me look up while playing my bounty hunter, I never even really noticed the way the citadel in Kaas City looms above the rest of the city.
And for a nice view of space, here's my boyfriend's Sith inquisitor boosting me through the Foundry. (We did eventually make it past HK-47 once he hit max level.) When we stepped out of the actual installation and found ourselves with naught but a force field above our heads, I was quite awed. Very atmospheric.
I bet you thought that I had given up on this! I haven't, but all the hullabaloo about server transfers was too distracing for me to write about anything else really. However, now that things are slowly getting back to normal, let's talk environments.
One criticism of the game that I've seen a few times is that it supposedly doesn't have good graphics. Personally I don't see that at all, but then I also feel that I haven't actually encountered a game with genuinely bad graphics in many years. That's not to say that I like all modern video game graphics to an equal extent, but my like or dislike isn't so much based on their supposed quality as it is about overall style and maybe nitpicking on details such as that I don't like the look of certain animations in some games (also refer to this Extra Credits episode).
The Old Republic has won me over in every respect here, as I love the slightly cartoony style (I really don't care for attempts at photorealism in games), I adore most of the animations (seriously, I could just watch Jedi knights jump around all day and I'd be happy), and overall the art direction very much follows the aesthetics of the films by focusing on interesting character designs placed in front of gorgeous backdrops.
My favourite operation from a visual point of view is still Eternity Vault. Nothing says "Star Wars" like huge, gaping chasms without safety rails! Also, the place just generally feels enormous, even though the area you actually play in is of limited size.
For a bit of contrast, within the same operation we have this scene, taken during a raid break. Here the little details actually work quite well - I loved the look of those glowy mushrooms. Too bad I rarely get to pay attention to them while we plough through trash mobs.
One thing I still don't do nearly often enough is look up. I thought that Quesh had pretty much no redeeming features until I went there with my agent and my companion Vector prompted me to look up with a comment about the redness of the sky. Dude! I can't believe I never noticed! I now try to pay more attention to my companions' prompts, as they encourage me to stop for a little while to appreciate the scenery (even if I'm itching to get to the next part of my class quest).
Mako has been very good at this on Dromund Kaas in particular. Until she made me look up while playing my bounty hunter, I never even really noticed the way the citadel in Kaas City looms above the rest of the city.
And for a nice view of space, here's my boyfriend's Sith inquisitor boosting me through the Foundry. (We did eventually make it past HK-47 once he hit max level.) When we stepped out of the actual installation and found ourselves with naught but a force field above our heads, I was quite awed. Very atmospheric.
27/06/2012
Using the new group finder, day 1
Today was certainly one of the more exciting patch days in TOR. Crafters were going nuts about augment kits, PvPers were itching to try out ranked warzones, and PvE players wanted to make use of the new group finder. While I've spent a lot of time PvPing as of late, I was firmly in the PvE camp today and my priority for the day was to try out the group finder as soon as the servers came up.
I was reminiscing about the release of WoW's dungeon finder last night and was rather amused when I went back to read the first impressions post I originally wrote on the day of its release. Has it really been only two and a half years? In some ways that post reads like something from another world to me now. How little did I know of how radically my dungeon running habits would change in short order... but I'm rambling. I decided to copy the format I used back then, do three flashpoints today and tell you in detail about how they went.
As an aside, general chat really cracked me up upon logging in today. The servers had barely been up for ten minutes and already people were whining that the group finder wasn't working because they hadn't got a group yet. Give people some time to log in, dummy! In-between those complaints, people were posting LFG requests in general chat as usual and getting told to use the new tool instead, which then led back to others complaining again that it didn't work anyway. It was extremely silly.
Flashpoint #1: Maelstrom Prison on my Guardian
My first order of the day was to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific on my lowbie knight. The Jedi Prisoner quest line is one that I like to do on all of my Republic characters, but I'd only managed to do Taral V on my knight so far. I made sure to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific and was surprised to get a group pop-up instantly. Not working, pfft! I zoned in... and found myself with a little shield icon under my portrait. Tank, what? But I hadn't picked tanking as my preferred role!
Unfortunately however, I apparently hadn't unselected it either... and that leads me to my first minor niggle with the tool: that it has all the roles that your advanced class can perform checked by default. I don't know why anyone thought that this was a sensible idea, especially considering that the game currently doesn't have a dual spec option or anything of the like.
Still, at the end of the day it was a user error, and I felt deeply embarrassed. I apologised profusely to my group mates and offered to leave, unless they wanted me to try tanking in my dps gear and spec. They all just stood there and stared at me in silence. Oh god, please don't give me the silent pug treatment in my very first run already, I thought. "Yes, no, anyone?" is what I actually put in chat, trying to coax some sort of response out of the group. One of them gave me the virtual equivalent of a shrug: "Up to you if you want to try it."
I went into Soresu Form and we gave it a try. And actually... it wasn't too bad! In fact, with all the droids that do knockbacks in Maelstrom Prison, I almost felt like I had an edge in tanking with talents like Unremitting. There were a couple of scary moments on large trash pulls and some boss fights when my health bar took a nose dive, but I mashed my survival cooldowns like crazy and the healer managed to keep me up at all times, something for which I gave him crazy kudos at the end. One of the bosses dropped a shield generator too, so I had at least the most important piece of tanking gear equipped by the end.
In the end what had begun as a huge embarrassment for me turned out to be a really pleasant run. My group mates weren't really very chatty, but I did get the distinct impression that they were simply happy to be there. They had no qualms about telling me that they didn't know how a fight worked and followed my instructions with no problems. At the end there were a lot of smilies and thank yous... and most of all I was happy to be able to say: "see you around".
At the end of the run I discovered that instead of porting me back to where I had been when I took the shuttle (aka teleport) to the flashpoint, we all got dumped outside the instance entrance. I thought this was a very good move though, as many flashpoints have quest hand-ins right outside, which you can easily do with your group this way. Not to mention that in nine out of ten cases being outside the entrance means that you'll end up on the fleet, which really isn't the worst place to be even if you were out and about somewhere else before.
Flashpoint #2: Colicoid War Game on my Operative
Next I wanted to see what things were like on Imperial side, and I had been itching to do Colicoid War Game on my agent anyway. However, I had to discover to my chagrin that for some reason the option to queue for that flashpoint was greyed out for me, even though the character was in the right level range.
Fortunately I managed to guess the reason for this correctly: I had a breadcrumb quest to talk to Darth Malgus (about the Colicoids), and once I completed that the flashpoint suddenly became available. As far as I'm aware Bioware has generally relaxed requirements to do the prerequisite missions for each flashpoint for the group finder, but I can imagine that me sitting on that intermediate step of talking to Malgus was causing an issue.
This time I didn't get an instant queue. After five minutes I got a pop-up, but someone immediately declined and it was cancelled. It took another ten minutes or so for me to get another one, but this time everyone accepted.
You might remember that when I first wrote about the Colicoid War Game, I described it as "both hilarious and horrible" and concluded that it would probably be painful to do in a pug. I did feel like challenging myself today though, and fortunately for me some aspects of the flashpoint appeared to have been nerfed with this patch to make it a bit more pug-friendly. For example the gun turrets now provide a slow but steady stream of heals while you're mounted on them, which honestly made the first section completely trivial. I think you'd have to fail pretty hard to die there now. However, considering that it was never my favourite part of the instance to begin with, I didn't really mind.
The fun part came when we arrived at the forcefield obstacle course. Nobody in my party knew how to do it, but I was happy to explain. Unsurprisingly we spent a lot of time waiting for people to run back after they had been knocked off and died, but at least it got people talking, which I quite enjoyed. In the end it didn't take too long for us to figure it all out, and the fact that Bioware nerfed the respawn timer of the patrolling droids helped too, without having a negative effect on the puzzle part of the section. I was kind of amused when our tank appeared to have gone AFK while manning one of the consoles, and then came back saying that his cat had spilled his tea on his lap.
Again the whole thing ended on a very amicable note and with many "see you around"s.
Flashpoint #3: A random hardmode on my Commando
When I logged back onto Republic side, one of our tanks had just come online and was marvelling at the new group finder interface. I asked whether he wanted to team up with me to try finding a group for a max level flashpoint. He tossed me a group invite and next thing I knew I had the window popping up to tell me that a group was ready. I didn't even click anything! This would become important later. Anyway, not surprised that a tank and healer combo resulted in an instant queue, we accepted the pop-up to find ourselves zoning into... Lost Island. Gulp.
Don't get me wrong, I've successfully completed it more than once by now, but it's not really something that I'd want to pug just yet. We decided to give it a go anyway, however on the first boss we quickly found ourselves running into problems. Our gunslinger (another former Luka Sene player, yay) was doing a pretty good job, but our dps Shadow wasn't exactly performing in a stellar manner. His gear wasn't terrrible but probably not really up to Lost Island HM standards either, and more importantly he didn't really seem to be doing much, spending most of his time standing at range and running away from things instead of damaging the boss. After the third wipe the gunslinger commented that we didn't really seem to have enough dps (in the most generically inoffensive way possible) and the Shadow offered to leave so that we could get someone else. After he did so I sent him a whisper to say thank you and that it wasn't anything against him personally, and he seemed to be in quite a cheerful mood still. This was probably the most amiable parting over low dps that I've ever seen.
We queued up to get a replacement, and as I looked at the group finder window I noticed that I was listed as a provider of both damage and heals. Remember how I said that it's all turned on by default and that I never got to confirm my role when my guildie queued us up? Yeah. I unticked the damage box and hit the update button, but figured that we were probably going to get another dps anyway.
(Insert foreboding music here.)
We got another group member within seconds, a twi'lek Sage. Everyone was like: "Awesome, two ranged dps, that's going to make this fight so much easier!" And we did almost kill the boss before hitting his enrage this time... even though it was with two healers. How sad is it that we didn't even realise that we had two healers until halfway through the fight? Even though it was close, we wiped again and the Sage said that "Shíntar was queued as damage" and that she was out. And true enough, that's when I noticed the little damage icon under my portrait for the first time. I can only guess that the update to my queuing status came too late or didn't work properly. Again I felt very sheepish. I couldn't really tell whether the Sage was angry about what had happened, but her curtness before leaving certainly made me feel guilty.
The rest of us were a bit unsettled and unsure whether the system was working correctly. We reformed the party but weren't able to queue up to continue our run. My guildie and I agreed that we weren't very keen on trying Lost Island again, even if it was a letdown for the gunslinger who seemed really eager. He was right that we had almost got the boss down, but considering that more difficult fights lay ahead and that we hadn't really been looking for that level of challenge when we queued up (user fail on my tanking buddy's part this time), it was probably for the better.
After a brief break we tried again and an instant group pop-up took us to the False Emperor this time, with a dps Guardian and a Sentinel (who was another former Luka Sene player, what luck). It was kind of funny when my guildie took a shortcut early on by jumping down a ledge, I blindly followed him and realised only as I was jumping that we were leaping right over a bottomless chasm. Fortunately I managed not to fall to my death.
"How many times have you done False Emperor?"
"About five to ten times, why?"
"It's just that that jumping shortcut reeks of someone who's done this place way too many times!"
Our dpsers seemed skilled, but we were barely two minutes in when the Guardian started to say "wait" repeatedly and that he had to answer the phone for work. We said that it was no problem, we were just going to continue clearing some more trash. Unfortunately he was still on the phone by the time we arrived at the first boss, though he kept typing out more comments asking us to wait and assuring us that he was trying to make it quick.
"I just hope you're not a doctor," my guildie quipped. "'Yeah, yeah, just give him some of those drugs. I've got a boss to kill!'" The guy laughed and said that he was actually a management consultant. Which was funny because he then continued to give us unnecessary advice about what to do, no matter how many times my guildie said "I know" or was already doing what he was being told to do anyway.
Mr Management Consultant also kept saying "go" a lot, which was kind of ironic considering that he was the one who had kept telling us to "wait" only minutes before. Nooo, not my first gogogo-er already! "Stop saying that please," my guildie told him eventually. Fortunately he obliged... until we got to HK-47 and he did it again, right after giving us another redundant tactics rundown. "Oops, I'm not supposed to say that, right?" "Say it again and I'll slap you! :P" my guildie replied. (I do love him so.)
Basically, the Guardian's attitude was slightly annoying, but not overly so. It helped that my guildie was making some light fun of the situation. In terms of skill we had no problems though and breezed through the whole instance in what was a new record time for me (though it was only my third run of the place I think). The culling of trash mobs that was also mentioned in the patch notes was certainly very noticeable in this flashpoint.
So what's my verdict on the new group finder so far?
At least on the high population servers, it works, even while being limited to server only. I have no idea what dps queues were like though. What with today being patch day, there were presumably also a lot more people trying it out than there would be on a more average day. We'll see how that works out in the long run.
In terms of how it affects player behaviour, I'm not sure what to think. Struggling to get people to communicate and running into my first gogogo-er on day one already is not a good sign, but I'll try to remain hopeful. For what it's worth I had fun today. And unlike on my first day of WoW dungeon finding back in the day, nobody quit at random, threw a strop, tried to kick anyone else or ninjaed anything, which is a good sign.
In terms of technical implementation, I'm impressed by how many different functionalities Bioware managed to roll into a single tool, though I haven't tried queuing for heroics, dailies or story mode operations yet. I just wish they'd make some minor tweaks to it, such as not having all roles selected by default, asking you to confirm your role and what you're queuing for when you're in a group instead of just letting the leader throw everyone in the deep end, and maybe adding some more sounds. I think there's a really quiet noise when the pop-up to inform you that your group is ready first appears, but everything else appeared to be silent, which felt a bit odd to me. I really missed having sound cues for entering the queue or having a new party member join.
I'd love to hear about other people's experiences with the new group finder (and in fact I'll probably be off to the forums now to have a look around for more opinions).
I was reminiscing about the release of WoW's dungeon finder last night and was rather amused when I went back to read the first impressions post I originally wrote on the day of its release. Has it really been only two and a half years? In some ways that post reads like something from another world to me now. How little did I know of how radically my dungeon running habits would change in short order... but I'm rambling. I decided to copy the format I used back then, do three flashpoints today and tell you in detail about how they went.
As an aside, general chat really cracked me up upon logging in today. The servers had barely been up for ten minutes and already people were whining that the group finder wasn't working because they hadn't got a group yet. Give people some time to log in, dummy! In-between those complaints, people were posting LFG requests in general chat as usual and getting told to use the new tool instead, which then led back to others complaining again that it didn't work anyway. It was extremely silly.
Flashpoint #1: Maelstrom Prison on my Guardian
My first order of the day was to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific on my lowbie knight. The Jedi Prisoner quest line is one that I like to do on all of my Republic characters, but I'd only managed to do Taral V on my knight so far. I made sure to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific and was surprised to get a group pop-up instantly. Not working, pfft! I zoned in... and found myself with a little shield icon under my portrait. Tank, what? But I hadn't picked tanking as my preferred role!
Unfortunately however, I apparently hadn't unselected it either... and that leads me to my first minor niggle with the tool: that it has all the roles that your advanced class can perform checked by default. I don't know why anyone thought that this was a sensible idea, especially considering that the game currently doesn't have a dual spec option or anything of the like.
Still, at the end of the day it was a user error, and I felt deeply embarrassed. I apologised profusely to my group mates and offered to leave, unless they wanted me to try tanking in my dps gear and spec. They all just stood there and stared at me in silence. Oh god, please don't give me the silent pug treatment in my very first run already, I thought. "Yes, no, anyone?" is what I actually put in chat, trying to coax some sort of response out of the group. One of them gave me the virtual equivalent of a shrug: "Up to you if you want to try it."
I went into Soresu Form and we gave it a try. And actually... it wasn't too bad! In fact, with all the droids that do knockbacks in Maelstrom Prison, I almost felt like I had an edge in tanking with talents like Unremitting. There were a couple of scary moments on large trash pulls and some boss fights when my health bar took a nose dive, but I mashed my survival cooldowns like crazy and the healer managed to keep me up at all times, something for which I gave him crazy kudos at the end. One of the bosses dropped a shield generator too, so I had at least the most important piece of tanking gear equipped by the end.
In the end what had begun as a huge embarrassment for me turned out to be a really pleasant run. My group mates weren't really very chatty, but I did get the distinct impression that they were simply happy to be there. They had no qualms about telling me that they didn't know how a fight worked and followed my instructions with no problems. At the end there were a lot of smilies and thank yous... and most of all I was happy to be able to say: "see you around".
At the end of the run I discovered that instead of porting me back to where I had been when I took the shuttle (aka teleport) to the flashpoint, we all got dumped outside the instance entrance. I thought this was a very good move though, as many flashpoints have quest hand-ins right outside, which you can easily do with your group this way. Not to mention that in nine out of ten cases being outside the entrance means that you'll end up on the fleet, which really isn't the worst place to be even if you were out and about somewhere else before.
Flashpoint #2: Colicoid War Game on my Operative
Next I wanted to see what things were like on Imperial side, and I had been itching to do Colicoid War Game on my agent anyway. However, I had to discover to my chagrin that for some reason the option to queue for that flashpoint was greyed out for me, even though the character was in the right level range.
Fortunately I managed to guess the reason for this correctly: I had a breadcrumb quest to talk to Darth Malgus (about the Colicoids), and once I completed that the flashpoint suddenly became available. As far as I'm aware Bioware has generally relaxed requirements to do the prerequisite missions for each flashpoint for the group finder, but I can imagine that me sitting on that intermediate step of talking to Malgus was causing an issue.
This time I didn't get an instant queue. After five minutes I got a pop-up, but someone immediately declined and it was cancelled. It took another ten minutes or so for me to get another one, but this time everyone accepted.
You might remember that when I first wrote about the Colicoid War Game, I described it as "both hilarious and horrible" and concluded that it would probably be painful to do in a pug. I did feel like challenging myself today though, and fortunately for me some aspects of the flashpoint appeared to have been nerfed with this patch to make it a bit more pug-friendly. For example the gun turrets now provide a slow but steady stream of heals while you're mounted on them, which honestly made the first section completely trivial. I think you'd have to fail pretty hard to die there now. However, considering that it was never my favourite part of the instance to begin with, I didn't really mind.
The fun part came when we arrived at the forcefield obstacle course. Nobody in my party knew how to do it, but I was happy to explain. Unsurprisingly we spent a lot of time waiting for people to run back after they had been knocked off and died, but at least it got people talking, which I quite enjoyed. In the end it didn't take too long for us to figure it all out, and the fact that Bioware nerfed the respawn timer of the patrolling droids helped too, without having a negative effect on the puzzle part of the section. I was kind of amused when our tank appeared to have gone AFK while manning one of the consoles, and then came back saying that his cat had spilled his tea on his lap.
Again the whole thing ended on a very amicable note and with many "see you around"s.
Flashpoint #3: A random hardmode on my Commando
When I logged back onto Republic side, one of our tanks had just come online and was marvelling at the new group finder interface. I asked whether he wanted to team up with me to try finding a group for a max level flashpoint. He tossed me a group invite and next thing I knew I had the window popping up to tell me that a group was ready. I didn't even click anything! This would become important later. Anyway, not surprised that a tank and healer combo resulted in an instant queue, we accepted the pop-up to find ourselves zoning into... Lost Island. Gulp.
Don't get me wrong, I've successfully completed it more than once by now, but it's not really something that I'd want to pug just yet. We decided to give it a go anyway, however on the first boss we quickly found ourselves running into problems. Our gunslinger (another former Luka Sene player, yay) was doing a pretty good job, but our dps Shadow wasn't exactly performing in a stellar manner. His gear wasn't terrrible but probably not really up to Lost Island HM standards either, and more importantly he didn't really seem to be doing much, spending most of his time standing at range and running away from things instead of damaging the boss. After the third wipe the gunslinger commented that we didn't really seem to have enough dps (in the most generically inoffensive way possible) and the Shadow offered to leave so that we could get someone else. After he did so I sent him a whisper to say thank you and that it wasn't anything against him personally, and he seemed to be in quite a cheerful mood still. This was probably the most amiable parting over low dps that I've ever seen.
We queued up to get a replacement, and as I looked at the group finder window I noticed that I was listed as a provider of both damage and heals. Remember how I said that it's all turned on by default and that I never got to confirm my role when my guildie queued us up? Yeah. I unticked the damage box and hit the update button, but figured that we were probably going to get another dps anyway.
(Insert foreboding music here.)
We got another group member within seconds, a twi'lek Sage. Everyone was like: "Awesome, two ranged dps, that's going to make this fight so much easier!" And we did almost kill the boss before hitting his enrage this time... even though it was with two healers. How sad is it that we didn't even realise that we had two healers until halfway through the fight? Even though it was close, we wiped again and the Sage said that "Shíntar was queued as damage" and that she was out. And true enough, that's when I noticed the little damage icon under my portrait for the first time. I can only guess that the update to my queuing status came too late or didn't work properly. Again I felt very sheepish. I couldn't really tell whether the Sage was angry about what had happened, but her curtness before leaving certainly made me feel guilty.
The rest of us were a bit unsettled and unsure whether the system was working correctly. We reformed the party but weren't able to queue up to continue our run. My guildie and I agreed that we weren't very keen on trying Lost Island again, even if it was a letdown for the gunslinger who seemed really eager. He was right that we had almost got the boss down, but considering that more difficult fights lay ahead and that we hadn't really been looking for that level of challenge when we queued up (user fail on my tanking buddy's part this time), it was probably for the better.
After a brief break we tried again and an instant group pop-up took us to the False Emperor this time, with a dps Guardian and a Sentinel (who was another former Luka Sene player, what luck). It was kind of funny when my guildie took a shortcut early on by jumping down a ledge, I blindly followed him and realised only as I was jumping that we were leaping right over a bottomless chasm. Fortunately I managed not to fall to my death.
"How many times have you done False Emperor?"
"About five to ten times, why?"
"It's just that that jumping shortcut reeks of someone who's done this place way too many times!"
Our dpsers seemed skilled, but we were barely two minutes in when the Guardian started to say "wait" repeatedly and that he had to answer the phone for work. We said that it was no problem, we were just going to continue clearing some more trash. Unfortunately he was still on the phone by the time we arrived at the first boss, though he kept typing out more comments asking us to wait and assuring us that he was trying to make it quick.
"I just hope you're not a doctor," my guildie quipped. "'Yeah, yeah, just give him some of those drugs. I've got a boss to kill!'" The guy laughed and said that he was actually a management consultant. Which was funny because he then continued to give us unnecessary advice about what to do, no matter how many times my guildie said "I know" or was already doing what he was being told to do anyway.
Mr Management Consultant also kept saying "go" a lot, which was kind of ironic considering that he was the one who had kept telling us to "wait" only minutes before. Nooo, not my first gogogo-er already! "Stop saying that please," my guildie told him eventually. Fortunately he obliged... until we got to HK-47 and he did it again, right after giving us another redundant tactics rundown. "Oops, I'm not supposed to say that, right?" "Say it again and I'll slap you! :P" my guildie replied. (I do love him so.)
Basically, the Guardian's attitude was slightly annoying, but not overly so. It helped that my guildie was making some light fun of the situation. In terms of skill we had no problems though and breezed through the whole instance in what was a new record time for me (though it was only my third run of the place I think). The culling of trash mobs that was also mentioned in the patch notes was certainly very noticeable in this flashpoint.
So what's my verdict on the new group finder so far?
At least on the high population servers, it works, even while being limited to server only. I have no idea what dps queues were like though. What with today being patch day, there were presumably also a lot more people trying it out than there would be on a more average day. We'll see how that works out in the long run.
In terms of how it affects player behaviour, I'm not sure what to think. Struggling to get people to communicate and running into my first gogogo-er on day one already is not a good sign, but I'll try to remain hopeful. For what it's worth I had fun today. And unlike on my first day of WoW dungeon finding back in the day, nobody quit at random, threw a strop, tried to kick anyone else or ninjaed anything, which is a good sign.
In terms of technical implementation, I'm impressed by how many different functionalities Bioware managed to roll into a single tool, though I haven't tried queuing for heroics, dailies or story mode operations yet. I just wish they'd make some minor tweaks to it, such as not having all roles selected by default, asking you to confirm your role and what you're queuing for when you're in a group instead of just letting the leader throw everyone in the deep end, and maybe adding some more sounds. I think there's a really quiet noise when the pop-up to inform you that your group is ready first appears, but everything else appeared to be silent, which felt a bit odd to me. I really missed having sound cues for entering the queue or having a new party member join.
I'd love to hear about other people's experiences with the new group finder (and in fact I'll probably be off to the forums now to have a look around for more opinions).
25/06/2012
Settling In
Three days on The Red Eclipse and I'm actually quite happy. I can't overstate the huge quality of life improvement that is short and reliable warzone queues. Since my initial bad run of eight losses in a row, things have evened out considerably and I've seen a lot of wins too. I don't mind the weaker players on my team anymore, and I laugh when poorly geared opponents make me feel like a goddess among men. I'm also starting to see more really good players on our side, and I'm amazed at how many of them are pretty much kitted out in full War Hero. Back on Luka Sene not even the hardest of the hardcore had that, simply because even if you sat in the queue all day you only got a limited amount of matches in and thus limited rewards. Suddenly the idea of owning a full War Hero set of my own eventually doesn't seem like a complete pipe dream anymore.
Still, I don't quite feel "at home" yet - I greet people whose names I recognise from Luka Sene, but the vast majority of the masses on the fleet remain a bunch of strangers. I believe that this will improve over time though. I'm taking note of people with memorable or weird names already (such as Mr Widdlywee of the Widdlywee Legacy, or the guy who has characters called Whalepoo and Whaleballs), and the other day I had an awesome team-building experience when I ended up in a random warzone with no Jedi. Who thought that such a thing was even possible? Seven troopers and a gunslinger made for a slightly odd group composition, but we had a good laugh about it and won by a landslide. I also memorised the name of the guy who kept putting guard on me as someone to watch out for in future games who should receive healing priority above all others.
On the PvE front, I actually pugged a couple of low-level flashpoints and heroics. I was surprised by how pleasant it was, and then I felt silly for being surprised. It's easy to forget that pugging wasn't always a complete nightmare and still doesn't have to be. Funny how even a short break from pugging made my expectations briefly revert to what they were in WoW instead of anticipating more of the goodness that is TOR pugging. I think there is a dedicated term for this in psychology.
As it was, I had a lot of fun. I think my favourite bit was three-manning a Nar Shadaa four-man heroic with no crowd control and a companion healer. When we stood in front of the first pull there was a bit of an "oh crap" moment when we realised the full extent of our predicament, but we marked up a focus target and decided to give it a go anyway. What a triumph that was when we survived even the patrol that added to the pull by accident!
I'm actually kind of looking forward to the group finder patch tomorrow... maybe foolishly so, but I'm thinking that with the sheer size of the server now, it might actually have a sufficiently large pool of players to work with while still leaving people with a sense of accountability that might prevent some of the worst possible asshattery.
My guild has also felt somewhat invigorated, and we had our first one-night clear of Explosive Conflict on Friday, which provided me with some more video editing material.
Basically, all is well in my (game) world, and despite of all my initial worries I consider this server transfer a success for me personally. I'm still a bit concerned about the effect that all those empty servers will have on the influx of new players, but then there is nothing I can do about that. I'll start talking about things other than server transfers again, I promise!
(As a side note, after all the bellyaching I did about the subject, I was vaguely amused by this post by Liore about server-transferring in Rift. In some ways it's like night and day.)
Still, I don't quite feel "at home" yet - I greet people whose names I recognise from Luka Sene, but the vast majority of the masses on the fleet remain a bunch of strangers. I believe that this will improve over time though. I'm taking note of people with memorable or weird names already (such as Mr Widdlywee of the Widdlywee Legacy, or the guy who has characters called Whalepoo and Whaleballs), and the other day I had an awesome team-building experience when I ended up in a random warzone with no Jedi. Who thought that such a thing was even possible? Seven troopers and a gunslinger made for a slightly odd group composition, but we had a good laugh about it and won by a landslide. I also memorised the name of the guy who kept putting guard on me as someone to watch out for in future games who should receive healing priority above all others.
On the PvE front, I actually pugged a couple of low-level flashpoints and heroics. I was surprised by how pleasant it was, and then I felt silly for being surprised. It's easy to forget that pugging wasn't always a complete nightmare and still doesn't have to be. Funny how even a short break from pugging made my expectations briefly revert to what they were in WoW instead of anticipating more of the goodness that is TOR pugging. I think there is a dedicated term for this in psychology.
As it was, I had a lot of fun. I think my favourite bit was three-manning a Nar Shadaa four-man heroic with no crowd control and a companion healer. When we stood in front of the first pull there was a bit of an "oh crap" moment when we realised the full extent of our predicament, but we marked up a focus target and decided to give it a go anyway. What a triumph that was when we survived even the patrol that added to the pull by accident!
I'm actually kind of looking forward to the group finder patch tomorrow... maybe foolishly so, but I'm thinking that with the sheer size of the server now, it might actually have a sufficiently large pool of players to work with while still leaving people with a sense of accountability that might prevent some of the worst possible asshattery.
My guild has also felt somewhat invigorated, and we had our first one-night clear of Explosive Conflict on Friday, which provided me with some more video editing material.
Basically, all is well in my (game) world, and despite of all my initial worries I consider this server transfer a success for me personally. I'm still a bit concerned about the effect that all those empty servers will have on the influx of new players, but then there is nothing I can do about that. I'll start talking about things other than server transfers again, I promise!
(As a side note, after all the bellyaching I did about the subject, I was vaguely amused by this post by Liore about server-transferring in Rift. In some ways it's like night and day.)
22/06/2012
My first night on The Red Eclipse
Transferring server as a guild was actually kind of fun - lots of people online and chatting excitedly. We didn't manage to get all of our active members transferred and into the new guild on the first night, but we made a good start.
The transfer process itself went as smoothly as everyone had predicted and was done within five minutes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I only had to change two of my character names: my main is now Shíntar ("with a funny eye"), and my bounty hunter with her three-letter name gained an apostrophe. I couldn't believe that neither of the four-letter names of my Republic alts were taken. I feel like I really lucked out.
The first thing I did after transferring was make a separate chat window for general chat so that I could hide it away without completely disabling it. It's not that the quality of the chat was that awful (though I did see people say some pretty dumb things), but the constant LFG, WTS etc. requests were just too spammy while I was also trying to pay attention to other things.
Next thing I ran around the fleet a bit to see whether I recognised anyone... and I did! I was really pleased when a friendly Vanguard returned my greeting emote and we showered each other with sparkles. It's a bit weird I suppose, but I really missed seeing those familiar faces around. They are not my friends; they are barely even acquaintances: I only really know their names and maybe a bit about their play style, but that's it. Still, that familiarity with the people around you is one of those things that gives an MMO a sense of place, and having the majority of my "small town" evaporate from one day to the next had made me sad, so it felt good to reconnect with at least some of them. I also joined the custom chat channel for former Luka Sene players that I had been told about and there were lots of people in there.
And then... it was time for warzones! After being unable to do any PvP for several days I really had an itch to scratch. I have to admit that the queues were very quick, five minutes tops, and I got the daily done on four characters in one evening, something that would have been totally unthinkable back on Luka Sene even during its better days.
The downside was that I lost my first eight matches in a row, and there were some seriously bad players on my team. I'm usually not very demanding when it comes to player skill, considering that I'm not that amazing myself, everyone has to start somewhere etc. but some of those games actually had me shouting at my screen. I think I died a little inside during the Huttball match where we had three players next to the central pedestal when the ball spawned, but they all just ran around it, refusing to touch the ball, until an Imperial player simply walked over and ran off with it.
To add some context, I felt that the quality of the PvP in the warzones on my old server was very high towards the end. Back when I started PvPing, Republic lost the vast majority of games, but over time we seemed to catch up as the population shifted, and while there was still some variation in win/loss ratios depending on time of day, I would go so far as to say that the Republic had a slight edge by the end of it all. Getting thoroughly spanked by random Imperials eight matches in a row came as a bit of a shock to the system after that.
There was a turnaround that made me smile though, when I ended up in a Voidstar match where I recognised a character name, a guild name, and one guy's appearance (nothing sticks in your memory like a Mirialan trooper dancing the night away with his pants off...). As luck would have it, I got grouped with four people from a former Luka Sene guild! I whispered one of them and he recognised me as well, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Unsurprisingly we completely obliterated the Imps in that game, and it felt good to finally get some revenge.
Curious how other people experienced the post-transfer PvP, I had a brief look at the official forums and actually found this thread on the subject pretty interesting. It starts with a silly complaint like most of them, but some of the responses are quite thoughtful. This post from the second page by "Astarica" rang particularly true for me:
Prior to the server transfers a lot of server basically have about 20 guys left still PvPing. You pretty much know exactly every one of them and every one of them are awesome players because a lesser player would've already given up.
That kind of gameplay is at a very high level but it's also really boring because good teams simply don't screw up. There are a lot of games where it feels like I'm just going through the motions, i.e. I attack the enemy's best healer. [...]
Now after the transfers there's an active population so all the regular players return so of course you don't have games where both sides effectively make no mistake. It's frustrating when your side loses a game that you should win, but the reverse is just as likely to occur too. Personally, I prefer having some variance over 'first team that caps the first turret wins in Alderaan" which is pretty much how the last 100 games on Alderaan went on my old server.
I don't consider myself an awesome player, but I completely see his point about how the long queues were off-putting for more casual PvPers. His description of Civil War games pre-merger is hyperbolic too, but there's some truth in it as well. For me it was more apparent in Voidstar, where towards the end pretty much every match got decided by whoever breached the first door first (nobody really got much further), while I actually saw people reaching the datacore repeatedly tonight.
Basically there are three things to consider in regards to this new warzone experience:
1) Short queues mean that more people are willing to play, which means more people in bad gear and with little experience on both sides. However, more people also means shorter queues, which is a positive, self-reinforcing cycle.
2) Even the more experienced people are all jumbled together from different servers right now, so people don't know who the healers are etc. This should get better though as at least the more frequent PvPers start to memorise some names.
3) With so many more people playing, there's also a certain luck of the draw, as you won't just play with and against the same bunch of hardcore PvPers all the time, so you might just have to get used to not having winning or losing streaks that are as predictable as they used to be.
At the end of the day, another player who posted on page four of the above thread probably said it best:
I'll trade getting owned with my team of noobs to window shopping on the fleet with WZ comms I don't have any day.
The transfer process itself went as smoothly as everyone had predicted and was done within five minutes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I only had to change two of my character names: my main is now Shíntar ("with a funny eye"), and my bounty hunter with her three-letter name gained an apostrophe. I couldn't believe that neither of the four-letter names of my Republic alts were taken. I feel like I really lucked out.
The first thing I did after transferring was make a separate chat window for general chat so that I could hide it away without completely disabling it. It's not that the quality of the chat was that awful (though I did see people say some pretty dumb things), but the constant LFG, WTS etc. requests were just too spammy while I was also trying to pay attention to other things.
Next thing I ran around the fleet a bit to see whether I recognised anyone... and I did! I was really pleased when a friendly Vanguard returned my greeting emote and we showered each other with sparkles. It's a bit weird I suppose, but I really missed seeing those familiar faces around. They are not my friends; they are barely even acquaintances: I only really know their names and maybe a bit about their play style, but that's it. Still, that familiarity with the people around you is one of those things that gives an MMO a sense of place, and having the majority of my "small town" evaporate from one day to the next had made me sad, so it felt good to reconnect with at least some of them. I also joined the custom chat channel for former Luka Sene players that I had been told about and there were lots of people in there.
And then... it was time for warzones! After being unable to do any PvP for several days I really had an itch to scratch. I have to admit that the queues were very quick, five minutes tops, and I got the daily done on four characters in one evening, something that would have been totally unthinkable back on Luka Sene even during its better days.
The downside was that I lost my first eight matches in a row, and there were some seriously bad players on my team. I'm usually not very demanding when it comes to player skill, considering that I'm not that amazing myself, everyone has to start somewhere etc. but some of those games actually had me shouting at my screen. I think I died a little inside during the Huttball match where we had three players next to the central pedestal when the ball spawned, but they all just ran around it, refusing to touch the ball, until an Imperial player simply walked over and ran off with it.
To add some context, I felt that the quality of the PvP in the warzones on my old server was very high towards the end. Back when I started PvPing, Republic lost the vast majority of games, but over time we seemed to catch up as the population shifted, and while there was still some variation in win/loss ratios depending on time of day, I would go so far as to say that the Republic had a slight edge by the end of it all. Getting thoroughly spanked by random Imperials eight matches in a row came as a bit of a shock to the system after that.
There was a turnaround that made me smile though, when I ended up in a Voidstar match where I recognised a character name, a guild name, and one guy's appearance (nothing sticks in your memory like a Mirialan trooper dancing the night away with his pants off...). As luck would have it, I got grouped with four people from a former Luka Sene guild! I whispered one of them and he recognised me as well, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Unsurprisingly we completely obliterated the Imps in that game, and it felt good to finally get some revenge.
Curious how other people experienced the post-transfer PvP, I had a brief look at the official forums and actually found this thread on the subject pretty interesting. It starts with a silly complaint like most of them, but some of the responses are quite thoughtful. This post from the second page by "Astarica" rang particularly true for me:
Prior to the server transfers a lot of server basically have about 20 guys left still PvPing. You pretty much know exactly every one of them and every one of them are awesome players because a lesser player would've already given up.
That kind of gameplay is at a very high level but it's also really boring because good teams simply don't screw up. There are a lot of games where it feels like I'm just going through the motions, i.e. I attack the enemy's best healer. [...]
Now after the transfers there's an active population so all the regular players return so of course you don't have games where both sides effectively make no mistake. It's frustrating when your side loses a game that you should win, but the reverse is just as likely to occur too. Personally, I prefer having some variance over 'first team that caps the first turret wins in Alderaan" which is pretty much how the last 100 games on Alderaan went on my old server.
I don't consider myself an awesome player, but I completely see his point about how the long queues were off-putting for more casual PvPers. His description of Civil War games pre-merger is hyperbolic too, but there's some truth in it as well. For me it was more apparent in Voidstar, where towards the end pretty much every match got decided by whoever breached the first door first (nobody really got much further), while I actually saw people reaching the datacore repeatedly tonight.
Basically there are three things to consider in regards to this new warzone experience:
1) Short queues mean that more people are willing to play, which means more people in bad gear and with little experience on both sides. However, more people also means shorter queues, which is a positive, self-reinforcing cycle.
2) Even the more experienced people are all jumbled together from different servers right now, so people don't know who the healers are etc. This should get better though as at least the more frequent PvPers start to memorise some names.
3) With so many more people playing, there's also a certain luck of the draw, as you won't just play with and against the same bunch of hardcore PvPers all the time, so you might just have to get used to not having winning or losing streaks that are as predictable as they used to be.
At the end of the day, another player who posted on page four of the above thread probably said it best:
I'll trade getting owned with my team of noobs to window shopping on the fleet with WZ comms I don't have any day.
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