Acceleration of Speed

These always remind me of my childhood.

Leveling speed.

This one facet of any game is probably something mulled over and over as the design process goes on. With good reason, it’s an integral facet of any MMO. How fast do you want players to move through each area? How quickly do you want people to reach the end? If you make it too fast, will it loose consequence? If it’s too slow, will players become frustrated, especially in today’s market of instant gratification? Is the focus of your game supposed to be on the journey, or the destination, and how do you create the curve appropriately?

WAR is an interesting beast in regards to how it approached level-progression. On the one hand, there is the 1-40 career levels you have to progress through. I remember before release, Jeff Hickman saying in an interview that it was a very time-friendly 10-days gameplay to reach cap. Yes, you read that correctly, 10 days of play time to reach level 40. The rampage system sped this up insanely well for highly coordinated individuals. However, for most of us, and eerily-so for me, he was pretty darn accurate. My very first character, my DoK hit 40 after 10 days, and some hours. My second character (my Shadow Warrior) did it in about 8. My Knight: in about 5. My Blackguard: in about 2 or 3. On the other hand, there are the 80 renown ranks, the amount of time needed for this achievement is considerable, I’ve only done it once so far, and I’m getting close on my second. 

Knowing the basics

Tobold fails to understand how EVE works. He played tried halfheartedly logged into it, so he knows all the implications of the recent devblog.

EVE is FULL of PvE. It’s rife with it. You can’t take a jump without running into it. Everywhere you go in EVE you are surrounded by potential PvE interactions. Even in the lowest of low-sec space, PvE is all around you. The kicker is: it’s completely interwoven with PvP, yes even in high-sec empire space.

“Dungeons” already exist in EVE. Every mission (quest) you get from an agent (NPC) spawns a dungeon. Until you start that quest, it did not have en existence. Out in some random far off place that no one would ever go to, objectives, NPC enemies, and intractable objects are generated, except, now anyone with a sensor can track it down too. In EVE “Dungeons” aren’t instanced, the whole world can find them if they’re looking. That’s what makes PvE in EVE both relatively safe, and also potentially dangerous. There’s also no rule to how many people you HAVE to take to these “dungeons”. Some level missions can be easily done solo, others can be done in seconds if you bring a friend. The decision on how to best achieve completion is left to the player.

But hey, I can’t blame a guy for wanting to try to tweak the noses of people who vehemently disagree with him. I can blame him for being completely un-knowledgeable about what he’s speaking, when he should know better.

WINGS

Feel free to ignore this post if you want something gaming related.

RRRRAAAAAWWWWWRRRRRRR!!!!!

Go here. She’s funny, but has not approved my comment that I’m nearly 94.3% sure I left. It (the comment) was great, and talked all about how headphones while grocery shopping is a great way to avoid unwanted social interaction that I employ with a 99.67% success rate.

Also, this is the fourth time I have edited this post for formating/typo reasons.

To hold you over

I won’t be able to attend the PTS tonight, so last night, I did some quick poking around on the test server, running around the lake and getting a look at all the new toys we’re getting. Or, well, as many as I could. Nothing feels drastically different from the old map, everything you come across should be comfortable and easy to interact with. There are still a few graphical glitches that seem to be lingering (like the cast bar ghost after interacting with a siege weapon), but for the most part, if you use the stock UI, basic information should be right at your fingertips, telling you different things in a familiar manner. Follow the jump for some pictures and comments.

Three is better than four

Tomorrow is the first night of testing the mechanics of the new RvR Campaign. Wednesday, the 6th, at 8 PM est is the scheduled kick off time, and the event will be taking place in Tier 3. So start patching now, get your character ready, and be ahead of the curve in preparation time, lording it over the foolishly unprepared miscreants holding back progress. Sometimes, knowledge of moral superiority is all that you have to fall back on.

So, get on there, and run around like maniacs, getting to be a part of the group that gets the first glimpse of how this will all work. I envy you, because I’ll be busy trying not to be bored in class. I expect reports from all of you on my desk first thing Thursday morning. No late work will be excepted.

No, that’s not a typo above, it is Tier 3. I actually had an interesting conversation about this on the forums today. This is the first event of many, and as I see it, it’s analogous to revving the engine of your car some before taking it out on a road trip. You want to make sure that everything is in working order and functioning as intended before you travel 2000 miles at 80 mph across highways and freeways on your trek across the country.

Waaagh you like a hurricane

Good morning class, did everyone have a good weekend?

Maybe my life is terribly unique and my situation is vastly different from others, but it feels at times that my weekends are busier than my weekdays. Catching up on school work, house work, time with the family, and general errands, it seems to eat up a lot of my free time. This weekend was one of those. My wife had a wedding to go to on Saturday, and that took up her entire day, leaving me to play Daddy all day, and then Sunday was spent helping out family members with some heavy lifting, and then about three hours of finishing all my homework (Bio I can die in a fire), and then went out for dinner with the wife, and got the hottest eff-ing wings I’ve ever eaten. My lips were purple. PURPLE. In the end, I was able to sneak in a few hours of game time across the weekend.

So, keeping that in mind, I tend to leave twitter, the community, and all game-related news on the curb side to be picked up on Monday morning. Weekends are my “personal” time so to speak, and so, anything that gets revealed then will inevitably be missed. So, I wanted to give you a heads up, because really, I don’t think my life is much different from others, we’re all busy real people. I’m here to give you the highlights of hurricane of information that headed our way, heaping information on our heads. Well, maybe it was more of a tropical storm, but it rained either way!

• Carrie has a podcast with TTH (thanks to Erdknuffle for linking there).
• Bootae was a good Euro blogger, and got first dibs on the infoz.
• John Cox (via Andy Belford) explained in a detailed manner, the reason behind the Badlands server issues.
• Massively finally got around to talking about the UK gamesday stuff, and the writer is quite pleased.