Welcome to another daily blogroll!
EQ2 has re-opened character server transfers via its Station Marketplace RMT store, halving the price and making the process as smooth as possible. I’ve started moving my essential characters from Najena and Befallen to Antonia Bayle, my original EQ2 server before my desire to play with friends led me to have characters on a half dozen servers.
Lazaretto is going the other way, to the PvP server Nagafen, where life is a little different. For one, AAs are so important that people pay high levels to lead them through high level zones for discovery experience.
Laz also writes about Vanguard’s utter reversal of its claim to be the most hardcore MMO on the market to where it is now catering to player desires for an easier, more casual-friendly experience. Sounds good to me. Maybe they could do something about that terrible map while they’re at it.
Angry Raider had an EQ2 epiphany of his own. Why worry about working to other people’s goals, when the whole purpose of a game is to log in, have some fun, and then go about your life? Gordon of We Fly Spitfires feels the same way, and instead of working on other people’s goals, getting Titan’s Grip in WoW and a Megathron in EVE Online will do.
Hey, I’m working on a Megathron in EVE Online, too! It’s a Nice Ship.
Ramon at Dalayan Diary heads into a mysterious warpstone in the EQ-based Shards of Dalaya and finds it’s kobolds all the way down. I’m usually pretty good at guessing which EQ zone corresponds to a given SoD zone, but this one eludes me. It looks too wide open to be any of the Sol dungeons. Maybe the Temple of Sol Ro?
Cuppy’s started a new blog for those who want to blog, but don’t want the hassle of maintaining a site or promoting it. It’s MMOBlurbs, you can post stuff just by sending an email, and though it’s a little rough so far, it could be the perfect way to give a cookie to your inner blogger.
Beau Turkey wonders if end-game raiding really needs to be such a bore. What if you replaced all the scripts and boredom with … minigames, like in Puzzle Pirates battles? It could be fun 🙂
Dusty of Of Course I’ll Play It settles the old argument about which a game should cater to more, the solo or the group player, by proposing a “soloer flag”. You couldn’t do anything BUT solo, but you’d get special, solo-only versions of the game’s dungeons, so even a soloer would have a chance to see everything. I suspect it would just turn every game into a ghost town…. most people group only because they have to to advance.
And lastly, MMOs may be like women, or they may be like men, but Green Armadillo knows that MMOs are really our furry little four legged friends. I’ve often thought MMOs were like biker movies of the ’60s, but I can’t explain why.
See you tomorrow, and keep on gaming!
10 thoughts on “Daily Blogroll 7/15 — Same quests, different day edition”
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eep, that idea of a solo flag that you could never reset … once set, you never ever again would have the option of grouping with anyone else ever and you actually get rewarded for that? That actually really scares me as a concept.
Put group content in? Fine. Put solo content in? Fine. But don’t ever EVER put anything in an MMO with the express intent of stopping people from mixing with others. And especially don’t reward it.
Cool to see you moving to AB!! Look me up!!
Warpstone Caverns in Dalaya is Acrylia Caverns. They’ve used a lot of the beautiful and fun Luclin zones that got dicked over on live for lower level areas in SoD so more people can see them.
Also, new hot zones? All ice zones? Isn’t it July?
Spinks, there’s still indirect interaction, one draw of a “persistent world”. Social interaction need not be confined to group combat.
Still, that is a bit weird. Though, when I think about it, isn’t that more or less what SWTOR is doing with their heavy focus on scripted storytelling? Making a “solo only” MMO? If the storytelling itself is largely solo, but combat is still a group thing, could that be the best of both worlds, or an immersion backbreaker?
EQ2 character moves: Half the price? It was $50 per character before, so now it is $25? That still seems way too expensive to me to me. A month of play, $15, an automated character move, $25? But at least the price moved in the right direction.
And I always thought that MMOs could be characterized by the different stages of Frank Sinatra’s career. But maybe that is just me.
They like to think of themselves as vulfweres, not kobolds, even though they look like kobolds. But shhh, don’t tell them!
I’m a solo player mostly and I wouldn’t want a solo only flag. The idea of forcing strips the flexibility. Solo and group players alike want more options in games not less. All this talk about people moving to AB makes me think about re-subbing and seeing some of you folks in game.
Not to put to fine a point on it..
(with apologies to They Might Be Giants… )
One little misconception I wanted to clear up wrt to the solo flag I was talking about in my post. I seem to have conveyed the idea that (1) the setting would be irreversable.. and (2) it was a completely mutually exclusive concept. Neither of these was what I intended. On the first point, I would want the flag to be non-trivial to change, becuase I want it to be a decision. But every MMO that has ever attempted to implement any decision that was completely irreversable has, at some point, come back and given you a way to change the decision. Believe me when I say I’ve learned from the lessons of Aldour versus Scryer. On the second point, I perhaps gave the impression that once you set the flag, you could only ever solo, or only ever group — and that too was not the intent of the design. By setting the flag, you essentially unlocked a small subset of content particular to your playstyle, that was exclusive. So raiders got high-end raid dungeons, and privateers got high-end solo dungeons, but everyone could still group or solo as they desired for the vast majority of the content in the rest of the game.
All of the comments about player decisions and exclusivity are still entirely valid, and it’s great discussion, but I wanted to make sure people were evaluating the concept in the right light, at least. 🙂
and thanks tons for the link Tipa. (by the way, I suspect your comment wrt to it turning much of the game into a ghost town would still be true. My biggest fear about such a concept is that it would be too popular, and no one would choose the harder, group content at all. Path of least resistence, and all that. )
Dusty