MMO Gaming

This was my last weekend of the month for gaming. Starting Saturday I will have hit December already. Having left off last week at level 19 I expected to get a lot done especially with the long weekend because of Thanksgiving. That was not the case.

That said I did manage to crawl my way up to level 21 in the Palisades and have worked a good bit of experience into 22 also. Unfortunately this seems to be the part of the game where the curve is not quite adjusted correctly. My brother, who is also playing is up around level 30 and has said that the curve starts to get better again right around that time, where experience coming in is actually useful compared to the experience needed. I’d like to see this tuned a bit. It is incredibly disheartening to complete a mission, especially one that may be particularly frustrating or difficult, only to find that the 18,000 experience you just got didn’t even noticeably move the bar.

I have noticed a somewhat interesting trend via my blogroll this week. People are warming up to TR it seems. Those who wrote it off in beta are coming back and finding that it doesn’t suck like they remember. I would agree. A fair amount changed between release and end of beta, and those who got in at one point in beta but didn’t stick around may be shocked to come back to a much more complete game.

The Tabula Rasa beta seemed to actually be a beta test, compared to what many others do in their beta test, just using it as a chance to try the game before you buy it. Unfortunately it may not have been the best move they made as people didn’t immediately warm to it.

I’m not saying that the game is without it’s faults, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten close to that, but I agree with the redefined views of the game people are having. It is fun to play. Whether that fun lasts for only a couple of weeks or whether it translates to a long-term MMO experience remains to be seen, but the very fact it is there means the game has taken a large step in the right direction for the genre.

But, getting back to where I happen to be at, I did manage, before the problems, to get back to Wilderness and complete the Targets of Opportunity mission there. I still had to collect some Assault and Defense tokens from the Landing Zone and Imperial Valley. Having completed that I was rewarded with a Clone Credit and the Wilderness Master title. I didn’t really need either, but it was nice to get the mission out of my log. I’m going to try to get a little bit more done tonight, but, as you may or may not know, tonight is a big TV night, with Chuck, Heroes, How I Met Your Mother and Journeyman all being on.

We’ll see how that goes.

ncsoft, tabula rasa, plaync, destination games, landing zone outpost, imperial valley, clone credit, concordia wilderness, palisades, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, Chuck, How I Met Your Mother, Heroes, Journeyman

I’ve now gotten things all sorted out. Took me longer than I would have liked, and I basically missed an entire weekend because of it, but I guess it can’t be helped now.

The problem had to do with the new security software I bought a few days ago, I had set everything up to run under the new firewall…or so I thought. As it turns out because of some problems I’ve been having with my second hard drive (the one I used to have all my games installed on) it wasn’t properly reading and allowing the game to run, causing my system to just hang instead of throwing up any sort of error. Not exactly how I would’ve designed the system but that’s just me.

At any rate, normal story writing will pick up on Tuesday (Monday is my recap day, remember) with the final week of activity. I’ll try and come up with some somewhat good way to end it, although this put me behind where I was planning to be, so I’ll have to try and play catch up a bit, which won’t be easy during the week.

I’ll be updating more tomorrow, I want to keep it short for now, since I’d like to get a few more minutes of play time in before I call it a night. Stay tuned for tomorrow so I can tell you all about how far I didn’t get this weekend, I’m sure it will be a great way to start your week. See you then.

ncsoft, plaync, destination games, tabula rasa, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming

Well, a day has passed and I still can’t seem to load up TR. I don’t know what the problem is but I’ve sent in a support ticket about it. I’m not sure why it continues to do it, I wasn’t having any problems until just yesterday. I’ll have to see what they say about it.

I guess there isn’t much to report because of this so I’ll just have to wait and see before I can continue on. Hopefully this will all be sorted out soon. Anyone have any suggestions?

On a bit of a side note to all this, I picked up a Playstation 3 today and a couple of games. I’m sure I’ll mention this again at some point a little more in depth, but since I’ve got nothing else to work on at the moment, now seems as good a time as any to give things a try. I picked it up today at Wal-Mart because they were offering the ten free Blu-Ray movies with purchase of the system, and an additional five can be mailed in for. Not a bad deal and a pretty decent start to a high-def collection.

Right now I’ve been playing a little bit, a very little bit, of Resistance: Fall of Man. It is quite obvious I’m out of practice with console shooters as I am having a much more difficult time with it then I should. I’m really missing the adjustable DPI of my G5, it feels like I’m not able to move quite as freely. Not to say the controls are bad, it will just take some getting used to again.

I also picked up the latest Ratchet and Clank game, but I have yet to load it up. I’m assuming it’s going to be just as fun as all the others though, which won’t be a bad thing. I picked up another game too, but I want to get some play time in with it before I mention anything about it. I have a feeling I may enjoy it quite a bit as from everything I’ve read it sounds really cool.

Anyway, still working on this TR issue and I’ll try to have something fixed by Monday at latest, we’ll see how it goes.

tabula rasa, plaync, plaync support, ncsoft, destination games, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming

I had a long weekend this week. Like many, because of Thanksgiving being a Thursday I took today off as well. I planned on getting some time into Tabula Rasa with my days off since I haven’t had much time to devote to it outside of a few hours on the weekend.

Well, as it turns out, that is proving to be impossible. I can load up Tabula Rasa just fine, but, after I click login (after supplying my username and password) the game just freezes. Not normal game freezing so I have to shut it down, it actually completely stops my computer from doing anything so I have to manually power off.

That is frustrating. That being the case I don’t really have anything in particular to continue with the next chapter on so I figured I’d take a moment and look at some of the “Feedback Friday” notes from the past few weeks. And by “look at” I mean “make fun of.”

We’ll start with a few weeks ago, so we can see the progression.

If you look back to November 9 we see a fairly healthy bit of feedback on some simple questions. Not mind-blowing, but it answers some basic questions players may have. While a little lacking in “stuff I give a crap about” I won’t hold that against them and just move on, because there is so much other stuff to make fun of them for.

On to the week of November 16 we find some actual somewhat useful information. Of particular interest:

Q. Regarding Ethical Parables, do the decisions I make now affect me later in game?
A. There is a branch at the end of the game. The choice you make determines which part of the story you are exposed to for a long series of missions. What those missions are, and what the branch is, I will leave to the player to find out….

That about covers the highlights from that week. Now, is it just me, or are these the most soft, cushy questions a person could answer? Is this really all the more people are asking about? Maybe I should be sending in some questions of my own and see if they get answered.

The hardest question out of all those to answer was the one about PlayNC Support and how long a response should take. Which, of course, could have been easily answered with a “when we get around to it you idiotic little dipshit” but I understand their take on it too. (As an aside I have never had a problem, in any game, including TR, getting a response from PlayNC support, they are one of the best in terms of customer service responses.)

And finally we’ll move on to November 21, which is, obviously, not a real Friday, but like so many others they are probably taking a long weekend, and I won’t fault them for that. I will fault them for the complete lack of anything remotely interesting though. It is as if each progressive week becomes more and more lame.

Take the questions from the Feedback Form that were answered:

Q. What is up with the PvP Ranks? My clan is listed twice!

A. There is a known issue with several clans duplicating or updating incorrectly on the PvP Stats Page. We hope to have this resolved soon.

Q. Is there an option to copy characters from Live to (Public Test Server) PTS?

A. This is a feature that we would like to have the future. For the time being we are rotating the PTS seeding with database copies from the live servers. The name of the server that was copied onto PTS will be listed on the PTS Patch Notes.

Q. How do I contact the Development Team directly with my comments, suggestions, and PTS testing results?

A. Submit your comments, suggestions, and testing results using our Feedback Form. If you locate a bug during your testing, please use the /bug command and describe your issue in the pop-up menu.

Am I the only one who thinks these are not important enough to be told to us in a Community News posting that happens each week that should be more focused on getting feedback about the actual game. Those are the types of questions that could be answered privately in an e-mail to a person, or, better yet, set up in an FAQ page somewhere, but don’t waste space telling me all about non-game related issues, I don’t care what Jackass A, B, or C is having problems with I want to know about the game.

I’ll assume it was because of the short week that this week is so…how can I put this in a way that is only mildly insulting…”meh” but if this trend continues as one of the only real forms of community outreach well, I will be sorely disappointed.

(Note: To those of you who want to bring out that before those questions was some info on the Military Surplus, etc. yes, that is true, but basically all that info was already shown in the Public Test patch notes so I am wholly unimpressed by the blatant double-dipping.)

tabula rasa, ncsoft, plaync, destination games, customer service, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming

As happened last week I’ll be taking a break from the story to give a little bit of info on what I did, since I didn’t get to play on my main character today.

There has been news of the next patch and what will be included in it on the main site. To understand this post it would be best to go check it out first.

A lot more issues are being dealt with this patch, which is of course good, but the big news is that this seems to be a bit more of some actual semi-useful content as well. The promised Military Surplus shops/auctions are going in. I’m not sure how useful this will be, but I think it is necessary to some extent to add a little bit of an in-game economy. Right now I’m sitting on (with just my main character) about 250,000 credits and I’ve been spending them fairly liberally. Having something to spend money on will be a good thing.

I won’t comment on the specifics of it as it isn’t yet fully implemented, I’ll wait until the official patch for that, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

One thing that is still there that is bothering me, as it is put under “Known Issues” is that the “Rage” ability does not show duration information. For some characters this isn’t that big of a deal, but for me, being a Commando, it can be a bit annoying. I use Rage a lot and not knowing when it ends, how long I have on it is a bit of a problem, I’m hoping this gets moved off the known issues list sometime soon. It is a small but crucial detail that needs to be taken care of.

At any rate I’m going to cut it a bit short today as I’m not feeling well, I’ll be back tomorrow to continue on with the story some more.

ncsoft, plaync, destination games, tabula rasa, patches, public test realm

Last week I was not quite level 20 and getting near the end of my time in Concordia Divide. This week I’m up to level 21 and just getting started in Concordia Palisades. Yeah, not very many levels gained I know, but once again I’m finding the curve to be a little off.

I’ve completed at least ten missions and my experience bar barely moves. In fact, I’m actually seeming to get less experience per mission in Palisades then I was in Divide…or at very best the exact same experience.

Soon enough I’ll be off Foreas entirely though and on to the next planet.

A side note on the slow leveling, though I spent the vast majority of my time playing my main character and working him up I did not spend all weekend (where most of my playing time is) using him, I did take about 30 minutes to level up a new character to five and choose the specialist class. I also spent a bit of time on my level fifteen Ranger doing some crafting.

The crafting in Tabula Rasa is actually one of the better crafting systems in a game I’ve seen, not because it is incredibly in depth or really the peak of what crafting can be, but because it fits in with what TR is. Tabula Rasa is about getting out into the battles and having fun and the crafting complements this. It doesn’t take very long to get anything done in crafting. The longest I’ve spent, from what I remember was just under two minutes. Unfortunately to make a lot of the best stuff you need a crafting alt, and there is no sense in creating that alt until you already have a character at 50 (who wants to put skill points into crafting and then still try and level a person) so I can’t say much about how the other, “better” crafting stuff works.

In Wilderness there weren’t very many bugs. In Divide, there were a few but none of them particularly bad. In Palisades there are bugs all over the place it seems and it is very frustrating. I knew this, of course, but I was kind of hoping that it would be changed and things would be different. Names of locations don’t show up after death, mission rewards or items don’t show up correctly on the mission box. These things are just unacceptable and sloppy. They don’t hurt anything really but it just makes the game feel like it wasn’t given enough QA time to take care of these small things which make the game look bad even though all the big things work (for the most part anyway.)

Hopefully these bugs will be taken care of soon, and maybe the next planet isn’t quite so bad, but I have a feeling it is only going to get worse and worse from here on with more noticeable and annoying bugs popping up. That’s unfortunate because they don’t need to be there.

That covers the majority of my thoughts from this week, and we’ll see how the next week goes. Soon enough I’ll be out of days in November and back to normal.

ncsoft, plaync, destination games, tabula rasa, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming

Normally this is the point that I would be writing a new “chapter” in the story but tonight, since the game has just been patched, I figure I’ll go over some of the things that were included in it along with some general thoughts. I don’t consider this to be the “normal” Wednesday post for the month but I thought it important to take a break from the fiction for a bit more reality.

I won’t go over the entirety of the patch notes as a lot of fixes and things were made but I did want to cover a few. Keep in mind I haven’t yet been able to log in to give all of these things a thorough look at so expect more thoughts from my Monday post in a few days.

The full patch notes, for those interested can be found here.

First up on the list is the Client/Server updates, promising greater stability and performance. I haven’t been able to see if this is the case yet, but assuming it is that is always a good thing. Though I have had relatively few problems with performance I know some others that have had different experiences and this change may get them to load up the game to check it out again when they previously may not have.

Another nice change in the patch was the increase of the mission log to 30. I don’t know if this was strictly necessary but it is nice and will be good to be able to keep hold off some extra quests. Of course, I disagree with the whole capping of number of possible missions in the first place, but that is an entirely different debate to argue so I’ll leave it be.

A few other small but occasionally annoying issues were fixed and I’m glad to see that, they didn’t greatly detract from the experience but some of the things they took care of were things that I had noticed as being a problem which means they were fairly obvious things that would need to get fixed. A long list of actual bugs were fixed as well none of which I really have a problem with so long as the fixes do work.

I would like to see that Known Issues list shrink greatly with each subsequent patch, so we’ll have to see how that goes but all in all it is a good and necessary first patch. Now, if only they would release the first operation with some actual content I may be very impressed.

plaync, ncsoft, destination games, tabula rasa, patches, patch notes, game updates

I didn’t get as much play time in this week, and unfortunately the leveling curve increases pretty sharply relative to the experience gained from each mission so there wasn’t near the increase in levels compared to last week. I did manage to get to level 19 though (and should probably hit 20 before the end of the day today.)

I’m currently hitting the end of the missions in the second continent, Concordia Divide with just a few instances to finish off and one or two missions outside of instances to do. There are a few bugs which are really starting to become frustrating though, not the least of which is the fact that the Targets of Opportunity missions in Divide are near impossible to complete as the Bane almost never take control of the control points. This is not because the players are just that good, rather it is because the Bane don’t really even bother to try.

Bugged missions annoy me more than almost anything else. They annoy me especially in lower level areas because so many people have done them before in beta, and for them to now have problems in live, well, it’s quite frankly unacceptable.

That having been said the game is still fun even if it can be frustrating. Lag has been minimal for the most part, with occasional problems that make it a little frustrating but not impossible or even very difficult to play. I think the lag can still be improved beyond what it is at now, but compared to some of the time in beta it is far better than it was before.

I’m a little annoyed that I haven’t seen a patch yet. I understand why they might not want to put one in, they are probably trying to fix as many things as possible, but even so it is sad to not really know what is going on. The lack of officials forums for the game means I really can’t even see very easily if anything has been mentioned about upcoming changes or expected patch dates. If something was mentioned somewhere on the web I don’t recall seeing it posted to their main page.

I’m hoping to get a bit more leveling in this week than last, though whether that will equate to an actual increase in number of levels gained remains to be seen.

I think the experience curve needs to be tuned a bit. It seems that most zones are getting five levels or less after Wilderness and that just feels like a very short time to be in a zone. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong though and that is the point. With the extremely linear leveling path they’ve set for themselves though I can’t help but feel more could have been done.

I’ll report back in next week with more thoughts.

See where I was last week.

ncsoft, plaync, destination games, tabula rasa, concordia divide, bane, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming

So, just now I decided that I’m going to reserve Mondays for posting about where I am in my time spent playing Tabula Rasa. Well, more specifically, doing it in an out of character way. Let’s get some of the basics out of the way first though. I’m playing on the Pegasus server, currently the only east coast server available and my (last) name is Calceres. If you are playing feel free to send me a shout in game (let me know who you are though, because otherwise it is just creepy.)

Since I pre-ordered the game I got to start playing almost a week ago now, though not nearly as much as I would have liked and I only barely made it to level 6 in those first three days. Currently I’m sitting at level fifteen, about halfway through on my way to sixteen. I’m playing a Commando at the moment (the third tier class after Soldier) with a cloned Ranger at fifteen as well.

So far the experience has been a lot of fun. Lag was minimal through most of the weekend, though around prime time Sunday night I did run into some issues, but they were only for a relatively short time and it was never as bad as some of what I’d experienced in the beta. Overall, the big issues with the game seem to have been cleared up. That doesn’t mean there isn’t along way to go still to get content to where it should be but from a technical standpoint the game is running fairly well.

I’ve been very critical in most of my postings about Tabula Rasa. Such that I think an important message that I have tried to convey before has not been seen clearly. The game is fun. I challenge anyone to proc Rage 5, whip out a shotgun, and assault or defend a control point and tell me it was boring. I think that NCSoft has a game that will, in fact, succeed on some level. I don’t think we will see an “Auto Assault” happen to this game as so many have been saying because the game is significantly better than that. In fact, Tabula Rasa is probably one of their best MMOGs to date.

Of course, as I’ve said before, there are flaws and some of them don’t even relate to the content. I’ve encountered a handful of bugs up to this point. None of them are game breaking, but some are annoying. Broken missions is probably my biggest annoyance. Most missions work fine but that doesn’t help lower the annoyance of finding the ones that don’t work yet. Worse is that some of these missions did work in the beta and are only running into problems now. That’s just frustrating. We’ll see how I’m feeling this same time next week. The first month is critical and I may have some different things to say if there are not some quick hotfixes put in soon.

Tabula Rasa, mmog, mmo gaming, mmo, ncsoft, destination games, richard garriott

If, like me, you have Tabula Rasa pre-ordered tomorrow begins the date when you can start playing. This is a good and a bad thing. It’s good in the sense that we will finally be able to start on characters that won’t be erased, bad, because, well, I have a feeling they aren’t fully prepared for what is going to happen. But let me take a moment to explain myself on this.

(more…)

Friday evening I came home to find a message sitting in my inbox about Dungeon Runners first major update, Chunk 1. There are some great new features added, of particular importance to me was the announcement that the movement feature had been changed so it wasn’t “laggy” anymore. I have yet to load it up but I will be doing so tonight when I get home. That was a major source of annoyance to me before. Though definitely a needed change they also added some other great stuff.

(more…)

I probably should have talked about this earlier, but I didn’t for a few reasons. First because I didn’t exactly know how I felt, and second because I wasn’t sure what was worth mentioning. I think, now, I’ve finally got it figured out. Of course, if you haven’t been keeping up on the TR news, than I’ll be explaining everything to you for the first time so let’s get that out of the way first.

Step 1 of this post is to read some of the latest information, I’ll summarize it later, but I highly suggest you go ahead and read the whole thing. Take a look here and here for what I am talking about (or what I am going to be talking about, as it may be.) Now that we have the foundation all set, time to get on to my part of the writing.

(more…)

As you know doubt heard Tabula Rasa has been pushed back about two weeks (formerly pre-order date 10/16 and launch 10/19) to 10/30 pre-order start date and 11/2 official launch date. As you also know I have been playing the game for quite a while. This is a step in the right direction. I said what my opinion of the game was not long ago and I think I came off perhaps overly negative in tone compared to the final score I gave. This is because the game itself is actually pretty good, and fun, but the problems that plague this game, compared to what should have been make it much worse.

One of the biggest problems I have had, and am still having, is with performance. This is not because of my computer (I posted the specs of the new computer I got a while back and it can more than handle this game, especially since I put in another 2GB of RAM yesterday.) The lag is, at its best times, horrendous and at its worst completely unplayable (I should know as I’ve stopped playing several times before because of it.) If this delay will help them to fix these issues (and judging by the length it is going to allow them one “full” extra patch) then it is a very good thing. I know talking with some friends we have all mentioned how with the delays of several other key games, like Warhammer Online, and Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa has the chance to delay itself by a little bit and still come out before any of that competition does. While being first isn’t necessarily best it certainly can’t hurt.

So, while some headlines would make you believe this is the sign of death for the game I’d hardly say that is the case, stability can only bring benefits to the game.

Tabula Rasa, mmo gaming, mmog, mmorpg, ncsoft, plaync, release date, warhammer online, age of conan, lag, server stability

It appears that Exteel, NCSofts mech shooter, is back in closed beta. While I would normally say this doesn’t bode well for a game I’m not so sure. Having not played in the original beta, who knows, the fact that there was a delay (and a long one) and now a renewed closed beta could be, in fact, a very good thing. I’ll admit that this game has been one of those that I’ve been watching not because I feel it will set the world on fire with it’s innovation, but because hey, I get to blow shit up with giant robots in it, and I’ll be damned if that isn’t fun.

I’ve applied for the beta, and if you like giant robots (and let’s be honest here, who doesn’t?) I’d recommend you go ahead and do it. The pricing, it seems, will probably be free to play and micro-transactions so you really have nothing to lose.

exteel, plaync, ncsoft, beta test, closed beta, beta games

I’m looking for opinions on the new GW expansion. I have all the other games (Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall) though I don’t play them a lot I still like to load them up from time to time (I believe I’ve mentioned before how much I hate not having the ability to jump, it really kills things for me.) However, I do like the series, the developers and the business model they are going for and it is something I want to support.

Does anyone have any first-hand experience with the new expansion? Is it worth it for the occasional player, or will it only really benefit someone who is really into the series? I’d love to hear some opinions.

arenanet, ncsoft, eye of the north, guild wars