A Geek's Cogitations, Conjectures and other Cortical Experiences

Category: MMORPG Page 25 of 29

The MMO Times: The Rapid Left Click Edition!

Issue 32

The launch of Diablo III and TERA has made for very little information to share lately. I haven’t tried TERA primarily because I have enough games to play that I don’t need another one. Now that Diablo III is out and Aion is F2P I now have to decide when I want to play either those games, WoW or Old Republic.

I only have a couple links to share with this issue but I didn’t want to wait much longer on posting them. I may even be running the risk that these links are old news already. Either way, if you need a break from Diablo III, or you need something else to do while you are frantically clicking your mouse, check out some of the latest information about MechWarrior Online and some interesting new MoP features.

SWTOR: End-Game Criticisms

The latest news about SWTOR has been depressing lately. Despite all the great things that the latest patch provided, other MMO news sites are still reporting a decline in subscriptions, and some are projecting a 500,000 drop in subscriptions by 2013. I guess I’m a little confused as to why people are suddenly turning away from this game because I thought the story and the lore are extremely compelling. Apparently, based on some of the articles I have been reading, the major contributor to the declining subscription is end-game content.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know what people find wrong with the end-game. After you hit level 50 you can either PvP or you can start doing Hard Mode Flashpoints (and then ultimately Operations). I guess I am confused as to how this is any different then what you do when you hit level cap in other MMOs, like World of Warcraft. Granted SWTOR doesn’t have LFG tools like the Dungeon or Raid Finder (for now, this will change with patch 1.3), but those tools are still brand new to WoW. Prior to their implementation you still had to find your own groups (either from your guild or using public channels).

I will admit, some of the end game dailies are a little “grindy”. You do have to get quite a few daily commendations if you want to buy any decent gear. Granted a much more entertaining method of obtaining gear would be to do Hard Mode Flashpoints. So, really, a group finder tool may be just the thing to help improve the end game, however, I hope its not too late. The population on the servers is already pretty meager and Bioware is already starting to talk about offering server transfer services. I hope to see things improving in the future because in my opinion, I enjoy SWTOR just as much as WoW (if not more) so I want to see it succeed and I’m doing what I can to help it succeed.

The MMO Times: Patches & Betas

Issue 31

Hello again Gamers!! The news rolls have been busy lately announcing patches going live and public beta weekends. It is a great time to be a gamer as many of our favorite franchises and games are on the list of betas and patches. The biggest dilemma to face gamers right now is which game to play!!

This issue has information about Guild Wars 2 and Diablo III public beta weekends. New patch details and more patch information for RIFT, DC Universe and SWTOR. Personally I don’t know what I want to participate in as I am really enjoying the SWTOR 1.2 Game Update but I am anxious to check out Diablo III. What will all of you be doing??

The MMO Times: First Contact

Issue 30

Hey Gamers! How does another issue of The MMO Times sound? If any of you are confused by the name of this issue, April 5th was First Contact Day because April 5th, 2063 is when Zeframe Cochrane makes first contact with the Vulcans, so there is some useless nerd minutia for you.

So this issue we have more SWTOR news, including a launch date for Game Update 1.2 (WOOT!). There is also some more beta and pre-order information for Guild Wars 2 and TERA. Again, I didn’t really talk too much about Mists of Pandaria because there aren’t a lot of details that are unknown at this point. Contrary to what I have said in previous posts (and on Google+) I actually have been trying out the MoP beta, perhaps I will cover that in a blog post.

The MMO Times: The Panda’s Are Coming!!

Issue 29

Hello Again, Gamers! Despite the title, there won’t be a lot of Mists of Pandaria information in this issue, mainly because there is so much out there that I didn’t want to flood this post with articles just about the next WoW expansion. If you really want to check out all the upcoming features for MoP I would head over to MMO-Champion, they have quite a comprehensive collection of information.

Instead I tried to keep things more about other games because, despite Blizzard’s best efforts, there are other games out there to play then just WoW and after nearly eight years, the other games are just more interesting. I did include a couple of WoW-related posts but I think people might enjoy some new information about upcoming (new) MMOs like Pathfinder Online and World of Darkness.

WoW: Why I’m Not Going to Beta MoP

I suppose it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that I won’t opt-in for the Mists of Pandaria beta, I probably will. In fact I may even log in to check it out, but I probably won’t do any long term testing of the expansion. In fact I probably won’t participate in any beta for a game (or expansion) that I intend to play when it goes live. I have decided this after playing the beta for SWTOR.

I discovered, after participating in the SWTOR for nearly 8 months, that once the game goes live, it starts to feel stale pretty quick. Granted there are some subtle changes and sometimes that is good and sometimes, not so good. For example, in SWTOR there was a preference in the Social options that I used all the time while I was in the beta, but when the game went live, they took it out. I never found out why but I was pretty disappointed to find it missing.

Eventually SWTOR became exciting again after I leveled past all the quests that I had already done repeatedly (because of data resets) in the beta. Be that as it may, I would still like to avoid that kind of repetition especially in an expansion where the level cap is only increased by five (which means there will already be some repetition, relatively quickly, when I start leveling the alts). I hope that I don’t discourage anyone else from participating in a beta. The beta test is an extremely important part of software development and the more people that participate the better the user experience will be (in theory) when the product goes live. It is also kind of fun to say that you had participated in the beta of a popular game.

Cheers!

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