PVPlab

Let’s face it, combat is a brief affair in Warcraft these days. Much of this is due to the fact that much like Burning Crusade, the new talents have been released, and there are a lot more players out there dishing out damage that level 70 gear isn’t really designed to handle. In this way, it’s hard to get a grip of how balanced things will really be until the expansion comes in a few weeks and we hit 80. I don’t know about you, but that can’t come soon enough.

Your best bet for now is to hunker down and wait. Most serious PvPers are taking a break from the action or just playing along and dealing with the fact that in the current environment DPS classes will rule, and some will seem downright insane given the burst their capable of (whether that’s balanced or not later on is anyone’s guess, looking at you retribution paladins!).

With that said, you should at least take the opportunity to look at specs you’re interested in and see how they feel to you. I was really torn as to how to spec my mage, but ultimately decided arcane is the most fun I’ve had in awhile! I like being able to throttle my dps in exchange for mana as needed, and it’s likely that will be my main spec of choice for both pvping and raiding.

What about you? Any comments about the current state of pvp? What do you think combat will be like come 80?

There’s been a lot of speculation as to how Blizzard will handle the transition of level 70 up to 80 arenas, and I’ve been a bit curious myself. Issues in question include whether they will still allow 70 rated matches and if so, what gear will be available to them? Well that question, at least, was answered late last week by a Blizzard CM, Bornakk:

You will be able to continue rated arena matches at level 70, but there will be no new gear rewards in this bracket. Only skirmishes will be available from levels 71-79 but then at level 80 the rated matches will be available again.

So essentially we’ll still have the option of competing for level 70 gear, but don’t expect anything new and flashy anytime soon for those brackets. The release date of the level 80 rated arenas hasn’t been announced yet, but personally I hope its not in place at launch. Doing so would mean those who race to 80 at launch would have free reign to gather matches and ratings and points before many people even see max level. The other issue that remains unsolved is points. Can you just stack arena points from a level 70 season and use them at 80? Will your points reset to 0 after leveling out of the level 70? Or, conversely, will arena points inflate so much at 80 that having your points from the 70 brackets won’t be much of an advantage?

Answers are trickling out, so for now we’ll have to wait and see.

If you’ve pvp’d in the battlegrounds for any length of time, you’ve probably run into one particularly frustrating problem. There you are in Warsong Gulch, scrambling to get help the carrier get back to your base before he gets stomped into the dirt, and you get cut down in the process. Back to the spirit healer you go, noticing that some of your fellow players are about to spawn as well. So you figure strength in number, I’ll just wait for them so we can move as a group…except they don’t move. After about 10 seconds you realize the player isn’t actually there, or running around in a circle like an idiot. Fed up, you run off into the fray alone, knowing full well that you’re probably going to get crushed by the opposition that has people actually participating in the fight.

AFKing in the Battlegrounds is still a widespread problem, despite a recent crackdown by Blizzard, many players still enter the BGs with absolutely no intention of doing anything except hitting the space bar occasionally (or worse, use a botting program to keep them in combat). Blizzard’s attempt to have players enforce the rules themselves by marking players as inactive hasn’t deterred the practice. After all what’s the real consequence? Most of the time players don’t even bother reporting someone afk, and players usually notice that their character has been marked, run them into combat, die, and go back to afking again. With a toothless tiger enforcement from players and sporadic at best punishment from Blizzard, afk players makes the whole pvp experience frustrating and removes the fun, competitive aspect of the fight.

As a result many players take the “if you can’t beat em, join em” approach, and the spread continues. Its a tricky situation that’s not easily dealt with, and Blizzard has been dragging its feet in dealing with the problem directly. Players, on the other hand, have come up with their own “proper” solutions to the problem. Here’s some I’ve nabbed from the forums:

• Let Players Kick AFKers: I don’t think I need to explain the potential abuse of a system like this, but plenty come to mind. Players could get kicked for no reason if the power goes to the BG leader. If a voting system is put in place, you’ll either need so few votes that you run into the same problem above or so many that you’ll never get enough votes to kick players who are blatantly afking. While it would be the most direct way to deal with the problem while putting the ball in out court instead of Blizzard’s, I don’t really see it as a viable option.
• Modify The Rewards System: I found an interesting suggestion on the forums recently. Basically the player suggests that we put rewards in place based on effort rather than just being there. This means that if your team fought tooth and nail against a pre-made to hold one node, you’d get your mark. If you roll over and let them 5-cap, however, then you don’t get anything at all. I think it might strike a good balance between rewarding losers for doing nothing and the system we have now. Given the tendency of most alliance teams to….not do so well in the battlegrounds, it would still reward those who fight without taking out any reason to play at all. I mean as an Alliance player if they took out marks as a reward for losing Warsong Gulch, I’d probably never enter that place ever again. This would need some tweaking to get the rewards right, to be sure, but it has to be better than what we have now.

Ultimately I think there’s no perfect solution for afking in the battlegrounds. Too much enforcement could result in punishing innocent players, but not enough and we’ll have too many afkers clogging up the battlegrounds. Blizzard has to walk a fine line, encouraging players to work toward winning while also stepping up enforcement and punishing afkers on a regular basis. Suggestions? Potential flaws in changing the current system? Any other feedback? Feel free to let me know.

It’s only been a few days since receiving confirmation that Cryptic Studios is, indeed, working on a Star Trek MMO.  At this point, very little is known about the kind of MMO Star Trek Online will be.  From what we can gather by having a look at the about page, players will get to choose between serving as a captain either within Starfleet or the Klingon Empire.  Your mission will be to outfit your ship for galactic exploration and ship-to-ship combat while developing an elite crew capable of exploring alien worlds and engaging in slightly more personal combat situations.  Hopefully, this means plenty of PvP.  Could be interesting…  Of course, this is all based on speculation and raises a lot of questions.  It seems, however, that we won’t have to wait too long to get some answers.

Come Sunday, August 10, at the annual Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, Cryptic will be unveiling the first gameplay footage for all to see.  Don’t worry if you can’t get to Las Vegas, though, as fans around the world will also get a chance to see the footage by visiting StarTrekOnline.com, where they can view the event live, via webcast.  All you have to do is register at the site and you’ll be all set.

News and information continues to trickle out from the Beta, some good, some bad. Alchemists in particular are not happy with the most recent addition of the last beta build: Potion Sickness. The icon and description can be found below.

Not good for Alchemists

Needless to say being an alchemist myself and the reaction on the forums, many people are not pleased. That said, I think this could workout in our favor if it is handled correctly. From what I understand, Blizzard is tuning potions to be particularly helpful to the alchemists themselves, rather than usable by everyone with equal effect. Perhaps there are self-buffs and the like that alchemists will be able to obtain by using potions, while they’ll still have limited use for non-alchemists as well. That or they’re tuning encounters so that you don’t have to potion-chug to keep your mana up, and they’ll be used for actual emergencies instead of par for the course of any raid encounter. All speculation of course, we’ll have to see how it develops.

There’s a new picture of the death knight flying mount available, and if you’ve ever been to Karazahn, it probably seems quite familiar….

That’s right, for not at least, they’ve just reused the old models from the skeletal gryphons that fly around Kara. I think it looks ok, if a bit awkward. Its possible that the skeletal mount is a placeholder until they find a better way to retool and make it look cooler. Although with the expected influx of death knights in the expansion….do we even want to make any aspect of the class cooler to play? I don’t think that we do…

Finally, if you have a hunter and you’ve been looking over the new talent trees, you probably ran into the same question I did. With exotic pets letting you tame previously impossible pets…can I have a devilsaur? The answer is yes! Although they do shrink down to a somewhat normal size, its still going to be tons of fun to have a baby t-rex as a pet! The devilsaur comes with the ability “monstrous bite” which, at present, does 3 things:

• Damage: Apparently the damage portion of this ability hasn’t been fully implemented. It only has one rank and hits for peanuts. Obviously there will be increased damage (I hope!) as development continues.
• Pet Buff: Monstrous bite also increases the damage done by the devilsaur by 5% per use, with a maximum stack of 3.
• Increased Size (RAWR): The devilsaur gets bigger every time he uses monstrous bite…I wholeheartedly approve of this effect! How big this makes him exactly I’m not sure, but I really do hope its huge.

I don’t even have a hunter and now I want to go level one just to have a pet devilsaur…or stegadon!..or…maybe I should have rolled a different main… Anyway I’ll try and keep everyone abreast of continued development as we go through beta. The more I read about it, the more excited I am for its release! I’m sure its right around the corner….

Post a comment with either an MMO that was being made that should have been the epitome of what you’ve wanted in a game that fell through or possibly an upcoming MMO that looks like it could be the same but might be/will be vaporware.

1. Infinity: The Quest for Earth
   Twitch-based, 100-billion-star galaxy to explore, practically as realistic a space game that is still a game you can have fun in. Combat simulator built and working, but there is just so much left to do that it is still vaporware.
2. Star Trek Online
   Says coming soon, but we know that soon means exactly the opposite.

We’ve already seen how Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning seeks to revolutionize the way we PvP with RvR, so it would be expected that WAR will have a new take on World of Warcraft’s battlegrounds. Scenarios will offer more incentive to PvP in other places than in the open world, leading to less ganking for lower level players.

In an effort to better compare these two titles in terms of features, I made the following chart:

*There are 12 scenarios, but a player will not be able to experience them all from one character. There are four scenarios for dwarves/orcs, four for men/chaos, and four for elves/dark elves.

Although the WoW content displayed in the chart is all pre-Wrath of the Lich King, it seems that Warhammer Online one-ups World of Warcraft in the category of instanced PvP. The new modes like bomb, where players rush to the center of the map to pick up a bomb, and then have one minute to deliver it to the enemys base before it explodes, and murderball, where player have to hold on to an artifact until they reach the goal time, look particularly fun and promising. The development team says they are still tweaking and testing the number of players that will be allowed inside the instanced PvP scenarios, but for now it will either be 12 on 12 or 24 on 24.

There’s been a lot of buzzing on the Warcraft forums recently as it related to expansion talents. The topics and gripes are fairly wide ranging, everything from the supposed domination by retribution paladins (wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?) to mage talents being by and large awful (if you’d like to form an opinion for yourself, you can check out the new end-game fire talent, living bomb, here). One issue in particular that caught my eye was the possible addition of the expansion talent trees before Wrath of the Lich King is released, much like they did with The Burning Crusade. The decision hasn’t officially been made yet, but a Blizzard Community Moderator did hint that its a distinct possibility:

We haven’t stated this as of yet, so it wasn’t me. I have said that it is a possibility much like Burning Crusade, but I can’t confirm this for you at this time. When the time comes, we’ll be letting everyone know more details about our plans.

(more…)

World of Warcraft has always been a light load on the hardware. While making the game very accessible, this is really starting to bug users, some of whom have been playing the game for four years now. As technology improves, and hardware costs get cheaper, more and more WoW gamers are expecting a graphical update. Blizzard has not recently commented on the matter, but a year ago, the following was posted on the blizzard forums by Nethaera, a designated Blizzard poster:

Could we? Most likely so. But that would mean limiting who could play the game. We also enjoy the style that we have and while we continue to make improvements, want to be very careful in how we go about doing it so that we can allow people to play without the need of needing to do massive upgrades.

This has been the classic excuse for this problem for the past four years, but it is very possible to release a patch/update without threatening the accessibility of the game. Two such ways to update the engine are: creating more levels to the graphics sliders in the option window, or creating an optional expansion pack that contains only the graphics update for $20. With either solution, Blizzard gains customers and/or profits (choice 2), while retaining their users with slightly old or outdated machines.

In fact, Blizzard did release a minor polygon update for the new content in Burning Crusade, and it is only logical that they will do the same for Wrath of the Lich King. Therefore, Blizzard isn’t truly concerned about alienating gamers, as a player who can run Westfall or Orgrimmar finds their computer slows to a crawl when they hit Shattrath.

Another excuse that has been thrown about by Blizzard fanboys is that Blizzard does not wish to change or impede upon the graphical style of the game with new, flashy, photo-realistic graphics. Anyone who attempts to make this argument should play Team Fortress 2. It is a beautiful, stylized, first person shooter that proves that style and modernity can go hand in hand. Imagine World of Warcraft graphics looking like this or this.

Clearly, the true reason Blizzard will not update their WoW graphics is because they simply do not believe that it would be a good business investment, otherwise they would have updated them already. As such, it is a true shame because an update made available in the ways mentioned before would not alienate current players, instead it would give Blizzard an extra feature to market, which could potentially bring flocks of new and veteraned MMO gamers.

For example, EVE Online launched its expansion, Trinity, which included a major graphical update. The players who use that update are still in the same world as players who do not use it, and those who can and want to run EVE with better graphics are satisfied. EVE also got a new marketing campaign, where emails were sent to all previous trial players and ads were put up on websites around the internet. Thus, the graphical update, combined with some other new content (fairly standard for an expansion), gave the publisher and developer reason to reinvigorate the marketing campaign for EVE, and get bucketloads of more players.

What do you think? Would an update be good or bad?

Just wait a few minutes; that’s all I have to do.  Just wait a few more minutes until my energy levels reach 25% and then I can attack again.  I watch the status bar build up until, finally, I can click the attack button and put another victim in the shipyard.  I count my gained experience points and revel in the moment of victory before choosing another hapless pirate to destroy.  A few minutes later, I strike again, and the cycle continues.  Welcome to the world of PvP in Star Pirates — a text-based MMORPG you play in a web browser.

When I first started playing Star Pirates, I couldn’t attack anyone and hope to win.  My prey consisted of players who were either already wounded or those whose stats were significantly lower.  I also had to avoid members of fleets, otherwise risk bringing the wrath of the whole lot of them down upon me.  I quickly learned that any money you had on hand needed to be squirreled away into the bank as soon as possible because there are players who constantly search for other players who have money on hand and will loot you before you know it.  By securing money in the bank, I become less of a temptation.  Keep in mind, though, even penniless pirates are still worth some experience points.

After spending piles of money and copious amounts of research points, I was finally whipping my ship into shape.  I’d upgraded to a larger ship with more hard points that allowed me attach an impressive arsenal of weapons.  Oh, yeah, I was becoming a real tough guy, now.  Claws, fangs, and a hide forged from an exotic heavy metal.  Wiping out ships with little or no trouble at all, I didn’t even bother glancing at stats anymore.  As long as I had more hull points, I was convinced I could win.  I’d grown too confident.

She was a Frigate Mk. II with 280 hull points.  Her captain didn’t even name her and she had a crew level lower than mine.  “This won’t take long,” I said to myself as I clicked the attack button and waited for the results.  The window reloaded, the log came in, and I was defeated.  Something had gone terribly wrong.

Just because a player has a lower class and weaker defenses doesn’t mean they don’t have significantly stronger weapons.  This is true for any game you play; whether a starship or a night elf, you never really know how a character is built until you find yourself either gloating over your victim or face down in the dirt.   In the case of the Frigate Mk. II, her maximum damage rating gave her the advantage several times over.  I had better defenses, but she was still capable of defeating me in only a few turns.

It’s hard to work up any amount of excitement for a text-based game that you play in your browser, but there’s a high level of suspense that comes from the fact that you can’t properly size up an opponent before heading into battle.  Many of the key stats are hidden, so you never really know what you are getting yourself into until it’s too late.  Again, there’s not much in terms of action, but I would imagine getting that “you were attacked and lost” message is just as aggravating for the person on the other side of the screen as it is for me.  Of course, on the other hand, most of the game revolves around staring at a progress bar, reloading the page every few minutes, waiting.  Waiting just a few more minutes before you can attack and start all over again.