The questing experience SWTOR and WOW

MMO Champion, one of the biggest MMO resource sites, released yesterday an interview with WOW Lead Quest Designer, discussing the Cataclysm questing experience post mortem. You can find the full article here: Cataclysm Post Mortem Quest Design I found it very interesting, having played the Cataclysm since launch day and considering I really enjoyed the experience. I think the Cataclysm, mainly the old world redesign was a very big step forward for WOW at the time, making many significant improvements to the questing experience. I intentionally don't call it "leveling experience", because this implies that the goal is to progress through the levels, while I consider the goal to be enjoying the experience. If it was simply work that was needed to get to end game and not a fun experience I doubt many people would've spent 20-30-40 hours doing it. Regardless of what you think of questing, whether it's a fun game, or a chore on the way to the "real game" at max level, an MMO can never succeed without a good and enjoyable questing, simply because most of the people will never get to the endgame.

I found some of the things he said at the interview very interesting, I'll sum it up for you:

Why do we play? Gear vs content

We've cleared EV (Eternity Vault) last weekend. This weekend we went there again. We had 3 players who weren't at the first run. The time it took us to clear it went from 3:30 hours to 2:15. Pretty descent progression, which makes sense considering most of us knew the encounters and we had an extra week of gearing up. When the op was done, an interesting discussion followed. What do we want to do next? There were 2 main points of view voiced by different guild members, with most people belonging to 1 or the other. 1 is to move on to Karagga's Palace, the second is to keep running EV. Obviously we could also do both, scheduling 2 runs next week, but we do have a "main" op night and members who will have to choose one of the other if we had 2 runs.

I'll present the main arguments for both points of view as well how we ended up handling it. I believe most groups running content are finding themselves having the exact same decisions to make. These are inherent to MMO endgame and even pre endgame play and boils down to a simple question: "Why do we play?". I have a very clear personal opinion on the subject which I'll try to leave to the end of the post.

Keeping the blog alive with idealchooser.com

Today isn't about SWTOR gameplay for a change, it's more about myself, the author of this blog and the blog future in general. If you've been following my blog, you know I've been pretty consistent in working on it. I was very proud to see the interest which really fueled my motivation to keep posting. In 1 month, since the blog was created, I got over 600 page views, that means over 600 times people either found an article and checked it out or found it interesting enough to keep coming back for more articles.

I know it's not a huge number compared to other sites, but personally I find it really encouraging that this many people got a glimpse of my work and even more so, the fact many of them kept coming back and subscribed to my feed.

When I'm not writing this blog I'm working on a shopping comparison and alerts site idealchooser.com. It's still very new and growing and I improve it every day, this is my full time job.

As you can imagine, keeping up the blog takes a lot of my time and every minute spent on it, is a minute less I have to work on my site and lately I'm finding myself constantly having to make the decision if I should invest more at the blog, or at the site.

I came up with a possible solution that I hope will work out. First of all, this is it, letting my blog readers know about idealchooser.com. I'm hoping it will make you curious to check it out. I really think the site is great for finding online deals, by gathering data from a huge amount of merchants, you can find many offers for anything you are looking for, helping you grab the best possible deal available. In addition the price drop alert option is a very nice way to be aware of price drops as soon as they happen.

If a small number of my blog visitors will check out this site and even a small number of these will make idealchooser.com a place they check out when they are looking to buy something online, this will make my time investment at the blog totally worth it.

So if you want to help me keep this blog running, please check out idealchooser.com, if you are willing to click the "like" button at the site, that's even better. I hope you will find it useful and this blog will end up giving idealchooser.com additional exposure.

Meanwhile, I also added a small, not annoying ad at the blog page, this will be the only advertising method from now on.

Thank you very much for reading this, I hope you like my blog so far and will also find idealchooser.com useful. I will be back to my usual SWTOR posts almost every week day as usual.

Endgame Eternity Vault encounters

I found the encounters in EV to be really interesting. The bosses are very different and unique and the fights make sure each participant of the group knows what he's doing. I'm going to discuss the bosses, this isn't meant as a complete walkthrough of EV, but more to point out what I think about the different encounters, my personal likes and dislikes and the main things to expect both as a participant and as a group trying to progress through EV.

I'll number the bosses and not name them, in case people want to go fresh and not know what to expect.

1st boss: This is a very straight forward encounter, the mechanics are simple, get out of bad things and use line of sight periodically to avoid a big damage of a special ability. It seems to be aimed to give people a sense of accomplishment by making sure the first encounter isn't too hard. You have to do enough DPS to take down the boss before enrage, but it's very possible. Basically any group that can clear an HM FP can also take down the first boss. Our group managed to take him down on the first try.

Operation review Eternity Vault what to expect

My guild had the first try at Operations Saturday night, we went to Eternity Vault. 1 of the 2 current operations and considered by some to be the easier one. I'll describe my experience running there as well as my observations on what to expect from your first OP.

We cleared the entire place in close to 3.5 hours. The pace was pretty relaxing, with occasional 5 minute breaks and discussions of strategy and plans. I would consider our entire group experienced and very capable, but that's just an opinion, I'm sure there are top guilds who would consider us a bunch of casuals while others, very casual players, who would consider us really hardcore. So I'll go into a bit more details about us, to give others better idea what to expect based on your own group experience and abilities.

7/8 of us ran about 10 HM before and had about 1/2 Epic (purple from HM, dailies and Tionese vendor) and half leveling gear, we could generally clear an HM with 0 or 1 unlucky wipe. About 2 nights before, 4 of us ran The False Emperor for the first time and wiped twice, once on HK and another on the last boss, who I won't name to avoid spoilers. The 8th person was less experienced, with only 2-3 HM runs and mostly leveling gear. Still he was a capable DPS who could do his job well. I guess this can give a general idea on how capable my group was, so readers can compare their own experience and know better what to expect.

Fresh level 50 gearing guide

Congratulations, you are 50, it's a major milestone in your SWTOR career, but the game is far from over for this character. There are ton of content that is meant for max level characters and as many people say "The game starts at max level". To be able to experience much of this endgame content, you will need better gear than you have at this point. Hard mode Flashpoints are very challenging without proper gear and Operations simply can't be done without it. So how do you get that much needed equipment upgrades?

There are 2 main ways to start gearing up your characters, FP and dailies. You can also get some nice PVE upgrades through PVP, an epic (purple) level 50 PVP item is almost certainly better than green, blue or even custom quality level 50 item. There is also the PVE trinket you can get from PVP which I mentioned at my last post.

Epic PVE trinket available with PVP rewards

Just a tip today which I've seen often missed in gearing guides. When you are gearing your level 50 character, aside from the obvious HM and dailies, you can also get a nice purple trinket using PVP commendations. You will need 800 PVP Warzone Commendations. You can easily get these buy running a daily PVP warzone few times even before you hit 50. These are also nice way to get some quick XP, especially if you enjoy the Warzones.

Once you have 800 of these, you can trade 600 for Mercenary commendations at the vendor next to the PVP quest terminal. 200 Warzone Commendations plus 200 Mercenary commendations is the cost of a Champion Bag, which contains Centurion commendations, as well as a small chance for a Champion token (PVP token similar to PVE gear tokens which is still better for PVE than most gear you get when you just hit 50). These Centurion commendations can be trades for PVP gear, however the PVP trinket is also very much a PVE trinket. So there you have it, a quick easy way to get an epic trinket which doesn't require any HM or dailies.

Subscription numbers soon with Asia Pacific

Bioware announced yesterday the coming release of SWTOR in Asia Pacific. You can read their new release here: The Old Republic Asia Pacific Launch. What people don't mention often when discussing the subscription numbers is that so far there are servers only in the US and Europe. There are people from outside of the current server regions who already play the game, but obviously the majority of potential subscribers in different regions will join when they have regional servers to play on.

Now, how much of the total subscription number actually come from different regions? according to Wikipedia  "As of January 22, 2008, World of Warcraft has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide, with more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and about 5.5 million in Asia."  However this is far from being the full picture and there is no way to really compare SWTOR and WOW numbers and assume it'll be similar in any way. Wow has a different subscription plan for Asia, also the exact region and locations of the servers are different.

So what can we say about the potential subscription numbers of SWTOR?

SWTOR frustrating bugs.

Last night I was running HM Boarding Party and hit what is apparently a pretty common bug on the second boss (Sakan Do'nair), the Jedi with the 2 healers. To make a long story short, basically what it does is making the healers immune to damage completely, making this fight impossible to complete, as you must burn down the healers or they keep healing the boss. This was pretty frustrating. After 5-6 tries, when we realized this is consistent and trying couple of things that didn't work, we gave up. This was really frustrating. Now I've found out later that there are possible, hard to execute, workarounds, but it doesn't change the fact that this bug makes this boss much harder than intended.

Another frustrating bug I've seen is the infamous HK-47 bug, to make a long story short, what basically happens is that when you destroy the 4 panels of his chamber (which you should destroy) too quickly, he enrage too soon, causing an almost sure wipe. Thankfully for us, we learned of the workaround, just don't hit the panels too quickly, after "only" 3 needless wipes.

Early PVE endgame experience

After 3 busy SWTOR days of exclusively playing my level 50 Operative, I have a much better picture of what the endgame feels like, what I need to do, what I still need to check out and how early level 50 feels like. I ran 5 HM FP (hard mode flashpoints) at this point, completed the Belsavis bonus series (level 50 daily quest hub), did most of the Ilum series and maxed out my trading skills. Told you I was busy :)

The daily quest zones feel very much like the leveling zones, which I think is a very good thing. Great plot and interesting quests, with the only difference being that you get daily commendations instead of XP which can be used to buy some endgame quality gear and mods.

As for the HM, what I was mostly thinking is how well they captured (AKA copied) WOW's feel of endgame gearing experience. The most similar gaming experience I can compare this to is playing following 80 in WotLK, or 85 in Cataclysm. The new challenging group instances, the great feeling or getting that new epic piece of gear. The satisfaction of completing a hard challenge with a competent group for the first time. Basically a really fun and familiar gaming experience. However there are some notable differences.