A well known computer gaming company, Bioware, attempted to produce a video game set in the universe of the Star Wars science fiction fantasy saga. However, the game failed to catch on and from what I have been reading the team who created it and, in the case of an on going game would be expected to maintain it, has largely moved on instead of being retained.
Here is an article from Forbes about Five Lessons Learned as SWTOR Surrenders.
Apparently, from reading the article cited and looking at screenshots in it and elsewhere on the web, the game tried to outdo Blizzard's WoW by adding lots of glitz; cut scenes, video presentations conveying the backstory, etc.
But a lot of the glitzy stuff did not really make the game more fun, it sounds like. The screen, I notice, looks really fancy and slick. However, SWTOR left out some important things that World of Warcraft has always had going for it.
WoW supports addons to let developers customize specific aspects of the game's presentation/interaction and really, I think, add a lot more handy information in it. There are entire web sites that explain in a wiki based format the stuff that is in the game, the stuff you do in the game, and so on. It is actually pretty complex in terms of the number of details that are out there.
So these addons sort of soften the blow of not having as much information as you would like available to you.
If Blizzard took upon itself to provide every panache then it would be hard to ever finish anything, and the game would be huge with each person finding much to it that they felt was unnecessary. The game would be huge, and a lot of that extra stuff would be regarded by bloat by people even if there was disagreement about what was bloat and what was impossible to do without.
SWTOR does not provide the ability to customize the game with community written addons. Right there, that should be a warning that something which matters a lot in many ways is missing.
WoW also provides the ability to write macros. Anybody can write a macro. They allow a user to specify more than one action that might be performed when a user presses a certain key or clicks a certain button on the screen, sort of.
I say sort of because, c'mon, Blizzard is not going to provide a way to kill every monster in shooting range by pressing one key one time. In fact, Blizzard bans that sort of thing both explicitly with rules that they keep presenting to their users pretty frequently, as well as making the game program itself just scoff at the notion that a whole symphony of character actions should take place with one key press or button click.
That being said, Blizzard makes macros powerful enough to be far from pointless in the game. For one thing in some ver special cases, two actions can be performed in response to one action taken by the user. They are not very consequential results but beats having to do it as discrete things.
The bulk of macro actions in battles serve one of the two following purposes. The game can be offered choices based on the target and other circumstances and take different actions based on the context at the moment.
That is pretty handy. Aside from not needing to move your fingers to a different place to do the different actions, you do not run out of keys on your keyboard and buttons on your screen. There are finite limits to a computer user interface.
The other thing is that Blizzard will gladly allow you to tell the game to preform different actions each time you press a given key. So, if you want to do a series of attacks when the key is pressed repeatedly, then cast a heal on yourself, and then do it all again over and over — you can do so.
Blizzard is not against simplifying game play.
The gist in part of what they absolutely do not want is to have the game botted (controlled as if by a virtual robotic player) to the point where the user can just walk away and check back later to find out how much gold the game made for him while he was gone, how much stuff the game killed for him, how much material the game farmed for him and then sold or crafted into stuff that could be sold.
The other part is they do not want people charging money to in effect be your virtual bot or gopher or whatever. Allowing some people to do that would eventually wring all of the fun out of the game for everyone else. Some guy would spend $50,000 to become uber powerful in the game and then act as a gatekeeper for other people to be able to have fun, or something crazy like that. Plus, it would start getting regulated as if the things inside the game were real, which they are not.
But SWTOR does not provide a WoW like macro facility either. There is just a small selection of buttons on the screen and you click them with your mouse or hit keys to make them take actions. It is pretty simplistic compared to WoW which has a much richer way to interact with the game.
It seems like what SWTOR provided was a lot of eye candy. WoW is successful because it provides opportunity and a bit of a demand to think. In its own way, SWTOR probably did too but I think ultimately it was not engaging enough and people grew weary of it.
The article also indicates SWTOR took $400 million to develop. That is a lot of money. It is just a computer game. Ultimately, it just did not generate enough to recoup its costs and cover its ongoing overhead.
Blizzard was fortunate and intelligent in that there is not a lot of intellectual property in terms of the story that they have to pay license fees for. Blizzard basically made up the WoW story from scratch by being or hiring very good story tellers.
Now that Star Wars is part of Disney, they own a lot of intellectual property encompassing stories, music, video, and so forth. No doubt they can try something like this again, fixing some mistakes made in SWTOR. Eventually, I think they will get it right and I do believe they actually will have another go at it.
Things did go wrong but in a game, that happens every now and then. You just try to do better in the next round. In this case, the game sort of failed because maybe it just was not fun enough. All the work was supposed to create something that was fun entertainment, not just look good.
According to a forum post for SWTOR three months ago, the SWTOR game did not fail. So time will tell what all this really means.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Not to fret, you will get that battle pet
I started playing with the new "battle pet" feature in WoW at about the same time as most other people — about as soon as it was introduced a couple of months back.
At first, I really struggled with getting high quality pets. I also found it very hard to level them up quickly. This is largely by design, I think.
Also likely by design, it turns out that it is a temporary setback. Things get easier as you go along.
Once you have a lot of battle pets, you can employ them in various clever ways to speed up the acquisition process, as well as leveling up your pets.
This past week, my evenings were a lot more rewarding than usual. I got some great battle pets; many of them of 'rare' (the best) quality: Spawn of Onyxia, Stunted Shardhorn, etc. I cannot remember exactly how many I got but it seems like it was a couple dozen new ones this week.
I also managed to speed up the leveling process of my battle pets quite a bit with a tip from a new friend in the game that took me under their wing for a bit after dinnertime one night, and explained their technique to get battle pets to jump up maybe as much as 5 levels in several minutes. Normally, that could take half an hour.
Basically, you team them up with a pair of your most powerful or at least much more powerful battle pets. When I say powerful, at the very least I am talking about how high their level is.
I tried that out and it works great.
Battle pets range in levels from 1 to 25. You take a level 1 pet and a couple level 25 pets and go to a zone where the battle pets are say, 10 or 15. Your level 1 pet just has to survive a single round and you pull them out immediately, and finish the fight with one or both of your level 25 characters.
Bang, instead of your character going from level 1 to 2 it goes from level 1 to 5. Repeat the process, and it will likely gain another level or two in one fight!
Another lucky break I caught was receiving some flawless stones which allow you to convert battle pets of lower quality into a rare quality one. I used those and they helped quite a bit.
Now, all of these new and improved pets are grist for the mill in obtaining and speed leveling more pets.
I am far from an expert but at least now I have not just the basics of the whole thing down, but also have got the process slightly refined.
At first, I really struggled with getting high quality pets. I also found it very hard to level them up quickly. This is largely by design, I think.
Also likely by design, it turns out that it is a temporary setback. Things get easier as you go along.
Once you have a lot of battle pets, you can employ them in various clever ways to speed up the acquisition process, as well as leveling up your pets.
This past week, my evenings were a lot more rewarding than usual. I got some great battle pets; many of them of 'rare' (the best) quality: Spawn of Onyxia, Stunted Shardhorn, etc. I cannot remember exactly how many I got but it seems like it was a couple dozen new ones this week.
I also managed to speed up the leveling process of my battle pets quite a bit with a tip from a new friend in the game that took me under their wing for a bit after dinnertime one night, and explained their technique to get battle pets to jump up maybe as much as 5 levels in several minutes. Normally, that could take half an hour.
Basically, you team them up with a pair of your most powerful or at least much more powerful battle pets. When I say powerful, at the very least I am talking about how high their level is.
I tried that out and it works great.
Battle pets range in levels from 1 to 25. You take a level 1 pet and a couple level 25 pets and go to a zone where the battle pets are say, 10 or 15. Your level 1 pet just has to survive a single round and you pull them out immediately, and finish the fight with one or both of your level 25 characters.
Bang, instead of your character going from level 1 to 2 it goes from level 1 to 5. Repeat the process, and it will likely gain another level or two in one fight!
Another lucky break I caught was receiving some flawless stones which allow you to convert battle pets of lower quality into a rare quality one. I used those and they helped quite a bit.
Now, all of these new and improved pets are grist for the mill in obtaining and speed leveling more pets.
I am far from an expert but at least now I have not just the basics of the whole thing down, but also have got the process slightly refined.
Much of the time the tough little guy has big weak guys behind him
The title of this post is not categorically true but it is true sometimes in World of Warcraft.
In World of Warcraft there is a buffet of activities a player can do in order to increase the capabilities of their character(s).
One of the main ones is to perform quests. Some quests can be performed in dungeons; most are outside dungeons. Performing quests typically gives an item of some value or utility, a small amount of gold which is the in game abstract currency, a little bit of reputation with one or more factions, and some experience which counts a tiny bit toward bringing the character to the next level.
Currently, in WoW there are 90 levels if you have the latest expansion set, Mists of Pandaria; just 85 if you have not yet upgraded to it from Cataclysm; just 80 if you still only have gotten as far as Wrath of the Lich King; only 70 if the only expansion set you have bought is Burning Crusade; and a mere 60 if you have not bought any of the expansion sets.
Battlegrounds become available to you around level 10 or 11, and dungeons around level 15. Battlegrounds take players from approximately 5 level brackets, kind of the way that wrestling puts together competing players based on their weight. In World of Warcraft, every character generally starts off pretty weak.
As characters gain levels, they get stronger, more intelligent, more agile, gain more stamina and health, and so on.
They also gain the ability to wear better gear since much of the gear in the game either is directly marked as requiring at least a certain level to be attained before it can be equipped, or it is only available in dungeons or from quest rewards, both of which do ultimately involve minimal levels in order to be offered them in the first place.
Now, it turns out in the game as in life, there is some better gear, food & drink, medicine (potions & elixirs), and ways of enhancing your gear than most people know about; or can afford; or want to take the time/expense to learn how to make it. Some of it can be obtained by just being friends with someone who has it or can get/make it too.
And this is from where what are called "twinks" in the game come into being.
Twinks are in game slang for "hard on the outside and soft on the inside" which is what some people think of Twinkies as being.
What many people do after playing WoW for a number of months or more likely years is that they create a "twink". Level 19 happens to traditionally be a very popular level of twink. This is because at level 18 you gain for the first time the ability to 'buy' gear from a battleground quartermaster, the one loosely associated with Warsong Gulch.
So at level 18, after plying your burgeoning abilities to fight other player's characters on the opposing team with help of fellows from your own team, you have earned a fair number of honor points; particularly if you know what you are doing and thus win more per match, or you are just plain persistent.
It's a somewhat perilous journey for players on the 'Alliance' side of the game to reach the quartermaster. I am not sure why that is. For the horde players, it is pretty easy to reach their quarter master at that level. I never found out why that was. I guess it plays into the idea of varied experiences. Not everything is equal at every point although it hopefully is evened out over all.
Anyway, by cashing in some of these honor points earned in battlegrounds at level 18, you suddenly are tougher and more powerful than players who have not done so. Because this gear is very good.
You can also get gear from doing dungeons. Like anything else in life, you don't get everything you want on your first trip when you go someplace to shop. It may not be in stock, so nobody gets it. Or it might be there but someone else gets it so you lose out on that trip.
A couple of weeks ago, after years of play, I decided to create myself a real twink. Not a half hearted, weakly backed, not very well understood and only semi successful one but a really good one.
I had been playing the game a number of years. I had a team of characters that could create his armor, craft him some preliminary weapons to get him started, enhance his gear and weapons quite a bit, and so forth. It was a slow process at first but it picked up speed over the weekend.
Last night I did the crowing achievement which was to put very powerful enchantments upon his two weapons. One weapon he uses when casting spells, and the enchantment I laid upon it made it a very potent aid that dramatically improves the potency of his spells. The other weapon he uses when in melees. That weapon makes him attack harder with the weapon and also get some unusually hard hits on his opponents an unusually high proportion of the time; one quarter of the time, it turns out at this stage.
I was not able to get into a battleground when my character was fully ready but there were people actively visiting dungeons. So, I fell in with a crew that ran dungeon after dungeon. For my part, I had everything I needed except for a certain glove and a certain boot. Alas, only one of them showed up the whole night and I lost the dice roll for it so it went to another player's character. Maybe some other night I will be more fortunate.
What I really wanted to do was gauge how effective my efforts to "twink" my character had been.
Based on what went on in the dungeon, I was pretty successful at getting his gear up to par. I was able to kill elite characters in the dungeon one on one without two much difficulty so long as I took a short break between fights. I could even fight two at once, though I had to heal myself slightly during the fight.
With a few other players helping me, we could down an elite character in several seconds to maybe twenty seconds or more if it was a "boss" character.
This was way better than my previous experience in these low level character dungeons with a new character. I garnered a compliment or two on how fast I was able to kill some of these elite characters. I actually made of mistake for the first couple hours though and just picked whatever elite character in the fight I wanted to attack. That is kind of a no-no, if your character is very powerful.
You are supposed to only attack the character the "tank" character is fighting . If you don't do that then abruptly that character will decide to attack you instead of the much better armored character designated as the tank. This forces the healer to split his attention between the tank and you. That can cause them to run out of mana which is a necessary resource for spell casting be they healing or damaging spells. It also gets them very unwanted attention from the enemy characters since a little healing is inconspicuous but laying out a lot of it in a short period gets very noticed.
So the gist of what I am saying is that my game play in dungeons had gotten a little sloppy as far as the "fine points" of it went because the speed at which my characters could damage the programmed characters in dungeons was decent or good at best but far from great. Last night it was actually great, though. So, I eventually figured out what was up, adjusted my tact so I was frequently determining what the tank was attacking and going after it until it was time to move on to the next enemy character.
How my character will do in battlegrounds remains to be seen. But last night's little test run implies that as far as the character's gear goes, my work is almost done. I expect I will have to sharpen my player-vs-player techniques used in battle grounds, just like my experience in the dungeon gradually reminded me of some fine points I had forget about.
I will also have to have my alchemist character start to create some potions for this character to use in battlegrounds. When more than a couple characters are ganging up on you, unless there is a friendly healer standing by giving you his attention/aid then you are going to die [for tens of seconds]. But healing potions and other consumables can give you a slight edge but fixing what is broken, protecting you against what does you harm, and improving your health and damaging ability.
So hopefully, that gives you a feel for how a "tough" level 19 character in a battle ground, while seeming very hard to kill and kind of unusually deadly did not just suddenly become that way. Instead, by getting help collecting/improving gear from other characters of his player or other players, he was basically crafted into an unusually powerful character.
So twinks are not created through their own efforts but by other character's efforts. Those other characters do not have to be particularly powerful examples of characters at their own level. They simply need some resources, abilities, and efforts they are willing to apply to this newer character.
People create their twinks as a way to blow off steam in the game as well as get some enjoyment about some superiority when battling other players. In the grand scheme of things, it is also a chance to fine tune your skills. This in turn makes you better when operating as a member of a party of 5 or 10 players who are venturing together as a team, into a challenging dungeon.
The illusion of twinks is that they are superior, self made, successful characters. The reality could not any further from that perception.
In World of Warcraft there is a buffet of activities a player can do in order to increase the capabilities of their character(s).
One of the main ones is to perform quests. Some quests can be performed in dungeons; most are outside dungeons. Performing quests typically gives an item of some value or utility, a small amount of gold which is the in game abstract currency, a little bit of reputation with one or more factions, and some experience which counts a tiny bit toward bringing the character to the next level.
Currently, in WoW there are 90 levels if you have the latest expansion set, Mists of Pandaria; just 85 if you have not yet upgraded to it from Cataclysm; just 80 if you still only have gotten as far as Wrath of the Lich King; only 70 if the only expansion set you have bought is Burning Crusade; and a mere 60 if you have not bought any of the expansion sets.
Battlegrounds become available to you around level 10 or 11, and dungeons around level 15. Battlegrounds take players from approximately 5 level brackets, kind of the way that wrestling puts together competing players based on their weight. In World of Warcraft, every character generally starts off pretty weak.
As characters gain levels, they get stronger, more intelligent, more agile, gain more stamina and health, and so on.
They also gain the ability to wear better gear since much of the gear in the game either is directly marked as requiring at least a certain level to be attained before it can be equipped, or it is only available in dungeons or from quest rewards, both of which do ultimately involve minimal levels in order to be offered them in the first place.
Now, it turns out in the game as in life, there is some better gear, food & drink, medicine (potions & elixirs), and ways of enhancing your gear than most people know about; or can afford; or want to take the time/expense to learn how to make it. Some of it can be obtained by just being friends with someone who has it or can get/make it too.
And this is from where what are called "twinks" in the game come into being.
Twinks are in game slang for "hard on the outside and soft on the inside" which is what some people think of Twinkies as being.
What many people do after playing WoW for a number of months or more likely years is that they create a "twink". Level 19 happens to traditionally be a very popular level of twink. This is because at level 18 you gain for the first time the ability to 'buy' gear from a battleground quartermaster, the one loosely associated with Warsong Gulch.
So at level 18, after plying your burgeoning abilities to fight other player's characters on the opposing team with help of fellows from your own team, you have earned a fair number of honor points; particularly if you know what you are doing and thus win more per match, or you are just plain persistent.
It's a somewhat perilous journey for players on the 'Alliance' side of the game to reach the quartermaster. I am not sure why that is. For the horde players, it is pretty easy to reach their quarter master at that level. I never found out why that was. I guess it plays into the idea of varied experiences. Not everything is equal at every point although it hopefully is evened out over all.
Anyway, by cashing in some of these honor points earned in battlegrounds at level 18, you suddenly are tougher and more powerful than players who have not done so. Because this gear is very good.
You can also get gear from doing dungeons. Like anything else in life, you don't get everything you want on your first trip when you go someplace to shop. It may not be in stock, so nobody gets it. Or it might be there but someone else gets it so you lose out on that trip.
A couple of weeks ago, after years of play, I decided to create myself a real twink. Not a half hearted, weakly backed, not very well understood and only semi successful one but a really good one.
I had been playing the game a number of years. I had a team of characters that could create his armor, craft him some preliminary weapons to get him started, enhance his gear and weapons quite a bit, and so forth. It was a slow process at first but it picked up speed over the weekend.
Last night I did the crowing achievement which was to put very powerful enchantments upon his two weapons. One weapon he uses when casting spells, and the enchantment I laid upon it made it a very potent aid that dramatically improves the potency of his spells. The other weapon he uses when in melees. That weapon makes him attack harder with the weapon and also get some unusually hard hits on his opponents an unusually high proportion of the time; one quarter of the time, it turns out at this stage.
I was not able to get into a battleground when my character was fully ready but there were people actively visiting dungeons. So, I fell in with a crew that ran dungeon after dungeon. For my part, I had everything I needed except for a certain glove and a certain boot. Alas, only one of them showed up the whole night and I lost the dice roll for it so it went to another player's character. Maybe some other night I will be more fortunate.
What I really wanted to do was gauge how effective my efforts to "twink" my character had been.
Based on what went on in the dungeon, I was pretty successful at getting his gear up to par. I was able to kill elite characters in the dungeon one on one without two much difficulty so long as I took a short break between fights. I could even fight two at once, though I had to heal myself slightly during the fight.
With a few other players helping me, we could down an elite character in several seconds to maybe twenty seconds or more if it was a "boss" character.
This was way better than my previous experience in these low level character dungeons with a new character. I garnered a compliment or two on how fast I was able to kill some of these elite characters. I actually made of mistake for the first couple hours though and just picked whatever elite character in the fight I wanted to attack. That is kind of a no-no, if your character is very powerful.
You are supposed to only attack the character the "tank" character is fighting . If you don't do that then abruptly that character will decide to attack you instead of the much better armored character designated as the tank. This forces the healer to split his attention between the tank and you. That can cause them to run out of mana which is a necessary resource for spell casting be they healing or damaging spells. It also gets them very unwanted attention from the enemy characters since a little healing is inconspicuous but laying out a lot of it in a short period gets very noticed.
So the gist of what I am saying is that my game play in dungeons had gotten a little sloppy as far as the "fine points" of it went because the speed at which my characters could damage the programmed characters in dungeons was decent or good at best but far from great. Last night it was actually great, though. So, I eventually figured out what was up, adjusted my tact so I was frequently determining what the tank was attacking and going after it until it was time to move on to the next enemy character.
How my character will do in battlegrounds remains to be seen. But last night's little test run implies that as far as the character's gear goes, my work is almost done. I expect I will have to sharpen my player-vs-player techniques used in battle grounds, just like my experience in the dungeon gradually reminded me of some fine points I had forget about.
I will also have to have my alchemist character start to create some potions for this character to use in battlegrounds. When more than a couple characters are ganging up on you, unless there is a friendly healer standing by giving you his attention/aid then you are going to die [for tens of seconds]. But healing potions and other consumables can give you a slight edge but fixing what is broken, protecting you against what does you harm, and improving your health and damaging ability.
So hopefully, that gives you a feel for how a "tough" level 19 character in a battle ground, while seeming very hard to kill and kind of unusually deadly did not just suddenly become that way. Instead, by getting help collecting/improving gear from other characters of his player or other players, he was basically crafted into an unusually powerful character.
So twinks are not created through their own efforts but by other character's efforts. Those other characters do not have to be particularly powerful examples of characters at their own level. They simply need some resources, abilities, and efforts they are willing to apply to this newer character.
People create their twinks as a way to blow off steam in the game as well as get some enjoyment about some superiority when battling other players. In the grand scheme of things, it is also a chance to fine tune your skills. This in turn makes you better when operating as a member of a party of 5 or 10 players who are venturing together as a team, into a challenging dungeon.
The illusion of twinks is that they are superior, self made, successful characters. The reality could not any further from that perception.
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