At the end of the session on Sunday we leveled up to level 9 which brings with it 'just' a new daily power. Aidan messaged me yesterday to look at the rogue dailies to see if anything stood out to me since they all seemed pretty bland. There were a couple interesting ones but nothing that really seemed very spectacular. A little extra damage, maybe some very situational utility, but nothing special. Then I took a look at my options... They're crazy! There are a wide variety of options and all of them seem very powerful...
For example, Aidan's best damage option was basically a normal attack followed by letting an ally make an attack too. So, around double damage but with two attack rolls. One of my damage options has me make an attack, and then for the rest of the fight I get to make an ally take an attack every round. So, I basically do double damage for the rest of the fight...
Maybe I want my damage option to hit a bunch of enemies instead of just one? Well, I can hit a 5x5 square for good damage and a save ends daze. Only downside there is it hits allies.
Or as a different take on ongoing damage I can make an 11x11 square zone which has all enemies in the zone take an extra d6 damage from all attacks. Is this better than giving an ally an attack per round? Well, assuming I use my at-will attacks for the rest of the fight giving out attacks then this will be doing 5d6 damage per round, excluding misses. So probably like 14 damage a round? Giving Sky an attack probably does about that much so they're pretty close. This attack has the advantage that if someone busts out an AE or uses an action point the damage ramps up. It has the disadvantage that if the enemies can get out of the 11x11 zone it does nothing. (The first one is a 3x3 square that gives out attacks but I can spend a move action to send it around.)
There's a cool pet buffing attack but I don't really attack with my pet so it's not an option for me.
Then there are the primarily healing options... First up I can make a 5x5 square that is difficult terrain for the enemies and heals any ally inside the zone for 7 each time they hit with an attack (max once per round). This zone can be moved with a move action but has the downside that I have to spend a minor action every round to sustain it.
Alternatively there's a single one shot heal which hits me and everyone within 10 squares for 7 healing. Sounds a little weak compared to the previous one, yeah, but it has a little bit of extra damage thrown in... An enemy gains vulnerable 5 (save ends). If a d6 per attack was good, 5 flat damage is pretty great! Of course it could actually get saved before anyone attacks which is unfortunate, and it also ends after the one monster dies. On the plus side the instant healing aspect will grant everyone a save! (Would the procs from the previous one also grant saves, I wonder? Reading the feat I think no. I also think I can't give myself a save so I totally cheated on Sunday. Frown.)
Finally we have the option that isn't technically healing but could well prevent more damage. And it's awesomely themed... Basically I'd polymorph one of my friends and turn them into a mountain. They'd become slowed (obviously, mountains are big and slow) and would resist 5 damage per attack. They'd also do 4 extra damage every time they attack. And as an added bonus when I first cast it I get to hit everyone adjacent to the mountain for decent damage and knocks them down. Downside, I have to spend a minor actions to keep it going. Upside, the target can spend a minor action to end it (in case the slow is too brutal I guess). This has some interesting options... Buffing the tank pretty much makes him an invincible killing machine unless the enemies run away. Or if we're in a bad spot and someone gets jumped by a couple guys or the tank is stuck somewhere else I can build a second tank. (Though they probably just go fight someone else then, but maybe that's all we need.)
I feel like the most important thing I can do is send out saves at a critical juncture. I already have a daily I use for just that though, so I'm not really sure I need a second one filling the same role. I'm not sure which way I'll end up going but one thing is for sure... My options are a lot cooler than Aidan's!
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Monday, October 03, 2011
More On Glitch
I spent most of the weekend away from the computer (I played board games with Duncan and Sara all night Friday which resulted in sleeping in late Saturday and then played D&D all day Sunday) and therefore didn't really get a chance to log in to Glitch. A lot of the time I was at the computer was spent futzing with City of Villains or playing League of Legends. I did know about this so I was actually researching skills in Glitch the whole time, tending to pick the longest available option to make sure I would waste as little time as possible. This had a couple of interesting side effects.
It feels like one of the ways you get quests is based on what skills you have researched. So when I finally logged in last night after D&D I was inundated with new quests. Capture pigs, teleport around, a couple different meditation quests, lots of other animal related quests since I powered all the way from Animal Kinship II to Animal Kinship V between sessions. I wandered around a bunch doing as many of those quests as I could before the football game ended and it was time to go to bed.
We were talking at D&D before heading out for supper about the game. It turns out Sky's wife, young daughter, and Sthenno have all started down the capture pig tech tree. There's a lot of different things you can gather but it would seem we were all drawn to the ones that deal with bacon. That I headed down this tree should come as no surprise to anyone who was my Farmville neighbour as I played that game pretty much exclusively to send pigs to my friends. The question now is what other skill tree should I start learning? Sthenno is doing cooking to go with his animals which makes sense. You can turn your pig meat into actual meals! The game is set up with a big tax on learning new skills if you've learned too many of them so fully doubling up seems wrong. I'm leaning towards becoming a tinker to make new and crazy things even though that doesn't feel like it should combo well with pigs at all. I can just be the crazy pig whisperer who makes random junk!
The game is also 'non-violent' but one of the skill is an attack. I've actually recently finished learning that skill (it chained off of the meditation skills and took a long time so it made sense to do it overnight. But it now has me wondering what an attack skill could possibly be used for. Does it let me grief other players? Do I get to slaughter pigs and butterflies? Robb suggested that maybe the game is just a big social experiment to see how long it would take for people to learn the attack skill in a non-violent game. I'm hoping there will be a quest associated with it that will explain why I'm now able to attack people with my imagination. (The real world is _very_ happy that I don't actually have that ability...)
It feels like one of the ways you get quests is based on what skills you have researched. So when I finally logged in last night after D&D I was inundated with new quests. Capture pigs, teleport around, a couple different meditation quests, lots of other animal related quests since I powered all the way from Animal Kinship II to Animal Kinship V between sessions. I wandered around a bunch doing as many of those quests as I could before the football game ended and it was time to go to bed.
We were talking at D&D before heading out for supper about the game. It turns out Sky's wife, young daughter, and Sthenno have all started down the capture pig tech tree. There's a lot of different things you can gather but it would seem we were all drawn to the ones that deal with bacon. That I headed down this tree should come as no surprise to anyone who was my Farmville neighbour as I played that game pretty much exclusively to send pigs to my friends. The question now is what other skill tree should I start learning? Sthenno is doing cooking to go with his animals which makes sense. You can turn your pig meat into actual meals! The game is set up with a big tax on learning new skills if you've learned too many of them so fully doubling up seems wrong. I'm leaning towards becoming a tinker to make new and crazy things even though that doesn't feel like it should combo well with pigs at all. I can just be the crazy pig whisperer who makes random junk!
The game is also 'non-violent' but one of the skill is an attack. I've actually recently finished learning that skill (it chained off of the meditation skills and took a long time so it made sense to do it overnight. But it now has me wondering what an attack skill could possibly be used for. Does it let me grief other players? Do I get to slaughter pigs and butterflies? Robb suggested that maybe the game is just a big social experiment to see how long it would take for people to learn the attack skill in a non-violent game. I'm hoping there will be a quest associated with it that will explain why I'm now able to attack people with my imagination. (The real world is _very_ happy that I don't actually have that ability...)
Sunday, October 02, 2011
NCSoft Response
It took 25 hours but the NCSoft people replied to my ticket about my lost log-in information. Unfortunately the reply was a form letter. I used to work in a support role for an online game and I certainly sent out my fair share of form letters so I'm not sure it's really ok to complain, but I'm going to do it anyway. In my case I was rarely in a position to actually do anything and sending people to a form to fill out was all I could do. I'd like to think in my case here that 'Sam' could have done something more.
At any rate, if I can't answer my security questions I need to fill out a bunch of other information. I can somewhat see why they'd want me to answer this stuff to prove I'm actually me since they don't want just anybody logging in to my account. On the other hand the account has been inactive for almost 6 years and I'm not asking for the information to be sent to me. I want it sent to the email address registered with the account when it was created. It feels like it would be a good customer experience to just give me my account back. Best case scenario I'm actually me and they make me happy by limiting the hoops I need to jump through. Worst case scenario someone steals an account I haven't used in 6 years. Disaster scenario is someone steals an account I haven't used in 6 years and then I actually show up and want it back too. In that case I'd just find a way to restore what I'd be missing and kick the thief out. It feels like the disaster scenario should be a lot rarer than the best case scenario, especially after they send out a recruiting drive email.
The stuff the form wants me to answer is my name, address, and date of birth as of when I created my account. (I can't imagine by birth day would have changed!) It wants the serial codes for the games added to the account, and the unique account IDs sent when I activated those games. It also wants the last 4 digits of my credit card used to activate the account.
Some of that I can provide. I do still have the initial email so I have that account id. I don't have the last 4 digits of that credit card since that credit card expired like 5 years ago and I didn't keep it. (I also had to have it changed after some fraud concerns.) I don't have a clue what the serial code would be. I've moved several times since then and the City of Villains box is not something that made it through all those moves. Frankly I don't even know where I was living when I activated the game. It wasn't out in New Brunswick since I was playing with my brother online only. It wasn't with Pounder, I don't think, since I don't recall trying to convince him to play with me. So it was probably one of the random places in Waterloo I lived in for 4 months?
So, yeah, I don't have most of the information they want. I might be able to eventually convince them that I'm me despite not having the info they want. (I once had my Yahoo account get hacked and managed to get it back by taking the 'come on, please?' tactic over and over until it worked.) Getting to take a picture of Oroku Saki is really not worth all that hassle though.
Time to uninstall a game I didn't get a chance to try again. Sorry, City of Villains, you lose.
At any rate, if I can't answer my security questions I need to fill out a bunch of other information. I can somewhat see why they'd want me to answer this stuff to prove I'm actually me since they don't want just anybody logging in to my account. On the other hand the account has been inactive for almost 6 years and I'm not asking for the information to be sent to me. I want it sent to the email address registered with the account when it was created. It feels like it would be a good customer experience to just give me my account back. Best case scenario I'm actually me and they make me happy by limiting the hoops I need to jump through. Worst case scenario someone steals an account I haven't used in 6 years. Disaster scenario is someone steals an account I haven't used in 6 years and then I actually show up and want it back too. In that case I'd just find a way to restore what I'd be missing and kick the thief out. It feels like the disaster scenario should be a lot rarer than the best case scenario, especially after they send out a recruiting drive email.
The stuff the form wants me to answer is my name, address, and date of birth as of when I created my account. (I can't imagine by birth day would have changed!) It wants the serial codes for the games added to the account, and the unique account IDs sent when I activated those games. It also wants the last 4 digits of my credit card used to activate the account.
Some of that I can provide. I do still have the initial email so I have that account id. I don't have the last 4 digits of that credit card since that credit card expired like 5 years ago and I didn't keep it. (I also had to have it changed after some fraud concerns.) I don't have a clue what the serial code would be. I've moved several times since then and the City of Villains box is not something that made it through all those moves. Frankly I don't even know where I was living when I activated the game. It wasn't out in New Brunswick since I was playing with my brother online only. It wasn't with Pounder, I don't think, since I don't recall trying to convince him to play with me. So it was probably one of the random places in Waterloo I lived in for 4 months?
So, yeah, I don't have most of the information they want. I might be able to eventually convince them that I'm me despite not having the info they want. (I once had my Yahoo account get hacked and managed to get it back by taking the 'come on, please?' tactic over and over until it worked.) Getting to take a picture of Oroku Saki is really not worth all that hassle though.
Time to uninstall a game I didn't get a chance to try again. Sorry, City of Villains, you lose.
Saturday, October 01, 2011
NCSoft "Security" Issues
I got up this afternoon around 3 and, true to my word, started installing City of Heroes. It downloaded some sort of launcher program first and then that started installing the game itself. I busied myself in other windows, screwing around in Galaxy Legion and playing some turns of board games on Yucata.
Suddenly my second monitor went black. (My computer is a laptop with a larger monitor connected via an HDMI port.) My laptop monitor flickered and came back with a drastically reduced resolution. Then my second monitor returned. I was a little freaked out, especially since nothing had popped up to indicate anything would be happening. Things were lagging but I managed to get to my desktop and change the resolution back. Then I looked and realized that City of Heroes had finished installing enough to launch itself in the background without telling me and took it on itself to wreck my display settings.
I went to that window and had a hard time moving around. It would seem it didn't realize that I'd changed the resolution back so if I wanted to click a button I had to move my mouse to where the client thought the button was instead of where the screen was showing it. Ok, fine. I manage to click the exit button after fighting for a few minutes and relaunch it. It screwed up my display again so I sucked that up and tried to log in. No go. I didn't know what my password was and it wasn't any of my standard ones circa 2005. Not too surprising I guess, so I went to the password recovery form. They know my email address (after all, they spammed me to get me to come back) so this should be a simple fix, right? Send a new password to my email address and let me play.
Nope. I enter my username in the password recovery form and they tell me I need to answer the security questions I chose when I created my account. I hate this sort of thing, but ok. What questions did I pick? My father's middle name and the name of the hospital where I was born.
WHAT?
I don't know the name of the hospital where I was born. I can't imagine 2005 Nick knew that either. On a whim I checked my birth certificate in case it said. Nope. Other than calling my mother and seeing if she knows I can't think of a way to get that information. There's no way I would have done that in 2005 to create a game account. Maybe I put in dummy information assuming I wouldn't need to use it? Regardless, there's no way I can get my account back via the form.
I found a way to contact support and sent them an email explaining my case and complaining that the form wouldn't let me get my account back. That was 5 hours ago with no response as yet. On the one hand it is the weekend and maybe they don't have people checking their support inbox right now. On the other hand they did just send out a recruiting email and needed to expect some people would try to log in and be unable to. I theorized that they sent the email on a Friday so I could spend my free weekend trying their game out again. Well, I can't do that because they're not letting me and it's not making me happy. I was willing to spend a couple hours trying the game again. Instead I've spent those hours installing software which screws with my display settings and trying to get back an account. It hasn't been fun and I'm pretty much giving up at this point.
The launcher listed some other games. Aion, Guild Wars, Lineage 2. Apparently they all use one master account like Blizzard's Battle.Net. So I can't play those games either. I did a little searching about this NCSoft master account and apparently it's a bit of a disaster. Apparently those security questions I couldn't answer? Added in on March, 2011. Which raises all kinds of questions... How did NCSoft find out my father's middle name? How do they know where I was born? How can they possibly justify keeping me out of my account for not knowing the answers to questions they made up? Do they not even want me to be able to recover my account?
I then found a horror story which is really hard to imagine happening. Apparently when you logged into your NCSoft master account it would sometimes log you in as someone else. Changing your password and other information once you were logged in didn't require reauthentication. So you'd log in as someone else and could then change their password to whatever you wanted. Which would give you access to their Aion account. And their CoH account. And their GW account... Sleazy people who figured this out would then log in and our of their account over an over until the site gave them access to someone else's account at which point they'd clean them out and repeat.
I'm just flabbergasted. The way they seem to handle security given those two things just blows my mind. I have so many games to play that I can't imagine giving these people my time or my money. One of my old WoW friends has been trying to convince me to play Guild Wars 2 when it comes out but it's an NCSoft title and I'm really not sure it's worth the risk. If I'm going to invest a lot of time into a character I want to be reasonably confident that character isn't just going to disappear one day, either to the system getting hacked or to the site randomly locking me out.
Suddenly my second monitor went black. (My computer is a laptop with a larger monitor connected via an HDMI port.) My laptop monitor flickered and came back with a drastically reduced resolution. Then my second monitor returned. I was a little freaked out, especially since nothing had popped up to indicate anything would be happening. Things were lagging but I managed to get to my desktop and change the resolution back. Then I looked and realized that City of Heroes had finished installing enough to launch itself in the background without telling me and took it on itself to wreck my display settings.
I went to that window and had a hard time moving around. It would seem it didn't realize that I'd changed the resolution back so if I wanted to click a button I had to move my mouse to where the client thought the button was instead of where the screen was showing it. Ok, fine. I manage to click the exit button after fighting for a few minutes and relaunch it. It screwed up my display again so I sucked that up and tried to log in. No go. I didn't know what my password was and it wasn't any of my standard ones circa 2005. Not too surprising I guess, so I went to the password recovery form. They know my email address (after all, they spammed me to get me to come back) so this should be a simple fix, right? Send a new password to my email address and let me play.
Nope. I enter my username in the password recovery form and they tell me I need to answer the security questions I chose when I created my account. I hate this sort of thing, but ok. What questions did I pick? My father's middle name and the name of the hospital where I was born.
WHAT?
I don't know the name of the hospital where I was born. I can't imagine 2005 Nick knew that either. On a whim I checked my birth certificate in case it said. Nope. Other than calling my mother and seeing if she knows I can't think of a way to get that information. There's no way I would have done that in 2005 to create a game account. Maybe I put in dummy information assuming I wouldn't need to use it? Regardless, there's no way I can get my account back via the form.
I found a way to contact support and sent them an email explaining my case and complaining that the form wouldn't let me get my account back. That was 5 hours ago with no response as yet. On the one hand it is the weekend and maybe they don't have people checking their support inbox right now. On the other hand they did just send out a recruiting email and needed to expect some people would try to log in and be unable to. I theorized that they sent the email on a Friday so I could spend my free weekend trying their game out again. Well, I can't do that because they're not letting me and it's not making me happy. I was willing to spend a couple hours trying the game again. Instead I've spent those hours installing software which screws with my display settings and trying to get back an account. It hasn't been fun and I'm pretty much giving up at this point.
The launcher listed some other games. Aion, Guild Wars, Lineage 2. Apparently they all use one master account like Blizzard's Battle.Net. So I can't play those games either. I did a little searching about this NCSoft master account and apparently it's a bit of a disaster. Apparently those security questions I couldn't answer? Added in on March, 2011. Which raises all kinds of questions... How did NCSoft find out my father's middle name? How do they know where I was born? How can they possibly justify keeping me out of my account for not knowing the answers to questions they made up? Do they not even want me to be able to recover my account?
I then found a horror story which is really hard to imagine happening. Apparently when you logged into your NCSoft master account it would sometimes log you in as someone else. Changing your password and other information once you were logged in didn't require reauthentication. So you'd log in as someone else and could then change their password to whatever you wanted. Which would give you access to their Aion account. And their CoH account. And their GW account... Sleazy people who figured this out would then log in and our of their account over an over until the site gave them access to someone else's account at which point they'd clean them out and repeat.
I'm just flabbergasted. The way they seem to handle security given those two things just blows my mind. I have so many games to play that I can't imagine giving these people my time or my money. One of my old WoW friends has been trying to convince me to play Guild Wars 2 when it comes out but it's an NCSoft title and I'm really not sure it's worth the risk. If I'm going to invest a lot of time into a character I want to be reasonably confident that character isn't just going to disappear one day, either to the system getting hacked or to the site randomly locking me out.
Friday, September 30, 2011
MMO Recruiting
I woke up this morning to two different emails from MMORPGs that I used to play. Both emails were espousing the new features recently added to the games. I wonder about the timing that caused them both to arrive at the same time. Is it just that they want to send out emails on Friday so that people think to use their spare weekend time coming back to the games?
One of the emails came from Final Fantasy XI. They've raised the level cap again and redid a few zones to provide higher level monsters. (Technical issues surrounding the PlayStation 2 apparently prevent them from adding new zones to the game.) I still want to play this game but recruiting up enough people to actually play with proved problematic. And unlike joining a new game (like Glitch, say) there's not a lot of opportunities to find people to play with, either. Most people returning to FFXI now will want to play to the new level cap (95). I have no ability to interact with those people in any real manner. So despite new stuff going on this email did nothing for me. The things that drove me away from playing in the second place still exist. (I left the first time because all my friends played WoW. That problem has since been solved.)
The other came from City of Heroes. I never actually played the original game but I did play City of Villains for a month and those game have since been fully integrated, I think. The reason I quit that game was a sort of combination of the reasons I'm not playing FFXI. I was already playing an MMO (WoW) and therefore didn't really have a lot of time to put into CoV. I didn't know anyone who played except for my brother, and often if we were both going to play a game it was going to be WoW anyway. I wasn't playing enough to justify paying a second monthly fee so I cancelled after my free month was up. I really liked my character, though. I was Oroku Saki and led a pack of ninjas called The Foot Clan. It was awesome!
The City of Heroes email was heralding the switch of CoH from a subscription based system to a free to play system with an item shop. Apparently because I played for that earlier month my account gets some sort of bonus in the free to play land. (I can join guilds, send private messages, and send in game mail.) It looks like anyone new who pays any amount of money ever also gets those same bonuses, which is nice. This switch does solve my initial problem. I didn't think I was going to play enough to justify paying, but now that it's free I can log in and tool around as the Shredder every now and then without feeling bad about it. Having to install the client is going to be annoying (why can't it be in a web browser like Glitch?) but I think I'll give it an install tomorrow and see. It's also quite conceivable that this change will actually bring new players to the game, giving people for my low level villain to group with.
One of the emails came from Final Fantasy XI. They've raised the level cap again and redid a few zones to provide higher level monsters. (Technical issues surrounding the PlayStation 2 apparently prevent them from adding new zones to the game.) I still want to play this game but recruiting up enough people to actually play with proved problematic. And unlike joining a new game (like Glitch, say) there's not a lot of opportunities to find people to play with, either. Most people returning to FFXI now will want to play to the new level cap (95). I have no ability to interact with those people in any real manner. So despite new stuff going on this email did nothing for me. The things that drove me away from playing in the second place still exist. (I left the first time because all my friends played WoW. That problem has since been solved.)
The other came from City of Heroes. I never actually played the original game but I did play City of Villains for a month and those game have since been fully integrated, I think. The reason I quit that game was a sort of combination of the reasons I'm not playing FFXI. I was already playing an MMO (WoW) and therefore didn't really have a lot of time to put into CoV. I didn't know anyone who played except for my brother, and often if we were both going to play a game it was going to be WoW anyway. I wasn't playing enough to justify paying a second monthly fee so I cancelled after my free month was up. I really liked my character, though. I was Oroku Saki and led a pack of ninjas called The Foot Clan. It was awesome!
The City of Heroes email was heralding the switch of CoH from a subscription based system to a free to play system with an item shop. Apparently because I played for that earlier month my account gets some sort of bonus in the free to play land. (I can join guilds, send private messages, and send in game mail.) It looks like anyone new who pays any amount of money ever also gets those same bonuses, which is nice. This switch does solve my initial problem. I didn't think I was going to play enough to justify paying, but now that it's free I can log in and tool around as the Shredder every now and then without feeling bad about it. Having to install the client is going to be annoying (why can't it be in a web browser like Glitch?) but I think I'll give it an install tomorrow and see. It's also quite conceivable that this change will actually bring new players to the game, giving people for my low level villain to group with.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Glitch!
Yesterday Tobold posted about a 'non-violent' MMO that had just launched named Glitch. He made reference to A Tale in the Desert which is a game I recall briefly trying and liking but not really playing for some reason. At any rate, I figured I'd give it a go and see what it was like. I went to the website and applied for an account which seemed a little weird. More than a day later I got an email with a link to create the account. I'm not sure why they're throttling account creation so hard but I logged on this evening regardless.
The first thing that jumped out at me is there's no client. It's contained entirely within a web browser window, and it's very slick. I've definitely experienced worse controls in a 'real' game client.
Gameplay itself feels a lot like a Facebook game. I have an energy bar and I spend energy as I go things in the world. It's not entirely clear what the ultimate goal is but so far there has been a steady stream of quests showing me how different things work. Mostly I'm just gathering random stuff from things I can interact with. (Squeeze a chicken? Get some grain! Nibble a pig? Get some meat! (It doesn't say the meat is bacon but we all know it is. And hence I am spending a lot of time tracking down pigs and nibbling on them!)
The game has a research/skill tree that works a lot like Eve. Start a skill researching and after X amount of time it will finish. You don't need to be logged in to the game for the research to function. It looks like you can change the skill you're researching without even going into the game itself as there's a webpage with the tech tree. (My hope is this page doesn't require Flash and that I can therefore learn skills while at work.) Unfortunately it seems they didn't learn from Eve when it comes to skills that reduce the cost of other skills... I'm currently learning the skill 'Better Learning 1' which reduces the cost of all other skills by 2%. It only takes 30 minutes to learn so it's going to pay itself off in 25 hours. Especially when that 25 hours can tick down while I'm not in the game it seems like an absolute must have. It even has a minor secondary effect! (Though the way they word it, the minor effect is the main ability and the 2% cost reduction is the tacked on part...) It's also a pre-requisite for teleportation, penpersonship, and bureaucratic arts. I don't know what those do, but teleportation sounds awesome so it's all the more reason to grab this skill.
Whoever wrote the quests has a quirky sense of humour. My current quest is called 'Happy Endings For All!' and it entails getting some butterfly lotion and then massaging 7 different butterflies. (You can gather milk from butterflies but only if you massage them first...)
I don't know if this game will be a keeper or not but not needing to install a client and having numbers to make bigger is certainly enough to get me started. Running out of energy may drive me away, but we'll see.
And as an added bonus, when you exit the game the following message pops up... "WAIT! You were just about to win the game!"
The first thing that jumped out at me is there's no client. It's contained entirely within a web browser window, and it's very slick. I've definitely experienced worse controls in a 'real' game client.
Gameplay itself feels a lot like a Facebook game. I have an energy bar and I spend energy as I go things in the world. It's not entirely clear what the ultimate goal is but so far there has been a steady stream of quests showing me how different things work. Mostly I'm just gathering random stuff from things I can interact with. (Squeeze a chicken? Get some grain! Nibble a pig? Get some meat! (It doesn't say the meat is bacon but we all know it is. And hence I am spending a lot of time tracking down pigs and nibbling on them!)
The game has a research/skill tree that works a lot like Eve. Start a skill researching and after X amount of time it will finish. You don't need to be logged in to the game for the research to function. It looks like you can change the skill you're researching without even going into the game itself as there's a webpage with the tech tree. (My hope is this page doesn't require Flash and that I can therefore learn skills while at work.) Unfortunately it seems they didn't learn from Eve when it comes to skills that reduce the cost of other skills... I'm currently learning the skill 'Better Learning 1' which reduces the cost of all other skills by 2%. It only takes 30 minutes to learn so it's going to pay itself off in 25 hours. Especially when that 25 hours can tick down while I'm not in the game it seems like an absolute must have. It even has a minor secondary effect! (Though the way they word it, the minor effect is the main ability and the 2% cost reduction is the tacked on part...) It's also a pre-requisite for teleportation, penpersonship, and bureaucratic arts. I don't know what those do, but teleportation sounds awesome so it's all the more reason to grab this skill.
Whoever wrote the quests has a quirky sense of humour. My current quest is called 'Happy Endings For All!' and it entails getting some butterfly lotion and then massaging 7 different butterflies. (You can gather milk from butterflies but only if you massage them first...)
I don't know if this game will be a keeper or not but not needing to install a client and having numbers to make bigger is certainly enough to get me started. Running out of energy may drive me away, but we'll see.
And as an added bonus, when you exit the game the following message pops up... "WAIT! You were just about to win the game!"
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Kill Things and Eat Them!
Armed with my Java transformation program I set off last night in search of power and tasty things to eat. The going was very rough at the start. I had a sequence of meat I wanted to eat in order to turn my starting goblins into higher level monsters but the problem is the monsters I wanted to eat were only found in the hardest dungeon I have access to, and themselves are substantially stronger than goblins are. My red bull was good enough to take them out but he could only attack 10 times before having to run back to the inn. Also, his progression path involved moving to a substantially worse level 1 monster before I could jump to level 2. And the first thing the goblins turned into at level 2 was actually worse than a goblin!
I made substantial use of save states and knowledge that the random number generator isn't random at all to learn how many rounds it would take to run from each fight. I also would go to a different level of the castle if I wasn't getting any good fights since there are different fights on each level. After several runs back to town (I remade the Bung character 3 times as he kept dying while other monsters were powering up) I eventually got to the point where all my characters were leveled up above 20 maximum health. Above and beyond remaking the Bung character I suffered two other deaths to leveled up monsters. (If any character dies three time they're gone for good.) One was even on my main character which is unfortunate.
On the plus side once I got my team up to level 3 I became essentially invincible. Most monsters attack me for 0 damage and my team tends to have 50+ actions they can take between trips to an inn instead of 10 like my red bull started with. They also kill enemies in 1 attack total instead of needing 5 or 6 attacks from my team. So while it started off rather painfully it's actually become a lot easier to level up as I've gotten better.
I was thinking earlier that I wanted to level a little bit and then would probably get bored of grinding and work on the plot. Having worked at it a little bit now I'm pretty sure I now want to just twink up as high as I can possibly get and then move on. Unlike leveling in most games it's actually getting easier and faster to level up on low level monsters than it would be on appropriate level monsters. Until I reach a point where I can't level on the trash in this castle I'm probably going to stay there... When I stopped playing last night my levels were 10, 6, 6, 4!
One interesting thing was that at level 6 I turned into a mosquito and it was an unbelievable beating compared to anything I'd been previously. Clearly whoever was in charge of monster design at Square has visited Riverview!
I made substantial use of save states and knowledge that the random number generator isn't random at all to learn how many rounds it would take to run from each fight. I also would go to a different level of the castle if I wasn't getting any good fights since there are different fights on each level. After several runs back to town (I remade the Bung character 3 times as he kept dying while other monsters were powering up) I eventually got to the point where all my characters were leveled up above 20 maximum health. Above and beyond remaking the Bung character I suffered two other deaths to leveled up monsters. (If any character dies three time they're gone for good.) One was even on my main character which is unfortunate.
On the plus side once I got my team up to level 3 I became essentially invincible. Most monsters attack me for 0 damage and my team tends to have 50+ actions they can take between trips to an inn instead of 10 like my red bull started with. They also kill enemies in 1 attack total instead of needing 5 or 6 attacks from my team. So while it started off rather painfully it's actually become a lot easier to level up as I've gotten better.
I was thinking earlier that I wanted to level a little bit and then would probably get bored of grinding and work on the plot. Having worked at it a little bit now I'm pretty sure I now want to just twink up as high as I can possibly get and then move on. Unlike leveling in most games it's actually getting easier and faster to level up on low level monsters than it would be on appropriate level monsters. Until I reach a point where I can't level on the trash in this castle I'm probably going to stay there... When I stopped playing last night my levels were 10, 6, 6, 4!
One interesting thing was that at level 6 I turned into a mosquito and it was an unbelievable beating compared to anything I'd been previously. Clearly whoever was in charge of monster design at Square has visited Riverview!
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Galaxy Legion: Modulated Xecti Disruptor
It's time for the next temporary mission in the chain! The energy and experience remain the same as always, 55 experience for 25 energy. This time you need to do it 90 times before you get a reward and you can get the reward a total of 4 times.
What do you get for your 2250 energy? You get an interesting ship module. It's size 15 for 40 cloak and 20 attack. For an attack module that's a really inefficient ratio but it's pretty decent for cloak. And since it's a mission reward the upkeep is going to be substantially lower than top-end guns so pretty much everyone should get all 4 of these as soon as they can. You often want to have the most attack possible at any given time and this module just makes the number bigger, space inefficient though it may be.
You're actually better off getting tactical officers instead of decks to put this on if you value the cloak at nothing, so maybe this isn't so hot? Well, it turns out there is an added twist. If your race is Zolazin or if your class is spy or hacker then the cloak bonus is doubled. And if your race is Konqul or Drannik or if your class is raider then the attack bonus is doubled. Pull that off and this becomes much better than tactical officers.
Right now I'm none of those things. (I'm a Mylarai miner.) So is this module actually worth putting on? For 15 rank points I can get the deck space to put this on or I can get 30 tactical officers. So is the 40 cloak worth giving up on 10 attack? I'm not sure it is. I do eventually intend on switching my race back to Konqul at some point, so I will want to have these on hand at the very least. So I'm going to get them for the future and will probably decide at some point that the cloak is good enough to make space for these.
What do you get for your 2250 energy? You get an interesting ship module. It's size 15 for 40 cloak and 20 attack. For an attack module that's a really inefficient ratio but it's pretty decent for cloak. And since it's a mission reward the upkeep is going to be substantially lower than top-end guns so pretty much everyone should get all 4 of these as soon as they can. You often want to have the most attack possible at any given time and this module just makes the number bigger, space inefficient though it may be.
You're actually better off getting tactical officers instead of decks to put this on if you value the cloak at nothing, so maybe this isn't so hot? Well, it turns out there is an added twist. If your race is Zolazin or if your class is spy or hacker then the cloak bonus is doubled. And if your race is Konqul or Drannik or if your class is raider then the attack bonus is doubled. Pull that off and this becomes much better than tactical officers.
Right now I'm none of those things. (I'm a Mylarai miner.) So is this module actually worth putting on? For 15 rank points I can get the deck space to put this on or I can get 30 tactical officers. So is the 40 cloak worth giving up on 10 attack? I'm not sure it is. I do eventually intend on switching my race back to Konqul at some point, so I will want to have these on hand at the very least. So I'm going to get them for the future and will probably decide at some point that the cloak is good enough to make space for these.
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