Monthly Archives: September 2008

Hey Guys, Getting Experience Points as a Reward For Completing a Quest is Not a Bad Thing

I was reading a post on BG (I know, mistake #1 right there) about how the new beginner quests actually give *gasp* experience points for completing certain tasks (but no fame). In total, they give you 1800 experience. Not really gamebreaking.

Comment #10 – “so…..low lvls is like WoW now?”

Leading up to this, there are a lot of ‘about time’ and ‘really could have used that 4 years ago’ type comments, but this one stuck out the strongest to me of all of them.

My personal feelings are ‘who cares anymore about leveling up’. Anymore, leveling to 75 is just a chore, especially after the first time. The second, third, fourth, fifth, etc 75 just become a larger chore than the one before it (this comes from someone who has 4 75’s, a 61, and 2 53’s). I welcome anything to make this task go faster.

With that said, there is nothing wrong with having a npc assign a task to (for example) go and kill 20 rabbits, then give you an experience points reward equal to around 1/3rd of that of killing 20 monsters, maybe a small money amount, and perhaps a reward based on what you killed. Actually, such a quest does exist, aside from the experience points part. While you can buy the items from the AH, I think the idea is to go kill a number of monsters in that family, help you learn what they drop, as well as provide guidance to lowbie leveling targets. See the quest The Seamstress, and its follow up quests Lizard Skins, and Black Tiger Skins. The final result of this 3-stage quest is a Tiger Stole. Not an amazing item, but not horrible either.

So the goal of the quest (I assume) is that you kill a few even match monsters, get 500-600 exp per quest, turn it in, get a few items and some money. Now add on the quest giving you a 300 exp per quest bonus too. For quests which are much harder, or more time consuming, like the warp 2 quest, perhaps a 3000-5000 experience points bonus would be appropriate. Something that helps take the edge off of leveling. I also think that as you get higher level, the monsters should give more experience (I do realize this was increased at least once already, I believe it should be increased again, but have the base exp per kill raised instead of the potential exp from a larger level difference). I’m not saying that at 70 every monster should give you 4000 experience and you should level in 10 kills, like at level 1, I’m just saying that maybe 500-600 experience per kill (from the same monsters that now give 150-200) isn’t a bad thing either.

Lets take what would be a higher level quest. In the early 50’s, you get a quest from some npc in Rabao to ‘help clear out kuftal’. It gives a bonus experience of 2000, and 15K money (or maybe an item along the lines of a Jaeger Ring). Suddenly killing a bunch of crabs in Kuftal is a little bit more bearable. Once this became the norm, groups could pick their leveling area based on the quests they could get as well. There would need to be enough quests to match the number of leveling areas — we don’t need even more parties up at Greater Colibri. Maybe a “Go kill 200 weapons in sky, come back for a 10,000 exp bonus”. Sum of experience (assuming 200 exp per weapon no chain) is 40,000, plus the exp bonus, brings the total to 50,000 experience points (approximately). It could get more people into old leveling areas, and make it worthwhile to level there again.

I understand this has the potential to create more ‘high level n00bs’. Well, they will be created anyways, might as well not torture everyone else trying to prevent what cannot be avoided.

The main problem with this is a big one though. There just aren’t enough quests to allow for many level 75 jobs. After 1 or 2, it would be back to grinding for you (depending on how many of these quests were repeatable, and how often they were repeatable). However, since the game is as old as it is, this sort of change would bring new life into quests, and help with the 3rd or 4th 75 job that people would otherwise probably not level.

I Really Laughed At this one

Background on the name ‘Sydonia’

At one point, a long time ago, there was a character on Diabolos (my original server) named ‘Sydonia’.  I’m admitting that the name is not original, and was picked in honor of my friend.

One of the last messages I have from them (I do not know if they were a guy or girl, and in a way, it doesn’t matter) is this.

syd_message

11/11/2005, nearly 3 years ago now.  Yes, I have saved this as a new POL message for all of this time.

To say I miss Syd is an understatement.

A long time ago now, the Dosetsu Tree added to the game, complete with a new item — the Raikiri.  Worth over a mil at the time, I actually went out and got the drop for this person, and gave it to them.  This is the only time I can remember that I have solo hunted a monster for someone else.  This raikiri was also the 3rd or 4th on Diabolos.  Syd wanted one so badly, the stats were quite good for its time (remember that not too many people had B01 access at this time, and most mid-50 parties were in the Tree where it has nearly full-time thunder weather) and it was blue (blue blades are something we both liked a lot).

I still have this raikiri on a mule, its value next to nothing now.  I can’t see myself selling it (I have thought about it, but cannot bring myself to list it on the AH), and I may just delete the item from the game when I quit.

Syd leveled samurai after we discussed Rurouni Kenshin, one of the few animes I actually enjoyed watching, on Cartoon Network.  She did so much because she thought it would make me happy.

I have not talked to her in years, but I have not forgotten her.  The name of my WoW character is in honor of her.

If I ever met this person in real life, or in another game, I would be happy to call them a friend once again.

Even just writing this post, and thinking about my friend, makes me so warm inside again.  And sad that I do not know what happened to her.

Wherever you are Syd, come back to us please.

+7

I Can’t Help But Feel Like This Was Directed at Me

Just because one person doesn’t care about something doesn’t mean other’s don’t’ care. ( linky! )

Lets face it, for most people, there isn’t a whole lot left to post about. And looking on TTTO, there are a LOT of people who play WoW or another MMO either to take time away from FF, or along with FF, or play it more than FF, only occasionally logging into Vana’diel. So a WoW post is probably just as interesting to many as a FF post.

Updated Syd Pictures

Syd has hit 65 on Mage, so I thought it would be time for some new pictures!

Ok, I never needed an excuse to post pictures now.

Me flying through the Marsh in the outlands, saw this, though it was neat.

flying_syd

Syd at the edge of the world.  This is literally the edge of the playable areas, and I thought it was neat.

syd_edge_of_world

This is what it looks like in PvP.  This is in the battle ground called Alterac Valley, and is a resized full screen.

syd_pvp

Very busy, lots of stuff happening at once.  Yet the lag is not very bad at all.

Here is me in Shattrath City, with my Indiana Jones hat on.

syd_updated_pic

I have a witch hat now, I should take a new picture.

Oh and I wanted to share this too.  I haven’t turned it off because I find it valuable, but as you log on, you get a tip for playing.

tip_quest

When you view your quest log, it will show you how many people in your party are also on the same quest.  It makes questing a little easier, as there are very few many-leg quests (talk to 10 people, and if you miss one, gotta start over), these are generally made into many quests, which really helps make sure you don’t kill a monster and have someone say something like ‘I forgot to talk to that npc…. damn’.  Ok that still happens, but there is less of it.

~syd

Syd Gains a Friend, and a Doppelganger

One of the things I dislike about WoW is that each character can only have 1 class.  Since I wanted to try a few different classes, I had to make myself a friend.

I chose Rogue for my second class, and I made Umah, the blood elf rogue.

umah

Currently Level 7, but waiting for my friend to have some more free time, and also still working hard to get Syd to 70 with all of her crafts leveled.

As some of you know, my linkshell has a former member who plays WoW as well, but on a different server.  Sadly, he plays Alliance *cry* on a carebear server *whine* (that means it isn’t an open world PvP server).

So, I was forced to make my own Doppelganger.

Meet… Sydonia!

syd_jr

I went with a space goat (Draenei) hunter.

Yesterday, I met up with one of DJ’s alts, Ewatt.

syd_and_ewatt

Ewatt gave me a tour of the Alliance cities, which is a decent amount of content I have not experienced yet, as my main character is Horde.

Ewatt also showed me this thing.  I don’t know what it really does, but it was fun to watch.

robot

Supposedly, if there are 2 or more of these, they will fight each other.  But it is hard to find the recipe, therefore, there aren’t enough of them to find to fight each other.

Well, those are the new me’s.  An update real Syd post coming soonish.

~syd

Feelings on WoW after 4 Weeks of Playing

First thing is first, this is a link to my character in the WoW Armory. It will show many of the important stats, and is rarely more than 30 minutes behind actuality. It will also give me a place to start. I’m sure most of this information is old to many people, but to some people who read here, it is a look at something they have never played before.

Key things to know — There are two factions, the Alliance and the Horde. While some will describe the Horde as the ‘bad’ side, this really isn’t the case. They are just two groups that don’t like each other, and from my experiences, the Alliance is far more evil (because its full of teenagers playing rogue gnomes).

I did levels 1-64 in under 4 weeks. This is faster than is normally possible for a beginner. This was due to two things — #1 – my friend knows the game and the quests very well and was able to get them done fairly quickly, and #2 – linked accounts give triple experience points for all quests and monster kills.

Since in WoW, the primary way to gain experience is to do quests, we were moving around a lot, which makes easy transportation key.

The primary long distance travel method is the flight path. These cover long distances fairly quickly, but require you to talk to the flightmaster first in order to learn the path. Unlike FF, the flight paths are an on-demand travel system that will take you automatically to your destination. There are also many small settlements around the game world, most of which have flightpaths. Every so often, Blizzard will speed up or otherwise make the flightpaths faster, or add paths to make more connections. This is the opposite of what SE likes to do. SE makes things take longer, Blizzard makes the annoying things take less time.

There are three types of settlements, Friendly, Neutral, and Enemy. The status is somewhat based on your reputation (or fame) with that faction. For example, all Horde cities are ‘friendly’ to all members of the Horde, and ‘enemy’ to all members of the Alliance. Then there are other groups that will be either neutral to you (such as the various goblin cities, unless you do a lot of quests, in which case they turn friendly) or enemy (some groups will consider you an enemy if you side with their opposing group, and questing one group will raise your fame with them, but lower it with the other).

The three statuses are color coded. Green is Friendly, Yellow is Neutral, and Red is Enemy. There is a stage between Neutral and Enemy called ‘Unfriendly’. These monsters have an Orange colored name, but won’t attack unless attacked first (like a yellow).

As I mentioned earlier, the primary way to get experience points is via quests. A quest will also give you some reward (and item or money or both), fame, and experience points. For example, last night I soloed a bunch of quests. It took about 3 hours, and I gained around 400,000 experience points (not as much as it sounds, as 63->64 is around 650,000 experience points, 64->65 is around 680,000 experience points). I also gained around 250 gold (money) during this time, and raised my fame with several factions. Oh, and this was all solo too. With a current level cap of 70, and as an attack magic user (mage class), I was able to solo about 2/3rds of a level in a few hours, near the level cap, that’s just awesome (especially coming from the FF world where you can’t solo much of anything).

For gear, there are several ways to get the best stuff. The first is quests. Once you hit the outlands (starting around level 58), quests give very good items as a reward. And then the next quest gives an even better reward. The second way is instanced dungeons. These are not always easy, but give a lot of the best PvE gear. The third is battleground and arena. This is PvP, and gives PvP-centered gear (mage gear with high defense for example). Some of these items are just amazing, even for PvE events. The final way is to make it. In WoW, there is the concept of a r/ex recipe for an item, and some of these make r/ex items (so you make your own gear via the crafting system, making it so that people will level a craft that compliments their class, and at high levels, can make some really nice stuff for themselves). As a frost mage, I’ve chosen shadoweave tailoring, which will allow me to make the Bind on Pickup (r/ex) Frozen Shadoweave set.

This set can be further upgraded from its awesomeness with sockets (not sure how these work entirely, but I assume its like Diablo II) and enchanting (while my character is an enchanter, it is not high enough to do the enchants I really need, nor does it have the recipes required). The game has included a mechanism for an item to be enchanted via the trade window (and not traded, because it is soulbound). To be honest, I still do not fully understand enchanting, other than it is quite expensive and can be very profitable.

Crafting in general is different in WoW than FF. For starters, you have to buy (or be trained, or find the drop) every item you wish to make. You get an item when you hit the skill required (so if an item is 240, you can learn it at 240). Items will start off ‘red’ meaning you will be guaranteed a skillup for making one, then fall to ‘yellow’, where you will have a 50-75% chance of getting a skillup, then fall to ‘green’ where you have a lower chance of getting the skillup, and finally fall to ‘grey’ where you have no chance of getting skill. Items all have different ranges, and while one item may go from red to grey in 25 skill levels, another may do the same in 10. There also are tiers for everything. For tailoring, you start off with linen cloth from 1-75, then move to wool cloth from 76-150, then mageweave from 151-225, runecloth from 226-300, and finally netherweave from 301-375. These correspond nicely with every 10 levels of the game. Likewise, with enchanting, you gain the items needed by disenchanting other items. For items to get your skill from 1-75, you will need to disenchant items from 1-10 (more or less).

In terms of the rarity of drops, if you level normally, you will not have an issue leveling most tradeskills along as you level. I fully believe I could level tailoring and first aid without issue, just with the items you get from killing monsters, if I had not done the triple exp thing. Enchanting is much harder, especially since we leveled too fast to really get enough items to disenchant as we leveled.

As it stands now, my First Aid is 375 (capped), Tailoring is 351 (cap of 375), and Enchanting is 220 (where you’d expect it to be for about a level 50, it is the most expensive craft to level and will be my focus after I get my flying mounts and shadoweave gear. My cap is 385 on this due to a racial bonus of 10 skill levels).

These are my feelings after 4 weeks of playing. I’m still in the newbie phase, and I still really like the game. I don’t know how I’ll feel after a bit though, once the character is basically completed as far as it can go.

The only thing I can say I really don’t like is that you can only have one class per character (unlike FF where you can freely change between 20 jobs). While not a game ruiner for me, it is a negative point. It also means that to level a different class, you have to start a new character, and do some of the same things all over again. I can understand why they do not let you do more than 1 class per character — since you cannot repeat quests, it would require a redesign of a large portion of the game, or require you to just grind your way up through the levels by killing monsters.

Oh, did I mention that you get rested experience points for logging out in a major city or an inn in a minor city? This gives you double experience points until it wears off (but in my case, it hasn’t worn off in a while, and just keeps growing).

-pyra and syd