Blade And Soul Beta, Headset Issues

I tried the Blade and Soul Closed Beta test this weekend. I didn't get very far, mostly because of an odd headset issue. I'll give quick impressions below.

Headset Issues

I had an odd issue with my headphones this weekend. For some reason, I could not hear voices at all, but all background music and other sounds came through fine. At first I thought it was caused by the Blade and Soul beta, so I uninstalled that relatively quickly. But that didn't help.

After a lot of fiddling, I found that if I adjusted the Left/Right balance of my headphones, I could hear voices. Of course, now everything sounded odd. It looks like I'll just have to find a replacement headset.

Blade And Soul Impressions

Because of the above issue, I didn't really get that much time with Blade and Soul. I tried the first 3 levels or so with three or so classes. However, since the beta was a weekend-only thing, I didn't bother re-downloading it after uninstalling it the first time.

Blade and Soul is an action-y MMO from Korea, being brought over here by NCSoft. The character creator is very extensive with crazy amounts of sliders. Sadly, for me this just means that it is very hard to make a decent-looking character, and very easy to make something grotesque. I ended up doing my standard "drag every slider to the middle" technique.

The game plays a little like TERA, with somewhat similar controls. There are some interesting design touches, like several classes having a block-style ability. Successfully executing a block restores resources and empowers one of your attacks.

However, I am not a big fan of the interface. Most western games like to have the default interface on the edges of the screen, leaving the center area dedicated to your character and the world. Blade and Soul moves a lot of the important UI elements into that center area, impinging on your view of your character.

Of course, the flip-side is that this is very common practice among experienced players. Moving the most relevant information closer to the center is very useful for performance. I just did not like it here, though. It seemed like there was too much "UI" and not enough "game".

However, I really did not get any time to give more than the barest of impressions. Maybe next beta weekend I'll be able to give a better overview.

Fallen Empire: Alliances

I've finished the nine chapters of Fallen Empires that were released. Shintar makes a good point, when she describes the experience as "the borders between your personal story and the rest of the game are marked more starkly." The main story is very much a true single-player experience, the KotoR 3 that people have been asking for.

But after that come the more traditional MMO elements. Here, Bioware has done some interesting things. The main story of Fallen Empire is not complete yet. What's been released is more like Part 1. Where it stops, your character is setting up an Alliance to oppose the Zakuul Empire.

In some respects, it's like Garrisons from WoW. Only the focus is on recruiting new companions, and sending you out into the galaxy to accomplish things, rather than encouraging you to hang around your base.

One amusing element is that SWTOR now has a second conversation style. Bioware is touting it as a callback to KotoR, but it's real advantage is that your character is unvoiced. This allows Bioware to add these small pieces of content without calling in all 16 class voice actors.

In any case, there are 4 or 5 companions you can recruit through small missions or other tactics. For example, one companion requires you to participate in 20 PvP matches (wins count as 2 matches). Another companion requires you to hunt dangerous beasts, which you can do by killing World Bosses. Level sync makes that a lot more interesting. I like this because the only reward is a companion, of which you have plenty. So these missions are totally optional.

There are also Star Fortresses. Six worlds have Star Fortresses in orbit, and you have to do a mission on the ground to take out the shield protecting them. The Star Fortresses themselves are miniature instances, which can either be done solo or in a group of 2-4. It's pretty great content for just grabbing a friend and running through them.

Finally, all the planetary Heroic missions have been rebalanced and are available from your base, offering transport directly to the mission. This is essentially solo or duo content, and rewards lockboxes which you turn in to improve your base, and also gives you legacy cosmetic gear.

All in all, the Alliances seem like a strong and extensible system for solo and duo endgame content.

Knights of the Fallen Empire: Early Access

Yesterday SWTOR launched early access for its latest expansion, Knights of the Fallen Empire. The launch was smooth, with no real server issues.

There was an amusing bug where all companions were not wearing pants when you logged in. The companion gearing system has changed, with gear being cosmetic only. Therefore companions no longer have non-visible gear slots. All extra gear was sent to your inventory or mail. Amusingly enough, companion pants were also sent to inventory unnecessarily.

The story is quite good. I'm in the middle right now, so we'll see how it ends. It's very much in the vein of Mass Effect 2, with a time skip and rebuilding your companion roster.

The graphics also seem to have bumped up a notch in the expansion, especially the major NPC models.

The big question I have is if this is really enough content. Each chapter is about one hour in length, and nine of them were released yesterday. So pretty much every one is going to blitz through them fairly quickly. Starting in the new year, Bioware is planning on releasing one chapter every month. Is one hour of story content each month enough to keep people playing?

On the other hand, it's more content than we got previously, and people kept playing. So who knows.

The other interesting element was that there is a minimal gear increase. Playing through the existing story up to Ziost gives you item level 190 gear, and HM raiding gave 198 gear. So far, KotFE has only been handing out 190 gear (mostly for people who choose the instant 60), and it looks like group content will start with 200 to 204 level gear. That's a very compressed gear curve, which is fairly unusual for an MMO.

So far so good. We'll see how the story finishes, and what endgame content looks like.

SWTOR and Class Armor

One overlooked aspect of the new SWTOR expansion is that SWTOR seems to be moving away from class-based armor entirely. This is unusual for an MMO based on classes.

The primary stats (Strength, Willpower, Aim, Cunning) are being replaced with a single stat called Mastery. So all gear becomes interchangeable class-wise. There are still multiple secondary stats, including some role-specific ones like Defense or Accuracy. But no longer will an item drop and you can say that it is Warrior gear or Agent gear.

The other element is that most newer armor is "Adaptive". This means that if you're a class that uses Light Armor, the armor is Light Armor for you. If you use Heavy Armor, it's Heavy, and so on.

The link between armor and class in a class-based MMO is usually very strong. But with these changes, the link becomes very weak. I'm sure that there will still be gear with class-specific set bonuses. But outside of that, we're setting up for a situation where any class can wear any gear.

I'm not so sure that I like this change. I like having different armor for the different classes. I suppose that it can be annoying to wait for your one piece to drop, though. Still, it does feel like the game has lost something.

Maybe this is an inevitable result of selling cosmetic gear in a F2P game. You don't want to restrict costumes to different characters, so you sell costumes that all characters can wear. And then there's not much point in forcing the player to find a Strength mod compared to an Aim mod.

I am a bit surprised that SWTOR hasn't taken the next step and started dropping armor shells separately from the mods in instances. That would separate the cosmetic part of the armor even farther from the mechanics aspect. People who wanted the mods would roll specifically on them. People who wanted the costume could roll specifically on the armor shell.

Crowfall and the Metagame

It's been a while since I've written anything about Crowfall. Artcraft looks to be steadily making progress. Unfortunately most of their updates in the last few months have been in video format, so I've pretty much ignored them. Videos just take so long to get through compared to text, and text is so much easier to reread and pull out bits to chew on.

In any case, Artcraft seems to be toying with the idea of promoting a "metagame" as in Eve Online. Where people can be spies and scammers in other guilds, and betray them, etc. It's always a newsworthy part of Eve, so it's not surprising that it would be attractive to someone making another PvP MMO.

However, I think it's a bad idea. To be fair, I think it's a bad idea in Eve Online as well. The culture of spying, betraying, "awoxing", and generally being hard to trust is bad for the game. I think games where trust is easier are a lot more fun. But Eve has its own culture, and the people who play Eve are happy with it.

However, I think the "metagame" is an especially bad fit for Crowfall. Crowfall's signature element is that the game board resets. After a while, the campaign world ends, and players start fresh on a new campaign world.

A strong metagame cuts across that. When the board resets, the alliances and enemies made should also reset. I'm sure we've all played board games with people who hold a grudge from one game to the next. Or two people who will always attack each other. Or people in a relationship, where you can expect one of them to throw away her chance at victory to support her partner. These games are less fun than new games where everyone is attempting to win.

Crowfall will never get rid of all relationships between campaigns. For one thing, guilds will want to play together and support each other. But it's better if the game encourages relationships between guilds to reset, to treat each world as truly new. But that will require discouraging the Eve-style metagame of guild politics.

DPS Meters and Player Behavior

Whether DPS meters are good or bad is a hotly debated topic. I saw an interesting Reddit post by WitcherMog that approaches the question from a different angle.

In FFXIV, there are no in-game damage meters. However, you can run an external parser that reads your combat log and gives information for your group. FFXIV runs on a  "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to meters, though. If you reference them in chat, it's considered harassment, and you get punished by SE. So meters are pretty much the province of individuals and high-end static groups.

WitcherMog ran 100 instances with his parser active and compared player behavior with parser results. He found that harassment of other group members for being slow or wiping uniformly came from low-dps players.

The negative behavior indulged in by high-powered players (as measured by gear level) was to slack off during fights. Of course, negative behavior in either case only occurred in a minority of runs.

This is not quite the same negative behavior exhibited in games with public meters. In WoW, any harassment is more likely to come from good dps towards the low dps.

The results do make sense. In a game without meters, a good dps makes the run faster and less likely to wipe. So really, she has nothing to complain about, as all visible outcomes are positive. Meanwhile the low dps player believes he is doing fine, believes that he is really a good player, so obviously any problems must come from the other players.

In a game with meters, on the other hand, the poor player cannot blame others for visibly bad outcomes, because each individual performance is quantified. However, even if the outcome is visibly good, a negative high-dps player can feel aggrieved that she is "carrying" the group, and incite harassment of the others that she feels are not playing up to par.

So it's really a choice of picking your poison. Without meters, runs that have negative outcomes like excessive slowness or wipes incur harassment from the very people who most likely cause the problem in the first place. With meters, a run that is successful might very well still see harassment, just because one player thinks another player is not living up to an arbitrary standard.

There's no obvious best choice here. Would you rather have poor players never realize that they're bad, or have good players hold others to an unnecessary standard?

Of course, we must reiterate that, especially in FFXIV, we are talking about a minority of outcomes. Most runs are successful and go just fine.

A Lull in the Storm

It feels like we're in a lull in the MMO sphere. There's stuff on the horizon, but nothing really interesting is happening right now. Well, I guess there was the Wildstar F2P launch, but I ignored that.

The Old Republic's Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion comes in a week. In a month, FFXIV will drop its 3.1 patch. Who knows when the next Warcraft expansion will come out. I honestly thought Blizzard would aim for a release around the end of the year. But with no beta in sight, that's looking extremely unlikely.

In the meantime I'm just casually cleaning up side-activities in TOR and FFXIV.

In TOR, I've levelled my Sith Warrior to 60, and am also looking to go through all the companion stories from the original game. I have 5 done, so only 3 classes to go.

In FFXIV, I've levelled White Mage to 59. I also have worked on pretty much all the other classes, gaining a level here and a level there. I really should pick one activity to focus on. But there's so many options I'm just bouncing around.

What are you doing in this lull?

Level Syncing

Last week The Old Republic revealed some of the game mechanic changes coming in Fallen Empire. The most controversial is that all planets will be level synced. That is, when you out-level a planet, your character and gear will be scaled back to the max level for that planet.

On the one hand, I can see why some people are unhappy. These games are about character progression, and level syncing undoes your progression. It's fun to come back to an old zone that gave you trouble and destroy it. What's the point of gaining levels if the game is going to arbitrarily roll them back?

On the other hand, because it's normal for a max level character to overpower old zones, the game never sends you back to those zones. Or if it does, it sets up a little max level area where the max level players go. It's harder to preserve challenge without level syncs.

Level sync makes it easier to add new content to old zones. For example, all holiday events in FFXIV are level 15 or 30. High level players will get synced down, and the low level requirement makes it easy for new players to join the event.

However, FFXIV only scales group content. Solo-content is pretty much left alone.

Another point is that level syncs also balance world PvP a bit better. Sure, a synced player is more powerful than a leveling character, but the disparity isn't as great any more. If world PvP starts up, the leveling players on the planet can join in.

In the end there is an unavoidable tension between maintaining character progression and preserving challenge. I think that FFXIV strikes a good balance for group content. I thought that Guild Wars 2 did a bad job maintaining character progression, as it was very aggressive about syncing levels, so you'd get scaled back even in the same zone. Games without leveling syncing basically give up on attempting to preserve a challenge in old zones.

We'll see how well TOR manages to balance both goals.

Starting Raiding In Warlords of Draenor

Atherne asks:

I've been thinking about this and have decided to try Raiding. I'll need to gear up an appropriately leveled character. Yours is the first Wow blog I ever read because I was looking for tips for my Paladin. My thought is, I always play Paladin, Shadow Priest and Warlock well in dungeons, so I should pick one of those for a first try. Any advice? Also, what Raid should I try first to see if I do well and like the format? Thanks!

I've decided to respond in a separate post so that I can get input from other people, especially people who are currently raiding in WoW.

I would suggest picking the character and specialization that you like the best and are most comfortable with. The only hard position is tanking, as tanks are generally held to a higher standard than everyone else.

The way I see it, there are three paths you can take:

1. Looking For Raid

Just sign up for LFR with your character. I would follow the Legendary quest, as it takes you through all the current raids in order.  It's pretty much like a dungeon run, only with a lot more people. You can read up on the fights in the Dungeon Journal, and that will give you a decent idea of what's going to happen.

If you sign up as DPS, your queue time will be fairly long. You can sign up for multiple wings to help with this.

This path is the easiest to get into. You can do it on your own time and on your own schedule. It's also the least rewarding path, though. However, you will see all the content and get your feet wet.

2. Pre-made Groups in the Group Finder

Here you would find a Normal Mode group for the raid you are interested in. Start with Highmaul if you can find it. You will probably need to watch some video guides, as it is expected that you will know the fights.

In some ways these might be the hardest groups to join, as these types of groups are often leery or unwilling to take completely new players. As well, most people are focusing on the latest raid, so it might be hard to find groups for the older raids.

The advantage here again is that you can do it on your own schedule. However, there's no guarantee that you'll find a group willing to take you on a specific day.

3. Find a Guild

Here you have to look for a guild which does Normal raids at a regular day and time where you can attend. You'll probably have to apply on their website, or at least talk to an officer in-game. Here you'll have to do whatever the group is currently working on.

From an organizational standpoint this is the most work. As well, you'll have to raid on a specific schedule. However, this is also the path which is most likely to be successful for a new raider. Because you are willing to commit to the guild, the guild is willing to commit to you, to invest in training you in how to raid.

This is also the most rewarding path, in my opinion. Working on mastering fights as a group is what raiding is all about to me, and this is the path which exemplifies that. But there's no doubt this is also the path which requires the most commitment from you.

The most important part here is to make sure you are compatible with the guild you choose. That your schedules match, and that you like the atmosphere in the guild.

Conclusions

Those are the options as I see it. LFR and Group Finder are easier schedule-wise, but does put a little more burden on you to learn fights and improve on your own. It's much easier to learn how to raid from an existing raid guild, and is also more rewarding, but the price is that your time is no longer fully your own.

Note that if you choose to look for a guild, you can still do LFR until you find one.

Thoughts and tips from other readers? What would you do if you were completely new to raiding?

Transistor Review

Transistor is the second game by Supergiant Games. Transistor is an isometric RPG-style game that's 4 to 6 hours long. Supergiant's first game was Bastion, which I loved. Transistor, though, I think I would have liked a lot better if I knew what the hell was going on.

Story

The best way to describe Transistor's story is that it is a technological noir crossed with an alien invasion. And then it gets weird.

You play Red, a singer who has her voice stolen for mysterious reasons. The game starts in media res, with Red standing over the body of a man who has just been stabbed by a giant talking sword, the eponymous Transistor. Red takes the Transistor and sets out to unravel the conspiracy that took her voice.

I'll leave it there to avoid spoilers, but the setting is very unique and weird. The story was decent enough, but it always felt like I didn't quite understand the setting, or what was really going on. It just felt like the author moved too far, too fast, and ended up leaving behind the people coming to this setting for the first time.

In part, this ended up leaving me cold, and I never really cared about any of the characters in the story.

Aesthetics

Transistor is a gorgeous game for all the senses. The artwork is stunning, the music and sound is outstanding. Along these dimensions, Transistor is truly a work of art.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Transistor is really neat. Basically, you "freeze time" and plan out your sequence of moves. Then when you start time up again, you execute your plan in a short burst. Next you wait for your ability to freeze time to recover, and your enemies attack you. You can generally move around during this period, but can't do much else. Once you get the hang of things, this is a really interesting system.

I adored the ability system. Each "ability" has an active, passive, and modifier effect. You have four active slots, four passive slots, and each active slot has two modifier slots. The passive and modifier slots start locked and you can unlock them as you level up.

The key here is you can only assign one ability to a slot. If you use the ability as a passive, you can't use it as a modifier or an active ability. It's a beautiful system that encourages you to use many abilities, and combine them in an interesting manner. For example, I used a summon ability with an AoE passive to give me a pet who did AoE attacks. I used the pet to clean up small attackers, while I focused the main attacks on bigger threats.

Transistor also includes a similar difficulty system as Bastion. You get Limiters as you level up. Limiters boost the enemies in specific ways, but also increase your rate of experience gain. You can choose exactly how you want to make the game more difficult. I didn't enable any Limiters, though.

Conclusions

Transistor is an ambitious game. It also falls short of those ambitions. Does that make it a failure? Maybe.

But these ambitious failures are often far more interesting than more pedestrian successes.

Eve Online Adds a DPS Cap Mechanic

Several years ago, I proposed a DPS Cap mechanic, in order to reduce the amount of optimization in DPS gameplay.

Surprisingly, Eve Online is going to implement a similar idea in their new Citadels expansion. The cap is on the target citadel, as there is a maximum amount of DPS that can be applied by attackers during a battle. Extra damage past the cap is just absorbed and disappears.

The intention here is to avoid requiring larger and larger fleets, and to stop an arms race between fleet size and citadel hitpoints. Instead, any fleet above a specific size will be "good enough" to take a citadel. Additionally, the DPS cap guarantees a minimum time that the citadel will be alive in a fight.

There are some other interesting wrinkles. For example, the citadel cannot be repaired or "healed" by friendly ships. I think it will start repairing itself after some time passes, though.

The DPS Cap mechanic is different than the one I proposed. It's on the defender, as a defensive mechanism. So from the attacker's perspective, it's a limit on the fleet, not on individual ships.

Still, I think this is an untouched area, and we will see more experimentation. I think this is especially true for world PvP games where there can be a large disparity between the two sides.

Earning Commendations as a Healer in FFXIV

There is a minor debate in the FFXIV community as to the proper way to play healers in random groups. FFXIV healing is not super-spammy. If you heal efficiently, you often have several free GCDs. So many good healers add damage during those free GCDs, as damage spells cost very little mana. Indeed, edge healers learn to go into the damage stance (Cleric stance - reduces healing, increases damage) at appropriate times in order to maximize the amount of damage they can do.

This has led to a discussion of the role of healers in random groups. Should you expect the healer in a random group to add damage? Or is a healer who solely heals--as is normal in many other MMOs--acceptable?

This in turn encouraged some good healers conduct experiments on random groups. They did several runs maximizing damage, while still keeping everyone alive. Then they did several runs where they did no damage, and just focused on keeping people topped off. Universally, it's been found that the pure healing runs yield more commendations from the other party members. This implies that the FFXIV community prefers the pure healing style.

This has caused some consternation among the edge healers. Why does the FFXIV community not recognize the optimum play-style?

I think that the answer is more psychological than anything else. In a random group, you don't know how much you can trust the unknown healer. So a healer who doesn't deal damage, but does keep everyone topped off creates a feeling of safety. That gives the other group members confidence and makes life easier for them.

Aggressively dealing damage as a healer generally means letting people drop in health a bit, and not topping them off right away. With an unknown healer, this can be a bit nerve-wracking for the other party members. Is the healer actually bad, and going to let someone die? Do I need to play more defensively to compensate?

So the best way to get commendations as a healer in random groups is to make your group feel utterly safe, and allow them to enjoy a smooth run without concern. In a group where everyone knows and trusts each other, this is not the best way to play. But in a random group, generating trust is often more important than strict performance.

Return to WoW Ends Ignomiously

Yesterday, I posted that I had decided to play WoW a bit more. By the end of the evening, though, I had cancelled my account.

The reason: I joined an LFR run, and it was absolutely atrocious. Tanks letting the mobs cleave into the group. People (non-tanks) running off and pulling extra packs in an attempt to clear things faster. Rushing ahead and starting the boss fight so that people get locked out.

It was such a bad experience that I asked myself if getting the Legendary ring was worth a couple more months of this. I decided it was not. Then I asked myself if getting flying was worth a couple months of grinding blue bars, and decided that was not worth it either.

The end result is that I cancelled my WoW account.

Now, I don't know if it will stick, or if I'll get bored and start playing again. I'll probably check Legion out, I guess.

Somewhere along the line, WoW lost its basic group gameplay "skeleton". Even though WoW is technically a trinity game, it no longer feels like a trinity game. It feels closer to a zerg than to anything else. And the zerg is simply not fun.

Grinding Blue Bars

I've been playing WoW a bit more lately. I decided that I'd like to at least get flying and the Legendary ring on my paladin.

I've come to the conclusion that the single worst mechanic in Warlords is the one where you fly to an area and then grind things until a blue bar is full. It's a terrible, terrible mechanic, and it is all over Warlords.

I hated this mechanic when it appeared in Guild Wars 2, and I hate it in WoW.

It's kind of interesting, because it's not that different from getting three daily quests to do in a specific area, at least in overall execution. But I think what makes it different is that the blue bar is just indiscriminate. You do everything you can as fast as you can.

Whereas the daily quests at least have specific targets. Part of doing dailies is a mini-optimization game where you learn how to complete the specific requirements in a minimum amount of time. As well, the daily quests can have a bit of story added in, and require specific targets like a boss.

Basically, for me, a structure like:

• Do 3 of Item A and 3 of Item B and 3 of Item C

just feels better and is more interesting in actual play than:

• Do 9 of [Item A or Item B or Item C]

Filling several smaller bars is better than filling one big bar. I strongly hope that Legion drops these blue bar areas and goes back to having different daily quests.

FFXIV Anniversary Event

FFXIV had it's second anniversary recently, and celebrated it with a pretty interesting in-game event.

The first part of the event was the standard low level FATE. Only the FATE involved defeating rapidly multiplying "bugs" and "regressions", in a nice nod to the challenges faced by the technical team.

In the second part of the event SE broke the fourth wall. A dream sequence sends you to the "Eighteenth Floor", which is a reference to the floor the FFXIV team occupies at SE. There several of the devs are present via in-game avatars but using their real identities. You can talk to each one, and they'll say something about their role and the game.

There's also some potential spoilers about future content.

At the end, the devs all gather around you. Yoshi-P apologizes yet again for 1.0 and promises to keep doing better and listening to the playerbase. And they wish you well.

It's a really sweet event. It's odd, but it's the sort of event that on paper doesn't sound that good, since it explicitly breaks the fourth wall. But it worked quite well even if it was a little hokey. Or maybe it worked because it was a little hokey. It's very nice to see such enthusiasm from the devs.

Gaming Updates

I thought I'd make a quick post about what I'm doing in various games.

The Old Republic

I took a fourth character, my Trooper, to 60. As well, in preparation for Fallen Empire, I've been trying to cap out my companions' affection and stories.

In operations, my group managed to kill Underlurker, making us 5/10 HM. We've killed him three times so far, but it's still pretty sketchy, and we haven't been able to get time on the next boss. The big issue is that we are continually missing one or two people each week and have to get a PuG.

As for the rest, it looks like the rest of the guild outside our 8-man group has disappeared. I'm not sure what we'll do about that.

Final Fantasy XIV

The issue I'm having in FFXIV is that I don't really have a new goal to concentrate on. My main class, paladin, is pretty much done unless I want to venture into the harder content, Extremes or Alexander. But at that level it does require some work in finding decent groups or a static team.

So I'm desultorily levelling Miner, White Mage, Monk, and Mechanist. I'm just bouncing between them with no real enthusiasm.

Others

I'm not really playing anything else. I did reinstall WoW, intending to at least get flying in Draenor, and see the new raid. But I haven't touched it for a couple of weeks. I think I'm just going to quit until the expansion.

I also reinstalled Diablo 3 to see the new patch. I got Kanai's Cube, but I don't really have any use for it. It seems to be aimed at the people who are more advanced in the D3 endgame than I am. I am only at Paragon 100 or so.

Player Bankers in SWTOR

I came across a neat emergent phenomenon in SWTOR: player bankers.

A non-subscriber in SWTOR has a credit cap of 350k credits. Once at the cap, any credits she gets above that amount go into an escrow account. She has to purchase escrow unlocks, either through the cartel market or on the auction house, to access any credits in the escrow account.

One method players have come up with to evade this restriction is player bankers. The banker is a subscriber, who can hold unlimited amounts of currency. When the non-subscriber approaches the cap, she deposits a significant sum with the banker, dropping her back below the cap. The banker keeps track of her account out of game, perhaps in a spreadsheet.

When the non-subscriber wants to purchase something expensive from the auction house, the banker acts as her agent. The banker purchases the item for her, and deducts the amount from her account. Usually the banker takes a fee at this point. Since the fee is less than the escrow unlock, the non-subscriber comes out ahead.

One thing about SWTOR F2P mechanics is that almost all unlocks are tradeable items, which can be bought and sold on the auction house. This is the feature which makes the banker a viable agent.

The transaction is also smoother. The non-subscriber doesn't need to juggle escrow unlocks, which come in specific sizes. She can make very large transactions just as easily as small transactions. I imagine that the banker can act as an agent for selling expensive items as well.

Of course, the downside is that the non-subscriber has to trust the banker. She has to trust him not to make off with the credits, but also to keep subscribing and keep showing up online. So most banker relationships occur through friend or guild channels.

I think it's an interesting phenomena throughout, and matches the historical emergence of banks to a degree. I also think that the more sandbox-style games can learn a lesson from this, and see that it might be possible to offload currency and monetary systems onto the players' shoulders, rather than insisting that it is handled by game systems.

PvP Changes in Legion

There are some very interesting changes coming for PvP in Legion:

• No PvP-specific gear - Heh, I actually talked about this last year, and I'm amused to see that Blizzard is actually trying for it. PvP will reward gear, but it will be just like PvE gear.

• Stats based on specialization - When you enter a PvP area, the stats from your gear are ignored. Instead you seem to get a set of stats based on your class specialization and item level. That template is common to everyone in your specialization. So if you have two Retribution paladins, one in Mastery gear and the other in Critical Strike gear, they will both have the same stats in PvP.  This allows you to just keep one set of gear on you at all times. This also gives Blizzard another knob they can tune which only affects PvP. For example, if Fire Mages are fine in PvE, but too weak in PvP, they can buff the Fire Mage PvP stat template.

• Item level scaling is lower than PvE - In PvE, 15 ilevels correspond to about a 10% increase in power. In PvP, 15 ilevels will correspond to a much lower number, maybe 3% or so. So while improving your gear does make you better in PvP, it's a much smaller increase. The gap between high and low end will be much smaller.

• Trinkets, set bonuses, and enchants do not work - Again, this eliminates much of the need to seek out specific pieces of gear.

• PvP talent track - PvP has a separate talent track. As you earn "PvP XP", you advance along the talent track. You get what looks like passives and improved variants of abilities.

• The talent track resets - Once you reach the end of the talent track, you can reset it, earning a cosmetic reward. I guess you can do this multiple times. Ideally, this means that people who PvP a lot don't have fixed advantage over other people. A full-time PvPer might actually be in the early part of track, working towards another cosmetic reward.

Overall, these changes look very interesting. A huge amount of experimentation, including a significantly reduced role of gear, something that PvPer's have been claiming they want for a long time.

There are some concerns of course. How will the talent track reset play with the serious PvPer crowd? If a maxxed talent track gives a significant advantage, wouldn't high-end PvPers be encouraged to avoid resetting it? That would probably make them unhappy, as they couldn't get any of the cosmetic rewards. Unless, of course, there are no rewards for getting a high rank or rating. But that seems just as weird.

How will Artifact Weapons interact with the PvP gear templates? Will your weapon become just a stat stick, or will it retain its power? How will that interact with your choices that you've made while leveling it?

Still, exciting times for PvP, and these changes should also make it a lot easier for PvE players to casually dip into PvP.

External Drive Enclosure, FFXIV Summer Faire

External Drive Enclosure

Thanks to the recommendations of gamingsf and Pallais in a previous post, I purchased an external hard drive enclosure from Amazon. It only cost about $30 CAD. It's a pretty simple device, shaped kind of like a toaster. You plug a hard drive into the slot, and you can use it like an external drive through USB.

It worked reasonably well, though it was a little finicky. I had to try multiple USB slots before it finally registered. But once Windows detected the device, it worked well, and I was able to pull data off both hard drives from old machine.

I managed to get my FFXIV settings, so now all my gear sets and macros are back in place. That's a big relief, as I was avoiding logging in and rebuilding everything.

FFXIV Summer Faire

The latest holiday event in FFXIV is the Summer Faire. It's a pretty simple event, with a couple quest lines and a bunch of Fates in Costa del Sol. One interesting change is that there are repeatable quests for Fishermen and Culinarians, which are an alternate way of getting the holiday currency for this event.

As normal, the rewards are mostly cosmetic. Swimsuits, for the most part. One change is that this event does also have some of the rewards from the previous holiday event (yukatas). Perhaps this will be another way to get old rewards, as FFXIV revamps holiday events every year. Before this, old rewards went into the cash shop. I thought that was a pretty fair way of handling old rewards, but this is a good method as well.

Ravenholdt or Riot

It always amuses me to compare the WoW player culture with Blizzard's WoW dev culture. A lot of the time they're the same. But sometimes there's a clearly inexplicable gap between the two.

Take the rogue class order hall, for example. If you asked the rogue community, they would all pick Ravenholdt Manor as the iconic rogue location. And with good reason. It has been the "rogue place" ever since Vanilla. Multiple class quests, as well as the legendary rogue dagger questline, have centered around Ravenholdt.

But Blizzard wants to put the Rogue order in the Dalaran sewers.

That is as pure an instance of tone-deafness on the part of the dev team as I can recall. First, no one really wants to end up in the sewers. Second, the Dalaran sewers used to be the PvP area, back in Wrath. That's what most people who were around back then associate with the location. Third, Dalaran is the mage city, and really has nothing to do with rogues.

Maybe if Ravenholdt didn't exist, the sewers would have been an okay choice. But it does exist, and it seems quite pointless to throw away all the history and resonance Ravenholdt has built up.

In any case, the Rogue community is trying to convince Blizzard to change course. Whether they'll succeed or not, I don't know. A lot of it might just come down to art time. If Blizzard has already finished the artwork and modelling for the Dalaran sewers, they may just stick with their decision.

Still, though, I take this instance as a caution against being too clever and dismissing bonds that the players have built up over the history of the game. Wherever possible, Blizzard should take advantage of those bonds, and allow them to do the heavy lifting.