Star Trek

Partially Borg-ified I talk a great talk about the importance of grouping and becoming part of a game’s community, but I don’t walk the walk as much as I should. When you open yourself up to grouping with strangers, you don’t know WHAT they’re going to do. Abusive chat, just plain abuse, people who think the group is there purely for their own benefit, could be anything. Most missions in Star Trek Online, because they scale with the number and level of participants, can be done solo or in a group, and at three difficulty levels. As in any MMO where soloing is a viable option, it becomes the normal way players consume content. ...

One lowly shuttle stands between the broken Romulan Star Empire and the rebellion of their ex-slaves, the goblinoid Remans, as their private war threatens to draw the Alpha Quadrant into a conflict that could destroy worlds. More worlds. The Romulans are still feeling a little sore that Spock didn’t save Romulus, even though he PINKY PROMISED! Before I get into the interrupted adventures of the Federation News Service, Cryptic made a teaser for the arc, “Cloaked Intentions”. You will believe Star Trek is still on the air! ...

So Saturday, I had this wild idea that it would be fun to make an STO mission in the game’s User-Generated Content system, the Foundry. See, I wanted to get a preview of the new Vulcan science ship that’s hitting the store next month. Making a mission that included it would be one way to do that. Playing other people’s missions based around the same general idea would be an even better way :) ...

Longasc and I were playing around on Tribble, Star Trek Online’s test server, and he wanted to show me the new Vulcan science ship which will be flyable by players sometime next month. Couldn’t find one, so he took me into a player-created mission that had one, but it was gone from there. So I figured, well, we could just make a mission that had that ship in it, and fly around it and whatever, do what we liked. In fact, we BOTH could, and play each other’s and… I started playing with the tools and though it would be really great if we could just get together, current STO players, and make an episode just for fun that we could share among each other. Maybe they’d have that new Vulcan ship, too. ...

Who owns your MMO character? The game companies say they do, but they didn’t put hundreds of hours into turning the character from an animated paper doll into a person with relationships, memories, friends, victories, stories and history. But it’s precisely because you HAVE taken the time and done all these things that the companies can keep running their game. But as long as game companies control access to your character, you’re paying them so that you can add value to their game. ...

A whole weekend lost in a Rift, but I think what I’ll remember most about this last weekend was this jerk in General chat – named, ironically, Karana – who was going on and on about how the quests and everything else about the game was a copy of WoW. Well, heck, I didn’t know Thomas Edison was resurrected just to offer his genius insights. But some people just can’t see past their own experiences with WoW. Like, the people complaining that every one of the classes will have a 50/16/0 point spec, as if the class-defining abilities of each ‘soul’ only happen once 50 points are spent on it, similar to WoW’s talent trees. ACTUALLY, the class-defining skill is usually given for free, at zero points. Smart players will have a synergistic three soul mix. Anyway, already went on about that, and though I’m loving Rift and have applied to a guild, I’m really tired of reading about it. ...

If you want to hear about the huge controversy over Jef Reahard’s one hour dismissal of Rift, well, I’ve already said all I’m going to say about it. There’s lots of MMOs, like Kung FOO, Fists of Fu, and Mabinogi that I played for an hour or two and felt no attachment. If someone had come up to me and asked me how I felt about those games after that hour or two playing them, I’d have told them what I thought. ...

We’re way behind on our latest project at work, so I’ spent most of Friday working. I did take a break, though, to log on and participate in the final Beta 3 invasion event this afternoon. I’d spent all night (until 4:30AM) leveling my cleric from 12 to 20, and though I didn’t get a chance to visit the Iron Tombs, I did want to help keep Freemarch free. I’d leveled from 16 to 18 in a raid group at one of Thursday’s invasions. That also earned me nearly enough planar currency to get some nice epic items. I logged on, joined in, and earned enough to get some “purple” leggings. Good stuff. ...

I suck at predictions, but everyone else is doing them. Luckily, I have a Magic 8 Ball. I’m just gonna list some games, and ask the Magic 8 Ball what it thinks of them. Question to the 8 Ball for all of these games: Will this game have a good year in 2011? Age of Conan: “Outlook Not So Good”. AoC released its first expansion, “Ride of the Godslayer”, last summer, and that’s pretty much the last I’ve heard of the game. I don’t think the Magic 8 Ball is correct; I think Funcom is content to support their current player base without feeling the need to go F2P. Their massively hyped launch should have helped them recoup their development costs years ago. ...

I was thinking about some of the things we know about Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s going to be a subscription game. It cost a hell of a lot to produce – perhaps more than $100 million. And yet they think they’re gonna have no trouble making their money back even if they have less than a million subscribers. It’s no secret. I can do the math. They’re gonna be bleeding their subscribers absolutely friggin’ dry in the Bioware cash shop. But that’s okay! That would have really bothered me a couple years ago, but now – I’m buying space ships in STO and pets in Wizard101 and heck, EQ2 is even taking the bloodsucking thing to a whole new level by adding a new Vampire race to their cash shop. ...