STO - 2nd anniversary rewards are a bit good

So normally games give you a load of old tosh for their anniversary rewards. A cloak, title or something else decidedly zzzzzzzzz. Sure there's been some decent veteran rewards in games, as in a reward for being subscribed for a certain amount of time; mounts black dye tubs (ahh fond memories), etc. Yet anniversary rewards received just for being logged in at that particular time are usually, well, a bit rubbish.

STO however is slapping that idea down and delivering some properly useful and rather substantial rewards. Everyone that plays during the 4 days from 2nd February can get a quest line that rewards them with proper all new design end game starships! You have to be at least level 5 to get the mission (or level 21 for Klingon, but Klingon chars start at higher level anyway) and then you'll have the ship as an inventory reward ready to activate when you get to Vice Admiral.

Odyssey Class Starship

Bortas Class Starship

Some details of the event can be found here. Klingon ship info here and Federation here.

If you've not played STO before it's probably worth installing, getting to level 5, getting the ship when the event is on and then if you ever decide to play it properly you'll have that waiting. Since it's free and all.

PS: After this event I would expect that these ships will only be available through the cash shop...

IF ONLY!

Probably just a Superbowl advert with that date, but oh if only it was the real deal..

MWO - Another mech revealed and it makes for a good comparison

And it's the Centurion; a 50 ton medium mech that typical has a rather mixed array of weapons. Medium Lasers, LRMs (Long range missiles) and a big old AC10 (Auto-cannon projectile weapon). Though with the Mechwarrior games typically immense customisation options and the many variants within the lore itself, the standard weapon load out probably won't mean a great deal. Whatever happens, this should be a reasonably quick and quite potent medium mech. This could be my new Uziel ;)

This particular mech is a really good example of how Piranha's concept artist is bring the old designs smack up to date. If you look at the original it's a very flimsy looking thing that when viewed with a modern eye... well it just doesn't seem even vaguely feasible.

Thanks to Sarna.net for the classic old image btw.

Whereas the new version is much more convincing. Fleshed out, chunkier and just a whole lot meaner looking, this new Centurion looks like a proper war machine that might actually be able to take some punishment. 

That's the thing with bringing battletech designs up to date, the old stuff just looks so flimsy. This of course is not helped by the concept of walking tanks in itself being ridiculous, certainly for bipedal ones. Weapon impacts, kinetic energy and gravity don't lend themselves well to the idea, but then it is make believe. ;) As mechwarrior has a gritter, more "real world" feel than most mecha-style-gundam-cock, I imagine it's quite a challenge for an artist to make it look cool but not leave the common-sense side of your brain screaming DUMBTARDED!

So far I think Piranha are doing a cracking job. Everything is sounding promising for MWO, early days of course, but I do like what I am seeing.

Official Centurion announcement

You underestimate the power of the Bark Side

Not seen this on telly over here yet.. Clearly Volkswagen love their Star Wars right now.

STO is now F2P

OK so I am a few days late announcing this, but I forgot, sorry :P



I would say that of all the free to play games out there these days, it's Star Trek Online that gives you the most content for free. Seriously folks this game pretty much throws everything at you for free and is very reasonable in what it expects people to pay for. It's also, in my mind anyway, the most improved since launch MMORPG probably ever.

As a free download this is one of the easiest recommendations I've been able to make.

Official site: http://www.startrekonline.com/

SWTOR 1.1 patch is not the PvP disaster people think it is

I say that for two main reasons:

1) It made players start fighting and doing actual PvP.
Sure it was a horrible clusterfuck of spawn camping badly tested crap. Yes it was horrible for those being spawn camped with no way out except to quit the game. And yes it demonstrated that the game simply can not handle lots of players in one area, but despite this we did actually see players fighting each other. Players doing PvP in the main PvP zone instead of standing around mostly AFK not even playing the game (not quite the point of a "game" eh?), whilst a few folks take turns to click the objective stuff and auto-complete the AFKers daily missions for them. So in that respect it is progress and is a step in the right direction. Albeit a step that led to Bioware immediately tripping over and faceplanting in a bloody mess hard on Ilum's frozen rocks.

But the main thing people will remember from yesterday was the lag. Oh... My... God... The... Lag.... In fact it lagged just as badly as the early days of WAR fortress battles, but was so worse because the number of players present in those bases on Illum was clearly far lower than we used to see in WAR. Plus SWTOR doesn't even have the excuse of collision detection complications. What Bioware need to immediately realise from this1.1 lesson is that Ilum and SWTOR will NEVER work as large scale zerg Realm vs Realm combat, that is unless they do something absolutely revolutionary with their game engine and servers. Really they need to ensure that future changes work towards making it about lots of small scale fighting all over the zone.

Not large scale combat in a small area, but instead it should be large scale combat over a large area..

Bioware's former Mythic employees should understand this, if they don't then I would question if they actually worked on WAR or just sat around smoking fags, drinking tequila and fiddling with their funky bits.


2) The major development screw ups for PvP were already made long ago. 
Yup. SWTOR was already up to it's neck in PvP problems, that is if you want anything other than arena e-sport. Firstly you can not make a balanced faction based PvP campaign with just 2 sides. It has never worked in anything and the only successful PvP campaigns are in games with 3 or more factions, be those game defined factions (DAoC) or player created ones (EVE, UO). Two faction PvP populations will decline over time as they turn into farcical alt-character switching nonsense and people get either sick of being zerged or bored of the lack of an actual campaign of any meaning.

Sure with instanced PvP you can get away with it to a point, but as the insane amount of Hutballs demonstrate, you'll either have to fight your own faction or wait a long time for those instances to pop.

Then we have PvP specific stats, in SWTOR's case "Expertise". It's always a stupid idea as it heightens vertical progression, lessens the impact of player skill and means new players (AKA new customers) join in PvP and get utterly steamrolled by those of us in fancy armour. Armour that, thanks to the expertise stat, boosts our damage against players AND reduces the damage they do, essentially doubling the percentage increase in it's effectiveness. PvP needs progression to have incentives that will appeal to a wide player base, but that doesn't mean progression has to be at the detriment of game balance and neither should it serve to alienate new players. Subtle stat gain, new abilities, different appearances and a myriad of other rewards can easily be implemented and will provide more than enough incentive. It does however require developers to think for themselves and not just dump a PvP stat on "cos that's what you do for PvP init".

Finally and as already discussed, the game just can't handle lots of players in one small area. Ilum must be redirected to spread the players across the zone and encourage them to fight all over the place. Otherwise it will always be a complete failure of a RvR zone. Which would be a tragic shame because it's a beautifully designed zone in many ways and has massive potential. But as any WAR veteran knows, waiting on potential is a right bitch.


So in summary, it was of course a bad patch and will be remembered for it's many problems, but it did at least kick off some actual PvP and perhaps more importantly highlighted some major issues that MUST be addressed if Ilum is to ever have a chance of succeeding. We just have to see if Bioware realise this.

SWTOR - Level 50 done and done

Yup, that's my Sith Assassin at max level in SWTOR. I've immediately started doing a lot more PvP, which basically means Warzones (scenarios/battlegrounds) because bugger all PvP is happening in Ilum yet. Having said that, last night I was kinda half afk and as such was not PvPing, but the guys were telling me it had actually started to kick off a bit in Ilum. So there's some hope at least on that front. Plus once the patch arrives (it's been delayed again) it will change the Ilum daily/weekly quests to require player kills, which should in theory spark things up dramatically. As long as there's not too much of a faction balance problem...

The first thing I did at 50 was go and check out Ilum, which as mentioned before is just point swapping crap at the moment, but that's a real shame because the design of the zone itself is brilliant. It's got lots of routes for travel, loads of ambush points and a mixture of wide open and more funneled areas. The basic concept of the campaign system is good, it's basically like a RvR lake from WAR with keep at each end and the objectives between, but it has been completely let down by the lack of any incentive to kill the enemy players. Once (or if...) Bioware get that sorted out, then in theory it should make for an excellent RvR/PvP zone and I can see it being exactly the sort of thing that would keep me subbed.

In fact if Bioware were to sort out the incentives so that all the materialistic purple pixel obsessed lame arsed humans playing the game actually started fighting and combined this with adding further RvR themed planets,  then SWTOR could actually be both a WoW and WAR replacement. That is a very big IF though... We shall see.

In other news, I've rolled my first proper alt. Gone for an Agent with the Sniper advanced class. Interesting so far, but more on that another time.