In 2008, we witnessed the failure of 2 hugely-hyped titles: Warhammer Online and Age of Conan. Mythic cut 4 of the 6 capital cities and 4 of the 24 classes just before WAR’s launch, the class balance was poor, and the game client and server were unstable and couldn’t handle RVR. From what I heard about AoC, the Tortage experience from 1-20 was awesome, then the quality of content dropped off. Simply put, neither game was ready to launch.

In 2009, there was excitement for 2 polished games, Aion and Allods Online, coming from Asian and Eastern Europe. NCSoft didn’t localize Aion sufficiently for the western audience – the leveling experience was tediously grindy. AO was supposed to be F2P but just before launch a stacking death penalty mechanic was added to the game that essentially required players to buy a Cash Shop item to remove the debuff.

By the start of 2010, I became increasingly concerned that social gaming might kill investment in MMORPGs. If you’re an investor, why would you risk tens of millions of dollars to build an MMORPG when it’s possible to build a profitable social game for a fraction of the cost and in a matter of months instead of years? Moreover, many believed that WoW had set the bar too high for new entrants.

However, Trion demonstrated with RIFT in early 2011 that it’s possible to launch a AAA-quality game. As Exec Producer Scott Hartsman told me, Trion was willing to wait until the game “wouldn’t fall down” and “had enough for players to do” at launch. I was a huge fan of RIFT, as it brought some innovations to class customization (you could spec with any 3 of 9 talent trees for each of the 4 classes), elegant warfront (battleground) design, and a stunning world. What we learned from RIFT is that a strong launch with a good product is not sufficient to maintain a subscriber base. There were multiple issues with the game, including buggy raid content, gear that scaled too much across tiers (leading to power creep and making it difficult for guilds to replace members who quit), and starting with Patch 1.5, increasingly poor decisions in terms of class balance for PVP. According to Xfire, RIFT isn’t even in the top 50 for online games, just 15 months after launch.

However, there was still hope for 2011, as SWTOR was going live before end of year.

SWTOR launched with neither the polish nor feature-parity of RIFT. E.g. the UI in SWTOR was clunky and could not be customized meaningfully, the auction house was difficult to use, and the game client had performance issues. Justin Lowe from darthhater.com was and is still getting ~15 FPS with a high-end PC. Despite these issues, I enjoyed SWTOR immensely. The game provided a fun combat experience – the animations and sounds made combat feel epic. I loved several aspects of its PVP, including the brilliant design of Huttball (a PVP battleground where you can pass the flag) and the fact that meaningful effects in PVP required the use of an ability with a cooldown, whereas in RIFT many of the most important effects simply proc from button spamming. That said, I believe SWTOR launched before it was sufficiently ready.

From a financial perspective, the launch of SWTOR was the most successful ever. Millions of copies were sold. However, there has been a significant drop in subscribers over the first 6 months. While BioWare has been working hard to deliver new content and game improvements, it’s not happening sufficiently fast to stem to flow of players unsubbing.

Based on what we’ve seen over the past 4 years, here is what I now believe:

1. It is possible to launch a AAA-quality MMORPG. RIFT proved that
2. It is possible to acquire a significant number (1MM+) at launch for a new game that requires an upfront purchase and monthly subscription. SWTOR proved that
3. However, if a game requires both an upfront purchase price and a monthly subscription, the players are going to be incredibly demanding and unforgiving

Regarding that last point, there’s a factor that significantly impacts a developer’s ability to keep players happy: most of them have been implementing games with a vertical scaling model, which involves delivering:

1. A huge world, with a lot of leveling content. E.g. zones with quests, instances, etc
2. Increasing tiers of content (heroics, raids) and gear at endgame

This model requires a huge investment for the developer, which in turn creates tremendous financial pressure to launch prematurely to recoup the sunk costs. Moreover at launch, some players will speed-level, tear through the endgame content, then complain there’s nothing to do. Even in a game such as SWTOR where BioWare invested heavily in rich story arcs and voiceovers. And the playerbase in general will expect more new content from the developer to justify the subscription. My gut feeling is that it’s nearly impossible for a developer to continue providing fresh content for a game built on vertical scaling while retaining a sufficient number of subscribers to make it financially worthwhile. The only company to have been able to do this so far has been Blizzard with WoW. Yes, some games such as EVE have gradually grown their playerbase, but they’re still south of 1MM players.

As I discussed elsewhere, horizontal scaling systems enable content to remain relevant over time and therefore provide much better ROI for the developer, which still providing entertainment value for the gamer. I would argue that horizontal scaling systems will actually provide a better experience for the customer, even though many players have been indoctrinated into believing that vertical scaling and tiers of gear create a positive experience.

So here is what I propose as the business model of MMORPGs:

1. Build games that scale horizontally instead of vertically. GW2 and TSW are doing that
2. Create a business model that doesn’t discourage customer acquisition and/or retention. Charging both an upfront purchase fee and a monthly subscription doesn’t make sense long-term, because it creates too many opportunities for customers to opt out. Any of the following are much better models for the long-term:
   • Having no upfront purchase fee and no monthly subscription, but provide microtransactions for virtual goods. This is the proven F2P model (a la League of Legends)
   • Having no upfront purchase fee but a monthly subscription. Many F2P games support this by providing a subscription that provides a bundle of virtual goods at a discount
   • Having an upfront purchase fee but no monthly subscription (a la GW2)

The main point about #1 is creating a compelling experience. Make the combat engaging. Make it social. Make if fun. If you do these things, you’ll grow your customer base. The #1 online game League of Legends has been growing swiftly despite lacking massive content. Riot Games releases new content such as hero classes, but doing so is far less costly and complicated than trying to release new PVE zones, group, and raid content.

Some people might rebutt point #2 by saying that a developer needs to recoup their costs. They do, but part of the reason they are under pressure to launch prematurely and charge upfront is because they are simply building too much content, and the reality is that content will soon be outdated.

My prediction is that Guild Wars 2 going to fundamentally change the way gamers experience and relate to content ArenaNet implemented GW2 with a horizontal scaling system and doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. ArenaNet has smartly invested in content that you build once and the players re-play forever: Structured PVP and WvW. AN has removed the leveling divide between players via their PVE sidekicking system, full Bolster to max level / gear in Structured PVP, and from what I understand scaling PVE such that a player never truly outlevels it.

If I’m right, GW2 will model a viable approach for other companies, and we’ll continue to have the benefit of choice as gamers.

When I attended GDC back in 2010, “Social” was the big buzzword as there was a lot of attention paid to the burgeoning Social Gaming market. Skimming this year’s schedule, “F2P” (Free-to-Play) and “Cross-Platform” are the hot keywords.

Why the shift in focus?

Let’s talk about F2P first. In a nutshell, the business model is to entice players to download and try your game and convert some of them to paying customers. The concept has been around for years and as the Internet’s infrastructure has matured, it has become an increasingly cost-efficient and viable distribution platform.

Most Social Games have been F2P from inception, as the games are very lightweight to download, require no separate (e.g. Facebook Apps / Games) or minimal (e.g. App Store) installation, and have viral incentives to encourage players to rope in their friends.

However, the traditional gaming markets, PC Gaming and Console Gaming, have their roots in physically-shipped boxed products and the games were – prior to a few years ago – impractical to distribute en masse online as the game downloads were huge relative to the average customer’s bandwidth. The costs of real-world distribution are significant.

The synergistic rise of high-speed Internet access by ISPs and the maturation of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) has made it feasible and viable to distribute even large games over the Internet. E.g. everyone I know playing SWTOR, which launched 3 months ago, downloaded the 20GB game instead of waiting for installation discs. Contrast this to Blizzard’s The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft just 5 years ago, where I dragged my wife with me to Target in the East Bay to stand in line with hundreds of other diehard WoW gamers at midnight to buy the game. (The game sold out about a dozen people after us, and there was a near nerd-riot LOL).

So the distribution side of making heavyweight MMORPGs F2P is there. But what about the monetization side? This in my opinion is the bigger challenge. How do you create a game that is sufficiently enjoyable without paying that it attracts and retains players, while still providing virtual goods and other perks that a fraction of the playerbase will gladly pay for? And how do you do this for massively-multiplayer games without creating a game that is essentially “Pay-to-Win”?

F2P is a bad word to the majority of MMORPG players, but that is mainly due to poor design and implementation rather than the concept being flawed itself. I’ve had both positive (Knight Online back in 2005-2006) and negative (Allods Online in 2010) experiences with F2P properties. Back in KO, one of my guildees, a pizza shop owner down in Brazil, was forking out hundreds of USD a month to maximize his enjoyment of the game, and I became a monthly sub ($15 USD) because it was worth it to me as a full-time working stiff who valued his free time.

The PC and Console Gaming industries have the benefit of watching what has worked with Social Games, which have proven that players will pay for convenience and for virtual goods, e.g. cosmetics / customization / in-game items, etc. Microtransactions FTW.

It’s only in recent years that some of the larger mainstream MMORPGs have transitioned to F2P, e.g. Turbine’s LOTRO and NCSoft’s Aion. Industry analysts and bloggers have been predicting the end of P2P (Pay-to-Play) games for a few years now, and while the industry is moving in that direction, P2P games are not dead yet – see EA/BioWare’s SWTOR and ArenaNet’s upoming Guild Wars 2 launch.

One huge reason why games are still P2P is that game developers need to recoup their sunk costs to reach product launch. E.g. the estimates for SWTOR have ranged anywhere from $100-200+MM USD. (The ironic thing: the most common complaint I’ve heard about SWTOR is the lack of endgame content or issue-free content. But hey we’re gamers and we’re never satisfied, amirite?).

And here’s the basic problem: how to make a P2P game scale its customer base over time. Having a hefty (e.g. $50 USD) price tag is a significant deterrent to acquiring new customers. Arguably no developer has figured it out aside from Blizzard with WoW, and even Blizzard started offering WoW to level 20 for free last summer.

As MMORPG developers sort out F2P, what I expect to happen is for the large-scale AAA-quality launches, e.g. the RIFTs’, SWTOR’s, and GW2′s, to be continue to be P2P at launch to recoup the sunk costs, and for those games to eventually transition to F2P but with mechanics that entice players to pay on a recurring (subscription) basis, expansion basis (GW / GW2), or microtransaction basis. We’ve already seen Trion Worlds offer new mounts (spider!) for a microtransaction even though the game is P2P and requires a monthly sub. This shift from P2P to F2P for a given game may be necessary to achieve a sustained net-gain of customers over time after the initial “burst” of customers at launch. And to do it right means that the developer would need to consider F2P mechanics before the game transitions from F2P to P2P.

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• Warhammer Online (WAR)
• Age of Conan (AoC)

The developers for those games make the mistake of over-promising and under-delivering, a cardinal sin for any business.

EA Mythic set the expectation that WAR would launch with 24 classes and 6 capital cities, but shortly before launch they cut 4 classes and 4 cities. The game client was unstable (multiple CTDs a night for me even a year after launch) and the servers simply couldn’t handle mass RVR without crashing or lagging severely. The “lakes” RVR while leveling was one of the most enjoyable PVP experience I’ve ever had, but the game fell down at endgame in T4. A game that hyped RVR couldn’t handle it.

I didn’t play AoC, but I kept tabs on the community. Funcom set the expectation that AoC would ship with DirectX 10 support – it was written on the box – but DX 10 wasn’t there until 6 months post launch. The game in Beta had serious performance issues and bugs, and Funcom unwisely drew attention to a “miracle” patch right before launch. It’s like saying “we’ve done a crappy job but finally got our act together, really!” Gamers loved the leveling experience from 1-20, but unfortunately the content team did not maintain that standard of quality from 21 to endgame. Rumor was that the writers across leveling zones had little or no interaction.

After WAR, in 2009 and 2010 I played several other “new” games to the Western market: Aion and Allods Online (AO). Aion’s grindfest killed my interest before I even reached level cap. AO had a terrific Beta experience go into the toilet when the game developer implemented a Death Penalty mechanic that basically made the F2P game a P2P game. I stuck with AO as paying to play wasn’t an issue for me, but I eventually quit due to the lack of appealing endgame content.

The failures of these MMORPGs unfortunately coincided with the incredible surge in growth and popularity of Facebook and Social Gaming. Money was being funneled into Social Games for obvious reasons, as I wrote in that Jan 2010 article. I grew increasingly concerned that developers would lose the financial backing to publish new MMORPGs, which typically cost tens of millions of dollars to launch. All any executive or VC had to do was point at the high cost and high failure rate to say it wasn’t be worth the risk. The MMORPG market was facing a vicious cycle, whereas Social Gaming was in a virtuous cycle of wildfire growth.

I went back to the safe haven of WoW in May 2010 after hearing that much of the tedious grinding in WoW had been removed. I enjoyed the latter parts of WotLK and then Cataclysm, which finally brought back meaningful challenge in PVE. Although as Josh “Lore” Allen recently pointed out to me, I am in the 1% who wanted things to not be faceroll, and the other 99% of the population had gotten used to the faceroll joke that was WotLK Heroic content.

While Cataclysm was my favorite WoW expansion, by mid February I was restless / bored with it. A fellow gamer, Castorcato, sent me a link to the talent calculator for a game I hadn’t heard of. RIFT. Looking at the talent calculator for an hour sold me on trying the game. Castorcato said that RIFT in Beta felt like the good things from WAR again, and I got very excited.

RIFT’s launch was the smoothest that I’d ever seen for an MMORPG. It blew me away. The game had bugs of course, but the level of polish was phenomenal, so it was able to meet the “is this as polished as WoW” standard question from the gamer community.

At WonderCon 2011, I asked a panel with Scott Hartsman (Exec Producer, RIFT), Dirk Metzger (VP Publishing, Zentia), and Nick Huggett (Customer Experience Manager, Runes of Magic) about the viability of the MMORPG market given the past couple years and their responses were highly encouraging. I also spoke with Scott after the panel about how Trion was able to launch a AAA-quality MMORPG.

As you may know, I’ve been critical of RIFT’s 1.5 and 1.6 patches – IMO they’ve derailed the great progress being made for PVP from 1.0 -> 1.4. But there is no denying that Trion has shown that AAA-quality launches of new games are doable, with the right mindset and execution. Trion has also brought a healthy amount of innovation to the MMORPG market – in particular with RIFT’s superb spec system and the game’s integration with social media.

So we started 2011 with a bang with RIFT, but that isn’t the end of the story.

EA BioWare is launching SWTOR later this month. I started researching SWTOR once I saw what was coming in RIFT 1.5 to determine whether it was a viable option for me. Long story short, SWTOR has greatly exceeded my expectations in Beta and I am pumped to play it at launch.

My guess is that RIFT has been a significant financial success for Trion Worlds, and I expect that SWTOR will be the same for EA BioWare.

This is great news for fans of the MMORPG, regardless what game(s) you play. The more success stories in the industry, the greater the degree of financial investment into game developers, which means more new games for us.

Thank you Trion Worlds and BioWare for delivering!

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• Re-work (balance) Pyro Mage’s Ground of Strength. It its current incarnation GoS provides total CC immunity indefinitely for the Mage plus the ability for their spells to stun, and this is rather imbalanced in PVP
• Increase Rogue melee and Marksman damage

The timing of the balance update makes sense – there has been sufficient time since 1.1 went live for the community to get its arms around the changes and to identify problem areas.

To date, players have often framed their feedback quite negatively. E.g. some players have been equating Trion to “Failcom” (aka Funcom, the maker of Age of Conan) and to Electronic Arts / Mythic Entertainment (the maker of Warhammer Online).

Both are unfair comparisons, but players have been badly burned since 2008 by games that were over-hyped but under-delivered, and Trion is experiencing the backlash from players who are now understandably wary of game developers.

While I am not going to predict what degree of commercial success Trion will have or whether Rift is the fabled “WoW Killer” (and as I wrote elsewhere that’s the wrong question to ask), Trion’s actions with and after launch show me that they get it. I have high confidence based on what I’ve seen and heard that Rift will continue to improve and that Trion is listening to the community.

Hopefully over time the majority of Rift’s players will perceive that as well.

As I have stated previously, Rift has been by far and away the best MMORPG launch I’ve seen in over 2.5 years, including Warhammer Online, Aion, and Allods Online. What has made Trion’s launch of Rift successful? Multiple, synergistic actions:

1. Trion didn’t launch until the game was ready. As Exec Producer Scott Hartsman said to me at WonderCon 2011, they were not going to launch until the game was sufficiently stable and had sufficient content
2. Trion has been unusually communicative about upcoming changes with the community. Examples: the Dev Tracker forum functionality to track all posts by Trion employees, Trion’s participation in 3rd-party fan podcasts, and their honesty in answering my questions in person
3. Trion is willing to make the tough calls to bring classes and specs into balance, even if the decisions are unpopular in the short term. I’m not going to tell you the balance in 1.11 is perfect. It’s not. Balance is an iterative process, and considering that we are ~7 weeks from launch, balance is reasonably good, even better than what I experienced as a 2k Arena Protection Paladin in World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion Patch 4.0.6

Class / spec changes for the sake of balance can be hard on the community, but they are absolutely essential for the long-term health of a game.

UPDATE (2011/04/22): OK, maybe I spoke too soon. On the Alpha 1.2, the CC immunity and 30% stun proc for Ground of Strength have not been touched. /sigh

UPDATE (2011/04/29): before I forget, the stun proc was removed from GoS in the first update to 1.2 notes published on 4/26. I think the indefinite full CC immunity is still an issue.

• Warhammer Online
• Aion
• Allods Online
• Rift

Rift’s game developer, Trion, has been remarkably savvy in how they have handled the game thus far, in particular by:

1. Not over-hyping their game then under-delivering. My impression is that Rift has mostly spread by word-of-mouth; my gaming friend Nathan and real life friend Gaardarun both raved about Rift from Beta
2. Delivering a stable, polished game at launch, with a clear path for implementing frequent updates/fixes with minimal downtime. The game servers have been taken down for maintenance at times, but the longest I’ve seen so far is 30 minutes, and Trion has managed expectations on downtimes pretty well. I.e. there hasn’t been that 12-hour unplanned downtime that we all dislike
3. Borrowing innovations from other games. Rift has taken some of the best mechanics and design features from games such as Warhammer, including the PVP mechanics for “tanks” such as Guard, Taunt, Hold the Line, etc and Detaunt. And other game features such as Achievements, Guild Achievements, Guild Ranks, etc that originated in Warhammer (and which Blizzard also copied)
4. Designing the most flexible spec system ever, which is both fun-to-play and IMO shields Trion from the class/spec griping from the playerbase

That last point has huge implications. Consider the following example with WoW. You roll a Paladin to heal at endgame as Holy, but you are unhappy with nerfs or issues for your spec. What are your options?

• Continue to play the spec and hope for future buffs, or
• Re-spec to Protection or Retribution and re-gear, or
• Roll a different Healing class, re-level to endgame, and then re-gear

Those are all crappy options to me, given that I value my time and what I enjoy most is endgame not grinding to get back to endgame. I know some people have been conditioned to accept the current market standards and would say “suck it up and re-level, it’s what I did” but I think that is a lousy customer experience.

With Rift, you can simply change which 3 of the 9 talent trees you are playing as a Healer (Cleric). Rift’s flexible spec system protects players from making a steep time investment in a class that they are later unsatisfied with for whatever reason.

The other implication of the spec system is that there are fewer opportunities for (real or perceived) imbalance between specs for the same class. Everyone knows a spec change has a low switching cost. No need to re-roll, re-level, and re-gear from scratch.

Is Rift the next “WoW Killer”? I don’t know and frankly don’t care. It’s the wrong question to ask – the right question is whether a game supports a virtuous cycle:

Trion made the right decision as to when the game was ready to launch, thereby avoiding the irreparable damage that was done by launching too early, as we saw with Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.

Will Trion continue to re-invest in the game over time? It’s too early to tell, but my impression is that they have a sharp management team, a perception further reinforced by an interview with Trion’s Marketing head back in December that I read today, while trying to find paying subscriber numbers. I haven’t been able to find those numbers yet – if you see any good articles please link them.

From a bigger picture perspective, Trion gives me hope for the “traditional MMORPG” market. Just over a year ago, I expressed concern that game developers were moving away from traditional MMORPGs and instead investing in social gaming. Trion shows how to do traditional MMORPGs right.

Please keep in mind that this is my honest, objective opinion. Like many of you, I’ve been burned by bloggers who hype up new games which only end up disappointing.

TLDR: I’ve desubbed from WoW to play Rift in the Head Start, which started today. I know this news will disappoint Paladins who have been following my PVP Guide and videos For me it’s time to move on. Keep in touch!

It’s still very early in the Cataclysm expansion – barely 2.5 months since it launched. In my opinion Cataclysm is WoW’s best expansion so far:

• Class re-designs have been largely well done
• PVE is challenging again (not that I really care but at least it made leveling not completely tedious)
• The PVP system is accessible and is about as skill-based as it has ever been.

Despite all this, recently I have felt restless / bored with WoW PVP. I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I will simply say I haven’t taken to Retribution as much as I had hoped, and I simply miss meaningful World PVP.

Earlier this week a gaming friend from the UK, Nathan, sent me a couple messages about Rift, a game which is launching in Head Start today.

Up until now I’ve largely ignored the Rift chatter / hype. I’ve had no reason to check it out, and I’ve been burned by hyped MMORPGs before, e.g. in 2008 with Warhammer (WAR), in 2009 with Aion, and in 2010 with Allods Online.

However, what Nathan wrote was very compelling to me, especially the following excerpts:

It is the perfect amalgam of WAR and Aion, honestly. What I like about it: customization…finding classes and roles that match something you would enjoy playing.

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html

I cried wolf when Blizzard ‘simplified’ talent trees, and this REALLY gets me pumped! Graphics are lovely, sound is great.

Battles are VERY Warhammer-esque (same engine I think too). I’ve played beta since the second phase, spent a couple of weeks getting feedback and to this day (beta just finished), I still have no idea what to play!

I played around with a Rift Spec Calculator. Each class can invest talent points in 3 of 9 different talent trees. The degree of customization is nuts, and this will generate a ton of fun discussion in the community. It’s clear that Rift has borrowed good mechanics from other games, such as the Guard and Hold the Line mechanics from WAR. The Guard mechanic enabled a tank to put a Guard buff on a friendly player that split damage on that player between them – so in essence tanks could protect targets when needed. HtL was a buff that tanks provided to players behind them, e.g. for mass charges or defenses. These were awesome mechanics that made tanks very relevant in WAR PVP.

The only thing that I noticed of concern is that Rift has only 2 factions – and in every game I’ve played that had concentrated server-based PVP (e.g. LOTRO, WAR), population imbalances tended to affect mass PVP outcomes. That is, the more populated side would tend to win, and this sometimes created a vicious cycle: the losing side tended to shrink as people got frustrated with losing and re-rolled, while the winning side got bored due to facerolling. I am still waiting for another game to copy Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) which had a 3-faction system – from what I’ve heard this was very healthy for PVP and created ebbs and flows in terms of faction strength that the playerbase enjoyed.

Yesterday my best friend from high school told me the reason he hasn’t been on WoW is because he’s been playing Rift Beta with a co-worker, and they bought the Rift pre-order because they were very impressed with the Beta. Net-net, the game mechanics in Rift sounded attractive enough and I heard good things from people whose opinions I respect, so I bought the Rift pre-order and cancelled my WoW subscription – I don’t have the time to play multiple games and I plan on chronicling my experience with Rift just as I did with WAR.

I will be playing Taugrim the Warrior, Defiant faction, on the Sunrest Harrow server (RP-PVP).

P.S. my reason for making the decision to switch from WoW to Rift has nothing to do with the 4.1 Patch nerfs that were announced on Feb 24. I made the decision before that:

Of course, I hope the 4.1 WoG nerf gets revisited, I just won’t be around to see it.

P.P.S. if you are playing Warrior in Rift let me know what specs you’ve tried so far and your take on them.

So after only 4.5 months of playing Aion, I’ve de-subbed.

The reasons are pretty simple:

1. the leveling was boring and very time-consuming. Fundamentally Aion felt like work to play based on its design
2. the main PVP zone, the Abyss, was largely empty. This was nothing like WAR, WoW, or LOTRO, where it was easy to find opponents to fight

The funny thing is my Chanter is only just over a level away from 42, which was my original target level for making PVP videos – Chanters get a ranged stun at 42. But the main thing is I simply don’t believe in Aion. I would not recommend Aion to a new player who is used to “Western” MMOs (e.g. WoW/LOTRO/WAR). So I figured it didn’t make sense for me to invest the time to level up and make videos.

I think some of the good qualities of WAR really set me up for disappointment with Aion. WAR was fun from level 1 all the way to 40, aside from the game instability issues. Aion was incredibly stable but consistently boring.

A YouTube subscriber sent me a PM back in September 2009 about Aion, and he was right about the game:

Not a big fan of aion, knowing the principle is Korean mentality based, it’s going to get old fast.

I myself been hooked in so many same type mentality game design and they all ending up a disappointment.

I work in the gaming industry, and I know how Aion is build as. [Aion] makes it more efficient for people who has time to waste, then instead of people who actually has the skills to show off. Quite imbalance approach, but then again, that’s their mentality of designing video games. (The american version is based off the asian version, same set of rules will apply.)

Hope you won’t spend too much time on Aion, you might setup yourself for a disappointment in the long run.

I’ve been following Keen’s posts about Allod’s Online so I might check that out.

We had no problems clearing the instance, and I was able to help DPS Kromede in between heals. Granted, we were both level 38 against Kromede. But the tank was using a 2h (so more damage taken), and I’m pretty confident we could have done this successfully at level 34.

The footage of this Kromede fight is fun to watch from a Chanter’s perspective because I am moving and shifting roles the entire fight, which is what Chanters do best.

Templar tips from Chalen:

• Use IJ to interrupt Kromede’s AOE. You have to back up a bit from Kromede for the interrupt to work
• You can switch between 1h and 2h weapons during pulls to rotate cooldowns to maximize DPS

Chanter tips

• the L37 skill Word of Quickness is incredible for burst healing. I should have used it when the tank’s health dropped to 25%
• Word of Protection is one stigma you’ll use from mid-game to end-game (unless you go heavy MC/DPS spec). It is a tremendous bailout ability in tight situations, because the extra avoidance and mitigation can be the difference between people dying or just surviving

Thanks Chalen for not just being willing but being interested in doing stuff like this. It breaks up the monotony of leveling.

Thankfully this morning I PUG’d with two very skilled and open-minded players and learned a lot in the process.

I joined a Templar’s Recruit Group for Fire Temple on the LFG channel very early this morning, so there weren’t many players online. After a Ranger and Sorcerer joined, the Temp said “OK let’s go” and I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. I wasn’t sure whether my 35 Chanter could handle solo healing duties but I was certainly willing to try.

The Sorcerer went LD on a pull when we had a couple adds and didn’t come back. From a cynical point of view, I don’t think that was an accident. The Sorc gave up instead of even trying. Fortunately, that didn’t affect our ability to clear the instance twice and get some nice blue mat drops in the process.

Here is footage of the 1st time we downed Kromede.

I went ultra-conservative on this attempt…I

1. didn’t melee
2. spammed Healing Light non-stop
3. chain MP potted most of the fight
4. stacked the deck in our favor by using the awesome group DP buff Word of Wind

Turns out it was a very easy and smooth fight. As you can tell from the footage, the tank (Inlove) used great positioning. He and the Ranger Maddux were very skilled players and it was awesome grouping with them. We handled some multi-mob pulls that I’ve seen wipe full groups.

This is as close to an apples-to-apples comparison that I could get between different classes, in terms of having the same level, comparable gear, and fighting the same mobs.

For Chanters, there are a couple things to be aware of in terms of our CC:

1. you can’t knockdown a mob already on the ground, but you can knockdown the mob as it starts to get back up
2. if you stun a target and re-stun it while the previous stun effect was still in effect, the 2nd stun will overwrite the 1st stun. An example of this is getting a stun with Infernal Blaze, then stunning with Parrying Strike. Depending on the situation, you may want to allow the 1st stun effect to complete before trying another stun (e.g. so that you can interrupt your opponent when they start casting after the 1st stun wears off)

Here are a few Chanter tips that I didn’t mention in the video:

• In PVE, you can tell that I allow auto-attacks (AAs)to weave in during abilities for my Chanter. Even at level 31, I don’t have enough melee abilities to spam non-stop without having to wait for either Meteor Strike (MS) or Hallowed Strike (HS) to come off cooldown. So I basically time abilities with some AAs so that I can use MS and HS whenever they are up. I tend to favor opening with MS over HS, because I want to get as many Pentacle Shock procs as possible and MS-IB do better damage than HS-BS. One could argue though that it makes more sense to open with HS to use Infernal Blaze as early as possible. You say po-tay-toe, I say po-tah-toe. In PVP I would spam abilities, because you have to get as much damage in bursts as possible (and before you get CC’d)
• For PVE, do not use Booming Assault, the 4th skill in the HS chain. It is an evil MP hog and does not debuff the target or have any useful effects
• It’s important to get used to watching the chain / reactive icons to the right of your character in the middle of the screen, instead of looking down at the skill bar. You want to keep your eyes on the action as much as possible, and having to look down can be a distraction

Here are a few Sorcerer tips that I didn’t mention in the video:

• The Curse of Roots stigma ain’t cheap, but it’s worth it’s weight in gold, for solo and group play. You will save yourself a lot of deaths by investing in it, so over the long haul, it will more than pay for itself.  It’s always sad to see Sorcerers who haven’t purchased it yet; not having CoR severely affects a Sorc’s ability to CC, especially when pulls get messy
• Did I mention how great Wind Cut Down is? Oh, of course I did, but heck, it’s worth saying again. And the 16s cooldown is short enough that you’ll use the ability every pull. So go out and buy it, if you haven’t already

I forgot to record flying; I wanted to mention that the easiest method I’ve found for steering while flying is holding both mouse buttons down. This allows you to make very fast turns mid-flight, which can cause problems for keyboard turners trying to keep up with you.

I’ll be traveling for work and holiday for most of this month, so my leveling will slow down quite a bit in December. I’m hoping to get my Chanter to 42 in January.