Gah! MMORPG’s are making me horrible at action games

I’ve been totally spoiled by MMORPG’s.

Most MMORPG gameplay is too easy and might as well come with a guarantee that you will succeed.  As long as you stick to the clearly labeled areas and monsters that are appropriate for your level, it’s smooth sailing.  After a while, you can almost shut off your brain and go into cruise control.  I often find myself daydreaming, instead of focusing on the onscreen action.

In many MMORPG’s, it is possible to challenge yourself and find tougher encounters, but it’s often not worth the effort.  For efficient and effective leveling/grinding, it’s usually best to stick to monsters that die fast and easy.  Dying slows your progress, even in games without a death penalty.

As a result, I’m used to playing easy games and constantly winning.  I’m not used to dealing with difficult challenges.  MMORPG’s typically don’t require fast reflexes or good coordination.  When you level or quest grind, it’s like a leisurely stroll.  No fast movements.  It’s like a marathon that tests your patience and endurance.

In comparison, action games are fast and furious.  They test your reflexes…your ability to think and react quickly.  You’re constantly bombarded by challenge after challenge, which grow increasingly difficult.  It’s completely different from how it feels when you are playing an MMORPG.

I’ve been playing my Xbox 360 a lot recently and I’m finding that I’m horrible at action games.  I used to be really good (years ago…).  I’m trying to play Bioshock and Resident Evil 5 and I’m unable to react quickly enough to do well.  The 360 controller is horrible for shooters (compared to the keyboard+mouse) and that doesn’t help, but that’s not the primary problem.  I get flustered easily now.  When I’m supposed to see incoming attacks and perform split second blocks, I can’t do it!  I’m no longer used to dealing with so many urgent encounters one after another.  The feeling of constantly being on edge is almost foreign to me now.

I have to play the EASY or BEGINNER difficulty!!!  My gamer’s pride is taking a severe beating.

Other than MMORPG’s, I’ve been mostly playing strategy, adventure and role-playing games for the past few years, so that doesn’t help my reflexes either.

I’m going to train myself hardcore to get back my gaming edge!!  No more leisurely gaming.  No more cakewalks!

I resubscribed to Gamefly

I miss gaming on my PC!

I’m very impatiently waiting for Radeon 5850’s to be more available.  Unfortunately, in the meantime, that means I’m stuck using a craptastic Geforce 9400GT in my gaming computer.  This is not a gaming card!!  It’s fine for home theater PC’s (passive heatsink), but it chokes when I’m trying to run any current games.  I have to turn down the settings so far that the games are too ugly to play.  I feel like I’m spitting on the hard work that the developers poured into creating these games.

I’ve been playing Torchlight for the past few days, but it’s too repetitive and simple to hold my interest for too long.  It offers classic Diablo 2 gameplay and does it extremely well.  It also runs amazing on subpar computers (it even has a netbook graphics setting).  Unfortunately, the lack of multiplayer is a big problem.  The developers are working on a ‘MMO’ version, but it’ll be an year or two before that comes out.

So I turned on my Xbox 360 yesterday for the first time in several months.  I was greeted by a huge whirrrrrrring sound.  I had completely forgotten just how loud the fan can get into the 360.  After relocating it behind my media center furniture, the sound was a bit more bearable and I got reacquainted with my 360 game library.

Unfortunately, my brother ransacked my library a while ago, taking all my best games.  So I resubscribed to GameFly.

It’s a bit expensive (~$23 a month for 2 games out at a time), but it works surprising well.  Gamefly has a distribution center in a neighboring state, so turnaround is only 3-4 days for me.  I always feared that mailmen would be tempted to steal the games, but it’s been reliable for me (there was a mailman who stole 2,200 games before getting caught).

A tip for Gamefly users.  Popular games and new releases are in high demand, which means low supply.  If you want to get a popular game as soon as possible, it can help to keep your queue as empty as possible and only list the games you want right now.  Sometimes you might wait an extra day or two, but if you really want a particular game right now, that’s your best option.

I’m currently replaying Tales of Vesperia, which is a great example of a traditional Japanese RPG.  I have Batman and Dragon Age in my Gamefly queue as well as some older games which I’m dying to play like Resident Evil 5 and Fable 2.

I’m extremely tempted to drop the cash to pick up a Playstation 3 or a Nintendo Wii.  The PS3 is only $300 now (120gb drive, which is easily upgradable) and is a great option for a Blu-ray player.  It’s also extremely quiet (I’m slowly getting aggravated with the 360 fan).

The last time I played a Nintendo game was Super Mario Bros!  I feel like I’m really missing out because I’ve never played a Zelda or Metroid game nor have I played any of the recent Mario games.

Blood Moon portal map

I’ve logged in for maybe an hour to check out the new Blood Moon content, but my current 9400GT is so horrible that it’s hard to play.  I have to play at half screen resolution and low settings, which makes everything super fuzzy.

From what I can tell, there is no easy way to find the Blood Moon content.  You have to either run around all over the place, or use the chat channels to work together with other people.  I guess that’s not a bad thing.  It does promote teaming up, but I’m so used to soloing in CO that it’s a bit of a pain.

The Champions Online Wiki page now has all the relevant quest and content information for the Blood Moon event.

Cryptic posted a nice summary page of all the Blood Moon content, including the perks, figurines and other rewards.

The new Zombie Apocalypse PvP minigame is actually kinda fun.  You end up killing dozens (hundreds?) of zombies, which gets really annoying.  But once people start dying, it gets a bit crazy and hectic.  I’m not sure how much strategy is involved, other than keeping together and using AoE attacks.  But it’s kinda similar to the Left4Dead zombie survival gameplay, which is a good thing.  In all my games, I was one of the last people to die and turn into a zombie, but playing as a zombie and picking off heroes looks fun.  I received around 2200′ish acclaim for each 10-15minute game.  I don’t know the experience reward, since I only used my level 40 to play.

Here is a nice map that someone put together that highlights the portals for the 13  undead heroes in Millennium City.  Right now, there is an annoying 2 hour timer for each portal (and I think a couple are bugged).  But by tomorrow, the timers are being reduced to 30 minutes, which should make it more bearable.  Try to team up and share missions as much as possible.  It’s far easier than trying to do it solo.

http://www.champions-online-wiki.com/wiki/Blood_Moon

I’m buying a new gaming videocard

I just made the final diagnosis.  My nVidia 8800GT is no longer capable of playing videogames.  Sigh.

I changed drivers.  Ran diagnostic tests.  Tried it using another OS.  Swapped it with another computer’s card.  There is nothing more I can do.  It’s definitely dead.

On a positive note, it does seem to be stable enough to run in my home theater PC.  720p and 1080p video play without any hiccups.  I’ll probably get an occasional freeze, but Windows 7 recovers from them fairly well.  Since I don’t have a Blu-ray drive, the 8800GT is probably overkill for a HTPC, but I hate to throw things away.

So, now I’m on a mission to buy a new gaming videocard.

AMD is currently leading nVidia in most segments of the gaming videocard market, from the low end to the high end.  AMD recently released the Radeon 5870 and 5850, which takes over the high end single GPU market.  Their new 5770 and 5750 has Directx 11 support and runs cool, cheap and quiet.  Their older 4870 and 4890 are still great performers and even better now with price reductions.  Anandtech.com has great articles with tons of benchmarks that cover the 5850 and the 5770.  Tom’s Hardware has a gazillion benchmarks that cover practically every videocard.

Here is my dilemma.

I want the new Radeon 5850 which is the new undisputed performance king at the $260 price range.  It offers DX11, Eyefinity, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, HDMI bitstreaming, and supersample anti-aliasing.  I’m not sure I need all that, but it spanks the nVidia GTX 285, which costs $100-$200 more, depending on the model, brand and retailer.  Unfortunately, it is out of stock everywhere.  AMD has stated that demand is extremely high, but they expect the supply to catch up in a matter of weeks.  I need a new videocard right now.

$150 to $170 buys me a Radeon 4870 1GB, which is a solid performer.  $160 to $170 buys me a Radeon 5770, which is slightly slower than the 4870, but has more longevity with DX11 support.  An year or two from now, running two Radeon 5770’s in Crossfire could be a good upgrade option.  Two 5770’s draw as much power as a single GTX 285 or Radeon 5850.

The Radeon 4890 is around $200 and a step up from the 4870 and 5770.  Unfortunately, it’s loud and power hungry.  For $190, nVidia’s offering is the GTX 260 Core 216 896mb but it competes with the 4870.  nVidia really needs to drop their prices across the board if they want to directly compete with AMD’s offerings.

The Radeon 5770 performs on par with a 8800GT SLI setup.  So any of these cards is a significant upgrade to my single 8800GT card.

Compared to the 5770, the 4870 is about 5-10% faster.  The 4890 is another 10% faster.  The 5850 is about 40-50% faster than the 5770 for an extra $100.

The Radeon 5850 is really nice, but I don’t think I can wait for the weeks (or months?) for me to get my hands on one.  It’s possible that a shop might have them in stock tomorrow, but it’s just a big gamble.  Every techie recognizes that the 5850 is the best buy for the $200+ market and they get snapped up immediately.

So I’m really leaning towards buying the cheapest card that gives me the performance/features I need right now.  4870 is faster and a little cheaper, but the 5770 has DX11 and runs really cool and quiet.  I’ll probably be buying one or the other sometime soon.

I’m not playing Champions Online any longer (I might check out Blood Moon…maybe).  My enthusiasm for Aion is waning with every day since I am in fear of the massive grind at higher levels.  So I’ll just catch up with my TV shows and anime until I get my new card.

I’m sad. My videocard seems to be dying…

Sigh.  My poor nVidia 8800GT looks like it’s dying on me.

A couple days ago, I started getting computer freezes when I was screwing around on the Champions Online Test server.  I hoped that it was due to the Test client and not my computer.  Just in case, I downloaded a GPU temperature monitor (CPUID Hardware Monitor is very good) and cleaned the dust out of my computer.

I installed Witcher yesterday and had a fun time playing it for a couple hours.  Everything seemed to be going okay, until I changed the graphics settings to high.  That triggered a long string of computer freezes.  Witcher freezes immediately now, no matter the setting.  I’ve had a few system restarts where my Windows 7 failed to reach the desktop.  I had a few system freezes where Windows 7 eventually recovered and told me that the videocard driver was non-responsive.  I had a few instances where I had some weird graphical artifacts on my screen.

I tried updating the videocard driver, but that didn’t help.

So now, I’m kinda hoping that something else in my Windows 7 installation became corrupted somehow.  I’m going to be spending a good number of hours over the next week doing some troubleshooting.  Sigh.

I bought the card more than a year and half ago.  Stupid me, I neglected to mail the warranty card, so I’m past the warranty period.  That means it’s probably better for me to just buy a brand new card, rather than messing with trying to get this card repaired or replaced.

As long as I spend at least $120, I can get a replacement card that is noticeably better than the 8800GT.  Over $250, it will be more than twice as fast.  So now is a decent time to upgrade, but I’m sad that I can’t upgrade my home theater PC with the 8800GT.

Oh well.  Lesson learned.  Always mail in the warranty cards for expensive components.

Cryptic finally opens their microtransactions store

More than a month and a half after launch, Cryptic has finally put some useful items for sale in their microtransactions store (the C-store).

1000 Cryptic points = $12.50

4 additional characters slots = 1200 points ($15)

Full retcon = 1000 points ($12.50)

Character rename = 280 points ($3.50)

2 additional costume slots = 400 points ($5.00)

The store also has some costume sets (240 each), emblem sets (80 each) and figurines (80 each) available.

Months ago, Cryptic had a minor public relations nightmare when news came out that Champions Online would have a monthly subscription and a cash shop.  Far too many people blew it out of proportion, flooding forums with rants and declarations that they would never play CO.  They all thought that CO would have a cash shop that’s similar to many free-2-play games that depend on their cash shops for money.

I was never worried.  The C-store is exactly as I always thought it would be.  The items available are on par with the cash shop offerings in other popular games like Guild Wars and City of Heroes.

The costume items are a bit expensive, but the prices for everything else seem reasonable.

I was a bit worried about how much Cryptic was planning to charge for a full retcon, but now that it’s finally available, I think the price is fair.  $12.50 to completely redo your character’s powers and talents?  Sounds good to me.  If it was any cheaper, far too many people would constantly redo their characters.

I’m sure that skeptics will say that Cryptic is going to constantly screw with the powers, forcing people to buy full retcons with every major patch.

Creating a well proportioned character

Step 1.  Drag the ‘chest’ slider to the maximum setting.

Step 2.  Done.

That seems to be the standard strategy for many people when they create their characters, especially female avatars.

For everyone else, I found a nice guide someone put together (Joumana Medlej at cedarseed.com) that provides a one page overview of how to draw a body.  The information about proportions can be really helpful when playing around with the detailed character creation tools provided by many games (Champions Online, Aion, Age of Conan, The Sims, etc.)

Aion: Possible huge increases in quest experience

I haven’t committed myself to playing Aion for one reason: the massive, crazy experience grind after level 25 or so.  I know that I will never have the patience to grind the countless monsters required to reach level 50.

That’s why this Massively.com post has me really excited.  The Korean version recently received a new patch to their Test servers that dramatically increased quest experience.  Massively guesstimates an average 500% increase and points out that one level 44 quest changed from granting “13,300 to 703,820 experience (53 times as much)”.

It’s on the Korean Test server, so this is not a guaranteed change.  It’s also possible that it might not make it to the western servers, but I think it’s very likely.  NCsoft should be well aware that western players are far less tolerant of grinding monsters.

When (if) these changes make it to the North American servers, I will take Aion seriously and invest some major hours.  Until then, I’m happy with casually playing CO and Aion and focusing more on single player games.  I’ve been neglecting my Xbox 360…I haven’t even turned it on in the last few months.

Champions Online: So many people!

Today’s patch introduced a great bug.  The game no longer automatically creates more instances when existing instances are filled to the maximum limit with people.  Apparently, the problem is due to the game miscounting the number of players in each zone.

Whatever the cause, I’m really enjoying this bug.  Every zone is bursting over with players and it actually feels like a real MMORPG now.  There are crowds of heroes at each NPC and a mob of heroes in the powerhouse.  Zone chat is lively (but still very stupid, heh).

Of course, there are downsides.  Some zones are pretty laggy and doing quests in the open areas is probably very frustrating.

Previously, each instance had a population limit of around 100 people.  Many people always chose to go to the least populated instances, to make it easier to complete quests.  As a result, the population was spread thin between a large number of instances.  A 100 people in some of these massive zones was not enough to make the game come alive.  Now, with hundreds of people in every zone, the game feels dynamic and more exciting.

Cryptic really needs to raise the population limits for each zone.

CO: TK shield is finally being fixed!

After a month of Live and even longer in beta, the most overpowered ability is finally getting some attention.  Cryptic never should have waited so long.  TK shield is one of the major reasons for why people were breezing through the game, soloing team content and making PvP into a massive joke.  It is one of my biggest complaints about the game and now it’s finally getting fixed!

Cryptic recently released these Test Server patch notes.  Players now need to advantage TK shield to get a lingering effect and it only protects against physical damage.  Many of the other block enhancing powers are getting a revamp as well.

Cryptic’s timing is quite horrible (for me).  I just posted my ‘farewell’ speech yesterday, complaining endlessly about how easy and stupid the game has become.  Now, they are finally fixing one of the major imbalances.  I’m curious enough to log back into the game at least a few more times once the changes reach the Live server.  I’ll probably check out the Test Server later today so I can see the changes in person.  I won’t believe it until I see it.  Cryptic has messed up before (Mindful Reinforcement…which is still bugged, by the way).

I’m especially curious to see how this impacts PvP.  Unfortunately, Cryptic is also screwing with my favorite power (Conflagration) by taking away its ability to remove travel powers (what the hell?).  Losing TK shield dramatically reduces everyone’s survivability.  People will actually die far more often, which will be a nice change.  It also means that everyone is going to use teleport even more than they do now, but overall, this patch is a big step forward towards a more balanced game.