Permanent and Non-Permanent Choices in Your Character

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Blackferne

Listening to Mos Eisley Radio Episode 29 Forum Assault, Zach and Brooks briefly discussed the issue about whether at some point down the road whether players would be able to change their spec or even their advanced class choice. They cited a developer statement made over the summer that the advanced class choice was a permanent one. This got me to thinking about how this will work in practice. Bioware has the ability to make the advanced class choice a permanent one, while still allowing players to redo their spec and focus on another area of their advanced classes talents

Skill Trees Will Allow a Lot of Flexibility

First off I want to remind everybody that each class has a total of 5 talent trees. Each advanced class has access to 3 of them, and only 1 of them is shared by both advanced classes. So to use smuggler as an example. Smuggler has 2 advanced classes: Gunslinger and Scoundrel. Gunslinger is known for the dual wielding(up close DPS) and trick shot (I assume powerful crowd control). Scoundrel is known for medicine and the scattergun (ranged DPS). So let’s assume (because I can’t remember what the advanced skill sets are called that the 5 for smuggler are Gunslinger(Dual Wield, Dirty Tricks) Scoundrel (Medicine, Scattershot) and Shared(Smuggler Core Skills).

So I roll a smuggler and at level 10 I choose. Hopefully they will give you a little playtest of each one, but at some point I make the choice and that choice is permanent and cannot be changed. This still allows me to “spec” different ways. I could be a DPS focused gunslinger or a Crowd Control focused Gunslinger, or maybe I’m a Gunslinger but more of a hybrid between two extremes. Like wise I could be a healing scoundrel or a ranged DPS scoundrel or a mixture. And I could be using companions to compliment my shortcomings so even though I’m a half ranged DPS half healing Scoundrel I always bring my healing companion and serve as the “healer” in a flashpoint.

Players Will Expect a Chance to Undo Mistakes

Why did I spec into Force Poke instead of Force Choke? I'm and Idiot!

So Bioware could, and I have no special knowledge one way or the other, say your advanced class is permanent, but how you spec within that advanced class can be changed for a price (and hopefully not an insanely high price). And in a sense they kind of have to allow some spec freedom because besides people will make mistakes, but they also make choices based on current game conditions and game systems will change as they play the universal mmo dev game of “continual balancing”. If I take a talent point in something and that talent is decided to be overpowered and they nerf it, I’m being “punished” for Bioware’s mistake not mine. Likewise if I decline to take a talent because it is garbage now, and Bioware buffs it later, why should I be punished for not being a true believer in the future upside of a current crappy talent?

We Need to Rethink How We View Advanced Classes

So I think the source of this problem in community perception has a lot to do with how we envision the game’s classes. We see Smuggler as the class and not so much Gunslinger or Scoundrel. But in reality the advanced class is what we will spend the majority of our time playing. Levels 1-10 (assuming you pick Adv Class at 10) is the introduction to game mechanics, and you are learning the broad strokes of what a group of advanced classes can do, only to make your real decision after you play a bit.

To illustrate this whole thing imagine in WoW that warlock and mage were combined to be the wizard class with warlock and mage being the advanced classes. At level 10 you choose mage school or warlock school, and then you get your three talent trees. One of those trees overlaps (fire damage), while two schools are unique to mage and warlock (mage gets frost and arcane, warlock gets DoTs and Pets). Now you can still respec in your school, you just can’t switch from mage to warlock. Now we don’t worry about this in WoW (if you want a mage, roll a new toon) because that permanent decision is made a character creation instead of level 10. SWTOR seems to be saying “We want you to get used to the broad category of a group of advanced classes, and then make your permanent choice.”

The Importance of Balance

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Blackferne

By now most people have seen the new Trooper video put out by Bioware.

What I love is the action sequence starting about 55 seconds into this video. We see some kind of Sith force user getting ready for the force jump slice and hack pawnage only to be refuted cool and calmly by the grenade of the trooper. What this tells us is that Bioware is committed to some degree of balance in the game.

In the Star Wars movies, which I love, the Jedi and Sith are portrayed as powerful Super Heroes and Super Villains to everyone else. If you need proof all I need to do is remind you of how quickly Darth Vader disarmed Han Solo in Bespin. And we all know how that turned out.

Now some may argue that Jango Fett and Obi-Wan seemed to have an even fight, but I would remind you that until Boba used Slave 1’s cannons to tip the scales it was looking really bad for Jango. And we saw how quickly Jango fell to Mace Windu.

So this Force user advantage poses a serious problem for players who are not interested in being a Jedi or Sith, but would rather be like Boba Fett or Han Solo. In order for the game to work there needs to be balance between the classes so no single class can always win. It can still be balanced if certain classes play better against one class consistently, but inferior to another class consistently. The important thing is that all players feel like their class choice matters. This video hammers home that point. We see the fall of the Sith seemingly so easily. It reminds me of this scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This commitment to balance will cause cries of not being true to the spirit of Star Wars from some fanboys, but it is important to remember that we are all playing a game, and a game has to have players starting on mostly equal footing. Imagine a game of chess where you only had your pawns and king, but the other player had all 16 pieces. It would be massively unfair, and unfun. The same feeling would be there for non-force players when looking at their friends who chose to be living Gods.

The Launch Pressures on a Guild

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Blackferne

SW:Tor is still a good ways off. We don’t even have a definite launch date yet, but that doesn’t stop people from laying plans for what they and their friends should do once it launches. But this excitement is full of potential traps that guild leaders and officers should be aware of to help keep group cohesion going into a very dynamic period of play after launch. This post was inspired by a revelation in the Q&A of the Studio Insider Friday Update on 12-17-2010 in which Dallas Dickinson, Director of Production for BioWare Austin, answered the following question:

Will there be different server types, as in PvE servers and PvP servers? (asked by Fruskov)
There will be several different types of server, including PvP servers and PvE servers.

Notice he says there will be several different types of severs INCLUDING PvP and PvE. That suggests that PvP and PvE are just two traits of server creation. I assume they will have time zone suggested servers so populations will roughly know when prime time will be, but I think there will also be Role Play servers, and probably the Role Play servers will come in a PvP and PvE variety. There may be additional traits for server rules that I’m not thinking of, but assuming the server list is populated with PvP, PvE, RP-PvP, and RP-PvE servers for a variety of time zones players have plenty of options for their game world. And that is great for players, but may not be as good for guilds who are coming from other games into SW:ToR.

A brief bit of history is in order to better explain this. The Church of Alvis was created in Star Wars: Galaxies in August of 2003. Now the thing to remember about SWG is that it had no official server rules. Every server was the same. Sure some servers took it upon themselves to become “The Unofficial RP server” or the “Unofficial French Server”, but in every server there was at launch some fledgling RP community, a PvP scene probably fighting over Anchorhead, and plenty of PvE players doing their thing. So you ended up with all kinds of players interacting and it led to some great moments, but you also saw players get frustrated that others didn’t take their aspect of game play as seriously as others. A notable Imperial Guild Leader on our server said that because others didn’t role play right, citing the Church of Alvis, his vision of Star Wars (movies and all) had been ruined. That is unfortunate, and probably avoidable by breaking the communities among the RP/ no-RP and PvE/PvP divides like World of Warcraft has done.

The problem that this presents to existing guilds is that their pool of players have to come kind of agreement about what aspect of game play is most important to them as a group. Is you guild significantly interested in Role Play or are they fine seeing people with names like Look Skywalkar and Darf Vaydar walking around talking about how the local sports franchise is doing this year. Similarly you have to decide as a group that you want world PvP at any time versus choosing to PvP under timing that you control as you’d see on a PvE server. Besides these questions, you also have to decide what faction you will run as.

The default for the kind of server for most people will be a non-RP PvE server. Heavy Role Players like PAX Imperius, who formed as a role play guild for Imperials, obviously know their members want no Loook Skywalkars and Darf Vaydars debating the merits of the west coast offense in the SEC. Likewise guilds like Veers Elite know that they don’t care about Loooks and Darfs and only want the chance at lots of PvP. Guild leadership has to be responsive to their members. That said it will be tough because any decision you make might result in a member leaving for another gaming opportunity. If Alvis were to go Sith I know that some of our members might go along with it even though they strongly prefer Republic, and I know some of our members have no interest in one faction or the other making the faction decision a deal/no deal on running with Alvis in SW:ToR. It is important for the guild as a whole to try very hard to come to a consensus on who they are so they can land on the right kind of server with the right faction.

Even if you get the right server and faction for all of your members you will still have some potential problems once the game launches. Every player is different. Some like to leisurely level seeing all of the sites and enjoying the walk. Some will race to maximum level and be chomping at the bit for “end game content”. Some players have more time to play than others who juggle gaming with other commitments in their life. Some like to roll and play around on alts while some only play one character all the time. This shouldn’t present a problem unless people have different expectations of what the guild is suppose to be doing. I’ve been playing WoW away from Alvis since 2005 with some other friends. I’ve been in a few different guilds and on a few different types of servers, and through each expansion that comes out I see the same pattern emerge. A few dedicated players race to max level, get raid ready then complain others are taking to long. The stragglers complain that they never get to raid just because they didn’t get to max level quickly. Arguments break out invoking cliche “core guild values” and “principles of fairness”, and some people leave. So to give these groups names, let’s call the quick leveling raiding types “Power Gamers” and the stragglers “Casual Gamers”. And while I’ll use raiding as an example I’m sure similar things happen in PvP guilds where people have to sit out of events because they aren’t ready, or frustration in RP guilds that Bob isn’t writing up a novel of back story like Jack did.

So all guild leaders and guild officers interested in keeping the group together should know going in that there will pretty quickly be a gap in progress (be it level, crew skills, RP stories, PvP skill whatever) that will start to frustrate players at some point. The key thing to remember is that players need to heard, and reminded that this gap is most likely a temporary one. After time the stragglers will catch up. One big suggestion is to set “deadlines” for inclusion. It has to be reasonable for a casual player, but not so far off from now that the hardcore player feels like she will never get to do the activities they really want to do. For example let’s say that your guild has a sizable group of people who are interested in raiding. The hardcore people may be ready in a month, the casuals will start being ready in two months if they are reasonably focused. Make a deadline of we walk into the raid in 2 months. It shows the hardcore people that you want to get going, but also lets casuals know that others are depending on them to get ready to tackle the content. Broad reasonable guild goals are a good way to give people purpose not only for themselves, but for helping other guildmates. If as a hardcore player, I know that a raid encounter requires players to be geared to a certain level (using the WoW model since we don’t know too much about SW:ToR endgame) then I am more willing to jump on guild members to join me on content to get that gear. Same thing with leveling professions, if I know that we need someone to level up their crew skills so we can have something as a guild, I will funnel materials and resources their way to assist. The casual player also knows that others are depending on them to join them for the activity and would be more focused in their game time to get to the group’s expectation spending less time taking screen shots of the flowers of Alderaan (ooh this blue one was really pretty!). I don’t want to say the players don’t have a right to dedicate their playtime towards virtual floral photography, but it is unreasonable for those players to think that they can dedicate time to that and be able to engage in activities that require lots of preparation and focus to be part of a group effort.

It ultimately boils down for guild leadership to listen to what their members want, and making sure that you provide a vision of where the guild is going, and how to get there. It won’t always be easy, but if you can have a generally accepted goal, and players are on the same page on how as a group you are getting towards that goal, it should work out well.

ToR Crafting and the Casual Gamer

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Furiel

This weeks reveal brought us even more information about the crew skills system in SW:ToR, including revealing a new crafting specialization – Armstech (correctly predicted by yours truly a few weeks ago here). However the real interesting part of this update to me was the second paragraph of the Companions and Crafting section (full article here). It reads:

”Players can issue crafting orders to up to five companions at a time, and each companion can add up to five crafting tasks to their queue. You can cancel crafting progress from anywhere if you need to, and the resources your companions were using will be returned to you. Your crafting queues will even continue to progress if you have to go offline – when you log back on, you’ll receive any items that were completed while you were gone.”

If you are a casual gamer like I am, but take progressing your character and all of his skills seriously, then this paragraph has to make you want to jump up and do a happy dance.

The real beauty of the queue though is how it can work in concert with the time factors of crafting tasks to allow even the most casual of players to be able to continue to progress without having to feel like they need to login every few hours or even every day to be able to keep up. Only able to play on the weekends? That’s cool bro, just queue up 5 day-long tasks for each of your companions Sunday night before you go to bed, then when Friday night comes go login and guess what, you have 25 more skill points and 25 nice items waiting for you. Suddenly find yourself with some free-time on a Wednesday night when you didn’t think you’d get to play? No biggie, just cancel the companion’s task WITH NO RESOURCES LOST and go adventure with them for the evening, then reset their queue when you are done. No harm, no foul.

It really is an elegant system that I see as rewarding both your hardcore players, who will be able to skill up faster due to their use of shorter length missions and ability to gather more on the go, and your more casual players who can make use of longer mission timers during their out-of-game time to still be progressing. Now we just need next spring to arrive so we can all take advantage of it.

The Post in which the Dood Posse Visits Austin

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Blackferne

In what has become a yearly tradition, Dood came to Austin during the holidays to visit the Alvians who live here. It was a lot of fun to catch up. We learned that Dood’s solution to any problem is to add bitters and a lemon twist. Jounville is under the belief it doesn’t count as arson if marshmallows are involved. And finally that every Alvian is geeky in their own way. If you had seen Gandolfini and Dood talk cocktails for over an hour you’d definitely appreciate that statement.

From left to right: Gandolfini, n'Jessi, Blackferne, Bulwark, and Dood

It was great to see the Church coming together to share a meal and have a great time.

Crafting Speculation

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Furiel

Recently Bioware released a large chunk of information about the crafting system in ToR, how it’s going to work, what the limitations are and what SOME of the available professions are going to be. Note the important use of the term SOME, because as with most things during this stage of development Bioware has elected to not reveal everything, leaving the rest to our imaginations. And that’s where I come in, I’m here to do your thinking for you! Or at least do some speculating on what the currently unknown Crew Skills are going to be. If you go by the Game Systems page there are currently 1 Gathering, 3 Crafting and 2 Mission options still unknown. I think there is some information that can be gleaned from the descriptions written on the Game Systems page to help fuel my speculations, along with several conclusions I have come to that have just as much reason to be right as they do wrong. So without further adieu, Furiel’s crafting predictions sure to go wrong!!

GATHERING

For Gathering we have 3 known types, Bio-Analysis, Slicing and Scavenging, and when thinking about the commonalities of the three I realized something, they are all things that can be actively done as well as being done through the companion mission system. In the crafting video they demonstrate times where a player actively scavenges a droid corpse and they also show when another character orders their companion to perform Bio-Analysis on a dead creature. We have seen in some media times where we believe that a character was slicing, or what appeared to be an interactive terminal in a flashpoint that the speculation is that it could be sliced. Assuming that is correct, then all 3 known gathering skills are capable of being done in the open world, so the logical extension would be that the fourth gathering skill must be possible in the open world as well as the regular interface. So with that limiting factor in place I came up with the following:

Gathering can be more than just materials.

Gathering: Information

Based upon the line “The resources and information you gather…” we already know how we are gathering resources, but how do we gather information? Slicing is assumedly one way, but I imagine this would be a different way to acquire schematics and also some other crafting related items through social interactions. Perhaps you send a smooth talking companion out on his own, or when you are out in the world, you go to a cantina or other gathering point where you would have a chance to encounter a “contact” that you could then interact with and obtain one of these items. I see the items received being something like single use items or buffs that will increase the success (or critical success) chance of either a crafting activity or mission. Say you receive “a dirty little secret”, you could then use that to enhance the success of your next Diplomacy mission by 5%. Or maybe you get “a hot tip” that gives you a 5% increase on your next Treasure Hunting mission. For crafting items you could get “an experimental polymer” that would increase your next armor creation, etc etc etc until you go through all of the different mission and crafting skills.

This would have the side benefit of encouraging more player interactions and socialization as people with Information Gathering would be hitting NPC gathering points to try to gather info they would then encounter each other as well and could theoretically interact with each other instead of just the NPCs.

Gathering: Mining

This idea has some traction with the community on Darth Hater and it’s not a possibility I dismiss, however I think it’s highly unlikely. Bioware has said they don’t like the idea of nodes just sticking out of the ground, and if you look at this dissection on the Darth Hater site it shows a Scavenging mission that involves going to a cave for metals and synthetic goods so that is mounting evidence against a specific mining skill.

CRAFTING

Currently we have 3 known crafting types currently, Armortech, Biotech and Artifacer, with three unknown skills. Unlike the gathering skills I think that the crafting ones are actually fairly obvious if you think about what is already available, how they are described and what is missing.

Crafting is where your specialization will really shine.

Crafting: Weaponsmithing

This one seems pretty obvious and I’m surprised it wasn’t listed at the start, but a craft skill to make weapons and weapon enhancements seems blindingly obvious to me.

Crafting: Tailoring

This seems obvious to me as well. Vanity clothes are usually popular and things like Jedi robes, cloaks and other non-hard metal armor items have to come from somewhere. And while yes, there is already an Armor profession, note the use of the terms hard metal and shielding in the Armortech description, I believe that this specification will mean there is a delineation between hard and soft armor types with the Tailor doing the soft types.

Crafting: Engineering

Originally I thought that this might be only a droid engineering profession, but after further review, analysis and feedback I believe a more general engineering profession is more applicable. This profession would be kind of a catch-all profession that would make many different types of minor items. Some major things I would expect to fall under the Engineer would be starship customization items, droid repair kits, item repair kits and possibly droid enhancement kits. Droids aren’t just the cool phones some of us have, they are also an integral part of the Star Wars universe. However it doesn’t make sense that I could inject bacta or force heal them, so having droid repair kits that would function just like a stimpack for players makes perfect sense, especially considering that mechanic existed in the original KOTOR games. This was the original thought that drove my first idea of having a droid engineer profession on it’s own, however realizing the limitations of that title in combination with the other areas like starship customization that didn’t have a home yet led me to expanding this profession to encompass all that it does now.

MISSIONS

From the description given to the missions on the Game Systems page the missions sound almost like a subset of quests that you would undertake yourself if you weren’t so damn busy saving the galaxy so you’ll just have to send your companions instead. The descriptive text on the Game Systems page I think it pretty telling on it’s own for this and I drew pretty much all of my inspiration from there for the two unknown mission types.

Missions will allow you to extend your characters influence.

Mission: Smuggling

Smuggling is a core concept within the Star Wars universe. Unfortunately the script requirements of video games makes it difficult to implement for players to partake in the more subtle versions of talking or bribing yourself past security. Having it implied because you sent out a smuggler-type companion to go do things like smuggle some sympathizers out of the opposition factions space or sneak some supplies into insurgents would be very cool and could be a good way to farm DS or LS points.

Mission: Research & Design

I’m only speculating this based on the line under missions “You can choose from a variety of mission skills is your crew into conducting research?” and I figured it would be something where you would send a companion to a facility or location to work with a specific researcher to assist in them furthering their research. The results of that mission would then either be a prototype item or a new schematic for a given crafting skill.

CONCLUSIONS

With what Bioware has already revealed the crafting system in ToR is going to be very different than what we’ve seen in a lot of the other MMOs out there. Grinding will be impossible due to the timings on crafting activities, and self-sufficiency will be difficult to impossible as well due to the 1 crafting skill per character and 6 crafting types, so unless you want to duplicate at least 2 classes you will never be able to cover all skills on your own. And that’s probably a good thing.

The Choices in Crafting

Posted on November 13, 2010 by Blackferne

Darth Hater has an interview with SWTOR Lead Writer Daniel Erickson in which he better flushes out how crafting will work. The minigame seems considerably less grindy than what is currently available in WoW, and reminds me a bit of factory and harvester use in SWG. The basic choice is shaping up to be how to best utilize your labor force.

The companion system will provide players with a series of choices on how to maximize their output. This output covers not only crafting or gathering items, but also their viability in PvE or PvP situations. Allow me to better illustrate. I want to preface that I have no special knowledge of Bioware’s intentions, but based on this interview, and all publicly available information this seems very much what they are signaling towards.

For simplicity sake let’s say you have three companions. In a combat setting they are a tank, a healer, and a damage dealer. This provides the versatility in combat they have often cited. Your group doesn’t have a healer, everyone brings their healer companion. Now these companions will also have various non-combat skills which they can utilize. Let’s say the tank is a great gatherer of stuff, the damage dealer is awesome at the diplomacy stuff, and the healer is a wonderful crafter. Whenever you take one with you to a combat setting be it a flashpoint or a warzone you are leaving the other two behind. If you continually rely on one companion you will limit how much time they spend doing those other things. So it would be really easy to see a player who relied on a crafty/healer companion having great success in maximizing their diplomacy games and resource gathering, but having less success in being a top tier crafter.

I predict that some guilds who want to co-operate for greater economic success will coordinate who brings which companion types to maximize an interdependence among people. The guild leader may always bring their crafter to flashpoints, so as to maximize gathering materials and diplomacy, but funnel those materials towards a guildmate who always brings the gatherer companion to flashpoints, leaving their crafter on the ship making items from the guild leaders materials.

Obviously there is a lot of complexity left to be revealed, but the core minigame mechanic for players to consider is how to best optimize their companions “work” schedule. Players who can plan ahead their play time will be in a better position than players who are constantly deciding what to do on the fly.

Welcome to the Church of Alvis

The Church of Alvis is a guild founded in August of 2003 in Star Wars Galaxies. Since then we have spread to other games, but always maintained a connection with each other. With the release of Bioware and LucasArts’s Star Wars: The Old Republic we have reformed on the Juyo ~~Canderous Ordo~~ Jedi Covenant server. Please feel free to browse the site and let us know if you have any questions or are interested in joining.

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