When Did Free-To-Play Start Costing Money?

Post soundtrack: “Try” by Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft

My timing couldn’t be better: I started playing the Allods Online open beta, started enjoying it, and then ran head-first into the news that this free-to-play game…  Well, it’s actually not all that free, once you reach the higher levels.

The game itself is quite charming – stylised graphics (reminiscent of WoW but with a much higher resolution), some charming races to play, and a new world to explore. 

“Set on the shattered remains of the planet Sarnaut, players will have the chance to explore the Astral space, battle Astral demons and fight for domination of dozens of allods, islands floating in the Astral space.”

It’s odd trying to make sense of the various familiarly-named classes - there are Paladins (fairly similar to what we know and love in WoW), Shamans and Druids are Warden subclasses (think pet-dependant hunters without the ranged weapons) and apparently the closest you can get to a WoW Rogue are Scouts (think a rogue with a hunter’s talent with bows).

I’ve rolled a Kanian Stalker (translation: a Kanian scout), and have played through to around level 11 at this stage.  It’s actually quite refreshing after the length of time I’ve spent in STO lately (ding Captain rank, T4 escort and level 32!) to get back to my fantasy RPG roots and…  Well, there’s more than a little grinding in some of these quests, but I think the novelty of new classes with different abilities and a different ruleset has been a nice change from WoW.

Three differences between Allods and WoW jump out at me when I started playing. 

• First, there’s no minimap.  You heard me right.  If you want to see where you are in the world (or even to work out which direction you’re facing, as I haven’t been able to adjust to the compass) you have to open the map.
• Secondly, there are no auto-attacks: in WoW it’s quite possible to you to start attacking a mob, then tab out briefly.  When you come back, you’re still auto-attacking (if you’re not dead).  In Allods if you’re not activating your abilities, you’re not doing anything.
• Third:  Remember only having a 16-slot bag in WoW?  In Allods you start with a single bag slot, with 18 normal slots (and 18 reagent slots for crafting materials, but you don’t have a use for them until you picked up a profession sometime after leaving the starting zone).  At the moment the only upgrade is a 24-slot bag that is either acquired by an ingame quest (which requires a lot of grinding – I’ve spent over 6 hours to acquire Iridescent Wings and Intact Mite Shells, with two more items needed from higher-level zones to complete the quest) or purchasing from the CS (cash store) for the bargain price of US$20.

Which brings me to the big issue at the moment with the game, namely the CS and its place in the game.  Initially the problem players had was with the prices themselves (which are apparently 10x what players of the Russian version are paying).

However, the issue that came to light was that a game mechanic makes purchase of CS items necessary when playing at high levels, namely Fear of Death (FoD).  This mechanic (where your stats are reduced by 25% for the duration of the debuff, which lasts over 50 minutes at level 40 and stacks up to four times) is negated by using items called perfume which make you immune to FoD for half an hour.  Perfume is available in the CS for US$0.75 ea or US$13.50 for a stack of 20.  Perfume is also available from a once-only quest you acquire at level 15, and then from a daily quest which takes around 30 minutes and rewards a single perfume.  (See this FAQ for more information)

Anyway, after a couple of days (during which time a vocal number of players whipped themselves into a frenzy on the subject), the North American publisher responded to the issue, requesting feedback from the players.

I’ve just listened to the Massively Speaking podcast (I recommend listening to the host opinions at around 21:50, and the interview itself starts at 35:20) that features an interview with someone from gPotato (the publisher), where he reveals that (other than the reaction from the player base over the prices) it’s actually working as intended. Players are intended to use perfumes in order to be competitive at high levels.  And if you want more than 30 minutes of high-level PvE or PvP play per 30 minutes per day spent farming, you’ll be dependant on the CS for your game-time.  (The Allods forum discussion thread on the interview also makes for interesting reading)

I’m rather disappointed, as I was quite enjoying the game with a view to playing casually if the endgame was equal to the leveling experience (along with the thought of helping build a flying ship with other players to then go explore the Astral).  But the bait-and-switch tactic inherent in the FoD/perfume dependency has really hit a nerve with me – and if I’m reacting this strongly after only a few days playtime, I can understand why long-term fans who are a lot more emotionally invested in the game are reacting even more strongly.

What it’s come down to for me is that the game is fun.  And it’s pretty.  And despite the bad taste in my mouth after hearing their plans for the endgame, the thought of levelling another character or two is still appealing.  But if they want to charge me by the hour to play the endgame and still insist the game is free-to-play it’ll be a frosty day in a demonic realm before I’ll give them a dime.*

I’m actually tempted to give some of the pay-to-play MMOs a try, with the growing number of trials abounding at the moment – anyone care to hear about Star Wars Galaxies, Age of Conan, or Warhammer?

/wave

(* - Yes, I’m aware that I’m over-reacting, and that developers have said they’re going to revisit pricing.  But this is my blog, so I can act like a child if I want to.  And they haven’t said they’re removing the pay-to-play component, so there!)

STO: Broken, But Is It Fixable?

Post Soundtrack: “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” by Ella Fitzgerald

My timing really needs work: I finally gird my loins to post that I’ve unsubscribed and am leaving, citing (amongst other things) the lack of autofire in space combat and the devs finally come out and say they’re planning on enabling some form of enhanced autofire but it’ll probably be a little while.

Also, in their latest Ask Cryptic column, they’ve released some sketchy information about their plans in relation to player skills.  In regards to the level cap:

The level cap will be increased to Rear Admiral Grade 10 in a larger update later this year. Additionally, a new Respec system will be added. At that point you can earn more Skill Points and purchase and rearrange your skills.

The level cap increase is interesting, although it is meaningless without content to play once you’ve reached it (as I found upon reaching it on my first captain) – fortunately by that stage they should not only have some variety of content for level 45 players, but they also have time to put level 50 content in place so players won’t be slamming into another glass ceiling.  I just hope they’re not so foolish they don’t jump to introduce respecs as soon as they can, as that really is an essential ability for a skill-based game like STO.

This is especially true when you consider the current assortment of Antiproton-everything badge weapons on offer from the endgame dailies – the only appeal of them is that they’re nominally “Very Rare” items (which is something of a joke when you consider how easy they are to acquire).  The inherent problem that arises with the system of purchasing skills in particular weapon types (especially with the high cost, especially for T5 weapon skills, and the limited pool of skill points with which to buy them) is that it limits the choice of a player when it comes to upgrading.

If (for example) an epic Disruptor Turret Mk X drops, it’s only worth taking if the player has the Disruptor skill.  If any other weapon type drops, it is less effective than a lower rarity level weapon type that the player has put skill points into. 

Let’s put it in WoW terms: imagine if weapon proficiencies were built into the talent tree (similar to the rogue skills for dagger and fist weapons, maces, swords and axes).  And now imagine that once you’ve put points into a talent, the points have been spent for good (or at least until the devs finally work out to to implement respecs). 

Now, a weapon proficiency gives the player a bonus to damage when using that type of weapon.  In STO the energy weapon types are Disruptors, Phasers, Plasma, Tetryon, Antiproton and Polaron.  Projectile weapons types (remember photon torpedoes from the original series?) are Photon, Quantum, Plasma, Transphasic, Chroniton and Tricobalt.  A player using a weapon of Type ‘X’ that they have maxed out gets a bonus of +52 damage. 

This means my Assault Cruiser captain, who has a number of Phaser Beam Arrays (Mk X) equipped, gets a bonus of +52 damage to each array.  With 4 arrays equipped, each doing 200 damage per hit, they gain a bonus of +52 damage each for a total of 208 extra damage (the equivalent of an additional beam array).

The problem comes with the need to spend skill points in order to level, with no way of knowing what skills you will be needing in order to take advantage of future item drops or rewards (such as the Antiproton badge weapons).  The system as it is currently set up benefits single or dual weapon-specific talent builds – the more of a single weapon type a player has, the more damage they can do.

From the devs comment on exotic weapon types:

Once you start breaking into the special weapons, you have to figure out which special effects work well with others. Just having 1 exotic weapon may not do so much for you, but if you can get a few, with special effects that work well together, that's when they get MUCH more powerful.

Unfortunately you don’t get any special weapons to play with until you’re at such a high level that switching weapon types would likely waste a large number of skill points that have already been spent (and currently can’t be reallocated).  Unless they mean you’re supposed to level your first character as a test bed to see what works so you can more effectively skill up your next character?  Or am I being overly cynical?

My issue with things like this is that…  Well, they just give the impression that Cryptic fails to think things through before they implement them.  The odd thing is, STO is actually (at heart) fun to play.  It’s just let down by the limited range of missions available, and an incredibly obtuse system of skills and talents.  Given time I think it’s possible for the devs to flesh out the game and give it depth that it just doesn’t have at this stage.  The lack of depth at the moment, though, is frustrating.

But enough criticism; it’s time to get back to time-wasting. I downloaded the free-to-play Allods Online client out of curiosity (the game’s in open beta, but appears to be pretty feature-complete) – I’ve seen a few WoW bloggers who’re dabbling (the latest being Elno at Plagued Candles) and have decided to give it a try myself.

/wave

STO: OK, So It’s Broken

Post Soundtrack: “I See A Different You” by Koop

After another session battling non-intuitive tab-targeting and the delightfully irritating three-handed control scheme for space combat (left hand on WASD, middle hand on cursor keys for shield reinforcement, right hand on the mouse) I gave up and cancelled my subscription to the game.

The tipping point in my decision was coming across the opinion piece here (and the corresponding review here), which summed up the growing dissatisfaction which I had until now been unable to coherently express, both in the lack of Trek in the game (from the first article) and the shallowness of the game and its mechanics (from the second).

This excerpt from the first piece quite accurately sums up one of the things I found most irritating about space combat:

Captain's Personal Log, Stardate 2409.3

The crew of the USS Spacebaricles continues to display a startling lack of combat ability. We engaged a Klingon Bird of Prey at 0600 hours today while patrolling the Regulus sector. After establishing phaser lock on the Bird's weapon systems, I gave the order to fire. The enemy vessel's shields took extensive damage, but it was clear that victory would require sustained battle. Unfortunately, and to my utter surprise, the bridge crew stood gazing at me hopelessly after the initial volley.

"Fire! Fire all weapons!" I yelled at the slack-jawed imbeciles.

They fired. And then they paused to stare at me again.

"Continue firing! Fire all phasers! Fire!" I cried, and continued crying, until the Bird finally fell. Hoarse and enraged, I retreated to my ready room to record this log.

I am beginning to suspect that a space-borne virus, perhaps designed by Klingon or Undine scientists, has affected my crew's ability to comprehend and perform simple tasks like sustaining phaser fire on a military target until being told to cease. I am engaging the ship's self-destruct sequence to stymie the spread of infection to other Federation vessels. If anyone should stumble upon this log in the scorched wreckage of this ship, please contact Admiral Quinn at Earth stardock and tell him that I always hated him. Tell him his beard is stupid and those spots on his face look like targ sh--LOG CORRUPTED

While I can understand why the devs may have felt it necessary to remove auto-fire in order to keep some semblance of interaction in combat, the accompanying shield reinforcement mechanic as it stands (pressing one of the cursor keys to reinforce the shield quadrant in that direction, or clicking on the centre of the shield graphic on the UI to reinforce all four quadrants) is just frustrating in its entirety, especially the way it fails to fit into the remainder of the control layout (see my comment above, re- three-handed control scheme).

While I’ve cancelled the subscription, I’m still going to dabble until the free 30-days that came with the game has run out – in the feedback I left the devs when they wanted to know “Why I want to unsubscribe”, the game is actually not bad if you approach it as a single-player combat simulator that just happens to have Trek art assets.  It just doesn’t have the content or length to justify a subscription fee, nor is the in-game experience social enough to be considered an MMO.

But it’s not a bad game, if you want to go pew-pew in Trek starships.

I just wanted more.

(And don’t worry, there’s more pretty screenshots coming)

STO: Encountering The Level Cap

Post Soundtrack: “Fly Me To The Moon” by Julie London

One curious thing about this game has been the way the level cap was lowered (along with a corresponding cap to the number of skill points a captain can earn) right before launch.  The previously announced level cap of 50 (nominally Rear Admiral, rank 10) became 45 (rank 5), along with much noise and fury on the official forums over the changes.

The reason I mention it is because I’ve finally reached it myself, after 4 days and 13 hours of time /played.  Meet the newest member of the Discordia family, the Discordia-D.

The tier-5 ships become available upon reaching level 41, after which you have another 4 levels to play with them before hitting the brick wall of the level cap.  This is equivalent to the level cap in WoW, where all further increases to your character’s abilities come from your equipment (which in STO means from Bridge Officers, along with ship and personal equipment).  Unfortunately there’s barely any endgame equipment available at this stage, and only one place to get it.

At launch, once you reached the cap there was only exploration quests and DSEs (deep space encounters – a space-combat PvE system where you and a random group of other players would get to kill packs of hostile NPCs) – there are only enough missions to get you to the cap, and no more became available once you reached it.

They’ve since introduced the hub for the initial round of end-game content, amusing referred to as “Raid Episodes” (which WoW players may recognise more appropriately as “5-mans").  Unfortunately it would appear that there isn’t going to be any larger-group content any time soon, so this will be all there is, once it goes live (apparently sometime next week).

The hub consists of a new space sector, with a corresponding new exploration zone.  A new series of three once-only missions became available featuring the Borg and Undine, presumably setting up the repeatable 5-man content yet to come.  A new defend quest is available for the zone (where you’re fighting off borg probes, spheres and cubes), and a daily exploration quest offers 5 tokens that can be used to buy epic Mk X equipment for ship and player – the token gear is apparently to be used to fill gear-gaps in preparation for the 5-man episodes.

All in all, it’s become fairly lacklustre.  Even with the new content slowly filtering down from the developers, the impression I’ve received is that the real end-game intention of the developers immediately post-launch is that players will just roll new characters to go through the levelling grind again, either as Federation or if they enjoy PvP, as Klingons (who are still pretty much bereft of any other levelling method).  And with the immediate limit of 3 character slots (with another two slots available for players who’ve taken the leap of faith with a year or lifetime subscription) this is a quite limited alternative (and no hint of when additional slots will become available for purchase).

It’s feeling more and more like I’ve reached the limit of my patience with the game as it stands, and am considering cancelling my subscription and move on to whatever the ‘next game’ will be (if I don’t return to WoW) – revisiting STO in a few months may prove more satisfying, when they’ve not only given players at the level cap variety in things to do, but have also knocked down more of the gameplay and balancing bugs that still have potential to annoy and irritate.

I’ve also spent quite a while trying to work out what game STO reminds me of, and finally figured out that it’s the super-casual-friendly free-to-play title Free Realms.  In STO the occasionally-challenging space combat can be fun, as can the occasionally-entertaining (albeit more primitive) ground combat, but with the complete lack of any kind of death penalties the game comes down to a you-will-win-if-you-play-long-enough grind that undermines what little complexity the game offers (and that complexity is something that the game does its best to deny you access to, due to pretty dire in-game documentation).

One a more personal note, one little bug that left auto-teaming broken until very recently meant that I ended up soloing all of the content until I reached the new hub at level 43.  Between that, and the severely instanced design of the game world, I’d have to say this MMO was (for the duration of the levelling process) not bad as a single-player game.  As a social title, though?  In my experience it has failed quite comprehensively.  Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the sandbox nature of Azeroth in WoW, but the instanced-everything nature of STO has been very isolating, and even Fleets (the guild equivalent in-game) are currently limited in function to another channel to chat in and some extra bank slots.

But for all my complaining, the game has been kind of fun.  The environments are bright and colourful (apart from the ones which are, by design, dark and muted), and the ship combat can be entertaining.  I’m still in two minds about dropping the game, as it can be a fun little time-waster; I’m just wary of subscribing to a game on this basis.

Well, I should probably see about updating my Priest PvP gear guide now that the new arena season has arrived – although maybe I’ll work on it after I do my STO daily (the singular one that’s in-game at the moment).  And enjoy some more screenshots.

/wave

STO: Cruisers – Speedy Molasses

Post soundtrack: “Love Resurrection” by Alison Moyet.  (I’m on a brief 80s kick – enjoy it while it lasts)

Another post, and another tier of ship opened up for my enjoyment.  Fortunately it’s challenging to play.  Unfortunately they’re rather a little aesthetically lacking – and they’re not a class of ship for the impatient captain.  Anyway, meet Miss Exploration Cruiser, my shiny new tier 4 ship.

Needless to say, that’s not her real name: she’s the USS Discordia-C, NCC 99309-C (tradition is a wonderful thing). 

As I’ve mentioned previously, there are three ship classes in tiers two, three and four.  (Tier five gives you two subclasses for each class, but that’s a tale for another post)  The starter ships, the tier one Light Cruisers, are jack-of-all-trades (and as you would expect, masters of none).  As a player levels, the three different ships classes that become available upon reaching Lt. Commander (level 21) begin to differentiate themselves more clearly:  the escorts increase in turning speed and weapon power, and science vessels are more effective in their role as support class (while still possessing mobility and decent damage capability).

Cruisers are defined by three things:  their ability to mount a large number of weapons (4 fore and 4 aft at T5), their ability to take massive damage, and a turning radius the size of a small planet.  Needless to say, these all increase with each tier, although the latter is rather unpopular with the masses.

The turning radius is a tad annoying, but to be honest it wasn’t that much of a jump from the T3 cruiser – I think the secret is to have the right engineering consoles, and custom power settings.  For a cruiser, the consoles I look for first are EPS Flow Regulators, which effectively regenerate power much faster.  This allows you to fire you weapons faster, your shields regenerate slightly faster, and adds a little to your turn rate.

I use custom settings for all four settings:

Weapons:  75/45/25/55
Shields:  45/75/25/55
Engines:  25/25/50/100
Balanced:  55/60/25/60

I tend to switch between them where it’s needed, but with the level of equipment I currently have there’s a degree of set-and-forget (followed by quickly-change-when-being-pwned, on occasion).

• Weapons is great for groups of small ships – frigates, fighters, birds of prey.  Also good for low-level content if you’re helping friends.
• Shields is fairly self-explanatory – a life-saver against named ships.
• Engines is what I switch to if I want to turn quicker (when out of combat, at least).
• Balanced is just that – a fairly balanced power distribution (I tend not to use it though, as the other three settings cover most situations).

My secret to successful cruiser captaincy is to have spare auxiliary power available whenever you can (hence my slightly higher aux settings), which leads me to my next secret.

Beam arrays are fun.  Conventional wisdom appears to be that a cruiser can’t successfully stack beam arrays because chain-firing them will reduce the cruiser’s weapon power dramatically, which in turn reduces their damage.  It might be my power settings, or the EPS consoles (or maybe both) but I don’t have any problems with weapon power and don’t have problems killing any nasties either.  (It’s actually quite satisfying watching fighter packs melt away under a 5-beam-array barrage)

The fun thing about beam arrays is that they play to the strength of a cruiser, which is the much-maligned large turning radius.  The fun thing I’ve found is that the slow turns make it fairly easy to keep my target broadside, which is within reach of both fore and aft banks.

The hardest part (after making sure your speed is adjusted for best effect – faster means larger turn radius, slower means smaller) is spamming the spacebar to keep firing everything while holding down the turn key.  (Needless to say, I’m getting a sore thumb – I’m beginning to consider investing in a gaming keyboard like a logitech g13 and setting up an autofire toggle to get around it)

On a more general note, there have been some interesting missions and tidbits of information that show up as you progress through the sectors.  The Romulan sector has some novel missions, not least of which is probably the mission that felt most like a Trek episode to me, which involved “ghosts”.  Amongst other missions, you also visit the remains of the Hobus system, the location of the supernova that facilitated the Trek movie reboot last year, and not only explains it but also weaves it into the game plot quite effectively.

Time for some more screenshots from the last few days.

Yes, I’ve been a busy little starship captain.  And as soon as the server comes back up, I’ll likely be busier for a little longer yet.

/wave

STO: 2nd Time Lucky

Post Soundtrack: “The Gods of the Yoruba” by Gerardo Frisina

The head-start is almost over, and what have I achieved?  Well, the highlight so far is probably my tier 3 heavy cruiser, the USS Discordia, NCC 99309-B.

I’ve been delving into the awfulness that is the forums (admit it, I don’t think there’s any official forums to a game this popular that isn’t heavily troll-enriched, and the STO forums are no exception) in order to pick up tips on cruiser captain talent builds (important considering Cryptic have yet to finish setting up any re-spec options), boff (bridge officer) talent selections, and equipment tips.  Needless to say, there is indeed some gold amid the dross – if I’m feeling enthusiastic, I might even post some links at some stage.

Basically I’ve just been doing what I do so well, which is levelling quickly – Commander Noube is currently sitting at level 21, which is Commander Rank 1 and (as the screenshot above demonstrates) opens the third tier of ships up for captains.  (New ships become available at 11, 21, 31 and the last tier at 41 – the current level cap is 45, i think)

I’m finding levelling is fairly smooth going, although I’ve come across the occasional small drought (possibly due to my haphazard route across the sector map, where I haven’t exactly followed what would appear to be the designer’s expectation) which I’ve evened out with some time spent doing exploration missions.

There have been some buggy quests still, including one that took four attempts to finish – fortunately the second though fourth attempts were only from the last spawn point in the ground portion of the mission, which was not as frustrating as restarting from the beginning would have been.  And one ground fleet mission seems to be bugged quite thoroughly (although the name of it escapes me), leaving it almost impossible to complete.

But for all the buggy quests, the ones that do work can be quite…  absorbing – especially the ground combat missions.  Yes, it’s all fairly formulaic (although it’s more ‘Kill 10 boars’ than fed-ex quests), but I’m enjoying it on the whole.  The scenery brings to mind a combination of the TOS physical sets and the corresponding matte paintings the gave those sparse physical locations a sense of scale.

Some examples from my time levelling:

Back to space, though.  And cruisers.

For those who aren’t playing the game, there are three ship classes.  Cruisers (epitomised by the Enterprise in the original series and the Enterprise-D in TNG), Escorts (the Defiant in DS9) and Science (the ship from Voyager).  Their roles are very roughly equivalent to tanks, dps and healers respectively.  But only very roughly, as each can have considerable overlap thanks to the abilities of the bridge officers who occupy your bridge, and the abilities that each class of captain possesses.  (Confused yet?  Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into it much further for the time being, so it won’t get any worse)

In the beta I went with an escort, because laser pewpew!! is fun (and it’s the most straightfoward ship class to play).  When I was reaching level 20 or so, however, it was becoming pretty rough going – the Romulan missions were wiping the floor with my escort.  My current cruiser, however, is getting through the same missions a lot more effectively (and with a lot fewer deaths) – my dps may be lower, but it’s hard to underestimate the toughness of a decently equipped cruiser.

Anyway, I’ve been working on upgrading equipment and items and crew as I’ve progressed and it’s going fairly smoothly (other than the occasional server downtime, which works wonders at ensuring that I get things done away from the keyboard).  I’ve not quite run into the brick wall that is the sharply reduced turning speed of tier 4 cruisers, but the reduction of speed from the T2 to T3 has given me a taste of what to expect – it’s a good thing I’ve been reading up on the subject, or it could have put quite a damper on my enjoyment of my chosen ship class.

There’s not really much more to say for now, other than “I’m enjoying the journey.”  So here’s some more screenshots to make it look like I’ve been busy.

But it’s time to boldly go – the server is back up, and Starfleet needs my services!

/wave