Why You Should Be Playing Rift: 02 – Porticulum Network

May 19, 2011March 16, 2011 by Belghast

Over the last few weeks I have become some what of a “Rift Evangelist”, as I have spent hours preaching to my friends why they should come over and play this new game. It is not something I have really consciously done, but I seem to have a constant stream of “isn’t this cool” moments to share. This series is devoted to these little sometimes overlooked features of the game, that all help to add up to such a rich experience.

Episode 02: Porticulum Network

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The Porticulumn Network is one of the coolest features of the game, but is also one of the most indirectly complained about systems for players coming from other games. I will admit at first I was one of the complainers, even going so far as to post on the beta forums about it. However after living with the system, I have come to appreciate exactly how amazing it is, both for rapid transit and the way it very gently nudges the player population to be community minded.

What the Porticulum Network gives you is the ability to transfer from between any two ports on the network instantly for a nominal fee (that gets less and less nominal the further away from your current hub you go). This is what we loved so much about the Dalaran portals in WoW, Fast Travel devices in Everquest II, and the various Plane of Knowledge portals in Everquest. This allows you to move quickly to wherever in the world your guild needs you to be.

The player starts with no portals connected to his or her network. They receive the first connection on their hub by visiting the Porticulum Master for their faction’s capitol city. From that point on, they can connect additional ports to their hub by talking to the Porticulum Masters in each of the zones explored. The above image shows a complete network for the defiant side (minus the new Porticulum at Knight’s Stand added in 1.01 patch).

When you talk to any Porticulum Master you are given the option to Bind Soul for a small charge. Doing this will give you the Soul Recall ability, and allow you to return to your bound porticulum. This ability has a hour long cooldown and a brief cast time. With the Total Recall guild perk you are able to reduce the cooldown to 50 minutes. This allows you to rather quickly get to anywhere in the world once an hour.

What You Give Up, And Why It’s a Good Thing

Now we get to the point of complaint many users including myself initially have. The zones in rift are fairly massive, and take a large time to cross. If you notice, most zones have only one portal. What the game lacks is an intra-zone taxi system, like flight points and horse paths that have been utilized in various other mmos. Initially this seems like a massive thing to give up, players like to be able to go where they want to when they want to with minimal effort. However, like the heading alludes to, not having these ways to travel intra-zone safely is a good thing.

Taxi systems general allow the user to skip large areas of content safely. In a game like rift, where part of the design is a constantly changing world where rifts and invading armies besiege towns, it requires community interaction to turn the tide of events. As you move through a zone, you are forced to confront these forces head on to survive. As a result I have seen random groups of players gathering to take down rifts on a regular basis. This kind of impromptu interaction is what I feel will keep the player community active and thriving.

As you move into some of the larger and more difficult to traverse zones there are multiple porticulum in the zone. For example Iron Pine Peak a 40-45 zone, had 3 well spaced portals allowing you to pop between major questing hubs easily. When you enter this phase of the game, the lack of an intra-zone taxi system really goes out the window.

It’s All About Immersion

One of the things has been amazing about this game is the level of immersion the player has. As you travel across a zone you carefully cling to the roads, knowing that just off the path lies your likely death. The game brings back the edginess and fear factor that so many early MMOs had. In Everquest, I knew that if I went wandering off in unexplored territory I was likely to find something that would squash me like a bug. However in the World of Warcraft era, we as players have become lazy as we are used to being able to wander zones with godlike impunity, or simply fly over the top of them ignoring all of the would be pitfalls.

I’ve come to appreciate the uncertainness and randomness of encounters this game has brought back to the MMO genre. I remember the sheer fear I had the first time I stepped foot into Muire Tomb in Dark Age of Camelot, or cautiously running the zone boundaries of Kithicor Forest trying to get through to the safety of Rivervale before nightfall. While I considered it inconvenient at the time, and was happy to see things like that gone in World of Warcraft… I have come to realize now that I have it back how much more depth it gave the game. After all, isn’t the reason why most of us play these games to have a break from our normal lives and be thrust into epic battles that just don’t exist in real life?

Why You Should Be Playing Rift: 01 – The Map

May 19, 2011March 15, 2011 by Belghast

Episode 01: The Map

One of the running themes with Rift seems to be taking the best features of other titles, improving on them and presenting them in a very solid interface. The in game mapping system is a perfect example of this. Above is an example of the main map during a Freemarch Death Invasion. It gives you a nice live heads up on what is going on with the world.

In the above example I have hovered over one of the invasion units represented by the crossed swords icon, you will come to be familiar with. When doing so, the map highlights the trajectories of all the current invasion forces that are on the move. This lets the players quickly see where these forces are converging upon, so you can cut ahead of the push and be ready to present a defense. In the above example it appears that all of the enemy units are converging on Eliam Fields and Kelari Refuge.

In addition to the invasion tracking there are numerous other things being shown on the big map. You can see there are a number of purple death rifts that have popped up. The player can mouse over any of them and get the status, level and whether they are major or minor. Each of the NPC towns is marked with a star icon, and each enemy fortress with an icon denoting the faction, dungeons marked with a green jewel and each major mob center marked with a castle like icon. I’ve not seen another game that gives the player this much information without having to rely on add-ons.

Waypoints

All of the above is nice, but where the system truly shines is in the waypoint system. The player has the ability to right click the map and set a waypoint. On the main map this is shown with a line drawn between you and that location. If you noticed on the image of the main map, at the bottom there is a simple and clean coordinate system. The addition of being able to set a waypoint makes it extremely easy for you to travel to a precise location in the world.

In addition to it making it easier for you to travel to specific locations, waypoints work while grouping. If you notice on the minimap I have highlighted the X> icon of the waypoint, and it pops up various information. In a party or raid you receive the waypoint of your party members. For traveling from rift to rift or coordinating defenses, this is a super simple way of letting folks know where you will be heading.

You can also see in the tooltip shown in the screenshot you are given a distance away. The most amazing thing about this is that while tracking quest objectives, it also denotes whether or not the location is above or below you. How much time have you spent in other games roaming around on the wrong floor of a dungeon looking for the quest mob that just isn’t there? I will probably cover the quest tracking system in another post, but the mapping system makes it simple to figure out exactly where you need to be to complete an objective.

But Wait There’s More!

Every so often in this game, there is an idea that just makes you think “why didn’t anyone else think of this?”. In the 1.01 patch Trion added in an extremely powerful feature without much fanfare. By opening a chat window, and holding shift as you right click the map to set a waypoint, it now sends that waypoint as a link over chat. When other players click on your link, the waypoint is set on their map as well. Take a step back for a moment and ponder the power of this.

How many times have you been sitting in guild chat, as a new player is leveling through an area and asks where a hard to find mob is located? Instead of having to do the “its by” dance, as you clumsily try and explain where it is, you can simply open up your map, from anywhere in the world and link to them a close approximation. Since this went in last week I have already used it a dozen or more times in guild chat and zone chat to answer folks questions. I find this kind of attention to detail simply refreshing.

Tracking

While not as sexy as the waypoint system, the tracking system in this game is everything you would expect it to be. If you click the magnifying glass icon on the side of the mini-map you are given a clean checkbox list of available tracking options. While tracking these appear both on the mini-map, and on a zoomed in view of the main map.

For the most part these are the standard set of options that were presented with games like Warhammer and in WoW with the Cataclysm expansion. It is just expected that at this point any game on the market will allow for tracking of multiple items, and this does it well.

One thing you will notice missing from the list is professions. Profession resource tracking is handled a little bit differently in this game than that of WoW. When you learn a profession you get spells that toggle on and off the tracking for that gathering profession. This was a little weird to get used to, but I appreciate it in the long run. There are various kinds of conditional tracking like the Reaver “Track Death Creatures”, that if included in the checkbox list would make it extremely cluttered. Trion has done a great job of presenting lots of information in a very clean interface.

I mentioned this feature for waypoints and quest objectives, but the above or below tracking works for resource nodes as well. How many times in other games you have spent tracking to figure out where exactly that node was, only to find it that it is in a cave you didn’t know existed? If you simply mouse over the mini-map icon you can tell immediately whether or not the node is aboveground or not.

Wrapping Up

The Mapping system is one of those things players just expect to work. When it doesn’t work, it is one of the first things players try to augment with addons (Cartographer / EQ2map project etc). Why is the Rift mapping system so amazing? Well mostly that it gives you all this functionality, in a clean, easy to use form factor… and completely out of the box without any user modification. It is functions like this that make me think Trion actually plays its own game, which is a point I question about many MMOs. It is this attention to detail that really has me so enthralled with this game.

Sidenote

Since this is the first one of these features, please let me know what you think. Was this useful? What would you like to see in the future? What overlooked features really have impressed you? Comment below and I will respond.

A New Challenger Awaits…

February 22, 2011 by Belghast

Forgive me father for I have sinned, it has been forever and a day since I have last blogged. I’ve been tied up with all the tasks and responsibilities that come with being the guild master of a 600 character guild. Honestly for me, that has been a major adjustment. We have always been a small tight knit family of raiders, and with the release of cataclysm some massive changes happened in House Stalwart.

In the past, by choice, we had shunned the concept of guild based raiding. Throughout our history as a guild we have been the core of several different non-guild raid groups, and at the tail end of Burning Crusade we struck out on our own and build one known as the Duranub Raiding Company. If you’ve read much of my posts in the past, you’ve followed some of our adventures.

Cataclysm however brought into line several things that rocked the core of this group. Namely the guild rewards changes, and the guild based achievement system lead us to collapse Duranub and begin to look at raiding as a guild. As a result, many of the smaller satellite guilds that had raided with us in the past made the choice to go ahead and collapse into House Stalwart. As a result we have grown leaps and bounds, from having 10-15 players on any given night, to having upwards of 40 players online.

This could have lead to some major schisms, but for the most part it has been a fairly natural progression. The majority of the players that now are in the guild were in the greater “guild ecosystem” beforehand. While we have as a result added in a lot of friends and family in the process of these new members, the result has somehow managed to maintain the same atmosphere we have always had. Primary difference being, instead of being small and flexible, we are now the 5th largest guild on the server.

The Doldrum Returns

Towards the tail end of Wrath, I struggled greatly with trying to find a desire to play the game at all. With the release of Cataclysm, I had an influx of new things to do that pushed this aside. However as I sit with 3 85s, all of which are geared I am starting to feel the same familiar tug of not really wanting to play. In the past, I was fine to dink around on alts but it was the raiding that I really was not enjoying. This time around, with the switch to 10 man raiding, I am enjoying that aspect immensely. I just find myself not knowing what to do with the rest of my time.

I’ve been known to wander off and disappear for weeks at a time, exploring various games. I’ve taken vacations to play all manner of games such as Warhammer, EQ2, LoTRO, and most recently the creation of the House Stalwart minecraft server. Each time a vacation winds up with me back in WoW, refreshed and ready to level something else. The problem is, I find myself getting “toasted” a little quicker each time. The digital blood transfusion, seems to be rejected more quickly.

Where’s the Beef

As a whole, I blame this most recent “funk” on Cataclysm itself. I had been in since the friends and family alpha, and to quote an 80’s commercial, I kept wondering “where’s the beef”. While the revamp of the oldworld is nice, when you are like me with 3 85s, 4 80s, and 7 characters between 60 and 80… the prospect of going back and doing the old content seems to lack meaning. So when you remove all of the oldworld content, that I agree needed to be updated, you are left with 5 outdoor zones, 7 dungeons, and enough raid bosses to make 1 Icecrown sized instance.

Cataclysm just lacks the same epic feeling that the other expansions have had. In so many ways to me, it feels half done. As I sat in Alpha, and eventually Beta I kept feeling that surely there was a major update they were holding out until live. For an expansion that I had been anxiously awaiting for two years, everything just felt incomplete. As a developer I have been here before, gotten into a project that was too massive to get done by release time. As a result you start trimming back, cutting everything that isn’t essential, so that you can meet your release schedule.

I feel that Blizzard bit off far more than they were prepared to chew when it came to revamping the classic world. As a result, you have this banquet of experience for new players, but for us veterans it feels like we are stuck eating budget gourmet. We as players simply expected more at this point. Yes we knew going into it that we only had 5 new levels of content, but I had experienced this same drop in leveling in Everquest without getting gimped on the content.

Lets look at the previous expansions, which should underline why I am overall unsatisfied with Cataclysm two months in. With the release of Burning Crusade it gave us plenty of content to chew on: 8 Outdoor Zones, 16 Dungeons and the introduction of heroic modes, and 15 total Raid Bosses. With Wrath blizzard kicked it up a notch and delivered even more content: 12 Outdoor Zones, 16 Dungeons, and 18 Raid Bosses. So to restate, when we look at Cataclysm that as veteran players only gives us 5 outdoor zones, 7 dungeons, and 14 raid bosses it just seems like we got cheated.

Stick a Fork In It

So at this point, two and a half months into cataclysm, I have leveled through the 1-60 experience twice, leveled through the 80-85 experience three times, and ground enough heroics to gear up those same three characters in 346 or better items. I am still in the process of raiding through the content, and am enjoying it greatly. However for the rest of the time spent in game, I am out of things I actually care to do.

This post has developed a life of its own at this point. Originally I had planned on writing about Rift, as during this doldrum I have managed to get myself hooked on this new MMO. At this point, that will have to be saved for another blog post. Apparently I as a player, had more than a few things to say about my disappointment in Cataclysm. I find myself greatly looking forward to the Rift head start this week on Thursday, and I plan on playing it furiously before and after my schedule raid times.

One of the cool features of the game is the in-game twitter client. Towards the end of beta I set up a separate twitter account @BelghastRift, and began tweeting various in game screenshots. I was initially afraid that the game would end up being pretty spammy, but overall it seems to be manageable, so I might end up switching back to tweeting from @Belghast. I think part of the problem with my blogging has been, that I’ve barely had the excitement about WoW to keep playing it on a weekly basis, let alone write compelling posts regarding it. You the readers, if I have any left, should expect to start seeing some rifts content as I explore this new game.

Onwards and Upwards

Ghostcrawler Does Not Owe You a Pony

January 18, 2011 by Belghast

Last week Ghostcrawler released an article entitled “Wow, Dungeons are Hard!” in which he outlined some of the complaints players have made about the steep learning curve of the Cataclysm dungeon content, and outlining the fact that it was very much on purpose. I found the article a very well thought out and well written discussion piece about what the folks over at blizzard were thinking about the way dungeons should fit into the entire gaming process. I expected that this would have helped to quiet some of the discussion over whether or not these zones needed a nerf, however it seems to have caused the opposite effect. There seems to be a large conflagration of posts both on the wow forums and around the wow blogosphere about that the dungeons are in fact too hard.

A Privilege Not a Right

One of the sticking points I have as I read through these complaints is the general sense of entitlement that the community has developed over the years. The ability to run heroics, and the ability to raid for that matter is a privilege not a right. Getting to the point where you can reliably contribute requires a bit of dedication and work from the player. it should require that the player spend time gearing up, and preparing for the fights.

I guess I just find it odd that folks generally have a problem with that. I am a very serious about gearing my characters, and make checklists of the various items I need from each of the dungeons. It is just something I have done since the beginning of wow, and has helped me keep things organized. I feel a big part of my job in this game, especially as a tank, is to be as well geared as possible so I am the least drag on my fellow players as possible. I’ve even developed little OCDs about this, to the point that I cannot log for the night without upgrades being enchanted and gemmed.

However it seems to many players the art of gearing, is a chore they would rather not do. In wrath we would limp into certain heroics straight from quested greens, and I assume that is the expectation that players have had as we entered cataclysm. When I saw that there were strict limits on the dungeon queuing I applauded them, as I have always been well over the whatever the specific number was. However as my guild leveled I noticed a number of players lagging behind, and barely keeping up with this cutoff point. As we neared 85 each and ever player had this 329 number in their heads, as soon as they found out that was the magic number that unlocked heroics in the dungeon tool.

329 is Not a Magic Number

The biggest problem I am seeing is the fact that the target number of 329 seems to be a resting place and “good enough” for most players. As though they pushed to that number and then are somehow done. Truth be told this figure is way too low to be effective in heroics on a wide scale. If you are walking in there as a tank at that level you will be struggling. I think I was probably 332 or so, when I finally walked into my first heroic. I had been waiting for one of my healer friends to finish leveling, and at that point it was very much an eye opening experience.

What the 329 number reminds me of is the way heroics worked in Burning Crusade. If you remember back to that era, in order to get into a heroic you had to gain revered with the specific faction that controlled that dungeon hub. So in order to run heroic Steamvaults, you had to run enough normal dungeons to be able to grind up your faction with the Cenarion Expedition and purchase the Reservoir Key.

This quickly became a pain in the ass, since as a guild you had to coordinate getting all your players to revered faction. However, as a result running enough dungeons to get to revered generally meant you had fairly decent level 70 dungeon gear when you were done. However due to the complaints of the community, this faction requirement was lowered to honored.

You could get to honored with almost all of the factions in question through simply running quest chains in the same region. The big issue at hand became the fact that having the heroic key, became a sense of entitlement. I functionally CAN run heroics, therefore I SHOULD BE ABLE to run heroics. The pug community on my server went completely to pot, as it was flooded with players completely unprepared and ungeared to be doing the heroic dungeons.

Raise the Bar

Setting the requirement for running heroics in Cataclysm at 329 is much like starting off the expansion with the bar set down to the honored requirement. Just from doing quests in twilight highlands and Uldum, it is extremely easy to reach a ilevel of 329. The problem being, without getting those critical upgrades from normal mode level 85 instances, you are completely unprepared for the step up that heroics are. A much more realistic number would have been 333-340, meaning that the player would have at least had to have spent some time running normal mode instances and raising their factions enough to start getting those 346 faction rewards.

If the heroic requirement would have been set to a higher requirement, the normal dungeon running would have several effects. The most obvious is of course with better gear, comes better stats, and more ability to dish out whatever it is your class/spec combo does. The normal mode dungeons are for the most part 90% the same as the heroic mode dungeons, with the boss fights being the big difference. The more time a player spends in these dungeons, the more they understand about how each of the various trash mobs reacts and how the normal abilities of the bosses function. With this firm understanding, moving to heroics becomes a much more iterative step.

So my only suggestion for making things more smoothly is to make it HARDER for players to zone into heroics. This is likely to be an even less popular opinion than that of the heroic dungeon difficulty being just fine as it is. However, if players are not willing to do the work on their own in order to ensure they are able to be effective group members, then the only way to make sure things move smoothly is to ensure that the requirement for the heroics is higher. If you come into a heroic with the bare minimum you are guaranteeing that the rest of the party will have to carry you through the instance in order for it to be successful.

The big problem with raising the cap, is that it is VERY easy to bring a character who is 329 along with a group of players who are in the 350s. We often do this as a guild, grab a geared tank and healer, and at least 1 geared dps in order to help out players with less than stellar gear. Raising the cap would lock this practice out. The only way I can see to bypass this problem, and still keep the players out who have no business being in heroics would be to evaluate a party when queuing based on the average score of the group. In this case, 3 players that are 350 geared, dragging along 2 players that are 329 would evaluate out to an average party gear score of 341.

The Master Plan

I honestly feel like Blizzard has realized exactly what the various decision they made during the wrath cycle have cost the community. As I said earlier, it has built a very entitled player base that leveled through an era of easy epics. When I was gearing my shaman, I had him fully outfitted in epics and and ready to participate in ICC10 only 4 days after dinging 80. Run the right instances, get a little luck, and it felt you were handed epics on a platter. An environment with no risk and constant reward is simply not sustainable.

So in turn they’ve turned the virtual screws to our characters, making us fight hard to earn those 346 level items. The ramp up in difficulty between normal and heroic is like stepping off a cliff if you are not prepared for it. However, if you go into the dungeon with your brains and a balanced group it is very much accomplishable. We are having to relearn the community how to play the game as a whole.

As I have said before, Wrath caused us to get soft as players. The easy train was fun while it lasted, but now it is time to buckle down and work for it. Wouldn’t you rather feel like you had earned your gear, and had to fight your way through a dungeon rather than steamrolling it and getting free loot? I found the roflstomp era of dungeon running to be boring and completely without skill. Now we as players are getting to stretch those muscles we have let atrophy for so long, and honestly for me at least it feels good.

I think with this expansion, Blizzard is trying to retrain it’s community and make them better players. I applaud that they have the courage to do so, and not simply kowtow to the complaints. Only time will see if they stick by this new mission. For the sake of the game and its future I hope they do. While Wolfshead Online called Cataclysm the worst expansion of MMO History, I think its more a matter of this is the most ambitious. They set out not only to change their game world, but at the same time their gaming community.