…that I got into the SWTOR Beta test this weekend.  Actually, that is the only thing I can confirm.

I just saw my weekend disappear into the ether. From being productive around the house to playing for 48 straight hours. Before, I was actually glad I hadn’t gotten a beta invite. I don’t want the game spoiled. But now that I have an invite, game on.

As for the NDA, I think they are dumb. It makes sense in terms of press, beta’s are by definition an incomplete product and you wouldn’t want news spreading about something that you’re not done with. Since blogs are sometimes considered press, I probably won’t make a post about my experience (even though not all three of you readers will care about SWTOR).

But, I still think NDA’s are stupid and senseless. They don’t stop anyone from talking about the game. And when they do, everyone understands it’s a beta and everything will change. What’s really dumb, is that people who love the game will the ones more likely to follow it, because they have good feelings towards you. The ones who tried it and decided they didn’t like the game, you’re NDA is meaningless to them. There’s no legal penalty you can exact on them, except dropping their beta access, which they clearly no longer desire. So those people are going to tell everyone they know that the game sucks. While the people who love it, are keeping quiet.

In general, I am against secrecy anyways. National security secrets I don’t buy. Details about a currently ongoing military mission, yes absolutely withhold those while lives are on the line. However, once a mission is complete, all the details should come out. If you don’t want the fact that you did something to be public knowledge, then you probably shouldn’t have done that thing in the first place.

But that’s a whole other rant. For now I just need to decide on a class to play. My starting characters are going to be Jedi Knight or Smuggler. So should I play one of those to try them out, or one of the others to see something I won’t see at launch?

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In an IGN article, Star Trek Onlines F2P release date was formally announced: January 17, 2012. Originally, they said they would go F2P before the end of the year. That’s clearly changed. There is a lot they still need to do because most of their changes need a lot of work. So I guess it’s a good thing they aren’t going to rush it out before New Years.

But this means that it will be 7 months from the last content release to the live servers, Season 4 in early July. The Duty Officer System was supposed to be released with that system, but won’t go out until F2P is live, so that’s now a 7 month delay. There really isn’t any point in playing on the live servers now, since everything is changing and there’s nothing new. At least LOTRO gave Turbine points to all subscribers for the months they were subbed between their announcement of F2P and the launch. Right now, subscribers are just being milked by Cryptic.

There are also several revelations in this article that I take issue with.

Cryptic’s decision to remove the subscription cost from their most recent MMO wasn’t sudden, according to Stephen D’Angelo, Executive Producer on STO and Chief Technical Officer. “We’ve always wanted the game to be free-to-play,” he says, “in fact we tried to make it free-to-play at the original launch, but our publisher [Atari] didn’t want us doing that so we didn’t do that.”

Really? Because Devs, including the former EP, posted many times they had no interest in going F2P, until the announcement they were. Though, I suppose you could argue that Atari wouldn’t allow it to happen, so he was truthful since they were calling the shots. We all knew it would happen eventually. This might explain why dStahl left and why the switch to Perfect Worlds.

The process of making Star Trek Online subscription-free is a little more interesting than what we’ve seen in the past. It’s due to STO’s level of difficulty. Simply put, it’s not very hard at all. According to D’Angelo, it’s possible for players to hit the level cap and get the best gear inside of a single day. The end result is that totally sweet loot doesn’t feel as totally sweet as it should. “A lot of the things people acquired weren’t worth very much to them,” D’Angelo says. So the plan leading up to the switch to free-to-play is to make the high-end stuff more difficult to acquire, and the low-end stuff simpler.

Really? Max level and fully geared in a day? Now, I can’t play a game for 24hrs, so can’t say if it really is possible to hit max level in that time period (I would say, No. While it’s a relatively short advancement, it takes a few hours to gain a few levels). But getting the max gear is quite time consuming.

To fully outfit a ship with all purple level gear requires 8 weapons (30 Emblems each), 3 pieces of ship equipment (105 Emblems each), 8 consoles (25 Emblems each), 6 personal weapons (25 Emblems each), 5 sets of armor (30 Emblems each), and 5 personal shields (30 Emblems each.

8*30 + 3*105 + 8*25 + 6*25 + 5*30 + 5*30 = 240 + 315 + 200 + 150 + 150 + 150 = 1,205

I counted 9 Daily missions that together yield 21 Emblems. That’s 21 per day. To get 1,205 requires 57 days of playing every mission every day. That takes hours a day to do.

What I really take issue with is the bolded part. The high end just isn’t “totally sweet” and isn’t worth the grind that it currently requires. There’s just not enough of a value to it to be worth while. The new STF gear that they are adding may make grinding through the STF’s provide something valuable, they aren’t adding anything new to the regular high end gear set. They are just making it harder to get. They’re logic just seems broken.

The annoying part is, they are focusing on making getting the current loot harder, instead of making the game better or adding/improving really bad systems. Exploration for example. This is Star Trek. The exploration system should be kick ass and second to none. But it’s craptastic. They keep talking about wanting to improve it, but never devote any resources to it.

People don’t play a Star Trek game to grind up for “Uber Loot”. Your market is a very casual, older crowd of gamers; not hardcore grinders. They play it because it’s Star Trek. Add more Star Trek, and we’ll pay for that. The ships are good. Add more systems (exploration, diplomacy, etc) that have consumable enhancements. And I don’t mean things that make you uber, things that just make it easier. Like LOTRO’s XP buffs, or travel tokens, or reputation boosts.

Because right now, the last paragraph of the article has a lot of validity. It’s just a play to win model that no one will care about.

It’s an interesting system that could either work wonderfully well, keeping both skilled and paying players in the best gear, but it requires the community’s acceptance of the system. It’s also up for debate whether this conforms to the maligned “pay-to-win” model, as players can still theoretically “buy” the best gear, even if it’s just from another player.

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Well it looks like Early Game Access to SWTOR will be “up to five days“.  I call fail on this. In the past, Early Access was described as a way for Bioware to ease people into the game without overloading the servers. It was also described as “significantly more than just a weekend”.  Since the game launches on a Tuesday (Dec 20), five days would be the preceding Thursday (Dec 15). That looks an awful lot like just a weekend to me.

I don’t see how spreading pre-orders in over just 5 days is going to significantly improve server access. People won’t have enough time to really spread out much that everyone is still going to be crammed into the started planets. I once again predict server queues.

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Some new info coming out of Bioware about Guilds in SWTOR. The first bit is simple, in preparation for launch guilds are being marked as to whether or not they will qualify to be pre-created on a server. This is a minor thing, but a good sign that we are getting closer to launch. It’s unclear when the guild server creation will happen, but presumably it happen for Early Access and not just at Launch. Still no idea when Early Access will begin.

The next bit of news is details on the different server types.

PvE (Player vs Environment) – Players will have to manually flag themselves if they wish to engage in PvP outside of designated Warzones and Open World PvP areas.

PvP (Player vs Player) – Players are automatically flagged for PvP outside of the designated ‘safe’ areas (such as Origin Worlds, Capital Worlds, and the Republic/Imperial Fleets; see below for more info).

RP-PvE – Players are encouraged to roleplay and act ‘in-character’ while playing on an RP-PvE server. Players must manually flag themselves if they wish to engage in PvP outside of designated Warzones and Open World PvP areas.

RP-PvP – Players are encouraged to roleplay and act ‘in-character’ while playing on an RP-PvP server. Players are automatically flagged for PvP outside of the designated ‘safe’ areas (such as Origin Worlds, Capital Worlds, and the Republic/Imperial Fleets; see below for more info).

Currently, there are only 3 choices for server type on the Guild page:  PVE, PVP, and RP. It looks like RP will be put onto RP-PVE servers and if you want to create a RP-PVP guild, you need to do that manually after launch.

The PVP rule set seems simple enough. There are safezones, primarily starter planets and capitals, but most other places are “Red=Dead” friendly. This can be fun, but I have no interest in that for a main game play. Especially in a game like SWTOR. The purpose of the game is story, which is hard to follow if you have to worry about getting ganked. It’s nice having the option to flag yourself if you are in the mood for PVP>

The Republic Sentinels will be playing a good old fashioned PVE server. We like some RP and some PVP but as side things, not our main focus. I wouldn’t mind a RP-PVE, but it’s easier find some people interested in RP within a medium sized PVE guild, than it is to get a RP heavy group ready to tackle a raid.

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There’s a nice piece on Massively about SWTOR crafting, or Crew Skills. There are not a ton of details, but it does clarify a few things. Primarily, it establishes that, contrary to what some podcasters thought, each Player only has access to 3 crew skills, instead of each Companion. It makes much more sense this way, and while it means I can’t be a one man shop, it means there will actually be an economy.

From the sounds of the article, it looks like the companion gathering still needs some cleaning up, but this is beta. It appears missions can gain you unique things along with crafting materials, while gathering specifically gets crafting materials. Unlike many games, crafting an item will take awhile, but unlike other games you can make your crew do it, instead of you need to stand around doing it. What’s not mentioned at all is leveling up in crafting and gaining XP. It’s not even clear if you do level up crafting.

I always found leveling up in crafting a giant time and money sink. It’s never a matter of just not having access to certain goods, the stuff you can make is almost always not as good. In SWG you have more experimentation points, in LOTRO it’s the ability to crit on an item. The biggest problem with leveling crafting is the need to make SO much stuff in order to advance. So much stuff that you don’t need and can’t use, and no one else wants to buy. So you just sell it to a vendor or trash it. Here’s hoping SWTOR addresses that problem because, despite my complaint, I’ve always loved crafting.

Going out and finding the right resources, and right bonus items to make a truly awesome item is good fun. Now, it needs to require some effort, but not be near impossible. Like Crafting Guilds in LOTRO. The armor you can make are great, and it takes time and patience to master the  guild and then make the required patterns over a few weeks. Or making a truly kick ass Krayt tissue enhanced gun in original SWG. Or a really fine tuned engine. But not like Mando armor in SWG. That was a pain.

While the article did not have much to say about what you could craft or how useful things were, one detail that it did have dealt with interdependence of resources.

• Armormech uses materials from Scavenging, Investigation, and Underworld Trading.
• Armstech uses materials from Scavenging and Treasure Hunting.
• Artifice uses materials from Archaeology, Treasure Hunting, and Underworld Trading.
• Biochem uses materials from Bioanalysis and Underworld Trading
• Cybertech uses materials from Scavenging, Slicing, Treasure Hunting, and Underworld Trading.
• Synthweaving uses materials from Archaeology, Diplomacy, Investigation, and Underworld Trading.

From the looks of things Armstech and Biochem are the simplest, requiring just two other categories, meaning one person can take all the necessary skills to make what they need. Where as the others require resources from more areas than a single person can take skills.

Now, obviously this is beta and not official information. It could be wrong. But assuming it’s mostly right and each crafting area will require multiple types of resources, this will be both annoying as hell and great for the economy. In other games, as a crafter, requiring components from another crafting skill set always annoyed me. They were never available for sale on the market for a reasonable price or in a high enough quantity. Finding a person could be difficult to impossible.

When it works, and there is a high amount of interdependence and demand for all products, it can make the game more fun. But based on this, Diplomacy will not produce much valuable crafting resources, and Investigation will only be slightly better. Scavenging, Treasure Hunting and Underworld Trading seem to be the must have skills, which means they will either be to plentiful so can’t make money, or in to high demand so can never find what you need for a reasonable price.

But overall the system does look very cool. Definitely different than anything else. Sort of a combination of STO’s new DOFF system and regular crafting.

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I’ve spend some time on Tribble, the STO F2P test server. I’ve read the Dev Tracker and their postings. Here’s some thoughts:

Dilithium

The reward economy really needed to be cleaned up. There were way to many systems (Merits, Emblems, Honor, Badges, etc). Merging everything into just Dilithium is a good thing. But they are going to far with it. Making ships cost dilithium was unnecessary. Their pricing is also ridiculous.

During the leveling process, you could run a few exploration missions and acquire enough badges to equip your ship with all green/blue weapons. But now the prices are higher with dilithium, which you are also using for a bunch of other stuff.

They have also added a dilithium cost to crafting. So instead of just acquiring anomalies and special anomalies, you also need dilithium. And not just a little bit, but something like 60% of what it would cost to buy the same item from the store. There are 40+ pages of people complaining about this and no dev response as of this writing. We’ll see what they decide to do.

Duty Officer

The Duty Officer system seems nice. It’s a collection game for acquiring DOFF’s and you can use it to level and also get a bunch of other things (items, XP, EC, anomalies, etc). The interface is pretty nice and they even added the basics of a Department Head system, where you can assign your Bridge Officers as department heads, and they make recommendations. Basic, but a nice touch.

However, leveling the DOFF tiers is crazy. For each mission, you get only a handful of CXP (Commendation XP used for leveling DOFF tiers). Missions run from 30min to several days. The amount you get scales, longer missions give more, but shorter missions give more per minute.

Currently, you need 2500 CXP to get to Tier 1 in any of the multiple categories. At about 2-5 CXP per 30min mission, if you ran all 20 missions every 30min during a 3hr play session, plus a 12hr mission right when you logged off, you could get about 500 a day. So Tier 1 would take about a week.

Unfortunately, you could never do that. You get a small number of missions in each sector, so you’d have to move between sectors constantly. And each mission has a cooldown before you can get it again so you’d never get that much in a play session. In reality, it would take closer to a month. Many people have not gotten much past Tier 1 playing for the last month in beta.

Tier 4 requires 100,000 by the way. Some people have estimated that it would take about a year for a casual player (2-3hrs a day) to get to Tier 4 in just one category (there are 8 or 9 I think).

STF

They have split the 3 STF’s into 6, 3 ground and 3 space missions. For each mission, every player will get a loot bag after killing the boss which is guaranteed to give a piece of common salvage, with a chance for better salvage. You turn this common salvage in to acquire the new STF items. There are ground and space sets. Each piece requires 30 common salvage, or one of the special kind.

So to get a complete set, you need to play these missions 90 times, or 15 times each. Since each is supposed to take 30min, that’s 45hrs of play time. So for a casual player about 2 months doing ONLY STF’s.

Conclusion

On the surface, many of the things they are doing seem nice. In practice, they are making the game into a giant grindfest. Everything is going to require a lot of play time to acquire. I liked the casual effort required to get stuff before. STO just isn’t good enough to play the amount of time required to get the cool stuff. Especially the repitition of it all.

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Bioware appears to have lifted the NDA for journalists on SWTOR. As such mmorpg.com has a whole host of articles that have been released, covering all of the Republic classes.

So here’s links to those articles with some thoughts at the end:

Trooper Class Preview

Smuggler Class Preview

Jedi Knight Class Preview

Jedi Consular Class Preview

My Thoughts:

• Everyone speaks very highly of the story and the immersion of the voice acting. This is something I am looking forward to, so it’s nice to hear it doesn’t get old, at least not by level 15.
• Dark vs Light actually involve hard choices. Several of the articles mention some dark themes and really being tempted by the two sides. It doesn’t sound like this will be a kiddy MMO.
• One mentioned, and spoke highly, of the mod system. It sounds like you can actually keep your low level guns and upgrade them as you level. Though there have been rumors circulating on the forums lately that Bioware removed this feature. So who knows.
• Questing is talked about highly, but the natural side effect is that this is not good for a sandbox game. But I gave up that hope awhile ago.
• Jedi don’t start out with lightsabers. This always annoys me. If you’re going to start the game as a Jedi, give me a damn lightsaber at level 1.
• The guy who wrote the Jedi Consular piece could use some practice. The piece was stilted, boring, and awkward. The others were written by people who actually felt they enjoyed their game experience were excited to talk about. This guy felt like he was trying to be excited but really wasn’t. So either its a lie and he didn’t enjoy the game, or he’s not a very good writer.
• I would have liked some more details about the advanced classes. The trooper piece talked about the differences but the others didn’t have much.
• The Jedi Knight piece mentions you get to pick your saber color, but not how much choice you have. Hopefully it’s more than just “blue or green”. I want my Mace Windu purple saber.

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Tobold had an interesting post last week where he blessed us all with a curse, “May you win every game you play!” The central idea being that games are boring if you can’t lose and that this derives from video games origins in arcades, where losing meant starting over.

Whenever I play a game and lose, the thing I hate the most isn’t the losing, but the need to redo what I just did. Especially when it’s an annoying platform section or something like that. Repetition, whether because you lose or because you have to grind something a million times to advance, is not fun. Now, you could argue that a game is always repetition, especially if it’s a fighting game, and you’re just changing the setting, but we won’t go there for now.

What I’ve always wondered is if you could make a game that that didn’t involve you losing and repeating, but did allow you to lose. Now, this would work best in a single-player story game or maybe in an MMO. PVP shooter games, it doesn’t really work, nor a strategy game. But in some kind of RPG or story based game, you could have the game evolve where failure is a legitimate outcome to any quest or adventure.

Your mission, rescue the princess. Success: princess rescued. Failure: princess not rescued, princess dead, you captured, etc. Since most games are linear, they only allow for the Success option in order for the story to continue. But in a game that allowed failure, you could fail to rescue the princess and keep playing. Maybe now you need to break yourself out of the prison, or need to redeem your good name.

Mount and Blade as a story mode that works kind of like this. You can decide at game start whether or not you can save the game at any time, or only when you quit. In the second mode, there is no reloading to fix a bad move. You just need to live with the consequences and move on. Since you can’t die permanently, just get captured and eventually break free, you can go from having an empire to being on the run if you aren’t careful.

Now, Mount and Blade is pretty limited in what you can do. It’s all about fighting and conquering so there’s no alternative game play styles. But it highlights the idea that games can be fun, without always winning.

What would other games look like if they took this approach? An MMO where you can fail the dungeon and not just come back tomorrow to redo it? An RPG where you don’t save the world or instead join the evil lord’s army? Would be a bitch to program but fun to play and try out all the different choices you can make.

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The testing of STO’s conversion to F2P continues on the Tribble test server. The Devs have been releasing information every so often in the form of Dev Blogs. Most of been pretty blah, but the two most recent ones raised some questions.

Dev Blog 9

In this posting, the new Executive Producer Steven D’Angelo, revealed how he will be very differently than Dan Stahl did:

You may have noticed that while we have been posting to acknowledge that various game play elements are not working, we are not posting how we intend to fix them. We are not telegraphing changes until we get a chance to try them out internally to make sure that they’re satisfactory. Usually this happens all the way up until the next build makes it to Tribble. I have told the team that it’s better to be quiet than to post answers that turn out to be different from what we actually end up doing. Misinformation can be worse than silence in some cases

Now, while I can’t disagree with the sentiment, it is a major departure from one of Cryptic’s best achievements, Dev to Player communication. They have always been very open with information, even when sometimes it turns out to be wrong. They would share what is being worked on long before it’s final, and the community had a chance to chime in their opinions.

With that one bolded comment, all of that could change. If the devs can’t talk about things that might change, then they can’t talk about anything, because everything might change. That’s how most companies do things, and that’s what most players (who visit the forums) hate. Only time will tell how much of an extreme this goes too.

Dev Blog 10

Another recent posting revealed some details about some changes their making to starships. The bright spot from this post, was that they announced they are reversing their decision not to give free starships at each rank up. They had been considering giving out discount tokens and some dilithium that would equal about 80% of the cost of a new starship. So instead of a new ship, players would have to grind t get one.

The new ship matrix makes it clear where they intend to get their revenue from. At each tier, most of the ships we have had access to are going to be available for purchase with in game dilithium or the rank up token. There will also be ships at every tier that are available in the C-store. Along with new skins, the ships in the C-store will also be more powerful than the ones available via in-game means. Usually coming with more Console slots or more bridge officer slots, these ships will also have special unique consoles that provide a special power.

In order to make the C-store ships appealing to people of all ranks, these consoles will be transferrable to other ships. So you could purchase all of the C-store ships, and then have a bunch of special powers on your Vice Admiral ship. Part of me thinks this is cool, and makes sense. Part of me sees it as “Pay 2 Win”.  If it were just unique ship skin and console, it might be balanced. But the other extras make the C-store ships inherently more powerful.

But, it’s F2P, so that kind of makes sense. We’ll see how drastic these changes are. So far, C-store ships have just been minor improvements. This might change that.

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Having trouble deciding what class you’ll play when SWTOR is released? Darth Revan on Reddit has a handy flowchart to help you pick:

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