I’ve been curious how long it would be before someone created a deck builder for The Secret World, Funcom’s upcoming modern MMORPG. And now I’ve had my answer. Poster the9thcircle on the official Secret World forums has provided an early version to play around with. It’s been built using the various images from recent videos, so not all of the abilities have been filled out yet, but hats off to you, the9thcircle for getting it going! I’m pretty sure I’m going to be spending a bit of time with this thing while I wait for the launch of The Secret World!
Want to play with it? You can go to the deck builder to start messing around with what’s there. the9thcircle is also asking for feedback and information to use in filling in the empty abilities on, so if you want to help out or give feedback, his post on the official forums is the place to go.
Taking up a subject that can be a point of contention amongWorld of Warcraft raiders, Ghostcrawler (aka lead systems designer Greg Street) posted an interesting commentary on raiding progression, difficulty, and the nerf bat.
Obviously, one’s own raiding point of view will help determine whether they approve of or disapprove of a nerf. But there’s some common sense mechanics behind it that, no matter your stance, are pretty much unavoidable.
Greg “Chostcrawler” Street on dungeon and raid nerfs
Raid encounters, to some extent, nerf themselves. This is because every week, the raid members acquire more and more gear. Secondarily, the community acquires more and more knowledge and experience, which translates into better videos, strategy guides, or even UI mods, as well as just more players who have experienced the encounters firsthand.
But it seems that this form of a natural nerf isn’t what players disapprove of. Instead, it’s the ones that take an actual hand from devs. I’m thinking of the ICC raid and gradual increase of a player’s buff for the instance. Yes, it was completely optional, but those players who wanted to stay on top of the competitive game, or those who wanted to quickly get through the content that they had already conquered without said buff, felt justified in accepting the offer. Hell, I did, too. If that’s what it took to see the content, I was all for it.
It seems the the developers have a similar stance, according to GC. Continue Reading
Life likes to throw curve balls every now and then to keep us on our toes. And sometimes adapting requires a bit of down time for those things in life that aren’t our biggest priorities.
Without going into much boring detail, that’s been what’s kept me away from WoW for the past 8 weeks. Real life mayhem — some planned, and some not so much. I can’t complain, because it’s been mostly fun; either traveling or entertaining guests who travel to see me.
It’s left me little to no time to keep up with everything that life requires of me, much less sit down for any quality playing time.
And the timing was pretty awful. Cataclysm had just been released. I had just finished up questing in Mount Hyjal and was revving to get to more new content and keep leveling up to 85. I was not at all thinking that this would happen. But, as I mentioned — curve ball.
Finally, as life starts to settle down a bit again, the itch to play is strengthening. But I’m worried. Continue Reading
Gearscore, the addon that became the ubiquitous way to measure the quality of a player’s gear, is soon going to move into a completely new version with many enhancements. The previous versions of the addon simply gave players a number representing the quality of their gear, and the addon would display the calculation for other players by simply mousing-over them or by querying other players running the addon. It received widespread criticism for assisting the cultural shift of measuring a player’s ability based on their gear alone.
Now, the addon is much more robust and displays all sorts of information about a player. It is lightweight at approximately 135kb of memory usage and does not take up as much space as shown in the video. The default “summary” page displays a weighted calculation of a player’s gear, as well as new scores showing the extent of their quest and achievement completion, raid experience based on boss kill statistics, and PvP experience. It also shows their spec, guild, guild ranking, and other player’s ratings of that character.
From there, it shows how well-equipped they are to participate in different raids and their overall progression status. Finally, it lists any red flags, such as wrong enchants, and all of the equipment the character is wearing.
Click through for more, and my own opinion on how to use this addon. Continue Reading
The dust from BlizzCon 2010 has settled, and so we’ve decided to turn our attention to the biggest announcement of that weekend and give it the full attention that it deserves. Yes, the announcement of Tribes Universe far out-shinned anything Blizzard announced. But, like Blizzard, Hi-Rez Studios didn’t really announce all that much.
We know that the company now owns the beloved intellectual property, and that the company is working on turning the property in to an MMOFPS. But that’s about all we know. And that’s not enough for us. So we put on our thinking caps – they have light bulbs on top – dug deep for some questions and chained the CEO of Hi-Rez and Chief Designer of Tribes Universe, Erez Goren, to a computer until our questions were answered.
Lore Hound: The company recently announced that it was taking Alpha registration for Tribes Universe. How far along is the game at this point? How large is the team?
Erez Goren: The majority of the work that has gone directly into the game thus far has been in building the technical foundation to support large battles on massive, open landscapes. We are much earlier on when it comes to gameplay.
Fortunately, when we built Global Agenda, we did so in a way that left us with an amazing platform for building a Shooter/MMO on top of the Unreal Engine. This means that much of the work around adding weapons, tuning gameplay, etc, is now able to go very fast as we finish the core technical work.
LH: Speaking of the Alpha, it is currently restricted to max-level Global Agenda players. Is this to reward those who continue to support GA, or do you believe these players are the best testing group? Continue Reading
Progression in ICC has been moving along at a steady rate for many guilds. The stacking buff in Icecrown Citadel that updates about once a month to add increased healing, health, and damage done pushes many guilds to be able to do previously impassible encounters and gives them enough steam to work through many more encounters until the buff is updated. Indeed, if we look at the graphs from WoWProgress, the leading site in tracking guild progression, the mechanic of the Icecrown Citadel buff has caused a steady increase in the number of guilds defeating each encounter.
In fact, they look rather linear. In comparison, the tier 8 and 9 progression graphs are not nearly as linear. After a short burst of hardcore guilds downing content, the number of new guilds defeating the content tapers off. Additionally, many less guilds have done older content than ICC. Click through for more… Continue Reading
Nethaera dropped a bombshell on the raiding community of WoW today, announcing some major changes to the way that raid lockouts and progression will work in Cataclysm. No longer will 10- and 25-man raids have separate lockouts, and no longer will they have different loot tables. The end goal is to make the content equally difficult in both modes to balance this out.
In order to reward players for successfully coordinating 25 players, bosses on 25 man mode will drop more loot per person than in 10-man mode, including gear, badges, and gold. Heroic modes will work similarly to the current Icecrown Citadel mechanic of toggling on a per-boss basis.
The developers would also like to shorten individual raids while keeping the overall amount of raid content the same. To that end, the first tiers of raiding in Cataclysm will feature multiple shorter raids instead of one long raid. They are also planning on tuning the first tiers of raids to players in quest and dungeon rewards, but hope not to trivialize heroic dungeons.
We are bound to hear some arguments both for and against these broad changes from now until well after Cataclysm is released, especially with many questions left unanswered. My main concern? What about the achievements?!
Back again folks with another weekly watch! This week has been fairly slow accually, we are nearing the launch of some of the greatest MMO’s ever made though. Like AoC and WAR, oh boy, 2008 will be fun beyond belief.
In a message involving me, I have just gotten back into the Lord of the Rings Online. My server is Gladden and my name is Altheron, feel free to message me in-game.
MMORPG.com’s contest for a Ideazon Zboard Reaper™ & Reaper Edge™ keyboard and mouse is going on. Click here to register in the contest. Remember, you must have an MMORPG.com account to register, so make one! 2 Days left!
John Smedley, SOE’s CEO, is hosting a dev blog here. Check it out! Mabye he will do something good this time!
Age of Conan…The soon to be king of MMORPG’s has finally uploaded their beta devolopment Q&A videos! Check them out! #1 here, #2 here, and #3 and #4 here!
Just a little warning, if you play Lord of the Rings Online, there has been a fradulent email being sent around telling you that you have been illegally trading accounts and in-game currency. If you know you haven’t been doing this and you get this email, ignore it. Plus, if it really WAS Turbine, they may ask for username, but never password.
All we can do is wait in agony for the release of the MMO’s of 2008, it will be amazing and I am looking forward too it tremendously.
I’ve been curious how long it would be before someone created a deck builder for The Secret World, Funcom’s upcoming modern MMORPG. And now I’ve had my answer. Poster the9thcircle on the official Secret World forums has provided an early version to play around with. It’s been built using the various images from recent videos, so not all of the abilities have been filled out yet, but hats off to you, the9thcircle for getting it going! I’m pretty sure I’m going to be spending a bit of time with this thing while I wait for the launch of The Secret World!
Nethaera 
