Potshot on Runes of Magic

This is a 30 second impression.  After the all the hullabaloo and kerfuffle about the $10 Runes of Magic Horse, I thought I’d better actually hoof it on over to actually try out RoM to see if somehow my opinion would change.

I downloaded RoM (about 4 gigs, relatively painless if a bit slow), installed and jumped in game.  Painless.  Unlike some AAA titles, it just worked.  Character selection– one race, familiar basic archetypes:  warrior, mage, scout, rogue, priest, knight.   Slightly more that a WoW level of character customization, but not too much.

The graphic style is somewhere between WoW and Guildwars.  If I had to put it in a nutshell, I’d say it looked like Guildwars, played like WoW but felt more like EQ2.  Everything is quite pretty, bright and glowy and with bloom, soft focused.  The animations are quite smooth and the spell effects are very EQ2 reminiscent.  In my book, all of these are good things.  I had fun.

The tutorial lasts all of about 5 minutes which is just fine.  If you’ve played any other MMO before, you wont need it, except it gives you some free stuff.  Once free of the tutorial you are transported to the noob zone with your Horse for a Day.  A nice addition.  Of course, the first thing that came to mind was “god damn the pusher man”.  Just a taste, and the first one is free.  I like having a horse early on.

The noob zone quests were all fairly typical basic orientation quests– learn gathering skills, learn basic combat, etc.  Still they were not so excessive as to be offputting nor so trivial as to be completely bypassed.

I spent only a couple hours max trying out most of the classes getting to the highest level of 6 and into the second town before I called it a night.  All in all a positive experience.  Stable, pretty, smooth, familiar yet different and enough of a positive experience that I will likely return to see what the future holds.  Very familiar experience, but when I think about it being a F2P game, I feel like they delivered a very high quality product.  What was conspicuously absent was outright suck.

For a F2P game, the level of polish is pretty high.  A few things that could be improved, but overall no deal killers.  Way too early to call this game a keeper, but if more F2P games assiduously stick to the developers Hippocratic Oath of “do no harm to your player base” in the initial experience like RoM has done, then they have a legitimate shot as success.  I have no idea what playing beyond the noob zone holds, but suffice it to say they didn’t eff it up for what I saw.  I had fun, I remain curious, I’d consider giving them money.

This is a 30 second impression, so who knows what my opinion may be down the road.  I could get bored to tears or find religion and hail RoM as the second coming.  So far it seems like a solid F2P option that doesn’t put the MICROTRANSACTION based model in your face.  Kudos to them.  Throughout the noob experience, never once was I beat over the head with solicitations like “If you purchased this you’d be uber”.  The Item Mall was just another menu screen to discover.

After a very brief evening exploring this game, I can say that regardless of whether I expected to play more than a casual month in this game, I’d be willing to throw down for the FREAKING $10 HORSE.  Hell, I feel like sending those guys $10 just because they made a game that didn’t piss me off and make me feel like they stole precious time from my life never to be recovered (let alone the box price…).  Seriously, horse = Alexander Hamilton = Truth.

The Horse You Rode In On

Well, other than Michael Jackson, Farrah, Sarah Palin, David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Mark Jacobs, Tobold telling certain readers to fuck off and Syncaine calling him an asshole, I guess its been a relatively slow news cycle of late.  Hence, my lack of posting.  If you don’t have anything nice to say (or at least interesting)…

Which means, of course, its time to return to one of the perennial favorite discussions of the MMO Blogosphere:  RMT.  The latest hobby horse to ride, the RMT mount.

Darren was a bit aghast at the cost of a permanent mount ($10) in the so-called free-to-play-RMT-supported Runes of Magic.  For the record, I haven’t played it, so I can’t comment on the rent versus own or ride versus walk necessity of a mount.  Wil, The Ancient Gaming Noob and WoW groupmate offerred a bit more of a shoulder shrug response.  Having just hit Level 77 in WoW and purchased Cold Weather Flying (and jealously eyeing) Wil’s epic flyer, its a subject near and dear to my heart of late.

Truth be told, while I’m usually more of the mind that RMT is the debbil, I think the RoM mount topic is a decent example of an RMT item and approach that could work in most games.  What the game companies need to keep in mind is that their RMT and game models should deliver value and entertainment to a broad audience with varied time budgets.

Simply put, the most legitimate use for RMT that I see in something of a traditional MMORPG is simply to permit substituting RL time for RL money, with a few caveats.  Coming from the subscription model MMO as a baseline, little violence is done to the business or game progression model by permitting time/dollar substitution.  I think RMT for gold sink items like mounts is probably a non-event.

In our little group, we have 5 dedicated individuals who have committed to playing together as a group from 1 to cap, visiting taking on all the instances we can in the game while level appropriate.  Our play time budgets vary wildly both among each of us and as our individual RL commitments vary.

Getting a mount at Level 40 in Classic WoW back in the day was a big deal for two reasons– its cost was not insubstantial and it greatly shrunk the world because of the increased travel speed.  For anyone on anything like a time budget, increased movement speed equals increased access to content.  If you have 2 hours to play and it takes 1.5 hours to taxi and walk there, it ain’t happening.  If you want to keep the player, you need to figure out a way to take out some of that sting.

Felsteed, Old School Style

Off-taxi travel is a content gate for most players.  Raising that money, or raising the money for an epic mount, or a flyer or an epic flyer for that matter, ultimately required devotion of time and little else to obtain the gold (and/or level) necessary to purchase mount and therefore unlock the content.  Despite having spent more than $800 on WoW over the course of 4.5 years (and having enjoyed it), my subscription longevity doesn’t entitle me to any special access to content (unlike LotRO which handed out bonus Christmas Mounts and which greatly enhanced my LotRO gameplay since travel cost, time and gold was getting hard to manage).

For those of us in our group with more time or inclination, coming up with the cash from mob or resource farming wasn’t too bad, but took time.  For others, that are more time limited, its always been a just in time stretch.

Dude, I'm Epic

Using the epic flyer as an example, if I really applied myself, I could probably log on and earn a few hundred gold a day without outlevelling our group too much in a relatively small amount of time each session.  At 200 gold a session, that would take about 25 sessions to yield the 5,000 gold for the skill and the mount.  If I played an average session every other day, that would be about 50 days or almost two months of just casual self-gold farming.  All other things equal, I should be ok with paying the equivalent of about $30 for my epic flyer (or the equivalent in game currency).

In a subscription based game (or hybrid), this kind of RMT is just simply accelerating the the next X subscription payments, where X is determined by each individual’s play budget.  As far as I’m concerned, this is pure win in a PvE game with a subscription component.  Revenue neutral to the company, time agnostic to the player and ideally impact neutral to the game itself.

Gonna Fly Now

Extension of the same argument would mean that I’d be ok with buying levels as well.  In the abstract dollars versus time exchange, I would be.  However, we don’t play in the abstract, so more care must be devoted to RMT transactions that have a more fundamental impact on the game experience, IMHO.

I’m conflicted on experience/level boosting.  Having alt-itis, I would love to be able to start a level 68 character and just experience Northrend having enjoyed old Azeroth fully and Outland (not so much).  For my play style, the progression is the game.  The journey itself the destination, so completely removing the journey with /level or purchasing experience outright seems to compromise the core gameplay to me too much.

Of course, experience progression is one of the things that keeps players apart.  I’d be much more amenable to buying experience boosting potions or trinkets that would increase the rate of progression for some period of time but still require participation in the progression game.  This is the kind of thing that would partially solve some of our static group’s challenges to “stay together”.  The laggards could simply buy a boost to help catch up.

To sooth my alt-itis, I would probably also be ok with unlocking a new starting level each ten levels of experience gained.  Once you’ve hit 20, you can reroll a level 20 character, same at 30, 40, etc. so as to not completely trivialize original content.

I would also be OK with all the fluff items that many RMT systems provide.  What I would avoid, however, is RMT for item-mall only items that greatly enhance abilities (i.e., Uber Sword of Uberness) that are bind on pickup or items that would have an unduly negative impact on the in-game economy (to the detriment of the non-RMT players).  Selling currency in game that can be used to participate in the in-game economy for both NPC purchases and player-based transactions (auction house sales, enchants, ports, etc.) has the potential to disrupt the economy quite a bit.

For gold sink items like mounts or experience, it doesn’t seem to me to be terribly distorting.  I suspect that the income effect from “liberating” the gold that would have been used to fund the purchase of the mount or other gold sink either finds its way into the player economy in terms of higher auction house prices (likely a boon for the non-RMT player selling on the AH) or negligible since the RMT player may play less since they don’t have to grind for a mount.  Over time, I’m sure inflation will still occur, and perhaps it would occur a bit more quickly, but these kinds of RMT are indirectly and probably wouldn’t significantly impact others game experiences negatively.  On a given server, how much impact does transferring in a level 80 player from another server have by paying Blizzard $25?

What RMT purchases should NOT be used for are the items that are traditionally bind on pickup– rare drops that serve as proxy achievements.  The Uber Sword of Uberness that only drops from downing the Big Boss Ubeross should retain both the value and the meaning it has.  In a PvE world, that would have no significant economic impact, but it certainly dilutes the achievement value and yes, the epeenery which, for good or ill, comes along with it which is part of participating in a massive game.

Covert Ops: Check

A quick update as our wormhole expedition preparations proceed at their glacial pace.  In addition to having a blockade runner on one account, I can check the box for a covert ops ship on the other, in this case the Caldari covert ops ship the Buzzard which is sort of a Heron on steroids.

Aside from sporting a cool camo paint job, it can fit a covert ops cloaking device allowing warping while cloaked which is awfully nice.

Camo never goes out of style

Struggling a bit with the fit, but for now its load out is as follows:

Lows:
Co-Processor II
Power Diagnostic System I

Mediums:
1MN Afterburner I
Codebreaker I
[empty med slot]
[empty med slot]
[empty med slot]

Highs:
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
Expanded Probe Launcher I
Salvager I

Rigs:
Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

Having the expanded probe launcher is nice.  I can use combat scanner probes and only pull out the core scanner probes when I need to go below 0.5 au scan radius.  With increasing skills, the Buzzard and the grav rigs, I seldom need to go that low.  Without the local channel to rely on to see if there are others in the system, having probes that show ships and exploration sites is a comfort.

Standards Rule, Ok

On other fronts, I’ve been undertaking a bit of an effort to coordinate some “platform neutrality” skill wise.  While several of us have covert ops capable ships (transports, covert ops etc.) resupply will probably be accomplished mostly by pedestrian industrial ships since they are cheap, small in mass and plentiful.  A dual consensus is emerging that most of us can fly the Minmatar industrial Mammoth or the Gallente Iteron Mark IV.  Most of us are also Caldari Badger pilots too, though the Badger doesn’t have quite the hauling capacity of the Mammoth or the Iterons.  So in order to provide maximum flexibility, one account needed to get to Gallente and the other to Minmatar.  Only a day or two for each and we’ll be good to go.  You never know which pilot may find himself on the k-space side of the wormhole and its always good to have a backhaul.

On the combat side, its looking like Drakes and Feroxes will be the basic ships of the line.  Relatively cheap, and having the legendary tank of the Drake will hopefully be a help with the sleepers.  The downside of course is having to bring ammo, but with an ammunition assembly array planned as part of the POS, that should be managable.

Manifest Destiny

Finally, I’ve been getting great feedback on the vagaries of wormhole POS defense-craft.  After canvassing sources, its a bit of a toss up between a large and a medium tower.  The cost and fuel savings associated with a medium tower make it awfully attractive.  Especially so if we went with something like a True Sansha control tower.  More expensive, but cheaper on fuel.

My previous approach was that you can’t go too far wrong with a large control tower.  I would hate to have a medium one popped.  But, the more info I get from folks, the more I’m backing off that a bit.

One big reason for considering a smaller tower is fuel.  I was working up a hauling manifest for the initial deployment and started having a few second thoughts.  I’ve been assuming that the initial colonization would be undertaken by 2 or 3 corp mates, all of whom have multiple accounts.  Among those likely suspects are 2 Orca pilots.  Even so, with a large tower configuration, basically one Orca is the POS and the other is fuel leaving little additional room for other necessaries.

Part of the challenge is the Orca’s ship maintenance bay.  At 400k m3, it seems huge.  It is actually a cleverly derived number designed to vex Eve players, I’m sure.  A fully assembled Hulk mining barge is only 200k m3, so 2 assembled Hulks would fit nicely in there.  Industrials and battlecruisers are all above 200k m3, so they don’t pair with each other or a mining barge.

Not that big of a deal really, but a bit of an optimization puzzle.  Unrigged ships can be dissassembled and hauled in regular cargo of the Orca’s or any other industrial.  Not all of our current ships are unrigged though.  I don’t rig my barges, but I do rig the Drakes, so more than half of a bay will be taken up with one ship.  Too bad both my accounts have Drakes.

Inevitably, we’ll resort, I’m sure to the tried and true method of podding out– flying out of the wormhole in your pod to conserve mass budget and then ferrying in additional needed ships.  Sub optimal, but vastly superior to collapsing the wormhole with too many ginormous ships like the Orcas.

Once the POS is up and running, who cares?  But its the intial foray that it would be nice to have all your building materials, industrial and combats ships all in at the initial deployment.  Ah, the excitement of Eve!  Generating an optimized packing list!

Gimme Shelter

Planning for The Expedition to wormhole space is proceeding to pace though it will still take us some time to amass the isk and materiel required for the endeavor.  As there is no ice in w-space, you need to bring all your own fuel.  Based on my scratch calculations (more on that later), I’m guessing that we’ll need the equivalent of about 80 million isk worth of fuel and trade goods to operate the station per month.

According to Grismar’s Ice Chart, Clear Icicle, the most basic flavor of Amarr ice, will yield some of the necessary fuel components for the POS and at current market prices is slightly more lucrative than mining veldspar in high sec.  When you consider the long cycle time, very large ice asteroids and relative absence of rats (not that they pose a threat in high sec) you have a recipe for near AFK mining during the week.

Of course, how much fuel to lay in for the expedition is a matter of debate.  How much fuel you’ll need is a function of the size of your POS control tower and how frequently you think you can reliably resupply. On the second point, probably the most conservative I’ve read is bring 3 months of fuel with you when you set up your POS in w-space just in case.  That’s the goal for starters.  We’ll see how long that takes to amass while acquiring everything else we’ll need.

Which brings me to the question at hand:  Wormhole POS design.  Opinions abound.  Strategies vary, not all are successful.

So approaching it like all things Eve I began researching the topic.  While there seems to be a fair amount of info out there on setting up POS’s in k-space, the w-space POS appears to be a bit of a novelty still.

Actually determining the fitting of the POS is simpler than fitting a ship.  The only two constraints you have are how much powergrid and cpu your control tower has.  Each additional module (e.g., corp hangar array, turret batteries, refining arrays, etc.) simply uses one or both.  If you have enough pg and cpu, you can bring the module online.  You can replace EFT with a simple spreadsheet.  There are some POS fitting tools out there like this one or QuickFit.

Nice view. Who does your windows?

The Tower of Power

The control tower is the center of the station and provides all the power and cpu necessary to run your desired modules.  So the first question for a w-space POS is how much control tower do I need?  Conventional wisdom suggests (as Letrange’s account confirms) that a small tower just wont cut it.

For the Amarr version:

Large: 5 million MW of pg,  5,500 tf of cpu
Medium: 2.5 million MW pg, 2,750 tf cpu
Small:  1.25 million MW pg, 1,375 tf

Prices follow the same structure:  a small base price is 100 million, medium 200 million, large 400 million.  Four times everything for four times the price (that includes things like armor and shields too).  I tend toward over-engineeing things so I’m inclined to go with a large tower and be done with it.

Services and Amenities

Deciding what other modules to install depends on what you want to do.  Here’s what I’m considering for starters:

Corporate Hangar Array
Ship Maintenance Array
Medium Intensive Refining Array
Medium Ship Assembly Array
Ammunition Assembly Array

Other options include a Large and Small ship assembly array.  I assume we’ll lose ships to sleepers and with a little planning, a few “standard” platforms and some modest stockpiles of fittings, we should be able to make spares as we need them with a limited number of BPOs or BPCs.  It would be especially nice if we could make a few BS’s in the hole which would help with Sleepers and any visitors as well.  For that matter, a mobile lab might be interesting to play with as well to research BPOs and work on invention.

I assume I would only really be limited by how much isk we were willing to spend on modules and offline them if we weren’t using them.

Defenses

Here’s the main area where viewpoints (and my own confusion) abound.  Most wormhole gangs probably wont have a swarm of battleships or they’d risk collapsing their exit hole.  Likewise, they may be looking for either easy pvp kills or sleeper loot, not necessarily hoping to find a POS to bash.

Seems to be three basic approaches:

• Turtle: Make your POS hard and and annoyingly long to take down so your opponents eventually give up and run before their exit wormhole collapses.  This means keeping a healthy stockpile of strontium clathrates on hand so your tower can go into reinforced mode if necessary, and using a combination of electronic counter measures to disrupt targeting (no afk shooting) and shield hardeners to reduce damage taken.

• Deathstar:  Make your POS reach out and touch someone with maximum boom boom.  The wormhole equivalent of a bug zapper.  Lots of turret batteries of various sizes to counter everything from sniping BSs to swarming frigates and everything in between.  Even more devastating when one or a few of the defenders have the Starbase Defense Management skill trained so they can take control of the guns and focus fire.  Even better if you have swarms of Tie Fighters corp members to scramble and defend the base.

• Middle of the Road (guess which one i’m choosing):  A combination of passive PITA defenses with enough active defenses to keep attackers honest.

Given this will be in a wormhole, conventional wisdom here says go with zomglazerz to avoid ammo needs, so Amarr towers it is.  Now, I just need to figure out how many, what kind and where to put them…

Here’s one suggestion:

4-6x warp disruptors *At least one online, 3-5 offline
4x stasis webs *2 online, 2 offline
5x shield hardeners
2-4 ecm arrays of each type.
2 neuts *1 online, 1 offline
Fill the rest of the grid with medium longrange guns

Here’s another:

7-8 hardeners,
10 guns,
point
Damp batteries.

And one more:

4 small and 4 mid size pulse lasers
neuting turret (for breaking active tanks),
warp scram
web turret

So I’m at a bit of a loss.  I’m leaning toward the first setup or something similar since I don’t anticipate having too many people online at any given time.  Since you have to anchor the turrets outside of the shield bubble, having some small guns to protect them makes sense, but is that really necessary or would mediums suffice?  Likewise, do I need any Large turrets (375 km) to deal with snipers?  What about pulse versus beam?  Seems that pulse would track better, but I had a conversation with a friend in another corp who was adamant about beams only?  What gives?

Finally, something I haven’t read anywhere, how to physically array them around your control tower?

A Sneaking Suspicion

Well, it seems like Expedition preparations are continuing on several fronts.

I’ve been mission running to get enough faction for a jump clone and mining out the mission spaces for isk.  Finally being able to access a level 4 agent with Amarr Navy located within my home system has been a big help.  Along with the faction bump, level 4 loot, salvage and the asteroids make it well worth while.

When not missioning/mining (or just too tired or lazy to do anything else), I’m putting away ice for our POS fuel depot in my newly minted Mackinaw.  Ice mining makes asteroid mining feel like the Kentucky Derby but its quite the semi-afk friendly activity which is what I need sometimes.  Fortunately, refined ice products are just about as or slightly more lucrative than veld in my region of high sec.

Finally, Wil just completed training on his Buzzard covert ops ship about the same time that I completed training for the Gallente blockade runner transport, the Viator.  Covert Ops capability has been a primary goal for the Expedition.

You know about the shrinkage right?

The Gallente have two variants of transport ships, the Viator and the Occator, with slightly different characteristics.  The Occator is larger (5,000 m3 base cargo), slower (90 m/s) and has 2 points of built in warp strength while the Viator is smaller (3,000 m3), faster (170 m/s) and is able to fit a covert ops cloaking device to allow warping while cloaked.  I opted for the Viator which is basically a stubby nitro burning funny-ship version of the Iteron Mark V.

Having already trained up to Gallente Industrial V for my Iteron Mark V hauler, it was mainly a matter of getting trained for the covert ops cloak and waiting to pull the trigger on the transport ship skill which runs about 30 million isk IIRC.

I haven’t decided how to fit it out yet.  The Viator has 1 high, 3 medium, 3 low slots and 2 rig slots.  Covert Ops cloak occupies the high, so thats done.  Its everywhere else that I’m torn.

In the mediums, conventional wisdom says a 10 MN microwarp drive.  Check.  Then it gets tougher.  Being able to warp cloaked is a great advantage to avoiding trouble.  Still your vulnerable in a few situations:  warping after a jump (whether camped or not) and getting decloaked by coming within 2km of an object.

The fits that I’ve seen discussed tend to foregoe cargo capacity for speed and agility (i.e. no cargo expanders in the lows, no cargohold optimization rigs).  Fully rigged for cargo (”yer doin it wrong”) would only give about 10k m3 of haulage anyway at a significant cost in speed and agility.

So here’s what I’m considering as a compromise (any thoughts appreciated):

Lows:
Synthetic Hull Conversion Inertia Stabilizers I
Synthetic Hull Conversion Inertia Stabilizers I
Expanded Cargohold II

Mids:
10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Small Shield Extender II
ECM Burst II

High:
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

Rigs:
Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer I

If my EFT is close to right, this should give a base speed of about 350 m/s (almost 2km/s on MWD), cargo of almost 4,800 m3 and an align time of about 5.5 seconds (depending on skills).  Not looking to get into trouble, but I’m hoping that this will get me out quickly enough.