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Through The Mist: Mists Of Pandaria Impressions

October 3, 2012 by

mists of pandaria impressions
Through the Mist is a regular column from Luke Le Page covering everything World of Warcraft. If you’d like something covered in a future column, drop us a line!

The Mists of Pandaria expansion has been live for just over a week and I thought it was past time for another column. Apologies for not putting one up sooner, but as you can imagine I have been spending a fair amount of time in game. (I know the feeling! – Ed)

A lot of this was covered in the Episode 43 podcast so I urge you all to have a listen to it. I felt that the launch was relatively smooth. Not having to log out was a huge leap forward compared to previous launches by Blizzard. The initial quests phased in quite well, despite the huge server loads.

The first Alliance quest in Pandaria however was bugged – a large number of people could not complete the quest. For those of you who are not aware of the Alliance introduction it involves jumping in a helicopter and completing a bombing run. I was stuck in the helicopter unable to complete the quest or even fire the vehicle’s attack move for around an hour. The second part of the quest involved destroying explosive crates on a ship that I could not see due to the amount of players stuck in the area. Eventually I received credit for a lucky shot and moved on.

That was about as bad as it got for me bug-wise, mob spawns are of course a different story, and my questing partner and I found a novel way around this by having him cast mind sear on me as I ran around like a headless chook hoping to get mob tags.

I really enjoyed the Jade Forest as a zone. I had played the very early version from the beta and it had some very nice changes made to it. It introduced us to a number of storylines that continue on all the way to 90 and hopefully beyond.

Overall I really enjoyed the levelling experience – I have to admit that I am a little annoyed that levelling is so fast. This is probably because I am a sour veteran that slogged through vanilla on a holy paladin.  The zones are absolutely beautifully designed and there is an amazing amount of immersion in the various quest lines. I got side tracked from levelling several times by chasing storylines and this eventually took me all the way into the Dread Wastes to the Insect race: the Kirk’thik. These remind me of the insects from the Star Wars universe. I am already looking forward to cutting a swathe through them in a raid environment and that is a feeling I have not gotten from WoW in quite some time.

I hit 90 relatively quickly, though nowhere near as quick as a lot of people as I was distracted by levelling a Monk, pet battles and exploration. I have to say there are a huge number of daily quests to complete and they offer a huge variety of styles so that it will hopefully take a long time to get bored of dailies.

I was reluctant to set foot into heroics immediately, so I began with a handful of scenarios. This was the first area in which I felt let down by Blizzard. While scenarios are interesting, they are extremely short and simple. They do not offer much in the way of difficulty and I feel that I will quickly become bored of them. However, the way in which they are structured (3 players of any spec) make them a good way to try and get gear when you have minimal time.

I have also completed around 5 heroics so far and I have to admit that they feel a little under-tuned. In one of my groups we managed an achievement without even trying for it, we also managed to pull 3 separate packs with no tank and no fuss. Difficulty aside I have thoroughly enjoyed the heroics that I have completed so far and I look forward to moving into raiding in the near future.

I also wanted to share this video with everyone as a form of thanks for reading, so enjoy it and have fun with your flying cloud!

Filed Under: General News, WoW Tagged With:

SWTOR: Patch On The Fly

October 2, 2012 by

Here’s an interesting development – a new patch is coming for SWTOR (likely to be 1.4.1) overnight, but the servers won’t need to come down.

So at 2am AEST (Midnight AWST and 4am NZST) you just need to log out and restart, download the patch and you’re good to go.

We’ll have the full patch  notes for you of course.

Here’s the blurb from BioWare:

Hello everyone, we wanted to let you know that we will be deploying a patch on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 10AM CDT (8AM PDT/11AM EDT/4 PM BST/5PM CEST/1AM AEST). All game servers will remain online during this period. Please be sure to restart your game launcher at 11AM CDT (9AM PDT/12PM EDT/5 PM BST/6PM CEST/2AM AEST) in order to download the deployed patch. If your launcher was open during the deployment, you must close and reopen it for a fresh login. Patch notes will be made available shortly after deployment.

Patch Deployment

Date: Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Time: 10AM CDT (8AM PDT/11AM EDT/4 PM BST/5PM CEST/1AM AEST)

All game servers will remain online during this period. Please be sure to restart your game launcher at 11AM CDT (9AM PDT/12PM EDT/5 PM BST/6PM CEST/2AM AEST) in order to download the deployed patch.

Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.

Filed Under: General News, Servers, SWTOR Tagged With: ,

Blitzkrieg: The Matilda Black Prince Review

October 2, 2012 by

Blitzkrieg is a new regular column devoted to the very popular MMO World of Tanks. If you’ve got a topic you’d like our resident expert Matthew “Scope” Pearce to cover, drop him a line!

Who wants some lead?

The Matilda Black Prince is the first British tank to be added to World of Tanks, and is similar to the medium tank Matilda supplied by the British to the Russians under the Lend-Lease program that was in World of Tanks before patch 8.0.

The new Matilda Black Prince has some big differences, one of the most significant being changes in the turret and gun.

The original Matilda in game used the ZiS-96 76mm, which had 65-108mm of shell penetration, making it hard to penetrate tier 5 heavy tanks. The Matilda Black Prince now uses the same QF 6 pounder Mk. V A that the Churchill used as well as the same A27 turret.

This means that the new Matilda Black Prince has a penetration value of 83-138mm, and the crazy ROF (Rate of Fire) of 26 rounds a minute, meaning it shoots a single round every 2 seconds giving it 1957 DPM (damage per minute)

The Matilda Black Prince is not without its drawbacks however – it shares the same frontal armour as the Matilda medium tank, but has only got 55mm of side armour compared to the Matilda medium tank’s 75mm.

Its engine is also lacking with only 190 horse power compared to the Matilda medium tank’s 274hp, meaning that the top speed the Matilda Black Prince can reach is only 22kmh on flat terrain. With such a low speed, it is usually best to shoot on the move with this tank, and as such I train my crew members in Snap Shot for my gunner, and Smooth Ride for the driver allowing me to fire more accurately on the move.

World of Tanks Black Matilda Prince

Erectus Turretus Maximus!

Because this tank is a premium tank, it gains far more credits than normal tanks, and helps the player save credits for those bigger tanks we all want to drive around in, as well as help pay the repair bills.

This tank is loads of fun to play and can be purchased for only 1750 gold from the World of Tanks in-game store.

Filed Under: General News, World of Tanks Tagged With: , ,

Text Summary of Joel Bylos Interview

October 1, 2012 by

For those you aren’t into podcasts, below is a summary of the topics discussed in our interview with The Secret World’s Joel Bylos.

As you’ll see, there’s a range of interesting topics covered. Please note: the responses are my interpretations and paraphrasing. If you want the words direct from Joel then please listen to the original interview.

Here we go:

Question asked by Question Paraphrasing of answer by Joel Bylos
Simon    
  Any other teasers for future plans or upcoming issues? Nice hint about next auxiliary weapon in Issue #4. New York Raid, player will be going back to their old friend Dave Screed AND meeting other characters from the CGI. Halloween event – all the background content is now patched, ready to be put live. Not a typical Halloween event, will need to dig through old irish lore. Puzzle raids will be available in a ‘few months’.
  How confident are you that the monthly update schedule can be adhered to, especially once you get through all the mapped out future content and have to start creating additional content with the heavily reduced staff resources. We now have a set pipeline for content releases including better bug testing and we’re confident it’s all possible. We also have an overlapping development plan to help ensure stuff comes out regularly.
  Different body-types, instead of the standard ‘one-body, many heads’ in a future update? Looking at other options with body shape but the clothing is attuned to the body and clothing system doesn’t allow different body shapes. Trying to ninja some other things that will make people happy
  Do you see any parallels between TSW and AoC? Learnt hundreds of things from AoC. Big two were consistency of content throughout the game and that the technology needs to be completely stable (approx 95% of AoC users who left the game, left when they reached Tortage and the city killed their computer because the tech wasn’t stable enough / framerate too poor.
  What’s your overall feeling about the MMO genre and the ‘game-space-in-economically-challenging-times’  
  Reviewing MMO’s. Are all reviewers gibbons? How do you review an MMO given it’s depth, complexity and essential time commitment. Should reviews be promoted only as ‘first impressions’ with caveats? Should it be illegal, on pain of death, to ‘review’ any MMO before the third content patch drops  
  Fluffy question… Rift giving a buck per Storm Legion purchase to a ‘save the pandas’ charity. Great fun from Trion poking fun. Important to acknowledge Blizzard have done important things for the MMO space, just wish they’d lose some more customers to TSW 😉
David Tell us a little about your journey from Australia to Funcom  
  How good was the response to the lifetime subscription offer and is it something likely to be offered ongoing? Think it’s going well but haven’t seen numbers recently. Lifetime subs are a big part of the core audience.
  What’s a measure of success for TSW over the next year? Current team is still in place and growing, customer base is growing, and in general that it’s a game people talk about in 5 years as an influential game on others. In-game want to fix PvP and other things that can be done poorly, more inter-faction conflict.
  Without mentioning other MMOs by name, what mistakes have you seen them make that you’ve already avoided or hope to avoid? Play lots of MMOs but don’t really judge them from a developer perspective. More about having our own rules – we were always committed to no-class system, no gathering professions, making crafting really good, can’t kill another human unless infected or enemy faction. Just having those sort of guidelines to drive the vision of the game. Investigation missions were a key thing that was non-negotiable. Future marketing should be based on the story aspects, not gear progression. No desire to go beyond tier 10 gear in general.
The Angry Postman Joel, TSW had an incredibly dedicated (yet small) audience almost from the onset. Long, detailed ARGS catered to that audience, and yet it seems very little was done to advertise the game outside of this core group of people. Do you plan to help get the game more mainstream attention going forward? The game is awesome, and unique and needs to be played by more people. Yes -we need to promote the game more widely and we’ll be attempting to do that
Ed Goldstein The Secret World delivers a solid story, but the largest complaint from the community is that there is a lack of scaling to prepare people as they move from zone to zone. I think the largest problem is that once they hit Blue Mountain the casual player finds that if they did not build their character correctly that they’re incapable of continuing on their own. We misjudged difficulty. We made Kingsmouth easier and Savage Coast slightly easier then Blue Mountain was where we wanted the difficulty to be. We don’t communicate clearly enough on skill point allocation. Looking at making story boss fights a little easier. Starter decks coming in 1.4 which will help as well as based on the inner wheel to give guidance on good builds. If you do roughly 70% of mission in an area you’ll be fine to move on. Hell Hotel wasn’t meant to be first area people went to in Savage Coast – was a legacy development issue.
  “So my question is a little complicated, do you see any method by which you can either educate players that when they zone complete that they have some understanding of the goal they are working towards to allow them to say, “”Wow I’m ready for the next zone.””  
  Failing that, do you see any chance of granting those confused players an opportunity to reset their skill points? (The largest problem seems to be players spending too many points in weapon skills as opposed to talismans. I.E. they have 5-6 weapons at rank 3 at the end of Savage Coast, but only major, minor and talismans at 1-2 ranks. – At the end of savage coast level by the way, talismans should be at 4 minimum.  
  This is not limited to Blue Mountain by the way, the same is true of Egypt, City of the Sun God, and finally Transylvania. (Though I feel that in many cases Transylvania is easier then City of the Sun God.)  
Belladawna Does your new position mean you can out drink Ragnar? Always been able to out-drink Ragnar 😉
  Are there any plans to build a high res in game model view? One is used internally, aware of third party options, no plans for official one at this stage
hyperjumpgrandmaster (Reddit) What are the plans to make PvP more meaningful? Is there a timeline for any of these changes? Open World PvP is not very likely to happen a all – too much of the game relies on that being the case. Cinematics don’t offer protection while being watched. Issue #4 will see changes in Fusang and PvP that doesn’t require the player to go to a specific location – factions fighting each other during special events etc.
  “Are there any plans for open world PvP outside of the fight clubs? Maybe a “”hostile”” server where PvP is always on after reaching a certain amount of skill points?”  
Voodoo Shark (Reddit) Are there plans to streamline current skills and mechanics? Definitely looking into streamlining – some skills too similar across weapon types. Will also address on auxiliary weapons with some new mechanics. Another new auxiliary coming in Issue #4 update
  Will there be a more consistent free trial? Big changes in trial set-up – announced in around 2 weeks
Filed Under: General News, The Secret World

Flash Point 43: Blenders Bonking Ferrets

October 1, 2012 by

MMO podcast Following hot on the heels of our Secret World special edition Episode 42, there’s lots to talk about this episode, with all the content updates being released across a bunch of MMOs. Also a big welcome to guest co-host Luke LePage who writes our regular World of Warcraft column.

Points of discussion:

SWTOR
– 1.4 update
– BioWare Live Stream
– lack of communication on updates
– Lore Update: Cortosis

WoW
– Luke and David’s general impressions of Mists of Pandaria
– Early sales of MoP down?
– Favourite early levelling areas

TSW
– Issue #3 content update
– Joel Bylos interview
– 50% discount offer

GW2
– account security
– general impressions

Marvel Heroes
– October 1st for Open Beta

– Shout outs for our forums, Facebook page, Twitter account and Simon’s Twitter account.

Please review or rate the podcast on iTunes if you can – it makes a huge difference!

Listen via iTunes or right here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:00 — 24.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Filed Under: General News, Podcast Tagged With:

Flash Point 42: The Secret World / Joel Bylos Interview Special Edition

October 1, 2012 by

The Secret World Joel Bylos InterviewThis is a special edition devoted to our interview with The Secret World‘s Game Director, Joel Bylos. Episode 43 will be live tomorrow if TSW isn’t your thing, although it’s worth hearing a senior MMO designer’s ideas all the same. If you are into TSW then you’re in for a treat as Joel covers a lot of areas of the game and gives some hints on the future of the game. A big thanks to Joel for taking some of his valuable Sunday morning at a park with his family to speak to us.

Points of discussion:

– Joel’s journey from Australia to being game director at Funcom
– What being Game Director involves
– Question from The Angry Postman: promoting TSW outside the Alternate Reality Game niche
– Transparency of Funcom/TSW with the struggles over recent months
– Question from Ed Goldstein: scaling between zones
– Question from Belladawna: Does the new position mean Joel can outdrink Ragnar?
– Question from Belladawna: Plans for an official hi-res model viewer?
– Question from Hyperjumpgrandmaster: Making PvP more meaningful, open world PvP an option?
– Question from Voodoo Shark: plans for streamlining skills and mechanics?
– Question from Voodoo Shark: ongoing free trial offers?
– Any other teasers willing to be disclosed? (Yes – including a heavy hint on Issue #4’s auxiliary weapon)
– The impact of layoffs on the team and optimism for the future and bringing some people back
– Can the output of issues be maintained?
– Ability to change body-shape in the future?
– Lessons learnt from Age of Conan?
– Lessons learnt from other MMOs?
– Rift doing panda charity donations (and a lame joke from the host on funding a different type of panda)
– Comparing TSW, GW2 and WoW combat
– What’s a measure of success for TSW over the coming year?

Post your thoughts on the interview below – we’ll have a summary of Joel’s responses posted in 24 hours or so but nothing beats listening to the full thing – enjoy.

Please review or rate the podcast on iTunes if you can – it makes a huge difference!

Listen via iTunes or right here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:29 — 19.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Filed Under: General News, Podcast, The Secret World Tagged With: , ,

World of Tanks: Patch 8.0 Tank Destroyer Review

September 30, 2012 by


Blitzkrieg is a new regular column devoted to the very popular MMO World of Tanks. If you’ve got a topic you’d like our resident expert Matthew “Scope” Pearce to cover, drop him a line!

G’day fellow gamers – recently Patch 8.0 of World of Tanks hit the live servers with its brand new physics engine, a graphical overhaul on some of the original maps, and also the introduction of a second TD (Tank Destroyer) line added to the Russian tech tree with four new TDs all up.

First up in my review is the brand new tier VII TD the SU-100M1

The SU-100M1 is equipped with the 100mm D-10S mod. 1944 gun with 131-219mm of armour penetration which deals 173-288 of damage, and sports a health pool of 830, and has a top speed of 50Kmph, with 90mm of frontal armour.

The armour for this tank is rather low for its tier, however its strength lies in its low profile and high camouflage rating, and how fast it can react to the ever changing battle with its amazing speed.

The upgraded gun 100mm LB-1C can shoot 9.52 rounds a minute with an accuracy of 0.33 at 100m, and an aiming time of only 1.7 seconds, which makes this TD an incredibly accurate borderline semi automatic sniper rifle with an average of 2070dpm (damage per minute).

The SU-100M1 tank destroyer offers players the speed of a medium tank, and the firepower and accuracy of a tank destroyer giving yourself more opportunities to move to your favourite bush, or sniper spot quicker and easier than before. 

Next up is the tier VIII TD the SU-101

The SU-101 comes equipped with the tier VII 100mm D-10S mod. 1944, has 990 hit points and has a top speed of 54kmph with 120mm of frontal armour.

The SU-101 plays as a slightly faster, more heavily armed TD than its predecessor.

This vehicle is a counterpart of the Jagdpanther II – it even looks the same.

There’s one difference though – the gun on the SU-101 is a TD version of the tier X IS-4’s top gun, and boy is it powerful.

Let’s compare the stats on the guns. This powerful 122mm M62-C2 gun is in a small nimble platform that has a nice 120mm of armour angled at 60° which means you can bounce quite a few shots from range while packing quite a punch and retaining good accuracy and a comfortable rate of fire.

Now for the tier IX  TD the SU-122-54

 World of Tanks Tank Destroyer

The SU-122-54 TD is based on the T-54’s medium tank hull with a max speed of 48kmph and 1530 hit points, while sporting a newer upgraded 122mm M62-C2 gun.

The strength of the SU-122-54 is not only in its powerful new gun though – it is also the smallest of the tier IX tank destroyers, making it harder to hit as well as having the best camouflage and thus making it harder for enemy players to spot you .

The SU-122-54 is also a great flanker due to its lower profile allowing it to move around unnoticed far easier than other tier IX tank destroyers.

And now for the tier X tank destroyer: the Object 263

 Object 263 World of Tanks Tank Destroyer

The Object 263 is completely different from its predecessors as it is based on the Russian tier X IS-7 heavy tank.

The Object 263 has 250mm of sloped frontal armour, making it one of the hardest tanks in game to penetrate frontally from range.  It’s got  1900 hit points with a maximum speed of 55kmph meaning it is also the fastest tier X tank destroyer in the game.

But wait it gets even better. The Object 263 comes equipped with the 130mm S-70A that has the best accuracy of 0.32 at 100m out of all the tier X tank destroyers as well as a rate of fire of 5.45, which gives it the title of the fastest shooting tier X tank destroyer and making it capable of dealing over 3300dpm.

This tank destroyer is a killing machine on crack – not only does it have an accurate gun that has an insane ROF (Rate of Fire), more armour then the most heavily armoured tank in the German tech tree (the Maus), but it also has an incredible speed of 55kph while the Maus can hardly get to 20kph on open ground.

Coming from playing the German tech tree for the majority of my World of Tanks career, with the amazing accuracy that comes with being a German tank commander and loving my Jag Tiger ,I have reluctantly started to climb the Russian TD line in order to get a tier 10 version of my beloved JT as the JpzE-100 just doesn’t feel like an upgrade from the JT but more of a downgrade.

So over to you, what do you think of these new TDs?

Filed Under: General News, World of Tanks Tagged With: , , ,

Interview With The Secret World’s Joel Bylos: Ask Your Questions

September 29, 2012 by

Interview Joel BylosThis weekend we’re pretty excited to be spending some time one-on-one with The Secret World‘s newly minted Game Director, Joel Bylos.

Aside from being a friendly guy, Joel is also an expat aussie, so we’re here to both give him some homegrown hospitality whilst grilling him on everything TSW.

It’ll be an interview for our Flash Point podcast, and so we’d love questions from the TSW community to pose to Joel alongside our own.

So – if you’ve got a question, post it in the comments below and we’ll ask as many as we can, with a full shout-out to each person on the podcast. Hard / critical questions are fine but please keep it civilised.

Ask away!

Filed Under: General News, The Secret World Tagged With:

The Secret World: 50% off

September 29, 2012 by

The Secret World discountIf you’ve been sitting on the fence about giving The Secret World a whirl, you might want to check out Funcom’s 50% price reduction off the digital download version. It’s being offered over this weekend only.

You get 30 days of playtime with that, so for under US$24.99 you get a relatively cheap month of quality MMO time.

Why not give it a go?

Filed Under: General News, The Secret World

Funniest Guild Wars 2 Review?

September 28, 2012 by

Back in February we posted a rather funny review of SWTOR from Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, and he’s backed up with another cracker review, this time for Guild Wars 2.

If you like cutting sarcasm then waste no more time, watch this:


 

What I like most about the review, aside from the gold humour, is that fact that it’s overall pretty accurate – do you agree?

[Via Guild Wars 2 Gamers of Oceania Facebook Group]

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Humour Tagged With:

Oceanic Soap Box: Expansionary Thoughts

September 28, 2012 by

There’s always something happening in MMO land but I have to say that this week’s been one of the busier ones. What, with Mists of Pandaria landing, The Secret World releasing its Issue #3 update and SWTOR putting Patch 1.4 live, there’s a hell of a lot on offer.

So let’s open up the discussion across those three games: what are your thoughts on what’s been offered this week for your favourite game? Are you in a renewed honeymoon period with the game, still really disappointed or somewhere in between?

Let us know!

Filed Under: General News, Op-Ed Tagged With:

Gizmo and Socks: You Bastards!

September 27, 2012 by

Gizmo and Socks: You Bastards!Ok, I have to admit WoW can still make me laugh. I’m early days in my levelling up in Mists of Pandaria, and have just completed the quests of which the title of this post comes from.

I won’t spoil anything by detailing who Gizmo and Socks are, but well done Blizzard on an amusing quest line combined with some slightly different gameplay to boot. I particularly liked the sniper work required.

Over to you fellow MoP’ers – did you enjoy these quests?

Filed Under: General News, Humour, WoW Tagged With: ,
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