XP from Kills or Quests – follow-up

A couple of folk were kind enough to read and comment on this post, and I’d been thinking about it some more as well.  There are some mitigating factors which I wanted to talk about.  Some of these are negatives about how EQ does it and some positives or ‘not as bad as it sounds’ stuff about LotRO.

Firstly, with EverQuest, helping your friends level is the same process as levelling yourself, any time, all the time.  While this makes it simple, it also makes it pretty tedious, in fact, much of EverQuest is pretty tedious (I can say this now, after not playing for a long time, although clearly at the time it was more engaging).  You go out, you kill stuff, you continue doing that until you level and then you do it some more.  So while it makes it easy to keep your friends at the same level, it doesn’t exactly provide much variability.

In line with that, although LotRO quest based XP means you might have to repeat the same quests a few times to keep your friends at the same levels, it’s essentially no different from EverQuest.  You get to run around killing stuff, while in the background your friends are completing quests and getting XP.  So the end result isn’t any different.  You might find you don’t get much XP, but the aim is to let your friends catch up, not keep the gap at the same distance so this isn’t an issue either.  Because the quests in LotRO cover a lot of locations, you’re more mobile than you would be in EverQuest and killing stuff is, after all, the same as killing stuff no matter where you are.  So it’s not as bad as it sounds.

Secondly, there is value in killing a lot of creatures in Lord of the Rings Online.  Each area has a number of deeds, those deeds give titles, XP and traits as rewards.  There are mob kill based deeds which tend to have two stages, the first gives a title, the second gives a trait.  If you only go to an area, complete the quests and move on it’s unlikely you’ll kill enough creatures to get both levels and you might not even achieve the first.  This is especially true of elite mobs (such as Trolls) or non-aggro mobs like crawlers.  However, if you keep going back to help out your friends, you will complete those deeds and end up with a more rounded character.  So there is absolutely some benefit to being in a place for longer periods killing the creatures, and helping your friends is just a bonus.

Thirdly, related to the above, there are quests from level 39 and up which require you to kill a lot of creatures to get rare pages (especially in Angmar and the Misty Mountains).  If you’re helping friends in those areas (which I am), then you’ll see your pages drop without having to go back later and just farm them.  Another bonus to being somewhere beyond completing the quests yourself.

There are numerous other things you can do, while helping friends level, which add value and which you would otherwise have to ‘farm’ or ‘grind’ out on your own.  As long as the mobs give some XP, you’ll earn skill-based deed increases (where you’re required to use the same skill over and over until you earn the trait).  Often in tough fights, you don’t get the chance to use less-useful skills but in trivial fights while helping friends you can use the same low-damage skill over and over until you complete the deed, without exposing your friends to a grisly death.  There’s always a need to collect crafting ingredients and recipes, even below your currently attained skill tier, which is why you’ll often find people helping out their friends leaving them to ‘handle’ some creatures for ‘just a moment’ while they mine an ore node or collecting some wood (before returning to revive their companions).

Turbine have added some specific rewards for repeating certain quests lines (mainly the Book based quests), since they’re fellowship quests and you always need people to repeat them unless you’re very lucky.  The rewards vary from the okay to the lacklustre but it’s still an option.

If you’ve done a lot of stuff solo, or in small groups, there’s a good chance you’ve missed a few fellowship or tougher-then-normal quests.  Going back and helping your friends while you’re slightly higher lets everyone complete these quests.  I had a perfect example of this a couple of nights ago in Angmar, there’s a bunch of elite quests inside a fort which I hadn’t done (neither had Grete or one of our other friends).  We were helping two friends level, and we went and did those quests.  With 5 of us they were fun, challenging and more interesting than the regular quests and we all got some XP.  Although the rewards weren’t really upgrades for 3 of us, it was still a good chance to do some of the harder content that we wouldn’t otherwise normally see.

Lastly of course, the real benefit, is that you get to spend time in a group with friends, having a laugh, some decent banter, and quoting nearly all of Aliens in the process.  Sure we chat in the Kin channel when we’re soloing or just mooching, but there’s something more social about being in the same fellowship, standing in the middle of Angmar cursing at the enemy and laughing when someone gets knocked off a horse on the run back to camp.

NB: All of this discussion excludes any element of swimming across Evendim.  There is never any good reason for repeating any action which involves swimming anywhere in Evendim.  Turbine need to add some swimming deeds.  Then and only then will I gleefully help out in Evendim.  Yes, adding the boat was a fantastic move, but by then I’d already spent half a lifetime swimming across that damn lake.  The boat doesn’t go to the Blue Lady’s cave does it?  Oh no.  And you still have to swim to Salamander Island don’t you?  Yes.  Too. Much. Swimming.

MMORPG / MMOG – xp from kills or quests?

This turned into a bit of a rambling piece – so I thought I’d add this paragraph at the top.  I wanted to write something to compare the difference between helping friends catch up in levels within EverQuest and Lord of the Rings Online.  This is it.  Oh, additionally I’m helping one or two friends level in LotRO at the moment (one new player, one player with a high level toon already).  This post is not a complaint, I’m happy helping them, this is just a comparison.

One of the major differences between the old guard of EverQuest and the new guard (if they can be called that now) in online gaming, WoW, Lord of the Rings Online etc. is the source of experience points, used to increase levels.  In EverQuest the primary source was and still is killing enemy creatures.  If you wanted to gain levels you went out and killed stuff.  There were quests in EQ (the name kind of implies it), but they had nothing like the structure or managed-activity that quests in more modern games possess.  And they didn’t give anything like the same amount of experience points.

If you had to collect some orc bracers for a quest, you got most of the experience from the killing, and a tiny amount from the quest itself.  Note: there were some variations to this, in some cases handing in rewards from quests gave you a nice little boost of XP, but as you levelled past the early teens that kind of thing vanished.

EverQuest finally evolved a task and quest system, which tried (but ultimately failed) to mirror that present in games like WoW and LotRO.  However even with that addition the primary source of XP was killing stuff; the quest might get you somewhere, might give you a reason to kill them, but grinding out levels and AA (alternate abilities) meant killing hundreds and thousands of creatures.  There was also a strong mantra of not rewarding risk-free actions.  If you could do something without risk, EverQuest either quickly added risk or removed the reward.

This is not the case with Lord of the Rings Online (I’m more familiar with that game than WoW).  Most of the XP you obtain while you’re levelling is from quest and deed rewards.  Killing a few creatures might net you a thousand XP, completing a single quest might net  you 4,000 XP.  That quest might include collecting flowers or defending someone from a few creatures.  The non-XP rewards (items, etc.) are more likely to be restricted to higher risk higher effort quests, but actual XP is given out pretty freely.    It scales of course, you get more XP later on than you do early on, and there are some long-ass quests which give out the same XP as some very quick quests.  But the point is, the killing is a side activity.  You don’t see people going out and grinding by just killing stuff to get levels.  You can do, but it takes longer than it would to go to a new area, get 15 quests and burn through them.  Quests in LotRO are level restricted, you need to be within 5 levels of them to pick them up (i.e. if you’re 37, you can see quests up to level 42).  This helps ensure people don’t leapfrog rewards.

These two primary levelling mechanisms affect how you help friends catch up in levels, or what happens when people play with different schedules / game-time.  In EverQuest if a friend was a few levels behind, or didn’t play as often you’d help them catch up by doing what you always did, find the best mobs in the game for giving XP and kill them until your eyes bled.  Everyone won.  If your friend was really downlevel you might have to pull some tricks to ‘powerlevel’ them because you might not be able to group, and you might have to burn through some non-XP giving mobs to help them, but once they were at a certain level (where they got XP with you in the group) then the best way to get them more levels, was kill the enemy.  If a few of you played at different times or with less or more frequency it didn’t really matter.  Quests (outside of progression quests, which I’m not going to cover) were generally a smaller part of the non-raiding game.

In Lord of the Rings Online however, the quickest way to help someone level, is help them complete level appropriate quests.  Anyone gets XP in the group regardless of what levels you are (if the creatures would normally give you XP), so level 60 characters can group with level 10 characters and the level 10 character will get XP from the kills.  There’s a reduction, but since kill XP is already the minor part of levelling it’s not such an issue.  The key is there’s no reduction in quest XP, regardless of the size of the group or the level of the characters involved.  But here’s the rub.  If people play at different rates, they get to different stages in the quests, and those quests may have pre-requisites beyond just levels for their acquisition.  As a result, you end up re-doing the same quests over and over if people log on with different frequency.

For example, friend A is on, and you help them complete 15 quests and they get a couple of levels.  They move on to a new area.  The next day, friend B is on, and you go through a few quests with them until friend A logs on again.  Now however, friend B can’t get the quests in the new area because they’re a level too low and they haven’t finished the pre-requisite quests in the old area.  So, friend A now has to go through the same content they did yesterday along with the person helping, to catch friend B up.  The next few days things are even, then friend B pulls ahead doing some stuff solo, and the following day you repeat this all again.

Add in that there may be 5 or 6 people, playing at different times, and with different levels, and you can see how this gets complex very quickly.

I love the LoTRO levelling mechanism.  I think being rewarded for exploring, finding things, and for activity which doesn’t always involve killing the enemy is the right option.  I think level restricting quests is the right option.  But it certainly makes it less trivial to help friends catch up than with EverQuests approach of ‘kill until you can’t kill any more’.

While LotRO is far more casual friendly than EverQuest, it also imposes some issues if people play at different times.  Someone is always going to be a level behind, going through quests you’ve already done trying to catch up.  Unless you all agree to only play those characters at the same time that you’re all on, but with a bunch of adults who have lives to live, it’s not a realistic option.

Maybe, if more than half the people in a group have completed the pre-requisite quests, then other people in the group can get the follow-on quests as long as they remain grouped.  Maybe the quests available to a person should be based on the highest group member up to a maximum of 10 levels rather than 5?  Not sure.  Maybe it doesn’t need to change.  Soon we’ll all be 60 (or 65) and grinding out deeds, virtues, access quests and legendary items and all this will be a misty dream.  But I thought I’d blog about it anyway.

NB: Yes, I know that the vast majority of quests in Lord of the Rings Online can be completed solo.  In fact, it’s more efficient to do some of them solo.  Only the small fellowship and fellowship quests really need more than one person.  However, it’s a social game, about being social.  More-over, you can complete much harder quests if you have some help (completing them while they’re red or orange) and hence get more XP for them as a % of your current level.  None of that is the point really, the point is that the quests are great, but they make helping friends level, or keeping a bunch of friends at the same level, much harder.

Movie Memories: Weird Science

I had a crush on Kelly LeBrock for about 10  years.  She was I think, my first movie celebrity crush and it was all thanks to this single movie.  That crush even resulted in me watching a Steven Seagal movie (Hard to Kill) I would have otherwise passed on because she was in it.  Weird Science was released in 1985 and as always I’m never really sure where I saw it first, although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in the cinema.  I do remember that since I was a nerd, and this was a ‘nerds do nerdy thing but then come good in the end’ movie that I associated with it pretty closely.

It’s a true pre-90’s John Hughes movie (the stuff he did post 1990 mostly sucked or maybe I just grew up) and it’s an iconic example of a whole bunch of stuff I loved from around then.  Of course, at the time I didn’t realise that I was watching a load of similar movies, or that these kind of films would spawn franchises like American Pie or one off homages like Road Trip, but they did.  If you’re younger than me and you loved American Pie, you should look out for Weird Science and anything John Landis or John Hughes did before 1990.

I just remember that I really fancied Kelly, that the movie was funny and involved computers and had nerds who won against bullies.  I didn’t even know they were nerds, or that I was a nerd, just that two kids I could sympathise with won out against the bad guys.

I really need to buy this movie on DVD as soon as possible.

My lasting memory of this film?  Any of the scenes with Lisa in them of course.  Burned into my memory.   She was a miracle of science.

Movie Memories: Highlander

kurganI love Highlander, to this day I think it’s an excellent piece of movie making.  Sure, it’s flawed in places, sure it’s a child of the 80’s and it has issues, but beside that it’s exciting, interesting and engaging.  I remember being as confused as hell the first time I watched it.  The jumps between different times in history really catch you out, especially when they’re all mixed together like they are at the start.

But I think sometimes films should be a little challenging in that respect, it makes you sit up and take notice, and once you’ve gotten to grips with that, the story is quite engaging and at the time it was pretty unique.

The imagery, cinematography and sound track are just superb.  The special effects were impressive for their day, although it’s a little hard not to cringe these days.  The interplay between Connor, Ramirez and The Kurgan is excellent.  I can still hear in my head The Kurgan’s cry of Ramirez with that deep gravelly voice.  In fact, I probably know by heart too many of The Kurgan’s lines, and a fair number of Connor’s.

vgamesTo someone who was tabletop roleplaying when it came out, this movie really helped enhance your imagination when visualising fights your characters were taking part in, remember, in 1986 computer games looked like the image to the right (which has nothing to do with highlander, btw).  In those days, TV and Film were the major source of images you could use to enhance your own imagination.  As a gamer and someone who read a lot, I absorbed those images I saw and re-used them in my games or my reading experience.  I knew how my character looked swinging a sword because I had seen Connor do it.  I knew how my huge barbarian looked when he bore down upon the enemy because I had seen The Kurgan do it a week before.

When I went to university I took or bought Highlander on VHS, I’ve already spoken about RoboCop and how we watched it over and over again.  If we weren’t watching RoboCop, we were watching Highlander.  In fact, we watched Highlander so much that the tape began to wear out, and we got a single solid line of black/white across the top of the picture as time went on, as well as general degradation of the sound.

When I got my first DVD player, I got Highlander and I was really disappointed with the transfer, I’ve got another copy now and I’m still not happy with it.

The two Highlander sequels are travesties of moving making history.  The second movie specifically is so atrocious that I still have nightmares about it now.  The third one essentially ignores the second and remakes the first one over again in an attempt to regain the fan base, but fails.  If asked, I would vote Highlander II as the worst movie sequel ever made in the history of ever.

So among my lasting memories of Highlander are the worn out VHS tape I used to watch at university and the pile of movie making shit that was Highlander II, besmirching the good name of the original.  However, I think the winning memory is the chance to enhance my roleplaying games by using the fighting imagery from Highlander to really engage in what my characters in those games were doing.

Nuns. No sense of humor.

There can be only one.

Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part seven

Is that a Light I see before me?

touch-up-comparisonI often find that with miniatures the end sneaks up on you, and it’s no different with Sasha.  One moment I was looking and thinking there was a lot of work ahead, and the next minute, she’s done.  Done in the sense that the main figure is done, the base is clearly not done, but I haven’t properly based a miniature for about 10 years since all I do when they’re finished is stick them in a foam box.  So, this is part seven in a seven or maybe eight part diary about painting Sasha DuBois (other parts are one, two, three, four, five, six).

Yesterday (Saturday as I write this) we popped out after breakfast to Hobbycraft and Maplins and picked up a few things.  Some acrylic extender which I’ve been after for a while, a magnifying visor, a brush stand and a few other items.  Acrylic extender prevents the paint drying so quickly which is useful when it’s very thin, which in turn is very useful when using small brushes and detail work.  I tested the visor on a couple of other miniatures and then set about Sasha’s yellow bits.  The extender is really excellent, keeping the paint on the brush useful even when moving slowly with small amounts of paint, and the visor is good enough to let me see some real detail.  The picture just above shows the panels on the back of the figure before and after the second layer.  That layer was put on using the extender and the visor.  That was all that got done on the figure on Saturday.  There’s a few of photo’s of that stage after the cut …

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Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part six

The Devil is in the Detail

Light grey undercoat on cuffsThis is part six in an increasingly long painting diary for my Sasha DuBois miniature.  There were five parts before this, which you can get to in order from here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  One of the most crucial things this diary has taught me is that no matter how good you think your painting is, no matter how well you think you covered an area, no matter how fine you think the line you just painted was, photographing it with a 7 megapixel camera and blowing it up will prove you wrong.  In some ways it’s quite handy, for example I’ve just come to the end of a session working on Sasha, and reviewing the photo’s shows me some places where I need to look a little harder and touch the various colours up a little bit.  I guess with a magnifying glass /visor I may be able to see that kind of detail, but when holding the miniature normally and painting it at the moment I can’t.

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Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part five

Cloak and not Dagger

First couple of washes go onThis is the fifth post in the Sasha DuBois painting diary set (the others are one, two, three and four).  I’m a bit up and down about my painting skill level at the moment (my regular normal state for anything I create), some days thinking I’m quite happy with my skill level thank you very much and other days a bit down because I feel I should be better, if I just spent a bit more time.  However, I spend as much time as I spend and I enjoy that time and at the end of the day that’s what truly matters, it’s relaxing and enjoyable.  I’m happy with being slightly better than barely average (at the moment).

At the end of the fourth post I’d just put the base coat onto the coat (this could get confusing), using scab red.  I then spent a little while (a few days) not really painting anything, and finally got back into the swing by putting a lot of effort into the zombies.  I also managed to wash and brush the coat on this mini and then put some black onto the boots (too thickly, sigh).  Anyway.

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Movie Memories: Ghostbusters

ghostbustersposterI was 13 when Ghostbusters was released in the UK and that is a very impressionable age.  Frankly, I loved it and everything about it.  I think I probably sang the theme tune for about 18 months after I’d seen it and I think I may have even had the 7 inch single.  I was probably just the right age to really find the film exciting, there was humour I wasn’t supposed to get (because it was a bit rude) but did, there was Sigourney Weaver looking hot (I was 13), there was some alien chick in cellophane who was maybe naked and maybe not, and there were truly amazing ground breaking special effects the likes of which had never been seen before.

I came away from that movie with a lifetime of quotes that have kept me going ever since (although they warp over time, naturally so please don’t correct them, I know they’re morphed),

  • where do these stairs go? they go up!
  • mother puss-bucket
  • what a lovely singing voice you must have
  • save some for me
  • woah, woah, woah nice shooting Tex
  • she sleeps above her covers, four feet above her covers, she barks, she drools
  • it sounds like you’ve got at least two or three people in there already
  • nimble little minx isn’t she
  • this is the last of the petty cash
  • i don’t have to take this abuse from you, i’ve got hundreds of people dying to abuse me.

And so on, and so forth.  Some of the lines from Ghostbusters have entered common usage in my age demographic (I dare you to find someone in my age group who doesn’t laugh when you say ‘Don’t cross the streams!’).  I even made a Ghostbusters backpack for a fancy dress thing we did that may have been that year or perhaps a couple of years later.

But all that asside, I have two lasting memories of this film.  Firstly, I remember being scared witless by the ghost in the library when she transforms into the evil version.  I think I remember talking to my sister about that on the way home from having seen the film.

And secondly, I remember being appalled when Ghostbusters was on TV for the first time, I think it may have been ITV, and it was edited, redubbed and cut to hell.  They changed mother puss-bucket to something totally stupid, and a bunch of other lines (like ‘thanks to dickless over here.  Is this true?  Yes, this man has no dick’ being changed to ‘yes this man is some kind of rodent’).  It was my first exposure to being ‘protected’ from evil movie content by having it badly redubbed to save me from myself.

Forget the fact that this was a PG in the UK and so by the time it came on TV any kid who wanted to had seen it in the cinema, but we had to be saved from the terrible language (like shit!) and the accusation of having no dick.  Folks, don’t be too surprised to learn that at 13, I’d heard words worse than that at school.  A lot.  I know, hard to believe, and I thank everyone for saving me from hearing it on the Television.  Ghostbusters was my first lesson in how the dialog can totally change a scene, how some words are just funnier than others, and that TV censors were hypocrits.

So, Ghostbusters, awesome movie which I love to this day that sticks in my mind because it was butchered by the censors.

Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part four

Fancy Pants

This is the fourth diary entry in the ‘Painting Sasha DuBois’ series, parts one, two and three can be found by the simple click of a mouse.

First base coat of trousers and topWith some miniatures (for example, a zombie army you use for gaming) it’s entirely possible to make yourself get on and paint them.  The technique is different, you’re trying to paint them reasonably quickly, and it’s not likely anyone’s going to be inspecting them individually from 12 inches away, but they have to look good at distance as a unit on the playing surface.  So you can forgive yourself short-cuts and missed lines and broad brush strokes (as it were).  However, when I’m painting a miniature I like, and I really want to look good I have to be careful not to make myself progress, because I find that I lose the spark that makes me care about the detail.  If I push it too hard, it ends up looking rushed.  So I barely touched Sasha when I sat down a couple of nights ago (hence the short part three post) and although I’ve made more progress again it’s slow going.

I’d just spent a day painting a mini with blue and scab red and wanted to avoid that exact combination, but I knew I wanted to do Sasha’s coat in the red because it just looked so cool when washed / brushed.  So I went for green on the trousers and top as a nice contrast.  In the past I’ve made the mistake of starting with a base layer that’s too dark.  The issue there is that the wash makes little difference or you have to use a black wash to get any result, and then any amount of dry brushing is just too severe.  So, this time I went with a lighter green base coat with a plan to wash that with a dark green to give it some depth.  I was in two minds about starting with the trouser layer, there’s a tricky bit of work between her legs (no sniggering) where the coat shows through.  There’s a good argument to be made for doing the coat first, since it’s slightly easier to work on the legs and not hit the cloak.  However, if you put a green wash on the legs there’s a chance it’ll run onto the back of the coat, but when you wash the coat due to the layout of the model it’s very unlikely to run onto the legs.  So I went with legs first.

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Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part three

Best laid plans

First base coatI planned to work on the major clothing areas on the Sasha piece after finishing the eyes for the third part in the diary painting thing (part one here, part two here).  However, if you read my post on inspiration then you’ll know I ended up doing Sasha’s hair.  Hair is one of those funny things, although we talk about it being black or brown or blonde or red, it’s really not those colours and it’s very hard to just simply paint hair.  Harder than you might imagine, so when I find a colour combination that works I’m really quite happy.

While painting the deadly hammer wielding nun in the inspiration article I found that one of the brown paints in the new paint set is really good as a base hair colour, which I then wash with a brown wash and dry brush highlights onto.  It’s really effective.  So once I’d got it looking nice on the nun, I picked up Sasha and did her hair.  That’s it, that’s all I got painted on her in this session.  Sometimes that’s the way it goes, I’ll paint huge areas and get loads done (if I’m inspired) or each section will be a real chore forcing me to keep going (if inspiration is a little lacking that day).

Hair after wash and dry-brushSo, Sasha got her hair sorted, hopefully soon she’ll get some clothing as well.  Her clothes really are quite interesting with multiple layers and lots of scope so I’m quite excited about painting them, but I’m also concerned I’ll screw them out, so I’m probably going to try and get into a bit of a groove by working on other miniatures first / as well.  I find that I get better and re-learn things after a long time away and that a few weeks in my hand is a lot steadier.

Fingers crossed.

You can check out part four here.