Posted by Lethality | 21 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Do Credits Matter?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

We’re back! At least temporarily… still trying to get a solid, consistent writer to handle the BM&C duties, so if you have any ideas for discussion topics, let us know!

The recent Public Test Server patch notes for patch 1.1.5 that indicated that speeders will have their priced reduced until patch 1.2. Now, there are no more details than that right now, and I can’t imagine the thinking behind that. Will they go back up in price in 1.2?

At any rate, I posed this very question on the PTS forum and once of the responses was from a player that said he had so many credits, he could afford anything they put up. This got me to thinking… do credits even matter anymore? It seems that most players who simply play the game have more than enough credits to do whatever they need to that the game lays out for them. In a way, your “credit counter” is just another progress bar. Not very interesting.

And honestly, I’m not just picking on TOR here. Most MMOs, including World of Warcraft, have devalued in-game currency so much that it has lost nearly all meaning. Some of this is due to the constant fight between gold farmers and RMT. There are all kinds of special currencies, badges, tokens and whatnot that replace the “money” in the game to assure the player is the one doing the content and earning the reward.

I miss the old days. When money was money and it was a way to buy whatever you wanted! And even then, I don’t think games should automatically fill your “money progress bar” so that you can have everything… you should have to work a bit and save – just like in real life – to achieve certain things.

What’s the solutoin? I don’t know… is it soulbound currency that you could only spend with NPCs and the Auction House/GTN? Maybe. But it just feels like we’ve lost our way (and the battle) when we’re looking for ways to replace currency with… other types of currency. What are your thoughts?

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Posted by Lethality | 30 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are You Playing Another MMO Besides TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

MMORPGs are interesting beasts. They consume enormous amounts of resources over the course of many years to design, develop and produce. Likewise, they also consume huge amounts time from players, who gladly give it up to enjoy exploring their favorite stories and worlds. I’ve always said that MMOs are consumed more as a hobby than a video game, since the nature of the participation is more of a long-term commitment and investment in improving over time. Not a run-and-gun quickie like a simple 40-hour video game gives you.

Because of this, there’s a widely-held belief that you can only play one MMO at a time… and I tend to agree. There just isn’t a way to fully engage in more than one MMO when you consider what that investment means, coupled with real-life responsibilities. This is why there always seems to be a “war” that someone has to win when a new MMO comes out… because one must stop playing one to start playing the other.

None the less, there are those that maintain that you can play more than one MMO at a time. So that’s the question for today… do you guys play another MMO besides Star Wars: The Old Republic? And I’m not talking about dabbling in a free-to-play title here and there, or the demo of some other game. I am talking about full on commitment to character development and everything the game has to offer. Let’s hear it, hardcores!

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Posted by Lethality | 51 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are You Rolling An Alt?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Today marks exactly 2 months since Early Game Access for Star Wars: The Old Republic opened up. If you began playing on that very day, playing just a couple hours several days a week, it’s been enough time that you could have a character at level 50 by now. So for those of you who are level 50, and I’m guessing many in the AAJ Army have at least one, did you decide to level an alt?

There are some complaints on the forums that people are “bored,” but a quick study shows that these players generally raced to level 50 for the most part, and expected unlimited gameplay options once they got there. It’s just not going to happen in a brand new MMO. Especially when BioWare made it clear they were betting big on the level-up game. With individual stories for each class, and the Legacy system in place to support exactly that, it shouldn’t be a big surprise they want players to play many characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Damion Schubert: We really want to put in systems to encourage replay. The Legacy System, which we hope to get in, will hopefully be in that venue. I am not ready to talk about what exactly it is and how we do that, but we are really betting heavily on the level up game. We are really betting heavily on the story aspects of the game, and we really want people to enjoy that journey, and to feel like that journey is interesting and exciting. We actually want to incentivize people to try the different classes so that they experience those other stories, and they play the game again. So that really put a lot of pressure on us to make sure that leveling up your second character and your third character is not grinding, and that it still feels like a fresh and interesting experience. We’re less interested in doing a Dark Age of Camelot “hey bypass all the content” in order to get to max level to do the endgame content because of what we think is important about our game and is our unique selling point: we want you to try that content. Maybe there is a way in the future, but that isn’t even a sparkle in our eye at this point. 

Now, I’m a fan of sticking to one character whenever possible… and due to my play time, that’s all I can usually do anyway. But I have dabbled in some other characters especially during Game Testing. Oddly, I find leveling an alt in TOR to be somehow more repetitive than leveling an alt in previous games. I can’t put by finger on it… the class quests are all different, but they make up only a small part of the content. If you pick the class that shares your main’s starter world, then nearly everything else you do is a duplicate of what you’ve already done, right from the start.

So I’m just curious how many of you guys are out there rolling alts, and what prompted you to do it. Are you simply bored at level 50 waiting for everyone else to get there, or are you genuinely interested in seeing the story for multiple classes? What is your experience of rolling an alt so far… different enough?

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Posted by Lethality | 15 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Did You Purchase A VIP Lounge Wristband?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

As you probably know, there is an area above the cantina in the respective faction fleets called the VIP Lounge. In this area you’ll find some entertainment, quiet corners to relax, and a few exclusive vendors. It’s basically a special place for your character to go and spend some down time, away from the general hubbub of the fleet!

Access to this area, however, requires that you either be a Collector’s Edition or Digital Deluxe Edition owner. However, BioWare saw fit to make one more option available to get access to this lounge. The cantina bartenders will sell you a VIP Lounge Wristband for the sum of just 1,000,000 credits!

Now, this will get you access to the area but still won’t allow you to purchase things from the Collector’s Edition vendor… so I am just curious – how many of you guys actually went out and bought a wristband, or plan to? Let us know!

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Posted by Lethality | 8 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: How Long Have You Been With Your Guild?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Guilds are a big part of what can make MMORPG’s enjoyable. In fact it’s this structure that lets you dodge some of the less glamorous parts of group play – terrible pickup groups, searching for hours on end for a group to play with or that inevitable ninja looter. If you’re playing Star Wars: The Old Republic – or any MMO – and you’re not in a guild, you’re doing yourself a disservice and likely missing out on a big chunk of the fun that the game has to offer.

Over the weekend, Massively posted a piece on The Syndicate. The Syndicate is perhaps one of the most storied long-running guilds on the MMO scene, dating back to pre-Ultima Online. That means they’ve been together for 16 years! They’ve even written not just one, but two books about themselves and the guild. Personally, I prefer the latter one – The Syndicate: Beyond The Legend – which was released just last year.

Personally, I’ve been with my current guild 7 years. I joined them in World of Warcraft just as they were on the verge of clearing Molten Core for the first time and haven’t looked back. We’ve traveled from game to game together, and even though we didn’t stick with all of the games, it’s a nice way to kick off the possibilities of a new world.

So I’m curious… how long have you been with your current guild? Did you just join them for TOR, or have you played with them for years elsewhere? Let us know!

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Posted by Lethality | 21 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Do You Have Trouble Finding A Group

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

While browsing the official forums, you never know what you’re going to find. Sometimes it’s a one-off weird question, and sometimes it’s a recurring theme that shows up ten times a day. One of these recurring themes, it seems, is players not being able to find groups to do Flashpoints or Heroic content with.

Some people blame the lack of an automated “tool” to build a group for them. Some people blame low faction populations. And some even blame single player gamers for being a large part of TOR’s audience and being completely averse to grouping at all.

Personally, I haven’t had this problem. I’ve been able to do all Heroics at the time they were given to me with just a few quick shouts to the zone chat. Plus, I’m in a good guild and I believe that the best way to play social games like this is to make friends. Odd concept I guess. I haven’t searched for a group in over 5 years in World of Warcraft!

Anyway, just wanted to check in with the AAJ Army on this topic – do you find yourself struggling to get groups for things? Let us know, and tell us about what faction and server you’re on as well!

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