Topics

46

Star Wars: The Old Republic / World Boss Locations

« on: December 22, 2011, 09:25:32 AM »

List them if you got 'em!

Tython: Forge Remnant.
Level 9. Name is Fleshraider Conquest Droid. 14000 HP. No idea on numbers of newbies.(Not a world boss in the true sense, but a 14000 HP mob in a newbie zone is not trivial...)
[smg id=83 type=full]

Coruscant: Old Galactic Market.
Level 18. Name is SD-0. Roughly 200,000 HP. Requires at least 16 guys on level or thereabouts.
[smg id=82 type=full]

Taris: The Brell Sediment.
Level 21. Name is Subject Alpha. Roughly 330,000. Requires at least 16 guys on level or thereabouts.
[smg id=81 type=full]

47

Star Wars: The Old Republic / Coruscant Heroic World Boss

« on: December 21, 2011, 09:42:12 PM »

Who is up for a pop at him say Thursday evening some time?

And by him, I mean the Heroic Droid dude with 200K HP...

Would need at least 10 of us at level 20 or there abouts (probably lower average level if we got more etc)

48

Star Wars: The Old Republic / Screenies from the game

« on: December 20, 2011, 07:17:09 PM »

Post any shiny/fun/show off screenies here.

First off has to be, my fat angry badass mofo jedi:

[smg id=79 type=full]

49

Star Wars: The Old Republic / BBC cover swtor

« on: December 19, 2011, 05:19:17 PM »

In an interesting twist they are actually covering another online game that isnt wow or eve...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16244994

Old republic Star Wars video game prepares to launch

Budding Jedi masters and Sith lords will soon have somewhere else to hone their lightsaber skills.

Star Wars: The Old Republic launches on 20 December and lets gamers play as characters from the iconic SF series.

Reputed to have cost more than $130m (£87m) to develop, SWTOR is a bid to grab a chunk of the lucrative gaming market for publisher EA.

It faces stiff competition from established titles, such as World of Warcraft, and many free-to-play games.

The Old Republic is set 3,500 years before the events depicted in the Star Wars films but uses many familiar elements from the movies.

Many aspects of the game involve moral choices that push players towards the light and the dark sides of the force.

The Old Republic (SWTOR) is a massively multi-player online (MMO) game and resembles World of Warcraft (WoW) and many others in that it asks players to go adventuring to turn their relatively weak starting character into a powerful hero.

Players can choose to play as many different races including human, Sith pureblood, Twi'lek and cyborg. At the start of the game players must choose whether to be part of the Galactic Republic or Sith Empire.

Different species adventure as one of several different classes including Jedi knights, smugglers, troopers and bounty hunters. Players also get a starship to explore the many different planets making up the SWTOR galaxy.

The game goes on sale on 20 December in the US and Europe but people who pre-ordered the game got access from as early as 13 December.

In the UK, the basic edition costs £45 and this includes the first month of online play. Continuing to play requires payment of an £8.99 monthly fee.

Other editions, deluxe and collectors, are available and include items for use in the game as well as a security module to help prevent an account from being stolen.

John Walker, a journalist at PC games news site Rock Paper Shotgun, gave a cautious welcome to the game. He said it was an "interesting confusion" of WoW and classic PC game Knights of the Old Republic.

Mr Walker said visually the game resembled a smartened up WoW and borrowed many of the well-known mechanics from that and other online role-playing games.

"However, and crucially, there is this huge amount of story in there, with every line of dialogue recorded, and genuine moral choices to be made, with long-reaching consequences on how you experience the world," he told the BBC.

'Distinctive and alternative'
"WoW has never offered anything close to that," he said. "And playing dark side, you can do some horrible things, which is fantastic."

He said there was an obvious tension in the game between the involving, story-driven solo titles that its creator Bioware is best known for and the populist multi-player experience required to attract subscribers and recoup development costs.

"I think there is a great deal that makes SWTOR distinctive and alternative enough to be interesting," he said, though he added that it was too early to say whether the game would be a hit.

"I'm hedging my bets at this point, as anyone should in the early days of a new massively multi-player game," he said.

Joe Martin, games editor at Custom PC, was less impressed with his time testing the game.

Mr Martin said "glaring technical inconsistencies", such as the fact that lightsabers do not cut through anything, robbed the game of the attraction of its setting.

"Jedi are supposed to be rare, but a massively multi-player game is naturally going to be full of them, which robs them of their rarity and potence," he said.

While playing, Mr Martin was struck by the divide between the complex single-player content and what he dubbed the "MMO-style filler".

"All the talk about this being the first MMO to put storyline into an MMO conveniently skips the reason why single player and multi-player games operate as discrete entities," he said.

With SWTOR, publisher EA is hoping to tempt players away from well-known titles, such as WoW, which also charge a monthly fee.

But it will also have to outdo the many free-to-play online games titles that started out with monthly charges but have been forced to drop fees to survive.

The launch of SWTOR comes barely a week after the closure of the Star Wars: Galaxies - one of the pioneering online role-playing games.

50

Star Wars: The Old Republic / Some fun images

« on: December 19, 2011, 12:29:30 PM »

[smg id=78 type=full]

[smg id=77 type=full]

[smg id=75 type=full]

[smg id=76 type=full]

[smg id=74 type=full]

51

EVE Online / CCP Xmas Gifts

« on: December 12, 2011, 06:08:27 PM »

For active subscribers:

Options are things like Destroyers + Faction Ammo
Neural Remap
Fuel Block packages
Boosters
Implant Sets.

https://secure.eveonline.com/Xmas2011/

Also ingame get an implant, the other half of the set that started with on Crucible day.

52

World of Warcraft Retail / Race to World First

« on: December 12, 2011, 12:49:42 PM »

A freaky wow documentary looking at the sort of folks who do this world first nonense.



Currently its free to view at mo, so laugh while you can

53

General Gaming / Everquest 2 is now F2P

« on: December 08, 2011, 01:58:22 PM »

As Garry mentioned on the shoutbox, EQ2 is now F2P.  In case you dont know, EQ2 is SOE's follow up to its early flagship Everquest.  Was released around the same time as World of Warcraft back in the day, and is very similar in many ways, from playstyle to Ui to mechanics etc  However this doesnt mean its all bad, the F2P system SOE is using means that instead.

The game world is quite large, and as part of F2P you get access to 6 expansions worth of material (however limited races/classes - sort of the opposite of LOTROs F2P) - and can buy the 7th and 8th expansions if you want that, to be honest there is so much content in the 6 expacs you do get that you shouldnt need more.

F2P limits/pricing: http://www.everquest2.com/free

(Bag & Gold limits are terrible, worse than they were under EQ2:Extended I think)

Game info: http://www.everquest2.com/game-overview

Basically if you want a swords and sorcery mmorpg, and have had a fill of Azeroth, do not really enjoy lotro for whatever reason - and can deal with SOE mucking things up then give EQ2 a go.  I play on and off (I like the crafting system) when I get there urge (I have a station access account...) and when i recall which server I tend to be on when i do feel an EQ bout coming I shall let you know.

Just dont roll a FAE if you can, I will be forced to find you in RL and hurt you.

Edit: its on steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/201230/

54

Star Wars: The Old Republic / Early Access opens 13th December

« on: December 07, 2011, 10:29:20 PM »

Early Game Access* will begin on December 13th 2011 at 7:00AM EST (12pm GMT), and ends on December 19th, 2011 at 10:01PM EST (03.01 AM December 20th ). During this time, we will be emailing invitations to join Early Game Access based on the order in which you redeemed your Pre-Order Code. Pre-load the game client now, so you're ready to play when your Early Game Access invitation arrives. Note that download time can vary and may take awhile.

So we all got this email.  Here's hoping we also all get in at the same time (or close to it ).

Edit: Yes I know this has been shoutboxed.

55

EVE Online / [DevBlog] you people really do love blowing up spaceships.

« on: December 05, 2011, 12:03:39 PM »

Blog | Comments

One thing I keep a close eye on as part of my role at CCP is the level of PVP activity within EVE. Seeing how many of you blow each other up and how often you do so is an important metric for seeing how much fun everyone is having. So, conveniently timed for MMOCrunch declaring EVE to be the Best PVP MMO of 2011, I present to you: many, many numbers regarding explosions in New Eden.

The information in this blog is limited to kills that have taken place since the new kill report system was introduced in the Trinity expansion on December 5th, 2007, up until very early in the morning of November 29th, 2011. Unless otherwise stated, we’ve also limited this to PVP, so ships lost to NPCs won’t count in the totals.

In total, 13,540,707 ships or structures were destroyed in this period in PVP, belonging to 1,075,754 characters or corporations. NPCs destroyed 7,559,088 ships belonging to 1,936,205 characters. That makes a total of 21,099,795 ships/structures blown up belonging to 2,251,177 different owners. To be fair a lot of those are rookie ships and such, but either way – that’s a lot of explosions.

From December 5th, 2007 until November 29th, 2011, 1,455 days passed. That’s 2,095,200 minutes. So, if you count everything that generated a kill report, how many things blew up per day/hour/minute on average?
14,502 per day.
604 per hour.
10 per minute (roughly one explosion every six seconds).

Where are all these explosions happening? First up, let’s take a look by security group:
     
[TABLE="width: 354"]

	PVP	PVE	Total
High Sec	1,974,022	6,317,926	8,291,948
Low Sec	4,126,911	510,683	4,637,594
Null Sec	7,061,988	568,353	7,630,341
Wormhole Space	377,786	162,126	539,912
	13,540,707	7,559,088	21,099,795

Which systems? Well, apparently low sec travel routes and Jita are quite active. I thought it would probably be of interest to show the proportion of the explosions that were probably more of a “squish” sound than a boom, because some places happen to have a rather high rate of podkilling:

[TABLE="width: 247"]

System	Explosions	% Capsules
Amamake	163,106	24.74%
Jita	160,742	28.20%
Rancer	157,429	43.98%
Tama	153,503	20.37%
HED-GP	138,101	38.05%
EC-P8R	137,094	38.15%
M-OEE8	121,044	40.34%
PF-346	106,272	39.85%
Old Man Star	87,008	14.94%
N-RAEL	78,560	41.69%

So whilst it’s been known for a while that travelling through Rancer will often result in being podkilled, it’s now official. It may be low security and therefore have no warp bubbles, but just under 44% of the losses there have been capsules. Probably best to make sure your clone is up to date before going there on a picnic.

The probably all-important question is up next; what has been getting blown up? Well, here’s the top 20 ship groups and then individual types for your enjoyment:

[TABLE="width: 202"]

Capsule	3,468,179
Frigate	1,738,142
Battlecruiser	1,299,488
Cruiser	1,011,138
Battleship	921,451
Rookie ship	805,728
Industrial	613,317
Interceptor	485,349
Destroyer	364,079
Shuttle	358,370
Stealth Bomber	334,478
Heavy Assault Ship	319,003
Assault Ship	268,630
Force Recon Ship	198,800
Covert Ops	152,634
Interdictor	143,217
Mining Barge	103,393
Combat Recon Ship	87,454
Exhumer	84,301
Command Ship	60,812

I’ll filter the rookie ships, shuttles and capsules out of the types, which gives the following top 20:

[TABLE="width: 141"]

Drake	505,263
Rifter	427,151
Hurricane	331,441
Kestrel	216,275
Raven	170,418
Caracal	167,771
Thorax	147,500
Harbinger	141,159
Thrasher	140,916
Manticore	136,193
Bestower	131,990
Myrmidon	129,330
Vexor	128,384
Dominix	126,295
Megathron	120,963
Rupture	116,389
Merlin	115,942
Punisher	108,978
Crow	105,390
Incursus	104,600

And what do NPCs manage to destroy? Well, from the looks of things, the tutorials are killing quite a few players:

[TABLE="width: 141"]

Condor	416,008
Atron	370,865
Slasher	262,312
Rifter	225,672
Kestrel	222,612
Catalyst	212,036
Drake	198,481
Thrasher	191,311
Merlin	173,076
Raven	161,661
Cormorant	159,616
Crucifier	155,691
Tristan	144,963
Executioner	113,012
Caracal	109,367
Punisher	108,685
Dominix	100,247
Coercer	99,493
Incursus	87,827
Vexor	74,613

The top 20 ships that people have been using to shoot at things (based on final blows):

[TABLE="width: 181"]

Hurricane	925,522
Drake	908,400
Vagabond	593,096
Zealot	466,449
Sabre	447,654
Harbinger	360,268
Megathron	313,688
Armageddon	256,671
Rifter	250,641
Rapier	247,652
Abaddon	241,913
Dramiel	233,302
Taranis	224,093
Cynabal	208,933
Tempest	207,350
Broadsword	206,377
Ishtar	199,092
Manticore	195,879
Crow	189,165
Raven	188,639

It would also seem that projectile weapons are extremely good at getting those much-loved final blows. Final blow weapons, top five groups:

[TABLE="width: 197"]

Projectile Weapon	4,553,113
Energy Weapon	2,039,118
Hybrid Weapon	1,794,480
Combat Drone	1,448,419
Heavy Missile	1,033,373

     
   And then by type:
            [TABLE="width: 293"]

425mm AutoCannon II	897,443
220mm Vulcan AutoCannon II	861,826
Heavy Pulse Laser II	603,060
Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile	579,528
200mm AutoCannon II	570,666

So, a high rate of fire seems to be of great use for scoring final blows. Not all that shocking.

Whilst writing this I was told that the idea of me writing a blog and not adding in some graphs is ludicrous, so I made some pie charts for you all to enjoy. In this, I broke down all ships by their hull size and excluded rookie ships, capsules and shuttles. "Other" includes structures, mining barges/exhumers, capitals and a couple of others which were too small a slice for it to make much sense to include.




Two more, these by tech level and faction. Tech level excludes rookie ships, capsules and shuttles, whilst race/faction includes rookie ships and shuttles. The "other" under faction is primarily structures that aren't of a particular race and pirate faction ships.





Now it’s time to put some names to all this destruction.

The top five killers (final blows), where the victim was not in a capsule, rookie ship, shuttle or tech one frigate. The brackets show the total kills and the number of unique victims:
Marovinchian (5,463 / 1,265), DiamondDog (4,455 / 4,259), Loren Gallen (4,383 / 3,555), kerjin (4,373 / 2,994), Hera Darkthorn (4,055 / 3,531).

The same again, but for player corporations rather than individual characters:
Sniggerdly(43,712 / 32,037), Genos Occidere(43,154 / 30855), GoonWaffe (39,943 / 25,922),  Fremen Sietch (39,405 / 27,820), North Eastern Swat (32,704 / 24,330).

And for alliances (total/unique victims):
Against ALL Authorities (115,425 / 56,169), Pandemic Legion (91,301 / 49,606), Morsus Mihi (85,062 / 38,735), Red Alliance (69,726 / 34,727), RAZOR Alliance (58,754 / 28,887).

The top five killers of capsules (again, final blows) and the number of unique victims:
ANGRY23 (4,448 / 4,198), DiamondDog (4,302 / 4,145), Xavier Theakstone (3,786 / 3,612), Lithia Tsanov (3,283 / 3,084), Mist3r Evil (3,280 / 3,171).

And the capsule stats but for corporations: the united (38,756 / 33,778), GoonWaffe (24,313 / 18,844), Sniggerdly (21,786 / 18,918), Fremen Sietch ( 15,453 / 13,369), Interstellar eXodus (14,574 / 12,276).

I’ll try to be fairly active in the comments thread and answer what I can. If there are a significant number of requests for more information, I'll probably do another blog.

Hope you enjoyed the numbers!

CCP Diagoras

56

Star Wars: The Old Republic / This is why I dont play with names switched on

« on: December 05, 2011, 11:03:49 AM »

(Not my screenie as obviously I didnt get in this past weekend).

But all those names do look tacky - which they do in every mmo that has names over heads.

[smg id=2 type=full align=left]

57

Star Wars: The Old Republic / Check your Pre-Order status

« on: December 04, 2011, 04:13:10 PM »

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=707413

Basically some firms (quick glance across that thread suggests mainly US firms, but I havent really read it end to end) seem to be cancelling them.

Stephen Reid does post and says this:

Hello everyone,

We will investigate this issue ASAP, although we may not have further details to share before Monday.

I obviously cannot speak on behalf of any retailer, however I would like to let people know who have pre-ordered and redeemed their pre-order code, that their Early Game Access is still secured. You may apply any Game Code from any edition of The Old Republic to your account.

As I said, we'll look into this ASAP and update you when we can.

However it does not hurt to check.

58

Star Wars: The Old Republic / Reasons to group

« on: December 04, 2011, 03:53:41 PM »

Beyond Flashpoints/Operations.

1. Bonus XP from bonus missions

Just for bonus and it makes doing bonuses in a full group well worth it. Since you get your completion exp + half of each persons completion. So in your example would be 1500 + 750 +750 +750.

This assumes a full player group, not a mix of players + companions filling the empty slots.  Nice that they do this though

2. In FP's different choices each run through actually can vary how the run goes, rather than zerg boss 1, zerg boss 2 etc.

Anymore?

59

General Gaming / Anno 2070

« on: December 04, 2011, 11:59:51 AM »

Game has been out a shortwhile on Steam.  Its really really good.  On the surface its a reskin of the previous anno games + new features, but once you delve deeper its really quite new and a good direction for the series.  Even with a slightly preachy eco message

I may have found my game to last till the 15th+

Trailer:
Anno 2070 Trailer


Downside is that its an Ubisoft game so has extra DRM on top of steam, but for once that isnt too bad.  And all the uplay features they added actually make up for their DRM obsession

60

EVE Online / [DEVBLOG] if you have 18 months, you can probably make two babies. or not...

« on: November 29, 2011, 07:10:28 PM »

Dear Spacefriends

It’s been a pretty crazy ride. We’ve made some really cool spaceships, made some not so cool pants (the pants look good, but you know what I mean) and now we’re making cool spaceships again. I remember back when the CSM came here once and the “18 months” meme was first created. Hearing people complain that we didn’t put enough work into the spaceship side of the game (and those people being entirely right) has not been a lot of fun.



(that's a picture of me burning in hell viewed through the door in Incarna, just in case you were wondering)

But how does the future look?

The good news is that the 18 months are over and it feels pretty good. We had about 4-6 weeks of actual development time to put this release together and I honestly feel that this is the best release we’ve done in years. The recipe contains a few teaspoons of really good looking people, an ounce of love for EVE and is topped off with good ideas from the community.

It’s really only the beginning though. If you liked this release, all of next year should be right up your alley. If it’s old, rusty and not in good shape, there is a chance it will be looked at. Anyway, the future still feels far away, so let’s look at some of the stuff we’ve done. I’m really happy with the entire package, but here are some of my personal highlights:

Being able to drag and drop targets to re-order them in any way you like. Anything that lets me drag and drop makes me really happy. The look and feel of EVE is so incredibly important and a usability change like this really makes it feel much more like we’ve reached the usability standard of most software in 1999. We’re still a few years behind, but goddamit, we’re getting there. Another change that falls into this category is rubberband selection. I’m pretty sure I’ll spend the first day after the patch just randomly selecting things in my hangar JUST BECAUSE I CAN. Haters gonna hate.

Constant ship/module balance is really the cornerstone of maintaining a healthy live game and we’ve not been doing a very good job of it lately. I hope we can keep up the momentum from this release and continue to do a wide range of balancing changes several times a year. Every time we do a big release, it should contain changes like the ones we’ve just put in. If we do put out a major release without balancing changes, it probably means that CCP Tallest and/or Ytterbium have been eaten by bears. That would be bad, but the reality is that there are very few things you can do to prevent a bear from killing you. According to what I’ve read online, playing dead isn’t necessarily the correct strategy and while there are a lot of great tips, I guess your best odds really comes from not being around bears.

Corp bookmarks. I’ve spent time in wormholes and the tools available to the people living there were in a state where I basically consider anyone there an internet spaceship MacGyver (Here is a link for you young people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver). They’ve been able to create a lot from very little and hopefully our changes to scanning, POSs and bookmarks will make their existence there better. I suspect we’ll be able to do more in the long run, but this is a pretty good start. In general, central storing of information like bookmarks, fittings etc should be a natural development in EVE. Having to carry around a USB drive, CD or a floppy disc (Here is a link for you young people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disc) is a waste of space when you could carry equipment to protect yourself from a potential bear attack.

I’m also hoping that our fuel blocks change will positively impact the ratio of corp/alliance logistics pilots that slit their wrists putting an arbitrary number of components into a spacebucket. This not only represented a lot of work, but also an arbitrary barrier of entry which I hope we can lower even more the coming year. Owning a massive structure in space that “does stuff” should be a cool thing everyone wants. These days, it’s basically something a few people do because they have a higher pain tolerance than the average human being.

Then there is a batch of changes that just make sense. That’s really the only way to describe them. They’re basically a set of changes that come off game features that are so silly this mental image pops up every time I run into them:



They are changes like not having an “enter old password” field on a container when you set the password for the FIRST time, being able to remotely un-rent an office and not being allowed to keep a dungeon alive just because you’re in a cloaked ship. Changes like that restore my faith in our collective ability to not have the dumb.

Anyway, at the end of the day, November 29th will contain a ton of changes that we feel were overdue. But even more importantly, it will be the first step in our road back to spaceships. Stick around, it will only get better.

We’ve had some great people working on this release. I’d like to extend a big thanks to Team Best Friends Forever for continuing to make awesome changes, Team Pink Zombie Kittens who join the spaceteam after working on Incarna and Team Papercuts who have contributed tremendously, considering they were on loan and made the transition from sparkly vampires to spaceships extremely quickly. All three teams have done a fantastic job and this is really just the beginning.

Toodles spacefriends,

Soundwave

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3211