Travelling at Warp 10

Not even a month in to Star Trek Online and I’ve hit the level cap!

I’m not even a third of the way through the story missions (episodes) that form the back bone of the game and I have both a Star Fleet Officer and Klingon Defence Fleet Officer at level 50. The recent 2nd year anniversary special event even gave me top level cruisers to use with those characters. I’m going to finish playing through the story missions and see what the end game stuff is like but it feels like I’m mostly done already.

The game doesn’t actually lend itself to playing in a group (although you can form temporary teams and fleets to play together) because it just scales up the enemies for the number of players in a team, so I’ve spent most of my time soloing. You also get given a new ship at almost every rank promotion, and mission rewards (and captured loot) give you levelled equipment for your ship and ground teams, meaning that you buy very little, and have even less reason to use the crafting system (although I guess it will be useful at the later stages when your rank is maxed out and you won’t be levelling beyond the equipment you buy/make). Bridge Officers are also easy to come by and cheap to train with the exact skills you want them to have, meaning no real reason to trade for the rare skilled ones. This easy rise to the heights makes it feel like a very odd game.

Star Trek fans should love the game, the feel is all there; the ships, the away teams, enemies, costumes, weapons, etc, etc. The back stories/history seems to be a blend of the TV shows and the movies, including the new re-boot movie, and elements are borrowed from all over the genre. Just don’t expect it to be a difficult slog, it is ridiculously easy to progress, so take your time and enjoy the episodes.

To Boldly Go…

Star Trek Online went free-to-play on 17th January 2011 and a friend has recommended it, so I’m going to give this a look-see.

Well, I got to Moria

I quite like The Lord of the Rings Online. I have 2 level 50+ characters, they’ve reached Moria, which opens up another stage of the game, and Turbine are continuing to add to the game with a new expansion coming this year to raise the level cap even higher.

One of our group proposed forming a kinship, and we have a couple of new to LotRO players joining us, so a couple of us have been working on some low level characters so we can start a lvl 20+ group as an almost full fellowship. Should be interesting.

Depending upon which region packs you’ve bought you have multiple options of how to progress through the levels, so you don’t necessarily have to go through the same missions/stories with new characters, apart from the epics (that form the fundamental story missions).

Lord of the Rings Online has been a good time investment for me, and a lot of fun.

Tanks for the memories

I did say that I would post my thoughts on World of Tanks, now that I’ve had more time playing it.

After 7 months of playing and over 6,000 random battles, I now have 3 fully upgraded tier 8 tanks. Tier 10 is looking a long way off, and to be honest the fun has gone out of this game for me.

When I first joined WoT in June 2011 there were 3 patches that made fundamental changes to the matchmaker, and added new vehicles and new maps. Several statements were made about upcoming changes to the technology trees, so it was quite encouraging at first, but the pace of change in World of Tanks has become slow and erratic since then. Changes to the tech trees announced 6 months ago have still not happened, although a limited French tech tree has been added. A new tier 8 premium tank, the Chinese Type 59, was added but due to it’s matchmaker rankings was mostly facing tier 6 tanks where it was difficult to counter. The Type 59 caused a lot of bad feeling in the community that eventually led to a matchmaker adjustment, but I think the damage is already done on that one. New game modes have been proposed but still not implemented.

The grind at tier 7 and above is insane. After fully upgrading your vehicle it still costs 80-100k+ research to move to tier 8. For an average premium player this is probably 100+ random battles, for a non-premium player over 150, played in just one game mode, Random. The game really needs some new game modes, as random is too random. Since the retail release of WoT it seems more and more people play with little or no sense of teamwork, in what is after all a team vs. team game. Griefing also seems to be on the rise again with people purposefully blocking and shooting team mates.

I’ll keep the account for now and play the odd game during special events, but I’m not interested in grinding it any further.

What? People still read this?

OK, I know I’ve been away for a bit, no need to badger me about not updating my pages, but I’ve succumbed to MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online and it is eating up all of my time!

I’ll post my updates on World of Tanks and The Lord of the Rings Online shortly documenting how my views have changed in the 5 months or so that I have been playing them.