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.

No one simply walks into Mordor!

The Lord of the Rings Online went free-to-play (freemium) some time back and a friend recently suggested that I might like it. I’ve not played any MMORPGs apart from a brief flirt with Flyff a long time ago, so I wasn’t sure what I was expecting going in, but my last week and a half have vanished into a blur of questing

The install process is a bit long; you download a small installer, which then downloads (slowly) and installs 8Gb of files, then you run the launcher and it patches your game (why aren’t the current game files in the original install?), then you finally log-in to a game server and create a character (all in all it took about 5 hours!).

As with most current MMOs they are designed with pretty low system requirements to allow older PCs to still be able to play, but LotRO also supports some DirectX 10 and 11 rendering techniques (for water and shadows, etc) that make the world look much more beautiful when turned on. After heavily tweaking the settings, and going key-blind over the many, many keyboard shortcut options, I finally head out in the starter zone.

The starter zone begins with an ‘instance’ that leads you through the basics of controlling your character with a dramatic story-driven tutorial. These instances are race-specific and you will meet a significant character from the book (Humans meet Strider, Elves and Dwarves meet Elrond, etc). These Epic instances often link to important parts of the book, such as later in the Human Epic quest line visiting Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest and Weathertop.

You then move on to more general quests in low-level areas, with early quests gaining you your starting armour and weapons, crafting skills (and tutorials on how to craft), introducing the various trainers and suppliers you will need to interact with, etc. A lot of low-level quests are ‘fetch and carry’; go to person A, person A sends you to person B, person B gives you an item to deliver back to person A, or ‘harvest’; person A sends you to kill creature X until you collect Y item drops, return them to person A, etc. There are also Deeds, race, class, and area specific usually involving killing or collecting a certain amount of things, visiting all of the areas within a region, using specific skills a number of times, etc. There are even region-specific Tasks that you can perform, usually collecting x amount of ‘trophies’ which are specific drops from creatures.

You gain Turbine Points for some of this that can be used in the game store to buy some of the many, many things available (such as removing the 2 gold cap on free-to-play players), there is even a tutorial quest that shows you how that works

My first forays I played with a friend who was starting his fifth character. I felt a little out of my depth, because he knew where to go, etc, and I felt like I was just trailing round after him without much time to read the quest text, of which there isn’t a huge amount but it is relatively well written. I started an ‘Alt’ character to act as a gatherer for me, each craft relies on at least one other to supply crafting materials and I wanted to be able to stop asking my higher-level friends to gather low-level materials for me. I took my time with my Alt, reading all of the quest text, taking my time exploring new areas, etc. I would suggest new players play to somewhere between level 10 and 15 before joining up with more experienced players, although temporary fellowships (grouping) with similar beginners could be beneficial.

The quests gradually lead you into higher and higher level areas so there is always a challenge, and there are many, many quests to undertake.

I now have a character at level 25 yet still have much more to explore having only really visited 3 of the 16 major regions. There is still much more of the game for me to experience, I’ve only tried a few Instances (some are tough challenges, solo and group), I’ve barely started with Skirmishes (battle instances) and I’ve not participated in a Raid (group instances) yet.

Now, I’m off to explore. More later…

Tanking, in a big way

A friend of mine introduced me to World of Tanks, a free-to-play (freemium), Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game.

The basic principle is that starting from low-tier light tanks you earn experience and credits during battles that you can use to research and upgrade new components (suspension, engines, radios, turrets, and guns) for your tank, purchase new tanks, and pay for repairs / reloads after battle.

The tanks are based upon the World War II era (actually from the 30s to the 50s including prototypes and experimental designs) and there are currently 3 nationalities; the Soviets, the Germans and the Americans. There are plans to introduce more nationalities, the French line being expected next, with English and possibly Italian later on.

Each nation has it’s own research tree comprising light, medium and heavy tanks, tank destroyers and self-propelled guns (field artillery). The research trees are being added to in each patch with an average of 70 tanks (including premium) expected for each nation in the final version.

Beyond your tank and its components you can also load two types of ammo; armour-piercing (AP) and high-explosive (HE), premium users have access to 2 more expensive types APCR and HEAT, and there are a wide selection of bolt-on equipment like cammo nets and consumables like first-aid kits. Your crew also gains experience and when they reach 100% they can learn secondary skills to aid you in battle.

Premium users can, rather than grinding experience to move up the research tree, buy specific premium tanks at various tiers, but these premium tanks cannot be upgraded and are usually slightly less powerful than fully upgraded tanks in their tier.

Battles are 15-aside played across a variety of maps using a capture-the-flag format…more on how battles work below.

Now on to my experiences of the actual gameplay.

World of Tanks is quite addictive at the lower tiers. Tearing around in a light tank, popping off rounds, and getting the kill-shot on an enemy tank get the adrenalin flowing and give you the hunger to experience the bigger, more powerful tanks.

It took me about 2 weeks of playing to get my first tier 5 tank, and now with over 1,500 battles under my belt after 4 weeks I have 2 tier 6 tanks. To get to a tier 10 will probably take a few months and 10s or even 100s of thousands of battles. As all that I’m doing is playing random battles this will be quite a grind!

The battle system currently is random battle; you select your tank, click ready, briefly sit in a queue until the matchmaker can select 30 tanks of roughly equal weight, then off you go for a 15 minute battle…rinse, repeat. The matchmaker system assigns a range of possible matchup ranks to each tier / type of tank and uses this plus tank weight to decide on who ends up in each battle. I believe that the matchmaker fills slots from the top-down so this often means that your lowly tier 4 medium ends up being at the bottom of the list, facing off against tier 7 heavies. You will occasionally get the match where you are top of the heap, but these seem much fewer and far between than being stomped by bigger, badder tanks.

This wouldn’t be such a problem, small tanks working in concert can take down a big tank quickly with few losses if they co-ordinate with each other ,but the random battle system provides no way of easily co-ordinating. Voice chat is reserved for premium users, as is platooning (teams of up to 3 players that join a game together), so free users can’t easily talk to team mates or even ensure that they can play with the same people over a series of battle to get some familiarity.

I’m still having fun but not as much as when I played in the lower tiers. I have even gone back and bought lower tier tanks that I didn’t try on my way up to tier 6 (you can have 5 tanks in your garage, or pay for more garage slots).

As they are still patching at roughly monthly intervals some of my gripes may be resolved, I’ll just have to wait and see.

Brand New Day

Been watching ‘Lie To Me’ with Helena, good series and I really love the theme music, ‘Brand New Day’ by Ryan Star