MOGS

Raid Finder Coming in Patch 4.3

This is straight from Blizz. I’m sorry its posted a bit late but I know you all are looking for a tidbit of information. There’s a lot more info out there too.

Raid Finder Coming in Patch 4.3

DC Universe Online – Hack n Slash fun

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) has launched their latest MMORPG this week, but if your looking for puny goblins or really annoying pygmys waiting to be slaughtered for daily quests, your definitely in the wrong universe.

DC Universe Online is set in, you guess it, the DC Universe. These are some iconic figures we are talking about here. Superman, Batman, Green Lantern.. and.. well… honestly I never really got sucked into comics, but there’s a ton of other important looking people standing around giving me stuff to do, and lets face it.. if your friends with Superman you got something going for you.

First Impressions

At first it reminded me a little bit of Champions Online, just re-flavored and smoothed out by a better development team. The graphics are pretty awesome when you stop to look at the scenery, some of the texturing and shadow work are amazing and there is a lot of little details.

Players will choose a mentor for their character (such as Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman for heroes and Lex Luthor, The Joker, or Circe for villains). Their starting location, principal quest rewards and mob loot will be influenced by that decision. The starting zones are either Metropolis or Gotham City, for both heroes and villains. Heroes get access to the Justice League Watchtower, while villains can enter the Legion of Doom headquarters. Other zones can be reached by teleporters from the two faction headquarters.

Character Creation

The character creation options in DC Universe Online are more limited than say City of Heroes or Champions Online, and the game uses a more traditional equipment system – so as you level up you will get new armor and accessories which will alter how your character looks. This is something that most regular MMO players are used to, but the thing that sets it apart from some of the other Armour systems is you can “lock” appereance items so no matter what item you equip you can maintain a certain overall theme for your character with little effort. This is one of those things I wish Blizzard would wake up to, my rogue wants to raid in his vanilla High Warlord set rocking glaives.

Overall as far as Character Creation goes, there are enough options available to keep everyone from looking like Batman, but compared to games like COH/COC where you can customize everything down to your spell effect colors, DC:UO could use some patch updates as far as character creation options go.

I’m not going to get into much about the class creation, because to be honest there’s so many options and specs and talents and spells it just makes my brain hurt. Essentially you can mix and max pretty much any power from the DC universe or comics in general and create a copy of your favorite hero or create for yourself the hero you always hoped you would be.

You can see my first character below, Kungfu, a duel sword wielding acrobatic ice ninja. I tend to enjoy melee characters so the duel swords was a no brainer, and the ice line of talents is awesome for tanking and has some good abilities for locking opponents down in PVP. There are so many different options though I’m sure as long as my interest is held in this game I will be rerolling alt’s to find the powerset the fits my playstyle perfectly. Right now there just isn’t enough information available so there is a lot of guess work.

Interface

The interface is built with console players in mind, but is slightly easier to navigate on a keyboard because of direct shortcuts. On the controller simple tasks like checking the map or activating missions requires navigating menus on a directional pad. Otherwise as a whole the interface felt a little clunky, much like the combat I wouldn’t say it was “bad”, it just feels like something is off.

Movement

Maneuvering is well controlled, but with a few flaws. Flying sometimes feels tight and you may get disoriented while flying inside small buildings. Superspeed is great when you’re running straight but poses some difficulties in tight areas. You may be turning a corner at one minute to find yourself halfway up a wall and turned around the next. Acrobatics is the other movement type in DC Universe and controls virtually without any problems but isn’t quiet as fast when navigating the city as the other two and has a small drawback in pvp combat against flying opponents. All three control rather well with a controller and only present an issue when moving fast through tight areas.

Combat

The problem for me, and personally it’s going to be the “deal breaker” if I can’t get used to it, is the combat. The basic combat should be familiar to MMO players. You have a range of abilities, some of which have cast timers, and some of which have cooldowns. Some abilities can be blocked, some can break blocks, and some can be interrupted. In low-level PVE you can get away with simple casting and a bit of blocking and movement, but I can imagine that you’ll need to make use of roles, and be more judicious with the block/stun/blockbreaking abilities at higher levels. The combo system feels a little cumbersome on the PC – remembering (and correctly performing) mouse click/click and hold combinations is annoying compared to pressing certain keys in a certain order.

For example, my Duel Sword Wielding Frost Ninja (sorry I just like saying that), has a attack called Ultra Flurry. They could have called this thing “Whirlwind of Death” and no one would argue. The problem is that in order to perform this attack, you have to click your left mouse button exactly 9 times, and then hold the button on that 9th click. If you accidentally click 10 times, you perform a completely different attack. So unless your a Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter god, or at least have an xbox controller you can plugin, you might find the combat system to be a little frustrating at first. It’s all about chaining attacks together, blocking, and interrupting blocks.

To try and make playing DC Universe Online a little easier I hooked my computer up to our monstrous 56″ Display, plugged in a wireless XBOX controller, and went to work. Personally it made playing the game a lot more fun. The square and triangle button are your primary close and ranged attacks, then abilities and consumables are assigned to the four buttons when you’re holding either the R2 or L2 buttons, effectively giving you 8 slots to assign. Attack combos begin very basic but can be upgraded to different combination’s of square and triangle as well as holding the buttons for different effects. That said, it never feels too much like an action game. Damage is still listed as “damage per second” and combat always comes down to how fast you can wail on the attack buttons, just like other MMOs. This all leads to a system that boggles expectations. Don’t go in expecting Batman: Arkham Asylum combat controls, but don’t expect standard PC MMO controls either.

Overall

Overall I think it’s a fun, casual game. It’s not going to affect the warcraft core player base, but I think a part of the warcraft community that is tired of the elitist attitude and hardcore mentality that has been taken to the extreme might find DC Universe Online to be a nice change of pace. It’s not going to be for everyone and it does have some issues that need to be worked out in order to make gameplay as smooth and polished as we have come to expect. I’m still not sure if it was worth the $50 bucks or whatever, we will have to see what the current “endgame” content looks like. However, if there is one thing that gives me hope in this game, it’s what my future tank set looks like:

Space Combat Announced in SWTOR

Yo Bobba we heard you like space in your space.

If you’ve been following the news coming out of the Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ panel at Comic-Con International, you’ve heard the announcement ¹ that we will indeed have Space Combat as part of the TOR experience! But what does that mean? Space combat is an alternative gameplay experience to the primary game of storytelling, questing, and ground-based combat. In space combat, you fly your personal ship to various “hot spots” on your galaxy map. From there, you will blast your way through asteroid fields, enemy fighters, frigates, destroyers, and a variety of other obstacles that will evoke memories of some of the great Star Wars™ space battles.

Space combat has been strongly suspected since the announcement of player ships at E3, but there was nothing to confirm our suspicions. According to the folks at Mos Eisley Radio, James Ohlen said that each ship will be customizable, and, of course, that the player will be able to use this ship in space combat.

1. source: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=173964  ↩

DC Universe Online – Comic Con Demo

The beta for DC Universe Online will be starting soon, and the official release date is Nov. 2, 2010. It will be for PC and PS3. You will be creating your own superhero in this game, akin to City of Heroes. The cool part though, is that you will be able to interact with the established DC heroes and villains.

However, the difference between this game and City of Heroes is that you will start with your super powers, and leveling helps to tweak them. Also, if you freeze someone in place, they will turn into a block of ice, rather then just be ensnared with a small “root” visual. You can then pick up and throw the player. This is interesting, because in utilizing special powers, the game is dynamically creating objects, rather then just using visual effects.

In the playable demo at Comic-Con, you had to protect the Batcomputer in the Batcave from the Joker and Harley. You fight along side Batman, and lose points when the computer is damaged, or you or Batman are knocked out (which only incapacitates you for a short time).

Watch out Ventrilo, Mumble in the mix.

The guy’s over at wow.com have done a pretty good writeup on their blog post Ventrilo vs. Mumble ¹, but considering it’s not a site that every single WoW player visits regularly, or something most non-warcrafters even have a reason to visit, I wanted to take a few minutes to highlight their post and help introduce you to Mumble, a low latency VOIP program for gaming. This is an application that is mostly unknown in the MMORPG world, where Ventrilo and Teamspeak have dominated, it’s far better known in the FPS circles where the extremely low latency helps give it a competitive advantage when calling out those enemy snipers and getting teammates over to help defend your bunker.

Mumble, unlike Ventrillo or Teamspeak, was specifically created with low latency in mind, and along with an excellent voice quality there is just as much lag as you would expect on a normal land-lined phone call. The latency is so low in fact that it allows for perfectly normal conversations, and yelling “Meteor in five seconds” actually means “Meteor in five seconds”; not “Meteor in three seconds by the time you hear this”. It also features Auto normalization, which to me is a huge benefit because that means I won’t have to sit there every time a new user joins chat, or I join a new guilds chat, and manually adjust the voice volumes for everyone to be an equal level. No more whispered call out’s I can barely hear, and no more eardrum shattering hunter’s crying about their pet dying. If you’ve ever had to sit there and go through the “Ok, say something now”, following by some tweaking and then another “Ok, say something again.”, you will fully appreciate this subtle but amazing awesome feature. Mumble normalizes everyone’s volume automatically on the server end, and does it right.

I highly suggest heading over and reading their full article which goes a little more in-depth into some of the features and functions of this great VOIP program, and then going to sourceforge ² and grabbing a copy for yourself and your guild to play around with to see if it fits your need. Once this gets a little more widespread in the WOW world I definitely see it becoming the new requirement, so when your applying to a new guild and you see “Mumble is used for guild communication, do you have this installed”, at least now you will have some idea of what they are talking about, and hopefully your savvy enough to see the greatness of it and be able to throw a big fat CHECK down next to the question.

Jake@MOGS

1. source: http://www.wow.com/2010/07/18/ventrilo-vs-mumble/ ↩
2. Mumble Download: http://mumble.sourceforge.net/ ↩

Starwars: The Old Republic Music

The emotional experience of Star Wars™ comes to life in new music created exclusively for The Old Republic™. From soft melodies that ring in the forest of Alderaan to the magnificent booming of a battle scene on Ord Mantell, a talented team of composers, musicians and developers came together to create a magical score for the game. Audio in The Old Republic, just as with the rest of the game, begins with the storytelling. As you all know by now, for the first time ever in an MMO, every quest and character will come to life fully voiced. This is a Star Wars saga that gives new meaning to the word ‘epic’: eight unique class storylines, thousands of hours of gameplay, and hundreds of thousands of dialogue lines. It is likely the largest voiceover project in entertainment history.

When you think about the legacy of Star Wars™, what you hear has totally moved and excited its fans: the orchestral score, the Cantina music, Chewie’s roar, and the pew-pew of a blaster rifle immediately take us to a galaxy far, far away. Developing sound for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ requires that they bring together the talents of dialogue writers, cinematic designers, voice-over actors, musicians, engineers, and production teams at both LucasArts and BioWare. It’s their job to create an audio experience that enhances the emotional experience of the game and reaches the quality level expected of the Star Wars franchise. As fans and as game makers, I hope they’re excited and privileged to breathe life into every planet, every weapon, and every creature that beeps, squawks, or just plain talks…and it’s not as easy as it looks, er, sounds.  ¹

Mark@MOGS
SWG Guru

1. source: http://swtor.com/news/blog/ ↩

Starwars: The Old Replublic Gameplay Walkthrough

Bioware recently released over 20 minutes of Star Wars: The Old Republic gameplay footage, narrated by the developers themselves and walking you through a few of the games aspects and features, including a decent look at three of the classes in the game (Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, Sith) and also a sneak peak at some of the games planets. From Korriban, the original Sith homeworld housing the tombs of many ancient and powerful Dark Lords of the Sith and containing tremendous dark side power, to Hutta home of the Hutt’s and Ord Mantell.

The videos will introduce you to not only three of the available classes, but also to some basic combat and a explanation of the “flash point” system. The story mode is shown and explains how a simple decision the player makes can and will introduce changes to the upcoming story line and effect the events ingame. You will also see the ridiculous effort they put into creating a custom voice for EVERY NPC in the game.

Overall I would have to say I am very excited, and while I didn’t see anything groundbreaking graphics wise, I’m hoping that this will end up being the replacement for Warcraft I have been looking for.

SWTOR Gameplay Walkthrough Part 1

SWTOR Gameplay Walkthrough Part 2

SWTOR Gameplay Walkthrough Part 3

SWTOR Gameplay Walkthrough Part 4

Cleaning Up the RMT Industry

IGE.com, a well known player in the RMT industry, recently sent out an important newsletter to its customers regarding the current state of RMT and some of the solutions to the problems we have all been seeing. Rampant in-game advertising, unethical outsourcing, and other fraudulent and blackhat techniques used to ultimately take advantage of you, the consumer.

Real Money Trading (RMT) is defined as the exchange of real money for ingame items or currency. This is an industry that was originally started by gamers, for gamers. Here at MOGS that is something we really take to heart. MOGS was born out of a passion for gaming, all of our staff are MMORPG gamers themselves so it helps us have a much deeper-rooted understanding of our customers needs.

Unfortunately, today’s market is not, for the most part, driven by gamer-to-gamer relationships. Instead, we find a multi-billion dollar annual market. We find company after company with little to no accountability. This problem is amplified when you bring venture capitalists into the mix. By pouring money into these illegitimate operations, they are just enabling them to spread in hopes that they can gain a customers trust long enough to take their money. Due to their lack of service quality these companies cannot grow organically. They can’t retain customers so they must resort to in-game advertising, click-jacking, and fake web storefronts in order to generate sales.

In this day of Fannie Mae, Enron, and the various other corporate accountability scandals that have hit major media here in the states, we may have become accustomed to this, but that doesn’t mean we should stand for it.

Regulators, Mount up.

In January of 2009, IGE started reaching out to some of the other RMT companies within this industry, explaining their goal of building a group of trusted sites dedicated to implementing some standardization within our industry. By working together and banding with some of the other legitimate RMT providers, we hope to make your gold buying experience as safe and secure as possible.

In order to qualify, the company must have adhered to a set of benchmarks that IGE has defined (Thankfully MOGS was already fully compliant). There’s nothing ground breaking here folks, ultimately it breaks down to Google’s very clever motto, “Don’t Be Evil”.

• Zero Tolerance for Fraud
• Ethical Sourcing Policies
• McAfee and VeriSign verified e-commerce sites
• Scrupulous monitoring of systems to prevent malicious activities. Our sites are guaranteed virus free.
• Absolutely NO in-game, or email spam
• Expert, English speaking and comprehensive customer service
• Clear and documented complaints escalations and refund procedures and policies
• Clear terms of services and privacy policies.

Gold Sellers you can trust (listed alphabetically):

Below is a list of companies that have proven themselves to be trustworthy, operating with a high standard of business ethics and adhering to legitimate industry standards. This is by no means an “end all, be all” list of legitimate gold sellers, only a list of some of the more notable providers.

1. www.EpicToon.com
2. www.Gamemasta.com
3. www.IGE.com
4. www.MOGS.com
5. www.Mymmoshop.com
6. www.RPGTrader.com
7. www.VIPGamer.com
8. www.Videogamegold.com
9. www.WoWGoldPig.com
10. www.WoWtreasures.com

The message is clear – You have the power to regulate this industry by only buying from trusted sites..

You can view the full email sent by IGE regarding cleaning up the RMT industry posted by our good friend at WoWGoldFacts.com