Tracking abilities no longer trigger global cooldown, which also reduces their effect on Rift contribution.
Rift’s Contribution system is something I’ve been meaning to address. During an invasion or rift closure, your contribution is measured against that of the other participants, with you competing for the best rating, and thus the best rewards. Warhammer had something similar, and if you’re a longterm reader you’ll know that I had more than a few issues with their contribution system too, and I discussed the issues with contribution systems in general.
You might imagine that our contribution is measured by damage dealt, healing done, or other useful things that people might do in a fight. It has long been known though that Rift contribution is pretty much just a factor of how many buttons you can activate. Today’s patch-note suggests that it is, in fact, determined by how much time you spend in global cooldown (and probably casting time). I’m not sure how channels work in to that equation, but what is certainly true is that actual effectiveness or usefulness has no part in determining your contribution.
So contribution has been raisable by doing things that are entirely useless to the task at hand, such as spamming your track button over and over. Track was a good choice as it has no mana cost, but you just as often see someone standing there spamming their instant buffs.
You’re at a disadvantage if you’re only doing things that are useful to the fight, particularly if you are melee, as you are likely to spend a fair bit of time running to targets. Now, you *could* use that time spamming something useless, if you’re lucky to have such a power within your skillset, but that makes no sense whatsoever within the context of the game.
Here is the thing for me. When I’m fighting a Rift or Invasion I want to spend my thought cycles considering how best to defeat the enemy. I do not want to spend them on organising within my head how best to arrange my actions to have the minimum amount of time when I’m not under a global cooldown, just so I can get a decent reward at the end. I do not want to know that if I stop hammering buttons, even for a moment, my contribution level will plummet compared with that of my fellows.
At any rate, I’m not a huge fan of competing within your own team, as it can lead to some rather self-defeating dynamics. For instance, I’m actually an idiot for healing other players, unless I believe that we can’t complete the task without it. The more time my colleagues spend dead or running back from respawn, the more buttons I can click in their absence.
Now, I’m not doing these things. I like to play for the team, and to be effective, but it has been extremely apparent that some people are not, and the folks who are playing fair are getting stiffed. Knowing this makes Rift much less fun for me.
Any contribution system is going to have its issues, but it is vital that they do not encourage anti-social or bizarre behaviours, and actually reward people for working as part of the team.
Update: Rift Developer Hartsman just sent me a tweet about this.
Agree with the overall feeling on encouraging weird behaviour. Addressing that as well. The current tweak just makes it “less weird”
So it sounds like we’ll be seeing some positive changes to how contribution works. Huzzah! Hopefully that will include changes to address the imbalance between ranged and melee in gaining contribution too.
My Aether Racing video finally uploaded! I wrote about this short-lived flying mount race event yesterday, and you only have a few more hours to catch it if your interest is piqued! The event has been, in this correspondent’s opinion, a massive success! It was well designed, and played extremely well as a race game. I now want a track in every large outdoor zone!
The video will blow up into 720 HD if you use the button along the bottom. Uploading in that quality does make it take an age to upload, but I think it really helps the viewer figure out what the heck is going on!
Today is the day of the EQ2 Aether Races! When you hear a bell ring, that’s the sound of a Ratonga getting his wings.
Ordinarily, you don’t unlock the Velious flying mounts until you complete a chain of level 85 quests, which come in adventuring and tradeskill varieties. Little Maltheas is a ways off being able to do either, so he has had to watch from the ground as his comrades took to the air. That changes today, briefly, as the Gnomes hold their new air race, which will allow all comes to engage in aerial daring-do over the the Butcherblock Mountains, Lavastorm, and the Tenebrous Tangle.
Race course signup NPCs are close enough to globe or wizard spire zone-in positions that *any* level of character can participate in these races, despite the courses being set in zones that are normally too difficult for some folks.
Prizes include:
* Cool new titles that show how awesome you are at racing.
* The ability to toodle around the zone in the racer that you used…as long as you beat the course time when racing. (This goes away when you zone or log out.)
* A new mount to use after you complete the Velious flying mount quests! (This is a permanent object and can be used after you complete the Gryphon quests in Velious.)
There are hazards and boons as you race so you need to study courses to get the best times, high-score lists, and more.
We know that there’s prizes, but we don’t know too much about how everything is going to work yet. Remember that these races are for one day only, though they’ll almost certainly be coming back for Tinkerfest later this year.
We’re still waiting for the servers to come up, but I’ll be updating this post with all of Maltheas’ aeronautical exploits, and fresh information! If you check back later, there’ll be video!
6:24 pm GMT
We’re off! Turns out I’m really bad at racing, especially when trying to commentate a video, but here’s a picture of the Butcherblock flying mount to be getting on with.
You'll believe a Ratonga can fly!
Here are the instructions for the race. They only pop up once, and I didnt have time to read it before my first race, and ended up dodging the scary looking golden clouds. Oops.
New C.R.A.S.H. Test Pilot instructions:
The first rule is: don’t crash! If you find yourself grounded, use spacebar to take off again.
Watch out for twisters! The red lightning will sap your engine power.
Definitely look for the floating gas clouds. They turbocharge your prop unit and make you really zip along!
The blue gas clouds vanish when you grab them. That means that other pilots can steal them, so watch out!
The green gas clouds never go away! they have the same effect as the blue clouds.
The golden cloud with the blue halo will blast away the twisters. It’s rare so grab it when you see it!
Warning: If you fall into water or lava, your flying machine is kaput until you get out. The C.R.A.S.H. pad requires a solid surface from which to take off!
Rewards
You get a temporary mount for the zone, and the Test Pilot title just for playing.
I just got the Cloud Buster title for scoring well over in the Tenebrous Tangle race.
The Sea Hawk title comes from Butcherblock.
Smokin’ Ace is the reward for Lavastorm. It also turns out that you might just get the rewards based on how many tries you’ve had rather than your time. It seems a bit random so far. I may have gotten a little bugged on this title, as it turned up in my reward window, when accepting the quest, but I never received it.
Aha! The track specific titles require you to get a decent time. Smokin’ Ace seems to require a time under 55 seconds. Fear not! If I can do it, so can you.
The Crash Test Dummy Extraordinaire title appears to be a reward for doing a lot of races.
Update: So in summary:
“Test Pilot” suffix: Earned from your first race.
“Crash Test Dummy Extraordinaire” suffix: Earned for doing quite a lot of races. 15 perhaps.
“Sea Hawk” prefix: Reward for a good time at Butcherblock.
“Smokin’ Ace” prefix: Reward for a good time at Lavastorm.
“Cloud Buster” prefix: Reward for the good time at Tenebrous Tangle.
You can choose one of 5 differently coloured reward mounts. They won’t fly until you complete the regular flying mount quests, but it turns out you can use them as an appearance for your land mount if you’re so inclined. It looks like you can pick one of these up per racetrack, doing wonders for your mount collection!
The beginning of a race can be rather laggy, as more people appear, so you can help matters by turning down your graphics a little. You’ll want to keep your view distance as high as possible though.
Maltheas shows off his Green C.R.A.S.H. Pad in front of the Tenebrous Tangle Aether racetrack.
Update: There is a video on the way. T’is a 25 minute epic, and won’t finish uploading until tomorrow. Which will make it far from timely, but there you have it. The Aether races have been enormous fun, and rather well done, and you should definitely try to catch them while they’re around.
Rift’s Guardian tutorial area has quite a large number of books to find, and they may be missable if you don’t pick them up, given that I know of no way to get back there once you leave.
That being the case, I’ve knocked up this little map, which will hopefully come in handy for anyone having trouble finding the location of the last one or two. I’ve also marked the location of certain relics of the Gods of the Vigil, which will grant a ten minute blessing if you should (And you ought to!) pray before them.
The map will be a little shrunk on this page, but you can click on it to view it at full size. I hope it comes in useful!
For today (actually yesterday, but it’s still going as I write) only, a free Othmir illusion item is available in EQ2’s marketplace. Technically it only has 50 charges, but as neither death nor zoning removes illusions, it is sufficient to last anyone who wanted to permanently be an Othmir.
Cheeves is pretending that he isn't impressed.
If I had any spare character slots I’d probably create a little ranger or shaman, just to play as an Othmir. Of course, they’re not a true playable race, and your armour doesn’t show on them, but they do have more animations than most monster models do, including the remarkably cheerful wave shown above, and a wonderful (though sadly silent) laugh. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have an animation for either sitting or standing type mounts, so you revert to your normal form while mounted. Also, there’s a lot of different Othmir models, seemingly of both sexes, occasionally in their famously bad hats, and you switch between them each time you zone, which might be a little difficult to explain! Nevertheless, there’s enough there to have some Othmir fun with, especially at low levels.
SOE have revealed what the next few Velious days are going to entail, and it turns out they’re not all going to be quite so screenshot worthy as today’s one was, but they are certainly worthy of mention.
February 23rd is a double Guild xp day. A good day to do writs, and a particularly good day for me to hand in all the status items that I’ve been hoarding for exactly such a day. will it be enough to push the mighty Green Lodge all the way to level 26? Unlikely. I’ll try to get some crafting writs done too.
February 24th will offer free character transfer tokens in the Marketplace, one per character, up to a maximum of five. These normally cost a quite ridiculous 25 dollars each, so I’m definitely going to grab some, just in case, though I’m actually not minding the merged Crushbone-Lucan server too much. Hopefully these tokens will sit happily in the bank without going out of date. They’ll be a great insurance against possible future problems. (Update: Amnerys from SOE popped by in the comments to let us know that the character transfer tokens will only be usable on the 24th.)
February 25th will have “cool prices” on frosty-themed items in the marketplace. I snort derisively at this day, unless the prices happens to be free, in which case I would indeed say “Cool!”. Still, it’s better than a day without a sale, and I look forward to discovering what the next Days of Velious will involve!
MMO players have an embarrassment of riches this week. Of course Rift will be opening up early access on the 24th, but the latest EQ2 expansion, “Destiny of Velious”, launches today, with an 8 day extravaganza of events.
On top of that, DDO will be having it’s 5 year anniversary, with an all-new piratey event recycled from the original tutorial island. I’ll try to catch some of that, though I hope it’s more enjoyable than the Halloween event, which I pretty much hated, and I have heard it is similar to.
With all that going on, where do I find myself?
Zoltoon, meeting up with some old friends in Everfrost.
Aye indeed, I’m still playing Everquest on the Fippy Darkpaw progression server, and have decided, now that the free period is over, that I’ll subscribe for a month. I’m a little surprised myself, though not because I didn’t think it was a good game. I just thought that I’d be unable to look past the graphics and would be a little bored with retreading ground I had very thoroughly explored a long time ago, but after a couple of hours I really didn’t notice the graphics any more any more, and I’m getting real pleasure from visiting the people and places I remember. I’m not the only MMO blogger that has felt this, and Stargrace is covering her adventures in old Norrath quite thoroughly.
As you know, I’m not much of one for raiding, and I never really had the patience for lengthy camps either, so I don’t really recognise the caricature of EQ that is often presented. I always found plenty to do, and kept myself well equipped enough for my purposes without engaging in activities I didn’t find fun.
I have picked up Scars of Velious, even though I doubt there’ll be much in it that’ll make very much difference to Maltheas’ life in the mid-level. At his current rate, he’ll be ready for Velious adventuring quests some time in 2017. He should get to experience the crafting content rather sooner, and of course he’ll probably go exploring the new lands anyway. At the least I’ll need to take a few pictures to show you. I think I’ll try to do a daily post from EQ2 while the special event days are going on. Day 1 is going to involve Othmir, which always make me happy!
I haven’t picked Rift up yet, and I’m still a bit conflicted on it. To tell the truth, I’ve found a lot of the coverage toe-curlingly embarrassing. Often it is kind of like reading someone’s secret love poetry to the girl of their dreams. Also, like true love, people haven’t been reacting well to any criticism of the object of their affection, which sucks out a lot of the pleasure of writing about it. Still, it’s a new MMO, and I’d probably do well to be in at the start of it. On the other hand, I’m not made of money. Once they add the Paypal option I’ll probably grab it as I have some advertising money sitting in there that I can’t use to buy something useful like food without fiddling about with transferring it.
Right. I *think* the EQ2 servers are down for the big Velious update, so I think it’s time to try to get Zoltoon sorted with the Stein of Moggok! I don’t know where I’m going to find the time to do everything I want to this week, but I’ll give it my best shot.
