Tera Online Impressions - A good start to my F2P adventures

After deciding that it was time to really start digging into the low cost pleasures of Free to Play games, I had a look at the F2P buffet table and selected the MMO Tera Online as my first stop in this land of gamers with empty wallets.

I have previously looked a bit into Tera Online, since it has a few interesting bullet points that makes it stand out from the rest of the fantasy MMO crowd.

Most notably the combat is a bit more engaging and involved than the "stand-and-click-hotbar-buttons" that most MMO's offer.
The game also looks quite impressive, running on the unreal engine it is a big step up from the much more functional graphics of WoW or even the more recent Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Okay, so it's not "Crysis - Elf Edition" but Tera Online is definitely pretty easy on the eyes

My curiosity was never quite to the point where I actually wanted to spend money on trying out Tera Online though, so the game going F2P was just the thing I needed to jump into another game of elves and magic.

So how did my first foray into the realm of non-payments turn out?

Setting sail for the land of Free to Play - A smorgasbord of gaming experiences for the frugal gamer

The Free to Play or "F2P" genre of games has been growing more and more mature during the last few years.

F2P games in the past were often a B-grade gaming experience at best, packed full of annoying limitations that forced the player to dump money into the game if you wanted to have just a little shred of enjoyment.
Furthermore the games were often designed in a way that gave the paying customers a significant gameplay advantage compared to the players that elected to not dump their real life dosh into the latest digital sword/gun/tank/electrical eggbeater.
This gave rise to the derogatory nickname of the genre "Pay to Win", which stuck to the F2P games for years and made "hardcore" gamers wrinkle their noses and proclaim that these were not "real" video games.

Nowadays the F2P genre has come a long way and designers seem to be moving away from the "Pay to Win" formula and instead trying to find alternative ways to monetize their F2P games, such as cosmetic options for the players or purchases that reduce various in-game waiting times.

Games such as League of Legends, Planetside 2 or Team Fortress 2 all provide gaming experiences that are on par with anything that you can buy at $60.

Team Fortress 2: One of the best multiplayer FPS experiences *and* it's free! It's like ice cream filled with hot dogs!

Like much of the gaming community, I have also been wary of the F2P games for a long time.
I really disliked the idea of committing my time into an experience that would attempt to slowly drain me of my financial deposits, leaving me stripped of my money and with a hollow feeling of disappointment.

EA to be the future of Star Wars games - A new hope?

About a week ago it was announced that EA has signed a multi-year contract with Lucasfilm to be the exclusive one stop shop for all your Force fueled gaming needs.

With EA's reputation in the gaming community currently hovering around "steaming pile of fresh dung"-levels, it is easy to start sharpening the digital pitchfork and lament this decision as the true death of quality Star Wars games.

Come to the Dark Side, my son.... We have awesome DLC!

But before you start ranting and complaining about how EA will surely crush your childhood Star Wars gaming memories and grind them into a fine powder of bitterness, perhaps it is worth looking at what we really lost with the closure of LucasArts and if the future is really looking as dark as Vader's newly polished helmet.

Guild Wars 2 Impressions - Almost a little step forward for MMO's

Several months ago I got caught up in all the hype surrounding Guild Wars 2 and I decided that I needed to place a preorder and get in on the ground floor.
I have to admit that my excitement for this non-subscription based MMO has since dwindled significantly, but I was still looking forward to jumping into the game this weekend, when the head start launch kicked off.

It's now Tuesday evening, I have probably spent around 10 hours playing GW2 in total and I can't say that I am feeling a massive pull from the game.

Don't get my wrong though, in lots of ways I think that GW2 is a very competent game and I even believe that it is showing a positive innovative way forward in certain areas.
But at the end of the day this is another 3rd person fantasy MMO where you click on skills on your skill bar, run quests for various NPC's that seem incapable of completing even the most basic of tasks without your heroic assistance and generally spend your time doing things that you have done hundreds and thousands of times before in WoW, Rift, SWTOR, Everquest and so on and so forth.

Guild Wars 2 proudly carries on the MMO tradition of completely practical armor designs for female characters...

When I first started playing GW2 the thing I immediately enjoyed was that the combat is much more fast paced than in most MMO's. If you've played Tera Online (which you probably have not, if the sales figures are to be believed) then you have an idea about the GW2 combat system.
Instead of simply standing around and mindlessly clicking your skills until such time as either you or your enemy keels over the combat in GW2 relies much more on you moving around, dodging attacks like a medieval Max Payne. It's a nice change of pace, and together with skills being dependent on cooldown timers rather than a mana/wrath/discipline/etc-meter it creates a faster flow in the games combat.

This also means that the traditional "holy trinity" of MMO's with a dedicated tank, healer and damage dealer class has been mostly gotten rid of. In GW2 every player is expected to do a little of everything and not be narrowly focused on one of these specific roles. Another great move in my opinion.

The Diablo 3 Ruby Pump'n'Dump - How I lost 10 million gold in 2 hours

Diablo 3 is a game full of economic opportunity. There are always money to be made if you know what you're doing.
There's also a crap ton of money to be lost if you don't and you try to get in on a wild wave of commodity pricing speculation.


Incidentally, it is the latter of the two options that I amused myself with yesterday evening after having read the Blizzard post about the Paragon system that we'll get in the upcoming patch...

Free Gold just waiting for me to pick up?! Throw in some magic beans and you have a deal, good sir!

Basically the Paragon system is going to be a way of alternate leveling that will increase your base stats and, more importantly, boost your gold and magic find to an eventual point where magic find and gold find on gear because completely irrelevant.

The Paragon levels will be gained through normal XP and this is the critical part.

The Old Republic Goes Free-to-Play - Will I fall to the Dark Side once again?

With the newly announced free-to-play option for Star Wars: The Old Republic I've been thinking a lot about if I want to jump back into my lightsaber rich adventures once more.
Back when SWTOR launched in December I played the game for quite a lot of hours and managed to get my lightning tossing Sith Inquisitor up to level 50 and complete his storyline.

While I did have a lot of fun during my time with SWTOR, I found it to ultimately be a disappointment for me and I ended up only paying for a couple of months of subscription before my enthusiasm for the game dried up like a Gungan in a Sarlacc pit.

Soon all of these lightsabers can be yours for 0 monies!

The big problem with SWTOR for me is that my motivation for playing it comes largely from experiencing the story, but to fit the game into the structure of a MMO Bioware padded out the trip through your character story with many many hours of uninteresting side quests and awful space combat missions.

On the other hand I found the character stories compelling enough that I wanted to play them all, but I felt like I was being conned out of my money by being forced to spend so much time doing things that I had no interest in.

3 Reasons Diablo 3 Gems show us the "Real" value of your Gold

It's been a few weeks since Blizzard gave us Diablo 3 players a chance to sell our piles of virtual dosh for some real world cash.

A lot more cash than what I have managed to earn selling Diablo 3 gold..

I've personally used this to unload 10 million gold for 25 Euro, which I was quite stoked about.
But when I tried repeating this success with another batch of 10 million gold I found that my auction did not sell, even after posting it three times in a row.

Naturally this is a direct consequence of Blizzard's institution of a minimum price on gold.
You are not allowed to sell your gold for any less than 2,5 Euro per million, which effectively prevents the normal mechanisms of supply and demand from working efficiently.

Charts make everything look more professional!

What is happening is that Blizzard has set a minimum price that is apparently higher than what the market is generally willing to pay compared to the massive amount of supply that is being offered at this price.
The result is that sellers throw their piles of gold in an increasingly bulging pile, while the buyers come in once in a while and take a few pieces from the heap.

But if 2,5 Euro per million Diablo 3 gold is not the "real" market value how can we find out what people are actually willing to pay?

This is where the gem market comes into play. Here are the reasons that gems are such a great tool for finding out what the "correct" value of gold is: