Being Saleh: Lagging Behind Expansion (Warframe)

Warframe and me got in the wrong foot, for years I always thought that Warframe is a team based shooter, not a co op shooter (a.k.a shooting aliens with friends -- and/or other people who might left you alone to die in a mission), a month ago I rectify that mistake by actually playing it. That's why it falls into lagging behind expansion category, warframe as it now is on update 23 and some people said it's a different game than two years ago.

Warframe is actually quite simple, it's an instance based shooter where every mission is take place in a random/scripted (huge) instance, you are called Tenno, a superpowered being clad in a superpowered armor called warframe, you also equipped with superpowered guns and melee weapons, in some case you are accompanied by superpowered pets and can put a superpowered wingsuit that made you fly in the void of space and take down capital ship with a big final fantasy styled superpowered swords. The story of warframe is also simple at best, the entire milky way galaxy is warring on each other and it's up to the Tenno to restore peace (by shooting aliens, mutants, altered humans, magical beings, and other Tennos).

Yeah!!! SUPERPOWER!!

THE GAMEPLAY

There are total of 57 warframes for you to decide how to wreak havoc on them, it's like your class, some warframe uses pure strength to destroy things, while others uses elemental or psychic powers, some can summon allies and mirages, buff friends, going invisible and backstabbing things, also fly and raining destruction from above, for short:it is an equivalent of a space ninja, you can run, shoot, wall running, double jump, slide, glide, performing melee combos, and in some cases stick to the wall, combined with wide variety of guns and melee weapons you'll have a good times choosing your way to kill things IF you can bypass the reality that Warframe is a free to play title and microtransactions is bound coming for you sooner or later.

You'll start with choosing from three initial warframes, the Excalibur is the melee type with decent shield and armor, the Mag uses crowd control and pick enemies off from afar, the Volt is the assault type with it's electrical and shield powers. After you complete the initial story you'll begin jumping planets (from mercury to void beyonds) if you follow the story you'll be decked with initial guns and melee weapons, also an auto turret at the end. Whatever you choose you can obtain the other two on a later time.

Yep, most people picked it first

On every planet there are nodes, on each node: a mission, you'll begin unlocking nodes one by one, each node have a set path and level, when you complete the mission on that node the next one unlocks, there are  branching path sometimes, at the end of planets there are junctions guarded by a shadow warframe, you can only access this junction if you complete the planet's requirements (what level are you, how many enemies killed, how much resource you have, etc) then you can access the junction, kill the guard warframe and open the next planet (with it's own set of nodes and requirements), Story quests are scarce and sometimes it requires you to unlock several planets or areas

Your warframe, weapons, pets, and other combat tools have levels, every mission and almost everything you do on a mission will contribute experience to your arsenal, leveling them up, you can slot mods (cards contained stat modifier) to everything making them stronger, the higher your weapons/warframe/tool level the more mods you can slot them although equipments are capped at level 30, mods also have levels where the higher their level, the more capacity they will take, thus experimenting with mods and arsenal is a fun thing to do between missions.

Your operator level is called rank, it determines what warframe and weapons  you can wield, for example Lex Prime,  a very good pistol requires you to be rank 8, you don't automatically level rank, instead when you raise an equipment level to max you gain something called affinity, you can also farm affinity from missions, when you die on a mission you have a chance to revive 4 times, each cost 10% affinity. When your affinity is high enough there will be a popup message said you can take a test to level up your rank, you can only take this test once a day, upping a rank also gain some benefit, like increased mod cap, reputation gain cap per day, and how many resource extractor you can place at a time.

Enemies on Warframe never dropped a warframe or weapons, instead they dropped resources, mods, and equipment blueprints, missions also reward blueprints and components, you can then craft your own equipment provided you have enough resource and  components, crafting on warframe is both extensive and vital, every warframe requires components and every components required abundant resources, crafting a warframe takes days and each components take half a day, it makes gaining new warframe or weapons a significant achievement...

Or not...

THE MONEY

You see, every warframe and weapons in this game can be instantly purchased by platinum ( the real money currency), so there I dropped the bomb, Your Oberon Prime warframe? gained by months of extensive random mission farming for resource and opened random relics until you have those components blueprints? Your friend can just shell 20 dollars and he's all set (they even gave you bonus mod for each purchase), you can also subscribe to twitch prime and they gave you prime warframes each months, running out of inventory slot for warframes (default is two)? Just purchase them from the plat shop, tired waiting for your Bronco Prime to finish at your foundry (crafting table) just finish them for a little plat.

I'm not going to the pay to win debate here but I'll tell you something for a little taste of warframe: your max leveled Volt warframe is not on par with say: a max leveled Volt Prime warframe, while you can craft the Volt Prime you probably won't survive to see it's blueprint drops, which is from opening high level relics, which can be found from running a high level missions, which can be accessed if you already unlocked the high level planet nodes, which is almost impossible to solo on your initial and story-gained warframes.

I crafted Limbo, Oberon, Nyx and none of them, my weapons, and my collection of mods can survive a level 25-30 mission with ease, I limped through  Planet Neptune but then I failed repeatedly on a main quest because I can't kill fast enough. I returned to earth to farm my Gara warframe components in order to gain an edge on Neptune (it probably won't). It's still have three days to complete as I wrote this, but still... crafting warframes, guns, melee weapons, pets, and combat tools provided on each rank should give you a feeling of becoming more powerful each rank gained, instead it's just changed your playstyle with miniscule power level change. Why solo? Well I am a solo player and since not much group will help on just a random node unlock you pretty much did the story quests solo, unless the nodes have special traits like 20% increased drops or whatever.

Gold can't buy anything, platinum can!!

I love free/freemium/b2p to play titles because I can point exactly what made me stopped playing (work points on Archeage, hard dungeons on Wildstar, my inability to jump on the right time on Destiny 2 and Guild Wars 2), in warframe going from the initial pre-playing feeling of "I want to be a xxxx warframe" to "Yeah I only got a Nyx component at the moment, it's probably cool too" should be enough for me to uninstall this game, going from "what you want to be" to "you can only be this for now" is a major irony of this game, especially when combined with the statement "you can be anything if you pay". But the fact is I'm still playing warframe because the side missions are fun enough and always crowded with people queueing, the void missions are also fun provided you have a relic which in my case -- almost depleted (I'm dying on missions), invasions are always good for farming resource and components, also seeing other people with their colorful warframe and devastating skills/ techniques are always fun (since they did all the work and I just picked up after them) =))

THE VERDICT

In short: if you're not picky of what you want to be in a multiplayer game warframe is a good fast paced stylish third person shooter, although it does have unhelpful tutorial and most knowledge you gain from this game came from asking people on general chat and wiki articles. On the contrary if you do want to be a specific thing in game I recommend you to buy them (warframe, weapon, etc) since the farming can be quite tedious. Also bring a friend or two, I'm not calling them shooting with friends for no reason.

It also made me regret buying this

Blade and Soul: A Latency-based Delayed Action Review

I actually have a weird feeling that NCSOFT only released it's 2012 martial arts MMORPG Blade and Soul in the west to counter Pearl Abyss/Daum's Black Desert, since it's four years past it's prime, and since NC has games with similar gameplay (action based) like Wildstar and Guild Wars 2 their difference becomes aesthetic only, and since Black Desert was restricted to US only players Blade and Soul gave access to worldwide, with one problem of course: latency...

Latency is the weird factor in action based MMORPG, In Guild Wars 2 the problem was diminished by the dynamic combat while in Wildstar and Blade n Soul your survival and dps depends on every button you hit and the exact time you hit it since many skills triggered by enemy's (both PVP and PVE) action. So yeah in blade and soul you'll dash around enemies, countering their interrupts, interrupts their deadly moves, grabbing them and throwing them around, mount them and lock them. So when your internet is so blashpemously late on receiving/sending the interrupt/counter data because of the high latency you might ended up very very dead.

Minor spoiler: They'll also be dead in the next few minutes

Babes and cats

Blade n soul has four races: the normally human (Jin), the half giant barbarians (Gon), the little fox-cat-other cute fluffy furry things-midget-hybrid (Lyn) and the oversexualized nymphs (Yun), and since it's Korean you'll find breast slider on your female characters customization and yes they'll also jiggling when your character moves so make sure to take a lots of screenshots and videos.... anyway, the classes are Blademaster (shiny swordsman!!), The Destroyer is a Gon-only axe wielder with slow but devastating skills, Force Master utilizes ranged attacks with flashy finishers, Kung Fu Master has long unbroken (depends on your latency) combo attacks, Assassins has incredible (again depends on your latency) timing-based skills, Summoners are Lyn only and have cats (which makes them easily the superior race and class), and Blade dancer is a chibi version Lyn only Blademaster. As you can see all the classes are damage dealers so it's another game without the holy trinity

My story
In Blade and Soul --just like any other action games -- your main attack is your left mouse button which is a resource generator while your right is usually a resource spender -- more devastating -- attack, your other alphabet skills ranged from crowd control to combo finisher, for example as a Destroyer I can press E to lift my enemy, press E again to wedge them against my axe to replenish my HP, press X to slam them towards the ground, and finally delivering the final blow with my right button skill, It's weirdly satisfying because the animation is so smooth and oh so so bloody :D. When i was knocked down by an enemy my X skill becomes a counter skill which whirlwind the entire enemy but if for some reason the enemy can follow the knockdown with say: a legbreaker lock (latency matters here) I will sustain a heavy damage or even KO'd, fortunately during the time my HP depleted I can do things like crawling out of the reach of enemies and then meditate until I was revived, unfortunately It only filled half of my HP so consumables like HP potions are vital in combat, also getting hit when you're on a downed state means insta-KO

As a solo player I met almost zero obstacle during my questing (at least until level 20), Unfortunately on higher level my unupgraded axe started to kill me faster than the mobs, so I'll have to go back to lower level dailies. The stat of my character are given by weapons, accessories, and soul wheel (piece of cakewheel), clothes are purely cosmetics so I kinda liked it since I like playing transmog/transmute with armors, You can 'feed' some weapons with another weapon to raise it's stats, most weapons you obtained as drops are sealed and you can unseal them with unsealing charms, but if you feed them to another weapon you won't need to unseal them, later in game you'll be introduced to lockboxes which can be opened with keys, there are two kind of keys: the brilliant and regular, regular will unlock the box but you'll get random weapons, brilliant will always give you your class-specific weapon, which sometimes can be used as a precursor to evolve an epic weapon, one thing though: brilliants are sold in the cash shop, they can be bought by specific in game currency but only if you're a premium member, so you know where I'm going with this, fortunately they're also drops from dailies and dungeons, although it's rare, the reason why I came back to low level area, gambling my lockboxes away to just find the precursor

I also met a lots of Hildibrands along the way

Big Bosses and losing your cash
Group play against world/dungeon bosses added some perks to the already interesting battle as you can execute a joint attack to break big boss' immunities against crowd control skills, Dungeons are usually basic milk run, plow everything until you get to the big boss at the end. Lack of pure healer class remedied by dragon blood system where you basically doubled or tripled your HP bar to withstand devastating attacks, sometimes it's just DPS race but the dungeons after level 20 have bosses that required some kind of tactics like killing adds, stun things, and stop hitting when something becomes immune.

There's a thing that caught my mind in the dungeon runs, the loot auction system that replaces the need and greed system for heroic and superior items, in other MMORPGs you roll numbered dice and hope RNG gets you that epic item, in BnS if you really want that item you place a bid on it, people will outbid you or pass, if you get the item your hard-earned money will be divided among the rest of your group, IMO it's a win-win solution EXCEPT when the untradable heroic weapon precursor drops and someone decided to ransom it by placing high bid right from the start, if you're patient you can get the money and run for another dungeon, if you're impatient... you can outbid them and lost your money.... so...well... you should be patient :P

In picture: Your daily life in dungeons

Verdict:
Overall Blade and Soul is a fun experience, nothing impress me much but somehow I still playing it just because of the story (and also wondering each level up whether I can pull off another crazy combos), Group play opened opportunities for joint eye-catching combo skills so make sure you play with friends because even if the story is rather interesting, the questing is horribly boring and money making are abysmally nonexistent (you'll lose money faster by purchasing brilliant keys). The hunt for precursors are 99% RNG and dealing with ransoms on dungeons is somewhat frustrating, I also heard that endgame dungeons are ridiculously hard, so get this: Bring a friend, you can solo almost everything and world bosses are always crowded but trust me partying for killing 20 mobs is faster and more fun, especially when the mobs are somewhat scarce. If I can get to endgame I might write something about it but now I'll just grind those precursors away, I found the hard way that NOT UPGRADING YOUR WEAPON THROUGH THE RNG SYSTEMS (Wheel of fate, lockboxes, and dungeon drops) will make your character considerably weaker on the next few levels.

I have six of this outfit before finding that axe

Being Saleh: Lagging Behind Expansions (Wildstar)

Oh Wildstar, I despise you so much, but I also loved you enough to play in 10++ session through a year on numerous trial account and get the loop of install-uninstalling to the point Thayd and Auroria become so easily navigated. Then one year came and the verdicts are in, the world didn't like you, even your publisher despise you, your company lost so many talented men and women, so then you're going free to play, but not before you put yourself as a part of E3 charity bundle, which I bought and play through last month, so before you've gone and throw yourself to the evil called f2p community, here's my second review of you my dear sci-fi-once-hyped MMORPG

The separation between the EU and US version are confusing, so I thought I was upgrading my old account, as a matter of fact I didn't so I ended up leveling my Draken Warrior into level 16, unknowing that I still played my trial account, only when I leveled up my crafting I found out that I didn't go to the next level that's when i found out, 5 days wasted of my free game time. So then I'm going fast, changed the region and roll a Stalker because they can go invisible and hit hard.

Story:
Wildstar tells a story about two warring faction, The Exile and The Dominion, once there's only one human Dominion until one technocratic race called the Eldan demands human's greatest warrior to accompany them to their homeland (with a threat of course), years later her offspiring came back, brings another race of mechanical origin called Mechari and start leading them to subjugate another races and planet, this doesn't bode well to some human and aliens which bonded together to become the Exile. One day a planet called Nexus, known as the last Eldan tinkering laboratory suddenly popped up, and both faction are on a race to claim it.

Taxis already provided

The whole story about Wildstar main storyline are revolving on finding a new home and a weapon race, because The Exile and Dominion are not the only ones who've arrived in Nexus, there are also other alien races ranged from the fluffy furry things to the tech-advanced oceanic species, not to mention the Protostar Corp, an intergalactic corporation which sold almost everything and anything also think the planet is a gold mine (both literally and figuratively) not to mention since Nexus itself a big Eldan lab which the Eldan fools around with the original natives and plants resulting in some hideous monstrosities and cool-looking giant robots.

The game itself had some cohesive lore on the Eldan and Nexus which scattered all around the world in form of notes, relics, and datacubes, finding them are not always easy and sometimes required player to navigate some jumping puzzle to reach them, contrary to them the quest NPCs offered a really tiny bit of it, this is a bit turn off since you probably have to scour some interesting area (i.e a giant unidentified skeleton in a middle of the desert) to know a bit more of it. Eventually you'll heard much about the Genesis Prime, and (spoiler), ahem... so yeah.

In a matter of aesthetics, the cartoony style of Wildstar fits their image story, space cowboys for hire, gun (sword) toting undead interstellar mercenary looking for home, every 10 level you're treated to some really cool leveling place, two bio domes, each contains opposite environment and biology to each other, a dark side of the moon where you can jump higher and discover more about the Eldan which is... disturbing, a contested areas which both faction wage an all out war against a nation of winged creatures, but unfortunately the design turns bleak on the max daily hub area, up until Carbine drops an update called strain which contains an awesome-looking (and hard) area, it's like Icecrown in WOW where you feel that you won't be save anywehere, even the sky.

Except in the taxis

Gameplay:
Let me emphasis this one once again: WILDSTAR IS HARD, yes, not only the difficulty, but your computer spec also decided it, you need minimal 30-40 FPS to survive an encounter, because as I said on my first review: YOU WILL DIE, AGAIN, AND AGAIN, and the game will sneer at you for dying again and again like a noob, oh yeah, count your latency, because anything above 200 will kill you, lag spike will smack you down, and in a dungeon it will ruined your entire life.

Unfortunately my life revolved around riding a hoverbike

Wildstar employed action-based battle, where all your attacks do area of damage attacks and also the mobs which you must dodge or interrupt with some skills, interrupting enemies are highly valuable because then your next attacks will deal extra damage to them. I'm a stalker and a melee damage dealer which means I will go toe to toe with enemies and I must killed them ASAP because of my medium armor, The Stalker can also become a tank which based on evasive manuouvre and skills to weaken the enemy's attacks but I'm not go into that light since I'm experimenting with my dps spec.

My first headscratch came on the skill selection, Stalker has like twenty five skills (plus five unlockables) and can only put 7 of them on the shortcut, you'll essentially played with shortcut because of the nature of the fast paced battle (no time for clicks), and each of them has levels which powers up their damage or debuff effects, I've been there on guild wars 1 but never have been so confused, so In the end I just selected the first five of them and roll two from the utilities section, because I've been so used to rotating them (final slot opened at level 30, so in 29 level I've been using the same skill set over and over again)

Did I mention all of them are active skills? So where's the passive? Welcome to my second headache, the AMP bar, it has dot things, and these passive dot things on some level unlocked new active skill, but here's a catch some AMP dots are locked and must be unlocked with the corresponding item, I got some from fighting the enemies in the world, but then at max level I realized I have too many locked dots, but then I remembered there's a vendor called imported AMP vendor (or something) so I bought a bunch of my class AMP, I still have some locked and really have no idea how to obtain them. They really need to work on this to ensure player got the full picture about how this thing worked since I reset them twice

DOTS!!

I followed my main quest and never left an area up until I exhausted all soloable quests, which sometimes racked my reputation to that area's faction to the max, it also helped my builder path, you know that one thing that makes wildstar awesome and made you interested on interacting with the world as my first review said. On a quest-following player Wildstar has a special final quest (but sometimes separate) that usually involved you to obtain an artifact of the scene to display on your city's museum, you can click them for more info, I personally liked this, but I would like it more if it can be displayed in my own house, what's the point of owning a house without your personal achievement?

Extras & Final Words:
I reached my max level three days short of my free game time expiry date, so I used the remaining time to gear up and queue at the group finder, unfortunately it seldom works, there are two PVE group instances: Adventures and Dungeons, Raid is on a whole another level and you can't queue randoms for them, they're also have attunements in form of gear levels and required quests, I've been queued for adventures and dungeons on my leveling progress (they're both level-synced) but it seldom pops even on higher level where it finally has the option random adventure/dungeon, thus it can also become a measuring tool about how many people actually played this game, and I must said: not so much, there are only two servers on Europe, one for PVE and the other for PVP, so comparing it to WOW or even Final Fantasy XIV won't work

Although FFXIV and WOW need more tied up giant robots

I love how Wildstar explored the sci-fi niche of a story, even when the story itself is mediocre at best, I love how the world was designed, although it's kinda empty, I adore the crafting and path system, my complaint was technical, some bugs here and there, the DF that seldom works (or probably dont have players queueing), If only my machine is a little better I probably will return here someday when it's going f2p as I have max level now. It's sad such good game qith so much potential wasted, I don't know what cause it, it's probably because it was initially aimed for hardcore players, as it was designed to follow the exact same path as Vanilla WOW, as they realized and added some content for casual players (like contracts and bounties) it was already too late, many people both players and key developers has already left the game. When wildstar haven't released the devs are all open and laughs, after the release however communication becomes scarce, the updates initially came fast (they said once a month) but halted at the third month, after that it was zero comms from them. I don't bought it at the time because it was too hard for me and I have FFXIV

Free to play is one final way for NCSOFT games to regain players, as exhibited by City of Heroes but they're eventually get the hatchet and shut down when Guild Wars 2 came out, Wildstar is the only subbed MMO NCSOFT has and now as they'll gone f2p they have numerous games to contend to like Skyforge which has similar theme but grindy content (no I won't count SWTOR as they're p2p), the question remains: will Wildstar finally buried when Blade and Soul (which has similar battle gameplay) came out to the west? As usual I'll just wait and see

Being Saleh: (Not) One Left

My MMO shortlist only has one name left: Phantasy Star Online 2 which will have their english version-south east asia only beta on the end of the month, sure there will be Archeage on upcoming month, I also (mildly) interested in Elite: Dangerous but since one of them is a sandbox (open PVP) and the other is a space sim, I'll probably will be there just to try things out. Also PSO 2 is developed for console so probably  it'll be more action oriented like DCUO, the free to play is the perfect bait though.

With two MMOs crossed off my list is a real relieve. My latest encounter with ESO didn't really working, to be honest as i played the last beta months ago I can't seemed to understand the game, I can't even write a decent, coherent post about it, some of the player said that now the game has matured a bit despite all the fuss (especially about the free month fiasco), but still it didn't even piqued my interest yet. With Wildstar however I found a short-timed joy, before it got into the phase where internet connection become your biggest problem and I quit tanking, oh and also healing, how people can heal through those messed up telegraph amidst those jumping and dodging is still amazed me, I probably just sucked though

With only a week left in my sub on FFXIV I once again contemplating about my stand on MMORPGs, I burned out once three months ago because of all the things i must try at least once, including my steam games, and until now I still haven't finished any of it yet, I guess maybe MMOs has evolved into the next best thing and I'm just too lazy to keep up, or probably just too lazy to play

Update: I accidentally renewed my FFXIV sub, damn you auto payment

Now the smirk seems haunting...

Dual Wield: Normality

Yes, I've been busy with works and games, there are several comeback I want to write about including the f2p conversion of RIFT (which happens like a loooooooong time ago), patch 5.3 of WoW's Escalation (while now 5.4 is hovering above), several old beta like FFXIV (i think I'll write it when I finished OB), and the continuity of Guild Wars 2 short story updates (which I missed like twenty of them, umm no, it was more like six) :D

but for now: I want to talk about the other world, again

No, not this one

I met a couple of my homies several days ago (yes, I still used that term for my non MMO player friends). One of our topic was branching, it was about our childhood friend, a really close one, we used to hang out of our youth until a year ago and then he abruptly disappeared, not really gone, but our contacts have been... disconnected, usually revolves around works and projects until I saw 'uncommon' act from him on his social media account statuses, occasionally leading and deliberately affiliated to some movement and party-like organization, not to mention some hormones....

Not to say on a big day of one of our friend there are no response from him and on his own big day he never said a word while his social media statuses are more vague than ever.

I had my share of youthful angst, hikikomori, and other terms of closing myself from the (real) world, I had my days of game and stuff addictions, but even in that time I never left my 'human terms'. Since gaming was never and won't be a long time accepted as a hobby on my country I'm sill considered a nerd, childish, or just plain weird and the least of them:'not normal', and I accepted that

And there we are, me and my homies (if you don't want to see this term again you can close your eyes and make more appropriate term) :P. Just talk about life and other lives, and we came to "Why he's not here with us?"

I replied: "Let's picture this: It is us, now, on a fancy (cheap) restaurant talking about stuffs, I'm talking with your wife, and playing toy car with your kids, I came onall of your big day, we catch up stories and work plans, and all this while there are no words from him? He deliberately dumped us and cut off all contacts, while there are lots of means when he wants to be here or even join the conversations. And you said I was the weird - not normal closet-basement online gamer?"

Of course he said yes and we get a good laugh together.

So let me tell you: Game doesn't change people, it doesn't make people weird and cut off from the real world, MMO doesn't, broken heart doesn't, politics are :)

Just look at Ellen Kiel, look at what cutthroat politics have done to her, CURSE YOU ANET!!!

Being Saleh: 40 hours later...

I catch a cold.... Thankfully I'm not on a tight schedule for work, as I said before my limit is 8 hrs per day =))

The early access are somewhat eventful, there's some serious issue about the interface not working on overflow server, the guild system is somewhat unfinished, still playable though.

I found nothing that can be considered gamebreaking (sPvP and WvsWvsW said to have some serious issues though), unless we count mail system and trading posts are down for half a day

I want to thank ArenaNet for giving their all to fix those issues, some of them probably haven't slept for days fixing everything while some of the community whine and nerdraged at them. Dedicated people are great, nuff said.

Time to rest