We have some exciting news for you today; no Blizzard didn’t announce the released date for Diablo 3 and no, neither did ArenaNet for GW2. MMOCrunch is moving to LoreHound.com!

It’s actually a reunion of sorts as the owner of LoreHound was one of our original staff writers here, iTZKooPA.  We are once again combining forces to form Voltron…I mean a new and improved LoreHound.com!

This will be our last update here on MMOCrunch and we will be shutting the site down permanently sometime early next week once LoreHound has been updated. So I invite all our readers to come over to LoreHound to continue to read our ramblings.

I was planning on writing a full review for SWTOR, but Pherephassa did such a great write-up on her SWTOR reivew, that I figured I’d skip mine and get straight to my likes and gripes. I’ll give you a hint, it’s going to be mostly gripes.

Undoubtedly the best part of game is the journey to endgame, after all this is what BioWare does best. Having said that, as a MMORPG player I found myself beginning to skip dialog as early as the mid teen levels and before I hit level 30 I was skipping it all with the exception of the main storyline. Even that I began to partial skip or you can say fast forward by the time I hit the early 40′s.  It’s not that I didn’t find it interesting, I just wanted to get on with things.

As a player who has never seriously crafted before, I actually enjoyed the crafting system in SWTOR. I didn’t have to waste my time grinding it out looking for resources or spending hours killing the same mobs, however while I enjoyed the mechanic of crafting, the entire system is broken since only a few professions can actually make any money.

For one, crafting is way to easy and fast. One of the main reasons I never pursue crafting is because of how much time it takes to master. In SWTOR I hit the max in all three of my crew skills within 3 weeks without really trying. Now nothing is wrong with the system itself, they just need to make the crafting time much much longer. While it took me 3 weeks to master all my crew skills, if you take the actual crafting time, it was probably only 3-4 days.  It should take at least 1 month of “crew skill time” to master a skill.

Secondly, they need to make craftable items better, not the best, but close. There should only be a handful of items that are better then the best crafted items and those items should be harder to get. Right now you can spend a few days in PvP or grinding flashpoints and obtain some of the best gear out there making crafted gear worthless.

Moving on to PvP which we all know is broken across the board, from open PvP to the PvP planet Illum to Warzones, it’s a mess. While Warzones recently got a lot better with the separation of level 50 characters, they still need to introduce at least one more bracket to divide 1-49. Open PvP and Illum need a full overhaul to become worth while since  currently there’s zero reason to participate in open PvP and nearly none on Illum as you can obtain the same rewards from warzones at an unmatched rate.

Continued…

The good thing about being a public company is that they have to release their subscription and sales numbers, so while we can only guess how many subscribers games like RIFT and LOTRO have, we only have to wait for a quarterly report for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

It seems SWTOR did better than EA expected, the numbers are below then some interesting Q&As during the conference call.

• 2,000,000+ copies sold – 40% sold through Origin
• 1,700,000+ active subscribers – 1 million concurrent

Q: Are these 1.7 subscribers paying?
A: Active subscribers means anyone paying or in their trial period. Most of those 1.7m are paying at this point

Q: You’ve previously said you need about a half million subscribers to be profitable, is that still the case?
A: At 500,000 subscribers, we’d break even. At a million, we’d be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about. As it scales up from there, we’re talking about a nice profit. At this point with the successful launch, we can take the worst case scenarios off the table.

With well over a million pre-orders, I have to say these numbers are not at all surprising. What will be interesting to see is which direction these numbers go next quarter and how many players they will retain. Then I’ll have something to write about.

En Masse Entertainment has opened up pre-order sales on their website today for their upcoming MMORPG TERA, giving players three options to choose from, Standard $49.99, Collectors Editions Digital $59.99 and Collector’s Edition $69.99. Regardless of which you you select you’ll have access to all closed beta tests as well as a three day head start. The full beta schedule is below.

• Closed Beta Test 1: February 10 – 12
• Closed Beta Test 2: February 24 – 26
• Closed Beta Test 3: March 9 – 11
• Closed Beta Test 4: March 23 – 25
• Closed Beta Test 5: April 6 – 8
• Open Beta Test: April 19 – 22
• Head Start: April 28 – May 1

Players who pre-order will also received in-game items to help them get started, you can check out the details below.  I’m excited!  :)

Continued…

Today Trion announced Rift Lite, a new unlimited trial where players can play all they want up to level 20 at no charge. RIFT Lite will be available staring today as it will be releases along side the launch of patch 1.7 the  Carnival of the Ascended.

Really no surprise here, just about every MMORPG today is doing some sort of unlimited free trial, so it was only a matter of time for RIFT to join in. Now the real question is does this mean Trion is softening up to the possibility of going free-to-play?

Following in the footsteps of Everquest 2, the original online gaming crack, Everquest will be going free-to-play this March, only 2 months from now.

Everquest will give players many options to choose from including a premium subscription, Silver and Free membership levels, item unlockers and more.  New players will also receive a Welcome Pack containing items to help them get started.

Pretty exciting news for veteran EQ players and even people like me who’ve  never played EQ. With same themepark MMO games being released every few months, I might give EQ a try as long as D3 or GW2 doesn’t come out before it.

Last week I finally hit the level cap in Star Wars: The Old Republic, but didn’t have a chance to get to Illum until this weekend and holy crap does it suck.  Now if you’re already level 50 and have traveled to Illum, you probably already know what I’m about to say, but if you’re not, seriously take you time leveling, you don’t want to be on Illum.

To start, Illum the “PvP planet” isn’t even dedicated to PvP, half of it is PvE, which blew me away when I got there and I had to spend the next few hours completing more story missions. Yay!? =\

When I finished off those missions I finally made it to the other side of the planet where I was greeted with on-screen notification messages of players who were near certain control points. It seemed like there were a lot of notifications coming up, so I started to get excited that I was in for some good PvP action, however as I neared my first control point, I saw no one. I proceed to another point, controlled by the Republic (Im Empire) and again saw no one, so I figured I’d try to take it over.

To take over a control point, you have to destroy the enemy vehicles in the area, which by the way don’t attack you so after about a min, by myself, I took over the point. I though, ok, that was boring, what next? Finally a Republic player found me as I was leaving the control point and decisively thrashed me.  While I don’t like dying, at least it was something.

I continued to travel around from control point to control point for about 30 mins, seeing a few players here and there and getting my ass kicked a few more times until I finally found where everyone was. It seems about 100 players were lined up standing infront of a narrow bridge staring at each other. I hung out for about an hour getting some kills and valor points, however the lag was too much and I finally logged out in frustration.

Visting Illum has now fully convinced me no one working at BioWare has every played a PvP MMORPG. By far SWTOR has the worst PvP system I’ve every played and makes games like WoW look like the grand-master of PvP.

Continued…

In a word, simplicity. There’s something to be said about a game where the characters have only five abilities, one being passive, yet still provide layers of complexity and strategy.

The reason League of Legends is able to accomplish this is through their skill trees, rune system and item store, which allow players to completely customize each character without adding additional abilities. While players can spend hours tweaking their stats, when they get into the actual game it becomes very simple.

When comparing it to my character in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have two hot bars filled with 24 abilities, then an additional two side bars with another 18 or so abilities, buffs, items and skills. I can’t remember the last time I played a MMORPG  where I had so many abilities as SWTOR. Full disclosure the only other two MMORPGs I played to the level cap were LoTRO and Warhammer Online, neither of which, from what I remember, came anywhere near SWTOR.

However I have played dozens of other MMO games to mid level and I can’t recall  filling up my hotbars by mid game in any of them. In comparison I had filled my two bottom bars and nearly another full side bar before I hit level 25. Then let’s not forget a fifth hotbar for companions.

However there’s a certain complexity that is expected when playing a MMORPG, much more than a MOBA game like League of Legends, but when is enough enough? Do we really need 40 abilities and items to select from while in combat?  Seems like overkill to me and while I don’t expect or even want a MMORPG with only 5 abilities, it wouldn’t hurt for MMO developers to take a look at what RiotGames is doing with League of Legends and perhaps simplify some things.

What do you think? Are MMO games going to far with the amount of skills and abilities players have access to or do you enjoy the complexity of it?

In the real world we all use a single currency system, ok, maybe two for some of the EU countries that still accept their old currency, but for most of us there’s only one. If you travel to another country you’ll have to exchange your money for whatever currency that country uses, but you remain in a one currency system.

When MMORPGs first started showing up in the gaming world, they followed basically the same logic, one basic currency that players can use to buy and sell their items to other players or vendors. However over the last decade, this system has ballooned into a complicated multi-currency system where it seems everything you do provides you with another type of currency. Call it what you like, tokens, commendations, points, it’s all basically the same.

Today MMORPGs are more about collecting tokens than they are about role-playing or even just playing. They have become a sort of achievement list for players to brag that they played 1000 PvP matches and now have enough tokens to get that awesome weapon everyone wants. To me that’s not a reason to play a MMO.

An overload in currency systems was the reason I quit LotRO some years ago and I have no doubt they’ve crammed even more collecting systems into the game since. However it’s not just a few games that are at fault, nearly every game today follows the same multi-currency system, including RIFT and SWTOR.

The issue has become so bad today that the simple removal of a token makes entire portions of a game pointless and irrelevant. Developers use these token systems to etice players to participate in activities they normally wouldn’t want to. For instance if you want more people playing mini-game X, simply create some epic gear and a token system specifically for that activity.  Boom, you’ll have people flocking to that mini-game in order to obtain those items, but the questions is, should they?

As a developer wouldn’t you want players to participate in certain activities because they’re fun and not because they get rewarded every time they do? If players are avoiding some areas of the game maybe those activities should be removed or reworked until players will actually want to participate.

I personally believe all MMORPGs should stick to a single currency system and allow mini-games or game features to fail if they’re not fun. If mini-game X is boring and I can get the same rewards elsewhere, I will.  That should give developers incentive to make mini-game X better, but instead they take the forceful route and create high rated gear and hide it behind a secondary currency.

Today Turbine announced the fourth expansion to Lord of the Rings Online, named Riders of Rohan.  The expansion which will be released in the fall of 2012 and will bring with it a level cap increase, new locations, mounted combat and much more.  Executive Producer, Kate Paiz, stated that Riders of Rohan will be the largest expansion to date and will be twice as large as Rise of Isengard.

NEW FEATURES:

• Experience the Riders of Rohan – Join with the Rohirrim and ride across the sprawling Plains of Rohan; witness the breaking of the Fellowship at Amon Hen; forge alliances with the Ents of Fangorn; and aid Éomer, adopted son of Théoden, as he seeks to protect his homeland from the growing Shadow.

• Introducing Mounted Combat – Ride into Combat atop your loyal War-steed as you defend the people of Rohan from the forces of Isengard and Mordor. Customize your War-steed’s armor and level its skills over time to aid you in mounted defense of King Theoden’s lands. Mount your steed and gather your fellows to fight against Warbands, contingents of roving warg riders that have been scouted all over the Plains of Rohan! It falls to you to head off and defeat this new threat before they over take the land.
• Advance to level 85 – Continue your legend in the next chapter of The Lord of the Rings Online. Experience new adventures in the epic story, and gain new skills and deeds as you face new challenges on your journey to 85!