7 days, 7 levels and 30 missions

In one week exactly I will be away on vacation to enjoy some fun times. One of the reasons that I decided to rush my jedi knight to max level is that I wanted to leave with my leveling done. Now, Secret World is coming out today with patch 1.1 and I’m really excited for the new stuff.

On top of that, they have a contest to celebrate the first month where if you do 30 missions during the weekend you’ll get a special shirt. And my JK is 43… so not there yet and quite a few hours of leveling ahead.

To recap:

• 7 days
• go from 43 to 50 in star wars
• do 30 missions in the secret world

Of course, I still have to go to work and I still have some real life obligations so I’m really not sure if I’ll manage it all but I’m going to try! Wish me luck!

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Guest writers and episodic content in TSW?

I have to give it to the Secret World, it’s a great game to inspire blog content. So tomorrow, TSW is releasing Issue one which is really a small patch with a few quests that deepens a bit some zones and threads in the game. It’s not a lot, but players are really excited to go back and explore the back story of some characters more as well as reveal more lore.

Then I started reading American vampire last weekend and I just love it. Besides being a great vampire story, they also brought Stephen King himself on board to write the story and the mix of a great writer and great comic book artist created one of the best comic book I’ve seen in a very long time.

So this got me thinking, small patches of content are something some players obviously like and guest writers trying new mediums can really produces great stories. So… why not try it in a MMO? I’d really love to see a writer like Stephen King do a quest chain or two for TSW and see what happens.

Anyone else think like me?

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Secret world: more replayability than expected

I admit it! I cheated the other night and played some Secret world instead of leveling my jedi knight /bad monkey.

I don’t think I mentioned it here but I switched faction two weeks ago to join up with Knight of mercy, a cabal (guild) with a few know blogger like mmogc and Rowan. Simply,  it’s more fun to have some friendly chatter when you play. But the downside is that I had to reroll a new character and start from zero, something I was a bit afraid of since I thought that I’d find it boring to redo all the same quests…

Well, not at all in fact. I find the quests a ton of fun to do even if I did them before and I think a lot if it comes down to the choice you have when choosing how to proceed in a zone. For example, I’m not doing the missions in the same order and it makes me explore the world in a slightly different way. I even uncovered stuff I had missed the previous time or saw links with later content that weren’t apparent to me the first time. It’s just like rereading an old favorite book and noticing all those details you missed the first time you read it.

And to my surprise even the Investigation missions are fun simply because I don’t recall all the details… I was literally stuck the other night because I had forgotten one detail and had to solve the puzzle again.

In any case, and it ties back to my early experience with WoW, letting a player have choice in how and when they want to tackle content goes a long way towards replayability.

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The Denova trash respawn bug, please help!

Edit: A few hours after this post, Bioware answered the forum post I wrote and asked me to submit an in-game bug report which I shall do again. It could be a coincidence but I’m starting to suspect that they do watch the blogs and twitter. I’ll keep you all updated as to how this progresses.

Following in BattleChicken footsteps. Today I’ll try raise some awareness in the blogosphere about a particular bug that has been driving me crazy and that has not received any acknowledgement from Bioware. I put in a ticket in-game, I put in a post in the customer service forums and no replies are forthcoming. Here’s the post in question copied here, as of the time of this post there was no replies yet:

Hi,

I’m raid leading for a guild and we’ve had all the trash respawn on us a few times when the game switched us instance a few times now and as recently as july 23rd for one of our guild members during a pug. For example we get switch from Denova 1 to Denova 2 after a wipe and that’s when the trash get respawned.

Lately, we started to designate someone to wait to release until people are back to stay in the same instance but even that isn’t working anymore since the rest of the group gets switched anyway when the come back in.

This is issue is incredibly frustrating for us because it makes us lose a ton of time and even had us call raids early because we were faced with 45 mins of trash reclear just to get back to where we were. I’m also really suprised to not see this issue in your list of known bugs since quite a few of us have submitted tickets about this.

I’d like to know is this issue is being looked at and when can we expect to see a fix.

In essence the bug is simple. When there’s enough people in Explosive Conflict, multiple instance of the zone are created (Denova 1, Denova 2, etc…). When that happens the game will sometimes switch the raid group from one instance to the other. Since we did not clear the trash in the new instance, we have to kill the trash again….

It’s very frustrating and a waste of time. What makes it worst is that it’s not listed anywhere in the list of known bugs and when I try to contact Bioware about this I get no answer. So I’m faced with two options here. Either this has been affecting only me and the rest of Snark Side or there’s other people suffering from this and Bioware simply doesn’t want to acknowledge the issue.

I’ll ask for your help here. If you have been victim of this bug please leave a comment here. If you have a blog please post on the issue or link back to this topic and if you have twitter I’d love it if you could pester Bioware a bit either by linking back here or to your own posts about this.

Here’s the thing, I love this game and I want to succeed but issues like this makes it hard for me to maintain interest in raiding both for me and for my raid members. I don’t want us to stop raiding because it’s pretty the reason that brings us together. Since this is our biggest issue, I want to see it fixed asap.

So I’m asking for everyone help here in making this issue known to Bioware and get an answer from them. Thank you.

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Powerleveling the Jedi Knight, one week in

Last week I agreed to level up a jedi knight quickly so we’d have a possible backup tank ready if we needed to level one quickly. I put the other games on hold including Secret World which I’m missing right now to get done as quickly as possible with the leveling grind. If you’re wondering why I’m doing it the powerlevel way it’s pretty simply. I know that if I drag it on for too long I’ll lose interest and I’ll have trouble finishing.

So, after one week, I’m level 33 and I’m questing on Balmorra at the moment. Not too bad considering and I’m hoping that one more week of this and I’ll be done. It’s a bit hard to say because I’m in the rough 30s patch where levels come much more slowly but we’ll see how it plays out.

Speaking of the 30s patch… why is it that the 30s feel like they take forever and when you hit 40 it seems to pick up speed again?

In any case, it haven’t been as boring as I would have tought and it’s even fun most of the time. I guess I’m enjoying the challenge of seeing how fast I can make it. I’m saying most of the time because I’m realizing that the leveling experience in Swtor is really uneven in terms of interest. Some zones are simply more fun than others. I’ll probably do a review of the entire leveling experience once I’m done.

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