Buggin' Out

This morning I spent a happy hour or so writing a bug report for EverQuest 2. Okay, that's a little misleading. I probably spent about ten or fifteen minutes on the report and the other forty-five trying to work out how to add a screenshot to my post on the forums.

Daybreak recently made some changes to the bug reporting process. There was an item about it in the News and Announcements section. The main change seems to be a prompt to copy the report to the forums, which seems like a peculiarly redundant process to me. 

I guess the idea is that added value is going to accrue from other players reading the forum posts and adding their information to the pile. The in-game reporting process is inevitably invisible to everyone other than the person making the report and whoever receives it at DBG but I'd always hoped that it was someone's job to read them all. I certainly never assumed anyone would read through all the comments on every post on the forums - even the bug section. I can't believe Daybreak could afford to pay anyone enough for that.

As I read the gloss now, I realize the new reporting feature copies the bug report text to your clipboard automatically so all you have to do is paste it and give it a title. I missed that part, naturally, and re-wrote mine from scratch.  

Then I tried to add a screenshot of the problem. Luckily I'd taken one when it happened. Not because I'd realized anything was wrong. I didn't notice until much later. No, I took the screenshot for a blog post I was thinking of writing. This one, I guess, although it's turning out quite differently from what I had planned.

There is a function on the EQII forums to add images to a thread. It requires you to insert a URL. I've done it before but it was a while ago and I'd forgotten how it worked. I tried to dodge the issue by just copying and pasting the jpg file directly into my post. It seemed to work until I went to upload the whole thing and got the message it was too long.

Much fiddling and experimenting later I decided that wasn't going to work so I had to go and re-learn how to give images URLs. It's fiddly. I got it in the end, after about a dozen tries. It does seem to me, not infrequently, that people who play mmorpgs are assumed to have a surprising level of technical facility. I bet you don't need to know this sort of thing to post on the Candy Crush forums.

The issue I was trying to report may not even be a bug, although I did have an actual bug I was going to report. For the last week or so, every time I log out of EQII, instead of getting a chat message every five seconds telling me I'll be logged in 20, 15, 10, 5, I get all of the messages at once, right at the start. 

That's a proper bug, no doubt about it. It also has zero effect on gameplay and I don't find it particularly annoying so I wasn't rushing to report it. Since I was doing another anyway, I thought I might as well do that one too, but then I saw there was already a whole thread on it so I didn't bother. I guess it annoys some people more than it annoys me. 

The thing I did report? That does annoy me. I really hope it is a bug because if it's a feature it's a very irritating one indeed. 

I've been plugging away at Overseer Season 3 and I now have more than enough quests to set the ten I'm allowed as soon as I log in each day. Most of them are still the basic, blue ones but I have three yellows and, as of this morning, two greens. 

Green (aka Celestial) is the top tier of quality. There should be some Purple (Fabled) ones just below that but so far I don't have any. For Season 3 the timer on Celestial quests has doubled from fifteen hours to thirty and the number of agents required has increased from three to five. 

My only agent with a Season 3 trait so far.
And the most boring name.

That's some inflation. You'd want a good reward for all that extra effort. I mean, it's two extra clicks with the mouse, at least. And you have to wait longer. I mean, come on, we pay a sub for this? (Sorry, just practising for the forum. You want to fit in, don't you?).

So far I've only done the first 30 hour quest twice. The second one is running as we speak. For a miracle I actually have agents with most of the specified traits but only because some of them are the old ones. So far my drop rate on agents with the Season 3 traits has been abysmal. I've had several new agents but only one has any traits at all.

Not to derail my own post but at this stage of the game, what exactly is the point of agents with no traits? I understood it when the Overseer system was new. At that point we were just happy to have any agents at all. Now, though? Why are we still employing people with no discernable skills?

I can answer that! Because they're really good fun to collect. And to look at. I only discovered today that if you open the Agent Collection tab in the Overseer interface it goes to a really impressive, large, well-framed portrait of the Agent in question. Instead of that tiny little icon where you can't even make out what race they are, you get a full-size, hang-it-on-the-wall oil painting.

That's a feature EverQuest has had since the start and I use it there all the time, or I did until I stopped getting new agents. I don't know if EQII always had it and I just missed it or if it was added some time along the way but I'm very happy to have found it. Some of the illustrations are glorious. And some of the descriptions are quite amusing, too.

The thing I was finding neither glorious nor amusing was the flag on the fabled quality (235 resolve!) cloth shoulder item I got from the bonus chest the second time my agents came back with Tarinax's head in a sack. The first time, the bonus chest didn't drop and all I got from the regular one was a forcelink, but this time my 70% success chance triggered and I got a very nice - very nice - upgrade for my necromancer.

Or it would have been if I could have given it to her. I didn't notice until I went to put it in the shared bank that it was flagged No Trade. And I'd received it on my Berserker. Who couldn't wear it even if he wanted to because it was also flagged "All Mages" or, as I'd put it, "Mages Only".

As far as I can remember there has never been any reward for regular Overseer quests that wasn't flagged Heirloom so it could be passed around the account. I think some of the holiday quests may have had No Trade items attached but those are all fluff items, not proper fighting gear. At least anyone can use them.

I'm very much hoping it is a mistake. If not, it's going to be something of a shot in the foot for a system that could better use a shot in the arm. I love the Overseer feature but it has its haters. Handing out No Trade items with class restrictions as the rewards for the most time-consuming content in the system, when players have no effective means of controlling which class gets them, well it's practically trolling us.

So I reported it. We'll see if anything comes of it. 

Meanwhile I'll keep plugging away at the blue and yellow quests. Maybe I'll even get some capable new agents. They must be in there, somewhere.

Eggs Over Easy

Yesterday, I logged in to EverQuest II to set up my ten daily Overseer missions. There's not really anything left in the Season Two rewards that I want but I need to earn more experience to ding 21 before I can start on Season Three. 

Or so I thought.

I was surprised (Literally. The sudden, unexpected blast of sound made me jump) to see an achievement appear the moment my character loaded into the game: Season 3 Overseer. Along with it came two new missions set in the Kingdom of Sky.

 

I'm trying to remember if this is how things worked last year, when we started on Season Two. I thought I remembered having to grind out a whole level first but maybe not. Also, things were still in flux back then. When aren't they, though?

The achievement co-incided with the arrival of the very brief Beast'r festival so perhaps it was pushed with the data for that. Whatever the reason, I was glad to see it. Now I can crack on with expanding my repertoire of missions, agents and traits, then begin reeling in those juicy rewards.

It took me a moment to recalibrate. I'd become so used to having a full board of options. For much of last year, around breakfast-time I'd log in whichever character had set the missions the day before, collect the rewards, then I'd set ten more from whatever was off cooldown. 

I'd swap to another character if I ran out of agents but usually I had enough agents and missions to rotate across the two-day cycle on my Berserker. I had the whole thing down to maybe ten minutes a day. I'd forgotten that it takes quite a while to build up that kind of momentum.

With a new season it's back to square one. With just two Season 3 missions the only option is to keep repeating them as frequently as possible in the hope that more missions will drop as rewards.

The two starter missions are blue-quality. They take one hour and they have a one hour cooldown. That means no more once a day set-and-forget. Not if I want to get this whole thing moving. Either I stay and play so I can reset the missions as they come off cooldown or I have to remember to log back in time to do it every hour or so.

I'm doing both. Before I wandered off to play Valheim, I'd seen that there were five new Beast'r eggs to find this year so I spent a while hunting those down. It took a while, not least because I thought I'd remembered how the event worked but I really hadn't. After I admitted to myself that I might be wrong and went to check on EQ2 Traders things went a lot faster.

I was in Freeport asking guards for directions to the eggs and they kept sending me to the vendor instead. At first it was annoying but then I took a closer look at what he was selling and I was glad the guards hadn't really listened to me.

Kinda sinister for a fluff event, wouldn't you say?

 

The way diehard EQII players complain about the game annoys me a lot. I get the very strong impression that few of them play other mmorpgs, especially contemporary ones. If they did they'd understand how incredibly generous EQII is compared to just about every other game of its kind.

Here's what you can buy from the Beast'r Eggschanger:

• Eight decorative housing items 
• Two character illusions
• Three plushies (animated placeable creatures for your house)
• Three cosmetic pets
• One full set of appearance gear

You can also trade out eleven of the sixteen available Beast'r Eggs, which are vanity pets, for house pet versions. Since you scribe the eggs into your spellbook to use them, you can collect duplicates, swap them and have both.

What's more, the cost of buying any and all of these is extremely trivial. Most of those items cost sixty silver. The most expensive, the Sifaye Robe Clothing Crate appearance outfit costs 2g 40s. A level one character could earn enough in a matter of minutes to buy everything the vendor has to offer.

This is for a very minor holiday, one that most players probably barely even notice. You can guarantee that kind of generosity, in spades, for every EQII festival. And there are a lot of festivals.

Compare that to Guild Wars 2, where this week the very similar, minor Choya event rewarded me with a few handfuls of crafting mats. And not very useful ones, at that. 

Most modern mmorpgs do not stock holiday vendors with good quality vanity pets, character illusions and appearance gear that anyone can buy for a pittance of in-game currency without having to farm for hours or days or even weeks. Such things, when they do turn up, tend to be tied either to log-in campaigns that require you to pay with your time or cash shops that ask you to pay with real money.

The Overseer system, which I think it's probably fair to say has found no more than grudging acceptance from the playerbase in the year or so since it was introduced, is equally open-handed. Indeed, as I found myself thinking yesterday, it may even be too generous for its own good.

I was expecting upgrades from the Season 3 rewards and even at this extremely early stage I have not been disappointed. The quantity and quality of the rewards will increase markedly as I gain access to the longer and more highly-rated missions but I got an upgrade from the second mission I completed.

Using the free starter kit from Reign of Shadows as a baseline, the floor for Resolve in current content would be 195. Having completed the Signature questline, most of my Berserker's gear is somewhere between 205 and 215, with one or two outliers in either direction. 

 

The lowest level rewards from Overseer Season 3 start at 205. That's from the blue missions. The yellow missions go to 210. Above those come purple and finally green. I don't have any of those to check yet but it's reasonable to assume they go to 215 and 220. If this season follows the same pattern as the last there will be some items better than that again in the Bonus chests.

This does mean that you could, in theory, outfit your casual, solo character to a uniform level better than you could expect from completing the content intended for you in the latest expansion, without ever leaving your spawn spot. Why you'd want to is another matter but you could.

Petamorph wand. So gonna use this!

I won't be doing that but I will be outfitting my less-regularly played characters with gear that means they can, if they wish, skip the Signature questline altogether. Of course, then they wouldn't be able to fly in those zones but then again they probably won't be adventuring in them either. 

Whether this is a positve thing for the game is another question. It incentivizes me not just to log in
regularly but also to play more when I do. I feel I get the best of both worlds, playing one character through all the content normally and then having the rest cruise through it in gear better than the content itself rewards, but I can see why it might end up being a disincentive for some people.

Whether it's a good idea or a bad one, though, I don't think it can be denied that it's exceedingly generous. If you don't like it you don't have to do it but I suspect some people made that decision without really understanding the possibilities. From the comments I see, both in and out of game, my feeling is that a lot of people gave up on Overseer missions well before they began to see just how rewarding they can be.

For solo players, that is. I'm not sure how much use they are to heroic group players or raiders. The gear certainly won't be of any interest and there's not much in the blue or yellow rewards I can imagine them getting excited over, either. It's mostly temporary adorns. Although, come to think of it, that may be the kind of thing players doing more difficult content burn through fast. I wouldn't know.

In the time it's taken me to write this I've completed several missions and recieved two new ones. One of those came from the Bristlebane Day holiday special Heist Society. I almost missed that one. It's a five quest sequence with some exceptionally nice, guaranteed rewards and it also pulls from the Season 3 pool for the random stuff, meaning a chance at new missions and agents. Very well worth doing in the few days it has left to run.

And that's me back playing EQII every day again. Mission accomplished from Daybreak's perspective, I guess.

Get Lucky: EQII

Yesterday evening, after I got back from work, I had my tea and watched a couple of ten year old episodes of University Challenge on YouTube with Mrs Bhagpuss (once a punk, always a punk, eh?). Then I logged into EverQuest II to check on my Overseer missions and something pretty amazing happened. Amazing enough to make me yelp "Yes! Yes! Yes!" out loud.

Back up a bit.

Managing Overseer missions requires some thought. Ever more so as the options open up. The maximum number of missions per account, per day, is ten but you can collect far more missions than that. The longer the mission, the better the potential reward (and the higher the risk of failure), so as you acquire more missions and your pool of potential adventures widens, the ones you really want to do are the longest ones you have available.

Only you don't get to choose freely from all the missions you've unlocked. The server selects seven (randomly, I'm assuming) for the day, meaning you have to do three of them twice to get all ten done. When a mission you've undertaken completes, it goes on cooldown for the same length of time it took to do. Or maybe twice that long. There seems to be some variation I haven't quite figured out. Either way, it's a significant tranche of time.

Similarly, each Agent needs a sit down and a cup of tea before they're ready to go again. Because I've been doing Overseer missions with half a dozen different characters I have Agents all over the place. And because the Bonuses and Mishaps rely on which unlocked mercenaries and familiars each of those characters have available... well you can see how that goes.

The very best potential rewards come from the ten hour missions. I now have two of them. On a day when I have to go to work, if I want to be sure of completing all ten missions, including any ten hour ones the game has been kind enough to give me, I have to log in and set seven running before I leave. And I have to remember to log in pretty soon after I get home to let the cooldowns cool down so I can get the last three done.

This is a significant commitment. Considerably more so than doing my dailies in Guild Wars 2, something I also still do every day, or getting my login rewards from Riders of Icarus, which I've abandoned, mostly because the botched transition to the new owner meant I couldn't log in for three months. I mean, can now but I don't want to. The moment has passed.

Getting back to EQII, the Overseer feature looked at first to be a fairly straightforward piece of fluff but it's turning into a significant time commitment, requiring planning and forethought, neither of which are my strong suits. It's probably not something I'd stick with for long once the novelty wore off if it didn't offer something meaningful in return. Building my collection of Agents and missions is fun but the kind of fun that only amuses me for so long.

The main reason I still do my Dailies every day in GW2 is that completing them gets me two gold every time. On three accounts that's more than forty gold a week and forty gold is serious money in that game's economy. Also, they're generally quick and involve playing the game fairly normally.

I thought I'd lucked out when I got this.

EQII has a daily like that, too. I do that every day but it pretty much completes itself if I just play normally. Overseer Missions are a thing apart and it would be easy to ignore them if the rewards weren't highly desirable.

They aren't, for the most part. As I was saying the other day, there have been plenty of complaints
about the useless and inferior items included in the loot table, complaints with which I have a good deal of sympathy. Or I did. Until last night.

Another aspect of Blood of Luclin that's received considerable criticism from some quarters is the change to the way crafting works. I've already covered that. I won't go back over it in detail. The key thing to remember is that to make Expert spells and Combat Arts, Sages and Alchemists now need both the new Shadow materials and the Shadow recipe books.

The implementation of the new mechanic for gathering Shadow rares has been tweaked so that it's no longer a problem. If anything, it's easier than acquiring rare mats under the old system, certainly if the wide availability and rapidly falling prices of Shadow mats on the Broker is anything to go by. Getting hold of the books so you can actually use them, though? That's a very different matter.

In the olden days crafting books dropped from just about any mob. In recent years they were moved to the loot tables of Named mobs in instances and raids. In BoL, according to Niami Denmother's invaluable write-up on EQ2 Traders, the recipe books for Expert Spells and CAs (and for Mastercrafted gear and items from all the other tradeskills) come only from the ten hour Overseer missions. And the chance of getting one is very, very small.

I imagine you can guess what's coming next. I got one! What's more, I didn't just get any one, I got one I could use. And it was a good one. A really good one.

The motherlode.

The book I received from one of my ten hour missions was Shadow Alchemist Studies 15. After I'd calmed down, the first thing I did was check the Broker to see what nominal value it had. I wasn't going to sell it, obviously. I just wanted to rub my hands and cackle like Uncle Scrooge.

When I searched the market, the cheapest any of the Shadow Alchemist books was selling for was a couple of million plat. The highest level book on sale was the one I had and only one person was selling. They were asking ten million plat.

Whether that's a sum anyone's prepared to pay I can't be sure but it's not unlikely. EQII has hyperinflation and some people have a lot of money to burn. I don't. I have just over 800k, which is plenty for general purposes but way short of being able to buy spell books.

I passed the recipe book to my Alchemist and he scribed it. As I said, it's a good one. It contains several key AEs for Berserkers and Bruisers, both of which are classes I play regularly, as well as some key buffs and heals for those classes. There are important CAs for other melee classes in there, too.

The next thing was to check the mats the combines require. I had all of them in quantity. So I made all the Experts in the list for the classes I play. They were all big upgrades. What's more, having them scribed means I can now use the offline research system to upgrade those abilities to Master without having to go through the intermediate steps, each of which takes weeks.

Having sorted my own needs I began to think about the commercial possibilities. I checked the going rate for the Experts my Alchemist could now make. They ranged from 400k to 750k depending on how desirable the ability might be. I had plenty of mats left so I made one and put it on for about two-thirds of the the lowest-priced.

Then I checked the price of the materials needed to make it. Buying all of them came to not much more than a tenth of the selling price of the finished item. This is obviously a potential goldmine, always assuming people are actually buying Experts at these prices.

Given the relative ease with which the materials can be found, the only throttle on Experts coming into the game would seem to be the limited availability of the recipe books. To some degree this is the reverse of what we've been used to, where books came onto the market fairly fluidly but rare mats were comparatively, well, rare.

I suspect this may all be subject to further iteration and amendment as time goes by but for now getting lucky with a ten hour overseer mission might just be a license to print money. Is that a good thing?

That's where we enter the debate on scarcity as a game mechanic, which is a whole different post and one I may get around to at some point. Certainly, knowing you might score big is a huge motivator for some people - if it wasn't, we wouldn't be having the lockbox controversy. For others it's a major turn-off.

But then, that's true of just about any game system you care to name. One person's demon is another person's darling, as we all know. The complicating factor in this particular case is the inarguable utility and perceived necessity of the items involved. A lot of people either need - or believe they need - Expert-level abilities just to play the game at all. Locking them behind this kind of luck wall is problematic for both for the winners and the losers in the Overseer lottery.

I'll worry about that later. For now, though, I got a Shadow Book!!! I'm not going to overthink it. I'm just going to enjoy it. And you can bet I'm going to be doing all the ten-hour Overseer Missions I can get my paws on.

Maybe lightning will strike twice. Although that would probably count as a Mishap...

Familiarity Breeds Confusion : EQII

You know how you can look at something every day and not really see it? Happens to me a lot. I like to think of myself as an observant sort of person but really, like most of us, I only see what I expect to see. I know we'd all like to believe we're the one who'd spot the gorilla but the whole point is that almost no-one does.

I like almost everything about EverQuest II's latest expansion, Blood of Luclin, but the thing that's really grabbed my attention is the new Overseer system. It's all the better because I never expected I'd be giving it any attention at all.

It's a fairly abstruse addition to a game that already feels gnomic. It's taken me a while to get to grips with it. I'm sure there's more to learn. I know there is.

Since I wrote about it I've been sending my Agents out on Missions every day, so I do have some practical experience. There's also a detailed entry on the wiki, which I've studied at some length.

Even so, it was only today that I got around to playing with the fine controls, the two Plus signs at the bottom of the window. One affects  Bonus, the other Mishap. You can use them to increase your chance of the former and reduce the risk of the latter, both things you'd very much like to do.

Unlike the system itself, there's a veneer of internal logic to this. To increase the chance of acquiring a bonus chest you can send one of your Mercenaries to accompany your agent. To help them avoid being captured you can lend them one of your familiars.

Okay, it's a very slim thread to hang a sense of reality on but it's something. You could imagine the Merc and the Familiar giving the Agent some kind of edge. I wouldn't say I'm feeling any immersion here but it at least has internal logic and a certain storybook charm. More pointedly, it's a mechanic with repercussions in the game proper.

To send a Mercenary to assist your Agent you must first have unlocked the "Hire Anywhere" option for that specific Merc. Some, the ones that come with expansions for example, are unlocked when you first hire them but you can unlock any by paying a small fee (currently 149 DBC which is about a dollar-fifty at the basic exchange rate).

That's a possible revenue stream for Daybreak, although I'd imagine it's more of a trickle. Most people who care probably have plenty of Mercs unlocked already. My Berserker has half a dozen on staff. Still, I'll probably spend a smidgeon of my triple-SC-sales savings on mercenary contract extensions for some other most-played characters.

Also, why are all my Mercs working pro bono now?

Although EQII may well have turned into a whaling operation at the difficulty levels above my ceiling, for me it's still nickel and dime stuff, if even that. At my level of involvement it's more a game of time-management than a wallet thrasher. As I've mentioned before, modern EQII comes with several offline training systems: mercenaries, mounts, abilities and familiars. There may well be others I've missed. I've been reasonably diligent in keeping up with the first three but I never really got going with Familiars.

That's because the only way I know to do upgrade them for free is to complete the daily Familiars Wild quest, the purpose of which is to catch a familiar to feed to one of your existing stable, thereby making that one stronger. Brutal.

I did the quest when it was introduced almost two years ago. I wrote about it at the time, praising it to the skies and saying I found it "very moreish indeed". Then I promptly forgot about it and never did it again.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I didn't blank the quest from my mind. It occured to me now and again that I should be doing it but I was well aware that if I did I'd just add every new familar to my stable rather than feeding any of them to the others. Not that I have a problem with that. It just never seemed to be the best use of my time.

Well, now things have changed. I could use a few more familiars to send out on missions. And the better quality the familiar - Legendary, Fabled, Mythical - the more it reduces the risk of the agent it accompanies getting captured.

With all that in mind, this morning I went to get the quest. I had a vague idea the NPCs were in Freeport and Qeynos but I couldn't remember where, so I went to the wiki, found the loc, cut and pasted it into my EQII Maps window in game and followed the glowing trail to... the exact spot I've passed by almost every day since the quest was added.

2019 was a good year for free familiars.

The three Conservators stand around under the gables on the street side of the East Freeport bank. That's the local branch most of my characters use. I'm in and out of there several times a day. Did I ever notice them? What do you think?

I was a bit confused as to why no-one was flying the feather to show they were open for business but my Berserker spoke to Steward Kres anyway. His reply? "I'll have more tasks for you tomorrow".

What? Why? I haven't seen you for two years! How can I still have a timer?

It occured to me that perhaps I still had the quest in my book. I have some stuff in there that goes back a lot longer than a couple of years. I opened my Journal to look but I couldn't find "Familiars Wild" anywhere. Off to the wiki to check what Category of quest it was.

"Mission", apparently, which I didn't know even was a category. But then, I could write a book on the things I don't know about EQII. If only I knew what they were...

Something else I didn't know until today is that the Quest Journal now has five tabs. If you'd asked me yesterday I'd have said there were three: Quests, Collections and Achievements. If I'm honest, I might have said two, because although Achievements have been in the game and the Journal for many years, I always forget about them.

As the most observant among you will already have noticed, this screenshot was taken nearly forty minutes after I finished writing the post. Blogging takes up a not inconsiderable portion of the day.

I had no idea there were tabs for Daily Objectives and Missions as well. When did they appear? I open that book almost every day and I swear I never saw them before. But then, I wasn't looking for them. Remember that gorilla?

It didn't help much. I found a "Familiar Daily Mission" on the astoundingly lengthy list. Seriously, there are pages and pages of Missions, almost none of which I ever do - or indeed ever have done. Every one said "No" under Completed but they still all had Reset Timers, including the Familiar. What that means I'm not entirely sure. At all sure. I don't have a clue.

To be on the safe side I logged into every character on the account and checked they didn't have the quest. No-one did. Then, because I'm nothing if not bloody-minded, I logged in the account formerly known as my main account (and even more formerly as Mrs Bhagpuss's account. Don't get me started...). My Necromancer there was also told to come back tomorrow.

I refer the author of the flavor text to Dorothy Parker's review of The House At Pooh Corner.
Also, could you please add a Merc or Familiar called Katy so I can use my "Katy On A Mission" gag? Oh, wait, I just did.

And that's where I'm at right now. Reset is in exactly five hours as I write this. That's seven in the evening where I am, midday in San Diego. I guess I'll have to wait and see what changes then, although since I haven't done the quest for two years I'm at a loss as to how the daily reset could affect things.

Always something new to learn. Always another puzzle to solve. I'm just hoping it's not some kind of bug. I could do without exploring the intricacies of Daybreak's Customer Service system. I'm all for exploration, discovery and lifelong learning but there are limits.

I'll come back and update this post when and if there's something to say. With luck, I'll have a picture of my new familiar to show off. Either that or a screenshot of my ticket number.

EDIT: Hmm. Reset made no difference at all. Steward Kres still says "Come back tomorrow". But... I made a new character and she was able to get the quest and complete it. Now Kres tells her to come back tomorrow as well. We'll see what happens then.

Party On! : Secret World Legends

Anniversary celebrations in MMORPGs often fill a dual role. For current players they fit into the game's calendar as one of the major holidays but there's also an opportunity for the company to remind the world in general - and ex-players in particular - that their game still exists.

As every MMORPG developer from Daybreak to Jagex seems to have discovered, the most fruitful route to increased login activity is nostalgia and nothing brings on a burst of the old rose-tinted like a birthday rolling round. On the other hand, sometimes there are things in your past you don't want to be reminded about.

Two years after an apparently successful launch, Secret World Legends looks very much like an also-ran, languishing in the slipstream of another, more profitable, higher-profile franchise, Conan, which saw its own successful revamp in Conan Exiles. Many Secret World veterans have never forgiven the company for mothballing the original game in favor of the supposedly more mainstream revamp and even players who were willing to go along with the change have run out of patience with the glacial pace of new content.

I just noticed how thick the soles on my boots are...

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Funcom's announcement of the Second Anniversary celebrations for SWL was received in certain quarters with a considerable degree of cynicism. Still, it offers a rare opportunity for the game to make an appearance on news sites, potentially bringing in some fresh (or more likely already-used) blood.

Talking about player retention in EVE Online yesterday, Wilhelm linked to a Superdata report that claims most new players beyond the two-year mark arrive as a result of recommendations from people already playing. A big bash like an Anniversary at least gets people talking. It's a start. I haven't heard anyone as much as mention SWL for months but over the last few days a few passing comments and mentions have cropped up in blogs I read. I doubt the game would have pinged my radar this summer had it not been for the publicity generated by the sophomore anniversary.

Two years may not seem much but it's probably a decade in MMO dog years. And let's not forget, The Secret World itself will be seven years old next month. Getting players to try an elderly game - or come back to give it a second chance - is hard enough. Getting them to hang around long enough to spend some money is a lot harder. SuperData estimate that just 2% of late registrants go on to play for more than thirty days.

You lookin' at my shem?

As far as inducements to stay go, there's nothing much new in this anniversary offer as far as I can tell, although I'm far from being an expert on SWL. TSW Database has an exhaustive breakdown of all the options, activities and rewards but I can't really tell what carries over from last year. I can't see much that would hold the casual player's attention beyond the duration of the event itself, no new storylines or explorable areas for example, while the official highlight, "brand new agents", involves a game system that's entirely unknown to me.

And yet, thanks to the Second Anniversary bash, it looks very much as though Secret Worlds Legends is back in my rotation. That's the rotation I don't actually have, of course: the random, whim-based, eeny-meeny choice I make most days, when I decide what I'm going to play.

I patched up and logged in a couple of days ago just to take a few screenshots and get some material for a post. I woke up conveniently close to the Argatha entrance in Savage Coast so I went to the hub to orient myself and sort my bags.

I guess this is where it all happens. Whatever "it" is...

There seemed to be a large crowd gathering next to a portal there so I hung around to see what was happening. When they all surged forward and vanished I followed them and in a few seconds I was unloading my pistols into the looming bulk of one of the PQ Raid mobs, a Talos of Gaia.

I used to love TSW's all-come, all-served hit point sponge open world holiday bosses. The only drawback was having to race all over the world while following chat and swapping channels (servers) to find one that was up.

SWL has done away with all that immersive, co-operative nonsense by putting the mobs on a fixed timer and sticking them in an instance with a portal in the game's main hub. Well, they did say they wanted to make things more accessible.

The effect is to turn the Taloses into even more of a loot pinata than they already were - and this in an event that has actual Pinatas that you hit with a bat. I am very definitely not complaining. I've done half a dozen so far.

Batter up!

They happen every hour, on the hour. Each kill gets you some drops and a shard that, when you collect five, combines into a Shem, the pet version of one of the bosses. I have two so far. Hang on, that must mean I've done ten bosses. Can that be true? I must be having even more fun than I thought!

There are login rewards and other goodies to be had but the surprising thing is that when each event ends I haven't been logging out to go play something else. I've been sticking around and playing the game.

In fact, I've done four levels. I roamed around Savage Coast for a while doing the League of Monster Hunters mission. Then I wandered over to Innsmouth Academy and did Carter Unleashed and a couple of others. From there I headed over to Blue Mountain, doing Ami Legend on the way, then the Sasquatch one for Sarge when I got to the military camp.

All of this is stuff I've already done in TSW.  I got almost to the conclusion of the main storyline of the original game and I've seen everything up to the end of Transylvania. Well, not every mission but all the scenery.

Some of it I remembered well, some only vaguely. One thing I did notice was all of it was a lot more fun. And when I say "fun" I mean "easy". I like The Secret World a lot but it was a slog. I was usually undergeared and always under-skilled. I died a lot and everything took ages. In SWL none of that happens.

Mobs die fast, missions take about a quarter as long to finish and the whole thing feels slick. What's more, my bags don't fill up with vast heaps of confusing drops that I have to spend hours sorting through and assessing. The few drops I get go straight into the Upgrade hopper and that's that.

I found myself wanting to play more and more. It had a lot to do with the addition of Levels to the game. As I was saying yesterday, the original TSW didn't use levels and at the time I had no problem with that, but I have to say that seeing that number tick up is a major motivator for me.

Levels are also more than just a cosmetic addition. If you don't level up you can't proceed with the all-important main mission sequence. I was ready to carry on with mine but when I finished Ami Legend (I think I was Level 22 at the time) the next mission on the tracker that came up was  "Level to 25". You can't make the importance of Levels any more obvious than that.

So that's what I'm doing. And I'm already nearly there. Wearing last year's party hat. Never in fashion, always in style.

Pretty much the motto of the whole Secret World franchise, I guess.

Makes No Sense At All: SW:TOR

Star Wars: the Old Republic has a lot of story, most of it delivered by typical MMORPG quests. They aren't called "quests", of course. SciFi games have "Missions". Call them whatever you like; if you're following the plot, you're going to have to talk to plenty of NPCs. And all of them want something.

Every Mission begins with a playlet. The NPC talks and you listen. Then it's your turn to reply. A dialog wheel offers three (or, rarely, two) choices. It's meant to make your progress along the pre-determined path seem less inevitable.

As well as making you feel like you have some say in what's happening, there are, supposedly, potential repercussions to make your choices meaningful. Your Companions might like or dislike you more depending on what they hear you say. Your slider might move up or down the Light/Dark scale.

These are things that sound like they might matter. They don't.

Last night my Agent managed to piss off her companion, Kaliyo Djannis, so badly I thought there was going to be a fistfight. Kaliyo threatened eternal enmity then my agent gave her some trinket she found in the bottom of her bag, Kaliyo gosh-wowed her thanks and the two of them went off to do another Mission together as though nothing had ever happened.

I wasn't surprised. It was established a few posts back that nothing you do makes much of a difference. In later expansions, I hear, miffed Companions can storm off and never come back but in the core game the most they can manage is empty bluster.

If we're going to settle this with a staring contest, Kaliyo, you're going to have to take thos ridiculous glasses off.

Companions' opinions are irrelevant. The Light/Dark system is purely cosmetic. There's still the narrative, though, right? Your moral choices must be stacking up to something there, surely?

Nope. Not so far as I can tell. Do what you want: all Missions have the same outcome, regardless, because whatever the Player Character decides is just fine and dandy with everyone involved. Execute or excuse, imprison or pardon, help or harm. No one gives a damn. You did the job, here's your pay, now let's all get on with our lives.

Oh, your handler or your boss or whichever random NPC handed you the job for absolutely no explicable reason in the first place may kick off for a moment but they'll always come around. At most it might take them a few hours before they realize they were wrong and you were right.

On a couple of occasions it's looked as if I might have made an actual enemy. No such luck. Just wait. Even if they left mad, soon enough mail will arrive explaining how everything turned out alright in the end. With a cash bonus attached, just to thank you for being so clever.

Playing a Light-inflected character on the Republic side, the anomalies were easier to handwave away. I was working with the grain. Sure, it was disconcerting to hear my Smuggler spouting homilies about sparing the innocent only seconds after she'd slaughtered forty or fifty data entry clerks for a Bonus Mission, but that's MMORPGs for you. At least Stealth meant she didn't always kill everyone that got in her way.

If it's relatively easy to  look the other way when my Smuggler's halo slips, playing Pollyana for The Empire takes a blindfold. The game wants to offer everyone equal opportunities to win Light or Dark points but it's a lot easier to be a loose cannon on the good team than a saint on the bad.

Where indeed? I'm basically The Empire now, right? What exactly is it the rest of you do, anyway?

Taking the the path I've chosen, Mission after Mission ends in an outcome that ought to see me on trial for treason, always assuming someone didn't just shoot me dead on the spot. I could cite literally dozens of cases because, to a greater or lesser extent, it happens almost every time but I'll stick to one particularly egregious example.

I'm jogging down some corridor when someone from the upper echelons of the Empire's military hierarchy buttonholes me as I pass. As usual he's mistaken me for Supergirl. He explains that Revan (aka The Ravanchist aka Revan the Butcher aka Darth Revan) left an active but abandoned facility on Nar Shaddaa. It's guarded by seemingly inexhaustible autonomic defenses that The Empire has been trying - and failing - to breach for years.

In the attempt they have lost a thousand men and ten thousand droids. He quotes those exact numbers. He's convinced I can do better. On my own. With no preparation. Now.

Plenty of Missions have set ups as utterly ridiculous as this but the set-up is the least of it. Off I go to do what a literal army hasn't managed in a decade of trying. And I succeed because it turns out I am indeed Supergirl, assuming  Supergirl solved every problem with a burst of automatic gunfire.

I take out all the defenses then I trot back to the military man to tell him the good news. He musters the troops and sends in a strike team to secure the target they spent all those years and lives trying to secure.

Oh, wait, no he doesn't! because that would make sense! What he actually does is ask me to go in, alone, find out what's there, then come back and tell him. So I do.

10,000 droids and little ol' me.

I find nothing much. Only a few aliens, the remnants of the slave force Revan brought in to run the facility. They're not aggressive so I'm not allowed to shoot them.  Not until I get that dialog option, anyway.

I talk to them and they explain they're maintaining something called The Infinite Engine. I could choose to kill them and take it or accept their gift of a "fragment" that will eventually grow into a new engine. If I do the latter the implication - no, actually, the stated outcome - will be peace and continued, unchallenged occupation of the facility for the aliens.

Being Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes I opt for the fragment. I take it back to the officer who sent me. He's not impressed. "Is that all you found?" he asks, looking at the speck of who knows what I've handed him. I assure him it is.

"Oh, well", he says. "Fair enough. I'm sure you did your best. Here's some money. Buy yourself an ice cream". Or words to that effect.

Excuse me? You're a (presumably) senior officer in the armed forces of a galaxy-spanning military dictatorship, who spent years of your life, a thousand of your men and ten thousand of your machines trying to get inside this place, but now you're going to take my word for it that there's nothing in there worth bothering with? You don't want to take a look for yourself? Send in some experts? Get some photographic evidence? You're going to leave it at that, walk away, never think of it again?

Are you clinically insane??

Seven hundred and ninety-seven credits? Seriously? I guess you blew the entire budget on those droids.

 It would be one thing if this was a freakish exception but it's so very far from that. It's pretty much the standard result when my Agent does anything you'd imagine she'd be put in irons for suggesting. In my experience so far, the player character can literally do no wrong. It's like living under some sort of reverse curse, where everything that can go wrong... doesn't.

I understand the gameplay reasons behind it. Most MMORPGs do something similar, if rarely so blatantly. The problem is that TOR's reputation rests in considerable part on the quality of its storytelling and as far as I can see, this blows that reputation out of the water.

Long before the end of Chapter One, my Agent should either be dead, on trial, in prison or on the run. Her name should be on Most Wanted lists across The Empire, her face on posters, every guard primed to arrest her on sight. Instead her reputation for reliability and efficiency grows and grows and she's entrusted by more and more important people with more and more important tasks.

I understand she's supposed to be an improviser, an innovator, a self-propelling bomb. I understand that results matter more than methods. What I can't understand is how any of that allows her to get away, repeatedly, with doing the exact opposite of what she's been ordered to do. Once in a while she'll lie to cover her tracks but mostly she just strolls back in and tells her superiors to their faces that she's disobeyed them and they'll have to put up with it. And they do!

Maybe this is all going to turn round and bite her later on. Maybe I'm just not seeing the long game BioWare are playing here. We'll all have a good laugh when I find out just how hard they pulled the wool down over my eyes.

Or not. I'm betting on not.

Weird Science (Fiction) : Warframe

Warframe is weird. I don't think that will come as much of a surprise, especially to anyone who read Jeromai's fishing stories earlier this week. You don't really expect to go fishing in a space shooter. Or maybe you do and I'm just being space-shooterist. It's not like I've played that many.

I haven't found an awful lot of time to play this one either but I gave it an hour or so last night. I began by fiddling around with the UI, where I spotted a series of social settings that appear to toggle the game between co-op, multiplayer and solo.

The default appears to be multi, which explains how I kept getting auto-grouped for missions. I swapped to Solo, where I could  make my own mistakes and go at my own pace and without getting summarily dragged along by someone else's much faster progress.

That seemed to work quite nicely. For a while. I finished up a mission to get the Nav segment that allowed me to locate the Alien Overlord, the one who set the Ascaris mindworm burrowing into my brain. I'd already done the missions to stop it doing that but apparently now it was going to explode. Or something.  I'm vague on the details, as usual. Anyway, nothing would serve but I go find the guy who put it in and kill him.

So I went looking for him and found him. It didn't seem like he was doing so well. My handler told me he didn't have his Elite guards any more, which was nice. Well, it was nice for me. He seemed a bit miffed about it. He mithered on a bit about the trouble I'd gotten him into and I got the impression he'd been demoted. Possibly fired. Maybe run out of space-town on a rail.

Honestly, I didn't really follow the plot all that closely. I find it hard to read, listen, roll, jump, shoot, loot, reload and generally not die all at the same time. I am becoming increasingly certain that action gaming is not the ideal medium for narrative. Odd, that.

There was a boss fight with Vor. That's the Overlord's name although since he was only the Overlord of the tutorial I am now more inclined to think of him as the Alien Janitor. Like all Tutorial bosses, if you can be defeated by a noob in starter gear, how Boss can you really be?

Not that he didn't give me a tussle. He warped about a lot, summoned plenty of guards and seemed to have the health pool of any fifty grunts in the game to date. My tactics of running at things with the trigger on my automatic rifle held down sort of worked. I died a couple of times but at this stage  Warframe appears to be one of those infinite revive games, where you just pop back up at full health next to the guy that killed you while he stays at whatever diminished state you put him in before you went down. GW2 works that way so I'm used to it.

No, let's be fair. It's not exactly the GW2 Duracell Bunny method. There's a resource of some kind associated with reviving. You spend an amount of it from a pool. I guess you could, theoretically, run out. I have no idea how I got mine (and I can't remember what it's called) but I had plenty of it. About ten times what I needed.

After the fight I wasn't clear whether Vor was dead or just defeated for now, ready to come back and haunt my psyche-space another day. I was too busy with A Moral Conundrum to think about him. Suddenly everything was all about whether I should go do something to stop the ship destroying a Colony or just get the hell out of there. My handler advised me to leg it and forget about saving the colonists.

I really hate being asked to make moral choices in games. I don't play for that kind of self-torture. I would have done the right thing and been irritated by being asked to make the decision but in the event the choice was made for me. I find the mapping in Warframe unnutterably confusing and in running around trying to find the Bridge, or wherever I was supposed to be going to stop the ship, I ran across the trigger point for Extraction, got sucked through a portal back to my ship and the Mission ended. Go serendipity!

Back on my own ship I got a short lecture from Lotus (That's the handler's name. I believe people call her Space Mom and I can see why). She told me I was a big boy now and I could choose my own missions from now on. I guess that means I'm finally out of the tutorial.

Jeromai reccommended I head for the Plains of Eidolon, which is supposedly a quasi-open world area. The location was on my world map but to get there I had to go through Cetus.

Cetus was... unexpected. Wareframe is weird.

If I was designing a space opera style, high-tech shooter with heavy emphasis on military hardware and cyborg battle suits I don't think I'd choose to put the main trading area in a desert souk. Okay, there is plenty of precedent, from Tattooine to Arrakis, but that's more of a reason to avoid the trope, rather than double down on it, I'd have thought.

Wandering around Cetus reminded me of nothing so much as being in Vanguard's Qalia. The music, the snatches of incidental dialog, the color palette, the vibe. I spent quite a while exploring, talking to vendors, checking their stock. I felt oddly at home.

And yet strangely lost. Warframe gives you a huge amount of detailed information and explains what almost none of it means. It's either invigorating or ennervating depending on your mood. Take the pet shop. I wanted to get a caged rodent to keep me company in my ship - because who wouldn't? - but I couldn't work out if the listed items (15 goopolla spleen, 11 mawfish bones) were the price the vendor was asking, the mats I needed to make it or what I was meant to feed it when I got it home.

And what kind of space shooter has a pet shop anyway? This game is weird.

Eventually I managed to tear myself away from the market stalls to look for the gateway to the Plains. I thought I'd seen that I had to talk to someone first and I was expecting to have to complete another mission to gain access but in the event I just clicked on the really big, really obvious door and there I was, outside.

Plains of Eidolon does indeed feel somewhat like the average desert zone of an MMO. Hot sun, baking rocks, looming towers, all of that. I wandered about exploring for a while without seeing any wildlife. Fragged a few rocks for mats. Wondered what to do.

Then something popped on the HUD, some kind of timed event. I headed in the direction of the marker and next thing there were dropships and bad guys and running firefights. I took a bunch out, died a couple of times, didn't seem to be making much progress.

The third time I died I stayed dead. I cancelled the mission, which gave me limited rewards but at least something, which I thought was sound design. I spent a while looking at my gear, auto-upgraded my mods and then I quit for the night.

I had fun. Warframe is good, I think. Definitely not my kind of thing but not not my kind of thing either. It would clearly require research and dedication to progress much further. Magson (aka pkude99) very kindly offered to walk me through the learning process and I may end up taking him up on it later but for now I think I'll just potter along, absorbing the strange atmosphere and letting myself be surprised by happenstance.

I might have to start reading the wiki though. I should at least find out how to buy myself a pet.

If All Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge... : Warframe

I have no reason to be playing Warframe. For starters, it's a space-based shooter, a two-for-one combo that misses me coming and going. And anyway, isn't it five years old or something? I've managed to live without it until now. You'd think I could just carry on the same way.

It's not even as though Warframe had slipped under my radar somehow and I was just now discovering it. Several bloggers I read have mentioned it in passing. One or two have posted on it extensively.

Over the last few years I've skim-read a lot of impenetrable detail on the game, most of which I neither understood nor tried to. I've looked at endless dull screenshots of suits of armor, each indistinguishable from the next. Glanced at pages of incomprehensible statistics, briefly, then moved on.

If you'd asked me, which why would you, since I've never even mentioned the game, I'd have said, vaguely, that I thought it was some niche, indie thing that hadn't found an audience. I'd have been wrong. Often am.

Hi! My name's Generic Alien Overlord #179. You may remember me from, well, pretty much anything.

A week or two ago I read somewhere that Warframe is very popular. Like really popular. It surprised me. Keen apparently read the same thing and it surprised him, too, because yesterday he asked "Why Do People Play Warframe?".

Supposedly they do. It's not Fortnite but it's popular enough to have its own convention, Tennocon. I don't think any MMOs I play do that, not any more.

In the comment thread to Keen's post, several people whose names I know and whose opinions on gaming I respect popped up to praise Warframe. One of them was Jeromai, who also posted on his own blog, Why I Game, to reveal he was up at six a.m. on a Sunday to get a Warframe freebie from Twitch.

So I downloaded the thing. I mean, what the hell, why not? If it's worth waking up at 5.30am for... And anyway, it looked as if it might be a bit like Firefall and I liked Firefall, even if I never really got that far with it. Warframe is F2P, after all. Even if I download It's not like I have to play it.

Making an account was quick and painless. The worst I can say is they did seem a bit over-zealous in getting me to re-enter the password at every opportunity. Well, three times. Maybe it was twice. Okay, probably not worth mentioning.

To quote Darren and Emma, "Look at what you can't have now"

I was surprised to find a full set of Beta terms to sign up to. Five years and still in beta? Is that right? I scanned the text. It seemed okay so I accepted it. Then there was an EULA. Skim-read that. Seemed standard, clicked it.

The download took about twenty-five minutes. I passed the time doing some quests in EQ2. When the PLAY button lit up it was really time I should have been heading to bed but I don't work Mondays so I logged in.

Making a character took a minute, if that. Nothing to do but pick one of three choices as a starting Frame. No appearance to ponder, not even a color scheme. One of the choices was flagged perfect for a new player so I went with that.

From there it was straight into an all-action Tutorial that reminded me very much of the original DCUO introduction. Run through tunnels and rooms with disembodied voices either yelling at you or cajoling you. Click on this, shoot that, crouch, jump, fumble. That last one was just me.

Yeah, y'think so? Or maybe just not bother?

It was one of those tutorials where you can't fail, I think. Or die. I was about as deft on the keys as a gannet playing the clavinet but I got through somehow. It  didn't feel like it took all that long but I didn't enjoy any of it.

Several times I had that familiar feeling of anger against the game, where what I most wanted to do was hit Escape, log out and uninstall. I often get that in new games, though, especialy when the controls are unfamiliar. I know to ride it out.

I came closer to quitting for real in the peace and quiet of my own ship. There were precisely two interactable items in the closed and locked craft and I wasn't able to interact with either of them. If I suffered from claustrophobia (as many gamers do) I would have quit there and then. Would have had to.

Instead I tabbed out and googled for a solution. Some results suggested I'd run into a known bug (well, it  is Beta, after all). Nothing suggested an answer to my problem. I tabbed back in and tried again. Still nothing.

If at first you don't succeed, hit it with a hammer.

And then by sheer luck, as I tried the same thing that hadn't worked the last twenty times, I happened to do it differently. When the game says "X Install Segment" in that specific location, apparently it doesn't mean "Press and Hold X", which is what you do earlier in the Tutorial (and as I discovered later in the Missions). Oh no!  It means "Lightly tap X and then get your finger the hell away from the key as fast as possible".

Once I did that it all started happening. With Communications up and running I was able to set out on the next stage of my great adventure. I looked longingly at the planetary options. Jeromai quite correctly surmised I'd have been happier trying the newly-announced "open world" content but one doesn't just stroll into Venus.

Instead I did Missions. Starter Missions. Choice of one. Did that. Then another. Did that. More running through tunnels. More shooting people, more being yelled at.

I ran and got a thing and ran back and stuck it in my ship. I broke a guy out of jail and he gave me a blueprint for another thing and told me to make it. I haven't worked out how to do that yet. There's a lot of plot and it's staggeringly unoriginal but it rocks along. There's a lot of voice acting and it's equally unoriginal but it's also kinda rockin'. Not bad at all. My own character seems flavorless in the extreme but the NPCs have style.

Insert "What a Cat Hears" meme here.

I'm not sure if this is still the Tutorial. I think it must be. It seems almost infinitely forgiving. I still have no idea what I'm doing but I didn't seem to be anywhere close to failing either of the missions. My boss/operator/owner/fan club keeps telling me to do things a certain way - don't get seen, don't trip the alarms - and I ignore her and rush in like a berserk robot and it still seems to go my way. The bad guy keeps threatning me. I ignore him. Ditto.

Thus far I would not say that Warframe isn't fun. It is fun. It isn't my kind of fun but it's the kind of fun I can recognize when I see it. I might even be able to have some fun like that - in very small doses.

I thought Warframe might be a bit like Firefall and it is. Actually it isn't. It's a lot like Firefall. I liked Firefall. Well, I liked some versions of Firefall. The problem with Firefall was that it was never the same game two log-ins running. Red5 kept changing it and mostly they made it worse.

Jeromai says of Warframe "It’s been improved since it first launched...it’s gone through a number of layered iterations..." so maybe it's the anti-Firefall. A game that gets better the more the devs work on it? I guess it could happen.

Fade to cyan

Anyway, I haven't unistalled Warframe and I'm not going to. I'm past the "I don't know how to do this and it's frightening me, Mummy, make it stop!" stage. Now I'm in the "I don't know how to do this but I reckon I can wing it" stage. If I keep playing, which is unlikely, I'll eventually hit the "Y'know, I really should learn how you're supposed to do this properly" stage at which point I'll be pretty nearly hooked.

I think what I need is a Frame or a build that lets me use nothing more than WASD, Left/Right Mouse and maybe two other keys, preferably F and X. That's about the limit of my action gaming skills. Okay, maybe Number Keys 1-4 for special attacks provided all they do is extra DPS so I can just hit them randomly in a panic once in a while.

That, in a nutshell, is how I play DCUO. If I could play Warframe that way I might indeed play Warframe. Now and again. Once in a while.

I do quite like it so far...