Pumping Irony

It’s been a few months since I’ve played Runes of Magic so I logged in this morning. I vaguely remembered the 3.03 patch for the Chapter 3 expansion had come out last month so this time I remembered to check if my skills had been reset. They had. Last expansion, I had no idea so I was running around with zero points put into my skills and wondering why I was barely surviving each fight with single mobs. If nothing else, free respecs are nice for tweaking builds.

I had left Jerreth in his house to accumulate XP/TP bonuses, which at this point were pretty much full. Once loading into Aslan Valley, my screen was assaulted with messages and a bright little pixie appeared! A Newbie Pet!

This little pet was included as part of the 3.03 patch for characters of levels 1 through 30. Sheesh. Here I thought “newbies” (excepting player knowledge and skill) were primarily characters in the starter zones but apparently Frogster has determined everyone less than level 31 is a newbie.

I checked both Jerreth (25 Priest/25 Knight) (now 27 Priest) and Arwellyn (13 Druid/10 Mage) and in both cases their Newbie Pets were level 10. I don’t have any other characters so I will assume that even for brand-new characters, the Newbie Pet is always level 10. It is worth noting that the Newbie Pet is a non-combat pet and as such will never draw aggro from monsters.

What does it do?

Clicking it brings up a UI dialogue frame that is essentially a small FAQ. The pet has text describing how to get quests, the difference between a normal quest and a daily quest, using the party search system, the transport book, etc. Perhaps useful for legitimate new players who maybe skipped the tutorial or forgot small details but by the time a character is level 10 or so, most of the content would already be known.

At level 11 and above, however, a more useful choice appears on the dialogue frame: Get Attonement Vouchers. Starting at level 11 in Runes of Magic, each death incurs an XP/TP penalty and 70% of all XP/TP you earn goes towards paying off that debt. Retrieving your tombstone will also relieve a large percentage of the debt, if you’re able to get to it. Once per day, the Newbie Pet can place an Attonement Voucher in your inventory which will completely erase the death penalty! The vouchers also stack, so you can collect them even if you don’t use them every day. Once you achieve level 31 any unused vouchers will be removed from your inventory.

The Newbie Pet will also cast a Heal spell on you in combat which will regain 300 health points. The catch is the pet seems to wait until you are in the vicinity of 10% health before it begins casting Heal, which has a two second induction, so it’s entirely possible you may die before the pixie heals you. Additionally the pet seems to have a lengthy cooldown on its Heal spell so while it’s a nice extra “oh crap!” feature, it isn’t something to rely upon if you’re out pulling mob after mob.

The downside to the pets (aside from accidentally clicking them instead of the intended target) is that everyone has them and when you go into heavily populated areas such as Logar and Varanas those little pixies kill the framerate. So please, be courteous and dismiss your pixie (and other non-combat pets) before going into towns!

Runes of Magic begins the 10-week process of updating to Chapter III: The Elder Kingdoms today. The full patch notes are up in the forums and are quite lengthy so I won’t bother re-quoting them here like I usually do. I would normally highlight the ones of interest to me but I’m so new to the game I wouldn’t know which ones are special to me and my character’s classes yet anyway; the Priest/Knight Elite skill changes are high level skills that I don’t have yet.

The beginning of the patch notes say that Phase 1 will be a 3-step process. I’m guessing that means 3 separate patches, the first one being today? In any event, the 3.0.0 patch is code-named The King’s Call.

Looks good, and I hope they’ve gotten the Guild Siege stuff working now. It’s been in public beta on the live servers for awhile now but everyone complains how unstable and buggy it is. I don’t think RoM has a test server, which is why they’ve been beta-testing sieges on the live servers.

Patch Notes 3.0.0 – The King’s Call – Runes of Magic US Forums

While trying to get my Knight class to 25 this morning, messages started scrolling that the servers would be shutting down in 30 minutes, then counting down every 5 minutes.

At first everyone was excited, hoping that it meant Phase 1 of the Chapter III expansion was coming today as Frogster stated it would be arriving this week.

Nope! In a bit of a surprise attack against gold spammers, Frogster is using today’s patch to remove the ability to trade Diamonds for Gold in the Auction House.

Dear Runes of Magic Community,

We will be immediately undertaking server maintenance from 10am to 11am PST.

In this maintenance we will be temporarily removing from the Auction House the ability to trade gold for diamonds, and vice versa.  Please note: This will not affect items already being auctioned.

We are taking this action in light of the dramatic increase in the number of gold sellers recently. This is a necessary step to protect you, our true community of players.

As soon as we’re certain that the trading of diamonds and gold between players can safely resume we’ll lift the temporary block.

In the meantime, please be aware that those who attempt to trade contrary to our regulations may have their accounts temporarily banned. The illegal sale of gold through third parties may lead to users being permanently banned from their accounts and from the game as a whole.

Thank you for your consideration,

Your Runes of Magic Team

I’ve noticed the spam increasing, especially the past week. Spammers are even spamming in the World chat channel — some on Artemis have even apologized for spamming World chat! Huh? — which requires use of a Megaphone — an item in the Diamond shop. (There are also Megaphones in the Phirius Token shop but these spammers are level 1 so could not have run enough daily quests to get the Megaphones.) This means the spammers must be spending money on the game in order to spam. Isn’t this the classic argument players use about gold spammers? That developers won’t do anything because the spammers have to have a subscription and are therefore giving the developers money? (Assuming trial accounts have been spam-gimped.) Prices for Diamonds in the Auction House have skyrocketed over the past week, even with the +100% Diamond sale this past weekend. Apparently the spamming must be working; someone out there must be buying these Diamonds — and likely having their credit card info stolen which is then used to pay for the Diamonds the spammers are using to buy Megaphones…  Yeah, real smart, people. Then again, apparently email spam still works too, or no one would still be spamming email.

People are retards.

Runes of Magic has three separate sections of the Item Shop:

1. Diamond Shop. Diamonds are purchased with money then spent in the shop. This is where the Good Stuff is sold, obviously.
2. Ruby Shop. Rubies are earned with any purchase in the shop from either the Diamond or Phirius Token shops.
3. Phirius Token Shop. Good stuff in here and only costs you time!

The Phirius Token shop is amazingly useful and is another way to reward players for simply playing the game rather than focusing on Diamond purchases only.

Each area of the game has multiple Daily Quests gained from either individual NPC’s or from a Bulletin Board in that zone’s town or city. Each character can complete 10 daily quests per day (for free), and each quest awards 10 Phirius Tokens for a total of 100 Phirius Tokens per day. The Diamond Shop sells a Daily Quest Token for 49 Diamonds that will reset your dailies so you can run 10 more each, but we’re not using that for this article.

Troy (formerly of the Voyages of Vanguard podcast) started playing RoM recently and I told him about daily quests and using the Phirius Token Shop and he was pleasantly surprised at learning about it.

My suggestions for initial usage of Phirius Tokens are buying a few items for your personal house. Houses in RoM are obtained free simply by speaking to a House Maid NPC in any town. Once you apply for a house, the House Maid lets you in and gives you a storage chest with 20 inventory spaces. Place the chest then go out and do those dailies!

Here is the Housing section of the Phirius Token Shop. My first suggestion is first buying the Long Beech Table for 400 tokens — 4 days worth of dailies. The table awards +15 TP (Talent Point) bonus. Next, get the Elegant Wooden Engraved Bed for 600 tokens — another 6 days of dailies — which provides a +10 XP bonus. TP/XP bonuses accrue while logged out in your house and function similar to Rest XP which we’re accustomed to in most modern subscription MMO’s. There are threads on the RoM forums detailing the math behind how the bonuses work, and they appear to be linked into your XP required for the next level, so as you level these bonuses increase exponentially.

From here, we can continue buying more TP/XP bonus furniture or my personal suggestion is to now start saving up for the Classical Wooden Chest which goes for 2580 tokens. Yep, it’ll take 26 days of dailies for that baby, but it’s another 15 inventory slots for spending your time rather than your dime. I am finding storage space to be a bit limited so any chance to get more (for free) and I’ll jump on it. Additional backpack and bank space is rented with Diamond purchases, as does increasing the furniture slots in your house from the basic 10 it starts with.

Another potentially useful aspect of the Phirius Token Shop is the Mounts section. There are two 30-day mounts in the token shop, the Brown Horse in a bag being the most useful at 1400 tokens. 14 days per month of daily quests spent on a mount that lasts 30 days probably isn’t a bad way to go while leveling, especially if you’re able to play every day to make the rest of the month worthwhile saving tokens for other things if you don’t want to spend Diamonds on a permanent (or temporary) mount.

From then, there are several convenience items such as Transport Runes or TP/XP potions and charms, etc. that can be purchased with tokens rather than Diamonds. At high levels when you begin using the Arcane Transmutor to enhance your gear, 300 tokens will get you another 10 charges. (I hear a lot of players simply make an alt, level it to 10 to get the free 10 charges, use them to transmute gear then delete the alt which lets them save their tokens for other things.)

Shortly after completing the Silverspring’s Hope set, as I mentioned last week in my first Runes of Magic post, I acquired the first piece of the next set, Top Secret Records. Over the past week I’ve leveled enough to start wearing them, but the final piece required killing the boss in Blood Gallery, a sub-instance inside the Forgotten Abbey instance.

Outside the entrance to Forgotten Abbey, here we see Jerreth on his flying Phantom Ferret mount, which I bought for him last week during the holiday sale. A little goofy but since it’s a flying mount I can ride it over bodies of water.

I’ve had Jerreth in FA three times now, counting this one, completing a series of quests. This run we completed all of FA to kill the Demon Witch Ancalon for my final FA quest, went outside for a quick bank/vendor trip, then back inside to enter Blood Gallery where we had to kill Count Hibara.

Once the real Count Hibara was down — the first quest has you fight a Count Hibara but you discover it was a fake — we had to fight all the way back out of BG into the FA foyer to turn in the final quest for the Bloody Earl jacket to complete Jerreth’s set!

From what I’ve been told, this set will carry Jerreth until he’s into his 30′s. I haven’t learned what the next set is; for now I’m looking forward to reaching level 25 so he can equip the new staff he got yesterday, then reaching level 25 on the Knight class so he can get the 25/25 Priest/Knight elite skill: Last Prayer.

I’ve decided to — for now — include Runes of Magic as one of my MMO staples. Out of the “true” F2P market it’s probably the best of the bunch. Perhaps I’m picking nits or splitting hairs, but I cannot bring myself to think of DDO’s freemium model to be quite the same thing as “F2P.” It also allows me to get into an established game rather than being an F2P Tourist (there, I just made a new sub-phrase) and jumping on the disastrous bandwagon of dreck like Allods Online. Yes, I tried Allods. It was uninstalled before I ever got a chance to look at the overpriced Item Shop.

So, I have a single character on the Artemis server: Jerreth, a Priest/Knight. I’ve gotten the Priest class up to level 19 and have been alternating between questing in the Sascilia Steppes (a new zone created presumably for leveling secondary classes) and saving up Daily Quests completed on the Priest then turning them in as the Knight so that class gets the XP/TP from them. It’s worked out well enough so far; the Knight is only two levels behind the Priest. I chose Knight as the secondary class because the Elite skills it provides when combined with the Priest make it the best primary healer (healbot) in the game. In all the F2P games I’ve installed and goofed around with, I’ve never leveled much and have never grouped with anyone so I wanted an in-demand class for grouping so I could get a chance to see what things are like grouping in F2P Land.

I knew I got my first Elite skill at 15/15 so that was a priority. I did not know the costs involved, however, but it wasn’t bad. I had to go out and gather enough resources to craft the second-tier materials out of them along with a hefty gold price. But a few levels later, Jerreth already has 100,000 gold again, so apparently gold isn’t much of an issue yet.

During the early leveling around Logar, I concentrated on earning the Glory of Logar armor set. I got the (rather nice looking) robe and trousers but the quest is currently bugged for the shoes. Oh well. I continued leveling and yesterday Jerreth acquired the final piece for the Silverspring’s Hope set. It’s a bit “foofoo” and kinda reminds me of the male Mesmer starter armor in Guild Wars for some reason. But it’s cool in an odd sort of way.

Jerreth is working his way up into Tagena now, in the northern section of Silverspring where the mobs are in the low 20′s, and has already received the first quest for the next cloth armor set: Top-Secret Records which involves some normal quests and a few in the first instance, Forgotten Abbey, which Jerreth will have to gain a few more levels to be a viable group member to enter.

Now, since I am choosing to really play a F2P, ground rules must be set. Unlike most MMO players I harbor no illusions that Frogster needs to make money. I am an adult with a decent salary and I have no problems whatsoever tossing some money at developers if I am enjoying their game. However, since I am not forced to pay monthly, I will only pay when I actually feel I may need or want to. In the meantime it will be an interesting experiment to see how far I can get and what I can accomplish if I decide to spend time rather than money. From what I’ve seen of the Item Shop, RoM does not outright sell gear and other unbalancing stuff. I am getting a bit tired of running everywhere so I will likely buy myself a mount soon, it’s just a matter of deciding which one. Otherwise, at this early stage of the game I have not heard of anything I would “need” to pay for. Should I decide to continue playing all the way to end-game, I’ve never heard of a single F2P where money did not come into play heavily at that point. So, if (and this is a huge “if” since I will be doing end-game in both AoC and LOTRO) I get to that point, and if I’m enjoying the end-gameplay enough to continue with it, a financial budget must be set. Normally I would suggest sticking to no more than what a subscription would cost, $15/month, but RoM doesn’t have a $15 package of Diamonds to make that easy. So I’ll think long-term and go for $180/year, which is what a subscription MMO costs annually.

Frogster ran a sale last week for +100% Diamonds, so I went ahead and bought the $22 pack of 500 Diamonds, which gave me 1000 Diamonds. So I’ve already given Frogster a couple bucks for my enjoyment of the game so far, I simply haven’t used those Diamonds to purchase something from the Item Shop yet. Remember how Darren went ballistic over the $10 horses? Those were the cheap 199 Diamond mounts. The cool mounts cost 395 Diamonds. Since I have 1000 sitting around, guess what I’ll be getting?

I did use the Phirius Token shop, however. Daily Quests in RoM awards 100 Phirius Tokens per quest, along with some XP and TP, and you can do 10 Dailies per day. Dailies reset at 10am Eastern, though there is an item in the Diamond Shop that will reset them whenever you want. I’ll be skipping that. In the Phirius Token Shop there are various furnishing for your house, some of which award either an XP or a TP bonus. I saved up enough for a plant that gives a TP bonus and am now working towards a chest that gives XP. The way these bonuses work is identical to “Rest XP” we see in most modern subscription MMO’s. If I logout Jerreth in his house, he begins to earn whichever bonuses the furniture provides and the next time he is out earning XP/TP, those bonuses will apply until he runs out, then he’ll simply earn the normal amount of each.

There are three Item Shops in RoM: the Diamond Shop (Diamonds are the “points” purchased for real money), the Phirius Token Shop which again is strictly earned by doing Dailies and saving them, so it’s more a time-based currency, then there is the Ruby Shop. Any time you make a purchase in either the Diamond or Phirius Shop you earn Rubies which can then be spent on special items in the Ruby Shop. In addition, Diamonds are allowed to be sold for gold, etc. so while it’s not quite on par with EVE and its Plex currency, it’s entirely possible for players to earn enough in-game gold to buy Diamonds on the auction house to make purchases in the Diamond Shop. Sounds like a very cool idea and seems like maybe it gives pretty much everyone the chance to “succeed” in RoM by spending both money and time as they see fit rather than requiring both.