Too Long; Didn’t Listen Episode 1 – Our Introduction

What’s Too Long Didn’t Listen? It’s a tight, 30-minute show in which a pair of experienced MMO bloggers take on two hot topics of the week. We’re a little dumb, a little funny, and opinionated out the wazoo. Hey, it’s just 30 minutes, what do you have to lose?

Intro: Who we are, what the show is about.

Segment 1: RIFT Post-Mortem

What we thought of RIFT
Strengths/weaknesses
Why we left
Long-term prognosis?

Segment 2: WoW vs. SWTOR

Is Mists of Pandara a good counter-strategy?
Does the Diablo III/Sparklepony/year-long sub package show that Blizzard is worried?
Is Blizzard devaluing WoW?

Outro: What’s coming up for the show!

Reference blog posts:

Dodge Online

Syp Online

Website: Massively and Bio Break
Twitter: @sypster
Email: justin@massively.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (34.0MB) | Embed

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This entry was posted by Sypster on October 26, 2011 at 6:05 pm, and is filed under General, Rift, Too Long Didn't Listen Podcast, World of Warcraft. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

Moryel

Merric & Syp?!?!?!?! This will either be the best thing ever or a complete disaster.

Syp

We’re betting “complete disaster”!

http://www.casualstrolltomordor.com Merric

What Syp said!
http://twitter.com/tdhowell Thomas Dodge Howell

How about “complete and utter disaster… with a side of dippy-sauce”? :)

Branick

No iTunes feed?

Chris

We need to have an actual episode posted before we can get the application in for the iTunes feed. iTunes and RSS info incoming soon.

Branick

Ah cool. :) I don’t mean to sound elitist or anything, but it’s a lot easier for me to download and sync a podcast to my iPod with iTunes and to manually add an audio file and designate it as a podcast. I look forward to giving it a listen once the feed info is up. :)

Anda

Great show and i enjoyed most of it. Although i can’t really understand the criticism of Rift, especially in comparison with LoTRO. Yes, the new way we get our souls is Rift is a bit disenchanting and there’s another changes or two which could/should have remained the way they were before.

But! It doesn’t make sense to talk about instant gratification in Rift, when in LoTRO there’s the ever-existing Turbine Holy Grail, the Shop, where everything is instant and is long past the “convenience, not advantage” motto it was introduced with.

As for motivation and involvement with the game world: I’d played LoTRO for more than 3 years (ended when Turbine took over the EU service, mostly due to general boredom, the intrusive Store and other concerns regarding the “global service”) and the only time i felt involved was when questing in Shire and that one time doing the epic quests in Mirkwood. The Shire is beautiful, enchanting, a world within a world; i can’t stop smiling when thinking about it. The rest is…even the “book” quests, kind of “meh”. We get the usual FedEx quests from a character from the LoTR books, nothing impressive. And that comes from someone does read the quest text and has read virtually every book about the Middle-Earth lore.

In comparison, the “story” quests in Rift are fresh and the player (at least i) feels like they actually make a difference. Even the zone arcs are carefully crafted, the zone story chain in Gloamwood or Stillmoor are outright great. Yes, there are FedEx, kill 10 rats quests but they are built so they provide a natural progression for the player, and, frankly, which MMO doesn’t have them? I’d say the story chains in Rift are way better than the LoTRO book quests. Still, Turbine is a prisoner of the license and there’s only so much content and sidesteps they can fit into the LoTR storyline. It’s a good business for them though, so we are unlikely to see them “man up” and proceed to Minas Tirith and Mordor – and stop gutting the lore – any time soon.

Of course all of the above is a subjective opinion, and a respect everyone who thinks otherwise. I believe it’s fine and dandy to not like Rift, it has its flaws. But best leave LoTRO out of the comparison because there’s just a handful of aspects LoTRO does better and honestly, story and the feeling of involvement is not one of them. For me, Rift started as a “filler” between LoTRO and SWTOR and by now i genuinely love it and will be sorry when i log off the last time around the middle of december. (No, i can’t play 2 MMOs in “tandem” :)). Trion provides a great game an a top-notch *service* around it, one i feel is unprecedented in the industry. I’m fairly sure Bioware will at least match the game quality but the service, that’ll be a tough one.

Sorry for the long rant :)

All the best,
Anda

http://thefanaticalswordsman.wordpress.com Geldarion

I can understand what you are saying about the grindiness of MMOs being ubiquitous. However, I would say that LOTRO is even better about it in the expansion that just came out. The new quests in Dunland really make you feel like you are making a difference in the lives of the people you help.

That being said, there are still grinds, definitely things that are annoying with LOTRO. I think grindiness has a chance of being avoided in SW:TOR and GW2 (maybe!). At least some of it. But yes, there are always grinds. :/

Anda

It’s not really that i’m too much opposed to grinds; in fact, i think both LoTRO and Rift did a pretty good job avoiding the need to do it. Well, mostly. Slayer deeds, i’m looking at you… :)

I tried to react to the discussion which i understood as a criticism of the Rift story and quest being detached from the player, while comparing it to LoTRO which allegedly did a better job at that. Well, i happen to disagree. :)

From what i read about TOR, there’s virtually no grind; and where is, players barely mind/notice. I hope to see it for myself, soon.

Grimbran

To be honest, I think Merrick and Syp were dead-on about detachment from the storyline and Rift world in general. LoTRO does a far better job of making the player feel involved and relevant to the world, in my opinion. From the way you describe LoTRO, it sounds like you played it like a WoW player would. (pickup and drop off quests automatically, not reading text. And probably lost track of the Epic Quest storyline in Lotro around the Tom Bombadil area, if not before, which is easy to do if you let it.) If that is so, I completely understand how you could feel that way. I read the text with each Rift quest, and most of the time it would be a bunch of random lore-garble about characters I’d never met, and their beliefs/desires. And most quest hubs dropped the previous one’s story to start whole new ones. And none of the stories seemed to matter in the next zone, which would drop everything before and try to start over.

LoTRO’s epic storyline gives you a connection to the fellowship of the books/movies and gives you a tie-together for why you are going into the next zone, a sort of continuity if you will. And it is easy to differentiate between a local quest that is part of the local flavor of the zone and a part of the epic quest chain, which pulls you from zone to zone as you try to make a difference in the overall war against sauron. And Geldarion makes a great point about the LoTRO expansion that just came out. The zones will even phase to different content to reflect your progress in the epic storyline, further cementing the feel that you are relevant to the plot.

Anda

You may have missed the section in my original comment where i say i *do* read the quest text and am familiar with the lore. :) (Never played WoW btw.) Even so, i did find the whole package lacking. Played through all the book quests and, save for a few, they weren’t too interesting, although i understand that other players found them engaging. I’ll give you the tie-ins with the next zone/quest hub, too – these exist in Rift as well, just for the record :).

At the end of the day, i played LoTRO for years, initially because i loved the carefully crafted world of the Shire and a few other zones. Then it wore off and i played because i enjoyed some of the classes and their group contribution (still consider the warden one of the best classes in MMOs). Towards the end, playing became a habit and i was looking for an excuse to stop playing. Turbine gave it to me by taking over the whole service and their overall handling of problems.

In Rift, i didn’t expect anything extra, just wanted to pass time between LoTRO and TOR. And i fell in love with the world, story, soul system, TRION’s unbeatable reaction speed and the pace of adding new content. Then again, that’s a subscription service…

I’m sorry i sound so bitter and disenchanted by Turbine and LoTRO, i probably view things in much worse light than they really are. Probably should have quit the game sooner and remember only the good things.

http://thefanaticalswordsman.wordpress.com Geldarion

This was awesome! I can’t wait for the next episode! Both Merric and Syp in the same podcast…too epic. Missed Goldenstar, though, I understand that this is a boys’ podcast (which is fine by me, hangin’ with the boys!)

http://twitter.com/tdhowell Thomas Dodge Howell

We may have her on in the future. :)

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Ranette

Very good podcast, loved the Rift analysis, I also played for about 7 months, 4 level 50′s rank 6 pvp, and I just quit because “Telara didnt stick to me”. Totally agree with you guys, looking forward to the next podcast.
Grimbran

Really enjoyed the show!
1) I agree about Rift completely. I liked the class system (tons o choices), rifts/invasions were initially cool and then quickly became predictable and pointless, and tutorial/intros were very cool. Other than those two things, everything felt like re-skinned wow. Waaaay too close for me. Pair that with an uninvolving storyline, no world-attachment, battlegrounds copy-pasted from WoW, and I played it for only 10 days before quitting in my mid-20′s. I will give them props though for rapid changes based on customer feedback though, and just generally staying in touch with the community. I havent seen a game do that as well as Rift pretty much ever. If I actually enjoyed the game itself, I’d be in heaven.

2) I’ve got mixed feelings about WoW already. It does what it does very well [dungeons/raids and pvp] but once one gets tired of it then there is nowhere to go and no reason to stay. Your only alternative to [raid/pvp/old-faction] grinding is grinding on one of the other 2 things. And the new expansion announcement didn’t entice me much. I’m fine with pandarens being added, though I never really wanted it. Pokemon-ish pet combat im fine with, because I can choose not to do it if its dumb. But I have two big beefs with the new expansion: A) a kung-fu class just doesnt fit in WoW for me. No interest in it. (esp paired with pandas which gives the horrible kung-fu panda similarity) B) Further dumbing down the talent tree system, giving even less choices than cataclysm does. 90 levels and i will get to make only 6 talent tree choices? really? The main reason I quit WoW right as Cataclysm was coming out was because of the shrinking of the talent tree and dumbing-down equipment stats. I was hoping they would pull a U-turn and not go even further down that road. “A” i can sorta deal with by not rolling one, but I can’t choose to avoid the new talent-tree system, “B”, just like I couldn’t with cataclysm.
Zyngor

This was too long. I didn’t listen.

But seriously, I did – nice job, gents. I may not be currently playing any other MMO than LotRO, but I’ll certainly tune in to hear your thoughts on the MMOsphere, in delicious half hour medium potion-sized gulps.
Tawariel

Great job guys. I like the 30 minute format – easier to fit into my day.

My feelings about Rift are similar. I also played for 6 or 7 months, and got tired of the never-ending gear grind. As a working person, I found the time sink almost too much to gear a single toon up for raiding, never mind alts. Every time I logged in job #1 was to grind out yet more gear so I could continue raid. It’s the WOW style end game, I guess, scaled to best serve folks who have few RL commitments. I also PVP’d a fair bit, including the PVP Raid rifts. Build Wars, mostly. I was in one battle ground where the entire opposing side was Parachamps. The build system is interesting but very much dominated by FotM. It wasn’t just hard to attach to Telera, getting attached to a particular toon was risky because the OP/nerf pendulum swung so hard and so often.
Stephenfry

Is this weekly? Because its simply awesome. Syp AND Merric! Wow. Not WoW btw, WOW. AMAZING.
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Too Long; Didn’t Listen Episode 1 – Our Introduction

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