One Of These Alts

The Only MOSTLY Dead Post

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:57:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Time” by Freddie Mercury (From the excellent and unavailable soundtrack to the musical “Dave Clark’s Time”)

"It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”

Kind of like this blog. (Goodness, where has the time gone?)

This has been an interesting year, with my gaming becoming increasingly portable and small-scale (I love my 4th-gen iPod Touch, although I’d love one of those prohibitively expensive iPads even more), and my MMO time being increasingly short in duration and generally tourist-like. Needless to say, I’ve been short of things to write about. (Although I’ll qualify that by mentioning that my life outside of gaming has been entertaining, with 23kg/50lb of weight lost since my last post in January with a new interest in fitness and diet now sharing my spare time, and a mostly painless 40th birthday now safely behind me)

Anyway, with SWTOR almost upon us (Impatient? Me?) I’ve been feeling the desire to dabble in writing once more, with a focus on TOR while it holds my attention but ranging a little further afield in time. (It helps that a good number of MMOs I’ve spent time in the past with have either become or are in the process of transitioning to free-to-play – have to love that kind of low barrier to entry)

My initial plan (once the head start begins) is to re-roll my beta bounty hunter (admittedly, mostly because of delightful starting companion Mako) and see where the game takes me. (I played Kia, the character in my screenshots, up to around level 28 in the last beta and enjoyed myself thoroughly, and now I want to see where her storyline takes her – and me.)

I enjoyed most of the mechanics of the class (unfortunately I have a tendency to pull more than I could handle on occasion, and even with a healing companion to back me up I found that it’s not really easy to burst down one mob and heal myself and tank the other two mobs beating on me, all at the same time), plus the storytelling (and the accompanying voice work, which worked wonders to help immerse me in my character) was easily good enough to keep me from pressing space to fast forward through the dialogue in the best WoW tradition.

In other personal gaming news, I’m still subscribed to WoW (having made the foolish, in hindsight, decision to sign up for the Annual Pass – I’m giving serious thought to taking the nuclear option of deleting my account completely), but am not playing other than transmuting truegold once a day and selling various pets in the AH – I don’t have the patience (or the thick skin) needed to spend time in the dungeon finder and LFR to gear up for… Well, for no real reason, if I’m not raiding.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the Star Trek Online F2P beta, and found that the new Duty Officer system is curiously more absorbing than the rest of the game (indeed, the character XP it awards is actually quite effective for levelling your captain on its own). Skyrim claimed my attention for a while before TOR beta, but I find it hard to go back to it now with its less-than-immersive storytelling, regardless of how open the world is. Dungeon Defenders also claimed my attention for a while (I’ve levelled a squire to level 58, and an apprentice to nearly 30), but I’m running into the limits of my solo-play patience again. Champions Online was an entertaining enough brief distraction, but it didn’t really hold my attention, much like City of Heroes (although CO had less of a “What can we sell you today?” vibe than CoH).

The F2P Everquest 2 tempts – or rather, the Ratonga do – but I just haven’t been able to find the appeal in the rest of the game world. Global Agenda is currently still installed despite my lack of playtime, but Dungeons and Dragons Online has finally been uninstalled, along with a few other titles that had been gathering digital dust and electronic cobwebs. (Oh, the Defense Grid expansion, You Monster, tempts me to the bottom of my tower-defense-loving-soul but I’ll probably leave that for the time being – Also, Hey! Isn’t it nearly Steam sale time?)

Anyway, I’ll leave this entry short and to the point (insofar as I’m ever really all that concise) and get back to mentally urging time to pass faster.

Has my headstart email arrived yet?

How about now?

Now?

/wave

DCUO – A Brief Distraction

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 01:09:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” by Five For Fighting

It’s deja vu all over again. After about 48 hours play over about two weeks (according to the Steam client, including time spent dabbling with other characters), I’ve hit the level cap with my superhero in DC Universe Online. I’m reminded in many ways of Star Trek Online, to be honest, and I can see a similar future ahead for DCUO.

Quick micro-review time:

The two games have some interesting things in common. The two games launched with very solid game engines, stable servers, and very low level caps that didn’t take long to reach. DCUO has a little more endgame content at launch (2, 4 and 8 player instances, and hard versions of single-player instances), but the UI is pretty unimpressive (especially the chat system).

The character customisation system is kind of nifty, but the UI around it is pretty minimal (like much of the UI, to be honest – it does just enough to get the job done, but don’t expect much usability). You can change the look of each gear slot (without changing the actual item equipped in the slot, which is a very nice touch) and alter the displayed colours on each piece, but are limited to the three-colour palette that you’ve set for your costume (although you can change these colours for your entire costume at any time). Unfortunately there’s no way of saving costumes, so if you have more than one that you wish to change between, it’s a matter of manually changing each piece in your inventory whenever you want to switch. If you have multiple gear sets for your character’s roles, you’ll have to switch out items individually as well.

Grouping is also fairly hit-and-miss, if you don’t have friends to play with or a league – the game’s guild-equivalent. You can get into alerts – the 4-player instances – with a LFD-styled queue, but for the harder ones you’ll want players for each of the four roles (tank, healer, controller, dps). Unfortunately while the game has you select your role when you queue up, it fails to explain what the roles are to players and doesn’t force players to take non-dps roles, so alerts with 4 dps players aren’t uncommon (and they usually aren’t all that successful).

I soloed most of my way to 30 (with a handful of alerts, where my ice tank hero attempted, sometimes successfully, to tank) and my 30 ding was something of a relief – my first thought was “Well, now I can cancel my subscription”. It’s not that the game is bad – indeed, the combat system is actually quite fun, and is a lot more visceral than games I usually play – it’s just that there isn’t much to the game besides the combat. Actually, the only other activity is collecting items and briefs. Oh, there’s the costume customisation aspect as well (supported by collecting new costume parts from combat and collecting), but without something like the WoW Armory or the Sporepedia where you can show off your creations outside the game, it’s of very limited interest to me.

Unfortunately a combat-based game with an item-collection sideline just isn’t enough to hold my attention – and definitely not enough to justify a subscription, no matter how nice the combat system might be. (Maybe I’d be more inclined if I was a DC fan, but I’ve been more partial to Marvel’s stories and characters, so I don’t even have the franchise to hold my attention)

Still, in the same way that STO has managed to overcome its disappointing launch and prosper as a niche MMO, I can see DCUO still being around in a year with an enthusiastic (albeit smaller) player-base, with active development continuing to add new content (and improving the lacklustre UI). I won’t be playing it, though.

Currently on my radar are Rift and Dungeons, both of which I’m sure are rife with opportunities to disappoint (and the next wave of the Rift beta starts in a couple of days). For now, though, Protector: The Planes awaits my attention.

/wave

So This Is Cataclysm…

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:37:00 +0000

Well, long time no write. In my defence, so many more talented bloggers have been keeping us informed (and entertained), and I really haven’t had anything to add, other than a heart-felt “Is that it?”

Yes, I’m another person who’s underwhelmed with what Blizzard has brought to the table with Cataclysm, and I’m currently spending my time turning my small pile of gold into a slightly larger pile of gold through various machinations on the AH.

I’ve currently leveled Mingle to 85, and she’s decently geared for heroics (only two greens remaining, her wand and one trinket, and wearing the epic crafted healer belt). Her tailoring and inscription are both at 525, and inscription is proving a nice money-spinner with mysterious fortune cards and inferno inks.

Pringle managed to get to 82 in Vashj’ir, and has maxed jewelcrafting and enchanting. Prospecting ore is still more fun than milling herbs, by the way.

Dingle is still sitting at 80, having very briefly ventured into Hyjal, but hasn’t really had much more time spent with her.

Ringle has been through Hyjal a little further, but I just haven’t been interested in leveling her to 84, where she’ll need to be to gain access to the recipe vendors in Twilight Highlands (she’s currently sitting on 490 leatherworking and 511 blacksmithing).

The surprise has been Kringle, who I’ve enjoyed levelling the most – hunters are still the most solo-friendly class. It’s kind of telling that even so, he’s only managed to reach 83 (but has 525 alchemy, and switched from herbalism to skinning to help provide leather for Ringle’s leveling, reaching 525 in that by the end of Hyjal). Kringle’s currently sitting in Deepholm, having completed the first of the pillar quest chains (with a cute pet turtle from BFD).

I’ve also run a Worgen through the new starting zone (and been… underwhelmed by the theme-park linearity and the feeling that you’re along for the ride) and have a Goblin most of the way through their starting zone (also underwhelmed buy most, but not all, of the experience – still a themepark, but occasionally a fun one). All I can say is, they had to make those zones once-only events – when you’ve been through the ride once, there’s nothing to come back to (and I can see the need to go through the ride for new characters to be a disincentive).

Incidentally, who else can foresee Worgen being left in the background while Goblins get thoroughly integrated into the WoW lore in the same way that Draenei and Blood Elves came to be treated after Wrath? (No, I’m not saying “Blizzard love Horde more than Alliance”, just pointing out that they really dropped the ball with Draenei after they dropped them into the WoW lore with TBC, and from what we’ve seen of Worgen and Goblin presence in Cata so far, it’s looking like Goblins will be favoured in the same way that Blood Elves were)

Now, there have been quite a few things that I’ve enjoyed about the post-80 Cata experience – a number of quite fun moments in the various zones, and some fun new mechanics (although I’ve yet to abuse Lifegrip with Mingle). But on the whole, Blizz seem to have substituted the breadth of gameplay pre-Cataclysm (for example, wrath levelling which had multiple paths all the way from 70-80) with a very linear leveling path brightened with the occasional patch of polish and occasional illusion of choice.

Incidentally, I’m really surprised they let the issues through in the final release where if you miss a quest-giver, you’ll find yourself locked out of further questing in a zone until you’ve managed to find the lost quest-giver (with no suggestion from the game that this is the case). I’ve been caught out by this twice in Hyjal, but fortunately haven’t tripped over it in Vashj’ir yet (which is apparently problematic, with the 3d terrain).

I’ve managed to force myself to grind Mingle to 525 archaeology (over several days and many hours, with most of the time spent auto-flying while I read a book or played another game on my ipod touch – thank goodness for Archy, which cut-down on the time-wasting quite substantially), and it confirmed my suspicion that it was going to be less fun than fishing, and mostly just a massive travel time sink. (Seriously, who thought this implementation was a good idea?)

I didn’t have the confidence to do any LFD while I was levelling, and my experiences have consisted of a healing a single run of normal Lost City of the Tol’vir with Mingle – horror stories from guildmates about the new state of pugs (now that healers can’t heal through stupid, and being blamed and/or abused for wipes because of this change) and the challenge of Cata healing (with mana management being the new measure of a healer’s ability) really made an effective deterrent to my giving it a try.

However, doing a normal run at 85 wasn’t excessively painful, aside from half-expected mana issues (there was just one wipe, but a couple of the dps had a couple of extra deaths while I was trying to keep up the tank). The problem for me is that healing just (as I’m hearing increasingly often) wasn’t fun. The change from “I want to decide who lives and who dies” from Wrath healing to “I hope I don’t run out of mana, and and please please please let the dps remember to run out of the fire” hasn’t been especially entertaining (especially as someone who used to LFD almost exclusively).

Currently? I’m mostly logging in to prospect for, cut and sell gems. And transmute Truegold. And mill herbs for cards and inferno ink to sell. And I’m hard-pressed to raise the enthusiasm to ~~run alts through the new theme-parks~~ level up other characters, as there’s nothing of interest for me at 85. The thought of hardmode raiding makes my skin crawl, and even normal modes aren’t appealing (although I suspect finding a guild which is just running normal modes may be challenging). Heroic 5-mans? Pugging them isn’t something to be done voluntarily (especially as a healer), but I have no interest in guild runs (probably because I still don’t feel comfortable in this guild). Normal 5-mans? My single attempt just didn’t engage me, even though the group did manage to complete it. (I’ve also heard a number of complaints about the length of Wrath 5-mans – do they need to make them quicker? Or is that solely a result of group competence?) Rep grinds? Well, if you’re not doing Heroics, they’re not really needed.

The sad thing for me is, there just isn’t really anything else. I’ve never been interested in achievements (aside from Loremaster on Mingle), I don’t collect pets, and… My dream of levelling more Dwarves lost substantial momentum when I realised that the revamped 1-60 levelling, while a substantial improvement over vanilla, was a lot more linear than I cared for (although not as bad as 80-85 has turned out to be).

I think I’ve run out of interest in WoW again – which is kind of unexpected, considering how much Cataclysm promised. Unfortunately it would appear that much of what it offers has a real lack of replayability for my playstyle, and I’m starting to run into that already.

But hey, it’s looking like there could be some interesting new titles in the near future - DC Universe Online (check out TotalBiscuit’s beta footage of the character creator and starting zone footage if you’re curious) and Earthrise come to mind (along with Rift in about two more months) - not to mention the substantial number of games recently on sale on Steam and other digital vendors (I’m currently knee-deep in Darkstar One and revisiting City of Heroes briefly).

WoW, on the other hand, is just something I’m playing if I’m feeling bored (or more accurately, until I get bored, which isn’t taking long). Cataclysm might have changed the world, but it wasn’t really a change that’s worked for me.

/wave

Priest PvP Gear: 4.0.1 Update

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:25:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Act of War” by Elton John and Millie Jackson

I’m still easing my way back into the game, but thought it was time to start getting my head around the changes Honor Points have made to buying PvP gear. My old guide here still covers most of the available gear, but it’s now possible to buy items that previously required an arena rating (namely weapons and accessories).

I’m also expanding the list to include all available caster cloth (I’m not really up with the play as far as the preferred stats for different specs, so the math is up to you). Basically these lists will tell you what is available, but it’s up to you which pieces you buy.

First, the PvP sets that are now available for purchase. There’s not really any reason to purchase the older sets (unless you like the aesthetics of a particular set), so you should really save up for the best – however, you’re unable to purchase the Wrathful shoulders which still require an arena or battleground rating of 2000 (which can’t be earned until the next season, at which time this gear will be obsolete). The difference between the two sets is (now, at least) that the Investiture set has spirit where the Raiment set has crit rating.

	Savage Inv/Rai	Hateful Inv/Rai	Deadly Inv/Rai	Furious Inv/Rai	Relentless Inv/Rai	Wrathful Inv/Rai
Head	550	660	770	935	1100	1650
Shoulder	348	417	487	591	695	n/a
Chest	550	660	770	935	1100	1650
Gloves	348	417	487	591	695	1040
Legs	550	660	770	935	1100	1650
ilvl	200	200	213	232	251	270

You also now have a wide variety of weapons to choose from, as the lower tier of arena weapons are no longer require an arena rating to purchase.

Weapons and Accessories (ilvl264)
Wrathful Gladiator’s War Staff (Haste)	2550
Wrathful Gladiator’s Focus Staff (Hit)	2550
Wrathful Gladiator’s Battle Staff (Crit)	2550
Wrathful Gladiator’s Energy Staff (Spirit)	2550
Wrathful Gladiator’s Spellblade (Crit)	1830
Wrathful Gladiator’s Blade of Alacrity (Haste)	1830
Wrathful Gladiator’s Gavel (Spirit)	1830
Wrathful Gladiator’s Endgame (Crit)	70
Wrathful Gladiator’s Compendium (Haste)	70
Wrathful Gladiator’s Grimoire (Spell Pen)	70
Wrathful Gladiator’s Reprieve (Spirit)	70
Wrathful Gladiator’s Touch of Defeat (Crit)	260
Wrathful Gladiator’s Wand of Alacrity (Haste)	260
Wrathful Gladiator’s Piercing Touch (Spell Pen)	260
Wrathful Gladiator’s Baton of Light (Spirit)	260

And of course there are the accompanying accessories and non-set items available from the usual vendor.

Wrathful Gladiator non-set items
Cord of Dominance (crit)	945
Cord of Alacrity (haste)	945
Cord of Salvation (spirit)	945
Treads of Dominance (crit)	945
Treads of Alacrity (haste)	945
Treads of Salvation (spirit)	945
Cuffs of Dominance (crit)	600
Cuffs of Alacrity (haste)	600
Cuffs of Salvation (spirit)	600
Cloak of Dominance (crit)	725
Cloak of Subjugation (haste)	725
Cloak of Ascendancy (hit)	725
Cloak of Salvation (spirit)	725
Cloak of Deliverance (spirit)	725
Band of Dominance	725
Pendant of Dominance (crit)	725
Pendant of Subjugation (haste)	725
Pendant of Ascendancy (hit)	725
Pendant of Salvation (spirit)	725
Pendant of Deliverance (spirit)	725

It’s still possible to purchase Relentless and Furious non-set items, but for the minimal saving you may as well buy the best you can. The Battlemaster’s trinkets are still available (along with an updated faction Medallion) and may have some use, along with the PvP shoulder enchant.

Medallion of the Alliance/Horde (ilvl264)	945
Battlemaster’s Ruination (int)	630
Battlemaster’s Fury (crit)	630
Battlemaster’s Vivacity (haste)	630
Battlemaster’s Precision (hit)	630
Greater Inscription of the Gladiator	165

Wintergrasp items now also cost honor points – a change that could be argued is long overdue,especially if your faction has had trouble winning or defending Wintergrasp. Admittedly at this stage the only pieces worth bothering with would be the shoulderpads (at a stretch - the Relentless set shoulders are the same item level), and possibly trinkets.

	Price	ilvl
Titan-Forged Cloak of Ascendancy	280	245
Titan-Forged Pendant of Ascendancy	280	245
Titan-Forged Shoulderpads of Salvation	490	251
Titan-Forged Shoulderpads of Domination	490	251
Arcanum of Dominance	65
Inscription of Dominance	50
Flow of Knowledge	280	200
Titan-Forged Slippers of Dominance	280	200
Titan-Forged Slippers of Salvation	280	200
Titan-Forged Hood of Dominance	490	200
Titan-Forged Hood of Salvation	490	200
Titan-Forged Raiment of Dominance	490	213
Titan-Forged Raiment of Salvation	490	213
Titan-Forged Cord of Salvation	280	213
Titan-Forged Cord of Determination	280	213
Titan-Forged Rune of Audacity	280	213
Titan-Forged Rune of Cruelty	280	213
Titan-Forged Rune of Accuracy	280	213
Titan-Forged Rune of Alacrity	280	213
Platinum Disks of Sorcery	280	213
Platinum Disks of Swiftness	280	213
Titan-Forged Cloth Trousers of Salvation	490	232
Titan-Forged Cloth Trousers of Domination	490	232
Titan-Forged Cuffs of Salvation	280	226
Titan-Forged Band of Ascendancy	280	226

In any case, it’s now entirely possible to gear up in battlegrounds (now that weapons, off-hands and frills are available).

Hope this is helpful, now it’s not really neccesary. (Will we have the Shattering next week? I’m certainly hoping so!)

/wave

Glyphmas Comes But Once An Expansion

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:17:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “They Say It’s Spring” by Blossom Dearie (in honour of some glorious spring days of late)

Hmmm, has it really been so long? (Considering my last post was over three weeks ago, signs point to “Yes”)

I haven’t fallen off the edge of Azeroth, at least not all the way down. I’ve been taking a breather, and enjoying things outside of WoW, not least of which is a change of diet (tried buckwheat noodles for dinner tonight, and it was particularly yummy) and getting some exercise into my day (inspired by Xeonio’s progress). I’ve also been reading about Stoicism, after coming across a link to a book review on the subject on Boing Boing a couple of months back.

In-game, I’ve been reaping the profits of being a Scribe; Glyphmas has been and gone, and I’ve made over 200k in sales (only 150k of that being profit, as I hadn’t prepared for it with anything remotely resembling diligence, and I missed the first couple of days). I’ve also been spending some of my collected Justice Points to gear up Ringle and Mingle (Isn’t the new community site nifty? I’ll admit to a “They wouldn’t dare” moment when I saw my RL name displayed above my selected main character, but it appears to only show up for you when you’re logged in), despite the fact the gear will be replaced by quest rewards in under a month (and I definitely won’t be keeping it, especially that truly awful rogue T10).

I’ve also been farming crusader seals with Ringle (although not from jousting) in order to purchase the third hippogryph mount for her enjoyment (probably my favourite mount in the game); tomorrow will put her over the magic 150, which leaves me in search of a new goal.

And I’ve been roped into joining a guild which a friend is an officer in(ostentionably to help with guild leveling, but probably really because they just don’t have enough gorgeous dwarven women). I’m keeping Pringle in OOTA as my banker (I really wish we had goblins on Alli side for that), but Dingle, Ringle and Mingle have all jumped ship.

I’ve been doing a little bit of writing for my arty project, but it’s still early days and I’m trying to decided what format to take it in. (My inability to write accents doesn’t help, especially with the dwarf-heavy cast. Actually, writing dialogue at all is a challenge.)

For now, it’s time for more writing (although no NaNoWriMo for me, unlike other more talented writers), the occasional daily LFD, and the tail-end of Glyphmas. Oh, and sleep. [3AM Crits you for 100k]

/wave

WoW: An Artistic Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 14:30:00 +0000

I’ve been contemplating a new project (related to this blog), and as part of my deliberations I put together this little combination of screenshot, WoWModelViewer, Photoshop (and a couple of nice little 3rd-party filters).

It’s just a proof-of-concept image (click for the full image), intended to make it look like I’ve been busy while I consider my options (and take lots of notes). It’s called “Entering Ironforge” – what can I say, I love prosaic titles.

/wave

WoW: Guess What’s Hiding In 4.0.1

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:55:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Moondance” by Van Morrison

I noticed something interesting while 4.0.1 was installing, and now I’ve found a working version of WoWModelViewer (the ‘DEV WORK’ version, so you should be surprised if it works) I found something veeeeeeery nice.

Isn’t Miss Goblin cute? And she has company.

Meet Mister Goblin. Some great little touches in his animations – I particularly love the way his ears sag when he cries, it’s quite touching.

Mr Worgan. Pretty much what you’d expect. And last, but not least…

And Ms Worgen. While she’s still prone to lycanthropic Chihuahua-ism when viewed from certain angles (and some of her animations have clipping issues with her armour that you wouldn’t believe), she’s not as poorly modeled as the initial screenshots of her from the char select screen would suggest.

She does seem to need a good few layers of polish, though.

Roll on 4.0.3!

/wave

WoW: Vanity Thy Name Is…

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:16:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon

I decided to do something about my unguilded state, and the easiest route was a vanity guild for myself. I purchased the guild bank slots while I was at it, so there’s a lot of space for me to fill with bits and pieces while I wait for Cata.

I’m not planning on making the guild a ‘real’ one (I’ve been a GL before, and it turns out I’m pretty dire at it), but it gives me somewhere to put my alts while I fail to get around to finding a raiding guild for Cata.

Now to go fishing for Mr Pinchy.

/wave

Shared Topic: What’s In A Name?

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 02:27:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Who? Where? Why?” by Jesus Jones

I’m usually not motivated enough to take part in the shared topics on Blog Azeroth, but this one caught me at a time when I’m reassessing my naming habits in preparation for adding new characters to my roster, come 4.0.1 and Cataclysm. (Warning: incoming stream of consciousness!)

I initially touched on my naming habits a looooooong time ago, but for those new here it can all be traced back to a mouse. I love the name Dinglemouse, a character from Spike Milligan’s book Badjelly the Witch (which I really need to buy a copy of). When I initially considered using the name for one of my characters, I decided to save it and try a variation first, which was Pringlerouse. Variations begat variations, and soon I had seven dwarves to play with (although Fingle has since moved servers, leaving me with an open spot in the roster, and there’s still no Snow White to keep them in line).

My current assortment on Dath’Remar, nominally my home server, is Pringlerouse (80 rogue), Kringlelouse (80 hunter), Dinglemouse (80 warrior, and star of my last few blog posts), Ringleprouse (80 rogue), Mingledouse (80 priest), Binglerouse (80 pally), Tingleflouse (35 druid and the only non-dwarf) and Ninglethouse (very disposable 58 DK and AH mule). On other servers my highest level characters are server transferee Finglethouse, an 80 dwarf priest and Pringle, an 80 gnome rogue on Argent Dawn (home of SAN-US), and Dinglemouse, a 70 troll rogue on Aman’Thul.

While Pringle, Dingle, Mingle and Ringle are pretty much guaranteed to stay around on Dath, I’m looking at re-rolling (and probably renaming) Kringle and Bingle with 4.0.1, and replacing (and definitely renaming) Tingle with a Worgen druid come Cataclysm. My quandary now is how best to name these new characters - it’s been hard to come up with names that fitted the system I’d been using yet sounded as good as the original ones (Kringlelouse never really rang true, and Binglerouse sounds more like a gnome), and I’ve been resistant to the idea of breaking tradition (at least, until now).

Incidentally, one little exercise which has helped me firm up the identities behind the names of my characters was a collection of little thumbnail descriptions I did of each of the main characters when I entered the Cataclysm Comic Contest a few weeks back on Disciplinary Action. (The winners’ prizes were really quite delightful, by the way)

Mingledouse, the pathologically pessimistic priest.
Dinglemouse, the timid tank.
Kringlelouse, the hunter who’s allergic to pets.
Binglerouse, the paladin atheist.
Ringleprouse, the clumsy yet ridiculously lucky rogue.
Pringlerouse, not a serial killer, honest.

Needless to say, while I’m definitely not a roleplayer it was fun to come up with simple hooks upon which I can hang the identities of my characters (even if they are just currently purely cosmetic hooks – although the behind-the-webcomic-scenes post on DA today has left me… a little contemplative of possibilities).

But I digress. (Like usual)

As I said above, for my dwarves my current system hasn’t really scaled beyond four of the first five, which means it’s as good a time as any to come up with something new (and probably more individual this time round), which means time to hit some online name generators to see what I can find which sounds good (probably my only criteria).

As far as other characters go, well, they’ve pretty much inherited dwarven names out of habit. My troll desperately needs a unique name of his own, and I’ll have to get creative if I roll some more horde-side characters (including a goblin, of course). As names are pretty much forever (or until you spend some cold, hard cash), they’re not something I want to come to regret. Time to cogitate.

After all, the Cataclysm is coming, so what better time to make some sweeping changes. Not just to how you play, but also to who.

/wave

WoW: D1 Mission Accomplished

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:52:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Uam Uam” by Povo

After much trials, tribulations, and many many runs of UBRS, I’ve not only completed Dingle’s D1 set, I’ve also completed the quest chains to upgrade it all to D2.

For the D2 set, WoW Insider helped out again with its mini-guide for the upgrade quest chains. But there’s several bits and pieces that they didn’t elaborate upon, which took a bit of doing on top of the ridiculous amount of travelling required for the D2 quests.

The first noticeable hurdle was Anthion’s Strange Request, the third quest in the chain to upgrade your leg, feet and shoulder pieces. This quest has you provide three Dark Iron Bars, 20 Enchanted Leather, three Mooncloth and four Cured Rugged Hides. The mooncloth was easy to find on the AH, but I had to make the Enchanted Leather and Cured Rugged Hides on my enchanter and leatherworker. The Dark Iron Bars are a little trickier, as you need to complete The Spectral Chalice in BRD before your miner is able to smelt them from ore. It was an easy solo for my level 80, and it took longer to procure the 10 truesilver bars than anything else.

Anthion’s Old Friend was the next hiccup, requiring the Crescent Key to get into the Dire Maul library. Fortunately this is just a minor speed bump, requiring a partial run through Dire Maul East to kill Pussilin for it.

The Three Kings of Flame is another speed bump, with Duke of Cynders being noticeably subject to the RNG. I stocked up with several sets of the Twilight Cultist gear (and a couple of Abyssal Signets) from the AH to use in the numerous attempts at summoning which you may (or may not) need to get him to appear – he’s a 1-in-4 chance from a Wind Stone, so good luck!

The last hold-up was getting a Flask of Supreme Power to turn-in for Final Preparations. As a vanilla flask, it wasn’t listed on the AH all that frequently, and I ended up taking one of my alchemists into Scholomance to farm Ras Frostwhisper for the recipe.

In the end, the longest hold-up to completing my D2 was actually getting the last item of my D1, the Breastplate of Valor, to drop. It was only on Dingle’s 19th run that Drakkisath finally relinquished it. And then it was back to Ironforge to turn in the final quest, and receive the last two pieces of her D2.

Accessorising is still a work in progress, but for now I’m using Dal’Rend’s Sacred Charge and the Draconian Deflector, along with the Knight’s Colors tabard. The weapon isn’t perfect, but it looks more substantial than the usual one-handed weapons, and the colours of the shield are close enough.

Next? Well, that’s a good question. Which is to say, I have no idea just yet. But with luck 4.0.1 is under a week away, and that’ll mean new toys (or at least, new abilities) to play with.

For now, I guess I’ll go on a road-tour of capitals or something suitably exhibitionist.

/wave

WoW: More D1 Farming

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 03:42:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere” by The Moody Blues

Now I’m busy farming for Dingle’s pieces of D1 (as opposed to planning for it), I’ve come across some useful tips (and things that would have saved me some time, had I thought of them earlier).

First, of course, is WoW Insider, who’ve put together a list of all the Dungeon One pieces for all 9 classes who have a set. Have a look here.

Scholomance:

Guess who forgot that the place needs a key? You’ll want to make sure you’ve unlocked the quest chain by doing Clear the Way and All Along the Watchtowers, at which stage you can pick up Scholomance (and get ready to go to Gadgetzan and Un’goro Crater).

Kirtonos the Herald? Well, turns out he needs an item to be summoned, Blood of Innocents. Quest time again! You’ll want to talk to Eva Sarkhoff, who stands just outside Scholomance. After several pages of dialogue, you’re offered the first quest in her chain, Doctor Theolen Krostinov, the Butcher.

In the followup quest, Krastinov’s Bag of Horrors, you’ll be called upon to kill Janice Barov, who’s tricky to find (especially if you don’t know your way around the place, as was the case for me). Once you’ve completed and turned in this quest you’re given your first Blood, and future kills of the Blood Steward of Kirtonos (an NPC in the library), Doctor Krastinov and Jandice usually drop additional bloods.

To summon Darkmaster Gandling, who drops the Helm, you need to kill the six mini-bosses around his study, along with all the mobs in Instructor Malicia’s room. This can be tricky for a strictly physical damage class like a warrior, as the Scholomance Occultists have a nasty habit of turning into ghosts who are immune to physical damage when their health reaches around 40%. This is a good time to be an engineer for the Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket (Stratholme Holy Water is a useful alternative for a non-engineer). The best way I found was to use devastate until the occultist reached around 60% health, then Shield Slam (or Revenge, although that can cause problems if you’re specced into Improved Revenge as the damage to a second occultist can cause it to transform) to kill it before it could transform.

Blackrock Spire:

Lost much? (Well, yes actually.) I was surprised to realise that the dungeons referred to as Lower Blackrock Spire and Upper Blackrock Spire (LBRS and UBRS respectively) are actually two areas of the same instance. While you’ll likely to learn your way around after some time, expect to get lost a lot. The Atlas addon is highly recommended in here (and looking for walkthrough videos on youtube is probably a good idea as well).

For warriors I’d recommend working through UBRS first (as two bosses drop D1 pieces) and then clearing out LBRS for the small chance that your Bracers drop (and bear in mind when they say those are a rare drop, they’re not kidding).

I’ve managed to accumulate seven pieces now, with only the Breastplate eluding me (and let me say now, I really dislike Drakkisath’s conflagration attack). Time to take a break and upgrade the pieces I have into their D2 equivalents. Queue “Farming D2” post!

Which leads to the eternal question: how best to accessorise?

/wave

WoW: Boredom And Dungeon 1 Sets

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 03:29:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Maniac” by Michael Sembello

In my quest to make my characters look like my characters (as opposed to your average I-pug-for-badges tier-wearer), I discovered a new self-evident truth: when you’re feeling bored and are looking for something to farm, there’s always your class’s Dungeon 1 set. (Ok, in this instance ‘your class’ doesn’t include death knights as they don’t have any item sets in vanilla or TBC content, but who plays a DK anyway?)

Now that I’ve a comfortable quantity of gold under my belt, the lull between dull, dreary old content and ZOMG exciting new content is subject to a little nagging temptation: “Hey, why don’t you spend some of that gold on your alts, with prices for mats and gear getting so low?” Needless to say, it wouldn’t take long to turn that comfortable quantity into a very small pile, regardless of low prices. (Plus with Cata coming Soon™, why spend gold on something soon to be replaced with questing greens?)

The character who’s been tempting me the most has been my warrior tank, Dinglemouse. This is fortunate as she’s not only capable of grinding through old Azeroth content (although pretty much any characters can manage it at level 80 with half-decent gear), but is also an engineer which offers some time-saving abilities when out in the field with Scrapbots to vendor trash (quite inexpensively as well, at a cost of only 2 saronite bars per bot) and Moll-E and Jeeves for extra ways to empty my bags of more valuable items if needed.

First, though, you need to work out where the set pieces drop. Cue this handy table for the warrior items:

Item	Dropped By	Found In
Helm of Valor	Darkmaster Gandling	Scholomance
Spaulders of Valor	Warchief Rend Blackhand	Upper Blackrock Spire
Breastplate of Valor	General Drakkisath	Upper Blackrock Spire
Bracers of Valor (BoE)	Trash mobs, Quartermaster Zigris	Lower Blackrock Spire
Gauntlets of Valor (BoE)	Ramstein the Gorger	Stratholme
Legplates of Valor	Baron Rivendare	Stratholme
Belt of Valor (BoE)	Trash mobs	Stratholme, Lower Blackrock Spire
Boots of Valor	Kirtonos the Herald	Scholomance

Now, three of these pieces are BoE and can be picked up in the AH (usually for a song). However, the gauntlets and belt are easy to pick up in Stratholme while farming Rivendare for the legplates, so purchasing them is likely unnecessary. The bracers on the other hand are worth purchasing if you come across them, as they’re the only item (once you have the belt) that requires running LBRS.

For convenience I started at the north of the continent, running Stratholme until I had the belt and gauntlets – I’m currently waiting for Rivendare to cough up the legplates (although if his mount drops, it might convince me to forgive him). Next will be Scholomance for the Helm and Boots. If I haven’t found the bracers by this stage, LBRS will follow on. And last (but not least) is UBRS for the spaulders and breastplate.

Once I’ve accumulated them all, maybe I’ll look at upgrading them to their Dungeon Set 2 equivalent. We’ll see how it goes, though.

For now? Stratholme awaits!

/wave

WoW: The Coming Add-on Cataclysm

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 03:16:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Cataclysm” by Blizzard.

There’s nothing like visiting the PTR to convince you it’s time to re-subscribe to WoW. Hence I’ve returned (albeit not especially triumphantly).

So I’ve started tidying up some loose ends on my old main characters on alliance side and have been trying to get my solitary high-level horde alt (ding 64!) up in level enough to do the new troll quest chain (despite the likelihood that it’s probably going to be just as truncated and as underwhelming an experience as the Gnomes failure to recapture Gnomeregan was).

But my limited time on the PTR reminded me of one important little detail: when Cataclysm strikes and (insert rampant hyperbole here, describing how things changing ruins the game you know and love, while simultaneously bitching about the game you know and love because it’s all the same and nothing changes and… oh, wait), it’s also likely going to be losing a number of the addons we currently know and love. (Ask yourself how long it’s been since some of the addons you may be using have been updated? My oldest was last updated Jul 2008…)

I transferred an 80 rogue and 80 priest onto the PTR, and while I can play a rogue with the default UI (well, I can solo; raiding would probably be kind of difficult) there’s no way in heck I could even heal a 5-man without Vuhdo. Looking at the collection of addons in my live install, it’s clear I’m going to have a lot of work ahead of me to get ready for Cata, not just in winnowing out those which are now unsupported, but also in searching for the new and improved.

There are three parts to the UI that my UI layout revolves around:

Action Bars: The default bars are almost the only part of the UI that I leave untouched – not only are they perfectly functional (and guaranteed to work the day after a big patch), but I also like the art used when you’re controlling vehicles.
Player/Target Frames: While sparse of information and truly awfully positioned (especially for classes with rapidly changing resources to manage, such as rogues, hunters and warriors) they do the job; in the past I’ve usually replaced them with XPerl, which is the best implementation I’ve come across so far of “It Just Works” in terms of unitframe addons. I find unitframes, once more sanely positioned, are best supported by a HUD in the centre of the screen, so important information is located where your attention is focused. (MetaHUD is my current HUD of choice, having dropped DHUD which hasn’t been updated for a while)
Raid Frames: I rely upon these for my healing, and experience shows I perform best with spells bound to all four mouse buttons (left/right/forward/back) with shift/ctrl/alt modifiers. My addon of choice for this is Vuhdo, which handles both frames and mouse-over healing quite capably (but isn’t currently PTR-ready, although apparently there’s a version for the Beta).

After those, it starts to get cosmetic. Unlike minimalists, I like having access to more information than the default UI usually reveals (although not necessarily displayed all the time). A Data Broker bar addon (and assorted modules) is great for this, my current being ChocolateBar. The minimap gets replaced and moved to the centre-top of the screen, cue Chinchilla. A more detailed buff/debuff display, Elkano’s BuffBars. Replace Blizz’s Floating Combat Text with MikScrollingBattleText. Replace chat windows with Prat and WIM. Then there’s Auctioneer, of course. And who can forget DeadlyBossMods?

To that you can add convenience addons like Atlas/Atlasloot, Fishing Buddy, Mapster, Opie, Outfitter, Skada, and little things like No Gryphons. And that barely scratches the surface of the various bits and pieces I’ve accumulated – I have 235 folders in my Addons directory, probably representing near on a hundred addons installed.

Methinks ‘tis time to cut back. And hey, what a great opportunity for it!

/wave

The Other Kind of Rock and Roll

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:22:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “I Feel the Earth Move” by Carole King

It’s been an… interesting week down here. We had a little 7.1 magnitude earthquake here in sunny Christchurch early last Saturday morning, and things are only just starting to settle down (finally). Thanks to a combination of timing and a solid building code, there was only one death (a heart attack during the quake) and two serious injuries (a man injured by a collapsing chimney and another man badly cut by glass).

Fortunately the suburb that I live in didn’t suffer any serious damage (both the power and internet remained on for me, as did the water although it was necessary to boil it before use for a few days as a precautionary measure); unfortunately, other areas haven’t been as lucky. A sizeable number of buildings have been left damaged, especially in the CBD and the east side of the city. Still, barring a much larger aftershock than the 3-5 ones we’ve been enjoy since the quake, the drama is all over and we’re working on picking up the pieces and getting our lives back in order. (And we don’t need charity; we’re pretty well supported already)

Personally, I’m still kind of on tenterhooks to some degree; I wasn’t particularly anxious during (and after) the quake itself, but the steady stream of aftershocks are starting to leave me feeling increasingly shaken (both literally and figuratively), especially when they’ve been going on for days as is the case here (apparently as I write this there’s been anywhere between 200 and 400 magnitude 3 or greater aftershocks since the quake a week ago, depending on which expert you ask).

Needless to say, my pc gaming has been pretty sporadic. I’ve spent more time over the last few days playing tower defense games on my ipod than I have playing much else on the pc. (And doesn’t the new ipod touch look appealing? I’m seriously considering saving for one, and maybe one of the new shuffles to free up space on my touch for more games if I pick up the cheaper 8gb model.)

Touching on WoW briefly, it was interesting to see the new Gnome and Troll quest chains have finally gone live. I wonder if that means we’re getting even closer to the Cata launch – anyone care to put money on it being under 3 months away? Needless to say, the news of something new to do in-game made me consider whether it’s time to re-sub to the game, but after reading of Gnomeageddon’s disappointment I’ve decided to give it another month. (I’d have to finish levelling a horde-side character to do the troll chain as well)

I very briefly logged into LotRO for the f2p headstart, but haven’t bothered to go past the store after finding that the turbine points I was supposed to have earned haven’t shown up yet. It turns out that a number of players are in the same situation, and leaves me wondering why they bothered going ahead with a headstart if they couldn’t give players their stipend to spend before the event ended. (The word “bone-headed” comes to mind…)

My time in EQ2E has also dwindled for some reason. I’ve joined a couple of guilds (each character in a different one), but for some reason I just haven’t been able to settle into the group, and my play sessions have been generally dissatisfying. It’s probably more my solitary nature coming to the fore, but it’s still left me irritated (albeit with myself).

On my ipod, on the other hand… Between Fieldrunners, The Creeps and TowerMadness, my TD itch is being well and truly scratched (and that’s not counting the other 6 TD games I have installed). I’m kind of ambivalent about the Game Center functionality that Apple added with OS4.1 though; it just looks like an unwieldy version of what you can already get with OpenFeint and Plus+ (and probably a number of other social platforms offer).

Well, it’s getting late so I’m going to cut my post short around here. I’ll just add that I’m now on twitter (like all the other cool kids), but don’t say much (in much the same way as I am IRL).

Two more links before I go: “Thirteen things I learnt from an earthquake.” and an alternate version of “I Feel The Earth Move” by Loretta Swit and the Muppets.

/wave

WoW: Making Old Gear Relevant

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:54:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Q baiano” by Zuco 103

One thing about the gear-grind in WoW that tended to irritate me, is that it’s almost impossible to make your character look like something other than one more tier-X-geared member of class Y. This little proposal is one way Blizzard could give players back an additional degree of personalisation for their characters.

The idea, at its heart, is a very simple one: give us the means to upgrade the stats on old tier armour to something close to either the current or previous tier of raiding equipment.

Let’s see what we have to work with, using the rogue tier sets as an example.

Tier	Set Name	iLevel	Era
1	Nightslayer	66	Vanilla
2	Bloodfang	76	Vanilla
3	Bonescythe	86-92	Vanilla
4	Netherblade	120	BC
5	Deathmantle	133	BC
6	Slayer’s	146-154	BC
7	Heroes’ Bonescythe	200	LK Naxx
7	Valorous Bonescythe	213	LK Naxx
8	Valorous Terrorblade	219	LK Ulduar
8	Conqueror’s Terrorblade	226	LK Ulduar
9	Conqueror’s Blah	232	LK TotC
9	Triumphant Blah	245	LK TotC
9	Heroic Triumphant Blah	258	LK TotC
10	Shadowblade	251	LK ICC
10	Sanctified Shadowblade	264	LK ICC
10	Heroic Sanctified Shadowblade	277	LK ICC

That’s a total of 16 sets (10 if you exclude colour variations). Yet in game at the moment you’re unlikely to see anything less than the top two tiers, especially when raiding.

There’s several approaches that could be taken to achieve this, but the simplest is to offer upgrade tokens purchased with emblems rewarded by dungeons and raids.

Let’s look at the rogue t1 chest, as an example.

Nightslayer Chestpiece, drops from Golemagg in Molten Core. Look at those lovely stats: 10str, 29agi, 20stam, 10 fire resist, and 14 crit.

Now, imagine if you will, a ‘generic’ set of stats for each armour slot, not quite as good as the highest tier set you can buy with each set of emblems. As there are two tiers of emblems being awarded from dungeons and raids, let’s see what they can buy:

Conquest: Garona’s/VanCleef’s Breastplate of Conquest (ilvl 232)
Frost: Shadowblade Breastplate (ilvl 251)

Now, apply 95% of the stats from each of those, and you have two upgraded items that wouldn’t be out of place in a (starting) raid today.

Upgraded Nightslayer Chestpiece (purchased with normal emblems):
Stats: 95agi, 114stam, 68 hit, 76 crit, 137ap
Heroic Nightslayer Chestpiece (purchased with heroic emblems):
Stats: 136agi, 136stam, 91 hit, 151ap, 76 armor pen

Working from that premise, let’s create our pair of tokens. One that is purchased for standard emblems, and one which requires heroic emblems (that two-tier system being the standard for cataclysm, last time I checked).

The upgrade token, when used, replaces the tier item with a new piece that has the same model but with modern stats, which makes the item wearable for (non-progression) raiding. For balance reasons, the upgraded tier sets would have a standard set of bonuses and sockets for each class, shared across all upgraded pieces that a player wears.

There would be limitations, of course. Upgraded pieces would be bound to the person upgrading, and players could only upgrade useable tier pieces (which are limited to their specific class – no Pallies in cloth T1). If desired by Blizz (who like to have things for players to spend their badges on), items could required a new upgrade token with each new raiding tier. Perhaps allow players to sell unused upgrade tokens, which would offer another source of income for players who save their badges, and another gold-sink for players who want to spend their gold.

(While a similar scheme could work for pvp gear, it would likely be considered too much work for Blizzard, and not just because it’s almost impossible to acquire some old sets (and would make it hard to judge a player’s skill by their gear), but the likelihood of complaints skyrocketing on the forums about rogues wiping the floor with season-8-geared players while wearing upgraded Field Marshal’s Vestments could get messy…)

This would also act as an incentive for players to revisit old content (to acquire the tier pieces to upgrade), and give us a new way to invest ourselves in our avatars (which has been lacking in this new age of identical players in tier gear from running heroics).

Now, I don’t really see this ever happening, to be honest – for whatever reason, Blizz is quite happy to let old content go to waste (both raids and gear – when was the last time you heard of a successful pug Naxx run?) while they implement the new shinies in the form of higher tiers of raid content and gear (and we’ve seen how well they put the raids together in Wrath… sigh…). But I for one would love to be able to step into the Cataclysm raids wearing an upgraded set of the awesome t5 on one of my priests.

/wave

EQ2: To Heck With It, I’m Having Fun

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:58:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Pulp Culture” by Thomas Dolby

I know I ranted, and raved, and complained when EverQuest II Extended was announced… (I did draw the line at throwing excrement, however – something I’m relieved about in hindsight) But I’ve since downloaded and installed the Extended client, and have started working on a new Ratonga after reading an enlightening post on Mystic Worlds.

The post, Logic of Subscribing on EQ2 Extended, reminded me of two things that had slipped my mind. First, it’s possible to have fun despite external limitations. And second, it’s silly to be put off something wonderful by something (or someone) disagreeable.

Oh, and third, it’s fine to change your mind.

(Also, with the pleasure I took in leveling Mingle, the phrase “Cutting off the nose to spite the face” comes to mind)

Reading back to my throw-my-toys-out-of-the-cot post about why I was leaving, I think my complaints still hold true. I still expect to get lost. The lore isn’t really well explaining. And crafting is only going to be more difficult, with the chronic lack of bag space for non-subscribers.

But I’ve started to come to terms with the RMT nature of the game – I might not agree with the prices, but I’m not the target audience for most of what they’re offering. As it is, all the game has cost me so far has been the data to download the client (which is still streaming in the background – 12GB takes a while, but you’re no longer stuck until the download has completed) and my time.

I had sufficient station cash on my account from special offers in the past (SC is the currency that Sony uses in their various in-game stores) to allow me to unlock Ratongas (along with another couple of races I’ll likely never play), so buying that pack was a no-brainer. I’ll probably be making my initial purchase of SC this weekend, which will raise my membership level to silver and give me an extra bag slot to play with (and I’m thinking of buying some diamonds as well, the Runes of Magic currency).

Incidentally, I’d started playing before the news surfaced on the forums today that SOE are going to be allowing bronze and silver members to purchase classes in the near future, and are considering changing the bronze chat limitations (currently limited to /say, /tell, /group and /guild) and may be allowing bronze and silver some form of access to the broker. So that’s my biggest complaint about the EQ2E tiered-membership system fixed, and another one that might be soon.

Anyway, it’s been a nice, low-pressure couple of weeks – I’ve been playing Spellforce (a nice RPG/RTS combo from 2003, which was on special on Gamersgate), started playing Runes of Magic (which is deserving of a post of its own at some stage), (re-)started EQ2E, and briefly played Alganon (very briefly; after I was able to stop turning my nose up at it, uninstalled it and deleted the installation files, something I’m rarely driven to do).

I’m also having something of a dalliance with the idea of learning German. (Yes, I have a foolish reason why: Perry Rhodan)

And twitter… Well, let’s just say, I’m exploring my options. (On that note, can anyone recommend a good twitter client for windows?)

Well, Pringlerouse awaits my attention – she’s busy with her betrayal quests, working towards signing up with Qeynos. (Having run through 14 levels of Neriak starting quests, I’m very glad to not be dealing with their so-bad-they’re-almost-parody brand of evil any longer – I’m amazed there wasn’t a baby-eating delivery quest in there somewhere)

Oh, and a prize* for the first person to identify the source of the lyrics attached to the screenshot above.

/wave

* – 1x unopened sense of satisfaction – single owner, never used. (Offer void where prohibited by law)

GW: Fulfilling Prophecies

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:46:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “I Don’t Care” by Shakespears Sister

I have to say, Guild Wars is probably the most single-player-friendly MMO I’ve come across. When you’re the single human in a party with 6 computer-controlled NPCs, one player-controlled hero NPC, and an idiot pet, it’s actually surprisingly reminiscent of Dungeon Siege (the stupidly fun first one, not the beaten-with-the-idiot-stick sequel).

The change of focus from traditional MMO epic-loot-centric play to the much more skill-centric mechanics of GW is a curious one to work through. My ranger/monk is sitting on level 15 at the moment, and is working on some of the side-quests around Kryta (around #3 on the primary quest chain list here – which puts my progression at around 10 of the 25 co-operative missions in the Prophecies campaign), and is getting pretty close to the level 20 cap. At 20, further progression comes in the form of acquiring additional skills and working through the campaigns. While there are some further armor and weapon upgrades (at least, as far as I can see in the GW wiki), they’re not exponentially stronger in the manner WoW endgame gear is.

While the items don’t approach the degree of aesthetic variation that WoW offers (you really have to admire the sheer volume of different armor designs that Blizzard’s art team has come up with over the years), they offer sufficient variation to allow you to personalise your character quite nicely – I don’t think I’ve seen many people identically dressed in the crowds I’ve seen in Kryta so far. (I’m quite fond of the long-coat look of the Ranger Monument armor, although the Deldrimor armor has a certain charm as well)

I’ve also invested $10 into purchasing the Bonus Mission pack; after completing the missions it’s possible to turn in the verified quest item for some nice weapons - I chose a nice Charr shortbow for Ringle to replace the Nevermore Flatbow bonus that came (along with a handful of other weapons for other classes) with the Guild Wars Trilogy pack.

The mechanic of co-operative missions is also quite interesting to work with. The entrance is essentially an outpost (where you have access to a merchant and the bank), and from there you can form a party (either with NPCs, Heroes that you’ve unlocked, or other players) and then attempt the mission for that outpost. The biggest downside is if you fail the mission (you all die, or a key NPC is killed) you’re returned to the entrance zone, and have to restart the mission. Needless to say, if it’s a long mission, it can get frustrating. But with the ability to work through the missions single-handed (well, with henchmen) makes it a good fit for my anti-social nature.

The two styles of computer-controlled adventurers are also a nice touch. The original variety are Henchmen: they’re essentially computer-controlled NPCs, which you have pretty much minimal control over (you can set a waypoint for them to move to and stay at, but that’s about it). With the Nightfall expansion came Heroes: think of them as Henchmen v2. Unlike henchmen, heroes can have their skills and equipment changed like those of your player character (although only at a town or outpost).

Heroes, along with Ranger pets, are also subject to slightly more player control than henchmen: they have a control panel that gives you about as much control over them as an old-school WoW hunter had of their pets, which can be summed up pretty much as “Attack, Defend, Passive”. Needless to say, don’t expect to have any fine-grain control over your computerised party members.

All in all, I’m enjoying my time in GW – indeed, it’s quite possible I’d be subscribing if it had been a subscription MMO. And having seen the GW2 Manifesto video, I’m very much looking forward to ArenaNet’s next move.

But I’m not sure they can top this:

/wave

GW: What A Diff’rence A Space Makes

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:43:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Space Oddity” by David Bowie

Well, NCSoft’s customer service has gotten back in touch, and it turns out I forgot that Guild Wars character names need to consist of (at least) two parts. Turns out the character I created was called “Mingle Douse”. …Sigh…

Needless to say, I’ve taken the precaution of taking a screenshot with character name showing. It’s not of ex-Mingle though, who I’ve deleted as befits such a troublesome disposable character. My new character is a Ranger/Monk called “Kay Pringlerouse”, who is level 5 and busy working through the initial Prophecies content. (Sadly GW only has the option of humans as your character’s race – I miss the options of most other MMOs)

I’ve also decided to give City of Heroes a try – it was a toss-up between that and Champions Online, but I prefer the scope of CoH’s trial (no apparent content limitations – although there might be some, as I haven’t seen any small print yet – just a 14-day limit) to CO’s demo (limited content, but no time limit).

Unfortunately the downloader for CoH is irritatingly slow, it’s only managing between 50-90kbs, and has been running for about 13 hours so far – needless to say, no fun screenshots to speak of.

Ah well, patience is a virtue. But then, so is preparation – and GW awaits my attention.

/wave

Guild Wars – Beaten By The Log-in Boss

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:44:00 +0000

I decided to log into Guild Wars and have another play around. When I tried to do so, I found out that NCSoft have added a new security question to the login screen: Name one of the characters on your account.

Guess who can’t remember the name of the disposable throw-away character, only created to have a quick play in the game with after buying it on special from Steam?

You know, it’s actually hard to beat this security question – I mean, it’s my own account yet I’m unable to compromise it myself.

Seriously, NCSoft. You didn’t even think to warn existing account-holders of this change coming, before it went live? And I feel sorry for players who’ve been on hiatus who may just get caught out by this as well. (Grrrr)

/wave

EQ2 – Moving On

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:18:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: Everquest 2 Main Title (Long Version)

Well, despite the appeal of my Ratonga and Froglok, my vague dissatisfaction with the game (and general disgruntlement about the direction that SOE is taking both the free-to-play version where about 2/3 of the classes are only available by subscription, and the increasingly obtrusive RMT store in the live version) have led me to unsubscribe and start looking for whatever will be my next MMO.

There was a lot that EQ2 did right, but I was just getting lost (and frustrated) with a lot of the game. A lot of this came from the lack of explanation for some of the mechanics (heroic opportunities, for example). The rest of it come from the fact that I just couldn’t find context for a lot of it – the lore proved to be pretty impenetrable in-game, and out-of-game resources were either ridiculously light-weight or up to 5 years out-of-date.

Still, despite the frustration (yes I could have asked for directions, but I’m a pretty antisocial player, especially in a game that’s new to me, especially one with such an established and experienced player base) I almost didn’t quit. Watching the Ratonga idle animations, and the realistic way Ringle blinked while I was taking my last screenshots before I logged out and uninstalled (I had a pet rat when I was younger, so yes, I know how a rat blinks) was one of those moments when a game can do something so simply immersive that it makes you take a mental step back for a moment, and go “Wow!”

Unfortunately the rest of the game just wasn’t working for me. Tradeskills are a one-trick-pony (admittedly I got the feeling I could have gotten a handle on them, but the press-one-of-six-buttons mechanic just wasn’t fun), combat is your bog-standard button-bar system (apart from heroic opportunities, which I think are supposed to have some greater depth in groups – or at least I think they did, remember what I said about a frustrating lack of information?), and why do mount items tooltips say they have a 1-day duration when they’re apparently (maybe? possibly?) permanent items?

Graphically, the game is a mixed bag. Some of the character models (mmmmm, Ratongas) are awesome. But a lot are dated, and generally “Meh” (all of the humanoid races spring to mind there). Many of the monster models are also surprisingly detailed and colourful. Which is great, until you see them standing around low-polygon terrain, looking as out-of-place as gold-foil edging on disposable paper plates. Still, the newer terrain for places such as the starting zone of New Halaas (where the low-poly count isn’t as bad) can actually look pretty good, especially compared to the boring height-map nature of WoW landscapes – there’s only so much you can do to disguise that, although Blizz did it’s darnedest to try with Wrath, and will be giving it the old college try with Cataclysm.

The game had some pretty good music as well – the Antonica theme was particularly enjoyable (a good thing, considering how much I heard it while Ringle spent there, doing low-level quests). There wasn’t quite the same immersiveness as the WoW music, but five years of listening to it may have something to do with that.

Ah well, back to Defense Grid (and Slay on my ipod) for the time-being, while I consider what game to try next. Considering City of Heroes and Champions Online have trials, maybe it’s superhero time?

/wave

EQ2 – Would You Free-To-Play It?

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:22:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Gonna Make You An Offer You Can’t Refuse” by Jimmy Helms

Well, I have to admit this news caught me off-guard. Everquest 2 will be offering free-to-play servers, going live (in an open-beta with no character wipes kind of way) next month. Welcome to the brave new world of Everquest II Extended.

It looks like they’re following the Turbine model, with the basic game free to play (subject lots of restrictions for the base account), but instead of limiting quest access they’ve appear to be making almost everything else available for purchase. The chart of the different plans and what they have available for each tier is an interesting look: link

So subscribers get pretty much the existing game (players who buy a full year sub in advance get bonus station cash each month, but standard monthly subs don’t), but non-subscribers have limits on character races, classes, character slots, spell tiers and equipment grades, bag slots (this one surprised me), coins (a maximum gold-per-level cap), active quests, and broker (auction house) access.

It would appear that having purchased EQ2 will have no effect on what EQ2E content you have access to, unlike the upcoming LotRO changeover. With LotRO, you keep access to the content you already have access to – if you’ve bought all the expansions, you will still be able to play everything you can now, only you don’t have that annoying subscription to pay. With EQ2E, the existing EQ2 players will remain on their servers and if they create a new EQ2E character it will, regardless of the status of their accounts, start off with your basic free account limitations like new players. (Sony have said that EQ2 characters can be copied to the EQ2E servers, but they arrive with no coins and only with ATTUNED and NO-TRADE items, and are then restricted to what your EQ2E account membership tier allows you access to.)

It’s going to be interesting to see what comes from this courageous, yet potentially divisive, move on Sony’s part – will existing subscribers feel they have to copy their characters (at US$35 each) across to the new servers? Will the free-to-play servers breath some life into the game? And what toll will this take on the existing subscription-only servers?

And more importantly, will this influence WoW’s future directions, if it proves successful for Sony?

/wave

EQ2: Belated First Impressions

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:07:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Pretty Girl” by Hogsnort Rupert

I was going to do this post first, but after starting to write about my experiences with my ratonga’s betrayal questing I decided to postpone this until… well, now. Enjoy! (Or for those who refuse to enjoy it on principle, “Be bored quietly please, so as not to annoy everyone else in the room!”)

My original idea was to give this a try after I finished off with my underwhelming dalliance with SWG, before moving onto something else (probably Fallen Earth). That plan, after a week spent thoroughly enjoying the experience of levelling a froglok past 20, turned into me buying it online, and I’m now getting my teeth into levelling a ratonga on a new server (with the plan further down the track of levelling another froglok – I’ve rolled the monk in the image above in preparation).

Anyway, here’s some of what I’ve noticed so far (no doubt biased by four years of WoW):

The initial character selection screen is a little intimidating (especially as someone new to the game, who is used to the min-maxing expected for raiding). 19 races to choose from? And then one of two starting zones? (Or four zones, if you’re a neutral race, which is how you decide your alignment) And then you have to decide between 16 of the total of 24 classes? Consider me lost.

Aesthetically, the beast races come somewhere between awesome (Frogloks and the Ratonga), kind of appealing (the feline Kerra) and not bad (the reptilian Iksar and the Sarnak, whatever they are). The monstrous Ogres look like big, chunky humanoid bullies, and the Trolls look suitably Troll-ish – both appropriate for their purpose. The other humanoid races, however are… generally meh – think of them as beginner Poser models from a decade ago. Except for the dwarven females, who have sideburns and beards. wt…heck? Seriously, if I’d not been so distracted by amphibians and rodents that I’d noticed that when I rolled my starting characters, it might have put me off the game completely. (Yes, I take my dwarven female aesthetics that seriously)

Still – frogs, rats, cats, lizards… No playable dog-people? (Ah well, I guess WoW has that covered)

It’s really nice the way player and npc models’ heads move (including looking up and down) in reaction to their surroundings. You walk up to someone and they look towards your character, meeting their eyes. That is very immersive, let me tell you.

There’s quite a difference between New Halaa and older zones. Admittedly, the high(er)-polygon terrain (while better than the older terrain) still doesn’t look that great up close, but it’s an improvement. The questing flow, however, (from the two zones I’ve done so far) is a lot better in the new zone – Halaa has better defined questing hubs, but the Timorous Deep isn’t quite as centralised and has a lot more back-and-forth missions.

And on the subject of noticeable, compare New Halaa’s 3-dimensional terrain to the height-map terrain in WoW. This is one area where WoW clearly looks inferior by comparison.

It’s amazing how steep a slope you can walk up – sometimes.

Griffons look funny. Seriously. They’re mount equivalent of the humanoid player models.

Maybe EQ did it first, but Aion does player character wings sooooo much better.

The stealth animation and effects are nice. The initial ‘blue’ effect before your character becomes transparent did take some getting used to, however, but now it’s grown on me. And there’s nothing quite like an (almost) invisible rat!

And speaking of stealth: You can activate it while moving, and it isn’t broken by out-of-combat periodic damage! Speaking as a long-time WoW rogue, this as all kinds of awesome. (Exactly why this is so awesome would probably escape non-rogues, and non-cat-form-druids)

And look – non-human skeletons!

Revenge of Command-Line. Seriously, I’ve not seen the command line referred to so much in a game. Even claiming special pre-order items requires /claim. (Edit: I later discovered that you can actually access them from the menu bar, but I had to find it myself)

Being able to change your home city is a nice touch. Being able to change your faction is an awesome one. (WTB dwarves for Horde, btw)

Crafting is curiously interactive, but not that intuitive. I need to work on it, I think. And if you want to level your Transmuting, it would appear you need to do so in the starting zone – unfortunately no-one tells you this. (Hopefully I can get Ringle back there to do some starter quests for the item rewards – there is absolutely zero items in the auction house that are, a) low enough level that she can transmute them, and b) cheap enough that she can afford them.)

Bag space is also taking some getting used to – especially the way each bag window can be moved independently and remembers it’s location on screen, but you have to open them independently as well. I need to see if there’s an open-all command I can keybind. Cloth bags up to 8 slots in size can be bought pretty cheap from a vendor. After that it appears they come from questing (I’ve managed to get a 10-slot bag from a tourism quest of Antonica, the level 10-20 zone outside Qeynos) or crafting.

Tailors make cloth bags, which have no weight but limited size. Woodworkers make boxes, which weight 10 units but have a larger capacity – I bought a crafted 24-slot box for Ringle, which cost a third of her funds at the time but oooooh, the space.

Storage in general is kind of odd, actually. You have your character’s bags. Then bank space, and you can fill it with bags that you then fill with items, or just fill with items. Plus the bank has an additional 8 or so slots that are shared between all your characters on that server. Then there is player housing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you can add some more storage there (although I haven’t explored that part as much just yet).

Collections! A nice way to give players another time sink, looking for random items around the game-world. These look like an effective way to keep players busy – if not to complete them for themselves, then at least to sell the items at the broker. (Spotted butterflies seem particularly profitable so far – I think Ringle has made about 4g from them)

Monster masteries – you can learn their language, and eventually (after grinding on them for long enough) earn a bonus attack against their race. (Fortunately each race gets the same attack on the same button, so you don’t have to worry about your action bar filling up)

The game looks pretty good on a modern pc, and it’s actually possible to run it on the absolute highest of settings without too much slowdown – admittedly I did have problems with areas of high ground foliage, which I reduced in density, and reflections in water (and water in general) can be problematic. But aside from those, the game runs remarkably well – just don’t look too hard at the humanoid player models.

All in all, EQ is turning out to be a fun experience. Not only is it remarkably open-ended so far, I’m enjoying my characters more than any other MMO I’ve tried since WoW. Even LotRO, which is probably more technically and artistically appealing than EQ, hasn’t gotten me emotionally invested in my characters this much.

Will it last? I’ve no idea. But for now, it’s good, clean, anthropomorphic fun. Also, cosmetic armour – trés awesome, or what?

/wave

EQ2: The Ratonga Who Changed Her Spots

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 13:41:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “7 Days to Change Your Life” by Jamie Cullum

Just an aside: I was going to write a “my first impressions” post about EQ2, but after finally finishing the series of betrayal quests I wanted to put something down in pixels about the experience while it’s still fresh in my mind. So if you feel this post is skipping over stuff, well, it kind of is. (I’ll try get the ‘prequel’ finished soon though, to try give this one some more context)

After getting a feel for the game, leveling a cute little Froglok to 20 on another server, I decided to give another species a try. In keeping with my “trend of falling in love with anthropomorphic animals,” I decided to give a Ratonga a try. (The fact I had a pet rat as a kid may have something to do with their appeal)

In keeping with my other trend, namely “How hard can I make things for myself?” I decided that not only was I going to play a rat, I was going to switch her to the side of all that is good and wholesome and pure and the like. And having finished the grind, I think I’m in a good position to say “Ouch.”

First of all, let’s be quite honest about my motives: I’m never comfortable playing an “evil” character in an RPG. In Fallout 3, I was the epitomy of heroism and all related virtues. Ditto with Morrowind and Dragon Age. In WoW I’m almost exclusively Alliance (although my dislike of the the aesthetic of the horde races, especially those awful anorexic blood elves, has some influence).

I was surprisingly comfortable being evil (or at least, evil-lite) as assassin Ringle played through the starting zone of Timorous Deep and reached the Sarnak city of Gorowyn. The quests, while pretty straight-forward MMO fodder, had some interesting storylines that explored the very turbulent relationship between the Sarnak and the Spirocs, a race of bird-like humanoids who share the island.

Eventually the plot within which the starter quests are framed has you contemplating whether the Sarnak will commit genocide in order to secure themselves from their opponents, giving you quests where you’re undermining the framework of Spiroc society – killing their food gatherers, and poisoning their un-hatched eggs.

Fortunately (for my peace of mind) you don’t take the final steps, and are summoned to Gorowyn where you speak with high-ranking NPCs who express concern that they do not wish to take such action, and thank you for all you have done on the part of the Sarnak. (Indeed, you are given quests to meet with Spiroc ambassadors to try broker some manner of peace, but unfortunately they have been so badly brutalised by the conflict that initial efforts turn out to be unsuccessful. Whether you’re able to do so later I don’t know.)

I was level 21 at this stage; my plan had been to reach 20 and start the betrayal questline to become a nice, friendly rat – the chain is initially available at level 10, but I wanted to spend a little more time being evil. Anyway, I found I had to change my home city, as Gorowyn doesn’t have a betrayal chain. So off to Freeport I went.

I’ll just take a moment here to comment on my experiences over the last couple of days, regarding travel between continents: “Argh! Just Shoot Me Now!” sums it up fairly accurately, I believe. I think the only thing I didn’t do wrong, was travel somewhere without first picking up the quest that I’d need to turn in when I got there.

I’ve been to the wrong city. I’ve been to the wrong continent. I spent so much time running back and forth (sometimes in the right direction, sometimes not) that Ringle’s boots have started earning frequent-flier miles. And then I discovered that I could use druid circles and wizard towers to fast-travel between continents. (I was aware of fast-travel via boat by now, but often had trouble finding the in-world item to use to access it)

So, my initial opinion of world travel in the game, especially in regards to new players? /facepalm

Anyway, back to the betrayal of all my kind stand for.

I switched my citizenship from Gorowyn to Freeport, and I encountered a little piece of flavour/lore that set the scene for the location quite effectively. Namely, I’d walk past city guards, and they would kick me and knock me off my feet. Apparently it’s something justified by lore, but it’s really put me off the city in a major way, and made the decision to go through with the betrayal an easy one. (Seriously, I’m normally a very even-tempered person, but that was really starting to get under my skin)

It was doing this chain where I really encountered the first problem with the online resources for EQ2 – often they weren’t timestamped, and the older resources were sometimes slightly (or in some cases, completely) out of date. One example was this brief guide: A Ratonga’s guide for Freeport to Kelethin Betrayal

The basic details (such as they were) are accurate, and this was where I learnt about both Druid Circles and Wizard Spires as transport methods. But the circles and spires are now usable without any need to discover them before you access them from other sites – reach one, and you have access to the entire network (yay!). Other instances were when I was trying to find quest info for my initial character, doing the New Halas starting zone, and having my searches keep giving me results for quests of the same name that are no longer in the game.

Similar results have come from searching for guides (such as for tradeskills and classes), where mostly unusable information tops the search results. Unfortunately it’s a case of search-and-verify, when looking for information.

And back, yet again, to Ringle’s blackheartedness.

The initial stage, becoming exiled from Freeport, was fairly straightforward. After speaking with Ambassador Brutus, I worked through a 5-quest chain in Freeport that left me exiled, and a resident of Haven.

The second stage was the most time-consuming. Eventually I managed to make my way from Haven, via Thundering Steppes, to Gil McMartin in The Commonlands (which was, amusingly enough) just outside Freeport. There Ringle started the quests in the Qeynos Faction Timeline.

I decided to work through the bounty hunting quests first, as it was easier to find a single target in a zone than spend an hour looking for multiple unknown locations with a zone the was some of the sabotage quests appeared. Once I worked out where I was going and how to get there, it was simply a matter of ‘Pick up the quest, run to the wizard spire, port to Antonica, set up waypoint, hit Stealth, and start running.’

The mobs you have to kill are scaled to your level, so they’re (mostly) not too hard – at least, not until #14, but I’ll get to him. The first five are all in Antonica, although they’re all over the map. Numbers six through eight are in Nektulos Forest, fortunately not too far from a wizard spire. Nine and ten are in the Thundering Steppes. Eleven and twelve were interesting – West and North Freeport respectively. (I’m soooo glad Ringle has stealth)

Number thirteen was more difficult, as the zone the target is located in (Zek) is level 30-40, and the wizard spire is some distance from his location. Needless to say, death occurred – Ringle’s. Fortunately the target is a lot easier to reach when you travel by boat, which I tried next. Then came number fourteen. And he wiped the floor with me, and repeatedly.

After the last death, I decided to go back to ‘grinding’ the last few faction that I needed – luckily there’s a very easy, high-faction, quest that’s not too difficult. After maybe half an hour running Extracting the Defector, Ringle reached ‘amiable’ and then it was off to Qeynos to do the final stages of the chain.

Now, I don’t know whose decision it was to have you start to prove yourself by picking up garbage off the main highway out of Qeynos, but it… Well, it makes for an interesting start to the process. The quest-giver describes it as an act of humility, which I guess is accurate. Then you donate a gold to charity (it’s ok, they give you back a receipt that you can sell for about 85 silver), and it’s on to one last combat mission and ding! citizenship.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I can catch up on Ringle’s crafting – and see if I can pick up some dangling quest starters so she can get into the swing of things as one of these new-fangled hero people.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to work out how to get there.

/wave

A Tourist In Tatooine

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:05:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “A Fool Like Me” by Jmdee Beat feat. Tassel & Naturel

I was going to do a long post about Star Wars Galaxies, having spent a week playing the trial and mostly enjoying myself quite a bit. But now I’m more interesting in a post about Everquest II, after spending a week playing the trial, and enjoying it so much I felt comfortable buying a copy. Oh, and I (briefly) tried playing WoW in anaglyphic 3D.

Anyway, at the top of my list of things to talk about is SWG. While the population of the game is a shadow of what it was at it’s pre-NGE peak, as someone who’s something of a fan of the Star Wars universe (and who usually levels sans company), it was kind of a fun game to finally visit – sadly I was unable to play the game at the time due to a resistance to the idea of paying a subscription to play a game (an objection to which it would appear I’ve overcome) and the lack of a credit card at the time.

I left before the 14-day trial ended because, sadly it just didn’t quite live up to my expectations in many, often rather subtle, ways. A fun game, just not quite as much fun as I wish it could have been (and I doubt there will ever be another MMO set around the classic trilogy time period, with the focus now on the Old Republic). Some of the issues were simply because of the age of the title – the UI is pretty dire in many ways, and some design choices just aren’t fun or don’t make sense. (The in-game auction house was pretty awful – and not just because of the lack of things being sold)

The much-vaunted character customisation was indeed pretty impressive – sadly it was a little underwhelming when I didn’t really see any other players, to see what they did to make their characters different. (It would actually have been great if they’d done something similar to droids, and allowed some degree of freedom in customising your companions – especially the ones you assembled yourself… Ah, well, what might have been…)

Anyway, much of the game was fun, of course. Space combat was a blast (quite literally) and, although grossly simplified from the days of X-Wing and Tie Fighter, was a lot of fun with a gamepad. That is, apart from some bizarre respawn issues that left a couple of missions impossible to complete single-handed. However that might simply be leftover from the high-population days where there were enough players to nullify that particular issue, or a bug, or maybe I was playing it wrong – I don’t really know.

Ground combat was pretty straight-forward, but it never really left me feeling I was in danger (unless I accidentally pulled an elite at the same time as my intended target). It actually reminded me of Star Trek Online, only without the ‘assistance’ of your NPC crewmates. (Admittedly that comparison could be due to the very small number of third-person sci-fi shooters I’ve ever played, giving me a very small pool of titles to compare it with)

Questing… Well, that felt kind of tacked-on. And considering that SWG was originally very much a sand-box game, perhaps ‘tacked-on’ is accurate. (Incidentally, the ‘chronicles’ system, which lets you create – and sell – player-created quests using items dropped by npcs might have been interesting, if there were enough players to keep the system running.)

Unfortunately I didn’t get past Tatooine, so my screenshot folder is very salmon-hued. And just as the landscape was all one colour, the droids were ridiculously lacking in variety as well. Actually, I think the way droids were implemented (and the lack of variety among them, in-game) were one of the things I was least happy with. (And not just because there were new-trilogy battle droids everywhere – ‘expanded universe’ only gets you so far, in my book)

I think what killed the trial for me, was the number of times my planned sessions ran head-first into server downtimes and maintenance. In the seven days I played, the server was already down for maintenance on two nights I tried to log on, and went down while I was playing on a third. (It’s kind of an un-written rule, as far as oceanic players of US-based MMOs go, that any server downtime is timed to minimise the effect on US players by shifting it to NZ/Aus prime-time) While it might just be bad timing on my part, the fact that I ran into it 3 days in the week I was trying to trial the game was really frustrating, and constituted this camel’s final straw.

Ah well, SWG was then uninstalled, and I decided to give EQ2 a try. About 36 hours of downloading later, it was installed. (Have I mentioned lately how much I really dislike streaming software installers?)

EQ can wait until next post, though – I should know better than to start writing at 2AM… So, enjoy this little teaser of an upcoming post subject while I go throw myself at my bed.

/wave

Being Stubborn Isn’t A Virtue

noreply@blogger.com (KiwiRed) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 05:04:00 +0000

Post soundtrack: “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” by ELO

Thought I’d take a break from my SW:G dalliance, and comment on the latest rant-worthy news from Blizz.

They have finally posted some updated RealID information on the forums, and three items from it caught my attention.

Q: Will the new StarCraft II forum posting name format (character name + character code) carry over into the forum communities of other Blizzard games?
A: Following our recent decision to no longer use real first and last names on Blizzard forums, we’re still evaluating how we’ll move forward with our other forums. Our ultimate goal is still to promote constructive conversations and improve the overall forum experience for our players, and we think increasing accountability is an important part of achieving that. StarCraft II already uses a character name and character code combo in-game, which serves as a unique player identifier and fits well with our goal for the forums. World of Warcraft handles player identification differently, so we still need to determine whether adding a character code system like in StarCraft II is the best solution. Ultimately, we want to come up with a system that makes sense for each community and fits our long-term vision for the forums.

This is promising, but I’m wary of getting my hopes up at this stage. An account-specific alias is pretty much what I wanted before I’d post on the forums under the new system, but we’ll have to wait and see if they can allow us to create an alias that we’re happy to use to identify ourselves on the forums or if they’ll insist on making us use a non-player-created ID – I can see them trying to sneak in a last-name-plus-character-code system, to be quite honest.

Needless to say, after the privacy train-wreck that was the initial plan for their RID implementation, I have no confidence that they can come up with something that players will actually want to use, as opposed to something that insists on trying to re-shape player habits (and wishes regarding privacy) in keeping with their grand “social gaming network” vision.

Seriously, this just doesn’t feel like it’s coming from the same developers who brought WoW to us – it feels like a design specification thrown together by the clueless brother-in-law of a marketing executive’s family member (“Everyone’s on Facebook – let’s copy them!”). Blizzard is known for taking an idea someone else came up with, sanding off the rough edges and polishing it until it shines. While that philosophy can work apparent miracles, in this case it feels like they are trying to build a feature out of a visionary mission statement written by another corporation’s public relations department.

Q: Do you have any plans to allow players to not show their real name to friends of friends while using the Real ID system?
A: As with any new feature we add to our games, we've been evaluating how Real ID has been used since its release to identify new functionality that would help improve our players’ experience. The in-game Real ID “friends of friends” list is designed to give players a convenient way to populate their Real ID friends list with other players they know and trust in real life, allowing them to quickly and easily send Real ID friend requests to these people without having to enter their Battle.net® account names. However, we recognize that some players would prefer not to be displayed on friends lists in this fashion, so we plan to include an option that will allow players to opt out of appearing on their Real ID friends’ “friends of friends” lists. We're anticipating this feature to be available for StarCraft II shortly after release of the game, and World of Warcraft at around the same time -- we’ll have more information for you in the coming weeks.

Jolly good, nice to see they’ve picked up on that little flaw in their vision. Sadly it’s rendered irrelevant by the next gem. (Also, opt-in is better than opt-out, but at least they’re including it as an option…)

Q: Are there any plans to change the in-game Real ID system so that players will have the option to display an assigned user name instead of their real names?
A: The Real ID system is designed to help real-life friends and family who decide to use it keep in touch with each other across Blizzard games, and our goal in using real names is to ensure that players will be able to maintain long-term, meaningful relationships on the service for years to come. One way it helps make that happen is by eliminating the need to remember who, for example, "Thrall123" really is when you see him or her pop up on your friends list again after months -- or years -- of being offline. Ultimately, we think this is the best way to ensure players who use Real ID are able stay connected with the people they enjoy playing with most in the long-term, and we don’t currently have any plans to change the system so it can be used with character names or alternate handles instead. That said, Battle.net is a living, breathing service that we will continue to evolve over time as we evaluate how players are using it and identify new ways to improve the experience.

Well, for a company who have had so much experience with MMO gamers, they seem to be remarkably… let’s just say, “Bull-headed.” The problem with one-size-fits-all solutions (“Real names make everything better!”) is that they rarely fit anyone very well. Especially not gamers who may have been using a single alias since discovering the world of online gaming.

But let’s see what they’re really saying: “The Real ID system is designed to help real-life friends and family who decide to use it keep in touch with each other across Blizzard games, and our goal in using real names is to ensure that players will be able to maintain long-term, meaningful relationships on the service for years to come.” Fine and dandy. Except RL friends and family are already in touch with each other. Seriously, they use instant messengers, email, facebook – any number of out-of-game systems. (Also, “real-life friends and family”? – just how large is this section of the player base around whose social interactions they’re shaping the features that are applying to everyone else who plays the game?)

And “maintain long-term, meaningful relationships”? That might have some validity if the service was available to players who aren’t currently subscribers. Once they stop paying to play, they have to fall back on, oh, instant messengers, email, facebook. Their definition of “long-term” would appear to consist of “while you are a paying customer”.

“One way it helps make that happen is by eliminating the need to remember who, for example, "Thrall123" really is when you see him or her pop up on your friends list again after months -- or years -- of being offline.” Of my online friends, the names I know them by, and by extension, the names I recognise them by in-game, are not their real names. I know the real names of a couple of ex-guild-mates, but they’re very much the exception. That’s the greatest failure of RealID with it’s focus on “real names for real players”: real players use real aliases.* (Plus “months – or years – of being offline” kind of requires that they’ve already signed up for RID. Players who aren’t currently playing need not apply.)

Well, colour me unimpressed. Needless to say, I (still) won’t be using RID in-game, with the real-name requirement. But it’d be nice to have the choice of posting on the forums under my identity of choice – if I’m still a subscriber, at least.

/wave

* – All broad sweeping statements are false. Including this one.