Where is Darren when we need him?

Surely this will bring him back for another post!

Yes, Blizzard has turned that corner at last and is now selling in-game items for real life money.  No more buying trading cards… well, actually, you’ll probably still have to do that if you want every possible item… the cash store is open, show us the money!

For Sale - $10 Each

For myself, I am going to again restate my indifference to buying items in game.  It is a PvE game, so my fun is generally detached from your fun regardless of how many trinkets you buy.  You want the $10 pet?   Knock yourself out.

Will I buy these pets?  I am going to say no.  $10 seems like a lot of cash for either of these guys, the panda’s contribution to charity fig leaf not withstanding.  Get back to me when there is a special mount for sale.

However, this evening my daughter will get to log into WoW and she is going to see that Panda on the splash screen and she is going to want it.

At that point I will have to start on another futile discussion about money and how it is not infinitely generated from the plastic cards in my wallet.  Then she will want to spend her own money on it (her saved up birthday, holiday, and tooth fairy money adds up to the low three figures, so she has declared herself “rich”) and I will feel compelled to nip that in the bud.

My big hope is that she’ll just zip through the splash screen the way she zips through quest text and miss it completely.

But at some point she is going to see it or see a panda in game and the question will come up.  Pandas have that effect on a sub-set of females in my experience.

In fact, you should have seen Ula’s reaction when I mentioned a panda on guild chat last night.  Sorry about that Skronk.

Runic Games has posted on the Torchlight Forums that the first patch is for Torchlight is now ready.

This is a full installer so you have to uninstall and re-install the game to do the update.

You also must install the version available from the vendor from whom you purchased the game.  So if, like me, you purchased from Direct2Drive, don’t go download the version for people who bought direct from Runic.

Abstracts from the announcement:

NOTES ON THE PATCH! PLEASE READ!

SUPER-IMPORTANT! YOU MUST USE A PATCH FROM THE VENDOR YOU PURCHASED FROM! Each vendor has their own DRM solution, and none are compatible. If you purchased from Steam, you’ll need the Steam patch , and so on.

This if a FULL REINSTALL. The packaged files for the patch changed entirely to improve loading times, so a full reinstall is necessary. If you are patching, you’ll need to uninstall your previous version.

BACK UP YOUR SAVE GAMES! Your uninstaller may ask you if you want to delete your save games. Make sure that it is UN CHECKED! If you want to be extra safe, you can manually back up your saves – I’d recommend this. Better safe than sorry!

Start->run

%appdata% and press return

Then browse to Runic Games\Torchlight\Save – and back up all the files there.

———————————————————————————–

Torchlight 1.12 Patch Notes -

* Fixed several issues which could overwrite saves, and protected against possible save loss. Save backups are now also generated.
* Much reduced load times for many users
* Some minor ingame performance improvements
* Fixed Needle Arc XP exploit
* Fixed Shadow Armor stacking effects
* Fixed vendor dupe bug
* Fixed various fullscreen startup issues
* Fixed broken Brink cinematic on subsequent plays
* Fixed merchant ‘thief’ exploit
* Fixed right clicking in inventory casting certain spells
* Fixed console not activating on Steam builds – this also fixes the fact that subsequent characters didn’t see the random dungeon unlock after the first completion
* Fixed issue with Syl’s cinematic not being “skippable” during first boss fight
* Fixed some DOT deaths not dropping loot
* Quest items no longer allowed in stash
* Several level fixes for a few places where things overlapped, or collision was missing, or stuck-issues cropped up
* Fixed texture/mesh/ replacement issues with mods
* You can now change difficulty level on the fly from the console without being branded a Cheater ( UNLESS you’re playing hardcore )
* Fixed pet minions not awarding fame
* Fixed slow load times when mods were enabled
* Pets inherit your spell masteries
* Magic find takes the max value between you and your pet when pets or pet minions make a kill
* Visible/increasing chance of stripping enchants via enchanter. Price based on # of enchants. Variables tunable in globals.dat
* Troll pet is properly invincible
* Tree Boss could be charmed – fixed
* Fixed issue – Returning to town if you died during Ember Colossus or Medea would make them dormant on return
* weapon + shield doesn’t count as ‘dual wielding’
* Shimmering Scale ( and 2 other socketables ) now work properly when socketed
* Ember lance slight nerf
* Ember lightning slight buff
* Aloe Gel summon provides better healing
* Equippables properly provide bonuses to passive skills
* Fixed display issue where multiple skill bonuses on the same item would collapse into a single display
* Hardware skinning settings respected properly for pet paperdolls
* Fix for potential bad state in the henchman battle
* Enchantments at level 100 now work
* Relabeled difficulty levels, and added tooltips explaining each
* Fixed ‘free spell purchase’ exploit
* Socketables cannot be heirloomed
* Fix for masteries not updating certain spell bonuses until logout/login
* Summon Blood Skeleton has 11 levels now
* Various small grammar and spelling fixes

* ADDITION : Rimlights, HW Skinning, and VSynch can all be altered from the Settings menu now.
* MODDERS: Items can be set to ‘always identified’

(Post title courtesy of Kaozz)

It was 10pm on Halloween night.

Real life Trick-or-Treating was at an end, our own little trick-or-treater was in bed, the candles in the pumpkins had been blown out, the porch light had been turned off, and all was finally quiet.  Even the cats had settled down,

On Eldre’Thalas, which runs on Eastern Time, the Hallow’s End had faded.  Trick-or-treating was also at an end, the decorations had been stowed away in their various bit buckets, and Azeroth was back to its usual self.

Fortunately, as we learned at Brewfest, the instance servers run on Pacific Time, so they are late to start and late to end when it comes to Azeroth holidays.

Which meant that we had a few more shots at the Headless Horseman to try and get his mount.  Four to be exact.

Ula was not on, but Gaff, in the form of his druid joined us for another round of Headless Horseman fun.  So we were:

73 Druid – Nerral
80 Priest – Skronk
80 Warlock – Bungholio
80 Warrior – Earlthecat
80 Paladin – Vikund

Unfortunately, you need to be level 75 to summon the Headless Horseman, so having Nerral along did not add another shot at the mount.

As before, the battles were pretty manageable.  Not totally easy, but the only way we were going to lose was to screw up pretty badly.

But in the end, no mount.

We got lots of rings, hence the title of this post.  We’d all be surprised if he had any rings left after our haul.

Not that the rings were bad (Vikund is wearing the Ring of Ghoulish Glee now), but by the end we all had most of the rings.  You cannot sell them.  You cannot have more than one of each.   Nerral has a couple of rings now that he can use when he hits level 80.

Other than rings, we did get the Magic Broom to drop four times, and Vikund picked up the Horseman’s Baleful Blade.  It isn’t quite a Tankard of Terror, but it looks nice.

But no Horseman’s Horrific Helm (which would have been nice for Vikund or Earl) and no Horseman’s Reins, the item that gives you the Headless Horseman’s mount.

Did anybody get those reins?

And with that, Hallow’s End was over for us.

Last Call for the Headless Horseman

Until next year Sir Thomas Thompson!

I have always been a fan of unintended consequences. It warms my heart and makes me chuckle when short-sighted planning and the general perversity of the universe gang up to undermine things.

Even when it happens to me.

Especially when it happens to me.

I have a bit of the anarchist in me.  I like to be reminded that real life does not care for anybody’s plans.

So when I saw over at Werit’s Blog that Warhammer Online was removing the 10 Day restriction from their free trial offer, the intent was clear:  Somebody felt that more people would subscribe to the game if the free trial lasted longer.

Now I haven’t seen anything official on this, and the Warhammer Online free trial page still says “10 Days,” but I understand that the key restriction in place will be that you cannot advance beyond tier 1 content.  There are probably others, but that is the only thing I have seen.

So I will be interested to see what happens (if anything happens) when an subscription MMO makes the first 10-15% of its game content available for free for unlimited play.

I cannot recall a similar scenario.  Certainly SOE offered their “Trial of the Isle,” but that had a hard geographical limitation.

So what do you think is going to happen?

A mass of free-loading tier 1 players?  A surge in subscriptions?  Nothing at all?

Things may be warming up a bit for us in New Eden.  Gaff has reactivated an account or three.  I am coming to the end of a training cycle that will let him fly a Hulk at last.  It might be time to leave the hanger and earn some ISK.

But I hear from other sources associated with our nominal confederation that the current favorite sport in empire space is Hulk busting.

Prey Yet Again?

Gangs of suicide gankers in destroyers have been roving the asteroid belts hunting Hulks for sport.  We just can’t seem to get away from suicide gankers in EVE, no matter what anybody says.  Some people just find it too much fun.

I haven’t been paying close attention to EVE, but I do tend to scan the headlines and have not seen anything about this.  Has anybody else noticed this phenomena?  Not that I don’t believe.  After all, it the Goons had their own Hulk busting campaign a while back.  But it would be interesting to know how wide spread this is.

Busting rocks in empire space may be a hazardous profession these days.

Still, I have to wonder.  Wilhelm, my main, has his shield skills pretty much at level 5 across the board.  I am going to guess that most miners, especially mining alts, do not have the same skill set.

Could I fit out a Hulk so that it could survive long enough for CONCORD to step in and save the day?

What is a good tank fit for a Hulk?

Time to see if my copy of EVE Fitting Tool is up to date.

I managed to get in some time with Torchlight over the weekend, in and around pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating, resetting clocks (ahh, the joy of “Fall Back“) and the Planet of the Apes.

While I had quite a bit of fun with the game over the weekend, all is not bliss.  No game is perfect and Torchlight has its share of flaws.

Bugs

Runic has a list of issues up on the Torchlight forums that they are working on, some of which they say they have fixed, but still have to make their way to end users.  There is no built-in update system, another divergence from Diablo, so unless you bought the game on Steam (grumble) you have to go looking for updates.

I’ve run into a number of the items on their list including the “Brink Bug,” which messes up a quest chain, and the performance related issues.  I’m just glad that I have not run into some of the nastier issues, like the failure to save.

And, as a side note to the developers.  I am happy that you have fixed a number of these issues and I am fine with you putting down the date, and even the exact time in some cases, when you made that fix.  But I know, being on the developer side of things myself, that the first questions will be “When will a patch be available and how do I get it?”  The answers to those (even if the “when” is “we don’t know yet”) should be in the same post (or in its own locked and stickied post) and not many pages into the responses to the fix updates. (And even that was just “no patch yet.”)

I sent an email to support to get some idea of what the patch availability and notification process would be and got a response from Brock Jones, the producer. (He apparently has retired from the superhero biz.)  While I appreciated the timely response, I would have rather been able to find the information myself and not wasted his time.

(Of course, if they put the producer on answering email, maybe they just want to keep him out of the way.)

Story

The more I play Torchlight the less involved I feel with the story.  For me, this is a serious break with its Diablo and Diablo II predecessors.  Diablo II especially had some distractions in it, but with only 6 quests per chapter, you spent a lot of time focused on the main thread of the game, the thread that lead you to the final battle.

The team at Runic however seems to have taken their long term MMO aspirations a bit too seriously.  The current conventional wisdom is that you need lots of quests in an MMO to move people along and give them something to focus on besides grinding mobs.

So there are lots of quests in Torchlight but, at least compared to Diablo II, and they do not feel connected.  One guy, Vasman, is always looking for the next flavor of ember, while a mechanical named Trill-Bot 4000 is always directing me to kill the next boss that is just a level or two down from where, and a guy named Hatch is sending me off in other directions.

But it is the quests for Syl that appear to drive the main story.  Or so I gather.  Unfortunately, one of the bugs causes you to miss a quest or two in that line.  Now, it is nice that you can pick up that thread further on down the line, but I still feel like I am missing something.

So while I am not as down on the game as MBP, I get his point about the feel of the game.

Sharing

The biggest interruption of my time playing Torchlight came when my daughter noticed I was playing a new game.  This lead to me having to relinquish my seat at the computer so that she could play for a while.

And she found the game to be quite fun as well.  I suspect that this is going to remain an issue until they get a version out that will run on Mac OS X or until she gets tired of the game.  And given that she has taken to imitating a zombie walking around my office moaning, “Torchilght…” I am hoping for an early Mac release.

So all is not absolute bliss in the world of Torchlight, but neither am I about to take back anything favorable I have said.  It is still a lot of fun for $20.

Now just waiting for the first patch…

Our television has spent a surprising amount of time tuned to the Fox Movie Channel this weekend.  Fox decided to run a special Halloween weekend event dedicated to The Planet of the Apes called Channel of the Apes.

The Plant of the Apes movies and TV shows were very popular when we were kids, and my wife and I both have fond, if fragmented, memories of them.

The first movie is still fun today, an over the top Charlton Heston romp, completely and inexorably mired in the time (1968) it was made. (Heston tells a teenage ape to “Never trust anybody over 30!”)

The other movies, and the 2001 remake are considerably less watchable, though there are bright spots.

But the TV series is just painful to watch today.  Roddy McDowell, the pillar of the show, couldn’t carry a series where at times they didn’t bother to re-dub voice work so the lines of second string characters were quite obviously being spoken through heavy latex masks.

I even pulled out The Simpsons Season Seven DVDs to watch A Fish Called Selma which includes Troy McClure starring in a musical version of The Planet of the Apes.

Amidst all of this Planet of the Apes revelry I started to wonder about Planet of the Apes as an MMORPG setting.

As far as I can tell, the only run at a Planet of the Apes video games came as low rated, made for the movie remake, cash grab by UbiSoft back in 2001.

Yet as an environment for an MMORPG, the Planet of the Apes does have some things going for it.

You have two factions more or less at war, the remains of a fallen civilization, a sparse population, and religious zealotry on both sides of the conflict.

You have the requisite space and lawlessness to make the Forbidden Zone a suitable MMORPG environment.

Just as long as it doesn’t devolve into “Kill Ten Apes.”

What do you think of the Planet of the Apes?

The Site

I’m now fully a month into the fourth year and I still manage to pollute the blogosphere with 20-25 posts a month, many of which contain a “TL;DR” amount of text.  I am surprised I have kept going this long.

Of course, we are at a bit of a crisis point, what with the main thread of the blog, the instance group, at something of a crossroads.

On the other hand, I have apparently not mined out the rich vein of gaming nostalgia yet.  Of late I have been returning again to TorilMUD and how things used to be.

Of course, unlike a lot of past online games, TorilMUD has the advantage of still being around so I can go refresh my memory.  Even it has changed a lot over the last 16 years though. (But they have a nice new web site up now!  Heck, they even have a Twitter feed!)  And they have been trying to align the combat systems more with the current d20 system that D&D uses.  Farewell THAC0!

One Year Ago

In one of the worst kept secrets, it was announced that BioWare’s MMO project was in fact Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Their subscription goals were, of course, quite modest. (NOT!)

I celebrated my 15 years of playing Sojourn/TorilMUD with the first in a series of posts that I am still working on.  Nostalgia FTW!

And speaking of Nostalgia, Tipa was out looking for EverQuest blogs.  I’m not sure any were discovered.

The instance group formed up a guild and was running in Warhammer Online.  We had our best night and our worst night, plus a few that were somewhere in between.  All in all though, things were not as exciting as we had hoped.

Mythic was trying out incentives to get better server balance while starting to talk about new stuff coming soon.  Not a word about the quest log however.

In EVE Online Potshot, Gaff, and I were playing with fleets and I was flying a shiny new ship.

And I stared logging into World of Warcraft again to get things lined up for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion.  I managed to survive through the controversial scourge event and was intrigued by these shiny new achievements.

New Linking Sites

The following sites have been kind enough to link here.  Please take a moment to visit them in return!

• Don’t Fear the Mutant
• Game by Night
• Mister K Plays WOW
• Salaryn’s Sword

Most Viewed Posts in October

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
2. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
3. Professor Oak’s Letter and Shaymin
4. Heroic Deadmines!
5. Arceus Event Annouced!
6. Scouting DDO
7. The Battle.net Conversion
8. XP vs. Vista vs. Windows 7
9. Diablo! I mean Torchlight!
10. DDO Guild Creation FTW! Almost…
11. Exciting Ways to Die in Kobold Village
12. Weighted Jack-o’-Lantern Fun

Search Terms of the Month

dead disney caracter
[Bambi's Mother?]

explosive mushrooms
[not the kind with which you want to experiment]

i got to the place where shaymin is but
[but?]

“i own a freighter”
[me too!]

how to do headless horseman twice
[first get him drunk...]

herve villechaize
[Da plane!]

Spam Comment of the Month

Don’t let porksword rust
[Is that a Kingdom of Loathing thing?]

Dungeons & Dragons Online

As part of the continuation of the instance group, we have begun scouting other games that might lend themselves to our play budget.  Dungeon & Dragons Online, now available with a free to play, item store supported option seems like a possible fit.  Potshot, Gaff, and I have rolled up characters, but we have not decided yet whether the title is worth pursuing in the long term.

EVE Online

Still mostly dormant for me.  I have been skilling up my main character.  He will be able to fly a Hulk soon, so he will have some flexibility in mining ops if/when we get back to New Eden.  Since flying the Orca got me most of the skills for a Hulk, I figured I ought to finish that off.  After that, I’m not sure what training goal I will go after.

Lord of the Rings Online

I pre-ordered that Adventurer’s Pack, which means that the Siege of Mirkwood expansion will be available to me come December 1st.  Of course, I still haven’t seen Moria….

Star Trek Online

I didn’t get in the closed beta, but I am on the press release email list, so I get nothing but teases about the game.  Still, I hear it is coming out next year.

Torchlight

Another distraction!

World of Warcraft

The instance group still lingers in Azeroth.  Certainly the “swap to horde” idea was an easy decision for the group, since the barrier to entry were so low.  We will see how well that sticks.

In fact, we haven’t played the horde guys too much over the last two weeks, since Hallow’s End has been going on.  Instead we went after the Headless Horseman and the achievements, stopping off at the Trial of the Champion while we were there.  But if you go to Pugchecker now, you’ll see that we are flagged green for all of the standard 5-person instance bosses.

Coming Up

I am sure there will be some more highs and lows with Torchlight.  It is a v1.0 (or v1.1) product, so there are always issues, some of which I have already encountered.

There is more nostalgia to be squeezed from TorilMUD.

And we’re getting to the point where I am going to have to look back and see if wacky predictions I made at the start of the year have managed to come true.

And, as always, tales of the instance group.

I get notes from Turbine every so often about offers and upcoming events related to Lord of the Rings Online.  As somebody with a lifetime subscription, I am always “on” as far as they are concerned, and I do not mind even when I’m not spending time in Middle-earth.

The latest items in my inbox are, of course, focused on the upcoming Siege of Mirkwood expansion and the new Adventurer’s Pack, both of which will be live on or about December 1st.

If you are on a standard subscription plan, you can get Mirkwood for “free” by upgrading your account to a multi-month payment plan by October 31st.

As a lifetime subscriber, I cannot change my subscription plan, so that deal is lost to me.  Instead they have something else for me.

As a lifetime subscriber, if I pre-order the Adventurer’s Pack by October 31st, I also get the Siege of Mirkwood expansion as part of the deal.

Now, you can debate as to which is the better deal.  I am sure people will have their own preferences.  But for me, the Adventurer’s Pack is probably the more beneficial of the two items for sale, so I would probably end up buying it either way.

And the key item for me in the Adventurer’s Pack is this:

Shared storage: A storage space capable of storing 20 items accessible by all your characters on the same LOTRO server/world.

As a crafter/pack rat, one of the annoyances of coming back to play the game every couple of months is finding that all my bank slots are full and that I have items for one character stored up on another.  This package will, improve my quality of life some.

The other items, the two extra character slots, the new mount, and the speed boosting cloak are all nice, but storage is always a pain for me.

So I would have bought the Adventurer’s Pack no matter what, but now I get Siege of Mirkwood as well.

I went and grabbed Torchlight from Direct2Drive on Wednesday night, letting the game download while I slept.

Not that it was a huge honking download.  It was just convenient for me to do it that way.  I prefer to let downloads that last more than a minute or two happen while I am away from my computer.

So the next evening I installed it to give it a try.

After about 10 minutes I realized I had been playing for an hour.  It is one of those.

It is slick, smooth, and quite clearly acquired some of the greatness that the Diablo series showed in the past.

If you have played the Diablo games of the past, the learning curve will be very short indeed.  There are some deviations from how things worked in Diablo II, but Diablo II first shipped over nine years ago, so it is quite possible that reflection over that time might have lead the developers to different choices.

The main departures from the Diablo series are in art style and story tone.

The art style is cartoon-y, in the same vein as Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield Heroes.  To wit, my Destroyer:

Vikund the Destroyer

Some people won’t be able to get past that I am sure, but it works for me.

And part of the reason that it works is that the tone of everything is a little lighter than it was in Diablo.

Diablo was very dark (though not without humor) while tone of Torchlight is more befitting its look.

If you can get past those two items, the game feels like Diablo II brought forward 9 years.

Click to move, click to attack, right-click for your secondary attack, click to loot, click to do just about anything.

The settings are stone simple for a modern game.

Torchlight Settings

I’m not sure what “Netbook Mode” does, but I gather that Runic is shooting for a large audience by trying to support very low end systems.

You cannot even remap keys.  Not that you need to, since there are not all that many keys to learn, and almost everything you need is clustered on the bar at the bottom of the page.

Belly up to the bar!

I am a little leary about having the hot keys split up the middle.  I tend to memorize the few keys I use all the time and go click on everything else.  On the other hand, having health and mana moved in from my peripheral vision seems to be quite effective.  Many of my Diablo deaths could be attributed my no glancing down to the corner of my screen to check health during a hairy fight.

But most other things will be remarkably similar to Diablo fans.

Character Sheet

Inventory Sheet

There are also health potions, mana potions, identify scrolls, town portal scrolls, three skill point trees, and all the equipment in the world dropping in various forms.  There is even a hardcore check box at character creation, which I am going to assume means perma-death.

Which is not to say that there is nothing new.

The simple fact that the game runs on my home system at 1600×1200 versus the 640×480 for Diablo and 800×600 for Diablo II is a big deal to me.  And on my system, a two year old quad-core with an nVidia GTS-250 video card, it runs very well.

It also runs well on my soon-to-be five year old laptop, though the CPU usage is such that I wouldn’t count on doing anything else on the machine while I was playing.

You also get a pet, either a cat or a dog, which fights along side you, has its own inventory slots, and can run back to town and sell stuff for you, though I haven’t check to see if he is getting short changed.

And speaking of inventory, you not only get the usual chest in town to store your excess goodies, but you get a shared chest that your other character can access.

Then, finally, there is fishing.

I caught one!

I haven’t actually fed a fish yet to my pet, nor eaten one myself (I’ve been too busy simply smacking stuff), but various fish are supposed to endow you with special benefits.  Something to look into.

Sound great so far?

Now the killer.   No multiplayer.

I know, what do I want for just $20?

But seriously, if the game had multiplayer, I could tell you what the instance group would be doing for the next few weeks.

Without multiplayer however, I get to decide if I go play with my friends or play Torchlight.

So that is a let down.

But, since the plan seems to be to move to a Torchlight based MMO of some sort, we may get multiplayer in some form in the future.

And since the game was designed with MODs in mind, I expect that the game will take on a life of its own if it achieves large scale success.

In the end, for $20, the game delivers enough sheer Diablo-esque joy for me to not fret too much about the missing multiplayer aspect.  I am not that far into the game, but I can already tell I will get my money’s worth out of it.  And there is something to be said for keeping things simple.  I hope it finds enough success to finance the follow-on plans.

If you miss Diablo, you will probably be able to find a home in Torchlight until Diablo III ships.

But if you didn’t care for Diablo, this probably isn’t the game for you.

While we finished the last, real, official, current, canonical five person non-heroic instance last week, swatting down King Ymiron like the bug he is, there were still things on our agenda.  Some loose ends to tie up.

The whole group was on.

80 Priest – Skronk
80 Warlock – Bungholio
80 Mage – Ula
80 Warrior – Earlthecat
80 Paladin – Vikund

And the first order of business was the Headless Horseman, a Hallow’s End standard.

This is our second year hitting the Headless Horseman in hopes of getting his mount.

The Headless Horseman Takes Off

For the group this represented attempts 16 through 20 to get the brass ring.  But it was not to be.  We now have quite a selection of rings, so many that we had to leave one horseman corpse unlooted, but no mounts.

Going after the Headless Horseman did not take us long though.  Compared to last year taking him down seemed quite easy.  There was no question that we were going to win.  Last year we lost once and it was work to win the rest of the time.  This year we previously went at him minus Earl and with a level 54 shaman in tow and it still seemed more like a chase than a fight.  (The shaman died a couple of times, but that didn’t change the balance of the fight.)

I don’t know if this means that were are just better this year in skill/equipment or if the HH didn’t get big enough boost over last year, but we beat him down 5 out of 5 times on Saturday and are 20 out of 20 overall so far.

Which left us enough time to go take a full group run at the Trial of the Champion.

We tried to do this as a four person group previously, and were not successful.  This instance is supposed to be a bit of a step up from the other five person instances in Northrend, so we were back again to give it a try.

Mounted for Battle

The first part, the mounted combat segment, was a bit chaotic as before.  Three of us died during that part.  However, the graveyard is close and if you run back you can mount up and join the battle again.  So after a lot of running around, we defeated the first three bosses in mounted combat.

Then we were treated to a change.  The event has been altered since last we ran it so that now, once the mounted portion is done, the bosses don’t just turn around and start wailing on your lance equipped character.  Instead, they just retire to the gate through which they came, allowing us to get ourselves together and plan out attack.

We faced Morka the Skullcrusher, Zul’tore, and Deathstalker Visceri.  Visceri had a mana bar, so we figured he ought to be first on our list.  We went straight after him.

Earl was able to keep all three on him and, while healing got a little scary for a moment or two, once Visceri was down, the drama ebbed and we were able to drop the other two.

The first round was complete.  We were now further than last time.

Next up was Eadric the Pure, who shows up with nine trash mobs in three groups of three.  We were surprised to find that none of these groups were linked with Eadric, so we were able to mow them down and then move on to the big guy.

His big move is Radiance, a flash of light that damages and blinds you for a short time.  However, this attack can be defeated by simple turning away from him, which the announcement that heralds the attack pretty much tells you to do.

We figured that out pretty quickly, though we all turned around at the announcement of another of his attacks, having fallen for the old “Simon Says” gambit, which did not diminish his Hammer of the Righteous.

In the end, Eadric went down.

Which left us facing the bonus round, the Black Knight.  He was a pushover out on the tournament grounds,  but now he was back from the dead and seemed a bit more formidable.

We had to face the Black Knight three times to get through the encounter.  He comes at you in three phases, first as a scourge, then as a skeleton, and finally as a ghost, and each segment has its own flavor, which we had to learn the hard way.

The first phase was straightforward.  We never had a problem there.

The second phase, when he is a skeleton, sees the Black Knight summon a group of minions who got out of control the first time we ran into them, leading to a wipe.

The second time around, we took care of the second phase by getting Earl to collect all the minions and then Bung and Ula rained area attacks on them, swatting them all down pretty quickly.  Then we smote the Black Knight, which lead us to the third phase, where we wiped again while trying to come to grips with the constant damage to the whole party and the “Marked for Death” special that hit and caused the death of Skronk early in the fight.  Another wipe.

So we ran through the the three phases one more time, there being no partial credit for the Black Knight, and at the final phase just had everybody keep a close eye on their health while we burned him down with maximum DPS.  We still ended up losing Ula and Bung in the fight, but they poured enough damage onto the Black Knight that we were able to finish him off.

And so we stood in victory over the orb that was all that remained of the Black Knight.

Black Knight - Not Invincible

Unfortunately, there was no achievement.  The Trial of the Champion achievement requires you to defeat all the possible bosses in the instance.  One pass through leaves at least three bosses left undone.  So if we want the achievement, we are going to have to come back for another visit.

On the upside, the loot chests were pretty nice, with a couple of nice, purple upgrades for the casters and a good cloak for Vikund.

And so we made it through the Trial of the Champion.  Since it was Hallow’s End there were a few out takes from the victory shot, since everybody seemed intent on scarfing the candy from the Headless Horseman.

We all had the Out With It achievement already, we just like throwing up in public.

As for next week.  I’m not sure what we’ll do on Halloween.  Probably five more shots at the Headless Horseman and some more puking.

Like Potshot, I have been trying to finish up the Hallow’s End achievements to get the meta achievement and the title of “The Hallowed.”

Once I figured out that the flimsy mask achievement was not a prerequisite for the title, I figured getting the meta achievement would be easy.  After all, this is our second pass through Hallow’s End achievements.  I picked up most of them last year at this time, so there were just a couple more to get.

And I was even more encouraged that I got the Sinister Squashling on my first trick-or-treat.  Things were looking good.

In fact, very quickly I was only waiting for somebody in the group to get the Leper Gnome wand.  That was all I needed to complete the  Masquerade achievement.  And nobody in our guild had one.

I could have paid somebody to hit me with the Leper Gnome wand.  People were shouting offers to do so for 5-20 gold.  However, after my daughter got ripped off by somebody offering that service, my faith in my fellow man dipped just a little lower.  There is no real recourse if you give somebody money and then they decline to wand you.

And so I waited for somebody in the guild to get one of those wands.  A week went by.  No Leper Gnome wands.

Well, actually, there were five Leper Gnome wands, but they were all on my account.  I was having no problem getting them.

At one point, Skronk got the random wand.

We met up and he hit me with that.  On the third try, I rolled Leper Gnome!

And I didn’t get the achievement.

The achievement is quite clear.  You need to be transformed by the Hallowed Wand – Leper Gnome, not just turned into a Leper Gnome by a wand.

Back to trick-or-treating.

Then, one afternoon I was in the Alterac Valley battleground.  I was just shy of the honor points I needed to buy something new.  And as we say waiting for the battle to start somebody said, “Anybody have the ninja wand?  I need it for the achievement.”

I had the ninja wand.  Heck, by that point I had most of the wands.  So I hit him with the ninja and he got the title and the achievement.

Seeing his success, I asked in the raid if anybody had the Leper Gnome wand.

Nobody responded.

Seconds passed.

The gates started up and the battle was just beginning when suddenly somebody hit me with the Leper Gnome wand.

Hallowed in Alterac Valley

The title was mine!  I am not sure who got me, but thank you very much!

And then we went on to win AV in record time.

Of course, about two hours later, Ula logged on and got the Leper Gnome wand trick-or-treating.  That is the way it always seems to go.

Now I just have to work on that flimsy mask achievement while we wait for the next big WoW holiday event, which is apparently Pilgrim’s Bounty.  I’m not sure how that is going to play outside of the US, but we’ll see.

Diablo ships today!

erm…

I mean Torchlight ships today!

Or whatever the electronic distribution equivalent term is, since they don’t appear to be shipping physical boxes.

Torchlight!  It was done by those guys who did Diablo!

I mean Mythos!

Wait, Mythos was done by some people who did Diablo.

And the same guy did that did the music for Diablo did the music for Torchlight!

But you get my point, which is that whenever we speak of Torchlight, we must also mention Diablo.

Diablo! Diablo! Diablo!

And in my view of the world, comparing it to Diablo, and bringing up the connections with Diablo, is saying something good about the game.

But I really liked Diablo.

And Torchlight does appear to have that Diablo feel to it, at least in the screen shots I have seen.

Screen shot from the Torchlight web site

It has been a PC game drought for me this year.  The only new title I purchased so far in 2009 has been Peggle.  (Yay for being totally behind the curve on that one!)

So Torchlight, with all its Diablo connections, may be my second PC game purchase this year.

If they will let me purchase it.  It is being sold through Perfect World, a Chinese MMO company with some ports in the US (Jade Dynasty, Ether Saga and Perfect World), and they seem to have an issue with my billing information.

They sent me an email telling me that they were sending me another email regarding a billing issue.

I never received that second email which had a key link I need to follow in order to solve this problem.  Or so they said in the first email.

I did, however, receive a third email (which was right in the spam folder that I was watching just in case the second email showed up there) which told me that since I did not respond to the second email (which I am going to guess had some time limit associated with it) my transaction was being canceled and my money refunded.

They took my money, had a problem with it, and are now sending it back.

So Torchlight may not end up being my second PC game purchase this year.

And this billing snafu certainly does not bode well for me looking into the Torchlight MMO franchise that the team at Runic Games, the Diablo pedigreed developers of Torchlight, is talking about.

It does, however, give the publisher’s name, Perfect World, something of an ironic twist for the moment.

Anyway, I’ll see about trying to buy the game again this weekend.  Perhaps they are suffering from the first day rush.

In the mean time, I’ll just watch the game play video over at Game Bunny.

Diablo!

Leuthilspar Tales – Part IV

As an elf starting out in the early days of TorilMUD you were stuck on an island for 20 levels.  An island with a home town and three zones, Kobold Village, the Faerie Forest, and the Elemental Glades.

Kobold Village, once you got in, was the preferred place to grind levels experience the game as a young elf.  But a zone like Kobold Village begins to feel crowded when even a half a dozen people are active in it.

So, looking for adventure, you might opt for the second best zone for young elves on Evermeet, the Faerie Forest.

(Not to be confused with the Faerie Forest outside of Waterdeep in Crushk or the Faerie Forest that was later added to the Moonshaes.  Look for a Faerie Forest franchise near you!)

In the MUD learning experience, Faerie Forest had a few things to teach you once you had grown used to Kobold Village.

If you could find it.

The entrance was hidden.  You had to get to the right room, which was located in a loop of rooms off the forest road, and search for a secret door.

You find a secret exit south!

Ah, there it is.

Once you opened up the door (keyword “open secret”) and entered, you had to face a couple of aggressive monsters.

A scruffy wood rat is here slinking around in the gloom.

Okay, a wood rat isn’t exactly fearsome, unless you are really low level and/or naked because you are trying to get back to your corpse.  The thing with the wood rats, they were in a set of three single-file rooms, which meant you could not just spam past them. (Unless you figured out that you could “recline” and scoot under them.  I’d like to see that in real life.)  You would just bump into them, and then they would attack you.

Once past the rats, there was another door (keyword “open foliage”) through which was the Faerie Forest.

And once you went through that door, you were in trouble.

That was a one-way door you just walked through.  The way out of the Faerie Forest lay somewhere else.  You had to find your way out, which meant exploring the zone.

Welcome to the Faerie Forest

Not that it was too dangerous.  Compared to Kobold Village there were only a few aggressive creatures.  There was another nest of wood rats and a anti-social goblin, neither of which were very fearsome.  Oh, and then there was Chacodyn up in his tree.

A malevolent chacodyn snaps into visibility.

OUCH! That really did HURT!

Now he was bad.  Stay out of the trees.

I well remember my first visit to the Faerie Forest.  I tailed in behind somebody else then went off exploring.

I explored for quite a while, then decided I really needed to get back to town.  So I explored some more.  I went back and forth through the zone.  I grew quite frustrated.

You see, I had not yet learned the secret to getting out of the Faerie Forest, a secret that can be summarized as:

nueuuedenensn

No, that is not the capital of Estonia.  Those are the directions to get from one landmark, the legendary Finn McCumhail, a verbose NPC on the path through the Faerie Forest (“Travel these realms with care!”), and the front door of Anna’s cottage, inside of which was the exit from the zone.

That translates as “North, up, east, up, up, etc.”

There is a trick in that path though.  You’ll notice that the last three directions you need to travel are north, south, then north again.  If you don’t do that little trick, you just end up back on the path you just came through.

I had narrowed down that area as the most likely way out, but could not get past that trick.

So I shouted.  I yelled for help.

Fortunately, back in those days it was uncommon to be alone in any of three Evermeet zones.  Eventually a ranger named Morianthis found me and led me to Anna’s house, telling me the path and its trick, so that I wouldn’t get stuck in the Faerie Forest again.

Morianthis became one of my friends in the game from that point forward.  And, in an ironic twist, it later came to pass that I was the mapper of zones and rarely lost if I could find a landmark, while Mori tended to get turned around once off the beaten path so that I got to come to his rescue a few times in later days.

But this time, Mori was the hero, delivering me to Anna’s house.

Before the Oak Tree Cottage

This is a pathway before the front of a large cottage which fills a clearing in the Faerie Forest.  The cottage is an interesting sight to behold.  Mammoth oak trees support the four corners of the cottage; the walls of the cottage seem to be grow right out of the oak trees. The branches of the four, towering oak trees, grow so close together they seem to form the roof of the cottage.  One cannot begin to fathom the time it must have took for this cottage to have been created. There is a small gravel pathway which extends around the cottage to the east and west.  The front door of the cottage is directly to the north.  To the south is the beginning of the clearing.

And quite a house it was.  The previously mentioned Chacodyn lives up one of those trees that forms the cottage.

Anna's House

Once at Anna’s house, you went inside, up stairs, and to the library:

Library of the Oak Tree Cottage
Exits: -S
A mysterious orb of shifting colors and light floats here.

Fortunately, the orb was labeled.

The orb is a giant globe of swirling colors and humming magical energy.
In tiny letters near the bottom of the orb it reads:
“For proper use, see library entry on returning home”

And once you figured out how to use the library (there is a sign in the room) you will find out how to use the orb.

Simply touch the orb in the library and you will be teleported out of the realm back into mortal lands.  Be warned though that once leaving the faerie realm, few find it easy to return again.

Well, as easy as getting past those wood rats again, anyway.

And once you touch the orb (assuming you are not wearing or carrying  something with the keyword “orb,” in which case you will have to take it off and put it in a container) you are teleported out to the start of the zone, on the other side of those wood rats, able to head back to Leuthilspar.

You now know the way out.  You need not feel lost in the Faerie Forest again young elf!

Next time, the bounty of the Faerie Forest.

I have at time considered dropping the engineering profession.

I picked up engineering originally with my paladin, Vikund, primarily to support my then main-character-of-the-moment Tistann, who is a hunter.  Among the many things that engineers can make are guns, gun enhancements (scopes), and upgraded ammunition.  All very useful to a hunter that has specialized in guns.

But while the engineering recipe list has some other interesting items, it can be a less than thrilling professional path.

It is certainly not a money maker as most of the interesting items you can create require that the user have an engineering skill close to what it requires to build.  So most of your wares can only be used by other engineers who would probably rather just make the item themselves.

And there are a couple of flat spots when leveling up the engineering skill where you either have to keep grinding inexpensive green items that give rare skill ups or very expensive to build orange items that always give a skill up.

Still, there was some utility for a paladin back in the days when they had no generic ranged attack to have a supply of thrown explosive weapons to pull bad guys.  And there were those seaforium charges to open up chests, though I have yet to find something in a chest that would sell for more that the cost of the opening charge.

So I have persisted with the profession, grinding it up in bursts then letting it idle.

Finally though, in Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard decided to focus a lot on one of the engineering profession themes, convenience items.  There have been a number of cool things, like the wormhole generator, that have made pursuing the career worthwhile.

But the ultimate item on the convenience list is Jeeves.

Named for the “gentleman’s gentleman” of the P.G. Wodehouse novels, Jeeves is a repair bot extraordinaire.   When you summon him, your party can repair its gear, sell items to him to clear bag space, and buy reagents and ammunition.

In addition, if you are a master engineer, you can also access your bank via Jeeves.

I have been working towards Jeeves for a while now, getting all the parts required to make him lined up and grinding those final 10 expensive skill points.  Last night, I was finally ready.

First, I had to go get the recipe.  The recipe is a drop that engineers have a chance to get by salvaging any mechanical corpse in Northrend.  And after killing and salvaging nearly 200 mechanicals by the Inventor’s Library, the recipe showed up.  It was time to make Jeeves.

An Expensive Parts List

The parts list is a bit pricey.  The Titansteel bars are about 200 gold each and the King’s Amber around 150 gold each, plus what goes into making the other repair bots that get folded into Jeeves.  But I managed to harvest everything but the King’s Amber, so the out of pocket expense was not so bad.

So once I put all those parts together, I was able to summon Jeves.

Jeeves in the Morning

There is a one hour cool down on summoning him, and he only stays around for 10 minutes because it seems he has other things to which he must attend.

Still, a gentleman’s gentlerobot indeed.

Of course, now that we’re somewhat done with the five person content, I am not sure how often I will need to call on Jeeves.

One of the game annoyances I could do without is guild creation.

When we rolled up on Lightninghoof in WoW, we had to go through the same old routine, getting 9 people to sign the charter when we only had 5 available.  We managed to get some friends to create characters to help us out, but in the end I still had to stand there for a while in Orgrimmar and grub for signatures.

It didn’t go too bad.  I didn’t face some of the usual problems, like people out-bidding my charter signing bounty, people signing, taking my bounty, then signing another guild charter before I have turned in my own (so their signature goes away!), or the usual “bigger must be better” guild spam inviting every unguilded newbie they see.  It did take a while all the same.

Eventually our guild was formed.  In the time it took me to finish that, Potshot had already earned enough money at the auction house to buy a guild bank tab.

While I was rolling up new set of characters again this week in Dungeons & Dragons Online (thanks to a tip from Vett on how to get a free key to add DDO to your current Turbine account) I was poking around at the various functions in game and came across the ubiquitous “Social” window.  As in WoW or LOTRO, this is where things like your friends list resides.  It also has a tab for your guild.

So I decided to see what it was going to take to form yet another guild in yet another game.  But I was in for a surprise.

Buy a guild now!

Want a guild?  Go to the item shop and buy a Guild Charter!

Now that is a cash shop item I can get behind.

Given the choice between spending time begging for signatures from strangers and spending a couple of bucks, I will take the money option.  The tool tip for the store is right!

Of course, I’m sure not everybody will be as enthusiastic about this as I am.  There is no “go beg for signatures” option on a free account.  Somebody will no doubt wonder aloud if this is not unfair to the unemployed or some such I am sure.  But I know enough people who pay for character transfers on a whim to think that this has the potential to be pure win for a lot of people.

But how much does this cost?

I clicked on the Buy Now button and was greeted with this.

No Guild For You!

The social tab appears to be a bit ahead of the DDO Store.  The DDO store does not have such an option available at this time.

So no guild for us… yet.

Still, I like the idea that we could just create the guild on demand via the DDO store.  Some day.

How about you?  Would you rather grub for signatures?

Last weekend both Earl and myself were off doing other things, so the instance group just fooled around with their new horde characters on Lightninghoof and waited for Hallow’s End to start up on the server.  (Eldre’Thalas is an East Coast server, so we get our holiday start times early out here on the left coast.  Lightninghoof is Central time though, so things arrived an hour later.)

So, rather than bore people with tales of wee hordelings and Barren’s chat or speculate further on what we might do next, I thought I would post something of an overview of where we have been.  If you want the play-by-play detail, you can look at the Instance Group tag here at WordPress.com.

First, when it happened.

Timeline:

• Instance group forms: September 2006
• We defeat Edwin VanCleef, first instance done: October 2006
• The Burning Crusade released: January 2007
• Defeat Archaedas in Uldaman: March 2007
• Extended Hiatus (Exile in Middle Earth) : March to September 2007
• Lord of the Rings Online released: April 2007
• Return to Azeroth: September 2007
• Finish Zul’Farrak: October 2007
• Whole group has epic ground mounts: January 2008
• First Burning Crusade instance run: February 2008
• Warhammer Online released: September 2008
• Tour of Warhammer Online: September to November 2008
• Wrath of the Lich King released: November 2008
• First Northrend instance run: November 2008
• Hiatus Two (author under deadline pressure): January to March 2009
• We finally defeat Ingvar the Plunderer: April 2009
• We twink Onyxia: July 2009
• We try Molten Core, decide sleep is better: August 2009
• We defeat King Ymiron, declare victory: October 2009

And during that  time line, we visited the following places.

Instances Done At Level: 36

• Deadmines
• Wailing Caverns
• Shadowfang Keep
• Stormwind Stockades
• Razorfen Kraul
• Gnomeregan
• Scarlet Monastery
• Razorfen Downs
• Uldaman
• Zul’Farrak
• Maraudon
• Sunken Temple
• Blackrock Depths
• Scholomance
• Stratholmes
• Dire Maul West
• Lower Blackrock Spire
• Hellfire Ramparts
• Blood Furnace
• Slave Pens
• Underbog
• Mana Tombs
• Auchenai Crypts
• Escape from Durnhold Keep
• Sethekk Halls
• Utgarde Keep
• The Nexus
• Azjol Nerub
• Ahn’kahet
• Violet Hold
• Gundrak
• Halls of Stone
• Halls of Lightning
• The Oculus
• Culling of Stratholme
• Utgarde Pinnacle

Instances Done Close to Level: 2

• Steamvault
• Shadow Labyrinth

Instances Done Over Level: 6

• Ragefire Chasm
• Mechanar
• Opening the Dark Portal
• Botanica
• Upper Blackrock Spire
• Onyxia’s Lair

Instances We Failed to Complete: 2

• Molten Core
• The Trial of the Champion

Instances Left Undone: 5

• Dire Maul East
• Dire Maul North
• Shattered Halls
• The Arcatraz
• Magister’s Terrace

Other Notable Bosses Slain: 2

• Headless Horseman – Hallow’s End
• Coren Direbrew – Brewfest

And while we were doing all of that, our personal lives went on.  A few details here.

Personal Statistics:

• Births: 0  (just missed Bung becoming a dad)
• Marriages: 0 (just missed Ula and Skronk by 3 months)
• Moves: 3 (1 across town, 1 across two states, 1 coast to coast)
• Homes purchased: 3
• Homes sold: 3 (and we’re all damn glad those numbers match)
• Mortgage indebtedness incurred: ~2 million US dollars
• Job Changes: 2
• Mergers and acquisitions of employers: 3
• Books published: 4
• Colonoscopies: 2

Group Hardware:

• New computers systems: 3
• New Video Cards: 8
• New motherboards: 2
• New processors: 4
• New monitors: 4
• New keyboards: 2
• iPhones purchased: 2

And, as a lark, some things we seem to quote regularly during our instance group runs.

Media Often Referenced During Instance Group Runs:

• Ghostbusters
• Monty Python’s Flying Circus
• Bored of the Rings
• Dave Allen at Large
• Kelly’s Heroes
• The Big Bus
• The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
• The Simpsons
• Generic badly dubbed martial arts films

At some point I will compile a list of the quotes we reuse frequently and put it up as a quiz and let people guess the sources.   This is the cheat sheet for that quiz.

Much thanks to Potshot for his additions to this post.

So what else happened during the last three years?

I only noticed recently that the Weighted Jack-o’-Lanterns that you can throw at people to give them a pumpkin head actually travel at the same speed as an epic ground mount in World of Warcraft.

Of course, there is an achievement related to those Jack-o’-Lanterns.  You have to throw one at each of the current player races in the game to get it.  I managed to get that.

Hanging around in Dalaran will get that done, though it appears that the Horde has been taken over by Blood Elves and Tauren.  Undead aren’t too tough to find, but it took me a while to find an Orc and a Troll.

Anyway, we were idling in Ironforge essentially waiting for the Trick or Treat timer to run down when we noticed a guy on his Hallow’s End broom circling the area between the bank and the auction house.

As he circled we saw that somebody had thrown a weighted Jack-o’-Lantern at him and it was following him around his circuit.

Then somebody threw another one.  I added one of my own.

Soon this guy had quite a parade following him around.

Around Ironforge

Here They Come!

There They Go!

Things to do in Ironforge when you are bored.

Buying gold makes baby murlocs cry.

So said Blizzard today on the US World of Warcraft site.

And if that isn’t enough to dissuade you, they have also put up a page listing out the issues that come up that are directly funded by buying gold, some of which affect every player in the game.

Dungeons and Dragons Online has been hovering around the vicinity of our list of potential replacements activities for the instance group, though we were waiting for the “Eberron Unlimited” free to play version to show up and settle down before we took a look.

Potshot had looked at the game about two and a half years ago and had found it a bit wanting.  Brent at VirginWorlds also devoted a show to exploring DDO from the view of the dungeon crawl experience, but wasn’t totally convinced it was the best thing ever.

Time, however, has passed.  And, as those who have played Lord of the Rings Online know, Turbine does not let things stand as they are.  They keep improving things over time, and DDO has had a lot of time since any of us last looked at it.

So we thought it would be worthwhile for a couple of us to scout out the potential of the game for the group.  Potshot, Gaff, and I all downloaded the client last week and created characters on the Khyber server. (No doubt I was feeling some nostalgia for tales of the Northwest Frontier.)

The download itself was relatively painless.  I hope we are finally past the days of, say, the Vanguard beta, where multi-gigabyte downloads fail or get corrupted and have to be restarted over and over. Turbine has a download manager that keeps the data flowing.  I let the download for the premium graphic client run over night, though that was probably unnecessary.  It looked like it was going to take well under two hours to transfer.

The only thing that did not go smooth was account creation.  I already have a Turbine account for LOTRO, and from the account management page, it seems that I should be able to have multiple games on the same account.  However I could not figure out how to add DDO to my current account, so I ended up just making a new account.  Yay, another account name and password to remember.

Once downloaded and installed, the game looks a lot like LOTRO.  Or, rather, given the relative ages of the product, LOTRO looks a lot like DDO.  Once in the game the interfaces diverge to meet the requirements of either game, but they are quite clearly the spawn of the same team.  And some activities, like logging in, patching, character creation, and character management, are as alike as makes no difference.

I created my first character on Khyber.  When playing for free, you are allowed to create two characters per server.  I chose a human paladin, not being sure what Potshot might pick (Gaff will be a fighter of some sort) thinking that a hybrid would give me some flexibility.

As I said, character creation is very much the same as LOTRO.  There are a couple of differences.

The first is that the area your character occupies while you change the settings is very dark.  In LOTRO you are outside in the sunlight, in DDO you are in a dungeon.  But it is so dark that it makes seeing the various customization options rather difficult.  And if you are in a bright room, forget about it.

The second is that, in LOTRO, your character is wearing what you’ll see them in when you first enter the world.  In DDO you have a very nice set of armor on, but when you actually create the character and get to the management screen, your character is wearing what appears to be a cocktail dress hastily crafted from a soiled tablecloth.

Really, this worked for Paris Hilton

Fortunately, this look is a temporary situation.  After running through the tutorial dungeon my guy ended up looking more like an adventurer and less like a victim of some fraternity initiate rite.

Dressed to kill

Not shown is the nice looking sword he got as part of the tutorial.

And once in the game I had to relearn some things.

First, the camera appears to be stuck forever looking over your should, so I gather that I am never going to be able to take an in-game picture of my character’s face.  I will forever be looking at his backside.  Not the tragedy of the ages, but you may have noticed that I am fond of those touristy “being there” photos; us at King Ymiron’s throne, us standing over the corpse of Prince Keleseth, us before the corpse of Onyxia.  Any shots like that in DDO will have to exclude me it seems.

And then there is combat.  You click to attack.  You can auto attack, but it seems to be less effective, so I stuck to clicking.  However, if you are used to holding down the mouse button to adjust your camera, things may seem awkward.  You can spot me in town, I am the one who keeps swinging his weapon for no apparent reason as I yet again futilely try to adjust the camera angle.

Movement, however, is not click based, thank the devs.  You can run around via the traditional WASD control keys, though for some reason E and Q were not mapped to strafe right and left.  The keys were not mapped to anything by default and the option to map strafing was in the list of movement keys, so I had to wonder why somebody chose not to just connect those two.  It didn’t take me long to figure it out, but still.

And while I was there I had to remap the key to take screen shots.  Control-P?  No, the Print Screen key on my keyboard lives only to take screenshots.  My fingers hit can find and hit that key with amazing accuracy, considering its location, so that must be mapped.

This week we are warming up a bit, learning the basics of the game, with an eye to actually running something as a group this coming weekend.

Of course, there are concerns in my mind.  There are only three of us and, like LOTRO, the default party size appears to be six.  Back in LOTRO this was a big issue because we only regularly had four people, which meant that we could not run any of the instanced content at the appropriate level without it becoming a wipe-fest.

I understand that you can hire NPCs in DDO to fill out your party, though I have not looked into it yet.  That could cover us depending on the cost and their effectiveness.  We shall see this weekend.

I received a letter from DirecTV the other day.  Enclosed in the envelop was something I had been waiting for.  A card.

BlizzCon Exclusive Gift

The Grunty the Murloc Marine loot card from BlizzCon, a reward for subscribing to watch the event on pay per view.

The card is… well… just that, a card, rather like a gift card, with instructions on the back on how to redeem it for the in-game pet.

Instructions

I suppose I could have paid for the pay per view event by just listing the card up on eBay.  They seem to be going for about that much or more.  But I wanted the companion pet, so I scratched off the backing and entered the code.

Grunty Redeemed

I had to do that quietly, because if my daughter had known what I had before I redeemed it, I would have been faced with an unbearable amount of pouting and pleading.  Fortunately for me, Mr. Chilly showed up the same day so I was able to distract her with that.  Well, that and some talk about the upcoming WoW 5 Year anniversary pet, the Onyxia whelpling.

Once redeemed, an in-game mail was waiting for me and all of my current characters.

There was even an achievement (a feat of strength) for geapping the attachment that came with the note.

It took me a moment to decipher what the achievement’s name meant.

And so now I can have Grunty the Murloc Space Marine follow me around if I like.  He is fine around town, though I could not recommend him if you are attmempting to be discreet.   Every so often he unload the magazine of his rifle into the air.

Grunty Unloads!

The sound can be startling, as it is a bit loud.

He will also pop a smoke flare every once in a while, which will draw attention.  That is fine if you are marking an LZ, but not so good if you were trying to hide.

I hear he will also open fire on the zergling companion pet that came as an option with the original World of Warcraft Collector’s Edition.  I’m not sure I’ll ever get to see that, as I hear most people took the panda or mini Diablo.

So one more pet on the pile for me.  I still need a few more for the 50 pets achievement.  And, of course, what does Blizzard give you if you collect 50 pets?  Why, another pet!

Pokemon.com has finally announced the long expected Arceus download event!

Arceus will be available for download to Pokemon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum at Toys R Us stores in the United States and Puerto Rico from November 7th through November 15th.

Arceus is a special Pokemon and cannot be caught in game.  The only way to get Arceus is via a download even.

Arceus info at Pokemon.com

Information about the event and about Arceus is available here at Pokemon.com.

I’ve been down with the flu for much of the last seven days so haven’t been keeping tabs on the gaming blogs as much as usual, but it seems that more than a few people have been getting themselves into a huff over the security implications of Blizzard making people merge their World of Warcraft accounts with Battle.net.

The argument has been made that using an email address is less secure than using an account name.

Which I would grant as true if we all just had one email address.  One we used everywhere, every day.  One displayed, perhaps, on the front page of one’s blog.

Honestly though, I have to think a bit to come up with somebody with just one email address these days.

My mom has more than one email address. (She reads this blog! Hi mom!)

My wife has more than one email address. (Another reader! Hi sweetie!)

And me? Don’t get me started.  I have a domain and essentially an unlimited supply of forwarding email addresses that can be as complex as I can stand but which will still show up in one of my in boxes.

The only person I can think of for sure with only a single email address is my daughter. (Not yet a reader)  But she does not use it, because it was only created to use for her Battle.net account so I could merge her WoW account.

Email addresses are plentiful.  Creating one that you don’t use regularly is simple.

And if you are itching at this moment to write a comment telling me the you have but a single email address, let me save you the trouble and direct you to Yahoo! and Gmail where you can create a new email address for free.

But I did think of one possible flaw.  What would happen if you decided to use that email address at a later date?  Or maybe you accidentally used that “everybody knows it” email address for Battle.net and now regret it?

So I went to the Battle.net account site.

I merged my account months ago to get on the StarCraft II beta list and to use the Blizzard Authenticator.  If you’re going to make security and issue but don’t use the authenticator, I’d have to question your commitment to the proposition of security.

And you don’t even have to buy the authenticator. (Which appears to be in stock as of this writing and on which  I doubt Blizzard makes very much margin at all, to bring up two things I’ve seen mentioned more than once.)

They make versions of authenticator for phones, and not just iPhones.

Really!  There is a version for my crappy old Kyocera phone on the list.  I was surprised when I went and looked!  The list of supported phones is pretty big now.

But I digress.

I went to Battle.net because I was pretty sure I remembered an option.  And I found it.

Oh, look, you can change your email address.

So you can change both your logon and your password as regularly as you like if you are security conscious and still find reason to eschew the authenticator route.

That would seem to me to actually offer more security options.

And, because somebody is going to ask, yes that option actually changes your logon, not just the email address at which you receive notifications.

A look at the email address change screen

So some of the rants on the security implications seem a bit over blown in my opinion, if you are concerned about security.

That last bit is the key.  If you are not concerned about security, your current account name probably falls into one or more of these categories:

• The name of one of your characters
• Some common variation on your name and initials (jsmith, johns, jsmith74 and you were born in 1974)
• The name of a pet or loved one
• A name (and probably a password) you have used on other sites (your standard web logon)
• Your current, most commonly used email address minus the domain name and the @ sign

And if that is the case, the move to Battle.net is probably just maintaining the status quo for you when it comes to security.

So did Blizzard blowing the lid off of security with this move?  I don’t think so.

On the other hand, Tobold’s prediction of general support line mayhem on November 11th is about as close to a sure things as I can imagine.

And it will be a double disaster.

Not only are people going to swamp the phone lines and bring down the forums, but Blizzard is forcing people to actually THINK about their accounts.

When companies make their customers do that, some non-zero percentage of those customers will up and cancel their subscriptions.  It always happens.

So this is going to cost Blizzard.  I hope their plans for Battle.net are worth the pain they are going to have to endure.

I’d even worry about how Battle.net is going to behave come November 11th.  What is going to happen when a few hundred thousand people suddenly create accounts and try to merge their WoW account.

So, mom, go merge your account over this weekend.  Give me a call if you have any questions.  When you do merger your account, you’ll get a pet penguin in game.  I already got mine.  Your granddaughter has one now as well.

Mr. Chilly

Mr. Chilly is some sort of northern Kalimdor penguin I think, and should not be confused with Pengu, who is from Northrend and a hatchling of the race of King Ping.  Pengu can only be bought when one has exalted faction with the Kalu’ak.

The Majestic Pengu

I understand that Pengu is going to get some red-eye reduction in an upcoming patch.  I just hope he doesn’t end up looking like his distant cousin, Mr. Chilly who has the potential to become the most ubiquitous pet in the game.  Everybody who converts to Battle.net gets him, and everybody has to convert.  Only those who delay too long may not get him according to the Battle.net FAQ:

However, please note that we plan to remove the ability to get the penguin pet at some point in the future.

I’m going to guess that the “point in the future” is reasonably far out, lest they get yet more support phone calls about why people didn’t get their penguin.

While I don’t get things like free accounts and the like, I do occasionally get press releases for games.

I don’t mind.  The obligations are low and sometimes something interesting or amusing shows up in my inbox.

I got one such today.

It needs a bit of back story to even be comprehensible.  It will probably be amusing to maybe three people total.

Back in my TorilMUD days, especially during the last round of it being called Sojourn and the current incarnation of Toril, there was a group of people who played that I used to refer to as the Emporia Mafia.  They were a group of students in Emporia, Kansas who all went to Emporia State University.

But they weren’t a group that started playing together.  Some knew each other, but not all.  It was more that the MUD seemed to pick up an unusually large following from this particular University.  And it isn’t actually a big school.  It is roughly one tenth the size of my own alma mater, which produced, as far as I know, only a single adventurer in the game.

So today I saw in my email the following subject line:

EMPORIA WAR DETAILS RELEASED

My first thought, after a chuckle, was that this must, somehow, be related to the Emporia Mafia.

However, the subject line was truncated by my mailer.  The full subject, once I opened the email, actually read:

EMPORIA WAR DETAILS RELEASED for DRAGONICA ONLINE

Not quite as amusing.

Still, it does make me wonder now if there is any involvement somewhere by someone from Emporia State.

Gaff always says that Emporia is the true center of the Universe, though he tends to follow that up with the fact that R. Lee Emory is from Emporia.  Certainly it gives the place distinction, but….

And, just in case you were interested in the full Dragonica Online press release, here it is:

Emporia War Press Release

Dragonica is a free to play, item shop funded, side-scrolling fantasy MMORPG that Tipa has mentioned a couple of times over at West Karana that I might not have ever mentioned had it not been for the oddball Kansas connection.

We were back above the Howling Fjord on Saturday night to take on the last of the original Northrend five person instances.

A little more than 10 months ago, back in November 2008, we first rode across Australia Northrend from the Borean Tundra to find Utgarde Keep.  At the time we didn’t know there was a boat that would take us straight there from Menethil Harbor.  Still, it was a heroic ride across country that harkened back to the early days of EverQuest when all travel was overland… though at least we had mounts.

And once at Utgarde Keep we managed to get ourselves killed for the first of many times by Prince Keleseth.

It took us some time to actually bring down Prince Keleseth.  And then we were stopped at the next boss.

In fact, we did not defeat Ingvar the Plunderer until April of 2009.

And while there was some time off during that stretch when one of the crew was busy writing a book, it still took us quite a few tries to get past that first instance because… frankly… we had problems.

We had been having problems since the later Outlands instances.

We were wearing under level gear, a lot of it acquired from the first quests around Honor Hold in the Outlands and we were spec’d in odd and random fashions.

It was surprising to some that we could do as well as we did with what we had.

And so we did research.  Not a lot of research.  In fact, just barely enough that you could even call it research.  But minutes were spent at sites like Elitist Jerks… well… only at Elitist Jerks… cribbing talent tree builds, finding recommended stats for equipment, and copying down spell rotations.

Armed with that, some improved gear, and a training regimen that consisted mainly of regretting not using the training dummies in town and humming “Eye of the Tiger,” we set out to conquer Northrend.

And so we had, nearly, standing now at the last instance.  Our assembled team:

80 Priest – Skronk
80 Mage – Ula
80 Warlock – Bungholio
80 Warrior – Earlthecat
80 Paladin – Vikund

So into Utgarde Pinnacle we went.

In the foyer

There we picked up two quests for the zone, one to collect crap laying about the dungeon and one to kill the big boss, King Ymiron.  Well, we planned on that last part in any case, but it somebody wants to give us a little more gold along the way, so much the better.

We started in, clearing the trash without much difficulty.  We didn’t notice the one tricky trash mob until later, but we’ll get to that.

We arrived at the first boss, Svala Sorrowgrave, just in time to see her getting instructions from Arthas/The Lich King.  I couldn’t help thinking that we could have maybe changed this somehow last week.

Another Arthas moment in Northrend

Svala wasn’t a tough fight.  Her big schtick is to pull one of the team out of the pack suddenly and place them on an altar with three acolytes surrounding them.  Kill the acolytes, who are not elite, and the battle resumes.  Svala did not live up to her boasts to the Lich King.  One boss down.

Moving on, we ran into the tricky trash mob, an abomination that puts a disease on one of the part that hits everybody else in the part for 3,000 damage every 3 seconds.  The person infected, of course, might not notice this.

And so we killed an abomination and moved quickly to another group of trash mobs, when suddenly people were dying.  Very quickly Vikund, the infected party, was the only guy standing versus three elites.  Wipe.

A look back at the combat text helped us figure out what was going on.  Vikund was put on purify patrol after abomination fights going forward, which was good as he seemed to be the one to get infected most of the time.

We then made it around to the second boss, Gortok Palehoof and his menagerie.  He has some stuffed animals that come to life when you annoy him.  You have to kill a couple of those first before you get to kill him.

The Stuffed Rhino

Okay, they aren’t stuffed, they are held in some sort of stasis field, but for all the good they did Gortok, they might as well have been stuffed.  In fact, if they had been cute and stuffed, we might have been distracted.

But they were not and things played out quickly and badly for Gortok.

And so off we went again.

Through some more trash and to the next boss. Skadi the Ruthless, who I could swear we had run into before at some point in Howling Fjord.  But then a lot of those Vrykul names sound similar to me, being from Stormwind and all.

Skadi (which, when I say it, sounds like “Scotty”) is an event.  Lots of things happen, there is a dry ice effect up half the corridor you are in, you get a message every so often about Skadi being close to a harpoon gun, bad guys running down the corridor every so often.  Amidst all that we tried to figure out what was going on.

And while the event was manageable, our process of discovery took some time, so when we figured out the whole:

Harpoons + Harpoon Gun = Skadi fight actually begins

By that point though we were too worn down by constant adds to pull it off, so we wiped.

And while the equation above seems obvious in hindsight, I personally didn’t notice the sparkling harpoons on the ground until well into the fight and every time I saw the message about Skadi being close to a harpoon gun (which means you can shoot him) I thought it meant he was going to start shooting harpoons at us.

I know, always with the negative vibes Moriarty.

Anyway, after one learning fight, we managed to pull it off and skill Skadi without much drama.

Which only left King Ymiron… and the assorted trash between us and him… to take care of.

King Ymiron Awaits

We had no idea what to expect, but had a soul stone up again, so launched into the fight.

The king summons things from the longboats on either side of the room at various points during the fight but, while they did prolong things a bit, in the end they didn’t help out the king all that much.  It ended up being a reasonably quick pile-on with us doing the piling and the king doing the dying.

The Moment of Victory

As you can see in the screen shot, we even summoned our own little support team.  Those of us who had done enough of the Argent Tournament did, anway.

The victory gave us a double achievement.

The loot from Ymiron was typical of our experiences.

The shoulders were leather, so of no used to the group, but the Signet of Ranulf was a bit of an upgrade for two of the casters.

We then stood for a final victory shot at King Ymiron’s throne.

Victory over King Ymiron

Then we headed through the now open side door in the king’s chamber and back to the orginal quest giver.  When we handed over the collection quest, the chest, which is sitting empty in the first screen shot in this post, was filled up with all the items we gathered, including a jade Tigger.

Somebody else's loot

And that is about it.

We have defeated the regular Northrend dungeons and have the achievement to prove it.

There is still the Trial of the Champion, which we may attempt.

There are the three new 5 person dungeons slated to come out in the not too distant future, Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection, which we may want to try.

And, of course, Hallow’s End and the Headless Horseman are coming up.  We’ll want to see what things he’ll be dropping this year.

But otherwise we have come very close to accomplishing the goal we set out for ourselves almost three years back, to do all of the 5 person instances as a group and at the level of the instance.

I suspect there will be a summary post on the subject some time soon.  You have been warned.