Testin

More WoW

I'm currently having a blast with my friend Pyrena and some of the old (and new) folks from Paragon on Frostmane PvP server. Here is lil' Xana @ ~25:


We are currently running through Deadmines, Stockades and Wailing Caverns while doing various quest with only the occaisional gankage. (I even killed a level 60 the other day being stupid.) I have no idea why horde level 50+ thinks its fun to try an gank newbs, only to end up ganked themselves half the time.

And these are quite possibly some of the best forum avatars evar (thanks Myst for the rain one):



And yes I hear a gallery of pleas not to have any more revealing Tarique pics:

Archlord Beta Ends.

Archlord comes out today at retailers. I have been fooling with the beta for the last three weeks. The game has low minimum PC requirements, and runs; however, I cannot believe they released the game. It had quite a few glaring bugs and often you would see Korean text throughout the game. Some windows didn't scroll properly for the English text. It did not feel polished in the slightest. Folks are gonna complain about the lack of customization in the faces (similar to Lineage II), and the whole point and click move thing. They did have WASD and key mapping support, but WASD was way slower than using the mouse/camera to move. I honestly liked the point and click this time. I zoomed the camera out to a 2/3rds view like in Diablo, and felt at home.

The good thing was the game is playable. It had quests, I didn't see any real combat issues or anything of that sort. My ablities worked. I played an Elementalist, so yes my pet did his job slowing mobs. I looked awesomely cute. (See Xianthe the Elementalist above... ((^_~ Y.)

Even with all the bugs, I fully support the concept of the game. Not every game needs to be an EverQuest or a WoW. It's nice to take a break in a PvP oriented game with PvE elements and not care about your gear cause it doesn't take long to level. (Although during beta it didn't seem like you lost gear even though some of the game text talked about it.) It reminded me a lot of playing Diablo with quests and crafting and a keke ^.^Y feel.

I actually enjoyed it and may have picked it up if they spent more time fixing the client bugs, but no way am I paying $14.95 a month for a truly buggy MMO. I would have preferred to see a smaller monthly fee ~$5.00 then I would have been tempted. I cannot possibly fathom why they would need $14.95 a month to run this MMO. Its not going to be a ton of servers, they probably aren't going to release a ton of content, and events will be done related to PvP. The players are making the content beyond the leveling grind.

Maybe I'll check the game out again in 6 months or so. If it's really good then they will have fixed those text/client issues. But I must say I was impressed with the amount of quests for this sort of game from what I saw.

Beta's Beta's Beta's

Right now I am in three different beta's. To say that I am busy would be an understatement. I take beta's as priviledges to ensure quality releases for games I love, as well as getting a sneak peak before having to drop coin and buy a game.

I have been writing bug reports, and giving feedback as much a possible, all while trying to have fun.

Once the NDAs are up I'll post pictures.

Matron Down - Permafrost Server First

Last night we gathered and took down Matron in about two kills after the right folks logged on. We did have two new members last night as well and they made all the difference. Not to mention a World Wide 1st!!!!!11111 of FoH all being on Ventrilo.

WoW Expedition #3

I played in Beta WoW then EQ2 and ended up choosing EQ2. Since release after pretty much maxxing my EQ2 character we have given various games a try. We are back giving WoW try #3 this time just before The Burning Crusade. Today's MMOs simply don't take up all your time like EQ1 or FFXI did unless you make alts or attempt to do every quest in game or something like that. So here are my cleric, druid and rogue. (Please note how elite my rogue is).

The marked difference this time is that we are trying to play with friends. I know sometimes it doesn't work out but we have hooked up with our old friends from Paragon (Hi Julie, Lola, Butters and Baruach!) on our old FFXI server, Sylph. We are all playing on the PvP server Frostmane in League of Trouble. They are all uber 60's in AQ40 headed to Naxx and we are all newb, but so far everyone has been nice to us and helping us level and what not. (Thanks all for making us feel at home!)

Some Screens From the New PC

So now that I have the new PC I have been turning up the graphics fairly high on raids. I took all these in at least Balanced settings. (Keep in mind I forgot to turn up the screenshot quality.) Its a large improvement from the old box with regards to lighting etc. I'll try to take some on extreme quality as well, as the new rig can pretty much run around all of Norrath in that quality as long as I'm not on raids. Balanced is the new raid setting.

Tarique in all his glory!

Off topic

I am a good cook, and I would go so far as to say a great one...but I cannot compete with Tarique whatsover in the plating/creativity department. (Terrible photo skills not withstanding.)

I'm sorry Tarique, but if I cook its not gonna look like this!

Computer go ~*BOOM*~!

So in the last two months, all my precious hard drives and beautiful screenshots are now sitting on my desk. But now I have a really nice new PC:


Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz 4MB Cache 1066MHz FSB
Power Supply: 650 Watt Alienware® Multi-GPU Approved
Motherboard: Alienware® Approved NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Motherboard
Memory: 2GB DDR2 Performance SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 x 1024MB
Graphics Processor: 1024MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7950 GX2L

Sure its Alienware, sure its commercial, but I got it in ~2 weeks and didn't have any issues. I'm happy with my purchase. Next time I'll probably go to a more indie computer builder, but this was all definitely not planned.

Wow, I'm lazy.

First, I was supposed to put up all the nice pictures on my hard drive - i.e. one of the main reasons I made this blog, and I have sorely failed. (Well, not so much lazy considering the amount of work I have been doing, but that's neither here nor there.) Secondly, stuff has been occurring.We have bounced from FFXI to WoW to Anarchy Online to now the EQ1 Progression server. Lots of pics, and stories to tell, so I will endeavor to make entries for each.

I'll give an update on EQ2 as well.We started out pretty OK with the adventure pack. It seemed like small group content and suited to all the folks taking breaks for various reasons. We came fairly close to getting a world wide first on the Nizara instance, and while that isn't much, I thought it boded well for our hitting this pack hard. We even defeated the winged bird encounter fairly quickly. But now, its weeks later and we have tried the turtle dragon all of 4-5 times and really only seriously once or twice. We got folks complaining about how hard this is and how we won't get it. They are right, to some degree. This encounter is beyond us at the moment, but I kinda feel thats how MMO raids should be. I came to EQ2 to get away from staying up 'til the wee hours camping named, only to find out the spawn happened while I was at work, but one night's worth of tries and people don't wanna do it.
It isn't like its even an hour most of the time.

I have come to the conclusion that MMOs are in a definite state of flux. No one plays just one anymore, and if they do, they play in very short bursts of time. Which I actually think is great; however, it seems we have lost our global ability to buckle down a few times a year and actually kill the hard stuff. In our guild, this has pretty much been going on since the D'Jinn Master. We did an awesome job of doing Pedastal of Sky and really trying the event, but we lost our drive when it came to Poets and the Godking. Its been downhill since. Obviously, all of this is driven
by what others want to do. It is simply not possible to map your play style onto a guild of 100 or even 40 people. Right now for me we are playing enough, but not enough trying hard when something really difficult is in front of us.

Meh.

Mutagenic Overlord down Sunday!

So that big bad mutant mantis is down now, and we can call Kingdom of Sky complete!

So, What I Have Been Doing Lately...

In light of my earlier post about our farm status of the Kingdom of Sky expansion, we have decided to start up in WoW. Tarique is playing a Night Elf Hunter and I'm playing a Night Elf Druid. We figured we wanted to play things that were fun, since in EQ2 and other games we tend to stick to needed raiding roles.

I must say, its refreshing to just fool around in a world where no one knows you, no one needs you to help them camp something, and you can just enjoy the content. I'm fully aware that at some point we will either reroll or stop playing entirely since raiding in two MMOs would be insane - (even if both don't have seven days of content.) With the quest oriented game play I am enjoying it. Normally in an MMO, I would skip doing quests unless its a kill quest with an NPC near by for mobs we are already killing, or a quest for a particular piece of gear or access. The beauty of the WoW system is that I know if I get the quests in an area for my level, I will probably level once or twice, and can move on to the next set. Now aside from needing to harvest meat for cooking - I have no reason to grind away on mobs with no purpose. This is a good thing. Other than the occasional tailored dungeon that you have to fight to the end to, this is the way people should level. It definitely masks the dreaded grind.

My impressions of WoW so far are good, but these are the similar to the impressions I had in beta. Not much has changed in this time. Great game to explore in, not enough ongoing raid content for me. I'm sure there are some folks that are just happy to do the same dungeon set with a freebie thrown in now and again. But instead I chose a game that allows us to do that including the freebies - plus allow for about 2 expansions worth of stuff per year.

We have ideas of pursuing other race/class combos, but for now I think we will stick to these.

Current EQ2 Happenings

Currently my EQ2 guild has one more raid mob to kill in the Kingdom of Sky expansion to call it complete - Mutagenic Overlord. It's not as though we have thrown ourselves nightly at it, but we did enough to know we don't have the proper class mix. The guy is a giant praying mantis that spawns baby ones to kill your raid. It's the anti-zerg. That leaves us with:

• Three Princes (contested)
  
• Halls of Seeing (instance)
  
• Lyceum of Abhorrence (instance)
• Pantrilla (contested)
  
• Harla Dar (instance)
• Gorenaire/Talendor (instance)
• Deathtoll (instance)
• Hurricanus (contested)
• Laboratory of Lord Vyemm (instance)
• Various x4 Quest updates (that we don't feel like doing for new folks/slackers)

Seems like a lot right? Not really. Until we have the proper folks geared up/recruited to do Mutagenic this schedule often leaves us with 2-3 free nights a week.

So, Tarique and I have been dabbling in WoW. We decided on this game because while console RPGs are excellent, we really can't play them together. I still have a few heritage quests in EQ2 I want to complete, but that's more for completion's sake. A lot of them aren't exactly compelling content.

A new adventure pack, Fallen Dynasty, due out this summer. I'm sure the adventure pack will be cool like the others have been, it's just a ways off. EQ2 has also announced a new expansion, Echoes of Faydwer. I'm really excited about this because I grew up in Kelethin in EQ1 and this expansion seems like it will have a nostalgic twinge for me. I'm really hoping for good things for these announcements, since the reason we are playing EQ2 over other games is the amount of new content. I don't care how compelling your raid content is -- if you end up doing the same dungeons and contested for over six months past farm status, its stale. And six months is pushing it, I'd prefer 3 or 4 with a small break to check out other games.

First Post

This will be a spot for me to post my happenings on my MMORPG characters and other items of interest for me. It's not really meant to be public, but I don't really mind if someone reads.