80 > 22+22+22+22+22

-Essential WoW PvP Math

We decided that for our weekly instance group run last week we would leave the Barrens and its colorful chat channel behind and venture into the dangerous world and perhaps experience the PvP side of our RP-PvP server, Lightninghoof.

I not really played on a PvP server in WoW before, so the whole situation was not clear to me when we rolled up on Lightninghoof.  I expected to be flagged PvP at all times.  But that turned out not to be the case.  While you can flag yourself PvP at any time, the zone you are in determines what else flags you PvP.

For each player, there are three flavors of zones.

There is what is considered the home territory of your faction.  This is sort of like the PvE servers, in that you only get flagged if you actually attack a player of the other faction.  however, players of the other faction are always flagged PvP when they enter your home territory.  So they other side cannot come in and stomp noobs but are exposed themselves.

Then there is contested territory, which is most of the world I gather.  When in contested territory, everybody is flagged for PvP.

Then there is enemy territory, which is the other factions home territory.  There you are flagged PvP but the other side is not, so you cannot go stomp their noobs but they can choose to come get you whenever they please.

We were off to do the Deadmines, and it turns out that Westfall is enemy territory for the Horde.  So we would be flagged for PvP the whole time, but couldn’t go a-ganking unless somebody obliged us by flagging themselves.  Of course, if a high level came along, we would be in trouble.  The equation at the top of the post also applies to level 50 and above in the ability to slaughter a group in the low 20s.

As part of the plan to get ourselves into Westfall with the minimum of deaths, Azawak and Hurmoo both went into the druid cat form and used prowl to sneak into the vicinity of the Deadmines summoning stone.  We flew into Stranglethorn Vale first, then swam around to the shores of Westfall.

Summoning Stone Under Observation

As the hour approached, we started assembling the team for the night:

22 Undead Mage – Bigbutt (Bungholio)
22 Tauren Druid – Hurmoo (Vikund)
22 Tauren Druid – Azawak (Skronk)
22 Orc Shaman – Earlthebat (Earlthecat)
22 Blood Elf Paladin – Enaldie (Ula)
80 Tauren Druid – Fayli (Gaff)

Gaff came over from New Eden to give us some covering fire if we needed it getting to the instance.  And it turned out we needed it.

Even as people were getting ready, Hurmoo got caught by a high level Alliance paladin near the summoning stone and was insta-killed.  Fortunately I had seen him coming and was trying to escape and evade while in prowl, so I managed to put my corpse close to a building.  This let me revive on the other side of the building, out of sight, and head for the hills.

Azawak and Hurmoo laid low for a while as the other troops got themselves in position and Fayli traveled out to join him.

When everybody was ready, we summoned in Enaldie, Bigbutt, and Earlthebat, then started quickly towards the instance.

However, in the tunnels, we found the paladin again.  He turned out to be level 80 and he killed us all pretty rapidly.  Fayli showed up, but we hadn’t told him it was a paladin, just that a high level Alliance player was on us.  It seems that a paladin is a tough target for a feral druid of the same level unless the druid gets the drop on him, so Fayli and the pally ran around the mines a bit while we revived and got killed once or twice more.

Eventually though, we all made it to the instance.

The Deadmines itself wasn’t much of a challenge.  As a group of level 22 players, we were a bit above level for the instance.  The instance is listed as being for levels 15 through 23, but by 22 you’re not really being challenged.  The NPCs at the start of the instance were grey to us.

Running Through Familiar Places

While familiar with the instance, we managed to get surprised now and again.  We had forgotten that patrols show up to sweep the room when you finish a couple of the bosses, so you can get take unaware, especially by that group that shows up after you finish the foundry.

Looking Out Over The Foundry

It seems odd though that Blizzard established this patrol thing pretty strongly in the Deadmines, then didn’t use it again.  At least I cannot think of an instance off-hand where something like that occurs.

We still showed care and did not get in over our heads… not very often anyway… even though everything was below our level.  Things got a little more challenging once we got to Smite.

Facing Smite

You have to love VanCleef’s ship.  Can you say “Top Heavy?”

We made our was along the decks and up the scaffolding, making it to VanCleef at last.

We though perhaps we could form an alliance with the Defias.  These guys are fighting against Stormwinds, why are they aggro to us?  But it wasn’t to be.  He fought, we won, the achievement was ours.

Victory Over VanCleef

Hurmoo is wearing the puffy shirt that dropped from VanCleef.  Nobody wanted it, so it went to Hurmoo to disenchant.

While the Deadmines was fun, it was something of a nostalgia ride, and as such, did not last very long.  We still had some energy left in us.  So we decided to terrorize Westfall.

We first went to the flight point to see what we could slay there, but everything showed up as “??” to us, so we gave that a wide berth.  No slaying the flight master for us.

We then headed to the Saldean Farm where all the NPCs were low level.  We killed them all in front of a couple of lower level Alliance players.

Death To The Humans!

Then we ran over and tried to free Old Blanchy from his oppressors, the Furlbrows, who regularly give away his blanket and feed pouch.  We slew them, but Blanchy was too brainwashed to accept his freedom, join us, and fight against the tyranny of Stormwind.

Free Old Blanchy

Then we headed into Elwynn Forest, where we slew guards until a pair of “??” Alliance players saw us and one-shotted us.

The Invasion Crushed

We went back, revived, found that at least our corpses were not being camped, declared a moral victory, and recalled for home.  We decided to do a bit on the Pilgrim’s Bounty end of things.

All in all, it was quite a fun run.  The Deadmines is still an awesome instance and I look forward to the heroic version that is promised for Cataclysm.  Then perhaps Sneed and his shredder will be a challenge.

Sneed And His Shredder

The instance is also very good looking.  Every time I go through it I am always struck by the lighting and how well it sets the mood.  Somebody spent a lot of time on this instance.

After figuring out how the tables at Pilgrim’s Bounty worked and getting the first achievement or two, we started calling it a night one by one.

If we stay on our instance trajectory, Shadowfang Keep will be the next on the list.  We are not dedicated to running all the instances again, the way we did with the original instance group, so maybe we’ll just go raid Westfall again.

Pointed out to me by a co-worker, a story over at GameSpot reports that one of my former neighbors (though San Jose is a big city) is suing Activision Blizzard over issues he has with World of Warcraft.  From the story:

He first takes exception to the game’s $14.99 monthly subscription fee, calling it the highest of any MMORPG. He contends the fee is aggravated by the game requiring players to travel great distances at a slow walking or running pace, with fast travel options like teleportation stones and mounts only available to gamers who rise to an advanced level or purchase the game’s expansion packs.

He also cited the game’s resurrection process, in which players travel in spirit from cemeteries back to the spots where they died in order to revive themselves, as an unnecessary part of the game designed to cost gamers money. Other fees at issue include the charges (up to $25) Blizzard levies to change their characters’ names, races, factions, or servers.

(Somebody find an MMORPG that charges more than $14.99 a month please.)

According to the story this guy recently had a case against the Sony Playstation Network dismissed and is currently suing Microsoft and Nintendo because:

…he alleged that a broken Xbox 360 caused him undue stress, and that a Wii system update blocking access to the Homebrew Channel third-party program interfered with his inalienable right to pursue happiness.

The rational behind his WoW suit:

…the suit also references the 2001 suicide of an EverQuest player, attributing it to a sense of alienation related to the game and mental health problems. The suit goes on to say the plaintiff has suffered from similar problems including major depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and Crohn’s disease, and he “doesn’t want to end up like [the EverQuest player] did as he relies on video games heavily for the little ongoing happiness he can achieve in this life, via the gaming medium.”

In addition to the suit, the plaintiff also wants a pair of celebrities to attest to the effects of alienation. The gamer is subpoenaing Depeche Mode’s Martin Lee Gore “since he himself has been known to be sad, lonely, and alienated, as can be seen in the songs he writes.” He is also calling Winona Ryder to testify, saying the actress’ appreciation for Catcher in the Rye will make her a relevant witness “to how alienation in the book can tie to alienation in real live [sic] / video games such as World of Warcraft.”

For all of this he wants (say it with me) ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

And he wants Blizzard to fix all the issues he brought up.  Good luck on that.

My wife asked, “Can we get something better than that crappy Wii Music?”

We’re still down on Wii Music around our house.

But this time, my wife was planning out how to keep 20+ people entertained at either end of Thanksgiving dinner this coming Thursday.  She was wondering if there was some Wii game we could get that would help out.

I pondered the new Wii Resort, but decided that the reference to Wii Music ought to focus the search.  So I went about looking into the Wii versions of the popular toy guitar games.

The first step last Monday was to walk over to the tech support department at the office, which is where most of the console gamers reside, and loudly ask the question, “Guitar Hero or Rock Band?”

They looked at me for about two beats and pretty much unanimously said, “Rock Band.”

I am going to guess that there was a certain amount of “pity the old guy and his Wii” in that recommendation because they followed up the response with a lot about Rock Band being easier, having “no fail mode” and such.

Which was the correct reasoning for a recommendation, since what I know about Rock Band and Guitar Hero wouldn’t have filled a thimble at that point.

I left to go look up reviews on Rock Band while they were still talking about sound/screen synchronization and the merits of the stage kit fog machine. (XBox 360 only I’m afraid.)

Some leafing through reviews showed that people thought the instruments with the original Rock Band were “teh suxor,” but most reviews seemed to really like the instruments that came with Rock Band 2.

Rock Band 2 was the choice.

The Choice

(Pictures for this post were all snatched from a Google Images search because, frankly, it wouldn’t have any pictures otherwise.)

So I went over to Amazon.com, forgetting to go through anybody’s web store front yet again, and ordered Rock Band 2. I opted for second day delivery despite the free delivery option being available.  I wanted to make sure we had it by Friday night so we could figure it out before Thanksgiving and I was afraid it might go via UPS, which has a habit of holding packages in their local warehouse until the delivery date has arrived.

Wednesday I got a call at work from my wife.  She told me that Rock Band had arrived, but that this giant box had also been delivered.  In her mind, a Wii game is about the size of a DVD, which she assumed was in the small box we got from Amazon.com.  I explained that the big box was Rock Band because it comes with a guitar and a drum kit.

I think this came as something of a surprise, but she was enthusiastic about it.

The box, about the size of Herve Villechaize’s coffin, was deposited on the floor at one end of our family room, where it sat for over 24 hours without so much as a remark from my daughter, a level of obliviousness that I did not think we would see until the teenage years.  I finally had to ask her, “What’s in the box?” before she looked at it, looked at me, then asked back, “What’s in the box?”

Then I told her she would have to wait until I got home from work on Friday to find out.  That built a level of anticipation in her that lasted for about 2 minutes, then she was off doing something else.  Spoiled child indeed.

Friday night finally rolled around, I got home from work, pizza was ordered, and my wife went off to some girl gathering leaving my daughter and I to unpack and setup of Rock Band 2.

I opened up the outer, then the inner box, and dumped all the bits and pieces onto the family room floor.  Then the impatience began as my daughter wanted to get in there and play right away while I had to do the Christmas Eve parental assembly routine.

This is what you get in the box:

Microphone, Drums, and Guitar

(annotated picture swiped from here just to make sure you knew which was the microphone)

About 30 minutes later, we had just about everything together and were ready to try it out.

The Guitar

The guitar… or the guitar controller, rather… is actually very nicely done.  It does not look or feel quite as much like a toy as other similar controllers I have seen.  It feels solid, if not as heavy as an actual electric guitar, and the buttons on the fret board are nicely colored only on the top of the neck, where you can see them when you’re holding the controller, as opposed to on the face of the fret board, where everybody except you can see them unless you tilt the guitar up.

The strap adjusted enough to accommodate both myself and my daughter at need and we were both able to at least get through the tutorial and an easy song or two right away without screwing up too badly.

The Drums

The drums controller is also reasonably solid.  It stood up to both of us beating on it for a few minutes.  Unfortunately, it only had to endure a few minutes until we gave up in frustration.

The drums are hard.

Or, rather, the drums are not as easy, even on easy mode, as the guitar.  When you select easy mode on the guitar, you only have to deal with three of the five possible buttons.  With the drums, even in easy mode, you have all four pads to beat on and the pedal to mash.  That was more than either of us were ready for on a Friday night.  Add in the fact that hitting the drums was somewhat loud yet unsatisfying and we went anti-drum pretty fast.

So the drums got placed over in the corner of the room, where they have remained untouched.

Mr. Microphone

With two of us playing the game, that left the microphone as the only other option.  My daughter wanted to play with the guitar still, so that left me on vocals, the front man for the group.

So where the drums are hard, even on easy mode, the vocals seemed very easy.  On easy mode I was belting out extremely high percentages and pretty much holding the act together while the audience was booing my daughter off stage.  Show biz is tough.

After having gone through a couple of songs though, I became pretty sure that one of those multi-tone car alarms would score moderately well in easy mode.

Still, it was nice to not be completely out of my depth for a little bit.  I did find that my own natural range (which runs from F-flat to C-you later) was so limited that I had to move straight to a low falsetto in order to keep my pitch on track with the little meter at the top of the screen.

That worked, but I have my usual problem of singing just as badly compounded by doing so while trying to sound like I am in one of the Monty Python “pepperpot” sketches.

The Songs

Rock Band 2 comes with 84 songs.  You can only play a few of them in Quick Play mode it seems, even after entering the alleged “unlock all” cheat code, so I am probably missing something.  Of the list we were allowed to choose from, we favored:

We Got The Beat – A song I chose because I knew the words.  Or I thought I did, anyway.  It can be amazing to find out you’ve been singing along WRONG for 25 years.

Hungry Like The Wolf – Again, thought I knew the words… I didn’t.  Even my wife was surprised at how much the lyrics varied from her own imagination.  Still, manageable on easy mode as long as we leave the drums out of the picture.

Cool for Cats – My daughter’s favorite, the one we have to play over and over.  This is where my daughter and I are of different minds.  She likes to pick a song and, you know, practice and get better, while I just want to turn on “No Fail” mode, crank through the whole play list, shout, “Thank You San Jose!” and call it a night.

We are getting better at it.  I think my daughter likes the song because it implies that cats are cool.  I am certain that she doesn’t understand the actual lyrics.  Hell, I’ve sung it more than a dozen times now and *I* don’t understand the lyrics.  But it is rock and roll, and it is better to sound good than to be good… or something.

Eye of the Tiger – The only other song on the Quick Play list that I knew.  My daughter wasn’t keen on it, despite having “Tiger” in the title.

We did try a few other items on the list, but few were familiar to me at all, so we seem to always end up back at “Cool for Cats.”

Downloadable Content

We went and explored the list of downloadable content for Rock Band 2.  There is quite a long list available.  Since we had some Wii points available, we grabbed Pretty Fly (for a White Guy) because it is the basis for the parody Pretty Fly (for a Dranei).  I was up for it, but it was quickly pulled from our rotation by my daughter because it contains a bad word.

I also threatend to download White Rabbit until I let my daughter listen to it on iTunes first.  That got the axe, which was probably just as well, since the downloadable content uses up a big chunk of the memory on the Wii and we seem to have filled up our SD Card with pictures from Pokemon Ranch.

So I have to figure that out before we can spend any more Wii Points on downloads.

Second Guitar?

After a few days fooling around, what I really want to get is a second guitar.  The guitar controller is the obvious cool aspect of the game.  I would go by Fry’s on the way home and buy one today, if I could find something somewhere online or in the written instructions with a simple title like, “How to add a Second Guitar to Rock Band 2.”

I have yet to find that, and the guitars look to be expensive enough that I’m not going there unless I know it will work.

Overall

So far we are having fun.  We have woken the Wii up from what has been a long summer sleep and we jump around in the family room in front of the TV for 30-45 minutes at a stretch, usually right before bed time.

We’ll see how things play out on Thanksgiving.  Maybe we can get somebody to play the drums.  As for songs I know, my backup plan was in that small box that arrived at the same time Rock Band 2 did.

Blizzard is celebrating an anniversary.   Tomorrow, November 23rd, it will have been five years since World of Warcraft went live.  And this year’s anniversary gift is an Onyxian Whelpling.

The Whelpling

As usual, Blizzard is including the nearest weekend day as part of the anniversary celebration, so when we were on last night and the server close rolled over to midnight, we all go the message.

And that meant that in all of our mailboxes there was a surprise waiting.

We were a little busy to go check our mail at that moment, being five low level horde players in Alliance territory, but mail keeps and we were eventually able to pick up our new pets.

Like other recent special pets (Mr. Chilly, Grunty the Murloc), the Onyxian Whelpling does not go away when you train it on your character.  It is a bind on account item that you can send to your future alts (on the same server/faction).

However, the feat-of-strength achievement is not tied to the pet, so you have to log on a character today or tomorrow in order to get that.  I’ve been through all my key characters this morning.  They have all been logged in, gotten the achievement, and claimed their pet.  Several still had Mr. Chilly waiting for them as well.

So now you’ll be seeing this guy all over Azeroth.

Onyxian Whelpling

Fortunately, the whelpling is pretty small, so it won’t be too obnoxious with hundreds about.

My own five year anniversary with WoW is still a few months off.  I wasn’t there on day one, but showed up about four months later.

Update from the WoW community site:

The World of Warcraft five-year anniversary celebration is now officially underway! To mark this special occasion, any character that logs into the game between now and Sunday, December 6 at 11:59 p.m. (realm time) will receive their very own Onyxian Whelpling non-combat pet, along with a special message from the development team. We have more World of Warcraft 5-year and Warcraft 15-year anniversary festivities coming soon, so be sure to keep your eye on the official website. Thanks for being part of the adventure, and we look forward to many more whelps and great memories in the years ahead.

So you have some more time to get the whelpling.

It’s like cooking amnesty

-Potshot

Another holiday is upon us in Azeroth, Pilgrim’s Bounty.  This holiday borrows heavily from the American Thanksgiving traditions, which tends to focus on food and cooking.

The way Blizzard has Pilgrim’s Bounty set up, if you have neglected your cooking skills on your character, now is the chance to catch up.  You need to buy five new recipes to complete the cooking quests, but the recipes are all spread out in skill level so you may only be able to use a few at first.

But the ingredients are all easily obtainable, and as you cook through the lower level recipes, you cooking skills will notch up and allow you to get to the next set.

So the event will let you catch up on cooking without a huge effort.

As for me, my cooking skills were already at the cap on my main character, Vikund.  But those five recipes put me over the top for my final remaining cooking achievement.

Chef de Cuisine is awarded for knowing 160 cooking recipes out of the 169 total that are currently in the game.

Happy Pilgrim’s Bounty to you, happy cooking to all!

The team at CCP dove fully into the in-game currency selling market with EVE Online a while back with their 30 day CONCORD Pilot License Extension program, or PLEX.

For $35 you can buy two PLEX which you can then sell to people in-game for somewhere between 250 and 400 million ISK. (Planning and patience can be worth 150 million ISK!)  You get your ISK, another player gets 30 more days of play time without laying out any cash, everybody is happy.

But what I really like about this is that it gives people a baseline value for ISK and things bought and sold with ISK.

A friend dropped me a note about the game.  He is starting off and while he likes the game, he is more interested in *pew* *pew* and less interested in the sometimes grindy acquisition of ISK.  (I’ll admit, mining is an acquired taste, and all the more so when mineral prices are down.)

He was wondering about buying ISK.  He had looked around and found some 3rd party seller looking to unload ISK at a rate of $70 per billion.  There is the wonder of EVE again, where 10,000 ISK and 1,000,000,000 can both be meaningful and meaningless in the right context.

Anyway, I pointed out that if you get caught buying from such a source, CCP will take it away from you.  That and a warning seems to be the standard for a first offense.

But I also did the math.

Even as a quick, low end sale, $35 buys you two PLEX which will get you 500 million ISK, so $70 would get you a billion and it would be risk free.  Potentially though, played right, that $35 gets you pretty close to the billion mark.  So the best case scenario would be paying the same price for a greatly increased risk.

That pretty much cleared up the situation for him on that front.

Then later I was IM’ing with another friend who mentioned that a corp mate sold one of his characters.  This is also legal in EVE Online.  You can sell a character for ISK.  You cannot sell your account however, nor can you sell your character for real world currency under the rules of the game.  But transferring a character for ISK is perfectly acceptable and CCP has a process that protects both buyer and seller.

Anyway, the selling price for the character in question was 8 billion ISK, which seems like a lot.  Just a billion of anything is a lot to me.

But then I did the calculation.  8 billion ISK buys you 26 months of game play, using the safe middle ground number of 300 million ISK per PLEX.  26 months of play is, at most, if you pay by the month, around $390.  And if you pay by the quarter like I do, it is down closer to $340.  That isn’t enough for me to want to sell either of my long term characters, assuming that I could even get that much money for any of them.

Not that you can actually cash out, because you end up with ISK or game time, but it gives you a sense of the monetary value of that transaction or really any transaction in the game, including making 3rd party ISK sellers look a bit silly at time.  You may view that as a good thing or a bad thing, a real measurement you can bring home or a breaking of immersion, but there it is.

Now the whole PLEX thing works in EVE Online with its single server (but regional markets and no instant delivery) and economy where everything can be bought for ISK, but where ISK is not really a measure of success.

But then you wonder, what other games could support something similar to PLEX?

Which economies are robust enough to support that sort of thing?  You’d think with the constant talk about illicit gold buying, (and how it will never go away) that there would be some games with enough currency flow to be able to practically implement something like PLEX.

We decided where to head on Saturday night based on where we were all initially located.

I’ll give you a hint where we were.

Ah yes, Barrens chat at its finest.  And on a roleplay server too, so who knows what was going on.

Anyway, there in the Barrens is Wailing Cavern, but you probably knew where we were going from the title of the post.

It has been a little over three years since we last delved into the Wailing Caverns.  Most of us just remembered that it took a long time to complete.

As for a line up, this week we had a substitution.  Out was Azucar the troll rogue and in was Bigbutt the undead mage.  Too much melee DPS and not enough crowd control, so the week was spent getting the new mage into approximately the right level range.  We kicked off with:

16 Undead Mage – Bigbutt (Bungholio)
20 Tauren Druid – Hurmoo (Vikund)
20 Tauren Druid – Azawak (Skronk)
20 Orc Shaman – Earlthebat (Earlthecat)
20 Blood Elf Paladin – Enaldie (Ula)

We got ourselves to the meeting stone to prepare for the run.  Azawak, Hurmoo, and Earlthebat were there first and got to illustrate how a ghost wolf does look like a druid using prowl in cat form.

One of these is not stealthed

No, I’m not going to let that go any time soon.

We got ourselves together and into the instance where we spoke to the Disciple of Naralex, who is the NPC that pretty much drives the whole story around this instance.  He first sends you off to defeat the four corrupt druid leaders in the instance.  That was clear enough, so off we went.

With the Disciple of Naralex

We managed to get through the first couple of bosses, learning to deal with the counter-crowd control that comes about from druids fighting druids.

Sleepy Time

We were making progress, moving through the instance about as fast as you can at our level and this were looking good.  We got a few good drops including Kresh’s Back and two Gloves of the Fang off of consecutive pulls.

Eventually though, time started to tell.  Enaldie, who had been up early, was too tired by midnight to go any further, so dropped out and went to bed.

The remaining four of us pressed on and continued to do well enough.  We took down the last of the preliminary bosses and then headed back to the Disciple.  Of course, we found that the first part of the instance had respawned.  Still, we did not think much of it.

We got back to the Disciple and kicked off the last stage of the instance, escorting the Disciple through part of the instance so he could summon the final boss.

We did okay to start, but then at the area just before the first bridge, one of the raptors we were fighting did its cry for help and managed to summon five more raptors in the middle of our fight.  Things went downhill rapidly from there.

They Saved Bigbutt for Last

As you can see in the picture above, three of us are dead, the Disciple is dying, and the mass of raptors is just about to turn Bigbutt into Purina Raptor Chow.

And that was the end of things.

Unfortunately, once the Disciple is dead, the instance is done.  Your interaction with him in not a quest that comes in segments that can be resumed.  No, the Disciple only allows you to escort him after you have cleared the four initial bosses.

Our only option at that point was to reset the instance and start over, or call it a night.  Since it was already 1am Pacific Time, we went to bed.

No achievement.

But we’ll (hopefully) remember next time to clear the path for the Disciple first, then do the escort.

For next week though, I think we will be venturing into contested territory to face the Deadmines.

The effects of Blizzard’s latest marketing scheme.

Vikund Gets Mohawked

Blizzard has Mr. T out there doing commercials for Wow again, and to coincide with this they have introduced the night elf mohawk grenade.

When it hits you, you get the the head shown above.  Gold chains not included.  Look to get hit in your local auction house.

Fortunately, you just need to right click to dismiss the effect.

Wihelm: Continuity One Two Three Abort Reminiscence!

Computer: Code invalid. Abort failed

Computer: Nostalgia field engaged

Computer: memory distortion set to random

Wilhelm: *scream*

So here we go.

Way back when I was a kid, back in a time between kindergarten and about third or fourth grade we, as kids, seemed to go through a stage where we ceased just playing with things and spent our recess and lunch hours playing at being things.

Looking back, it was very much a reflection of what was influencing us as kids… which is to say we played at things we saw on television.

Unlike my father in his day, we rarely ever played at being soldiers, at least at school.  He grew up in the shadow of WWII, which was viewed as a “good thing.”  For us, the Vietnam was on the news every night and it was a “bad thing.”  Many of our teachers actively discouraged anything that smacked of the military.

So we had to find other ways to dress up our desire to run around and pretend to shoot each other.

Cops and robbers was popular, primarily because it required little in the way of window dressing.  Some people were cops, some people were robbers, cops chased the robbers around, we had shoot outs, and argued about who shot whom first.  Generally the cops lost.  Authority figures were on the out, lawlessness reigned.  It was quite the exaggerated reflection of the country beyond the school yard.

We also played Planet of the Apes quite a bit.  This was not as popular because you had to conform at least minimally to the story line.  But it was an outlet for gun play and we did not care about the symbolism represented by the failure of man and the ascension of the apes.  We just wanted to pretend to shoot at each other.  Apes tended to lose and man usually reasserted his primacy.  In some way this probably predicted the election of Ronald Reagan.

And then, once in a while, we would play Star Trek.

Star Trek was different.  Not as many people would play, but girls would join in.  They wouldn’t play cops and robbers or Planet of the Apes, but a few would tag along for Star Trek.  So I knew there was something special going on, since the last time we played pretend with the girls was back before we decided playing house was for sissies.

And while we would cut to space battles and shooting phasers pretty quickly, the whole thing was different.  We would start out behind the backstop standing around as arrayed like the bridge crew.   We would crash around as the ship went into battle, then beam down to a planet or over to another ship looking for trouble.  Prime directive?  Our phasers were never set to “stun.”

But unlike the other two things we played, nobody was playing the bad guys.  This was a PvE roleplaying affair.  Nobody played a Klingon or a Romulan, they were all pretend.  When we shot, there was no follow on argument about who shot whom to break the flow of the story.

I should have written down the names of those who joined up on the bridge for these occasional play sessions, these pre-pubescent Trekkies, just to see who still feels the pull of that show to this day.

I don’t need to say that Star Trek was huge and had a lot of influence.  I think the fact that I can write about Star Trek without giving much in the way of context says enough.

But to be there, in the early 1970s, was to feel the influence when it was still young and fresh and still fit into its uniform and did not require a hair piece.  The original series was in syndicated reruns constantly throughout that decade. (Though at one point, every time I turned on the TV they seemed to be playing “And the Children Shall Lead,” an episode I grew to loathe.)

Star Trek lived on through some really bad episodes in the third season (see above), through cancellation, through an animated series, through some really weak movies and bad uniform choices, through a series of spin-offs (each with its own major flaws) and unlikely aliens, and through wave after wave of truly bad video games (with a rare gem now and again) to still exert influence today.

And I have pretty much eaten it up through most of its history.  I have watched all the shows, seen all the movies in the theater, read a disturbing number of the books, played the table top games, the role playing games, the MUDs, and a good portion of the computer games.  And after all of that, I still feel a great affinity for the universe of Star Trek.

Which is a blessing and a curse.

Star Trek again looms on the horizon for me.  Not a new TV series or a movie to stress my faith more than any midichlorian ever could.  No, it is a new computer game, a game with a lure unlike most that have come before it.

Star Trek Online.

Press Release Screen Shot - Your Game May Vary

A massively multiplayer version of the Star Trek universe.

Something within me sings with joy at the thought of a Star Trek MMO.  This is exactly what we were trying to achieve standing in a semi-circle out on the edge of the field at school way back in the day.

But part of me wants to look away.  That part shudders with the fear brought on by the dozens of mediocre TV episodes and poorly thought out games that came before.

According to the press release, Star Trek Online will be here soon.

ATARI TO SHIP STAR TREK ONLINE ON FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Star Trek Online Offers Fans and Gamers Opportunity to Experience Beloved Star Trek Universe through Space and Ground Gameplay

New York, NY (November 9, 2009) – Atari, Inc., one of the world’s most recognized videogame publishers, and Cryptic Studios™, creators of the acclaimed Champions Online, City of Heroes and City of Villains, announced today the highly anticipated Star Trek Online for PC is set to release on February 2, 2010 in North America and February 5, 2010 across Europe and Australia.  This first-of-a-kind massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) will offer space and ground gameplay to fans and players.

“Star Trek Online is poised to become the ultimate Star Trek gaming experience,” said Jim Wilson, CEO of Atari, Inc. “Throughout the last four decades, Star Trek has been a mainstay in pop culture, influencing legions of fans through television, film, and more. Star Trek Online opens a whole new chapter and expands upon this incredible universe in 2010.”

Taking place in the year 2409, continuing the story of the latest film installment, Star Trek Online boasts extraordinary features and lets fans both new and old experience unparalleled adventures.  Players will have the opportunity to become a high ranking Starfleet officer and will participate in missions that will take them into the depths of space, across exotic planets and even inside other starships.  Star Trek Online offers total customization, where every ship players command can be customized, from color to construction. Additionally, anyone can create their own species in Star Trek Online, as well as customize the look of their avatar’s uniform.

For more information, please visit: www.startrekonline.com

February 2nd is sooner than I would have thought possible, which does not help me deal with the dread.

In an office just miles from where we played Star Trek as kids… and even closer to where I live today… a team at Cryptic Studios is preparing Star Trek Online.

Of course, just a couple of years back, the same game (or not the same game) was being developed by a team at Perpetual Entertainment just an hours drive from my home before it was cancelled, so salt is being consumed in quantities large enough to get a caution from my doctor when it comes to the eventual availability of the game.

Something about all of this playing out within proximity of my home makes it all the more compelling for no logical reason.

Not that it matters.  Logic is a pretty flower that smells bad.

I do not have much in the way of a choice when it comes to this.  I’ll be there on day one.  If they offer a lifetime subscription, I’ll buy it.  A collectors edition?  Let me get out my credit card.  Star Trek alien prostetics I can wear whilst I play?  Sign me up.

Press Release Screen Shot - Things May Never Be This Cool

So you know where I will be on February 2nd.  Prepared for disappointment but still full of hope.

Unless, of course, the whole thing gets delayed.

Nah… that never happens!

My daughter and I finally dusted off our Nintendo DSes and made our way down to Toys R Us to download Arceus on the last day of the event.

Arceus

We were alone downloading at the store.  I imagine that those with Pokemon on their mind grabbed theirs last weekend.

The process was simple as usual.  We have been to enough download events that there were no mysteries involved.

My daughter, on getting her first close look at Arceus declared it a complete rip-off of Dialga.

Dialga

I don’t quite see the resemblance myself, but I am probably distracted by that pet fence that Arceus appears to gotten stuck half way down his body.

A post in which I draw two points and declare there to be a line.

Before I start, I just want to point out the humor tag on this post.  Some people will miss that and not read the post in the spirit in which it was written.  It is Friday.  Relax and just chuckle at my folly.

I have a theory about fishing and fantasy MMORPGs.

Fishing Yet Again

I believe that there is a correlation between how well a fantasy MMORPG does relative to its contemporary competitors and how deep and interesting the fishing mechanism that is available at launch.

So, the better the fishing is at launch, the better the game will do relative to other games that launch in a similar window of time.

My data set so far:

EverQuest: Launched March 1999

Fishing: A relatively straightforward but deep fishing mechanism.  You needed a fishing pole which had to be equipped.  You needed bait, which got used up as you fished.  You could fish in just about any water you could find.  And you caught a wide variety of things, from fish that could be used for cooking, to rusty weapons that could be sharpened, to junk for the vendor.  So in many ways very much like real fishing; pick your spot, grab your pole, make sure you have bait, and fish away.

Market position: Rapidly became the king of the hill, declining only when the next generation of competitors came along.

EverQuest II: Launched November 2004

Fishing: Barely a fishing mechanism at all.  No fishing pole or bait required.  Fishing was reduced to harvesting “fish nodes” which at launch would yield at most a single fish per try before the fisherman had to move on to the next node, so you were constantly on the run.  And then all you ever caught was fish, never the stereotypical old boot or rusty dagger.

Market position: A strong start that rapidly faded with the game never achieving anything close to the popularity of its predecessor.

Lord of the Rings Online: Launched April 2007

Fishing: None at launch, added later (too late by my theory)

Market position:  Mid-pack, never a contender for market leadership.

Warhammer Online: Launched September 2008

Fishing: None

Market position: Mid-pack after losing more than half of their early subscriber base

The Wild Card

Now, the whole in my data set is World of Warcraft, but only because I did not play on day one so I cannot speak personally to the state of fishing back then.  But from what I have seen since I started playing five months after launch is that WoW has a very EverQuest-like fishing paradigm.  You need a pole.  There is no bait, but you can attach a lure.  You can fish wherever you want.

And furthermore, WoW has continued to improve fishing as time went along.  There are fishing tournaments, fishing achievements, fishing quests, some truly special fishing poles, and even some pets that you can obtain only by fishing.  You can fish up an amazing amount of things.  Plus there was that fishing chair that was in the card game.

Don't mind me, I'm just fishing

What Am I Saying?

Now at this point you may wonder if I am somehow suggesting that fishing is the most important feature of an MMORPG.

I am not.

I am moving more towards a “canary in a coal mine” view of fishing.  If a company has had the resources to deliver a reasonably polished game and has had the time to include fishing as something more than an afterthought, that the game might have the makings of a winner.

More Data Needed

Of course, to test a theory one of the things you can do is see if it would have predicted the same outcome for similar events outside of the current data set.  In this case, other MMORPGs that have launched.  I have taken two sample cases of good and bad fishing and drawn a line and then forced a couple of null set results onto that line and called it a theory.

So what other games have had fishing at launch, how good was that fishing mechanic, and how have the games done?

For example, while I wasn’t there, I am going to guess that Ultima Online had fishing of some sort.  I mean, if you could be a shepherd, how could they miss fisherman.  And while I tend to see UO as more the culmination of the long running Ultima series of games rather than a game on the D&D-Diku-EQ-WoW trajectory of MMORPGs (which isn’t a bad thing), it was the market leader in its time, it exceeded the expectations of the developer, and it lives on today.

What about Aion, Runes of Magic, or the upcoming Alganon?  Alganon certainly took a cue from WoW on interface, did they also borrow fishing?

Something on the hook

Other Questions

Should this theory include PvP oriented games or not?  I put WAR on the list because Mythic invested in a PvE game.

Is it limited to fantasy?  Did Star Wars Galaxies have fishing?  Could this have been an early indicator for the fates of Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa?

Is there another game mechanic besides fishing that fits the theory better?  I cannot bring myself to generalize this to a good resource harvesting mechanism because fishing generally represents such tangential feature to the game that I think it is special.

Or is this all just the view of somebody who has maxed out the fishing skill in every MMO he has played?

Five years ago I rolled my first character, Nomu Stonemantle, a dwarf priest, in the post-cataclsym world of Norrath that is the setting for EverQuest II.

It was my primary game for a good 18 months and I have gone back to visit on a number of occasions.

While I have not played for almost a year at this point, I am sure I will be back at some point.

Norrath, both pre and post-cataclysm are virtual places, but places with real memories for me.

We finally reached the point where there were no more holiday events to go after and no more fresh instances to run for the group.  It looked like we might spend a Saturday evening playing our new characters, the ones we rolled up on Lightninghoof, one of the RP-PvP servers.

But what should we do?

With five of us, running around the Barrens seems like a bit of a waste.  We had all progressed into the teens with characters though, so Ragefire Chasm seemed like a good plan.  It is a nice, low level instance.  Yes, we did it before, though not exactly as it was intended.

So an objective was set.  Now which characters should we play?  Each of us had at least two or three characters in the right level range.

We shuffled through the deck of possibilities and ended up with the following roster:

14 Troll Rogue – Azucar (Bungholio)
15 Tauren Druid – Hurmoo (Vikund)
16 Tauren Druid – Azawak (Skronk)
17 Orc Shaman – Earlthebat (Earlthecat)
19 Blood Elf Paladin – Enaldie (Ula)

This gave all of us somewhat different roles than we had in the old group.

Azawak became the tank, leaving the healing role behind.  Azucar and Enaldie left behind ranged DPS for… melee DPS.  Earlthebat got to stand back and take the ranged DPS route.  And Hurmoo was no longer in close doing melee DPS, but got to stand back and heal.

Fortunately, to support the learning curve for our new roles, we were, on average, a bit over level for the instance.

The first order of business was to get all the quests for the instance lined up.  A few were easy and could be shared, but there was one quest line that starts at Thrall that we had to all run through.  And run is the operative word, since it meant running back and forth around Orgrimmar for a bit.

Finally though we had all the quests and were ready to go.  We had all the quests.  We had a laundry list of things to kill.  We were at the instance door.

Somehow I, as Hurmoo, was nominated to be the group leader.  Usually that is a mistake on the order of going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line, but things did not go too badly.  I need to go off and find some macros for putting up raid icons, but otherwise the floaty crownie thing on my portrait was not the mark of death.

Considering how new we were to our roles, the run went smoothly.  None of us died despite some teething problems.

Azucar got some on-the-job training about stealth and sap, which was required because he was our only crowd control option.  Being the lowest level in the group meant that his stealth was not as effective as it might otherwise have, but that just reinforced the lessons.

We do have to get used to having somebody stealthed and leading the way in the group.  At least one group member kept following our stealthed rogue as he was trying to sap, triggering the expected proximity pull.  Again, we made it through despite the that.

Having a druid bear tank worked well enough.  At this level he also put out the most damage, thanks largely to the retribution aura Enaldie had up.

Ragefire Chasm itself is somewhat odd in its design philosophy.  There is a whole side path of mobs that leads to nowhere and the main boss, Taragaman the Hungerer, is the second of four bosses you kill, so the achievement comes up when you’ve still got work left to do.

He was not an epic fight for us.  We cleared some of the surrounding groups and then went after him.  Soon we stood over his corpse.

Taragaman Defeated

That left us the clean up of the two passages behind Taragaman’s area, which we worked our way through slowly as we tried to fit into the new dynamic of our group.

In the end we stood looking out over the dungeon having made it to the far end.

Mission Accomplished!

And then we had to walk all the way back to where we came in because there is no back door to Ragefire Chasm.

The ironic twist of the night was the loot.  Formerly we were a group that wore only plate or cloth and we seemed to get a huge amount of leather or mail armor drops.

Now we were a group that wore only leather and mail.  So what dropped all night?  Cloth.

So cloth much dropped that I later trained Hurmoo as an enchanter so that we could at least disenchant items we cannot use if we get a repeat performance.

Ragefire Chasm is nice, and served as a good place for us to start working on our grouping skills.  In fact, we were wondering why there wasn’t an Alliance instance at the same level before you got to the Deadmines.

Of course, Ragefire Chasm is something of a single use dungeon, so investing in an Alliance version might not be worthwhile, though who knows what Cataclysm will bring.

Once we were through the dungeon and had turned in all the quests, our group had all leveled at least once and three of us leveled twice.  So our group looked like this at the end:

16 Rogue – Azucar
17 Druid – Hurmoo
18 Druid – Azawak
18 Shaman – Earlthebat
20 Paladin – Enaldie

At those levels, there is little point to heading back into Ragefire Chasm.

But now where to go next?  Do we face the PvP aspect of the server and try to get to the Deadmines?  Or should we try the long and winding road that is Wailing Caverns?

The weekend has come and gone and Runic released their patch as promised.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a patch, it was a full re-build of the installer.  You need to uninstall the original version and install this new version.

This was all done for the right reasons, so I do not know if I can fault them for making this choice.  But it has left me waiting for the update.

The problem is, they say, that each of the digital vendors needs to add in their own DRM scheme.  As of this morning, some of the vendors have done that, and some have not.

Of course, I bought my copy via Direct2Drive, so I do not have access yet to the update yet and there is no word on when that may happen.

Lesson learned?  Try and buy directly from the company if possible I suppose.

Now, on the bright side, I am not suffering from any of the major, game-play stopping issues, so it isn’t critical for me to get this update.  I just have some mild, irrational anxiety knowing that I will have to reinstall.

Until then, I’m waiting for Direct2Drive.

Our move over to the horde side of the Lightninghoof PvP-RP server has been progressing slowly.

We’re trying new classes and getting used to new home towns.

One of the classes I have been playing with is the shaman.  It is a fun class so far and I have a lot to learn about it, mana management being high on the list.

But I have a problem with the class.

At level 16 I got the ghost wolf form, which is a travel form that gives a speed boost akin to the druid’s cheetah form.  That part is great.

The problem is that the ghost wolf is… well… a ghost.  Unfortunately, for somebody who has spent a bit of time playing a rogue and a lot of time playing a druid in cat form, being a ghost has the same visual effect as being stealthed.

Ghost Wolf

And while I know at some higher intellectual level that being a ghost is not the same as being stealthed, something in my brain keeps making that assumption.

I’ll be running across the Barrens and see something to harvest on the far side of a few aggro mobs, so I’ll just weave between them like they can’t see me.

Only they can see me.

At that point it is usually a good thing I am in travel form because I have to run away for a bit while I remind myself that I am not stealthed.

That lasts for about five minutes and then I do something similar.

It is really annoying.  But it is like breaking any habit, it is going to take time.

WoW.com has a post up today that says Haris Pilton, vendor of the “Gigantique” bag in Shattrath, will be getting an even bigger bag when WoW patch 3.3 comes out.

The new bag, called the Portable Hole, will have 24 slots and will cost 3,000 gold.  It will no doubt be a boon for OCD packrats everywhere in Azeroth.

Picture stolen from Wow.com

But to call 24 slots a “Portable Hole” seems a bit of an over-statement in my book.

After all, I’ve see what a Portable Hole can hold.

Blizzard, call me back when your Portable Hole can carry all of that or change the name.

Or do you think we’re never going to see a bigger container in game?

There is a nice piece up this morning over at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs where Fake Steve (Dan Lyons) points out (with his usual flair) that while TechCrunch was going after Zynga’s scam ad driven virtual goods business all last week, over at the New York Times they were working on a piece that ran on Saturday about how virtual goods were now bringing in money, which included Zynga as an example of how this market was maturing.

Did the New York Times mention any of the practices that TechCrunch brought to light?

No.

But which will influence people more?

Which article scares you more?

The Arceus download event is finally upon us.  You can bring your copy of Pokemon Diamond, Pearl, or Platinum to download Arceus at Toys R Us stores in the US and Puerto Rico from November 7th through the 15th.

Toys R Us does not seem to be pushing this event as much as they have done previous such events.  The event does appear in their weekly ad, but the mention is buried several pages into it.

This event is, of course, part of a coordinated push by Nintendo to keep interesting in Pokemon at a simmer while we await a new installment in the series, the promised Pokemon HeartGold and Soul Silver.  As such, this download event coincides with the release of a new Pokemon movie “Arceus and the Jewel of Life” and the addition of Arceus related booster packs to the Pokemon Platinum version of the trading card game.

The Three Faces of Arceus

More information is available over at Pokemon.com.

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?