I was again invited to join Adam, along with Craig from Voyages in Eternity, Brenden from Another Here, and Beau from Voyages of Vanguard for another lively podcast round table.

The topic was RP vs. XP: Role playing in MMOs, another huge savanna of a topic, which seems to be Adam’s specialty.

We quickly and cleanly dispatched the cliche pre-conception that role play means a bad British accent and a Shakespearean vocabulary. (After all, how would the British role play then… or would they be role playing all the time?)

Then Beau immediately torpedoed my own pre-conception, which was that role play requires interaction, and suggested that role play can be a solo endeavor, and that role play can be immersion in the game and its environment. (Read more on his own immersion project ideas here.)

We then went in to what MMOs could do to encourage role playing and found ourselves walking the line between making the game more life like and making the game accessible and convenient to those with limited time budgets.

The topic, of course, was far too much to take on in a single show of reasonable length, but quite a few ideas and experiences were brought up as part of the discussion.

Most of the show stayed in the domain of fantasy, though EVE Online did get mentioned a couple of times. (You can find EVE role players all over.)

What surprised me was that we managed to steer pretty clear of Star Wars Galaxies (mentioned once, and only in passing, if I recall right) despite it being an MMO with classes geared towards role play. (Anyone here an entertainer?)

It was a fun show, and Adam swore he would digest what we said and then come back at the topic on another show.

Witty Ranter is part of the omnipresent VirginWorlds Podcast Collective.

You can find episode #8 here or on iTunes.

If you like the show, take a moment and leave a review on iTunes.

A few days back I walked into my daughter’s room.

For no real reason, I posed my hands as if I was carrying a box.

“What have you got?” my daughter asked.

“A box!” I replied.

“What’s in the box?”

I had not thought that far ahead, so I just went through the motions of opening up the invisible box. It held a smaller box, which held a smaller box, until I got down to an imaginary box that fit in one hand. I pretended to open it up, and held it in front of her.

She reached in and pulled something out. I asked what it was. She said, “A gym badge?”

All roads lead to Sinnoh.

A gym badge is, if you play the Pokemon games, what you earn for defeating the local gym leader.

A gym is where Pokemon trainers go to improve the skills. Every jerkwater town in the land of Pokemon seems to have at least one Pokemon gym with its own odd-ball, tin-pot dictator, hidden behind a layer of incompetent sycophants, and running the place in the name of his or her Pokemon philosophy.

And a trainer is somebody who battle with Pokemon, so when you play the game, you play as a trainer.

Some trainers seem to sit in a single town and hang out at the gym, waiting to be challenged. Other trainers… anybody other than an NPC… travel from town to town with the thought of challenging gym leaders and winning gym badges.

And since my daughter and I have been playing Pokemon Diamond together, we tend to talk about the gym badges and how we’re going to get the next one. (We both have 7 of 8 now, so we’re moving right along.)

And, coming after some evening play time, a gym badge popped right into her mind.

This gave me an idea.

“Yes,” I said, “The badge for your gym!”

This immediately set her off to thinking about what her badge would look like and what sort of Pokemon her gym would specialize in.

Eventually we decided that we would each after to form our own gyms and then challenge each other.

But first we would have to design gym badges. Off we went to the iMac and KidPix.

KidPix: Best tool ever for this sort of thing. Easy to use, lots of neat tools, and plenty of just the right kind of clip art.

We eschewed the rather stylized gym badges of the game, preferring something more akin to a sign. A gym shingle, if you will.

My daughter, deciding her gym was all about electric Pokemon, put her own rendition of Pikachu in the middle.

I, with a mix of water and electric Pokemon, and less patience for drawing, went the full clip art route for my own gym sign.

And so they were printed out, hers she hung on her bedroom door, while I hung mine on the door of my office at home.

I also printed out half size versions to serve as the gym badges.

The battles themselves proved to be interesting. In leveling up my Pokemon, I chose a somewhat Eisenhower-like “broad front” approach, so I had, representing my gym, a full pack of six Pokemon in the low 40s.

My daughter, in contrast, had chosen a narrow thrust approach, more akin to Montgomery’s vision, and thus had a level 60 Luxray, a level 44 Pikachu, and then a few more electric Pokemon in the teens.

We chose to do double battles, where we would each field a pair of Pokemon at a time. She was the first challenger.

The battle did not go my way. I decided to try to whittle down her lesser Pokemon, saving the titanic Luxray for last, thinking to attack where my enemy was weakest.

However, the savage blows from her main Pokemon chewed up my team while I failed completely to knock out even one of hers.

So when it came my turn to challenge her, I changed up my tactics. I threw everything I had against her Luxray. A few key critical hits and I was able to force it from the battle. While it had cost me three of my own Pokemon to remove her monster from play, the odds were now in my favor. I was able to knock out her Pikachu in the next round, then chewed through all of her lower level Pokemon quickly enough.

Which, if nothing else, might shed some light on the whole operation Market-Garden fiasco.

“I let you win,” she said, a comment I blame entirely on the influence of my mother-in-law, for whom the term “good loser” (along with “good winner”) is an entirely foreign concept.

So we each have the gym badge of the other.

However, as we approach the end of the game, my daughter has been considering non-electric Pokemon. This might mean the founding of a new gym, new badges, and new challenges.

We shall see.

Stolen wholesale from the in-game profile of an EVE Pilot named Darth Vaders, who may have written it himself or grabbed it from another source.

I was looking at his profile because I wanted to know what somebody who took that name would put in their bio. (Good on you mate if you’ve the balls to back up that handle! I barely have the moxie to sustain the handle “John Doe.”)

I found this amusing enough to repost, mostly because you cannot close the “Local” chat window, so I’ve seen enough of this sort of thing to know this list hits uncomfortably close to the mark some days.

Rule #1: The guys who killed you are total cheaters

That’s right. There is no way a total badass like yourself could have done any kind of noobish mistake and gotten killed. The only way that is possible if the defenseless targets you were gunning for cheated! Perhaps some of them are Devs and spawned a doomsday bomb into your cargo hold, or maybe they used lag and hacking to screw up your connection!

Be sure to yell explicitly on how there’s no way ‘lowlifes’ like them could have ever touched your magnificence. This leads me to the next point.

Rule #2: Make sure they know that you are better than them

You must not forget to repeatedly mention how these ‘peasants’ or ‘noobs’ don’t know crap, while highborn nobility such as yourself are total pros from back in the Pre-alpha release. Perhaps to further emphasize the point, you should suggest that your opponents are all sons and daughters of prostitutes. Such characterful additions to your smack talk on local show your fine character and class, no doubt striking fear into their hearts should they ever encounter you again.

Rule #3: Remind them you have powerful friends

Peasants like them couldn’t possibly comprehend what a mistake they did, cheating to kill you. One thing never fails to strike terror in their hearts, and that is appealing to your most deadly of allies of course!

Brag and gloat about your connections with ‘BloB’ or whatever that big alliance thingie is in the bottom left of the map. Talk about how you’ll put a twenty trillion ISK contract on their heads by talking to your good friend Selena, leader of the Mercenary Coalition. You of course, pay them to do these things, since a PvP god of your caliber is above destroying such noobs.

Rule #4: Be sure to use ‘flavorful’ racial slurs at random

Nothing tells your opponent that they are weak and pathetic than to assign them random derogatory ethnic names. Did a Caldari Raven somehow destroy your 2 billion ISK Nanophoon and pod you because you were stupid enough to sit around AFK in a belt? Be sure to call him something anti-Semitic, or some variation on a common slur for black people! Are you irked that your complete ninja skills deserved better, but that cheating target of yours somehow hacked your computer into aggroing CONCORD? Shout loudly that he is a homosexual.

Whatever happens, be sure to say the most offensive thing possible. After all, the best defense is a strong offense-based vocabulary.

Rule #5: CAPITAL LETTERS SHOW THAT YOU MEAN BUSINESS

YOU GET THAT? Loudness shows just how damn angry you are. If you aren’t talking in caps, you aren’t putting enough feeling into destroying the pitiful souls of your victims like a spaceship flying grim reaper. Their morale will be crushed by the sheer force of your rage and will. Even better, yell into your own room or into your own teamspeak line. Invite your enemies to listen to you yell.

Just remember the lesson you first learned as a baby being spanked: There isn’t a problem in the world that can’t be solved by yelling, and possibly tearing up. Not cowardly tears of course, but manly tears like what a Space Pirate Badass like yourself would shed.

Rule #6: There is no such thing as too much profanity

**** you, you stupid *** jack***. It was NOT my ****ing fault that little ****s like you used lag and the god**** *** bug exploits to kill my **** ship! I’ll kill you again when I see your faces, b*tches! ***munches.

Rule #7: Nothing proves your superiority more than threatening real life physical violence

Lastly, after all other techniques are expended, only one method is a sure-fire way of bringing the fear of your wrath into those opponents. Threaten them, and don’t let up. Tell them exactly how you’ll track down what country, state and street they live in, smashing kneecaps and crushing their skulls

Just a reminder that there is only ONE WEEK LEFT in the 365 Day LOTRO Anniversary Contest!

And, frankly, there is only ONE real entry so far, so that person is going to WIN a 30 Day key for Lord of the Rings Online unless you enter the contest SOON!

You can read all of the details about the contest HERE!

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED!

We now return you to the normal rules of capitalization.

So far the production of Badgers, the Caldari industrial ship that is one of the most ubiquitous haulers in the game, has gone well.

Production and sales have been steady, while the prices I have been able to get for the ships has been well above my initial target price, thanks in large to the previously mentioned regional price differentials.

One of my goals for this production experiment has been to minimize the outlay of ISK. So after buying the blueprint original and doing the material efficiency research on it, I have kept the actual ISK expenses to just production station costs.

That meant mining my own minerals versus buying them on the market.

Not a problem, at first. Each production run of 15 Badgers requires the following minerals:

Tritanium   372,000 units
Pyerite      98,865 units
Mexallon     37,860 units
Isogen        5,760 units
Nocxium       1,980 units
Zydrine         375 units

The first four types are all easily obtained by mining in high security space. And Nocxium can be found in high sec as well by mining Pyroxeres, though the rate and which you get it is pretty slow.

And then there is Zydrine.

I do not need a ton of it, but it is not readily obtainable in empire space. There is at least one mission where Gneiss asteroids show up, and refining Gneiss will get you some Zydrine, but it is a roll of the dice actually getting the right mission.

I managed to get through the first half dozen production runs without going to market just based on the Zydrine I had collected from missions. Reprocessing every equipment drop from every NPC will supply a little bit. The drops from drone missions will get you a little more.

But, in the end, I had to start buying it.

Granted, it is totally worth the expenditure.

But something about it rankles. I like to be self sufficient in my trade skills and not at the mercy at the market.

But that’s just me.

As I mentioned in my post “Moving to Amarr Space,” the regional market into which I dropped was close to ideal for making money, at least at a slow pace. The competition was low, variation in pricing was huge, and buy orders were relatively scarce.

What I did not know at the time was that I was sitting close to where three regions come together. In the past, I have tended to end up right in the middle of a region, so that no matter which direction I went for 3-5 jumps I was still in the same market.

Now, however, I am one jump in one direction and three jumps in another from different regional markets.

And they are very different.

One jump away from where I am happily selling Badgers for 800K ISK a piece, the regional price drops by nearly a third.

Three jumps the other way, I would have to slice 25% off of my asking price to be competitive.

So I am looking for a good way to exploit the differential between these two markets.

While I cannot haul badgers, I could certainly buy them and fly them I suppose.

Or I could find something smaller.  Something to exploit these regional differences.

And I have to keep my customers from finding out that they need only one more jump to beat my prices!

Ars Technica reported over the weekend (via Private Equity Hub, which unfortunately charges for their content, so I couldn’t follow up on details) that Turbine has secured $40 million in additional venture capital (bringing their total up to $88 million) and will be announcing a new project soon.

That brings up two immediate question.

First, what will Turbine’s new project be? Another MMO surely, but an original IP or will they be licensing again?

So far they have two original IP MMOs:

Asheron’s Call - success
Asheron’s Call 2 - failure

And two licensed IP MMOs:

Lord of the Rings Online - success
Dungeons and Dragons Online - still open, but hardly a smash

Which route to go?

Second, what is the cash out plan? Those venture capitalist dollars are not angel investments, they will want their money back somehow.

For the second question, there are two obvious routes, go public and sell the company to somebody bigger.

Going public for the sake of going public (to pay off the VCs) is almost always a mistake and ends up damaging the company in the end.

But selling to another company can also shake things up more than people like. Plus, my thoughts immediately stray to one big company that wants to get into the MMO market, but that has failed to so far: Microsoft.

The cash out plan is almost inevitable because of the venture capital involved. It is just a question of how and when.

On the new project though, speculation can go wild. What will Turbine do?

Is their commitment to Dungeons and Dragons and their relationship with Wizards of the Coast strong enough that there might be another IP in that domain they want to try? Say, a nice outdoors IP like Forgotten Realms?

Or will Turbine lay down the sword this time and pick up the gun or the laser?

What will be the next project?

What do you think Turbine should do?

After losing my Mammoth a while back, I went looking for a way to get another Cargohold Optimization Rig I built for its replacement.

The sticking point was alloyed tritanium bars, which currently run for around half a million ISK on the market.

The blueprint original I have for Cargohold Optimization required 100 alloyed tritanium bars.

50 million ISK for one set of ingredients alone. Too much.

While I was slowly collecting those bars by running missions (I have 34 total now) I decided to see if material efficiency could save me a little ISK.

The blueprint original I had been processed to a material efficiency level of 20.

To get it to a material efficiency level of 80 would cost half a million ISK.

If getting to 80 would cut the bill or materials by even ONE alloyed tritanium bar, it would pay for itself.

So I queued up the blueprint and waited.

After a 30 day wait, I got to see if my bet paid off.

The answer is: No

At material efficiency level 80, the blueprint still requires 100 alloyed tritanium bars.

So the jump from 20 to 80 does not change your bill of materials by even 1%.

Be warned!

im here on behalf on goonswarm and would be interested to know if you and your small corp would be interested in moving to 0.0 space with us

That was the beginning of a conversation with a complete stranger in EVE Online. He sent me a convo invite and pretty much opened up with that.

Goonswarm? Heady stuff for a noob like me.

I was interested at once because, say what you will about the Goons, they do seem to live an exciting existence in New Eden.

The temptation was great.

I did explain that my corp was so small that I was the only active member, but that did not seem to be an issue for him.

There were, of course, issues for me.

The first was the 150 million ISK up front security deposit, promised to be returned once they were sure I was not a spy.

Money up front is a concept I generally associate with entangled Nigerian assets and contractors who don’t finish the job.

Given that Goon philosophy described elsewhere about winning the game by making the other guy quite, I would not find it far fetched if this was just a way for somebody else to come off 150 million ISK richer at my expense. There are no rules against that sort of griefing in EVE, so woe to the fool who is parted from his money easily.

And then there is me and my own EVE play style which, given some of the feedback I’ve gotten, frustrates the crap out of a few readers.

I tend to plod around, exploring dusty corners of the game, completely ignoring what people often tell me is “the point” of EVE, which is PVP in 0.0 space. But that is the way I end up playing most games.

And there are always more of this little corners to explore in EVE. Just yesterday Van Hemlock posted a guide to exploration and scanning. This has been on my “To do” list for a while. Something new to occupy my hours!

So I am torn on the decision. Continue on my usual path? Try something radically new and potentially be bilked out of some ISK?

To bee or not to bee, that is the question.

Saturday night found us one player short. Bung was out with some sort of contagious crud. So we decided it might be a good night for working on alts.

Unfortunately, while our main group is fairly well coordinated when it comes to being able to work as a team, our alts are a little more chaotic. So this is who we had roving Hellfire Peninsula on Saturday night.

59 Warrior - Scscla
60 Hunter - Nodens
64 Hunter - Tistann
70 Warrior - Earlthecatwo

Tistann is my own hunter alt, while Nodens is Skronk’s. Scscla (pronounced on Skype as “shizz-ill-uh” and not “scuzz-claw”) is Ula’s gnome warrior alter ego. And Earlthecatwo is Earlthecat’s… well… level 70 warrior alt. Earl can be a binge player at time, so his alt hit 70 a while back, has a flying mount (which we got to see finally) and is doing the daily quests to grind cash for his epic flying mount.

Between us and out pets, we had lots of tanking, plenty of DPS, no healing unless you count pet healing, and not many other options.

We briefly discussed our potential for doing Hellfire Ramparts, but decided we had best stick to group quests.

On the plus side, Earl and Tistann had not done any of the group quests in Hellfire Peninsula.

The downside was that Sccla and Nodens were not yet eligible for those quests.

I read the 10 Commandments of Altitis yesterday and thought perhaps an 11th ought to be something along the lines of “if you plan to do more than solo with your alt, you might try to plan alts with your friends.”

Not that that is what alts are about, but here we were at the picnic and everybody ignored instructions and brought potato salad.

So we got together to just plow through some level 60-ish quests together.

At the time the experience for killing mobs did not seem to bad, running to 250-300 exp per.

However, when I thought about it, I realized that, solo, these guys were 1000-1200 exp. I think the fact that we were playing LOTRO the night before and were killing light blue and green mobs for a quest, 19-27 exp per kill, might have colored my perception.

There was much node harvesting as we quested and Tistann, who is a leatherworker, made out well skinning ravagers and boars.

And Scscla hit level 60. Always a landmark level.

We still have not decided our path for next week.

The Site

My post, “SOE Announces Graphite Realms,” was popular enough to make April 1st, 2008 my highest traffic day ever. (Brenlo is never going to give me SOE office supplies again!)

It was, of course, me indulging in one of the two long held April Fool’s Day traditions. The first tradition is pranks and similar tomfoolery. The second tradition is complaining about all the pranks and tomfoolery. Together they have a perfect symbiotic relationship.

I supposed that I will never earn my curmudgeon certification until I leave the first tradition for the second. Maybe next year.

The worst thing about hitting a peak though, is the fact that there is always that slope down on the other side as traffic returns to normal.

Roller Coaster!

On another topic, WordPress.com has added a new feature that generates links to possibly related posts. If you opt in, some links, under the heading “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated),” may end up at the bottom of your posts. Your own site only gets linked if you opt in.

I opted in, just to see what came up. So far, most of my posts lack possibly related links, though “Angling in Angmar” has a few connections to fishing blogs. Imagine that!

And, finally, I have received a SINGLE entry in response to the LOTRO Banner Contest post. And that guy doesn’t even play LOTRO. So the next entry could be the winner! A 30-Day time code there for the taking!

If you are having problems with the 730 x 140 size, just get close (a little bigger is better than too small) and you won’t be disqualified. Having made a hundred or so banners, getting the sizing right is easy, but I understand that some people have problems in that regard.

Get your entry in by May 16th!

One Year Ago

Back in April 2007 we were wondering what was going to happen with Sigil Games Online after their less than stellar Vanguard launch. (*snort*) There was much speculation. Soon, however, we would be free from the rambling posts of Aradune.

In EverQuest II Gaff and I visited Emperor Fyst, I ran around in Nektropos Castle with the Everling clan, and complained about experience in Splitpaw.

While our WoW group was winding down for the summer, with Earl off to Broadway, the remaining four of us went off to Middle-earth with the launch of LOTRO. Titles were the new thing! A year later, I still have yet to get any of those emote titles.

I answered the musical meme question, “Five Reasons Why I Blog.”

Van Hemlock was leet.

Our Wii finally came out of the box.

And, finally, I had a problem with a video card that eventually had to be RMA’d, which sounds a lot like this April. I hope this won’t turn into a yearly thing.

New Linking Sites

A big thanks to these sites who link to TAGN. I encourage you to give them a visit in return.

• Ignoratio Elenchi
• Killed in a Smiling Accident
• The MMO Notebook
• The Squirrel’s Den
• World of Blogcraft

So maybe it will be next month when I cannot find a new site linking to The Ancient Gaming Noob.

Most Viewed Posts in April

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
2. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
3. EVE Online - The Tutorial
4. SOE Announces Graphite Realms!
5. My LOTRO Video Crash
6. 2008 MMORPG Progdictionations
7. What Is A “Tank” In EVE?
8. Mammoth Explosion
9. Moving To Amarr Space
10. Is There Hope for a Science Fiction MMORPG
11. TAGN Central
12. LOTRO is Go!
13. The Profusion of Interdiction
14. Five New EVE Online Wishes
15. One MILLION Chinese!

Best Search Terms

somebody thinking
[not here]

faux wood computer
[Like those station wagons from the 1970s?]

isk exchange rate wow
[I don't think you can spend ISK in WoW... not yet, anyway.]

EVE Online

I had the big move to Amarr space which has started me on a big mission-running grind for standings. I have been running lots of missions. I have also been mining lots of kernite. And then there was my industrialist aspirations, producing Badgers for fun and profit. I still rarely see anybody I know in EVE, though Van Hemlock was nice enough to convo me to say “Hi!”

EverQuest

I embedded that Sayonara Norrath video in a post to help promote Tipa’s EverQuest Nostalgia Trip campaign, and it darn near snagged me as well.

However with LOTRO coming back into vogue, EVE still simmering, and the instance group still going, I knew the free time for another venture wasn’t going to be there.

It will probably be Fall again before I return to pre-cataclysm Norrath. Next time around I’ll get Gaff and Potshot signed up and we’ll see how far we get.

Lord of the Rings Online

A replacement 8800GT card fixed my video issues. I still use the nVidia control panel to turn up the fan on the card when I play LOTRO though. The “automatic control” seems to think turning the blades at 29% of max rpms is the solution for all heat issues. I crank it up to 60% when I venture into Middle-earth, which keeps the card in a reasonable temperature range, if you consider 60 C reasonable.

New criteria for the next video card: Better heat sink mechanism.

Once in LOTRO, fun is there to be had. Some of the instance group plus Gaff “three box” are back in Middle-earth as well. There is fishing, fighting, and crafting. And, in general, the game seems a bit smoother compare to our last venture into it. Combat has been tweaked so it feels a bit less awkward. It still isn’t at the WoW level of responsiveness, but it has been improved.

Random trivia: A dwarf guardian yells A LOT in combat!

World of Warcraft

The instance group has been moving forward, though with the failure at the Mana Tombs, it appears that the difficulty level is starting to ramp up. Aside from Earl though, we do not seem to be spending much of our non-instance group time in Azeroth. Middle-earth is stealing that time.

Wii

While the Wii has not been getting a ton of use, it still entertains guests. Lots of Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart Double-Dash, and LEGO Star Wars gets played with visitors, along with the usual Wii sports.

A friend of ours brought over Endless Ocean. Our friend is big into the scuba diving, so thought it was a great game. My daughter likes it quite a bit. For my part, “endless” seems to be an apt description, as the game seems to slowly plod along with no end in sight. More like Interminable Ocean to me.

DS

My daughter has been distracted from Pokemon Diamond a bit over the last month. First it was Pokemon Pearl. She wanted to get going there to capture the Pokemon that aren’t in Diamond. Then there was a one week love affair with Horsez 2, which we got through GameFly. All this has allowed me to catch up, somewhat, with her in the game, and we both stand with 7 gym badges and are chasing around Team Galactic with a vengeance. She still has the advantage in that a couple of her Pokemon are in the low 60s, while my highest level Pokemon is only 42.

Coming Up

Instance group, adventures in Middle-earth, the ongoing struggle in EVE, and perhaps the defeat of Team Galactic?

It has been a while since I have written anything on the topic of ancient gaming. Perhaps I should dig through my notes and post on that topic. My Stellar Emperor/MegaWar III posts seem to be getting a lot of traction of late.

On Witty Ranter # 7 we spent some time thrashing about trying to get people with somewhat different viewpoints to get together and create a plan for an MMO given a hypothetical $50 million war chest.

My initial suggestion was to hire some Bulgarians to do some sort of multiplayer version of Bejewelled and then split the remaining $49.5 million between us.

That was against the spirit of the whole premise, plus it would have made for a very short show. Instead we came up with some sort of rated M for mature, free to play, micro transaction, space game with no swords allowed EVER! A proud moment for all of us, to be sure.

But I had another idea in mind. A way to take $50 million and turn it into a magical everlasting money machine.

I said the magic word, the word that drives this idea about 27 times during the show, so Adam couldn’t have edited them all out.

The magic word is Pokemon.

I have been aware of Pokemon for some time now, not just since a DS wandered into the house. Heck, I have some real Japanese Pokemon cards stashed away somewhere.

But only since my daughter started drinking the Pokemon Kool-aid have I really started to see how Pokemon is everywhere.

So suspend your disbelief for a few and tell me if this wouldn’t be a money maker.

First, it has to go on the PC. Yes, I know, Nintendo will never go there, but that is why I said to suspend your disbelief. Come on, suspend it! Now!

Grahpics won’t be 3D. Instead it will be a mild upgrade to the Diamond/Pearl level of graphics. This will let it run on every PC made since 2000. You’ll be able to run it at home, at the office, on the road.

Then there will be the world. It will be done GuildWars style. Towns, contest areas, arenas, and the like, those will be shared areas. But when you and your friends go off into zones, it will be instanced. This will keep overhead down as every bit of action won’t be sucking up server resources.

Finally, it will be inexpensive. You’ll have to buy a box or a download copy, but $14.99 a month? forget about it!

The base game will be free to play. You will be able to buy expanded content as it comes out or subscribe to plan on the order of $20 a year to get access to all the content.

Of course, there will be micro transactions via the standard “spend cash to buy in-game points, use those points to buy cool stuff” model.

And, to tie it in with Nintendo’s standard game plan, while there will be some items and some Pokemon that will only be available on the DS Pokemon games, but that can be brought over to the PC version via Nintendo WFC.

So what does the PC player get?

Aside from slightly better graphics and a bigger, zoomable window on the world, the PC will have the option to go through the game with friends. I envision being able to form a group of two to four players to explore with a scaling encounter system that will adjust the number of opponents relative to your own group. There could be areas with epic Pokemon encounters, where you would need not just four people, but four people with the right Pokemon with the right skills to take down the bad guy.

Plus you can add on all of the tricks of the trade from MMOs past and present. Things like player housing, gym factions, live events, seasonal items, storage and travel options, all infused with micro transaction upgradability goodness.

In the end, Nintendo would never go for it. But I think it would have the potential to be a serious money maker.

And it must be a good idea. I got up this morning to post this article and found that Massively had a post on the same topic. Go go Pokemon MMO!

As promised, Lord of the Rings Online’s Book 13 update included fishing!

Woot, fishing!

For no good reason, I have done fishing in every MMO I have played that made some sort of angling mechanic available. I have had characters with fishing skills at the cap in EverQuest, EverQuest 2, and World of Warcraft.

Therefore I knew when Turbine announced fishing for LOTRO, I would be there.

Friday night I found the NPC that grants the fishing skill in Bree. He sends you off to another NPC in Staddle, by the pond of course, who finishes up the “how to” and will sell you some bait.

LOTRO follows the WoW model, where bait enhances your ability to catch fish, but is not required. This is compared to EQ where, at least back in the day, you needed bait for every cast and EQII where not only don’t you need bait, but you don’t even need a fishing pole. One just appears miraculously when you need it.

Equipping my new pole (and hat), I was soon fishing.

In my usual haste to get to the good part, I skipped through all the… well… words… and just started casting. So it took me a minute or two to figure out that you have to hit the fishing action button both to cast your line AND to reel in a fish when you get a strike.

I noticed other people making the same mistake, so I passed along that tidbit wherever it seemed appropriate.

And speaking of getting a strike, LOTRO’s fishing, like so much in the game, is a quality experience. You actually see a fish in the water approach your bobber and take the bait. Granted, it seems to always been the SAME fish, one that bears almost no relation to what you actually end up catching, but it is a damn good looking fish, there in the water, and it makes the experience that much richer. See, look:

So far I have caught weeds, goldfish, minnows, and, no doubt in homage to EQ fishing, rusty daggers! (Too bad my weaponsmith cannot sharpen them for skill improves.) All of them are vendor trash as far as I can tell.

Of course, also like real fishing, once you find a decent spot where the fish are biting, everybody else in the world seems to show up.

The final LOTRO touch, as you might expect, is titles. I fished until my skill hit 10 (out of 200) at which point I got the first fishing title, Apprentice Angler.

Now I just have to make my way to Nen Harn for some fishing.

Alan “Brenlo” Crosby and Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske host this episode of the SOE Podcast, with Jason “Pex” Ryan reading the news.

• SOE Game News
• Listener Emails: Joseph
• Podcast 32 Follow Ups
• Fan Faire count down
• Top 10 reasons you know Alan is cranky and Top 10 pathetic excuses for having to miss a Raid
• Interview with Robyn Vallee, the Community Manager for the Volunteer Guide Program
• Vanguard Update 5
• Interview with Vanessa “Eovania” Barrera (German) and Midori “Momochi” McDaniel (Japanese) from the international community team
• The Love Doctor
• EQ2 House of Commons Chat
• The 3rd annual SOE Block Party - July 26th
• TV and Movies
• What are you playing?
• Out Takes

The show is available on iTunes as well as from the official SOE podcast site.

The show was recorded on April 21st and runs just under one hour and twelve minutes.

The SOE Community team is also asking that if you enjoy the show, if you could take a minute and go Digg It on Digg.com.

Last week Adam, the host of the Witty Ranter podcast, invited myself, Darren from The Common Sense Gamer and Shut Up We’re Talking, Brenden from Another Here, Peter from The Addicted Gamer, and Crovan from The Bitter Old Noob and The Drone Bay podcast to get together with him on Skype and do one of his famous discussion shows.

The show topic was presented as:

We’re the game design team, we’re given 50 million to make our own MMO. Flesh out the MMO as a show topic.

And so off we went, limiting ourselves to some specific areas of MMO design, including genre and business model.

What we ended up with… well… stronger voices prevailed and some old farts and polite Canadians might not have ended up agreeing with certain aspects of the result. Still, we all had fun.

So if you want to hear six blind men arguing over the design of an elephant, now is your chance.

Witty Ranter is part of the prestigious VirginWorlds Podcast Collective.

You can find episode #7 here or on iTunes.

I joked as we were looking for the instance that the name of the instance meant it was a tomb for mana users who entered it.

Little did I know how spot on that observation would be.

Looking for the instance. Yes.

What with time spent by some of us in LOTRO of late and my efforts in EVE Online, we did not do a whole lot of groundwork in advance of this run. I cannot speak for the others, but Vikund was still parked where I left him the previous Saturday night.

So when the time rolled around, we were a little vague on the whole location of the instance. Somewhere in the Terokkar Forest, right?

A couple of us got in the general vicinity of the Mana Tombs but then had to run around for a while, first to find the meeting stone to summon the other party member, and then to find the actual entrance to the instance.

After a Three Stooges level of effort, we finally got everybody together, picked up the two quests outside the instance, then went in. The group was:

64 Warlock - Bungholio
65 Mage - Ula
65 Priest - Skronk
65 Paladin - Vikund
65 Warrior - Earlthecat

We started off lost, then stepped into the instance, only to end up dead.

The first pull in the instance was nearly a wipe. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the fact that we were all of three steps from the entrance, it would have been a wipe. Skronk and Bung went down quickly, then we decided to get out. However, Earl and Vikund were both hit with DOTs and managed to die outside of the instance. Ula was the only survivor.

That set the tone for the night.

We nearly wiped again a few yards further into the instance, Ula being the sole survivor again.

After that, we really buckled down and took care. We even managed to make it to the first boss, Pandemonious, the biggest voidwalker we ever did see.

We even defeated him on the first go! We seemed to be getting back in the groove.

Of course, he dropped a mail item, the Boots of the Outlander. Our luck in that department holds.

Then we moved onward, and managed to wipe on trash mobs again. There is Vikund, dead again.

He looks so peaceful, he could be sleeping.

More care went into getting to the next boss, Tavarok.

Oh, the pain. Here is a shot of us, all dead, with Tavarok in the background.

We were eager to go again though. (You can see the bones left from the last effort.)

And we wiped again.

It was declared “time for research” and WoWWiki came out.

It turns out that Tavarok has a 30 yard AOE attack that stuns and does quite a bit of damage to casters.

So we positioned the casters outside of a 30 yard radius of Tavarok and had at him again.

This time we won. It wasn’t easy. Tavarok’s crystal prison attack has a much greater range and knocks off half of your hitpoints as well as stunning you. This is why we lost Skronk and Ula in the fight.

And, as our streak dictates, Tavarok dropped a leather item, the Nethershade Boots. Bleh.

Still, onward we went, dying again on the way to the next event, which got some of the team, who were already showing paper doll to the red, durability to zero stage where equipment is simply no longer usable.

For the first time in a long time, we had to send somebody out for repairs. Ula put up a portal for Skronk, who went off and found a repairbot at the auction house and brought it back. Earl has his engineer skills high enough to deploy the bot, so we all stopped for a repair break.

Repaired and rested, we moved on. We managed to clear all the way to the last boss, Nexus-Prince Shaffar.

He actually has some witty dialog.

He also creamed us three times running. He didn’t just beat us, he beat us into the ground. We were not even close to winning.

He beat us so rapidly I did not even get a screen shot of it.

And after the first defeat, even advice from WoWWiki wasn’t any help to us. We were fighting way out of our weight.

Having run back to the instance after the third route, we decided to give up on Shaffar and just do the escort quest we passed up before calling it a night. The NPC made it sound easy!

All we had to do is follow him around while he emptied out his Ionic Breezes nether collectors.

And, in the first fight, we wiped.

That was it for the night. More than three hours in and many deaths later, we called it.

Two bosses down.

Two quests left hanging.

Too many deaths.

Now we have to regroup and figure out what went wrong.

While we were at the lower end of the level range (64-66) for the instance, we were not totally off base attempting it.

And while we were not, perhaps, in our finest form that night, we were still working together pretty well.

I am starting to wonder if the curse of the boss drops, the fact that we seem to get mostly leather and mail items that none of us can use, is beginning to work against us. Maybe our equipment just isn’t up to par. After all, we have been doing mostly instances and very few quests. We might be behind in the department.

So next time around, we will have to decide what to do. Should we go back and farm an instance for blues, or go run some quests for levels and green upgrades?

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar launched last year on April 24th.

While those of us who pre-ordered were in the open beta that allowed you to carry over your characters into the live game, April 24th was the big day. It was the day the game box went on the shelf, the day I ran out and bought the collectors edition.

But because 2008 is a leap year Turbine has to wait one extra day to celebrate the one year anniversary of the Lord of the Rings Online launch.

To make up for that extra day of waiting, I thought I would kick off the first TAGN LOTRO contest.

About a month and a half back I offered up my nine remaining Founder’s referrals to readers of this blog.

Nine people took up the offer, and this week Turbine notified me that I now have one 30 Day time key for LOTRO.

So it is time for a contest to give away that key!

The Contest

The first contest is simple. Just make me a Lord of the Rings Online themed banner for the blog. The best one gets a 30 day time code for LOTRO.

The Rules

Banners must be 730 pixels wide and 140 pixels tall.

Banners must be in .jpg or .png format.

Banners can be original artwork or taken from screen shots.

Banners may NOT use material from the Turbine or the Lord of the Rings Online web sites or any press or promotional collateral provided by Turbine. (Which covers most of the screen shots you see on gaming news sites.)

Banners must master their fear, or fear will be their master.

There is a limit of three entries per person.

All entries must be sent via email attachment to wilhelm2451 at rightbox dot com.

Please put “LOTRO Contest” in the subject line of your email. [new]

All entries must be received by 2:01 am UTC on May 16th, 2008.

The winner will be announced in a post on Monday, May 19th, 2008.

The time code will be sent to the email address that the winner used to submit their entry.

In the event of some sort of “tie,” all winners will receive a 30 day time code.

Employees of Turbine, their immediate family, and their pets are not eligible to enter. Neither are the owners of the Mongolian BBQ place around the corner from my office. (Worst gastric distress ever!)

Judging

The judging will be based on banner aesthetics and layout, the use of space within the restrictions which the banner position on the site imposes (see “artistic considerations” below), and how frickin’ cool it is.

While I will be the final authority in picking the winner, I may seek advice from my wife, my daughter, my mother, members of the permanent floating instance group, co-workers, the kid next door, the mailman, readers of rec.arts.books.tolkien, the pizza delivery guy, or Kibo.

Suggestions

Give your entry a unique title and put that title in the body of the email. There will be thousands hundreds maybe a dozen at least your entry, and I don’t want to lose track of it.

Indicate how I should refer to you (name, handle, whatever) should you be the big winner. Include the URL for your website or blog if you want that included as part of your identity.

If you have no use for the 30 day time code, but want to enter anyway in the hope of just seeing your name/handle on the site, feel free, but let me know that is your intention. It guarantees you won’t win the time code, but I will no doubt call out exceptional entries.

Artistic Considerations

Take into account the “Home” and “About” tabs that stick up into the banner area. I can’t make them go away, so make sure they don’t spoil your entry.

The title and tag line in the banner currently are placed there as part of the WordPress theme. I can turn them off if your entry includes the name of the site. But remember, the site name is “The Ancient Gaming Noob.” Any variation or misspelling may count against you, unless you are an ogre. The tag line is purely optional. You can leave it off or make up your own, though tread carefully there, even if you are an ogre.

If you omit the blog title, make sure that the title currently in the banner does not spoil your picture. And while I can remove the title, I cannot change its color, so avoid a large white patch in that area that will wash out the title. (See, these banners don’t just make themselves, do they?)

If you feel you have to sign your work, go ahead, but large signatures, guild logos, email addresses, URLs, or imbedded “work from home” offers may count against you.

MS Paint is the work of the devil. Use it for your entry only if all else fails.

Some weeks back I put up a post about how long material efficiency was going to take for my new venture into ship building.

Eventually the 49 days elapsed.

My blueprint was in hand.

I had materials stored away for production

I was ready to commence production.

I was going into the business of Badgers.

I chose that lowly Caldari industrial ship, the first hauler for so many people, because:

• The blueprint original (BPO) was cheap for a ship
• They seemed to sell well
• The price seemed to be stable and at a level where I could make a profit

The last bit was, of course, the most important. If I was going to invest in a BPO, I wanted to be able to make my money back.

The BPO itself was 3,138,750 ISK.

Researching to Material Efficiency level 12 on the BPO added 2,278,836 ISK to the investment.

So my initial investment was 5,417,586 ISK, plus 49 days of waiting.

Fortunately, the market stayed stable while the research went on.

Materials and manufacturing cost per Badger, based on current mineral prices:

ME 0 - 348,720 ISK
ME 12 - 306,196 ISK

So the 49 day wait was worth over 40K ISK per Badger produced, which ends up being a pile of tritanium on a production run of 15 ships.

My selling price for Badgers is 540,000 ISK, which turns a tidy 231,104 ISK per ship sold.

Which meant that I had to sell 24 Badgers to get back my initial investment.

I have already sold 40.

So, if nothing else, Badgers have made me some money.

Of course, there have been some challenges.

I only noticed after my first production run that a packaged Badger is 20K cubic meters in size. That is more space than any of my haulers can handle.

The next size up in hauling from an industrial is a freighter. While I am a mere two hours training time from flying a freighter, the cost to buy both the ship and the skills runs to the 1 billion ISK mark. I just have to sell about 4,400 more Badgers to get there.

With a freighter not an option for now, I have had to improvise and build where I plan to sell.

I load up the BPO and all the materials for a 15 ship production run, fly off to the neighborhood in which I want to sell, and start producing on location.

I have thus, established myself in the ship building business. Plus I am sure I could sell the BPO for quite a mark up if I tire of production. There seems to be a pretty steady market for BPOs with some material efficiency research on them.

I wonder though, with the removal of NPC sold shuttles, if I should go into the shuttle business as well?

Friday night marked the return of at least some of the WoW instance group to Lord of the Rings Online.

It was unplanned, but after my wife went to bed early (she stretched out on the bed for a minute and then the sandman crept up and mugged her… it was a long week for her) I decided to just log into LOTRO for a few minutes, just to look around.

But once in I was hailed by Skronk and Ula who were also getting reacquainted with the game. They were in the North Downs around Nan Amlug. Since I was near Trestlebridge, I hopped on my new mount and headed out to play with them. Our group consisted of Skronk’s captain, Ula’s minstrel, and my guardian, Nomu.

We picked up some quests from the area and went out hunting.

High points of being in LOTRO again.

Graphics - Wow, I had forgotten how beautiful Middle-earth can be in LOTRO

Appearance Tab - There is not one, but two appearance tabs in LOTRO, so you can have two outfits on hand. You can see in the picture above Nomu is wearing a bucket hat in his appearance tab in anticipation of the upcoming fishing hobby.

Ambient Sound - Out in the fields the ambient sounds were quite amazing, some of the best I recall hearing in an MMO.

The Founder’s Horse - While not as swift as the mounts that can be purchase at level 35, they are both free and faster than walking, which makes travel in the game much easier. All three of us are founders, so we were all able to ride.

General - Skills seem to have been tweaked since we last played together. While still very rusty, we were able to work as a team fairly effectively.

All in all we had a good time. I think we all need some warming up in the game, both to get used to some of its quirks (the UI just is not as responsive as WoW’s) and to come up to speed with all the changes that have come into the game since we last played in the fall of 2007.

I will have to keep an eye on a couple things though.

The first is money. Theoretically Nomu should be able to buy a better horse at level 35. However the price, 4 gold and a couple hundred silver, seems way beyond what he will have been able to save by that point. Quest rewards and vendor items off of mobs seem to be barely keeping ahead of the repair bill after an evening in the field. I hope I don’t have to start working the auction house just to start making money.

And the other is my video card. I would like to avoid any further video card issues, so I have been turning the fans up and watching the temperature on the 8800GT.

Still, the green fields of Middle-earth seemed very welcoming.

Just because Tipa has the EverQuest Nostalgia ball rolling again with the declaration that “EverQuest is Not Dead!”

Watch this, get all misty eyed, make a new character on Luclin.

Or something like that.

Alan “Brenlo” Crosby and Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske host this episode of the SOE Podcast, with Old Man Gamer “Dellmon” reading the news.

• SOE Game News
• Follow Ups from Podcast 32
• Listener Emails: Dennis, Louis and Jason
• Dramatic Rant Reading from Auroz on the Station Forums
• Inside SOE – The Tale of SOE Fan Faire 2008 (Vegas again!)
• Interview with Laralyn McWilliams Lead Designer for Free Realms
• Interview with Hubert the Hamster
• EverQuest Game updates
• EverQuest II Game Update 44
• EQ2’s Day
• Brenlo’s 41st Birthday (April 8th)
• TV and Movies
• What are you playing?
• Out Takes

The show is available on iTunes as well as from the official SOE podcast site.

The show was recorded on April 9th and runs just under one hour and eighteen minutes.

The replacement 8800GT arrived from Velocity Micro yesterday afternoon. So after a quick swap I was able to try the new card out.

The first thing I did was run the nVidia stability test which would cause the old card to crash within 30 seconds, regardless of card temperature.

The new card ran through a 10 minute pass without issue.

Then I brought up LOTRO, got out my hunter, and played for a little over an hour.

No issues their either. Plus, my hunter hit level 24. Only one more level until he gets his first horse.

So I am all set to play Lord of the Rings Online again.

And a good thing too.

Within the instance group there has been some renewed interest in LOTRO.

Skronk (Potshot) has been back in the game a bit.

Ula has shown some interest in coming back to play now that housing is available.

And I have had the urge to go back for a while now, which is why I have been griping about my video card issue.

And that urge increased when I read that one of the new Book 13 features is fishing!

Fishing!

For no good reason I end up fishing in almost every MMO I play. (There is no fishing in EVE Online… but mining is pretty much the moral equivalent.)

I like that Turbine has declared fishing a “hobby” as opposed to a profession. Although you can cook your fish and eat them if you have the right profession, the true spirit that seems to be in play here is titles and such, always a strong point in LOTRO.

So look for me on the shores of Nen Harn, fishing pole in hand, some day soon.