June 2012 in Review

The Site

Summer is here, the silly season, when people go looking for news stories where none are to be found.  I think it officially started when that decade long Civilization II game made it to Yahoo news then somebody had to go to Sid Meier to get his take on things.  And the profound words from brother Sid?

It would be amazing if we could come back in 2025 and find out if someone’s had a 10-year game of ‘Civ V’ going.

Yes, way to push the current product line.  I’ll get right on that.

Which actually has nothing to do with the site except to prove that it is summer.

It has been quiet around here because I’m on a boat.  Summer means vacations.

The actual boat

Sing the song if you feel it to be appropriate.  I know I’ll run into somebody singing it.  I just hope it isn’t me.

I’d try to tie the ship’s name, Conquest, into the new Rift feature, but that seems like work.  So onto the usual end of the month blather.

One Year Ago

I had to get out my Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD.

I was wondering if people were picking on Lord British.  This was before he started talking about his “ultimate RPG” and made it a very entertaining sport.

We were not playing WoW, but guild accounts were being hacked.  And we were not even among those 600K WoW players that supposedly went to Rift.

LOTRO announced the Rise of Isengard expansion and offered up a exp boosting item for pre-orders.

I was wondering what launch conditions would be like for SWTOR.  Of course, I sort of figured it might launch before mid-December.

LEGO Universe announced it was going free to play.  At our house, my daughter enjoyed it for a bit, but eventually dropped it for Animal Jam.

CCP began a slow and deliberate campaign of alternating between shooting itself in the foot and sticking said foot in its mouth, all in the name of the Incarna expansion.  And my sentry drones were still boring.  And then LulzSec brought them down.

SOE announced a new version of Station Access, its “all games for one low monthly price.”  Called SOE All Access, it had a price of $19.95 a month.  This was a welcome drop from the previous $29.99 a month price.

Of course, by this point, SOE had dropped The Matrix Online and had just announced they were killing Star Wars Galaxies, so there were certainly less games to play.  Of course, that was also back when they had some games that were not free to play.

At least SOE was up and running after the PSN/SOE outage.  A pity they fumbled the marketing opportunities offered by their make good plan.

The instance group had finally gotten out of the damn starter zone in EverQuest II Extended, but the game still wasn’t sitting well.

On the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server, the Ruins of Kunark expansion was opened up and then “finished” in short order.

Five Years Ago

I got all Buddhist on the subject on the raiders vs. non-raiders rift. I think what I said could be applied to some current controversies.

I ran down my list of complimentary comment spam.

I did a poll asking which software people used for voice coms.  At the time, almost nobody who responded was using game-integrated voice software.  Most people were using Ventrilo.

We were still playing LOTRO.  I was out at the Forsaken Inn… not for the last time.  The instance group, minus Earl, finished the first epic book… again, not for the last time.  And server queues, something common at launch, were starting to disappear after just two months.  This was odd, since the last great server queue experience was with WoW, where queues went on for over a year on some servers.

Vanguard, which was merging servers… yet again, not for the last time… gave rise to a discussion about future proofing games.  I held that just making system requirements huge… something that was an issue with Vanguard… was not the same thing.

After letting Blizzard’s announcement of StarCraft II sink in, I put up a post about the original StarCraft back when it was our office game of choice.

Darren was all worked up about crafting being the suck, so I started trying to list out all the things that might be wrong with crafting. Then Tobold suggested the whole “figure out recipes by trial and error” idea and I ran screaming from the room.

And I said nice things about “Opinions of the Misinformed.”

New Linking Sites

The New Blogger Initiative helped me find a bunch of new linking blogs.  So I will mention a few of them each month.  The first round is:

• Gaming for Introverts
• One Click Pony
• Toastman’s Blog

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in June

1. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details
2. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
3. Reshiram and Zekrom Download Event for Pokemon Black and White
4. Hulkageddon V – Destruction Comes to an End… Mostly…
5. On Talent Trees and Skill Points
6. Riders of Rohan – Higher Prices, Fewer Incentives
7. The Decade Long War in Civilization II
8. And Then We Ganked a Chimera
9. Destroying the CSAA at YVSL-2
10. Fifty – Not Just Another Level in Telara
11. Hulkageddon, Technetium, and the Circle of Life
12. Elemental Absurdity

Search Terms of the Month

female gabe newell
[Please, no, in the name of all that is holy]

cartoon pictures of little kids to be shown on microscoft word
[Not bean kids I hope]

why did star wars galaxies fail
[George Lucas – The George giveth and the George taketh away]

Diablo III

I came into June still playing a lot of Diablo III.  It had replaced Rift for a few weeks running as the Saturday night game for those of the instance group not on hiatus.  However, that has begun to taper off at my end.  Part of that was because of other games competing for my limited play hours, but some of it was no doubt because, having played through the game once in Normal mode, running it again in Nightmare was hasn’t provided much new.  The game is harder.  You have to pick your battles more carefully.  I cannot just run my barbarian into any huge group of monsters I see and expect to win every time.  And you have to start looking into different stats on equipment.  I noticed that gear with resistance was dropping a lot more and took the hint.  Grabbing fire resist gear for The Butcher actually made that fight easier the second time around.

But the longevity of the content, for me at least, seems to be in doubt.  Which brings me back to what I wrote a number of times; what is Blizzard going to do with the game going forward?

EVE Online

With the end of the war in the north, things have been quiet.  There was a jump in fleet ops when IRC was the target, but that seems to have settled down.  I have been spending some time doing industrial stuff in empire space with an alt who now has access to a fully equipped industrial station.  But otherwise there has not been much to write about.  Of course, it is said the Goons invade somebody every summer once school is out.  Maybe things will get lively soon.

Rift

I have been back in Rift quite a bit.  The announcement of the Storm Legion expansion prodded me to get to level 50, and then being there got me exploring what to do in the game at level cap.  All in all, I have put in more play time in Rift than any other game over the last month.  Meanwhile, the various vacation and outdoor plans of the instance group has put us on summer hiatus.  I did get my cleric out to try and level him up… I figure mentoring is coming soon… but found out that I really need to work out how to play a cleric solo around level 36.  I just died a lot.  Ah well.

Coming Up

What is coming up in July?  The instance group on hiatus, Diablo III winding down, playing Rift end game?  Am I going to have to start posting about Lord British tweeting about his running times?

We definitely need to invade somebody in null sec.

In the mean time I am going to have Issac make me another drink and go wander over to the Lido deck.