31 | October | 2014 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Site

Not much to complain about this month. I changed the site theme a few times one weekend, but still cannot find one that is better than the current theme on all fronts.

I converted a couple of much-used tags into categories on the blog, so if you want to pull up, as an example, all of my posts that were formerly tagged “Quote of the Day” or “YouTube” or “Null Sec,” they are now available under the Categories drop-down on the side bar. That makes them just slightly more convenient to get to.

I do want to thank fellow New Eden resident JD who sent me two PLEX in game because he likes the blog. While I have a media account (got that a few months back) for that other blog I run, I certainly could use the ISK that selling a couple of PLEX provides. I have been living off of ship reimbursement money for a long time as I haven’t really been interested in any of the ISK making aspects of the game for quite a while now. I do not sow. My indolent life as a fleet op pilot has been extended, I do not need to go get a “real” job in New Eden quite yet.

So I immediately ran out and bought a new ship for the current deployment.

Basilisk at a wormhole

The Basilisk makes me a Reaver space priest of sorts… would that be a shaman?

One Year Ago

EverQuest: Mactinosh Edition was slated to shut down after a ten year run. Meanwhile, EverQuest Live launched Call of the Forsaken, the game’s 20th expansion. The Fippy Darkpaw server made it to The Buried Sea expansion. Meanwhile, in EverQuest II, insta-level characters were set to become a thing.

With the release of Pokemon X & Y, which required upgrading to Nintendo 3DS hardware, I was saying farewell to the series. Little did I know I would be pulled back in a few months down the road.

As part of some NBI event I attempted to recount all the guilds I had joined over the years.

Somebody was attempting to remake the old Kesmai game Stellar Emperor.

Path of Exile finished up beta and was officially live.

After a post-F2P boom, Trion went back to paring down the number of servers for Rift while its servers in China were shut down completely.

The instance group was still running Foundry modules in Neverwinter.

I was trying out War Thunder. After failing to get through the tutorial for World of Warplanes, I opted for its competitor, which seems better suited for the inept like me. I was able to get out there and be a target for other players while bombing at least.

In New Eden our gate camp deployment to the Curse region was wrapping up almost as soon as it started. It felt like we had just snuck in. It was time to go home to the quiet of Deklein for a while and wait for the Rubicon expansion. While there I finally bought my first capital ship, an Archon carrier. It went for its first jump and then stayed docked for almost a year. Of course, I found out I had a lot of stuff sitting in hangars around New Eden. Nine million things, to put a number to it. And CCP was setting up classes for new players… which was great if you lived in the European time zone.

I was pondering the “journey vs. destination” question with MMOs while feeling a bit wistful that World of Warcraft holidays were not offering much new.

And we finally ditched AT&T DSL for Comcast cable-modem internet, resolving the bandwidth sharing problems at our house.

Five Years Ago

Last year at about this time Torchlight came out, giving a lot of people a Diablo-like injection of fun. It didn’t have a lot of replay value for me. Once I burned through the game once I was pretty much done, which made it unlike Diablo II, which I returned to a number of times. But it was just $20 and gave us a taste of what Runic might be able to deliver going forward.

I was on a MUD history kick, with tales of exciting ways to die in Kobold Village, the Kobold Temple of the Unholy, getting lost in the Faerie Forest, and all the rooms in TorilMUD.

It was also the three year anniversary of the regular Saturday night instance group, and I presented a summary of what we had done.

A couple of us scouted the then newly Free to Play Dungeons & Dragons Online as a possible next game for the instance group, but it didn’t stick.

I was able to buy the Adventurer’s Pack for Lord of the Rings Online and get the Siege of Mirkwood expansion for free. Not as good of a deal as monthly subscribers got I understand, but a decent deal. Of course, LOTRO has changed a lot since then.

In World of Warcraft October that year saw me finish off both the Brewfest and Hallow’s End meta achievements. I was still left with one achievement for each holiday though. Fun was had with pumpkins and the Headless Horseman.

The instance group returned to Utgarde Keep to take on Utgarde Pinnacle, at that time the last five-person dungeon in Northrend. We were victorious and gained the Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement. But otherwise we were deciding on where the group should go next.

And Blizzard was busy merging everybody’s WoW account into a Battle.new account because… well, it wasn’t because of better security.

New Linking Sites

The following blogs have linked this site in their blogrolls, for which they have my thanks.

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in October

Search Terms of the Month

anyone like “fansy the famous bard” shown up lately?
[Not around these parts, no]

what to do with 30 cents on steam
[Wait for Valve to make a pricing mistake]

where is the first quest in stonetalon mountains
[I know where you’re stuck!]

“diablo iii” “auction house” admit
[Don’t worry, they admitted it was bad]

EVE Online

Null Sec started the month in a panic about the changes coming with the Phoebe expansion. Free wheeling jaunts across the width and breadth of New Eden would soon be relegated to memory as crippling jump fatigue became a thing. And then everybody seemed to decide to use the last couple of weeks to get in some last hits while prepping for the new reality. The musical chair metaphor has been used to describe the reshuffle of alliance locations in null, and the music is about to stop. It will be interesting to see the before/after map comparison. And will there be any open space on the map for new players in the sovereignty game?

Total War: Rome II

This continues to be our Friday night game and we still have aspects of the multiplayer skirmish game to explore… not to mention just getting better at handling troops in the field. One of the problems with being a long time MMO player is that I find skirmishes mildly unsatisfying over time. Get your pieces out, fight the 20 minute fight, look at the result, reset. As painful as it was at times, I think I preferred the long term campaign that Civilization V gave us. I still do not love the AI in Civ V though, so I am not aching to go back to that. As always, while playing the current game I am looking around for what might be the next.

World of Warcraft

If I don’t get the Headless Horseman’s mount today, the last day of Hallow’s End, I may very well scream. I mean, up there in the “five years ago” section I mention us hunting him, and we didn’t get the mount back then. Ah well, the random number generator will make you its bitch.

Otherwise it has been a month of tidying up, getting used to the changes with 6.0, enjoying having a bunch of free bag space, and otherwise killing time before Warlords of Draenor drops. It is still theoretically possible that I could have a fifth level 90 character by then. Or I might just max out archaeology at last. We shall see.

Coming Up

Holy crap, November will be hella crazy when it comes to the games to which I pay attention.

There will be expansions to examine in EverQuest and EverQuest II. Expansions to play in World of Warcraft and EVE Online. Pokemon Alpha Ruby & Omega Sapphire will show up on the back end of the month. There will be BlizzCon and whatever Bilzzard is planning to spring on us, and then the World of Warcraft 10 year anniversary… and before that there will be the EverQuest II 10 year anniversary.

These are among the reasons why I haven’t bothered to grab Civilization: Beyond Earth or been very interested in Steam’s Halloween Sale. My dance card is full. My calendar of posts is filling up. I am glad I decided to take the week of Thankgiving off from work.

And I am sure I have missed something on that list. What else is coming up in November?