March 2013 in Review

The Site

WordPress.com decided to give us some color in their “visits by country map.”

Actually, we had color, but the choices were limited.  Basically, it was red-orange, orange, or beige.

Visitors from around the world

The map has changed a bit and we have a bit broader spectrum of colors.

A more colorful world

But Greenland is still appears larger than South America or Africa.  Damn Mercator projection!  What does that say about WordPress.com?

It has also been a little over a year since WordPress.com started tracking this sort of thing, so I thought I would compare the top 10 countries they list with what my Flag Counter side-bar widget shows.

WordPress / Flag Counter

1. United States / United States
2. United Kingdom / United Kingdom
3. Canada / Canada
4. Germany / Australia
5. Australia / Germany
6. Sweden / Netherlands
7. Netherlands / Sweden
8. France / France
9. Brazil / Poland
10. Poland / Brazil

It is the same ten countries with some difference in the ranking after the third position.  So I guess that means that one is about as accurate as the other.  Or something.

One Year Ago

The family and I went and visited the USS Iowa while it was docked up in Richmond.

April Fools spirit hit Wargaming.net a little early.

It only seemed like Zynga was desperate a year back.

I took a quick peek back into Need for Speed: World.

Raptr said I could be the top WoW player they tracked… if I just played another 18,999 hours.

I also rolled a new character on a new server in LOTRO because… why not?

In EVE voting commenced and The Mittani won the chairmanship of the CSM 7 by a large margin.  And then he named names during his alliance talk and was removed from CSM 7 and banned from EVE for 30 days.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, we were being taunted by a LEGO Rifter that we were doomed never to see and Derek Smart was telling everybody DUST 514 was doomed to fail.

Meanwhile, the war in the north was heating up again even without The Mittani.  The CFC was picking up systems in Tenal as bases of operation for the upcoming offensive.  Then there was the bloodbath at C-J6MT.

In Rift, we had a couple of runs at the Foul Cascade.

EverQuest turned 13 and went free to play.  That saw more than a few of us run in to give it a try.  Fall nostalgia in the Spring.  We ran the tutorial, tried out mercenaries, and created a guild.  I am not sure what became of our little group.  Nostalgia is like that.

It was also announced that Vanguard would be going free to play as well.  While on the Fippy Darkpaw server, LDON and LoY went live… I think.

Then I was trying to find another blog name that used the TAGN acronym as a setup for an April Fools joke.  That totally fell flat.

And, finally, I attempted to bring together as many memories from the early days of Air Warrior as I could.

Five Years Ago

I was again ruminating about the whole “Why So Much Fantasy in MMORPGs?” thing, this time on the shores of chaos.

We started to see the end of the “Brent hand picks the news” era over at VirginWorlds.  The reign of myself and CrazyKinux was near to an end.

I got a Nintendo DS Lite and my own copy of Pokemon Diamond for my birthday!

EverQuest celebrated its 9th anniversary.  A very nice time line print of the game was posted over at the EQ Dev blog to celebrate, along with a video.

In Lord of the Rings Online some sites were speculating about future expansions.  And then Turbine announced The Mines of Moria!  Meanwhile, I was trying to give out some founder’s referrals.  I think I still have one or two of those left.

In World of Warcraft, patch 2.4 was the latest end-of-the-world panic.  I was trying out Alterac Valley trying to get a mount, not reading that I needed to get exalted reputation to buy it.  Meanwhile the instance group made it to Shattrath and then hit the Blood Furnace while my wife and her friends were drinking apple-tinis.

Official forums were the talk again for a bit, as Marc Jacobs said he wasn’t going to have them for Warhammer Online.  No, the Warhammer Herald (to be created in the image of the Camelot Herald) was going to be enough.  Well, we know how that worked out.

And, finally, five years ago Gary Gygax left us.  We still miss him because we still feel his influence every day.

New Linking Sites

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

• Insanity by Increments
• Leo’s Life
• Spicy Funyun

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in March

1. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
2. The Seductive Comfort of Azeroth
3. Google Reader Alternatives? Again?
4. Age of Kings Gets an Unofficial Expansion
5. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
6. Five Games I Want to See Revamped
7. Completionism in the Wayfarer Foothills
8. Wrapping Up My Seven Days of Azeroth
9. Backwards in Time to Forgotten Realms
10. Shroud of the Avatar – Lord British Discovers Kickstarter
11. Jagdpanther
12. First Time Out with Tech Fleet

Search Terms of the Month

heir to the empire audiobook
[I have that!]

bond almost dies
[Every Bond movie ever]

spaceship blows up
[Every EVE Online day ever}

churchill i with 100% crue
[Motley]

whats a goon in ancient rome
[Mittanicus Maximus?]

how mcuh isk poer hour can a hulk make?
[How is Veldsparr formed?]

EVE Online

I got in on an op early on in the month, when I was able to use my freshly finished logistic skills to fly my Oneiros at last.  And then there were the homeland defense fleets at the end of March.  However, the rest of the month was mostly passing on fleets where I did not have an appropriate ship handy, skill training, and figuring out what I want do to next in EVE.

Guild Wars 2

Well, that lasted a couple of weeks.  Didn’t hate it, just stopped feeling the need to play it once I hit the next set of zones.  Pretty much the same response I had with the original.  There is probably a lesson in that.  Anyway, I should probably explore the why of that at some point.

Neverwinter Nights 2

We played a bit of this in the Saturday night group.  It went from awkward to fun, and then we stopped playing.  We now have this odd fragmentation on Saturday night where what we play depends on who shows up.  I should make a Venn diagram.

Rift

Hey, we actually played some Rift.  Maybe we will carry on here and actually start in on the Storm Legion instances.  And speaking of Storm Legion, I am trying to figure out why I have no real enthusiasm for the expansion.  It was supposed to be bigger, better, and bolder or some such, right?

World of Tanks

Tanks keep rolling.  This is one of the subset of the instance group games.  I am chugging along towards my tier IX goal.  Russian heavies and German tank destroyers are the thing.

World of Warcraft

I played it for seven days and had about six and a half days of fun.  The last half day was less fun, and managed to convince me that I really did not have to subscribe to the game again.

Coming Up

Well, it is April Fools tomorrow, so tradition dictates that I post something about Blizzard’s jokes.  I have nothing planned for the site.  No, really.  The best I could come up with was to change the theme to something silly, and I think I’ve already done that, or change the site name to “Triaminoguanidine Nitrate” or some such.

I expect there will be a couple of posts about games I am not playing.  And the whole Kickstarter thing going on now with Shroud of the Avatar and Camelot Unchained.  I hope Mark Jacobs holds off until April 2 to launch his.  Too much risk of confusion on April 1.

And we are coming up to the 1 year anniversary of the Burn Jita event last year in EVE Online.  I wonder if there will be any follow up on that?

Returning to Fort Locke

Part two of our adventure around Fort Locke in Neverwinter Nights 2.  Part one is here.

I left us standing in a dark, zombie infested graveyard, having said farewell to sunshine.

In the graveyard

Here we were tasked by Lt. Anton to find the missing commander of Fort Locke and any missing patrols he might have sent this way.  Our party was Fengorin, a dwarf warrior, Peri, a druid of some sort, and Sigwerd, a half-elf rogue.  In addition, we had as NPC companions Khelgar, the stereotypical fighting and drinking dwarf, Neeshka, the tiefling rogue of some repute, and Bard, Peri’s pet wolf.

And it was here that we would truly test our mettle as a group.

The first order of business was to clear the surface of the graveyard.  The zombies and skeletons, which came in small groups, were not terribly difficult.  However, contact with the zombies left you diseased.  You ended up with the “zombie stink” on you, which among other things was a debuff.

The “zombie stink” could be healed with a healing kit, of which we had limited numbers, or if a saving throw against constitution was met when resting.  Khelgar, a dwarf of astounding constitution, shed the stink on the first try most of the time, as did Bard the wolf.  Neeshka however was giving us a glimpse of her usefulness by steadfastly failing to get shake the stink no matter what.  Experiments with healing spells failed to find a solution, so in the end she just stayed stunk.

More after the cut.  Many pictures, lots of words, and so on.

Learning Lessons at Fort Locke

Another Saturday night found us with a small group, just the three of us from last week.  That meant a chance to continue our look at Neverwinter Nights 2 and the original campaign that came with the game.

In anticipation of this, I actually ran Sigwerd, my rogue, through the tutorial again to pick up the bits I forgot, like how to use a ranged weapon.  It seems as simple as equipping both the weapon AND the ammo, something I somehow missed on the first pass through.

I also went and remapped some of the default keys.  I moved PAUSE from the space bar, since my trained reaction in any such game is to hit the space bar to jump, leading to an annoying number of awkwardly timed pauses for everybody in game.  I also changed the movement keys so that they were the same for all of the character modes.  I am not sure who thought it would be a good plan for them to be different by default.

As the grouping hour approached, the next big test came.  Could we resume a saved game as a group.  One would assume “yes” I suppose.  But NWN2 is really a single player game that your friends can join you in, so Potshot, who was hosting the game, was the one to save it.  I wasn’t not completely confident that we could simply carry on from where we left off.

My concerns were unfounded though.  Potshot was able to restore the game for himself, and then the two of us were able to join as well (port forwarding continued to work for me).  I think the implication here is that other people could join or we could sit out a session.  He isn’t dependent on us showing up, though we are dependent on him running the game.  We were together again where we left off, at the Inn.

Companions reunited

Once there, it was time for some warm ups and then back to the story in progress.  All of which appears after the cut because I go on for pages as usual, plus there are some actual spoilers for the campaign.  If you choose to continue from this point, you have been warned.

Backwards in Time to Forgotten Realms

As I mentioned at the end of the last month in review, the more pen and paper focused wing of our Saturday night group, Potshot, was looking into more small party adventure-centric options for our group.

And so he headed to GOG.com to grab Neverwinter Nights 2, a game first published in 2006.  It is the Obsidian Entertainment second version of the BioWare original.  For $20, you get the whole package including expansions all wrapped up, updated, and ready to download and install.

Neverwinter Nights 2

The download is 6GB, so that part was an over-nighter for me, but otherwise things went smoothly.

NWN2 is based on Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, which pretty much means nothing to me at this point.  I still think of 2nd Edition, with its THAC0 and such, as “the new stuff,” so anything after that is strange.  But it is also based in Forgotten Realms, which is the D&D setting nearest and dearest to my heart.

Potshot has grand designs for NWN2.  It comes with a tool set that lets you be the dungeon master and design adventures through which your friends can play.

But before you can run, you have to walk.   And before you can walk, crawling is often advisable.

And so this past weekend was spent trying to get the basics going.

I had downloaded the game and run through the tutorial, most of the information from which I promptly forgot once I left the game, when Potshot and I started to work on playing together in the same game.

Which is where there were some issues.  A meandering narrative after the cut.