During my hiatus, Star Trek Online launched. Would everyone who is blogging about it kindly stop? You look like you are having an awful lot of fun. I am very much enjoying my stay in EQ2 and I am already invested in Sentinels Fate. Getting Star Trek Online would mean skipping out on Mass Effect 2 and adding another MMO subscription to my pile and I just don’t think I am willing to give up my adventures in EQ2 for right now.
As I mentioned in my last post, Vanguard depresses me. Having recently started Station Access back up, I just had to download Vanguard and have another go at the world of Telon. Right now Vanguard is “celebrating” its 3rd year as an MMO. I use the term “celebrate” lightly since, unless you happened to log in for the live event, you wont find much celebrating going on at all.
My ranger in Vanguard was hanging out near Misthaven Crossing and I decided to take the riftway to New Targonor for the 3rd anniversary quest and celebration. In making this trip I saw NO ONE until I made it to New Targonor and went down to explore the town a little bit. Here you have this massive, gorgeous city with no one in it, save one Blood Mage doing some crafting. After a bit of poking around I decided to get down to business with the 3rd anniversary quest.
It took me a while to find the celebration quest giver. Mostly because there was no in game graphics or fanfare going on to indicate any sort of celebration was taking place. When I did find the little guy, he gave me a single quest, the reward for which was the 3rd anniversary present. He did mention celebrating the history of Telon, which was great! But the entirety of the quest was to just turn right around and turn the quest in. There wasn’t even a speech about Telon or its history, just a “Happy 3rd birthday vanguard. Have a box of stuff” message.
The items are great. The bag you get is especially fantastic. However, it made me really sad because it is so obvious that SoE had a skeleton crew create this event. I couldn’t help but imagine the little halfling that gave me the quest delivering his lines in a high pitched monotone dripping with jaded boredom. It felt less like a celebration and more like when you ask a friend if they are OK and they say “yeah” but you can totally tell that they are so totally not.
It is so sad to watch Vanguard die like this. I think it not only is the best looking SoE game available, but it plays very well. The interface is clean and easy to familiarize yourself with ( if you’ve played WoW, you know what to expect). There is great diversity in race choices and while all the class staples are there, you have a handful of special ones like Blood Mage, or Psionicist that are pretty neat.
However, the scope of Telon is just too big for the community left playing it. In fact, Vanguard has had a problem of bloated scope from the day it launched. It needs people. I can’t help but wonder if a free-to-play model, similar to DDO wouldn’t be in order. It is abundantly clear to me that Telon wont survive without finding people to play it. Asking people to pay $15/month for the game is a bit much at this point. However, a free-to-play model could bring people in where they could, perhaps, feel compelled to spend some money in the in-game shop.
I would love to see this happen, but I doubt it will. It feels like SoE has already put the game out to pasture. Its sad. I feel like there is so much wasted potential there.
*blows dust off blog console* Hello? Does this thing still work?
Its been a while. It is funny coming to my blog and seeing my latest post being about the release of WoW’s 3.3 patch. However, life being the way it is, stuff happens. Back in December we had a nasty pipe burst incident at my house, causing flooding in our basement that was distracting. Then there was the end of year push at work to wrap things up before the holiday breaks. Distracting. Then there was the holidays themselves. Ugh. Oh! Did I mention that in early January we had a son? Yeah, busy.
A lot has happened to me in that time. I am not playing WoW anymore. I am not saying that I have quit for good, but after 3.3 hit I just completely burned myself out on both PvP and all the heroic dungeons. The guild I was in made it abundantly clear that they would rather run their core 10 people in 10 mans, AND their alts rather than work on expanding the guild by either making a 25 man group, or at least another 10 man group. It kinda sucked because there were many extremely well geared members having to pug raids weekly who were ready to go with a new 10 man group. The leadership just isn’t there.
So I took a break and played some single player games for a while (Dragon Age). After a little while, as is always the case when my WoW mania fades, my Everquest mania crops up. So I decided to resub to EQ2 for a while. I wanted a fresh, new start so I rolled a brandy new Shadowknight on the Antonia Bayle server. That lasted a few days before inspiration hit me to play a ranger. So I rolled a ranger. Say hi Ranger:
Daeran, The Ranger
I am having a blast playing him. It helps that I moved to the Antonia Bayle server. I had heard that Antonia Bayle was THE happening server and a lot of cool people from the blogosphere play there, however, I was still surprised at just how active the server is! There are people everywhere and the chatter level is high. I tend to solo whenever I can in modern MMOs. Its not an anti-social thing, it is a time constraint thing. I might have to disappear to feed a baby or help with something at the drop of a hat. Being tide to a group makes it difficult. However, it is essential that I have chatter going on around me. Otherwise I begin to feel so lonely.
After playing the ranger for a few weeks now, I am hooked enough that I broke down and pre-ordered the collector’s edition of Sentinel’s Fate. Yeah, collectors edition of an expansion FULL of content … that I wont be touching for MONTHS since it is all high level. I can’t help it. I really wanted that Evercracked DVD, and the new mount sounds neat, and … I am such a corporate shill. 
My EQ2 subscription did end up turning into a Station Access subscription, as is always the case when I resub after a long break. I have been dabbling in EQ1 and I logged in to Vanguard to get my 3rd anniversary bag thing. Vanguard depresses me, but I will go into details on that in a separate post.
Other than that, I activated my EVE online account finally and have been going through my 30 free days. I love the game, but I find it hard to sit down and play it for hours on end. I log in, do a few things, set some skills and then I am good for a while. It is a great game though, but I just find myself easily distracted from it. Hopefully I will have some posts about my experiences in EVE soon.
P.S. – Yes, I did buy the Kelethin Outriders appearance armor set. Thanks to the connecding! promotion they have going on, I had been granted some station cash. I bought the armor and had 200 points left over even.
The long awaited patch 3.3 is here at long last! However, I only got to play a tiny tiny bit and didn’t have time to run any instances or do anything like that. I did do my cooking and fishing dailies and watched an achievement bonanza roll in. Cooking daily was first and out of the bag dropped the Delicious Chocolate Cake recipe. I quickly nabbed the ingredients and earned the achievement for making it. Next up was the fishing daily. The daily was the last one I needed for the “Do all Northrend fishing dailies”. In the fishing reward bag was a waterlogged recipe which earned me 5 more Dalaran cooking awards, which in turn earned me the “25 Dalaran cooking awards” achievement. Lastly, out to Outland and lo and behold, Old Man Barlowe’s daily is Crocolisks in the City, the last one I need for that achievement.
For that one I had to sneak into Ironforge and fish up a crocolisk, and while I was there I spent a while just mindlessly fishing, HOPING to get lucky and have old Ironjaw pop up for that achievement, but it didn’t happen. However, what DID happen was that my fishing reached 370 in that time, so that when I got back to Dalaran I trained for grandmastery of fishing, earning another achievement.
While all of this was going on, friends and strangers were busy running around the game ranting and raving about the changes, for better or worse. I started to try and do the Icecrown Citadel attunement quest, but right away it sends you into the 5 man dungeons to kill things, so that was off. Maybe tonight.
My guild was a-bustle with activity though. Players who were many months removed from the WoW login screen suddenly found the desire and fortitude to log in … and get right in to a raid spot. I can’t bitch too much about it because I was unable to log in until late at night and even then I had other things going on while playing, preventing me from doing anything group-wise, but I do find it funny how a new patch always brings back the lapsed.
The new random dungeon tool looks and sounds amazing. I can’t wait to break it in this weekend. With any luck I cna begin farming the last set of triumph emblems I need to fill out my tier 9 while working on a frost emblem collection for tier 10 gear.
Last night, after getting the little one to bed, I decided to put a little more time in with my current trek through Halflife 2. I was right at the beginning of the Highway 17 level. That level is great for so many reasons, but the end part of it, where you have to cross the train bridge by climbing around underneath it and through the utility walkways, THAT is an amazing piece of level design.
First off, the level is gorgeous and you really get a sense of how high up you are. Secondly, there is precious little sure footing in the level. A wrong move could not only mean plunging to your death, but you are having to cross while being shot at sometimes. Then the section at the end where the aircraft is shooting at you and you have to run across the underside of the bridge to the rockets to take it out, it is such a tense moment and it feels fucking great when you down that fucker.
One of the best gaming moments of this decade I think.
First off, I own both of them already. For the sake of full disclosure: I bought the pandaren pet and was gifted the baby KT pet from a relative. Blizzard finally adding micro-transactions to WoW seems to have caused quite a stir among the MMO blogging community. I guess I just don’t understand what the big deal is. Yes, the price is pretty steep for what amounts to a few minutes of “oh cool!” in the game, but I am a big boy who works a big boy job and brings home a big boy paycheck … that I am free to waste on little boy toys.
I am a Warcraft nut. I love all the games, their art, their music, their lore, etc. I am the Warcraft equivalent of that crazy guy you know who has an entire wing of his house devoted to his Star Wars collection. These days, when I go into a Toys R Us and I see that Star Wars action figures cost $8.99 a pop, I think that they are out of their minds for charging so much. To the Star Wars nut, I imagine that I would sound a lot like other people sound to me right now. So I guess my point is that I am probably not a good candidate for judging if $10 is too much to pay for a virtual item in an online video game. Hell, I am their target audience!
By all accounts ( and thats not saying much ) the pets seem to be selling pretty well on my server. Good. I hope Blizzard makes a killing. I love their products and I want them to make more. Would I prefer that they reconsider the price point? Of course! The thing is that these pets are the brand new hotness. If they expand their store to include a dozen NEW pets, all $10, well thats way too much money for me. I will then have to start being choosy.
I find it sort of funny that people say “Hell no I wont buy this in game PET for $10! We can talk when it is a mount.” Both the pet and mount would pretty much be cosmetic vanity items, but it is cool when it is something your character can ride? If said mount was a 310% speed mount, well then that crosses a line because that directly affects your performance in the game. However, if it is normal speed then it is just another cosmetic change for $10.
Some people cynically say that this is just the beginning and that these pets and character changes they are selling will be the gateway to them selling epics right from their store! I firmly believe that one should never say never, but I would call this one as very far out there. Blizzard really takes game balance seriously and introducing items like that would make their balancing job a million times harder. Cosmetic changes though, fire away, I say. If they charge $100 for a new in game hat and enough people are prepared to buy it, well, I may not have the hat, but it is still a good move on Blizzard’s part. They obviously knew the market better than I. It is all about supply and demand.
I have always said, both to myself and others, that the thing that makes MMO games special is the possibilities for social interaction that they present. These days, before you hit the level cap, being social is largely optional. You can group up to tackle tough quests and to run dungeons, but if you want to just log in and focus on grinding out that next chunk of a level, you can, and many people choose to play this way. However, once you hit the cap, the things you can do to progress require a group of people to accomplish them. This is where is pays off to have a guild or group of close friends who can help you out with this content. More than anything else, the fact that I am experiencing the end-game content of WoW is due to the fact that I have friends in the game who play with me.
However, recently, the guild I was in faced a meltdown of sorts. A handful of our key players defected to a different guild, leaving us unable to run the 10 and 25 man content we had been running. The guild leaders spent a week trying to recruit new members in to fill out the ranks until one day I logged in to an empty guild and a MOTD message saying that we were merging with the guild that all the key members had originally left for. Only … this wasn’t exactly true. The guild leader and a couple of our remaining top players had merged. Everyone else was on their own to beg for a position. For a couple of days I was upset and angry about this. However, after a couple days I realized that the guild I was in was little more than a group of buddies. There was no structure or focus. Scheduled events would be changed/canceled at the last minute, despite constant reminders, requests for help from guildies would go ignored for weeks, and so on. This was a group of friends messing around and not a guild, focusing on balance and progress. It is no wonder that we had top players leave. They wanted to progress and were being held back.
I spent a couple days bugging the leader of the new guild for a place. All I wanted was to play in the same place as my buddies were. I was told to be patient. I was told that they wanted “only the best players” in their guild and that they were reviewing the requests on a one by one basis. Eventually, I stopped caring about it. The kicker is that my former guild mates were responsible for getting me hooked back into WoW, which caused me to lose interest in Aion. I learned the other day that the guild leaders that had decided to abandon our guild to “merge” with the new one were now no longer playing WoW, but had moved on to Aion. So our entire guild was destroyed, and a week later, the people responsible for it are not even playing WoW anymore.
If I sound mad, believe me, I am not. At one point I was mad, but now I am looking at this as a good thing. I am now free to join a different guild, one that I can do some research on first. It sucks that I wont be playing with some of my friends, but maybe the guild I do join with be more focused and responsible towards the needs of its members. This whole experience really drove home the responsibility that guild leaders have towards their fellow guildies. Yes, in the end it is just a game, but the potential for a lot of hurt feelings is very high if you are not careful and dilligent.
I looked at the date on my last post and I realized that I was rapidly approaching a month without a post and I wondered why that was. In the past few weeks I HAVE been sick, but nothing too major. I was also busy at work for a little bit, but nothing too bad. What happened? Well, the honest answert is “the end-game happened.” I have been level 80 in WoW since March. Unlike the rest of the world, I have only one level 80 in WoW. I am, by far, the slowest person I know when it comes to playing MMOs. I have always been behind the curve of my friends. In the days of vanilla WoW, I was lapped to level 60 multimple times by friends. I didn’t hit level 60 until months after TBC was out. When Wrath came out, I was still level 64. Mind you, this was not with constant play time. I had a sea of abandoned alts, many of which that are near level 30 or 40, which seemed to be my burn out point. Also, the time it took me to get to level 80 was fraught with many months of being unsubscribed to WoW. Something clicked earlier this year and I finally forced myself to grind out ot the end for once.
People always say that, with MMOs, the game truly begins at the level cap. I always thought this was absurd given all the pre-cap content I was enjoying. Now that I have been at the level cap, I am finding mysefl agreeing with them. I always imagined that I would be less busy once I hit 80. After all, there would be no grind to do. Log in, bang out a few dailies, call it a night whenever I am ready, on my own terms. It turns out that once you hit the cap, the world opens up to you. You are powerful enough to do so many of the little meta game things seeking achievements, doing old quests for the fun of it, or running around testing the waters of PvP for a night. Before hitting the cap, there was one solitary goal: level up. Log in, do your quest lines and reach out for one more bar of exp before calling it. At the cap I find myself logging in, doing a slew of daily quests, running out to work on the loremaster achievement, help a friend with a low level dungeon, hit up that battleground, etc. Before you know it, I find myself awake at 3:00 AM on a weeknight for the third night in a row.
And that, my friends, is the real truth behind why I have not updated my blog in a month. I have been playing too much. Whats funny is that, now that I have experienced the end game, I have nearly zero desire to level an alt. If I am going to make progress, I want it to be on my one character. Granted, I have designs in mind for a goblin character when Cataclysm hits, but even then I bet that I focus on getting my Paladin to the new cap first. Similarly, getting heavily into the end-game content of WoW has also killed my MMO ADD. I haven’t played Aion in weeks and I already canceled my subscription to the game, despite liking it quite a lot, I still havent redeemed by EVE online account code to start my free 30 days of it, and despite being handed a free weekend of LOTRO, I didn’t even log in once. Maybe getting to the end-game is the cure for those of us that get seasonal bouts of MMO wanderlust?
The odd thing is that I find myself seeing other games in a new light. I feel a desire to play other games like EQ2 right now, but I want to because I want to see if the EQ2 end game is anything like the WoW end game. Before, my love for EQ2 was fuled by a love of the lore and setting and the enjoyment I derive from building up a character in the various settings the game provides. Now I am wondering “Hmm… Does EQ2 have daily quests at the end game like WoW does? What about something similar to the emblem system of gearing up?”
I know I can’t maintain the pace I have been setting the past few weeks, and sooner or later I know I will give in and start playing another game, splitting my focus again, but for now I am completely sold on the WoW end-game. The Halloween seasonal events started yesterday and I found myself giddy with delight at the thought of all the new stuff to do. I somehow doubt that that is how a 32 year old man should react to such a thing.
The Caverns of Time
I had intended to spend very little time playing games last night. I needed to log into WoW and do my dailies and then I wanted to log out and do something low key like read a book or just sleep. However, I made the mistake of hooking up with some guild mates to blaze through the Argent Tournament dailies and save myself some time. What took place after clicking the “Accept Group Invite” button was a whirlwind of blood, sweat and tears, followed by a sense of dread at how I will manage to function at work the next day, given the ungodly hour at which I was going to sleep.
First we quickly knocked out all the Argent Tournament dailies. While clying over to Chillmaw’s area my guild mates noticed that I was still flying on the same swift flying mount I had since TBC. “Don’t you have a dragon yet?”, asked one of my guildies. I explained that I was working on the Wyrmrest rep to be able to buy a red one. They then informed me that you could get one by running The Culling of Stratholme instance and reaching the end within 30 minutes, and offered to run me through it. “Fantastic!”, I thought. I am not one to look a free drake in the mouth. So we down Chillmaw, steam rolling some alliance players in the process who had been camping the area, killing off newbies. Then we hearth to Dalaran, hop in the portal, and less than 30 minutes later:
During this run I was on Ventrilo, chatting with my guild mates and getting to know them better. They took a look at my woefully underpowered gear and started making suggestions on what I could do to improve. This led to the suggestion of running a trail of heroics and the ToC 5 man on repeat in order to gear me up a bit. Here is what ended up happening:
and
and lastly …
I got a TON of great loot. I got a number of upgrades for my Protection spec and a slew of items to start my retribution or Holy off-spec, all iLevel 200 or higher. On top of all of this, I managed to max out my rep with Wyrmrest and started working on Kirin Tor next. Not only was it a ton of fun, but for the first time in a long time I felt the bonds of the guild growing. I have personal friends in the guild, but the people I ran with last night were strangers to me. They just wanted to gear me up and help raise the ability of the guild as a whole. The power level of my paladin skyrocketed last night, not only in terms of gear power, but also in terms of building confidence in my ability to tank high level encounters and in terms of camaraderie with my guild mates.
Oh! I am also 10 tokens away from finishing up Brewfest. Should have it all wrapped up today after I get home. After that … my first big time guild run. We are hitting up 10 man ToC, followed by the 10 man Onyxia fight. Should be fun.
It was pretty uneventful, but not for lack of trying. On Friday night I logged on to find none of my guild buddies on. I went ahead and proceeded to solo as many quests as I could and work on leveling my gathering skills. Eventually a guild mate did show up and we knocked out a couple of group quests before I called it a night at just shy of level 16. One thing I noticed on my server (Yustiel for the interested ) was that general chat was chock FULL of people bashing World of Warcraft while extolling the virtues of Aion. I wanted to write about it, but Gordon of We Fly Spitfires beat me to the punch.
Now, different people like different things. Thats great. Thats what makes the world go ’round. However, I couldn’t help but laugh at one character in particular who was laying into WoW left, right, and center, explaining to all of us how Aion does things SO much better. I just don’t see how people could miss the fact that Aion is a blatant WoW clone. What does Aion do that WoW doesn’t? The flying? I can fly in WoW. The combat while flying? Maybe that is cool, but it is still just combat. Does the PvP-centric nature of Aion, give it a leg up on WoW? Maybe, but who has had enough time to really tell how it will ultimately pan out for Aion? Lets face it: Aion is solid and fun, but innovative it ain’t.
The best part about this guy’s ranting and raving was that after a while he says “I lost 4 years of my life to WoW, I am not going back.” 4 years!! Assuming that he is telling the truth, that’s a lot of time and money thrown at a game that he hates so much. Plus, I wonder what he sees in Aion that assures him that he isn’t about to waste another X years of his life in this game.
Last thing I wanna say about Aion: Man it is pretty, but does anyone else feel like the world is incredibly small? I look at the world map and see how large the “zone” I am in is and then I see how fast I can run across it and it worries me. Maybe the Elyos areas just suck, but they feel tiny to me. Then again, maybe a small world is good for PvP. I get the feeling that Aion is going to lose me because of lack of PvE stuff to do. As exciting as PvP can be, I just don’t know if it is enough to hold me.
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