Life returns to Everfrost
Climate change is something we can bounce back from. Two years ago, Everfrost was hit by global warming in LU27. The tradeskill desks went under and no one in the right mind had any reason to linger around cracking arctic shelves.
However, just as the planet we live on went through multiple heating and cooling stages, and is still, discounting geographical changes, largely intact, so is Everfrost in the world of Norrath. With the recent GU48, Everfrost seem to have bounced back and people once again, flocked back, bringing with them a few new series of quests to the zone.
Proudly discovered by both Calreth senior and junior
One of them happen to be a widow who lost her husband after being attacked by sharks. Poor, poor her. Feeling sorry for her because, having nearly lost my life on multiple occasions before to Dreadwake and his lesser entourage, I understood how she felt and decided to lend her a helping hand. I set about salvaging what remains of her family possessions off the ocean floor, aiding in the eradication of sharks, and retrieving her husband’s wedding ring. I had discovery on the wedding ring and the final mage earing reward on Calreth, both on the Najena and Antonia Bayle server. Yay me!
Also, I suppose due to the melting of glaciers and what not, an opening has been torn in the mountain ranges such that the entire zone is now connected, instead of the NE path from the docks leading to a dead end. Some rather charming ladies seem to have taken up home there.
I haven’t done a lot given how much new content GU48 introduces to the game, but what I can confidently say at this point is that global warming does not signal an end to all life.
It’s my first day
It’s not just an excuse for my bad performance, I swear!
I finally coughed up the US$50 to move a Lv 70 Wizard I had on the Oasis server over to Najena and joined up with Nostalgia so I get to play with all the cool people in it from time to time. I’ve been meaning to do it for sometime now but I always ended up dragging my feet. But with the US dollar going up (1.4 Singapore dollars to 1 US dollar now), it was now or never.
Having read about Tipa’s problem with having her characters transferred due to sales crates, I wisely logged in and remove them before applying for the transfer. I had not logged onto that particular character for what must be at least a thousand days, and I almost felt guilty when I logged into an active guild with people going “that’s one name I haven’t seen in a long time”. That didn’t stop me though.
I didn’t want to play another Wizard since I already have one that’s Lv 80 on the Antonia Bayle server, so I went ahead and betrayed it to a Warlock. I had consulted with Shadowgeist earlier in the day and we both thought it was better that I betrayed first so that I got the chance to learn how to properly play one during the next 10 levels, which meant that I was forced to buy new spells, instead of getting a few levels in first then betraying which would give me the benefit of using my Ad3/Master spells that I had on Wizard. The nice thing about gaining faction for Neriak (betraying from Qeynos to Neriak) prior to being accepted as a citizen is that it comes with a fat load of AA from the series of assassination quest which gives +3000 faction each, including AA from both the easy peasy names and the quest itself. Being evil has it benefits. I made about 3 points worth of AA in total.
In addition, 6 repeatables that give +5000 faction each were also necessary after completing the above mentioned quest line to bring me up to the amiable faction required. Sadly, these quests were neither fun nor rewarding. I picked one which told me to grab 10 stones and to kill a certain number of vampires along the way. The specific mobs needed for the quest, the priests, had a poor spawn and it ended up taking a lot longer than I expected it to. The next one I picked (which I stuck to for the next subsequent attempts) had me kill spiders and collect eggs. The update from the spiders were rare, and therefore it didn’t go that much faster compared to the previous quest.
I emptied my bagful of eggs into the hands of the quest giver and strolled happily into Neriak after all that is done, ready to finally settle down, but not before I got involved in some bodyguard duty, child kidnapping and trafficking, vagabond and courtesan killing and a few pieces of paperwork.
The next hour was spent eating cold refrigerated chicken pieces leftover from my earlier attempt at cooking lunch and mulling over which spells I need to be getting.
I was later invited into an Obelisk of Blight group which I was hesitant to accept because I doubt my abilities. Here I am, a Lv 70 Warlock who has no experience in the class whatsoever. I eventually accepted it anyway and nearly got the group killed when I casted Rift and didn’t realize how much further its range was compared to other AoE spells I had and ended up pulling a ton of mobs. My mix mash of Adept 1 or Apprentice IV (for those which I can’t find Ad1s for, or were just heavily overpriced. 96g for a Ad1 root? I’m not paying that!) didn’t do me very good either and placed me near the bottom of the parse almost all the time. The group must have thought I was a pretty bad player.
Overall, it was a rather productive day in terms of gaming. Also, watching Stargrace’s reaction to me being in her guild sent me grinning and giggling. It was something that I’ve been waiting for all day.
Torrent Knights is level 30
Torrent Knights is now level 30
It took awhile, but we finally made it! Level 30 means more bank slots, and also access to more mounts. I’ve been considering getting Xedil a mount for sometime now, but I keep putting it off thinking that I’ll be able to work my way up the tradeskill levels and get myself an Earring of the Solstice from the tradeskill epic and have a run speed buff from that. It’s still a while away so I might go visit the stables after all.
Congratulations to you Stargrace, even though you no longer play on this server, it’s still your guild!
Custom interfaces
It is both a good and bad thing that applications are skinnable or extensible. Being skinnable or extensible means that an application is well written enough that there’s a certain level of abstraction between the interface and the application itself. It also means that users can customize it to their preference, and implement their own features on top of what’s available.
At the same time, when the first thing most players do after installing World of Warcraft is to look for a custom interface at one of the humongous sites dedicated to providing them, and people constantly talk about a list of “must have” addons, it becomes obvious that the default UI is sorely missing much needed features that should have been available right out of the box.
This is not a problem unique to WoW, it applies to any application that presents themselves as being extensible. The same charge has been levied at Firefox again and again - why don’t the developers look at the top five extensions people are using and incorporate them directly into their product?
Blizzard, I am truly disappointed in you
Blizzard has one of the worse billing systems ever, and the conversion from a trial to a paid account is an unpleasant experience too.
First of all, I tried to update my trial account to that of a fully functional, paid account. After being firstly greeted with an invalid credit card number while trying to do so, I proceeded to try a second time, thinking that I must have mistyped some bit of information even though I’ve committed my credit card details to mind a long time ago. Nope, it did not work, but I took out my card, verified, and preceeded to try another three more times. At this point I suspected the error might be on their end and did a Google search for it.
The result is this thread here on the official WoW forums. 449 posts and 23 pages since 2007 of the same problem. Reading the users comment, I checked with my bank and there were four billing requests totaling up to a over SGD$100.
The suggested fix by one of the posters was to enter the last four digits of the card number in the zip code field, and that worked for me. Though having over $100 on hold, and me praying hard that they get released after a few days and don’t actually get charged makes me a really unhappy customer. It makes me want to dish out all the slurr for WoW I’ve always held inside me.
I’m frankly shocked at how a company that boasts a 6 million subscription figure can have such a huge problem with its billing system.
Not done yet, this is the first MMO that I’ve came across that actually takes time (up to 72 hours) for a trial account to be upgraded to a full account. It’s 3 hours and counting and having paid for my game, I’m still waiting to be given permissions to talk in the channels, to IM people, to use the broker, and so on. It should require nothing more than for a few shell scripts to run and execute and few SQL update queries the moment I hit the upgrade button. I sure hope it doesn’t have to be done manually.
To summarize, my WoW experience was great until I actually tried to get a hold of the game, which was where it took a sharp ninety degrees downturn.
Nektropos Castle: The Return
I haven’t been able to get a group to do the new Runnyeye instance yet, but I did manage to get a few friends together and do another zone that I’ve always wanted to run through, Nektropos Castle: The Return, or Nek2 for short.
Nek2 is basically a level 50 remake of the good old Nektropos Castle that we’re all so familiar with. The only difference is that unlike Nek1, which has a ton of quests inside, and even more heritage quests which require you to tour the zone, Nek2 has a total sum of zero quests.
Shelia Everling - damn she's massive! (and notice the typo)
The instance is a lot more linear than the first. Unlike the first, the place has caved in at a lot more places, resulting in conveniently blocked passageways and only one path leading to the end of the zone.
Two of my friends returned to the game because of the Living Legacy trial program, who conveniently happened to be a Shadowknight and a Dirge, complimenting my usual duo of a me (a Fury) and friend who plays a Swashbuckler. With the exception of the two patchwork golems right at the beginning of the zone who seemed to have a ton more HP than even some of the other names, we tore through the zone with just four of us.
It was a fun trip down a zone that I’ve always longed to do, and we came out with a decent amount of AA gained. The only thing that I would whine, and whine really badly about the zone is that the drops were pathetic. Every single named we killed dropped wood. Disappointing. Disgusting. Pathetic.
I hate arcades and musings on my gaming history
ArsTechnica recently ran an article on the dying of classic video game arcades and many gamers today talk about them with a kind of wistfulness. Unfortunately, despite being a gamer myself, I am unable to share that same nostalgic feelings.
I don’t fancy arcades. Wait, that sentiment is not strong enough to express what I feel. Let me rephrase my point.
I hate arcades.
That is not to say that I’ve always felt this way towards arcades. I did beg my parents for money to allow me to visit arcades when I was still in primary school, that is to say, when I was between the ages of six to twelve. Past that however, I cannot recall a single instance of wanting to be in an arcade voluntarily.
It would seem that as I grew older, I actually started to despise the arcade more. Right now, I see them as a horrible entropy of noise and light, blaring and flashing at me from every direction. It’s a seizure inducing place. I love being able to sit in the quiet comfort of my chair, being in an room that has just the right temperature, and completely immersing myself in a virtual world with zero distractions. The arcade just isn’t a conducive gaming environment.
One’s personality also changes over time, and so does the activities that he indulges in. The same applies within the context of gaming. Aside from all that noise and crowd, it seems that the genre of games that I play shifted. I used to be a huge FPS (first person shooter) fan. I played every sequel of Unreal Tournament, every sequel of Quake, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Battlefield 2, and most recently, Team Fortress 2. However, I am no longer able to obtain the same sense of gratification from these games that I was able to before. I am only able to manage perhaps, two or three hours a week playing Team Fortress at most. Past that, it feels like “why bother?”.
The above mentioned games all share common similarities with arcade games. There is no compelling reason to play them. They’re all in essence, an infinite loop of a grinding treadmill. It is not the same as in an MMO, whereby I might spend ten hours getting a level, but that one level is as intrinsic as it can get. I get to keep that one level, and as long as that virtual world exists (the game isn’t pulled offline), I’ll forever be one level higher than I was before. In an arcade game however, when I come back tomorrow, even to the same machine, I’ll have to work through all of that again. There is no persistency, there is no goal and hence, actions simply have no resulting effect.
Not all shooters are the same however. Single player shooters generally much more like an RPG. They have a compelling storyline to follow. Sure, I might have to kill a couple hundred Covenant grunts in Halo along the way, but there is real and visible progress being made that is relayed through the advancement in the finely crafted story.
A huge sandbox is what these shooters and arcade games are, and being placed in a sandbox with another individual so that we can spend the next couple hours trying to mindlessly blow each other up over and over again is no fun. Remember that episode of Stargate SG-1 where Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson got stuck in a time loop? It’s exactly what these games are. No matter what you do, you always start back at zero again. That’s the reason why I choose to play RPGs and MMORPGs, and I can never bring myself to play the same kind of shooters I once did before.
EQ2 Patch (26/02) and Problems
It seems that after yesterday’s EQ2 patch, players in certain regions of Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong) have been reporting problems that they either can’t login (invalid username/password, waiting for login server #) or they crash to desktop moments after being in game with no error message whatsoever. There’s a thread on the official forums going on to discuss this currently, although no official word from SoE has been received.
There doesn’t seem to be a network issue as some people suggested. I did a few tracerts and everything seems in order. I find the problem extremely curious because under normal circumstances, going link dead usually throws me to the login screen, instead of just mysteriously crashing to the desktop. Still, I’m keeping my fingers crossed and trying not to come up with any conspiracy stories until official word has been received.
Edit (28/02): It seems the problem has been fixed. Those who had problems connecting were instructed to drop a PM to one of their tech support agents by the handle of TSR-DanT with their station login and IP address.
Ok, if you have from Singapore and are unable to connect, please PM me your station name and your IP address Please do not give me a 192.168 address, it does me NO good. Make sure you disconnect your router, or use a site like http://whatismyip.com/.
If you ask for my opinion, this makes it sound like they accidentally cut some of us off while they were blocking certain address blocks, and that they were adding us to a white list of sorts to get around the problem.
The not-so-epic epic
It’s done! I beat the game! Okay that was a bit of an exaggeration. The heroic portion of my epic quest was completed yesterday, well actually bit over a day now at the time of this writing. I got lucky with Kotiz, a bunch of guildies were needing updates in deep Sebilis and I managed to tag along and he was right there, and dropped exactly what I need. There seems to be issues with him not dropping the quest item according to other Wizards in a thread over at EQ2flames, so I’m extremely glad mine went smooth.
I won’t be getting the mythical-flagged raid version of my epic anytime soon because it’ll be a long while to go before my guild is able to clear Veeshan’s Peak. For the moment being, I’m glad to have the quest largely out of the way so I can focus on my upcoming exams in two weeks time. That doesn’t mean I’m just going to drop everything I’m doing in EQ2 thought, I’ll be still helping some friends get their updates.
Epic quests and why I hate Chardok
Having finished my tradeskill epic (and dying twice to rats in the special instance of Nek Castle because I was careless), I moved on to progress on my Wizard epic.
Chardok is an absolutely horrible zone. It is much worse than working on the CMM part of SoD in EoF, because not only do you have mobs 6 levels higher than you, you also have to deal with the ambushers that drop from the cliff occasionally, which to make matters worse, are often bugged so you would pull it, only to have it take a swipe at your party, reset, and do it all over again. Therefore, the trip to the Palace where my updates were was much harder than actually hunting inside the Palace. It was extremely frustrating being in pickup groups that would spend all day just attempting the journey, but not actually arriving at the Palace.
However, we soon found out that unlike other heroic zones, you can have more than one group, form a raid, and have the mobs still drop loot. Excellent! If we can’t beat them by skill, we’ll unleash a zerg upon them! And that was what we did, eventually heading there with three groups. After two whole days of hair-pulling frustration, I was able to get the body drops I needed from the mobs in the Palace. Hurray! I wonder if Sebilis could be two-grouped also. I’m not looking forward to have to kill Kotiz deep inside Sebilis at all. I daresay at this point it would be a bigger pain in the ass than in Chardok. Who on earth am I going to convenience to go all to way down to camp a named with a 2h spawn timer right infront of the entrance to Venril Sathir with me?!
Frustrations and an endless slew of curse words aside, I did actually enjoy the experience of getting to know and having to work with strangers, resulting meeting with a whole bunch of people, whom some are really nice, that I’ll never come across otherwise. That’s the beauty of quests which forces you to group and actually help each other out, instead of just soloing the entire way. I hate and love you SoE devs at the same time.
