SOE is conspiring against me yet again

Everquest II

I enjoyed EQ2 quite a bit. Then GU61 came around, and messed with pretty much everything. The bugs that hit my character (randomly resetting AAs for no apparent reasons while I was playing, not being able to zone into the GH, and later not getting out) made me walk away, for the time being, about two weeks ago.

Now that the next weekend is around, and I might have another peek at the game, hoping that most major bugs will have been sorted out, I read that SOE was hit by a power outage.

Let’s see how fast they get back on their knees. Knowing them, and being the snarky guy that I am, I’ll venture forward and say the games will have game-breaking bugs from database or synchronization issues all weekend. SOE, you make it really hard to love your games.

Edit: It gets even better. The last round of “fixes” actually broke more than it fixed. *sigh* Oh well, another EQ2-less weekend, I guess. There’s other options around. Oh the frustration at how this company is managed.

Craftception

Lord of the Rings Online

The plan was relatively simple: get Latakia, my Yeoman, to Artisan level, so I can make level 30 food, which would benefit my warden Hiltibrant. I already knew from him that getting Artisan proficiency required a quest. And since the Cook’s Guild is in Michel Delving, I knew I was up for a travel there. Which is fine: as I’ve said numerous times, I love the shire.

However, the quest required me to cook several expert-level food items, and one of them was a strawberry pie. And the strawberries were not sold by vendors, but rather farmed by a farmer. At artisan level. That came as a bit of a surprise, because so far, cooked food had only required the same or lower levels of farmer’s supplies. And farming tends to be a slower leveling than cooking, too, so it always lagged behind for me. I took that as a challenge though! So I farmed, and farmed, and farmed… finished journeyman level, progressed through expert level… then I realized I didn’t get any experience any more.

Uhoh. There’s also a quest to progress to artisan level for farmers! And, that of course sent me from Michel Delving to Hobbiton! Not that that’s a huge distance, but still… for that I hadn’t been prepared. Also, from now on, I’ll probably have to visit Hobbiton more often, because I’ll need superior fields, which don’t grow near Bree. Oh well. The fact that there aren’t that many spots to do superior farming was obvious from how crowded it was:

It's crowded at the commons!

So, I went and planted some crops that I needed for the farming quest. Then, I went around to quest NPCs to present them my produce, and show that I was worthy of the artisan farmer title. Then, I finally could plant the strawberries. Then, I went back to Michel Delving and made the strawberry pie. Then, I went around to quest NPCs again (other ones this time, though) to present them my food, and show that I was worthy of the artisan cook title. Then, I was done. *phew*

All in all, a good night’s work.

Cranking up the other Turbine

Lord of the Rings Online

Sunday, I felt not that interested in playing DDO again. My bard and Rogue/Wizard are both at the right level to group with my friends, and I don’t want to start yet another class. So I looked at the icons on my desktop and realized I hadn’t played LotRO online for quite some time. I also had read a post by Wilhelm, in which he talked about the revamped Evendim, and the southernmost area of Oatbarton, where he did a lot of hobbit-chores.

Hobbits? Quests? And gift mathoms? I’m so on it! And my Warden was 30, just the perfect level to start! So I logged in. The login screen indeed told me it had been “1 month”. It might round up a bit, but still, wow! That long? Oh right, I was on vacation in the meantime.

You start the Oatbarton quests with a breadcrumb quest you get in the Lone Lands. I assume you can also start right away, but I had this yearning for some old-fashioned travel. So I didn’t port over there (with my special Warden spell), or took the pony express. Rather, I rode on my own terms from Bree, where I started, to the Forsaken Inn, and back via Bree, Stock, and Brockenborings, to Oatbarton.

I went there...

...and back again.

You have reached your destination.

Yep, this looks like my kind of town!

And there were a lot of chores to be done. The big market was just around the door, and there were still a lot of things that needed to be done. To name a few, I:

...herded chicken that had run away (note the tilted chicken, from when the hands have already gone back to their original position, but the chicken hasn't despawned yet. Cluck?!)...

... crushed grapes (while getting my groove on!)...

... and churned butter. Which seems to be physically demanding. See how Hiltibrant wipes his brow? Maybe it would work better if you weren't in full armour.

The final tally, after having fun doing some chores for hobbits, was 27 gift mathoms. But wait, what was that? I was sent off to Oatbarton’s little sister town, just north: Dwaling. The glass blowers from there were supposed to present their wares, too, but it seemed they were in a bit of a pickle. They are going through their own housing crisis, with some unseen investor having bought up most homes. The city is not in a good shape, and overrun by human ruffians. They even locked up the public holes! Of course, I had to help. I don’t have pictures from that part (stab stab kill stab etc), but after I taught the ruffians a lesson, I was approach by a glass blower to help them restock. After collecting some sand and other materials, I even was allowed to take a shot at glass blowing myself!

This is more difficult than it looks, and it already doesn't look easy!

Of course, I was a natural talent at this trade. Ahem. As Mr Glass Blower told me: “Well, I am not quite sure what we can do with this. Perhaps it could be use as a tray to ash one’s pipe after smoking. A useful thing, if not the most glamorous of objects.” I claim that as a success!

Speaking of success, the Dwaling quests awarded another 13 gift mathoms, so I had a grand total of 40. That was quite a bit of experience, and as a result, I’m now an ally of the Mathom Society.

The mandatory "reputation spam" picture.

Overall, a very fun night. I wish there were more nooks hidden away with quest lines such as these. But I haven’t even visited half a dozen areas in earnest so far, so there’s still lots of things to be found! On the side of tangible benefits, with rested XP and the Isengard pre-order trinket for 25% more XP from mob kills, I made almost 3 levels in Oatbarton and Dwaling. That’s pretty nice, too.

Right now, I’m itching to try out my minstrel again though. Or maybe roll something now? Maybe a dwarf or elf, to try out their starting area? We’ll see.

Overpowered and Underpowered in DDO

Dungeons & Dragons Online

On Saturday, I didn’t get as much time to play as I had planned. This was mostly due to a late Summer day (after July and August had utterly failed to deliver, any warm day in September needs to be used), which I spend sitting in a chair on the balcony reading. (Walter Kempowski: Das Echolot. A fascinating kaleidoscope, but I don’t think there’s an English translation; besides, it doesn’t belong into this blog.)

In the evening, I played a bit of DDO with Dioneo, my bard. I decided I’d like to try out some non-free adventures, and pondered my options. I could take a subscription, to open up everything temporarily. However, DDO is pretty strict about what you retain when you downgrade again: additional characters above your “premium user” slot are locked, you lose bank access, etc. Also, “everything” is not quite true: several options, such as the Favored Soul class, do not come with a subscription, and need to be bought separately. Finally, while I like the game, I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend in it at any given point. I’ll probably wander off and come back later.

In the end, I bought the medium point pack, which was still cheaper than a three-month subscription, and gave me the possibility to buy some stuff, and keep the rest for later. I opted for two low-level adventure packs, the Catacombs, and the Seal of Shan-To-Kor, which got good reviews on the forums. I wasn’t disappointed. The Catacombs are a classic “slay the undead” adventure with a decent story, and give a LOT of favor (reputation), which is useful because it unlocks things like classes and races for non-VIPs. Shan-To-Kor was a massive (for a low-level at least) dungeon crawl, which felt well-made, and the last area gave me some challenge, even on normal mode on my overpowered bard. Especially the final boss was a very close encounter. Plus, the dungeon gives Coin Lords rep, which means I could unlock the fourth inventory bag from favor.

In the end, I reached level 4 on my bard, and decided to revisit my Rogue/Wizard that I play in our static group. Now, the group is mostly, but not completely, static. I left early one night last week, and my friends decided to push on for one more adventure. Which means I was a bit behind. While I was still towards the end of level 3, they had already hit level 4. So, I went and tried to get the remaining experience. It was pretty painful. Compared to my bard, my Rogue/Wizards feels very underpowered; especially the limit on spell points can be a problem, but also the surprisingly low damage output. I just assume it will get better with levels, and Wizards will be able to catch up. After some cursing and unexpected deaths, plus running level 2 “easier than average” quests repeatedly, I finally hit level 4, and can now park this character again until we start playing in a group again. Soloing will probably not be my favorite part on this character, no.

Altitis on Xen’drik

Dungeons & Dragons Online

(Yes, I had to look up the name of the continent on wikipedia.)

I’m generally not a person that suffers from altitis, the Obsessive Reroll Disorder. I pick a class, and I stick with it, unless I’m really unhappy. Which doesn’t happen often; I guess I’m reasonably good and anticipating what I want – or I’m just undemanding.

Not so with DDO, it seems. When I came back to it this week, I already had a 5 Cleric. To play with my friends, I designed a new character, who right now is a 1 Rogue / 2 Wizard. Then I heard how powerful melee classes can be early on. And I realized that, for whatever reason, I had four character slots instead of two. I can’t remember buying anything off the DDO store except for the port wine for the store breadcrumb quest on the starter island. But it gave me that itch to try out yet another new class. So, meet Dioneo Pavane, right now a 2 Bard.

I built him myself, off one of the standard paths (which is probably a bad idea, given how little I understand of D&D in general and DDO in specific), to get specifically what I wanted: a character that can kick some ass, but still works well as a buffer and off-healer. To be fair though, it will strongly consider suggestions made for the Classic Rocker. I’ll probably go with the Warchanter prestige, but I started with Power Attack and Master’s Touch. The weapon I got from the tutorial quest is powerful enough that I could plow through normal and hard difficulty quests in Korthos Village with ease, so it only took me 2 hours or so to reach level 2. I then took cure light wounds. I’m really looking forward to trying out that build in the other island quests tonight or tomorrow. My friends are both gone for a couple of days, so I have all the time in the world to get my Bard to level 3 or even 4. We would then all have 2 characters each in the same level range, which would make for some nice switching I guess (or, if it goes wrong, endless thinking about which characters we’d rather play).

I realize these posts seriously need some more screenshots. Even I probably won’t want to read these posts in a year to remember what I did, without some eye candy. I’m not sure I’m good at taking nice screenshots, but anything is better than nothing.

Azshara, or: The Primacy of Economics

World of Warcraft

Back when I started playing WoW, there were a couple of zones that had a lasting impression on me. I remember playing for the first time, and getting ready to leave the Valley of Trials. When I realized that this was only a small part of a huge zone, which itself was only a tiny part of a world, I was in awe. I remember the Barrens, which (save the god awful chat) will always have a place in my heart as the vast areas of savannah you traversed (it helped you didn’t have a mount, of course). I remember Blackrock Spire, and the vertigo looking down from the bridge towards General Drakkisath‘s room to the very bottom, and all the places I had walked through to get there. And mapping out Blackrock Spire and Blackwing Lair, in my head, to figure out what way I was looking when I stood on the “balcony”, and that it all fit. But I think most of all, it is Azshara I remember.

It might be a curious choice, because there never was much of note there. But when I read Shintar’s notes about old Tanaris, I realized that this was not so curious after all. The zone had a very distinct feel. It was stuck in eternal autumn. There were lots of old ruins there, it was the site of an ancient catastrophe. But most of all, it was empty. It felt like wilderness. You could go there and actually feel like you were at the border of civilization, in an untamed world. Except for one short quest chain (the infamous tablet quests, which gave immense amounts of experience for little work in the later years), there was little reason to go there. I remember the weekly trips through the zone, down the cliff, along the coast, to the tiny island of Duke Hydraxis to pick up the Aqual Quintessence for Molten Core. Other than that, if you were in a Server First Guild, or you were really lucky, you might spot Azuregos. If not, you might run across his spirit.

Sometimes, you might even see both of them up at the same time, especially later on when Azuregos wasn't as interesting as a raid target any more.

In short, it was a place I liked to hang out at. A place that I could explore, and be sure that there were few people who actually had visited the nooks and crannies too. I went there every now and then to relax. I liked being at what felt like Land’s End.

Every now and then, there would be talks about changing some of the zones (most of the times, just rumors among players). Opening up Hyjal, or Gilneas. Remaking Winterspring, or Silithus. And of course, making Azshara “useful”. I was always happy when it turned out that nothing would change in my private wasteland.

But economics dictate that an opportunity not used has a cost. And land that lies waste is a great opportunity. After all, everything in the game should have a use, and every area should have quests to do, right? Even though technically, in a virtual world, space doesn’t cost much after it was designed once, and populating it is probably about as expensive as designing a new area. But the Azshara we know, and that I loved, came to an end when the world was torn asunder. It was finally civilized, made useful for the grand goal of a smooth leveling curve.

The new Azshara sure has a lot more entertainment value than the old one. There’s many quests, easy and fast transportation, and it has direct access through Orgrimmar (granted, I was always a bit surprised that one of the most remote areas of the game happened to end up north of one of the main capitals).

Azshara, to me, is an analogy to the evolution of virtual worlds. From an area that was world, and little less, it transformed into the often-quoted theme park. Quite literally so, with a roller coaster going through the whole zone. And a resort! And, of course, it’s the goblins that built all this. Economy outside of the game has changed the face of the world, with the help of the most greedy and economy-fixated ingame race. Now, instead of silent autumnal cliffs and dunes, we have arsepunk everywhere. By the way, thank you for that word Melmoth, I rarely found my own opinion on that topic put into words that well!

My sentiments might be fueled to a large degree by nostalgia. Nevertheless, losing Azshara was, I realize now, one of those thousand little things that made me lose interest in WoW over the last years. Sic transit gloria mundi. Rest in peace, old Azshara, I will remember you for what you once were, not what you are now.

Eberron, Here We Come

Dungeons & Dragons Online

My vacation ended on Friday. So yesterday was my first day at work again, and I ran into J, a good friend (student who just started his thesis here), and we realized we both have a decent amount of free time right now. That reminded us to pick up our plans again to start a static group in an MMO.

I’ve never done static groups before; I don’t have many friends that are into MMOs, and we never seemed to be in the same games, or on the same servers. So this is something new to me. We had decided some time ago to try DDO, because we both had little experience in the game (I had played a couple of nights some months ago, he never had), and it seemed to cater well, with its choice of difficulty for each dungeon, to a group of two people. J asked a friend of his, S, and he seemed to be interested too, so the two went off downloading and installing DDO (I still had my copy).

Slow internet connections, some confusion over the registration process (“you’re saying I can’t use my LotRO account because they’re separate, but I also can’t use the same user name, because they share a name space??”), and general indecision with respect to classes meant it took us a couple of hours to get going. We could start around 10pm. I sadly forgot to make screenshots, so you’ll have to take my words for it.

Our group consists of a Cleric (S), a Ranger (J), and a Rogue/Wizard (me). Not sure whether that’s an ideal setup, but I guess we’ll manage. I, especially, felt very useless. This is because I want to make a wizard with just a dash of rogue, for trap detection and disabling. Yet there is a consensus that you have to take the rogue level as the first one though, because it means you’ll get a lot more skill points than if you take wizard (whyever that would be). Of course, whenever I had upgrade choices during the quests, I took the wizard stuff, because this is what I want to end up with. So I ran around with a rusty rapier for half the evening, for a whopping 1d6-1 damage. Plus, I had chosen my stats and skills with wizard in mind. But I bet it will get better as I get a level of Wizard or two.

I like the storytelling in DDO. The story itself on the starter island is quite nice. Basically, you went shipwreck and stranded on a tropical island, which, strangely, has snow falling from the sky. You’re informed that this is because of a white dragon who has messed with the weather (you’ll run across him later). Other than that, your first quests mostly deal with helping the townsfolk by fighting back invaders to the store house, and investigating the town crypt.

I have to say I like the voice of the dungeon master, with its over-the-top voice acting of monsters every now and then. Also the fact that you sometimes have to solve puzzles and not only hack and slash.

We played until all of us hit 2nd level. Due to the fact that we all play together, and that you get experience not for killing monsters, but finishing quests, it was easy to stay close together in XP. By the time we dinged, it was 1am, and I was very tired. We called it a night, and decided to play again later this week. I’m not sure whether both J and S enjoyed the game as much as I hope, but we’ll see. It would be a fun thing to do once a week or so.

Oh, and I already know how to spend my lunch break today: figuring out which skills, feats, and enhancements to take for level 2. DDO shows its DnD heritage there; there’s so many important choices, much more than in your run-of-the-mill MMO. And especially for me, with little DnD experience, and no rails to follow because I customized a multiclass character, it’s really complicated! I do enjoy it though. Meaningful decisions are great.

The Raid Review: Better Late Than Never

Raiding, World of Warcraft

After a very eventful and work-filled week (read: preparing for my vacation, and playing games), I finally had the time to re-watch The Raid and now feel somewhat able to give a review.

First of all: I think it has its shortcomings, but overall is a decent documentary. The film focuses on one specific raid group (Lore et al.’s “Double Dragon” 10-man group from their guild “Months Behind”), which I think is a good thing. More is not always better, especially if your budget is limited. It then tries to extend this very specific view by interviews with “experts” (I use this term loosely, I will come to that later). It also limits its time to about 45 minutes, which I guess is also fair enough. I personally wouldn’t have minded a longer film, let’s say 90 minutes, with more topics and/or details, but long documentaries generally aren’t considered very “hot”.

Second: What the fuck is up with all the beeping? I sure hope I will be able to watch one without this stupid beeping at some point. At times, it was hard to make out what people were saying.

Third: The film is cut very fast at times. That is especially noticeable in the beginning, when you get second-long one-sentence comments by a bunch of people you’ll see again later, but there isn’t even enough time to give them a caption. I would like to know who is talking at some point. If there isn’t enough time to show the caption, maybe the cuts are too fast for a documentary. But that’s just my opinion, I’m old-fashioned when it comes to cutting.

Alright, enough with the general comments. Let’s move to the film itself. One of the most important sentences that describes the scope of the film is said early on by Prof. Castronova: [some] people seek out gaming to achieve. That doesn’t come as much of a surprise, seeing how raiding, especially raiding in World of Warcraft, is an achiever’s game. I have yet to hear of socializer or explorer raids. It’s still something you should keep in mind while watching the film. Complaining that the view is too achiever-heavy is like watching an Ingmar Bergman movie and complaining that there’s no explosions.

After the short introduction (what is an MMO? How to describe an MMO to someone who has no idea what it is?), we’re treated to some scenes from Icecrown. The remaining 40 minutes will basically be interviews about certain topics, seperated from each other by short boss fight excerpts. I’ll talk about a couple of those topics in a separate post; I had them here originally, but it got too voluminous.

The problem with the fight excerpts is that they overemphasize success over failure. Yes, there’s a segment of the film talking about failure and frustration, complete with wipe scenes, but overall, a lot of the boss fights seemed short and easy. That doesn’t go well with what is said in the interview parts, where they talk about difficulty in raiding, and how boss fights (plus preparation etc) can take a long time every attempt. Maybe they should’ve tried to show a graphical tactic for at least one boss, with spawn points, move paths for different players, etc. Not an in-detail description, just as some sort of clipart to show that a lot of stuff can be going on at any point in time.

For the interview parts, I think overall, the choice of interview partners was pretty good. Prof. Castronova knows what he’s talking about, though I have the feeling that at times, the cutting wasn’t all in his favor. The only complaint I have is about Jesse Schell, who comes across as someone as a self-important idiot. (Again, it might have to do with what parts of the certainly much longer interviews made it into the film.) Raiding being based on prehistoric human behavior? Yeah right. The Guild members of “Double Dragon” were obviously set for interviews, though it seems they didn’t interview all of them, why ever that would be. The way they’re presented shows them in a light that neither glorifies nor condemns. Especially when it comes to questions such as media usage and addiction, some of them give insightful and non-stereotypical answers. I liked that.

They also stress the importance of friendship, or at least social bonds, in MMO’s, especially in raiding. Several times, you hear them say “I wouldn’t be playing any more if it wasn’t for the other people and for my commitment to this group.” They also talked about burnout and how groups can keep people interested, but ultimately, they might leave. Lore says, The future of Double Dragon is uncertain. With the film being in post-production for a year, I would’ve liked to see a short “and then” for each member. Are they all still playing? Is Double Dragon still kicking? I could probably go and look it up on the armory, but that would’ve given the film nice closure.

Sadly, I think the film fails on its self-imposed goal of describing raiding to complete outsiders. It starts very low-level, even describing in short what an MMORPG is, but from there, it just goes too fast. Bonnie Nardi mentions how she started playing WoW, and originally didn’t understand anything people said because of the sheer amount of jargon. I’m afraid this will also happen to viewers of the film who have no prior knowledge in MMOs and raiding.

Ultimately, the film is a nice work of documentation. It is, to my knowledge, the first one to document raiding in detail (even outside of the focus of WoW), and will therefore, even for its shortcomings, be an interesting point of reference in the future.

The Raid – First impression

Raiding, World of Warcraft

Yeah, I watched it, because I wasn’t very tired at that time. Guess even tiny web streams these days go with the big movie theaters, though. They didn’t start until almost a quarter past. This is not a lecture that is entitled to academic quarters!

Anyway, they said after the screening that they will make the film available for download (or at least re-streaming) for 3 days starting from now. I might give it a second view tomorrow, because I missed a couple of things, like who some of the people actually were that they interviewed.

Now I’m tired. More tomorrow. T out.

Watch “The Raid” Tonight

Raiding, World of Warcraft

MMO-Champion announced today that the WoW documentary “The Raid” will have a live online screening tonight. Actually, it is a reminder, but I missed the original message, so to me, it’s as good as an initial announcement.

I haven’t heard much about the film yet; most was somewhat silly arguments about how “the film was out of date” because it focused on ICC. I guess some people are not aware of post-production (although, depending on when they shot the footage, they should’ve had one year by now – that would be ample). There were also some complaints that it made look every raider like a basement dweller. The short trailer doesn’t tell you much in that respect.

The main problem to me is that they chose a quite ridiculous time for their stream, from a European point of view. Seriously, half of those interested, easily, will be here, and you chose 6PM PST? That’s 3AM CEST. And that translates to “aww come on”. Why not 6PM EST? That would have been a decent time for everbody. (Except the Aussies. Sorry, but you are not quite as many over there.)

Nevertheless, if I stay up that long (and I intend to), I’ll watch it to get some first-hand impressions, and I’ll report them here.