[Kingdom of Loathing] Starting up in the Kingdom of Loathing is pretty simple. Your first quest is to visit the Toot Oriole and complete the tutorial. Your second quest gets you a familiar. Your third quest is to kill ten rats.
Well, “was.” The quest was revised last week, and while it is still rat-related, it is no longer simply “kill ten rats.” And we cried.
: Zubon
[World of Warcraft] Decoration’s for Warcraft’s version of Halloween, Hallow’s End, have gone up. Like last year’s Winter Veil Festival, this is more decorative than anything else. Pumpkin head’s aren’t attacking like they did in City of Heroes, but there are several decoration and a few special items to be found. There are also 3 quests. One is similar to the Children’s Day quest where you must go collect items from the different capitals. In the other two quests, the Horde must vandalize Southshore and the Alliance must clean up the mess. They are somewhat controversial on the official WoW message board as they are extremely difficult for the Horde (especially on a PvP server) and impossible for the Alliance unless the Horde complete their quest. Here are some of the sights of Hallow’s End:
We’ll start with the Alliance. I’m a Horde player mainly, but I do have Alliance alts to do my bidding as well. Below is a picture of Stormwind, the human capital.
[World of Warcraft] I like to visit the Blizzard WoW forums in my “I dunno WTF to do” moods. I typically visit the class forums, which means the mage forums currently, considering that’s my main class right now.
The mage forums were actually getting pretty sickening. Mages feel forgotten and gimped, and they have no reassurance from Blizzard, beyond the promise of an invisible spell a while ago, which has not been added or even explained or hinted at when it will be added since then. Beyond that, there has not been a “blue” post yet (“blue” refers to a Blizzard rep who posts on the forums).
Lately I’ve been finding EVE getting less and less fun. Many people who I knew quit weeks or months ago, I’ve had nothing but constant setbacks in which cases I lost a Raven to a level 4 mission, and in a strange turn of events, my scorpion to Concord. I’m trying my hand at an Appocalypse battleship now, this of course means I need to train up skills I didn’t previously have as a missile user, the training to fly the ship -WELL- will take about 2 months, I’ve been sitting in station doing nothing, with occasional mining, I haven’t done any pvp for 2 weeks, getting bored :/. I might go back and try WoW again, or try something new, not sure yet.
-Zxyrox
[City of Heroes] My wife hated MMOs. Before we got married, she saw them as competition for limited attention, something distracting from time we could be together, and could you and your friends shut up about that #@%^ game for once? Of course, now that we are married, she is quite happy for us each to have things for “me time.” You can run out of things to talk about just staring at each other all day.
She was never interested in playing them. Besides the horror of having met gamers, there is a lot of pressure in online games. You are playing with other people, and they are depending on you. If you mess up, you are interfering with others’ lives. You and I have seen a thousand people who apparently have no skills other than wasting your time and getting the whole group killed, so that view is novel and refreshing. Besides, many games are tedious, difficult, or just ugly, and who wants to play those?
Then we got City of Heroes.
[City of Villains] That villain planner I linked before seems to be unavailable, so the quick version of “everything you want to know” is here (well written). At least, that’s everything I wanted to know, except specific powers. You can find specific powers elsewhere, in a lot of places, if you’re that interested. Yes, A LOT of them repeat COH powers, so you’ll mostly be interested in the new ones, which mostly means Mastermind primaries. (You get three summon powers that can all be active at once, some minion buffs, and some attacks).
The very quick summary? “There’s lots of really cool stuff, so if you’re a COH player who isn’t so upset about Enhancement Diversity that you’re planning to hate Cryptic forever, you’ll want to buy this.” Not that there’s anything wrong with either choice.
: Zubon
[IGN Live] Well even if I could afford the $120 for BlizzCon or the $85 to just go to the event and miss out on the Offspring concert, I wouldn’t be able to go. The event is sold out. As much as I enjoy WoW and Offspring (wouldn’t mind having a pet murloc either), the line up was always underwhelming to me. Panels about StarCraft: Ghosts (which I have played at Comic Con, contrary to the claim on the BlizzCon site that it will host the 1st public hands on gameplay), fan costume contests, playing Blizzard games on LAN, etc. Nothing really stood out aside from the Offspring concert, although they have said that detail about the WoW expansion will be announced at the con. I’m sure the details will be all over the internet a few minutes after they are announced anyways.
[City of Villains] The NDA for City of Villains is gone, so anyone who was looking for info about it may now be successful. The most amusing comment I’ve seen to date is, “You know everything you wanted them to do with COH? They did that with COV.” The most interesting info I’ve seen to date is this, which is Hero Planner with the COV powers instead of COH powers – not pretty, but it works. I have no idea if that thing is up to date, though.
So if anyone who has been testing it wants to say something, consider it an open comments thread. Oh, and I hear good things about COV inherent powers, so feel free to mention those if you know them. :)
: Zubon
[EVE Online] Istvaan Shogaatsu and his Corporation, “Guiding Hand Social Club” recently made waves in EVE for infiltrating yet another Corporation (under contract), making off with over 30 billion ISK worth of items and in-game cash, pod-killing their CEO and stealing a super rare ship. I managed to catch up with the man behind the mega-theft and he politely granted me an interview. Here it is:
Ethic: Lets start out with the latest big news out of the Guiding Hand Social Club (GH-SC). You had an assignment to, as you put it, “utterly demolish Mirial and bring all who followed her to their knees in one fell swoop”. Mirial was the CEO of Ubiqua Seraph corporation. I think everyone can agree that you certainly did what you had been hired to do.
Has there been any negative fallout for you from completing that assignment? From players? From CCP (the company that makes EVE Online)?
Istvaan Shogaatsu: No less than nine threats upon my life immediately after the major heist, delivered chiefly through email, arriving from hotmails or anon remailers. A GM also complained that our action has flooded them with petitions, but this was mostly in good fun on their part.