[Kingdom of Loathing] Back at the Kingdom, 15 new skills have been added to the game. The long-term plan is to fight the Naughty Sorceress at level 15, not 11. The skills expanding the game in that direction are now mostly in, with the additional quests and such to follow as content is completed.
A bunch of new skills are now available from your friendly neighborhood Guild Trainer. All classes now have skills up to level 14, except Turtle Tamers, who only got a level 13 skill, and Accordion Thieves, who got their skills all the way to 15.
Discussion thread is here. As ever, new friends are welcome in the Kingdom. :)
: Zubon
[City of Heroes] I really like making level 6 characters. It is a great way to spend an evening. If you have not played City of Heroes, get a few friends and a few trial codes and give it a shot.
Get a team of three or four people together on Teamspeak or Ventrilo. You can get to level 5 or 6 in a couple of hours. Fire up Heroes or Villains, and each of you design whatever character you like. Almost all of them work well together. My SG has had fun making the same sort of character to try out, so one night we had three Fire/Fire Brutes and a Dark/Dark Brute rambling around.
Do your first contact worth of missions. Play, run, crash, whatever. You will get to level 5 or 6. In that time, there is no death penalty. You start out with two powers and will get to pick three more that night. You will level 5 times in a single evening and go through a small story or two in the missions. You will not need to worry about when folks will be on, what levels everyone is, or anything else that creates problems in forming teams: you are all the same level, and you need not see those characters after that night. You get to try something new. No grinding, no worries, just a bit of very fast play with lots of instant gratification.
And if you find that you really like one of them, congrats, you have someone new to take to higher levels. Try it out a few times, and you and all your friends will have some level 6 characters on that server. Now you can all decide what to play and try some of the other content together.
: Zubon
[City of Heroes] Just for the record, if the level cap for City of Heroes/Villains ever rises from 50, I am quitting and never coming back. WoW is about to raise its cap, and the idea sees occasional play with respect to CoX.
Two reasons: first, I will feel obliged to level my 50s to 60. My original level 50 is my “do everything” character, so I will naturally send her through everything I can and get all the badges available. Even if I enjoy it, it would be fairly grindy to do that with multiple characters. Why do I need to do that? Besides the natural feeling of wanting to “beat the game,” enough of my friends would feel that desire such that I would either grind towards the new level cap or need new friends for a good while.
Second, I have done a lot of Hamidon raids. Enhancements are only effective for a few levels after you get them, which means every one would be worthless by level 60. I like not worrying about loot in City of Heroes; the once-a-week Hamidon raid fulfills all my needs in that respect. If I am going to throw all that away, I might as well toss the rest of the game with it. Those of you raiding to get equipment to be able to do the next raid to…? That is not a game I am playing.
More things to do at 50? Fine and good. More levels past it? I’m out.
: Zubon
In City of Heroes, before Enhancement Diversification, I could two-shot groups of yellow minions easily. Now I can two-shot groups of green minions easily. I can wipe out grays by the score and use knockback to send them further than a football field.
Ignoring leveling speed, it really should not make any difference whether you are beating up a green minion or an orange one. It is the same Freak Slammer. The level difference only affects the numbers over his head. Many games make you strong enough to fight only one even-level monster, but you could fight two or three lower level enemies at time. It is the same goblin, just with a different number.
Continue reading ‘Color Matters’
[Lineage 2] Over the past month, I have tried two MMORPGs in addition to the two I already play. One is old and one is new. The old one is Lineage 2. The new one being Rising Force Online (known as RF Online or RFO). Both are Korean based MMORPGs and, surprisingly (or not), both are very similar in several ways. In fact, they are so similar that I wonder if they are using the same engine. As far as I know, they were not created by the same company so it is a bit peculiar to me. Luckily, the gameplay, while it has its similarities, is the least similar between the two.
I will only be addressing Lineage 2 this time as I have used up my free 30 day trial and have decided not to play it anymore. I only recently bought RFO and have only begun testing it out.
Continue reading ‘Guinea Pig’
[EVE Online] I was hanging out in one of our stations in Alliance space when someone asked for help hauling some scrap parts and modules over to another station we have in order to be refined down to minerals. I answered the call and loaded up my industrial-class ship with about 10,000 cubic meters of junk. Away we went.
On the way, the corpmate flying with me asked if I wanted to follow them around afterwards while they blew up some Sansha’s Nation ships in the nearby ‘roid fields. My job would be to collect anything left after the explosions so we could refine it (or sell it in Empire space if it’s valuable).
Continue reading ‘Making Some ISK’
Free to play online games sounds like such a good deal…after all, it’s free, right? “Free to play” MMORPGs aren’t actually free (yes, it is false advertising when they say “100% free”). The publishers and developers make their money primarily by generating revenues from in-game advertising, and micro-purchases of in-game items and other perks. [Yes, I know there are exceptions, but I'm talking about MMOs in general]
Games in Asia have long been based on a “pay to play” model where gamers usually buy time cards at a cyber café, gas station, or something similar, which they redeem for time in a game. These are usually hourly or daily options. So, going from “pay to play” to “free to play” seems like a logical next step. One of the reasons that the monthly subscription model hasn’t been as popular in the East is the lack of market penetration of credit cards.
Continue reading ‘The Folly of Free to Play’
I’m sure you remember this commercial…Avery Brooks (AKA Captain Benjamin Sisko, Deep Space Nine) is complaining that we were promised flying cars by the next millennium, blah blah. If you enjoy reading a lot of science fiction (the older good stuff!), then by all rights we should have flying cars by now as well as a lot of other cool things. At least the PC is pretty powerful and we have the lovely Internet.
But not only are we missing the flying cars, we don’t have a kick ass Lunar base, man hasn’t set foot on Mars yet, and we certainly can’t teleport ourselves around. The virtual reality craze of the real early 90s was too soon, and fizzled out before computers and VR hardware had matured to a point to really be useful for much beyond making people motion sick and giving them eye strain.
Continue reading ‘We were promised flying cars!’