The Countdown begins…

[EVE Online] Well my last skill in EVE is finishing up…not much to say today, our CEO of the corp is attempting to build a starbase player owned station (POS) and has scouts out looking for that, a few of the corp members pitched in and got the ore for a Moa for me after the whole Ore incident…

i’ll post more when something interesting happens…such as my skill finishing… i figured out by halting the skill and training some learning skills i can speed it up…it went from 3days to 2days…so im not complaining….

I’ll have that mining barge yet!

(Im gonna go see Revenge of the Sith tomorrow…hope it isnt a dead weight movie like i’ve been fearing, more info on that as well later)

-Zxyrox

Trebuchet

[Guild Wars] I’ll give you another screenshot from GW. This time it’s my elementalist.

gw e1

Oh, interestingly enough, if you join a guild – all your characters join the guild. I did not know that. I had made a guild with one of my characters just to see how it works and next thing you know all my characters were in it. Since I am in a real guild now (with capes and a hall!) I had to log in all my characters to see if they had the cape too. They did.

The nice thing is, in the guild list it shows your current character name as well as connecting it to the name of the character you original joined the guild under so it’s easy to see who you really are.

Tonight, my Necromancer got to fire a couple of trebuchets at the enemy. That is my favorite word right there, trebuchet. Trebuchet. Sweet.

The mission involved driving back the Charr forces. As I got closer to the wall I needed to push them behind, I noticed a guy standing by a broken trebuchet (there’s that word again!). He told me to find three parts he needed and we could use the trebuchet to detroy the large groups near the wall.

I located piles of rubble around some other broken trebuchets and eventually found the parts he needed. After giving them to him, he showed me how to use the trebuchet. It was fun to see all the Charr forces falling beneath my bombardments. As I got closer to the wall I found another trebuchet I could fire and of course I did. Nice sound and visual effects.

– Ethic

Tuesday Night Drunk

[World of Warcraft] My friend loves his alcohol. A lot. This guy once got so drunk on New Years Eve that he unzipped his pants on the Las Vegas Strip 30 minutes before midnight and relieved himself on Caesars Palace while random tourists took pictures. Now that you have that delightful image seared into your memory, we jump to last night. My friend, decides that Tuesday night is a great night to go to a bar. I decline his invitation, but he finds some drinking buddies and they set off. Around 1AM I get a drunk dialing call from him. It’s the usual how much he misses his girlfriend type stuff, but then he starts talking about WoW.

You see, my friend, unlike me the dilettante, pretty much concentrated on just playing WoW and only having character and an auction house guy. Even though he started playing at the end of January, the guy has hit lvl 60, bought an epic mount, and has enough money to buy another one if he feels like it. I have many friends that play the game. Some are in well organized guilds that have killed Onyxia several times. However, those guys all pretty much joined the same guilds they joined in beta, assuring that their fellow guildmembers would be fairly hardcore gamers. Myself and four others wisely cordinated and ended up on the same server (unlike my other friends), but we are casual players compared with the others. My drunken friend plays a lot more than us so he is frustrated. Hence the drunken call.

Ever since getting his epic mount my friend has been bored out of his mind. He wants to go try and kill Onyxia and run Molten Core, but he knows he won’t while he stays in our guild, yet he doesn’t want to leave his buddies since middle school. So he calls me and lays out the plan he must have been formulating for quite a while now. Using his advertising background he plans to turn out little guild of five guys from Orange County and a couple of Australians that don’t mind playing with us American insomniacs into the greatest guild ever. It’ll be interesting to see how far he goes with this, or if he’ll even remember tomorrow morning.

DC

Matrix Online coming soon.

I have received my registration code to play a free week of the Matrix Online. This will begin next week and I plan on having a daily update here for anyone that is interested.

This is all predicated on the fact that my poor laptop will be able to run the game with its meager memory allotment. A memory upgrade is on my personal shopping list, but not until after the free week. Hopefully the game will still run.

By the way, if anyone has a suggestion on a place to purchase a gig stick of memory, I am all ears.

ringthree

4 days left…

[World of Warcraft] Well I still have 4 days of waiting for my level 5 industry skill to finish, and in the meanwhile I’ve dinged many beautiful levels in WoW as I’ve gone from level 16 to level 18 over the course of the weekend. I’ve had an interesting weekend as I played a little of Starcraft with some old friends … however alot of them disappeared to WoW never to be seen by me again … or they all play DiabloII which is the worlds most broken game … Needless to say I don’t play D2 anymore but I still go on it to make sure my account doesn’t die … heh I’m one of those people that can’t leave a dead horse alone I guess.

As far as WoW goes, I finally finished Fenris Isle and am now finishing up my random quests I never had the time to finish before I get out of this cursed (lag ridden, and constantly under attack from alliance) silverpine area and move on to bigger and better things after I ding 20 …. most likely I will never leave due to the fact that once my Skill is done I’ll be back on EVE for the most part…

As far as the raid on Fenris isle went … it was rather interesting, I got a semi-competent group together who didn’t perma AFK or run into a big group of mobs only to be ripped to shreds and blame the healer. However this one little noob who wasn’t grouped with us insisted on following us throughout Fenris Isle and expecting us to leave the kill for him I guess. Well after we finished, the mr. niceguy of the group didn’t want us to leave until this noob had his quest done too … but everytime the boss respawned one of the groupies always had to attack him before the noob could and therefore killing alot of us and having to wait another 5 minutes for the spawn…

We kept this up for another 2 spawns until the healer put his foot down … it was complete chaos, the noob was /saying all this shit to the healer about how he can’t play the class right and about how everyone is screwing it up for him … so we all decided to leave and the mobs had noob for lunch … he logged soon after that…

I tried to get everyone focused to finish the “rest in pieces” quest on the island but everyone was too busy doing pro-raid duels… and the level 20 priest insists on dueling me until I cave in and she spends the whole time fearing me into mobs until I die so I disbanded and signed off for the day…

Some people lack commitment…

-Zxyrox

Project: New Hope

I’m invisioning an MMORPG that I would enjoy and I’m going to share it with you now. You will also find it appealing and will call for game developers to create this world for us. One of you is a developer and will have a great desire to pay me loads of money for the idea and will not want any additional work from me, just the idea. Yeah, right. Copyright me. I’m not claiming it’s original, just claiming it sounds fun to me.

So here we go.

“Project: New Hope” – Our planet was destroyed by a freak ecological
disaster. The few of us that remained were forced to leave on
starships to search for a new planet suitable enough to call our home.

Years go by and we discovered only one planet that would fill our
needs perfectly. The only problem is that it is currently inhabited by
some sentient creatures. These creatures are of a lower intelligence
than us and they are not interested in sharing the planet. They choose
to fight rather than let us live. We have no choice, we must take the
planet by force if we want to survive.

We have the ability to launch small crafts from the main ships which
will allow us to land on the planet surface in small groups. Being
outnumbered, our missions will be precise in nature. Go in – complete
the mission objective – get out. Missions will range from capturing
specific creatures for study, steal natural resources, destroying
military objectives, stealing military plans, finding weaknesses, stop
their crude attacks on our ships, stealing weapons, destroying
important infrastructure, or simply reducing the population of these
creatures.

By completing these various objectives, we hope to be able to take
over a small continent so we can put a base or two on the surface of
the planet. From these bases we can then undergo more advanced
military strikes on the creatures.

Eventually our goal will be the complete eradication of the creatures,
save for a few we may use for our needs. We must take control of the
entire planet, it is our only hope for survival as a species. Our
future depends on it.

Perhaps someday we will have the planet all to ourselves. We need to
make it our home, this planet the creatures call Earth.

– Ethic

FFXI goes 360.

[Final Fantasy XI] E3 is a well-spring of information of just about anything related to gaming. Final Fantasy XI is just as lucky as any other. After the annoucement of Xbox 360, you would expect the floodgates to open for all the developers to announce their games. The interesting one for FFXI players is that FFXI will be ported over to Xbox 360. This news item was profound enough for Forbes to pick up the Microsft/Square Enix annoucement. Words like “key victory” were even used. I don’t really see how this can be touted as a “key victory” when Microsoft is including a four-year-old MMO on a console that isn’t exactly percieved as RPG/MMO-friendly, but when you’re Microsoft (and engaged in a console war with gaming powerhouse Sony), you take your victories however you can get them

What does this mean for FFXI? More players, first and foremost. The lifeblood of any MMO, especially one the size of FFXI, is players. The more the better. This will mean that FFXI will be the only MMO that operates across three different platforms (PC, PS2, now Xbox 360). This allows SE to continue to develop content knowing that they will not be losing subscribers anytime soon. Second, this makes one wonder if the PS3 version of the game is far off. SE has plainly stated that they are a multi-platform company and Sony has supported SE greatly in their endeavor to bring FFXI to their console. I would be shocked to hear that there wasn’t going to be a PS3 version.

Conjecture around the Xbox 360 version is rampant, but most of the speculated improvements are likely to be overblown. SE has said they have no intentions of locking players out of graphical upgrades and as the PS2 is the limiting factor here, we are likely to see resolutional upgrades for Xbox 360 but not much else. Play Online (SE’s proprietary network) will likely still be the portal to reach FFXI, and if the rumors about how the next generation Xbox Live pricing structure will work are true, then it will not cost new players anything more than the normal cost of the content ID’s to play.

The other likely outcome from this will be a new expansion. Although, a new expansion was likely to emerge soon anyway, this annoucement will likely set a firm date for when it will be available. There is precedence for an expansion to be made available when this MMO hits a new platform, as the Rise of the Zilart was made available when the PS2 version of FFXI was released in the US.

ringthree

It’s a curse…

[Guild Wars] I swear I have this curse regarding video games. Whenever I start to really like a game, something happens to smack me back down where I belong. Tonight was one of those times.

Feeling pretty good about GW, right? Yeah I was. Until I got these two quests. One was to go find some census papers from the wilderness and the other to escort some recruits to a guard station.

For the census quest, I picked a few henchmen and off we went. We got out to the chest the paper was supposed to be in and an ambush closed in on us. We got wiped because of some stupid gameplay by the henchmen (I swear I did nothing wrong, lol). My screen tells me it will be 10 seconds until resurrection.

We resurrect, but the healer henchman is missing. I can see her name in my group panel, but she is nowhere to be seen. We head back towards the chest and I can see that she is taking damage so she must be somewhere. Eventually we show up in the same area and I can see her dot on the radar but she was not there. After watching the pathing of some ranged attacks on her, I realized that she is under the terrain. Nice.

I opened the chest and nothing is in it. No census. Fun. Map travel to town and come back out again and this time it is in the chest. Quest completed. This brings to light an issue with the instancing. I hate that I have to clear out the same areas over and over everytime I leave and then re-enter the instance. Can’t they make it save for a few minutes or something? Would be nice.

Next quest, escort the three recruits to the guard station. I find them easy enough and off we go. A few times I have to go back as the recruits must have failed orienteering. Finally I get to the guard station and he yells at me because he was expecting three recruits and I only have two. Um, what the heck happened to the third guy?

I ran all the way back, retracing our steps and eventually find him standing in the same spot as where we found them. Nice job, soldier! Back we go again making sure he was following this time.

You know the saying that an army can only move as fast as it’s slowest soldier? This guy is living proof. I had to stop over and over again, waiting for Private Lazybones to get it in gear. Eventually, quest completed.

One last thing, I joined a guild tonight. Nobody I know, but they have a nice guild name and there is not one stupid character name in the guild so far. I have a cloak and a guild hall too, kind of cool. They seem like nice people. I guess I’ll find out how this is all going to work.

– Ethic

New Content For Free?

[Guild Wars] I just read that ArenaNet is going to be giving players two new explorable areas for free. Yeah that’s right, a game with no monthly fee is adding content to the game for free. Why aren’t you playing this yet?

As part of our commitment to bringing you new content via our free live updates, the first streaming update for Guild Wars offers players access to two extensive new explorable areas: the barren expanse of Grenth’s Footprint and the fiery depths of Sorrow’s Furnace.

I’ve been trying to think of things that GW doesn’t offer that other MMOs do. I am having a hard time thinking of one single thing I personally miss. Anything that is missing is usually something that sucked in the first place. Perhaps more time will cloud my dreamy view of the game.

– Ethic

Hey Shamans, I can walk on water too!

[World of Warcraft] As promised I did play WoW for the remainder of the weekend while I waited for my skill in EVE to train ( 5-6 days =/). The server was extremly laggy, buggy, and pretty much anything else you can complain about. All the horde players were running around doing the “I’M JESUS” in the public channel as they floated across the water while I was amusing myself flying floating around the world until I realized I couldn’t loot anything.

I logged back and I was no longer floating, however now there was a pack of about 5 (lvl 15-20) alliance running around killing random quest npcs while the hapless level 12’s were trying in vain to protect the sepulcher and nearby outposts, I myself was attacked halfway to fenris isle in the decrepit ferry (Im a level 17 warlock) by a hunter (lvl 15) and I had to fear him and kill his pet before I could run the rest of the way to fenris isle meanwhile dodgeing undead mobs.

I found it funny how many level 12’s were freaking out while exclaiming the obvious “OMG A LVL 18 PALADIN JUST KILLED MY QUEST NPC” while all of the level 20 horde players could have cared less even though they had the ability to stop the invaders. I grouped for fenris isle and it seemed the reports of “I CAN WALK ON WATER” had died down as I swam over there, but of course due to the horrible lag on the server I was disconnected moments before we finished killing the boss mob, therefore ruining my quest. All in all it was a pretty interesting night and I did get some minor quests finished.

Overall there was nothing more interesting than about 20 undead Jesus sightings…

-Zxyrox