Category: General

General

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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How Alts Happen

I made a Minstrel a week ago so I could pick up a couple more trade skills. He holds stuff, he eventually crafts, great! I got him in the kinship today, so that I could use the kin storage chests to transfer items. I went on a trade skills supply run across a few zones, then went back to kin storage to transfer it.

After logging on the other characters for their toys, I brought on the baby Minstrel. He had done nothing outside the tutorial area except pick up the quests when you first enter the real world. Grab all his stuff from the kin box, and head to Thorin’s Hall. I can hit the vault there and maybe crunch some of these trade skill supplies into points. Oh, cave claw along the way, lets zap him to get a click on the deed log. *bing* Oh, I have a quest that needs some of those. Hmm, and I need this cave to the north. I can hit that before swinging by Thorin’s Gate. Fight goblins on the way up, collect the items in the cave, fight goblins on the way down. *bing* First deed complete, basic goblin-slayer in Ered Luin (new title). And I hit level 7 along the way.

Hmm, those cave claws and the items I picked up are half of two quests. I can redeem them at Thorin’s Hall, so let’s get the other halves before heading in. Zip across, collect a few items, whack a few enemies along the way. Quest done, done, done, trade skill quest done with the items I transferred at the kin chest. Let’s do my own trade skill stuff, which gives me a new weapon, oh and that other quest done. Just a couple more quests before I’m done in the area, so I might as well clean up and move on. Quest done, level 8.

Run along to the next town, drop off quest done, done, done. One is a click-and-come-back, and it passes me by another quest (done), so let’s clear that river and … small detour, talk to that guy after clearing the river (done), head back. Hit a few birds and cats along the way to get another quest half-done. And back to that second town, another quest done, level 9. And somewhere in there I completed another deed, the first for completing quests in Ered Luin.

Luckily, I am out of blue bar (rested xp), so I can go to bed now. But tomorrow, if I want, I can finish the quests that take me from here back through the starter area and back, then the first group quest and on to the middle-sized city in the middle of the zone… And I’m 3/4 of the way through the first bar of a trade skill, so I just need a bit more bronze to finish that out… And so it goes.

: Zubon

Self-Set Standards II

If you proudly tout yourself as “Best PC Game Ever,” that is a lot to live up to. Even if the game is really really good, it will rate “below expectations.” If your “revolutionary MMO” is Everquest +/-5%, we will mock you; if your “WoW-killer” gets 100,000 subscribers, your marketing has turned a viable, sustainable, successful game into a disappointing failure.

Rick Astley’s Greatest Hits describes “Rick’s true legacy: as one of Britain’s best and most underrated blue-eyed soul singers.” Fair.

: Zubon

There are a few good songs on the album beyond the classic. The video really does add something.

Also Annoyingly Linear

The problem with annoyingly linear is not that it is linear, but that it is annoyingly so. Done well: Portal, a puzzle game where the whole point is to get from Point A to Point B. Done not too badly: the last level of Portal, where the tile set changes but there is still just the one path and someone has conveniently painted signs as if this too were a planned part of the enrichment center activity.

Done fairly badly: City of Heroes office buildings, where each set of elevators only goes between two floors. To get to his office on the top floor, the boss must walk about a mile and take five or ten staircases (on the strange multi-story floors). The shapes of the floors have no connection to each other, despite the normal outside appearance. Darn non-Euclidean architects. This one is bad in terms of logic and suspension of disbelief, not gameplay; as a gameplay element, the buildings are fairly straightforward tubes of monster to smash. The gameplay problem is when things are less linear, and you must find the last three enemies standing behind a rock around a corner on a small incline on a spur off the third path on the second level, who did not notice when you fired some grenades and a sonic wail at their boss twenty feet away.

Done badly: Garth Agarwen in Middle Earth’s Lone Lands. Garth Agarwen is an outdoor instance, your group’s own chunk of the red swamp. There are a few loops and dead-ends, and a fork separating the two big bosses, but mostly it is a path that winds around itself. It faces the same strange architecture whereby you go through every room to get to the back. It is as if you took all the hallways out of your home and put a door on either side of each room. And sometimes the door is a trapdoor leading to your basement, then up to the catwalk you built near the ceiling to get to the trapdoor up into the bathroom, through the door in the back of the shower into the laundry room, slide the oven aside to get into kitchen, take the door to the kids’ room, out the window into a fenced portion of the backyard, climb the ladder to the top of the shed, then walk across the board into your bedroom window to get your cell phone, which already went to voice mail, dangit. Was that oven-slide a one-way passage? I need to use the bathroom. It might be faster to jump out the other bedroom window and walk around to the front door, assuming the dogs haven’t respawned.

Again, this is not necessarily bad gameplay, although it is annoying to see a teammate just above your jumping height when you know it will take a hundred yards of running to reach him. Could you just throw me a rope? Or when you shoot an enemy and must wait a minute while he navigates all those corners on the way to you. Or when you try to think about the enemy actually living there. Okay, it’s annoying.

: Zubon

Open Mic Night

Can you please turn on “push to talk,” at least until you get over that cough? Or until you sell those cockatiels?

I confess: I discriminate against pre-pubescent males. Something about the voice of the twelve-year-old boy coming from the Orc Reaver grates. It is bad when they are whiny or needy, but perhaps worse when they are the group leaders who are trying to instruct incompetent adults. The modern age is full of examples of small children explaining technical matters to their elders, but I do not need it in my headset for an hour. I know he’s twelve, but just listen to him when he says that we are moving out.

Turn on your voice chat in PvP. Yes, I mean you. I don’t care if you don’t have a mic; listen. Stop blowing into the mic.

: Zubon

GamerDNA

When did they ruin GuildCafe? I made a GuildCafe page a while ago, but when I went to my new guild’s site there to try to connect to it, I could not edit my The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ status. Going in to edit my games only lets me see the first six, with no option to reach the rest, and I cannot even delete and re-add the game.

Why don’t we make a lousy version of MySpace, intentionally focus it on a limited audience, then change the name and bork the tools so it is even less useful?

I shouldn’t blog after midnight.

: Zubon

Out of 100 people who hate Bartle…

– 20 probably shouldn’t be allowed on the human section of the internet.
– 10 miss his points. Completely and repeatedly.
– 15 corner themselves with their own arguments.
– 5 point at those cornered guys and laugh.
– 30 have arguments which basically reduce to “I don’t like you dissin’ my game”
– 10 think he’s an old fart/academic/smartypants therefore he’s unable to have real opinions of real value.
– 5 think he can’t comment on MMOs because he really hasn’t put in 200 hours in “Barbie Genital Herpes World Online: Arena”
– 3 read, and don’t post, when they probably should.
– 2 guys actually prove him wrong here and there. And Bartle loves it.

I Hate Your Guild

I hate you for spamming every 90 seconds, with a paragraph of text that takes up the entire chat box. You are almost as considerate as the gold-spammers. They at least restrict themselves to one zone.

Let me tell you, nothing says “selective” quite like a guild that broadcasts for members. Constantly. I am sure that is how the most competent people come together. And that whole bit where you don’t even spell the words properly? Gold.

: Zubon