Category: General

[Kingdom of Loathing] For those interested in such things, several people tried for one-day Ascensions (i.e., beat the game) in Kingdom of Loathing yesterday. They were coming off Hardcore-Oxygenarian (max difficulty) runs and donated a good amount of the money to have maximum rewards/resources. Bashy seemed the most likely, being perhaps the most prominent player in the Kingdom. He has…everything. Mysticality day, a good donation item, coming off an Oxycore run… good times.

This thread tracks the progress of several of the runners, along with commentary and cheerleading. Or, if you want to cut to the chase, read after the break.

Continue reading One-Day Ascension?

[City of Villains] Folks asked for a typical day in City of Villains, so here is the running account of today’s play. [edit: I have been informed that this is pretty boring. Sorry about that.]

Log in my level 39 Dark Blast/Thermal Radiation Corruptor. Friends are also in this level range (two 38 Masterminds, 35 Dominator), so I immediately join them. We run a few missions against Wailers and Circle of Thorns, then they all need to go for various reasons.

Continue reading A Day In the Life

[World of Warcraft] I try not to gripe too often. No one wants to hear it. This time, I’m just a little too angry. What’s my problem? Obviously it is about World of Warcraft. It’s not about the game itself but the stuff that Blizzard keeps adding to it that simply doesn’t work well. What is it this time? Deserter.

Haven’t heard of the new Deserter debuff? It happens when you abandon a battleground. It’s basically punishment for those people who leave a game when the outcome of the game doesn’t seem to be in their team’s favor. It gives you a debuff that lasts fifteen minutes and does not allow you to enter a BG. Sounds pretty good, right? After all, it just fixes one of those annoying little nuances that whiney, impatient gamers bring to WoW. WRONG! It brings along several other problems.

Continue reading Seriously, Why?!

[World of Warcraft] Just a quick note that my server (Hellscream) opened the world event gates today, at the moment I dont have much to share other then. “WOW THIS PLACE IS A LAGGY HELLHOLE” taking screenshots and whatnot…might post more later.

-Zxyrox

[EVE Online] Thought I’d share something I’ve been pondering over the last few weeks….

In EVE online, my “progression” came in different stages.

First 2 months: Mostly I was just getting to know the game…new shiny, new gameplay…new style…new (almost) everything. I wasnt sure on what I wanted to do… I had skills spread out in all directions, and I did missions and mined with a friend for the most part.

2-3 months later: I had decided I wanted to be a miner/industrialist. I had my skills queued up for a mining barge craft, which I would fly within a month, I stayed in the corporation’s system and harvested isk all day long, making around 10mill per day

Continue reading Have not posted for a while…so…

[World of Warcraft] Today was my server’s (Mannoroth) day for the gates of AQ (Ahn’Qiraj) to open. Unfortunately, I was on the road today, had to pick up my brother, and forgot that my local time zone is not the same as my server’s time zone, so I missed the opening of AQ by a few minutes. Regardless, I got to run around the area and have a little fun.

Continue reading Live Event: AQ

[EVE Online] One of the things EVE Online is known for is skill training in real time. That is, you click the start button, and the skill trains. It takes a certain amount of time, whether you are online or not, and then you get the skill level when that time is up. Pretty simple.

About the only way to make this go faster is to improve your attributes (Perception, Intelligence, etc.), either through the Learning skill set or by buying valuable cybernetic implants. Conversely, the only thing those attributes do is cut skill training times.

As a player, you face a simple choice: learn Learning skills or go for directly useful ones. You must play for a long period of time for the time spent on the Learning skills to pay itself back, but the best time to train those skills is from day one, before you really know whether you want to play EVE. This must have interesting effects on player retention, and I presume that someone at CCP has done the math.

Continue reading Learning Skills

[City of Villains] I understand that many of you used to play Everquest or some other game where it was accepted for team-formation to take as long as a half-hour. Apparently, there are still games where grouping is nigh-mandatory and forming a playable team takes that long.

Stop playing those games.

Continue reading Acceptable Waiting Times

[EVE Online] I have mentioned before about the Important Storyline mission of “give the janitor a ride to his vacation spot.” Working for another corporation recently, I was again offered the chance to be a janitor’s taxi, a mission that strongly affected my standings with several empires. This is a janitor of some import. I realized, talking with him while we warped between systems, that the janitor is actually Chuck Norris.

As the greatest actor of our time might say, “Whoa.”

: Zubon

In-game, we do not have five-hour meetings. When we get a large group of people together for five hours, we are going to slaughter things by the thousand.

In-game, we do not spend the first half hour of our gathering engaging in a clever ice-breaker, to help get those creative juices flowing and put everyone in the right mental place for a free-wheeling discussion. We spend the first half-hour alt-tabbed, reading web pages while waiting for everyone to get to the right zone. We may also be discussing character builds or the latest test server notes on Teamspeak. (If anyone has a way for me to alt-tab from life during clever ice-breakers, please post it in the comments. No PDAs.)

Continue reading Work vs. Game