Category: General

[EVE Online] I know a few of you have been wondering what EVE Online is like…and although I’m not the best at explaining things I will…

In EVE there is a gigantic galaxy…with hundreds of solar systems…all having a security rating…1.0 is tight security and 0.0 has no security. All the players play on one server (excluding the test server). You pilot a multitude of ships and use a plethora of skills depending on what path you wish to follow… there are no limits to the amount of skills you can have and can transition easily to which ever style suits your play (asteroid miner, mercinary, space pirate, trader, or a ship builder). Each has its own challenges and there are probably more than I have listed…

Open ended as the game is…to get a truely engrossing gaming experience you need ISK (EVE money) and lots of it. Usually one joins a corp to get started off and then ascends the ranks of corps from the newer ones to the more serious ones…. a corp is like a guild in WoW or other fantasy MMOGs

As far as game mechanics go… you pilot a variety of ships…from the fragile frigates to the intimidating Battleships and even the middle ground cruisers…however there are alot more classes of ships designed to do what you want them to, be it a fighter or a hauling craft.. but you dont control the ships directly, so if you enjoy fast paced shooting combat, EVE isn’t for you…the piloting involves clicking on an options interface like other MMOGs. You customise your ships with whatever weapons and electronic gear you can, from ECM to velocity upgrades

If you engage combat, and death is eminent… you can eject into your lifepod which is your last defense from death…if you are killed in this pod (podded) then you respawn as a clone in the last station you sent the clone to..higher level clones result in less skill loss…if you are killed then you lose some skill points you had trained.. about skill points…unlike in some games…it is impossible to power level a character seeing as how all skills train at the same rate (unless you learn skills to make training easier).

Well that’s all I can think of at the spur of the moment…if you have any other questions then post a comment and I’ll see if I can answer them. (By the way if you are interested in getting EVE check out www.eve-online.com and check it out…if anyone decides to try it look me up and I’ll try to help ya out :D )

-Zxyrox

One of the main characters involved in Turbine (makers of AC, AC2, DDO, and MEOLOTRO or something) left a few weeks ago and has now found new employment.

Jason Booth is working for some non-MMO company so it’s unimportant. Ha.

Anyway, he left some comments regarding MMOs that I wanted to point out to see what people think about them. There is a lot of truth there to be sure, but is it really that black and white? Here is an excerpt:

… the MMP industry is boiling the formula down to a very destructive set of lesson for our society. These lessons appear to be:

Achievement is far more important in life than enjoyment, family, friends, etc.

We should all be equal, regardless of our given talents. Time and devotion to achievement is all that matters, skill and smarts are worthless.

Don’t think, just grind.

If you grind harder, you will be “more cool” than others.

The problem is that none of these really lead to a happy or compelling life. Play is supposed to be an enjoyable learning function which helps you to understand some aspect of life, not a time waster, or worse, something which literally drives you to neglect your life.

Good luck in the future Jason!

– Ethic

[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

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

[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

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

[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

[EVE Online] Well my weekend optimism goes out the airlock…. Apparently CCP can’t function well enough to make sure everything stays in the Corp hanger. Chaos today when my corporation’s CEO announced that the corporation hanger had been cleaned out, and apparently only a corp. member could do that.

Problem here is that that wasn’t the case at all, and in the meanwhile people were being blamed left and right for what happened until I go to my CEO with the Minerals I have required to build my new cruiser and of course he goes to the mineral storage container that was securely locked with a password…and woe and behold the minerals are gone too….

At this point we all know that it couldn’t have been anyone of us because it was in the Admin hangers with a password…which only two people have access to. Now he’s upset and I don’t throw down on him for being pissed off, because isn’t part of the $15 you pay a month towards maintaining everything? Making sure player stats are saved and items are left where they were before? CCP has never given me a problem like this before and it’s a shame that all those hours of mining I did to get those minerals for my cruiser are gone…heh I think I’ll go play WoW tonight…

-Zxyrox

Good day gentle reader. This will be the first of hopefully many more posts to come. My hope is to be able to comment about MMOs in general, but for the most part I will be talking about WoW. It is the only MMO I currently subscribe to and therefore know the most about. I have played just about every major MMO out there. Usually I preorder games and play the betas ($10 for 3 or 4 months of play is a bargain) or I buy the full retail version on Ebay once the game has been out for a while. That being said, I have yet to “invest” in a copy of Mourning. Of course the downside is that I am usually spread pretty thing playing WoW, whatever Betas I can get in to, and my PS2. However, it does give me a pretty decent understanding of where each game is strong and weak. I have friends that complain about every little detail in WoW and I have friends who are Blizzard fanboys that would not talk bad about the game even if Blizzard decided that all Horde characters should move at 1/2 speed.

As much as I like WoW, I must admit that the fantasy genre isn’t really my thing. Sure, I can play fantasy games and I have nothing against them, but at heart I’m a sci-fi geek. I’ve tried AO, EVE, and a few others (not SWG though, I’m a Trekkie) and I haven’t found a sci-fi MMO that has really made me want to pay a monthly fee yet. MxO was fun and I think has an amazing ammount of potential, but I’m not too big on the hacking/cyberpunk thing. I thought the game would be set mostly in the “real world” and you could go around Zion and the tunnels, with an option to go in to the Matrix. In hindsight, that probably wouldn’t have made for a better game than what they came up with.

Also, I was a big comic book geek back in the 90s where every 5th issue of a Marvel comic had 2 or 3 covers (regular, hologram, foil, etched, chrome, etc.). I got a chance to play CoH a while back. I bought the special edition on Ebay for $20 off some guy that just bought it for the Heroclix figure. The game itself was pretty fun, but not enough to get me to pay $15 a month just yet. I’ll probably give it another shot once CoV comes out.

So that’s pretty much where I stand with MMOs for the moment. The fantasy games are tops despite not being my favorite genre. I’d like to see more sci-fi games and would like to see CoH polish itself a bit. My most anticipated game is Star Trek Online just because I’m a Trekkie (but boy, that was an awful final episode of Enterprise). But for the moment I’m sticking to WoW.

DC

heylo everyone….I’m new to posting here and I’ll take the opportunity to introduce myself. I’ve played many MMOGs in my gaming career…but the ones I frequent most now are the famous/infamous Fantasy role playing game known as World of Warcraft (WoW) and the space based MMOG known as EVE online.

For those of you who have never heard of EVE online, or have never played it; it’s a game involving space travel and management of money, assets, and knowledge of the EVE universe. You can choose a profession, but unlike MMOGs like WoW and EQ you don’t “choose” your skill per se…but you can utilize different methods to make money or ISK. I’ll get more into how the game works later but now you have the basics…

You could consider me an anti-pk in some respects, I don’t generally prefer PvP as a Profession or Game style, but a little of it every now and then doesn’t bother me… I could care less about powerleveling in adverse to playing the game not to get the next level…but to have fun with the game (one of the reasons I play EVE online is that it is virtually impossible to powerlevel skills in anyway). For now I’ll end my introduction and ill write more about my experiences, likes/dislikes. or information on the MMOGs I frequent later. Farewell for now….

-Zxyrox