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Shared Storage

I do not know what it costs in these days of Turbine Points, but I received shared storage in LotRO as a part of the Siege of Mirkwood/Adventurer’s Pack deal of 2009. I may or may not have thrown some Turbine Points at expanding it, but I may if I notice a sale (otherwise: save for buying this fall’s expansion).

I had originally bought in-game housing for the shared chest, so this replaced my need for a house, and it was conveniently accessible from any vault. Upgrade! I only re-acquired housing this weekend, because I am willing to spend 1 gold plus 50 silver per week to give all my characters a convenient recall to Thorin’s Gate. The atmosphere in dwarf housing may not be the best, but it is the closest to town and a stable, and my new house is conveniently right next to the door. Upgrade!

shared storage After the 238th time of forgetting that I wanted to pass that [Drop of Amber Resin] to my Loremaster while muling, I used the new tabbed vault interface to set up what you see in the picture. Each character gets a tab (level/class indicated), and when I empty out a character’s pack of goods for alts, I just drop items on the appropriate tab. (You do not need to open each pack, just drag the item to the tab name.) 9 characters, 10 tabs, plus a main pack for unsorted items: no more forgetting items when switching characters.

This has been especially handy as I take advantage of tasks. My Warden has been gaining a level a day, so when I finish a quest hub, I dump the out-leveled vendor trash on a character who can redeem it for xp. (The same applies if I farm deeds or visit old dungeons.) I usually pass 5 to 10 tasks worth of excess vendor trash, plus change for when I play those alts again. It is not a lot of xp, but it works around the 5/day/character task limit, and the loss of silver means nothing when my level-capped character is sitting on enough gold to buy an entire neighborhood of housing.

: Zubon

An Unusual Advertisement

The developer diary for the new upcoming LotRO instances fails to name or discuss the upcoming instances. It is almost entirely about loot and barter token drops.

Okay, how does it advertise the barter token drops? “[T]he costs for barter currency have been inflated significantly,” and that new currency is available on from quests that “reset just as though they were on the twice-a-week raid reset timer.”

The makers of Rift quake at launching in the face of such competition.

: Zubon

Alpha Endurance

For my return to City of Heroes, I took three characters out of mothballs. My old main, a Blaster, is on the list of characters to play. I mentioned taking Leadership on too many characters; she was one to pick up a couple of toggles, and Ice Blasters were always known for dumping their attacks very quickly. She received the endurance-conserving Alpha Slot enhancement. Wow, that solved everything. For non-CoXers, imagine picking up an ability that reduced the mana cost of everything by 15-25%. Combined with the already high endurance recovery, that made the difference, letting her attack more or less continuously forever.

The next options along that chain are damage resistance and range. She has just the one, small damage resistance power, so improving that will not do much, but I am amused at the idea of adding more range to all her attacks. She already has three damage/range Hami-Os in Caltrops, so this will let her “drop” them all the way across a room.

: Zubon

In Line At Disney World

As I sit waiting for the server to come back from what seems to be the daily or so Rift downtime, I really hope the latest queue-avoiding trick is being fixed. It’s a rather blatant code error that I’m not going to explain, as each time someone explains it in public chat there are even more people doing it. However, people use it to avoid the queues, going AFK for multiple hours, such as their jobs, and come home and instantly get in. It’s annoying for those of us who have to wait in the queue, although even playing on the much-maligned Faeblight, I don’t find them that bad. Last night I logged in to a proposed 90 minute queue, but I got in in just over 30 minutes. Today I logged in twice, both times with no queue, in the morning and early afternoon. I’ve seen the queues going down every day, and expect as the “Race for 50” pack finishes and logs out in boredom, and the afk exploiters get booted, it will simply be a full server.

To me, the queues are good, in that they throttle the people coming in to a (barely) reasonable level, and except for the second day, I’ve never had to wait for over an hour. I’ve waited that long at Disneyworld to go on a 37 second ride. I just login to the queue and go get other stuff done.

[GW2] The Depth of a Norn

The norn can be hard to understand. We want them to be giant, animist, shape-shifting Vikings, but that’s too simple. That’s not depth; that’s just a bunch of cliches rammed together in some fashion where a lesser fantasy game would conclude a new race has been made. ArenaNet didn’t stop there. They gave them life and purpose. I find too often in many fantasy games (MMOs, solo, or even table top), we just handwave some of the most important questions on a new race. It’s when there are actions by the race that make us stop and think because it feels wrong, it feels not human, that we find depth.

The first time I saw this was when I read Lord of the Rings. Elves never made sense to me. They are leaving? They are sad at Man? Buck up, you point eared snobs! I thought they were just full of themselves, except for Legolas. He’s a pretty cool guy. Finally I realized in playing Lord of the Rings Online watching Glorfindel’s face get painted by the sun in the shadow of leaves that Tolkien had given them depth. A depth I could only realize if I thought like an immortal elf that had seen all this before. They wouldn’t make sense in human motivations, and I feel ArenaNet has given the norn the same treatment.

Continue reading [GW2] The Depth of a Norn

[Rift] Emmobilized


Cool Rift Pic
Embattling Life

No, that’s not an accidental typo. The English prefix “em,” along with it’s sister “en,” means “to make into.” So, empower is to make something with power. Subsequently “emmobilized” would mean to “to get people in action for action, like war.” In Rift, every time a rift event drops, the players around mobilize. In a zone-wide invasion event, it seems sometimes that the whole zone answers the call to repel the planar intruders. Except, “emmobilize” is not a word.  “Immobilize” is. In much of my time in Rift’s Head Start, I have felt immobilized despite all internal intentions to the contrary. I have hope that soon the clouds will clear.

 

Continue reading [Rift] Emmobilized

Import Quality

I have somehow gotten this far without blogging about the Alchian-Allen Theorem, but it is an economic principle you should understand in this international games market. It also applies to cartoons and dating, so stick with me through the econ.

Let’s start with those cartoons. You should expect anime in the English-language market to be of higher average quality (or at least broader appeal) than the anime in Japan. Why? It is not worth the cost to translate and localize crap shows. Fan-subbed series should be of lower average quality because companies will have already brought over the more lucrative (higher quality and/or more popular) titles. (Notable exceptions: bootleg fan-subs torrented while something is still mid-season; shows that are “too Japanese” to survive localization but are great if you know the culture.)

More generally in entertainment, you should expect the titles imported to be some of the best ones that country/language/culture has to offer. At least, you should expect them to have broad appeal, which is often but not always a sign of high quality. (Can I stop doing that disclaimer? Assume “better” means “better bottom line,” which is often associated with quality but sometimes with appealing to the lowest common denominator, which is not always bad either.) Lineage and Aion are probably the Korean MMOs with the most appeal in the Western market, ditto the Final Fantasies from Japan. Weird licensing issues pop up, but if the money is good enough, you can expect those highly profitable games to come over. Second tier, maybe. The equivalent of our crap games? Not worth shipping. You may have noticed other titles coming over using lower fixed costs, notably less effort at localization (contribute your favorite lousy, completely unprofessional translation) and less advertising, and you may have noticed that many of them are really poor. (The same applies in the reverse direction. WoW has many Chinese subscribers; has Age of Conan been localized for China?) As fixed costs drop, you should expect more options but lower quality or more narrow appeal. Recettear had a great localization, but a limited number of people will get excited about a fantasy adventure game where you run the item shop.

Oh, I promised you sex. This applies to human interactions as well. If you have a long-distance relationship, you will probably expect it to advance by leaps and bounds when you meet in-person, because you did not fly 5000 kilometers just to watch TV together. Similarly, if you go to something like E3, PAX, BlizzCon, etc., you are going to expect a really good experience when you drop hundreds of dollars to attend; if you go to something more local, your expectations will not be as dialed up, and you are not as invested. Let’s re-phrase that: if you live in Anaheim, you might go to BlizzCon if you think it looks pretty good, but if you live in Boston, you are only going to BlizzCon if you think it will be really awesome; same convention, different thresholds and expectations. These kinds of raised expectations can go well or lead to really huge disappointments as all the dreams (and money) you had invested in this person or convention crash on the shoals of reality.

: Zubon

Quote of the Week

Inertia is the inclination of moving objects to keep moving, and for stationary objects to stay put. Once you get going in EVE, it’s easy to keep going. The skill queue charts your course, you have your market ops and your research and the ongoing political situation with your allies and enemies, and it’s just easy to keep moving in that space.

But should you stop — your skill queue empties out and you forget what you were training to do, nobody in game remembers you anymore, your research seems pointless and you are no longer connected to the game.
— Tipa

It applies generally.

: Zubon