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Lag and Gambits

As a Hunter, lag is inconvenient. I might need to wait an extra second before an arrow fires, and I will occasionally mess up my rotation because a lag spike lasted longer than an activation/animation time. Meh, I sometimes shoot people in the face a slightly different way than expected.

As a Warden, lag is fairly horrible. Gambits key off combinations of three skills, so you could be in trouble if thrown-off timing leads to your getting the wrong skills, the wrong order, or a gambit firing before it is complete. If I need my area effect morale leech (312-4), I may really need that health, and 31-4, 32-4, 12-4, or 312-“why isn’t this firing” are not going to cut it. Those are all other gambits, one of which has a small HoT, but they are not the one I need.

Server-side lag has been problematic since the last update. Every fight or two, everything freezes for 0.5 to 2 seconds. It feels absurd to whine about 1 second delays, but that is very frequent, relatively large, and annoyance builds up. Gameplay has a rhythm, and you do not want skips several times a song. I find myself paying more attention to the UI so that lag befouls fewer gambits.

: Zubon

One Entitled Eight-Ball

Is Rift a success? Yes, I am a happy customer. The end. Print that for a box top and smoke it, Trion. Everything else from their return-on-investment to some silly “3-monther” yardstick is irrelevant. Yet, the story doesn’t fully end because this is a subscription game, and I have to determine whether it’s a success every single month. I will never say I am going to subscribe until the servers go dark. Therefore, Rift is instantly a success, and it will never be a success.

The MMO community carries a weird sense of measure for a successful game. It’s like there is some pressure for the game to be timeless that seems found nowhere else in the video game world. People are buying a new Pokemon this month, which is the exact same game every iteration. What about the $60 console games with 10 hours of gameplay before the credits roll? I own games on Steam I have never even played! Yet somehow it matters if Rift is timeless now?

It must be some weird artifact of the bygone days, you know before World of Warcraft ruined “community,” to be benchmarking the game’s life at launch. I certainly am not looking for an indefinite home, especially in a subscription-based game. I am looking for a sweet-vacation spot. When I hit sunny Acapulco, my fun is definitely not inhibited by worries that the town is going to go donkey turds in five years. It surprises me that people are viewing their MMO time that way. Hopefully they are still enjoying the game regardless of what their magic eight-ball is telling them

–Ravious
so let it be written, so it shall be done

[Rift] Breaking Through

Starting the Event

Last night was the kickoff event for my Rift guild, Gaiscioch. We congregated at the entrance of Silverwood (from the tutorial zone), and rode through Silverwood on to Sanctum to help people pick up the porticulum warps. Along the way we ran over any extraplanar forces. Then we headed to the Defiant side, where we helped stop a water invasion, and then turned on the godless mongrels just outside of Meridian. Being that most of our 150+ person event was below level 25, the soulless guards of Meridian were able to single-handedly wade through the Defiant tombstones and stop our ascent. I had to say I don’t think I have had this much fun in an MMO since my first big RvR event a few years ago.

Continue reading [Rift] Breaking Through

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