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Race at my own pace

In Lotro I now have two max level characters. This is good. One would think this would give me more flexibility when looking to fill an open slot for the new raid. But it doesn’t.

I still don’t have the last two pieces of radiance gear I need to enter the new raid. The entire time I was leveling up my Runekeeper, I kept an eye on the global LFF channel to see if there were any groups forming for the pieces I needed. When you think of it, it’s rather ridiculous to think that it’s far easier to max out a new character than it is to get the tier-1 raiding gear. The EU servers went down tonight for the new raids, and I’m afraid that neither of my max level characters can enter the new raid.

I don’t mind the idea of doing some requirements first before getting into the new content, but those requirements shouldn’t be such a major pain to accomplish. I can’t say for sure, as I haven’t experienced the book 8 raid, but I doubt that every boss in there is tougher than the hard-mode challenge faced at the end of Dark Delving or 16th Hall. If only I had obtained my radiance gear before they fixed the exploits like everyone else!

I’m not alone, of course. All my friends who came over from Star Wars Galaxies don’t have the necessary armor either. We came much too late for the Rift, and just a little too late to get the gear we needed to see the Watcher and Book 8. If they were all 60, we could probably make our way through the radiance gear instances without exploiting them. They’re great players, and we conquered the SWG content together.

I’m now faced with a choice. Either I can try to catch up with the new content or I can wait for my friends to catch up with me.

Downtime = Weight Gain?

I have lost five pounds since getting into Team Fortress 2. Many of you are familiar with gamer diet, wherein you get a new game and forget to eat while you play for hours at a time, but I have been actively applying this to dropping some weight. First, willpower is a limited resource, and freeing myself to binge on one thing saves my resources to avoid binging on another. Second, my major effort is reducing calories, a good portion of which comes from eating only when hungry, rather than from boredom or habit. With a constantly active FPS, I do not have time to be bored or wander off for food. In an MMO, a ten-minute horse ride is a great time to go make a sandwich; in a FPS, a ten-second respawn time is all that separates you from a control point that is still in play. With no snacks at the desk, I have no caloric threats until we get back to the original point of gamer diet: look up from the game and realize it is time for bed.

Who has time to be hungry when there is an entire BLU team to set on fire?

: Zubon

Guild Wars Book Titles

Time for a lore lesson.  Guild Wars 2 occurs 250 years beyond the happenings in Guild Wars 1.  In between this time, a lot will undoubtedly happen in Tyria (and beyond).  I would guess that we will learn a lot of the changes in-game.  ArenaNet likes to leave a lot of crumbs so lore-happy fans can piece together things like civilizations, cultures, metaphysics, history, etc.  They are also releasing three novels via a deal with Pocket Books that will give vignettes of the changes that occurred across a quarter millennium. Continue reading Guild Wars Book Titles

IP Onslaught

I am not sure what I think about this.  38 Studios has a dream team of creative minds.  R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane alone could create an Arcadia beyond most mere mortal’s dreams.  Add in all their concept artists, game designers, and even coders (they have imaginations too!), and of course a great world is going to be created.

That being said, I feel like a bipolarized consumer of intellectual property (“IP”) when it comes to MMOs and offspring media.  Continue reading IP Onslaught

Reader Critique Requested: Toytown Tower Defense

Having noticed that our readers include a great many fans of tower defense games, the maker of Toytown Tower Defense asked for feedback on why his game might not have been well received. Or let’s put that in less polite terms: it is rated just below 3.5 on Kongregate, when some real garbage clears 4. Let’s get some reviews in the comments, something more substantial and useful than the Twitter-like comments on Kongregate. Try it before my ensuing comments bias your impressions. Continue reading Reader Critique Requested: Toytown Tower Defense

Learning Curves on the Shooting Range

My wife hesitates to try cooperative multi-player games because she does want groups depending on her to do something she does not know how to do. If your tank does not know her job, you wipe. If this is your crowd controller’s first time in a complicated fight, you may be in serious trouble. This worked fine in City of Heroes: not only could she solo for almost everything, but when she did group, she was a Scrapper who did not care about dying. There are very few cases in CoH where anyone cares if the Scrapper dies or has less than the perfect DPS setup.

As I am learning Team Fortress 2, I see that, but there is another factor: many of the people shooting me already know what to do. There are nine classes to learn, most with some special feature, six of whom have three additional options for their equipment; there are also all the maps to learn, some with multiple stages, all with their scattered refills, control points, backdoors, ambush spots, ramps, etc. While you are trying to get the swing of all this, one guy is lobbing pipe bombs at you, and you will be shot in the head in you pause in a sniper’s field of vision.

Some things are more intuitive than others. Protect this point, check. Move the cart along that line, check. And then you find that the map has multiple vertical levels, a little room with ammo and health, back stairs that everyone else on your team seems to know, and windows that you may or may not be able to shoot through. While someone with a flamethrower is leaping around the corner at you.

One of the great barriers for PvP games is that they are not newbie friendly. If veteran players are alongside green recruits, that is great for training the new guys and integrating them, and horrible for having their first night of play involve being shot in the head twenty times by guys they never saw. TF2 is kind enough to give you a picture of your killer, so you can see where those snipers are after someone kills you.

: Zubon

Like WoW

Describing Aion as “WoW with wings” caused one commenter to conduct a whole review and ranking system comparing, in his opinion, which MMO was most similar to Aion.  As was to be expected, it was differentiated from World of Warcraft at every possible instance.  Comparing an new MMO to World of Warcraft is a pretty common occurrence throughout the MMO blogosphere and game forums.  It is damn near the MMO locus.  Yet, there is much to differentiate even Runes of Magic ffrom World of Warcraft.  So what does WoW-like mean? Continue reading Like WoW

Happy 6th, Star Wars: Galaxies

Grab a pint of blue milk and raise your glass to the sky as we celebrate the 6-Year Anniversary of Star Wars Galaxiesâ„¢!

The Annual Empire Day celebration is back, and this year it is bigger and better than ever. Join Princess Leia and Lord Vader along with your favorite Star Wars® characters for awards, rewards, fireworks, events and elaborate ceremonies!

Join with our community and the Star Wars Galaxies Development Team in sharing your Star Wars Galaxies 6-Year Anniversary wishes by having your character sign the 6-Year Anniversary DataPad!

Gather your friends and join the celebration in-game between June 23rd and July 21st, 2009:

Empire Day Ceremony: Participate in an elaborate Imperial or Rebel ceremony featuring Lord Vader or Princess Leia in which you could be hand picked to receive a special badge.

Special Events: Locate all of the Imperial Recruitment and Anti-Propaganda kiosks and the Rebel Alliance Resistance and Vandalism Kiosks spread throughout Theed and Coronet to earn points and tokens redeemable for prizes.

Profession Quests: Traders, Entertainers and Combat professions will be able to participate in special Empire Day themed quests sure to deliver action and adventure.

Collections Complete special collections tied to the events and quests and earn tokens, GCW points, and in some cases, new titles for your diligence!

Special Items Use your hard earned tokens at special vendors to purchase Empire Day specific items such as a Tantive-IV Landspeeder, house decorations, and other Empire Day items.

Don’t miss out on this special occasion, it’s not everyday that Star Wars Galaxies celebrates 6 years of online adventure, intrigue, and excitement.

– Ethic

Enjoy the Maze

A behavioral scientist is a type of psychologist who spends a lot of time putting rats through mazes. Sometimes it’s a big maze, sometimes it’s a very small and simple maze. The one thing they all have in common is the cheese at the end.

The rats behave consistently. They move through the maze as fast as they can to get to the cheese. That’s just natural reward seeking behavior. Every rat we test is always going to get to the cheese as fast as they can. At no point do the rats ever slow down and just enjoy the maze.

Yet, our MMOs keep asking us to enjoy our maze. In the case of Lotro’s summer-festival maze, they mean it literally. But I wouldn’t be going through that maze were it not for the reward. I could get a new wall-paper for my house or a new fish-slap emote!

Our video game masters don’t want us reaching the end of the maze and getting full too quickly… so they ask us to slow down. We don’t. So they make the maze longer. They tilt the maze so that we’re struggling to go uphill to get to our cheese. Bastards! Why couldn’t they just make our maze more complicated and puzzle-driven? Then at least I’d feel smart when I beat the other rats there. Feeling smart is an especially nice little piece of cheese.

Really, if they wanted me to slow down, all they have to do is drop little bits of cheese all throughout the maze. Then I’d actually have something to stop and enjoy.