Kill Ten Rats

This is gold. Comedy gold. The guy that wrote this probably isn’t American so the grammar is a little off, but its the internet. No one has good grammar on the internet (well, besides me).

If you don’t have a wife, or fiancée, or girlfirend, or have ever had one of the above, or ever plan on having one of the above, or have met a woman, or have heard of the term “woman,” then this is not for you. For the rest of us men out there, this is great.

If you are a woman, please ignore the following link…

Guide: How to manage having a wife and playing a MMORPG.

ringthree

[EVE Online] I am warping about Gallente space, running some missions, shooting down pirates, when my contact asks me to deal with The Disgruntled Employee. Hmm, what is this?

Yes, I have something for you. Federation Customs recently sacked one of its employees after a routine inspection revealed a large amount of indecent pictures stored in his personal database. Sadly, this ex-employee wasn’t all too pleased with our decision, and has resorted to camping outside of our headquarters and harassing our customers. Fortunately though, we dug up some old offences this guy made and revealed them to the authorities, who promptly lowered his security rating quite a bit. In effect, he’s fair game. Please warp over to the location on the bookmark I’m about to give you and squash this little pest. I doubt he will survive for long, as some of our customers are heavily armed. So hurry up and take him out if you want your reward.

It is a short distance from “porn on the work computer” to “price on your head.” Of course I select option 1. No problem, I’ll do it, since camping someone’s HQ is rude. Let’s head to the mission!

The disgruntled smut-king’s hideout is supposedly located within this former asteroid belt which has been almost completely mined to oblivion. A suspicious looking hollow asteroid and a few barren rocks are all that remain of this once densely packed belt.

Ah, there he is, with two of the weakest drones I have ever seen. Checking info:

A disgruntled ex-employee who has been harrassing local customers.
Threat level: pathetic

Mission: success! Tomorrow: more heroics!

: Zubon

[Lineage 2] In Lineage 2 you have the wonderful feeling of knowing that if you ever need help, you can simply type /gm and usually within 20 minutes a real GM will be talking to you (wow).

This concept tends to breakdown however when you ask a question and the GM continues responding with prewritten form responses which in no way answer your question. After informing the GM that this response does not answer your question, you are rewarded with another form response which is simply the same response you were given before, yet written somewhat differently.

What is this GM doing, playing Russian roulette with a response generator?

Finally I explain once more what my question is and why this person has not yet answered it. Response? “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” I told them no thank you and to have a great day.

GM Evaluation: Poor!

Spot

[World of Warcraft] I fail today at naming this post but I do provide you with information about World of Warcraft. Cold hard facts from the Lead Developer Shane Dabiri (we go way back, we do!) about the great and wonderful-ness of WoW, and how they plan on taking over the universe on the backs of Epic White Tigers.

There were some comments of note:

We are committed to delivering the highest quality online experience for our players. Some of our upcoming plans have already been mentioned on our community site. For example, in our next major update, we will be releasing Blackwing Lair, a 40-person raid dungeon, where you will be able to battle against the epic dragon Nefarian and his minions. We are also working on a 20-person dungeon called Zul’Gurub, and the mysterious lands of Ahn’Qiraj in Silithus. Outside of dungeons, we want to continue adding new world events, such as a carnival that will take place in Mulgore and Elwynn forest.

Awesome! A third dungeon to grind through endlessly when you have nothing else to do after you ding 60!

Of course, on top of all this, each content update will also bring new quests, items, professions recipes, and continued class improvements. Some have asked about an expansion and what it might hold. I wanted to let players know that it is in the works, and we’ll release details as soon as we can.

Yes, Azeroth, not everyone has left Blizzard to go work at NCSoft! We still have the guy that brings me coffee in the morning. And we managed to shackle two of the junior interns to a desk. They are now being instructed in game coding, a la A Clockwork Orange! So there is an expansion on the way, but the GM’s will be forced to ban you if you ever ask when it might be released. Oh yeah, forgot to mention we tossed that in the last ToS update…

Anyway, back to reality, Blizzard looks like they are working pretty hard at content development, so there should be more for everyone soon.

Blatantly stolen from the WoW general discussion forum.

ringthree

Well, normally I think CCP is one of, if not the best devs in MMO history, the customer service is great, the server is reletively lag-free, and the patches dont take forever to download and best of all, I’ve never been stuck in a server que, ever. In adverse to WoW where there have been server downings, que’s, and just no way to get on. CCP has always made me glad to be onboard, but there is an aspect of the game that sets me over the edge.

1. The GMs (much like UO) are extremely evil and sedistic most of the time. Hell, most of them ARE pirates, and they have been known to kill random innocent players in low sec with thier uber gimped faction ships and tech 2 mods, therefore having a ship about as powerful as 5 Battleships, which is obsurd. And they have the powers of a basic chatroom moderator, except they dont need to be limited to a chat window…no! Lets give them the ability to take away a players ability to type in private conversations, corp, local, and even send eve mails for set amounts of time for either A. being petitioned for disrupting a chat channel (which can sometimes be a false acusation) or B. because you slight them, although it is rare to run into a GM in person or in chat, it has happened and multiple people have complained. I myself was gagged my first week of EVE for “Not respecting the rights of members in the channel” which was basically me going into a chat and being a newb unaware that it was a roleplaying channel, and when my friend asked if anyone liked anime was told “anime, hmm the records have no history of that since 2010!” and then questioning the sanity of the roleplayer.

2. A new bookmark nerf, now CCP has kept nerfs and most things to a minimal if not beneficial degree (the missile nerf sounds like a good idea IMO) but they now want to nerf bookmarks which are essencially an ability to set up a quicker faster route to an asteroid, stargate, or station. Making the travel system in EVE semi-bearable. Now CCP is one of those companies that give the Pirates(PKers) ALL the love as far as nerfs, updates, and fixes with anything else. And they have been complaining that its too easy for an industrial ship or helpless mining craft to escape thier clutches with quickwarps(QW). So the devs are going to make all the pirates happy by proposing a way to make a quickwarp that worked one day, not work the next. However I can see one good reason for this and it is serverside loads from the people with thousands and thousands of bookmarks. Now, saying the QW make players invinceable is a load of bullcrap, it still takes large ships like battleships, battlecruisers, industrials, and even cruisers time to warp, and having to fly 15km in a slowass indie is possibly the most annoying thing you will ever do in EVE, hell in low sec we have to constantly take supplies to our POS in a .3 system, therefore meaning each time we carry millions of supplies through those systems to just keep the thing alive or even to get the products from it to sell, we will need to bring an escort with us, which might not work if they are in large ganging groups. Overall this idea is stupid.

3. Not being able to dock at a POS. I could go on for hours on this but I already have on everything else so I will spare you the pain…but… I REALLY WANT TO BE ABLE TO DOCK AT MY OWN STATION. I would think this would be standard issue. Considering a starbase is…well…a starbase, and its nothing more than a chore without that ability. Hell I would move out and live in low sec if I could dock with our POS, and yet CCP complains about trying to get people to go out in low sec. Well not being able to dock at a station and nerfing QW, the most essencial travel tools, aren’t going to help. For the first time i’m not liking the choice of CCP but still the game is great and I cant wait for the new Dreadnaught class ships to be released…for now…happy hunting you lucky pirates!

-Zxyrox

I read online forums. Alot of online forums. Not just for MMO’s either, but that is a story for a different day. I have found one constant in the forums about MMO’s. Everyone bitches. They bitch about everything. They bitch about bugs, they bitch about nerfs, they bitch about RMT, MPK and anything else in the alphabet soup of complaints. It gets to the point where I wonder why some people play these games.

In amongst all of this bitching there is the occasional voice of sanity. This is a list of the sane and rational thoughts that I have compiled that, if followed, will likely help to improve everyone’s game experience.

1. Have fun. Seriously, if you are not having fun playing these games then something is wrong. If something is wrong, maybe it’s time to find something else to do.

2. Be nice. Its a pretty simple idea. Don’t grief, gank, MPK, or in general piss people off. I am sure it’s fun at the time (actually, I dont even understand how it could be fun at all), but you are just ruining the experience for everyone else. It’s kind of the American way now to only think of yourself, so I guess it’s the cool thing to do, but almost all of these games are based on some kind of community and if you are not helping the community, then you are just hurting it. Even, if you only care about yourself, then you should still be nice, because no one is ever going to help you if you dont.

3. Dont buy or sell in game currency. What is the freaking point? This is not Doom 2. There is no “idclip” command or god mode. What is the purpose in cheating in an MMO? This one has always gotten to me, I just dont understand the motivation. Do they think that all of their friends will think they are “uber” just because they instantly have “uber” gear? More like they will think that you are an attention whore.

4. Want to have “uber” gear, but don’t “need” it. We all want to have our epic armor, or our rings of doom or whatever, but that doesn’t mean its necessary to have them to play the game. Farm, work, quest, do whatever to get it but dont let it frustrate you that you dont have it.

5. Understand simple economics. Just because things are expensive and they are continuing to get expensive doesn’t mean the economy is broken. A contstant in all MMO’s is that money is always coming into the economy, through farming, crafting and questing, and less of it is going out of the economy, through loss, buying NPC items, etc. This means that there is a constant state of inflation in all games. Inflation isn’t bad, per se, because the cost of the item that you want may be increasing but so is the cost of the items that you are farming. It all balances out.

6. The developer is not out to get you. Blizzard really is trying to fix the bugs. SOE really does want you to be happy when you are playing. Square Enix isn’t out to get you. They have tons of people that are working on the games to make them better all the time. Just because YOU feel slighted because YOU perceive a problem doesn’t mean that it is an actual problem.

So, I guess I just spent a bunch of time bitching about bitching. I know I feel better.

ringthree