April 2007 Entries
Why does everybody suddenly want to hear what I have to say these days?
And by that, I don't mean it in a figurative sense, as in read my blog and consider the ideas sometimes presented here. No, I mean literally, hear my voice. It's always been a constant low-grade irritation for me, probably dating back from my first days in a proper Planetside outfit. Those didn't last long mind you, but often I'd be nagged at to 'get on TS', as if me suddenly being able to hear the vague and general non-specific warnings and orders would in some...
So, when last you left us in GuildWars: Nightfall, we'd all fallen out over the classic 'Friend of my Friend is not necessarily also my Friend' type of conundrum, and somewhat lost track of where we were, and what we were supposed to be doing, and for a moment there, during the long dark teatime of the soul this week, I even considered on giving up on the whole thing and just doing solitary maudlin cyber-tourism in Anarchy Online on Tuesdays, instead.
Luckily, despite pretensions at being a brooding over-sensitive Byronic type in my online dealings (complete with big shirt sleeves),...
Interesting observations here:
Raph's Website: The Game Without Treadmills
(Via Virgin Worlds)
In which I am reminded why Raph Koster has quite the guru status he does. The piece is short, relevant and to the point, and basically explains why the Treadmill we all supposedly hate, is unfortunately, quite necessary in any MMO that hopes to be a big hit. It particularly struck a chord with me, because I've seen exactly the phenomena described first-hand, in my month-by month flitting from title to title.
Being "In The Industry", and so on, I expect he can't point fingers at particular titles very easily, but STILL...
More EVE card game hijinks, and this time, two matches, two players each. Game one went much the way the two-player fights seem always to, with myself, as Minmatar, with my usual and only minimally refined Frigate Swarm deck, pitted against a continually evolving and somewhat disjointed Caldari opponent deck.
Each of the four races does seem to have an underlying theme to their cards on the whole, and strategies that suggest themselves. I've figured out mine quite comfortably now, and for Minmatar, it really does seem to be about getting cheap ships out early and often, and not getting...
I'm not sure what I was expecting really - a scene from memory mostly, which no longer exists in any real sense, nor is likely to ever again. It was glorious once though; the eastern plaza of Omni 1 Entertainment; the bustling vibrant hub of a busy world.
This was five years ago, I suppose. Anarchy Online had been released long enough for various patching and tweaking to have been done, and even a bit of a rewrite of how textures worked in memory - compression and the like, I think. I forget exactly, but there was a big progress bar...
Bah...another of those chain-letter tag blog things again, courtesy of The Podnosticator. You know, when I'm done here, I think I'll track this one back to it's source and have a Very Stern Word with them about attention seeking. Anyway, I'm afraid of curses, misfortune and ill-fated happenstance, so here's my five things:
Five Reasons That I Blog:
1) I have a terrible..thing....you know...that you use to remember stuff with, so it helps to write stuff down.
2) For reasons that are far too complicated to go into right now, if I drop below two thousand words a week, this blog will explode,...
So having a spare Battlecruiser that I didn't quite know what to do with, I thought I'd have a poke about in one of the much talked about 0.0 Outer Regions, and try a bit of 'Ratting' first-hand. The Battlecruiser is the ideal ship for this, as they are powerful enough to be able to cope with the NPC Battleships found in the asteroid belts out there, and yet affordable enough not to be too crippling if other players find and gank you.
Platinum Insurance for my chosen ship costs about 10 million ISK, for 12 weeks of cover (all...
Shameless reblogging, I know, but this is brilliant:
MMOG Nation: Prelude to a Merge?
In which Michael gives us a heads-up about an inspired upcoming Star Wars: Galaxies event - the systematic, and organised demolition of all player housing belong to player accounts that have been inactive for a year or more - "Use it or lose it!", which is all very fair and expected, but what isn't, is the manner of the demolition - the remaining players get to do it!
Presumably, the 'Condemned' housing will be given hit-points, and become shootable. I imagine the Commando class (if it even still exists...
Warning! Today's rambling contains feelings, hissy-fits, drhama, sub-optimal gameplay, and scenes of an Emo Nature! If you are easily offended by painful examinations of self, here is a link to a video of a man making an iPod Smoothie with an Industrial Blender, and I'll see you all next time!
I guess it started off okay, the usual sort of thing - a bit of minor tidy up questing on Istan while we waited for all three of us to log on, and then it was back on to the Primary Questing - the storyline of Nightfall. By now, myself (The...
More EVE CCG fun last night, with a rousing couple of games, and everyone won something, showing that our various deck tweaking skills are coming along nicely.
Game One (Minmatar (Me), vs Caldari, vs Amaar - three way), saw me pull off an very clean start, and early dominance, with a good handful of Asteroids and Trade Posts on my Home Region, complete with mining Probes. The quick draw and deployment of a Moon Harvester then meant I could throw out a large number of cheap ships very quickly, which is exactly how my deck should work. No Cyclones or Ruptures...
Somewhat spontaneously, and for no particular reason more pressing than sheer nostalgic wallowing, I found myself downloading the veteran freebie Anarchy Online Basic Client yesterday. I'm not sure what it is with me and Free MMOs, but I've always had somewhat magpie-like tendencies when it comes to free-to-play client downloads. Oooh! Free! YOINK!
I'm also interested to see how badly these older titles conflict with Windows Vista, being ever the online masochist, although this weekend's gaming was good...only one Blue Screen of Death all weekend long! Score! I'm quickly developing a flinching aversion to installing anything on the new PC that's...
While in other, more normal MMOs, 'Experience' is king, and gaining levels is both the means to power, and the purpose of becoming powerful, in EVE Online, it's all a little different. There, much like out in Real Life, the point of it all is to become as financially wealthy as possible. Skill levels are important certainly, and in some cases, required in order to unlock the more advanced ships and equipment, but on the whole, it's the ISK balance that's the real regulator of progress.
There are several ways to go about earning enough in-game pocket-money to be able go...
Anyway, back to it, and onward with the ongoing adventures of our Tuesday night Guild Wars: Nightfall group.
We'd kind of stalled a bit lately, mostly due to conflicting schedules meaning that one of more of us was unable to play, and we'd still not made it off the island of Istan, (lower-left), which forms, for Nightfall, the newbie area covered by the 'Pre-Searing' section of the original game. Mind you, Istan certainly seems bigger, better laid out, and more full of interesting place, people and things to kill than Pre-Searing Ascalon ever was, and we've all still got a number...
This bank-holiday weekend saw the arrival of the latest in a long line of gaming PCs in the Van Hemlock Household. My somewhat accidental Second Life success has finally, and quite improbably, been turned into a real and concrete payout, which runs somewhat contrary to the general opinion of the place I'd both formed myself, and seen talked about a lot elsewhere - furry, cyber, casino, pron, etc.
All the more surprising then that in about four months, my invention, which I'm still not going to identify here, has been popular enough that I can buy a new PC entirely...
Meanwhile, in Outer Space, life goes on. Since our Corp's recent brush with War, which turned out to be a narrow escape and something of an anticlimax, we're all a bit more concerned about our somewhat rusty and/or non-existent PvP Prowess; not so much in the capacity of lone-wolf deep 0.0 solo survivalists, or massive Alliance Zerg Fleet Wings but our ability to hold our own in Empire space against a finite and known aggressor, as in the form of the typical Inter-Corporate War Declaration.
To this end, last night was our first organised Civil War event. It consisted of a...
And so the days turn to weeks, and the weeks roll over and over and become churning months and weary years, and WTF??? Q2 2007 already? zOMG! Ultima Online is 10, Everquest and Asheron's Call are 8 and Anarchy Online is 6, and I've played them all, for approximately as long. In spite of this, I'm seem to be showing no signs of growing up, getting a life and transferring my obsessive addictive compulsive tendencies to something more respectable like Playing Golf, Watching Television, or Solitary and Determined Alcohol Abuse.
Idle chatting one night in the EVE Corp recently, ended up...
So, there you go. More or less a year after unrolling the Planetside: Reserves program, SOE have now discontinued free access to the game for all Reserve station accounts, bringing the year-long free trial of the obscure MMO-FPS to an end. To be honest, I'm rather surprised, figuring it was going to be like the Anarchy Online one - effectively free for ever, but contractually obliged to declare it in year-long blocks for some reason. Seems I was wrong, and for you, Reservist, the war is over.
Current Reserves accounts are now locked, although can apparently still be unlocked and upgraded...