The Ranterbury Tales
When Pick-Up-Groups Attack!
Ask and it shall be delivered!
My first real go at group work in Dungeons and Dragons Online the other night, and something of an eye opener, and exercise in frustration to some extent. I'd quite quickly found myself fascinated with the idea of traps, secret doors and so on, so rerolled as a Rogue, to better get to grips with this unusual and somewhat unique feature. Also, the dwarf's running animations are pretty awful, somewhere between 'constipated ape in a hurry' and 'seized up robot'. Turns out I needn't have worried too much - halfling running looks just as...
Flush without resounding success, mentioned previously, in 'A Bold Confrontation', the guild was all set to tackle the second Guild Writ in the series - 'A Daring Confrontation'.
Not that I've ever had much experience with WoW Raiding mind you, but so far as I can see, EQ2 does seem to do, if not a better, than certainly a more flexible job of the same kind of gaming experience. For starters, the Raid Instances I've seen so far seem to scale dynamically, based on the average level of the members of the raiding force. The various set-pieces and event-attacks still...
Level 40-49: A_Banqueter says, 'CH Raid, LF DPS!'
This is usually how it starts. I'm running along, from A to B, and the occasional capricious mood hits me, partly based on psychological self-harm, partly because it's an anecdote, and I can't just bang on about Second Life the whole time, but mostly because part of me still wants it to work - despite all my bitterness, I still want to be a hero. So pausing only to deconstruct and translate the acronyms (CH - Cauldron Hollow, a raid instance off the Nektulous Forest zone in Everquest 2, LF - Looking For,...
Man, my luck never changes. It had been a quite agreeable World of Warcraft session so far, working out of Cenarion Hold in Silithus. Killed a few bugs, gathered a few knick-nacks, visited a few sights, even grabbed a bit of Silithyst and delivered it to the Horde base.
It was a short run and no Alliance even saw me, but I like to feel I’m helping. Something of a doomed task really, given Horde/Alliance populations – the counters were 22/200, 95/200 respectively, and it’s been that far apart every time I’ve been there. I got 6k xp for doing it...
An Optimist whispers: “hi want to go ST? we ready to go”
I blink, almost crashing my Velociraptor 2000 GT, (which I call ‘Cherie’ on account of its unsettling grin) into a passing plague-frenzied bear, who looked as surprised as I was. I was galloping back through the Eastern Plaguelands to the Bluwark, carrying a particularly worrying flask of grim-looking liquid plague for the inspection of those nice Argent Dawn folks. Undead are all pretty much the same to me, but apparently there are Bad Undead, and Even Worse Undead, and these Argent Dawn folks pay well for various interesting guerrilla...
After a World of Warcraft lifetime, mostly consisting of hitting things in with axes very, very hard, the end is in sight. Level 60 now twinkles on the horizon like an oasis city across a moonlit desert, promising riches, status, wealth and most of all, an end to the constant slaughter, and a quiet life in domestic retirement. My axes will be things I hang over the fireplace, and show to my grandchildren on winter nights…
Of course, I have to get there first, and I still have seven levels to go, and I’m now at that difficult age where I...
And so my epic saga of heroism, derring-do, a desperate fight against overwhelming evil, and all that jazz, continues. Blackfathom Deeps (23-27), a waterlogged cave system plagued by sea monsters, snake-people and angry elementalists, passed me by entirely – despite my best efforts with Meeting Stones, shouting in the appropriate zones, joining the occasional guild, and even forlornly one-hitting lowbie mobs outside in the hope of attracting passers-by, the optimal levels simply passed too quickly, and before I could get in on a group for the place, I was already too powerful. Nothing prevents me form entering the place anyway,...
And so the Epic tale of Instance-Based World of Warcraft Heroism continues. The Wailing Caverns (15-21), a cave network full of big snakes, insane druids and dinosaurs, came and went without much to report to be honest. It took a while to get a decent group going, but once that happened, the trip went perfectly – everyone knew what they were doing, and did it well. We only got wiped out once, and most importantly, no-one logged in a huff when that did happen. All very good from a game experience point of view, but lousy for ranting material.
Next was...
It’s a flashback episode today, and not even about World of Warcraft, but gather round anyway as we travel back, back, back…
It was the heady days of early Star Wars: Galaxies. Combat was still delightfully anarchic, spaceships hadn’t been invented, and even land speeders and player towns were still on the ‘Coming Soon’ list. I’d been playing for about a month, going through the usual early ‘first go’ incarnation – the one where you make all the crippling development mistakes while still coming to terms with stuff like ‘Walk Forward’, ‘Attack’ and the like.
I’d had my heart set on being...
It's all change again, and this incarnation, I’m a Horde Warrior. I’ve pointed out the various features of Warriors in World of Warcraft elsewhere, but the specific one that I had been most anxious about was Threat management. In a group-based MMO the Warrior has one key roll – to ensure that all the monsters spend the fight beating the hell out of him, and not any of the more fragile members of the team. The Warrior has the hit points, armour and damage mitigation to survive this kind of battering, and typically anyone with other functions in the group,...
I was a Warlock the first time I encountered the Deadmines, one of the first of World of Warcraft’s instanced group-based Dungeon romps. Life had been good to me so far; my class worked well, I’d seen a lot of new and interesting places, carried out a lot of not-uninteresting quests and had some fairly neat rewards. I’d mined a bit, engineered a bit, fished a lot and generally had any number of low-grade but satisfying adventures, culminating in a prolonged campaign against a veritable army of suspiciously organised bandits in the Westfall farmlands. The Sherrif chap told me he...
So I gained a few levels, and begin to travel a bit. I’ve always been an Explorer, and bizarrely enough, I find that zones which have the typical ‘Snowy Winter Wonderland’ design usually have a powerful psycho-suggestive effect on me, leaving me sat in front of my PC shivering, even on hot summery evenings outside. Time to head south for the winter, I thought, and hopped on the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind, and the Human Newbie forest, an altogether more clement locale.
That’s when I met The Steamroller. A Human Paladin of a similar level to me, who seemed to be...
Everyone has to start somewhere, a truth that we’re all pretty much aware of, and yet one we find easy to forget, because for many of us, it happened such a long time ago; in my own case something like six years ago now. I mention this not to brag, if anything, the reverse: MMOs are what I’ve always done, and I can barely imagine not knowing instinctively how to function in a virtual world not my own. While certainly new individual games may vary, they rarely vary by that much, and these long-practiced and rather pointless life skills are...
"WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot,
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,
And bathed every vein in such licour,
Of which virtue engender'd is the flower...
...yes yes yes, that's enough; I'm sure you get the idea. The opening few lines to ’The Canterbury Tales’ by Geoffery Chaucer, (1342 – 1400), which even translated from Middle English to contemporary, is still borderline unintelligible, or at least hard work for the casual reader. The premise behind it is still pretty sound though; thirty pilgrims, of all sorts of types, meet in an Inn in London, and agree to all travel to...