In EVE Online, at my new home at the Sisters of EVE base in the Arnon system, with Mining IV, Refining III, and two Miner II mining lasers and purely selling in-system, I make about 27.5K ISK per minute of mining. If I processed the ore at my current level and sold it in the best market within seven jumps, I would make about 26K ISK/minute of mining, not including travel time. The question is, how many sessions of mining would it take to pay for the skills and equipment necessary to make refining more profitable than just selling the ore straight with no additional skills going toward mining? EVEMon has me at about ten days to having the skills necessary to fly a ORE Retriever mining barge… EVE is the first game I have HAD to play with a spreadsheet open.
Speaking of which, new EVE patch is out today. Just bug fixes, but they do install a new version of DirectX? Why? Doesn’t Microsoft keep my computer’s DirectX updated with their updates?
Anyway, on to the blog roll.
And because I’m en EVE noob, I’ve been poring through the back posts of the most famous noob of them all, Wilhelm of the Ancient Gaming Noob where he notes that the 1.6m skill point boundary where the 100% skill point bonus disappears used to allow an exploit where you would start a new really long skill just before your noob time expired, and it would stay double experience for the duration. Well, they nerfed that, but the exploiters still win.
Remember Pirates of the Burning Sea aka EVE of the Caribbean? The pirate-themed historical trading MMO was based around three-realm RvR but never really struck a spark in players. Via Massively comes the news that Flying Labs thinks players are having fun the wrong way, by farming mission objectives that give the best loot. This has gotten to the point that that’s all people do, similar to the old problems with Warhammer’s scenarios and more recently with City of Hero’s Architect missions. Rather than making missions more fun or identify player perceived need for those particular rewards, FL is removing loot from mission NPCs….
I dunno. Sounds dodgy to me at best. I get that the rewards were not intended, but PotBS is a pretty brutal game to begin with, on the same scale of complexity with EVE Online, but with more punishing PvP, when I played.
Speaking of balance between realms and Warhammer (weren’t we?), Keen talks a little about Warhammer’s new “Land of the Dead” expansion which will solve all the issues with realm wars and give people reasons to fight the good fight for their king. Or will it? Due to Warhammer’s two-sided conflict vs Dark Age of Camelot’s three, one side can dominate a server so that the other side perhaps NEVER gets a chance to try the new content, since it can only be reached by the leaders in the realm war. Keen points out that DAoC’s three-sided conflict kept all objectives in play all the time, and I remember DAoC’s version of LoD, Darkness Falls, as often changing hands a couple of times nightly. It was FUN.
We reported last week about Thom Terrazas leaving Vanguard to become the new executive producer of EverQuest, following Clint Worely’s departure for an unannounced project (EQ3…). Nostalgian Lazaretto of Complete Heal happened to mention this on the Vanguard forums and … oops … Nobody had bothered to tell the Vanguard players that they were suddenly without a producer. And hilarity ensued.
Saylah hates Free Realms. She hates the idea of it. She hates zoning. She hates instances. So why is she a level 7 chef with a satchel of food? It’s those damn addictive minigames is what!
Ogrebears, one of EQ2’s most renowned bloggers, left the game a couple of months ago to play WoW instead. Since he seemed to be back in the fold for his Norrath Street View project, I asked him if he was back. No, no, no. He will never play EQ2 again, and this is why. Hold on, are you sure you want to be playing MMOs at all?
Via Massively, a complete writeup of Mortal Online, the upcoming all PvP, all the time, completely sandbox, do what you wilt shall be the whole of the law, kind of game. Like, you know, Darkfall. Players in Spellborn were very much looking forward to Mortal Online whereas they were pretty dismissive of Darkfall. Probably because they haven’t had a chance to try Mortal Online, yet. Serious PvP MMOs are a different breed. Many people had just come off Darkfall or The Realm Online before Spellborn, were headed toward Mortal Online, and probably were thinking about what comes after that already.
After waffling a bit over tech support issues, wondering if he would continue to play Age of Conan or if this would be his time to quit MMOs forever, Openedge1 is loving the upcoming patch which fixes combat and is wonderfulness in a box, so Viva le Conan!
Syp wants MMO NPCs to man up and solve their OWN problems rather than snare unwitting players to solve them – and like as not just ask the next person who comes along to do the same thing! The real problem is one of respect. Ever tell a child to go do something just to keep them busy and out of your hair while you’re doing something? Well, MMO worlds are populated entirely with people who just want players to go away and will tell them ANYTHING.
Let’s all send good thoughts Crookshankz’s way as he camps Emperor Crush in EverQuest’s Crushbone. Mmmm…. and get that nasty inky assassin, too!
Hudson and about a million others reported that the Champions Online launch has been delayed until September. I have to admit I was looking forward to this game until I found it was modeled after the WoW quest model – you know, get all the quests from exclamation-point decorated NPCs at a quest hub, follow the quest helper to clearly marked areas on the map where the quest may be completed, complete the quest and return for xp? Sorry. I’m done with mindless quest grind MMOs. Way to be heroic.
I was REALLY looking forward to it, too.
Lars at MMOment of Zen would like to take EQ2’s mentoring system and expand it so that your level would be automatically set in accordance with whatever zone you happened to be in, so you would never actually outlevel content. That sounds… cool! At least if the rewards (xp, AA xp and loot) still scaled back to be useful to you at your actual level.
And that’s about it for today. Keep gaming, and if you are flying in EVE or mining in Free Realms, FRIEND ME!