Aion

Can’t stop Saylah from blogging :) - Tipa Leave it to the creative player-base to find a way around the 3-hour queues on the high population servers. Some have decided to stretch the “Personal Shop” feature that allows you to sell items while unattended, into a means of keeping their characters online 24x7. I mean – seriously, all I could do was laugh my ass off when I logged into the game and saw the sea of players who are mostly just AFK, setup as vendors. I felt like I was in the market district of some turn of the century ghetto. Mind you, somewhere in that mass of “For Sale” slogans and messages are quest NPCs and people that really have things to sell. Can anyone say, “Where’s Waldo?” ...

Aion launched yesterday for pre-orders. Cownose got in. Petter had the five hour queue (and he’s under deadline!) Heartless_ isn’t playing, but loves him some queues, anyway. Lars got to level 3, server kicked him off, welcome to four hours in the queue. Naamah got in, but his friend had to wait three hours. It’s a good thing, though. I think he kinda has to be positive about the whole thing, though. AT&T and NCsoft conspired against Keen. ...

Picture is Maxfield Parrish’ 1922 masterpiece, “Daybreak”. Dad had bought an old print of that from SOMEWHERE and we had it above our mantle as long as I can remember. I used to think of stories behind that picture. The true story, that it was a painting done specifically to be reproduced using the then-new CYMK four color lithography process, never occurred to me.

*Another guest post by the always awesome Saylah! – Tipa * Three hours in a log-in queue, was the price my family paid to create characters on servers with friends or acquaintances. I knew the wait would be long but nothing prepared me for that length of time. It exceeded any of the long queues I’d experienced in the early days of World of Warcraft, following our AC2 guild to Illidan. The pre-selection opportunity hadn’t yielded the ability to get on the servers where we knew people. Initially, it wouldn’t allow us to create new characters on our intended server as Asmodian, stating we had Elyos characters there. The only Elyos characters we had were from Beta, which aren’t persisted and shouldn’t have mattered. ...

Guy just keeps popping up everywhere, don’t he? I am playing Runes of Magic now because, hey, WoW is coming out with a new expansion that I probably won’t play, so why not reminisce about good times in WoW by playing some other game? Runes of Magic only allowed me to pick from two races, Elf and Human. I thought they had some short folk in the character concept art, but I guess those were just meant to be children. It’d be kind of cool, by the way, to start of as a child in an MMO (optionally, anyway), and play children’s games of crafting, socialization, war and magic while slowly aging and learning more of the wider world and your place in it. ...

I am so very pleased to welcome Mystic Worlds’ Saylah as a guest blogger while she lets her blog lie fallow for awhile. – Tipa Aion wasn’t on my radar - at all. I didn’t have any preconceived notions going into the Open Beta (OB) other than the game looked attractive from all the screenshots I’d seen. And I’d received enthusiastic emails from Mallika about her experiences in the Closed Beta. I’m going to keep this accounting short since it’s being graciously hosted on West Karana. I don’t want to kick-up any dust over at Mystic Worlds since I am by no means, ready to started blogging regularly. Smile ...

Was there ever a mob that you really, REALLY hated as a low level, that you just HAD to go back later on and just kill, kill, kill? Well, old Dorn in North Ro was that mob for a lot of us EQ players. Seeing him CRINGE before me now in EQ2…. Worth the ride! One of the things that made EQ so memorable was that there was really nothing like it at the time. They could pretty much try anything, because, what else was there? Not like these days, where there’s so MUCH choice, so MANY good games, that it’s hard to stick with just one, and so game devs do whatever they feel they must to grab and keep players. ...

That’s like Galaxy Express 999, NOT the Futurama ship. That’s Planet Express. Ever, like, DIE in a game, and your pet begins dancing around your decaying corpse, singing about what a great day it is? Thanks, Hello Kitty Online! Leveling has slowed quite a lot in that game. My pet is having a super time, though. If you spend several hundred hours in your game of choice, the LAST thing you really want is someone coming up and telling you that you’re wasting your time, because Game B is SO much better than your Game A – insert any two games in those slots. Super Mario World vs Legend of Zelda. Cribbage vs Bridge. WoW vs…. well, any other game that is not WoW. ...

I’ve been thinking of swapping my sidekick in Legends of Zork from the Gent (who made me essentially immune to traps) to the Accountant (who earns interest on your stash) for awhile. It kinda disappointed me that they nerfed her – it used to be that having her in your base would soon make you rich as Croesus. Not so much anymore, but as each upgrade now costs well over a million zorkmids, I need all the help I can get. And I can switch back to the Gent later on, once I’ve reached my goals and seeded the clan bank with some good upgrades for others. ...

Started on the second tier of Grizzleheim last night. The Virgil Roughlands (level 25+) are a pretty significant step up from Svarstaad Pass. Even two boxing, I had to choose my cards with a lot more care than almost any challenge in recently-completed Krokotopia. At levels 27 and 32, my two-box team is as closely matched as they have ever been. Thankfully, Marissa now has the (yucky) Humongofrog to match up with Allison’s Sandstorm for mass monstery death. ...