Aion

Is Gatheryn in open beta or not? Massively says not yet, but following Merry and Pippin’s example, I showed up where I wasn’t invited because they couldn’t keep me away. Picture above is from the docks, where it’s clear they haven’t invented automated rust scrapers and hull painters in Elymia as of yet. In news of the OTHER upcoming superhero game, Massively also has screens of SOE’s DC Universe Online. This fast-paced, arcade-ish actioner looks to be the evil twin to Champions Online’s more traditional quest-based offering. ...

Having heard about the EVE Fitting Tool from a helpful commentator, I spent a lot of time last night working some Battle Clinic builds into viable builds for me. VERY happy. Later on, the corps went on an impromptu trip through a wormhole, where we were relentlessly shadowed by the corp (Bones) who had staked it out. They allowed us to take on a Sleeper cell before we left. We got some T3 loot, but since we’d all brought expendable ships (that’s my Exequoror “The Liberator” hovering outside the wormhole), we weren’t up for taking out the second wave, which included a battleship. (Drew at Wizard of Duke Street has a little more about wormholing). ...

I THINK this screen shot came while we were raiding the City of Mist for Jalanea’s shaman epic. Remember when guilds used to raid the City of Mist? Something I really liked about EverQuest was the mix of raid targets in leveling zones. Now it’s all instances and keeping people away from each other as much as possible. Sad. ...

EVE Online wants you to make money. It’s hard NOT to be swimming in the stuff. So your given level 3 mission might have a couple dozen enemies in it. You get a bounty on every one you kill, they drop loot which can sell for a fair bit, can be salvaged for loot worth a million or more (sometimes much more) if you get a decent price, and many have asteroids that you can mine with very little danger that anyone will locate you. I’ve been sending my mining proceeds to one of the corp officers, and last night he parked a battleship at the local trading hub for me – the mainstay of the Gallente Federation Navy, the Dominix drone tank battleship. Half a kilometer of hurt clad in a meter-thick skin of tritanium. Now I have to train for a few days to be able to fly it to my base in Aunia – the EVE Online equivalent of bringing a new battery and a pair of jumper cables to check out a used car. (THANKS, RED!!!) ...

I got a spam comment today which mentioned, while complimenting me on explaining some vague idea to them, that they were unsure of this blog’s update schedule. Geez. When even SPAMMERS wonder why you don’t update every day, it’s getting out of hand ;) Fact is, most of the time I am doing boring stuff. CrazyKinux linked to a blog once that insisted nobody wants to read about someone running mission in EVE Online, so once I read that, I stopped posting about my adventures in EVE. I’m leveling up a character in Wizard 101 so I can do Grizzleheim with level-appropriate characters, but that takes time. I do fit in little bits about what I’m doing in EVE and Wizard101 now and then in these blogrolls… but they don’t seem worthy of entire posts! ...

Back in EverQuest, the raid leader had banned all mage pets because they tended to push bosses into walls. The mages were not amused. Aion: Next WoW killer? Caliga thinks Aion might take that coveted #2 spot of ranked subscription-based MMOs right behind World of Warcraft with a final tally of 800,000 players. He’s forgetting that WoW players always return to WoW. Always. My own prediction? 200,000 six months in because A) it’s a WoW-like, and B) it isn’t WoW. ...

Aside from just being a shout-out to John Landis fans, I will be away on family business all weekend, returning Tuesday. I don’t know if I’ll bring my laptop, but I won’t be gaming in any event. The banner picture is of a raid dying in EQ2’s Wrath of the Elements x2 raid instance. It’s a guild raid, and the guild is Twilight Disciples, and it’s a PST raiding guild with a full roster of raiding nights, but the WoE raid was fun enough that, warning them I’d likely be missing most weeknight raids due to being asleep, I accepted their offer to join. I even won some T3 gloves from the raid, but I don’t have enough shards to finish them. If you’re not an EQ2 player, most of this paragraph was gibberish. ...

Okay, THAT was a day of good discussion, so thanks, Wolfshead :) Why did I feel your “first impressions” article needed rebutting? Well, SOMEONE had to stand up (and thanks to Hudson, who did!). I couldn’t say that stuff about WoW and expect to come away without comment. In grand blogging tradition, Wolfshead now has a rebuttal to my rebuttal :) ...

The weekend went by too fast, as it always does. Rock, Paper, Shotguns Kieron Gillen had the perilous job of re-reviewing Darkfall for Eurogamer. Eurogamer’s original review score, 2/10, was savaged by the Darkfall developers and players. In Darkfallout, Kieron talks about the perils of being the clean-up crew for a disaster, and why he was shocked at the reaction by some other game journalists to the first review. Following up on last week’s discussion about how MMOs are like men, women, dogs, or kitchen cleansers, Green Armadillo notices that his dog is a lot like an MMO player. Except we have to go get our OWN food. ...

What makes The Prancing Pony such a “must see” when you’re in Bree? Butterbur just stands in that same spot all day and all night, perpetually on the edge of remembering what it is he needed to do while buying sticks and pebbles from snickering children. If you go, though, to the cloakroom on the second floor, you might find Melmoth of Killed in a Smiling Accident hiding from insanely super-powered wolves as he struggles with Lord of the Rings Online’s gated content – where overpowered common animals with a long history of being dead block lower level adventurers from peeking around the next curve. (Wolfshead also has a tankard of tears, by the way, for the poor, bereft children of J.R.R., whose money beds require additional stuffing). ...