Daily Blogroll

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). ...

Apparently, Diablo-esque MMO Mythos, formerly developed by the Diablo-esque developers of Diablo, who lost the rights to their game to Korean publisher HanbitSoft, is apparently … coming. Details are slim, but it looks as if Redbana, publishers of the online dance game Audition, will also be taking on a newly relaunched Mythos. Head to the Mythos site to sign up for the beta… Thanks to Heartless_ for spotting their solitary tweet on Twitter about this! ...

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!!!) ...

Hey, everyone ELSE returns to WoW…. And why not? Rumor has it that Blizzard is definitely going to introduce the Worgen and Goblin races as new playable races… something ever World of Warcraft player has been expecting since before Burning Crusade was announced. With news of the new expansion and the Starcraft II delays already making the rounds, Green Armadillo asks what else could Blizzard possibly have in waiting to surprise Blizzcon attendees? ...

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. ...

Well, would YOU bet $200 on a game that nobody but press is allowed to talk about, a month before it’s released? When Lord of the Rings Online offered the same deal – A Benjamin and his identical twin for a lifetime subscription – you had a month to think it over. Not so with Champions Online – if you insist on playing before committing, the offer goes away. Probably the best thing about the offer – access to the Star Trek Online beta, and Mirror Universe outfits for same. So, if I want to play STO and get all the best goodies, I have to toss two c-notes Champions’ way? ...

Sorry for the entire and almost complete lack of posts this week… family stuff. Guess I should have called it the “WEEKLY Blogroll”…. What makes an MMORPG an RPG? Nowadays, EVERYTHING seems to be called an RPG. First person shooters like Call of Duty 4 are suddenly RPGs because they include levels (and, arguably, classes as well). So is that it? Is any game with leveling now automatically a Role Playing Game? Zubon of Kill Ten Rats wonders if that’s all there is. Psychochild responds by taking a look back at the origins of the term in pen-and-paper gaming. These days, I tend to regard games that don’t force you into certain paths as more of an RPG that on-rails MMOs like WoW. Zubon has a point when he says Second Life is more of an RPG than most games that claim the title. ...

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. ...