EverQuest

And oh yeah, we finished clearing Veeshan’s Peak and then cleared up to the Maestro in the Shard of Hate! First time the experience is new. Second time, it’s like, can we skip ahead to the part where I get something :) No, it was fun, just not much to write about. Afterward, I bought the Erollisi Day crafting book from the vendor in East Freeport, farmed a dozen or so Orc Love Letters in the War Elephant Breeding Ground and other orcs in the area, and made almost all of the things you could make. All except the ring at the end – ran out of love letters. ...

We started Veeshan’s Peak last night, but it didn’t go all that well. We were supposed to clear up to the Taskmaster, and then finish it on Thursday. As the night wore on, we were just going to clear up past Nexona. And then at the end, we would have been happy to just have Druushk dead before we finished for the night. We couldn’t even do that. Druushk hasn’t been a problem for awhile. Why last night? It seemed like a fairly low attendance night. Were people skipping the first night of VP? I don’t know. But Thursday, we start in on Druushk again, and I hope we’re back to form and we just get her dead. Kasul needs his Mythical, and it would be wonderful to have a second Mythical in Nostalgia. ...

This weekend was filled with “real life” stuff, leaving little time for gaming… but I did get some time in now and then. I went ahead and made a kinship (called, unsurprisingly, Nostalgia) on the Windfola server in Lord of the Rings Online – just to make it easier to talk with everyone. I’d prefer to be in some larger guild but I imagine it would be tough to find one that everyone liked. Small guilds, like this one, have an arc. They rise and then linger on for awhile before fading away. ...

This isn’t Veeshan’s Peak. That’s Thomas Lionblood, the Friendly Necromancer, on the left, though. If your MMO doesn’t have dragons in it, it’s just not a fantasy MMO, is it? You can take out wizards and plucky farm boys and enchanted princesses and evil kings and all that, but if you lose the dragons, well, you’ve lost me as a player. There’s just a deep need inside every person to seek out a dragon, and then kill it. Be the dragon killer – be a hero. ...

This is my week to be the “on call” developer at work, which means I carry the Pager of Doom and also have to go to bed early and get up early. PLUS, yesterday I had more dental work done and was in so much pain I drugged myself senseless and slept from the time I got home until 11PM. But there’s always casual MMOs to fill in the free hour here and there. ...

Hey we’re gonna quickly run, quickly run From the entrance to your lair, Nexona Have us a bit of scaly fun, scaly fun We’re coming so beware, Nexona Buff ’em up, get a coup- ple of mana sticks Swap your gear, stand right here, sing arcane resists My, aye, aye, aye, aye Woo! Ma ma ma my Nexona Ma ma ma my Nexona In a cubby, lizard sacrifice, tastes real nice, ...

Regular readers of this blog may know that my eyesight is really bad. Tonight, I set up my laptop to use an old 1280x1024 monitor that I could set pretty close instead of its own display, a 1680x1050 display that is really cool, but has tiny pixels. I can see again! I can actually read all the text on the screen, and follow conversations! It was pretty important to do so, because tonight was a really good night, and I wanted to see it all. ...

The pickup raid group I’m with killed Venril Sathir and cleared up to Elder Enron in VP last night, but I’d crashed earlier and after I rebooted, didn’t dare launch FRAPS and XFire in case they were the cause of my crippling lag, so no pictures. Since I hate posts without pictures, I’ve illustrated last night’s raids with pictures of an entirely unrelated mission in City of Villains. See what I did there? ...

Last year, Massively’s Michael Zenke interviewed SOE’s John Smedley about, among other things, the future of SOE’s all-inclusive Station Access plan: John Smedley: Sure. I don’t mind this being public. We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price. We have two problems, though. One: we have third parties involved in this. LucasArts, for example, will have to buy off on this, as would others. Second is the less obvious one: Promising future stuff is the meat of the problem. We haven’t found the right way to word things yet. To be honest other priorities have gotten in the way. That’s what we want to offer people. ...

I don’t know why I missed this HUGE sculpture in the gnomish bit of the Moors of Ykesha before. So like, NOW you know where the mailbox is… from ORBIT. I wish they did the same thing for the location of the druid ring. People kept trying to lead me to it. “It’s right next to the landing pad!” “From the cannon?” “No, just where you get off the boat!” I run around for about ten minutes. “Is it the wizard spires?” “No, but it’s near them.” “Yay! Okay!” Five minutes later. “Okay, this druid ring. Does it look like other druid rings, or is it like a pipe in the ground or something?” “No, it looks EXACTLY like all the other druid rings! It’s right next to where you get off the boat! Just go down a little and THERE IT IS!” ...