I at first didn’t want to write anything about fear, the topic of the first Blaugust Promptapalooza prompt. I’d much rather talk about the second one, which was easy, and all prepared. But, I came into this Blaugust thing determined to write a post for each writing prompt. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean I get to skip each. The things that are hard, are the things on which I should focus. ...
This is going to be a little Twitter-heavy, and I apologize for that. The @PantheonCrafter account, posted a survey today about crafting: Would you prefer the crafting mechanics for @PantheonMMO to be turn-based (like Vanguard or FFXIV), real-time (like EQ2), or Click-to-Craft (like WoW)? Feel free to reply and say more! #mmocrafting — Pantheon Crafters (@PantheonCrafter) August 18, 2020 I just had to question the whole idea of crafting. It’s become a checkbox item – does your MMO have… [x] crafting? [ ] fishing? [ ] dance emotes? ...
Sorry, I just spent the last half hour looking for exactly the best song I remembered from Martin Mull which was… perfect for this writing prompt. And that took me down a rabbit hole with Martin jamming with Glen Campbell (awesome!), and then I got to watching more YouTube and now it’s forty minutes until work and I have a blog post to write. I get distracted easily, and today’s prompt, from Nogamara of Battle Stance, is all about that: ...
June hasn’t been the best month for gaming. Tom and I are ramping up our 3D printing, and working on that sort of stuff is taking more and more of our time. I hope it’s worth it. I have a severe backlog of minis to paint – I have to finish the Gloomhaven PC minis, I have an army of vermlings and cultists to paint for the first few Jaws of the Lions scenarios, some snakes… Plus printing the terrain tiles. ...
It struck me last night, as I was pulling Unrest for our fireplace room group, that it was the experience of taking a camp and pulling mobs to it for the group to kill – probably EverQuest’s core gameplay – is precisely the gameplay feature that no other MMO has valued enough to include in their game. Group content in other MMOs seems to be highly curated; you start at the beginning of the ride, are taken past visually stunning wonders and carefully choreographed boss encounters, and then are delivered to the end, given some gifts, and are set free to go on your way. Certainly World of Warcraft was that way when I played, and Final Fantasy XIV is definitely that way. Significantly, Final Fantasy XI Online was not that way. It leaned into the EverQuest model of finding a camp and pulling to it. ...
Again, my huge advantage over Kasul is that I still am forced to work from home, but on the plus side, I get to get in the Aradune queue early and am usually able to play by the time I am done work and have supper cooking. The question of what to do during the time when I’m playing alone, since I don’t want to outlevel Kasul, was easily answered with tradeskills. I can do all the tradeskilling I like. ...
Aradune has returned to the endless queue strategy, which is a huge upgrade, I guess, from the “let everyone in and watch the server die” strategy they’d been trying for a couple weeks prior. This actually isn’t a big deal, for me. I work at home due to the pandemic, so about three or four hours before I think I’ll be ready to play EverQuest, I just get in the queue and go back to work. Several hours later, as easy as that, I’m in EverQuest. ...
We absolutely, 100%, gave it our all. We braved the long log in queues, trying to log in as soon as we got home from work and waiting the two-three hours to play an hour or two before bed. When Darkpaw decided to vastly expand the number of people who could be logged in at once, we patiently waited the ten or fifteen minutes it would take to simply zone. Running to an experience zone could take awhile, but we did it. ...
It’s a week since Aradune opened. Raid guilds have the planes of Hate and Fear on lockdown. Naggy died last night; probably Vox has died, too, when I wasn’t on to see it. Groups have level 50 alts to sit outside the group and buff and heal. I was not prepared for the pace of a Time-Locked Progression Server. Kunark doesn’t open for another eleven weeks! I guess it does take time to farm a full set of planar. I’m hoping people will still want to raid when Kasul and I get there. ...
I haven’t written much about our adventures on the Aradune server in EverQuest largely because we haven’t had very much time to adventure on the Aradune server in EverQuest. Our experience has been the same as everyone else who wants to sit down and play a video game for a little while. You start up the game and then find out how many hours it will be before you can play that game. Usually it’s two to three. Then when that magic moment comes and you can log in – and you have no warning that it’s coming – you have some small amount of time to choose a character and enter the game before you’re tossed out into the login queue once more. For another several hours, probably more of them now. ...