MMORPG

Walking with Undead Dragons I’m just still not convinced that naming EverQuest 2’s latest expansion after what must be an incredibly painful condition was the best strategy. If YOUR tears were indestructible stones that amplified all magic to dangerously explosive levels – if you were ALSO a creature of magic like the dragon goddess Veeshan – you can see how avoiding crying situations might be to your advantage. Kerafrym, the prismatic dragon, is the big bad of this expansion, imprisoned for eternity as the sleeper in Sleeper’s Tomb. His parents were an ice dragon and a fire dragon, believed to be EverQuest 1 legends Lady Vox and Lord Nagafen, a mating that was forbidden by the Ring of Scale. Loot-hungry players wake him up and send him rampaging through Nagafen’s Lair, Permafrost (home to Lady Vox), Dragon Necropolis and the Temple of Veeshan. ...

Ethra and Lord Valkiss take on Captain Goldjaw It’s an exposé! It’s the kind of information SOE doesn’t want you to know! It’s probably been banned by the government! It’s Merc Science! In the calm before Tuesday’s Tears of Veeshan release, we folks in Lunar Wolves have just been exploring, clearing things up. A mad romp through Kael, all its instances and the contested bit? Yeah, we did that. Griffin rides through the Forgotten Pools? Done and done again. A mad romp through Harrow’s End? We laughed at Drinal, and she laughed barked back. ...

Boared Stiff. When I found out “Top (some number) (some thing)” articles were called “listicles” (for List Articles), my life was changed. I’d always had these feelings I couldn’t explain, where I’d think of some provocative list of things and then put any old things in as the list, because getting people to click on the link and come to the article – the LISTICLE – would be mission accomplished. Article could be blank. ...

Trapped in a world without color I don’t actually talk, or type, like that texty speak. I don’t know what came over me. Well, I kinda know. There was a bunch of bloggish commentary a few months back on the kind of random ranting bloggers do. You know, bloggers don’t have any deeper insight than anyone else on anything, by and large, but we do have our blogs. It makes us feel more important, gives us a louder voice. But everyone shouts on the internet. It gets tiring. I realized that I really don’t have anything to say about the current state of MMOs. I’ve stopped trying to follow the crowd to every new game; Sim City 5 cured me of that. Wow, way to buy into the hype, right? ...

Hangin' with mah Supes Last week, we Spodians decided to shake things up a bit by, THIS week, trying to join a raid. You kinda have to raid, at some point. Almost every piece of gear costs Marks of Triumph, and the gear for the content you are doing typically requires a set number of marks. A typical Tier 3 “daily double” mission might give 150 marks; which isn’t bad, except the T3 armor requires a couple thousand for each piece. ...

Weapons of Powah My defiler, Etha, got her epic weapon over the weekend. It’s a deadly spear with a disreputable history, an appropriate weapon for a defiler. (Etha is, of course, named after my original EverQuest character, about whom I’ve been sharing early, early EQ screen shots on Google+). Etha’s epic is the fourth for my characters, after Tipa’s dirge epic (having previously done the troubadour epic), Scatter’s berserker epic, and Dera’s inquisitor epic. A good night in Skyshrine will get Etha the rest of her levels and AA, and then it’ll just be grinding the Chains of Eternity and Siren’s Grotto solo dungeons for gear for her. ...

Garrundar the Vile and friends All I really ever want from a Dungeons & Dragons game are dungeons and dragons. So many games emphasize the former over the latter, hiding those dragons away for a very long time. I think there’s something primal in all humans that wants to battle a dragon, some monster that is such an ancient enemy that it has embedded itself into our very DNA. Jack Vance wrote a story about meeting our ancient enemy, the dragons, on some distant world. Turned out they feared THEIR ancient enemy – humans – just as much. Epic battles ensued. ...

Yellow constructs? No problem! After our hard-won victory over the Supreme Justice last week at the South Gotham Courthouse, where the game kept presenting that alert as the “daily double” every week, we wondered if we’d be forced to do it again this week for the best rewards. The game, though, has tuned itself to the needs and desires of Team Spode, and wasn’t going to send us back to the Bailiff just quite yet. Stryker’s Island was the alert of the day. ...

Objection Overruled I haven’t written about DCUO in awhile, not because we haven’t been playing. We’ve been playing every week. I haven’t written about DCUO in awhile because we’ve been working on one particular instance, the South Gotham Courthouse — and we kept losing. Now, we haven’t attempted the court house every week; it’s been a spotty summer, with people having other obligations some weekends. But every Sunday when we did meet up as a full group, the South Gotham Courthouse would be the daily double… taunting us. ...

Dera Then and Now I had this concept of going through my EQ characters that had corresponding characters in EQ2, tracing their experiences through the two games. First up: Dera, my halfling cleric. Everything was going along smoothly until I actually logged in to EverQuest to get a better screen shot. Soon I found myself in an AE group in a temporarily-uber version of Blackburrow. And then I remembered what I hated (and liked) about the MMO granddaddy. ...