MMORPG

When you kill a wolf in, say, Lord of the Rings Online, it just kind of fades away. When you kill a wolf in Dragonica Online, THAT happens. That wolf isn’t going to be just fading away. They’ll be picking bits of wolf out of the trees for the next year. Dragonica Online is an arcade-y, 2D MMO along the same lines as Maple Story and Pi Story (no relation). You travel along from screen to screen and encounter merchants, monsters, other players, special glowing portals to missions, and you do your best to help those NPCs you come across with the problems that threaten to bring light to their dark, meaningless lives. ...

See, this is what I like about KingsIsle. The Bazaar wasn’t all that useful when the Grizzleheim expansion launched. It did the job, but it wasn’t easy to use. KI has an entirely new Bazaar up on the Test server, and invites all W101 subscribers to give it a try this weekend before it opens on all servers. Items may be sorted by school, price, usability, minimum level and quantity. It becomes extremely easy to find upgrades. ...

It’s been a year since Dina Tipa and Dera Arda were able to be in the same place on the same server. I’ve got a HECK of a lot of “solo” quests to get done now, and now that I have a pet healer, they won’t take forever because of downtime. Today I moved Brightknife – my character who does the fashion shows and the EQ2 one-panel comics – and Dina, my main, to Antonia Bayle. Dina lost her home due to a bug that happens sometimes when you have to change your name in a move. The same bug hit Stargrace, and a GM dumped the entire contents of her home into her inventory. That’s a nice thing for them to do, but my home had a Stargrace-built theater in it, and though she volunteered to build it again if she had to, I’d rather she didn’t have to. ...

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). ...

I think this might be old news, but here it is: KingsIsle is sending out truckfulls of gift cards to department stores and electronics outlets the world over. Using Crowns garnered by redeeming the gift cards in game is, by far, the cheapest way of enjoying W101. You pay as you go, don’t pay when you don’t play, and you never lose access to areas you have already bought, even if you never play again. ...

Welcome to another daily blogroll! EQ2 has re-opened character server transfers via its Station Marketplace RMT store, halving the price and making the process as smooth as possible. I’ve started moving my essential characters from Najena and Befallen to Antonia Bayle, my original EQ2 server before my desire to play with friends led me to have characters on a half dozen servers. ...

After naming their name/gender change potion “Norrathian Witness Protection Program”, I was thinking SOE would have a cool name for the item that let you switch your server, but it’s just called “Character Transfer Token”. So boring. Why not “Commotion Potion for Interworld Motion” or something? But they went with Character Transfer Token. And it costs 2,500 SOE Bucks, which is $25.00. Great deal, right? Except that you can’t just buy 2,500 SOE Bucks. You can buy 2,000, or you can buy 5,000. So if you want to transfer one character, you’re going to have to buy 5,000 for $50, transfer your character, and have $2,500 left over. I guess you could transfer another character. Or buy some house items or something. ...

Like an ebbing tide, the weekend slowly recedes, leaving behind the flotsam and jetsam of yet another Monday. Only a few years too late to knock ’em dead in Mrs. Moran’s 3rd grade English class on similes. Are the World of Warcraft’s raids too dependent on scripting to be done by unaided humanity? I haven’t played WoW in a few years, but it’s sounding more and more like WoW raids are just a multiplayer, more colorful version of the old “Dragon’s Lair” video game, where you had to move to lit-up squares in a room to defeat monsters. Actually it sounds EXACTLY like it, as Copra found out to his dismay. WoW raiding – an update of a classic 80’s video game for a new generation. ...

No blogroll for today, I’m the on-call developer this week AND I’ve been moved to a project at work with a daily morning meeting starting this week, so it’s a time of adjustment. One game I am not playing is a browser game called Evony, which promises something like EVE’s skill training. I know nothing more about it, and I won’t. Why? Because they are SPAMMING MY BLOG. Here’s just their latest attempts to spam comments into my blog – all with fake email addresses attached: ...

I love the feeling of peace and serenity EVE Online gives. And then sometimes weird, exciting stuff happens. A corps-mate and I were testing weapons fire and tank abilities last night when a battle broke out behind us as rival corps met outside a station. It was great, and for some reason reminded me of the very first story I ever read about EVE Online, about The Great Scam which put the game on everyone’s long range scanners. ...