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? ...
I loaded Lord of the Rings Online back onto my computer (where it replaced Vanguard and Guild Wars; my disk space is such that if a new game goes on, an old game has to come off). I’m not sure how I felt about the game. I’d not left it on the best of terms; after a bit of excitement, LotRO had settled into a series of horrid grinds. Kill N of X. Run to some far off place, and then run back. ...
I’m mad at my Sprite. Most of the time, she’s a good pal. We go out in the world, fight evil, have a laugh, do magic tricks… Sure, sometimes she asks about boys, but I just laugh it off. She’s not ready, you know? She just isn’t ready for that thing. But little Sprites grow into Pixies so fast these days, and I blame myself. I should have known, should have had “the Talk”, before she met… Thomas. ...
Check out that xp bar! Less than one bubble to 46… I was tired and tuckered out last night from two late nights of programming image filters (the latest result is the candy-colored candy shop seen in my ShutterCal widget), but while a test image rendered, I thought maybe I’d just jump into Wizard 101 and see if Suri was up for a trip through Big Ben or Kensington. I love running through Big Ben. ...
Yay! Another night where I successfully avoided writing! I KNOW what I want to do for the last part of the current Stout Henry adventure, I know how it begins, ends, the middle, but when I sit down to write, I do something else. Tonight, I went back and played some more City of Heroes. it has changed a LOT just in the past few months. It has Rest XP now, and day jobs, and one mission that just threw DO enhancements at me. I upgraded near every power. With all the new recipes I got, there’s going to be some evenings spent at the invention bench. ...
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!” ...
Stingite over at the amazingly wonderful Wizard 101 blog, The Friendly Necromancer, has made an INCREDIBLE dance video from Katzenstein’s Lab. Makes me want to run right there and invite some friends for a party of my own :)
I took a lot of pictures while adventuring in Spellborn. I intended to make a huge gallery post, but did a comic instead. You can see all the (decent) photos I took by visiting my Spellborn Gallery. Each screen shot has a caption explaining where it was taken and other interesting info. If you really want to get a feel for what the world of the Enclave looks like, check it out.
I’d worked so long on the Spellborn comic – way longer than I thought, it took forever to come up with the story and then I had to go back and make tedious reshoots to fill in the plot and a long time in Photoshop to make it look like Mercy and Erisa were in the same place at the same time – that I thought I would reward myself with some EverQuest II time. I don’t play enough of my favorite game :) ...