Pirates of the Burning Sea

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too – my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning. ...

It’s been a little over a week since I started blogging over at Massively, and while I am really enjoying myself, I think I still have a lot to learn about story ideas. It’s all about the page views, right, and what brings in the eyeballs better than our dear old friend, porn. So I suggested this to the editors, and they pretty much informed me that they already had plenty of Second Life coverage, and maybe I could work on this piece about “Shoulder armor through the ages – how high is too high?”. ...

From a comment on Tobold’s excellent post about the tank shortage in the World of Warcraft (or more accurately, the Protection-spec’d Warrior shortage): I’ve been playing WOW for 2+ years now and everytime I see pvp hurt pve, it makes me wish there was a viable pve alternative to WOW. I happen to think there are plenty of viable PvE alternatives to WoW. Not least among them EQ2, but also LotRO (the breakout MMO of 2007, by anyone’s definition viable), Pirates of the Burning Sea, FFXI Online and literally hundreds of smaller MMOs, most of them free to play, most of them with very dedicated and helpful player bases. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Vanguard these days. ...

Nothing like the warm trade winds blowing off the water to get you excited about spending a lot of time in a stuffy house with people who hate you trying to find out who hates your employer the most. Ah, the life of the free trader. The man who is not what he seems… the person all too willing to believe he is being betrayed; and the one who is not so quickly convinced. Will I ever see these people again? ...

Really quick update. I have posts waiting to finish writing about the economy in Pirates of the Burning Sea and other adventures in that world, plus starting the troubador and tradeskilling epics in EverQuest 2. The Troubador epic is apparently called the Ayonian Axe (like your guitar is an axe, get it?) – I’m busily doing the Poet’s Palace access quest so I can continue on it – and the tradeskill epic is an earring whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s the same as that EQ1 Luclin-era FT3 earring every alt had, and is made from the exact same combination of crafted items, one for each trade. Yes, as a crafter, you will need the help of every other kind of crafter to finish your epic. The cloaks are just a little extra reward. Someone linked the armorer cloak, and so here it is via the dressing room for your viewing pleasure. Above, are the first things I made when I got online after doing my PotBS crafting for the day – mannequins, just wearing some Nightchord on the left and Melodic Xegonite on the right. I don’t know where the boots for the Melodic got off to, so I tossed Vhalen’s on the dummy. I never did get Nightchord boots even after doing Labs hundreds of times. ...

Pirates? What pirates?

The good guys (bottom) prepare to liberate a fort, sink a fleet and quell a rebellion in Red Tide Goodbye, Blanche DuBois. You always knew the asylum awaited you at the close of your mad, drunker life. Pirates of the Burning Sea has become a place to go for many of us in Clan of Shadows when the raid is full. While it would have been nice if people had randomly decided to join the French on Bonny so I wouldn’t have to reroll, in the end most of the people gathered on the side of the British on the Guadaloupe server. ...

In the comments to my “first glance” post for the Pirates of the Burning Sea, Rusty from Flying Labs responded to my experiences with lag and random disconnections while playing. To be fair, it was my son who was having the lag, on Rackham, and he mentioned that a lot of people were complaining about it at the time. My problem was with losing the connection. It’s possible they were related. ...

When I got home last night, my son was all smiles and grins. He’d finally passed the test of skill needed to join a prestigious online clan in Call of Duty 4 – having to kill ten opponents – real people, mind you, not AIs – in a specific death match, and to have twice as many kills as deaths. So his night was spent learning the hand signals and call signs and sekrit words and playing maps for fun. And if he was doing that, then he wasn’t sailing the open seas as the Pirate captain, Scranton Ratskull. I had nothing better to do than catch up on the last few episodes of Jericho (AMAZING show, by the way – MUST WATCH. Can anyone NOT believe the American government would destroy half their own country if it matched their political goals?), and so after I spent a few hours copying my website to a new location, I installed Pirates of the Burning Sea. ...

I finally hit 31 in Rock Band last night after about a dozen duels of which I lost two. Huh? Levels? Grinding? PvP? Yeah, this is Rock Band. If you start exploring the Multiplayer menu in Rock Band, and avoid the unsatisfying “Band” player matching, where you and three random strangers from Xbox Live slowly come to understand why people suck, you’ll come to Tug of War and Score Duel. Score Duel was unsatisfying. Tug of War is surprisingly strategic. ...