Vanguard

One of the nice things about doing the Daily Blogroll is that it takes the pressure off trying to do something fun every night. Tuesday night, Kasul and I were playing LotRO, running around doing quests in the Lone Lands, and I realized I was bored senseless by the tedium of LotRO’s quest grind. Last night was all W101; a friend and I did a couple Moo Shu Onis and then farmed Baron Greebly for cool stuff, and we let each other see our homes. I was playing with a good friend each time, but LotRO’s soul-crushing quest grind couldn’t be saved. I suspect LotRO won’t be on my hard drive much longer. I love the players, but the game is just a grind in pretty clothes. ...

When I’m running around the mean streets of the Rogue Isles in City of Heroes, you know what I hate the most? Nah, not the dons of the Family. Not even Longbow. It’s those damn tourists from Paragon City. And NOW I find that the heroes themselves are thinking about slumming their dark sides on my turf? Sente hopes the expansion adds more depth to the Mission Architect, allowing real choices instead of “if it moves, kill it. If it doesn’t move, harvest it.” gameplay so common in CoX missions. Syp sees this as a necessary move to separate the game from Champions Online and DC Universe Online. Spinks wonders why it took so long for such a basic premise as heroes and villains swapping sides to make it into the game. Hudson hopes the expansion will deal with City of Heroes’ boredom factor. ...

My new computer is due to be delivered today! I’ll be at work, of course, but maybe I can finally find their delivery center and pick it up afterward. My hope and fervent dream is that this will be the computer powerful enough to run Lord of the Rings Online…. Anyway. A couple of weeks ago, Paragon Studios introduced the Make Your Own Farm Mission (aka Architect) system, where players could find a badge they wanted to gain, and find the perfect mission among the thousands created for this purpose to gain that badge, or that level, or whatever they liked. Experience with similar level creators in such obscure games as Diablo, Diablo II and LittleBig Planet wasn’t clue enough that many players would use their new powers to create and play custom missions to benefit their characters. ...

I’ve renamed the Web Log to the Daily Blogroll, just because I like the name better. Also, in the Shameless Self Promotion dept, look for the last Adventures in Monopoly scheduled for later today. There’ll be more adventures with Dire Bear, Scottie and Car, when they have another story to tell. It’s server merge time in EQ2 again. This time, the US PvP servers Nagafen and Venekor (RP) will merge after Fan Faire in June. Most PvP players seem okay with it, but some are taking it really hard. ...

Welcome to the Sunday Web Log! When’s the new EverQuest server coming? The rumor mill has it that the 51/50 server – new characters start off at level 51 with 50 AAs – is in the bag. Others assume that SOE will be opening a new progression server, and have reactivated their accounts in order to start over. As near as I can tell, nothing has been announced yet, but it seems likely that we’ll be able to play on the new server, whatever kind it is, in June. Oh, and EQ players? You voted two frogs in as Mr. and Miss Norrath of 2009? I mean, grats to Kannak and Molleah but … frogs? ...

On February 17th, 1980, around 10PM, I was so frustrated with some puzzles in Dungeon (which would later become Infocom’s flagship game, Zork), that I found out where on the University of New Hampshire’s engineering school’s VAX-11/780 the game was installed, and printed out all the text in the game, hoping that would give me some CLUE to the devilish puzzles. I still have that printout, covered with my scrawled notations and maps. Why I’ve kept that printout over twenty-nine years – longer than many of my friends have been alive – I don’t really know, but there it is. I look at those words and remember nights spent in the lab learning about programming sound, graphics, user interfaces and compilers, but late at night after all the homework was done, trying to solve yet another puzzle in Dungeon. ...

2008 has been an absolutely amazing year for MMOs, and my personal progress through them. Last year at this time, I’d just found the absolutely most perfect EQ2 guild – they were great raiders, loved grouping, and were fantastic people besides. With Clan of Shadows, I managed to do every flagging raid for Ruins of Kunark and was ready to step in and do my best to help the guild as they conquered Veeshan’s Peak. It wasn’t to be; I didn’t make the full membership vote. It wasn’t even close. That disappointment, along with other things to fill my evenings, eventually led to the end of raiding. Without raiding, though, I didn’t have much incentive to log in anymore. I tried to make things work with another guild, Delusions of Grandeur, but it just wasn’t CoS. I guess if I couldn’t make it in CoS, I didn’t want to settle for a lesser guild. ...

Stargrace wrote that everyone who plays Vanguard was given a camel. I’ve never had a camel before. They say about Vanguard, that you can just pick a direction and start walking, and nothing’s going to stop you. Anyplace you see, you can walk to. So I got some provisions from the kind merchants at the Village of Trush, packed up the bags, left a note for my family so they would know that I was okay, and I climbed up on the camel and looked all around. ...

Due to the new character joining Stout Henry in his further adventures, AND due to me using Vanguard to generate illustrations for the story, Stout Henry was delayed until I’d leveled up a gnome enough in VG so that he could pose for screen shots. I finished that last night, and I think he came out pretty well :) VG’s Isle of the Dawn was still really laggy on my computer, but the superior gear that comes from it makes it a bad idea to skip it. ...

Maracas aren’t as good at warding off intergalactic invaders as I thought they would be. While out gathering the day’s meals, my duckling tribespeople were startled by a huge contraption which WALKED on white, clanking legs down from the sky and sucked up the food animals that were being kept in the pen behind the main hut. It then buzzed the village twice and stalked back up into space. ...