Stargrace

Into The Wilds #GuildWars #GW

As the release date for Guild Wars 2 (quickly) approaches, I’ve been meandering my way through prophecies in Guild Wars 1. Completing all of the major story lines as well as the bonuses you can find in each mission. So far I’m not very far, I’ve completed up to the wilds, which is mission 10 out of 25. Still, I’m pretty happy with my progress, and the story is getting quite interesting.

My Mesmer / Ranger (I went back to my original character) is level 18, and since I’ve dipped a toe or two into Eye of the North already I have a few heroes at my disposal which makes doing these missions MUCH easier. Even though I am using the wiki as a guide the cut scenes and story are still really great and I haven’t skipped through any of them yet.

One ‘difficulty’ I’ve had (if you can call it that) is reading the map to follow along with where I should be headed. Because the map is partially blurred until you traverse over the land, it makes reading it and comparing it to the wiki map quite difficult. Combine that with the fact that I simply get lost by turning around in most cases, and it’s a wonder that I’ve gotten this far at all.

You can add me to your friends list in-game (N) as Silhouette Reveur, I’m still looking for a lot of mini pets if anyone has any duplicates they wouldn’t mind sparing. I’ve got three of my own collection but for once I’ve no alts so I have none to spread around.

Now that I’ve adventured through a significant chunk of the prophecies chain I’ve come to really appreciate the game a lot more than I did when I first purchased it. I don’t even miss the ability to jump (much).

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Still Not Quite There Yet #EQ2 #EverQuest2

Sony announced last week that players would be able to complete dungeons as their characters instead of having to pick an avatar to play, and I thought that this would be a fantastic way to motivate players to actually complete the dungeons – I was wrong. It’s not enough.

Player created dungeons are great in theory, but in practice there is still too much missing from them to make them worth while for players. Number one, you barely get any experience from completing them. If you run a player dungeon and then go run a regular zone or even quest for the same amount of time, you will find yourself quite far behind. As an example, I took my 90 shadowknight through a dungeon that was 90 minutes long (and rewarded 300 tokens) – gaining not even 60% of a single aa. In that same amount of time, I was able to gain 10 aa mentored down to 65 and running through New Tunaria.

Now lets take a look at the tokens. The shop is located in the station cash shop, and there’s very little motivation for players to actually spend the tokens aside from picking up the mount (500 tokens) and maybe some repair kits. The gear available is sub-par compared to items you can solo quest for, and also random from chests (and flagged as no value, so you can’t even sell it or transmute it).

There are no shinies in player created dungeons. There’s no trash loot. There’s no chest drops, no spells, no craft recipes. All of these things are reasons why players should (and will) continue to quest and explore through regular overland zones instead of the creations of other players.

You can argue that this is a good thing, forcing players to explore “the world” instead of being stuffed inside of solo dungeons – however, with the introduction of mercenary a lot of players are already exploring on their own and doing dungeons alone. Why not have them at least partaking in dungeons that are created by other players.

I really think that user generated content is incredibly amazing to have in games, but I also think SOE missed the point of them in this round. Players need more than a neat dungeon layout to entice them to do them more than once. It’s simply wasted resources other wise.

Exploring Anew #EQ2 #EverQuest2

Ah how things have changed. I’ve been spending a bit of time in EQ2 as of late – I know, big surprise right? It’s been a few years since I’ve played the game to any extent, but I found myself missing some of those game aspects that EQ2 does very well, such as crafting and housing as well as user generated content.

Game Update 63 brought about a lot of changes, and so (of course) has time. The new level cap for both adventuring and crafting is 92. There are now ‘prestige’ points, which are in your alternate advancement tab but use their own point system. The cap for aa is now 320 – and everyone was granted a bunch of ‘free’ points because they lowered the amount of experience it required to get any. This means a few of my characters (without having even logged in) found themselves at 320 already.

There’s still a few things I don’t understand. A lot of people are running a ~~sinking sands~~ Skyshrine dungeon for mythicals – and I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out with time. (Edit: huge thanks for the comments that cleared up the one mystery) There are new dungeons to explore, including a solo / duo one in Skyshrine (I believe). There are new crafting quests, and new crafting apprentices. I haven’t managed to pick one up yet, but I hope to soon.

In a future game update players should be able to use their own characters to run player created dungeons, which I’m pretty excited about. One of the major turn offs at the moment for me doing a player created dungeon is the fact that the avatars are rubbish. I can solo them perfectly fine as a healer avatar, but not with anything else. They’re also quite boring to do alone. The rewards that you can use your tokens to purchase are also a bit lacking (imo).

I hear that PVP is also getting an overhaul, much needed. I’m excited about that, I used to love running the pvp instances when they first came out. I’m not an enormous fan of PVP but some times you just get that itch.

While everyone is off playing The Secret World (and let me tell you, temptation is hard to resist here) I’m eagerly waiting for Guild Wars 2 to come out. I’ve pre-ordered and can’t wait. Even though I should be working on my Guild Wars 1 achievements, I know. I did manage to get a few more missions done in it. I should really buckle down – but those distractions! They’re everywhere!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Remodeled Starter Cities #EQ2 #EverQuest2

I really like the newly designed Freeport. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, especially since we’ve all gotten used to having to zone from one section to another, but the transition was smooth and it’s much easier to get around now.

The newly designed Qeynos is in the works and should be out when the next update goes live (I believe, I could be wrong). I don’t know that I have any characters who even live in Qeynos any more, but I’m sure I can find one or two to use to explore the area.

Community Effort #WurmOnline

This weekend Sincor organized a mass casting of ‘Rite of Spring‘ ‘Holy Crop‘ and ‘Ritual of the Sun‘ on the Deliverance server. Each of these spells belongs to one of the three Freedom Gods, and requires 300 favor to cast which means a lot of linking. I was only too eager to help out in any way that I could and so I volunteered a priest of each deity, and helped out with a few gems.

One of the major benefits to casting these spells is that the players online who are followers / priests of that deity will gain 5h of sleep bonus when the spell goes off. The downside to this is that too many people want the sleep bonus but don’t want to help out with the cast. I was sad to see that a few of the ‘old timers’ were unwilling to come to Green Dog to help with the cast, giving some pretty feeble excuses. All community events like this only work if they have the help of the community behind it.

For those who did come out, I was thankful, and had fun. It was nice to see parts of the community come together to help benefit the entire server, although it did not help that the following day the servers all went down numerous times so everyone (online or not) was granted 5h of sleep bonus. Some players even went so far as to complain that they already had 5h sleep bonus so they didn’t personally benefit from the 5h that was granted from server issues. Really? We are so selfish that we have to complain when others benefit from something that we already have? Honestly, it just made my head hurt.

There are a few other community events scheduled for this summer, including a summer festival of sorts on the Independence server which I am looking forward to attending. There will be games and prizes given out as well as priests casting and other good things. I love these player run events, and I think they really add character to a game – as long as they can be managed well. It’s only too easy for one person to spoil it for a group and for arguments to follow. Thankfully we don’t see too much of that.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!