Author: Stargrace

Just another gamer with too much time on her hands.

Lets Talk Exploits

I am a firm believer in the fact that there is a difference between exploiting, and “taking advantage of a game mechanic” that is NOT exploiting. Let me specify. Killing a ring event over and over again so that you can get the drops from it doesn’t constitute as exploiting in my books. You’re standing in one spot, not doing anything outside of the realm of the game. You’re not manipulating anything, you’re not being sneaky about it. You probably should report it because you know it shouldn’t work this way, but you’re not doing anything specifically WRONG standing there killing encounters. If for some reason said ring event goes through a fix so that it only spawns every 4 hours instead of every 10 minutes that is a result of a game mechanic that has been fixed. If you stand there all day and get reported for it (we’re not talking about using any third party programs here) chances are you’re not going to get in trouble.

Now. An exploit. Lets say with the newly released battlegrounds you figured out that if you transmute an item on the battleground server from your inventory, it would then clone itself as you returned to the regular server and you’d end up with the item back in your inventory along with the transmuted result. In this case you are blatantly abusing a game mechanic,  manipulating it in order to make the game do something that it shouldn’t be doing. Cloning items is bad m’kay?

Lets take it one step further. Lets say you figured out a friend from your guild was taking advantage of this exploit, and heading off to battlegrounds every chance available so that they could clone items and mute them then sell them on the broker for huge sums of cash.

What do you do?

Do you bother reporting them? Do you just wait for the game company to look into it and take care of it? Does your opinion of your guild mate change at all?

Whether or not to exploit something is always a personal choice that every individual has to make for themselves. The truth of the matter is that in pretty much every game if there’s a way to break it or find a way to gain an advantage over someone else, there will be people looking to take advantage of it. Whether or not they actually get caught at it, is another issue.There are always stories about raid guilds trying to break the avatars in order to find an easier way to kill them, or break a raid encounter (pulling Veeshan’s Peak mobs through the barriers anyone?) in order to accomplish their “goal” easier. How do you decide whether or not you’ll participate in something like that? Are the risks worth the rewards?

Nice Try

Above is a scam. If you get a tell like this in game, do the smart thing and do NOT go to the web site linked (which I have blocked out here). Block the person, and report them. It’s NOT NCsoft telling you that you’re about to be banned. I’d like to say that no one falls for these sort of things, but they do. Be smart about it, please.

Are you a Faction Fiend?

Faction!EverQuest II boasts a LOT of different factions. Each expansion comes with its own drop down menu that you can use to sort by, and figure out who likes you (and of course who does not like you). Some of them there’s nothing you can do about, as there’s no way to work the faction up from the negative standing, but then there are the factions that you almost feel obligated to work up for whatever reason (a lot of this relates back to my ‘do you enjoy dailies’ post).

This is the faction standing for my tailor. It differs from my jeweler, and my carpenter, because they’re each working on faction differently. My tailor needs faction with the Kerra Isle Outfitters in order to purchase special recipes. The jeweler needs faction with the Researchers of Quel’ule, and my carpenter needs faction with the Hue Mein Craftsmen.

When the daily quests only reward 2,500 craft faction, and you need to climb to 40,000 it can be pretty slow (and boring). Especially when you have multiple crafters to log in every day to make sure they all get their faction taken care of.

One very neat thing SOE has done is allowed almost all of the faction items to be heirloom (minus the recipes, which is why I’m working each character individually) which means you can put them in your shared bank, and you don’t have to work faction on every character you own (unless you’re like me, and you need those recipe books). I love this idea. I love that I don’t have to grind a whole lot of faction across every character if I don’t want to.

I’m getting there. Slowly. At 30,000 faction my tailor can purchase one of the books available, it’s casual wear, which I think is just appearance gear but I’m not certain about that. At 40,000 she can purchase battle secrets gear. I’m hoping that’s PvP gear but I’m not certain. I know I could probably find everything I want to know at EQ2traders, but I would rather wait and find out on my own, leave a little surprise after all this faction work I’ve been doing.

How important are factions to you in your game of choice? Do you spend hours working on them for achievements or other rewards or could you care less about who hates you? I want to hear below!

Spirit’s Resonance

Sentinel’s Fate has a lot of instances, which is something I quite enjoy. Although I don’t like having a billion different type of tokens clogging up my shared bank. That’s a story for another day. Today I got to adventure through Spirit’s Resonance, which is basically an instanced replica of “The Hole” (which is contested). One of the great things about this zone is that there are a LOT of quests associated with it.

Plus the Mark of Manaar quest, which grants you a token (of course).

There are a few things to make note of as you explore through this instance. Number one. You’ll have a quest that requires you to trap a bug – you get a bag in your inventory in order to do this. Well. DON’T TRAP THE KEY MOB which also happens to be one of those little beetles in the graveyard. Woopsie. That’s what happened to my group yesterday as we made our way down there.In fact the more people who /bug this the better, so that we can have the key mob flagged differently and people can’t go scooping it up as a quest update.

The last mob in the instance was probably the one I enjoyed the most (SPOILER INC):

Every 20% the mob will discombobulate someone and you’ll have to run to the back of the room where you’ll see some book shelves. You’ll be in the form of another creature, much like the void beast fight in TSO where each group member takes possession of a different creature. You’ll have to kill 3 rounds of books, with 3 mobs in each encounter. If you don’t, bad things happen to your group. It is a random person who is selected every 20% so have fun with that. I was chosen twice on my bard, and the healer was also chosen twice. The best part is that as you’re morphed into some other creature, the group gets to kill a version of you. Mean while, the “mob” speaks as you, much like they do in Unrest. So I’m working on killing the books in the back of the room, and my NPC version of me is asking who is parsing the encounter, and if anyone wants to head to Blackburrow afterward. It was great.

I managed to gain a few more upgrades for the troubador as well. She’s slowly inching her way away from being an int / str based caster, and over to the new agi scheme that was implemented for scouts with the release of Sentinel’s Fate. I’m also just a smidgen away from getting UT finally, so maybe I won’t be so disliked. Ok so my guild has been pretty great at letting me tag along despite the fact that I don’t have UT, but it’ll still be great to have.

Happy gaming, I’ll see you in Norrath!