A Pixel Nomad

Day 3 Daw: Emerald Kingdom

This game hasn’t been released yet, it’s still in alpha testing, but the team working on Emerald Kingdom have been incredibly helpful and vocal with their growing community, and that’s why I’m nominating them as my day 3 Developers Appreciation Award recipients. In specific I want to give a big thank you to Azrael Deling who has been fostering the community since day one.

I love community, it’s what keeps us playing in pretty much every single game when we’re ‘done’ the game. Communication between those who are creating our favorite games and those of us playing helps to keep everyone happy.

Want to learn more about the game? Check out their Emerald Kingdompedia, or the Emerald Kingdom web page. To learn more about the team at Double Cluepon Studios who are making all of this happen, you can check out their page.

Day 2 DAW: EverQuest #EverQuest

14 years old, and still going strong. My second nomination for Developer Appreciation Week (thanks again Scarybooster for running this event) is the good folks who work on EverQuest – no matter what year they worked on it.

I recently started playing EverQuest again, and I’m so glad I did. There are over 600 people on most evenings (on my server, Drinal). The quests and expansions are still going strong and while it’s certainly not the glory days of this game any more the community is there and the developers have a close relationship to them. There have even been some developer changes lately to help bring the game more in line to those released these days, with an offline mode for the auction house, and mail that you can use to send items instead of just text (not that I ever get any mail, if I do it’s usually just spam).

This is a game that a lot of people use to mark how ‘fun’ they have in other games. Even if they don’t feel like they can return any more they’ll re-live the glory days over and over again, measuring each of their newer games against how much fun they had in it. Developers have left lasting impressions on players (not always positive), and honestly that’s what we all hope to do some day.

So thank you, developers of EverQuest. Without this game I would have never met some of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t have started my blog (way back when, MmoQuests used to be just about EverQuest) and I would have never had so many new and amazing opportunities come my way.

Day One DAW: Glitch #playglitch

So by now you’re looking at the title wondering “what the hell is DAW?!” – it’s a week long celebration of developers. In specific, it’s an event created by Scarybooster that has run for the last four years, giving thanks to the developers of our favorite games instead of acting like the ungrateful consumers of content we often come across as. Welcome to day one of the Developer Appreciation Awards.

My first award goes out to the wonderful developers of Glitch. Every single one of them. They created a game that was outside of the norm, and isn’t that what all of us keep asking for? Something different. Something new. Sadly, Glitch shut down last year and that’s why it’s even more important that I award this. If you enjoy playing a game, it’s so very important that you show your support, because not all games last forever. Eventually they shut down, and losing a game that you enjoy playing really sucks. I can’t even begin to imagine what that feeling would be like had I created the game. I imagine that when you work on a project like that you put little pieces of your heart and soul into it, and pray that the other gamers understand where you’re coming from.

So thank you, wonderful developers of Glitch. I really liked your game and appreciate all the hard work you all must have done on it.

Gear, Dungeons, and Karma – Oh My! #GW2

My elementalist is now at a comfortable level 80. I reached 400 chef, artificer, jeweler, tailor, and huntsman. I love having the ability to swap out my crafts on a single character, it makes things much easier.

Combat Wombats kicked off the night with a karma banner and a 15% karma buff for 24 hours. I used a potion and some karma food and managed to open enough jugs and drops to have slightly over 200,000 karma, which gave me a great start on level 80 karma gear. I picked up the chest, legs, helm, shoulders, and back pieces. I have almost enough laurels to pick up my first piece of ascended gear, and I’m now working towards obtaining my legendary. I’m going to do it in stages, I figure. First I’ll work on getting world completion. While I’m doing that I’ll be saving up the karma required and dabbling in PvP. It will take time but we’ll see how it goes.

I joined up with two guild mates to attempt to pug a dungeon, and I discovered one really annoying ‘feature’ guild wars 2 has regarding their dungeons. If the person who started the dungeon group (ie: zoned in first and set the dungeon) leaves, you get kicked out and you’re forced to re-start the instance with someone else. We struggled doing path one explore of Caudecus Manor, two named down (with some helpful hints) no thieves or mesmers in the group to make sneaking around easier, and mid-fight a member left. Suddenly we all found ourselves outside the gate in whatever stage we had been in before we got kicked (ie: I was laying dead on the ground).

One person should not have that much control over a group. The person who left didn’t give us any time to find a replacement or even notify us that he was fed up and wanted to bail. There was nothing to do but either start over again or just give up. Since it was already after midnight I decided to stop for the evening.

Tonight the Combat Wombats are making another dungeon run, and I’ll be going along on my elementalist. I’m excited to see how it goes.

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

The Half Way Mark #GW2 #GuildWars2

At the half way mark, my elementalist is sitting at a comfortable level 40. Last night as I was running around trying to get my daily done, I embraced a few facts about the character. While it may have been alright for my guardian to romp around Tyria wearing gear 10 levels lower than her, if I want to stay alive on my elementalist, my best bet is to upgrade her gear every 5 levels or so. Not a big deal at this stage of the game, gear is barely a silver per piece. So when I realized I was wearing level 18-24 gear at 39, I went and upgraded every single piece.

It made a huge difference in my ability to survive, which in turn makes a difference in my attitude as I play. Dying over and over again is not really fun.

I haven’t been quite as dedicated with my crafting this round as I was with my guardian. I’ve chosen to go the artificer / huntsman rout because an artificer is what I need to create the legendary staff I want one day, and huntsman was next on my list of “crafts I want to have maxed” – I have plans to max each of the crafts (slowly). With the guardian I made sure not to move on to the next zone until I was finished with the tier I was crafting, but this time I haven’t bothered to do that. Maybe I should. Actually now that I think about it, that was a much smarter way of completing things since I personally have more than enough time to farm components.

I really want to get into some dungeons, but I’m not sure where people go to look for a group. I also have no idea what a lot of the abbreviations I see in Lion’s Arch stand for. Fractals are another event I’d like to get into but finding a group for that has also proven to be difficult during my play times. I’m sure I’ll get to experience all of these things before too long!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself! (Also, this weekend will be filled with Neverwinter beta goodness, so expect a few posts about that in the upcoming days)