December 2007 Entries
Bah! The Tuesday N00b Club slammed headfirst into yet another brick wall of adversity this week, this time in the form of another overpowered mega-boss monster, and all in all, left me in a rather despondent mood really. It exposes a certain hypocrisy about the game, I think, or at least the direction the game seems to be taking increasingly in recent expansions and campaigns. Guild Wars has been, for me at least, a fascinating exercise in almost collectible card game style 'deck-building' strategy, coupled with an extremely well executed variant on Diablo. But its the unique skill and...
Just as the ugly spectre of relentless grinding for xp begins to raise it's head in earnest in City of Villains, a Winter Event! Huzzah! I must admit I wasn't expecting the levels to slow down quite as suddenly as they appear to have done in the Rogue Isles, despite anecdotal evidence to support it all. I'm now level 27, and am perhaps playing two sessions a week, and things really do seem to be Getting Serious now, and CoX seems, to me at least, to be very much an MMO of The Old School. Perhaps it...
Back to work in Guild Wars: Eye of the North, and after a emotional and fraught sojourn on the Tarnished Coast, we now strike out east, to the Charr Lands. Little Gwen is now all grown up, and many years have passed since the Searing destroyed Ascalon. She's found hate-fuelled gainful employment in the ranks of the Ebon Vanguard, a kind of commando regiment from what is left of Ascalon who make it their mission to take the fight to the enemy, and cause all sorts of ructions deep in Charr territory. Using the nearby Eye of the North...
So Trinity came and went and was something of a mixed blessing, as it turned out, not least of all logging in for the last few days and seeing a stonking great 'DO NOT REBOOT!' Message of the Day. I gather there was some kind of troubles with it mucking about with critical Windows XP system files? For the first time since I got it, I find myself glad to own Vista, which by all counts was largely immune to the somewhat alarming boot sector destruction hijinks. Mind you, it wasn't just that, and there's a pretty huge...
Bit of a quiet week on the Guild Wars front, with RL getting in the way and making us miss a turn, as it were. Annoying, but we're not in any particular hurry, so I don't mind. I still got a few hours of solo questing in though; largely inconsequential side-jobs for cash and xp that don't really count in the grand scheme of the ongoing story that much. These were mostly in the 'mid-game' regions of Tyria and Cantha, as I play a bit of catch-up, bringing my Mesmer through the Factions story and outposts, only this...
Once upon a time, I imagined myself a Scientist in EVE Online. This was the golden days of the Tech 2 Lottery, an ill-advised system all in all, and now recently replaced. After about 45 days of skill training in an otherwise useless skill, I got talking to an agent who would give me just under 50 'RPs' a day. These Research Points would accumulate over time and each represented one ticket in a gamewide periodic lottery, which governed the distribution of the incredibly rare Tech 2 Blueprint Originals, licences to print money, in effect. Suffice to say...