June 2009 Entries
As a rule, I don’t cheat in MMOs. This isn’t some moralistic smugness mind you and my online honesty is more a thing of fear than rectitude. I just assume that The Server Sees All and I’ll get caught and permabanned so fast my feet won’t touch the account cancellation page, and anyway, how do even go about it? Using leet hacking skillz out of War Games or Johnny Mnemonic, I’m sure. Everything I learnt about hacking, I learnt form Disney’s seminal work on the theme, Tron and I just look daft in a glowing blue cycle helmet.
I’d also just...
Some more excessive self-indulgence here:
Van Hemlock (Ep 57): A Tank, a Healer and a CC walk into a bar...
It's another What We're Playing One, which turns out to include:
Guild Wars
Lord of the Rings Online
City of Villains
Planetside
Runes of Magic
Beneath a Steel Sky
Infamous
Prototype
Red Faction: Guerrilla
EVE Online
A Tale In The Desert
Sam N Max...
Part Two of the Tuesday N00b Club Sorrows Furnace rampage went well, seeing us complete the last bit of To Sorrow's Furnace; Noble Intentions without too much mishap and roll on to the finale of the interesting but underused Sorrow's Furnace quest set; The Final Assault.
It isn't a new place by any means, dating back to September 2005, long before the addition of the Eye of the North dungeons, but the place functions in a very similar manner; a large underground map whose contents can alter depending on currently active quest states. I'm not sure why it had taken me...
Yikes! Two of these posts back-to-back. This is likely to be either the Editor's tardiness on the previous show or alacrity on this one, but either way, even more talking here!
Van Hemlock (ep56): Axe-Grinding as a Participation Sport!
A casually thrown out Twitter Question went supernova this week, and became the topic in itself; "This week saw us literally paralysed by LotRO's Dread System, which was quite irritating! What MMO mechanic annoys you the most?"
A massive list of gripes ensued, showing that pretty much all of us dream of a somewhat better game than we play at present. Pretty much the entire...
Here is us, doing some talking, about E3!
Van Hemlock (ep55): Eclectic, Effervescent, Egocentric!
Which to be fair, is mostly a show brought to you by Jon, with me heckling at regular intervals! Its a What Were Playing One, and the Twitter Question was: "Another E3 come and gone. See anything you liked? Didn't see something you hoped to? Let me know cos I missed the whole thing!"
E3 didn't really give me personally a lot to drool over, and seemed mostly to be about Console Stuffs this year, in particular, new and interesting ways to look a fool in the privacy of...
After some kind of bizarre self-inflicted mental kung-fu, I seem to have accidentally tricked myself into resubbing to PlanetSide for at least one month, possibly more. I take the general point that it isn't our fault as consumers if a product doesn't do well - it does indeed need to be something that people actually want to play. Despite that, I quite fancied a go anyway.
Logged in to immediately receive my Four Year Veteran Merit, again proving what a loyal *chortle* customer *snicker* I have been all that time! I also logged in to find that my old Main Character, a TR...
After this weeks jaunt we've made a bit more progress on the Lord of the Rings Online Epic, fetching up in Book 5, Chapter 8, for those following along at home. The previous big punch up, at Chapter 5 was quite hard work, not least of all hampered by the fact that although I was having a blast, my little hobbit on the other hand, was quite terrified throughout the final boss fight of the instance.
I'm sure I'd gushed before about how interesting and novel the Dread/Hope mechanic in LotRO is, with different places, people and situations causing increases in,...
Some fascinating numbery analysis here:
Ardwulf's Lair: Digging Into Xfire Numbers
Ardwulf is quite clear on the pinch of salt with which Xfire's statistics are to be taken; a self-selecting and possibly unrepresentative subsample of online gamers, mostly in the FPS and RTS demographic. But for want of any better numbers, they make an interesting yard stick.
Specifically, hes out to examine the Sony Access Pass stable of titles in the light of Matrix Online's imminent closure, possibly to determine if Vanguard is next, but the one that got me worrying was second-to-last entry, and now nearest-the-door Planetside, a game that regular...
People seem to think that guests are a Sometimes Thing for the show, which we can respect, so its back to something a bit more normal this week:
Van Hemlock Podcast (Ep 54): When DRM ATTACKS!
Which mostly features yours truly getting quite stroppy about SecureROM issues while trying to play Supreme Commander. Grr! Overall, the fight against software piracy is a tricky issue that probably has no obvious solution, or at least not one that we could come up with in half an hour!
The Twitter Question wasn't a terribly original one this week; "What MMO are you looking forward to next?",...
Confronted with The Old Problem again on Monday, in Lord of the Rings Online, although LotRO is hardly the only culprit. I've been gushing about what a rollicking good time I've been having in there for some weeks now so I shouldn't be surprised that some of my other online friends (mostly from the Tuesday N00b Club and Guild Wars) have expressed an interest in trying the game out and have rolled up new characters on our server, [EN] Glirain.
I'd invited them to join the LotRO Kinship, of course, and we chat and natter during play, but there the friendship ends for...
Of a weekend, I like to potter about the various MMOs I have on the go. The regular week nights are good for progress and camaraderie, but I like to wander about solo sometimes too, and flitting about at weekends is a good time for that kind of thing. City of Heroes is a bit trickier than most for solitary meanderings though, and has a very peculiar...well, problem isn't quite the word, but out of all the MMOs I've ever played it perhaps the most difficult one in which to solo. By that, I don't mean the usual gripe...