Category: Pointless Ramblings

Bad apples

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night being Halloween, we spent it all watching the Ghost Hunters Live Event. Seven straight hours of Ghost Hunters doesn’t leave any room for gaming. But can I just say, Amanda Tapping as a guest investigator = epic win. I now have a huge nerd crush on her.

Anyway since I didn’t do any gaming yesterday I don’t have any news to relate. Instead, I want to talk about mean people. Specifically, mean gaming bloggers. And no, I’m not going to include any links: no need to improve mean people’s google page ranks!

Right now it seems like there’s a wave of gaming bloggers leaving Warhammer Online. For the most part these are people who were in the beta, loved the game, got caught up in the hype and the excitement, threw down their money, and found a game very different (and less fun) from what they’d been playing in beta. So they’re disappointed and either a little sad or a little angry, and they’re quitting.

I find this sad. Granted these are just games, but still, to see a person going from excited about an event to disappointed…I have enough humanity in me to see this as unfortunate. But for some bloggers, this is an opportunity to laugh and jeer and enjoy the misfortune of others. That’s just mean and frankly, it says a lot about you as a person.

Even though “gaming” is becoming more mainstream, as “Gamers” (and particularly as “MMO Gamers” we’re still the object of much puzzlement and faint scorn in the greater public. When we go back to work after a few days off and someone asks “Did you do anything fun on your vacation?” most of us won’t say “Hell yeah, I hit level cap with my Priest!” because if we say that, we’re going to be labeled as some kind of anti-social loser, and honestly in a lot of companies this kind of label can negatively impact opportunities for advancement. Instead we say “Ah, I just kind of hung-out at home and relaxed, y’know? Rested up, read some books, watched some movies.” and then the person we’re talking to will smile knowingly and say “Yes, sometimes the best vacation is just to stay home and enjoy the family.” and all is well.

Which is a wild tangent, but my point is I still think we gamers need to stick together and cut each other some slack. The fact that you love World of Middle Earth and I love Warcraft Online is a teeny, tiny, trivial difference compared to the fact that we both love staying home and playing an MMO vs the people who choose to go to the movies/bar/opera/crack den/sports arena/hiking/ballet as their preferred way of spending leisure time.

Tearing each other down just makes our community weaker. How about we all (myself included, I’m certainly not infallible in this respect) try to be a bit more supportive of each other. We’re all gamers, after all. We’ve got plenty of common ground to cover.

War’s ups & downs

Posted on by Nimgimli

While playing Warhammer last night I had some quests to do in RvR areas. A few times I ran across a member of Destruction, and we did battle. The experience buffs make a huge difference. I’ve been grinding plague trolls for like 2 weeks (obviously not literally). I’m level 15, they’re level 15. They give 400 experience per kill. Up the road a bit are these pesky sprites that are level 16. They also give 400 experience. When I ran into a level 15 Destruction character and fought him 1 on 1, I got 2000 experience for the kill. Later I encountered a level 17 Destruction character and beat her. 3000+ experience for that. So yeah, the xp buffs make a marked difference.

WARNING: Moping, whining part of the post begins here.

This morning I log in and go back to grinding plague trolls, fantasizing about a day when I can get a group to cap Chapter 7 influence. Then amazingly, more people show up. I join their open group and we churn through stage 1. Finally I’ll be able to do stage 2 on this infernal, hateful, spiteful, vile Public Quest. And then… they all leave. And I’m left alone again doing this quest.

Ah well. I go grind sprites while the trolls reset. At one point two of them attack me. Things are looking bad, so I pop a health potion. “That item cannot be used yet.” WTF? The icon isn’t dimmed, there’s no cooldown timer on it. I try a HoT Potion. “That item cannot be used yet.” Bam. Respawn. *sigh*

At this point I’m not having fun and thinking that maybe cleaning the toilet would be more rewarding than grinding more trolls and sprites. I decide to say the hell with it and move on, leaving Chapter 7 incomplete. And then Mandred’s Hold comes under attack. There’s chatter about it in /regional and I head out there to defend the homeland. Destruction has a sizable force attacking the Keep. Order has… me. At least that I saw.

I try to pick off a straggler but get noticed and killed. Respawn, head into the Postern Door. Destruction is inside but I get up the ramp and aid the NPC Keep Lord in defending as best I can. Still no Order. Destruction pushes up the ramp, I die. Run back…and just as I get to the front gate the guards change to Destruction. Keep is lost.

In /region there’s much moaning and groaning. I give up, go back to finding quests or something to do. Then Destruction hits the other Keep. Much more moaning and hand wringing in /regional, with a side dish of finger pointing. Finally it sounds like maybe someone other than me might actually think about perhaps defending, so I turn around and start running back. But by the time I get into the area, the keep has fallen. More moaning and groaning, and then someone suggests “Well let’s take it back!” but they’re shouted down by some self-professed Leader of Order who explains that its not a good time because there are defenders.

WTF? Isn’t that the BEST time to have a fun battle?

At this point I realize that my day is slipping away and a long unpleasant work week is drawing near and having to work this hard to have fun just isn’t an efficient use of my time, so I log.

Yes, I’m pouting & whining instead of acting. I could’ve shouted down the self-professed Leader or Order. Or I could’ve done what most others did and just let Destruction steam-roll the BO’s and Keeps and keep grinding trolls. But by this point the wind had gone completely out of my sails.

Warhammer is great fun with the planets align and you find a group and there’s some openRvR happening. But for me, that’s maybe 25% of the time that I play. And I’m really starting to question whether its worth $15/month for that 2 hours of real fun I get out of it every week.

More blogrolling

Posted on by Nimgimli

Cleaned up the blogroll some more.

I re-ordered links in reverse alphabetical order. Why? Well I wanted to organize them in some kind of objective fashion, and since almost everyone goes with alphabetical, I figured I’d give the late-alphabet folks some love by moving them to the top for once.

The blogroll is a perpetual work-in-progress. If you want to be on it, or know a blog I should be reading, feel free to leave a comment. Here’s a repost on my criteria for linking to you, reprinted from my last post on the subject:
———————————–
If you’re not on there and want to be, drop a comment. My criteria for inclusion on my blogroll are pretty hazy but generally: 1) if you have Dragonchasers on your blog roll, I’ll almost certainly include you unless your blog is actively offensive to me (not very likely). 2) If I read you regularly, I’ll include you as a “public service” for other Dragonchasers readers because I think you rock. 3) If you’re a frequent commenter, I’ll include you as an indication of what great taste in blogs you have. 🙂 Plus I probably read you as well…I often follow links from commenters to check out your blogs.

BlogRolling

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I played Rock Band 2 until my hands were cramping, my back was aching (I was playing slouched back on the couch, coffee-house style!) and my eyes could focus on nothing other than note charts. It was a blast! But…not much to say about it other than… IT WAS A BLAST!!!

Anyway…

I’m making some changes to the blogroll here at Dragonchasers. “War Bloggers” is now “Gamer Blogs” since I’ve found so many quality blogs that aren’t really war-oriented and I want to start including them. Plus the reality is that so few of us dedicate our blogs to one game. This way I can link to places like Construed and have it “fit.”

If you’re not on there and want to be, drop a comment. My criteria for inclusion on my blogroll are pretty hazy but generally: 1) if you have Dragonchasers on your blog roll, I’ll almost certainly include you unless your blog is actively offensive to me (not very likely). 2) If I read you regularly, I’ll include you as a “public service” for other Dragonchasers readers because I think you rock. 3) If you’re a frequent commenter, I’ll include you as an indication of what great taste in blogs you have. 🙂 Plus I probably read you as well…I often follow links from commenters to check out your blogs.

I do want to keep the length of the list manageable, so I’ll be going through and cleaning things out every so often. But if you’re linking to me, I won’t remove you. We must all appease the Google.

Peggle Whisperer

Posted on by Nimgimli

I had a crappy day at work today, came home pissed off at the world for no reason I could put my finger on. Went to log into Warhammer and the authorization servers seem to be … unhappy. By the time I futzed around enough to get myself logged in, I didn’t feel like playing. Putzed around on my Warrior Priest alt a bit and logged.

Sitting in front of the computer thinking what to do and fired up Peggle for a minute.

A few hours later, I “finished” the game (meaning I got through all the levels in Adventure Mode.

I still don’t know why I was so angry, but I know I’m not any more. Sometimes you just need a silly relaxing game to take the edge off.

I am…the Peggle Whisperer.

Of course, I didn’t get high score… hmm, maybe its time to start over… 🙂

Easily influenced

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night you got a rant. Now you get uncomfortable naval-gazing….

That’s right, its the introspection post! Woot!

A couple of nights ago I went tearing through Tier 2 with CoWs and others and had an absolute blast playing. Since then I haven’t had any significant time to play. But I’ve been following blogs and some boards and this whole scenario issue has been eating at me.

And before ya know it, I’m ranting about everyone playing scenarios and no one doing OpenRvR when *the last time I played* all we did was OpenRvR. Granted most of Destruction didn’t get the memo but it was still fun to be in a big group (that wasn’t playing a scenario) taking down objectives.

I dunno why I let myself get caught up in the negativity. I think it has a lot to do with being frustrated because I want to play but can’t. So already my brain is headed down the road to snarky and when there’s other snarky brains headed in the same direction, mine just joins the warband and the snark breeds.

Before I do any more commenting on Warhammer, I’m going to wait until I find some time to put a few solid hours in. Get the joy back. Pretty much every time I log into Warhammer, I have a good time. Often I have a great time.

Maybe I’ll get to play tonight. I’ll definitely get the chance tomorrow. Blessed weekend, come to me!!!

Scenarios are not MMO

Posted on by Nimgimli

Warning: This is an opinionated, biased rant. 🙂

Jobildo’s post got some excellent comments and in turn got me to thinking about scenarios and why I resist them as much as I do.

And the answer, it turns out, is pretty simple: I’m not paying $15/month to play Team Fortress with some RPG trappings. I’m paying to play a Massively Multiplayer game with a persistent world. Call of Duty 4 allows me to play missions over and over on the same handful of maps while leveling up a character and guess what? It doesn’t cost me a penny once I’ve bought the game.

For people who sit in a warcamp and grind scenarios, there is really no need for a persistent world. A lobby would do just as well, wouldn’t it? A lobby would require vastly fewer server resources and would’ve cost orders of magnitude less to develop.

Essentially, this is battle.net.

It feels stupid for me to pay a monthly fee to, in part, support the infrastructure for a world that no one wants to use.

And I’m kind of dubious that after ranking through 40 levels in scenarios, people are suddenly going to go into OpenRvR (erm, that assumes that T4 scenarios exist…I honestly am not sure if they do)! More likely they’ll either leave the game or keep grinding scenarios until they hit 80 renown, and then leave.

What I’d like to see is all the scenario grinders funneled off to one server, and all the OpenRvRers gathered together into another server. The grinders shouldn’t have to pay $15/month to play, either, but that’s a side point. The OpenRvR Server shouldn’t even offer scenarios.

What irks me is that, yeah, it’s hard to find OpenRvR even on high population servers. Why? Because everyone is grinding scenarios while commenting that OpenRvR isn’t fun because no one does it. Curiously, I wonder if there isn’t MORE OpenRvR on less populated servers with longer wait times for scenario queues. I plan to find out.

I understand people want to get to cap as fast as they can. That’s why the gold sellers also offer leveling services. Grinding scenarios isn’t the fastest and easiest way to cap: paying someone to level your character is. But I don’t see anyone openly suggesting this is the best way to go about it. Why not? If all that matters is getting to 40 as fast as possible, why not just buy your way there?

If you really enjoy running scenarios, then this rant isn’t really directed at you. Enjoy the game, though why you pay a monthly fee to do in this game what you could do for free in any of a multitude of others is beyond me.

But I’m seeing people expressing opinions along the lines of “I don’t really like standing around grinding scenarios but there’s nothing else to do.” Well you sir/madame, are part of the problem. Get out of the damned queue and get out and start exploring the world! Yeah, it might be quiet at first, but if people on both sides of the battle just opted to not grind scenarios for one night and head to the RvR Lakes, there’d be *plenty* to do!!

OK, end rant.

Whew, I feel better getting that off my chest.

And Mythic, for the love of all that is holy, stop sticking us in a friggin’ scenario queue every damned time we move into an RvR Lake. You’re just fanning the flames doing that, tempting people to leave!!!

OK now I’m REALLY done this time.

The flip side: a night of “solo” War.

Posted on by Nimgimli

So last night, I was feeling pretty cranky and unsociable, but I still needed my daily War fix. I logged on for some solo fun. I was thinking “Log in, kill monsters, log off.”

Turns out it isn’t easy to solo in Warhammer.

And by that I don’t mean that going solo is hard or overly challenging. I mean that there are so many easy ways to group up with other players (implicitly or explicitly) that before you know it, you aren’t solo anymore. You have to kind of go out of your way to play by yourself in this game. (Just to be clear, this is a compliment.)

It started when I realized I still had a few quests left in contested (RvR) areas. I coulda shouted out to the CoWs for help but like I said, I was cranky and didn’t really feel much like talking. I figured I could chance it. After all, everyone is in Scenarios in Tier 1, right?

I’d just hit my first quest goal when I spotted a level 10 Marauder skulking about. Those guys are about as heretical as one can get, with their freaky arms and all. So I did what any good Witch Hunter would do. I shot first, planning to ask questions later. It was a good fight. Level 10 DPS vs Level 10 DPS. Sadly for him, he flinched first… his first reaction was to run, letting me get in a few shots before he decided to turn and fight. Pretty soon, one dead Marauder.

I figured he’d be back with friends. I figured right because before too long three Destros showed up. Three on one didn’t seem too favorable so I ran like a little girl. Popped my Flee, downed a potion and got away before the assorted DoTs and Snares could bring me down. I ran to the guards (I’m sure they had a few choice unmanly names for me at that point) and kept running, circling around to enter the RvR area from another venue.

Y’know what’s creepy & fun? Running into a town square and finding a bunch of bodies that haven’t decayed yet, and wondering which side won. I was whipping my camera back and forth scanning for action and finally spotted movement. Friendlies! A rag-tag bunch of order came running back from the direction of the Destro guards. We took back a control point and hung around for the 3 minutes it takes to solidify the capture. I wasn’t in a Group but I was in a group, if you follow me. We took another control point and hunkered down to finish the cap. Destro kept fainting at us from different vectors, but we held strong. When the timer went off and we got the bonus renown, everyone cheered. By then I’d finished my quests so I headed out of the RvR area.

It was time to leave for Norsca, as I’d finished all the quests in Nordland. In Norsca, I noted one more RvR quest that I’d lost track of. I had to scout a control point in a cave on an island. This is the one thing I really did Solo all night. I ran out there, not a soul in site. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for attacks to start. I hoped to trigger the quest from outside the cave, but nope. I crept inside. Empty. No guards, no players. The control point was Lost, which meant it had changed hands fairly recently (too bad, I was hoping for a solo cap!). I crept back out. Stealthed away, then ran like heck. Success. Sounds boring now, but doing it wasn’t at all.

It was getting late, but I figured I’d start grinding out some Influence in the Chapt 4 PQs. I wasn’t looking to get involved with anything, but when a group invite popped up from a Bright Wizard, it felt rude to ignore it. After all, this WAS a PQ I was doing. We chatted a bit while we ground out the first stage of the PQ. Then another player joined us. And last, a level 23 White Lion. Suddenly we could take the PQ seriously.

We beat it, and of course all got loot bags with such a small group. After a quick discussion we ran off to another PQ, adding a couple more group members but dropping one. The next PQ was completed in fairly short order. The White Lion had a Standard and it gave a +20% Morale Buff and a +3% Exp Buff. My Morale gauge was filling up faster than I could use the skill! With that PQ done, we headed off to yet another. By now the group was in the swing of things, chatting, joking, killing, helping each other out. People were rolling Need on things they could use, and Greed on things they couldn’t. Everything was fun and easy-going. No stress.

The next PQ had a surprise inside. And I’m not going to spoil it, but OUCH! During this one there were a few dwarves running about; they never joined us but definitely were integral to our ultimate success. Nice guys, too. We had a nice chat after the battle.

Finally I *had* to go to bed. Lady Luck was with me; I’d rolled for first place once, and second place twice in our PQ lotteries. I’m not sure what happens with a high level character in these things; I ranked first in contribution on one of them. A level 10 ranking 1st when there’s a 23 in the group? I’m guessing he gets penalized for being so high level, or just doesn’t get in on the meters at all? Anyway, 3 loot bags came with 3 equipment upgrades: tunic, boots and a new rapier. Woot!

So during my whole “solo” night I really did one thing alone. And I’ve specifically mentioned the chat that was happening in /group and in /say because I keep reading articles about how quiet Warhammer is. I don’t find it quiet, really. I’ll grant you that region-wide chat channels are quiet. But face to face conversation seems fine to me. I really don’t miss anonymous-ish chat channels with their petty flame wars and Chuck Norris jokes. When you’re standing right there in front of a person, or are grouped with them, chances are you’re going to treat them more like you would in ‘real life’ and not just randomly attack. And that’s been my experience so far.

All in all, another night of great fun and adventure in Warhammer Online. I began the night at level 9 and finished about half-way through level 11, without touching a scenario. (I keep hearing that doing scenarios are the fastest way to level, but 2 dings on a weeknight seems pretty good to me.) What’ll be next!!?

Warhammer Update 1.01

Posted on by Nimgimli

We’re getting a big Warhammer update.

Highlights from the Herald:

* Players no longer need to scroll down through the EUALA when logging into the game. The window now defaults to the bottom, and players need only check the Agreement box and click accept.

* The war against the gold sellers continues! We have made improvements to the Appeal system to allow players to report spam messages from gold sellers more quickly.

* TAB-targeting should now more consistently select the nearest enemy in the player’s field of view.

* Corrected an issue that was preventing players from adding new friends to their friend list even while the number of existing friends was below the list’s size limit.

* Fixed the issue that was causing players to sometimes get stuck in a particular animation state.

* Monsters which change velocity while moving in combat should no longer return “Target is Out of Range” sometimes when attacked by players.

* The /ignore command will now work more consistently.

* In response to player feedback, we have made improvements to player pet movement and behaviors.

* The Pet window should no longer disappear when its master is zoning or entering the game.

* We made many UI fixes including a new “autoloot” feature requested by many players.

* Guild cloaks will now display their heraldry properly.

* We have made several improvements to the chat window, and it should now be more intuitive to use and set up. A number of chat window issues were resolved in the process. We are continuing to work on your requests about chat, with more improvements to come in the future.

Not bad at all. Seems like they’re working on the hottest issues, to me.

Good show, Mythic!