Playing Catch-Up

My goodness! It's been, like, two and half weeks since I posted. Busy, busy, IRL. The big gaming news of the past little bit seems to be the cancellation of EverQuest Next. I can't say I am too surprised, but it is a disappointment. While I never played the original EQ, and only dabbled in EQII and Landmark (which I also "invested" in), I was looking forward to seeing the StoryBricks concept in a polished game.

But enough about that. What I have been doing for the past couple weeks, besides neglecting the blog, is playing a bunch of SWTOR (no surprise there, either). When Scooter can get involved, we're working on our Team Jedi, currently en route to Hoth. My Baldrvar is delightfully Dark, while Scooter's Vireena is only the Diet Coke of Evil. (Don't tell her I said that.)

SPOILERS (for a 4-year-old storyline)

As an aside, I wish that (1) Sith light armor wasn't so uniformly goofy, and that (2) gear did not change appearance between the Imperial and Rebublic side. I wanted to keep Valerija in a short jacket, but the only one I could find was the one you see in the pic, a level 7-ish piece. There are plenty of medium armor jackets for smugglers that would fit the bill nicely, but they literally change to Agent garb when viewed on the Imp side.

When I'm on my own, I've gotten caught up in my Light-side Sorcerer's story. Valerija came to the realization she was being groomed as more than just an apprentice by Darth Zash. (What, the haircut didn't give it away?) And with the help of Khem Val, the Dashade, she sprang Zash's trap, with unexpected consequences for all of them.

With the first chapter of her Sith career over, Lord Valerija (or is it Lady?) decided it was time to shed the resemblance to her former master (mistress?) and stepped out in a big way.

There are a couple other adaptive armor jackets I would have preferred, but they are out of my price range. This is Theron's jacket, dyed Yellow and Deep Pink. Njessi will probably kill me. I also had a bit of buyer's remorse over the pompadour, but after playing through a few cutscenes, I think it fits my newly independent darkangel.

She may be attempting to reform the Empire with the Light, but Valerija is no pushover. That bubblegum-hued lightsaber cuts just as deeply as any red, green, or blue one.

And she can toss lightning with the best of 'em.

That's not to say Valerija doesn't have a sense of humor. Her motley band of pirates, archaeologists, fallen Jedi and Force-eaters keeps her amused and bemused all at once. But she'd do anything for them, and thus, has gained their undying loyalty. Loyalty that she'll need in the times ahead, as she pursues Darth Thanaton across the galaxy.

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Updated History

Cheating a little here:

My current repertoire includes EverQuest II and The Secret World.

My main game right now is The Secret World. My lovely bride, Scooter, and I loved sunny Egypt after months in soggy Maine, but we're now traipsing through the snowy mountains of Transylvania. It's the smartest story and skill/ability system on the market, in my humble opinion. The recent updates "The Last Train to Cairo" and "A Dream to Kill" feature the most enthralling storylines I have followed in an MMO. I currently have a toon in Egypt's Scorched Desert, and two in Transylvania's Carpathian Fangs.

Between Christmas and New Years Eve, we decided to try something a little different, after looking into a couple F2p titles, we started playing EverQuest II. Our first two characters were OK, but we chose poorly on our starting area and tired quickly of the polar tundra around New Halas. Picking up again with a Ratonga Conjurer (me) and a Half-Elf Warden (Scooter) we restarted in Greater Feydark and are currently in the second zone of the continent, Butcherblock Mountains.

Guild Wars 2 is on the back burner. I had a blast in my recent stint as a Norn Mesmer—Greatsword Mage, FTW. GW2 is a ton of fun (the most important thing in a game), easy to jump into and play for a few minutes or a few hours. The game has a good skill/progression system, great graphics, plenty of lore, and just a touch of whimsy—without going overboard. I have a human Engineer at the max level of 80, and several other characters at lower levels.

I love Rift, playing regularly from the beta tests in January of 2011 through October of the same year, partnering in-game with my beloved Scooter. I cannot say enough great things about this game, or the developer, Trion Worlds. It's not perfect, but the polish and responsiveness of the game and company are things other devs should aspire to. For reasons not really clear even to me or Scooter, when our toons hit 50 (max level) the wind went out of our sails, and we really had no desire to continue playing the game. We recently got involved again, with House Stalwart, but discovered that something about the game causes us both eye strain.

I played Star Trek Online from just after its release in February of 2010 until May of 2011. I dipped in a toe again in June of 2012, checking out the Duty Officer system and other developments to the game. With the recent Legacy of Romulus expansion, I started up a new Romulan Captain and got my Main up to max level. Amongst all my MMO characters, I am still most attached to my STO crews in many ways.

I had a lot of fun with Star Wars: The Old Republic, from mid-December of 2011 into August of 2012 after pushing to achieve 50 (max level) and finish up the story on my Imperial Agent. I was initially very excited about the story-centric gameplay. The game has a lot going for it; but in the end, the way BioWare and EA have managed the game and community has left a bad taste in my mouth.

I played World of Warcraft from June of 2006, when a friend got me hooked, until October of 2011. I have two level-80+ characters, plus many more lower-level ones. I tried the Pandaren starting area in the Mists of Pandaria expansion (in October, 2012), but got a "been there, done that" feeling from the experience.

Neverwinter is a fun third person shooter/D&D hybrid, and I love my half-Orc Great Weapon Fighter. I didn't get very far, but it was a nice diversion.

I have tried Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and Defiance, but found them not to my taste.

Please see also my character pages. Links above.

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POTD: New Companions, New Adventures

Yesterday was busy! And exhausting . . . it looks like rather than a 3-day like most people, I will only be getting one full day off. Even I don't have much time, but I wanted to post a couple pics from Wednesday evening in Norrath with Scooter.

Meet "Sally," the mini-cognatic bixie bopper, my first fluff pet in Norrath. I got her by completing "Sniffwistle's Superior Attacker" near Kelethin. Coincidentally, Scooter named hers "Sunny."

We also discovered the Taxi service, only minutes before earning out first mounts. Scooter has quite the lead foot.

Tonight we'll hit level 20 for sure, maybe more. I hope everyone enjoys your Friday and whatever length of weekend you get. :)

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A Place to Call My Own

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As a software instructor, my job does not often involve heavy lifting or other manual labor. But this week, we are preparing portable classrooms and moving servers, uninterruptible power supplies (basically big batteries), furniture, and floor panels (for wiring). All this in addition to running power and network cabling, etc. I am exhausted. And sore. And I've gotten myself into a pattern of writing at night, when I would prefer to carve out time in the morning. In any event, this little post will be short.

One thing I was able to do this evening was get in some game time in EverQuest II with my sweetheart, Scooter. We're continuing on with our toons, Chervil the ratonga and Farreyn the half elf. I think Scooter is enjoying her mostly ranged-caster Warden, and I like my little Conjurer just fine. I'm not overly attached to pet classes, but they're nice to have around. I didn't get a picture, but my earthen avatar upgraded to a larger version and handles aggro very well, while Farreyn and Chervil bring on the pain.

We sailed through about four levels, reaching 12 before finding Kelethin and each getting a house for all the stuff we've picked up. That's an interesting thing about EQ2—as opposed to Rift—it seems like more furniture drops off random mobs. Rift's main non-purchase source of housing decorations seems to be fishing. I do like that Rift's dimensions include outdoor areas and even buildings. EQ2's seem to be only interiors, but I could be wrong.

All right. I think that's it for me, with another post early tomorrow. I hope everyone has a great evening—or day, depending on where you are.

Station Cash Makes the World Go 'Round

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My Feedly has blown up with folks talking about SOE's recently announced changes to their subscription policies; specifically, how Station Cash is doled out and accumulates. Bhagpuss offers a perspective from across the pond; The Ancient Gaming Noob has an excellent analysis; and Syncaine has jumped on a comment to that post to illustrate the seeming absurdity from the player perspective. Unfortunately, it is not the player perspective holding sway in this situation.

Far from being the nefarious plot some players may think, the accumulating SC has apparently been wreaking havoc with SOE's IRS accounting. Responding to some questions about accounting rules, I offered these possible explanations on Syncaine's post:

The difference is that, unlike cash equivalents (e.g. gift cards), SC points are not any kind of real currency, especially since you can't get a refund on them. They are [the "good" that] you have purchased. From an accounting (and tax) perspective, any item that you redeem using them is irrelevant to the transaction. And the fact that R&D costs the company money in February is also irrelevant in January. The mount in [Rohan's] example earned them no direct profit from an accounting perspective.

It might also help to think of the items in a cash shop as services rather than goods. If, by way of a gift certificate, you pay in advance for a massage, the tax, etc. is recorded at the point of sale, not upon redemption of the service, even though the (labor) cost of the service occurs [at the time of redemption]. When buying SC (or other cash-shop currency), you are paying for a future service in the form of the intangibles you later redeem from the shop.

I could be totally wrong in the details, after all, the "service" could be represented on the books as a liability (like accounts payable) that will be expensed later. Accounting is complicated, and the potential penalties for screwing it up include loss of investor confidence, criminal fines, and jail time. So we want our favorite game developers to get it right. :)

EDIT: Something just occurred to me, that strengthens my "service" argument. If the items in the cash shop are simply code to be copied and applied to the player's account, where is the inventory? If inventory is not involved in the transaction, is that not a service? (Although to be honest, I subscribe to the economic perspective that there is no such thing as "goods." Whatever you pay for is really a service rendered.)

Leavin' On a Jet Plane

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Thank you to those who have been so interested in my pledge to write every day this year, and who have attempted to hold my feet to the fire. This weekend, I fell off the post-every-day wagon only two days after getting on. I have also realized the importance of a routine, since I put off writing any posts until I was too tired to actually write. I had a better record in July. I wanted to spend some extra time with Scooter, because I left on an extended business trip today. So far, my hotel internet connection does not look promising for prime-time gaming, given the load times just for web pages.

The Desolation of the Hobbit

On Saturday, Scooter and I went to see The Desolation of Smaug. I enjoyed the movie, though that is at least partly because I haven't read The Hobbit in years, and only know in broad strokes what liberties Peter Jackson took with the text. Not that I think it is necessary for movie makers to slave themselves to a book text.

My favorite recent movie, Cloud Atlas, unfolds quite differently from the book, cutting from scene to scene in different eras, whereas the book was basically five stories cut in half and sandwiched around a sixth like a Dagwood. That approach would not have worked well onscreen, but the intercutting does. More recently, Scooter and I saw Saving Mr. Banks, about P.L.Travers' trip to Los Angeles to finalize the film rights to her books with Walt Disney. The movie Mary Poppins is quite different in tone from the books. I'm not sure if it would be the classic it is if they had stuck to the way Travers wanted it done.

One problem with the "Jacksonverse" Hobbit is the weight of knowing what is yet to come chronologically. Bilbo's ring isn't simply a magic ring. It's THE ONE RING. That blond wood elf isn't just a soldier, it's Legolas! The Necromancer in Mirkwood isn't simply a sorcerer, it's the not yet-full-strength Sauron (whom Gandalf should have had no trouble defeating and driving out, as related after the fact in the book). So The Hobbit can't simply be the grand adventure that the book was. The same sense of doom infused the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy—and Titanic.

Anyway, Smaug was quite an adventure and certainly moved the story forward. But it suffers from Middle Movie Syndrome, much like Back to the Future Part II. The Two Towers suffered a bit from this, but not nearly to the same degree. In the end, I realize that it is mainly there to get us from the first movie to the third one. I can tell you what happened in Smaug, but I'm not sure I can tell you what it is about. But . . . I did like it. Though I do wish they had left more of Benedict Cumberbatch's voice in that of Smaug.

New Adventures in Norrath

Sort of taking some advice from commenters on Friday's post, Scooter and I decided to start new characters in the Fae lands near Kelethin. I chose a Ratonga Conjurer and named him Chervil; his first sidekick I named "Tuff." I was this close to making Chervil solid white with those shades. Scooter went with a Half-Elf Warden named Farreyn. So far it's been pretty fun, we played for a few hours after finishing chores and errands yesterday. I like Mage classes well enough, and Scooter decided the melee Swashbuckler wasn't much fun, she also prefers ranged combat. We also dipped our toes into EQ-style housing, and perhaps I will post on that in the coming days.

I hope everyone has a great week, I'll be offline during most of the day in the coming weeks, but hopefully I can find a routine for posting.

No Rest Till New Halas

Not quite two weeks ago, Scooter declared that she was a bit bored with the MMOs we are "currently" playing and set out to find a new experience. We did a little research on different F2P games out there, since we plan to check out some of the new games coming out in the spring, and this is really just to tide us over until then. Unless, of course, something really draws us in. After looking at a few games, like Allods and Aion, we settled on EverQuest II.

I suppose you could call this a bit of a "Nostalgia lane" piece, though other than a plastic figurine of a High-Elf that a friend bought at a garage sale and gave to me, I have no previous connection to EQ. We haven't played very much to be honest, but I'm already considered "experienced" by Raptr. I think that's more an indicator of how old the game is than that few still play. We picked the RP server, Antonia Bayle, partly because I've had good experiences with RP servers ever since Rift, and partly because it is frankly the most heavily populated server. In the few places we have been so far, there seem to be quite a few players out and about—doing quests, I assume.

It's A Lot Like . . .

I'll probably get a ton of crap for this, but as a player who cut his teeth on World of Warcraft, this is a lot like WoW. It would be far more accurate to say that WoW is like EQII—though they were in development about the same time period and were released less than a month apart. OK, OK, if WoW is Zeus, then Everquest II is like, Poseiden, and EverQuest is Cronus, the father of both. Or put another way, if Everquest is the English of Shakespeare, then EQ2 is modern British, and WoW is American. "They're related," is what I'm saying. But more like cousins than brothers.

Jimbuire & Merewyn

Having said that, I think in many ways, EQ2 is what WoW might have ended up like if Blizzard hadn't listened/catered to millions of people in simplifying the game. Of course, that's as someone who had only played a relatively paltry 17 hours or so, and have yet to reach level 20. Even with the option to create a level 85 character (at no apparent expense), the questing and accumulation of XP seems appropriate to the area we started in; unlike WoW, where immediately following Cataclysm, we quickly out leveled the areas we were trying to quest in.

Taking the Plunge

With all the expansions the game has gone through, there are quite a few options on race and class. Because some races and classes are aligned good or evil, not all classes (professions?) are available to all races. However, there is an equivalent class of the "correct" alignment, so the options are still pretty side open. Despite choices like Ogre and Ratonga, Scooter and I played it relatively safe with Wood Elves. I picked the Fury class, an elemental cleric (for healing), and Scooter went with Swashbuckler, a melee Scout.

For some reason, the option of starting near Kelethin (the home of the Wood Elves) was not presented to Scooter (who finished her character creation process first) and we ended up in the icebound north, near New Halas. This was fine, since we had no experience with the game, but we're already getting tired of the relentless white of the tundra landscape. My favorite zones in games are woodland (like Elwynn Forest or Grizzly Hills in WoW, or Silverwood in Rift). Snowy woodlands are cool, too; but not endless snowpack.

Jimbuire

The conversations that start quests are an interesting variant. I like that you can be sarcastic or even a bit mean to the quest giver, and your words hold true, unlike certain games' voiced dialogue. I do wonder if the dialogue will have an effect in the long run. The basic movements and combat are comfortably familiar, though it's odd for me to stand still to cast spells after getting used to the more—mobile—combat of TSW and GW2. I like that gray mobs (that give no XP for kills) become non-aggressive, making travel easier, even on foot. That said, there is a lot of running back and forth from the quest hubs to the questing areas, and if you miss a step in one quest chain, you'll end up going back through areas you've already been to for another. Character progression (abilities / specialization) is comparable to other MMOs, but the Alternate Advancement (AA) system seems like it was cobbled together over several expansions rather than designed to mesh smoothly.

The SOEmote system that applies the player's facial expression to the avatar is amusing, but it doesn't capture my eyes very well due to the screen glare on my spectacles. Also, I tend to go a bit stone-faced when playing games, so it would take some concentration to use the system effectively. Scooter and I just turned it off.

How Long Will We Sojourn Here?

We haven't even gotten into the housing potential, which I know is a big part of EQ2's appeal to a lot of folks. I did get lost in the housing system the other night, popping out in Qeynos and taking almost an hour to figure out how to get back to the zone Scooter was in.

While EverQuest II has been a pleasant experience overall so far, little niggling things make me wonder how long I will stick around. Right now we are Bronze Level (F2P). Upgrading to Silver (B2P) doesn't seem to unlock the sorts of things I wish it would, like the slider that adjusts how much XP goes to AA or being able to send mail. [EDIT: I know about the shared bank space.] Given the great experiences I can have in GW2 and TSW (or even Rift) without committing to a monthly subscription, paying rent for Quality-of-Life and User Interface options is not something I am willing to do. And the frequent reminders that I could upgrade (for a nominal fee), while not irritating to me as it is to some, certainly is not endearing the game to me.