West Karana

As I was working through DOMO-like* Florensia last night (expect a separate article about it tonight), I was thinking, and this goes back to my MMO DNA project, wouldn’t it be nice to take one of those F2P imports and really play the heck out of it, and blog about it, every day for a month? I think it woulld take that long to really get a thorough sense for a game. EVERY MMO is pretty similar at the start — pick up quests, go kill quick-spawning beasties, level up, etc. You can’t review a game based purely on the new player experience, as important a part as that might be.

So anyway, last night I was painfully entering quest text from Florensia into Babelfish, as the game is still largely in German (side benefit: players in the Florensia beta will be getting a good reading knowledge of German until they get the English localization patch done). And I was thinking, this game has twin talent trees for abilities in land and sea; the sea game itself runs in parallel and has its own grouping dynamic; there’s no way I am going to get a sense for this game in a couple of nights. All I could really tell was that this game shared a similar style with *Dream of Mirror Online. I’d just barely built my first ship.

So I’m thinking that, possibly starting September, I will be playing a different free-to-play every month, and try to really understand the game enough to know why they were popular enough to import in the first place. I’m thinking my first one will be Pi Story or Dream of Mirror Online, both games I have some experience with. If Florensia localizes before then, maybe Florensia.

More details as the time comes closer, but I think it would be fun to do this kind of thing with other people who are interested in checking out new games that don’t get the press of a WoW or a AOC or a WAR.

* note — if you want to be inundated with info about F2P games, sign up with Aeria Games, Outspark and Frogster — those are the majors (Frogster is EC/Asia only though they are running the Florensia beta for now).

I haven’t done a “what I’m playing” thing for awhile. So here’s my current roster of games, and I’ll start off with what I’m NOT playing. And that game would be Mythos.

MMOs:

Mythos had one of the strongest beta communities on record, with unparalleled access to devs. Community Manager Taylor Baldree would hold court in the #mythos IRC channel every night. Devs would respond daily on the forums. And all that was leading to a game that I very much wanted to play. With Hellgate: London’s reprieve by Namco Bandai, let’s hope there IS hope for Mythos as well.

Pi Story and Florensia — I played a few hours of Pi Story in closed beta, but it ended before I got too far in the game. Florensia, I didn’t get into the closed beta but has since gone open. Pi Story is a 2D side scroller MMO in the vein of Secret of Mana or Legend of Mana — a fast, action RPG MMO. Florensia is a Japanese pirate/fantasy adventure which has been compared to OnePiece. I like Japanese MMOs because they generally are closer to Western sensibilities than Chinese or Korean MMOs. I really want to get back to Pi Story, but will probably be on Florensia for a few days to check it out. Huge production values, I want to get a look at it.

Wizard 101 — W101 has been my addiction the past couple of weeks, but it is getting a little grindy and bugs in the Tomb of Storms in Krokotopia are making it difficult to progress. It IS beta, after all, so I am not too concerned. I am about at the point where I can write a decent first look at it, and then sit back and wait for release. This is one darn addictive game, but I begin to dread battles because as you move up in levels, each battle takes more and more time. Even with other people, the games have become so fantastically strategic that it’s hard to see how well their target audience does once they’re facing two rows of Rank 4 Elites and your deck contains only three 404 point heals…

City of Villains — love the game, love the characters, just don’t have time for the grind. I didn’t even actually intend on playing it last weekend, I just wanted to use the character creator. I just kept getting swallowed up into mission groups — random people would invite me all the time, and all but one of the groups were great.

EverQuest — Tuesday and Friday nights are for EQ. It took awhile to get used to the game again after so long away, but I am very comfortable there once again. Finding groups outside the Nostalgia nights is still a hassle, so, as when I played before, I don’t bother looking for groups. I just run around and explore or work on my epic. I don’t hold out the hope that the next expansion will bring anything for casual players; sounds like the whole faction grind, tiered high end raiding system they love so much now. But that’s okay. They already wrote MY EverQuest, and it’s still there to play.

EverQuest 2 — I haven’t logged on EQ2 again since I finished my storm armor quests. I hate soloing, and I only stuck it through the considerable soloing for that assassin armor because I wanted to take a screenshot of my character wearing it. My goals in EQ2 — getting my troubadour’s mythical epic, or finding a high level casual raiding guild — seem impossible. My level 80 troubadour and inquisitor are guildless, and it’s so depressing not having anyone to talk to when I log in that I don’t spend much time playing. I think my inquisitor might still be sitting in the bottom of RE2 where she was when she was kicked out of the group so they could bring someone else’s healer in. My troubadour has been unable to even get a RE2 group, and I have no idea how I am supposed to report on EQ2 happenings when I don’t even have a guild :/ It’s tough and depressing.

Vanguard — I’ve been spending some time in Vanguard, running around, doing quests, and hoping to get a good sense for the current state of the game. Again, being guildless and playing entirely solo are so crushingly soul-draining that I can’t play long before I just want to fill the emptiness with a game that has people I can talk to in it.

Looking back, it looks like I have been largely playing games with easy grouping and fast-paced gameplay. Not surprisingly, these are the two trends I think herald the forthcoming next wave of MMOs that will supplant the WoW-likes.

There’s two MMOs out there you have probably not heard of. There’s HUNDREDS of those, right? Once you get out of the calm, safe, bathwater-warm surf of the current crowd of big budget MMOs, it’s a wild tide of MMOs with names you can’t remember and details you can’t recall.

None of them will challenge WoW, so you WoW-ians can get back in your chairs. I am not going to say anything negative about the current crop.

I’m just really fugging tired of the same old crap coming out year after year. And so my quest to find the next MMO that is different enough so a jaded MMO vet like myself can enjoy it. I think I may have found it in the Dutch MMO, Chronicles of Spellborn. They have a real-time, deck-based combat, full PvP and decent PvE, a unique graphic style, full character customization, an interesting and unique world and all that. I was so happy when I heard that they had signed a preliminary deal with a US publisher, though they were cagey about exactly who that would be.

A couple of months ago, their European publisher, Frogster, started talking about a Chinese MMO they had acquired — Runes of Magic. This had been written by (IIRC) some Chinese developers who played World of Warcraft in the US and when they returned to Shanghai, were determined to make an MMO inspired by WoW. Frogster got it a new, Western soundtrack and said they had done various other things to make it more acceptable to the west. (The soundtrack, btw, is very good).

So now Frogster has Spellborn and Runes of Magic. It has said it has a potential US publisher, but now it has two 3D MMOs to push into the US somehow.

While working on an article about Frogster’s new European releases, which include both Spellborn and Runes, I noticed they are also publishing StoneAge 2, a Pokemon-ish MMO, which is being published in the US by Aeria Games, who publish a LOT of free to play MMOs here.

If they are the potential US publisher for Spellborn, they may be hesitating to announce because all their games are based around RMT, and Spellborn was to be a subscription game. Runes of Magic, however, was always built to be free-to-play, and would fit very well into Aeria Games’ lineup.

So that’s the shaky stack of Jenga blocks I’m using to wonder: Is Spellborn being held back in the US so that Aeria Games can fasttrack a WoW-like into release? I dunno. I hope not, but I fear that is the case.

Just to re-iterate: 1) I don’t know if Aeria Games is the intended US publisher for Spellborn. 2) I have no idea if Aeria Games is considering publishing Runes of Magic in the US. 3) This is all based upon the one near-meaningless fact that Frogster is publishing SA2 in Europe and Aeria is publishing it in the US, implying, to me, a relationship.

So, actually, this is my heartfelt letter to Aeria Games. If my disjoint chain of reasoning has any reality to it, and you are now deciding between Spellborn and Runes of Magic — let it be Spellborn? Please?

Rumor has it that The Middleman, probably the best SF/comedy on TV this season, is in danger! Not of cancellation, but of being restricted to just one season. Creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach writes on The Middleblog that despite stellar network support, ratings haven’t been great, and they have decided to end The Middleman at episode 12, and to go out with a bang.

If you don”t watch The Middleman, you should. And if you DO watch, but via torrent or something, well, watch it on TV (I do, now), or watch it online — ABC Family streams each show after it airs, and people watching via the web in that way definitely support the show.

It’s way better to support these shows while they are still on the air, than to discover them on DVD years later and ask, plaintively, why they don’t make shows like THAT anymore! Just what I have to say about Firefly…

I tend to play City of Heroes/Villains in spurts. Months will go buy without anything, and then I’ll play for eight hours straight.

I have lots of reasons not to play that much. Most of the game is in the character creator, which is justifiably awesome. Once I’ve made my character, she’s made and barring inventions and trips to the tailor shop, will look exactly the same at 50 as at 1.

Another thing that doesn’t change, is missions. When you’re soloing, missions can be challenging, but in a group of eight or so people, you just find a crowd of mobs, use every ability, rez, and move on. I’m so busy trying to keep up and not get lost that I don’t know the plot, if it even has one, or what we’re doing. It’s a frantic hairball of confusion until “MISSION COMPLETE!” displays, and we exit the mission and head to the next red star on the compass.

By making the game random, it becomes meaningless. I know there are task forces, at least on the good side, but at least on the evil side, nobody was doing them. And I’ve been on task forces; they are the same thing as random missions, except with a plot (which everyone ignores).

I guess that’s why I play in spurts. I play until my character gets her travel power. I know there is nothing to look forward to except variations on what I have already seen, so there’s no point to move on. I have three genin and one jounin ninja in my team, I do sabotage missions in Paragon City with ease, and in a team my ninjas do dps and keep crap off me while I ice storm the ground, snow storm them so they move slowly and gale them against walls with superstrength winds. I might grab some healing powers after I get my final ninja training power, but aside from that, what is there to look forward to but another sewer mission?

My love for the superhero genre beats itself against the iron barrier of CoX’s random mission design. Let’s hope Champions Online’s handcrafted missions bring on the perfect storm that brings the superhero MMO into the mainstream. DC Universe Online? I dunno, all I saw in the trailer was Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and that crowd, and since I know you can’t play as the DC superheroes, I’m not sure why they showed them. Who really cares what they do? You won’t be playing DCU to watch some NPC be the hero. You play because YOU are the hero.

Okay, DCU trailer bit: Wonder Woman. She can fly without her invisible jet? When did THAT happen? And can you imagine a worse flying suit than a bustier and panties? Everytime she lands, she must spend ten minutes picking bugs out of her cleavage, while the guys just brush the crud right off. I wonder how she keeps her skin looking good when she has been running around outside, mostly naked, for forty years.

I was dinking around on Wizard 101, when I thought it would be really cool to see if I could take Tara from Wizard 101, and put her in City of Villains. It’s supposed to let you make near any costume, right?

Well, turns out, first, CoV doesn’t do a great job of modeling children. Fine, so it would be a grown up Tara. And instead of the blue/blue outfit, one with that expensive purple I can’t really afford in W101. No peaked caps, so I went capless. And dragon wings because, well, they are neat. So say hello to Tara Mythcrafter — 23 Adept Conjurer in W101, 18 Magic Mastermind in City of Villains. Her minions are ninjas. She herself controls the wind and wields the power of storms.

Turns out it was a double xp weekend in CoV, so I joined a mission group and, well, levels in mission groups are crazy.

This photographer was taking pictures of me and my boys as we took out some flying bozos in the Cape district. So when I was through, I served him with a DMCA take down notice. I showed him the notice, and then I took him down.

The funny thing was, after I checked the pictures in the camera, they weren’t of me after all. Think I could get a good price for it on eBay?

PS. Sharp-eyed readers might wonder where Tara’s dragon went, and where the unicorn came from? Funny thing about that. Turns out its mating season, and Boomer went to the warm beach sands in the south to mate and lay her clutch. So I went to the pet store and asked if I could get something a little unusual. The storekeeper said, cute girl like you needs a UNICORN! And I said, no, no, everyone has those. Do you have a werewolf or a vampire or something? Maybe a basilisk or a venemous snake? Or even a spider? He said no, he didn’t sell those sorts of things. I pointed to the sign above the cash register, “Ask about our Vampires, Werewolves, Basilisks, Snakes and JUST IN, Jumping Spiders!”.

He said they were all out, and he gave me a unicorn. Oh, well. Lily is a nice companion, and she doesn’t bite, like Boomer did. Still, I miss the old girl and hope her mating season goes well.

Terror — if you’re a dragon. Nostalgia the Guild set up a face-to-face for Naggy and Vox with old Veeshan, and I don’t think Queen Vee will be too happy with her progeny.

We’ve been tracking Lord Nagafen all week to see that he remained up. And shockingly, the elder guilds with their twink brigades didn’t move on the dragon, so Friday night, it was Nostalgia’s turn. We were short handed and had only one healer, the incredibly overworked Coldheat, but we weren’t going to be stopped. Also, we didn’t have a FD puller, but we weren’t going to let that stop us either.

We tried various ways to clear the room; the best way seemed to be to toss a gnome in first, and Gnewton performed amazingly as bait. I think that BBQ sauce-soaked robe he wears combines both fashion AND fine cuisine in an amazing way.

Eventually we got the fire lizard alone and we rushed in. Being very short on healers, we had our steadfast servants out for extra healing. We lost Coldheat and then Ceiphied, our tank. Thankfully, Urtog had come by, and he stepped up like a true dwarf and took the aggro and tanked, without healing, while the rest of us desperately tried to take Naggy down. Finally, the dragon turned to run — we had him. As long as we could keep him from heading into the lava and letting the molten rock from Norrath’s core heal him. He died with his head inches away.

Ceiphied got Red Dragon Scales for his epic.
Tipa looted the Torn, burnt book for her paladin’s Fiery Avenger.
Hierophant’s Crook and Blight, Hammer of the Scourge were looted for the guild bank.

Being only 8:30, we headed over to Permafrost and Lady Vox had apparently recovered enough from last week’s beating to set up shop again.

We had a couple of dirty pulls with Vox + some trash mobs, but on the first real pull we got her alone and took her down with no more trouble than we had last week.

Lady Vox was as kind with the epic drops tonight as Lord Nagafen had been. Are they trying to convince us to move on, or something?

Ceiphied looted White Dragon Scales for his bard’s epic.
Tipa looted Torn, Frost covered book for Sela’s Fiery Avenger.
Tipa also looted Runed Bolster Belt because apparently every melee there had same of better haste. WTF? Here I am feeling pretty cool about my FBSS and everyone else is laughing at me. So yeah, I looted it.
The guild bank looted the Dragon Bone Bracelet.

Well, we just need another set of Red Dragon Scales so we can do the quest to make them into Green Dragon Scales for Ceiphied’s epic, and then we won’t need to kill the dragons anymore. Raiding, though, is fun — and these past couple of weeks have been a real pleasure. As we level, we’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for other one or two group raiding opportunities. There’s a bunch of. Luclin has several single group raids; there’s the nameds on the near side of the chasm in the Deep, Ssra has Rhag 1 and Rhag 2, etc. We’ll see what happens. Two groups in good gear could do a lot of old world raids. Problem is, of course, that high level people in good gear can solo them, and often do…

Anyway, another triumphant night for Nostalgia. We aren’t a raiding guild, but when it comes time to do a raid, it’s good to know we can. That will come in handy as we try to finish our epic.

W. T. F.

I did not expect this.

Happy dad Brian writes:

We’re happy to introduce our son - Atticus David Shimkin. Born July 18, 2008 at 1:05 am, weighing 6 lbs 15 oz, 19 inches long.

Everything went smoothly, more details and pictures to follow. Mother and baby are doing just great. The baby’s been really alert and started feeding immediately.

And I’d like to point out that I was, I think, alone in the family for predicting the baby would be a boy. I’ve been thinking of him as a “he” for months! I’m also very happy to see my dad’s name as Atticus’ middle name. It’s a tradition in Brian’s family not to discuss baby names with anyone, so I didn’t know Atty’s name until a couple of minutes ago. I wonder what his name would have been if he had been a girl?

Atticus is a name with a long and colorful pedigree. Famous people named ‘Atticus’ include Atticus F., Atticus K., and Atticus C., so baby Atticus is in good company!

We’re just so very very happy everything went so well.

My sister is in labor with my new niece or nephew, and I don’t want to go to sleep until he or she is born! So exciting, since I think she (or he) will likely be the last baby born of their generation. Allyson, Shannon, Andrew, Jazzmin, Ilsa, Ellie — and now Fruity (temporary name). My cousin Adam still has time to get in the running here, but who knows…

I even watched “Blades of Glory”. Which made me want to wretch. What a terrible movie. On the other hand, I just finished watching the trailer for “Watchmen”. It looks — amazing. Just like the graphic novel. It’s been derided for not doing much more than filming the novel, but considering how people have a conviction that there are no worthwhile stories told in that medium, maybe seeing it in a movie will give them a taste of what they are missing. That said, I don’t read comics anymore, either. Print is too small, they cost too much for too few pages, and these days, all the main titles are in gigantic title-spanning story arcs that aim to try to lock you in to buying a bunch of expensive comic books really often in order to be told a full story.

That just seems like money grubbing to me.

Watchmen, you can buy in one collected book, the full story. There are so many stories told there.

Back in Wizard 101, I am happy to report that Tara Mythcrafter is now a level 21 Conjurer Adept, called by some Giant Hunter; by others, Krok Thrasher; and by the college of Ravenwood, the Protector of Wizard City. She has been working diligently to set things right in the Pyramid of the Sun, but there is too much wrong for one wizard to correct; even with all her friends standing at her side. The only ones who can free the hand-wringing Mungles is the Order of the Fang, an ancient order of Krokodilians, now far weaker than they were. I have been gathering together the relics of their power, which largely consists of fighting deadly creatures ad infinitum, same as every other MMO.

At these mid levels (the game seems to go to level 50), the deck building and card playing strategic combat has become even more involved. You have to think at least two moves ahead and frantically arrange your hand so the best cards rise to the top. Seed the deck with some strategic treasure cards when the only kind of luck you get in the draw is the bad kind.

Every card played has a pip cost associated with it, and you get one pip per round. Occasionally, you get a power pip which counts as two pips as long as you are playing a card from your school — Myth, in my case. This is KEY to getting high-rank (1 rank = 1 pip) cards out early enough to do some good. It’s almost impossible to bring out a rank 4 card not of my house — I nearly always need to play a healing card (costs two pips) before I get enough.

You can play cards from any house. Every few levels, you get a training point you can use to buy cards from another house. It’s best to focus on just one so you can get the higher rank cards, but that’s not mandatory. My secondary house is Fire; but I should probably have chosen Life. With a choice of Myth, Fire, or whatever the Myth Prism refocuses Myth magic to, I have a pretty good arsenal from which to draw. I can usually get a rank 3 fire or myth card out after the opening buff/debuff phase — buffs and debuffs cost no pips, and the debuffs the mobs cast on you give you a sense of the spells they’re about to slam you with.

Group play is made even more strategic because you are prevented from talking freely to people unless they are on your friends list and have “Secure Chat” enabled. You can turn on “2D view” which adds information to the UI about the hit points of the mob, the hit points and mana of your group, and the actions each group member is about to take. It’s not on by default, but without it, you waste a lot of magic.

Anyway, nearly through Krokosphinx Island. The next place in this world is the Temple of Storms, and then I’ll be off to the next world — a world of humanoid dogs that are stuck in England’s Victorian era. The clothing dropped there is delightfully retro, and I am looking forward to it. There is yet another world past that one, and I don’t know where the rabbit hole ends. But I think it is currently ended at that fourth world.

Top middle picture is my current gear. There’s some outfits that connect more with the Egyptian theme than the one I am wearing, but that’s okay. It’s just a placeholder for the next world’s robes. I’ve dyed all my gear blue-on-blue with yellow highlights. Nothing flashy, just a quick fix to keep looking good. ALL the hundreds of wizards I have seen in Wizard 101 pride themselves on their robes and usually have strikingly colored outfits– you really do come to recognize people by their colors and their staff.

How does W101 stack up against other MMOs? It has levels. Monster experience counts for less and less as you advance in levels, and almost all advancement is through quests. There are no real classes, and everyone can solo well and heal themselves fine. Plus, you can buy treasure cards to duplicate anyone else’s spells if there are some you really envy. Aside from larger card decks, there’s almost nothing to spend money on aside from treasure cards, pets and dying outfits (like most games, but especially so in W101, buying merchant gear is a really bad idea).

Combat in W101 is extremely slow. A battle against a boss and its henchman can easily take fifteen minutes; even simple figts against regular mobs can take five to ten. Each battle is, after all, a complete card game. So while you can repeat boss battles for loot, people just tend to keep moving forward.

Inexperienced players may feel lulled in by the simple, kid-friendly early levels. After a certain point, gear must be chosen for resists and for increasing the chance of a power pip. A badly constructed deck can leave you without any effective cards to play and no healing in easy reach; playing poorly can leave you with a healing card in your hand, and a desperate need to play it but without the pips to do so.

Four of us were fighting a 2000 hit point minotaur and his friends at the front of the Krokosphinx dungeon, and one of the people kept bashing fire spells at a monster protected against fire spells. All I could say was, he must have a really bad deck if he can’t change houses. Or perhaps he didn’t focus on a secondary house.

Although I understand its purpose, not being able to talk freely with the other players SUCKS. It’s the worst part of the game. Sometimes someone takes the trouble to figure out what they want to say, but usually there’s no time for that in battle, and people should be able to figure out what they need to do from the 2D display. The only real communication comes when you invite someone to be your friend, or you get invited. That’s a big step in W101, because these people are going to be porting on top of your head from then on, so you better get used to having them around.

So, just saw on Engadget that Mad Catz is gonna take an actual real electric guitar and turn it into a Rock Band 2 controller for PS3 and Xbox 360. So, real guitar, real size, real weight… except, you know, it’s still a fake guitar.

Now, I’m really confused. Okay, you take a REAL GUITAR and make a FAKE GUITAR from it. Isn’t that… insane… a little?

Now you know what would be awesome… if it still could be used as a regular guitar — SIMULTANEOUSLY…

If you actually CAN watch this, then I guess their servers have managed to recover from yesterday’s crush. After trying for awhile, I just got the first episode of Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” through a torrent.

Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, a struggling mad scientist hoping one day to join the supervillain group, “The Evil Society of Evil”. He occasionally does a video blog where he discusses problems like how his transmat ray is going, what his nemesis Captain Hammer (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) did to him last week that really hurt, how his evil laugh is coming along (he has just gotten a vocal coach), and how nervous he is about talking to a girl he sees at the laundromat, Penny, played by Buffy’s Felicia Day.

This leads into the song “Freeze Ray”, about a gun he wants to invent that will freeze time, so it would be easier to talk to her. He’s interrupted by his friend Moist, who has the power to make stuff damp. He’d been on a date last night with the super-villainess Bait and Switch. At the end of the night, he’d been hoping to go home with Bait, but… oh well.

Among the sopping wet pieces of mail he delivers is a letter from Bad Horse, the evil equine leader of the Evil Society of Evil, which leads right into the song, “Bad Horse” (and where did those cowboys with the painfully fake mustaches come from?).

The thing is hilarious. It’s short, has four fantastically funny songs (the other two are the one Penny sings as she tries to get signatures on her petition to convert an old building to a homeless center, and the song that ends in a three-part harmony between Dr. Horrible, Captain Hammer, and Penny, “A Man’s Gotta Do”).

I won’t spoil anything — but watch it. There will be two other “webisodes”, and even though all three together will likely be only half an hour — I’d buy the DVD.

edit — link to Joss Whedon’s post about Dr. Horrible, how it came to be, and what will become of it. Next episode is up THURSDAY and after July 20 they will no longer be free to watch, though it’s well worth paying.

Mayong Mistmoore looks so hunky in that portrait! He makes ALL the inky ladies swoon!

I keep saying EverQuest isn’t hard, but what I should probably say is, EverQuest isn’t hard, if you have great equipment. I haven’t put the same sort of care into Sela’s gear as I did for Tipa’s, and it shows. Empty item slots, missing spells, statless gear in at least one spot… I suspect the same is true for the other members of the Tuesday group. This gives us quite a different experience. Instead of laughing off danger as we slice through enemies without thinking, we can, and do, get overwhelmed, and die.

The Tower of Frozen Shadow is particularly deadly to us. Though we all got in safely and up to the second floor in no time, when we started crawling through the Library in search of the key to the third floor servant’s quarters, a named who brought huge aggro, did us in. He wasn’t too bad by himself, but attacking him seemed to arouse half the spirits on that side of the room. So that was a wipe.

Being the only rezzer, I released and used the AA to get a full xp rez and my body back, and headed back to the Tower.

I’d THOUGHT I had gone through Allakhazam’s and gotten every spell for my paladin, same as I did for the ranger. But, no. I was missing some vital spells, and it was the lack of Invisibility to Undead that would kill me a second time. Lull just doesn’t do the job.

Bought the spell. Summoned my corpse. Paid one of the many clerics who do a brisk business in resurrections in the guild lobby to rez me (and she threw in a temperance for free! What a nice halfling!). Headed back. With ITU working, I got everyone’s corpses pulled and rezzed.

After that, it was smooth as anything, though it seems unless I am 100% focused on a mob and keeping it taunted, stunned, and warded (for undead), it goes right for the berserker, druid and mage. This is bad news for multiple pulls, because I can only keep one on me for sure. The others turn back to another victim when I turn back to my original target. The only sure way I have seen to grab aggro from everything is to start healing people.

After about an hour in the Library, we got ourselves an enraged librarian, who gave us the key to the third floor, which was nice of her. I do wonder why we had to send so many dead scholars back to their final reward before they got upset enough to send someone in after us.

Up we went to the third floor, backs to the wall as we awaited the armored patrol. We didn’t have long, and we fought the first and then the second one right after another. We moved from there to the cooks’ room and took on a few of these before calling it a night.

We ended up standing in front of Randall, the Fellowship guy, making the Fellowship we should have made weeks ago. This while make wipes easier to recover from, especially as we come to places not easily returned to, like the upper floors of the Tower of Frozen Shadow.

All told, I got a neat Defiant two handed staff, in which I had almost no skill. I ended the night with skill in the 40s. I’ll probably need to get a two handed slash and two handed piercing to work on, just so I have a wide variety of options. I don’t really like the staff — no bash. But I know I have to build skill in different weapon types.

Before we started, I did a quick check on Nagafen with Brita, so unless the people who seem to have been farming him can get a twink raid together to kill him before Friday, we may have a chance to add another dragon to our kill list, and hopefully find some epic drops in the entrails. I have no idea how we’re going to clear his lair. Our little trick to clear Vox’s lair won’t work here… and Naggy, like Vox, has line-of-sight aggro. If he can see you, he will chase you. Maybe, if you can still bind inside the lair, we can just have someone with the gate spell be the puller. Even if lull works on the giants, which I doubt, the Fire Giant Magus who stands next to Naggy will still be aggroed when he aggros. I dunno. Maybe someone can kite Naggy while we kill his friend, though that idea seems crazy.

Well, we’ll think of something. Rayzr and Ebonfang are 52 now, and maybe some old Nostalgians could show :)

I wonder how I ever thought I would get out of buying Rock Band 2.

No such luck. That set list ROCKS.

Reserve my copy now, I guess….

I have nothing against old MMOs. In fact, I spend most of my time in one of the oldest. But I know that EQ is old, and I play it now not to see new things, but just to reminisce about all the good times I had in it.

People have been going off to World of Warcraft for years, and starting their adventures in Azeroth. I’ve even done it (and my gosh, has it been three years already?). But I’ve been reading the adventures of Cownose, who recently starting in WoW, and Ogrebears, who is just starting, any my first thought for them both was, why would they want to start out with that old game?

And I startled myself thinking that, because it was the first time I had even thought of World of Warcraft as being old. And yet, it is. It’s no longer the young upstart, it’s something they market to older people. When your spokesmen are a 60s scifi television star and a 70s action show star, you have to wonder, who are they targeting with WoW? My PARENTS?

At this time in EverQuest’s history, it was just about to release its fifth expansion “The Legacy of Ykesha”, which was widely seen as a shrewd move to reposition the aging game toward more casual players. WoW’s *second* expansion will likely release around its fourth anniversary. *cough* But this isn’t about the pace of expansions. It’s that by 2004, EQ was the market leader, but it was showing some cracks, cracks that WoW’s release later that year would widen and split entirely apart.

WoW was the better game, but more than that, it was the newer game. People had done everything in EQ — many, many times — and unless you were in one of the top raid guilds, you probably were still angry that Planes of Power had been mostly a raid-guild-only expansion (and though the casual player-focused LDoN was just about to come out, the expansion after that, Gates of Discord, would cement that raid-only mentality). In short, many EQ players were looking for a change, and with the news that many raid guilds would be jumping over to WoW en masse based on the phenomenally popular beta, it was clear the torch had been passed. EQ was now the “old” game, and WoW was the fresh young debutante, flirting with her suitors.

WoW is now where EQ was then. It’s old, people have done everything there is to do in WoW, many zillions of times, and the game itself is being marketed toward an increasingly older population. It’s still as great a game as ever, but will that matter when someone is looking for a new fresh game, and WoW becomes the game their parents play?

WoW may weather WAR and AoC, but it can’t escape time. With AoC and WAR being so similar to WoW and being marketed to the same aging demographic, those games entirely skipped the demographic of upcoming, new MMO players (especially WAR — fans who have played the tabletop game for a half dozen years and people who played the equally aged Dark Age of Camelot form the bulk of the people who aren’t just looking for a WoW-like to play in general).

Unlike fine wine, games do not improve with age. Instead, they narrow themselves to focus on the players they already have in a struggle to keep them from leaving. I find the same freshness and energy in Wizard101 that I remember from the WoW beta, though W101 is in no way attempting to be a huge, expansive game like EQ or WoW. But the energy is there. And that energy, or the lack of it, is what dooms all older games and is what will doom WoW.