Odds and Ends

Stargrace recently posted about how she becomes disaffected with games once she hits the level cap in them.  I made a reply in the comments that I am in the same boat.  It probably explains my severe alt-itis.  For me, I hadn’t really noticed I was growing disaffected with Rift (heck, even now I’ll tell you I love the game) until while writing that post I realized I’d not played it in over a week and I hadn’t missed it.  Now granted, as seen in my post below. . DDO’s new artificer class is my current “new shiny.”  I figured that once the 1.5 patch came out I’d be back over in Rift to work on grabbing some AAplanar attunement points.

I read the patch notes for the 1.5 and they actually make me want to work on my rogue a bit, as well as checking out the new solo/duo dungeons on my cleric, and the PA stuff sounded interesting at 1st, until I read a thread where someone had compiled all the PA’s a cleric could get and at the end summarized what the whole kit’n’kaboodle got you, and the answer was — very little.  Not even a single gear piece of improvement.  And it would cost you over 92 million xp being ground out.

Now I’ll grant you that the final 5 levels of Rift cost about 2 million xp overall and they only take a few days to get, so even a casual player like me can probably get “all the PA’s” in about 3 months, but to what end really? 30 points to 3 stats is a nice boost, but it’s hardly a big deal, especially as these are considered by the game to be buffed points, so abilities that boost your stats don’t apply to them.  78 spell power is about an 8% boost to me with my not-so great gear, but if I played enough so that I could get all those PA’s in that time, I’d probably upgrade my gear to the point that I’d be looking at a 3% boost, if even that.  In short, these are things that I certainly won’t turn down when I receive xp enough for them, but there’s no incentive for a casual player to go chasing them either.

My Rift sub is on their 3 month plan.  I’d thought to let it renew for until the end of the year when SWTOR comes out, but… I think I’m just going to cancel it.  In my remaining time I’ll be able to go see the new solo/duo dungeons on my cleric and there really isn’t much else I’m interested in seeing.

This leads me to DDO, as I expect I’ll be enjoying its F2P goodness as my primary game for the next few months.  I’ve got my Warforged Artificer up to level 5 now, and it’s almost ridiculous how easy it is to play this character right now.  My dog pet sits at 122 hitpoints, which I can buff up to 173.  My character sits at 75 hp which I can buff to 126.  This is an insanely high amount for a level 5 character, especially one with a d6 hit point die.  Damage done is very high, so very few mobs get close to me to even try to get in a hit.  And next level I’ll get Stoneskin and Flame Turret, so my defense and offense both will dramatically improve.  Should be fun to experience as I move through it.

A friend of mine has been talking up Champions Online lately to me, so since it’s F2P I installed it to check it out.  When F2P you are limited to archetype power sets that the game selects for you, so you don’t get overwhelmed by choices right out of the gate.  The character creator is insanely amazing and I could easily spend hours creating a character if I wanted to just checking out all the options, much less choosing some of them.  I’ve tried the Fire, Ice, Blade, and Soldier archetypes so far.  The energy building mechanic is something I’m still getting used to, but it seems to work pretty well, and I like that if you’re paying attention to the mobs that you can block their high damage attacks.  I’ve barely made it out of the tutorial, though, so I can’t comment on a whole lot yet as I’m still feeling things out.

And to close…. EVE online recently released their Incarna expansion, which included the new “Captain’s Quarters” for you to walk around in with your new avatar.  Some enterprising soul(s) discovered that the looping video playing on the TV in the room could be customized by converting your own video files to BIK format and dropping them in the appropriate EVE folder on your hard drive.  Here’s what CCP had to say about it in their latest dev blog:

Now, most companies would have branded this as a defect and “fixed it” by doing checksum validations on the files or something equally boring. But not us. . . . [Instructions on how to do it all] . . . [K]nowing our players,  we are of course absolutely certain than none of you would ever, ever think of putting anything even remotely questionable on your screen, given the total lack of constraints and the rock solid moral high ground on which our pilots firmly stand…

I love their sense of humor.  Almost makes me willing to re-sub to EVE.  Almost.

Happy Gaming!

End of an Era

I’ve been debating with myself about canceling my EVE account since February or March.  At that point I’d not really played since last November or so due to being a bit burned out on it.  I’d moved to null, but the corp asked me to do a lot of PI for them, so I didn’t get to join fleets much and the PI was about an hour commitment each night and cost me money which the corp said they’d reimburse, but never did.  Frankly, it was boring and I was losing money on it and so after about 3 months of it, I just didn’t log in anymore.  Beyond that, being a part of the “Deklein Coalition” meant we were Goon pets and as a result we had to check not only our corporate site, but also our alliance site and the Goon site as well just to find out what all was going on.  Our corp calendar had alliance stuff and sometimes people’d put up the DC stuff too, but trying to find something in my timezone that didn’t want me to form up 2 hours early then fly around to bash POS’s for 5 hours after that was a bit hard to do.

So yeah, I burned out and burned out hard.  I kept the account active thinking that if I just burned my skills up long enough, maybe I’d feel the desire to come back at some point.  But no, that desire never returned.

Even with that, I did have a goal to be able to fly a capital ship before I left the game, so back during the whole shitstorm right after Incarna’s launch I figured it was as good a time as any to pull the plug. . . but I was within 2 weeks of finally realizing that goal of being able to fly a capital, so I did re-sub after all.

Well.. now that training’s complete, I still don’t want to log in, and IRL cashflow issues are making me look for things to cut out of the budget, so… EVE is over for me.  My final skillpoint tally is to the left, as I’m sure you’ve already seen, and no you can’t have my stuff becuz I can’t log back in to try to give it to you anyway.

I actually had planned to contract my remaining assets to my corp and email them to let them know I was out and they could boot me,then move the character back to Jita and sell it to someone who would make better use of it, but I couldn’t be arsed to log in to take the couple of minutes to do even that, that’s how little I cared to log in anymore.  The game got its hooks in me enough to make me feel kinda sad about that, and yet, I can’t say why.  Other than a couple of smaller roams I did shortly after I moved to null, I can’t say that anything I ever did in-game was all that fun.  The game was always just too slow paced for me in PvE, and I’ve never been much of one to PvP.  It just doesn’t give me the rush that other people feel.

And so… thus ends the era of my time in EVE.

The Post I’ve Been Forgetting To Make For a While

And Stargrace reminded me by posting today 😉

Since my last post, in Rift I’ve gotten my Guardian Cleric up to level 50 and my 2 friends also managed to get to 50 as well.  We’ve formed a “center” of groups in some dungeon runs with me tanking, 1 of them being healer, and the other being dps.  Our guild is the largest on the Faeblight server, possibly in the game, with over 2600 member toons, though how many actual accounts that is isn’t really known.  Still, even in the middle of the night was seem to have at least 40 people online at any given time and in prime time it’s usually pushing 300 online.  We’re so big that when a new member joins the pasted welcome announcement from the leaders actually includes the following warning: “Do NOT look at the guild roster with the “Show Offline Members” enabled — it crashes most computers.”

For myself, I’ve been through several T1 dungeons and a few T2’s also.  I’ve got my gear up to where T2’s feel pretty comfortable, at least as a support or dps role.  I’m not sure I quite have the stats to be able to heal a T2 yet, but we’ll see how that goes eventually.

I’m also working up a warrior, since I actually rather enjoy tanking, and while I do okay at it with my cleric, I have preferred the warrior style in the lower level dungeons in the past, so I’m working the warrior up in order to be able to be “more effective” at 50.  I started this warrior out in a pure dps mode for leveling, but as I’ve gotten higher in levels I found I was drinking a lot to regain health after only 4-5 fights and getting adds could be downright scary, so I left that build for if I’m doing dps in a dungeon (haven’t yet. . . ) and made a more tank-y build that can still dish out some decent hurt.  TBH, it actually feels like I do MORE dps with the tank-y build than the dps build, plus I can take on 5-6 mobs at a time without difficulty.  I have some minor self-heals from the Reaver portion of the build, use Paladin for the full heal every 10 minutes plus the +block skills, and then have 29 points in the Riftblade soul for damage output.  It loses health little enough that using the full heal once every 10 minutes is often enough to keep me in a comfortable zone, and I’m almost never drinking to restore health any more at all.  I also have 2 tanking builds for dungeons — 1 for the AE trash, and the other for single-target boss fights.  so far I’ve really only needed the AE trash build — it’s worked just fine on bosses also, but I have the other for just in case. . . .

On the EVE front, I’ve finished training Logistics 5 and someone actually brought a Capital Ships book out to my region, so I bought that and am currently working the 3rd level of it as a pre-req to being able to inject the Carrier skill.  The funny thing (to me) is that I have a skill queue with 212 days planned out on it right now, but I’ll actually be able to be in the Carrier with all the “required” skills to fly it competently in about 9 more days.  Nearly all the rest of the skills are taking things to level 5 in order to be “perfect” and that means two 48+ day skills, several 30+ days skills, and a smattering of 7-9+ day skills as well.  My corp has also asked me to start being a POS fueler since I can fly the Transport Ships.  That means I’ll be logging in at least once a week instead of just letting the skills burn.  I’m hoping that this, coupled with my ability to fly a carrier, will reignite my passion for EVE a bit more and get me to log in and join some ops and such.  Even though I’ve not played much in the past 8 months or so, there’s still something about the game that ignites my passion, so I don’t want to cancel out of it just yet.  Perhaps if I find flying a carrier isn’t as fun as I am hoping, but we’ll see when that time comes.

Update on Activity

I re-subbed to EVE since I was less than 2 weeks from flying a carrier and I wanted to fly one darnitall!  Plus, I wasn’t actually mad about the EVE changes themselves, just Zulu’s devblog, and what with his mea culpa about that, I’m satisfied that it didn’t represent his normal feelings about the EVE playerbase so I’m back.

Finished all my pre-reqs last night except for I need the Capital Ships skill book and there isn’t one out in my region of null, and we’re in a hi-sec war yet again, so I’m not real keen on trying to hit up one of the school systems there right now.  so I’m training Logistics 5 to prepare for the triage module while waiting for the war to wind down, then I can go get my book from somewhere and it should be interesting to see how the jump to a cap ship changes the game for me.

With the Northern Coalition in something of a fail cascade now, I’m no longer “tucked safely in back” anymore, but now my alliances space is within just a few jumps of the front and some of our systems have been hit, such that we’re pulling some of our ship storage POS’s down.  The changes to the jump bridges means that the jump bridge POS’s aren’t in the same places anymore either, so I need to fly around and update my bookmarks.

I’ve also put duplicate ships or ships in the same class up on the market.  I’ve always been told to keep my footprint light in case I need to move quickly, but over time I’ve accumulated 2 HIC’s, 2 Logi’s, several interceptors, a few Drakes for ratting, and I’ve got my industrials/transports for PI on top of it all, as well as my fleet-fit BS’s — all scattered across 4 systems over 7 jumps. . . and not all of it in my alliance space for that matter. . . .   So I’m hoping at least some of it will sell and I’ll be down to a more manageable ship number soon.  Though if I get in a carrier as soon as I hope and can hook up with corp/alliance cyno people, then I can just carry everything around myself.  Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to have 2 accounts so I can have my own cyno alt, but meh.  I’m of the opinion that if you can’t succeed in a game with only 1 account then you’re not as social as you should be.

So anyway, there’s my EVE update.  Now moving on to Rift:

I’ve got some friends who I played SWG with, then we moved to EQ2 together, and now we’re all playing Rift too.  I told them when we started that I was Defiant on Faeblight, and they did make a few characters there, but they had another friend playing on Wolfsbane — Defiant also.  He had his own guild, so I moved over there and started working on a few toons with a Bahmi Warrior as my primary.  But Wolfsbane started getting hit with “queue to log in” syndrome, plus the guild was only about 5 actual people and we were scattered all over level-wise, so it folded.  My friends came back to Faeblight, but since they were Defiant already on Wolfsbane, they decided to go Guardian on Faeblight, so if I wanted to play with them . . . .you guessed it, I got to start over as a Guardian this time, in spite of having 4 Defiant toons, level 50, 29, 29, and 29.  Did I mention that each had crafting up to 280-300 out of 300?

So since I found I like the Cleric archetype best of the 4 Defiants I’d been playing, I made a new Mathosian Cleric for my main.  I decided to make it a “pure harvester” and figured I’d just dump mats to a crafting alt and let that toon make my armor, weapons, and jewelry from those materials.  Works well in theory, but I shortly realized that I wanted to make my own runes too since Rift’s Auction House is a big fat joke and you really can’t find much of anything useful on it, especially when you’re leveling up.  And since a Runecrafter more or less needs Outfitter to be able to get enough of it’s own mats to make runes, that meant I couldn’t really just dump Weaponsmith and Artificer from the crafting alt so. . . . the Defiant warrior got deleted.  I had another level 29 warrior on Wolfsbane, after all, so if I got the warrior bug I could just go log him in.  And thus I had 3 characters covering all 9 crafting professions — 1 to harvest, 2 to actually craft.

As an aside, it’s been pretty fun on the crafting alts leveling them up simply via crafting and the exploration xp granted from when I’ve had to run out to the various quartermasters.  These crafting alts were level 7 when they left the tutorial/intro zone and then ran straight to Sanctum.  They’re level 15 and 13 now — I need to quest out their souls for them sometime soon. 😉  But that would mean playing them for more than crafting. . . . .  Surprisingly (to me) I’ve only had 1 death during all my various explorations with these low level toons, in spite of the roads not necessarily being safe in Rift.  Of course, I also haven’t tried to go to Stillmoor on them yet either, but IIRC it’s not a bad run from the Chancel of Labors in Iron Pine Peak, and I’ve got that portal unlocked on both crafters, so. . time will tell.

Anyway, we joined a small guild they found initially, but then that guild was a complete joke, so we ended up joining Gaiscioch after doing a run with a couple of people in that guild.  They were good players and we had fun chatting with them during the dungeon, so we expressed our interest in leaving our current guild and they immediately invited us.  It’s been a good fit so far — lots of guild groups and premades, and when I got 50 on my cleric last night I was immediately invited to a daily raid and got 11 plaques for just a few minutes of killing a single raid mob.  Plus I can start doing the T1 dungeon runs now and start gearing up more and seeing how it all works out.  It’s been a fun ride so far, and I’m looking forward to more!

CCP Fail

Update up top:  CCP Zulu posted a dev blog that read to me as “CCP = teh awesomesauce.  Players = whiners who need to shut up about all CCP’s awesomeness.”  That attitude rubbed me the wrong way, so I canceled my account after all.

Wow, what a week in EVE!

Incarna released to much disappointment.  No content update to speak of other than the new turrets (which actually are well received) and the Captain’s Quarters, and the CQ is being turned off in droves by players (including me) as being a massive resource hog that’s sometimes even causing graphics cards to overheat.  There was also the “Noble Exchange” added with its RMT cash shop and obscenely outrageous prices for vanity items that no one other than you would ever see in the game’s current state.

This comes on the heels of a leaked internal newsletter wherein arguments were made along the lines that RMT shop transactions *should* allow things like ships, ammo, and faction standings to be sold, in spite of CCP’s promises in the past that the NEX would only contain “fluff” vanity items like clothing for your new avatars, decorations for your quarters, and maybe paint jobs for your ships, among other things.

Tippia goes over it on her blog far better than I could, so I’m not going to try to reinvent the wheel and let you just go read it there instead.

What really prompted my to even make this post though, is that so many people are upset about it that the forum threadnaught about it is expanding faster than I can read it, and now people have taken it in-game to the largest player hubs, including Jita, Rens, Dodixie, and Amarr.  At justin.tv you can (currently) watch a live feed of the Jita protest — over 2000 people in local (about 700-800 more than normal for this time of day) and quite a few of them are trying to destroy the memorial at 4-4 (the major trade hub station).  I’ve heard reports that Amarr has over 1300 in local right now also, though I’m not at home to be able to log in to check.  This is an amazing rebellion by the players over all this.

And I’m also saddened to report than a good friend of mine — the one who got me playing EVE in the 1st place and just a couple of weeks ago said he planned to be playing for 20 years to come — told me today that he’s canceled his EVE account and is going to sit on the sidelines until this all shakes out.  I’ve been leaning toward pulling the plug myself for the past few months since I really haven’t played it much since last November and still don’t really have much of a desire to.  And yet, frankly since I am so detached from the game right now, this whole thing seems like a big tempest in a teapot to me, so if I do end up leaving, it won’t be due to any of the things that have popped up.

How’s that for an anti-climactic ending to a post?