Places I’ve Been

I have been compelled by Kirith Kodachi to post a map of my travels within EVE.  Unfortunately I’ve only explored a small fraction of the EVE universe. Full Map I was in EVE University briefly where I spent a short amount of time up on Korsiki. EVE University But most/all of my time is spent in the Sinq Laison region with some occasional trips through Essence and Every Shore. Home Like Kirith points out, once you have a base of operations setup you don’t normally stray far.  I don’t mind traveling, but I like to keep my assets organized and limited to a few stations.  This makes moving a pretty large undertaking.

I have a jumpclone and a shuttle setup for some day when I want to do a little sight-seeing maybe I’ll have to plan for that soon.

Little Things Make a Big Difference

The patch notes for Book 8 are out, and while there are lots of nerfs and other changes people are concerned or upset about, there are some small but nice improvements.

One bright note in Book 8 is a change to buying stackable items from vendors.  Up until now, you’ve had the option of either buying one or buying a full stack.  As a hunter, I always like to keep a full stack of travel rations.  Often I’ll get down to about 20 left and want to stock up, but that means I either need to buy a full stack of 50 and take up an extra bag slot until I use the 20 I had left, or I have to buy 30 rations individually.  Book 8 will add two options:

  1. Holding ALT when purchasing will pop-up a dialog and allow you to specify a quantity.
  2. Holding TAB will fill all of the stacks in your bags.

The TAB option will be perfect for me, I’ll just need to be sure I only have one stack of travel rations or I could end up carrying 100 around instead of 50.

Turbine is also adding a new /ui command to allow users to save and load layouts.  This is nice for people (like me) who have lots of alts (I’m using all seven character slots).  Now I can save my hunter UI layout and load it on a new character without having fiddle with rearranging all of the windows manually.  I can also setup different layouts by resolution so when I switch from my desktop to my laptop and back I don’t have to manually readjust everything.

The maximum stack sizes of consumables have been increased: food to 50, reputation tokens to 100, traveling rations to 100, crafting ingredients to 100, potions to 50.

There’s also a crafting revamp coming with details in an upcoming dev diary.  Some of the changes mentioned in the notes though will be nice:

  • Optional ingredient drops will have clearer tool-tips, the drops will be simplified, and resource nodes will be able to produce them.
  • Lots of adjustments to minimum level requirements for crafted items.
  • Make All button added to the Crafting window.
  • Common crafting ingredients that are sold by vendors will now say so in their description.

None of these changes is big, but small things like the vendor stacking change can be a daily annoyance and fixing them will only make the game better.

As the patch notes say: It’s the Little Things That Count

Quilldragon

There’s a new blog up dedicated to fantasy literature:

quilldragon

The brain child of Regis from the Wizards & Wenches Warhammer blog:

Quilldragon is to be a fantasy blog that focus extensively on fantasy literature. By that we mean that Star Trek is not fantasy literature, and neither is World of Warcraft or Xena the Warrior Princess. Instead we will focus on our genre and deliver news of books, authors and happenings; reviews of old and new books; insightful and interesting articles about the genre; and everything else we can come up with.

If you love fantasy this is the place for you.

Head on over and check it out.

MMO Firsts

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how/why I got started with MMO’s.  Partly from filling out the questionaires for Randolph over at Grinding to Valhalla, but also from Syp’s Firsts Meme over at Bio Break.

First MMO Played?

EverQuest

First Character Class/Role Played?

Wizard

First MMO Subscribed For More Than A Consecutive Year?

Dark Age of Camelot

First MMO You Fell In Love With?

Dark Age of Camelot, I could actually level by questing instead of grinding MOB’s.

First Guild You Really Felt Attached To?

Hammer and Anvil from DAoC.  I was in a pickup group with several members of this guild.  We had so much fun, I got a Guild invite while we were in the group.

First Character/Game You Leveled To End Cap?

Brynulf on Landroval in LoTRO both to 50 the original cap and again to 60 after Moria came out.

First “Wow” Moment In A MMO?

The earliest moment I remember is in EverQuest, I was at the beach near Freeport and the sun was rising/setting.  I actually stood there and watched it for a couple of minutes.

First MMO You Burned Out On?

EverQuest after months of playing 8 hours a day.  After a while I just got tired of MOB grinding, and trains, and having elite MOB’s wandering around in the midlevel areas stomping me.  My biggest gripe was how little actual questing there was in the game.

First MMO You Followed Avidly Prior To Launch?

City of Heroes, it was a superhero game and I was a big comics nerd.  This was also the first game I closed beta tested.

First Time You Felt Truly Noobish In A MMO?

EverQuest – I was playing a wood elf and was trying to find my way through the woods in the dark.  I didn’t understand zones and was trying to use the map that came with the game to find my way around.  I ended up running around and around the zone border until the sun came up and I could see.

First MMO You Went Alt-Crazy In?

I’m going to cheat and give two answers: EverQuest and LoTRO.  In EverQuest I kept making alts and fiddling around with them, maybe getting a couple of levels.  In LoTRO I have five alts all at level 20, and my goal is to get them all to level cap.

Lawncare and the Undead

In the division of household chores between my wife and myself, I am the one tasked with mowing the lawn.  I can’t complain about it too much, since it only needs to be down for six months out of the year (as opposed to laundry), and it takes my only about an hour to do the front, the back, and trim with a weed-eater.  Despite all of that, I don’t like lawn-care, or gardening, but  I love Plants versus Zombies.

This game was not on my radar until I heard an interview with Jason Kapalka on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call 133.  I bought it on Steam for $10 ($9.99), although you can also get it directly from PopCap but it’s listed as $19.95.

I’m not going to do any kind of in-depth review because I’m having too much fun playing (4.8 hours according to Steam).  Plus Syp over at Bio Break already did a better job than I could have.  I will say that the sense of humor and quirkiness reminds me of World of Goo.

Update – Destructoid also has a review up if you want something even more detailed or just to see some screenshots.  You can also find a demo on both the Steam and PopCap sites.

Comment Spam

I don’t like spam, not like anyone does, but I understand why email spammers do it.  Send out enough email and you’ll get at least a few people to click on a link, it’s not like sending an email is expensive.  I don’t understand blog spammers though.  Why would a spammer take time to continually try to post spam comments to a blog?  Is it intern spammer training?  I don’t get it.

What prompted this whole train-wreck of thought was my comment spam queue.  I check my spam comment queue sporadically, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly.  When I checked the queue today, there were 248 spam comments ranging from 4/10 to 4/18.  What’s interesting though is they are all for the same post.

The spam filter I use works very well, I’ve had zero problems with spam comments showing up and I haven’t had to mess with moderating commenters, so the comment spam is more interesting than annoying.  Still, spammers seem to really like that one post.

Ered Luin Revisited

I haven’t been to Ered Luin since the game launched.  My first character was an Elven Hunter on Gladden that I got to 15 during the head-start week.  I ended up re-rolling a Man Hunter on Landroval after I read on the forums that it  was going to be the unofficial role-play server.  So it’s been nearly two years since I’ve spent any time there.  I have an Elven Rune-keeper, Calenel, that I’d started but only played to level 8, so Book 7 seemed a good time to get back to him and see what kind of changes Turbine had worked out.

First thing of course is the XP curve change, I killed a rat and dinged 9.  Pretty nice.

Celondim has been streamlined a bit.  I remember a fair bit more running from Celondim to Nen Hilith and to Limael’s Vineyard and back again.  Now there is a quest NPC that sends you out to Nen Hilith and then is a small quest hub of four NPC’s that the mouth of the dell.  The same thing Limael is now at the tower on the hill just before her Vineyard instead of back in Celondim.  So now instead of two or three trips out and back, it’s one.

Duillond has a bit more running, but it’s still much improved.

As Calenel reached the teen levels, I noticed I couldn’t find any elites and had no trouble soloing all of the quests I was given.  I was especially surprised to find that you can solo all the way through the Prologue now.  I’m working through the Bree Prologue quests on a Man Warden character and there are still Fellowship quests towards the end of that chain.  I’m interested to see if Turbine changes the Bree and Shire prologue quests as well with the next content release.

Overall, the new zone is much more streamlined and enjoyable.  I’m not sure why the Prologue quests were made solo-able but it might point to a general shortage of low-level players in the Ered Luin region.  It’s certainly nice to be able to join a Fellowship as an option, but not be blocked.  I remember the Lone-lands being especially bad for that, I would login with a quest log full of Fellowship quests that no one was doing.

Blog About Bloggers and Podcasters

I read a lot of blogs, i currently have 136 subscriptions in Google Reader and about 1/3 to 1/2 of those are gaming related.  Most bloggers, that I read, make at least some reference to their personal life, often to provide context for opinions, but no one really goes into detailed about their backgrounds or explores why they write.  For most of us it is enough to write without doing any writing about writing.

Randolph over at Grinding to Valhalla has started a project to change that.  He’s gotten quite a few bloggers (including me) to fill out questionnaires about themselves and their backgrounds.  One of the things I find interesting about his blog is the categories he’s put together.  You can look at bloggers by experience level (age), hearthstone (location), and profession (both actual and dream).

If you are a blogger and you want to participate, check out the Chapter 1 questions.

LoTRO 360

The Lord of the Rings Online for the Xbox 360 rumor has been making the rounds again.  The first one I saw was from Destructoid.  It was posted on April 1st, so I immediately assumed it was a joke, but if you check the comment thread Brad does say on the following day that it’s not an April Fool’s joke.  Tony at MMeOw picked it up as did Massively both of which source the Destructoid post.  Massively also references Joystiq who references Destructoid as well and followed up with Turbine PR:

“We’re not talking about what we’re working on specifically, only that we’re making a console MMO and actively working with Microsoft and Sony.”

Turbine has admitted working on a console MMO apparently planned for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, but it’s much more likely to be a new design rather than a port of the existing game.  Jaxom92 makes several good points, but the biggest one is the controller/keyboard problem.  With the exception of Final Fantasy XI, all MMO’s have been designed around mouse and keyboard.  To go to a controller, the game would have to be drastically changed.  Either the game would have to be simplified or the pacing would have to be changed.  The alternative of course is to require players to get a USB keyboard to plug in or provide a peripheral, after all everyone was willing to buy a plastic guitar.  Even then you have an ergonomic issue.  When I play my 360, I play on the couch.  I’m not going to spend hours on the couch with a keyboard in my lap and a mouse on the armrest.

Now Excited for Arkham Asylum

Growing up Batman and Spider-man were my two favorite superheroes.  My experience of both were limited to Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons.  Living in a small town, I didn’t get any exposure to comic books until I got to college.  I’ve enjoyed the recent reboot of the Batman movie franchise and I loved the Spider-man movies, although the last one was the worst of the three.  I’m also reading some of the classics.  Currently I’m reading Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, and I’m planning to get Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Long Halloween next.

So despite being a Batman fan, I wasn’t really looking forward to Batman: Arkham Asylum until I saw this video over at Destructoid.  If you like the Frank Miller era Batman, go watch this now.  The game play looks good, the atmosphere looks awesome, and the graphics look fantastic.  It sounds so minor, and it’s not something I’ve really though much about, but I think Batman’s cape is a major element to the character and this game really seems to have nailed it.