h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And End of Ages is the last of the Mysts. There's just nothing interesting, to me, about being in battles, unless they are silly ones of the sort we have here. A game should make you use your brain, not just your virtual trigger finger.

Listening to this conversation, I'm not convinced y'all have found a better way! All this queuing up, and having the quality of your experience detracted from by a bad fellow player...

Lil, I enjoy WoW for it's universe and it's play. The idiot that I run with is just one guy, there are 5-10 more (not to mention my guildmates) that I like to run with. We do our quests, grind for XP and just in general have fun. Even the idiot that plays with us can be handy to have around as cannon fodder at times...

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That's mean... funny, but mean.

After having a think I've decided to give DDO more time, partly because I judged the game after only about 4 hours total playing time and partly because one of the Powers on the DDO Beta forum pointed out that you never know what changes the next patch will bring.

>>pointed out that you never know what changes the next patch will bring.


yes, indeed. i know a lot of ex SWG and FFXI players that would agree to that

Mr D, he *is* a warrior. He is supposed to be a meat sponge. He just sucks at it. For all the aggro he pulls off of me he fails to pull aggro off of the priest or shaman... He does not know his class. I am not saying that I am a skilled ninja, but I am learning to play the rogue and I am doing well with it. In PvP I hold my own (till I get jumped by 60 Paladins or bloody night elves), in grinding I do well (better alone than in a party oft times).

Lil, the reason we're not seeing many more games like Myst is because everyone's convinced that online play is the wave of the future. And, much as I hate to admit it, that may very well be the case.

Also, games like Myst are always either 1) undergraphically powered, or 2) lacking in your ability to control your environment.

I mean, take a text game like Zork. You could manipulate anything, and you could use dozens and dozens of commands (just *try* to say "jump over the red log" in a Myst-like game where it's not been implemented. You can't. But in text games, it's common to get a reaction from nearly anything). However, it's a text game, so the graphics are nil.

Meanwhile, in Myst, you have visually stunning graphics and sound. Unfortunately, the interactability drops tremendously. There simply isn't time to implement every single item that's drawn into the scenery, and create dozens of different verbs for them. As such, Myst-like games are basically "intuitive scavenger hunts" where exploration amounts to finding a hotspot on a screen. Sure, the puzzles can take a lot of thought to solve, but actually finding the puzzles in question isn't a challenge.

But still...if I could just get one more Zork game with graphics...that'd rock.

I enjoy playing Project Entropia because of the interaction with other players - games that are *only* about hack&slash never quite appealed to me...

...although I must admit that it was quite an exhilirating experience when I was out hunting drones with my disciple recently...

There were a lot of Plumaterguses (colourful birds that can't fly) and Exarosaurs (small plant-eating dinosaur-like creatures) around but, as these don't give much loot, we ignored them while searching around for drones.

Unfortunately, these specific creatures show empathy with other creatures - if an animal nearby is attacked by a player, they come running and start attacking the player.

Drones are attracted only if another drone is attacked.

The terrain was a bit tricky, with lots of plants and trees, limiting the view. When we finally spotted a drone and started shooting at it, we didn't realize there were more drones nearby.

Ah, the adrenalin kick I got when each of us was attacked by 2-3 drones and several Exos and Plumes! I tried to keep an eye on my disciple's health bar, but even if it had dropped worryingly low, I wouldn't have been able to make my way to his side to heal him. Fortunately, he had the sense to stop attacking and heal himself when needed.

We both survived - the only injury being sore trigger-fingers! And looted quite well!

Something that fascinated me from the very beginning was the art of tailoring - I wanted to create those cool pieces of clothing too! Unfortunately, the materials needed cost a lot - either money, if you buy them from other players or in the auction - or time and ammo, if you decide to get the materials yourself.

I'm now experienced and wealthy enough to do some tailoring - not every attempt is successful, but I recently managed to craft several pairs of shoes, that I got paid fairly well for!

Yesterday, I also bought some boots in the auction simply because I liked the look - spending money on items besides armour or weapons was something I wouldn't even have considered a couple of months ago - but these I just had to have! A pair of silver-coloured, stiletto-healed calf-length boots...

Having finally got the hang of combat in DDO (although I'm still not overly keen on the way it's done) and having finally started to actually enjoy the game I've discovered another gripe: bigotry.

Not racial, sexual or anything but against players of World of Warcraft. Apparently it's a game inhabited entirely by l33t teenagers and no *real* role-player with any self respect would ever play it. One person even went so far as to say that if he saw any of the "WoW masses" in the game after it goes live he'll stop playing (quite how he intends to tell if these people also play WoW based purely on an in-game avatar is beyond me), I told him that this playground gang attitude is pathetic only to be told by someone else that calling people pathetic is typical of WoW players and just shows why people don't like them!

Hmm, if those are the people playing DDO then I shall avoid the beta.

SWG is still being adpated and fiddled with, but I am enjoying the new character quests that were introduced with the NGE, nice story lines and they pay quite well. Still not worked out what all the new stims do, or even if they are of any value. Tailoring in SWG is fun, harvesting the resources can be a bit of a bind, but I had an architect preNGE and she still has loads of resources. So may create a second character on my second account who is a tailor. In the meantime, my character (Caerwynn,natch) is still an Entertainer and happily dancing in Theed cantina most nights. I really enjoy the social side of the game.

an announcement from square-enix (FFXI) about RMT today:

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/information/060209.html


this is about the third or fourth time something like this has happened since RMT really became a problem (about 2 years now).


this past tuesday marks a year since the suicide of a very good friend whom i played ffxi with. i still miss him quite horribly.

i wrote about it on my site a year ago, in a few places:

http://sporky.net/archives/000733.html
http://sporky.net/archives/000744.html

I started out clothcrafting, since I was a mage. I could only buy basic materials from the guild, they only have about 10 items per 24 hours in game, so at their shop opening time several people would hang around and buy up all they had. It took ages and shedloads of gil to gain any crafting levels, 90% of my game time was spent farming stuff to get money by myself, which since I didn't have all that much time to play was deadly boring, (10% on crafting) plus I'd wind up picking up loads of random stuff along the way and my storage at my house was always full of things waiting for me to get a stack of them so I could sell them.

I also tried fishing... I dunno, I guess everyone fishing must've been using bots or had lots of friends on their linkshell to chat with, because that was deadly dull, and it was always the same people standing in the same places all the time...

I'm sorry about your friend, sporky

So you can join World of Warcraft and become a farmer and a pacifist?

Farming means that you are searching for specific items. Some of these are plants (herbalisim) others are skins (obviously you have to kill the mob to get it's skin) others are for item drops.

When I say that I am farming it means that I go to an area with a lot of animals for me to skin. I kill the animal and then I skin it.

You have to quest and kill mobs for xp. You can't go anywhere inthe game without the hack-and-slash.

That being said though, I know a guy whose chracter has two outfits... his questing gear (armour, cloak, etc) and 'generic' gear (shirt, breeches, boots) when wearing his generic gear he's but a simple farm hand. "Priest, sir? Me, sir? No, sir. Not me, sir."

Most RPers have a couple of outfits for RPing.

Do you have FlagRSP installed? Very hand tool for RPing from curse-gaming.com

Y'know, if it *had* actually been farming, I think I would've enjoyed it more... but wandering around Saruta Baruta looking for those horrible crawlers to kill on the off chance that they dropped a smooth stone, or, hopefully, some silk, did my head in.
Bitter and twisted? Moi?
I did actually enjoy a lot of the game, just not crafting.

Hmm... well since I'm trying to get more into the RP side of things in WoW I may have to start saving up for some civvies... something simple I think, what with me being a Paladin.

Should have done the Cenarian Circle or whatever it was then Mr D. I got a really nice teal suit from that.

I think there is still time to do the Lunar Festival, you only need five coins to get a suit and all the starter area Elders are easy to find.