Social Media Tilt

Posted by FelizB on Apr 18, 2012 in Guildwars 2 | 3 comments

A couple of minutes ago, this tweet shows up, sent by @Guildwars2:

Participating in the Beta Weekend Event?@Ravious over at @KillTenRats wrote a nice guide, check it out: Post at KillTenRats

Woohoo ! Where’s the announcement? I check Twitter and find nothing, except the usual stream of messages, not even when selecting for @Guildwars2. Facebook doesn’t have much either. The flood of messages on facebook is actually modest, since I have an account just for MMO related things. The Arenanet RSS feed hasn’t been updated since April 10th. And my email inbox has no GW2 related messages. Steam’s coming out of my ears.

After my third visit at Kill Ten Rats I finally notice a link to the original @Guildwars2 tweet ! A tweet 7 hours old. And there it is, a Facebook post as well, 7 hours old, too. But there’s still no RSS update, no blog post. nor is there any email.

And there I was, thinking I was set up well to keep tabs on my MMO environment: My RSS reader is subscribed to the feeds I am interested in, a couple of aggregator and news websites like ZAM or MMORPG, plus a lengthy list of blogs I like. Then there is Twitter and Facebook, both on isolated accounts, keeping the Foursquare Check-Ins and the sharing of cat pictures separate in my personal account. I am also subscribed to the newsletters of various games and gaming companies, which are filtered and labelled on, you guessed it, another separate email account.

This is serious information overload, and in the cases of Twitter, Facebook and the News sites, things get lost, since the news items are published in sequential order without any further options to filter by source. Things get, because often enough, the announcement of a “Game of Thrones” MMO is scrolled off screen by the competing babbling coming from @RandomGame and @UpcomingGame. And if that’s not enough, there’s a Zombie trivia  event by @YetAnotherGame going on as well.

What I am saying is this: News and Information is drowned out by the noise coming from social media. This is not being helped by the availability of multiple channels like Facebook and Twitter. The creators of news end up feeding all channels. Leave it to the recipient to filter out what he needs. But I don’t have a tool that can filter the news in a way I can process it. I know there are some efforts out there trying to make life easier, but those tools want to be found, and worst of all, need to be configured.

Until then, no “Game of Thrones” for me.

Excuse our Dust

Posted by FelizB on Apr 15, 2012 in Blog | 4 comments

This blog has gone through some changes in its appearance since I started it, somehow indicating its change in content. So why stop now? I am an able programmer, know the basics and some of the inner workings of WordPress and I am having fun working with web site designs and layouts. Oh, and it might get a business started, or at least it might get me a job.

I am not much of an artist or graphics designer, but it’s fascinating anyway. Ever since I joined Google+ and saw their changing layout, I’ve been trying to recreate the style, but wasn’t very successful. Look at this website for my first attempt: http://cooklikeaguy.com/. It’s all white, and that’s about it. But now more and more sites have popped up using and improving the theme, Guildwars 2 among them. The style is called “Minimalist” which strives to reduce a design to only elements that are needed for the object to function. Among the websites on my blogroll, Milady’s Hypercriticism has a perfect Minimalist design. I’ve been looking at the layout of that website with envy ever since I noticed it. Of course, I have been staring even more intense at that web page over the past weekend when I finally made up my mind about a new layout.

I’ve been experimenting with various WordPress themes over time, some of them premium themes (Gabfire Themes, Elegant Themes), and some of them free like Arras and Suffusion. I wasn’t much of a friend of Elegant Themes, since they don’t handle ads in a way I like it. But the more I looked at their Aggregate and Minimal themes the more I wanted to use them, until I finally caved in and added my own coding to support ads. I also made some other changes while I was at it.

What you see here now is the result of a couple of hours work this weekend. I have a few more things to change and move around, but the basic layout is there already. Hope you’ll like it.

Vanguard and I

Posted by FelizB on Apr 13, 2012 in Blog, Featured, Vanguard | 4 comments

I feel the itch. Now that free-to-play has been announced for the game, it looks like a couple of former players are already returning, in hoping the community will grow quickly. There’s been some activity among the bloggers regarding Vanguard, too: Ardwulf’s Lair has a couple of articles and Bhagpuss @ Inventory Full has some honorable mentions as well.

I have to say, I’d like to return, too. A few days ago, I signed up for another Vanguard trial. This screen shot is the result of 2 hours of playing a bard. Vanguard is one of the MMO’s I regularly go back to, when other games turn sour on me. I just love some of the games mechanisms: You’ll eventually have to decide if you want to skill up one weapon over the other: long- or short sword, piercer or a mace. At some point you won’t have enough skill points to keep them all maxed. My bard can “compose” his own songs. In combat there are skill combos and situational abilities I need to act on.

I am usually not much of a trade skill kind of guy, but I often do the basics and come back to it every now and then. The trade skill sphere has some interesting concepts. Your trade skill level is independent from your adventuring level. You can only advance through work orders, which will not produce any usable goods. You can make usable items, but they won’t advance your skills. You have your won set of trade skill gear and tools. The same is true for harvesting.

The game has a third sphere, diplomacy. To make it short, I’ve never been using it much, but it does have its own rewards.

The world of Telon is huge. Three massive continents offer enough room for content, cities, dungeons and places to just go Ooooh and Aaaah. You can have flying mounts and you can build your own ship to travel oceans and rivers.

Vanguard is certainly old school (now without corpse runs), but you will respawn elsewhere and have to run back, if you want to continue working on your current goal. Mobs will respawn on your way, if you don’t hurry or if you were in way to deep into a dangerous area. Grouping is often recommended.

There’s more to the game, like nice race and class selections or meaningful NPC factions. But I’ll leave that for another time, to be discovered as I get further into the game.

SWTOR and I

Posted by FelizB on Apr 10, 2012 in Blog, Star Wars: The Old Republic | 0 comments

Back in October when I got an invitation for one of the beta events for Star Wars, it was all fun and lightsabers. The game had great classes, a good story, interesting combat mechanisms, a selection of companions and it looked like a great game overall. Turns out, there were plenty of gaping holes in the game. Boring race selections, not so well thought out crew skills, a poorly implemented Galactic Trade Network. And worst of all, an inconsistent game world, with Republic and Empire sharing the same map, holding identical positions on it. The quest lines on a single planet were to long and lead you in general along a rail, without many options to stray from the path. I don’t think you have the option of just skipping a planet or a segment of your characters story.

I did play for a while together with my wife until we hit Taris on the Republic side, but her initial interest was a straw fire, and my fun was gone shortly thereafter as well. Maybe I had to wait for patch 1.2 for to long, but there is no excitement in me to wait for it.

I did unsubscribe on Sunday, but have a couple of days left to take a screenshot or two. I don’t want to start a lengthy goodbye rant, like it usually happens on the SWTOR forum. I had fun playing and I bear no ill will toward the game or the players I leave behind. It’s just not my game anymore. I will stay in contact with the SWTOR blogs around me. The people there are fun and have interesting things to say. I don’t want to give up that.

So long, SWTOR. Let me know if you want to have my stuff…

Zombie Apocalypse Survival Tip: Save the Yellow Pages

Posted by FelizB on Apr 9, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Remember that big plastic bag on your front steps containing the white pages directory and two volumes of yellow pages? The bag you usually carry over right to your trash or recycling bin? Save them, and replace them at least once a year. There won’t be any internet with zombies having taken over the local power station. And there will be more zombies than usual working for your cell phone company. You will need the good old paper version to look up the location of the nearest gun shop, weapon- or blacksmith.

Speaking of blacksmithing: Do you know where you can find the nearest forge? How to build your own? What fuel to use? Do you have any idea how to forge a shovel or a pickaxe? No? I suggest you go to Wikipedia and print out the article on Blacksmithing. Now ! Thank me later.

So I bought the season 1 DVD set of “The Walking Dead” and watched it over Easter Sunday. Nice show to watch while you are preparing your dinner. And there’s my step son who’s producing Zombie Apocalypse survival tips on a weekly basis.

Three Weeks of Everquest Free to Play

Posted by FelizB on Apr 5, 2012 in Blog, Everquest | 0 comments

It’s been three weeks already? Time flies when you are having fun. And I am certainly having fun getting back to Norrath and Everquest. I’ve made a few characters on the brand new “Vox” server, while hardly looking at my old ones. I just don’t think I’d be able to play them very well at their level. Creating new characters gives me time to relearn the game and to get familiar with the changes since I left. Besides, new characters are fun, at least for me.

For the F2P start SOE created “Hero’s Journey”, a guide and a set of achievements through the leveling process. It took me a while until I found out about this, but once I noticed it, all was good. It leads you through the Crescent Reach zone and all other zones of that expansion. It gets you great gear along the path. If you are going to restart, I recommend to do just a few steps in the tutorial, just enough to get you 3 pieces of armor, and continue with Hero’s Journey.

Not following Hero’s Journey lead me to the level 10+ armor quests and my first encounter with the old competitiveness of the game, namely kill stealing. Old Everquest hands will know that loot rights and experience gain for a kill go to the player or group who do the most damage, not the person who tagged the mob first. Which of course happened to me, trying to kill tarantulas in the Desert of Ro. They are kind of rare and all of a sudden, the tarantula I just had engaged was dead. Some higher level shaman had killed it and continued to clear out the area without giving others the chance to finish their quests.

Lots of drama has ensued over this in the past and obviously will continue. This extended into raiding as well, since dungeons and raids were not instanced. Guilds and players had to compete for the kill. I could already experience my dose of hardcore behavior while visiting Project 99 a while back, and just hope this doesn’t extend into the new end game. Time will tell.

But now to the nicer sides of the game. You can notice much more cooperative behavior among the players than anyplace else, even if you take the competitiveness into account. Players offer buffs in the Plane of Knowledge and asking for buffs is accepted as well. Group play happens, although with the limitations of not having a LFD tool. But the players are far more willing to group up and share. Experienced and higher level players will run up to you and hand you loot, or just offer it for free in chat. And as it used to happen, valuable loot that nobody in a group or raid wanted is often offered to the public in general chat.

Speaking of POK, since F2P players can’t sell their goods in the bazaar, they have to rely on /auction chat. Which gives the already humming Plane of Knowledge even more traffic and there’s some hope it will become like East Commonlands, the market place of old. However, it seems to slow down a bit, as subscribers offer their guild mates to sell their gear through the subscribers traders.

So far, I haven’t run into killer issues with free-to-play. Most of the gear on my old characters is unusable, due to having bad augments, but that’s more of a bug than intention. There is a limit on the amount of money a character can have and there is no shared bank. F2P players can’t send mail or parcels. This limits the ability to transfer items between characters, but nothing keeps you from creating a second account and using it to hold a few bags. The number of bags is limited, which initially seems like an issue, but in the end, with a bit more organisation, you’ll get by.

I am a bard of old. I did crowd control in Solusek A and Karnor’s Castle and I charm kited in the Plane of Nightmares. So I asked in the bard channel what instruments are now in easy reach for my level. The answer made me cringe: Use the instrument modifiers that come with your defiant armor. Modifiers not even half the strength of your standard store bought lute or hand drum. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be to much of a surprise, with leveling now being so easy, there isn’t much need to squeeze out an edge through 10% more damage output with you drum. At least they confirmed that the higher run speed coming from a better drum is useful.

And lastly, something I am far from mastering, yet. The game mechanics of the solo and group game are much more dynamic than modern games. Even though, you can chat a lot while on auto attack, you still need to pay attention to what’s going on. Roaming mobs for instance. Crowd control. Managing pets and MERCs. Your focus is not on what button to push next in your spell rotation, but you look around and react to what’s going on. This might be a bard specific thing, but I had to be on the lookout with my beastlord as well.

Anyway, it’s been a lot of fun so far. I am still rediscovering all the old places like the Ry’Gorr Fort in Eastern Wastes or Warsliks Wood. I am not expecting to stick around for 6 years, though. Probably more like 6 weeks and then on and off. Which is the great thing with F2P. No need to go through subscribe/unsubscribe. Just play.