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  • As the Glitter Fades

    Posted on by suguay

     

    Many of us who have played games have at one time or another had moments, periods of time, when for whatever reason our favorite game loses its luster. We are no longer excited to log on and finish that next quest line, or mission, or attend the next raid. Usually what has happened is some new game has tempted us with something even more glittery and lustrous. Sometimes, it is life itself that tempts us away.

     


    I have a friend that discovered the demands of being a new father were greater than he expected. While blessed with a cute baby girl, she is not one of those babies with a quiet disposition. She is demanding of his time and attention. He found that devoting the time needed to World of Warcraft nearly impossible to maintain. In the interest of being a good parent he has let his account lapse, at least for now. Most mature gamers would agree that this is as it should be and not at all surprising. But perhaps it is not that the game has lost its pull rather that he has chosen to prioritize his daughter over playing a game.


    I have another friend with whom I share a bank guild. He had heard some people in another guild he is in have been playing a new game called “Rift”. This weekend he decided to give it a go. He hasn’t been on World of Warcraft for 2 or 3 or 4 days now.  He too has been tempted away by the shiny new toy, so to speak.


    Lest it sound as though I am complaining and lamenting the loss of my friends in the online world I should point out (fess up) that I too have been pulled away. What pulls me away is not, as it is for my one friend, a new family member. Nor is it the call of a shiny new or different game, as it has been many times before, it is not even the impending upheaval in my domestic circumstances. What lures me away is an old passion rediscovered. I have been pulled way by that most demanding of lovers, music. And, more specifically the guitar.


    For reasons not pertinent to this article, I have taken back up playing the guitar and I can tell you that for me the games do not even compare. The high, or sense of accomplishment from reaching the highest level, surviving a real tough battle, making it all the way through a raid or dungeon by the skin of your teeth just do not hold a candle to the sense of accomplishment, excitement, and progress that comes from playing an instrument. In the case of the guitar there is first, surviving the cutting of the strings into the finger tips and the cramping of the hand as you struggle to hold the strings tight so they make music and not some dull thwup. Then there is learning the notes and the rhythm or speed at which those notes are played. This part can require hours of practice and repetition, playing the same barre or two over and over and over again. At some point, you find you now have all the bits in your head and you can play the whole song, all the way through, without stopping and returning to some reference material. Now you will spend hours more playing the same song, the whole song, over and over again and again trying to get it just right. When you finally make it all the way through the song there is a feeling of triumph that you have, at least this time, survived and maybe even conquered.


    The satisfaction is complete. The pain and the gain both are real and physical. They are not some virtual repair bill or achievement or loot.


    While I have enjoyed my time playing online games and they have served me well in entertainment, making friends and things they have allowed me to learn about myself, they do not sing the siren’s song for me as does that object of sound and beauty that sits on its stand and harkens to me to pick it up and bring it to life even as my fingers ache and burn and scream. I will pick it up and play.


    And so as the glitter of the online world fades for me I return to reality, yet, unlike the princes and princesses of Narnia, this reality is not lack luster and less exciting than the world I just left. This reality is more like Sleeping Beauty awakening to find her prince, and my prince is a guitar.

     

     

    Support artists. Buy their music.

    Keep music and art education in our schools.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    Games Land

  • Still Progressing at 85

    Posted on by suguay

    Ok, so I hit 85 and promptly and temporarily lost interest in playing my Death Knight. Sad, pathetic, but true. I don’t rush to the top level just to get to “end game” content. It’s all a by product for me of watching the progress/experience bar fill up, gain a level and repeat. When my bar went away at 85 I had nothing to mark my progress and so it felt like I was just putting in time.

    And so I went off to anther toon that still has plenty of progress bar to go, and played that for a while. Not that I had finished all I should with my DK. Far from it. I had half the quests or more still to do in Hyjal and Uldum, I had barely started Twilight Highlands and my Jewel Crafting wasn’t even 500 yet, not to mention First Aid and Archeoloy. Oh, and I hadn’t even bothered with the ultra fast flying skill. 

    I don’t remember what got me to spend the time on my Death Knight again. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the progress I’ve made since then. I found a couple of ways to measure my progress that has kept me coming back. 

    First thing I did was finish off Twilight Highlands and get that acheivement. This also gave me the Exploration acheivement for exploring Cataclysm. Then I set about figuring out where the missing quests were for Hyjal and Uldum. I wanted the Cataclysm Loremaster acheivement and I had to finish off those zones to get it.

    I found the one in Hyjal and was able to finish it off. I got a lot of mining in with that one. For Uldum, I had to spend a lot of time flying around the zone and going back to places I thought were done before I found it. I probably ignored it originally or saw it, meant to get it and forgot about it. Anyway, I was then able to finish off Uldum and get the Loremaster acheivement for Cataclysm. Along the way I got my Jewel Crafting to 500+. 

    Now what to do about Deepholme. I had missed a quest there too. Because I had a dungeon quest that turns in with Therazane, I missed that she also had another new quest. Once I picked up that quest and finished it and just a few more, then all was well in Deepholme and now I have Dailies there as well as the quartermaster.

    Now that those are all taken care of you might wonder if I’ve lost interest in my Death Knight again. Actually, I haven’t. I still have my Jewel Crafting to cap. I’m at 522 right now. You’d think I’m close except I’m a Draenei so I have the racial for Jewel Crafting which means cap for me is 535. I have Archeology to work on as well as First Aid which is around 513, 515 or something like that. My item level, while improved from the raid is still only 327, just 2 points from being allowed into Heroics through the Dungeon Finder.

    I found the quartermaster in Twilight Highlands and have been doing some dailies there like I do in Deepholme. I still have Northrend and Cataclysm cooking recipes to collect and there are a few other acheivements I’m working towards. Oh yeah, and there are the Dungeons. I do want to do those as well.

    Even at 85 there’s lots I can do and still have that sense of making progress.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    Games Land

  • I Did My First Raid

    Posted on by suguay

    A couple of weeks ago I was invited to do my first raid. Yes, I’ve been playing a couple of years and this truly was my first 10 man raid, or raid of any kind for that matter. We won’t go intothe why’s of how that is the case, we’re just going to skip ahead to the good stuff.

    It was a wipe fest. As expected. We did Twilight Bastion and most of us were horribly under geared for it. I know my item level was only 314 at the time. One of the other DPS said Player Score ( the new Gear Score) was tellign him that it would be “formidable” for him and he was one of the top 3 in gear. So it was a challenge. And everyone expected that.

    We even had trouble with the trash. It took us a while just to get down the first group and stay out of the puple/black puddles on the floor. After a while I adjusted my approach to doing damage and instead of standing right next to the mob and wailing on it like I normally do, I let my ghoul do that and I would run in, hit it a few times and then back off. This approach meant I wasn’t doing as much damage as I otherwise might because my auto attack wasn’t contributing. However, it did mean I quit taking as much damage. And since our healers were having a hard enough time keeping up the tanks, I figured this would have to be the trade off.

    We did finally manage to get through the trash and to the first boss. This was about 2 hours into it. The first time we tried we lasted about 48 seconds. A little reasearch and we tried something else and we lasted 38 seconds. I think we tried about 5 times and wiped every time and our first attempt was the best we did, or longest we lasted. We finally gave up when the trash at the entrance re-spawned.

    I was really glad we were done. It was very late, at least for me, and I was rapidly running out of steam. Not that I didn’t have fun. I did. No one expected us to finish it and I thinke we all expected to die a lot and so there was no drama. Would I do it again? Sure. Though I would like to start earlier and I think for that to happen I’m going to need to be on a server in my time zone. I’m currently east coast United States and the server I’m playing on is on Pacific time as were the raid leaders. 

    I was invited to the second attempt the following week. It didn’t happen for a variety of reasons and my not being there wasn’t even a factor. Now I hear the healers for that group, one of whom invited me in the first place, well they are likely to be taking a hiatus from World of Warcraft. So it will probably be quite some time before I get to raid again. 

    Guess I better get to running dungeons.


    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    Games Land

  • Made it to 85

    Posted on by suguay

    So I made it to 85 on my Death Knight. I made it pretty quickly given the amount of play time I put in and in comparison to the slog it was to 80. I did it in less than a month. I did no dungeons and had no guild benefits as a boost to anything. I also did not play as rabidly as I did when trying to reach 80.

    My trip from 80 to 85 was strictly via quests and mining. Yep, that’s it. No guild bonus.
    I’m in what is basically a bank guild and while there are about 26 or 27 members most of those are toons of about 5 of us. The majority of the time I am the only guild member on and many of the others are lower level toons. So with over a month since Cataclysm and the new guild leveling system we are still only 32% to level 2. So no guild perks yet.

    I still haven’t run any of the new dungeons. In a few cases I was out geared for them on normal by the time I located the entrance. Truth is, I haven’t run a dungeon in a group on my DK since I changed to Unholy and that was at least a couple of months before Cataclysm, so I’m a bit out of practice and I have little idea as to how things will go in a group with the new spec.

    I found the leveling to go very quickly just doing the quests and mining. The fact that you get experience now from mining and herbalism and I think Archeology is a huge bonus in my mind. Sometimes the XP is fairly small but when you are mining to get ore for prospecting, as I do, you tend to need a lot to get the gems you need and so the small amounts of XP add up and quickly.

    The change in the way quests are done is very helpful as well. By not having the group quests and being able to turn in and acquire some quests in the field makes things go a little quicker. Having map markers for where to go to do the quests helps make planning my route easier as well.

    There have been a couple of quests that have caused me to have to stop and rethink my approach and ultimately use spells that I had not previously used. I think this is really good training for the things I’ve heard about from the new dungeons.

    I have found some oddities with a couple of the new Cataclysm zones. For some reason in Hyjal, while I haven’t finished all the quests there, I can’t seem to find anymore there. I have the same problem in Uldum. So now how am I supposed to get the achievement for doing a certain number of quests in that zone? Deepholme is also a little strange. I have done the required number of quests, I can’t find any more though I do have the two dungeon quests but now the dungeon entrance is gone, the ports to Stormwind and Orgrimmar are gone as well as the vendors and there is fighting in the temple.

    I still need to do Twilight Highlands. I had pretty much just started it when I hit 85, I haven’t even gotten as far as getting the portal to Stormwind open, though I have a quest relating to it. No, sadly, I got to 85 and lost a little interest and have wandered off to level my Gnome Warlock. I will have to put some time in with my Death Knight though. I need to be prepared for Friday. I’ve been invited to my first raid. If it happens it should be interesting and maybe even fun. I’m expecting to be really bad and I think a couple of others are expecting a wipe fest. I know I am.

    Guess we’ll see how it goes. And then I’ll be leveling my Warlock up to 85.

    See you in the machine.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    Games Land

  • New Sci-Fi MMO — Perpetuum

    Posted on by suguay

    There is a new Sci-fi MMO out called Perpetuum. This game comes to us from Avatar Creations Inc. out of Budapest, Hungary. The basic premise is that you work for a corporation controlling a robot/Mech that is on another planet. The need is to control the planet and it’s energy resources because we here on good ol’ planet earth have run out. Hmm. Shades of the future?

    I think that is what I find most intriguing about the game. The back story has just enough shades of how things are today to make the world you join more viable. A quick bit of the story background. Basically, the governments of the planet were doing a really bad job and were overridden by the corporations. The major corporations for the 3 main factions formed a syndicate to control the new planet and take over it’s resources for our energy needs. There’s one hitch. The planet is inhabited by a robot race.

    The game includes questing in the form of assignments. There is mining and crafting as well as the usual military style play and of course the currier quests. The market is player driven much like Eve and Planet Calypso(Entropia). Leveling is a bit different. You don’t buy skill books or pay a trainer to learn new skills. You are given so many extension points per account per minute for the time the account is active. You can spend those along with some cash to either learn a new program(extension) or upgrade one you already have. This is a sandbox style game with pvp.

    The controls are a little different. I am accustom to playing most games in angel view with the ability to zoom in to first person and you are looking the direction you are traveling in. The robots don’t handle quite the same, or if they do I didn’t find the setting. You may not be looking the direction you are traveling and that can be a challenge to overcome if you play other MMO’s. It will take some time to re-program your brain. You can control that by changing your view as you go.

    The mechanics of fighting are also a little different. Like in Eve it takes time to acquire your target and then you have to set it to active before you can start shooting at it. The mining mechanics are even more different. You have to do a large area scan and then a small area scan and you have to have charges for doing the scans for a particular type of resource. Then you have to target the area you want to mine and have mining charges for that particular resource. It’s a bit more involved than say World of Warcraft, Everquest II, or even Eve, though that one can get more complex.

    When you loot the robots that you fight you sometimes get these shard type things that you research. When you do this it will give you a percentage of the knowledge for creating an item. It will not always give you the same item. One may give you 7% of the knowledge to create a particular kind of bullet and the next my give you 20% knowledge on how to create a miner. The crafting/manufacturing processes on the surface seems a bit complex and expensive. However, I must confess, I have not played it long enough to really get involved in that part. I did play long enough to want to purchase stuff from the market. However, at just a few days into public launch, the market, being player driven, was not very developed in the area I was.

    The social aspect of it felt a little isolated to me. You start off in an NPC corporation, one of the major ones in the syndicate. There are player created corporations as well, like guilds, societies, or corporations in other games. I have not gotten involved in these. There is the corporation chat channel and probably a more global chat. It’s very easy to turn these off and so I didn’t pay attention. It is also easy to filter the other players out of your HUD list so you only see your targets. This too has it’s dangers. Because of that ease of filtering you can find yourself very isolated in the game.

    The game is prices comparable to other MMO’s at $10 to $15 (USD) per month for play. I think that’s reasonable. When I paid they were running a special at $10 for a month though the normal is $15.

    So overall, I like the game. I like the sci-fi concept and it being planet side instead of in space. Space based games are sometimes very dark visually and there are days that that really doesn’t appeal to me. Not to say that Perpetuum is all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a little dark visually as well with some variations. While I will probably spend more time playing it, and paying for it, it isn’t likely to be my main go to game when I want to play. I didn’t find it engaging enough that I was compelled to go back to it right away after I had been out of town for a couple of days. I think I loaded it once or twice after that. Some of that is the isolation and some of it has to do with my preferences. I really have to be in the mood to play a sci-fi MMO. I think it is something about the genre. They tend to be more involved, require more commitment to really advance to anything other than a grunt warrior. Not that I think that’s bad. When I’m really in a thinking mood where I need or want something really complicated and involved, I want a sci-fi MMO to play. And Perpetuum is likely to be my next go to game for that.

    Just a note: I’ve included the link to the website at the top so you can get all the information on game play and story line yourself. It is quite developed and there is no way, especially with the little time I have spent in the game, that I can come close to filling in all the details of information that you may want or need for getting involved in Perpetuum. Therefore, I encourage you to visit the website at: www.perpetuum-online.com

    Cheers and see you in the machine.

    Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.


    Games Land