September 2009

Random Acts of Kindness – in Game

stargrace September 19, 2009 3 Comments

Sure, it may be  a video game, but that doesn’t mean that random acts of kindness don’t affect our moods and dispositions in very real ways. Each player is controlled by a real person (well, in most cases) and they have real emotions. You have the power as an individual to help someone have a fantastic day, or a horrible day, just by game play. That’s a pretty powerful thing when you think about it.

Yesterday morning I decided to randomly help out a guild mate get some levels on her new fury. She plays the raid warden, and offered to create a fury and get them to level 80 by next weekend in order to gear out with a mythical. It’s a lot of work and requires a lot of time, I have so many alts I know just how difficult it can be to do in such a short span of time. While I didn’t know her that well, she was still a guild mate and I wanted to help, so I spent a few hours yesterday morning (along with Hamal) taking the fury through the instances in the Clefts of Rujark (Scornfeathers Roost, Vaults of Dust) as well as Hidden Cache, and then off to Tomb of the Living in sinking sands. She managed to ding from 56-59, and I felt really good helping her out. I didn’t expect anything in return.

While I didn’t expect anything in return – I am a big believer of karma. Later on in the day I had not one amazing thing happen to me but four, performed by someone who I’ll leave nameless on here out of respect for privacy. It wasn’t something that was earth shattering that they did, but it was still something random, and unexpected, that completely caught me off guard and left me dazed for the remainder of the day in some happy stupor of bliss. It was awesome to say the least.

My challenge for today is for everyone out there in game to do one completely random act of kindness for someone. It doesn’t matter if they don’t appreciate it in return, do it anyhow. It doesn’t matter how big or small the act of kindness may be – give it a try. You never know, you may have just put a smile on their face that will last the entire day. Have you ever done a random act of kindness or had one done back to you and want to share? Feel free to leave a comment below! I’m always interested in hearing about these things.

I started a new ranger! A gnome. Named Willamina. She’s a quest character, won’t be power leveled through anything. I figured I would write a weekly rp story about the character (for my own interests of course) as she explores Norrath. I have a background made up for her and I’m looking forward to it. So far she’s on the Queens Colony, level 8, exploring.

GU53 is slated to go live on Tuesday the 22nd and you can bet that I am mighty excited. In the mean time, have a fantastic weekend and happy gaming no matter where it finds you!

Are you a Compulsive Skill Worker?

stargrace September 18, 2009 3 Comments

In order to continue working on my swashbuckler epic, I had to get my foresting to 300 (out of 400). This is only one of many skills that characters are granted in EQ2 – and unlike most of the other skills, you can’t work harvesting skills up on a training dummy in your guild hall (wouldn’t that be nice).

Are you one of those people who compulsively levels up all of their skills every time the cap is raised? Or do you wait until you’ve hit the end level and work them all up there? Do you work up your swimming and alcohol tolerance right along with your piercing and harvesting skills? I really wish I were that sort of person and I think at one point in time I may have been, but working up skills takes a lot of time, and as I’m leveling up I just let them rise naturally. Sadly, your harvesting doesn’t really get a work out in later levels, though from 1-20 there are a good number of beginner quests that require harvesting and you can at least raise them to 20 (which is required to harvest T2).

It took a few hours but I finally managed to raise foresting to 300, which means I can continue on the quest.

It seems that luck was actually on my side last night! I needed better weapons, badly. I’m working on the epic, but my weapons in the mean time are quite poor. I headed to Crypt of Agony in Sebilis with the hopes that MAYBE for the first time ever I would see the Cardiocutter drop from the final named. I’ve attempted to get this weapon so many times in the past. For both the dirge and the troubador. All through the Ruins of Kunark era as well as most of TSO. It wasn’t a matter of just never winning it, I’ve never seen it drop in all my runs.

Yesterday, it dropped. My swashbuckler is one happy little scout.

The hot zone changed to Mistmyr Manor last night, and bards were out in full force attempting to win their drums. There was some drama on the 70-79 channels about a 75 illusionist winning over a dirge (not me!) but honestly I don’t see the point of bringing that into public channels. If you don’t expect people to roll on loot in a group either don’t bring them along, or make sure the rules are stated from the outset. You can’t decide once the zone is over how things are going to be distributed, once people have lock out timers. It’s just a piece of gear, there’s no need to get other people involved in the dispute on a public channel. While I don’t know any of the people involved with this particular incident, it was also none of my business.

It’s Friday! I hope everyone has a fantastic day no matter where you find yourself. I should be finishing up the swashbuckler epic this weekend, next weekend is going to be a mythical run and I should be adding two more to the two I already have. Looking forward to it!

See you in Norrath!

What Zones Appeal to you?

stargrace September 17, 2009 8 Comments

Pictured above, my mystic swimming from the Sunken Theater (Veksar 2.0) over to the docks in Fens of Nathsar in EverQuest II. It got me thinking about what sort of zones I miss in certain games, or what zones I found inventive and creative. One thing that seems to be a carrying theme in pretty much any game I play is that I do NOT like zones that are under water. I just don’t enjoy them. Floating along, being unable to control where my character is positioned (and not to mention having to keep enduring breath of some sort up) is just not fun for me. I find it stressful.

However, I loved zones that had ‘air’ properties to them, or zones like ‘The Grey’ from EQ Live where you were required to also have enduring breath due to lack of air (rather then water).

There are lots of zones that carry themes in them, the molten rocks of Lavastorm, the icy cold of Everfrost, and the deep caverns of Befallen. I like zones that have themes to them, they add to the story lines and give players a world feeling to it. What other creative worlds / zones / instances come to mind besides the typical elemental ones? If you could create your own world what would it be compromised of?

In game, things are slowing down a little. The swashbuckler is still working on her epic, I need 300 foresting before I can move to the next part. The foresting is at 90 and moving fairly slow, which is exactly what I expected. Each time I level up a character I say to myself that I am going to work on their skills as I go along so that I’m not left at the end having to work them all up – but it never ends up that way.

Four of us headed to Veksar 2.0 yesterday (guardian, swashbuckler, troubador, and myself as mystic) we did die twice and once was more then likely my fault but I don’t think we did too bad. My mystic does have her mythical, but she’s not wearing raid gear like the rest of the people in the group. Doing the instance with four people was difficult, it was still also a lot of fun.

Rumor has it that GU53 will be coming out around the 22nd (next week) but I haven’t seen any confirmation of this yet, so I’m not holding my breath. It will certainly be nice to have the auto mentoring in effect as well as the new achievement system, and crafting goodies. If you haven’t peeked on test yet, well you’re in for a lot of great updates!

Happy Gaming no matter where it finds you!

I feel pretty, oh so pretty

stargrace September 16, 2009 6 Comments

How important is how your character looks to you? Above is my swashbuckler, wearing her T2 void armor and her class hat from the Barren Sky Hoo’loh chain. Hamal was off yesterday and so we decided to work on the class hat, I’ve long wanted a hat with a feather in it (in game) and while I didn’t even know if this one would match what my swashbuckler was currently wearing (I found out it did) I wanted it ‘just because’.

Lets face it, for most people appearance slots in EQ2 are pretty important. Especially with a very limited amount of visually different gear available to players at level 80. There’s the T1 shard set, the T2 shard set, and T3, and T4. If we didn’t have appearance slots pretty much every class would look like every other class. With these appearance slots we’re able to (some what) customize how we look, and change that based on our moods (you have to be level 20+ to take advantage of appearance slots).

Have you ever done a quest (or raid) specifically for a piece of gear that ‘looked neat’? What about that black barrister’s robe that’s quested in Zek? Ever longed for the box of classless hats from the Legends of Norrath? These are hats that give off the appearance of a class hat but is made specifically for the appearance slot without restrictions of class. Ever purchased a clothing item off of the station marketplace? I have, I own the cowboy looking hat – now if only they were heirloom instead of no trade.

I don’t miss not having dyes (a la EQ Live) simply because we do have a large selection of colourful clothing available to us. I know a lot of people constantly ask why we don’t have dye available in EQ2 and the answer is always the same. Since tailors can make appearance armor, and there’s a lot of lower level quests that reward neat looking gear – not to mention some off of mobs (the black and white daring outfit that drops in sebilis for example) I’m confident that I’ll find something out there that looks good.

Now, with the station marketplace some times I feel a little peeved simply because some of the best looking gear is sold on there for real life money rather then giving players the option to find it in game. This can also be said for some of the best looking furniture. I’ve come to simply accept this, I’m not against these transactions (obviously I’ve purchased items myself) but that doesn’t stop me from wishing that some of the items (or all) were obtainable from within the game without having to spend real life cash on it (since I already pay for a subscription). Without getting into that whole argument, the appearance gear really is amazing looking. I still also wish it was heirloom so you could trade it between your account rather then having to purchase the gear for one specific character.

The later stages of the Hoo’loh helm are still green to a level 80, and I had fun doing Halls of Fate (Sothis) with Hamal, two scouts and no healers. The updates were far easier then I ever remembered them being, and the quest even rewarded status at the end which I was happy for. Once the hat was obtained (and login servers started working again, they were down for 2 hours yesterday morning) we decided to level Dragons Flight (my baby guild on the Oasis server) to 15, inching us closer to 30 (which is my level goal for December). The experience is still fairly fast at these low levels, it doesn’t feel as though it begins to slow down until around level 22 or so. I’m hoping to hit level 20 by the end of this month at the latest, and then have the months before December to hit 30 and purchase (yet another) guild hall. We’ll see how that goes, knowing me I’ll be playing some where else by that time, heh.

I hope everyone has an amazing Wednesday, no matter where you find yourself. Happy gaming!

Charging for Epic Updates?

stargrace September 15, 2009 14 Comments

No doubt if you’re in the 70-79 channels you’ve seen people auctioning off raid slots to people for epic updates. These zones are from Runes of Kunark, and can run anywhere from 50-500p an update depending on what guild you’re going with and what server. While a lot of people debate the moral factor of whether or not it’s “right” to purchase your epic update, that’s not what I want to discuss.

What about the people who sell these updates to others?

My guild runs these RoK raids pretty much every weekend (minus VP which is done once a month), Thuuga, Pawbuster, Leviathan, Venril Sathir, etc. We do NOT charge pick ups for these raids, and some times we’re only adding 1 group of our own guild, and the rest are pick ups. Running a pick up raid is a stressful thing, but we do it, and we love watching people get updates who may not other wise have a chance to get them (be it because they belong to a smaller family guild, their schedule does not allow for it, etc).

Loot is handled on a NBG /random 1000 basis, and any masters that are not needed by those in the raid are taken by our raid organizer (on these weekend raids most of the time it happens to be the shadowknight running them that I talk about every so often) as a “thank you” for us hosting / organizing the raid for people (and then put into our guild bank). Not a lot of masters typically drop that go un-needed to begin with, but it happens from time to time.

This is a great way for us to get our updates for our own characters (since RoK raids are not exactly on the schedule any more) as well as help out the community on our server. It’s gotten to the point now that when the weekend rolls around we’ll get numerous tells randomly asking us if we’re running said zone and if so and so can they come along for an update.

The one weekend we do run VP we take names of people who need updates from specific kills, and we swap them in and out for those kills so that the greatest number of people can get their mythicals as possible. It’s something I would really love to see more guilds doing, instead of charging for updates.

There’s always a small debate as to whether or not non-raiders should be able to obtain these items (be it through paying or not) and honestly I don’t think owning a mythical (or not owning) makes a player good or bad. Yes, it will help their character but in the end it is really the players skill that gets taken into consideration. If you are good at your class, and you group a few times out there, you will be remembered for it. Likewise, if you are a shoddy player, you’ll also be remembered for it. Each class has a specific set of “things” they should be doing, and group mates notice this. Positioning as a tank, curing as a healer, using jesters and PoTM as well as CoC as a bard, all of these things make players good (or bad).

Are we in the wrong for allowing people this free method of obtaining their mythicals? They do have to do the work of gaining the fabled version first, and they also need to show up for the raids that are required, but aside from that it’s mostly the work of a TSO raid guild that pulls the others along. Is this wrong? We’ve even allowed pick ups to die and remain on the ground (dead) during raids for their update (this doesn’t work with conjurors who have to be alive, but a lot of classes can remain dead) if they were nervous that they were going to mess up some how (ie: Venril Sathir script pre-nerf). Are mythicals in the hands of non-raiders a bad thing?

Personally, I dislike the fact that there are pieces of gear in game that are quite common to obtain (these days) that have the ‘mythical’ flag. If you remember back at the beginning of EQ2 there wasn’t even a fabled flag. Prismatic 1.0 rewarded a legendary weapon for your hard effort (and trust me, at level 50 it was a LOT of effort). I think that the more common we make these items, the less special they are. I enjoyed mythical when they were exceptionally rare one time server rewards for unique encounters – and would have been satisfied with a fabled weapon (same stats, but minus the mythical tag). Of course that’s not the decision of the players but the designers, so the point is sort of moot. Pretty much anyone can get their mythical for the right price these days, and I don’t see a difference in giving them out for free so long as people want them.