March 2012

Ding Level 80! Instantly. You Win. #WurmOnline #WoW

I couldn’t help but give a little gasp of surprise yesterday (not in a good way). Reading my RSS I discovered that Blizzard has revamped their ‘resurrection’ scroll, you know the item you could send out to recruit your friends to the game. This time 300% experience was not enough, they had to allow those people to instantly move one character to level 80.

Really?

Is that what it has come down to? I don’t want to hear ‘well it’s world of warcraft, what sort of people did you think were playing!’ – because I play the game, and I’ve never in all my time gaming wanted anything like that. What happened to games being about hours of enjoyment and working on a character instead of all of this instant gratification that players seem to be demanding.

It left me feeling incredibly out of the loop, especially with my latest Wurm adventures. I have two premium characters (the cost is so wonderful that I have no issues with this) and I decided that “city” life such as it were, was too ‘easy’ for one of my characters. I packed up her belongings and set out in search of adventure. I found it, too. I’ll be writing about that in a separate post as I didn’t want it cluttered by the rest of the negativity that I’ve mentioned here.

What are your thoughts on instantly leveling up a character? I realize that everyone is entitled to their own method of game play, and it certainly doesn’t affect my way (except there will be a nice influx of people who have no idea how to play a level 80 character) but honestly it’s a method that I can’t even grasp because it’s so far beyond my own realm of personal enjoyment. It honestly baffles me.

 

More Carnival Goodies #RiftGame #Rift

Even though I should be working towards getting on of the four awesome balloon companions available, I couldn’t help but spend my glass beads on this carnival mask. A bit scary, no?

I moved all four of my defiant characters to Faeblight yesterday, deciding that I’d much rather be on a heavily populated server. So far, I haven’t regretted the decision to move, nor my decision to come back to the game. There’s a lot to do!

A short post today, so as always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Lets Go To the Fair #RiftGame #Rift

I stopped playing Rift a few months ago because I had reached level 50 and not being a fan of raids I found myself with very little to do. Those months were not spend idle, and Trion has added a lot of content to the game since then so I decided to log in for free on my lower level characters to poke around. Needless to say the sirens call was too strong for me to avoid, and I ended up signing up for 3 months (I love multi month deals).

One of the current in-game festivals is their one year birthday celebration, and Meridian is decked out with a fair for players to enjoy. The fair reminds me a lot of the one you find in World of Warcraft, with games for players to enjoy. One game in specific is almost exactly alike, where you toss a ring on a critter that is penned up running around in circles. They do have a unique game that I absolutely loved, it involves the screen shot above. You speak to the NPC and pick a team to cheer for (I picked the red team). As the horses run around the tracks, you jump on the platform and the horse pulls forward. Jump too much and your horse will run out of steam and fall behind. I had no one against me, so I naturally won (woohoo). I loved this little game and found it a lot of fun. In the background of the screen shot to the left hand side you can see players mounted up jumping on balloons. Pop 30 balloons and win a prize, was the basics of that game. There are also vendors with treats for players, and fortune tellers, and even an NPC who will try to guess your weight if you stand before him. He of course has nothing but snarky comments to toss your way in return.

The fair is not the only new thing pulling me in game, there’s also Ember Isle, which I have never explored before. I headed to the zone briefly yesterday to poke around and was astonished to realize that it is actually an entire zone. I thought perhaps it was just a small area. I did a few of the beginning quests, and then headed back to Meridian, content that there’s enough content to last me a little while (not to mention my alts, and all of those quests I never did).

Getting a feel for the game again is a bit difficult, I wouldn’t want to jump right back into a dungeon without at least re-familiarizing myself with my class. I’m also contemplating moving to a heavier server, for now I’m on a medium population. There’s also my guardian characters that I haven’t played yet, they’re sitting at level 4. All in all? I’m quite happy to be playing again.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

 

Rescue Mission #WurmOnline

One thing WurmOnline still has that many other games do not (Vanguard also still has this feature) is corpse retrievals. I’m talking full out when you die you lose everything except your deed and merchant papers retrievals. All your tools, keys, weapons, gear, gone. When you die you also lose skills, a lot of games still have this method of death penalty, where you lose skills or experience or your armor takes some damage. In Wurm it is VERY dangerous to die because half of the time if you’ve been out wandering you have no idea where you are. You also re-spawn at Green Dog if you don’t own a deed, or you can choose to spawn at your deed. If your allies are close by you can also chose to spawn at one of their deeds. I was not so lucky.

It was 1:30am and I was incredibly tired. Arkenor was nice enough to sail be down to the area where I had died, and once I had retrieved my corpse (it was spiders who got me the first time) I decided that to make the trip worth while, I would attempt to charm a raging bear and bring her/him home for the bear breeding program. Now, bears on their own are not too bad. Raging bears, were a mistake.

The bear went into a frenzy on me right away, hit me four times in a row, and down I went like a sack of potatoes. Dead. Again.

Ouch.

Normally death doesn’t bother me, it’s a natural part of this game, losing my items is quite painful these days because they’re high quality. They also include useful items like my Fo statue which I use to cast spells. No statue means no spells. Having no back up weapons was probably also poor thinking on my part. Because I was frustrated I logged off, that’s just the normal thing to do. I came back to the situation this morning with a clear mind (and some sleep) and felt much better. I now had a choice. Do I go after the corpse and risk dying a third time (it was a good 30-45 minute walk through dangerous lands) or do I start from scratch.

I probably wouldn’t have minded starting from scratch except for one thing. My keys. I really didn’t want to leave the keys to my boat and my deed just floating around the lands of wurm. So I grabbed.. well, nothing. I headed out without armor, no compass (I’m getting much better at figuring out where I am without one these days), no creature by my side. I was able to walk without having to regenerate any stamina because I had no weight.

I found my corpse, grabbed all my belongings, bee-lined straight for my boat, and sailed home. Lesson learned, stay away from raging bears. Even if I had of been able to handle a hit or two, there’s no way I would have been able to continue with that as the bear aged and grew in power. Animals hurt more the older they are.

It was still a great adventure.

Glorious Days #WurmOnline

One of my favorite spells as a priest of Fo is charm. It works as a tame spell, giving the exact same levels of loyalty. Since I reached 40 faith (and thus 40 favor) I’ve been trying to find exotic animals to tame and bring back to my deed. I was looking in specific for unicorns, they’re not very handy creatures but what girl doesn’t like a unicorn. Yesterday, finally, my wishes were answered. It was unicorn day in Wurm, or at least that’s what it seemed like. They were everywhere. I ended up with four of them, a hardened, slow, and two sly. They brighten up my deed quite a bit (the slow is a very bright blue colour, the sly are green).

I purchased 500 bricks from a player who was offering to sell them for 1s and that included delivery. Bricks are really annoying to make, especially since I had already made 300 and still had 500 to go. I have no issue purchasing bulk goods or rare goods from players, especially when I have a budget of 10s a month to help invest in the market. The bricks were delivered without incident (highly recommend the folks who did so) and I was able to finally complete the walls of my 2nd deed, Fippy Keep.

Now that the walls are done I can take my time working on the areas that I want to improve, piece by piece. I want to join the animal pens together between the two deeds since their perimeters join, and create a very large pen. Animals only require one tile to live healthy lives, but I’m really more fond of giving them more space.

I would still like to find a champion unicorn, as well as a raging one. I’m also still on the look for eggs / hens / alert dogs, and added to that list are cave bugs. I think it would be a neat endeavor to breed cave bugs. I doubt I could give you a proper answer why, I just think they’re interesting and it would be nice to have a supply of dye-making bugs.

I found a water tile on the Keep deed yesterday and built my first fountain. It’s in a fantastic location that is close to all of my buildings, and it looks pretty neat. Hopefully now that those pesky walls are up I can spend some time making the place look good, and do a lot of replanting. I want to surround the outside with trees so that the keep blends into the forest. As soon as it’s looking a bit better I’ll post some videos of the place, as well as more screen shots.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Nomadic Gamer