Gaming

60 Sage (finally)

stargrace January 24, 2007 5Comments

Faydai manages to hit level 60 sage

Finally out of the dreaded succulent root teir (on one character at least) and onto T7! I’m quite happy with that. It brings my total crafters (who also all adventure) to 70 provisioner, 66 jeweler, 60 woodworker, 60 sage 50 alchemist and 29 tailor. I really should try to grind the jeweler the last few levels it takes to level her to 70, I’ve just been slacking. That goes for the woodworker too. When you only get 1-2 recipes a level though, there’s no motivation besides grinding out guild writs which can be.. well, it’s just plain boring.

You may have noticed for the past week or so that any time you tried to log into character select directly (it may have only been an issue on Lucan D’Lere, I’m not sure) it would give a message that said “finding character (name of server here)” and instead of loading in the character of your choice, it would try to find the name of your server as a character name, and boot you to the character select screen. I found this mildly annoying as I’d much rather just log in a particular character then having to go through the log in screen and select from the 6 I have. Today though, there was a small download to fix that (finally). The Eq2 servers have been awful lately. There’s speculation that it’s due to Vanguard servers coming up in preparation for the big opening day, but I’ve really no clue. Most have experienced excess lag, and just little weird bugs going around. It’s all of these small annoyances though that eventually add up.

Finding that perfect UI

stargrace January 21, 2007 0Comment

Profit UI, at 1650×1080

Finding a UI that matches your play style is one of the most important things for any gamer I would think. While the default UI may be ‘good enough’, a lot of people are looking for just a little bit more.

So what sort of UI do you use? eq2interface.com is just one site of many (and probably the best out there) for displaying different UI’s that people can download. One of the more popular ones is profit. It’s easy to install and pretty bug-free which is always an added bonus. Why profit? Well, there’s a few reasons

• Hit enter to loot
• One click cures (noxious, trama, elemental etc)
• A clear display of character stats (everything from coin, to experience gained, to general stats such as strength and resists)
• Everything on the UI can be moved / re-sized to your liking
• Add / remove as many hotbars as you want and display them however you want
• Smooth and clean feeling

Since I upgraded my monitor, I had to change the resolution to the two MMO’s I play. This gave me a huge amount of extra space in the UI, I love it. I added four chat window’s to profit along the bottom, one for guild / say / group / yell and general messages like motd’s and down time (which I pay attention to the most) and then to the right of that, my dps window to watch what’s hitting me and for how much, then my hotbars, to the right of them another window for channels like 60-60 and Qeynos_Crafting, to the right of that, NPC says and tells so I can read the lore behind quests without being worried about losing everything in spam. Yes, I love my UI’s.

Faydai hit 59 sage, one more to go and she’ll be out of the dreaded T6. Then it’s time to get Yamini (the alchemist) from 50-60. I’ve been looking forward to it. I’ve always wanted a sage, especially as I was leveling my characters up and looked for spell upgrades. It’s a lot cheaper to harvest the rares / make the spells myself, then pay 20g per combine which is what typical crafters charge. I still also need to get Silverstep from 60-70 and even Dasie has been sitting at 65 and 91% into it for months now. I figure I’ll get them all to 60 first, and then worry about the grind to 70.

Gah. Why SoE Frustraits me so

stargrace January 18, 2007 4Comments

Stargrace, the slacker

So, a little bit of a rant this morning. Have to get it off of my chest. At 8:55am, smack dab in the middle of poets palace, the servers start spamming that they are coming down in 5 minutes, for a 4 hour update. There was no warning previous to this, nothing on the update notes, nothing in the forums, so you know it’s some random bug they’ve got to be fixing. Updates are typically on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, rarely on Thursdays. There was some speculation that it was unrest going in, but that’s been stated to be in game as of the GU (game update) 32, which is some time away.

The message also said it was just the US servers coming down. Of course, I’m in poets, on the third floor, with my 18 hour lockout already started. I looked at Shadowgeist and said “ok.. we better get moving”… used my sol ro miracles, and we sprinted off to the fourth floor. Completed all four named, in 4 minutes, out of breath and with me dead since I ganked agro too soon, nothing worth while dropped and I was pissed off that servers were coming down at all with no warning.

10 more minutes go by. Then 15. Speculation on other servers about what’s going on. Apparently a few servers had come down for their 4 hour updates. LDL however, was still up. It’s now 40 minutes past the down time set by spam, and the server is still up.

Sighs.

It wouldn’t bother me quite so much if I felt that SoE gave even the briefest thought to any of their player base. I used to think they did, but the past few months have just gotten progressively worse.

Yesterday I could not re-activate my account. I had station access, and wished to drop it. They ask you for some secret password though and to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never ever chosen one. So to drop station access, I cancelled my account completely ( I’ve done this in the past as well ) and then when it was closed, was prompted to re-activate. Well. I get a 403 “Forbidden” error when I try to access the “my account” section at all. So I follow the help commands. Live Chat is also not working. I get an error / timed out message. I try email support. Also not working. So I finally bite the bullet and decide to call them long distance and find out what’s going on. I have raids that night and would rather not miss them.

20 minutes on hold from Ottawa Ontario to San Diego and someone finally (a real person) is speaking to me. They tell me it must be my credit card. . . . uh . . . Pardon me? I can’t access the site at all because of my credit card? I can’t even get to the ‘type in your password’ portion. So I attempt it one more time, and low and behold, the site is working agian (I checked the forums, this was an issue for a few people, since the 15th roughly).

Sighs again.

I have little patience, I know. But come on folks I’m a paying customer here. I know a few people are feeling the exact same way. Like we’re being ignored completely while things are going on. I don’t mean to bash away at SoE, I do still play the game after all, but my patience is wearing thin on some issues that I think are important.

Now that the rant is done, on a completely different note. Stargrace hit 87 and almost 88 ap’s yesterday. We did a labs raid with three healers, that was.. interesting. To say the least. We did wipe a few times, but came out fairly unscathed. We also only had three groups and one group didn’t have a healer at all the entire time. No wonder people are one grouping the trash in this zone.