To Guild or not to Guild

Many of you have been reading Stillwater’s posts about his renewed efforts in EQ2. I ran into him last night, and a little bit today and he was asking me if I was a guilded and if not whether I would like to be. He is a member of what appears to be a pretty good guild of fellow bloggers and he showed me their website and everything. It seems like a great guild, but I told him I would think about it.

Why?

Here is what is running through my mind and maybe if I write it out here it will make sense. I play MMO’s on what one would consider a pretty weird schedule. I often log in 3-4 hours in a given day when I have time, but (and here’s the catch) I don’t play in large blocks of time. I fit it in an hour here or there. I try and log in for the hour or so that my daughter is down for her daily nap, then I go to work during most normal people’s gaming time, and then I play for an hour or two when I get home from work. Now in total that is a decent amount of time to be logged into the game, but it is piecemeal.

Why would that make me ineligible to participate in a guild? I don’t know. Most MMO’s that I have played I don’t last very long in because I don’t have a group of friends (aka guildies) around to make it worth while, so joining a guild should make sense right? I guess I am just worried that I will not have a lot to contribute to a guild because I can’t play for long stretches of time or at “normal” times. I usually don’t get home from work until almost 1 AM ET and how many people are still playing at that point?

I am finding that I really like this game and I really want to establish myself in it for quite some time. Joining a guild seems like the logical thing to do. For a game that was just supposed to bide my time until SW:TOR drops, I am really pleased with it. So I guess that I think my answer will be: “To Guild.” That is of course if they will have me!

-Pid

Still Alive

Just a quick post to say I am still alive. I had a case of Strep Throat last week and the couple weeks before that at work were murder. I am still rolling in EQ2 and actually made contact with Mr. Stillwater from Games and Geekery today.

-Pid

IGN’s Dragon Age: Awakenings Review

IGN has just posted a slightly more positive video review of the expansion than the one mentioned at Gamespot. I don’t think it is enough to make me shell out the cash for it yet, but I am anxiously awaiting a price drop!

-Pid

Happy 11th Everquest

The original Everquest celebrates its eleventh birthday today! The subscriber numbers might not be what they used to be, but there is still a great community. From what I remember at least. Fifteen expansions and no real sign of stopping. My days of playing classic Everquest are done, but if you ever wondered what the old girl looks like, according to MMORPG.com you can get a copy of the original game + all 15 expansions for the whopping price of $2.50 from March 16th through March 26th if you use Steam. Welcome to Norrath!

-Pid

Gamespot’s Dragon Age: Awakenings Review

Quick note.

Dragon Age: Awakenings is officially released. Gamespot has a decent enough video review of it here. I am going to wait until the price drops to even consider this one. Especially if the story is not as good as the original.

-Pid

EQ2: Department of Gnomeland Defense

I finally made it, Adventure level 32! I decided to reward myself with a horse. I looked into my bank and found a bunch of rare resources that I could live without and sold them to make enough cash to buy Ol’ Blue here. As I mentioned in my last post, I had planned on starting to adventure down EQ2’s “Golden Path” this week. The requirement for doing so is to reach level 32 and then go talk to a quest NPC that lurks near the zone line to Lesser Faydark and Steamfont Mountains. From there he tells you to meet him near the Gnomeland Security Headquarters. “No sweat,” I thought. I was feeling pretty good about my ability to solo in Butcherblock, let’s move on. It was not long before I found the Gnomeland Security Headquarters via their graveyard!

Apparently, the Golden Path has a few kinks that need to be worked out. If Sony is intending on having this be an avenue to take new players from newbie status to level cap, they may want to alter this area a little bit. Essentially, Steamfont mountains is designed for characters level 35-36+. At first I thought, no biggie, I was kicking level 34 mobs in the tail in BB Mts. I can do this…I was wrong. I did a little research and via an EQ2 soloers timeline I realized that I could do some leveling in the Enchanted Lands and/or Zek. As it turns out, I had to go to these places to do some harvesting for a crafting quest anyway. So off I go to kill some badgers and fairies in Enchanted lands until I am beefy enough to follow that yellow brick road again.

Despite this little hiccup, I am still having a great time playing. I am moving along at a  nice pace where I can adventure some days, craft other days, and group up with a friend of mine once in a while when he is able. We just got our group characters up to level 17 and I am anxious to try a dungeon soon. The solo content is a little too weak for the two of us. We are also anticipating a third soon, so it will be ridiculous here soon to continue down the solo line of quests. One thing I will note though, is that while grouped last night, it seemed as though the Adept Spells were dropping like crazy. This rarely happens while I am soloing, so I can definitely see the advantage to doing the whole group thing! Hopefully I will have more to report soon.

-Pid

The New Old EQ

I have been meaning to comment on Tipa’s post about the new survey that Classic Everquest players are being asked to take.

According to Tipa, this is what they are asking players for feedback on:

Poll Question: What new feature would you be most interested in seeing in EverQuest?

• UI Revamp — Work with the community to come up with a new default skin for the EverQuest UI, with a possibility for other changes like re-sizable hot bars and backpacks (not increased slots, however).
• Increased inventory space — Revamp the inventory management system to allow backpacks larger than 10 slots.
• Player housing — Personal player houses with items that can be placed inside, a ranking system, access rights, etc.
• Improved guild system — Advanced guild rank management, guild halls that allow decoration and item placement (similar to player housing).
• Revamped bazaar/broker system — Offline trading, trading outside of The Bazaar zone, etc.
• New player character models — Optional new player character models (any new visible armor would only be visible on the new models).
• More mercenary types — New AI types like DPS, crowd control, etc.
• Player generated content system — Allow players to place NPCs and traps, set mission types, and turn loose their custom zone for other players to experience and gain points in a scaling reward system.

My thoughts on these:

UI – The UI is indeed dated, but functional…there is plenty else to focus on that would improve game play.

More inventory space – More space is always handy, but again there are better things to do.

Player Housing – This would add a missing element to the game, ie something to do when not grinding mobs or grinding crafted items.

Improved Guild System – This would be nice, especially for the raiding guilds

Revamped Bazaar – !!!!!!!!YES!!!!!!!!!! The brokerage system in this game is awful! It actually requires that you be logged into the game 24/7 Please fix for all those poor souls that still play this game.

New Player Character Models – This would be well received. The way the models are now, every barbarian warrior looks nearly identical to every other barbarian warrior etc.

More Mercenary Types – This would continue to help sustain a dwindling population, but would really be a blow to PUGs (for those that use them).

Player Generated Content System – I suppose this would be neat, but unless you are at level cap there really is no lack of content in this game. Also, unless done right, there does exist the potential for exploits a la CoH/CoV.

The one point I would make in all of this is: if these things are what you are looking for, why not just go play EQ2 instead? The game is notably more of a theme park than Classic EQ, but many of the same elements exist. Also, a lot of the fluff from EQ1 has carried over to EQ2. I guess if EQ1 is your cup of tea however, there is no substitute. Personally, I do not anticipate trekking in classic Norrath anytime soon.

-Pid

/Ding 31 in EQ2

I just leveled my Necromancer to level 31 today. You can see him in the above photo flying the friendly skies over Butcherblock Mountains. The I am just about ready to embark on the Yellow Brick Road Golden Path quests that start at level 32, and I am trying to wrap up some of the random quests I have left in Tier 3 BB Mts. The questing in BBM was not as well laid out as it was in Timorous Deep, but I was also running back to TD on occasion to do some crafting and other stuff. This may have contributed to the feeling that the quests were haphazardly laid out, but then again, I do think this is a valid point.

Things I did note in Tier 3:

1. The progress overall seems to have slowed way down from the first two tiers. It did not slow down to the point that I felt I was slogging through the levels, but it was a marked difference from before. Again, part of this I believe is in the layout of the T3 quests. I don’t think the progress was slow enough to complain about, but BBM is definitely starting to lose it’s luster.
2. If you want to do some harvesting in Tier 3, head to Thundering Steppes and then head west from the docks until you get to Thundermist Valley. Watch out for the griffins, but the area is wide open with resource nodes as far as the eye can see!
3. By level 30 with about 26 AA’s or so I can easily take on the heroic mobs in BBM solo.
4. Upgrades to spells becomes more important as you level up. Find a sage and make friends, or roll one up yourself. I have my sage level at 30 on Pidd the Necro.

I am looking forward to the tier 4 content. I hope that the Golden Path quests are all they are cracked up to be!

-Pid

Pidd Netherbinder on his way from Butcherblock Mts. to the Thundering Steppes

Dragon Age: Awakenings 15 Hours of Content

I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but I read an article today in PC Gamer that states that the new Dragon Age expansion is only going to have 12-15 hours of content to play through. If you are meticulous about completing each and every side quest, you may be able to eek out 20 hours of game play. $40 for this?! Seems pretty weak to me.

-Pid

Image source: Pid & MS Paint!

Tipa Tackles the Waterworks

I haven’t had a lot of time to play lately due to my job, so I have to live vicariously through others. Tipa has a great blog post about an adventure in DDO. I wholeheartedly encourage you to check it out.

-Pid