Redwolf's Journal (continued)

A recent WoW developer blog is, to me, worth noting. While it is primarily a reaction to outcry about "favoritism" for the Horde (or Alliance) in the game, the point that strikes home for me most is the necessity of adversity for heroism. While the whole "home village destroyed by evil warlord" thing is cliche, heroes need something to overcome. If they never suffer loss, they can't overcome it to shine. Whether related or not, I'm finding myself increasingly dismayed everytime I watch the Star Wars prequels (or even Return of the Jedi, to a lesser extent). Ugh. This entertains me, especially with the mention of WoW losing a million subscribers and the assessment of existing subscription MMO status. Sparked by Thanksgiving dinner conversation, I found myself recently thinking and re-overanalyzing my experiences with the SCA. The road not travelled, I suppose. How might things have been different? If the people I'd gotten into it with hadn't m

Sort of an off-weekend for WoW. Current roster still limits our progress, and I think Ragnaros is only likely to fall to us if we actually save a lockout and focus on that. Disconnections hurt us more, and we ended up 9-manning our way up to 5/7 bosses. Feh. Indications are that 4.3 goes like tomorrow (though I would have guessed next week and we won't know for sure 'til the morning), which throws a new raid into the mix. If we can't finish Ragnaros, is it worth starting on Dragon Soul content? Maybe - raid-end bosses can sometimes be that much harder. But I don't want to beat my head against the brick wall of new bosses too much either. Figure I'll be seeing a fair bit of the new 5-mans soon, but I'm still very undecided on whether I want to put effort into PVP for that lovely-looking conquest gear. Another two missions (I think?) down in Guild Wars, after catching someone up through one we did last week. Once again, the heroes are being used by an overzealo

Another beta testing weekend, so I've managed to get in a little more play, though I think I may be about done for now. I wanted to see a little more of the post-prologue content, but time limitations and technical issues have effectively kept me to level 10 and under. Big tech issue of the weekend for me? An inability to load into any of the characters I made last time. I keep seeming to freeze at the loading screen (for 20+ minutes at least) or getting bounced back to character select. New characters were not an issue, but this kept me from playing more of the trooper I'd already made. Disappointing. Otherwise, I saw some queues Friday and Saturday - something they still need to work on for release. Played some Jedi Knight - reasonably standard "you seem to have great potential as a Jedi" stuff. Ran into one quest about two padawans in love. The light side option is to basically turn them in to their masters who are against the whole thing in an absolute "l

A bit more about Skyrim... - The mage guild quest line seemed a bit short, even if it wasn't time-wise, and I've been inducted into a circle of werewolves. I have yet to do too much with other guilds yet. - I've killed... okay, helped kill several dragons. Some days they seem to come out of the woodwork. Town guards help a lot. The one that tried to jump me at the mage guild picked a bad spot just because it gave me convenient cover (I'll do whatever I can to avoid fighting one in the open, thanks). - I love the dwemer ruins, though I sort of wish there were some ayleid ones. - The spells generally look and work well, though I do miss being able to make my own. - A companion may get in the way sometimes, but they make fights soooo much easier. A lot of fights in general are tough if you just run in and try to slug it out. - That was a tall mountain, but I wonder if it was really 7000 steps... I'm enjoying the mountain vistas. The game in general feels somew

Saturday night's WoW played out about as "normal." Performance wasn't as good as last week, probably due to some slight shuffling in our raid roster and assignments. I have nothing against our "new" shaman, but she hasn't had much raid involvement previously. Also, as much as I respect our guild leader, it seems an arcane mage is a poor choice to send skyward after Alysrazor due (I presume) to the burn-and-regen techniques they use. Our usual death knight can see the big firebird down in two cycles, but this stretched over three and was rougher in general. Staghelm finally coughed up the druidly-desired staff and a paladin/priest/warlock shoulder token. We're largely back at square one for Ragnaros, struggling at the first transition a couple times before calling it. And I've been trying to push through getting materials for making enough flasks to get the cauldrons - blar! Guild Wars went okay, driving through 3 more Winds of Change quests. We

Played more of our revamped-into-Dresden-Files game last night. Mostly enjoyable, though having one character who tends to go off and get into trouble alone leaves the rest of us idle or playing catch-up. Aspects are still taking some getting used to, but we ran a combat session and learned a bit more about the use of them there. If you want to take out an enemy, that usually requires a big hit, which can take tagging a lot of Aspects to build up to. The question is whether it's worthwhile to use "normal" attacks to build up to it - if you do more damage than their stress track, they end up gaining Consequences, which are taggable Aspects - or whether it's better to use Manuevers to try to apply Aspects directly. The former is more conventional and (in my mind) satisfying, but the latter is probably easier against more powerful opponents. In any case, having Fate points is a big plus, as free tags go fast. There's still some concern that we're not seeing e

I've never really been into competitive gameplay - I preferred cooperatively blasting things back when I played Doom in the computer lab and I've pretty much ignored many "big" games (especially in the FPS genre) because they had a large focus on online PVP play. My competitive streak is something I try to mess with as little as possible because I know going down that road gives me no joy. So after avoiding WoW arenas like the plague, why am I even considering it? Um... well... as I mentioned before , that Season 11 paladin armor looks pretty strikingly cool. Just how much trouble am I willing to go through for a look I like? That's the question... Due mostly to converted Wintergrasp (the last PVP-oriented thing I thought well of in the game), I'll probably go into patch 4.3 with 4000 (or near to) honor points. That's a couple items of the lower-tier PVP gear that (if the pattern holds) has the previous season's model. Not what I want, but it'

"There was a beta testing event over the weekend. I did participate." I think that's the official NDA line. Without getting into details, I'll say there was some good and some not so good. It was not enough time to get very far into the game, but it was enough to gain a clearer understanding of how several aspects work. The experience has not radically altered my expectations of the game for better or worse.

So while my interest in DCUO is waning somewhat (by level 17/10, quests are looking a little too parallel between hero and villain sides and starting to feel grindy), there's plenty of other stuff popping up. SWTOR is doing a mostly-open beta weekend that's... probably just started. It's my impression invites went out to everyone registered at the site or with EA, and there's some intent to stress-test servers. Mind you, after those first few days with DCUO, I'm not really looking forward to technical problems getting in and playing such a game, but... I'll probably poke at it some over the weekend. And Skyrim just came out. I went ahead and picked that up after work last night, and was a little surprised at the number of people waiting around for the midnight release. I suppose the store knew exactly how many preorders it had, so could judge the value in being open early. Pre-game impression: WTF? I bought a physical DVD because I wanted a physical DVD t

Just finished the sequel to Geist - a suitable continuation. It's still not a perfect five-start book to my point of view, but it's got some elements that make it reasonably unique compared to typical fantasy fare. I feel a little disappointed at how Merrick is increasingly the special person while Sorcha's role in things seems to be lacking. Oh, she's at ground zero of the climax (and a couple other events), but doesn't actually seem to contribute much of importance to the story. Power? Perspective? Personality? Eh... maybe I'm nitpicking. The geistlords and "little gods" and ancient history and religion all weave together in a way that I find interesting. I do wish some of it were tied together a little better, some events feel rather arbitrary. So... imperfect, but enjoyable in my opinion. And the way things end... well, there better be another one.

... I sort of hate the internet. There's a little too much "ether," too many servers and routers and providers. We come to rely on this connection and it takes so very little to hamper or cripple that, and then you're left wondering who dropped the ball where. Route tracing showed poor, poor responses way down the line toward our host tonight. While trying to talk to people and figure that out (which is a trial in itself), we had a total outage just where our ISP connects to anything else. After that cleared up, the whole connection to our host was better. So was it our ISP? Or the next hop? Or frickin' cosmic rays? I'll probably never know...

WoW went pretty well, all things considered. Had some minor staffing issues with the raid - hastily filling in our tenth slot with relatively raid-inexperienced folks. Still, we made decent time through our usual six bosses. No work at Ragnaros. Personally, I made out like a bandit with four drops. Guild Wars was okay, though we suffer from part of what I find annoying about the game. For all the supposed convenience of outpost-warping, it's still hard to coordinate which characters have been where and who has access to what zones. I've noticed another detail that's put me off a bit with City of Heroes, Champions Online, and now DCUO: lack of immersion in cities. There's always at least one big city that serves as hub and quest zone and the blocks are... either crawling with (mostly-hostile) quest mobs or sparsely populated by a few folks who might spout random lines. It doesn't make me feel like it's a real city in the least. DCUO even has moving headlights

So last night we finally got around to our Dresden Files RPG game. Importing characters and campaign from a Witchcraft game makes for certain oddities. The character conversion appeared to work okay. The setting overlay... isn't rough, exactly, but it causes a sense of (previous) isolation. That's not entirely unrealistic. I'm also checking out DC Universe Online... Our three (plus one who was absent) characters from the existing campaign looked at the new-to-the-campaign (but native to DFRPG) White Council Warden and said "What the heck is the White Council and where have you buys been while we've been struggling to beat back ancient Atlanean gods trying to take over the world?" The characters had no sense of the plights faced by the other group, but that's potentially plausible. The Northport characters have seen all that point-blank, but not been a part of the Council's war with the Red Court. On the other hand, with no real presence in Northpor

It's been a slightly odd week. On the up side, most of the problems brought to me have been quick fixes, including one that'd been going on for a while. Thankfully, looking at it from a different angle helped find a solution. On the down side... well, the internet connection at the office has been down for over an hour now and while I'm not on shift, I'm concerned. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's pretty crippling. And of more direct impact to me than that, it seems there won't be Christmas bonuses this year. I guess raises (meager though they were) AND bonuses in one year is just too much these days. I can't say I was counting on it, but I was sort of assuming. :/

... apparently involves a free-to-play online game . I also find the interview about the process of getting to where the game is now to be interesting. So many little licensing issues and restrictions to cope with. The FAQ indicates it'll even be set toward the beginning of what's probably my favorite timeframe, in 3049 at release - when the Clans are just starting to invade the Periphery but before they hit the Inner Sphere. It actually sounds pretty great save for one personal factor: I don't really like PVP competitive play in video games and that sounds like the primary focus.