Adventures of Taas

These days I do most of my screenshot uploading via the auto uploader in XFire which ends up putting the screenshots on my xfire profile / screenshot area.  The problem with this of course is that the worst possible place to keep screenshots you want your friends to actually see is an xfire profile!

So periodically I’ll go through my xfire folder and upload some updated shots to Flickr so people actually see my screenies.  Today I added the following:

World of Warcraft – Mostly shots from my recent return.

Warhammer Online – Assortment of guild event shots.

Everquest 2 - Some old-ish raid shots from when I was playing 2-3 months ago.

Again – if you want to follow my screenshots the best place to do it is in my XFire screenshots page.

Last night after a round of Left 4 Dead with Evan and Chris (Will of course had afk’d and dropped out) I popped on to the Aureus Knights forums to see if anything was going down and was floored when I saw a thread titled “City Defense – Altdorf”. Surely our Capital City wasn’t under attack?

I didn’t think I’d be seeing Altdorf under attack until the 1.2 patch changed the way zone control works but there it was. So I scarfed down some dinner and made my way to Altdorf.

For those not familiar with the process I’ll give a quick summary:

• The enemy must “lock down” two pairings (four zones in total) and take over the Fortress in each pairing to open up the final Fortress siege
• The enemy must capture the final Fortress before the capital city to unlock the city for siege
• Once the city is open for capture two fronts essentially open up:

A scenario named Altdorf War Quarters where you have to capture and defend 5 control points. I did this once during the defense and it was hectic, battle heavy fun.

The main defense takes part in the city proper. Instances auto-create that pit 48 destro against 48 order players. The city basically becomes a giant public quest where you have to kill X number of the other side, put out Y fires and control two control points within the city.

• I believe there is more after this but we never got to see it because we managed to push Destro out
• This whole process runs for 6 hours

All and all it was a lot of fun but not without its problems.

The Good

• Street battles felt epic and dirty. If you could imagine what house-to-house medieval warfare was like the game really felt that way
• The Altdorf War Quarters scenario was fast paced and fun
• Well coordinated teams could win the day; skill was definitely a factor. The population caps on the city instances and scenarios worked out very well.
• Renown gain was great

The Bad

• Population control was well thought out, poorly executed. Above I gave Mythic a “good” for this but the actual execution of population control was bad. How was it bad? You could decide which instance of the city defense you entered which meant you had groups farming gear on both sides in instances where there were 0 of the other side.
• Experience gain was next to nothing. Well you could get some good renown gains XP was no where near where it should have been
• Defenders who were losing received very little in the way of reward. The end-game gear only comes from winning the defense Public Quests – there should be some sort of Attacker / Defender influence system to give some auxiliary rewards.

Suggestions to Make it Better(TM)

• Remove the ability to select which city attack/defense instance you enter. You either join your warband (if you are in one) or you get assigned to the most active instance with a space for you
• Add Influence rewards for City RVR
• Change the kill the other side objective to players only. Destro was getting very good at setting up the battle in a position where they could just farm our NPCs and fly through the PQ
• Add better information on the status of the war. The victory points bars are rather ambiguous. Let us know how each city defense group is doing… how the scenarios are breaking out. This is the big show, we need to know what’s going down.

All and all I had a lot of fun. This being a big part of the end game of WAR felt a little underwhelming (many on the forums are now QQing that they are leaving the game because of this) and I hope Mythic continues to improve City Siege.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately and its not just the hecticness of the Christmas season that is to blame.

No – I am in an MMO rut. One of those really bad MMO-depressions that hit everyone at one time or another. I’m feeling burn out in three different games and that is really making it hard to focus on any MMO or getting much of anything accomplished. I spend the time I have available to play games thinking about the three games that are haunting me and eventually I get frustrated, give up and fire up my Playstation 3.

The three games I am torn between at the moment are World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online and Everquest 2. I really want to enjoy at least one of them but splitting my energies between them is not working out for me. I’m also having specific issues with each of the games that is really preventing me from saying THIS IS THE ONE, THIS IS WHAT I AM GOING TO PLAY.

With World of Warcraft I can’t exactly place my finger on the issue. Its a lot of ‘been there done that’ (I’ve leveled so many characters from 1-50 I don’t even want to think about it) with a side of ‘everyone is bigger than me’. With WoW I have a sincere desire to hit 80. I.REALLY.WANT.TO.RAID.WOW. The journey is really killing me though. I’m an accomplishment driven gamer to a certain extent and there is very little sense of accomplishment in the early and mid game of WoW. I’m old school MMO – and WoW doesn’t offer much to my kind in the early levels. I haven’t given up on this yet but something has to give or I don’t see this happening for me.

In Warhammer Online there are a few issues. The first and foremost is that for the first two months (plus beta) of the game being out I was one of the primary people behind the 4th largest guild in Warhammer Online. And let me tell you – guild officers in guilds this large work their asses off for you – go kiss your guild leader now. It was a lot of work and I fell in to the trap of running events and attending to administration with 100% of my game time when I should have said “no, instead of leading a keep raid on Wednesday night I’m going to do something I want to do – Other Officer XYZ you run the Wednesday Keep Raid”. I genuinely love my role in Aureus Knights and I have no intention of stepping away from it to any extent but next game we start in I’ll be doing more to spread the work load around.

Warhammer Online itself is a game with flaws – that actually isn’t fair to say because what game isn’t with flaws? But with WAR there are a few things that stand out that make the game difficult to fully embrace as a main game. I find the PVE lacking. Now when most blog-commentators point out the PVE factor they say the game doesn’t have enough raiding or dungeons or whatever and I actually am not talking about that. I think the dungeons WAR does have now are great (public quests being integrated in to dungeons is truly game changing for MMOs and I expect to see it in many future titles). No when I talk about PVE in WAR I think that the questing is just damn boring. It is a fairly linear solo experience that just isn’t rewarding once you’ve done it to level 30. It just offers so little – and I’m a huge PVE gamer.

The second flaw that nags at me with WAR is that the best way to advance your character (in the widely accepted opinion of min/maxers and now the community has fully embraced it) is to scenario grind. One of WAR’s greatest strengths is that it allows you to experience several different facets to advance – this is the sphere system that Vanguard promised (but didn’t especially deliver on) on crack. In WAR you can advance your character through PVE Questing, PVE Public Questing, ORVR or Scenario RVR. Awesome, bang up job… good stuff. Right, until after the first month everyone realized you could get more XP and PVP XP (Renown) by doing nothing but scenarios and do nothing but scenarios they did. Even on some of the busier servers now the world is a ghost land as people sit in war camps queueing for scenarios.

So I don’t know – WAR is fun. There are some fun classes and the Open World RVR is amazing when the sides are balanced or are balancedish. But there really are some nagging flaws. It just won’t click with me.

That brings me to my gaming-love. Everquest 2. EQ2 is now 4 years old and I’ve been fairly dedicated to the game for around 3 of those years (having started in early beta and taking a break pretty early on and then coming back with a vengeance) and I think I’m finally hitting the end of the “primary game” cycle with EQ2. You know that point you reach after the peak of playing a game where you start to look back from the end game and think “how much longer can I beat up on the same tried and true content?”.

I can’t really point to any particular mechanic in EQ2 that is a causing my doubts about the game. Arguably The Shadow Odyssey, the expansion just released for EQ2 is a dream come true for me – it is primarily group based, it is based on the mechanics of my favorite Everquest 1 expansion (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) and it offers a tonne of highly replayable game play that is engaging and at times plain difficult. So I have no excuse here – I can only think of being at that point in the MMO life cycle where enough is enough, you just can’t do game XYZ as your primary game any more.

So I’m not sure where that leaves me. This blog post obviously didn’t help me answer any questions as I’ll be concluding here in a few lines feeling no better about where I am at. But I know many people have been here before – do you have any strategies for coping with burn out like this? I think my medium term future with gaming involves a whole lot of single player experiences on the consoles – maybe I’m just overdue for a bit of a genre break.

Here is my first weekly update – a look at how I spent my week gaming!

By the numbers:

• Everquest 2 – 11 Hours
• Warhammer Online – 3 Hours
• Team Fortress 2 – 2 Hours
• World of Warcraft – 2 Hours
• NHL09

This week was supposed to be all about World of Warcraft but I found Everquest 2’s expansion and the temptation to join back up with my EQ2 guild (League of the Ignoble Liver) was too great to avoid. The Shadow Odyssey is EQ2’s 5th expansion and is focused primarily on the high end. Those who played EQ1 will be familiar with one of the primary features – doing dungeons for points that can be spent on a wide range of gear – known in EQ1 as LDONs.

These instance based missions are awesome. The expansion added just over 20 new such mission instances and the three I’ve done so far have all been a blast. My personal highlight was in Deepforge (one of the instances based out of Lavastorm) having to fight the instance boss on the run because he drops AOE pools that will erase your health bar in minutes and you have to run away from them.

In a few days I’ll have a full TSO review up… but for now I’m having a tonne of fun with the missions and the expansion as a whole.

As for the Saturday night raid, my first since May, it went extremely well. We raided a Tier 2 RoK dungeon (my first Tier 2 RoK run – we were stuck farming T1 when I left in the spring) named The Temple of Kor Sha. We cleared several of the nameds pulling in quite a bit of loot (mostly healer stuff) and eventually had to call it after wiping several times on one of the final mobs (the name now escapes me). For my first run back in EQ2 it was a huge success, I had a blast.

Warhammer Online got more attention than I expected it to get this week. The Live Event stuff for Heavy Metal is currently going on (Heavy Metal is the upcoming patch where they are introducing two of the cut tanks – they are doing daily events to get people to unlock them early) and I’ve been logging in every day to complete the daily tasks. Every time I log on my Rune Priest I’m reminded why I don’t want to level him anymore – he’s just such a bitch to level.

I have started a new chracter, a Shadow Warrior, and he has been a great improvement. I’m really evaluating what future I have with WAR and the fun I have with my Shadow Warrior over the next few weeks will be crucial in deciding if I stay or go.

As for World of Warcraft – My Warlock is now level 16 he really should be higher but the distractions above have made it hard to find time to log on. I really hope to spend more time on him this week (20 by mid week would be nice). The time I’ve spent in WoW so far has really been enjoyable it just has to compete for my time with everything else I have going on (both gaming and other wise).

I rounded the week off with quite a bit of NHL09. I’ve gotta say – the boys at EA Sports did a great job with this iteration. The game is actually quite challenging. I’ve been whooping the AI in the NHL franchise for years but this year I’m really getting a challenge out of it. Hell – my Detroit Red Wings are in 6th place in the Western – since when does that happen?

That was the week – I have a test this week at school so the early part of the week is going to be a write off but I should get some gaming in later on in the week1

Earlier this month I threw out a call for help to help me narrow down a PvE game to play this November. The games in question were World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. Both games have expansions coming out this month (WoW’s is now out and EQ2’s comes out in a few days) and I wanted to get back in to one of them (with WAR on the go and working on managing one of the largest and most active guilds in WAR I can’t possibly do both PvE games).

I did get some feedback (thanks guys!) and I actually reactivated my account in both games and got my feet wet and I’ve come to a decision – I’ll be playing World of Warcraft.

Some of you will remember back in the late spring/early summer I was talking about getting a WoW character to 70 before the expansion came out. That never happened because in June I got in to the Warhammer Online beta. Even when I was at my peak enjoyment with WAR I couldn’t help but regret not getting my paladin to 70 in time for the expansion.

World of Warcraft’s end game really intrigues me. I know I know, those of you who’ve played the game to death will be sitting there in your chairs muttering how the game is an item progression and rep grind at the end game but what you ex-WoW fan boys won’t admit to yourself is that for a period of time, and it differs by person – some it was a short time some it was years – is that you really enjoyed that experience and likely pumped 1000+ hours in to it.

As I said in my previous post I’m looking for a big end game PvE MMO to compliment the PvP gameplay of WAR. I’ve raided quite extensively in Everquest 2 and I really LOVE the raiding concept. Talking to people who’ve raided quite a bit in WoW it really seems that the World of Warcraft raid game will really appeal to me and what I’m looking for. The game has a great loot and instance progression that I can’t wait to sink my teeth in to.

So heading back in to WoW I had a bit of a dilemma – I couldn’t stand my paladin any more. I have no problem with the class per say but there is something about Hybrids that drive me nuts. Am I a tank? A Healer? Weaksauce DPS? So I clearly needed a chance of scenery for this go at WoW.

That change of scenery came by way of Chris. About 2-3 years ago he stopped playing on our Alliance server (Medivh) and moved to play Horde on Daggerspine (f u Jim ). I didn’t follow because there was just something about Horde I couldn’t get in to (this was pre blood elves) and I also was playing EQ2 heavily at the time.

So I’ve decided to really change things up and for the first time I’ll be playing not only Horde but on Daggerspine which is a PvP server! PvP servers in PvE games seem entirely pointless to me. In WoW if you want PvP you go to the battlegrounds or arenas. PvP servers are just a breeding ground for ganking (in my opinion). But alas – I want to play with my friends so I’ll go where they go.

So there we go – WoW it is. I’ll be posting updates regularly on the status of my character. He’s now level 8. I decided to go with Warlock which is probably my favourite class in the game likely because of its broad array of utility and the different ways you can play them.

This should be fun… thanks for pushing Chris.

I’m a huge UI guy. When I recently returned to World of Warcraft (post incoming on that topic!) I spent a whole day not playing so I could get my UI just-right.

So I figured what the heck – I’ll put up a UI section here on the website. This weekend I’ll be adding some screenshots and links to the mods I have installed – for now you have a list of what I use.

Thanks to Will for the inspiration to get this down on paper! Check out My UI here.

You’ve probably found your way here from rjoworld.com or by some strange act of random google. This is part of my personal network of sites (adventuresoftaas.com and ryanosullivan.ca make up my mini blogging network) where I share bits and pieces of my life.

Adventures of Taas is my ramblings and observations of the computer gaming industry specifically the Massively Multiplayer Genre.

In the coming week’s I’ll do a lot more to introduce myself as a gamer and to introduce the games I play!

So why did I pick adventuresoftaas.com when I’ve always been rather boring in the past? (Come on I spent over 9 years using rjoworld.com as my blog host – rjo being my initials). Taas is my Everquest 2 Troubador. I’ve spent the most time with him (I have over 1000 hours clocked in EQ2) and I’ve without question had the most fun playing him. He was also the first character I ever took to end game in an MMO – so he holds a special place in my heart for that.

Taas doesn’t see much action these days (Warhammer Online being my current game of choice – EQ2 is a side destraction at best these days) but he’ll always be my number one. So I dedicate this blog to him.