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Hmm, yes… well, I doubt mine is the first blog to suffer neglect due to the behemoth that is Twitter. I’ve not had much to say lately that hasn’t been able to be encapsulated in the brief medium of 140 characters, plus I haven’t touched EQII for months. I have been playing a lot of Free Realms mind you, trying to determine whether my four-year old is competent enough yet to be able to enjoy it (that’s my excuse anyway!). She’s perfectly au fait with the flash-style games on Nickjr.com (or .co.uk anyway) but I can’t help that think the slightly more advanced pace of FR, plus the need to read quest texts and display the kind of patience that four-year olds aren’t generally known for, makes me think otherwise. We’ll see I guess. Meantime, if you see a Prezzer in there (or in any game really), that’s going to be me, so say Hi and we’ll ‘research’ (ahem) some quests together!
The upward key change three-quarters of the way through the Superman II theme.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. A couple of half-hearted attempts at travel comedy notwithstanding, it’s just been damned hard to find either time or, indeed, energy to sit down and dictate something to be entered by the team of faithful manservants I have on hand to carry out my earthly whims at any given moment.
Life has been busy, both work and personal, some good, some great, some devastatingly terrible and some nerve-shatteringly tense, not in that order. But the one overriding reason behind the lack of wit, banter and anecdotal amusements is simply this – I haven’t been playing EverQuest II since some time last year.
My not-so frequent updates will become even less so for the next two weeks or so as I’m about to jet off on holiday for a fortnight to the golden fabled land of Japan to see the wife’s family. Paradoxically for a country that is by all measurable standards living in the future of us all, my technology access levels will actually be severly limited while there – precious little internet near where I’m going, so my thoughts on the election, the EQII expansion and whatever else springs to mind will have to wait.
Not that I seem to have been playing m uch EQII lately as it is. Not by choice, I hasten to add. Even though I haven’t logged on since before the guild halls went live (I know, I know), I still remain as firmly convinced that this is the single best fantasy MMO out there by miles and will be returning shortly after I get back. I blame pressures of work and the addiction to the beta test of Football Manager Live.
Anyway, have fun, see you on my return, and I’ll be sure to take loads of photos of the giant robots and post them as soon as. Because we all know there’s nothing more fun that sitting through someone else’s holiday snaps… even if they do feature random Godzilla attacks and cosplay girls.
It may be early, but the results are starting to pour in and based on an exclusive NutsInNorrath poll of the three guys I passed between the tube/subway station and work this morning, the next president of the world/United States of America is officially…
1 vote – Barack Obama
1 vote – Sorry I can’t stop, late for a meeting
1 vote – Didn’t I get a restraining order on you last time…?
So, there you have it. At 17:36 GMT this station is officially declaring Ralph Nader as the next president of the United Federation of Planets. All hail the king!
Seriously though, go America! Go vote, go make a future we can be proud of!
… I have never heard of, let alone watched, As The World Turns. Just in case yesterday’s post left any of you wondering. Now hush, momma’s stories are starting…
I’ve sadly not been spending a lot of time with EQII just lately. I didn’t exactly make full use of the recent double XP weekend, aside from pushing through two levels and spending a lovely evening teamed with a female wizard blasting through beetles in Butcherblock (alliteration not intended). It was a handy chance to practice my Templar’s team healing powers, something I haven’t had much of a chance to play with during my 20’s. I’m still not entirely au fait with how they all work, but neither of us died so I guess that’s something.
So, as you may have noticed, I’ve just discovered the button on the post editor that lets you put in a [click here to read more] link early on in a post(*). Something I’ve been trying to work out for ages and yet has been blatently obvious and staring me in the face this whole time. So it now means that a single post of mine won’t fill up the entire home page and my older ramblings can get a bit more shelf life should anyone want a fuller perspective on my growing ineptitude. You can all stop laughing at me now…
(Or for the non-Brits out there, Murphy’s Law)
Over the last couple of days I came into possession of a copy of The Lord Of The Rings Online and had fully committed myself to giving it a thorough exploration this weekend. See what the fuss is about, check out one of EQII’s newer rivals. All good stuff.
So, which weekend does SOE decide to make a double super-boosting, all-you-can-eat XP weekend?
Sigh.
Red pill, blue pill? Red pil, blue pill…
Lack of recent updates = increased activity away from game. Sorry about that. Basically as every issue of E-ON draws nearer to deadline, my spare time for writing blogs and, often, playing EQII tends to dwindle – and that’s precisely what’s happening here just now.
That said, I have been able to spend some time in Norrath, deliberately so since joining the guild as I didn’t want to seem uninterested. Far from it, although there hasn’t been much in the way of guild ‘activity’ per se, just being part of a social group while playing, joining in on the random guild chat (and enjoying the bizarre twilight zone-style life of listening to conversations via the voice channels and responding solely with type due to my not having a mic set up) and even adding a few status points by exploring writs – both combat and tradeskill, although the Rush Orders are a bitch given that you have no idea what sort of components you’ll need ahead of time. I had tried some forward planning and used the guild bank to gather some harder harvests prior to commencing one that I’d failed previously, and was making damn fine progress until with just one item left to go and about 55 seconds left on the clock, I discovered I’d miscounted the components by one solitary ingredient and was therefore doomed to failure. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve joined a guild!
An actual guild!
With, like, other people and everything!
Experiment Time! Ever concious of the boundary-pushing nature of other, some say better, EQII blogs, I figured I might as well try and put into practice a little idea that’s been floating around the old noggin for a short while now. I call it Live Blogging. Or Insta-Reports. Or Immedi-o-Diary. Nah, Live Blogging will do.
Basically, while most blogs gladly tell you all about the fun and hijinks their authors get up to in game, these are always ‘after-action reports’, as the military according to Tom Clancy books would call them. That’s all well and good, but it just isn’t instant enough, dammit! So instead, Live Blogging brings you the action AS IT HAPPENS… almost.
As promised several blog posts ago, a list of International Holidays EQII Should Add To Its In-Game Events <applause>…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day – September 19th
A no-brainer for most, this is perhaps the most widely celebrated geek festival outside Sarah Michelle Gellar’s birthday. Simple server-side scripts add ‘Yarr!’ to the front of everything typed into the chat window, and replaces every occurrence of ‘you’ with ‘ye’ in the game. All class pets are replaced with parrots for the day (and a special quest line rewards participants with an in-house parrot), and quest rewards are paid in doubloons. Ironically, anyone playing Pirates Of The Burning Sea today will be able to celebrate International Talk Like A Faux-Medieval Knight day instead.
International Civil Aviation Day – December 7th
Griffon races, Freestyle Levitation exhibitions, and a temporary loan of that giant airship that floats around Atlas Park in City of Heroes to give people tourist rides around popular raid zones. Fun for all the family!
No Pants Day – First Friday in May
This one has a precedent as in 2008 the first virtual No Pants Day was held in the online golf game, Shot-Online (you’re all big fans of Korean Virtual Golf role-playing games, right?). Utilising the Emperor’s New Clothes armour set on offer from the current Portal Storms quest reward giver, this is a mandatory day of walking around sans pantaloons, in order to level the playing fields, put night elf males into catatonic shock around their home towns as the lady elves shake their thang, and will help to find out just which mighty Guardians and Paladins are overcompensating with their talk of impressive DPS parsers. Additional bonus: Queen Antonia doesn’t have to change from her normal wardrobe!
International Day of Non-Violence – October 2nd
Can you imagine that one? I realise PvP servers might suddenly become like ghost towns (more so), but imagine a day where not a single creature is killed, all auto-aggro is removed, weapons are rendered powerless (but retain the fancy visual effects for the hell of it) and crafting actually becomes a valid pastime (just kidding, just kidding).
World Dance Day – April 29th
Ho yes! Bring. It. On. City streets filled with /emoting NPCs getting on up, getting on down again, moving to the grooving and serving notice on the funk. Adapting the ‘dance moves’ puzzle from the Halloween house last year, quest lines see you having to impress judges with your rhythm action prowess in exchange for boots filled with magical goldfish and ermine-lined cloaks. Blackburrow is temporarily neutralised and turned into a giant goblin rave zone, and PvP fighting is replaced with guild ‘dance-offs’. You like that? Cos that’s the way it is. Healing Word to your mother!
One of the reasons I rolled a healer class on this restart in EQII was that I wanted to make myself useful for grouping situations without having to go through the intimidating process of working out how best to hit things to stop them biting me dead. Everyone loves a healer, right? We don’t get in the way, just sort of mill around at the back, tossing out band-aids and soothing words, eschewing the glory (and, usually, the loot) in favour of keeping YOU alive and in tip-top condition for beastie eradication duties.
Sure, as a Templar I’m pretty handy with a mace and can throw down the occasional Lightning Storm From Hell™, but mostly when danger rears its ugly head I bravely turn my tail and, uh, fled. Flee. Beat a hasty tactical withdrawal from the combat arena. While other classes boast of chat log files filled with impressive DPS scores and the like, mine tend to hold the virtual world record for most number of “This encounter is no longer worth any experience” appearances. I’m sure once it actually said: “Dude, it’s a grobin. You can’t even beat a frigging grobin? Jeez, let me show you where the safe harvesting nodes are.” Although I may have been hallucinating from a lack of sleep.
Anyway, I’ve had some success with pick-up grouping since hitting level 15. A few incursions into the orc-held territory east of Kelethin saw me providing healing words left, right and centre for a crazed killing machine on a seemingly unstoppable mission to eradicate the whole of orc-kind. Seemingly, I say, as it eventually did stop when the other member of our team (a guy so ineffectual I’m actually having trouble remembering what class he was) decided to go for dinner rather than stay and do his duty (whatever it was).
Dinged through about two levels in that time though, so can’t complain, and even managed to do a bit of hotbar re-ordering, neatly organising all my heals into one area, offensive spells in another, debuffs just over there, rezzes in that top part and miscellaneous junk (summon food and water, anyone?) tidily in the part of the third bar that rarely gets troubled by hot mouse lovin’. I then promptly tested it out on a nearby Orc Footsoldier, forgot where everything was now that I’d moved them from the disorganised, yet familiar place they had been, and died.
A final note, I improv’d through one round of the Portal Storms quests shortly after that (after spending a good half hour getting lost in Kelethin while looking for the Qeynos teleporter. Seriously, would some colour-coding on the acorns go amiss?) and after dispensing with the Portal Void schlong-on-legs beasts by running away until they lost interest each time, eventually plumped for the misty blue lighting orb thing as a reward thinking I’d be emitting a cool, pulsing glow that radiated off everything around me. Nope. It barely has enough oomph to emit a fart. My advice, save up for the cooler-looking armour instead.
Incidentally, are those void-dildos supposed to be that hard to beat, or is it just because I’m a Templar and so by definition less effective in combat than a melted plastic spoon?
Only a quick interim update, but having just viewed the exciting happenings shown at Allakhazam I’d just like to say “Kudos, sir. Kudos.” to whoever made the design decision at SOE to put the little dock workers into the game, furthering that whole ‘immersion’ factor that I alluded to back in this post. I’m not going to speculate on how the guild halls themselves are going to work, although I’ll be disappointed if we don’t get snooty guild butlers that open the main doors to visitors and treat your guests with barely disguised contempt.
Also, many congratulations to Kiara on the new job as Community Manager. I’ve only had the briefest of encounters with her when commissioning articles for EQuinox, but she seems like a great choice – always helpful and friendly, extremely knowledgeable about the game and defintiely, as in keeping with a lot of SOE’s recent EQII hirings, a fan favourite having been a favourite fan. If that makes sense. All power to you!
Going Nuts In Norrath 
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