Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

That`s the Sound of the Men…

Random Thoughts

Things have been a bit hectic lately. Job interviews and whatnot, so the updates have been slim, and will probably continue to be slim for a bit yet.

Tomorrow I head off to interview for a job that may suck. Some of you out there probably suffered through the period I was working on third shift and hating it because I wrote horrible and silly thing in my .plan file. This job may suck just as much, or it may not. It may be third shift, which would suck. Suck, suck, suck. Sorry, this paragraph just seemed to need more sucking to properly display the suckiness of the suckage that sucked. Suck.

Anyway, even if the job doesn’t .. you know .. it doesn’t officially start until December 10th. So about another month of not working, right?

Wrong.

“Jason to the kiosk. Jason to the kiosk.”

I am not working at Toys “R” Us as seasonal help. Seasonal means they pay me less, work me harder, and plan to fire me anyway the day after Christmas. So I don’t see any reason why I can’t take them for a ride around the block and then jump ship before I get fed to the dogs, do you?

Trade Skills: The Good and the Bad

Random Thoughts

So today I decided to try out the trade skills of Dark Age of Camelot. I’ve been familiar with the old UO style, and the EQ style, and never bothered AC (are there trade skills in AC? I never cared to stay long enough to find out). What follows is, as always, my opinion.

We’ll begin with how to do them, and I’ll stick with tailoring since its what I chose to do. I talk to the Tailoring Master and say I want to be a tailor. He says, “Great!”, and I get a skill point. I buy a tailoring kit and some supplies: wool thread, leather, cloth. Deciding ahead of time that skilling up on your own just costs money you never get back, I take the option of doing consignments.

For those who don’t know, you can make stuff in DAoC and sell it to a vender at low levels of skill for anywhere from 50% to 95% of the cost of making the item (barring failures), OR you can have the master of your skill task you to make something and deliver it for him in which case you average about 120% of the cost of making the item. Yes, that’s right EQ fans, you make a PROFIT!

So I start asking what he wants me to make, I make it, and I deliver it. I started with 13 silver pieces and today I ended with 12 silver pieces. I know what you are thinking, “Didn’t he say profit?” Yeah, I did. The last task I got asked to make was leather boned gauntlets which require bronze studs. I had to pay 3 silver for 20 bronze bars to make 20 bronze studs so that I could use 1 stud for the gauntlets (yep, you buy things in amounts of 20 from what I have seen so far). So in reality I had 15 silver before I bought the bronze bars, and I haven’t even turned in the gauntlets for my reward yet. Pretty neat, eh?

On top of that, the trade skills are a tree. Tailoring isn’t just tailoring. Tailoring is just the act of making the final product. There are sub-skills like clothworking, leatherworking, and metalworking, and I earn skill in those as well depending on the content of the item I am crafting.

There are two annoying nit picky bits with trade skills though. First, when doing consignments, you have to find the people. You start to cheer and shout out loud when you get a repeat customer because you already found them. Finding people is made easier though because you can ask any guard where to find them and they will literally point the way. Of course, nothing is fool proof and they will point directly to the person, so all I need now is the ability to walk through walls. Second, at least in EQ, you hit combine and you know immediately if you failed or succeeded. In DAoC you get a progress bar. Now you and I both know full well that the game knows before you even start to display the bar that the item was a success or not, making me wait 10 second just to tell me I have to try again is a pain in the ass, especially when you end up having to try 8 or 10 times before you succeed. But then again, not having to physically put items into my sewing kit is nice, so is not having everything automatically eaten on failures.

In the end, DAoC has a more well thought out Trade Skill system. That’s plain as day. However, all EQ would need to do in order to catch up again would be to put in Trade Skill Quests where you are given a no drop note with an order on it, make the item, then return the item and note for money. Oh, that and venders where you can store buy more materials for skilling up, hunting rare supplies is a bitch.

Let the mud slinging begin.

Random Thoughts

You may notice that there is a link missing from my page. SlowNewsDay.net no longer exists. In a soap opera like stage of drama and finger pointing they closed their doors. If you read over on CamelotVault or some of the various DAoC message boards around, you can see bits and pieces of the drama.

In all this, there was one valid point. Scott Jennings, a.k.a. Lum the Mad, wrote some software to manage the news and message boards for his site. He got hired by Mythic Entertainment, who made DAoC, and he turned over his website to other people. In the end, Scott being in close contact in an administrative sense to a site that was supposed to be looking at gaming for faults wasn’t a good idea, and everybody knew it. He needed to remove himself from the site, now SlowNewsDay.net.

After that, I can’t be certain of anything. But the result was the same, SlowNewsDay.net is gone, fingers are pointing, and everyone is a little less polished than they used to be.

And sometimes they do it wrong.

Random Thoughts

After such a glowing view of the new GM events in EverQuest, Verant goes and has a 7 hour patch. No wait, a 9 hour.. make that a 12 and a half hour patch.

But I supposed they were due. The last half dozen patches have actually finished BEFORE the deadline. I guess something broke today.

Hail fellow britons, how fare thee this day?

Random Thoughts

In DAoC news, for the umpteenth day in a row NO ONE TALKED TO EACH OTHER AS THEY SOLOED AND SKILLED UP!

That’s my one bitch about this game so far. I play on Pendragon (Test Server) mostly, but I do crawl out of my hole to play on a “live” server now and then, and in neither place do you find people talking much. In guilds and groups its different. But if you try to stop in town and say hello to someone, they usually turn, acknowledge that someone did say something to them, then run off to continue whatever they were doing, which in turn leads me to run off doing my thing.

Talk god dammit! TALK!!!

In City of Heroes News…

Random Thoughts

.. the people on the official CoH Message Boards continued to discuss how cool the game is even though it doesn’t exist yet! They talk about the game disecting each frame of the admittedly damn cool gameplay movie. They roleplay. They create characters (most of them will end up bitching when someone steals their idea before they get their hands on a copy of the game). They form super teams.

Let me repeat… The game does not exist yet!

This isn’t a new thing. It’s happened with most games that have come out recently. See Dawn for an extreme case of people defending a game that will NEVER exist (I have my Beta account set up anyway so I can laugh at it properly). Mostly though, this kind of religious ferver just results in disappointment and general community divisions and hatred as people bicker and bitch about whether or not capes should be in the game.

I think the first sign of the coming apocalypse is any time two people argue about something where not only can neither of them win, but even if they could it wouldn’t matter because its not up to them to decide.

Back to my comic books…

Random Thoughts

As you may recall, I have a collection of comic books I want to unload. eBay won’t let me do it as I want to, and rather than spend time and money splitting the sets out to sell them in parts, I need another service.

If anyone knows any online auction place that will let me set up something for sale at around $5,000 minimum bid, let me know.

And sometimes they do it right.

Random Thoughts

The Weekend before Halloween, Verant make a change on the servers for what they called “Adventure Weekend”. They sped up the spawn times for the large contested monsters in the game. The dragons, Venril Sathir and others. Lots of guilds got to do alot of the high end game.

“But what about the little guys?” you ask.

Well, they also patched the server on Halloween morning to introduce a bunch of scripted events. In several zones werewolves and undead roamed where they previously hadn’t. And these monsters dropped very nice equipment. A few pieces were even good by the high end gamers’ standards, but most were aimed at people around levels 10 to 40. Each of these zones had a story, and completing the story ended the event… but… it would start over again in 2 hours to give more people a chance to participate.

This is exactly what Verant needs to do more often. Not always dropping loot and other things, but to have a zone be unpredictable. The spawns more random. Get the players involved. Like having 2 quests in a zone, if the good guys win evil is vanquished, if the bad guys win good is sent heading for the hills. These events, when followed and not farmed, were engaging, interesting, and fun.

Now, on to my next comment…

Those were scripted events. Today however, I ran into what is usually referred to as “a_GM_event00”. Usually these events are nothing but people getting killed and crappy loot.

However…
(in character)
I head to Karnor’s Castle for some hunting. We build a group and get ready. Kill a few things and I run in deep to pull something out to play. As I round the staircase in the Left Courtyard toward the Well, I see “Sentry of Sathir”. “Cool”, I think to myself. I’ll pull him out and have some fun. Then a dwarf flies by. His name is “Knight of Brell” and he says only one word: “RUN!”

I round the corner and I see him.. Venril Sathir. Immediately I take the dwarf’s advice and run. At the front of the Castle now I see them all coming: Venril Sathir, Knight of Sathir, Sentry of Sathir, and Drolvarg Captain. They charge us and we brace for it.

Things did not go well. We were beaten out of the zone. We collected ourselves and then once more into the breach. We stand longer this time, and a few of us fall in combat. Our clerics revive us and we rejoin the fray.

The word has gone out, and the army gathers. The Drolvarg Captain falls. I begin shouting orders and the adventurers begin to listen. The Sentry of Sathir falls. Collected more fully know we charge. The Knight of Sathir falls.

And we fail. Venril Sathir lays the Knight of Brell to rest.

Now enraged we charge at last Venril Sathir himself. I call out to rally the forces assembled. We battle. Each of us tired, weary, but we continue. And finally, Venril Sathir falls.

We collect the spoils of our fight: Cleric Greeves, Magician Staff, Wizard Staff. I allot the loot to those who helped.

From deep within the bowels of Karnor’s Castle, a voice echoes, “I will return!” Venril Sathir is far from done with Norrath.
(end in character)

See.. now THAT was fun. I wish more people could see the game like this. And I hope that Verant does things like this more often.

All Hallows Eve.

Random Thoughts

Last night was Halloween. One of my favorite nights of the year, even though I partake of it too little.

I’m happy to say that Cobb County didn’t try this year to celebrate Halloween on the 26th or some nonsense to avoid work and school conflicts. I’m also happy I wasn’t innundated with warnings about rapists and murderers about. I wasn’t told to make sure the kids start trick or treating at noon and are done before sundown.

People seemed a bit more relaxed this year. Well, except that perhaps they were looking at Halloween as an escape from terrorist threats, anthrax scares, and all the real world bring-me-downs that we have seen since September 11th.

I headed out this year to a local Taco Mac. The best Taco Mac around in my opinion. Built in an old Steak & Ale building it looks totally different from all the strip mall steel and glass crap many of the others are made of. It’s homey. Smokey. More a bar than a restaurant. And I went with my fiancee and a few friends. We talked and drank. I think my friends were bored, or just had too much else going on to relax.

One by one they left. The band came on the stage, Tommy Gun, and with the end of their first song, the last friend left. My fiancee and I stayed. The band was good. Bordering on great. We drank. We sang. We danced. Ahhh… relaxation.

After the first set was done, we too headed out. We got home and decided to take a stroll out in the full moon light. The night air was brisk, and we wandered the streets, empty of trick-or-treaters in our apartment complex, and talked. We laughed. We smiled. Ahhh… relaxation.

The worries melted away last night, and once my friends were gone and the music began to play, up until I drifted off to sleep during the final credits of The Amityville Horror with thoughts of bleeding walls and demons in the basement drifting through my head, it was a great night.

I love Halloween.

Sorry, I don`t have an icon for…

Random Thoughts

Horizons. I’m also running a bit late with this news. Check out the main page. It appears that NCSoft has stepped up with $4.5 Million to help fund the project. Most games cost about $3 Million to make, so hopefully this should mean that Horizons WILL see the light of day.

Horizons, at least if you believe all that you read, is the most ambitious of the MMORPGs to unveil itself. If it can hold true to all its designs it will be a major force in the market place. But therein lies alot of “if”s.

Only time will tell.