West Karana

Yay! Another night where I successfully avoided writing! I KNOW what I want to do for the last part of the current Stout Henry adventure, I know how it begins, ends, the middle, but when I sit down to write, I do something else.

Tonight, I went back and played some more City of Heroes. it has changed a LOT just in the past few months. It has Rest XP now, and day jobs, and one mission that just threw DO enhancements at me. I upgraded near every power. With all the new recipes I got, there’s going to be some evenings spent at the invention bench.

Oh yeah, I dinged 20. I didn’t join any teams, though I got a lot of invites, because there was always the chance that I would suddenly start writing. Logged out at the Tailor. If I log out there for 21 days, I’ll earn the Fashion Designer badge :)

I decided at 9:30 that no more excuses, I was going to write.

So i started off by changing the outfits on my Rock Band 2 avatar, and comparing the character creators between RB2, PS3 Home, Spellborn and Vanguard. Then I had to try out the new outfit on several sets. Then I changed the outfit some more and started trying for the Bass Groove achievement where you have to finish a song 100% on Expert using only upstrums. I did get the Gold Star achievement, but I don’t know what that was for.

Then I worked through a few of the band challenges, then came back here intending to at least start writing, and did the joke post (below), and now it’s 1 AM and since I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, have to go to work REALLY early to make up for leaving early.

I don’t want to use Write or Die for this, but I don’t think I have a choice.

Last year, Massively’s Michael Zenke interviewed SOE’s John Smedley about, among other things, the future of SOE’s all-inclusive Station Access plan:

John Smedley: Sure. I don’t mind this being public. We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price. We have two problems, though. One: we have third parties involved in this. LucasArts, for example, will have to buy off on this, as would others. Second is the less obvious one: Promising future stuff is the meat of the problem. We haven’t found the right way to word things yet. To be honest other priorities have gotten in the way. That’s what we want to offer people.

In the past year, Flying Lab’s “Pirates of the Burning Sea” was added to Station Access, but none of the things mentioned were ever mentioned after this. We EQ and EQ2 players STILL have to sign up for the Station Players Advanced Character plan — at a buck per month per feature — to see detailed information about our own characters.

With RMT for sure being a big part of upcoming MMOs The Agency and Free Realms, and given that both those and DC Universe Online will also be released on the PS3, where monthly subscription plans are unknown, it really looks like the business model for SOE’s MMOs is moving away from the monthly subscription plan.

If having the Station Access won’t give you any sort of benefit to the newer MMOs, what is the reason to keep it, aside from currently actively playing three or more SOE subscription-based games?

Assuring Station Access subscribers that their monthly investment in SOE games will be valuable going forward should be a top priority. Otherwise, players in these cash-strapped times will be looking at their expenses, and wondering if they really are getting $30 worth of gaming from their subscription.

I don’t know why I missed this HUGE sculpture in the gnomish bit of the Moors of Ykesha before. So like, NOW you know where the mailbox is… from ORBIT.

I wish they did the same thing for the location of the druid ring. People kept trying to lead me to it. “It’s right next to the landing pad!” “From the cannon?” “No, just where you get off the boat!” I run around for about ten minutes. “Is it the wizard spires?” “No, but it’s near them.” “Yay! Okay!” Five minutes later. “Okay, this druid ring. Does it look like other druid rings, or is it like a pipe in the ground or something?” “No, it looks EXACTLY like all the other druid rings! It’s right next to where you get off the boat! Just go down a little and THERE IT IS!”

More running around. I load up the EQ2 Wiki. It has the locs of all the druid rings — EXCEPT this one! It’s a friggin’ CONSPIRACY!

So I start taking the “down” bit to heart, and start circling the landing pad. Cliff. Cliff. Cliff. Certain death. Cliff. Monster. Cliff. Oh look, here comes a ledge. Complete with druid ring.

Duh. I can’t imagine I could have possibly sounder thicker over guild chat.

I didn’t spend all night sounding like a trickster god had struck me blind and the only cure was at the druid ring. I had just gotten back from driving my son back to school in Rhode Island, and was poking around the City of Heroes holiday stuff while totally forgetting about the rice I had steaming in the cooker. “Why am I hungry?” I thought, as I sent my ninja army chasing down another group of angry snowmen in Cap du Diablo. “Didn’t I cook some rice?”

Cook, yes. Eat, no.

I got a tell on XFire inviting me along on tonight’s Daily Double, and nothing was going to stop me! I’d never been to this zone before. It went so fast that I’m not sure I’ve been there yet :P This was the bouncy one where someone bounces and catches balls of magical energy. I ran out of arrows halfway through that fight — those nights in Veeshan’s Peak go through arrows like anything, and I’d forgotten to restock.

The moment I got into game, the same guild that I’ve been raiding VP with asked me along again to clear further in. I declined, I had more important business, but it was nice to see I had a raid slot. Mythical is so close!

So that was fun. Afterward, I logged to do some housework and ended up watching movies on the PS3 as I copied some shows there from my computer. Next time someone visits, they will be ambushed by Blackpool :) It would be really nice if the PS3 preserved my folders, though. I did some virtual house cleaning as well. I cleaned up the mess in the Nostalgia guild hall basement. I’m a failure at decorating. I know what I want to do but I don’t know how to do it and it just comes out all wrong. I’ll try to figure out something in the privacy of my own apartment.

I was playing City of Heroes because I am about to cancel my account. Money is incredibly tight these days and I have to cut corners where I can. But I thought I would get a couple more play sessions in before I canceled and deleted all the files except the patcher. I’ll probably cancel EverQuest as well, and drop the Station Pass for my main account, leaving me with only EQ2. It seems SOE is bringing out their new MMOs under a non-subscription model, so the Station Pass will become less and less valuable. If The Agency and Free Realms and DC Universe Online move toward RMT business models, what good is Station Pass? It’s double dipping, and I’m not a fan of that.

I also organized those blog posts I’ve done comics for, as well as the old Crimson Eternity comics, and made them easier to get to, should you want to see them all for some reason. I was kinda surprised to see I’d been doing the CE comics, some of them, since I’d been blogging. I thought I finished doing those before the blog, but it turns out it wasn’t as long ago as I remember that I was raiding in CE. It seems like ages. Anyway, the “My Comics” link in the sidebar will have them all.