Reader Velmonte asks:

Tipa, what game would you consider for a person who is just breaking into the world of mmo’s? One of my friends, has been wanting to try one, but I need to suggest a game that has basic quests, but is still fun, colorful, and immersive. I was hoping you could help me out! Thanks!

This is a really great question. With new MMOs coming out every day and hundreds to choose from, it can be crazy trying to find the perfect game. Fact is, maybe you can’t find the perfect game first try, or maybe after playing an MMO a bit, you find yourself ready for something new.

The most important question to ask when looking for a MMO is, are my friends playing this game? MMOs are all meant to be played with other people; otherwise, single player RPGs like Bioware’s excellent Dragon Age: Origins will give the adventure, quests and party building without worrying about finding other players.

The second consideration is, will this game work on my machine? If you have a MacBook and don’t want to use Boot Camp to boot into Windows, your choices are very limited (but there are some options). If you have an older machine, you may not have a great experience with some of the later games.

I haven’t played every MMO out there, but I’d like to go through some of the games I have played with an eye toward the things (aside from friends playing) that would be most inviting to a new player. I’d look for interesting game play, games that start off easy and gradually show their depth, great graphics, great character customization, and active new player communities.

World of Warcraft must be mentioned first; it’s the MMO so popular that when most people think of the genre, they think of WoW. WoW’s content is famously easy, with the changes made to the game over the past few years making it one of the easiest MMOs to play, ever. It is colorful and runs on most any computer, even the Macs. Character customization isn’t the best — you will find your character’s face on lots of other people’s characters — and the community at this point is expert at WoW and unforgiving of new players. The newbie areas are also largely empty, though that should change when the next expansion adds two new races and completely redesigned newbie areas. Also, the Looking For Dungeon (LFD) tool makes finding groups automatic, but you will find that most dungeon groups expect every member to be extremely familiar with each dungeon and able to handle each encounter with little or no discussion. WoW does so many things right, that it’s easy to overlook the very few things it does wrong.

Lord of the Rings Online started out playing much like WoW, but in the years since has found its own niche. LotRO is deeply based on the lore of J.R.R. Tolkein’s books, and your character will follow, lead and meet the Fellowship and together you fight the evil legions of Mordor and restore peace to Middle Earth. Your character is far more customizable, and you can equip gear just for show to give you complete control over your character’s appearance. With housing, frequent festivals and celebrations and a variety of non-combat skills like playing actual music on in-game instruments, LotRO has built itself a strong and newbie-friendly community. Its high system requirements are the only blemish on this excellent game.

The sequel to the grandfather of 3D MMORPGs, EverQuest 2 takes customizability to an entirely new level. Its housing and massive guild halls make interior decorating a popular player occupation, supported by many trade skills. Crafting is a respected career path, with no combat at all required if you want to pursue that path (although most crafters mix adventuring in with their knitting). EQ2 boasts several stellar newbie experiences deep with plot and lore, so you are immediately immersed in the world. From the faerie-like Fae to the dark and manipulative dark elves to the wandering frogloks to the conniving ratonga, no other MMO gives you the number of classes, races and individuality of EQ2. This does mean that EQ2 can seem daunting to a new player. Like many older MMOs, the newbie areas will be largely desolate and the groups you do find will assume you know the game well. The game also requires a fairly hefty computer, and few would call EQ2 colorful.

Wizard101 is one of my favorites. The game is colorful, features a unique combat mechanic involving playing cards and building decks that starts out simple but leads to great depth, and has a variety of non-combat activities like home decoration and crafting. Though the game is nominally a subscription game, you can play the first several areas for free to get a taste, and have the option of purchasing access to new areas instead of subscribing. The characters, though colorful, have little individuality — you’ll see many copies of your character in the world. The game is also targeted for children and young teens, though many adults do play. The chat censoring and other kid-friendly features may be off-putting to older players. The game runs well on low system requirements, and I considered W101 to be the best new MMO of 2008.

Free Realms is an odd little nugget of an MMO. The developers couldn’t decide upon just one theme to the game, so they put in everything they could think of to make a game where the only goal is to make sure you are never more than ten seconds from doing something new. Characters can have one or many jobs, evenly split between combat jobs like brawler and ninja and non combat jobs like miner and postman. Each non-combat job opens mini-games, often themed for the area, based on some of the most famous casual games ever made. Add in player housing, pet training, the occasional live band performance, everywhere a new game to play, and a player population recently reported to be 10 million strong, and you have an unmatched new player experience. You will find clones of your character everywhere, and the highly stylized player characters may not be to everyone’s tastes. The game is free to play, though the cash shop is heavily promoted.

Out of all the Asian imports I’ve played, Dream of Mirror Online was probably for me the most successful. Your character is drawn from the real world into a mirror world full of Mirror Kings and only you (naturally) can save the world. Follow the plot through cut scenes, mysteries, and bizarre and over-the-top boss battles in various parallel universes, or discover and breed rare pets and hang out in town socializing, it’s up to you. The fairly unique class system lets your character take on any role and mix and match the abilities from any two classes to make your character your own. (This system is somewhat similar to FFXI Online’s, and Free Realms has echoes of it as well). Since each new class means going back through the newbie areas, even a couple of years into the game’s Western launch, the newbie areas are still full of players. The real-time harvesting is a way to get some of the drudgery of harvesting done without having to be physically present at the computer. If you don’t mind a strong anime/manga bend to the graphics, this might be the game for you.

Any of these would, I think, be an excellent introduction to the world of MMOs, and perhaps a permanent home for a new player. Other games, like Dungeons and Dragons Online, EVE Online, the original EverQuest, Aion, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall and Allods Online would appeal more to the experienced gamer. Most of these games have demos or free trials, and I’d urge a new player to give a couple of them a try to find out which appeals to them most. If you aren’t having fun in a game, it’s best to just move on. There’s so many choices available these days that there’s bound to be a fit for everyone.

If someone is looking for a deep game full of story and lore and “worldness”, and their computer can handle it, I’d recommend Lord of the Rings Online. For sheer casual fun, Free Realms. For kids or adults looking for a more strategic but always fun game, Wizard101. For the most freedom and individuality, EQ2. For the best social tools, DoMO. For the easiest game that can run on anything, WoW. Whatever you are looking for, one of these games likely has it.

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Having heard about the EVE Fitting Tool from a helpful commentator, I spent a lot of time last night working some Battle Clinic builds into viable builds for me. VERY happy. Later on, the corps went on an impromptu trip through a wormhole, where we were relentlessly shadowed by the corp (Bones) who had staked it out. They allowed us to take on a Sleeper cell before we left. We got some T3 loot, but since we’d all brought expendable ships (that’s my Exequoror “The Liberator” hovering outside the wormhole), we weren’t up for taking out the second wave, which included a battleship. (Drew at Wizard of Duke Street has a little more about wormholing).

The biggest news in the EVE realm had nothing (or little) to do with the space game. Yesterday, at GDC Europe, EVE developers CCP announced Dust 514, a dirtside FPS for consoles where success on the ground leads to success ij space based planetary and system control.

Not much is known about the title. The teaser video shows standard FPS action on the ground, with two frigates trading shots overhead. I get that Starship Troopers feeling from it, and it’s a good feeling. Darren of Common Sense Gamer doesn’t see any way they can pull off a new MMO in the current generation of consoles. Heartless_ wonders at the connection between Dust 514 and the technology for EVE’s announced “ambulation” mode, where players can walk about on space stations.

With Blizzcon only days away, bloggers have been speculating endlessly about rumors that the next World of Warcraft expansion will bring a complete revamping of the old world. That didn’t go over so well when EverQuest started on that path with the Prophecy of Ro and Depths of Darkhollow expansion, but maybe Blizzard can succeed where SOE failed. Spinks wonders if even a total revamp could get people back into the old zones again, especially if flying mounts and other modern features were brought into the old world. Damion of Zen of Design doubts people will want to revisit zones they were already quite tired of before.

The Cataclysm rumors also suggest that many new previously forbidden (by lore) race and class combinations will get WoW players back in the alts game. Green Armadillo wonders why developers are all so eager to cite lore as reasons for something they didn’t want players doing, but have no problems breaking it at their whim if they change their minds.

Writing about Lord of the Rings Online, Armadillo says:

The problem? This game is set in Middle Earth. I don’t remember Gimli’s axes bursting into flames as he fought the malevolent ice wraiths of Caradhras. (Actually, I don’t remember the malevolent ice wraiths of Caradhras either, maybe Gandalf was busy whining to Aragorn about being forced to go to Moria while the battle raged off camera. Of course, if the game stuck to just foes the Fellowship actually fought during the story, the beastiary would be very repetitive indeed, especially in the context of a game full of “kill 360 of this type of enemy” deeds.)

Naamah at Aionic Thoughts has a new video courtesy of Kotaku about the game’s 1.5 patch, the one that will launch with the game in September and has never been played by Western testers. The developers say there is no grind in Aion? That’s good news. WoW-like gaming has been synonymous with grind for so many years.

And speaking of videos, Werit has been going all Stephen Spielberg lately with Fallen Earth, the post-apocalyptic MMO which has largely been overshadowed by higher-profile releases. Wanna kill posthuman mutants and zombies and save the scattered fragments of humanity? Fallen Earth might be your game.

A fan of Wizard101, but upset because you can’t get anyone to team up with you for arena dueling? Stingite of The Friendly Necromancer advises sitting down with your friends and finding what it would take to get them into the arena, or why they may be reluctant to go. Seven hour duels would be reason enough for me.

F2P game correspondent Warhammermer has a Dream of Mirror Online AMV to the tune of The Killers’ “Human”. The line, “Are we human, or are we dancer?” refers here to DOMO’s Dancer job. Yes! Dancer is a job in DOMO! Warhammermer also has some news of a movie tie-in within SOE’s Free Realms which left those outside of the US without meatballs.

Anjin at Bullet Points has been spending a bit of time in the F2P version of Dungeons & Dragons Online, and aside from a few crashes, kinda likes how DDO mixes up the standard dungeon crawler with more action.

Spellborn has officially become a Free to Play game, says Acclaim Games’ Community Manager, David “Historian” DeWald:

At point, you checked out The Chronicles of Spellborn. Today, as you read this, Spellborn as it currently exists is now free to play. Keep in mind that there will be no upgrades and no patches. It has become in effect, an Action RPG with superior Multiplayer. The only thing it will cost you to play is the time it takes to download.

So play it. http://www.tcos.com

Now because it is frozen in time, we will be creating events for the players and we will help support any players that want to make their own events. And if you have thoughts on how we might make this version more enjoyable as we wait for the New free to play version, we are glad to listen.

Is that enough news for you? It’s just gonna keep flooding in as the games we’ve been waiting all year to play start hitting the shelves. So happy hump day, and keep gaming!

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I’m kinda tired of Free Realms. Not the game; heck, considering my computer now refuses to run Lord of the Rings Online for long, I’ve been spending most of my gaming time in Free Realms. Beau is having fun playing. Pete at Dragonchasers took a 75 degree turn and went from being marginal about the game to a fan in just three short days. Syp of Bio Break is still dubious, but what does he care — his wife is Tinker Bell!

MBP at Mind-Bending Puzzles writes about a traditional Irish card game named “Twenty-Five”, the second most complicated card game in the world. The first most complicated? The Free Realms trading card game.

As far as I know, Station Access members are still NOT members in Free Realms, even though we were told we would be. This is still annoying me even as I work on the non-member jobs, Ninja (lv 7), Miner (lv 11) and Cook (lv 8).

Sure, some goof in World of Warcraft may have gone around using a GM item to one-shot every raid in the game, but did you realize that an NPC in Wizard 101 was giving out free dragon pets? So take THAT, WoW!

Lars of MMOment of Zen has a final verdict on the City of Heroes Architect system: No matter how innovative the missions, they still work like every other CoH mission — run through a maze, hunting randomly placed stuff.

Psychochild looks at crafting through the ages, with a deeper look at how EverQuest II’s crafting has changed since launch, what they did right and how it could still be improved.

When I read that Aventurine was adding solo-friendly islands to Darkfall, my first thought was, “go here to find a lot of solo people to gank”. Syncaine, however, is liking these new changes to the Darkfall PvE experience. I’m betting Syncaine is secretly thinking “target-rich environment”…

Beau waxes quixotic about Aeria Game’s Dream of Mirror Online, especially about the cut-scene heavy epic quest that takes you through the game. I’ve written lots about my own adventures in the game.

I STILL think DOMO is one of the best social MMOs going. I’m still looking for a decent exploration MMO. No, EVE Online is NOT an exploration MMO… it’s an Achiever MMO, exploration doesn’t really mean that much when everyplace you go is pretty much just like every other place. It comes closest, though. I’m desperately hoping Cryptic’s Star Trek Online IS, though. I’m tired of Achiever MMOs.

Lastly, Runes of Magic is in danger of becoming last week’s fad, but Scopique is right in there playing and wondering just how long Runes of Magic can keep skimming the best parts of other MMOs into itself to become the All-Devouring Uber MMO.

See ya tomorrow! Keep gaming!

Oh, and Wizard 101 and Star Trek Online devs? I apologize in advance, okay? You’ll see what I mean… later…

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I was tired and tuckered out last night from two late nights of programming image filters (the latest result is the candy-colored candy shop seen in my ShutterCal widget), but while a test image rendered, I thought maybe I’d just jump into Wizard 101 and see if Suri was up for a trip through Big Ben or Kensington. I love running through Big Ben.

She wasn’t on, so I do what I normally do when I’m bored and running around Moo Shu. Head to Shirataki Temple and take on, once again, the Plague Oni. Takes about 45 minutes.

There are four mini-bosses and two major bosses in Shirataki, but the best loot is saved for the very last. The Plague Oni can drop a nice sword, a pet, and a wide variety of end game gear. But the past half dozen or so times I’ve killed it (as I creep toward level 46 from the xp gained killing the mobs along the way), I’ve gotten just one loot, and that one loot has always been trash. The Footwraps of Pictures that was the sole loot from Plague Oni? +21 health and +2% Storm resistance, Storm school only. I wouldn’t wear that if I were a Storm wizard. It’s trash loot.

Plague Oni used to drop good stuff — I got my second sword here — but now he drops nothing. My theory? The RMT NPCs that drop by to sell holiday gear also place some of that gear on NPCs. The Onis were said to drop some of it, sometimes. I think that screwed up their loot tables. Plague Oni supposedly drops my Life shoes. I’ve even GOTTEN THEM with my alt when I was two boxing, but of course there is no item trading in the game. But since Harvest Hannah arrived, it seems neither the Plage Oni nor the Jade Oni drop loot.

Anyway, after that disappointing run, I went to bed at 9PM and didn’t wake up until 6AM.

This weekend I have to bring my son back to Warwick. I’ve been doing a lot of that. Last Sunday I drove him to RI. Wednesday I brought him back for a dentist appointment. Sunday I’ll bring him back AGAIN. Two hours each way leaves me totally dead and exhausted.

I imagine this weekend I will re-install Lord of the Rings Online and check in on my Captain. I don’t think I am going to restart on another server, but I might see what’s happening on Winfola. I think my Captain was level 34 or so? There’s been a lot of new stuff since I last played, and the North Downs grind might be a little more manageable.

Definitely going to get back into DOMO. I WANT TO PLAY SPELLBORN SO MUCH! I am trying my hardest not to get too involved in Spellborn because it all has to restart whenever Acclaim brings it to the States.

I hate having taken a taste and forced to wait for the meal.

Isis says Hi. Rendered with the Candyshop filter.

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Last year at this time, I’d just found the absolutely most perfect EQ2 guild — they were great raiders, loved grouping, and were fantastic people besides. With Clan of Shadows, I managed to do every flagging raid for Ruins of Kunark and was ready to step in and do my best to help the guild as they conquered Veeshan’s Peak. It wasn’t to be; I didn’t make the full membership vote. It wasn’t even close. That disappointment, along with other things to fill my evenings, eventually led to the end of raiding. Without raiding, though, I didn’t have much incentive to log in anymore. I tried to make things work with another guild, Delusions of Grandeur, but it just wasn’t CoS. I guess if I couldn’t make it in CoS, I didn’t want to settle for a lesser guild.

I started poking around back on EverQuest. I really missed my characters there. Not raiding, so much, but the friends, community and camaraderie that makes EQ unique. A lot of people commented that they’d love to play through EQ again, if they didn’t have to do it alone. So I thought we might do together what we’d never do alone, and along with ten or so fellow former EQ players, started Nostalgia the Guild on the Luclin server. NtG peaked in mid-summer when we got to dragon killing level and put the hurt on two of the three bosses of the original EQ, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox. (We never killed the third, Phinegal Atropos, as a guild). SOE’s summer Living Legacy program had the unexpected side effect of boosting the power of our armor and weapons to raid levels, and a lot of things became possible with very few people. Although fairly diminished, NtG still meets Fridays to explore Old Norrath.

Stargrace took the Nostalgia idea and brought it forward 500 years to the devastated Norrath of EverQuest II. I eventually transferred half my characters from Befallen to Najena to join the guild there. I’m getting the urge to raid and group again, so I may be moving some of them back to Befallen… the loneliness of a server I have no history with dooms me to pickup groups with players I have never met and will never meet again. Nostalgia EQ2′s two active members aren’t enough to build a group or a raid… so there’s not much to do unless I want to do it alone. I hate playing by myself.

In February, I restarted my Neopets account with the sole goal of reaching and beating level 100 of their Shapeshifter mini-game. Shapeshifter starts out as the kind of brain twister that is fun to solve, but quickly goes well beyond the bounds of anything that can be solved by unaided humans in a normal lifetime. So this supposed kids game is really a test of your ability to develop an algorithm that can solve an enormous non-directed decision tree before the Sun goes nova. With help and encouragement from other solvers, I developed a Python program I called Shifter that could solve the hardest levels in no more than a day, and often far faster. On April 1st, 2008, I solved the last puzzle and was the Neopets Shapeshifter Champion for the entire month.

February also started my short-lived affair with Pirates of the Burning Sea. My son wanted to give it a try, so I bought a copy for him, intending to buy a copy for myself if I liked it. He grew bored with it. I liked it a lot, and made a character on his account, got up to a fairly decent level and was getting my free trading skills up, working through the storyline, and getting involved in some really exciting battles at sea.

It was on Station Pass, too! This was somewhat of a killer, actually. My son is not on the Station Pass, so I would have had to start paying for one or pay the PotBS subscription fee to keep playing, all the time I could be playing it for nothing extra if I just had my own account.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to start all over again, or pay to buy another copy of the game, so I just let it lapse. There were plenty of issues, but the game had amazing character and ship customization, absolutely gorgeous and tense battles, and I even liked the story. Sailing back and forth on the Caribbean though, not so much. Having to depend on a wide variety of people to make goods, definitely not so much. I wanted to play, but I just didn’t have the time or the money.

I felt sure that by the end of the year, I’d be totally engulfed in the one sure-fire hit MMO of the year, Flagship Studio’s Mythos. I’ve played a lot of Diablo clones, and even some, like Cronous, that try and take the action RPG into the MMO realm, but none had nailed it like Mythos. Even before they expanded the heavily instanced Overworld into a more world-like map with zoning only for cities and dungeons, I felt they had made perhaps the ultimate casual MMO… Rumors of money trouble inside Flagship turned out to be truth, and over a tumultuous weekend, Hellgate: London, their other title, was taken by their Asian publishing partner, and Mythos was dead.

I would like to be playing Mythos right now.

In March, a major new chapter of my life began when I was hired to blog about breaking MMO news for Massively.com. The pressure of writing so many articles, keeping a full time job, trying to keep Nostalgia rolling, and raiding in EQ2 eventually left me unable to do any of these things well. I put my full time job first, where it had to be, and focused on real life issues, like getting my son enrolled in college and figuring out how to pay for it (answer: I didn’t. I am broke all the time now :( ). My Massively adventure ended after an ill-fated trip to the SOE Fan Faire put me in massive (sorry) debt, and my job was cut down to doing EQ2 guides, a task for which I was incredibly unsuited, since I was hardly playing EQ2 at all at that point (which continues to this day), and I’d never written a guide to anything in my life :P Massively and I parted ways in September.

I went back to writing just for West Karana, where I planned to change the direction of the blog from just chronicling my adventures in mainstream MMOs to seeking out, playing and being an advocate for lesser known MMOs.

It’s not that I don’t like the AAA, high budget, huge marketing department MMOs. I just find them too similar to each other. So many players look eagerly to a new MMO to banish the blahs they feel with the game they currently play. They play the new MMO for awhile, discover that it’s essentially the same as the game they already played, and pronounce the entire genre dead.

I was looking through MMORPG.com’s list of games, and some of them looked totally, wildly different from anything I had ever played. Somewhere in those hundreds of games would have to be dozens that went in a new direction.

Oh yeah, there were. BUNCHES!

In early July, I discovered Wizard 101, probably via Massively. This was an entire MMO built around a wildly kooky collectible card game. I was absolutely and utterly hooked. This was the sort of thing I’d been looking for — an MMO that was just entirely out of left field. It was superficially a kid’s game but quickly turned into a game requiring strategy and teamwork and great skill in deck building. I played until they turned out the beta lights, took a couple week’s break, then started right in on the live game.

If anyone wanted to dip their toes into MMO gaming, I wouldn’t give them a copy of EverQuest II or World of Warcraft. I’d sit them down in front of Wizard 101, right where the Headmaster of Ravenwood School of Wizardry is giving a test to see what sort of wizard you are. It’s not Hogwart’s by another name. It’s something new, unique and fun. Wizard 101 was one of the breakout hits of 2008, and I expect wonderful things from it in 2009.

My on-again, off-again relationship with City of Villains flipped “on” again for awhile in July and August. I love the idea of a super-hero, comic book game, and I like what NCsoft has done with the game since they acquired it from Cryptic, and the character creator is unparalleled, but… the repetitive gameplay just can’t keep me for long. I started to get into their crafting system, but after awhile I just stopped logging in. I’m still subscribed, for now, because I am waiting for the mission designer coming in Issue 14 or 15. I want to see what that is like.

Spore owned my gaming time for a few weeks in September. I really wanted to like the game and very much enjoyed building new creatures, vehicles and space ships. I just didn’t get into the space game that is the majority of the time spent playing — you breeze through the other portions in an hour or less. It still has a place on my hard drive.

Recently, I’ve chucked pretty much every game into the back seat in order to play Dream of Mirror Online. I played this game briefly earlier in the year, and it made a very good impression, but the huge number of games out at that time pushed it away before I’d gotten to level 10, where the jobs, and the game itself, open up. As I played it, I couldn’t help remembering the last game that made me feel this way — the original EverQuest. I began to notice a lot of similarities between the games — death penalties, slow leveling, an emphasis on community over leveling, wide open zones and dungeons — it was EverQuest! A Taiwanese game company had managed, somehow, to meld EQ’s gameplay and community with the Asian anime-flavored, cinematic games. Absolutely stunned me, and I am having a lot of fun playing it.

Honorable mentions: Guild Wars — I want to play this more. Why don’t I? I don’t know! Probably because I hate playing alone. Florensia — another Asian import. I loved the fact that it had a cool land game AND a pirate-themed sea game, but it reminded me of DOMO so much, I figured I’d just play DOMO (good call). Vanguard — even though it runs crappy on my machine, I still pick it up now and again, and it still has a spot on my hard drive. Spellborn — this was intended to be a major part of my fall gaming, but it has been pushed to next year. I still have high hopes for the game, if not for the publisher’s commitment to the title.

2008 was a very intense year for MMO gaming, full of tales of intrigue and adventure — and that’s just the marketing departments! Some of this year’s biggest releases — WoW’s expansion, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online — I just could not find time for. 2009 isn’t looking as intense as 2008, but it might well be SOE’s time to shine if they can get The Agency and Free Realms out the door. Champions Online is also scheduled for the year, and perhaps DC Universe Online as well, giving NCsoft’s City of Heroes a run for its money and market share. News of Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic should keep people thirsting for more space-themed adventure in 2010. And, Spellborn!

Happy holidays, fellow gamers :)

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You don’t lose xp when you die in one of Dream of Mirror Online’s missions, which is very nice of the devs, because, who’d do them then? We died A LOT. It was mission night in the “Deadly Gods” guild, and we went all over the Mirror Worlds, advancing the plot lines that take you through the game.

First, though… I got my alchemy to 10 (FINALLY! And with plenty of powders left over, too!), and made my Hunting Knife. It took two tries, but I had enough blue powder for three, so I wasn’t worried. I had to level up the dagger in order to upgrade it, and that was just about the time I got invited to a Male Bird of Paradise group in the Phoenix Tower. There was a lower level thief in the team, so I figured I’d get to use my AE abilities.

Nope. I was asked to pull. So I did. Soon, another group came by and set up shop on the other side of the room. There’s plenty of spawns in the room, so I wasn’t worried, but they were aggressive pullers.

REALLY aggressive. Sometimes they’d even AE the mobs I was luring back to my group and yank them to theirs. Many times I’d stand toe-to-toe with their puller, wrestling for the mob. They were ALL OVER our side of the room. Super frustrating. By the time the group broke up, though, I had dinged 26 and was 3/4 of the way through to 27. Not bad, and since my Thief goal is to get to 30 before dropping back to another job, likely Musician, I am progressing really well.

Itziar wanted me to stop by after the group to get a picture, because I was to blame for the new DOMO addiction. I’d talked to Itziar lots, but we’d never actually met, so I was thrilled to get together for a photo-op in Eversun city.

A sylph. A dirty, no good, rotten sylph. They’re too GOOD to touch the ground or to hold their weapons.

Well. This is the modern era. I will allow myself to be seen with sylphs. CERTAIN sylphs.

I meditated awhile, then headed to the Inn Basement to try and pilfer a Chef’s Knife recipe from a Caskmaster for Gameiro, but no luck there. While doing my best to make those wisecracking barrels shut their boozy faces, the guild invited me to come along on some plot missions.

Well, duh :) Of course I’d come.

The first mission took place in the Pandora’s Box mirror world, from a mirror deep inside Neptune’s Tower. Our job was to defeat one of the great animal spirits that were turning beasts against people, the Great Northern Turtle Spirit. Defeating him is as close to a raid as anything in DOMO.

It didn’t end well. In fact, we didn’t even scratch him before we all died. So that one goes on the back burner until we’re all 40 or so.

We did the Black Widow one, another one I can’t remember the name of, and my mission, against the Crossbone Swordsman.

I got to be the star of my own little movie :) It seemed I was usually just out of the frame for the cinematics to everyone else’s movies, totally a spear carrier in someone else’s film. But this one was all about me. When the movie ended and the fight began, the swordsman only had a chance to use his AE 50% HP attack once before he died.

After that, it was off to the Farrell Family Crypt to defeat Octavius, one of the good guys from another mission. One of the earliest decisions you make in DOMO is to choose sides in the battle of people vs the beasts — you can choose to kill all monsters, or choose to try and bridge the yawning chasm between beast and person. I chose the latter. So in the missions, friends in one person’s mission can be enemies in another.

Such was the case with Octavius, an NPC who looked so much like Goku from Dragonball Z that whenever he’d show, the team chat would be filled with “HIS POWER IS OVER 9000!” and such.

He’d been the hero in the previous mission, holding off hordes of the evil Empire Guard by himself while those members of the team who survived the initial assault (not me) peeled one after another of the guards off and killed them.

In the Farrell Crypt fight, he was the enemy, and when he hit, we hurt bad afterward. The first three or so times we tried this, we had no Doctor, and hence no healing. And then a Doctor joined the guild :) Two tries later, we finally had Octavius and his two evil spiders dead.

By then it was very late, I had to go. It was a fun night in DOMO, though.

And I finally made my Hunting Knife (squeeee!)

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Ripped right from the refrigerator door, Crayon Physics Deluxe answers the age-old question, “What if those drawings I made in kindergarten were REAL? And I had to guide a ball around them to collide with stars for points?”

The developer has just released the beta/demo, so it’s only the first two worlds and a partially functional level editor, but it’s cool to think of inventive ways to bring your drawings to life as incredible, crudely-drawn, machines.

Level editor? Sure, I couldn’t resist making one of my own.

What music student has never been felt trapped on a staff! Will you trickle down the triplet? Sneak past the hemi-demi-semiquaver? Out-ferment the fermata? (Okay, I forgot to put the fermata in…). One glissando too many, and you could find yourself dropping straight into the bass line… and nobody wants that.

Crayon-based physics puzzle fun. Love it. The full game should be coming out fairly soon… I hope.

After all the meditation I did yesterday, I was only able to get my alchemy in Dream of Mirror Online up one more point, to 9. Just one more to go. I thought that by buying a slightly better kind of incense that I would be conjuring up some blue fragments, but nope, all red. I seriously can’t imagine the sort of effort it’s going to take to get alchemy from 10 to 15 or 20.

Itziar clued me in to DOMO’s Casino Night, where you buy tokens to use in slot machines in the hopes of winning snowballs which you can use to purchase stuff from snowman vendors. I dropped a couple thousand gold into those machines, winning me loads and loads of steaming … prizes … and all I could afford from the snowball vendors was some sort of pet saddle which won’t work on my pet. So, pretty pointless.

They brought DOMO down last night to add in the holiday decorations. When it came up again, winter was everywhere! I don’t know about you, but I’m right in the middle of REAL winter right here. I even got my car stuck in a snowdrift last night. So, mostly in my video games, I want to see warm things.

Anyway.

Gameiro is working on alchemy too, so he’s going to build his forestry up, which will make light armor crafting a lot easier. For some reason, that takes a lot of wood.

I also finally finished downloading and patching that other game, so I played that some while waiting for DOMO to come back up. It’s… full of really, really small text.

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Nobody is as impatient at my slow progress through Dream of Mirror Online as I am. I wanted this weekend to be all about the Alchemy. I lost my Alchemy levels (as well as Thief level 24) in the Great Rollback Disaster, and I wanted to make that all back, but mostly the Alchemy.

I have this grand design for my weapon upgrades. I REALLY want to make my own level 20 weapon. The bonuses for a crafted Hunting Knife made with Excellent-grade materials make it a FAR better bargain than the one you can buy from a vendor. Plus, its Earth bonus damage would make it a great companion to my level 23 Damp Knife, which carries a Water bonus.

The only thing standing between me and my new dagger is gaining level 10 in Alchemy. Any player can craft things up to level 9. To make the dagger, I’d have to allocate Commoner points to extend my Alchemy cap to level 19, and also extend my Meditation skill to 19, as the recipe takes Blue Powder, which cannot be gathered by anything less. I was lucky to get a Commoner’s Spring from doing the Drill Sergeant quest in Swan Lake Basin, which gave me five points to allocate, and I got another Commoner point from handing a refined Dino Oil to an NPC in Copperhorn Mountain. Dino Oil is refined from 20 Dried Lizards found off the many and various lizards of Copperhorn Mountain; and so I spent most of Sunday lurking about there.

I came across the Sandstone Lady Bug after turning in my Dino Oil for a Commoner Spring

There’s no better way to really get to know a place in DOMO than by getting the zone’s kill quests. The kill quests for Copperhorn Mountain are given by the Darkdale Destroyer, just up the stairs as you enter Darkdale. The mobs are, on the whole, WAY easier than the mobs in Placid Plains, and about the same level. There were lots of people there. I got a group fairly quickly and we ground out the kills — altogether fewer kills needed than in the Placid Plains quests. If you’re level 18-23, coming here might be a better idea than heading straight to the Plains. Though I did get an excellent group there the other night… I guess it always is all about the groups.

Many, many lizards, plants, moths and hedgehogs later, I hunted down the two bosses in the zone, slaughtered them, and earned the title of Darkdale Destroyer. The Darkdale Village Elder wouldn’t offer me the quest to unlock the local dungeon, so it seemed (having gotten 24 back along the way) a good idea to try and clear out some older quests and perhaps reach 25.

Trying (and failing) to solo the Treasure Map instance in the Eversun Inn Basement

I’d captured one of the Copperhorn lizards in a mirror, and my pet had hit 18 and gained a very cool magic armor buff, and I was higher level, too, so I thought that maybe this time I’d be able to take on the treasure chest at the deepest part of the Inn Basement dungeon.

Twenty minutes later, when the instance timer ran out, both Teddy and the lizard would be dead, and I’d be just a sliver of health away from joining them.

Itziar suggested I get a cask group and ask them to help. Well, I would have, but there were no cask groups around when I entered the instance. Soon, though, one showed up, and I got myself invited in. After we cleared the platform of casks, in we went (and there was another person who also needed it, so it was all good).

With friends to help, the Treasure Map instance went much better

My usual solo tactic was to do as much damage as I could without dying, run off, rest and heal, then rush back in and repeat. This tactic was too slow to win. Tanking the mobs with a level 15-24 group didn’t look like it would work too well either, but we managed to finish off the chest, the goo that came after it, and the four adds it summoned. It was a close and narrow thing, but we finally got that done and got a huge amount of experience from it.

I stayed in the group for awhile, pulling and doing some AEing. When the healer (lv 15) complained she wasn’t getting much xp with me in the group, I asked to be allowed to stay just for 10% more xp so I could reach level 25. She said okay, I leveled, gave my thanks, and headed out.

Itziar tells me the pink line joining us means this sprite and I feel a love connection. Um. I don’t think so!

I’d made back my level amd gotten another, but my alchemy was still in trouble. Crafting items with the stuff I’d harvested before the rollback had earned me alchemy level 8; when I redid those same steps after, I’d only gotten to 7. I did herding for awhile to get some more down, and made 8 on my first combine. I then did some meditation for awhile and afterward made some Iron Axes, level 18 weapons for Mercenaries from a level 8 recipe, but didn’t manage to hit 9 again.

So, today while at work: Meditate for some more Red Powders, and keep making weapons until I hit the Holy Grail of level 10. Then use advanced meditation to obtain some Blue Powders, make my Hunting Knife, do some kill quests to level it up, then upgrade it to a level 25 dagger.

That should be enough for one night…

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They say you can’t polish a turd, but I beg to differ. Placid Plains is full of Premier Pupu, so, yum for that. After spending a good hour doing alchemy (now level 8 from making level 0 recipes; today I will make level 8 recipes to 10 and beyond, hopefully), I thought I’d track down the fairy that supposedly gives a quest to upgrade my flying speed in Collingwood City. Which is smack-dab in the middle of high level zones, so it was with some care that I flew there.

It’s a really confusing city full of ramps and islands and teleporters, and I had no luck finding this fairy. The only quest givers I could find were ones that wanted me to kill level 40-ish mobs.

I decided to head back to Placid Plains and finish the last Raymond quest. Raymond just stands around at an intersection, like NPCs often do, begging people to kill various mobs for cash, experience, loot and titles. In DOMO, you can level by solo grinding trash mobs, but if you’re planning on doing something like that, you might as well get the quest for it, and these sorts of quests are repeatable, so why not?

This particular one sent me off to kill Premier Pupus.

I was glad to see that they were just pigs. They were too high level for my level 20 monster mirror, so I used the mirror to capture a giant hedgehog. I figured out how to make my teddy bear pet tank, so I’d send the two pets in and use my Musician skills to keep Teddy alive and in mana, then I’d pull it to me with Bolt from the Blouse, follow up with a Super Stab and a Pilfer and then auto-attack it to death.

Since I can heal my pet but not myself, this worked out a LOT better than me tanking the whole way.

DOMO tip: When someone says they are ‘flagged’, it doesn’t mean that they have fulfilled certain requirements to enter a difficult zone. It means they have pressed the little button with a flag on it below the chat window and clicked the checkbox for looking for a group. When someone is flagged this way, they can be added to a group from a different zone. You can also choose the title “Please add me to your team” so people walking past you can see you’re looking.

I’d flagged myself while stabbing poo, hoping that I’d find someone else killing poo and we’d be able to kill them faster together, or at least, form an autoloot group.

DOMO tip: Mobs drop their loot right in the world, but it only lasts for half a minute or so before decaying. If you’re killing monsters very quickly, you might not have a chance to grab the loot before it poofs. The usual solution is to ask the zone for an autoloot group. Everyone groups up, sets the loot order to automatic by team member, and all loot is automatically picked up. The team members continue to solo out of sight of each other so they don’t share xp or loot.

Instead, I got an invite to come to “pt for mbops”.

I moused over his picture to see that he was in Phoenix Tower, which I vaguely remembered as one of the places a flying pig hid when I was doing the flying quests, so I knew it was in Swan Lake Basin, several zones from where I was in Placid Plains.

But what the heck were “mbops”? Or “fbops”?

There’s nothing that’s going to stop me from going someplace new — the Bartle test pegs me as a strong Explorer type, and it’s not wrong. I headed back to and through Eversun City and off to Swan Lake and the dungeon.

Phoenix Tower is not much to look at from the outside, but from the inside, well, it felt like home.

I zoned in, and there was a group training mobs to the zone, and this guy who was afk at zone in got killed by those mobs.

It brought tears of joy to my eyes. EverQuest, I missed you so much.

I don’t point out these similarities of DOMO to EQ with sarcasm, but with respect, and I’m being totally honest. Yes, DOMO is HARD. It has real penalties for screwing up. You do not level particularly fast. It is a VERY social game, and leveling up is NOT the primary goal. Chatting, making friends, crafting, working on outfits and such, and teaming up for challenging group content — that was the purpose of the ORIGINAL EverQuest and is the purpose of DOMO. The fact that so many of their game mechanics are straight out of pre-PoP EQ when all conventional wisdom says that people want to level quickly to get to some end game and skip any social or group content is just amazing.

Most of the group was reluctant to actually come to the dungeon until we had a Doctor (healer) and Mercenary (tank). It’s true that any character can take either or both of these jobs, but doctors, especially, have a hard time of it. Just like in EQ, groups are reluctant to have more than one healer because they need space for more dps — especially AoE dps. This requires docs to have spent heavily on their group healing skills — the “froggy” skills, since they take a small frog as a material component, as opposed to the single target heals, which are far more useful, since those can be used to fill out subjobs. It also means they have to have a lot of time healing for groups, and healers in DOMO, as in every game that swears by the Holy Trinity, are first to be blamed when things go bad.

DOMO tip: The Holy Trinity are the three classes in EQ-like MMOs that form the basis of any group, and consist of a beefy class built to take damage, a healer to heal that damage, and a buffing class of some sort. In DOMO, the Trinity is Mercenary, Doctor and Musician. Play one of these jobs if you want groups all the time.

Once we’d gathered, it was time to head down to the Male Birds of Paradise, past the Female Birds of Paradise. I knew if I waited long enough, I’d find out what “mbops” and “fbops” were!

Once down deep enough, we pulled mobs here and there until the group leader suggested I start pulling.

Oh. So THAT’S why I got added to the team. They wanted a puller. Sigh.

Pulling, as in EQ, means gathering mobs and TRYING NOT TO DIE. I personally don’t find it much fun, but if it gets groups, I’ll do it. There was another group in the vicinity and we two pullers were trying to stay out of each other’s way. The group was chatting and stuff, and nobody noticed when all the healer’s spells were in cooldown just as I brought a big bunch of mobs, so that ended in a couple of deaths.

And later on, I was watching a movie and not paying as much attention as I probably should have been, and began pulling mobs to the other group… which got me a kinda curious tell from my own group. Oops.

Ding 24, though. One level before I switch from my Level 3 Pocket Knife to my Level 2 Hunting Dagger… I don’t actual OWN a Hunting Dagger, though. That’s what I am building alchemy up for. Once it hits 10, I can make my Hunting Dagger, level that quickly to level 2, upgrade it, and it will be waiting for me when I hit level 25. After that, my faithful Pocket Dagger can enjoy retirement in my bank vault, while I alternate Hunting Dagger with Damp Dagger through level 33.

Met LOTS of friends in game last night as well! Itzier, Gamerio and Ghostie, great to meet you :)))

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Computer on, online, but AFK while at work today. Today, while I am converting bond letters at work, my DOMO character will be doing a LOT of harvesting — this is designed in to DOMO, it’s not an exploit. In fact, DOMO will even log you out when you’ve harvested as much as you can, which is nice of them.

I’m ALSO downloading a very large MMO that I can’t talk about yet. So, busy day for me, busy day for my computer…

So anyway, /afk, back in a few hours.

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