2008 has been an absolutely amazing year for MMOs, and my personal progress through them.

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 :)

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!)

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.

Taking on the Giant Butterfly outside the bandit camp in Copperhorn Mountain

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…