My lizard, Leapster

When you think about it, Fae are just the right size to be eaten in one gulp by the EverQuest 2 jumping lizard mounts. I’m too terrified to dismount, and so I leap from place to place within Lesser Faydark, death from above for the invader Tier’Dal who nonetheless managed to drag me from my mount last night and slaughter me.

Experience is slow in the Lesser Fay. Every EQ2 story I read tells of people hitting 60, 70, 85 before they realize it, in just a couple days, but I’ve been working on this zone for months, with breaks to do quests and some seasonal events. Clearly, this hasn’t been my main game.

I cashed in all my station points to buy a month of “gold” membership, then almost immediately went back to Star Trek Online. STO, though, has become a mission grind to earn tokens from the three Borg space special task forces to equip my starship with the best gear. I’m just six missions from earning new engines. I’ll finally be able to lose that worrying plasma leak.

The USS Manchester is ALMOST de-Borged

Last night was the first night of Star Trek Online’s “free to play”. Everything was busy. The STFs were AWFUL. One went pretty well, but the other two — I don’t want to insult anyone by suggesting that they have no idea what they are doing. But some of these people had no idea what they were doing.

All the STF missions have the main thing you’re supposed to be doing, and some other things that someone needs to be in charge of. In “The Cure” space mission, someone needs to destroy the ships that the Borg shipyards keep launching while the rest of the group is destroying the shipyards. When a shipyard is destroyed, the other shipyards send out more powerful ships. This role is usually handled by a science ship, who can keep the NPC at the center healed. The rest of the group heads back to the center after each shipyard to take on the tough ships before proceeding.

Imagine my shock when four of the five of us stayed behind to take on the easy ships while I was the only one working on a shipyard. Imagine my further shock when they proved unable to kill them all speedily.

I guess this is my hint that I should be working on elite missions, except most of the elite missions I have tried have been with people just as clueless, except the enemies are much stronger.

And the reason I say nothing is because I don’t want to be “that player” who makes all the other people in a random pickup group feel bad by dissecting their mistakes.

New Freeport

I have a friend who is so into Rift. “You have to come back!” he said. “Ember Isles is amazing; the new warfront is awesome; the instant adventures are great!” I want to come back and see all this! Then he started playing SWTOR.

I really still want to come back. Problem is when I log in, I have to figure out all the new stuff; seems the soul trees change every time. I have to remember how to solo and how to group. I guess the penalties for getting it wrong aren’t that high, and the new instant adventure thing could help get my feet wet quickly. I should check it out.

Tonight, though, after working on some Spotify playlists I wanted to get saved, my goal was to see how many MMOs I could get working again. Seems EQ2, STO and DCUO had all decided within a space of days to just give up and refuse to work.

EQ2 I got working via downloading it from scratch. I did the same with DCUO. Since I wanted to play EQ2 and DCUO was taking up my main account, I logged into my second EQ2 account, intending to take my 80 Inquisitor and do some Freeport exploring. Instead, I took my 71 necromancer out.

Her skills and gear weren’t impacted at all by the silver account status; she just didn’t have any amazing stuff. You don’t focus on these things when you’re still leveling, after all, as every spell, ability and piece of gear will just be replaced.

Anyway. Yesterday I couldn’t continue on to the new gliding mount on my berserker, Scatter, as she’s only 58 and 60 was needed. Nothing was holding Adora back; in fact with my vast selection of pets, none of the encounters were any trouble at all (granted, most of them were gray). Far sooner than it’d taken to get the leaper mount, I had the wind Komodo mount. It’s… a little hard to control. I nearly glided right off the Kingdom of Sky, so I took the spires back down to the Commonlands and went to have a look at Freeport.

Aside from floating towers spinning slowly overhead everywhere you look, there’s no zone lines any more! All four parts of Freeport and one zone now. The whole city looks like it was brought into sharp focus and saturated. Very pretty. The EQ2 character models have always been a little too realistic; now that extends to the architecture.

I still haven’t _done_ anything in the game. There’s a huge gap between futzing around looking at stuff and getting ready to group. The latter takes real commitment.

T'pral at the library computers

Someday, I’d like to be invited to Starfleet Academy to _teach_. But this time I came to learn — about duty officers. I’d played with them a little bit on my main. There’s a tantalizing little minigame involved. Various missions require various skills and temperaments. The better your duty officers match the requirements, the better the result.

I’d played with the duty officer system just before STO went free to play. After it went free to play, I couldn’t log in any more. So… just as with EQ2, I deleted everything and downloaded everything again. And this time, I got right in. Weird.

I just plan to keep current on duty officer missions, at least with my Vulcan captain, until I figure out what I want to do in the game.

At least it works now, though.

Back in black! Er, yellow!

Couldn’t get into DCUO past few days. I downloaded it anew day before yesterday and still no luck! Today, DCUO dropped a massive 5GB patch and afterward I could play just fine.

I didn’t do anything. Just flew around and remembered I’d forgotten how to do anything else.

Next up: Rift and Wizard101. And then I’ll have enough MMOs to keep me busy for awhile.

Rapture Raptor!

I do WANT to play Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I WILL play it. Just… not right now. I’m not in a good place with MMOs at the moment. See, I’ve just spent a month playing Skyrim, and it’s left quite an impression. I just don’t know if I can play a tightly scripted MMO when I’ve just spent 130 hours exploring a world.

There’s just too much hype around the game right now. The hype makes it impossible for me to consider the title calmly, because, being the contrarian I am, I’d be inclined to hate it. It can’t possibly live up to its hype, but why should that matter? Someday I’ll sit down and watch all the Star Wars movies, or maybe play KotOR again, and then I know I’ll want to play SWTOR. Or someone will want to form a static group — because it doesn’t even matter what game it is, meeting once a week for a static group is reason enough to play anything. My time in DDO proves that.

Anyway, EQ2 was my game tonight. I’d had to stop playing months ago when some sort of driver upgrade kept resetting my video card every minute or so, making the game unplayable. When EQ2 went F2P last week I deleted entirely all my old installations and made a new one from scratch — and it worked wonderfully!

BUT… EQ2 F2P is not EQ2. It’s some different beast. I was grandfathered in to a “Silver” account, but my characters were too far advanced in abilities and gear to use much of their stuff. I understood that EQ2 wasn’t ever going to be playable entirely for free once past the very beginning levels, but I’d been hoping.

I couldn’t get into my account details (for some reason) to check out my subscription plans. SOE customer service just tonight cleared that up. I got in game and blew the rest of my Station Cash on a one month gold subscription. 31 days to see what’s happened to EQ2 since the last time I played. A long, long time ago.

Why do I need to carry messages back and forth?

All that time ago, I’d been working on the quest for the one “flying” mount available to a level 58 berserker, the leaper. This quest starts at a fossil dig in Butcherblock Mountains, and involves bringing a fossilized egg to life. There’s so much back and forth couriering between two close NPCs that finally one of them lampshades the absurdity by wondering loudly why the OTHER NPC doesn’t just COME OVER and talk to him!

The quickened egg is used to summon a fully grown “sailraptor” into Norrath, which instantly imprints and just begs to be jumped all over the zone. How could I possibly refuse? I could not.

The next mount, the glider, requires level 60. The flying mount requires level 85… but Fae, such as my dear Scatter, can actually gain true flight without needing a mount at all. So that’s something cool.

I don’t think I’m getting Scatter to 85 in 31 days, though. To be honest, I’m not even sure how I’d go about soloing a berserker. Fae are hardly the best race for it. I just rolled her up for fun when the race became available and never expected her to get out of her teens. Now look at her.

Scene from a WoW raid

There’s probably worthwhile studies to be done on the MMORPG phenomenon. The games of the genre are designed to keep you interested and engaged for thousands of hours. The game itself is a potential setting for the formation of a long-lasting community that could extend far beyond the game realm. MMOs have provoked real life violence. Prisoners are rumored to have to play them to support repressive regimes by bilking money from Westerners.

More than near any other sort of video game, MMOs have gravitas in the real world and a transformative effect on their players.

“What Gamers Want: Researchers Develop Tool To Predict Player Behavior” advertises itself as a study of how gamers play MMOs. With such a study, the authors claim, “we are able to predict what a player in a game will do based on his or her previous behavior, with up to 80 percent accuracy”.

Intriguing. What kind of person crafts, or plays the market, or focuses on PvP? Are some people likelier to become community leaders? Who likes the follower role — are these people the healers? There’s hundreds of questions that could be asked.

This study, however, doesn’t focus on the players at all, really. It focuses solely on achievement. Not in a general sense, either: it’s a study on how people earn achievement rewards in World of Warcraft.

From the press release: “Specifically, the researchers collected data on 14,000 players and the order in which they earned their achievement badges. The researchers then identified the degree to which each individual achievement was correlated to every other achievement.”

So, this study didn’t focus on actual player achievements, like leadership, community building, teamwork, life/game balance, or anything. It correlated the Blizzard-defined achievement rewards, conditions that Blizzard chose because it was something they could track and would help keep players in the game by giving them specific goals.

This paper doesn’t study MMO players. It studies Blizzard’s efforts to guide WoW players.

Compared to 2008′s study of EverQuest II players, where they used extensive logs that recorded every action players took in the game, this WoW achievement-focused study looks weak.