West Karana

After we cleared Protector’s Realm tonight, we said, hey, what the heck, let’s pop over to the Shard of Hate and see what we can pull from the place. Since the last time we went, a lot of the Epic x3 mobs have been changed to Epic x4. Why is this important? When an Epic x3 is fought by a four group raid… it drops no loot. This probably explained our abysmal drops the first time we we went. This time, it was fine. We got several chests, some masters, some nice pants — just from trash. The first boss dropped a VERY nice bow which could have been made specifically for a bard (and a bard did win it!), and Davic tells me that mob also drops the most perfect bard weapon in the world, Marrow’s Song; same delay as our epic, boosts our run speed song and our proc song; full of all the stats we love best…. But for some reason, this uber bard weapon which, let’s face it, is nearly as good as our epic, is usable by ALL scouts PLUS guardian and berserkers. Any non-bard who even so much as bids on this in jest… should be hung, feet first, outside the gates of Freeport or Qeynos, exposed to the ridicule of the crowds. I don’t have the DKP to even consider such a weapon, but I’ll bid what I can just so nobody gets the idea bards don’t want this for some reason :) Of course, when bards bid against bards the bids go up by ones or twos :)

Naturally, when bards THINK they’re gonna be bidding against other bards, they might make their first bid too high. I bid five points on Nox Noctis… and won it. The delay is too fast, but it will do until I get Marrow’s Song, I guess :) Could have more stats, but the boosts to double attack and dps make it a good replacement for my Jade Reaver, I hope. I’ll still have to woodshed it some to see if it really improves my dps.

We killed a lot more trash than normal for their random drops, but only attempted and defeated the two Tier 1 bosses.

Tobold noted that this is the eighth anniversary of the Ruins of Kunark, EverQuest’s first and (arguably) best expansion. The designers had somehow figured out all the things that were right about EverQuest, and made more of all that, while adding things we had never seen. That is what a game’s first expansion is for; it’s a letter to the players saying, we watched you play, we took notes, now here’s what you wanted. The game at launch and the game at first expansion provide the datapoints from which to plot the game’s ultimate direction. What sort of direction did the Burning Crusade give to WoW? A further emphasis on high level grouping and raiding? Anyway, happy birthday, EQ, and as a present, a screenshot from one of my first groups in Kunark, fighting goblins in the Lake of Ill Omen.

Massively’s Kyle Horner reports that Pirates of the Burning Sea is dropping 7 of its 11 servers, a merge of Vanguard-ian proportions. Liz Strickland’s server, Guadaloupe, is among those under the axe, so I’ll have to choose another server; leaning toward Antigua. This move should serve to concentrate the players and make PvP more fun. Personally, I always ran from PvP. PotBS is a decent game, but real life eats up a lot of my time, and if I could only have time to play one MMO, in the end, it wasn’t going to be PotBS. I don’t feel every MMO needs to address every kind of gameplay, but once I figured out how to win the NPC battles (board as soon as possible, defeat enemy crew in melee, loot ship, rinse and repeat), it became dull. I was nowhere near skilled enough to win the whole shooting at each other game, but boarding would always come through for me.

I have more, but it’s time to head to work :)

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too — my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning.

Honestly, though, you can’t become the person you were, who didn’t know what was around the next corner. Not in a game you have already played. You have to move forward. And so this is my challenge. It is difficult, INCREDIBLY difficult, but will leave you with those same sorts of memories that you had when you first got into MMO gaming.

Pick a MMO — any MMO — and uninstall every other MMO from your hard drive. Additionally, pay no attention to any new MMOs that may be coming out. None of this trying it for a month to see how it goes. Just make it a game you have not played before. The game itself doesn’t have to be new — just you. It could be fun to pick up a really old game like Asheron’s Call and just jump into the deep end, or pick up Age of Conan and wade through blood for twelve months.

One player. One game. One year.

If you run out of content, bug the devs in the forums about expansions and run through the game again. Meet people like yourself. Form new friendships, see things and do things that dabblers will never see or do. You almost certainly did this once with another MMO and now you remember how much fun that was. So do it again. Here’s some suggestions.

Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Mythos, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Chronicles of Spellborn (assuming it ever releases), EVE Online. I deliberately leave out EQ2, WoW and LotRO, since they are popular enough that there’s no mystery or chance of discovery to them at all (especially WoW, but then, you probably already played that game anyway). If you’re daying, you might even try Star Wars: Galaxies. Don’t believe the common wisdom about games. People absolutely thrive on trashing games they don’t like, even though other people may enjoy the game (in which case, they feel, those people are WRONG and should be playing a different game). It doesn’t matter what people say. You’re going to choose your game and through thick and thin, when you decide to sit down a spend a few hours in an MMO, that’s the one you will choose.

MMOs cannot be fully enjoyed by dabblers. Commitment is part of the attraction.

Second step to this is to blog about it. If you aren’t a blogger, Blogspot and Wordpress (West Karana runs on Wordpress) will set you up, for free, no cost to you, in about a minute. Day 1 of the new game: Create a character and just write about how that goes. Win or suck, this is your game for a year. So keep a journal online, and in five years when you look back upon this year fondly, you’ll remember everything that happened.

The question is — could you play a single MMO for an entire year in order to get that same sort of feeling for a new game that you did for the one you remember?

Me? Well, I’m still loving EQ2. But there will come a time, maybe this year, maybe next, when I *will* take this challenge. Currently, Chronicles of Spellborn and Champions Online (neither with any sort of release date) are at the top of my list. I expect AoC and WAR to be too dominated by griefers to be much fun, but I’ll be trying out both games just to see.

It’s been a little over a week since I started blogging over at Massively, and while I am really enjoying myself, I think I still have a lot to learn about story ideas. It’s all about the page views, right, and what brings in the eyeballs better than our dear old friend, porn. So I suggested this to the editors, and they pretty much informed me that they already had plenty of Second Life coverage, and maybe I could work on this piece about “Shoulder armor through the ages — how high is too high?”.

“No no no!” I cried. Well, typed. “What if I just go to various games, undress my own characters, and make a calendar from those pictures?”

Blank stares. Let me give you an idea: Concrete floors have more expression. So, grumbling beneath my breath, I vowed to do that article and show them just how good an idea it was. Here, then, for your enjoyment: Massively Multiplayer Women. (They didn’t like the title, either… hadn’t they ever seen Age of Conan!!!???)

City of Villains: Sometimes, it’s not what you wear, but how you wear it. Black Oyl was a petroleum researcher at Texxon when she fell into a tanker full of $110/barrel crude. This would have been fatal if the light of the brightest Gamma Ray Burst ever recorded hadn’t hit Earth at that precise moment. Black Oyl emerged from the tanker wearing a dollar’s worth of oil on a five dollar body and fights oil executives by seeing that their stretch limousines are detailed poorly in the Houston luxury car wash.

Dungeon Siege 2: “But DS2 isn’t even an MMO!” pointed out the editors. Always blocking my flow with details! You’ve heard Chalice Eversong’s story a thousand times, it’s the kind of growing-up story everyone can relate to. You and a friend get drunk one night and sign up as mercenaries for an evil army, and even though you really suck at fighting and get your butt kicked by tree branches, somehow, it turns out you’re a legendary hero and are the only one that can defeat your boss. And then your boyfriend dies, you get captured by tree people, forced to do menial labor all the time, blah blah blah, it’s happened to all of us. Chalice just wants to show that just because you’re prophesied to save the world doesn’t mean you can’t let your hair down with your party once in awhile. Hey, that’s why it’s called a PARTY!

EverQuest 2: “I’m NOT doing this!” yelled Nashuya. “Oh, yes you are,” I said, as I stowed her armor, bit by bit, in her pack. “This is a GREAT idea for an article, and you’re gonna just have to grin and bear it!” This was before my editors said that actually, it was a crappy idea for an article. Nashuya’s blue-tinged skin positively glows in the light of the corpse-flames of Fallen Gate. Nashuya protests too much. Way back when EQ2 first came out, player characters were assumed to be shipwreck survivors without a penny — or armor — to their names, and looked just like this until they did some quick armor quests. Now new characters come complete with armor, weapons, and a selection of promising spells and combat abilities. It’s just like being back on newbie island, Nash!

Sins of a Solar Empire: Yeah, I know. Don’t start with me, okay? The Kor Battleship “EDS Eliza” is two kilometers of the meanest hunk of ship in three systems. She appears here clad in nothing but ten meter thick electro-strong neutronium plating. She’ll give ya the ride of your life and then kick you back to that ice planet with the arctic research lab from which you came.

Dream of Mirror Online: No, this ISN’T my character. DOMO characters are CHILDREN. What kind of pervert ARE you? This is one of DOMO’s Mirror Kings. Yup. In DOMO, even the guys look hot. Boys and girls alike can look forward to what they can become. And, yeah, this may look like some high-end animated cartoon, but this is actually what DOMO looks like. Pretty cool, huh?

EverQuest: Relaxing in the guild hot tub, Vah Shir beastlord Shinai Oftheancients lets her guard down for this candid shot. Her name…. well, that’s a long story. See, we had this guy in the guild that wanted every single weapon that dropped that he could use. The weapon he wanted more than anything else in the world ever was one called the Shinai of the Ancients, which dropped in the Plane of Time. So prior to every PoT run, he’d send tells to every other person who could wield it and ask them to let him have it. He would also helpfully suggest to officers that he deserved to be given it outright, should it drop. So I made this beastlord, named her Shinai, got her to level twenty so she could have a last name, got an officer to invite her into the guild and proceeded to wonder, loudly, where my weapon dropped. Fun times!

Mythos: Wuvwy Angel is just a large cyclops in a small world. Since, in Mythos, player characters are monsters (gremlins, satyrs, cyclops and most monstrous of all, humans), Wuvwy can’t complain about not being understood. She just has trouble getting people to see her soft, feminine side. Me? I’ve never seen anyone prettier. Nobody can wear a torn nightshirt like she does! Now, put down the gun, please? Oh yeah — open beta soon, guys.

Vanguard: Huh? This IS undressed! In the Victorian-age sensibilities of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the best skin is covered skin. Tipa is a fantastic bard; you might even say she’s outstanding in her field. Get it? She’s actually out STANDING in her FIELD! *Cough* sorry. Am I done yet? Oh, one more?

Pirates of the Burning Sea: Liz Strickland is dressed for the Caribbean SUN, but what she likes best is the Caribbean FUN. Stepping off her Bermuda sloop, the first thing she asks the dockmaster is where the heck the disco is in this rat-infested excuse for an outpost of the glorious United Kingsom. When the sun goes down in the British Empire, baby, the lights come UP.

—

Well, anyway, you can see what a brilliant idea this was. The editors just don’t understand me. Tomorrow, another article they rejected: Implementing the I WIN! button in World of Warcraft.

From a comment on Tobold’s excellent post about the tank shortage in the World of Warcraft (or more accurately, the Protection-spec’d Warrior shortage):

I’ve been playing WOW for 2+ years now and everytime I see pvp hurt pve, it makes me wish there was a viable pve alternative to WOW.

I happen to think there are plenty of viable PvE alternatives to WoW. Not least among them EQ2, but also LotRO (the breakout MMO of 2007, by anyone’s definition viable), Pirates of the Burning Sea, FFXI Online and literally hundreds of smaller MMOs, most of them free to play, most of them with very dedicated and helpful player bases. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Vanguard these days.

It’s not that there aren’t viable alternatives to WoW. It’s that WoW has become a game so unusual and disconnected from normal gameplay that the MMOs that have proceeded among more normal paths seem bizarre to those who have played no other games.

Reading Tobold’s blog is like glimpsing an alien world (and I have played WoW). Grinding badges? Vending-machine epics? Honor as a currency? Doing highly repetitive activities for vague reasons? In essence and as far as I can see, removing the entire adventure component of the game?

WoW started as a very normal game — like EQ and DAoC with all the boring bits removed, and lots of help, no choices to make, very easy and casual and cartoony and really, nothing but fun. I really, really enjoyed my time in WoW, and I met a lot of really good people and a few jerks. So don’t call me a WoW-hater because I am not.

But somehow, somewhere, it got twisted. The fun bits were replaced with a race to the grind. Maybe because I haven’t played since before BC came out (I left when AQ was opening), that I just am not hearing about the fun, but I have several WoW blogs in my feed and am just distressed at what I read. People do this — voluntarily? The only ones who seem to be having fun are the ones that are going counter to the current direction of the game — the ones who are leveling slowly and hitting all the old content, as outdated as it may be.

What will they do when they finally hit the level cap?

It was these cries from WoW players for a viable alternative in the face of MANY real, viable alternatives that they blithely dismiss that was the basis for the post I made wondering if WAR would finally be the game that could wean people from their unhealthy obsession with WoW — a game that was supposed to be a haven for casual players who just wanted to have some quick fun, but has become exactly the sort of behemoth for which it was once the best alternative.

If there’s any overriding purpose to my blog, it’s to show that the other alternatives are damn fun in their own rights.

You CAN leave WoW. But you can’t go blindly into a game, kill ten rats and declare it boring. That won’t work. You can’t do any MMO truly alone. Seek out the community, join a guild and ask questions and get an idea of what the game means to those who love it. Then you’ll get a real sense for it. And then, maybe, you’ll find there are viable alternatives to WoW.

Nothing like the warm trade winds blowing off the water to get you excited about spending a lot of time in a stuffy house with people who hate you trying to find out who hates your employer the most.

Ah, the life of the free trader.

The man who is not what he seems… the person all too willing to believe he is being betrayed; and the one who is not so quickly convinced. Will I ever see these people again?

It’s a dangerous place. Perhaps you would be safer if you returned to England. But no, the money is too good, yes?

I do like the free trader quests. The next one in the line had me salvaging a deal gone horribly wrong. It was okay, though. A little withdrawal from petty cash along with a few stern words set that right.

If only more of the quests were like that. If only they all were!

Not all quests go so well. These Mayans, for instance, were entirely unreasonable. I thought we could do some trading, maybe build a small resort there, lead some hunting parties into the jungle, and give these natives good jobs, like dishwashers or room cleaners — they could even staff the shops!

They would not deal with me! Are not my doubloons as good as anyone else’s? Because I came alone, without my first mate by my side, I forgave them their insult and let them live.

Those masks they wear would fetch a good price in London. I really must see to obtaining some.

This is a quick fort defense a couple of society mates and I did. How do you color your sails? That’s probably in a book somewhere.

To be honest, I haven’t touched Pirates since I got accepted into Delusions of Grandeur. Raiding and working on my epic takes all my Pirates time, and my non-MMO time is spent playing Rock Band and Audiosurf and Phun and other littler games. I do want to get back into it; it’s a great game, just… not as good as EQ2.

Nothing alike, really nothing alike at all, they can’t be compared, I just have so much to do in EQ2 and nothing in particular I need to do in Pirates.

They all think you’re a jerk, Mr. Burrows. But not me, I like you lots. About 350 doubloons worth of like, please, and mind, I don’t take credit.

I have ships throughout the Caribbean. One down in Georgetown, one in Port Royal, one in Bluefields and one in Sisal. I gathered 120 small pennants and turned them in for a Dolphyn ketch, that I turned around and sold for 6000 doubloons using my mysterious auction house powers to find out where they sold best.

I wish I had something else worth selling…

*Really* quick update. I have posts waiting to finish writing about the economy in Pirates of the Burning Sea and other adventures in that world, plus starting the troubador and tradeskilling epics in EverQuest 2. The Troubador epic is apparently called the Ayonian Axe (like your guitar is an axe, get it?) — I’m busily doing the Poet’s Palace access quest so I can continue on it — and the tradeskill epic is an earring whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s the same as that EQ1 Luclin-era FT3 earring every alt had, and is made from the exact same combination of crafted items, one for each trade. Yes, as a crafter, you will need the help of every other kind of crafter to finish your epic. The cloaks are just a little extra reward. Someone linked the armorer cloak, and so here it is via the dressing room for your viewing pleasure. Above, are the first things I made when I got online after doing my PotBS crafting for the day — mannequins, just wearing some Nightchord on the left and Melodic Xegonite on the right. I don’t know where the boots for the Melodic got off to, so I tossed Vhalen’s on the dummy. I never did get Nightchord boots even after doing Labs hundreds of times.

That armorer cloak:

Again, sorry for the tiny news items; I’ve been playing and not writing :)

Later: Earring of the Solstice is the tradeskill epic. The armorer cloak above grants +1.4% success chance to armorcrafting. And as a sanity check to those people who were loudly complaining that their epic quests had not been found within a few hours of server up — GROW UP. ALL had been found by the time I went to bed, and compared to the difficulty of even the EASIEST quests in EQ1 when Kunark went live the first time, these are NOTHING.

Should also be noted that the epics don’t seem to require high levels of RoK faction, as was widely expected they would.

I got this pristine xegonite melodic armor when I turned 62 in July, 2006, as a gift from my former and current guild leader, Xagain

Pirates? What pirates?

The good guys (bottom) prepare to liberate a fort, sink a fleet and quell a rebellion in Red Tide

Goodbye, Blanche DuBois. You always knew the asylum awaited you at the close of your mad, drunker life.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has become a place to go for many of us in Clan of Shadows when the raid is full. While it would have been nice if people had randomly decided to join the French on Bonny so I wouldn’t have to reroll, in the end most of the people gathered on the side of the British on the Guadaloupe server.

Liz Strickland at character select

It’s all somewhat funny, as this is exactly how I ended up restarting on the Faydark server in EQ2 and abandoned my original characters on Antonia Bayle. My EQ1 guild at the time, Viking Alliance, chose Faydark because they heard it was the de facto European server (and they were a European guild. Being unemployed at the time gave me the ‘freedom’ to group and raid in the mornings and leave my afternoons and evenings free).

And so was born Liz Strickland, Freetrader for the British Empire. I changed all her look from how Blanche had been dressed aside from the hat and boots that I loved. Perhaps… Liz sunk Blanche’s ship and fished these from the wreckage?

The Lady of Guadaloupe and her crew

Aside from some stuttering immediately after zoning, there were no problems with lag and no disconnections at all. About midway through the tutorials, I decided to see how the game performed at max settings — 1680×1050 instead of the default 1024×768, with all the graphics bumped up and it was smooth as Havana rum.

I completed the tutorial and the first few missions and made it to level 5 in about half the time it took to reach level 3 on Bonny. Once you get used to the controls and learn some basic strategies on fighting — separate the enemy, close and board as soon as the enemy has been weakened enough, never turn through the wind in battle, let your NPC allies (if you have any) engage the enemy first — the early missions, at least, aren’t hard.

By the time I’d finished, the raiding was over on EQ2 and we nearly had a full group with which to take on the Red Tide.

This is the first group mission, and the quest giver even helpfully suggests doing it multiple times until everyone has gotten the various nice loot items that drop there. So, we did it twice. Not for loot, but because we failed one of the mission objectives.

There’s a whole list of them.

Looking seaward from Port Jenny

It’s a night mission, which means your accuracy is down and your shots don’t travel as far. I was reminded to order my crew to focus on Gunnery — speed and accuracy in weapons — to help make up the difference.

Thirteen ships patrol the waters outside a fort held by a villain who is brutalizing those who live there. There are twin missions — one to retake the fort by rousing the inhabitants against their master, and keep the master from blowing the fort up. The sea mission it to destroy every enemy ship and allow not even one to escape; then when the fort’s master makes his own run for it, sink him and his allies.

The tide here is red, but the blood isn’t ours.

Afterward, I worked on a couple smaller solo missions and began the Freetrader quest line, which brings me from far Port Jenny to Port Royal in Jamaica, a very, very long trip that I began this morning.

The wind was against me so I am having to tack through the Caribbean; I’ve been attacked by pirates twice (and ran from them both, I’m no idiot). After about twenty minutes, I had to unfortunately leave for work and docked at a Spanish port (Santo Domingo? Maybe…)

Tonight, I’ll finish my trip to Port Royal and see what kind of price I can get for the 20 units of wood I have in my ship’s hold. I’m not entirely sure selling my incredibly valuable wood at Port Royal is a great idea, considering it is due to be sunk by an earthquake, but the trip will at least give me a substantial amount of goods and experience, and a new ship besides.

Which… I will have to sail all through the Caribbean once again because my warehouse, gravel pit and wood lot are at the other side of the sea. I’ll have to finish up my missions there and move my operation to someplace a little more central, I think.

My second day playing was far more successful than my first. The game still reminds me strongly of EvE Online, but in a good way. Unfortunately, since I am playing on my son’s account, this won’t be included in my Station Pass. I’ll probably have to restart once more unless Flying Labs is allowing character transfers already.

The game ran almost flawlessly, aside from the stuttering after zoning I mentioned. There is a whole lot of zoning. The sea battles, while beautiful and looking fairly realistic, don’t stand out from one another. You circle your enemy looking for advantage while chipping away at their hull and sails, then close in with the anti-personnel shot and finally grapple and board and end with a crew vs crew fight that is just exactly like all the other ones. Every fight, from the lowest to the bosses that I’ve encountered thus far, plays the same way.

But the game lives at the nation vs nation warfare, the massive fleet battles, and the economy, and all this stuff is just to get you ready for the battles to come. At this time, though, no ports on the Guadaloupe server are in contention (some are threatened), so it’s hard to see how the game will change when the server begins to go to war.

So many games I played once and then never again (Vanguard, Tabula Rasa) — this one makes me want to log in again and see more. This could be the casual game I’ve been looking for — quick missions, fast leveling, graphically gorgeous, deep economy and massive fleet battles.

More on my adventures in Port Royal once I finally get there :P

In the comments to my “first glance” post for the Pirates of the Burning Sea, Rusty from Flying Labs responded to my experiences with lag and random disconnections while playing. To be fair, it was my son who was having the lag, on Rackham, and he mentioned that a lot of people were complaining about it at the time. My problem was with losing the connection. It’s possible they were related.

Rusty wrote:

I would be surprised if the lag you’re experiencing actually is because of Rackham. It’s busy, but other players are on it with no lag, and it’s running inside our tested tolerance. Noting that you’re also disconnecting from Bonny several times, is it possible there’s a problem with your router and UDP traffic? I wouldn’t normally suspect this, since CoD (excellent game, by the way) seems to be running fine, but I thought I’d check.

Oh, and for Relmstein - Our travel times are dramatically faster than Eve, and so far players delivering cargo seems to be working out.

UDP is a protocol that is used to send information that does not guarantee delivery. In the case of PotBS, my son’s problems with lag could very well be something to do with this. MMOs send you information on where you are and every other moving object in the game on a regular basis. In order to let you play smoothly, the local client has its own idea where you should be, and sends this information to the server every so often.

Apparently, for some people, the server and the client occasionally disagree, and the client takes the server’s word for where you are — and suddenly you’re back where you were five seconds ago.

My disconnections might be related — I don’t just lose the connection to the server, I lose the connection to the Internet for about thirty seconds. It’s almost like I was being hit with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. It could be that UDP packets are being held up somewhere, then delivered all at once, knocking me offline.

My guess is that some sort of routing error between my computer and the PotBS servers was causing both problems. After a few disconnections and the server itself apparently disappearing for awhile, I played the rest of the night with no problems whatsoever.

When I got home last night, my son was all smiles and grins. He’d finally passed the test of skill needed to join a prestigious online clan in Call of Duty 4 — having to kill ten opponents — real people, mind you, not AIs — in a specific death match, and to have twice as many kills as deaths.

So his night was spent learning the hand signals and call signs and sekrit words and playing maps for fun. And if he was doing that, then he wasn’t sailing the open seas as the Pirate captain, Scranton Ratskull. I had nothing better to do than catch up on the last few episodes of Jericho (AMAZING show, by the way — MUST WATCH. Can anyone NOT believe the American government would destroy half their own country if it matched their political goals?), and so after I spent a few hours copying my website to a new location, I installed Pirates of the Burning Sea.

In my list of needs, a new MMO sits just below “more hours in the day” and just above “a new hole in my skull”. It’s not as if I can refuse to even take a PEEK at new variations of the games I love, and PotBS is quite a departure from Word of Warcraft. And so Blanche DuBois, who ALWAYS depends upon the kindness of strangers, became a French freetrader on the Bonny server.

At the heart of PotBS is a slow, stately, sea battle simulator. Ever mindful of the wind, the condition of your hull and sails and the type of shot loaded in each cannon, you maneuver slowly around enemy ships — and not being too dumb, you are often outnumbered — and try to separate your opponents and having done so, blast them to splinters. Or more usually, slow them down and weaken them enough to grapple them and finish them off on board deck, hand to hand.

This is more than a little like EvE online. You have your hull damage — aft, forward, port and starboard — your guns, the need to keep at best range, destroying ships and looting cargo from the debris. You also have the depth to tactics, even more so as you try to use the wind, derelict ships and islands to force the enemy to sail where you want them to sail. An enemy tried to sail around an island with me chasing them — going against the wind — I turned away from the wind, sailed around the island the long way (but faster) and met him as he came around the point with my cannons blazing.

I guess the NPCs share something else with EvE — they aren’t all that smart, but they make up for it in numbers and having better ships. At least better than my level 1 boat.

Added to the sea adventure is an entirely standard land adventure, where you run around in port towns doing small instances and talking to NPCs with various punctuation marks floating above their heads, gathering quests and finally getting back onto the water. Not much to be said about that.

My son loved the game, but he complained about the lag. That is likely because he plays on Rackham, the second most populated server. Since the game wouldn’t let me create a French player on his account — just Pirate, like him — I chose the least populated server, Bonny, instead, and noticed no lag. I did however get disconnected several times during the night, and at one point it looked as if the server had disappeared completely. I eventually had to completely redo a quest I was doing when I got booted. They were planning on doing rolling restarts of all servers when I went to bed, so it’s possible they were dealing with problems like these.

The French players were fairly helpful to a pathetic newbie, right there with suggestions for how to talk to your trainer (the quest to talk to your trainer says to left click on him; in reality, you hit the ‘X’ key. Left clicking does nothing.)

This was only a very brief look at PotBS and I did nothing but the first few missions, so I have nothing to say about the trading, resource gathering, manufacturing, or PvP. So really, what *have* I seen?

The ship battles — first rate. The avatar combat — well, definitely not as complicated as EQ2 or even WoW, but that will certainly change with levels. The land game itself I know from reading elsewhere definitely doesn’t remain as simplistic as it seems at the start. Character customization is among the best, given that they only have to dress humans and men and women share the same bodies — and over at Mystic Worlds, I learned that women will get their own bodies at some point, so that can only get better.

I guess that’s the phrase that sticks with me after my first few hours of play — Pirates of the Burning Sea is an okay game with a fine sea battle simulator that can only get better.

At least it’s not another WoW-like grindfest. And that immediately gives it higher marks in my book.

I finally hit 31 in Rock Band last night after about a dozen duels of which I lost two.

Huh? Levels? Grinding? PvP?

Yeah, this is Rock Band. If you start exploring the Multiplayer menu in Rock Band, and avoid the unsatisfying “Band” player matching, where you and three random strangers from Xbox Live slowly come to understand why people suck, you’ll come to Tug of War and Score Duel. Score Duel was unsatisfying. Tug of War is surprisingly strategic.

You’ll rise the first few levels quickly — I was 27 after my first couple of hours. But it’s been a grind since then. I’d thought 30 was the level cap until I played someone who was 36. And so I grind. Some days it’s hard to find a group, but last night, I was getting them almost immediately, leaving me very little time to practice the quick stick twirl, which I find I am liking a lot more than the standard big spin. I saw a commercial for that new teleporting teenager movie, Jumper, and Samuel Jackson was using a big spin with this little grapple thing they use to stop people from teleporting.

So I’m a MMO player, so I guess I’ll be grinding to 50…. in Rock Band….

Vanguard: This is like Beta all over for me. In Beta, I played one day, meant to play again, never got around to it. Here, I bought the game, played one day, meant to play again, never got around to it. It’s not the bugs or lack of players or performance. It’s just TOO SIMILAR to what’s out there now. I was telling Genda the other night that I can’t see how Copernicus (from 38 Studios) can possibly succeed if they give us anything like what we already have. And that, I think, was Vanguard’s most damning failure. So, I’ll be uninstalling it. I can always reinstall it later. I just never have a free hour and figure it could best be spent playing Vanguard.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: My son got this over the weekend, he’s having a blast. He’s level sixteen or something now? Back in his level 1 ship, he can’t keep anything afloat. The lag is horrendous, but even with that, he’s having fun. He’s actually off the Xbox for hours at a time. He’s a pirate, of course, and he groups with other pirates and sails around sinking the French.

Naturally, if I play, I will have to choose the French. I have a great name: Bois Embrouille, but then I was thinking I could be Blanche DuBois, because I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.

No particular movement with my EQ2 characters: Winterwing became a 28 bruiser after doing the Nektulos Beach questline, then heading to Butcherblock to complete some of those quests. The quests are moving toward the higher level part of Butcherblock, near the Lesser Faydark zone. Soon she’ll be starting in Steamfont as I continue bringing my very first character through EoF. Dorah, my necromancer, reached level 67 as she worked through the lower Kylong Plains quests — and got her Sokokar, of course. Every single quest reward has been an enormous upgrade for her.

Huh. I wonder if I spend too much time gaming?

Anyway. Some minor news from my various gaming related interests:

EQ2: Finished Tier 2 last night (finally!) as the Overking went down quickly and painlessly. The raid leaders decided not to flag everyone who needed him in one go, instead some of us (including me!) got in this time, and the rest will go the next time. It’s more important to actually win than to try to do it all at once, but lose. We went on to do Leviathon, the hentai tentacle monster in the Chamber of Destiny (which is not that crystal emerald sphere after all, but a different place entirely), to finish Tier 3. I’d have pictures, but I sat out of that raid. Next time! Listening to the fight on guild chat was fun. People turning into fishes to grab things from the beast’s stomach… some of us sitting out did a Vault of the Eternal Sleeper run, and they were still fighting that same guy when we were done. LONG fight. I finally got Dina’s Coat of Imperious Strikes (legendary RoK scout-set bp) from the boss of VoES… I’d though that dropped only in Maiden’s, but apparently not.

Afterward, I got Dera and we did a CoA run. No masters, but Dera got a ring that procs power on heals. That was kind of embarrassing, because I wasn’t aware Inquisitors *got* heals, but a careful examination of my spell book revealed some toward the end. Who knew? That was nearly as embarrassing as finding myself suddenly in Jarsath Wastes as we were clearing. That hammer gets me into so much trouble…

I’m not questing with Dera. Instead, her final two levels are being done entirely through dungeon runs. She is now 60% through level 79. Would it be faster to quest? Yes, definitely.

Rock Band: Some of my son’s friends got Rock Band for Christmas, so we’ve been forming online bands with them — usually me on drums but sometimes lead guitar. It’s better having friendly people in the band… when I screwed up one of my solos on “Green Hills and High Tide” on Hard and failed out, they didn’t complain, I just got to try it again (and nailed it the second time). We downloaded a lot of the DLC (Downloadable Live Content). Last night I downloaded the new Hives song (for me) and the Metallica pack (for my son). I was tempted to get Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps” but didn’t. Still no Queen.

I couldn’t find any publicly available episode guides to Goong AKA Princess Hours, so when I get a moment I’ll start with those. Because you all care about Korean comedy fairy-tale soap operas? No, because you might if you knew more about it :) I wasn’t that enthused but my sister kept nagging me to watch it, so because I loves my sister, I did, and… hey, you know, this is pretty good… I checked out my Bittorrent this morning. I was drawing bits of it from Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Italy, even some from the good ol’ US. And I was amazed that out of all these fellow fans all over the world, NONE of them had the last 2.8% of the second episode.

What’s up with THAT?

As much as I like Rock Band, it’s hard to look at that Xbox as anything but a piece of white plastic crap. It’s as loud as an idling car, daily (it seems) one or more of my son’s friends goes offline suddenly because their Xbox died with the Red Ring of Dead (RRoD), and my son tells me OUR newly-purchased Xbox went halfway to RRoD once.

I just GOT that thing. It didn’t come with WiFi, the controllers are expensive and crappy, it’s just cheaply and sloppily made. Compared to the Wii and PS2, which are WAY better constructed (GRANTED they are simpler boxes)… I resent that little toad-like creature. I put up with it because I must. I’d rather have gotten a PS3.

Now that the High Def format wars are essentially over (Blu-Ray, shockingly, the winner) and the PS3 is one of the cheapest Blu-Ray players around (above and beyond its ability to play games), I’m thinking of replacing it. But backwards compatibility with my older PS2 games is vital.

Unfortunately, Sony REMOVED backward compatibility with their new, cheap 20 Gb machines. And the 80 Gb machines emulate it in software — not the best solution (though cheaper to manufacture). It turns out the old 60 Gb machines that are no longer manufactured have the “sweet spot” — Wi Fi *and* hardware PS2 compatibility. These are hardly anywhere to be found — certainly NewEgg and EBGames had none online. While we were food shopping at BJs last night, I noticed that the PS3s they were selling were the old, fully compatible, 60 Gb machines. I’ll have to see if my straining checkbook can handle the $500 they’re charging.

Second step would be to force my son off the Xbox occasionally so I can use the TV to play MY games. Or watch movies. I don’t have a HDTV, but plan on getting one this year. I think that 32″ 1080p Toshiba I’ve been eying might fit the bill. And heck, since my son monopolizes the TV with his Xbox addiction, I could just move the new HDTV and PS3 into *my* room for luxurious movie watching while I play, you know, *my* games. My little 15″ color TV (yes, it’s tucked away on a side table next to my desk) could use some upgrading…

Pirates of the Burning Sea… I don’t have it. I intend to play it *sometime*, but who the heck has time? I’m not a serial adopter, always dropping what they have to flock to the new shiny. But I’ll check things out when I can. It’s clear that you can only seriously play one MMO at a time. I am probably years away from giving up EQ2. I’ll try PotBS, though, sometime. Vanguard first. I’ve heard good things and bad things about it, and by the time I get to it in a few months, probably all the launch issues will be gone and the rough edges smoothed away. No reason to play it from Day 1 that I can see. If a month helps some, a year should give the devs enough time to make it the game they would have liked it to have been if they’d had more time.

By then all the serial adopters will have moved to Conan and Warhammer (and will be hotly anticipating the new shiny after that) and those who have found a true home in PotBS will be able to explain all the ins and outs of their world. I’ve predicted it will become *the* place for huge naval battles at the expense of a PvE or a solo, 1v1 PvP game — I think Warhammer will turn out to be the home for the more casual PvPer.

Guess I don’t have much other ’stuff’ to talk about. Weather is warm in Connecticut this week, but that will change. It’s still winter. It’s been totally fun watching the Democratic race. First Hillary is the anointed one! The Obama wins in Illinois and Huffpost sanctifies him and tears Hillary apart! Obama ftw! Nothing can stop his inevitable victory! Just swear him in already!

And then Hillary wins New Hampshire! OMG! She was supposed to LOSE! Didn’t she read the SCRIPT?

New Hampshire is the most Libertarian state in the Union. We’re natural cynics. You can’t just SAY. You have to DO. And what has Obama DONE?

I dunno if Hillary will win the nomination. In fact, I think probably it will go to Obama. But I love the soap opera. And anyway, none of the Democrats really match how NH thinks. That nod goes to the Republican John McCain, who is so plain-spoke he could be a native. It’s no surprise he won the Republican race. Heck, even though I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, I might vote for him as someone who actually would have the ABILITY to heal the stupid left-right division in American politics and get something done. Hillary can’t do that. Obama says he can but has no track record. And none of the other Republicans has the slightest interest in doing so.

2007 opened with me splitting my time between EQ1 and EQ2. Through brief flings with LotRO, Dungeon Runners and Mythos, and even briefer flings with a half dozen more I played just once, I ended the year in pretty much the same place — playing EQ2 exclusively.

There’s these incredibly massive hype/PR machines and all they want to do is build up expectations for their ground-breaking, world-shaking title, or book, or movie, and then when it finally arrives, you go “meh” and wait for the next big thing. And the hype machine worked overtime this year. Burning Crusade, Vanguard, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa; all have (or had) the hype machine promissing so much that almost anything that came (or will come) can only disappoint.

Not to say there aren’t some excellent games in the past year and coming soon. I just hope they can survive their hype machines. If you promise a carnival and bring only a pony ride, well, people are going to be disappointed, even if it’s a really good pony ride. Promise a walk in the park and it’s “Hey! They have a PONY RIDE!” Underpromise, overdeliver.

2008 will be a year of great expectations and diminished realities.

Personally, I expect to have EQ2 as my main game through the entire year. Because everyone needs a steady game to call home. You may wander, but you always come home. For a lot of people, this is WoW. For me, it’s EQ2.

It’s going to be hard for EQ2 to raise expectations, though. Out of all the games I’ll mention, it has the toughest road. The last couple of expansions have ridden on EQ1’s coattails, but I don’t know if they’ve noticed, but EQ1 no longer has such long coattails. Drawing from a subscriber base that has fond memories of EQ1 but doesn’t play that game, but want something both new and familiar to them… well, that doesn’t bring many new players in. EQ2 gets most of its new players from WoW, who appreciate EQ2 for its technical innovations but have nothing invested in EQ1 nostalgia.

Prediction #1: EQ2 will reinvent itself by the end of the year, either through some innovative new setting or a game mechanic that lets players have an impact on the world. I’m fairly confident about this one, because otherwise, the hits it will take when WoW’s next expansion and Warhammer come out will probably kill it. It has to respond strongly, and “Velious, EQ2’s Fourth Expansion!” or whatever won’t bring anyone new into the fold. Chasing EQ1 is a stupid strategy.

Prediction #2: Pirates of the Burning Sea will launch strongly, and settle into a role of being about massive clan-based fleet vs fleet battles. I don’t think people will do much solo PvPing, and the economic game will be used to fund the massive fleet battles. Ladder rankings will be an obsession with the players. I’ll try PotBS. I’m not that excited about it, but I think massive fleet battles will be the killer app for PotBS, and it seems from all signs that Flying Labs is positioning it precisely for that. Soloers and non-combatant types interested in the trading game, I think, will not be its final audience.

Prediction #3: Age of Conan will launch and sink without a trace. Come on. PvP with sex and boobies and lots of blood in an election year? The first politician who sees this game will tear it to shreds. ‘Sinking without a trace’ would be the best outcome. ‘Being used as a reason to crack down on MMOs’ would be the worst. Luckily, the teenage boys who make up its natural audience will balk at the subscription fees. Plus, who the heck even knows who Conan is? If the average player even remembers the old Schwarzenegger flick, that’d be amazing — the people who would want to play this game weren’t even born then.

Prediction #4: Warhammer: Age of Reckoning will sell two million boxes and take its place as the #2 MMO in North America. I think this is a slam dunk, being basically World of Warcraft with even more arena games. Those people who love the battlegrounds and arena battles in WoW will flock to the new shiny. This will be a relief to Blizzard, who can cede the battlegrounds market to EA-Mythic and focus more on their excellent PvE and raid experience.

Prediction #5: If WoW’s second expansion, Wrath of the Liche King. comes out this year, it will be disappointing. Given the presence of two and probably soon to be more WoW-alikes in 2008 (LotRO and WAR), almost anything Blizzard can come up with can only be thought of as ‘more of the same’.

Prediction #6: NCSoft will announce a Station Pass-like “pay one price, play all our games” payment plan. Because it’s about time they do that.

okay, those were the safe predictions. Now to get a little ‘out there’.

SOE: SOE will be bought out by a well-known games company, who will announce the development of a virtual world where players can take their characters from all SOE games and live and adventure together in a world they create. This brings hundreds of thousands of players back to SOE games as they take their Jedis and Code Jockeys and Rangers and Blood Mages out of cold storage and into an entirely new world that they create — sort of like Second Life for MMOs. This will be heralded as the birth of a new sort of MMO gaming, where your characters adventure in one world, but play in another.

Star Trek Online: After the new Star Trek movie loudly tanks, all development stops on the Star Trek Online license. EA then picks up Perpetual Entertainment (or what’s left of it) as a wholly owned division focusing on MMO middleware, its first internal customer being Bioware. Bioware in 2007 announced they were using PE’s middleware for their game, so this isn’t really all that out there. There’s a chance EA-Mythic may pick up the STO license along with the company.

MMOs and movies: At least one movie will launch day-and-date with a matching MMO. MMOs will be increasingly seen as commodities and part of the exploitation of a movie license. Tie-in figurines, pop-up picture books, props, Halloween costumes, video games… add an MMO to the list as something necessary to the launch of any new genre movie.

Guitar Hero: A MMO based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Memory of Whiteness” that lets musicians and musician wannabes play virtual instruments in player-created bands, quartets, symphonies — what have you — will be announced. Unlike Guitar Hero, players will be able to play both tunes available in the game, and tunes of their own composition. The MMO will usher in a revolution of musical creativity. Well, this is something I *want* to happen. And given the popularity of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, why not? I just threw in KSR because, you know, people should read his books.

Roleplaying & Machinima: An MMO that takes fan fiction and makes movies from it will be announced. Write a story and watch it acted out, or advance the plot in real time with friends. This will do for the craft of writing what the Guitar Hero MMO will do for the craft of composing: bring art to the masses at the cost of authenticity.

I want MMOs that make people SMARTER and INVITE CREATIVITY. And so I dream of a future where MMOs will open doors in your mind instead of seal them shut.

MMOs are still a young industry and there is still time to reinvent itself out of the circling spiral drain of cheap entertainment. Ten years on and they are still writing the same game. 2008 will be the year someone dares to show something truly new.