I’m back home after a fun time with my Dad, a few pounds heavier, and laden with swag. I hope everyone had a great Christmas, and is feeling recovered enough to face the New Year. It was a bit of a hellish journey home, with trains being cancelled to the left and right, but the reward of sleeping in my own bed again was worth the replacement buses and hikes between stations.
The Rift beta NDA has dropped while I’ve been away, so I’ll be posting about that for the next few days, I expect. Though you may well be already sick of hearing about it! The hype is being laid on pretty thick in some quarters.
Over the holiday, my Dad and I finally finished our run through Deep Space 9. It’s always a rather sad moment when you reach the end of a series that amazing, and I’m not sure what the next show we’ll tackle will be. Because I still have DS9 swimming about in my head, and it is pretty appropriate for the start of a new year, here’s sentient hologram Vic Fontaine and Captain Benjamin Sisko with “The Best Is Yet To Come”!
I don’t know whether Vic Fontaine is in Star Trek Online yet, but he’ll certainly be making a personal appearance just as soon as the Foundry goes live! Being an ageless sentient hologram has its benefits, and in fact we know that he’s still going many thousands of years after the events of STO! Comforting to know, as the Universe don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!
We received the first batch of Velious Winter Rewards today. As well as a nice painting of the original “Scars of Velious” Everquest expansion’s cover art (it was probably my favourite of all the EQ expansions), we got something far more interesting. A butler!!
Good day, Sir (or Madam)! We are pleased to introduce you to the newest member of your household staff; your Coldain Butler. Your new butler can be placed in your house and will speak to his master as well as guests who may come calling. He may also be asked to join you on your adventures, and will follow you outside of your home for the span of an hour. He is very outgoing and will speak to others when hailed, and also likes to talk about his master. We hope you are pleased with this new member of your staff…he is certainly pleased to be in your service.
If there was ever an adventurer in need of a steadying influence and a helping hand, it would be Maltheas. Fortuitous it was, then, the day that Cheeves arrived on his doorstep with impeccable credentials. He had been so impressed by Maltheas’ efforts to help the folks of New Halas that he had decided to seek him out, and offer his service.
Maltheas and his butler, Cheeves. What jolly adventures they are sure to have!
After some experimentation, he appears to be purely cosmetic, though I do very much like the feature that lets him come out of the house and follow you about. He is content to sit back and let Maltheas deal with any uncouth louts that might trouble the merry pair. To my very great joy, he also peacefully coexists with Mr Snowy, Maltheas’ snowman companion. It’s possible he’s taking up the deity pet slot, but Malth hasn’t got to the level where he’d get one of those, so it’s impossible for me to tell. What’s important is that Team Maltheas is now one Coldain bigger!! After years of abuse from the wandering Qeynos NPCs, it’s nice to have one to sing his praises! Let’s hope he does not let it go to his head and remains a humble(ish) servant of Rodcet Nife.
In other Velious-related new, Maltheas recently met some very pleasant Othmir.
Hoorays for the Othmir!!
He’s very glad to have made friends with these fine fellow-rodents, and is looking forward to hearing their tales. In exchange, he will teach them advanced Ratonga pants technology, and all will be richer as a result. We’ll be seeing a lot more of our semi-aquatic allies when we finally make it to Velious.
If you want to meet the Othmir too, they’re part of the Velious prelude quests that are currently available. These quests will vanish when the expansion launches, so don’t leave it too late if you’re interested. You can start the quests with the Duality in Paineel, and the adventures scale to level, so are suitable for young and old, though the very young might find some of the travel a little nerve-wracking.
I was considering doing a full post on the prelude quests, but they’re so lore-heavy that I’m not sure how many would be terribly interested. Everyone, on the other hand, likes pictures of Othmir.
We had finally added the 60-69 tier in our leaderboard, and Maltheas was still holding his own against such distinguished adventurers, and looking forward to striving to improve his own efforts.
Already, twitter accounts that uses the same login details are being used to spam advertising. It’s raining Acai berry spam on twitter right now.
It is very important that if you use the same password for any games that you used for Gawker (which includes Kotaku, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, as well as Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Deadspin, and Fleshbot), you change it right away.
Fresh (if that is a word that can be used to describe anything involving the undead) information regarding EQ2’s new Vampire race has just been put up over on the official site.
The Freeblood vampire race will be available through the Velious Winter Rewards promotion for qualifying EQII subscribers and EQ2X Gold and Platinum members as part of the February reward. For those who don’t want to wait that long, the race will be available on the Marketplace in late December. Stay tuned for more details!
So Freeblood Vampires will first appear in the Marketplace this month, then folks who’ve been subscribed for the three months up to February, and also purchase the expansion, will get them. Seems kind of the wrong way around to me if you’re trying to reward people for loyalty, but there you go.
Flying Maltheas not included in offer.
These new vampires are described as being the result of one of the Nights of the Dead event’s quests, “This won’t end well…”, in which you are invited to the village of Somborn in the Loping Plains. Upon arrival you are attacked by a mysterious assailant, and awaken a day or two later with no memory of the intervening period. I’m not a big fan of that quest’s story, as you discover that you spent that period murdering an entire family, including children, while under vampiric influence, and you then cover it up! I don’t consider it “canon” for many of my characters, as most would either immediately own up to the crime, or spend the rest of their lives feeling terrible about it!!! As an ex-Bloodsaber, Maltheas has enough youthful mistakes (though nothing quite so serious) to pay for as it is.
Luckily for Maltheas, all the pictures of Vampires so far have been of human/elf females, so it does not look like the world is going to be hit with an influx of the terrifying Ratonga Vampires this time around. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further information though, as you can never be too sure with bloodsuckers.
The connection to Somborn and “This won’t end well…” dictates that they are of the D’Ryil bloodline (as it was Sarkon D’Ryil and his childer who were the source of the evil there), which splintered off from House D’Morte when Lazarus D’Ryil was abandoned by the D’Mortes and decided to ally with Neriak. To this day, D’Ryil vampires may be found within that dark city.
This is important, because the D’Morte line was begun (in times most ancient) when its founder drank from the Ewer of Sul’dae, a powerful artifact of Anashti Sul, the goddess of undeath who made her return to Norrath recently. Originally the goddess of healing, she went a bit wrong in the head (to cut a long story short), and was banished. Maltheas’ patron, Rodcet Nife, replaced her in the Norrathian pantheon, and has battled against her works ever since. Vitally, the D’Mortes became vampires without the involvement of Mayong Mistmoore, believed to be the first vampire to exist on Norrath (and of course, he, and his progeny, are still going strong).
However, the name “Freeblood” implies that these new vampires have no loyalty to the D’Ryils, but it is always interesting to know from whence the blood has flown. A vampire can call itself free as much as it likes, but it is still a slave to its hunger. Whether any of this lore I’ve mentioned gets retconned remains to be seen. Very little of what we know about the history of Norrathian vampires is certain.
Given that this vampire invasion is going to happen, although I consider it a dubious idea, I’ve decided I might as well have fun with it. Who better to fight against the rise of the Vampires than a priest of Rodcet Nife! I’m going to look into putting together a good vampire-hunting costume for Maltheas. He needs a suit of some sort, and a most excellent hat. I might even sacrifice some of the Station Cash I’ve accumulated to the cause.
One of the special features of the Freeblood is a Racial Trait, “Reveal Inner Self,†which lets the character change from attractive to demonic in appearance.
Another feature of the Freeblood race is a new hand-to-hand combat animation set. In addition, it will include a special “invisible†appearance weapon that lets the character use these combat animations, even if they’re wielding a sword and shield.
Another Racial Trait, “Bloodletting,” grants a minor Lifetap spell to occasionally drain health from targeted enemies.
There were concerns that it might be delayed, but the Star Trek Online servers will be coming down today (December 9th, 2010) from 10 am GMT to Midday GMT for the much anticipated Season 3.
This is a major update, with a lot of features that players have been waiting for. I’ve included the patch notes under this brief post, but I’m particularly looking forward to the newly expanded crafting. From the sounds of it, the Federation will actually be able to make high level phasers at last! It’ll still probably be a pretty dull crafting system, but at least we’ll have far more reason to use it. Being able to make worthwhile gear is fun whatever the system!
Arktoth is more interested in Disruptors.
Poor Arktoth will also have a fair bit more content and opportunities available to him. The Klingon side of things has been a frustrating place to be til now, but with the arrival of Klingon crafting, the equipment imbalance may be over. (Though that may lead to it’s own problems. The Klingons already seem to crush the Feds whenever they meet, in my PvP experience on both sides thus far.).
I’m also surprisingly excited about the replay function. As well as giving us the opportunity to go back and play our favourite missions for new rewards, it gives me one more excuse to hang around in my ready room!
It doesn’t sound like any part of the Foundry made it in to this update, but work continues on it on the test server, Tribble. I’ve been hearing good things about it, so hopefully it won’t be too much more of a wait before it’s first phase comes to Live.
I’ll report back on my experiences in Season 3 later this week.
The release notes for Star Trek Online’s Season Three are below!
Gearscore, the World of Warcraft app which decides how good your equipment is and assigns you a score, is loved by some, and despised by many others. It has long been used as a way for raid-leaders to decide who is worthy to join them on their terribly important expeditions, without requiring them to waste any thought on treating the candidates as individual human beings who are more than the sum of their equipment slots.
Today, Gearscore has been taken over by Ten Ton Hammer, and it has become Playerscore.
So now it’s not just your stuff that’s being rated and dismissed. It’s YOU!!!!
So, what is Playerscore?
PlayerScore is a way to get information about WoW characters, and help figure out how competent they might be. Not only does it provide automatic scores and profiles, it allows players to rate each other. You can view PlayerScore info in-game or on the Web, whichever you prefer.
Some of it is gathered and uploaded via our AddOn and Updater. Much of the profile data is pulled from the WoW Armory.
Allowing player-rating will be gamed by the guilds, and place individuals at even more of a disadvantage in the ratings than they already were.
For me, the most ugly aspect of Playerscore is that you have no choice as to whether it will have power over you. We did not ask this unaccountable corporate entity (currently Master Games International Inc) to become the arbiter of who gets to do what in WoW. It does not ask you to opt-in to the system. You can’t even fully opt out. You can choose not to use it yourself, but that won’t stop it from being used against you. I consider this to be the greatest fault with the system. It should allow you to log on to its website, and tell it to stay the hell out of your business.
Only when that is possible will a sufficiently large number of people be able to make a stand against this mindless and dehumanising add-on. Of course, the way that it essentially forces people that want to raid to use it, through peer-pressure, is the key to its success, so I would not expect to see that change any time soon.
We are not the sum of our inventories. We are not numbers. We have context.
Prisoners of Playerscore
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.â€
