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This is a rather ancient post I made on my original website, long before the days of such useful things as blogs or WordPress. I’ve cleared out most of the posts from that time, and am in the process of tidying the rest away, but I thought this might provide a small amount of entertainment. It was the year 2000, and a pattern had already begun to emerge. Some monsters were ubiquitous. Today you might poke fun at the boars, but back then the little chap that was everywhere was the rat.
Today I received this handy bit of information regarding the upcoming merger of my EQ2 server:
I’m generally fairly irritated with EQ2 at the moment, for a fairly wide range of reasons, most of which involve the ever-diminishing portion of the game that paying a subscription will gain you access to. Still, I’ll be logging Maltheas and his pals in over the the next few weeks to give them a fighting chance of keeping their names. The problem with Lucan d’Lere merging with Crushbone is that one is a Roleplaying Server, and one is not. How that’s going to work out in the long run is impossible to know, but I doubt it’s going to make spontaneous RP any easier. The only other Roleplaying server is Antonia Bayle, which is packed to the gills, and unsuitable for Lucan to merge with. Lucan is certainly seriously underpopulated, and has been for a very long time. The thing is, players from both Antonia and Lucan have been crying out for Antonia players to be able to move to Lucan for years. Had that been allowed, Lucan would be in a much healthier state, and Antonia would not be so horribly overcrowded. To add insult to injury, Lucan players who want to remain on an RP server can move to Antonia, but only if they are willing to pay for the privilege. That doesn’t seem right to me. Either the server is too full or it isn’t. If it isn’t then players should be given the choice of going to Antonia or Crushbone, at no cost. Server merges should not be a source of income, where players have to pay extra to end up on a server of the same ruleset as the one they signed up for. Update: The merger has been rescheduled for the 16th of February. Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” monologue never fails to move me. A single pixel breaks down the barriers between all the family of man, making us realise how very few we are, and how alike, when compared with the rest of the universe that is not us. I often think about that when I read gaming blogs and forums, and Martin Luther King day seems an appropriate time to talk about it. As gamers, we divide and subdivide ourselves, into evermore insular tribes, contemptuous of all outside OUR group. Hardcore, Casual, PvPers, non-PvPers, people younger or older than ourselves. Those who play different games to us, or who play the same game but are less experienced, or play in a way that we don’t personally approve of. People who speak other languages, or who show less perfection than ourselves in their typed English. We have special labels for the people outside our own tribe. “Noobs”, “Carebears”, and a great many that I am not comfortable writing down. We have a derogatory term for every occasion. Just as an extraterrestrial visitor would consider the differences between the different sorts of human to be trivial, an outside observer would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the different tribes of gaming, and could be forgiven for concluding that gamers are the worst people in the universe, based on our own opinions. Gamers are sometimes demonised by the general media, or by politicians, but it tends to be nothing compared with how we talk about ourselves. Bashing one group of players in order to appeal to another’s sense of superiority, or even just to stir up controversy, is a technique used across the whole range of gaming journalism, from the scrappiest little blog to the large sites and print media. It is an unworthy deed, and it infuriates and saddens me whenever I see it. It drains my will to be part of this gaming society, though where could I go? We just reflect humanity’s own obsession with dividing itself, but in microcosm. We should not be in the business of “otherising” our fellow gamers. We are too few as it is, and the universe so very large. (Update: As of the 19th of January, the website seems to have returned to life. I guess someone finally remembered to pay their domain registration fee!) This won’t come as any great surprise to those who followed my posts on Lordcraft: World of LordCraft – Evony decides to take on Blizzard World of LordCraft – Don’t Play, My Lord. To recap, it was an Evony-clone (I believe by the same people who make Evony) that “borrowed” liberally from World of Warcraft. I strongly recommend reading those old posts to see quite how hilariously shameless the entire business was. I’ll just repost the original trailer, mostly so that the title of this article doesn’t look quite so random! Continuing on from Part 7! 2:45 pm GMT, 8th of January I’ve picked Outfitting, as it’ll allow Osgard to make armour for himself. He gave up the foraging skill to make room for it, as I’m hoping that herbs and wood won’t play too much of a part in it. Right away, the trainer has three recipes to sell me. Cloth shoes, leather shoes, and the ability to turn burlap cloth, which I’ve been looting from fallen enemies, into “Bolts of Burlap” which will be a crafting ingredient. Osgard also got a skill for salvaging cloth and leather armour, and the outfitting button itself, which brings up this window:  Rift's Outfitting Window The Outfitting trainer offers a couple of quests. One requires me to bring him 4 bolts of burlap and 4 soft leather. The leather flumoxes me briefly, as there is no tailor recipe for that, but I discover that it is a butchery recipe that I can bring up using my til now neglected butchery button. We’re back! Since the end of part 6 we’ve had out first look at Rift’s pricing scheme. Beta 4 has come with a fairly beefy set of patch notes. I’ll try to mention any important changes I see as I play through in this phase. The big changes for this round are an increase in the levelcap to 27, and the turning on of the PvP Warfronts. While I doubt I’ll be getting to 27 this weekend, I will try to check Warfronts out to cut through the chatter and get the skinny from the horse’s mouth, ideally before it tramples me into the ground! 9:12 am GMT, 8th of January Off we go, somewhat later than intended. I managed to lose all desire to play any MMO at all last night, in between some bad news coming from EQ2, and reading some Rift posts which are so gushing with hyperbole that they are indistinguishable from a press-release. Watching the Rift-specific websites compete to see which of them is going to be Trion’s very special favourite is getting to be a bit embarrassing to watch. This always happens before any new MMO release, but it always leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about MMO-blogging. A good snooze fixed me right up though, and we’ve had a hotfix while I napped!:
Mr Breki and Mr Petter were kind enough to invite me on as the special guest for the relaunch of their Claims of the Normal Podcast. It was the first time I’d done anything quite like it, and there’s probably several minutes of me just going “Ummm”. I also say “Basically”, “actually”, and “pretty much” vastly too often. Valuable lessons were learned, and I had a whole lot of fun. My thanks to my fine hosts for making me feel so welcome and at ease. We discussed Rift, EQ2, WoW’s Cataclysm expansion, DCUO, and a whole lot more. If you fancy checking the show out, you can find it here! |
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