I heard within the whisp’rings of a bee:
a city proud and free that strove for good.
A Paragon that showed us what could be,
Yet now dark void remains where it once stood.
In hero sleep, and villainous slumbers,
As rogues dream undecided in their turn.
Not forgotten in their countless numbers,
I’ll miss you, Bee, and one day you’ll return.
Edit: Folks keep asking me what this is all about! Briefly, NCSoft shut down the still profitable City of Heroes MMO this week, shattering a thriving community for reasons that remain indecipherable. It was a damned shame. Spelling Bee was my favourite hero in Paragon City, famous for his battlecry “It’s Time For Plan Bee!!!!”, and many other bee-related puns which gave me literally endless glee. I really will miss the little chap. Until another Superhero MMO comes along in which he can be reborn.
My friends at “It’s a Trap!”, here in Norwich, made a rather jolly steampunk film a couple of years ago, involving steam-powered weaponry, and a terribly menacing Bolt-filled exosuit.
Such was the response that they decided to push half a league, half a league, half a league onwards, and have been working on turning the concept into a web series. If this trailer is anything to go by, it should be quite a romp!
I wasn’t expecting it quite so soon, but an announcement just turned up in my mailbox. They were discussed at Fanfest, but Krono are already upon us, and with any luck will cause some gnashing of teeth in the illicit-RMT trade.
They work pretty much like PLEX in EVE Online, and the peculairly similarly named Chronoscrolls in TERA. Someone with real world money buys the Krono, and then can trade them for ingame money/goods/services to another player, who can then redeem the Krono for 30 days of subscription time. Technically, they could use the Krono themselves, but that would be a pretty daft thing to do, as Krono cost more than just subbing for a month, or the gamecards available in retail stores.
What they are is a way for cash-rich players to buy gold ingame, without filling the pockets of scammers. If you do it sensibly, making sure that the payment and Krono are both very much there in the trade-window, it should be quite secure and risk-free. SOE has been allowing people to trade gamecard codes for gold for some time, but that is fraught with dangers for the buyer, with little recourse should the code you buy “mysteriously” not work.
However, I do take issue with them costing more than gamecards. That feels as if SOE are placing a premium on security and safety for their players, which is something no company should ever do. It calls into question whether this is being done to protect players from scammers, or just to make more money. With no cut for the retailer, Krono would still be more profitable for SOE than gamecards, even if they cost the same.
Only EQ2 will be using Krono for the time-being. If the experiment proves to be a success, they’ll be rolled out to other SOE games. Eventually, I expect this method of game-time acquirement will spread widely throughout the MMOsphere.
It’s been a while since I last posted, but I have been jerked out of complacency by the stunning return of the equine menace known only as Horse-boy. When last we saw him, he was haunting Hardgate Street in Aberdeen, spreading fear and misery in his wake. As I’m sure you’ll remember, we uncovered the terrifying truth about Horse-boy. THAT HE DOES NOT HAVE A FACE.
Now, as Hurricane Sandy threatens the eastern coastal regions of the United States, he has returned.
Having turned the corner to be confronted by a camera crew, he took the quick decision to pose as a simple horse-headed jogger. But what is his real reason for being there?
(Updating WordPress and some plugins seems to have thoroughly discombobulated my site formatting. I’ll get on that.)
Kelloggs are trialling Froot Loops in the UK at the moment, in special limited edition boxes. I used to eat them, alongside any number of other colourful cereals, when I lived in the US, so I picked up a box. I don’t remember the US ones well enough to be able to compare the taste and crunch, but these ones taste pretty good to me.
Froot Loops come to the UK.
The UK version only has 3 colours of loop, and for good reason. Our version only used natural colours, so we have orange, coloured with carrot, purple, coloured with blackcurrant, and green, coloured with spinach and nettle. You can’t taste any carrot, spinach or nettle, by the way. Here are the British ingredients:
Cereal Flours (Oat, Wheat, Maize), Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Salt, Natural Citrus Flavouring with other Natural Flavourings, Plant Extracts (Nettle, Spinach), Fruit and Vegetable Extracts (Carrot, Blackcurrant), Colour (Papricka Extract)
And here are the US ingredients:
Sugar, whole grain corn flour, wheat flour, whole grain oat flour, oat fiber, soluble corn fiber, contains 2% or less of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut, soybean and/or cottonseed), salt, red 40, natural flavor, blue 2, turmeric color, yellow 6, annatto color, blue 1, BHT for freshness.
There’s quite some difference there. Firstly, the US version has sugar as its number one ingredient. It also has partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, while the UK version seems to manage with no oil at all. Our primary cereal seems to be oats, while the US, unsurprisingly, has corn at the top, and then some soluble corn later. I’ve no idea if that really changes the taste much, but oats are quite a wondrous food. Oats have the highest protein levels of any cereal crop, which probably explains why UK Froot Loops have THREE TIMES the protein of their US counterparts.
Then you have Red 40, and a host of other artificial colours. BHT, or Butylated hydroxytoluene is a petroleum-based antioxidant used for freshness, but once again, the UK version manages to mysteriously not need it. It is possible that the natural colours (such as the carotene in the orange loops) are doing double duty, as they have strong antioxidant properties themselves.
The point of this post is this: There is no good reason why Kelloggs could not use the recipe they’re using in the UK in the US too. Even if you don’t care about the artifical chemicals (and you should), the British recipe is undeniably far better for you. The calorie amount is actually roughly the same, but the British version has about three times as much protein (great stuff, but also a slow-release calorie source), and about two thirds of the sugar. So neither are what you’d call healthy food, but the Glycemic Index of the US version would be much higher, as it releases its energy over a shorter period of time, meaning you get hungry again more quickly.
Essentially, UK Froot Loops are quite unhealthy on their own, but in moderation you could fit them in to a reasonably healthy diet. US Froot Loops are a comparative nutritional void, laced with a variety of suspect artificial substances with links to hyperactivity and cancer.
So, why not ask Kelloggs if they’d like to start treating American customers as well as they treat British ones? Currently, the deck is stacked against any American who wants to eat healthily, and the obesity epidemic can certainly be blamed in part on the choices companies make in formulating their products. As this post has shown, producers know how to make healthier products, but they feel they can get away with cutting corners when US consumers are concerned.
I’ve been in the Beseiged Farmlands of Transylvania for a couple of days now. It’s pretty heavy going. While it’s sometimes tricky to figure out how tough things are, everything here drops QL 10 gear, which is the highest QL I’m aware of. There’s still two more Transylvanian areas after this one, and I assume they’re tougher still, so I’m not sure what sort of gear will be found there. Perhaps blue and purple gear becomes more common out that way.
As I discovered yesterday, being decked out in QL 9 and 10 gear does not render you as invincible on Solomon Island as you might think, and I still managed to get myself killed in the Blue Mountains when I swept back to finish off a mission I’d found too much for me previously. (By Jove, do I HATE Mud Golems!) While QL 10 certainly makes you tougher, it is far from the exponential increase in power that you would see in a level-based MMO. That’s a good thing, as it means that the lower tier zones can still be interesting, at least from a challenge perspective, though the gear you might find there on your return would be destined only for recycling.
Transylvania is largely as you would expect. Vampires to the left of you, werewolves to the right, and it hardly ever stops raining, a lot like the weather in Norwich at the moment. It makes me rather miss Egypt. The place might be infested with cultists, but at least it was usually sunny during the day. When everything all seems a bit bleak and grey, I like to visit my new friend Cucuvea. Certain parts of Transylvania make you feel like you just stepped into Greater Faydark, Silverwood, or Teldrassil, and Cucuvea’s home is a lovely warm place for any adventurer who needs to get out of the rain. Also, she has free wireless.
Cucuvea’s home inside a Transylvanian Tree in The Secret World.
There was a state of the game letter yesterday, and I was excited to learn that Funcom are planning monthly updates as part of our subscription. The first will be on the 31st of July, and will mostly involve adding more investigation missions throughout the zones. This, as you might expect, makes me very happy. It’s entirely likely that the first few updates are just launch content that wasn’t finished in time, but that’s OK. If they keep to their monthly intentions, it just might inspire me to stay subscribed full-time.
As time passes by, there is one thing I’d love to see updated eventually. Egypt and Transylvania are both quite heavy with ghouls. While I understand that artist time is finite, the ghÅ«l of Arabia, and the vampire-related ghouls of the Carpathians are drawn from somewhat different mythologies, and I think would be good for them to be two different sorts of creature within The Secret World, for the sake of variety as much as anything else.
The same goes for the return of scarecrows in Transylvania. They should look different to Henderson’s creations on Solomon Island. Perhaps some “thin-style” scarecrows, if scarecrows there must be. Of course it is inevitable that models and monsters are going to be re-used in different zones in MMOs, but those are the two cases that just feel a little odd to me, especially if you’re trying to evoke the feeling of different places and cultures.
The Secret World went into head-start a little over a week ago now, and I have been deep into my investigations of all that is strange and spooky.
I absolutely adore investigation missions, and I wish there were more of them. I am very proud that I have so far managed to solve them all myself, and they are, alongside the story, what makes Secret World so compelling for me. I am aware, though, that there is a finite number of them, and they will have minimal replay value (also, they’re some of the few missions that you can’t replay on the same character), unless I somehow manage to forget the solutions. In a classless game there does not feel like too much purpose in creating an alt, and I doubt I will, as the differences in playthrough experience between factions are slight. In any case, I love being a Templar!
As ever, I’m a bit of a questing completist, and I’ve done every mission I can find on the way here, apart from a small number in which I get eviscerated. I will pop back and deal with them, eventually. For now, I’m just glad to get away from New England to somewhere sunnier and less filled with zombies and draug. Maybe I’ll find the final lore items that continue to elude me in the lower tier zones. From what I know about the number of zones in the game, it would seem I’m just over halfway through, as I just arrived in the City of the Sun, the second Egyptian zone.
I’ve not done much with PVP or the group dungeons yet, other than one jaunt into Polaris with a few twitter friends. It looks to me that none of the group content will not be soloable regardless of how powerful I get, so I shall have to bite the bullet and potter along on further excursions. I may even end up enjoying it!
Looking like a complete tourist in al-Merayah.
I can see many of the issues that SWTOR had coming to haunt TSW too. The stories and content are fantastic, but I am not sure there is sufficient quantity for the long-term, though that depends on how quickly you devour it, and your tolerance for repeating missions. Be that as it may, I can definitely recommend coming along for a visit, as what there is is quite excellent.
