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It has been a while since we checked in with the Extreme Questing Leaderboard!! When last we peeked, back in June, it looked a bit like this:  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. This time the board looks like… Continue reading EQ2: Extreme Questing Update: Fubared Edition Overnight, the Gawker network was compromised, and their account details have been stolen. 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.  Louisiana Hominid caught by Hunter's Camera. Maybe.
Sound like rubbish? That has not stopped it from being plastered all over the news across the US, and indeed the world. The UK’s Daily Mail is convinced that it’s Spider-Man, continuing their proud tradition of being utterly wrong about everything. Gee. Well if the anonymous viewer says it’s not a hoax, that should be good enough for everybody, right? No need to actually investigate any of the details. It is said that this mystery hunter uploaded the picture to the website of Wildgame Innovations, a company specialising in track camera’s and deer attractants. That is certainly their logo on the picture. That logo is affixed to any of the user-submitted pictures on their website. Oddly though, I can find no mention of the monster picture on the website, or anything monster related at all. I have tried to get in contact with Wildgame Innovations to find out if they actually ever had anything to do with this picture, or whether the viewer just stuck their logo on it to make it look more authentic. I’ll report back if they get back to me. Anyhows, to get to the thing that actually got me bothering to write a post on this: There has been some reporting that it is a Resistance 3 viral after Insomniac Games tweeted:
But a later tweet has stated that they were just joking. Unsurprisingly, only the first tweet has gotten any coverage. I have some interest in cryptids (I’m an ecologist by training), and I’d have to say that I’m pretty sure this is a fake. The creature looks too smooth, for starters (I’m assuming it’s made of flesh and blood. If it’s some sort of ghost/demon/killer robot all bets are off.). Then again, I don’t like to totally rule anything out without evidence. Chances are it’s a viral for…something. If not Resistance, than for some upcoming horror film. Or maybe it was just some very free worldwide advertising for a certain purveyor of deer attractants. If you’ve not yet had your fill of terrifying monsters, you could check out our investigations into Horseboy or The Creepy Gnome. Update: I just noticed. The timestamp on the picture is entirely different between the still I’ve got and the one used in the video. The still picture is from the 11/30/2010, while the one in the video is 12/04/2010. I find it very hard to think of any legitimate reason why this would be the case. I had some interesting visitors in my back garden for a little while this morning. I have no idea what these birds are. They were around the size of a starling. Notably, many of them seemed to have a head-crest.
You can click the picture for a rather larger version. As usual, my cheap camera utterly failed to get a decent picture. Update: After a little research, it looks as if they were Bohemian Waxwings, not commonly found in the UK, though plentiful over in Northern Europe. Perhaps they came over for the winter. If so, I hope they weren’t too put out by the awful weather of the last few weeks. It has warmed up a little now, at least. I don’t think I’ve ever seen waxwings before. I hope they come back. Update: They came back :) Only about ten of them this time. I guess that means they must be living locally. Neat!  A far better picture of a Bohemian Waxwing I nicked off Wikipedia. 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.
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. Update: There has been a little bit more new information.
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?
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
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