The Colbert Report, 28th of January 2009

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Project Alfrik: An Everquest 2 experiment.

Reading an EQ2 forum a couple of weeks ago, I saw someone mention that on the PvP servers, folks like to lock their characters at 10th level. in order to try to accumulate a few achievement points, to give them an edge against enemy players.

That got me wondering. How many achievement points is it possible to have at 10th level? The posts thought perhaps 5 or 6, but I suspect that is an extreme underestimate of the amount of achievement xp that is out there. The answer is extremely important to anyone trying to survive in the hellish lands that are the Everquest2 PvP servers.

Maltheas, Ratonga Templar of Rodcet Nife, is my questing character, doing his level best to do every single quest in the game. He is permanently combat-xp disabled, and only enables quest xp when I have decided he absolutely needs to in order to proceed. Currently at level 34, he has over 400 more quests done than anyone else in the 30-39 level range (though given that most keen questers will have levelled out of tier 4, that’s not a terribly accurate guide.). More germane to my new project is that he has 81 Achievement points . He would have many more achievement points if he had not been born long before achievement points existed, so did not get AA xp for many of his early adventures. Yup, he’s a four year old character who is still level 34. Extreme questing takes time!

There are, of course, a lot of characters who have done more quests than Maltheas, but they are all significantly higher level. Here is the current leaderboard for characters up to level 50, the original level cap.

maltheas-leaderboard-1775

Needless to say, I’m extremely confident that our adventurous rat can smash the current top total on that chart. A mighty feat that absolutely no-one apart from me will care about in the slightest! I probably ought to post a little more often about what he gets up to, and the extreme-questing playstyle, but we’ll leave that for another time.

Alfrik, my new side project will be level-locked to 10th, and try to acquire as many Achievement points as possible. He’ll do this purely through soloing. I’ve picked a good soloing class for the job, the paladin. While I play on a PvE server, the results will still be applicable to the PvP servers, though it would be more time-consuming to achieve there, on account of being regularly murdered. This is where he currently stands, having just poked around a bit in the Peat Bog and Forest Ruins thus far.

alfrik-4

Not sure whether to include exploration events yet. Technically he could run around the world getting every possible exploration event, but . For now, at least, I’ll stick to doing it the old-fashioned way with just quests and named monsters. Of course, he’ll snag a few explorations while he’s travelling around anyway. Decked out in a full suit of crafted iron platemail that he knocked up, let’s see how far he can progress. I’ll try to remember to post an occasional update!

The Colbert Report, 27th of January 2009

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The Colbert Report, 26th of January 2009

Continue reading The Colbert Report, 26th of January 2009

The Changing Face of Spam

I don’t know if this is just me, but in the last couple of months I have seen an extreme drop in the amount of email spam I receive. It’s not being swallowed by the spam-filter in my email software. It’s simply not getting to my computer in the first place. Perhaps it is being filtered out by ISPs, but I am more inclined to think that they’ve given up sending it to me.

At around the same time-frame that I saw the decrease in email spam, this happened to the comment spam here:

spamchart

It suggests to me a change in strategy by the world’s spamhauses. However, of the thousands of spam comments this blog received in the last month, only one managed to escape Akismet’s awesome filtering powers (And was duly deleted by me). The minuscule cost per spam-comment allows the spammers to cast their net extremely wide, but even so, I must confess that I don’t really understand how comment-spam can be an economically viable method of attracting customers. Instead of posting billions of gibberish comments a day, they would do a lot better to put that effort into writing in coherent sentences.

The Colbert Report, 22nd of January 2009

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The Colbert Report, 21st of January 2009

Continue reading The Colbert Report, 21st of January 2009