Comments have been disabled on dukestreet.org for some time, due to the unbelievable level of spam being posted. I have now installed IntenseDebate comments, which require some level of authentication. They require javascript to be enabled, but I'm looking at that as another barrier between the automated spammer and my time.
So go ahead and comment on anything you've been holding off on!
Posted by Drew Shiel on June 3, 2009 at 12:27
The new Doctor has been known for some time - Matt Smith. However, his companion for the 2010 series of Doctor Who has now been revealed by the BBC as Karen Gillan.
Gillan appeared as a soothsayer in The Fires Of Pompeii in 2008, but it was a small enough part that I've next to no recollection of it. She's described by Steven Moffat as "funny, and clever, and gorgeous, and sexy. Or Scottish, which is the quick way of saying it".
With actors like Smith and Gillan in the lead roles, is it even possible for the writers to avoid romance plots? New Who has taken this direction with Rose, and implied it in a few other cases, such as Moffat's own Girl in the Fireplace, so I won't be surprised if we see some chemistry on screen in Series 5.
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 29, 2009 at 15:06
The broker system in Everquest II is fairly complex, and I'm still getting the hang of it. It bears a bit more resemblance to the Market system of EVE than to WoW's auction house, although with the important note that there is no such concept as a buy order, and that geographic location only has effects on broker commissions - you don't have to go pick up your item.
The process for selling something is that you place a container on your broker screen (accessible via broker NPCs or a market board in a personal or guild house), and put things for sale in it. I have two containers; I believe there's a way to get more. You set the price of the item, and it goes up for sale on the global market system. You can check the price of other items on the market by searching for them, and thus far, I've been undercutting by small amounts with reasonable success.
The process for buying is that you go to a broker (not a market board) and search for your item. This will give you a list of results, which allow you to buy directly or, in some cases, to visit the house of the seller and buy there - I think that's something to do with having display case furniture. Buying directly incurs a commission charge from the broker. I've seen this as 10%, 20%, or 40%. On the low-level items I'm dealing with, this is not important, but for higher-ticket items, it's a big chunk of change.
As long as you log in at least every seven days, your items will remain on the broker until they sell or you remove them. And therein lies my main problem; the market for some goods is utterly saturated, and the only reason anyone sells them at all is that you can't vendor them. Nothing expires, so everything stays there at a constantly falling price, as others undercut. Indeed, some low level crafting materials are coming in at one copper, plus one copper commission - this in a game where there are one hundred copper to a silver, one hundred silver to a gold, and one hundred gold to a platinum. Platinum is the currency in which real deals are reckoned.
My second problem is that there's no bidding. I don't bid often in WoW, but canny bids can make the auction house there a lot more interesting. Obviously, with no 'end date' for the item's availability, you can't have an auction system, so the second problem has the same underlying cause as the first.
Once I get enough cash together, I'm going to be embarking on some cuatious economic adventures in EQII - buying from the brokers and reselling at a profit, as well as engaging in gathering runs for certain much-sought-after crafting materials. I'll let you know how that goes.
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 27, 2009 at 14:32
Well, I'm past the trial, bought myself a game card to continue, and am enjoying Everquest II massively. I'm trying to work out some of what makes it entertaining, particularly in comparison to other games, and WoW in particular.
First and foremost, it's not guided to death. If I have a question, my best source of information is my guild, and the second-best is to explore and find out for myself. There are guides out there, but there aren't the hundreds that exist for WoW, and some of them are out of date or otherwise inaccurate. Hitting Google for solutions is not always an option, and that's refreshing.
Second, the stories are interesting. The possibility of giving different responses in the conversations with quest-giver NPCs is great, and I find myself genuinely interested in the stuggles between the Sarnak and their various avian foes. I particularly liked a point where, in the build-up of quests to what looked like a final win, the plan was cancelled by the boss of the guys I'd been working for, and I was given an explanation as to why - because it was like a plot twist in a tabletop RPG. I'm finding the stories more personal, more comprehensible, and, in many cases, a lot more immersive.
Thirdly, I love the crafting/housing/economy end into little bits and back together. There's an actual effort involved, there are hundreds of things you can make, and most of them are actually useful. My house is mostly furnished with stuff I've made myself. And last night, I got my total cash up to 1 platinum, and fully expect to keep that trend going. I do have some quibbles with the way the brokers work, but I'll write more about that later.
Ephrator Ephrasis is on the Lucan DLere server, and is happy to talk to his elders and betters. While, of course, secretly plotting to destroy them.
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 27, 2009 at 13:18
I'd like to call your attention to Quilldragon, where I and a bunch of other talented blogging types will be putting forth our thoughts on the concept of 'fantasy literature'. Put it in your feedreader!
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 19, 2009 at 12:40
At level 12, I took Ephrator the Kerra Necromancer looking for the capital city for his starting region. Since he's a necromancer, he's evil, and since he's evil, he starts off near Gorowyn. It's actually quite challenging to find Gorowyn, even from Gorowyn Beach; the path up to it is unmarked, and were it not for the yellow dot on the minimap (which took me some time to notice), I'd not have found it for a long time.
Once inside, I explored some, and then found two key things: tradeskills and housing. I'll write about tradeskills later; right now I want to rhapsodise about the housing.
You get your first house for free. It has one room (mine is large and octagonal, with a round window). It cost 5 silver a week to keep it. This is by way of being a small pittance; ten minutes of killing off the pirates on the beach near the city will net you more money. It comes with some free starter furniture - a table, a chandelier, a mirror, and a noticeboard thing that works as an interface to the market system. You can store stuff here, and furnish it however you like. If you put it crafting gear, you can do your tradeskills stuff here. If you furnish it with display cabinets and such, you can sell things you make, gather or loot here too.
Coming from the point of view of WoW, where player housing doesn't exist, and a brief drop into LotRO, where it was too pricy for my noob self, and EVE, where a player-owned station is pretty strictly a corporation endeavour and requires a lot of logistics, this "here you go!" thing is great.
And then I visited the guildhall for my new guild. Oh. Em. Gee. The building is gorgeous. I'll provide pictures at some point, once I find out who in the guild did it, and if they're ok with me posting images. And it has ALL the crafting facilities you might need, plus NPCs standing ready to sell you materials, broker your stuff to the world, or provide numerous other services.
This level of support for guild activity, well, certain other games could learn a thing or two...
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 14, 2009 at 10:56
With the help of FilePlanet, I finally got EQII downloaded and installed. There was a nasty moment when the newly installed game put up the exact same 'updating...' message as I'd been looking at all through Saturday, but it only stayed for a few seconds, and I was in.
Everquest passes the 'just one more quest' test, and is the first MMO I've tried since WAR to manage that. I created a Kerra (feline humanoids) necromancer (pet and debuff/dot class - I think) to get the hang of things, and I'll probably create a few more alts as well to see which classes I like.
Character creation has an enormous breadth of choices; 19 races, something in excess of 20 classes, and even within a race, there seems to be a lot of customisation available - I hit the 'randomize' button about twelve times on the Kerra, and didn't see any two cats that really looked alike.
The game ran a little bit slowly at first, but I reckon Vista's strange approach to new programs is to blame there; it was fine afterward.
The starting area I arrived in (and I'm not 100% clear if I'm considered evil, neutral, or what, and what difference that makes) is on a tropical island, with the major opposition being the local birdmen. The initial quests are clear, and not all of the kill ten foozles variety, and there's as much tutorial as you might want, which is easy to avoid if you don't want it. The quest-giving NPCs all have actual voices, which is nice at first, and then annoying - I turned voices down to zero after the second or third one, largely since I could read about ten times faster than they could say their lines.
I haven't got killed yet, which is rather a new experience in an MMO, and I logged off last night - reluctantly - at level 7. During the evenings this week, I shall start contacting people in-game and looking for guild membership!
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 11, 2009 at 09:22
So, my notion of playing EQII for a bit was going swimmingly up until Sony got involved. I got a trial invitation (thanks, Ysharros), got set up with the necessary accounts, and started downloading. For EQII, you need to first fetch the Station Launcher program, and then use that to get the EQII files. This was going fine until my network connection dropped. And the launcher, instead of restarting where it left off (45%), started the download again.
So this time 'round - it's not exactly the zippiest of downloads - I set it going, disabled all timeouts and sleep functions and anything else on my machine, and left it running overnight. I came down to it showing 98% downloaded, and it's been sitting there now for half an hour. I greatly fear that it's not doing anything, because the time to completion (5:55) hasn't changed at all. There's no way to check if it's doing anything, as far as I can see, other than its own metrics of percentage completed and time to completion.
So I'm trying Fileplanet - except it looks like good ol' Fileplanet can't find the file.
I COULD go looking for an actual boxed copy of the game, but this is the 21st century, dammit, and we have the internet for that now.
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 10, 2009 at 09:52
Visuals of EQ2 Guildhalls in the last week or so have tipped me over to the point where I want to give the game a shot. However, I gather that the guild aspect is an important part of the game, so I don't want to dive straight in and try to play solo - I'd like to find a guild, possibly even before I start a trial. And if there's a refer-a-friend deal of some kind, it'd be nice to get that too. So if there's anyone out there who plays EQ2, has a guild that will let me in, and can point me in the right directions, please drop me a line at gothwalk@gmail.com. Thanks!
Posted by Drew Shiel on May 7, 2009 at 16:29
I am not at all sure how this managed to escape my notice so far, but there's an upcoming game called Cities XL, which is basically SimCity with MMO elements. In other words, it's a PvP resource management game, and therefore, from my point of view, digital crack.
I'll be keeping a firm eye on this one, and if it's even half as cool as I hope it'll be, I'll... probably play nothing else for months, actually.
Posted by Drew Shiel on April 17, 2009 at 14:15
So, Funcom's next game, The Secret World is starting to be revealed. Massively have a very preliminary look at it. I wasn't all that impressed with the text description, but I really liked the teaser video clip at the end. Obviously, it's conceptual rather than game footage, but that's not a problem at this stage, and I do like the concept.
It'll be bizarre if Funcom manage to roll out a this-world-with-dark-secrets game before CCP, whose buyout of White Wolf should really have given them all the tools...
Posted by Drew Shiel on April 7, 2009 at 16:37
Legends of Zork is a Kingdom of Loathing style online game - except it's not quite as punningly juvenile, it has some artwork, and it's connected, however vaguely, to the grand old Zork games. Go, sign up, do a few turns, and then the material below will make more sense.
Continue reading "4 Quick Tips for Legends of Zork"
Posted by Drew Shiel on April 7, 2009 at 13:06
This morning, I was listening to Van Hemlock and Jon work out the details necessary for a 'fantasy EVE' game. Yesterday, I was reading Syncaine's diatribe on WoW Tourists in Darkfall (and noting, as an aside, that they're a bit like the tourist complaining of all the curry served in Indian restaurants).
I've worked out the parameters for an 'ideal MMO' for myself, and they're not too far off the Fantasy EVE notion. However, in today's crowded MMO market, there has to be a reason why this game isn't already in development or even in play.
Continue reading "Why is there not a Fantasy EVE?"
Posted by Drew Shiel on April 3, 2009 at 21:59
As noted in the previous post, I'm spending a lot of time playing with the Auction House in WoW. The Auctioneer addon makes it very easy to do so; it would otherwise be a nightmare of data management - although I'm occasionally tempted to break out the spreadsheets anyway.
Here are some good blogs and sites - and some good posts on them - about the current state of affairs in WoW economic circles, and how you too can make thousands off the auction house and live in state of gold-induced bliss. The dreams of rare crafting materials listed on the AH for one copper are your own problem.
Girl Guide's Girly Girl Guide to Preparing for 3.1 is a nice, solid post about getting ready for 3.1 from the plain old don't-break-the-bank point of view.
Just My Two Copper is very possibly the best WoW economics blog out there, and 22 Steps to Using Auctioneer Correctly is an excellent post on it. And here's more economic speculation on WoW patch 3.1, which can't be bad to know about.
Crafter's Tome is a superb WoW tradeskills site, with a good index of recipes, guides, and a crafts-oriented blog alongside it. And, of course, WoWHead is the Source of All Knowledge, and is the first step in working out just why a particular kind of fish sells for 3g each.
Posted by Drew Shiel on March 25, 2009 at 13:42
