Entries Tagged 'MMO' ↓

“Is this event awesome?” That’s the question one of my guild mates asked in chat some 13 minutes after the Guild Wars 2: Lost Shores event started. Due to so server issues right when the event started it ended up being fairly laggy for myself and a good number of my guild mates. The solution proposed on Twitter by @guildwars2 was to leave the map and come back. So, thats what several of us did, only to come back and land on an overflow server where the event was already finished.

So, no so far the event isn’t awesome it’s not done yet though so there is still hope… Now, I need to decide if I should continue playing or get back to working.

This past Sunday while I was playing Guild Wars 2, I remembered the spare $10 burning a hole in my PayPal account. So, I figured why not use it to buy some gems to use in-game. I mean then I could unlock an extra character slot or maybe some more bank or bag space (it fills up so fast). After thinking about it for a bit, I pulled the trigger and purchased 800 gems. It was a standard PayPal transaction, so I did unfortunately have to leave the game for a moment but everything worked nice and smooth. There have been some reports around about people not receiving gems for a while after buy, lucky for me though, mine were there seconds after the transaction completed.

800 shiny new gems, now I just needed to figure out what to do with them. Jumping into the section of the trading post that requires gems I decided I didn’t want any of the items that didn’t really fit in the game. What were they thinking with that decision anyway? Sun glasses and boxing gloves? Anyway, I thought about buying a couple of boosts and quickly decided not to bother. In the end I bought two packs of mini pets for 300 gems each. After opening my new gifts I had six new pets, but one was a duplicate. That was kind of disappointing but really not unexpected.

Shortly afterward, I started to wonder just how much work it would be to get mini pets off the trading post – and as it turns out, not much. I jumped into the trading post sold my duplicate mini pet for about 20 silver and turned around and placed two buy orders for a couple of more common fine (blue) pets. Since I had placed my buy orders about 50 silver higher than the then top order it they completed in a matter of minutes. So far so good, but now I had no money. There was, however, a quick solution for that as I happened to have 250 copper ingots sitting in my bank. The ingots I listed on the trading post priced to bring in about one gold, this would set me up with a nice chunk of change – which I was about to blow on little virtual “pets” for my little virtual guy. Using the funds from my ingots I was able to place buy orders around nine more pets. At the time, prices for the fine pets, ran from about six silver to around 16 for the mini Jungle Stalker – it’d have to wait till I had a bit more coin.

I had gathered my earlier 250 copper ingots over the course of just playing the game, stopping at nodes to mine as I passed them. I figured I could spend an hour or two in the lands around Queensdale and easily pick up more copper ore. I restocked my mining picks, bringing along 500, it takes two copper ore to create one copper ingot. For the next maybe hour and a half, I gathered all the copper I could find out in the field. I wish I had timed it better but, I wasn’t thinking about the post when I started – just all the shiny new mini pets I’d have. Of course, there could be better places in the game to “farm” copper and I’m sure I didn’t run the most efficient path around the map but I did end up about 380 pieces of copper ore when I decided to call it quits for the night, after all running around like that isn’t exactly exciting. Before logging off though, I want back to the Trading Post and placed a few more orders. I checked the next morning and most of my orders had been fulfilled, a couple I had to replace at slightly higher prices as someone had come along after me and placed an order one copper higher than mine. When all was said and done I had a total of 31 mini pets, 26 then made from my time “farming” which I’m was about two hours of “work”, plus the time I had spent getting the first 250 ingots. Currently, of the “Set 1” mini pets I have all the fine (blue) ones and ten of the masterwork (green) ones. The prices start to ramp up rather quickly once you’ve hit the master work level since the rarity increases so, it would probably take a bit more farming to get enough money to continue purchasing.

So, what was the point of that? Well, that’s for you to decide, if you’ve got spare money burning a hole in your pocket and no time then by all means buy gems – and convert them to coin, which I would have done if I knew upfront I was in the market for pets. Or if you have some spare time and the want, then take an hour or two and gather up enough materials to sell for a few silver. Of course you don’t even need to “farm” you can just simply play the game, over the course of playing you’ll easily amass enough coin and gathered materials that you can get whatever you want, mini pets or other.

Last night I took some time out to join some of my guild mates in Guild Wars 2 in World versus World, or WvWvW as its also known, for a few hours to see what all the fuss is about. Boiled down, it’s basically large-scale player versus player pitting three servers against one another. Last night it was those of us on ‘Sanctum of Rall’ against ‘The Tarnished Coast’ and ‘Yak’s Bend’ in a fight to see which server could take and hold more strategic points on the map. The organized guild event was to take place at 6PM PST, knowing that WvWvW has been seriously backed up since release I was sure to queue up about 45 minutes early. Figured it would be just enough time to run around gathering materials but, that’s another post altogether. I ended up waiting around 35 minutes  I believe, I didn’t really time it since was keeping myself busy.

Just whats going on here?

Once loaded into the map I found myself in a castle with vendors and repair NPC’s close by. Our guild uses RaidCall for communication during community events I was quickly able to get my bearings, figure out who was “in charge” and find my way to the mob. Mob’s not really the word, in-game it’s referred to as a Zerg and that fits better. Anyone who’s played StarCraft knows can imagine what it looks like when dozens of players come swarming down over all wall.

When I caught up with everyone they were on the way to a supply depot to the west of the keep spawn. We quickly dispatched the one or two player characters in the area and mowed down the NPC’s. I unlocked an achievement tier called ‘Yakslapper’ for destroying a caravan carrying supplies for one of the other servers. This is mostly how the first part of my experience went, running after the Zerg, attacking and staking fallen enemies. Awesome! So far so good, this WvW stuff is great!

No so fast, it was at the time of my first death that I realized one of the my least favorite things about WvW. Once I died I was given a choice to warp to a way point, back where you start on first loading the map. This meant I spawned, ran over to the repair vendor and then had to run all the way back to the Zerg. Which was absolutely no fun and a couple of times made even worse due to missing actually meeting up with the group as they had already moved off in some other direction. On one memorable occasion I had run the path and found everyone just in time to have the ‘raid leader’ call out: “Everyone warp back and head toward east supply.” Bah. I was just at east supply not 5 minutes ago, I ran through there to get where I was. Even with the issues of meeting up with the group though, I have to admit I had a good time – I’ll probably be giving WvW a few more goes, heck I might even start to like it.

Aion (PC)

Back in the beginning of September I had a chance to finally sit down and play some of the Aion open beta. I had been kind of following the development and wanted to get in and play. Once the open beta started I set aside a few hours to see what the buzz was about. Overall, I wasn’t super impressed. Sure, the game looked nice but, it didn’t really grab me. Honestly, I already knew I wasn’t going to be buying the game since I don’t play MMO’s with monthly fees. It just wouldn’t make any sense when I already seem to struggle to find the time to play. Anyway, I managed to work my character up to level 12 or 13. During my play session I mostly saw the same old MMO-ish stuff “kill x of y” and “fetch” quests. Another thing that kind of disappointed me was the large wall of text at the opening of some of the quests, most people probably won’t even read it, other quests had a brief cut scene that didn’t seem all that great to me. I did have a fun time playing it just wasn’t enough to convince me to pay for the game and then the monthly fee. Maybe I’ll give it another shot once it goes free to play.

Scribblenauts (DS)

Scribblenuats has done something no other DS game has managed to do so far – convince Kris to pick it up and turn it on. I showed her the game one night and the next day she’s wandered into my office asking where the DS is. For me the game got old really fast, I probably won’t ever pick it up again, and Kris has since moved on to Peggle DS. So is Scribblenauts her gateway to gaming? Probably not, I think it just shows what a good concept the game was too bad it’s so boring. Oh, and Kris just unlocked Peggle Nights.

Plants vs Zombies (PC)
A friend of mine has been playing Plants vs. Zombies for quite a while now. Well, not as much playing now as tending to his Zen Garden. For some reason I had resisted picking it up from Steam. I’m not sure why, I just never bought it. Browsing through my RSS feeds while on a conference call the other day I read that PopCap had released a Flash version of the game. It was then that I realized this is the perfect work companion so, I immediately bought it through Steam. I finished my first run through adventure mode a few minutes ago.

The Witcher (PC)
Seeing the leaked video of The Witcher 2 made me want to jump back in and continue working my way through the game. It’s such a good action RPG, I really need to finish it up. I spent a couple of hours working my way through a few quests I had open. I’ve still got a way to go in the game but I’m working on it.

Persona 3 FES (PS2/PC)
The day before picking up Plants vs Zombies I found myself with some downtime at work and really wanted to play some Persona. However, I didn’t feel like dragging out the spare TV and setting it up in the office. I knew I should have bought that TV tuner card. So, I made an ISO out of my Persona 3 FES disc and started playing with the latest build of PCSX2. I didn’t even play too far in since I really wanted to continue the game I have already started but still too lazy to drag the TV into the office. Now I’ve got too saves and still have 100+ hours of RPG to go through…

Dominion (Tabletop)

I’ve been hearing about Dominion and never really knew what to think about it after all, the descriptions I heard were pretty odd. Well, I finally had a chance to sit down and play a couple of games and it was pretty fun. Fun enough in fact that we may even play it again.