Things that make you quit a game

Log into Warhammer: City Siege. Okay, good stuff. Run to the door to zone into a siege, instead be sent to a Tier 1 zone. Run across the map to a flight attendant, and go BACK to the city.

Can only find instances empty of allies.

Decide instead to try and solo roam/gank any destro trying to cross Reikland unhindered.

On the path back from the city gates, drop down to the river and follow the path to Reikland, only to meet an invisible wall by rocks that you cannot jump over, even though you can clearly see the other side. Turn BACK around, and try to run up what clearly looks like a ramp returning to the bridge back to the base camp outside of Altdorf.

Discover ANOTHER invisible wall on the ramp, and have your access impeded. While rubbing your nose against the invisible wall like a hound on the scent of fowl, looking for any possible sliver of an opening through, you slide a bit off the edge of the ramp, and get stuck in a perptual non-moving fall. Only to be killed to unstick you, and put you back in the base camp. Only there are no healers in the base camp, so you are left stuck with a 15 minute PvE death timer that you have to run back to SOMEWHERE to heal.

Sorry, no scenarios, everyone is in the city.

Back in the Saddle

"Bringing sexy back." "Where did it go?"

I’m a bit rusty here, with having been too busy to give any attention to my writing of late, so I’m just going to jump right into the saddle and take this thing for a ride. All climax and no foreplay style.

I left my guild this last week.

The final straw on the back of the camel was a disagreement before a 6v6 they had set up, and then how they requested I spec to complement. The situation just exemplified the entire outlook they had started to take on how to approach the game, and combat. Where their playstyle was taking them one way, mine was another way. The gaming philosophy is one that I disagree with, and won’t participate in. It’s one that can work, and I hope it will for them, but I don’t think it’s the best, nor do I find it enjoyable. I don’t hold any animosity or anything towards them, but I highly doubt any reconciliation or a return to their ranks until they change how they play.

I’ve been playing less and less of late, thanks in large part to my finals, but also thanks to a smattering of EVE, and also out of just a general lack of desire to do ANY MMO gaming. MMOs in general are starting to dull on me. However, the recent solo-ishness of my gameplay has brought me to some really fun and entertaining scenarios, and has reminded a bit more of self-reliance in-game play, but also, brought some of the silly, ridiculous FUN back to the game for me.

Over the weekend I had one of the top five most humorous instances in my WAR career. I was playing as a melee spec for shits and giggles, and at one point entered a Blood of the Black Cairn scenario, that had four marauders. As I was running around doing my hit and run, bob and weave, in and out multi-range attack style of the SW, I noticed the marauders were REALLY starting to give me some love. At one point, I had three purple tentacle beams all converging on my back as I exited the fray (oh why didn’t I PrintScreen!?). Then I saw “Disrupt” then another “Disrupt” and a smile started to grow on my face, but it stopped short, as my character then went flying through the air in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go.

Can’t win them all.

The rats have landed

As you should be well aware of by now, The Verminous Horde RvR pack arrived last Thursday, and we just had our first full weekend of play with the new toys it brought. Rats have been roaming the lakes left and right. As far as patches go, this one was implemented incredibly smoothly. No game-crashing bugs, or campaign-destroying issues were there, and downtime for it was relatively minor, especially when considering how much was added in. That’s not to say that there aren’t issues that need to be dealt with, and the importance of the various issues will vary from person to person. For instance, on some servers, it was discovered over the weekend that scenarios were obliterated into non-existence. And of course, in typical, and perfectly reasonable ( is my “/sarcasm” needed?) internet fashion everyone cried bloody murder in response.

Strike of the Match

Yesterday, Andy Belford tweeted that  scenario matchmaking was coming soon to a server near you. A lot of people are excited about this. I don’t know if I fall into that particular group of folks quite yet. My initial response is “cool – better fights”, but when I sit and think about it, actually think about its reprecussions, I find myself sitting on the fence, with a slight lean towards the side of unease.

There is a thread on the official forums where Andy gave a fairly robust explanation, something that twitter’s limited message size couldn’t allow. He confirms the general concept that performance and skill will be used as a marker for how players are matched, and a very rough outline for how filling of scenarios will function, and he even went so far as to give some teases about the potential of cross-server scenarios.

Video: RR74 Shadow Warrior

Well, this probably won’t be as entertaining as your typical random internet person making wild accusations and raging at corporate entitties, but hey, it’s easier than reading!

You miss me?

It looks delicious, but it's not!

I know you did. It’s okay, I missed you too.

After beating the game, I took the next day off from writing, and yesterday I was out-of-town for work. So you had to make due with mashing F5, praying I would bring you some enlightened reading material to help you whittle the hours away at the office. So, here you go: me, providing you, a fraction of your daily dose of time-wasting.

With the achievement of RR80 on my Knight, I have only a few minor goals left for him before he’s got all that I could possibly want. I have full Sovereign, and 3 out of 8 pieces for the second set. I also still need to get my royal weapons, and I’m currently around 100 insignia shy of my two-hander, and then I have my sword/shield to get. Or I may reverse that, I haven’t decided 100% yet, which way to go. In large part, I’m still unsure of what route to take because the vast majority of my guild decided to be trendy, go-alongs, and rerolled to Badlands.

Tales of hate, entry 9

Today is June 21, and I will be posting this on July 15, 2010.

It was an interesting weekend for my Blackguard. I got to play a bit here or there, and even do a city siege. As I said from the get-go, I’ve been keeping mostly on the down-low about my character, but not being overtly sneaky about him. If people found out who I was, so be it. I wouldn’t lie, and outside of my forum signature on the Alliance forums, I don’t advertise my identity on him. That said, if you’ll reach back in your memory banks, you’ll remember a post (a couple of weeks ago for you) where I talked about some awesome drama and an ex-guildie. Luck would have it, that I ended up in a city siege with him. Within minutes of his guilds arrival, I got chatter asking if it was me.

I confirmed.

Tales of hate, entry 8

Today is June 14, I will be posting this on July 14, 2010.

After a couple of weeks of debate, I did decide to reactivate my Blackguard’s account and keep it active quasi-permanently. Meaning it may go forever, it may go till these posts start going live in July, or it may go until 1.3.6. Reasoning totally dependent on my mood, the tides, and whether my daughter laughs at my silly noises in the morning. Completely arbitrary. Still, I played a bit this weekend, and had a good time at it again. Kaah is firmly into RR41, and quickly making way to RR42. As usual, I was enjoying almost insta-pops the entire time I was playing him, but sadly, none of my guildies decided to commit in any serious fashion to their destros since everything in house has returned a happy equilibrium.

A new (or so old, I forgot it) and interesting experience was pushing zones to the city starting early in the AM. I wouldn’t call it fun per-se, but it was interesting. What intrigued me the most, was the behavior of the people I was zerging with. As I said before, I’m doing this whole thing completely unguilded, so I am going with the full experience of a friendless, unsupported, unknown nub. I make full use of all the systems in place to bridge the gap as much as possible. I make liberal use of open warbands to mooch as much healing as possible. I’ll frequently run into a lake, hit “L” and join the biggest warband I can. If they look like they’re doing something semi-productive, I’ll run over to them, and fight in their general direction/area.

Of course, I’ll be in queue for a SC.

Tales of Hate, Entry 6

Today is May 11, I will be posting this on July 12, 2010.

I hit a bit of a benchmark over the weekend. I reached renown rank 40. It’s not major, but it’s another mastery point, and it’s always been that dividing line in my head between “early game” and “end game”. It’s the indicator of leaving the lower level stuff behind. It’s not even half-way to the cap as far as renown points go (that honor falls on RR69.5), but it’s an indicator, and that means something. Judgement at this minor stepping stone: I like the class. Almost enough to make it full time.

Tales of Hate, Entry 5

Today is May 6, I will be posting this on July 9, 2010.

I made almost the entirety of renown rank 38 last night, I’m a smidge away from 39. I logged on, and did scenarios for the entire time. The only delay from hitting the queue button and getting a “please-accept” button was at the very beginning, when I had to synch up with whatever groups were out there. I used that time to run south of Martyr’s Square in Praag. Once I got my first scenario, I literally never moved a step from that spot for the rest of the night. It was awesome.

I played 10 scenarios, and they ran the gamut of available instances. I had ones that started off even and fresh from the start, to imbalanced to one of the sides, or already in progress. Still, I walked away with 7 wins and 3 losses, totally pugging it up. I noticed that the loses really started coming closer together as I approached 10:00 PM EST. I had a  good time though. Even as a total pug, I had a blasty-blast. People died, I died, enemy healers were hopefully cursing my name or spitting frustration at the site of me. If I was able to walk out of a scenario having made a healer or two’s experience worse because of it, I felt accomplished.