So, I wanted somewhere to post my reviews of stuff, and decided this was the easiest approach since Blogger doesn’t support categories. I’m going to post all the old reviews I wrote, but since I have no idea on what date they were posted, I’ll just stick them in as I come across them, and all future stuff will be correctly dated.
WoW
So, World of Warcraft finally finished patching and I got to play again. Levelled an undead warlock to 7 and then a Tuareen (sp) Shaman to 3 (took like 12 seconds).
Levels 1 to 7 in WoW *are* more fun than in EQ. EQ’s tutorial has come a long way to making the first few levels fun, but every race and every class plays the same tutorial, no variation, which means once you’ve done it once, you’re going to have to repeat the same steps for any other race/class combo. At least with WoW the first few levels vary based on race, although there’s little difference in the grand scheme for classes, but there is some difference at least.
And ok, it basically amounts to ‘finding the first quest giver, bringing back what they asked for and then hunting for more quest givers and killing the stuff they talk about’ for 7 levels, and in some ways EQ’s tutorial is structured better (it explains the game concepts as part of the quests). But the bottom line (look, two sentences one starting with And and one starting with But, sorry grammer) is that starting in WoW is just more fun.
It’s pacier, I never died once, and I had fun completing the quests. It looks prettier, EQ still hasn’t caught up in that regard.
You know what though? WoW *still* has less soul. You can’t talk in channels or in /shout when you’re low level, to stop spam-bots and account-sellers advertising. It also means you can’t talk to yor fellow players in the early stages. I waved at a few folk, but no response. The only time anyone interacted with me was to ask, and I quote,
“r u a mge”
To which I replied, “No my wretched undying friend, I am a warlock”. To which the reply was,
“kool”.
Ah well, so much for immersion. I’m sure it would be the same in the EQ tutorial.
There’s no real need to group for any of the early quests in WoW, where-as in the EQ tutorial unless you’re twinked to the gills some of the tasks are much easier grouped, and I think that probably goes some way to encouraging more interaction. The only time I’ve been in the tutorial recently we grouped with a random stranger to take out one of the task bosses. Other than EQ2 I’ve not played another mmorpg really, and I only played EQ2 in beta, so I can’t really compare other tutorials / new character starting processes.
I’m downloading Star Wars Galaxies at the moment, because I’ve never seen it and it has a free 10 day trial, so we’ll see how that compares.
Patch-of-Doom
I thought ‘I know, I’ll just stick WoW onto my machine and play for 14 days for free, for a bit of a break from EQ’. Hah! 120 minutes later I’m still patching.
Gah.
Brain Pain
A lot of my job is second-nature now. Making changes, fixing problems, suggesting solutions, pretty easy stuff, although that’s mainly due to experience. But every now and then we have to make a change to a paritcularly complex system, that we perhaps don’t touch very often, which has it’s own specific unique issues that must be considered.
Today was one of those days. My brain hurts! 4 hours of solid focus to make a change that would take 20 minutes on any other system.
Another day, another baked on stain
Another day goes by, another hot day to be precise. I spent half of it headbutting mindless and pointless processes at work. It wasn’t as bad as yesterday in that respect. I’ve decided that Scott Adams is in some way watching me at work. Yesterday was a non-stop process mire. This was yesterday’s Dilbert (sorry about the lame popups). Just right on the nail, totally described my day.
There is some solace in the fact that I’m obviously not alone in my pain-at-work, otherwise Scott wouldn’t get so much stuff right, it can’t happen by chance surely? It is scary that so many organisations are so screwed up that Dilbert is basically an honest representation of life at work.
In other news, I’m totally addicted to the last 30 pictures on live journal (not safe for work). In fact, may not be safe even if you’re self employed or unemployed. Make sure there’s no one else in the house near you. I can’t be held accountable for the images on that link – it’s the last 30 things posted to live journal and we all know bloggers are basically weird. The rate of new content is incredible, every 15 seconds will replace the entire page, and if you send the link to someone else you can totally expect it to look different when it gets there.
The guy who hosts the little script that does that stuff also has some really cool stuff on his main site. I love the frogger game 🙂
Anyway, I really should try and sleep.
BBQ
The BBQ last week was cool, just 3 of us (me, Grete and a friend), but it was still relaxing. We sat out until about 11pm – just amazing weather. We ate too much and we burned the ribs and the wings, all traditional BBQ activity.
The only thing that was missing was me dropping a charred-on-the-outside but raw-on-the-inside chicken leg on the floor and then fobbing it off on the person you don’t like. Since there wasn’t anyone there we didn’t like and since we didn’t have any chicken legs, we couldn’t do that bit.
Otherwise, 100% traditional UK BBQ without the rain 🙂
Hot!
It’s 33 degrees C! We had no choice …
TNF Raid News – July 15th
These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.
Another good turnout (thanks to everyone for supporting the alliance raids). A quick blast through Carprin and Bertox got another few folk that vital step closer to their full EP flags. Good work from everyone staying focussed and our quickest clear yet.
We moved from CoD to Lavastorm, to try our hand for the third time at Volkara. We knew we had the right strat the previous two attempts, but we were a little low on numbers and practice always helps. So we went in tonight with plenty of confidence. This time we set the rampage order nice and deep and when Volkara finally sauntered into our cavern, we jumped and nailed the 8 legged freak to the ground. We were slightly over-run by the last batch of eggs but enough people survived to get us rezzed back in, next time it’ll be even tidier again. The picture on the left is the ‘before’ picture.
And here’s the after … phear my l33t image skills.
After laying waste to Volkara, quite a few folk had to go but we managed to get 3 or 4 groups into the Plane of Earth to go and play with the biggest Crocodile in the Planes. A scrappy fight (we got an add through the door) but a frantic and fun one. Grats to everyone who held on to the end. I dropped to 0% health at the same time that the Croc did, but I regened 1 tick of health and he died 🙂 Grats to those who got loot and thanks for helping us get another key to another door in the long arc of PoP progression.
Sofa Bed
So it took Bubbles about 40 minutes to find the bed … I’m sure she’ll enjoy using it almost as much as we do 😉
As you can see, the sofa colour is cream which fits well with the original bright orange carpet and the orange, green and yellow curtains.
/grin
Phwew!
I’ve blogged so many posts in one evening, the last 10 all had word verification turned on by blogger! Well, they’re in. Everything I blogged directly onto www.darkstorm.co.uk/tony is now on-line here. The stuff I blogged before that in LiveJournal or somewhere else isn’t here yet. I may do those another time to see how far back I can get this thing going.
I’ve changed the Archive link to be a drop down since there’s now so much archive content!!
In other news – we went to Ikea and bought a sofa bed, had one last blitz of the back bedroom and then built the bed. It’s up, we can see the floor, another car load for the skip, some stuff in the loft, some stuff shoved in cupboard and a boat load of stuff to donate to charity, but finally, after three years, ALL ROOMS in the house are useable.