The Farstrider Scout

In our efforts to find something to play yet again, we bounced back to Guild Wars to pick up on the Prophecies campaign again…  And a short time later, before we knew it, we had finished it!

Unfortunately, this is actually a bad thing.  With GW2 in the works, ArenaNet isn’t working on any new content for Guild Wars, so the more we do, the less there for the future.

Granted, there’s still the Factions and Nightfall campaigns, plus the Eye of the North content, but Gina doesn’t feel that it’s worth it…  And at the moment, there are other games that I would rather play by myself.

So, with Age of Conan being a bust (for now - I’m still kind of hoping Funcom will come through, but I doubt it), and nothing else really “doing it” for us, Warhammer Online is the next thing on the horizon.  Gina is pretty gung ho about it, but I remain skeptical.

Yes, it looks alright.  The things I’ve read sound really good in concept.  But there are a few things that keep me going “Why should I play this game.”  One of them is the developer - Mythic, of DAoC fame.  Granted, I had several good years playing DAoC, but Mythic was my first experience with a “bad” developer (Are there really any good ones these days?). 

The second is their parent company, and publisher - EA.  EA, in the past few years, has grown to be a monolithic, and dare I say it, monopolistic, company.  They currently hold several exclusivity contracts for major sports associations in the US, pretty much guranteeing that games made for the sports those associations represent are the only ones played and bought.  Now, while I’m not a big fan of sports games, I am rather unkeen to support this kind of practice.  In addition, their Battlefield series, which I do play, has suffered as a result of poor decisions.

Thirdly, to me, despite what I hear, this smacks of a WoW-clone (and therefore, an EQ I clone).  I’ve found that, while WoW was fun, the endgame became a staggering and ever growing curve of forced grouping and choice between raiding elitism, or selling my soul to the arena, neither of which I was interested in.

Lastly, I feel that there are two camps when it comes to Warhammer - Warhammer, and Warhammer 40k.  Now I completely understand that in essence, they are one and the same, at least as far as a timeline is concerned, but I see myself as being from the latter camp.  And Warhammer Online can’t give my my heavy bolter or Land Raider APC.

Take a very long time to finish.

Gina and I did our first ever task force missions earlier today, running errands for Positron with a friend of ours.  We started around noon, and I don’t think we finished until around 4 or 5pm.  It really started getting old after the 6th mission, and we were all glad when we completed it.  None of us really gained any experience out of it, as I was 25, Gina was 16, and our partner in mayhem hit 16 shortly after starting.  The biggest benefit was probably the 100k prestige we racked up, which I immediately put to good use in the base.

On a better note, I’m enjoying running around and exploring all of the newer content that’s available.  It’s a far cry different from the standard, run-of-the-mill “defeat these villians in this cave/office building/sewer” missions that make the game only playable for a few hours at a time.  I just hope there’s more of it ahead.

I finally managed to find my EOS utility CD, as well as a flash card reader, and was able to get the pictures off my camera.

I’m not going to post them here due to file space (I only have 100mb TOTAL available for this site), but I did upload them to Picasa, so you can view them here.

Also, the track photographer took a LOT of photos, which can be seen here.  Big kudos to him!  Unfortunately, he left after the first changeover, so there aren’t any photos of the stock classes, or anything from the second run when most of the cone destroying seemed to occur.

The results for the June 15th Autocross event finally got posted.

The two marked as DNF (did not finish) is where I missed a gate, and the number in the PEN block is the number of cones I plowed over.  If I hadn’t taken out those 5 cones on my last run, that would have been my fastest time.  Even still, with the PAX index, I came in at around 50 seconds, which I don’t think was too bad for my first time.

The next event isn’t until the 27th of July, and while I’m definitely looking forward to it, I really can’t find much to do to prepare for it.

So, what does one do when they game that they had planned on playing for a long time falls through with no decent replacement in sight?

In my case, it involves going back through whatever games I had installed on my computer - Silent Hunter 4, Star Wars Galaxies, Vanguard, Everquest 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Team Fortress 2, Jumpgate…  All with mixed results.

The changes being made in Age of Conan are a huge letdown. Unfortunately, despite the 200 page thread on the forums regarding the issue and the drop in players as shown by Xfire’s tracking, Funcom has seen fit to ignore the outcry and forge ahead, leaning more and more to a forced group/guild style game.

We don’t do that kind of thing, so we’re taking our money elsewhere.

Yesterday marked our three year anniversary (no, not the site, you twits, our marriage!).

Three years is a long time, in some views.  Others, it’s rather short.  It’s all a matter of perspective - my parents have been married for at least 26, but I would put it into the 30’s.

I won’t say things have always been easy - in reality, things have been extremely difficult at times, and it’s been a rough road we’ve travelled.  And I won’t say I’ve been the perfect husband either, because I know some of those difficulties have been created by me.

But in all this time, despite the hardships, I’ve never stopped loving my wife - if anything, I love her more now than the day I first proposed.  And I’m looking forward to many more years together, be they long or short.

I love you, Gina.

Whelp, we’ve cancelled our AoC accounts (for now), thanks to a sweeping, and gamebreaking, change in game mechanics.  I’ll probably resub in a week or so, once I get tired of playing Silent Hunter 4, because try as I may, I’m finding it difficult to go back to any other MMO’s.

But, back on subject…  This gamebreaking change that Funcom has seen so wisely to implement, is to scale all elite mobs and bosses to the player’s level and, more recently increase the difficulty of all mobs level 70 and above. 

The first change was made (don’t quote me on this, as I can’t find the source of this information) in order to address the issues with gold farmers.  Unfortunately, the end result has been cutting off content for those who are incapable of, and/or unwilling to, find a group to do this with, as well as making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to complete the content with a group at the required level range.  Not to mention that, since normal players can’t farm grey elites now either, it makes any gold seller’s job easier, as horses cost a minimum of 2 gold, which is quite a sum.  Most items at level 40, when you can first ride a mount, sell to a vendor for a copper or two and some odd tin.  Since in this game, 100 tin = 1 copper, 100 copper = 1 silver, and 100 silver = 1 gold, that’s quite a lot of farming you need to do in order to buy your mount within a few levels of being able to ride it.  Most people I see in game don’t have a mount until around level 55.  There is a thread on the Funcom general forums with over 100 posts of complaints, and well over 1000 views…  Yet Funcom has seemingly seen fit to ignore this issue.

The second change was only made today and while it’s too soon to tell for sure, early rumors are saying that it’s impossible to solo at level 70 now.  Can you say “Forced grouping”?  I sure can.

I haven’t posted in a while, mostly because between work and getting the car ready, plus my normal play time, I just haven’t found the time.  I did make it to the Steeda event on Sunday though, despite the alignment on the car not getting done (which is getting taken care of tomorrow morning, I might add).  It was cloudy, muggy, and a bit on the warm side, but there was a breeze that helped out somewhat.  When I was racing, I didn’t even notice it.

The people there were, thankfully, very friendly and helpful, and I think I learned a lot.  I was doing much better by the end of the day, despite the amount of cones that I ploughed over on my last run.  The heavy ass end of the Saturn seems very conducive to drifting around tight hairpin turns, which helped set me up for the next gate on the course…  But it was also a downfall on the slalom until I learned to maintain a constant speed, instead of slowing down or trying to pick up speed (which was right before the hairpin turn as well, I might add - not exactly a good thing).

Sadly, I didn’t get to take very many photos, because when I wasn’t racing, I was working the track, and they didn’t want anything distracting us from our jobs.  Work wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be though, mostly just chasing after cones that drivers knocked down/off their marker box, and calling them in.  There were quite a few spectacular cone explosions - one from one of the Steeda Mustangs, and another from one of the local racers who ended up taking out 7 cones - most of a “wall” in one go.  Someone also managed to score a hit on the timing gate lights with a cone that got thrown from their tire at high speeds.

All in all, I had a blast, and I think I’m definitely going to keep going.

Good lord, how am I going to afford this?

Only a few days left until the autocross/Solo II event this weekend, and part of me is having second thoughts.  Talking to…  “naysayers”, for lack of a better word, at work, hasn’t helped, and neither has the fact that my “crew” has been slated to leave for a TDY, so he won’t be able to help me at all…  And I still need to do a couple of other things before the car is really ready.

At the very least I need someone with another car so that I can put anything extra I have (food, water, spare tire) in it while I run with the Saturn…  And I haven’t asked my wife since I doubt she really wants to watch me, being paranoid about my driving and all.  I’m kind of running out of options though.

I also need to dig out my camera, and possibly my video camera, so I can at least get some pictures up here.  Aaaagh!