Don't forget that other Holiday

There's a holiday that comes once a year, sometime between Halloween and Christmas. It's a special time where we all come together as a family and look at ads to decide where to shop on Friday.

Shopping centers don't remind us of Thanksgiving because the only thing they can sell you for it is a Turkey.

It's up to you to be grateful for everything you have!

Tabula Rasa R belong to no1

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21224

Sionara, game I never tried.

Info on Spellborn! Actual, factual info!

http://news.filefront.com/the-chronicles-of-spellborn-closed-beta-starting-in-november-heading-to-north-america-in-january/

Apparently Europe is gettign it very soon and America has to wait till next year. Oh well. I have too much exploring to do already. Where's my mining cap?

Dexter says it all..

This comment by Dexter Tiberius here
pretty much sums up my feelings about things. I like how he compares PvP(RVR) in Warhammer to chocolate. I like it, I even love it sometimes, but I can't stand it for very long as it quickly raises my insulin levels so I have to just have a little every now and then.

Dexter Tiberius: 2:20 PM

Bought Lotro at launch, felt a distinct lack of pvp, left it for warhammer when it came out. After a month of warhammer, i realised (for me at least) pvp was like really nice chocolate, nice to have once in a while, but you get tired of it really fast. Especially when everyone's in a scenario and too busy to chat, makes the game seem really empty =/. I did have some really good times in warhammer, but with the current state of the servers, and really empty public quests( xp in scenarios are too good, plus since you get xp AND renown for renown gear, no one does PQs very often =( I decided to try MoM. So far i'm liking the new classes XD hopefully will reach 50 by the end of december so i can enter moria.

-thanks Dexter

I know return you to your regularly scheduled monster slaughtering and 2GB downloads.

An unexpected Surprise...

So sometimes I suddenly get creative...

This last weekend I had an idea for a board game I wanted to make.

So I did.

On Friday night I drew game pieces and a gameboard and invented most of the rules, and the next night I got it to the point that I could play it with my wife. After a little talk with Thallian, we are planning to make it into a simple computer game. Hopefully this is not a premature announcement, but the game is actually quite simple and will be a good warmup for our bigger game project.

I'll show you the game art when I have it all scanned in.

-Anton

HOGGER RAID!

On Tuesday night, WoW had a huge server outage. I couldn't get on my main server all night...

For a little while, there were only 20 or so servers up. During this time a lot of people created characters on those 20 servers. I happened to have a level 3 priest on one of them, so I joined in.

The next thing I knew, people were spamming general chat in Elwynn Forest with talk of a "Hogger Raid." Hogger is a level 11 Elite boss in a public area of the Forest.

Curious, I moved in the direction of Hogger. As I approached, I saw more and more level 1's gathering...

We finally found hogger, but not until at least 25 level 1 characters had joined our mob. We engaged. it took a little while to down him, but the 25 needle-point wounds finally left Hogger in the mulched grassy forest floor.

"Hogger Down!"

Bigger Death Knight Dilemma

So one of my friends is playing his Death Knight character right now, and he confirms one of my fears about this class...One of the first quests is "Slay 10 villagers and 10 peasants" or something along that line...

So one of the things I've always liked about MMO is you can customize your character's appearance, class, and basically play how you want from a huge assortment of choices. Here, they've given me one new class and they expect me to play it, but it happens to be one of the most evil classes yet introduced.

I play a Holy Paladin, typically, so you can guess where I'm going with this. Anybody else wish Blizzard could have given more than one new class so we didn't feel obliged to play a new "Dark Side" character?

Me being lazy...

I know I could just look up for myself what's coming out soon and what's popular by searching the internet, but...

I'm curious what everybody is playing right now...I'm obviously playing a lot of World of Warcraft, and I'm excited about Thursday's release of Wrath of the Lich King...

What is everybody else playing now? and what are you gearing up to play next? (include when upcoming games are being released!) Post a comment!

Death Knight Dilemma

Lich King's coming out next week!

I'm worried about Death Knights. They're going to invade the game. Besides being new, they will start at level 55. I don't really want to play a Death Knight, but if I'm going to play an alt, I'd much rather start at level 55 than level 1.

So here's my proposal...I'd like for Blizzard to make it so that ANY new character is given the option of starting at level 55 (as long as you already have a level 70 character). That way, the world won't be flooded with this new class running around everywhere, and leveling up other alts won't be such a repetitive process.

What do you guys think?

(Maybe if this idea gets spread all over the blogosphere and Blizzard's forums, it might reach Blizzard's ears, so if you like it, spread it)

New instancing (dungeon) system for Lotro

So THIS is really interesting to me. They are learning from other games and adding clustered instances to Lotro similar to Scarlet Monastery or Sunwell or Naxxrammus or whatever where you have progression between the clusters. They are also planning on gating the raid encounter so you have to complete the progression. If the progression isn't made impossible for mere mortals then I'm fine with this. If it near impossible except for the leet then I'm not so ok with it. I really didn't like the ridiculously hard attunement system (see Naxxrammus again) and I really did like the key system where you get a Bind on Pickup key from defeating the end boss. You could even have a key from the boss of each one to the next so you cannot skip and you'd have to Learn to Play(tm). Hopefully Lotro wont devolve into some gear based power grind like WoW though.

On the other hand, I hate to say it, but I'm bored of this system. Its a good system, but I'm bored of it. Whine(tm). :P The task force system of City of Heroes and the mission systems of some games push us to break out of the norm and do new things. I like this. I will definitely be supporting Cryptic in Champions Online for at least a couple months. Especially if its as revolutionary as City of Heroes was when it came out.

Nevertheless, this is a marked improvement from how Lotro's instances worked previously, and the three man instance sound particularly good at adding variety. Well have to see how it all plays out. The Rift was very well made so I have some reason to hope.

Legendary Weapons, the rundown

So a fellow named PyroBurn has posted a very thorough guide on Legendary Weapons in Lotro. Seriously Lore masters who want to be like Gandalf need a sword one too, but it shouldn't be too hard for them to patch that in later, since they already built legendary swords for burglars and champions and hunters and so on. Here's the guide: http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Legendary_Items_Guide

Some short thoughts on Angry Anonymousity

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/03/angry.internet/index.html

So cnn wrote an article about how people are lashing out from behind a cloak of anonymity. This is not a new or amazing topic so I'm not gonna belabor the point. I'm just gonna say that there's a good reason I do not allow anonymous posts on my blog, cuz I don't want to encourage people who think that they can say mean and hurtful things to vent or to use expletives because they believe it strengthens their position*. Or that believe that anger == strength. It takes a lot more strength to control your anger, than to just give in to it. This country and world have too many people who are slaves to their passions already. Bridle your passions and use the freedom and reason which make us men/women instead of animals.**

*(Note to anyone who will listen: it not only doesn't strengthen your position, it shows weakness of character.)

**This goes for in game too, You will have more fun and deep satisfaction helping others grow and overcoming enemies than you will being angry and selfish. PVP+PVE with heart, not with rancor or greed.