So let’s see here…
In the last month I’ve tried a few new MMOs. This time around it was FFXIV, as I mentioned previously, in which I made it through the intro content before the oddity of the setting just started to wear on me… I just don’t like the Final Fantasy genera I guess – it’s too much of a mishmash of gritty realism and weird bad acid trip for me to really care much about why I’m having to kill ten bizarrely alien critters. So I uninstalled it.
I then re-installed WoW as it is free until level 20 now… I’m happy to report that I am completely over the addiction, as I got terminally bored with it in about an hour and uninstalled it.
Next up was WildStar. I really, really want to like WildStar – the writing and art direction are amazing and right up my alley, but the game just lets the story and art down so badly. I played for a few days before the frustration with game mechanics overwhelmed the desire to want to play it – and I uninstalled it.
After this was a very brief stint in TESO. They have, once again, redone the starting instance of Coldharbor… I think Coldharbor has been completely redone like eight times now – but the rest of the game tends to be the same broken mess it was during alpha. Yep – uninstalled it too.
And now I find myself back in ArcheAge, and having fun with it.
I was in the early, early alpha for the North American version of the game and it was great, then it released and the first two months were pure hell; server instability, Trion trying to figure out how to handle the popularity, and the game was absolutely rife with bots, cheats, hacks, and other such game-breaking things.
It was not uncommon to actually see accounts teleporting inside the vendors on the intercontinental trade routes – skipping the hours long travel and player pirates or brigands that were the risk to the reward. Then the economy tanked because of duped items, and eventually the cash shop was really the only thing left standing – and all this was the first 30 days…
I had managed to plan and play well enough to score an amazing bit of property in a perfect location on three long trade routes with easy access to the ocean for trade with the other continents – then the servers were down for a week, and when they came back up one of the land bots took my property in milliseconds and Trion was unresponsive to my problem.
So I bailed.
But here we are a year later and most of the stupendously broken things have been fixed, and I’ve been once again wandering the world looking for fame and fortune – and having some very good success I might add. Some friends of mine are still living in ArcheAge, so I have a good basis to start with, and I’ve been working on getting to level 55 as time permits.
ArcheAge is a PvP game, so there has been plenty of that as well. I am happy to report that I still have ‘it’ – whatever ‘it’ is – and I can hold my own out in the world. I’m not one for starting a fight, but I damn sure finish them when I get jumped.
I play what is called a ‘skullknight’, one of the tankier classes out of the 120 classes in the game, but I’ve set it up to be a bit of a sleeper in that no one is expecting that much crowd control and damage from a defense build… One of my spells is something called ‘imprison’, which creates an impassible bubble around my character out to about 10 meters in any direction – and once that is cast, whomever attacked me is locked inside that bubble with me for the next 15 seconds – and that tends to not end well for them. 😉
Something similar happens if my clipper gets boarded out in the ocean, in that I pop imprison and accelerate – the enemy are trapped in the bubble, but the ship is not, so they just slide off the aft end of the ship as I sail away.
It’s fun.
I hope to have land and a farm here soon, so I can resume where I left off a year ago with trade… If anyone reading this is interested, drop me a note. I’m on the server called “Kyrios”.
Lastly for this update I will be in Anaheim the first week of September; I fly out of Denver on the 31st and get back on the 7th. I’m there for EQLA on the 4th to the 7th, and a whole lot of folks I know (Aryte, Kei, Aurkae, Clinton, Kali, etc., etc.) are all getting together there for a weekend of total chaos. So the few days I am there before the show are just to slum around Disney and have a bit of a relax before the weekend.
If anyone just happens to be in Anaheim the fist week of next month, let me know!