Milestone Achieved! Time for a Breather!

So the dust has settled from Funcom’s Reevaluation period, and it’s gotten quite hard to recruit for the guild. I started The Creeping Darkness in Conan, partly, as an experiment to see if we’d be able to start a brand new casual guild that could be support by the game. I’ve spent a few months now recruiting, and to say the least it’s tough.

I’d have to say we were pretty successful since we finished a Tier 1 city. The core members, Openedge1 and his family, Turindal, and I have gone our separate ways for now, trying out new games and all that. We’ll no doubt start things up again when the veterans points are implemented or when the new expansion comes out. Openedge1 still plays the heck out of the game, and I’ve moved on over to Champions Online! For now though The Creeping Darkness in Age of Conan is on hiatus!

The Creeping Darkness: Guild Night Raises The Wall!

As usual, I’m busy as ever. College, Age of Conan, and now…..Champions Online!
Last night we had a huge guild night,all focused around our guild city. The Creeping Darkness is a rather small affair. I refuse to spam /globalchat with a guild recruitment link, and that is certainly to my detriment. I, truly, don’t find anything wrong with it. I just enjoy grouping, or politely chatting with someone, and asking them if they’d like to hear about the guild.

Now that the official rush of the “reevaluation period” is over, we are back to a steady but decidedly quieter pace. We have about eight regulars that hop on and off during the week. The guild night, now on Thursdays at seven o’clock EDT, has become a set group of five returning people. Openedge1, his wife, their son, and a great guild member  known as Krayor, consistently join me to go off and cause some trouble in-game.

For a group of five people, raising the outer wall of a guild city is a daunting task. The resources can be acquired rather easily, Krayor and I saw to it quite early. The real kick in the face is the forty gold that had to be raised to build and move my architecture crafting profession forward!

As I might have said in an earlier post, Openedge1′s wife is the money maker. They have been generous enough to place earning their sons one hundred gold War Horse mount on hold to help build the city. Since launch, The Creeping Darkness has always been a small guild; I actually like it that way. I’d gotten used to the fact that completing a Tier 1 guild city was probably not going to happen.
Imagine my surprise when last week I realized I had enough resources, in my inventory. to build the outerwall, and then was given the rest of the cash from our resident sugar mama! Holy Smokes! It took me about an hour and forty-five minutes to count out, verify, and craft all the things needed!
Here are a few screenshots from our initial meet-up in our city, and the construction of the outer wall:

So that’s that…well not quite! After getting all the materials together for last night, I spent time setting up our next goal. It being the inner wall, and having another nineteen gold investment, I’d figured it be a far off goal. That was until we found out that we’d collect all the resources need…just needed the cash! Yet again, Shanrhiana, popped in like some Dickens Age Benefactor, and gave us the gold needed! A few minutes of hurried crafting later:

What a great guild night! A full Tier 1 city! Next week we’ll be trying our hand at some more interesting instances, and I’ll attempting to recruit a bit. Thanks everyone who saw the guild city to completion!

The Creeping Darkness now has a Champions Online branch! Anyone that would like to join just in-game mail me, @Blamefulgecko.

The Creeping Darkness Guild Night: Magically Delicious!

The Creeping Darkness is in full effect! Last Monday we had a fantastic guild night. The family trio of Openedge1 donated about 14 gold into our guild; so we decided to do some building.

Originally, we were going to save up the huge 41 gold needed to build the city’s outer walls. After easily amassing a huge amount of resources, including sandstone, ash wood, copper, and silver, we were in a dilemma. We’d collect so many resources that we actually had our next goal prepped and ready to go! This being the building of our crafting professions workshops.

To explain a bit, Age of Conan’s guild cities include buildings that are tied to their classes, and crafting professions, excluding the Tradepost and Keep. The class-based buildings are as follows, Library (Mage), Temple (Priest), Assassin’s Guild (Rogue), and Barracks (Soldiers). Each one of these buildings adds a passive buff to anyone that is a part of the guild. As these buildings are upgraded the buffs grow in power.

The crafting workshops, Architect, Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing, and Alchemy, contain the reagents needed to work the specific classes. Now that we have all the buildings of a tier 1 guild city, a person can collect their resources, go to the guild city, do all their crafting there and use the tradepost to put anything they like on the marketplace.

I was too busy counting out resources, and refining materials, to take many screenshots. Openedge1 took quite a bit though during the raising of each building, so check them out here.

One thing I made sure to do is to appoint  Openedge1′s son, Tashar, as advisor to the placement of the each building. This is where creating and naming your own guild ranks would come in handy! I know he’d love it if I were to give him his own guild rank called Advisor. He’s worked pretty hard to collect gold and resources, and it made the guild night experience that much more worth it to see him excitedly run up and down each building as it was erected.

I’d mentioned earlier in the guild reinstatement that I tried to place each building in the logical spot that it would be. For instance, the Assassin’s Guild is tucked away in the back of the city. Advisor Tashar took the time to, not only, think about the placement of each building, but also to explain the reasoning behind each placement. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, great kid!

Finally, I really wanted to show my thanks to the main contributor to the guild so far, Openedge1′s wife Shanrhiana. The only way other than spamming a wall of “Thank you so much!” Was to have an impromptu ceremony in her honor. I hurriedly crafted the needed components for the outer walls gate and made a little speech of appreciation before constructing the gate.

This was the icing on the guild construction event cake that evening!

Set as reminder of the hard work Shanrhiana has done for the guild!

Okay…so after that we logged off and went to bed…NOPE! There was more guild fun to be had with a run of a dungeon called the Cradle of Decay.

From what I gathered from the quests, the Cradle of Decay seems to be a cave…containing a bunch of old evil nasty things, chilling out inside of it. The neat thing about it resides in the encounters that are provided with each boss. The cave seemed to have a few common perils that we had to avoid. Openedge1 led the way and we were told to be mindful and avoid any carnivorous plants and dead bodies strewn throughout the instance. I really wanted to ask why we had to avoid these things, assuming some nasty damage over time debuff, or enemy ambush would follow, but it was too much fun having that sense of blind adventure that I didn’t want to have it spoiled.

Preparing for another enemy encounter.

Shanrhiana was lining up a shot that brought the caverns ceiling down; clearing out several nasty statues that would have animated.

In the end, we got a few neat pieces of gear for the group, and got to explore a nicely put together dungeon….ADVENTURE!!! Man o’ Man! Was that ever fun!

Today on the Catwalk: Scarclaw Set

What a busy past week or so. I’ve been messing around in Champions Online, getting ready for classes that will be starting in a few days, and finishing up a summer research position I’ve been working on.

I think it’ll take a couple posts to catch up. I’ve been bouncing around a few thoughts, and I think they’ve really added up.

First things first, when I started Age of Conan over, one thing that got me really jazzed up was the reminder by Openedge1′s Fashion Showthat the diversity in AoC’s gear is present, but the player needs to explore to find it.

I remember at launch running the Sanctum of Burning Souls, for my Scarclaw set. It’s a gear set that is clearly designed for, my class, the Bear Shaman. I won’t bore you with the stats, and just show you a picture:

It consists of a helm, chestpiece, leggings, and boots. I was lucky to get everything but the boots in four or five runs. Those darn boots on the other hand took forever. I’d spent too much time trying to get them to stop, but luckily they have the greatest chance of dropping on the first two bosses so we didn’t have to go through the whole instance.

During launch, I spent most of my time actually collecting resources and grinding for cash to build the guild city. I didn’t really run many instances in the Noble District, Field of the Dead, or Eiglophian Mountains. I’m really hoping that the great dungeon design continues throughout AoC. I don’t just mean the engrossing story, the quests, the architecture, and boss encounters provide either. I mean the actual layout of the dungeons.

I may have went into the Sanctum instances fifteen or so times with three groups, but the instance has multiple optional bosses, and as we acquired the gear for a particular group member we were able to cross that boss of the list. It made for a fun and much less arduous gear excursion!

I don’t know if I’ll have it in me to collect every piece of every set I encounter for my class. I think it was important to get the Scarclaw set out of Sanctum, because I had so many fond memories of running around in it at launch. That may sound weird, but it was just one of the many things that helps me immerse myself into the world.

But anyways, time to check the old marketplace, and Crom it up a bit!

Age of Conan: Patch Changes

With the announcement of the next major patch in Age of Conan centering around enhancing the guild experience, I started to think about some major features that I find lacking in the day-to-day operation of a guild.

Craig Morrison’s letter to the community gives us some interesting hints to an in-depth and competitive guild experience system, but what I hope that will be unveiled later is a comprehensive plan to give more control to the guild concerning, flexibility of AoC’s government system and the guild rank permissions.

The above photo shows the drop down menu (1) that contains the different government types there are to choose from in Age of Conan. The game has a huge amount of lore and each government (2) has a large amount of backstory and can be tied to one of the many cultures in the game. It may be for a roleplaying purpose but you are not able to create your own government or ranks. I find this to be one of the major things lacking about the system.

When creating a guild, in previous MMOs, I’ve really enjoyed having the ability to create prestige rankings for people that have been members in our guild for awhile. I also have used the ability to create ranks as a means to keep track of alts in the guild. We are a casual guild so the more flexible we can be with these features the better.

I don’t know if being able to create ranks would be as critical if I had the ability to adjust the permissions of each rank provided to me.

The list of available rankings (3) increases in responsibility as the list descends to Lord. AoC does not allow you to adjust of of the permissions (4) for any of the ranks though. That means, using the Nemedian government as an example, Aspirant to Squire have none of the listed guild permissions.  Knight is given a large amount of permissions including inviting, kicking, promoting (no more than one rank below them), and demoting. Commandant, which I assume to be the officer rank, get the permissions of Knight and also the ability to make our guild city vulnerable to attack. This is used to initiate guild city siege warfare.

I’ve learned to work around the issues that spring up from these limitations. I would really like to be able to allow someone to invite a person but not promote, demote, or kick them. I think this is more important in the long run than creating or renaming ranks. Right now we run a pretty tight ship for a casual guild because of the huge jump in responsibility that we hand over with the rank of Knight.

One thing you may not think to notice is missing in the list of permissions (4) is something in the vein of  “Can place things in guild bank.” and “Can take things from guild bank.” While the first seems to be trivial, the second one has been a source of a good bit of frustration. As of right now, the only ranks that can access the bank are the officer, and guild leader positions. I want to be able to give a longtime guild member the ability to take things from the bank, without making them an officer.

Being able to adjust the rank permissions would also allow me to use the government theme that fits us. Acheronean seems to be the best theme for our sinister sounding guild, The Creeping Darkness. I can’t justify using it though because of the way the permissions are set up.

These features are standard in most other MMO’s. I don’t think they, in anyway, take away from AoC’s uniqueness. They would just give guilds more options when it comes to management.

A few other knit picks:

- If I can’t create a new rank to keep track of alts, please allow for notes to be place next to guild members names. It would also help to keep track of a characters current crafting professions. Again, present in many other MMO’s.

- Fix the issue that sometimes causes a new guild member to have to relog their character in to be added to the guild chat channel.

I'm really loving Age of Conan, and appreciate all the hard work the dev’s have put into filling in the gaps the game had at launch. Keep up the good work and all that!

Now off to Bear Shaman it up…by Crom!

Misfire

What an adventure I have had! Throughout the past two weeks leading up to our guilds first Monday night meet-up, I’ve had some unusual computer issues. Included in the craziness was, odd checkerboard like graphical issues, weird freezing black screens of doom (always when I’m in the middle of a huge battle), display driver crashes, and an unusually high amount of zone crashing (loading from one area in the game to another).

On a hunch, I decided to try and shut off Xfire, and everyone of those issues cleared up immediately. I was able to participate in the guild night with everyone, and didn’t have one significant issue. I took having to turn off Xfire with a little bit more disappointment than I thought was possible though.
I’m going to avoid any rant that may seem possible by the exponentially frustrating situation of having the only game you want to play at the moment not work. Patches come and go and it’s a given that sometimes programs just don’t play nice sometimes.

I tend to jump onto the bandwagon of new things quite late in the game. That includes sites like, Gamerdna, Xfire, and Twitter. I have yet to figure out if it’s a fear that I’ll get addicted to checking, posting, interacting, and so on. It most likely is though.

Xfire offers the ability to track your hourly progress in games. Logging the new games experienced, and moving them over to my gamerdna page. There’s something comforting and compulsive about seeing the current game that I’m playing slowly overtake the other games that I’ve logged time while Xfire was installed.

I’ll cut to the chase and say that, Xfire, and other social network/stat tracking sites have made me jump on the bandwagon known as, Achievement Whore. In truth, I was smug in my belief that I wouldn’t have to worry about that facet of my personality. I didn’t own and Xbox 360. I mean really that’s the only way that happens, right? Yeah, I know, that’s just a thin excuse perpetrated on myself to stipend the inevitable conclusion.

Ticking numbers, that’s all I’m missing about Xfire right now, but damn it if it isn’t nice to see each little increase.

There once was a man…and his name was DING!

Pod-o, Blog-o, Blah Blah Blah

One interesting bonus of jumping back into Age of Conan has been the connection I’ve been able to make with some of my favorite podcasters and bloggers.

Mark and Noah from Channel Massive decided to give AoC a try after hearing about some of the changes that Funcom has implemented recently. I jumped at the chance to invite them over to the Set server to group up and “By Crom” it up a little. It looks as though they are liking the improvements to the game as much as I am.

If you’ve never listened to their podcast, I’d highly recommend it. They’ve recently taken the leap from a strictly MMO focused affair to a general video game podcast. One of the most interesting segments that they have is called “Blog-o-steria”, it pretty much consists of that weeks most butt knuckle crazy blog post. Be it a tantrum, or the rantings of an oblivious know-it-all. They are working on their 100th episode at the moment. Quite an achievement for a podcast.

Another interesting person that I’ve run into, thanks to twitter, is a blogger by the name of Openedge1.
I’ve just recentlystarted following Openedge1′s blog for awhile. It’s always a good place to find out what’s happening in the world of AoC. He enjoys the heck out of the game, but doesn’t forget that some parts still need some major overhauling. For some reason though, he takes a ton of flak from people on the forums!

Openedge1 plays with his family.  His wife and son, hop around the world of Hyboria, having a go at bustin’ some faces. Joining into a group like that is really refreshing, and I feel lucky to be able to interact with them. It’s really made AoC that much more enjoyable. His wife = super funny. His son = super polite.
Well off to play the Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo, just thought it important to post what good friends I’m making while purifying the unbelievers.

By Crom! or Let’s Play Catch Up!

Okay! That’s it! I’m doing it! I’ve been putting off working on this blog for months. Trying my best to convince myself I don’t have much to say just isn’t working. The more I surround myself with bloggers, the more annoying the itch is to seriously try it out.

Over the next few days I’m going to try and catch up on what has been going on, and what my current foray into gaming has been.

First things first, I’ve gone back to Age of Conan. I actually subscribed to the game again very soon after patch 1.0.5. I was one of the unlucky that started paying for the game right before the free 2 week evaluation period. The improvements they’ve made have pushed the game are to be admired.

The main issue I had at launch was a nasty memory leak that would force me to restart the client every 45 minutes, or be smacked over the head with a crash to desktop. This was foreshadowed by a blanking of both the world and mini map. Extremely frustrating and completely killed the flow of an instance run. It’s no fun when your group has to clear out an area just so you have a safe spot to restart the game.
The more I think about why I left, the more I realize that it wasn’t from and inherent flaw with the mechanics of the game. Out of game it was easy to rail on class imbalance, client performance, and Funcom’s treatment with patching. When I got into the game though, I couldn’t help but have fun. With this patch,it  is the way that it should have been at launch.

I joke around in-game with statements like, I’m loving this game now that it’s finally out of beta, but in truth I’m really glad that Funcom had it’s chance to clean the game up. I think it has to do with the fact that, underneath the grime of a icky launch, there is a genuinely good game here. Experiencing the  closure of games like Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London first hand, it’s clear that it’s a rare thing for a developer to have the backing to bring a game back from the abyss.

Once I realized that Age of Conan is “Strong Like Bull!” I decided to try and salvage my old guild on the Set Server. the guild was created at launch, and thanks to the rush of initial players, saw a nice growth in membership. Sadly, the lack of content once you hit around level 60 killed the guild pretty quick. I stuck around and used up all my saved capital to build our guild city as much as I could. Planning never to come back, I took one more ride on my speckled white horse and unsubscribed from Age of Conan.

Coming back to an MMO is always tough, because I end up completely disconnected from the progression of my character. To avoid this I decided to start over. A simple decision that paid off in the long run. I never played the early levels enough to want to hurry through them. The quests, while familiar, are still vague enough, in memory, that I pour over them as if reading them for the first time.

To continue the positive vibes, I’m playing a brand new game.

A Noob’s Welcome

Welcome to the grammatical spasms of a newborn blog. You will witness the awkward posts and inconsistent formatting of a writer who has something to say, but is jumping into a medium that he’s only had the courage to admire from afar.

What made me take the leap, you ask? That would be a kind hearted kick in the ass by a professor.
I’ve never wanted to admit it, but I only feel like I’m on a creative roll when I’m either making up stories or writing something down. My latest professor, a Dr. Richardson, gave me that kind of hard time you can only really think back to as a training montage. I had one good semester to poor my heart out onto a piece of paper, and see what significance it had for me.

This could go on for a few more paragraphs, so I’ll just end this section with, I changed my major to English and have had the itch to write.

Now on to the reason…

Originally, I was going to name this blog “The Fuzzy Carebear” to point out what kind of gamer’s head you’re getting yourself into. I tend to avoid ranting and raving about things I can’t change. I tend to accept that “this game is not for me” and don’t have any reason or want to prove to followers of a certain gaming philosophy, that my way is law. I say this because it has become a regular aspect of blogging, this Blog-o-steria! as the hosts over at www.channelmassive.com put it. I’m going to try my best not to fall into that pit.

I hope to have my first real post up soon! I’m currently interested in writing some stuff about my experiences with The Chronicles of Spellborn, Requiem: Bloodymare, and Atlantica Online.

Excitement!!!!