Endgame Viable

I’m all-in on FFXIV at the moment so get ready for wall-to-wall FFXIV posts this week! Last time I wrote that Square Enix wouldn’t do much about their guild housing prices unless people didn’t buy them. After I wrote that, they backed off a bit on their ridiculous prices, but not by much. Out of curiosity, I snooped around the guild housing areas to see just how many of the plots had been bought up already, because I assumed people would buy them no matter how much they cost or how much mindless grinding they had to do. (185 words.)

There are a lot more “early access” games now than ever before, thanks to Steam and Kickstarter. Basically what this means is that some random, poor game developer can release what amounts to a semi-playable demo of their game and then ask people to buy it for a (surprisingly minor) discount, hoping that they’ll raise enough money and interest to fund the rest of the game development. In a lot of cases that is as janky as it sounds, because some Steam developers think it’s okay to put out crap that is buggy and unplayable, but I think it’s a concept that can work well for the MMO genre, since MMOs are almost always in constant flux even after their official releases anyway. MMO players as a whole should be used to bugs and change. (535 words.)

Yeah, so we’ve been waiting for Everquest Next Landmark, right? We all thought they would start in January, right? We all bought an alpha or beta package even though we don’t want to admit it because it’s stupid to buy beta access for a free game, right? So what do you think goes through my mind when I get an email with a subject that looks like this: Ultrviolet, you’re invited to play EverQuest Next Landmark! (196 words.)

This is it. It’s all or nothing. My marmot is almost out of health. He won’t survive another round, and he’s the last one. I throw the box. I watch with breath caught in my throat as it teeters … totters … and falls down on the frog. I got it! I pump my fist and celebrate the capture of a new battle pet in WoW. My gnome jumps for joy on the screen, too. For this is not just any captured battle pet. This is a blue. A blue frog, to be specific. Not blue in skin color, mind you. Blue in rarity. That means it’s a special frog with lots of health and survivability. You don’t see blue battle pets out in the wild very often, so you try to grab them when you see them. (303 words.)

Remember the good old days when you could buy tons of awesome AAA games from Steam for ridiculously low prices? Yeah, I think those days are over. I was pretty disappointed in the Fall and Winter Steam Sales this time around. Almost all of the AAA games I saw on deep discount sales ($10 or less) were ones that I had already bought in earlier sales. (I still haven’t played 90% of them.) Most of the “new” sales were on indie or half-finished games, and only about 1 in 100 of those looks interesting to me. (Another 8-bit platformer? Really?) Not to mention the fact that I’ve already bought most of the indie games that interest me because they’re pretty cheap even when they aren’t on sale. (287 words.)

I’ve been “into” Massively.com a lot lately, listening to their podcasts and watching their streams, and one thing I’ve noticed is that some of them have a total love affair with Star Wars: Galaxies. They talk about SWG like most other people talk about Everquest 1: They diefy it like it’s the greatest thing there ever was or ever will be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that not only did I never play or even see it, I never even knew it was an MMORPG. (279 words.)

I recently reformatted my PC and reinstalled Windows 7, so of course I had to re-install all my games. But instead of re-installing the seemingly hundreds of MMOs I previously had, I decided to limit the number of MMOs installed so I could try to cut down on this MMO ADD I’ve been experiencing. So far I’ve installed WoW, FFXIV, LotRO, SWTOR, EVE, and Mortal Online. (Well, and Steam, obviously.) By sheer coincidence, I happened to have active subscriptions for those games as well (except MO). I typically buy 3-month blocks of sub time and then cancel; the order that the subscriptions will expire over the next 3 months is: FFXIV, LotRO, EVE, SWTOR, then WoW. (213 words.)

Continuing my adventures in finding an MMO to get hooked on before the new ones come out in 2014, I turned to venerable EVE, the best-or at least the most popular-game I’ve never paid for. With reckless abandon, I bought 3 months of time and downloaded the client. I haven’t played EVE in five years, when I played for a week or so during a free trial. Surprisingly, my character from the free trial was still there. I have no idea what “level” he is or if EVE even has a measurement for that. I didn’t get very far past mining with him. (763 words.)

The first week after NaNoWriMo I had to force myself not to write a new story draft because it had become such a habit. The second week it was kind of a relief not to have to write anything, and that terrible story had finally left my brain. In the third week I was anxious to get back to planning or writing something, lest I fall into a not-writing habit. Then came the holidays and the end of the year, and I predictably fell out of the writing habit. (507 words.)

After reading over this article on Massively by Anatoli Ingram, I am stunned that the author can even remember the names of those four GW2 Living Story characters, let alone come up with a thousand words of an article analyzing their personalities and backstories. My experience of the last year of Living Story was something like this: Oh there’s this cool new Living Story! Oh there’s nothing to actually do, but I got some achievements. Oh now there’s another patch, and now there’s this guy, and he helps with this instance, and he’s Eir’s son, and I got an achievement. Oh there’s this Charr, and she’s an outcast, and she helps with the other instance, and I got another achievement. Oh there’s some time where I didn’t play and missed some stuff. Oh now there’s a ditzy blonde porn star and another woman standing on a hill investigating a Tower in Kessex Hills for some reason, and I’m tired of doing this stuff just for achievements. Oh I missed most of the Tower story, but now I need to help the porn star and the other woman inject a thing into another thing so the thing blows up and I can get back to Kessex Hills. Oh now the Tower’s gone and it’s Wintersday so I’m going to Lion’s Arch to get some more achievements. (455 words.)