Back in the day, Everquest was the hot game on the market. I can’t recall all the times I would hear people in electronic stores talking about their new addiction that was slowly being known as Ever Crack. I resisted for a very long time, feeling that if I wanted to play a game on line, why should I shell out a monthly fee when a majority of multiplayer games, like Quake 2 and the new Unreal tournament, came with free online play.

I finally, like all of us, got talked into playing EQ by peer pressure. The lure to simulate a session of dungeon and dragons with many of my college friends through on line play across various states, to bring back the luster of the old days was just too good to true and I just had to give it a try. Besides, the guy that ended up talking me into it was a high level jedi and knew how to work the mind trick to his advantage. I played for about 2 or 3 yrs. I really can’t tell you the correct number because I was spending all my time trying to level up my barbarian shaman and didn’t keep track of the time I was spending. First mistake when buying into the whole MMO atmosphere, never forget how much time your spending away from real life, but that’s another discussion.

But for me, Everquest was the “IT” MMO game. I’m sure others talk about how great Asheron’s Call was or Ultima online, but as far as advertising in stores, magazines and word of mouth, Sony’s Everquest was getting all the hype and promotion. Sony was on top of the MMO world and continued that trend by releasing expansion after expansion. Adding new content on a regular bases to keep the consumer spending and happy. Sure, a lot of stuff had to be fixed because the expansions themselves would either break the game or the game got broke after someone exploited a piece of code to their advantage and developers would have to fix the issues, but at least Sony was trying to get stuff out to the paying customer on a yearly bases.

SoE was on top of the world. No one could touch their subscription numbers, they were the it company. They added a few more games to their stables, like Planet Side to sweet’n the monthly charge. All an effort to keep the customer happy and subscribing to that monthly fee.

Then the inevitable happened. While SoE was developing their next step forward in MMO’s another company slipped in the door and took the spotlight away. SoE made the fatal mistake of assuming that MMO customers will stay loyal no matter what comes out on the market even if your doing your best to turn out the next exciting product. I was that interested in EQ2 but not fully committed to the concept of future proofing, as it came to be called. But, I had a good, wealthy friend friend purchased and then shipped the game to me, so there was no excuse for me not to give it a try, especially after having been a loyal EQ player for so long. But to their own fault, SoE made the game too graphical and hardware dependent. Players, who had spent years playing EQ, just were not ready to spend up to $2,000.00 upgrading their computers just to play a re-envisioned version of EQ.

So one has to ask, if Sony hadn’t made EQ2 so graphical heavy, would they still be on top of the MMO industry? I honestly don’t know and this is why.

Recently, I’ve become bored as many others have, with WAR. So, I’m probably going to give it up, but I just don’t want to rely on WoW for all my online entertainment. I considered giving EQ2 another shot at some of my hard earned dineros. But when I ventured out to pick up the newest expansion, The Shadow Odyssey, I couldn’t find a copy. I searched, Wal-Mart, 2 different Target stores and Circuit City, nothing EQ2 related was to be found. There were plenty of Age of Conan, WAR, LOTRO and even some Tabula Rasa copies, but nothing, unless you count the EQ Anniversary box, on EQ2. But here is the strange thing and why I think the stores are very bias.

Every store had a Wrath of the Lich King display. If they didn’t have a display, they had tons of game copies and monthly game cards. The idea came to mind that either Blizzard is pay graft to get their product displayed heavily in stores or the market has already decided who the king is and it’s WoW. Whether tons of people are playing EQ2 or not, shouldn’t that game be available and readily at hand for any consumer to purchase without having to be bombarded with Blizzard’s Lich King?

I finally found a copy at Best Buy, but even there, they had a huge display set up for Lich King, but no display or massive shelf space for the EQ2 expansion, and it was just released as well. So, apparently the market has spoken. Even if your not a gamer, the public recognizes WoW as the winner of the MMO wars. Second I would have to say a tie between Lotro and WAR, followed by AoC then the dead Tabula Rasa. EQ2 is far behind in market recognition and considering that SoE was the big dog several years back, with EQ being top of brand recognition, it’s a pretty sad state. So what happened? Did Blizzard just throw a war chest of money at the marketers and say, “We want everyone to know who we are, we don’t care the cost.” Or is EQ2 that bad of a product that players just can’t find a place for it in their MMO hearts anymore?

The irony of going from the industry name for MMO’s to having a small amount of shelf space for one or two copies of their current mmo titles was just shocking. Did Blizzard just pass out a lot of kool aid in department stores on day or is SoE’s EQ2 just that far back in consumer’s minds that they don’t deserve any floor space? Either way, it’s pretty sad for a company that was riding the high not so many years back.

As a side note, I didn’t provide any links to Blizzard or World of Warcraft in this post.

As stated in my previous post, the wanderlust of Warhammer online has pretty much faded, as it has with many others. This normally coincides, with most MMOs, when the 30 day trial subscription expires.

Warhammer online suffers from many things. Some of them could have been fixed, like limiting the number of races, making area’s much smaller so more interaction could be forced between sides or having larger population caps and less servers. The issues many are that the game is lacking in PvE and because of this, they are starting to lack in population. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game had large amounts of PvE content to keep those that are still playing interested, but since a majority of the game content is driving off the RvR side and populations becoming smaller, the game will suffer more I fear.

I have often heard people say that they plan to keep Warhammer to slake their PvP urges and World of Warcraft to satisfy their PvE needs. But the concept of WAR only works when people are actually logged in playing, unlike WoW, which doesn’t have any content that is driven by gamer attendance. If only Mythic had spent more time developing its PvE side instead of forging ahead with all their RvR concepts, the game wouldn’t be suffering such bad losses.

Even now Mythic is urging people to move characters to more populated servers so they can keep the RvR balance in check. They have yet to mention server closings, but that is only a matter of time. With Tabula Rasa already closing it’s doors and Age of Conan not fairing much better, I wonder how long before Mythic will have to either release some awesome PvE content or finding another way to entice players back.

I enjoyed WAR when I was able to play, but now I just can’t seem to muster up the energy to log in and play a scenario, especially when ques are longer than waiting at Cracker Barrel on Thanksgiving day. (by the way, that wait is approx. 1 hr 15 minutes) I have limited amounts of time as it is, I don’t want to spend it waiting to get into a scenario or trying to find enough people to do a PQ.

Honestly, I hope Mythic can pull their game up and make a grand go of it, but I’m starting to think putting all your eggs in one RvR basket just isn’t the smart thing to do.

Finding a good guild to hang my MMO hat has been a favorite topic of mine. You just don’t know what your getting into till you’ve made the fated choice, wondering if everything will be wonderful or if you’ll have to start looking for another place to hang your hat 3 or 4 months down the road.

Lucky for me, I made a great choice when I decided to play Warhammer online.

Casualites of War is by far one of the most helpful and group oriented guilds I have every been a part of. They look after the whole guild, not just the individuals at the top. Their goal is for everyone in the guild to have fun. They plan events that cover all levels of players and they encourage everyone to participate. If you need help questing or doing a PQ, they are more than willing to come help without wondering what’s in it for them. That’s what I call a great guild.

But, alas, my time in Warhammer was to be brief. Work started to take up most of my time and I was unable to keep up with WAR 0r the guild like I had hoped. When I finally got some free time to play, the wanderlust of WAR had faded and I just couldn’t force myself to log in to play. I started spending more time on my Xbox 360, since it only required small amounts of my time rather than tons like MMO’s tend to do.

The days of being in a great guild seemed to be fading from me. But alas, I was saved again. Casualties of War decided to branch out, to be more than just a Warhammer guild. Several of the members had lost interest in WAR as well but wanted to keep the guild alive in other MMO’s, so they decided to become a multi game guild. Lucky for me, they decided to make World of Warcraft there second guild venture. I was already set to keep my WoW account and pick up WOTLK, so this was fantastic news. The only draw back was, they wanted to start over. I was a bit leery of this, since I was all set to take my two 70′s into Northrend, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to be in a guild that I knew from experience would look after it’s membership as a whole not just the upper elite, which previous guilds I had been in tended to do.

So, I did it. The guild started over on Rexxar, a… well… a PvE server. Man, it hurt to say that. But right now, I’m having more fun these past few days than I have had in the past 2 years of playing WoW. I use to look down on those who had chosen a PvE server over a PvP server, but to be honest, after having experienced both, I am here to say, officially that I prefer the PvE. I mean, after playing WAR and seeing what PvP really is, Blizzard’s so called Real World PvP is, well, pretty lame. The best thing to do is, pick a PvE server and just do Battle grounds if your itching for action. The rest is just pointless.

Players have been saying this for years and now I truly understand, the PvP aspect of WoW was slapped on and ever since, Blizzard has been trying to justify it, reshape it and make it their own. The fact is they have failed terribly in trying to make it work. Battle grounds are ok, but real world PvP just isn’t working. Some might think that being able to gank someone, who’s character is 30 levels lower than theirs is exhilarating, but the fact is, it sucks for the guy or gal getting pounded, especially if they are camped repeatedly. Many a player has quit WoW because of this horrible excuse for PvP.

Anyway, I am happy to have found a fellowship of good gamers.

Go CoWs.

I’ve been away from the mother ship for sometime and have only recently started my slow indoctrination back into the collective of mindless, borg like, MMO players. In my, me time, I only played Wow for short spurts, specifically, when the last content patch came, which introduced all of new and wonderful changes to class talent trees. I did manage, after the patch, to spec out my Protection Warrior using the new tree design (actually, I copied a fellow guildies Prot spec, but he is an awesome tank, and I hate thinking), and I have to say, they gave us out all the loving one company can to a character class.  Sorry Steelrat my friend, they just don’t like rogues.

Protection warriors are the new AoE tanks. This didn’t become very evident to me, due to my limited game play, until last night when I started my stroll through Northrend. I was able to pull 3 or 4 mobs at a time and still had complete and utter control over them without any mess. Starting off my attack rotation with thunderclap, cleave,  and finally stunning them with the new talent, Shockwave.   So far it’s been very effective and efficient.

I was also informed, by a fellow guld member, that pulling 3 or 4 mobs at a time was a pretty low count for a 70 protection warrior, but in my excuse, I don’t have all the nice pretty gear that comes from some raiding instances.  I do have all the gear out of Kara, except for the shield, which would have been nice, since the blue one I still have is pretty lame, but I did managed to get a ring and shoulder pads from ZA in the last few weeks, but since everyone is moving forward, I think my chances of getting great gear are in front of me, not behind at this point.

I am currently deciding if I should level my warrior or Mage first, but either way, I am sure I will be enjoying Northrend way more than I expected.  I did notice that the horde have resumed hostilies, but that was before I found all my new spells and had them properly placed on my hot bar, now I wouldn’t be so certain they would win that fight in a rematch. lol

WWW.oakstout.blogspot.com

Please update your blog rolls.  I’ll try and post a reminder here when I can from time to time.  If WordPress hadn’t gotten all flaky on my I might still be here, but since its been giving me a ton of grief over the last few months, I decided I need to try something different.

If for some reason, WordPress stops being a total ASS, I’ll try and start my blog up back over here.  But in the mean time, please visit my new site.  I know lots of people have been wondering whats up, but now you know.

I hope it doesn’t inconveince anyone by the move.

So, I’m going to be moving to my blogspot account. So if you have this on a feeder, you might want to change too, www.oakstout.blogspot.com. I would make it a link, but all the controls for doing that are missing right now, sorry, but you’ll just have to cut and paste. I’m done with WordPress.

One of these days I’ll throw down some cash and get my own website, but till then, I’ll be blogging on free sites. I’m hoping to have the site, the other site working by this afternoon. Right now I just have a small introduction to myself, so feel free to experience some more poor writing. lol

Again, its www.oakstout.blogspot.com

See you all there.

These can be said of just about any type of game. 

But what makes an MMO great?  Is it the different race/class combinations?  Is it the questing and rewards? The way a character fights or cast spells?  Is it the graphic or maybe the sound effects and music?  Could the game bring something innovative to the genre that no other one has or maybe some thing that has been tried before but failed?

I bring all this up, because when I was thinking about my experiences in AoC, it occurred to me that this game was good, but not great.  The game lacks polish.  (Sorry to Darren and others that hate that term.)  Characters shouldn’t be disappearing into the ground, getting stuck on terrain or losing pets every time they zone in to or out of an instance.  Graphical glitches should be lower than what appears to be happening in this game.  My preception is that beta is where companies find these small problems and fix them before the game is released.  Worse case scenario the game gets released and a miracle patch is sent out to ease the pain.  Something as simple as your character getting suck on a rock or bush shouldn’t be happening the first week of release.

Classes are another issue.  Every class should be pretty much balanced when the game comes out.  I know that this isn’t always possible and some tweaking might be necessary. The fact is, we shouldn’t be see Rangers pwning people at point blank range, especially if the Ranger is getting the snot kicked out of him by a dagger wielding assassin.  I love nuking people at point blank range with my demonologist, but I also think that if a bunch of undead are beating on me, I should get interrupted a few times and that just doesn’t happen.  Worse case scenario is when they find out there is an unbalanced Feat,  Nerf it in the wrong direction and make the whole Feat line pointless, causing the player to really hate that class.  I have a friend that plays a rogue in Wow, who bitches everytime a patch comes out because of something Blizzard took away, but he still plays his character because in fact the nerfs are little and a much needed change or so I keep telling him. lol  Designers need to balance a class not over power or gimp it to the point where players won’t ever touch it again.

The in game mail, auction house and bank are still down.  These things are key to the success of any MMO.  They help drive the ingame economy.  How can people get the materials they need to build these big guild houses if you can’t sell or buy much needed items on the auction house?  Designers have lost a good bit of their end game just from this problem.  You also can’t pass off items of value to an alt or keep things that maybe useful later because of limited storage space.  This is a failure in my book.

The PvP is pointless.  I know that the PvP in WoW seems tacked on, but at least they have some way of rewarding the player for participating.  AoC doesn’t offer anything that I am aware of except at end game where you can lay siege to other guild keeps. But what about the lowly level 15 that wants to get his gank on?  I like real world PvP just as much as the next person, but after pwning people for 5 minutes it gets kind of silly.  Why grief people all day?  Especially since there isn’t a penalty for ganking people half your level or lower.  It seems like people would get fustrated after a while and just say screw this game.

From what I’ve gathered from several web sources, AoC had a flawless launch.  why?  Because the servers have been rock solid and the lag has been minimal?  I just don’t understand this philosophy.  Just because the game hasn’t had a major shut down, doesn’t make it a great game.  Look at WoW.  Right after it was launched they had server problems and had horrific lag.  Everyone was complaining and Blizzard gave everyone extra time to make up for it.  Did WoW go under because of this?  NO.  Blizzard is the top dog now and their launch was anything but flawless.  I do have to give props to AoC.  Funcom did learn from Blizzard’s mistakes and had servers on stand by to take up the slack.  A smart move on their part.  But does this mean they have a great game on their hands?

The quests are fun, the game has lots of nice action and the graphics are spectacular.  At times, there seems to be too much for the player to do.  I mean, how are they suppose to attack, switch weapons, hide and complete combos?  Not to mention being able to block attacks, lay traps and direct their pets around?  All of this seems overwhelming at times, but its challenging which was the point the designers were trying to make.  They want the player to become more immersed in the game’s action, which I am glad to say, they have achieved.  They have successfully taken the old art of combat and made it something different.

My current plan is to keep Conan as my second MMO.  But why Oakstout, you’ve all but trashed the game?  Well, to be honest, even with its faults, the game is a blast to play.  I’m not saying its better than LOTRO, but it has captured more of my attention in the short span that LOTRO ever did, even with its achievement system.  I also don’t want to be too quick in my decision.  All the issue I currently have with the game can be fixed.  Its just a question of how long it will take and if they will really make the effort to get it done correctly.

So is AoC a diamond in the rough?  No. Right now its more like a lump of coal that is on the verge of greatness, if only the right kind of pressure is applied.  I just hope it doesn’t take too long.

Did you think it was going to be that easy? You expected me to just say AoC beats WoW hands down right? Well, not exactly!

Well, I’ve been playing Age of Conan since last Tuesday (release day). Due to my heavy raiding schedule in WoW, which is a wonderful excuse, since I’ve been struggling for so long to find a great guild and I’ve have finally found one. Because of this slight unexpected happiness, I haven’t been able to get past 20 yet, but I do have several at level 9 and one at level 18.

Here’s the run down so far. The lag for me is minimum, although I did hit some pretty good chop on Saturday while playing, but I brought my graphical settings down a bit and that helped. My current machine, which i built the middle of last year is a pretty beefy machine.

• 8800GT 512MB
• Dual core 2.5ghz
• 2Gig ram
• Over 500Gig HDD space.

I can run the game on medium with a 2xAA setting, and a few other graphical effects turned on. I do love the Bloom effect, but that had to get turned off this past Saturday due to some lag issues. This lets me achieve an average of 28 – 40FPS. Not bad for right out of the box. It runs better than EQ2 did on my current machine, not to mention the scenery, characters and over all look of the game is better.

The game has been pretty rock solid since I started playing. I’ve only encountered a few issues, like, when exiting the game I get an error, which causes the game to rescan all the files before I can log in again. There is also the nasty, getting stuck in the foliage effect, which if they don’t fix soon will really start to piss me off. lol I have also noticed a few graphic glitches, like my character becoming bald while swimming in water and when putting on a frayed head cover my character looks like she’s wearing a white cat on her head, which would be nice if my character had white hair to start with. Over all the graphics respond a lot better than in this game. Basically the trees don’t move while all the extra textures are being rendered, as they do in Lotro.

Everyone should already be aware of the two types of questing once you get into the city of Tortage. The night time questing is by far the most fun. The problem is that you can only do those for so long before you hit a level block. Once this occurs, and it does for every one, you have to head out and do some real world questing to get your levels up. Not a big problem, but you end up dying a few times on the night time quests before you realize you need to level up outside. But for the most part, the Day time or Multiplayer questing is a lot of collection quests and “kill this many” quests. The drop rate on the collection quests is nice, but there is an issue doing quests that ask you to pick up stuff off the ground, especially if your with a friend or group, because the respawn for these specific items is long. Your party members also don’t get credit for it if you pick it up before them, which I’m glad WoW does.

Overall the game is a lot of fun, but still full of bugs, but nothing that is crippling to the game play. If you play a demonologist, your demon despawns everytime you zone in and out of an instanced area. This is annoying. (Oh, a really funny side note, if you have a male character, your demon is female, if your female, your demon is male.) The Trader, which is the person that handles the Auction house, bank and in game mail is still being worked on and is currently down. I’m hoping this gets resolved soon. You also can’t create chat channels nor can you change the color of your text. You can create separate boxes to filter your chat, but since you only get a few options as to what kind of chat you can filter its not that big of a deal.

Currently I’m on a PvP server and I haven’t for the life of me figured out what the purpose of PvP is at the earlier levels. You can kill people, but you don’t get anything for it. It would be nice if you got something for killing people the same level as you or higher. It would also be nice if they imposed some kind of penalty for people that are 10 levels higher than you camping your area.

This leads me to class balance. Some classes are just over powering. Rangers for example can pretty much pwn anyone their level if they have distance on you, but they can also do it at close range as well. What about a few interrupts? I’m beating the crap out of a Ranger with my club and he’s still able to fire point blank at me and do combos? If someone was beating the crap out of me with a club I don’t think I could pull a string back on a bow and fire repeatedly at him. I’m not asking for too much realism, but come on. I mean if I can pull down fire from above and get interrupted, then why can’t a Ranger? Like I said, some class balancing would be nice, especially if your end game is going to be all about the PvP.

Ok, thats the last of my thoughts. The game is great with the exceptions of those problems listed above, but they aren’t deal breakers, they just need to get fixed. And since they seem to be on top of things, like creating more servers for people to migrate too, I think they will get around to eventually fixing the other issues.

As a side note, If your going to PvP, I would recommend a Nostromo N52 controller. It pretty much rocks with working the combos and is a must when playing a complicated class like the Ranger. (Yes, I have an over powered Ranger. I created her when I kept getting pwned by one. lol)

If you have been on the fence about this game, i say give it a try. The real question is can FUNCOM get the game under control and fixed by the time Wraith or WAR comes out. If they can’t get it done, they’ll lose a lot of people.

Oh and just for the record, I’m not going to give up my WoW account for AoC. Its fun, but not a WoW killer. I would say its more a TR or LOTRO killer than anything else.

Like food, some movies shouldn’t be left out past their expiration dates. If left out there too long, they just go bad.

This movie is just plain awful. Truly, utterly, awful and  like food that goes bad, it smells. It’s ok to have a bad movie as a guilty pleasure, Armageddon is mine, but this movie is so unpleasing that you’ll have to flush twice to get rid of it.

The concept for the movie when it was originally written was probably a great one, then Lucas started adding his horrible dialog and it just got out of hand from there. Lucas just can’t write dialog. He just can’t and anyone that says he can is just some poor Star Wars Fanboy that thinks the paper under Lucas’s pen is sacred. Well, in this case its just putrid.

The franchise was at its best when the first movie was released. It was awesome. Everything was possible. Nothing in the movie was too outrageous. It was possible to accomplish all the things Indy did in the movie. I didn’t have to suspend my disbelief that far. It was a true action movie that had acting and heart. This time, not so much.

First, you have to can get past the terrible, phoned in acting. Its very evident that Mr. Ford just did it for the money. There is no excitement, no charisma to his character. He had his hand out and they just piled the money on. Look, the last Die Hard movie was a bit of a stretch, but its Oscar winning material compared to this crap, plus Bruce Willis spends most of the time laughing during the movie because even he knows its crap. Then you have the supporting cast, which with the dialog that Lucas wrote, didn’t have a chance.

Then you have to deal with the completely outrageous special effects action. I mean, I can think of some creative things to do in a movie, but sword fighting while straddling two moving vehicles, which, by the way, was done in one of the recent Star Wars movies, is just stupid. Especially since its been done before. Then there is the Tarzan act which, I’m not even going to get into.

Look, I’m no movie critic, but this movie is a must miss. Someone at the studio was passing out hits of acid the day this movie got screened, because it should be hidden away in a vault till some courageous adventurer comes and rescues it from Spielberg and Lucas or at least throws it on a fire. i would see Event Horizon or Sphere again before i saw this movie for free on a network.

Lucky for me, I didn’t have to spend any money on this crappola, the boss man treated all of us, but for those that are worried about spending the money, go see Iron Man again, trust me. You will thank me later.