That PVP rant

I didn't even try PVP in SWTOR until my third character (the Gunslinger), but by then I had already had enough of the repetitive planet quests and wanted something else to fill the gaps between class story quests. I would never class myself as a real PVPer, I just like to hop into a Warzone and fool around for 15 minutes, but strangely enough I was soon hooked to running Warzone after Warzone, because they provided an exciting distraction from grinding quests, teams were usually pretty decent and the rewards were good.


Crazy gunslinger guy, riding a speeder like a boss.

I also found that I became a vastly better player after getting my butt handed to me over and over - I had to learn which abilities I could use to counter this class and that effect, how to cap and hold objectives using my wits instead of brute force.. and the hardest of all, learning not to use knockbacks to throw a Huttball carrier over my team's goal line. Usually I had a good time, because even the short chats I had with my team during WZ matches was more social interaction than I encountered while out questing.


However, last week's Patch 1.2 brought some unexpected changes to PVP, namely severely decreased rewards for the losing side - before 1.2, even if your side lost the Warzone match, you still got a decent reward for your effort and time spent. Post-1.2, you don't get ANYTHING unless you gain at least 3 medals during the match. This is problematic for several reasons:

Medal farming is deleterious to team play and completing Warzone objectives. Of course there are always kill farmers and those that "derp in the middle", but it's much worse now since everyone wants to ensure they at least get their 3 medals. If the opposing team is better organised and wearing vastly better gear, it can be a real struggle.

Team imbalance no longer ends Warzones - enjoy that 8v4 for the next 10 minutes, since half of your team quit after the enemy's first capture or score. And why wouldn't they, since there's no penalty for leaving and the rewards for losing are hardly worth the time anyway, so and it's often a better option to just quit a losing WZ and re-queue for another.

Late joiners don't always have enough time to gain enough medals, even if they contributed to objectives. If you end up in a WZ that's halfway done and your team is obviously losing, you might as well quit and re-queue.

Warzone medpacks and adrenals have become unsustainable - their costs were doubled in 1.2 (from 10 comms to 20) - do you want to spend that 20 comms you got from the last WZ lost to buy ONE medpack or ONE adrenal? Or save it for Battlemaster gear?


Before someone raises their voice about medals being much easier now - yes, it's really easy to get over 10 medals now if you know what you're doing (and if you really decide to farm them instead of completing objectives), but sometimes you just end up ganked so badly (hello 8vs4 matches) that even if you want to stick to the end you don't earn enough medals and you get zilch for being a punching bag for 15 minutes.


My baby consular (lvl10), bravely holding a turret in Civil War. Gave me a chuckle when a lv14 BH tried to take it, but I just circled around the turret healing myself, so he gave up and ran away.

(For the record, I mostly play sub-50 PVP, since I enjoy it better than the expertise/gearfest that is lv50 PVP. I win more often than I lose.)

I wouldn't otherwise even write about this subject (since I'm a casual PVPer at best, always queuing solo), but I'm just disappointed now that after finding and enjoying a new side of the game, it's suddenly been made unnecessarily grindy and unfriendly. The rewards system before 1.2 worked just fine, and the only addition it really needed was a function to vote kick AFKers. I just hope Bioware will wake up and make SWTOR Warzones worth playing again, instead of encouraging people to quit matches until they land in a winning team.

(in before "baaw entitled carebears, L2P or GTFO")

Ressing Roll100

Hiiii, anyone still here? I know it's been months and months since my last update, sorry about that! I've got plenty of things I'd like to rant and ragewrite about, but I think I'll have to take it easy and not scare away any remaining readers with my massive turbine hate and anti-f2p hatespeech well-formulated arguments against a certain game that has been frequently featured on this blog... but not anymore, mwa-HA!

Well, to cut the long story short, I got finally fed up with the sub-par performance that Turbine has been delivering with Lord of the Rings Online, the unimpressive and unfinished Rise of Isengard expansion, the horribad LotRO community site, lack of targeted advertising (newsletters and loading screens with US-only competitions and WalMart ads) and the greedy and intrusive cancer that is the LotRO Store. Oh, and all the people who continue to spend 20 money on fugly mount that's unlocked for one character only. And I don't mean you, dear reader, but all the other tools that support a game that isn't worthy of its IP :).

Ohhh, feels so good to get that off my chest. Here's hugs to everyone! Happy gaming!

MEANWHILE, IN RIFT:

massive dragon invasion is massive

So, yeah, Rift has been good, but more on that later. The new region, Ember Isle, is calling →

Rift: derp

← my face today Haha I fail so much. I had some troubles logging in to Rift (again!), so in my frustration I thought the mobile authenticator was borked (again!) and I uninstalled it from my Galaxy Tab. Which anyone who, uh, actually ever read what it says on the authenticator wouldn't do, since it basically locks your account and you have to contact their customer service for help. *twiddling thumbs* Let's see how long this takes...

The Grindaversary

As most who've been reading the LotRO community forums and blogs know, the current Anniversary Event, also known as The Grindaversary, has been quite unanimously declared a complete fiasco. The token costs for the few new cosmetic items and the garish festival horse are way too high and they're only available, one at a time, from two minigames, one of which can only be completed twice a day. The other option, the Thorin's Hall bar fight, is fun but gets tedious very quickly — mostly because of the long waiting times between rounds.

And the icing on the cake is, of course, that after the whine escalated Turbine went and added a third option to the token grind, and it's only available on the US servers since our EU provider still doesn't have the system in place that would allow lotteries on our servers.


Damn carebears, whining about pvp.

So I went and did a few rounds of Beer Brawl to get the horse and a couple maps for the new Cartographile deed. And by a few rounds I mean around 80 rounds. I managed to get myself quite addicted to the minigame, and the waiting wasn't so bad after I dug up an ebook to read between rounds. What really really pissed me off (and still does) were some lame table campers — but at least they were easy targets to knock out of the fighting area, ha-HA! After the umpteenth fight I had absolutely no qualms about knocking people away from the beer jug and grabbing it for myself. Give no mercy and expect none!

Luckily I also had several friends helping with the maps so we each ground one or two and then shared them between us so everyone got all the maps counted for the deed.



After Lothi got her horse as well we went to take some screenies together but it was too dark and they didn't turn out quite well. Suffice to say the horse looks very silly and hastily made.



I also got a /salute from somewhere during the Beer Brawl and it finally completed the /swordsalute deed for me. Yay!

Fixing that distant shadows bug

In DX10/DX11 mode, there's a big ugly shadow covering most of the distant landscape.

Since the F2P update and the additiong of DX11 support, there's been a very ugly graphics bug in LotRO when using DX10 or DX11. Turns out it's a problem with the "distant lighting" setting.

Here's the fix:

1. Go to Options → Advanced Grahics and turn off DX10 Distant Landscape Lighting (use the search box at the top if you can't find it)
2. "Refresh" the graphics by changing to some other Landscape Lighting Quality setting (ie. from high to low)
3.  Change the quality setting back to what you had before, but leave the DX10 Distant Landscape Lighting checkbox unchecked

Here I was thinking that my landscape screenshots would be forever ruined, so I'm very happy about finding that fix!

Tall lady

I don't get this

So basically CM removed all multi-month subscription options from LotRO. What it means is that people who had had some really good 3-month or 6-month sub plans, from various Founder or anniversary offers, got their subs cancelled and were forced to renew them into more expensive 1-month plans.


Meanwhile Turbine is, like, uh, EVERY OTHER MMO OUT THERE, still happily trying to sell me a cheap multi-month sub.

So please remind me, what does the EU distributor (CM) have to offer to EU players, especially new ones without established accounts and social circles, that Turbine doesn't provide better and for a lower price?

Rattles behind the curtains

Tiny Easterling Hobbit says hi!

So, LotRO finally went F2P even here in Euroland, and the past week has been pretty exciting. I haven't been able to play as much as I otherwise would have (or would have liked to), since I started at a new job last week, my aching arms are killing me if I play more than half an hour, and seems my main PC is, once again, going all drama on me ("baaaaw my innards are at least 3 years old, let's turn the monitor signal on and off and have some overheating-induced flickering artifacts in your face"). If it turns out it's really the graphics card that's dying my conscience should finally allow me to buy a new, beefy dx11 card to replace it. Yay?

I'm also thinking of getting a cat. Or, actually, two.

And I mistyped that as "car" on the first try.

WAAAAAH I WANT A KITTEEEEEH!

Now I get it

-- why certain people hate the LT fight so passionately. As a hunter I'm actually pretty damn good in there, all things considered (honestly, it's just one massive ego trip for hunters), but now that I've seen it as LM I can only say.. can we please forget that place even exists and never ever go there again? Please? And maybe nuke it from orbit too?

Close your eyes, it's..

Purple prose time!

From Bad Roleplayers Suck:
The frosty breeze cooed hither from the coast, the seasonal leaflets whirling downward like papery snow settled, the crepuscular beams split down through the web of branches as a silvery blade and splashed alike holy water upon the sward, and Anel passed by, the phantom of the woods unseen and unheard. Of quiescence, Anel’s presence was utterly unknowable but the utterings of the breeze thereabout was ubiquitous. Sibilating, the susurrus from his shifting lips echoed amidst the oaks and conifers. Anel’s tune desisted; he sat.

(click on the link to read the whole thing - at your own risk, though!)

Whenever some elements in the Laurelin RP comm make me facepalm so hard I can't find my nose anymore, I'm still happy this level of thesaurus-molesting purple prose hasn't found a foothold there - yet.

Remind me why I even bother

So I thought "why not?" and bid on a 2nd age symbol, won it, made a sword for my hunter. In before "3rd agers are just as good" - I wanted to get rid of my ugly 3rd age club so I could fix the relics, and hunters actually have some pretty good legacies on melee weapons nowadays, plus on a 2nd ager I could even max out all of them. I got 2 starting legacies, and on reforges I only got some crappy melee legacies nobody in their right mind would use - at least not before all the more important ones are maxed. So please remind me again why the Legendary Item system is so legendary and useful and rewarding?

I find it completely inexcusable that a 2nd ager, which are so damn hard to get in the first place, can get less than four (not to mention just two!) starting legacies - I would have been happy with just 3 pool A legacies and replaced the rest with stat scrolls, but obviously I can't have nice things EVER (I'd show the awesomeridiculously bad LM staff I made a couple months ago but I just closed the game and don't feel like logging back in again).

*grumble*

I'm guessing the only people who like the LI system are those luckwhores who get nice things on the first try - I know for certain this was my last attempt in a long, long, long time.

>> QQing over virtual items

OMG HORDES OF WOW KIDDIES

-- IN MY GAME NOOOOOO.



^ that seems to be currently the hot potato in the LotRO community, and even more so in the RP threads. As we learned last week, The Lord of the Rings Online is going free to play later this year. This "f2p" is very far from the more common, free Asian mmos, since it's pretty much just an unlimited trial with severe limitations (such as only one character per server, money capped at 2G, less storage space), which can be removed with microtransactions in the ingame store. What most of the early ragers on the forums missed was that subscribers and Lifetimers would see no change in their game, in fact they are getting free points each month to spend in the store. Personally, as a Lifer, I'm pretty happy with what we've seen of the new model so far. There's even going to be additional character slots in the store, so I could roll at least two more toons! Because 9 is so not enough.

Back to the topic - of course, the new f2p will mean that EVERY SCREAMING KID ON THE INTERNET IS COMING TO ROOOOOOIN MAI AR PEE SERVERS. Some of the folks on the forums are wondering if their precious Laurelin should be turned into a VIP-only (VIP meaning subscriber/Lifer), with a multi-part questionnaire posed to each new player thinking of rolling a new scrub there. I have a feeling that in reality that would not stop those who plan to join Laurelin just to grief role-players, but it would most likely deter those who are still undecided about RP or who like RP servers for the community. I hate it when role-players get all territorial.

(it's a funny thing how each f2p discussion brings up "wow kiddies" - aren't they already busy playing their p2p game? kiddies logging in while wow is in maintenance, you say? well, that's maybe an hour or two away from my life, and in that time I can easily avoid them, if I ever even happened to run into any!)

What personally makes me RRRAAAAAAAAGE is that there will be NO CONTENT UPDATES until the game goes f2p, meaning there will be a ~10month gap between any meaningful new stuff. Meaning it's going to be a very, very quiet summer in Lotroland, unlike last year, when we got a nice new set of instances to entertain us until SoM. I'm assuming there will be a summer festival in a month or so, but that's not comparable to proper new level-cap instances (no, I won't forgive Turbine, not even when there's a wicker chair and a hammock among the new summer festival prizes). I had been sort of hoping there would be a new update soon-ish, which would give me some incentive to play again (I don't count role-playing as playing the game - it's 3D chatting :D), but it seems like we'll have to wait until autumn now. Tsk tsk.

What I fear the most now is that the quiet period will make me lose touch with many new acquaintances I've made, both ingame, on the forums and even real life - I'll just have to come up with something to combine all three.

Break time

So I quit LotRO last week.. I think. It's come to a point where I log in just to fight the urge of deleting each toon, which I just can't do since a few are my precious RP playthings and every other is a valuable Supreme Master&Kindred crafter. I had the same feeling in 2008 when I quit GW (which I also had played passionately for many years) - there's just nothing in the game to do, and the things I'm still missing are either easy to grind in a couple days (which I could do any day, meaning I'll never do it), or locked behind such a massive endless luck-based grindfest* that I'm not even going to consider going through it.

* like, grinding SG half a dozen times each day for a chance at a Symbol, yay!

Maybe I'm just spread too thin - I have 8 characters at lv60+ (and I've done the lv35 horse quest maybe 10 times), because I like playing all possible roles. I guess my problem is that I just don't prefer one specific class over the others (and it's not that I "like" them all, it's gone to a point where I'm disliking one just a little less than the others), and the current game mechanics are very much trying to force you to focus on one. It's the whole awful and unrewarding LI system combined with Radiance gating that means that if I ever want to do anything interesting with my new characters I'd have to grind a massive amount just so they'd be able to join the ride. I'm sick of the Legendary Items and how the entire endgame** just revolves around them - I don't want to spend all my game time working towards a lottery that only gives me disappointment nine times out of ten.

** there is no endgame, there is only SG

I like leveling alts, but my character slots are full already, and advancing new toons would just eventually lead them to hit the same brick wall I'm stuck at with all my other characters. Like my bf said it: "why should I level up my alts, so that they too can run SG?". I'd kind of like to just delete all my scrubs and maybe save one or two so I could focus on them better, but it still wouldn't fix the fundamental sources of frustration in the game - the reduced quality of content (and complete lack of it) is so obvious and it doesn't show any signs of getting better. The devs just seem to apply band-aid upon band-aid instead of actually.. oh, I dunno, amputating the whole current endgame mechanics? :D

Hm, maybe I'll go play Aion again, it's so bad it should make LotRO seem like a shining gem. It's just weird that I'm so used to wasting hours in LotRO each day that I can't really come up with other things to do with my spare time.

My boyfriend's reaction to this new Dev Diary:

Well, damn

I installed Win7 last weekend, completely replacing my old Vista. I backuped all my important program files, documents and pr0n, and in a couple hours I had a nice fresh Win7 running with all my tabs in Firefox, Vent server configs and whatnot intact.

Except I'd lost a month's worth of Aion screenshots, because they were apparently located in the program installation folder and not my Documents folder like every other mmo does. As I wrote earlier, play.com had charged and shipped me a copy of Aion although I had cancelled my preorder, and because I never got any kind of reply from their customer service I decided that what the heck, I'll try this.

So I played it for a month, taking a ton of screenies for a multi-part report about the game, community and stuff. But now all the screenies are gone and I'm not technically savvy enough to dig up anything from a formated hard drive, so I'll just give a summary:

The graphics are bad. Characters look cool, but the average player can only create characters that look like horrendous clowns or crackwhores. Environments are bland, empty and lack any kind of close detail if you wander just a bit further away. Give it dynamic lighting, like in the video a couple posts down, and it'll start looking good.
I don't mind if people like the Twilight books but I do get annoyed when they say it's "good literature" - same with Aion, who markets itself as "the most graphically advanced mmo" which some people even seem to believe when it looks only a few steps better than some Korean free-to-play games. This is mostly why I collected such a vast amount of screens to illustrate my point, but as they're gone now I'll be happy to challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

Around level 20 you are basically forced to group to advance in the game. My server was full of spanitards, who LFF'd in English but only spoke Spanish in groups, even though me and some others said we don't understand. Some PUGs I left intentionally when I realised we couldn't get anything done when four people are chatting to themselves in a foreign language, only to end up in another moonlanguage-speaking PUG after answering another LFF that was clearly written in English. Besides the community seems a bit too young and weeaboo for my tastes, although I did run into the fabled Aion RP community a couple times and would have loved to look into it more.

At level 25 you're able to enter the Abyss, which is the main pvp area in Aion and spanning levels 25 to 50, meaning there's always some highlevel asshat camping the spot where newbies land the first time to do pve quests. I really really don't see the point in clumping half the players, and with such a large level difference, in one area and expect them to play nice. Then again, the whole pacing of Aion is very strange to me, since first you need to endure 25 levels of very dull pve to get to a pvp area, where you have to do pve again to gain levels while being farmed for pvp points by highlevels.


Saraste, Spiritmaster level 25, of Gorgos server, taken from the Aion database. I liked that you could log into the site to check your auctions and mail, or look up a recent ganker's level and gear :D.

My class of choice, the cc-and-pets class Spiritmaster, is also apparently very broken at the moment. While it has some very powerful pvp crowd-control abilities, some of it's basic functions are just so laughable that it was actually the first thing that made me decide not to continue playing (since now way I'd be willing to endure the first 20 levels again on another toon). Firstly, it's a pet class whose pets don't fly in a game where pvp revolves around flying. Secondly, all Spiritmaster damage is damage-over-time, but mobs can only have a limited amount of buffs/debuffs on them (7-9, can't remember correctly), so once you've fired off your damage spells the opponent could just rebuff themselves with their own abilities to completely remove the SM dots. Thirdly, SM pets and related abilities don't scale with gear, so if I'd ever hit the level cap I could still walk around naked while everyone else could make their characters even more powerful with epix gear.

I did have occasional fun times in the game too, especially at level 20 when I eventually found a good, English-speaking pick-up-group for the mandatory group quests. The monster design is funny and combat is fairly engaging. It's just that so many things in Aion are complete opposites of what I'd consider a good mmo, and while I can aknowledge that not everything should suit my personal and often quirky tastes, I just never had enough fun in the game to continue subscribing.

Being skinny does not make you pretty

.. or even happy. It really doesn't.

This is a bit of a personal rant, but I just can't help it. People admiring bone-thin looks just makes me so angry. Also frustrated. Once again I managed to stumble upon some pro-ana discussion forums while casually browsing the internetz, and it still makes me feel sick to the bone.

Joy of being a gamer in Euroland

...is that publishers will rip you off as much as they can. After over two weeks of "we'll have the info next week", that is, waiting for the European pricing of the upcoming LotRO mini-expansion, Codies dropped the bomb an hour ago. Not only are they NOT bringing us the sweet life-time and multi-month subscription deals that Turbine offers their customers on the other side of the pond, they've managed to make an even more confusing list of Special Packs, Triple Packs, Adventurer's Packs and whatnot.

Also, according to their calculations, 20 pounds equals 28 euros (xe.com says it's just a bit more than 21).


Graph made by Berryl of TSM.

In my wildest doom&gloom imaginations I had thought they'd take the original 20$ price on the new expansion and somehow convert it to 30€ for us poor oldworlders... so in a sense I wasn't too far off in my speculations. They did indeed manage to get us pay twice as much as we would have in the US (or I at least, in my current subscription situation).

I'm kind of suspecting that the reason (or maybe one of them, other than good old Greed) Codemasters aren't bringing us the multi-month or life-time-based pre-order offers is that, somehow, their accounts tech doesn't allow it. I mean, Turbine are eagerly promoting their social network and how it ties with the new expansion, but us here in Euroland can't have it because CM don't have the tech for it. I really really wouldn't be surprised if their accounts system doesn't allow them to make special deals for certain types of subscriptions.

I always love having to pay more so I can have less stuff <3.

Also, I made a new tag for this level of BEING VERY MUCH PISSED OFF.

Order Fail

As I wrote previously, I had cancelled my preorder on Aion, but nevertheless it just came with the mail a moment ago. Apparently my credit card had been charged a week after I had cancelled the order, bleh. I don't have the time or energy to start playing it now, so if anyone wants a pristine, unopened copy of Aion for 39€, leave me a note here or on facebook. Otherwise I'll have to tackle play.com's returns procedure tomorrow.

Lhassie WIP

Bluuuurgh first time in a year or more that I'm actually drawing(/painting) something. So rusty! Thought I'd start with something easy, like a superboring portrait :p. Let's see if I ever have the time and energy to finish this.

On another note, Laurelin Archives, a RP portal for Laurelin, opened yesterday. I've played 1½ years on a RP server and haven't really done any RP at all there, but I felt curious so I registered to see what the site is like (I love the idea of Argent Archives, the similar WoW RP collective, and have long wished Laurelin would get something similar). My issue with RP in LotRO, and Middle-Earth in general, is that character options are so limited and you can't really be that original when coming up with a backstory for your character.

Besides I'm rather picky about quality - in my version of ME elves don't spend nights getting drunk in the Prancing Pony and not every Man is a direct descendant of the Dúnedain or a mad serial killer. All those Gil-Galad's heralds, Elrond's apprentices and Aragorn's illegitimate daughters just make me die a little inside. How hard is it to make a character with no relation to existing canon characters?

I'm sort of interested in elf-RP, but I'm not sure I'd be able to pull it off that well, and frankly I've no idea what people even do when RPing elves. Compose bad poetry about stars and moonlight? Angst? The thing is, I'm severely allergic to purple prose writing, which seems to be rather prevalent among elf role-players. I'm not a native English speaker (durr hurr), but I just hate cheesy verbose character backgrounds (why do so many players try to come up with the most ridiculous and pompous descriptions for their character's looks?!) and how some role-players feel the need to write a 200-word paragraph about their intimate feelings while picking up a fallen coin.

Rrrrrrrage.

And now off to the countryside for four days of relaxation-->

Galadriel's problems

I really like the design of Lady Galadriel in LotRO, but her model irks me so much!


This is something that struck my eye the very first time I met Galadriel at the end of Book 6: SHE HAS NO HIPS. Sure there's a nice amount of T, but where's the A? Especially the left side just looks.. wrong. And what's with the huge pointy jaw?


I think she was described as tall, but she doesn't look nearly as imposing as my hunter. I don't know really, but I sort of expected Galadriel to be tall and slender and elegant, and not standing in that stupid 'hey I'm about to relieve myself' pose that all the NPCs in the game have (even when walking!!). Can't they make even just one or two other default poses for NPCs so they wouldn't all look like, uh, they're just waiting there for the player to click on them?