Monday, June 29

So it's been awhile, a lot has happened.

First, I was finally able to return the Empire: Total War game to Best Buy. I received full in store credit after explaining to them how broken the game was. I'm so glad I tried to return it, apparently they have changed their software return policies. The breaking point for me with the game was when I attempted to play it one night, but the Steam service was down. I had internet access, but I could not access Steam, which meant that I could not play Empire: Total War offline because you have to load Steam either offline or online in order to play. But if you're online but Steam is down, you can't join Steam in offline mode. I was very upset with Steam more then the game, and I plan on never using Steam again. I hope the concept fades out, but for me the best games are MMO's and thankfully Steam hasn't entered that realm of server service yet and hopefully they never do.

Second, I have quit WoW. I cancelled my account just the other day. My arena partner was not happy, but she saw it coming after the terrible changes that have been made to the game for patch 3.2. The tiered reward system of WoW is horrible, and that will actually be my last article for MMORPG.com in the WoW setting, I have it written it just needs some polish before I send it in. The illusion of an MMO has been gutted from WoW, and now it's nothing more than a giant competition. If I wanted to play a game that involved 99% of the player base failing so that 1% can succeed I would... I can't think of any other game like that to be honest. Blizzard has polarized the end game rewards and it is truly ruining their MMO. I am still looking forward to the future Blizzard MMO, as well as Diablo 3, so I haven't given up on the company, though I can't help but sigh each time I look back at what made WoW start to fail, and then I just see the Activision-Blizzard merger.

I'm looking forward to Aion as my next MMO, and may continue to write articles for MMORPG.com related to Aion. Here's Penny Arcade's news post on Aion, the chipmunk and ferret reference is spot on. Perhaps I'll even attempt a little video editing technique with those articles since I'm in the beta, but I would really have to rush to get that working. When you're the guy after the guy after the guy after the guy in a system, your articles don't get published when you submit them, they just aren't high priority, and I've come to realize that with my WoW articles that, sadly by the time they are put up on the site, they are usually out of date by 2 or 3 weeks. MMORPG.com is a busy company and I'm just a coresspondent, not a writer or columnist. And even those two positions I can only imagine suffer under some minor publishing delay.

Aion looks beautiful. I'm in the beta with a pre-order key from Gamestop. Comcast internet has been spiky recently so I've had some unfortunate lag while playing that others haven't had to deal with, hopefully these hangups will go away soon. I honestly don't notice them with regular browsing, but with streaming videos from Hulu.com or trying to play a game online, the hangups are very noticeable. In the future I'm hoping I can ditch Comcast and get a more reliable ISP, or I hope that Comcast stops being so corporate bad.

One of my current projects is my book, which is set in a mid-fantasy, as opposed to low or high fantasy, world. In my mind, these may not be the proper descriptions, High Fantasy is the mixing of major magic and new races set in a low tech, possibly steam punk, but not sci-fi setting. While Low Fantasy involves very rare magic use and low technologies, an almost barbaric setting that covers the concept of magic through idea types such as Oracles. Not that Low is worse than High, it's just a different world. I'm hoping to make a book somewhere in between. Violence is prevalent in many fantasy stories, but not like what I'm hoping to produce. I'm experimenting with the process of violent action being used to create thicker emotions and attachment to characters as well as development.

I'm also working on a d6 mech system. I just feel that there needs to be faster, dirtier, stream lined battles for some of the worlds out there, for many games. Many players of table top games love to pour over numbers and modifiers and obscure bonuses and penalties. Honestly, if you have to keep track of the way your Mechs turret is facing... that's just too much in my mind. Table top games should be approachable and not forever hardcore realistic. Warhammer has done a great job of this I feel with their rulebooks, granted I've only ever read Rulebook 6 (possibly 5) I believe, and not 7 or 8 which have been released since I bought it. Brettonian's vs. Lizardmen boxed set. That editions rule book covered all of the basics of the game in the first 40 pages or so, and then the next half of the book covered technicalities that were all pretty optional. Yes, you can play a game and pour over the finer details of it and never really get anything done, or you can play a game and have a good time, and then play another and another.

I love working on model terrain, and hope to get to spend a little time doing that in the near future for Mechs. I'm currently looking at using the hexagonal system in play, while square cut boards that can be pieced together in any shape or form desired.

I'm also still looking for a real job so I can fund some of these wishes of mine. Such as getting an Air Conditioner, clothes, The Sims 3, a hair cut... food...

Had a great time at the Brewhouse the other day, excellent sports bar, or pub rather. Watching the USA vs. Brazil game. One of the best scenes for watching Soccer I've ever been to. The owner is an Arsenal fan, as are some of my friends, so once the game was over and USA lost and we were all feeling terrible, myself mainly due to the start of a hangover already since we got there 2 hours before the match even started, the owner came out to cheer us up with an endless supply of beers.

Empire... again, and some arena!

Well I wasn't able to return Empire: Total War. So... I'm still playing it. Though it's gotten even more boring as I've wrangled the remaining vestiges of fun from it. I recently downloaded a campaign mode mod that lets me play as any faction I want. That actually adds a good deal more fun to the game. Honestly, campaign mode is all about the first 30 years. Can you survive? Can you get a solid hold on your territory/ocean space? And then once you've done that it's rather cut and dry repeat repeat. Each nation in the first 30 years on the other hand is very different, and that's nice. Just the number of territories, starting location, etc. The mod is nice, though I can't remember the name of it at the moment, I want to say it was called "grand campaign"... but I think that's also the name of the campaign setting in the game... so anyway. I even got to play as the pirates. But since all the mod does is make different factions playable, a good portion of the factions still aren't all that playable. The Native Americans don't have access to higher technologies or units as the game progresses, because they were just never put into the game. The pirates can have a maximum of 6 units... and they're melee only... lol, so they're pretty much impossible to proceed with.

Did more 2v2 arena last night. We're up to about 70 games played or so for the season. Maybe it was 60. 54% win ratio. Not amazing, but much better than the first two weeks. Playing Sunday morning at 7am seemed like a good idea... until our 1800 MMR team went up against a 2400 rated MMR team. Obviously we didn't lose any points for that loss, but it was interesting. We lasted a good while, but I wasn't able to put out enough damage on the DK, nor reach his holy paladin healer due to the crazy amount of CC, and when the DK is sitting there doing practically aoe damage through disease spreading it really takes a toll on my healer. Though I suppose the best strategy would be to follow my healer till we get to a corner break, hof myself, turn and rotate onto the dk's healer, and then when hof wears off switch back onto the DK. I think I'll try that next time.

More Empire

They just don't respond. You tell them to line up and shoot, and when they do it, they won't shoot. And that's only if you actually manage to get them to line up. I cannot tell you how many times I have used a group of infantry and put them in line and they end up facing BACKWARDS. Huge bug. This game is so incomplete I cannot believe I'm still playing it.

Planning on returning this game today.

Arenas, Empire: Total War

Well, I'll have to amend my Empire: Total War score of 6/10 and knock it up to a 7.5/10. The replay ability is there. There's a large number of broken issues, but the combat aspect of the game is slowly getting a little more fun as I play it more. I haven't played too many games where one of the key features was so unnecessarily messy to work with. That's probably a lie. I haven't played many games that were like that Recently. I was kind of expecting a game released in 2009 to not have the same issues as games I used to play back in 1995.

Can't wait for Diablo 3, just because it's been too long. I probably won't even play it for more than 2 weeks once it comes out. I was never one of those hard core people to actually hit level 99.

Did 2v2's today. It's rather ridiculous out there. The new concept from Blizzard as "earning" your way higher? Complete fail. It feels like a deluge of worthlessness. And it only feels worse because I'm not even to 1000 yet despite our MMR going up with the number of wins we've had over 60+ games. MMR used to be about 1700, it's wavering around 1800 now, but our rating is still just a measly 700.

I thought that games were going to get slower in season 6, but boy was I wrong. They've gotten faster. In TBC you could spend 6 to 10 seconds thinking about what to do next and come out okay. In S5 you could spend about 3 to 5 seconds. In S6... you have about 1 to 2 seconds. Otherwise you just lost. It doesn't really feel like I'm playing a game that involves any ingenuity or thought anymore. It feels like arenas are a game of wrote and memorization. Yes, heavy strategy, but it's all strategy that is applied outside of the arena. You don't think up strategy on the spot. You might get some crazy idea and try to pull it off, and it might work, but that's not strategy, that's more like deciding to turn left instead of right. So far this is probably one of the most disappointing seasons I've played in. I didn't think Blizz could make it worse, but they managed.

Empire: Total War

I think the gaming companies have finally developed the perfect way to prevent pirating. Release their games broken and then slowly fix them over the next couple of months with patches, so that every time somebody finishes a complete upload of the game, a new patch comes out and the people trying to create the hacked versions have to either do it all over again, or just fix the hacked part. Granted patches are usually hacked in a timely manner, when a company releases patch after patch after patch almost once a week, well... I can imagine even the most devoted hackers would get tired of redoing the same thing over and over.

The game looks great to play, the reviews talk about how great the game is, and yet I still haven't gone out and bought it. $50 just does not feel worth it to play a game like Empire: Total War. Though honestly I'm surprised they aren't charging $70 or more yet, considering everything else has inflated over the years, while the price of computer games has seemed rather stagnant for the last decade. I want to play it. But I can't think of when I would have time to play it. I don't even raid in WoW right now and my time feels better spent enjoying free forms of entertainment, and thankfully legitimate ones through Hulu.com. What a wonderful site, for now. It will probably run out of entertaining content quickly, since I don't like sitcoms. If only they had the History Channel and not just Nova. Nova is great, but... you go to watch an episode on ants, and it's not actually about ants, it's about this guy who used his study of ants to explain social patterns in society. I mean come on now... teach me more about ants! The last 15 minutes or so of the episode didn't even involve ants at all, it involved monkeys on an island!

WoW Update: I cannot arena at the moment because my arena partner xferred servers and I have not been able to follow yet. So I am stuck, not doing arenas, BG's get worse every week, and raiding has stopped completely. I don't need to spend 16 hours a week raiding, not when finding a guild is rather laborious and often a fruitless pursuit. The last one I was in lost the raid leaders, and then two of the three tanks, and then the 2 guild masters that caused all the drama went AFK again after messing everything up. I don't know why the raid leader didn't just remake the guild, but whatever. So WoW is incredibly boring right now. Ulduar is an impenetrable road block unless you're in a serious guild, 10 man raids don't offer any gear upgrades from what I already have, and PvP is stagnant and hasn't changed for 5 seasons, going on 6. I can't wait to find a new game. Sad to say, I am mostly looking forward to new Blizzard games. Diablo 3 and their currently unannounced MMO.