Pumping Irony

First, Happy Halloween! And for tomorrow, here’s a Happy Samhain for those who are more inclined to that holiday!

October was rough on PI.net and myself. Much frustration from my third catastrophic disaster with various servers hosting my sites. If it happens again, perhaps I should just take it as a sign or omen that I just shouldn’t be doing this and call it quits. We’ll see. I’ll take the high road and hope that since I’m with a reputable host this time (even though they don’t let us SSH… gah!) that it simply won’t happen and I won’t have to make that choice.

MMO-wise:

Just today Arwellyn, my Lore-master, reached level 31! I’m ecstatic to be spending more time in Middle Earth and I think my WoW raiding burnout has finally subsided so I will likely put the bulk of my concentration in the near future into LOTRO and Arwellyn in particular. With the release of Book 11 my kinship has a kin hall. Our leader had us take votes where to place it. Up until the very end, Falathlorn was in the lead but the final day of voting before the update came out the Men came out and sniped the bid so our kin hall is near Bree-town. That actually works out great since Bree-town is such a convenient central location, especially at Arwellyn’s level since she can choose to quest in the Lone Lands or North Downs quickly. Since we can recall to the kin hall, Arwellyn set her personal bind location to Esteldin since she’s doing quite a bit of questing out of there.

In Vanguard, Dolndruth is level 18 but I haven’t touched him in about a week or so, because of LOTRO mostly. I’ll have to figure a way to balance my time between the two, because I’m really enjoying each game, and I’m also in awesome, incredible guilds in each as well, and that really makes a huge difference in any game.

I didn’t get to play DDO much at all this month. I did login a few times but because of my days off and typical play times I was unable to find groups at my character’s level. I’m also in an excellent guild in DDO, by the way!

Out of curiosity I decided to pick up two F2P games: Archlord and Rappelz. Mostly because of the F2P titles I’ve seen, those two have the best graphics! Aside from the dastardly click-to-move crap, I’m actually enjoying my time in each. It’s easy to do if you just take the games at face value. They’re about grinding, and they make no bones about it. It’s not something I’ll spend a day doing, but I can pop in for 30 minutes or so, explore a bit and whack some foozles. While in the trainer isle in Rappelz a guild was forming and was mass-inviting. Wondering just what people in guilds would be like in these F2P games, I accepted. Interestingly enough, most were adults, all were English-speaking, most had current or prior experience with traditional P2P MMO’s… I guess for some reason I wasn’t expecting that. Archlord has great graphics, a nice soundtrack, and the engine is super-fast. I’ve had a few CTD’s though, something occasionally goes wonky when I click merchants. Aside from that, the world is pretty atmospheric and I’m enjoying the exploration.

I almost forgot about the Eye of the North expansion for Guild Wars so I bought that yesterday just in time to still be eligible for the extra mission pack that will be released next month. I haven’t spent much time in Guild Wars in a few months, which is a shame because it’s a tremendously enjoyable non-MMO game and being in the Guildcast guild is interesting because unlike other guilds I’ve been in where you either have real-life friends, or you read guild statements in forums and apply to some that fit what you’re looking for, the only thing anyone in GLU has in common initially is that they’re fans of the podcast. Back when I played WoW, I listened to Taverncast and always wished I was able to join their guild The Pod People but I wasn’t willing to abandon all the work I’d put into my characters to scrap them and start from scratch on a new server.

I did login to Guild Wars with my monk Benjeth and headed to Lion’s Arch for the Mad King event. I died twice, once because I had no idea which command to use and once because the Mad King challenged me to rock-paper-scissors and I lost. But Benjeth did come away with a new scarecrow mask and 30 trick or treat bags! I might grab my necromancer Mortanse later and do the event in Kamadan just for kicks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 10:26 pm and is filed under MMO Gaming, Whatever.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.