Pumping Irony

I enjoy walking quite a bit and usually get a few miles per day when it’s nice but I decided to up the ante this week. I ended checking in at just over 22 miles from Monday to Friday! Not bad. I felt a blister coming since Tuesday and it made its appearance Thursday night. Nearing the end yesterday, my instinct told me I should stop because I was really starting to feel it but no, I pushed myself for another lap and by the time I got back home was practically limping. Taking the weekend off to let it heal but next week I’ll see if I can get 25 miles – 5 miles per day – and do so slightly quicker.

I checked in with my kinship in briefly, but for the most part I am waiting for Book 7 to go live on Tuesday before I make any effort to get back into LOTRO. I’m not positive but I thought I either read or heard in a podcast that due to the lore regarding the elves of Lorien, having player housing there is out of the question so I’ll probably be making the rounds in the Ered Luin neighborhoods to look for a suitably scenic Deluxe plot. I suspect I’ll have a difficult time with it – those Deluxe houses are always crammed up against other houses in rather non-scenic areas. My existing Standard house is in one of the most scenic spots in the neighborhood. I wish I was allowed buying a Kinship house; I could certainly use the storage space. Yes, I can afford one.

I spent most of what little gaming I did this week in DDO. After joining the guild Chainmail in November, I’ve barely spent any time in DDO whatsoever due to my overall MMO burnout/malaise. While walking this week I caught up on my podcasts, part of which was six or more episodes of DDOcast, which got me in the mood to get back in. So I’ve been getting to know the guild, letting them get to know me. I spent time in voice chat with a few asking questions about the wizard class, then we set out running some adventures. Now, Koriander is two ranks into level 8, roughly 60% to the third rank. Also got a few new items, my favorite two being an Aberrant Robe which has Wizardry II (+50 Spell Points) and +17 Spell Resistance, and Clever Goggles of Jump which gives a +2 to Intelligence as well as a clickie for the Jump spell that can be used 3 times per day. That might save me the need for carrying Jump potions for now.

Also I’ll mention that  the leader of the Chainmail guild, James “Lagin” Thomas, will be featured in DDOcast episode 108! The segment will be recorded tomorrow afternoon and I think the topic will be about old-school D&D gamers who have stuck with the game through the years and all its various incarnations. He’s been playing since the original white box D&D set and even still has the original set of the very first modules ever printed for the game. I may have misunderstood what he was saying about the formation of the guild but it sounded like he also had to jump through some hoops to even use the name Chainmail but ended up being approved by Wizards of the Coast. Something like that. Perhaps they’ll get into that discussion on the show.

Finally, I realized my Vanguard subscription was still active for some reason so I canceled that a few hours before the announcement that Live Gamer RMT would be coming to all US servers. I have some feelings on that, which I more or less stated over at Stargrace’s blog, as well as over IM with Karen/Jaye. I feel my points are spot-on but primarily for the modern PvE games. Others have counterpoints which apply more directly to Vanguard and its non-instanced, contested content nature and I absolutely concede to and agree with that part. I don’t know… I almost think Vanguard is too old-school (despite having more modern UI and mechanics) for Live Gamer. Or that adding “appearance tabs” ala EQ2 and LOTRO then selling optional fluff outfits with no stats like EQ2 is doing may have been a better fit for Vanguard. But that would facilitate actually programming in the appearance tabs, and I don’t see that happening. [Edit: I obviously missed in the patch notes that appearance tabs were in fact added two weeks ago!] I am unsure I can even name a specific reason why I secretly like the game and wish it success, but let’s be honest: the new content that was “promised” to arrive by Christmas still hasn’t arrived four months later. The reason I don’t play is because the population is nearly non-existent when I login. In a group-centric game, that clinches it, and I logout. I’m not interested in grinding mobs solo to level cap and missing everything in the game just to grind the one single raid currently in the game. No thanks.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 6:11 pm and is filed under DDO, LOTRO, Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.