MMO Gaming

This week’s post of the week is another great primer post for something I am going to touch on in depth soon, and also just an interesting tidbit that I wasn’t aware of, so I’m putting it up here.

Generally speaking having loot in a game doesn’t matter to me (to clarify that, as it can be taken the wrong way, having the best loot for myself doesn’t matter, having loot in a game in general I like) but this I found odd. Apparently in Auto Assault not all bosses have a loot table, which, though I could be wrong, seems a bit odd. I have to assume that a boss is harder than a normal mob so they should have some kind of reward for the difficulty, and to be honest as much as I was thinking about starting AA back up again, I’m not sure if this is something I should worry about or not. I don’t play a game only for the loot, but mobs that should have loot and don’t is not the right way to impress me either.

Does anyone that plays the game have any details on how things work a bit better, I’d really love to hear?

Anyway, the post can be found here.

Auto Assault, NetDevil, NCSoft, loot, bosses, loot tables

This week’s Pic of the Week comes in the same idea of the one from last week. Another loading screen, this time of Rappelz, which I finally managed to download and begin playing (fun so far). I’ll try and get a few more in-game shots for the future as I’m playing but I can’t seem to find any I really like which show the action (I’ll have to get some video perhaps?). Anyway, without rambling any further, here is the picture.

Pic of the Week, Rappelz, GPotato, free games, Gala-Net

This week’s picture is from one of the loading screens of Space Cowboy Online. I would’ve gotten some in game shots, but I just love this screen to much not to show it off. If you haven’t already downloaded and started playing the game (it’s free) you should, it’s a ton of fun.

Space Cowboy Online, Screenshots, Pic of the Week, GPotato, Gala-Net

This week’s post of the week comes from MMORPGForum.com. The post, entitled “MMO over other games…why?” talks a bit about something I plan on going into more depth about in a future topic, but I think this is a great primer for what I want to say. So, what about you folks, why play an MMO over another game?

MMO games, MMORPGForum.com

This week’s picture comes not from my own shots, and not from someone sending them in, but from the City of Heroes gallery. Normally I’d prefer to stick with shots that people send me or that I take, but I love this shot to much to let it go.

I’m not sure why, but that to me is just an awesome picture. Anyway, there are a bunch of other great shots in the CoH gallery to check out too.

I missed the story of the week the past two weeks I believe (maybe it was more than that, I seem to have a problem keeping up with things given how busy I am at the moment. But, at any rate, the “weekly” article is back. Today I would like to illustrate an example of a bad guild, with bad guild leadership.

This story comes from my early days in playing World of Warcraft, way back when I started and was playing on the Hyjal server. At this point in the game I joined the same guild my brother was in (who had gotten in because of a friend he had that was in the guild). The guild was, at the time, the largest on the server housing somewhere close to 400 players (it may have even been more). This guild happened to be a sort of do whatever guild, there was no real, proper structure or focus for the guild (i.e. it wasn’t a “raiding” guild and it wasn’t a “family” guild, it just was).

At this point it is important to mention that generally I wasn’t well known within the guild, I didn’t do a lot of talking or grouping with other players, or asking for help for that matter mainly because a lot of the people in the guild were a higher level than I was at the time (this didn’t particularly bother me though). I did, though, agree to host the guild forums for them because I had a bit of experience using phpBB and messing around with web development in general. So, I set up a guild forum off my personal website and hosting plan and didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t ask for anything in return I just put it up to help the guild out.

Now, the leader of this guild, who will remain nameless, had a bit of a problem. There were several (somewhere between 5-10) officers in the guild aside from him as the guild leader. A lot of people were now starting to hit max level or getting to the higher levels with their characters and were starting to leave the guild for those that had more of a focus on what they wanted to do (for many this meant going to guilds that were doing raid content). The guild leader would constantly complain about how much work it was being a guild leader and how he really didn’t have time to do it with his full-time job and family, etc. I mean literally all the time. I wasn’t really to fond of this because, even at the lower level that I was at, it really didn’t do much to help my morale or belief in the guild and I was not the only one.

So, thinking that I would be helpful, I sent a private message to the guild leader saying that if he didn’t have the time to dedicate to the guild perhaps he could promote an officer to be the guild leader and he could step down for a bit to just being an officer. I felt this was a fairly reasonable suggestion, and it was sent to him innocently enough, I even offered to help out in any ways that may be needed to make the guild run better. Well, as it turns out, I was wrong. I got a reply that seemed completely off the wall to me, filled with cursing and his telling me how he was a supervisor at his workplace and he knew how to motivate people, etc. I responded back basically saying he could do as he wished and I was only making a suggestion, and that, to not cause trouble, I would just leave, as at this point other people had found out about my private message (via officers who then spread it everywhere) and let things return to normal (at this point I had no desire to be in a guild with someone who was an idiot anyway). So I went ahead and quit, as did my brother, and we thought everything was fine. I even left the website/forums up for them to use as long as they wanted as I really didn’t care that they were able to use it, I left without really feeling any particular hatred toward the guild master or the guild.

They mentioned, a short time later that they would be moving to a new website/forums (one of the other officers had set things up from my understanding). They didn’t want to lose posts so I e-mailed a database backup to the guild leader and didn’t really think anything of it. After they had things set up I disabled the board on my web host (I didn’t delete anything at this point, just disabled because messing around with things wasn’t a high priority for me).

A few weeks went by and nothing really happened. Then, I signed up for an account at a forum and was going to put up an introduction post (in the forum they had specified for it). I remembered I had written a decent introduction post at the guild’s forum and, given I hate introduction posts in general, I opened the forum back up and copied/pasted my into to this new forum. I forgot though to disable the old guild message board again because it really wasn’t a priority. Of course, a few days later the guild that I had left had their message board hacked (because they had not updated to a new version of the software that had come out) and, noticing that the old board that I had put up was now no longer disabled accused me of hacking their site to get back at them.

Up to this point nothing had really phased me, I had gotten a bit annoyed before when I had received the rude response but overall I didn’t really care. This accusation changed that though. It really struck me the wrong way because it went against what I did at places like phpBBHacks.com where I was on the Support Team helping people fix their forums. This idiot had gone and accused me of caring so much about the fact that I had willingly left his guild that I would then go and hack it to get back at him. My first reaction was to tell this guy exactly where he could go shove his delusions of grandeur, but I didn’t. Instead I did what I would do with any other person who had a problem with phpBB, I offered to help him fix things, and try to get a backup, etc. He refused, and decided to put his conversation with me on their site so that everyone could see how much of a jerk I was.

Happily it had the opposite effect. Within the month about 75% of the long-time members had left and the guild basically fell apart because they saw what an imbecile their leader was. I’d love to say that I was a better person and this didn’t mean anything to me, or that I was even sad about it, but I’ll be perfectly honest I was ecstatic that the guild leader got exactly what he deserved.

So that’s my crappy guild leadership story, anyone have one of their own?

guild leaders, World of Warcraft, Blizzard entertainment, message boards, hacking, Story of the Week

Well, this time we have a new place that earned the post of the week. This week the post of the week goes to MMORPG.com. Normally, I don’t like those “I’m doing a survey, answer my questions” posts, but this one seemed different in one important aspect, the results would actually be available to those that wanted them. So for this week, a post about a survey to complete gets the honor. If you have a couple of minutes (10-20) take the time to fill it out, as the survey does ask some interesting questions.

Now, the post.

Post of the Week, Survey, MMORPGs

This week I decided to show a Screenshot of Dungeon Runners I took today while I was playing. I’ll write a bit about the game in another post, but for now, here’s the picture.

Pic of the Week, Dungeon Runners, NCSoft, PlayNC

Because those fine folks over at Blizzard are kind enough to keep having noteworthy posts, the World of Warcraft forums, once again, have gained the post of the week.

The post in question can be found here. In particular I am speaking of Nethaera’s comment on that page.

Why does this post get the honor of “Post of the Week”? I can’t possibly explain it all in this post, to do so would be an injustice to my ranting. The purpose of this post is merely to highlight, to point out the obvious stupidity is for an upcoming post.

World of Warcraft, Looking for Group

This week’s forum post of the week comes from the World of Warcraft forums. Seeing as how the massive 2.0.1 patch was released recently it seems like a good time to go with this game. The post is a poll about class balance now, as voted by the players. It seems to be fairly decently updated by the original poster and does give a good idea about what some people are thinking.

By the way, I play a warrior, and yes, we do suck.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=54915566&sid=1

Post of the Week, World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, Patch 2.0.1, Before the Storm, Class balance

This week’s story comes straight from me and my time spent playing in City of Heroes.

For those of you that have ever grouped in the game (and, if you’ve played for a few levels, you already know this is the best way to do things) you’ve probably already encountered “the guy”. There are many players that can be counted among this title, but I was just starting out playing the game, and hadn’t had any bad experiences, so I was starting to assume that people generally understood how to work together as a group…until I (and a group of others) joined up with this guy.

The first thing we do is head over to where the mission is going to start and wait inside for everyone to get there, pretty typical of playing. He is the last to show up so our troubles with him began later than they otherwise might have. We pull the first pack of guys and start taking them down, easy enough, everything is going well. They drop and we head forward, the path splits here and we can go in any one of three directions. We head left, the genius heads right. We start attacking the next group, he attacks on his side and almost instantly he is dead (because, as you know, this guy is almost always, undoubtedly, a Blaster who doesn’t realize that he will be killed when the enemy sneezes on him). We finish taking down our group and head over to help him. We bring him back, and say everyone should stick together to the left, so we head back that way. He charges the group again after he has regained his health and, once again, he is dead. This time though, he is yelling at us for not helping him.

To cut what could be a long and repetitive story short, this happens about four other times before he is removed from the group. The lesson here is fairly simple, if you are “grouping” in the game, then actually group together and work as a team. It is not very hard to do and will save everyone involved a headache.

City of Heroes, City of Villains, NCSoft, Cryptic Studios, Story of the Week

Paul from over at Toy Bender sent me a pic of his time playing in MMOs. I got a chuckle out of it, hopefully you do as well.