July 2014 – MMO Juggler

EVE – No Way Out

I had grandiose plans for my EVE session tonight. Well, grandiose for me. 😉

Aurora finished training Drones 5, and is ticking down on Caldari Cruiser 5. So I was going to fly out and buy a few more skills books: Drone Interfacing, Drone Sharpshooting, Caldari Battleship, and probably a few other misc ones.

Summer and Autumn have both finished training Interplanetary Consolidation 5 and are ticking down on Command Center Upgrades 5. They both need to haul goods to market (Coolant and Mechanical Parts), get extra Command Centers, and do some misc stuff (buy Water to finish off a mostly completed Nano-Factory, upgrade clones, etc).

But… none of that happened because something seems to be wrong with scanning, probes, the updates, I’m not sure.

This is Aurora, zoomed in as far as possible on a signature, but only getting 0% resolution.

Without finding the N110 exit, I couldn’t really do anything so I logged off a bit disappointed. I needed to get to the market and access medical facilities, so the exit to hisec was absolutely required.

I searched outside EVE and found a bunch of old posts about broken scanning, but nothing seemed recent. So… not sure. I guess I’ll check back in a few days and see if it is working again.

Planet Explorers

If you want to play an open world, sandbox, crafting/building game, there are several choices. Minecraft, Terreria, Windborne (early access), Starbound (early access); if you add in simulation then perhaps Kerbal Space Program, Space Engineers, and Habitat also qualify, at least partly…

So recently when I opened up Steam, another one caught my eye: Planet Explorers. I read the blurb and the game is described as “an open world sandbox adventure RPG game set on a distant planet”. Wait a sec, RPG in addition to the other stuff? Hm… very interesting! I watched a few of the videos and liked what I saw. When I noticed the game was also 40% off (dipping the price for this Early Access game to $15), I grabbed it.

After starting up, I chose the single player story mode. I was treated to a quick video showing an attempt to colonize a planet, with an unfortunate ship crash:

Next I found myself standing by a wrecked ship with somebody calling for help.

Various dialog options led to some help screens, and I imagine as the game is fleshed out, the tutorial will be more comprehensive.

However, I could experiment and try to figure some stuff out. The top 4 icons by the mini-map were inventory, missions, build, and replicate, so I tried some stuff out. Basically the first “mission” I was given was to locate supplies, but to do that I needed to build a shovel, and in turn, to do that I needed to harvest some wood. I was given a shovel recipe, which I right-clicked to learn.

After a few minutes I figured out that I needed to equip my dagger, then walk up to a tree/plant, and attack it (left-click). That started a progress bar showing how far along I was to chopping down the plant.

One plant gave me 5 wood, another gave me 3, etc. I needed 10 blocks of wood so I gathered that up, then checked the replicator pane. The hammer icon was lit up so I clicked it and created a shovel.

With my new shovel I wandered around the ship looking for a good spot to dig up the supplies. I spotted a half-buried crate near the rear, so I dug it up and found medicine.

Anyway, to sum up, the next few missions involved harvesting plants to make medicine, then getting water in a pitcher. After helping my fellow survivor, I got a mission to look for others somewhere to the north.

Unfortunately I had to stop, not having too much time available to play.

So far so good, I think I’ll dabble here and there and see where the mission goes!

Raiding

I missed Wilhelm’s post on raiding – I must have skimmed through my RSS feeds too fast, trying to catch up over the long weekend.

I don’t really have any deep thoughts on the matter, except to add my lone anecdote. In the post, Wilhelm says:

I cannot name a single raid in LOTRO.

I know one *raises hand*.

How about the Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu? An epic adventure where 12 bold explorers battle their way to the ancient evil contained in the depths of a mine, an imprisoned balrog named Thaurlach…

Sorry, got carried away there. 😉

Anyway, just teasing a bit. The reason this comes to mind is that the Rift is one of the few raids I’ve done, in any MMO I’ve ever played.

Here’s some clarification.

AC didn’t really have raids, I think the closest large group high level content was the Lady Aerfalle quest chain on Aerlinthe island. I took part a few times.

GW didn’t really have raids, instead it had elite missions sprinkled around. Those weren’t multi-group, and portions of some were soloable. I did most of those, several times.

GW2 falls into a new design offering landscape events with no fixed upper limit on players and no formal grouping. These are also shorter in duration than typical raid content. I’ve taken part in a few Living Story events, a few wandering dynamic event groups, and a few dragon kills (Tequatl).

LoTRO, I mentioned above. The one LoTRO raid I’d always heard about when my kinship was active was Helegrod. But we couldn’t field 24 people for the Dragon wing so we did the Rift instead. Oh, the LoTRO Wiki has a list of raids, and I count 17 non PvP ones (counting Helegrod as 4 raids). Two of the ones in Angmar, Bogbereth and Ferndúr the Virulent, and Filikul in Moria, are essentially single boss battles with trash mobs, so they are quite short compared to a typical raid. I remember doing Vile Maw once… anyway, the Rift is the one I’ve done many times, although the last time was years ago.

WoW? I never made it to the end-game content. I did a few dungeons here and there, but by the time I started playing, it seemed like the only lower level characters around were alts of people that raided, so it was all about grinding to max level and it was hard to find a group to do any of the content along the way.

EVE? Well, I’ve never even been in a fleet with anyone else, so no “raids” or the EVE-equivalent of “ginormous space battle”. I am thinking of moving Aurora to a PvP corp as two wormhole PI farmers should be plenty.

I’ve dabbled in a bunch of other MMOs, but not enough to get to the “raid” content in them, if there is any.

It might seem like something drastic is lacking in my MMO experiences. However, as much fun as I had raiding in LoTRO in the Rift, I’m not really eager to become a raider. I had more time for playing MMOs back then; now I can’t imagine devoting 4+ hours 2 or 3 times a week to work through raid content!

LoTRO – Helm’s Deep

It seems like forever since I played LoTRO, and so I resolve to change that. I finally got around to entering the Helm’s Deep epic battle. And… without sounding like too much of a downer, I think I see why the player base didn’t get too excited over them.

It was sorta passive, a very detached combat experience. I ran around with Naerys and gave orders (not sure that was too effective) and spent most my time cranking ballistas where at least I could tell I was doing something constructive.

At the very end, I stayed near Gamling and fought whatever mobs threatened him. I kept my eye on the progress meter, which was stuck forever at 75%, but then it finally updated to 87.5% and then suddenly, the battle was over.

So… I wasn’t up for the next epic battle, one is enough for each play session. 😉 I know the general criticism of these battles isn’t good; as for me I’d almost prefer they be more like skirmishes – I find those fun. I shouldn’t form my opinion just yet as I’ve only done 1, and see 4 more are coming up.

Well, one at a time and then onto Vol 3 Book 14!