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The Continuing Saga…

… of Simon and MMOs.

I’m actually in a strange place right now as I haven’t really been playing anything all that much over these last few days, bitting and bobbing with Guild Wars, Maple Story and even popping into WoW now and then.

During my last foray into WoW I left the guild I was in (long story, suffice it to say I no longer feel stressed when logging in), formed a new one called “The Chosen Few” (which sounds like a really poor western) and then with Joanne’s help levelled Twigleaf to 24. I still can’t quite get “into” WoW at the minute though, although I think my sabbatical is over.

I originally wanted two level 70 characters for when Wrath of the Lich King hits, I doubt I’ll manage that now with this uber-apathy I currently have but it’d be nice to get close.

I’m still enjoying forays into Guild Wars, I recorded this brief troll farming vid about a week ago mostly for me testing various video compression settings. I thought I may as well dump it up on youtube.

So, in short, I’m back in WoW (Yay), still enjoying GW (Yay) and quite strongly apathetic at the moment (Boo).

Tags: apathy, guild wars, wotlk, wow

Sabbaticals and Me…

I’m still on my WoW sabbatical, peering in now and then solely to help boost Joanne, I can’t see myself going back to WoW regularly until Wrath of the Lich King releases now.

Instead of the MMO behemoth that is WoW, I’ve been playing Guild Wars and, rather bizarrely, Maple Story.

Maple Story is an odd game, it’s a cutesy free-to-play 2D MMO that’s based entirely around grinding. It’s oddly compelling and I don’t know why!

It is essentially a regular 2D platform game where you kill things… a lot. There is something strangely relaxing and addictive about it which I can’t quite put my finger on but it’s very enjoyable at the moment. The thing is, I hate, hate, hate grinding. Constant repetition of killing enemies with no point just to level up drives me nuts in World of Warcraft so how come I can tolerate it and even enjoy doing it in Maple Story?

The only thing I can think of is it’s cuteness, it has a strange appealing feel to it that somehow makes mass-slaughter of literally thousands of snails/mushrooms/slimes more tolerable.

Regardless, I’m finding it fun at the moment, and it, along with capturing elite skills in Guild Wars is taking up the majority of my time.

I’ll definitely be returning to the World of Warcraft when the Lich King demands my attention, which as of right now appears as if it might be in October.

Tags: guild wars, maple story, mmo, wotlk, wow

gwBBCode is go!

After fiddling around for awhile, I finally got gwBBCode to work again. I made a simple 5 line plugin to call the parser on a post submit. Should be a bit more maintainable that way. There is a subtle problem that I can’t track down though…

Posting a build works fine… like so:

[build prof=W/Mo name="Current Build" Str=2 Axe=12+1 Tac=8+4 Hea=10 Pro=1 Smi=1][Cyclone Axe][Bonettis Defense][Gladiators Defense][Executioners Strike][Dismember][Axe Twist][Vigorous Spirit][Sprint][/build]

Posting individual skills as icons borks my layout (I need to do some CSS-Fu to fix that) but wierder is that when posting text links, the first text link appends a closing <p> tag, any that follow it don’t… so to post text links I have to surround them in a <span> or <div> tag… like:

[[Cyclone Axe] [[Bonettis Defense] [[Gladiators Defense] [[Executioners Strike] [[Dismember] [[Axe Twist] [[Vigorous Spirit] [[Sprint]

I’m not really sure which script is at fault, Wordpress or gwBBCode. But, it works, which is what matters…

Edit: It seems it all only works on the main page and not others (for example, the post’s page itself….) trying to track down why not now.

Edit 2: I have no idea why it isn’t applying when you visit this post itself…. having them display on the index page is better than not at all though, so it’ll do for now…

Tags: guild wars, gwbbcode

Gwen! You’ve Gotten Bigger…

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I ordered Guild Wars: Eye of the North with some of my birthday money, it arrived yesterday and while I haven’t really progressed passed the first few quests I thought I’d comment on Guild Wars as a whole.

Guild Wars is often called an MMO-lite, you only see other players in the world when in towns or when those players are in your party. Out in the wilderness it’s just you and your party. Guild Wars also has no subscription fee, you buy the game and that’s it. You can play forever (well, until the servers shut down eventually).

At times it feels very much like a Diablo 2-esque dungeon crawler and although it has a very PvP-focused end-game it is an accomplished PvE game too. It’s probably one of the only games to really successfully blend PvP and PvE into a single game.

I’ve played Guild Wars on and off since it launched in April 2005, I own both extra campaigns and now the expansion. I have always loved how the game plays and I think it does a lot of things right, the setting is generally fantastic with both extra campaigns having a totally new feel (Oriental for Factions and Persian/Arabic for Nightfall).

Anyway, one thing Guild Wars does great is skill-based combat and graphics. Each class has 150+ skills to choose from, what makes combat interesting is that you can only have 8 skills on your characters hotbar at a time. Making tactics and strategy important, which skills you choose to combine and take with you really matter.

Graphically it still astounds me how good the game looks after all this time. Hopefully the few screenshots I’ve posted show some of that beauty. It is a very beautiful game.

So why hasn’t it ever really kept my interest over long periods?

I’m honestly not sure, while there isn’t the sheer amount of “stuff” to do as in World of Warcraft, there is still a LOT to work towards and obtain. Collecting “Elite” skills and getting high-end armour and weapons takes some commitment and with plenty of titles to obtain (think achievements) there is always something to work for.

I love the scenery, character designs and classes. I love the overall feel of the game and how it all works, but for some reason it’s never been enough to root me to it for days/weeks/months at a time like World of Warcraft, yet I still absolutely love the game.

What that magical “something” is that is missing, I’m not sure, but I know that at this moment I am loving Guild Wars again. Perhaps it’s the sight of Gwen, all grown up and fighting back against the enemy who destroyed everything she held dear as a child. (Ignoring the illogical nature of the fact we haven’t aged and she has, by 8 years )

Tags: Eye of the North, guild wars, mmo

Birthday Money, WoW and Guild Wars

As anyone who knows me will attest, I dabble in programming quite a bit. Normally not actually finishing anything but dabbling non-the-less.

For my birthday I got a little bit of money, with that money I’ve bought myself “World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons“. It’s a well recieved book that is apparently quite thorough, written by “famous” addon authors.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get to grips with the LUA implementation WoW uses and write some interesting addons, I already have a request for a bag addon from Joanne, she hates pretty much all the bag addons I’ve ever shown her…

I’ve also bought myself the last Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North. I keep getting twinges to play now and then so thought I’d pick it up as it was only £12.

In other news, a fellow guildy has suggested I do a beginner’s guide to WoW addons as my Addon Corner’s are only understandable by WoW Geeks so that’ll be my next Addon Corner.

She also mentioned levelling guides to me so I thought I’d cover my thoughts on those along with levelling addons in my next blog post.

So busy busy me for the next few days…

Tags: addon, Addon Corner, guild wars, programming, wow