Love. Hate. Win. Lose. Sadness. Loneliness. Life. You! Must! Battle! On! YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
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July 25th, 2009 by /images/author.gif)
TheMissingNin
As per my tweet last sunday, I reactivated my Warhammer Online account via the 10-day free offer that popped through my inbox recently. I’m inclined to agree with Solid Snake on this one, WAR has changed. It’s an interesting game to be a part of right now - since the end of beta and the launch of the game, and since my horrible forgetting of the game thanks to the likes of Fallout 3 and other hits of last fall, the game has had time to mature.
The game now has about 1/5th the amount of servers it had on launch, and only one of the European-English servers has a considered “High” population. If I can say anything bad, is that the lower teirs of the game seem a bit barren of players, but a quick glance of the map, which I often do when I login, shows that in that Teir 4 Endgame space, there’s always something going on. And every night I’ve played this week (and I have played EVERY night this week) a City Seige was either underway or on the blades edge of beginning. I’m looking forward to getting there.
RvR rewards have been completely overhauled to give you more incentive to make sure you’re always queued for a scenario. You can get random armor drops off enemy players. Medals, which also drop, are tradable like honor from vendors. Renown Rank still opens up new equipment as you go along, and each RVR lake now acts like a big public quest giving you influence and therefore influence rewards - which are usually blue-level equipment. Not to mention the percentage gain increase you get towards your Renown and Rank for just participating. And all that for hitting some one in the face with an axe.
My few complaints lie with the game’s transportation. I think they could’ve come up with something a bit better than a helicopter back-pack for traveling between zones via flightmaster, something that makes more sence like an airship or something, and as I’m hitting the 10th and 11th Rank and the game-space is exponentially increasing, I really could be doing with a mount by now. Speaking of, they’re a little plain for a universe steeped in such amazing lore. 3 factions have lame-assed horses, Greenskins have Wolves and Boars depending on your characters size. The Dwarfs have aforementioned Helicopter Backpacks minus the zone travelling - which I think looks really stupid - leaving the Dark Elves with some badass looking Raptor beast. I doubt they’d outright replace the mounts, but more choise would be sweet. As for zone travel, that might be tougher to change.
I decided to start a new character, leaving my old witchhunter and Archmage for the time being and after much deliberation, I decided to start my life as a Dwarf Slayer. So far I’m really liking the class, when I’m in a scenario - which is about every 10 minutes, I feel really powerful against other players, with the mix of direct damage and really strong AOE Melee attacks. To be analogus to WoW, it’s like a Rogue mixed with a little Bear Tank, with the Swipe ability - except it has a better range, shorter cooldown, and actually does some damage.
If you’d like to Join me in WAR, you may have a 10-day trial sitting in your inbox yourself, hit me up ingame. Order on Karak-Eight-Peaks as the Dwarf Slayer “Colts” or as Destruction on Karak Norn with the Chaos Zealot “Belruel”. The game has changed enough now to carry many of the ideals the game initially promised, and there’s been much refinement on the game’s systems and stability - I haven’t crashed out once. It’s just a shame that people consider it a failure, despite it still making many millions a month. Tycho knows what I’m talking about.
This weekend is the Magic US nationals, and I hope that we get to see some Randy Buller + Brian David Marshall live commentary broadcast action as the top-8 rolls around. I’ve been keeping up with the action via the Event Blog over at the MTG site. And HERE ARE SOME of the decks I’m interested in seeing in action. I think we’ve got one hell of a metagame going right now, but I’ll be happy to see faeries roll out of standard come the fall - And let a new standard of Zendicar, M10 and Alara take hold, a place of no bitterblossom, no Wrath of God and more than 10 Planeswalkers.
It’s been a really weird week for news, First we get an officially liscenced Halo Anime. Konami are making a Metalocalpyse game, which I pray will be awesome. A South Park Tower Defence game is coming to XBLA, which via gameplay footage looks pretty decent. Finally we hear that APB is going to be out in March next year and will have a 5-10 year lifespan.
Our first video is quite possibly the best videogame interview ever recorded. I suppose you really need to be a diehard GFW fan for that statement to hold true, but Geff Green should be appreciated by everyone. Filmed at ComicCon09.
Next we have the song that for this week, I’ve always been looking forward to hearing. It’s meme meets DJ Mixery.
And Lastly there’s what todays post title is all about. Ronin Dojo Community Collage DX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water, is some amazing american made animation in the vein of nerdery with a japanese anime twist. Please watch the awesomeness unfold, it’ll take you less than 20mins to watch the entire series. Episode 1 is embedded below and HERE is a link to the rest of the series.
So that’s my week. For the weekend, I’ll probably be playing WAR most of the time, to get the good out of my 10 day free trial and to decide if a subscription if in my future. Next week I’ll be talking about my holiday plans, because starting this friday, I actually will be on holiday. I just have to endure a week of factory-bitch work first - which I’m anticipating to be worse than my regular office-bitch work.
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I’m sorry (this is really an apology to myself) that I haven’t been posting alot lately - twitter or otherwise. Shit’s been busy around here. I’ve barely played WAR enough as I wanted to. But Caturday is nearly upon us, and I think we all know what that means.The guild is up, has been for a couple of days, and everything is going smoothly (except for recurring CROSH TO DOSKTOP and OTHONTICOTION FOLD OPPLOCOTION WOLL NOW TORMONOTE). When I checked yesterday, we were 2/3 of the way to G-Rank 5, when we’ll get our first battle standard. You’re very welcome to join us, information on the poster above these words, and if I know you, tell me so, and you’ll get auto-bumped to an officer position. That’s just how we roll. “Serious Business”, I think is a pretty decent, and not so much lore breaking, name. Especially compared to the other choises. Ironically, Serious Business (shortenable to “SrsBsns”, “SBsns”, “Seriose Bisnez” in lolcat form, or “SORIOS BOSNOSS” in Fronk form) isn’t really serious at all, we’re just a group of friends, friends of friends and old WoW-Buddies. If you fall into this catagory I urge you to join us.I’m enjoying my Archmage for the moment, but I’m starting to want to play other classes, specifically a Witchunter and less so an Engineer. I’ll maybe go back and do it when Rin hit’s Rank 20 (at time of publish Rin is Rank 17). Though, the whole “fuck the strong guys, let’s gank the healer” attitude is annoying me a little. A more ninja like approach is needed.The guild, myself included, hypothesised that there would be a nice content patch around the same day that the new WoW expansion (I’m srsly dredging care here). Or maybe an ingame event. Maybe the remaining character classes.If you’re all about the Destro, allow me to try and sway you to the side of Order. In WoW, The good guys are the Alliance, and the Bad Guys are the Horde, who aren’t really bad guys, but only bad guys because the good guys said so, hence not bad guys - just a little less humanoid than Purple Human tall, Human Human, Human Short and Human Shorter. In WAR, the Good guys are Order, and the Bad Guys are Destruction, and the bad guys are actually bad, and the good guys are only good because the bad guys are badder. Example - The Dark Elves are fighting a Civil War against the High Elves, ergo the High Elves must’ve done something bad, really bad, in the first place to make the Dark Elves want to rebel. Alot of the Order’s races are morally ambiguous. Like the Dwarves who are so, how can I put this?… Emo, that they drown their sorrows with alcohol powerful enough to fuel tanks, and hold grudges deep enough to last as long as their empire has stood. Or the Witchhunter who without question can use excessive force on the citizens of Altdorf to gain simple peices of information. And that’s just like…oh well… the Horde.Moral Ambiguity breeds character. Destruction can come in droves and level Altdorf to the ground, but there’s always the possibility that left to it’s own devices the Empire would’ve crumbled under the weight of it’s own personal problems anyway. Like perhaps, say an Emperor who’s fine with being the literal god to all of his people.The