Shine, Bright Morning Light

Still in Memphis

2009-12-21T21:56:35Z

Why is it still in Oregon?! Why has it been shipped from Portland to Portland? Wrrrrryyyy.

*ahem*

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From lunch conversation with ketsugami:

"Kingdom Hearts is a licensed game that doesn't suck. I wonder when they'll make KH3?"

"Disney owns Pixar now, does that mean that we'll get a WALL-E world?"

"...actually, come to think of it, Disney owns Marvel now too."

"Sephiroth vs WALL-E vs Wolverine! Fight!"

Spoodlemonkey

2009-12-21T16:57:44Z

Since I don't pay attention to these things, I didn't notice that it was 2x exp weekend in Aion, and leveled rather faster than I wanted to.

I realize this sentiment probably comes off as heresy to the grind-minded occupants of the latest kMMO craze, but I mean it - I would rather do quests at my level than power through optimal grind zones, and mobs stop dropping loot if you're 10 or more levels higher, meaning you can't find a party for quests you're too high level for. I fail to understand this design decision - in WoW you're allowed to run lowbies through instances if you wanted to and get them cool loot. Maybe they're afraid that it would kill low-level partying?

Anyway, Aion is a much more gear-dependent game than WoW, so I almost always prefer money or gear rather than exp for quest rewards. I suppose if I were worried about leveling past the range at which you can do certain quests I could always go jump off a few cliffs.

-Getting lucky with weapon drops helps immensely with combat efficiency - most of my ability to solo elites depends entirely on the Black Claw Chieftan's Staff I was lucky enough to get on a farm run. Armor matters somewhat to a melee character, but nothing really beats the ability to smack things down really fast.

-Reached Morheim. Morheim is the first lowbie zone subject to groups of random gankers who come in from the Rifts, but the victims will usually warn of their location in time for you to port home or just hide in a corner until they go past. Also, snow appears to be a recurring theme in Asmodian locations.

-Unfortunately, I missed a bunch of group quests back in Altgarde and will have to go back and LFG for them. Fortunately, I've also discovered I can solo heal BC groups as a Chanter as long as the group isn't of the Leeroy persuasion, so it probably won't be that bad.

-Acquired regen Mantra. It ticks slower than Word of Revival, but they stack; the cast time penalty from Rage Spell is irrelevant when your regen takes care of all the in-combat healing for solo encounters.

-Played a bit more with the crafting system. It's sort of worth it if you really wanted a good item for the slot, as making your own (including grinding fees for raising skill; might I mention that the skill raising is painful and debilitating and about as interesting as watching grass grow?). You can get it for maybe about 20% cheaper than AH prices if you wanted to collect your own mats and fight the RNG to make it proc a green, and the base mats at this level are pretty cost-negligable. Made 4 sets of Silver Earrings, 2 of which proc'd green, which will then get turned into Rose Quartz Earrings once I figure out where to get some Rose Quartz. Fortunately you can use stuff you've soulbound to make other stuff (though I think the new piece of gear will still be soulbound).

-Found a quest with a poor lovelorn Asmodian (keep in mind these guys have blue skin, claws, and their eyes glow red and stuff) who wanted to pick a present with which to court a girl. The choices were a pair of earrings or an ornate Cube (cubes = inventory bag), at which point my RPG instincts took over and immediately said "more inventory space FTW".

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Unrelated: Awhile back I signed up to MyAnimeList to track what I was watching, but eventually found it kind of pointless as harinezumi does a much better job of obsessive cataloging. What amuses me is that, almost a year since I stopped updating, I am getting e-mail notifications of people commenting agreeing/disagreeing with the review I once wrote on Code Geass R2. Must be because it's gotten localized recently or something? It's mostly one-liners, but I'm amused at the one guy who went on at length about why I am ~~interrogating the text from the wrong perspective~~ deluded and wrong using points I already covered in the review and maybe not realizing that it's been over a year and I no longer care one way or another. I am terribly sorry to have offended your fanboy sensibilities, mea culpa.

Movie Thing: Avatar

2009-12-21T03:51:56Z

I should realize by now that Rotten Tomatoes and I do not share common opinions all that often.

Went to see Avatar (no, not that one) with the usual suspects. The CGI is very pretty, action scenes fast-paced without devolving into incomprehensible blurs, and some of the scenery pieces absolutely gorgeous; the florescent plant life and floating continents, in particular, were a joy to behold. The key to making spectacle, I feel, is to not go to great lengths to explain it but just show what you're going to show and let suspension of disbelief do the rest. And, as improbable as the weird biological network thing they were going on about is, I find the concept to be quite cool.

The plot, on the other hand, was so full of moral dissonance, double standards, Hollywood logic, and wall-bangers that I had to turn my brain off about halfway through, and not in a sorta-good "I'm enjoying the explosions of a cute popcorn movie" way. I was warned that it could come off as racist, but I am not even sure who it's racist against, since the factions appeared to be a contest between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Stupid. In a nutshell it's The Last Samurai but dumber. I could go into detail, but it's not really worth my time. Let's focus on the floating continents. Yay floating continents.

PS. One day, I would like for an adventure hero's introduction to the mystical native society to be instigated by some craggy, tough, bearded giant instead of the obligatory blue-skinned space babe. It would be the greatest love story never written.

Unrelated: There's a certain specific point at which you introduce rice to egg when making home-made fried rice without the convenience of a restaurant cooker, which is about when the egg is tough enough that it's not trailing streaky yolk all over the pan, but not completely solidified, so that it clings slightly to the rice as you fry it together. This comment brought to you by observing teppanyaki.

Unrelated II: Apparently jRPGs suffer from a lack of evolution. I'll get back to you on that one when I've stopped laughing. Or no, wait, I'll be busy playing FF13 in all its linear glory and suffering through the agony of being forced to not make choices. The horror. Wake me up when one of those revolutionary non-linear games delivers the same quality of story/character development as a good jRPG.

Fanboys Hate Money, Redux

2009-12-17T23:15:56Z

Countdown to bank freakout 3... 2... 1...

Speaking of Final Fantasy, my favorite recurring summons of the series is Alexander. It's not as popular as, say, Bahamut, but there is something infinitely cool about a giant holy-element mecha. So I'm rather happy that it is one of the main party summons in 13. I really, really hope this game is good.

...hmm, now I need a related icon.

Unrelated: # of times random passers-by have commented on my hair ++. Is it really that unusual for people to have long hair? Should I dye it purple?

Unrelated 2: It takes a moment when I pick up an American comic book to realize that I am staring at the back page with all the credits on it. Citizens demand cross-cultural formatting consistency.

Art-Related

2009-12-15T21:36:25Z

-The pencil versions of comic book panels are amazingly good scenery references, where scenery is stylized sufficiently to be reduced to what can be done with basic lines and pencil shading, but not stylized to the point of losing detail.

-Trying out a new coloring technique that I found on a DeviantArt tutorial, which involves shading the original image in monochrome and then layering the colors on top using Multiply layers. This seems to provide better tones throughout the image - light source and relative brightness are consistent across colors, but I have yet to work out the right setting to incorporate patterns.

-One of the things about learning Photoshop via experimentation as opposed to any sort of real class or tutorial is that I don't know how to describe settings like Screen and Multiply. I know what they do, but explaining the concept behind them requires Wikipedia.

-Aion artbook want *spazz*. As I've mentioned, I started playing this as sort of a reaction to DA's aesthetic of Realistic Is Brown. Some of my favorite game settings have what one might call "dark" themes (Summon Night, Shin Megami Tensei, some of the FF or Tales games even), but do not subscribe to the bloody-grimy-brown aesthetic. Just because a story is about soul-crushing despair and eternal damnation doesn't mean it needs to be bereft of color and shiny things.

-Sometimes, however, that backfires. In drawing a ninja sort-of inspired by Muramasa, I must constantly fight an urge to accessorize by giving her a giant floofy yellow patterned scarf.

UI

2009-12-15T16:51:38Z

Once upon a time, the WoW UI did not have the ability to display pet health bars in the party frames. Thus, healers had to use some sort of targeting macro, find a mod, or just ignore pets cause Demo/BM sucked anyway.

Then pet health was incorporated into the standard UI, as with so many popular UI mods, and became supported for most raid frames. Hunters and warlocks everywhere rejoiced, or at least had more cause to whine if the healers let their pets die.

Dear Aion: WTB pet health bar in party frame, PST. Particularly when the SM pet is like 50% of their damage output and you insist on screwing over melee with vicious AoEs, and the SM doesn't yet have the Water Spirit.

PS. Why is the UI not moddable, anyway? Something like DoTimer would be awesome when you're cycling HoTs on 5 people.

Also, the way to kill bosses efficiently is to train the boss somewhere where their adds will reset. Is this working as intended?

-At 20 you get these things calls Stigma, which are kind of like equippable super-talents. Rage Spell is pretty good because your bread-and-butter solo heal is an HoT with no cast time; Healing Conduit (= short duration Judgment of Light, basically) seems like it can be useful in a large raid or something, but the stone itself is random drop off bosses and I don't think I care yet.

-Raising the Aether collection skill is a pain in the arse. Actually most crafting is a pain in the arse and it's not really worth it unless it's making your own pots.

-Why yes, I am your all-purpose Do Everything class at this level, including OTing stray mobs, respectable DPS, and all the healing.

Chocolate Cats

2009-12-14T17:51:49Z

-Chocolate and teppanyaki happened over the weekend (not, of course, on the same occasion) :3

-Getting enough sleep makes strange dreams happen, whereas not getting enough sleep makes them go away. A recurring theme in my strange dreams seems to be finding a place that sells Chinese breakfast foods, like the early morning street stalls I grew up with.

-Played around a bit more with the Elyos mage. The important thing to remember during the "prologue" part of the game (level ~9) is that once you hit 9, the Ascension quest gives you exactly enough exp to hit 10, but it doesn't carry over to the next level as you're capped at 9 till you finish Ascension. So, if you cared about efficiency, as soon as you hit 9 you want to drop everything, do Ascension, then come back to finish the rest of the quests. However, it's important to remember that you can no longer gather resource nodes in the starting zone after you classchange.

-Kind of like Dragon Age, the cutscene that goes with the Ascension quest is designed for !mages, because your character suddenly starts doing kung-fu with a sword, which mages normally can't even equip (might I add that WoW allowing mages to use swords is kind of cool?). The Asmodian version is sort of the other way around, where it's implied you get some magic Eleventh Hour Superpower.

-Sanctum is somewhat prettier than Pandaemonium, but less conveniently organized as it takes a lot more walking to get to the trade district where all the crafting shops are (Pandaemonium's trade district is conveniently located next to the bank/AH, more or less). There appear to be transparent flying fish. Not sure if you can die of falling off the edge of a floating platform.

-Elysia and Asmodae have this interesting environmental theme where it gets sort-of-dark but never quite night in Elysia, and sort-of-light but never really daytime in Asmodae. Correspondingly, "daytime" looks way better in Elysia while "nighttime" scenery looks better in Asmodae. It's a neat touch. Also, Elyos will summon giant leaf umbrellas when it rains.

-Like the Elves in Lineage, female Elyos casters go for the miniskirt + long half-robe look. In a world where you spend quite a bit of time flying, well...

-As a mage you have a choice of Orb or Book. garzahd says that the main difference is between Magic Boost (orb) and Magic Accuracy (book). The other functional difference is that a book is a long range weapon while orbs are melee, and while as a mage you aspire not to melee too much, having a ranged weapon means it's easier to pick off mobs you didn't quite kill without wasting MP to overkill with a spell, or autoattack while your pet is tanking. I think in general I prefer spells to not miss, but the caveat is whether the extra MBoost puts you over the level where you can cleanly 2-shot something instead of having to use 2.5 spells.

-The Magic Crit stat is entirely useless in this game because spells cannot crit - the only thing that stat affects is the crit rate of any normal attack you make with a magic implement. This is not immediately obvious, and a lot of caster gear has MCrit on it anyway. We are confused. On the other hand, since 6/8 of the classes love Crit (Crit/Accuracy are different stats from MCrit/MAcc, btw), one imagines that mage classes have the potential to become quite rich by selling all the Crit-boosting accessories and manastones they won't use.

-The chain skills interface plays a little differently for a Mage than most other classes; a Mage's basic spell is spammable, but what this means is that you don't always want to use the chain skill. In fact, in terms of mana-per-damage efficiency you always want to use the spell with cast time as opposed to the chain skill that doesn't have cast time, or save it for if/when you're in trouble since the chain skill does have a CD (think of them like Lightning Bolt vs Earth Shock). The standard interface for chain skills turns the button for the normal skill into the one for the chain skill if the normal skill is used and the chain skill is off CD, which saves hotbar real-estate. As a Chanter you don't have the option of spamming your normal attack skill since its cooldown will be way longer than the 2-second window you have to activate the chain skill in, so if you don't want to use the chain skill, just don't press the button. For a Sorcerer, you want to be able to keep spamming Flame Bolt even if you don't want to use Blaze, so you have to set up separate buttons for them instead of using the auto-conversion. Having the chain skill button normally visible also helps with tracking cooldowns.

-While a healer can just heal through adds, as a DPS class you have to burst them down before they kill you. For Sorcerors it's about ~~sheep~~ CC. A Sorc can handle up to 3 mobs at once if you root one, sleep the second, and blast down the third (lead with the snare/knockback combo). Root doesn't last as long as sleep and the spell has higher CD, but sleep has a cast time, so you want to kill the rooted mob second and maybe re-cast sleep in between running away and snares. I'm not sure if DoTs will break CC or not, something to experiment with.

-Also got my Scout to 10 and briefly played with the Assassin class. Assassins appear to be made of stuns and damage cooldowns, and can put out pretty good burst if all your CDs are up and you're lucky with crits. The class still feels pretty flimsy in terms of defense, though, and it remains to be seen whether you make up that deficiency as you level.

-Facing is much more relevant to aggro in Aion than WoW - as long as you approach from behind you can walk up and backstab a mob without stealthing before they aggro. Similarly, you can walk pretty close behind something and not aggro it as long as it's not looking at you. Not sure if aggro is level-sensitive.

-Chanters get a run-faster buff at 18ish. :3

Say What You Mean

2009-12-10T20:15:46Z

Inspired by a tangent discussion spawned from dvarin's commentary on NPC interaction and quest rewards.

Imagine this scenario:

Hero: "Okay, I've saved your family from the bandits."

NPC: "Yay! Here's some money for your trouble."

Hero: "No need, you look poor enough as it is."

NPC: "Well, since you're such a good and selfless person, I'll give you my Magical Sword of Dragonslaying +6 that I just happened to have lying around instead!"

In some circles this is considered a secret test of character to see whether the hero is worthy. To me, it smacks of Holier-Than-Thou obnoxiousness. I just saved your ass from the bandits, and now you're going to reward me based on whether I'm a virtuous person, as judged by some nebulous second-guessing of my motives? How are those things even vaguely related?

Even if you do want the reward for a good reason (Saving The World, for example), you have to pretend not to in order to actually get it, in some law of inverse practicality. No, really, we'll be okay fighting the Hordes of Evil with a spork. Or, if you were sincere in that you did not need the offered reward, somehow you get something else anyway in a bizarre reverse bait-and-switch.

My issue here is that this setup encourages either blatant lying or Stupid Good. Being virtuous is one thing, but virtuous does not necessarily preclude practical. While I wouldn't normally go out of my way to force rewards out of NPCs, the idea that they will hold out on you unless you insist on not being rewarded, somehow being a) a better judge of your needs than you yourself and b) also a better judge of your "character" as opposed to your actual actions for which you're ostensibly being rewarded, makes no sense. It leads to the idea that a Stupid Good character who insists on not being rewarded will have praises and treasures heaped upon them for the express trait of their virtue alone, and that any thought of self-gain, even if it is for practical purposes of "I can't save the world armed with a herring" is automatically "bad", or less worthy. Except, of course, that if you misrepresent your motives, everything's peachy again.

If the hero says they don't want the reward, they either do not need the item, in which case giving them one is redundant, or they actually do need the item, in which case they are putting some idea of selfless virtue over practical concerns, and rewarding them for this behavior encourages overlooking said practical concerns in a "god will provide" kind of mentality. In addition, if the NPC was so poor that they could not afford to provide a reward, why are they offering it in the first place? If they are not and, indeed, have something of even greater value, why not either offer that first, or not offer it at all?

I'm not sure if it also applies to real people - real people are rarely so simple as that - but in fictional environments I much prefer an honest crook to a hypocritical martyr. At least you know exactly where you stand with practical self-interest, as opposed to having to play kind of esoteric etiquette guessing-game based on someone else's definition of what exactly constitutes good moral manners.

P&P Theorycrafting

2009-12-07T03:13:04Z

D&D 4.0 system would make an amazing FFT-style SRPG. Y/N?

The official character builder tool is actually not bad, and helps with remembering what spells you have (technically I have a bunch of spells that I don't use very often because I forget change dailies depending on the situation) and saving some math. It also contains information from PHB3, which I'm fairly sure hasn't been released yet, and other articles that are not in book form.

What I am not sure will work out for them in the long run, however, is charging both a subscription fee for their online tools and trying to sell books/maps/miniatures. I get that it's meant to be similar to an MMO model, but it sort of feels like a half-assed transition to an online system; as I don't play in their national association or anything, I don't particularly feel compelled to use any of their rule updates. One of the things I dislike the most about MMOs is the mechanics changes that suddenly change your character abilities. In MMOs I accept it as inevitable, but in a disconnected tabletop setting it feels unnecessary unless there is something wrong with your particular game.

Unrelated: Want Sengoku Musou 3 but can't really justify getting a new console for one game twice in the same month. Ah well. There are, however, always the older games. Le sigh.

Group Dynamics @ Aion

2009-12-03T19:22:47Z

I will post about something else one of these days, really. It's just that work has been a bit busy lately and I lack the energy to do something other than game.

-Got invited into a group while poking around the Altgard mau outpost; it's apparently a fairly popular low-level grinding zone, though I had quests in it. Also, a "sword" frame around an enemy UI means it's elite. It's important to check for this before charging into a zone, though thanks to heals and gliding, running away is not as difficult as it could be.

-Group was Templar/Cleric/Gladiator/Chanter, which worked out fairly well but the Cleric died a couple of times due to range aggro. Heal-gro seems worse in Aion than WoW - as a DPS in WoW, for example, if you needed to save the healer from a stray mob until the tank can get to it, hitting it once or twice will generally do the trick. In Aion it takes quite a few hits to get its attention, though maybe this is just because I don't have sufficient DPS?

-It is also important to note that when you res people, they res where they died rather than where you cast the res from. This seems like a major design oversight.

-The role of a Chanter in a group is apparently "whatever the group could use more of". In this case, since tank/healer were taken care of, I played DPS/offhealer. Clerics don't seem to have a long-lasting HoT, or at least the one I was with didn't use one, so I generally kept the HoT running on the tank and got down to smacking things with a stick.

-Not sure if mobs block/parry/dodge, or whether this is affected by positioning as in WoW, but tried to stay behind mobs on general principle, and also because some mobs have frontal cone AoE.

-Quest item drop rate leaves a little to be desired.

-Did get the level 18 green staff I was planning to buy from the AH as a random drop, though (Cleric already had it), so that was pretty fortunate.

-If you're not intending to use it, melting gear into ~~shards~~ enchantment stones sells better on the AH than the base value of the item + cost of extraction tools.

-As for enchanting items myself, given that you need stones of higher level than the item and the possibility of failure, I think it might just be cheaper to sell the stones and just buy new gear as you level.

-Advantage of using a staff over a mace is that staffs knockdown on crit. Wonder if it's efficient to slot all crit manastones to get this effect more often.

-MagicBoost stat has no impact on healing spells.

Compatibility

2009-12-02T17:17:08Z

Interesting fact of the day: Googledocs parses Word 2007 docs better than Word 2003 does. Maybe Microsoft is not unjustified in its paranoia about Google stealing their market.

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Daily spazzing @ Aion, entirely of the "squee! pretty!" variety, and thus best illustrated with screenshots:

-Alien sky
-Mountains and city. Forgot to turn off the UI for this, note the goldspammer.
-Better view of character model. The demonic pineapple in the background is a resource node.

EDIT: Penny Arcade, on Dragon Age (link to article rather than comic strip due to spoilers). I actually had to reload because of that.

More UI Stuff

2009-12-01T19:05:55Z

The other thing about Aion keymapping is that there needs to be a way to propagate the same keymapping across all characters. Not "press T for heal", but "press T for the skill I put in the third hotkey space on Bar 3". Having to redo this every time you make a new character is a little annoying.

The downside to customizable UI is that it's a fair bet that even someone playing the same class/spec wouldn't be able to effectively use someone else's UI. There's certainly no rhyme or reason to where I put the skills on mine, other than a vague idea of "heals go in this general area, AoE here, Panic Button on variations of F" that I try to keep consistent across my WoW characters. And the good old "I have not enough spaces to put everything on my bars, so this gets shoved there and I don't really need immediate access to tradeskills so it goes on Bar 5...".

Tried Elyos briefly. Female Elyos mages start with this big floofy skirt and have a very demure cutesy idle animation that I'm certain is designed to inspire maximum moe in certain demographics. It's hard to find a voice set for females that's not extremely high pitched, however.

*spazzes a bit more about scenery @ Aion* Part of why I am inspired to play this after Dragon Age is that, while Dragon Age is a very good game, the eye gets tired of looking at brown.

Totally Unrelated to Gaming

2009-11-30T21:34:08Z

We watched a riff of the Twilight movie as post-Thankgiving entertainment.

I can now say with 100% certainty that it is every bit as bad as its reputation makes it out to be. Sparkly vampires wut.

PS. White makeup + red lipstick + gelled 80s punk hair do not attractive characters make. At least they got the "freaky" part of the vampire thing right, however unintentionally.

Aion Log 3

2009-11-30T17:55:42Z

Mouseover macros aarraghghah.

Or any kind of target ability cursor would be nice, actually.

The way targeting works in Aion is that pressing the key for a skill uses that skill on your current target. If it's a beneficial spell and you have a hostile target selected, it uses it on yourself, like the self-cast option in WoW. This is all well and good when soloing.

However, there is no option to turn self-cast off, and attempting to use a skill without a target selected always results in the skill being used on yourself (or, in the case of attack skills, the skill will not work). Now I'm not sure if raids or grouping in Aion is quite as busy as some WoW encounters can be, but in WoW it's kind of important to be able to maintain current target while healing other people (to track enemy ability use, if nothing else), or pop heals quickly on a variety of targets using a free targeting cursor (ie, you press the button for Heal and then select who to cast it on). This isn't a major issue in solo since you only have to heal yourself, but I can see it getting very messy for group situations. And as far as I can tell there is no way to implement mouseover macros, which are my tool of choice for applying instant-cast HoTs.

Overall a number of things about the UI remind me of WoW 1.0, before it's gone through some zillion iterations of both official and user-inspired mods. I still think one of the best decisions Blizzard ever made about their game was the ease of UI modding, it lets the players do most of the work.

Regardless, this game is I think the first one since FFX where I've had to stop every 10 minutes or so to gawk at the scenery (and press the Print Screen button). The world setting and lore is pretty neat and I seriously think that they should flesh out the Campaign story and make a single-player traditional RPG with it.

Tales of the Master Chef

2009-11-29T06:19:25Z

Aion-related.

Level 15, still have not run into a grind wall. If anything, the crafting system is the real timesink.

Crafting Hijinks

It's been traditional that while we recognize that RPG characters may have various skills at other things such as crafting, the way to level said skills generally involves killing bears, whether it is because of a level restriction in learning higher ranks of the crafting skills, or just access to higher level materials that must be, yes, obtained from killing dire bears.

Aion has a strange solution to this particular problem, in that it the crafting/character level propagates the other way around: mastering the finer points of roasting shellfish makes you more awesome in combat.

This is just due to the simple addition of exp for successful item crafting. Aion has done a better job than Lineage in making its crafting system accessible to new players, although whether that can be considered "more grind" or not is up in the air. When you train a crafting skill, you can get a Work Order from the trainer, where you're provided some items to craft into some specific other items, which allows you raise your crafting skill without actually having to go out and hunt for materials. The lowest level of Work Order supplies all its materials free, and when you turn in this order you get a few crafting mats, maybe a recipe if you're lucky. Which means that, technically, if you were sufficiently bored, you could just repeat this non-cost Work Order to acquire infinite amounts of Exp and money (from selling the mats you get). It's about as interesting as watching grass grow, of course, but I envision the Iron Chef stepping out from the depths of the kitchen at level 50 with a giant frying pan of doom, angry glares of death for the invading demonic army that had dared interrupt his banquet preparations...

That's not to say their crafting system is faultless - crafting vs drops is always a bit of a delicate balance. You should be able to, with some sustained effort, make stuff for yourself if you take the time to go collect materials, for cheaper than store-bought. Aion's crafting system throws in 2-6 rarish items into any gear recipe that are obtainable (*ie, drop at a decent rate) only at certain areas, which seems like it somewhat defeats the purpose.

Given this, the only crafting skills worth taking at lower levels are alchemy and cooking, neither of which require rare materials, but provide a nice backlog of self-made consumables with which to fuel your monster killing efforts. And, of course, taking crafting skills early is a sure way to cause an inventory implosion.

Other Things

-The initial PVE questline is actually quite ambitious, your character has a supposed background and everything, and even some of the non-Campaign quests have voice acting and cutscenes and whatnot. I hear that they ran out of content (or time to develop such) after a certain level, but I really hope they're looking to fill out the world. It would be really nice to see a story-focused PVE MMO at some point that utilizes some of these systems (ignoring the fact that the 3 zillion other people are also The Chosen One, of course).

-Aion uses a chain system for its skills - ie, attacks that you can use only after landing certain other attacks. For example, as a Chanter we have Hallowed Strike, which then chains to either Inferno Blaze or Booming Strike. HS has a shorter cooldown than either, so your cycle is something like HS > IB > [sandwich regen or Meteor Strike here] > HS > BS > etc. It adds a bit of extra dimension to the system so you're not just spamming buttons, though I understand some classes have more complex chains than others.

-Having no interest in taking part in large scale PVP (yes, I realize it's a PVP game. Meh) and knowing nobody else who plays the game, I picked my class with an eye towards solo. A Chanter is a hybrid healer, much like shamans or paladins in WoW, and thus extremely tough in solo PVE. I don't kill things very fast, but as long as I'm over the critical threshold (ie, kill mobs faster than they respawn), I'm willing to trade slower mob killing for lack of downtime. I've only died once, due to being jumped by an elite I hadn't noticed was there, and may have used one mana pot once upon a time. Chanter is one of the Priest sub-classes, the other being the Cleric, which is the pure caster version (think of them as jRPG healers vs D&D clerics). Clerics seem to be the only true healer class, just as Templars (defensive class of Warrior) are the only true tanks. I'm not even sure if Chanters count as "healers" for purposes of "LFG Healer", though I suspect the answer to that depends on how desperate the asker is.

-The reason I'm not playing a Cleric is that spells with cast time can be interrupted by any attack, though it appears the more damage the attack does the more likely it is to interrupt. For a caster that has no keep-away gimmicks (Sorceror/Ranger) or pet tank (Spiritmaster), this seems like a poor plan, even if you do get Mail ("Chain", in Aion parlance). I also suspect this is the reason that, from what I hear, Clerics don't like Assassins in PVP much.

-However, I have gotten a full green set of leather from low level drops, the game seems to want me to make a Rogue of some sort. Probably an Assassin because I hate dealing with consumable ammo. Lack of durability is not as much of an issue if you have a higher level alt to feed you greens, with which you can one-shot backstab equivalent level mobs.

-Chanters have permanent buffs called Mantras, which can be turned on and off and affect the entire party, like pally Auras. You can have multiple mantras up at once, and each Mantra is represented by a floating emblem over your head. The emblems stack too, so a high level Chanter is running around with an iridescent composite emblem fading in and out over their head. It's a really cool effect.

-I mentioned before that it's a good idea to look at the Abyss (PVP zone) balance of your server before jumping in. This is hindsight, because I'm playing Asmodean on Israfel, which is... well, not as bad as some of the servers, certainly, but not really the dominant faction, either. However, by the time I'm of a level to care about actually having to watch for gankers, I will have a) gotten bored and quit the game or b) there will be a server transfer service available (in the pipeline, but was delayed). If I were to redo this and care, I would probably reroll on Siel, which has a minor but not overwhelming Asmodean advantage.

-The way fortresses/artifacts in the Abyss work is that there's a seige period every day (evenings) where the forts are vulnerable, much like RO, Lineage, and most kMMOs. Holding the forts give you access to special items and buffs, as well as certain instance zones. This sort of setup always creates an interesting social system, especially since it's Faction vs Faction as opposed to Guild vs Guild, as in the earlier examples. Everyone would certainly *like* to enjoy the benefits of the PVP, but not everyone necessarily wants to do the actual fighting; in my observations of Lineage and RO, it makes the top PVP players extremely cynical and elitest, as "casual PVP" doesn't really happen very often when there's permanent territory at stake.

-Asmodeans have this sort of furry crest down the middle of their backs, which extends into a tail that swishes around when they walk. It's especially cute on the midget characters because they always seem to be running due to having the same movement speed as everyone else.

-This being an animish game, it's perhaps not surprising that some of the players are of the fanboy demographic. I have not seen a Sephiroth yet, but there have been several variations on Kenshin. What is a "Botosai"? Although I suppose it's really the designers' own fault for including a Cloud hairdo in the character creator (there is no other way to describe it).

-Let's talk bugs for a moment - the Aion server seem to have different instanced "channels", that you can swap between. I learned of this because one of the quests wouldn't work unless you were in Channel 5 for some bizarre reason.

-Also, you get DC'd from the server if you take too long to fiddle with the character creator, which seems a bit of a design oversight. Of course, you're allowed to completely change your character's appearance in-game after the fact, so I suppose it's not as bad of a handicap as it sounds.

-The flight system takes a bit of getting used to, if only because keyboard/mouse are designed to create a control scheme for moving in 2 dimensions. The spacebar turns your flight mode to glide, which is unfortunate because that's what you hold down to go higher in WoW flying. The limited flight time in early game makes it rather obnoxious to try to farm mats out of the aether motes (which have to be collected while flying).

-Asmodeans do a forward flip when jumping. Kind of like Night Elves. fortunately that's about where the resemblance stops.

Aion

2009-11-27T11:54:49Z

Hey look, I'm up at Stupid O'Clock due to !Dragon_Age.

Curiosity (and an urge to look at pretty) got me to finally poke at Aion (after verifying that it will run on my new system).

-Character creator is gorgeous. If you're a fan of slightly-anime-ish type of characters, it's designed to produce exactly that with minimum effort. Not, of course, that you can't make grizzled barbarian types too, but that Penny Arcade strip about character customization is entirely true. You can also install a hack to get Japanese voices for the characters/quest NPCs/etc. My first character, for example, turned out to be voiced by Koyasu.

-Scenery/background is pretty cool looking, with a lot of floating light effects, falling leaves, and the like. I've only tried Asmodean so far, but I hear the Elyos side has a lot of cool locales too.

-Game system is... well, it's a clone of WoW, as basically every single MMO is now obliged to be. The controls are less "sticky" than WoW is - you don't get the half-second command queuing (that I hadn't even really noticed in WoW until I came across the lack of it in Aion). That is, you can't press a button for Action B while your character is in the middle of the animation for Action A and still have it work; you have to wait till the animation completely finishes before pressing the button for B. Otherwise, standard WASD movement, camera controls, etc. Targeting is a little wonky because I haven't figured out how to make it do a free-cursor targeting yet, though the system is set to self-cast for beneficial spells without losing your current target by default.

-When in doubt, play a healer. There are 4 base classes in Aion: Warrior, Scout (rogue, basically), Priest, and Mage. I started a Priest on the principle that having the ability to heal yourself gives you a bit of a buffer when you're learning a new system, and am wondering if they're not a little overpowered, at least at lower levels. Mana at < level 10 is not a concern ever, and the Priest has no downtime and can tank/kill up 2-3 mobs if you manage your heals right. Tried Scout a little later, and the lack of heals definitely bites. Maybe the other classes will make up for it with higher level skills for more DPS later.

-I learned that I could kill 3 mobs of equal level because 2 adds got trained on me by some douchebag in a local quest area. This speaks poorly of their mob aggro system, and puts me in mind of the giant bouncing zombie trains of RO.

-There's an integrated storyline in the starting zone - you have a overarching plotline that's called the Campaign, which is a long extended special questline that eventually culminates in your character Ascending To A Higher Plane Of Existence, as well as non-linked sidequests. I have thus far not had to do any grinding (as of level 7), so it remains to be seen if Real Content continues into the rest of the game.

-Navigation is pretty convenient, possibly moreso than WoW - each quest has hotlink text for all their NPCs and areas, and you can track objectives pretty easily on the map, avoiding the Shrine of Mankrik's Wife problem.

-They have totally not fixed the botting/goldseller issue, and I'm just not sure NCSoft ever bothers that much with it. Just logging into Siel and going to the starting area I saw no less than a dozen bots. Fortunately, unlike, say, Lineage, resources in Aion seem balanced in such a way so that the average player can actually afford reasonable upgrades just from quest rewards, so I don't expect any botting/farming to have a significant impact on anything other than extremely high-level play.

-While server doesn't quite matter most of the time, there's a high level PVP game going on and it affects certain things like NPC merchant prices and what areas/artifacts are accessible for your side. It probably pays to look at their server list and see how the Abyss (PVP area) power struggle is going before picking a server. You can only play characters of the same faction on one server, so if you make an Asmodean character, all of the characters you make on that server must be Asmodean.

-There is probably more PVP at higher levels, but thus far I haven't encountered any, and it remains to be seen whether you can PVE to a decent level or not.

There Will Be Cake

2009-11-23T17:35:15Z

The Windows 7 tablet default settings consider "holding down the stylus" to mean "right-click", which explains its completely bizarre behavior in Photoshop. Since you have to hold down the stylus to draw lines, doesn't that sort of defeat the point of a tablet in the first place? Fortunately Google, as always, was of great assistance in turning it off.

Unrelated to the above, our cafeteria has revised its menu to include more health-conscious food, such as fresh fruit, vegetables (yes, including broccoli), and low-fat salad dressing. One thing that almost never seems to come out right, however, are various "healthy" baked goods, which always turn out a little dry. Makes sense, I suppose, since most cakes and pastries are made of sugar and fat.

Work-logged. So happy it's almost Thanksgiving.

Game News Post

2009-11-14T01:16:29Z

Haven't done one in awhile, mostly because there's not a whole lot to write about. Nevertheless:

-New RPG announced by Squeenix, a new game in an old series called Estopolis. I know nothing of the original series, but the splash art contains a beautiful floating continent, and I am always in favor of floating continents.

-XBox OS updated for compatibility with Facebook and Twitter. Um... good for you? (Facebook and Twitter, as I understand, are for people who post one or two lines of text. Aside from spur-of-the-moment NERDRAGE posts, I generally try to have some amount of content when I post to LJ, so I've never really seen the point of using them.)

-XBox version of FF13 announced to contain some bonus in-game item. Irrelevant to me, but somewhat amusing to see that more developers have caught on to the essentially free value and distribution of virtual items in place of physical loot.

-Some sort of mysterious countdown page over at Nippon-Ichi. I can only assume this marks the imminent ~~Zombie~~ Prinny Apocalypse.

-New Samurai Spirits ("Samurai Showdown"?) to be released in December. Man it's been ages since I last tracked one of those.

-Ar-Tonelico 3 has apparently moved to polygons for its combat character representation.

Windows 7 Permissions

2009-11-12T08:58:45Z

Die in a fire.

Internet backfire

2009-11-11T21:57:33Z

I may not play WoW anymore, but sometimes it is good for a laugh. One of the advantages of alt-itis is a decent working knowledge of how other people's classes and specs operate. It avoids making yourself look a bit of a moron.

Shiny

2009-11-10T18:11:29Z

Acquiring a new computer is much like moving house - there winds up being a lot of junk that you suddenly realize you don't really miss. The major problem with an SSD is that since I didn't blow $500 on a huge one, there are a limited number of large programs I can install on it, though most of those are games.

[insert reminiscing about the days of DOS-based OSes and green-and-black screens with giant floppy drives here]

Next step: set up real sound board and maybe a video switching box for impending game console.

..."clean up desk space" might have to happen first, though.

Argh

2009-11-06T21:58:52Z

"According to the laws passed in the Patriot Act after 9/11, all banks are required to verify the identity of their customers, so you have to fax us copies of your social security card and a bill as a proof of address."

"...my social security card is 10+ years old and some of the numbers are illegible. Also, I do not pay utility bills."

"Er... pay stub? Or maybe a bill from another bank?"

"..."

I am so freaking sick of having to prove my identity to various institutions. What, that I have been a customer at your bank for the last 3 years is not proof enough? How about the ID I showed when I signed up, did you lose the copy of that somewhere too?

Newegg

2009-11-05T20:53:13Z

Question of the day: what does "Newegg" mean? Why do they have eggs as a logo? What do eggs have to do with electronics? According to Wikipedia:

According to Newegg customer service representatives, the name "Newegg" stems from a Taiwanese philosophy meaning "new beginnings".

A brief look at their Chinese website proves that, yes, the Chinese translation of the name is quite literally "new egg". However, I've never heard the term used in anything other than its literal sense, so I'm totally drawing a blank on this one. Maybe someone who is Taiwanese might have a better idea.

%$#@!@$@#%!@#$@#%

2009-11-03T00:33:22Z

Title.

A Matter of Perception

2009-11-02T22:19:29Z

1) Hmm. Many of the original male characters I draw appear to be bishounen. Maybe that's overdoing it a little?

2) Wait a minute. How often do I see a major female character in a game/anime who's not young and pretty?

3) Well then. So as long as the ratio of attractive-to-plain male characters does not approximately exceed the ratio of attractive-to-plain female characters, we're good?

4) Yup.