Perpetually Bored

NCSoft is adding the first two of its planned character services to Lineage 2 on the 31st of this month, which includes change of character names and a gender change, with the long promised character transfer coming later. Those two services will set you back $29.99 and $9.99 respectively.

Now I can finally turn my female elf obsession in L2 into a reality and go rename my character into ‘PrettyElfGirl’ from ‘Computerz’ and turn my pansy looking elf male into the opposite gender! Woot! Oh wait, I don’t play the game anymore.

Frostfell (EQ2’s version of Christmas) is finally here, when the servers go up that is. I’m really excited since this would be the first Frostfell season I’ll celebrate here on the AB server, and I can’t wait to get a hold of all the fancy clothing and house items – both old ones from Frostfell 2006 and the newly introduced ones this year. Finally, I’ll have something in EQ2 to do again. Oh, the best thing about GU41 – there’s going to be tableware furniture items! Dishes and cups!

Lineage 2’s expansion, The 1st Throne, goes live today. One thing I love about L2 is that expansions are absolutely free. I’m not sure if my account is active, I’ll have to check it later. I’m excited too, but between this and Frostfell, I’ll have to say I’m more enthusiastic about Frostfell sadly. I really don’t see myself playing L2 full time again. I really do want to be on the moment it goes up however, as there’s almost guarantees that fights will occur the new err… whatever, clan hall or fortress I think it was, haven’t quite been following the patch notes.

But oh, before I get myself even more hyped up, remember my post about having to miss the MMIS raid due to midterms? Probabilty couldn’t be more against me than to place both the MMIS raid and L2’s expansion launch on the same day where I can’t attend either. I’m pretty upset over it.

Anyway, Office 2007 SP1 is being released also, so grab it here if you’re running Office 2007. I really should be studying, but I can hardly concentrate at all. I love my course, I love what I’m studying, but studying for a test, which is based on nothing but pure memory work really kills any enjoyment I would otherwise have.

Rise of Kurnak came out earlier this week and it definitely kept me busy. I love the expansion and the amount of content that’s been added, especially solo content, since I no longer have to be bored while looking for groups. The only grumble I have is that when you do actually do want to have someone to play with, they’re usually either too far ahead or behind in the quest lines, and thus either one will have to help the other catch up.

The technical issues that the Antonia Bayle server is constantly experiencing is rather irksome, but not to be unexpected. With 6 instances of Kylong Plains alone and at least a hundred in each of them, I doubt the server has had any more population at any one time than this. Zoning has to be biggest issue, with about half of the time resulting in either a 10 minute zone or me getting booted from the server.

The new legendary set pieces in RoK aren’t too appealing, and their set bonuses are feeble compared to what came along with the EoF pieces. Also, their stats seem kind of low compared to what I’ve seen on other random armor pieces. I’ve already broken my 6-piece EoF bonus from replacing a few slots with newly quested ones from Kunzar Jungle.

Questing in RoK is a great and new experience to me. For the first time, I actually have to attempt to figure out the quests as they go along, instead of just looking up EQ2i and inputting the waypoint into the game directly. Of course, this also means that for some quests, I get stuck at a certain point and look around for hours before finding the objective, or yell for someone that has done it to provide me with directions.

So whats one do when the EQ2 servers go down? Hop on another MMO of course! I volunteered to help my old guild with raiding Baium. I hate Baium, especially when you only have a small force for it; it takes ages. I either get the job of kiting around the angels for an hour, or stand in my nice little corner. This time, it was the latter.

Finished up Swords of Destiny timeline after a long and aggravating weekend in Castle Mistmoore. I’m rather impressed at amazed at myself for getting through the whole thing. All that’s left now is to turn my staff into a Soulfire one by slaying Mayong Mistmoore himself. Currently, my guild isn’t quite capable of that yet, but I don’t think he would be as much  of a pain to kill in RoK at all with the added levels and gear.

Speaking of RoK, I wish I could skip school and be home right when the server goes up, but I’ve lab sessions on that day and it wouldn’t be possible. I’m actually rather busy throughout the entire week so I’ll probably be missing the chance to get item discoveries. Calreth still does not have a single discovery to his name yet.

Also, Lineage 2’s test server for the new chronicle came out a couple days ago. However, by the time I finished updating and patching, which took about 2 days on my terrible connection here in Singapore, the servers went down for some unknown reason. From the screenshots I’ve seen and from the 5 minutes I spent looking at the login screen, the revamped interface looks amazing.

It’s easy to overlook something as simple as a global chat channel, but it plays an important role in an MMO. It connects everyone together, giving them a single channel of output, be it anything from the daily political/religious/which-class-is-better-at-soloing/Chuck Norris debate to forming and looking for a group, it is something one expects to always be present. It lays the groundwork for the server community.

Logging back into Lineage 2 for a short while today, I immediately noticed this loss. I wanted to greet everybody, to let everyone know that I’ve returned even if it was just for a moment, hoping that someone I knew was on, but I was robbed of the opportunity to do so because I didn’t have access to global chat. In Lineage 2, global chat is exclusive only a few ‘heroes’ – one of each class that wins the olympiad competition monthly.

Without a global chat, to look for one group, one would have to physically go out to the safe zone in the outskirts of a hunting area to congregate and shout for a group. This isn’t so much of a problem back during the early days of Lineage 2, as there were only 2 main exp areas. Right now, I don’t even know how one gets groups other than already knowing someone through social circles. I’ve never took a huge notice of this previously because I usually group with guild members only, and almost never do pickups, and I still don’t.

After all that’s being said, I can see one reason why having global chat would actually be a disadvantage in a PvP-centric game like Lineage 2 – the kind of chat that goes in there would probably annoy a good number of the population who aren’t board warriors.