SOE Station Access

Michael at MMOG Nation has written an interesting article about the upcoming price increase for Sony Online Entertainments Station Access package. Station Access is the (currently) great deal that SOE offers players to access several of its MOGs at better prices. For $25 a player can subscribe to Everquest, Everquest 2, Vanguard Saga of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, The Matrix Online, and several other games instead of paying a single fifteen dollars a month subscription for each game. Along with this, Everquest 2 players get to have a few extra characters instead of the extremely limited six they can have with a standard subscription.

Unfortunately, the price rise to $29 dollars for the Station Access subscription effectively makes the cost the same as two standard subscriptions. While the original price might have some value for players who do like to play two of the MMOs that SOE have to offer, the new price diminishes that value to where there is no real incentive to purchase a Station Access sub. Having said that, EQ2 altaholics might have reason to subscribe given that they get extra character slots, and there are a few other benefits to subscribers if they use them. SOE might also have a few additional extras to make up for the price hike.

So far I haven’t decided if I’ll drop back to a standard sub for EQ2, (I wouldn’t bother for Vanguard) or pay the extra five dollars. Given that I’m not currently doing very much gaming at all, and that my attention has been captured by Lord of the Rings Online, I might just decide to cancel the subscription completely. It doesn’t matter in any case. I can always reactivate the sub later if I feel inclined to play any of the SOE MMOs that I have already purchased.

New Keylogger Warning

Nathaera from the Blizzard Forums has posted a warning about a new spate of keylogger scams. It seems that there have been a number of posts on the forums including links to a hostile program called tony danza. So, if you are browsing the forums at the moment be very careful of the links that you follow.

In fact it’s probably a good idea to be careful what you do on the net in anycase. Always make sure you have a good firewall installed, and use an anti-malware program to check what your computer is downloading. You should always be aware of your account security.

Be extremely careful when you buy gold. I’d recommend you didn’t buy gold anyway since there is a risk of an account ban if you are caught. And besides it really is cheating. Even accepting gold from someone you don’t know is fraught with danger. But aside from those considerations, a lot of gold sellers will try and install a keylogger on your computer.

Why you ask? Well consider that keylogger scams exist for one reason only. To steal gold from players by breaking into their accounts, converting their gear to cash, and send that gold to a gold seller. Gold is valuable after all, why not try and get it back from the person you sold it to?

You have to ask yourself, why would you trust the thieves that you are buying gold from to treat you any different than their victims?

The Winds of Change

I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought to the format and structure of Stropp’s World lately.

As you might have noticed, I haven’t really posted a huge amount about World of Warcraft in recent times. The reason being that I simply haven’t been playing it. I’ve been playing the Lord of the Rings Online beta when I can, and have been checking out other MMOs as well. I’ve even been tempted into some offline games from time to time. Gears of War being one of them.

Since my focus has been widened a bit, it’s been on my mind that perhaps the current theme that I am using for this blog might be a little too focussed on World of Warcraft. So, I’m firstly looking at doing a redesign of the site. I’ve got a few ideas of what I’d like to do, but I’d like to ask you some questions on what you would prefer.

1. Would you prefer the site to keep the dark colour scheme that is currently being used, or would you prefer a light scheme? Maybe something in between?
2. Some blogs present articles on the index page in a truncated format, with a ‘read more…’ link that take the reader to the complete post. This has the advantage of keeping the index page shorter so the reader doesn’t have to scroll through huge pages. It’s good if the blog has lots of very large articles. The downside is that some people don’t want to click through to the full article. What do you think, should Stropp’s World use this format?
3. Do you like the format of the sidebars? Would you prefer more or less links, categories, etc? Are the sidebars to busy for your taste?
4. One of the things that I will be doing is tidying up the categories list. A few months ago I thought I could use it to emulate a tags style system, but it just ended up looking very messy. Do you ever use the tags panels in other blogs and web pages to find content? If you do, I’ll look into a proper tags plugin.
5. Is there anything else you would comment on about this site?

I would really appreciate it if you could provide some feedback on these questions. The easiest method would be to leave a comment here, but you can also use the contact form to send me an email. And don’t forget that I am always happy to receive any feedback on the site that you want to offer.

Create your own coloring books

Sometimes you just find something so absolutely creative on the internet that you almost fall off your chair.

Delaney at Casual WoW – A World of Warcraft Blog has a post up that shows you how to turn your favorite WoW screenshots into the pages of a coloring book. Delaney used Photoshop Elements with a very simple two step process. Unfortunately, I don’t have Photoshop Elements, and I haven’t figured out how to do the same thing in Paint .Net yet. Everything I tried so far comes up very blotchy, and doesn’t look at all as good as Delaneys.

This could be great to produce a homemade coloring book for your younger relatives. Homemade gifts are often well appreciated, and a lot of kids would appreciate the fantasy setting of World of Warcraft to color in. It doesn’t even have to be limited to WoW. You could use settings from any game that allowed a screenshot to be taken. If you don’t think the WoW setting is appropriate for younger minds, then how making some up from games suitable for their age group?

It’s a Mods Life

Man, I’d hate to be one of the CM Mods on the World of Warcraft official forums.

Those folks must have the patience of saints, or at least the patience of someone with a lot of patience. Maybe we should change the saying to "someone with the patience of a Blizzard Mod."

One of the forum rules is for the posters not to cry out to nerf some other class. If you make such a post, there’s a good possibility of getting at least a temporary ban from the forums. Since all your characters are linked to one account, that means none of them will be usable to post during that time. Along with this, posting about being banned is also a bannable offence.

I find it hilarious to see posts like this and this. These posts may not be related at all, but the principle is still there. If you don’t want to be banned, obey the rules. Running full pelt at walls hurts, and it’s funny to watch.

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

Doctor: Then don’t do it.

I hardly ever post, but I do read the forums from time to time and I reckon the mods do a great job with the Blizzard forums. They’d be unreadable without the CMs.

Cthulhu Nation Online

A couple of weeks ago I made a post about five IPs I would like to see made into MMOs. At the end of the post I asked for opinions on what other intellectual properties should be given the MMO treatment. DM Osbon commented that he would like to see a MMO based in the Cthulhu world of HP Lovecraft.

Well, it looks like there is such a beastie out there, and if you are not careful it might drive you insane like much of Lovecrafts world. Trying to pronounce Cthulhu is having that effect on me.

I happened across an interview on Gamersinfo.net about a game called Cthulhu Nation. Cthulhu Nation is bills itself as an ongoing and continuously evolving MMORPG game. It is free to play once you register on the website, however to get access to more lands and quests there is a subscription of about US$5.50.

Now while I haven’t played it yet, it appears a bit more to me as a graphical MUD more than a full fledged MMORPG. First thing to say is that Cthulhu Nation is a web based game. Yes, you can play it in a browser. There are no huge downloads to worry about. The main interface sets out a series of panels with stats, creatures, and the like, and an area of hex panels which are locations you can move to. The location you are in is described in a text panel.

This MUD like look and feel is not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately some modern game designers seem to believe that a game is good if it has good graphics and they don’t give a rats about story or gameplay. Ever laid down good money on a game that looks gorgeous but where the gameplay is as interesting as drying paint? If you have you’ll know what I mean. On the other hand, I’ve played several text only games that have kept me engrossed for hours at a time. Cthulhu Nation may in fact be one of these.

The next time WoW has some downtime, or even if you need to play something a bit different, why not give Cthulhu Nation a go? If you can figure out how to pronounce it, it might not drive you insane. Or as insane… Maybe just a little.

The Surly Blogger

It’s been quite a week.

I spent around a thousand dollars this week on my system. A few weeks ago I mentioned that my wireless router just completely up and died. So on Thursday night I went out and bought a new one. In fact I bought one that would also act as a storage server so that I could centralise some of my important files on my home network. So then, because I had bought a router that acted as a storage server, I had to buy some storage didn’t I? So here I am with a DLink DL-624S and a Western Digital 500GB MyBook sitting on my desk. And wait, that’s not all. I also bought myself a HP Printer/Scanner/Fax. Unfortunately, the router will only act as a print server and won’t handle the other functions, so I might just have to connect it up to my PC instead of running the router as a print server. Oh Well.

Not only that, my nephews fourth birthday was on Friday so doting Uncle Stropp spent more than a few quid there too. Walking down the aisles of the local Toys R Us made me extremely jealous. Man, do four year olds have it good these days. There’s all sorts of cool stuff for kids. RC Vehicles abound. All sorts of robotic dinosaurs, gizmos, and other things. I want to be four again!

On to my main news, I have started a new blog called The Surly Blogger. When I started Stropp’s World, I intended to make it a quality resource for World of Warcraft players. (I hope you’ve found it as such.) Over the last six months, it’s evolved a bit and the focus has expanded to more than just WoW. That’s just the beginning as far as I’m concerned. However, I also started it as an experiment to see if what I was reading about Blogs as income generators was true. I think it is.

So today I have started The Surly Blogger as a continuation of that experiment. I’m implementing a lot of what I’ve learned here at Stropp’s World, and hopefully within a few months have a resource that will provide a lot of value to its readers. My first post lays out one of the most important life lessons that anyone can learn. You need to have a go to achieve anything in life. Have a look if you’re interested. There is still a lot of work to do on the site. Stropp’s World has sort of evolved with bits changing over time; I expect The Surly Blogger to go through a similar process.

So yeah. It’s been a good week, even if I still have to get a bit of hardware working properly.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Lord of the Rings Online Regular Updates Planned

Asheron’s Call was the first MMORPG that I played back in the dim dark ages of the year 2000, and like some other things, the first is usually remembered fondly. The scale of the world, learning the dungeon layouts, killing my first Lugian, and crossing the dangerous countryside just to climb a mountain and look out over the miles of virtual landscape. It also happens that Asheron’s Call did one other thing that I haven’t really found repeated in any other MMORPG since. It had an episodic storyline that was updated frequently.

Each month, once a month in general, was Patch Day. Now this was the day which it was advised not to play, but it was always hard not to play on this particular day because the story was updated. There was always a story teaser on the official website, and often new monsters and items were added. On top of this the seasons changed, summer into autumn, autumn into winter… grassy plains became snow covered. Autumn leaves fell from the trees. It was something, I think, to behold.

Well in an interview on the LotRO Warcry network, the Executive Producer of Lord of the Rings Online, Jeffrey Steefel, has made a few comments indicating that Turbine are planning to handle updates and live events in a similar way to Asheron’s Call 1. While he wasn’t able to reveal details, Mr. Steefel did say that the first content update was planned to be 30 days after release. He also mentioned that some members of the AC1 live team will be on the LotRO live team. I have to say I find this very encouraging.

I’ve also heard some rumours that Turbine is planning to do major updates to the game approximately every nine months. These will probably be in the form of expansion packs and will update the major parts of the storyline. The initial release of the game covers the areas mentioned in the first book, as well as the Hobbit. I expect the first expansion will add the locations and storyline events from The Two Towers, and the second expansion will deal with The Return of the King. What a third expansion will involve is anyones guess. Anyway, this is just speculation based on what I’ve heard from unreliable sources, so don’t bet the farm on it.

In any case, the signs are encouraging that Turbine is going to treat the story and lore with the respect that it deserves. It also looks like there will plenty to keep players engaged for a very long time.

Server Downtime

If you’ve tried to access this site over the last day, you’ve probably noticed that you couldn’t.

It turns out that last night (my time) a couple of hours after I had finished writing up the Lord of the Rings Online – Beta Glimpse 1 and had gone to bed, the hosted server had some sort of catastrophic failure. I’m not sure exactly what happened. It was bad enough to require around eighteen hours to repair and rebuild, and the storage device was trashed.

I know this because when it finally came back up a little while ago, the Lord of the Rings Online – Beta Glimpse 1 article I had spent at least an hour writing was gone. Doh!

Fortunately, Bloglines had the article in its cache and I was able to copy and paste it into wordpad and from there restore the article, with a few minor adjustments. I reposted it a few minutes ago.

In any case, my apologies if you tried to access Stropp’s World today and couldn’t. Hopefully it will be all smooth sailing from here on out.

Lord of the Rings Online – Beta Glimpse 1

In playing the LotRO beta I’ve come across a few features that I thought you might find interesting. Over the next few weeks before the release of the game, I’ll be posting some glimpses of these features.

The first glimpse that I’m going to give you is of the Deed Log and Traits.

The Deed Log keeps track of your in game accomplishments. These accomplishments aren’t individual quests, but can be any of a number of achievements. In the picture above you can see three deeds that are available to me in Ered Luin. The Defender of Ered Luin is completed when I finish 30 of the quests available in Ered Luin area. The Goblin Slayer and Hendroyal Slayer accomplishments are completed when I slay a certain number of each creature.

When an accomplishment is completed, the player is rewarded. The Defender of Ered Luin reward is the Compassionate trait which is displayed in the tooltip in the screenshot. I’ve also seen a few folks running around with a title ‘Defender of Ered Luin’ so I assume I’ll get this title when I complete the accomplishment.

This is an example of the Title panel. You’ll notice I’ve selected Klarm the Wary as my active title. I received that when I reached the 5th level without being defeated. The title ‘of the Iron Hills’ is the title I was given when I started my character. Klarm is still pretty low level, so he doesn’t have many titles yet. Frankly, I’m disappointed that there is no ‘the Short and Hairy’ title.

Now you remember the Compassionate trait that was being tooltipped in the first screenshot?

Since I haven’t completed the achievement, it’s not available to use yet. However it just so happens that I a couple of traits I prepared earlier. Charity and Patience both alter some of my attributes. However, this alteration may not be positive for all attributes. Some traits may boost one attribute and lower another. Before you can gain the benefits of traits you must equip them.

Traits can only be equipped by dealing with a Bard. You should find a Bard in most major towns, and possibly in some more out of the way places. When you get close to a bard, you’ll see a lute image on the minimap. There will probably be a few NPC dancing around the place that will give him away too.

Once you find him, open up a conversation by right clicking him and choose the equip traits option. Choose the traits you want to equip, or unequip and give the man some coin for each trait you want changed. Voila! Your traits have been changed.

One other thing. You are limited in the trait slots that will open up by your level. I can only have two traits equipped here until I level up enough to open up another slot. You’ll also notice that there are different categories of traits. Race and Class are pretty self explanatory, but I’m not sure what the Legendary traits are yet, or how they will be gained by players.

Usage of the Deed Log and the Traits system should allow players to come up with some unique builds. There are plenty of tabs in the deed log, one for each major map area plus the class and race tabs. This means that there will be plenty of traits to choose from. More in fact than there will be slots to equip them. If the trait system has been designed right, there shouldn’t be any cookie cutter templates to choose from, allowing a the player a lot of diverse options for his character.

I also think it’s a great idea to vary the gameplay. Now, players are no longer dependent on just quests to progress their characters, and I also think that this is a step above the reputation system in WoW. Yes, there’s still a mechanic of kill x of this, or do y of that, but it seems to me to be a somewhat more organic way of achieving.