Guest Posters Wanted

In May I’m going to be taking a little trip.

A good friend of mine moved to Sydney a few years ago, just before I moved to the US for work. I spent two and a half years living in Baltimore before the secondment ended and I moved back home to Adelaide. Before I came home, I took six weeks off work, bought the car I had been leasing and drove across the United States with my friend who had flown in for the trip. 9400 miles and a whole bunch of states and Canada later, we arrived in LA, sold the car and flew back to Australia.

That was over two years ago now, and the last time I had a real holiday. My friend has been bugging me since then to come up to Sydney for a visit.

So in May, I’m going to drive to Sydney along the coast, spend a few days there, and drive back across.

I’ll be taking two weeks for this little adventure, which presents me with a couple of problems. Getting someone to look after my cat, and keeping the blog posted.

The cat is sorted out. Friends and family will be making sure he’s looked after. But since Oz country town hotels aren’t as wired as US ones (nearly every hotel in my trip across the US had wireless broadband) posting anything will be hard. Besides it’s a holiday. Aside from lots of driving, who knows what I’ll be doing.

So this is my appeal to you dear reader. I’m looking for a number of guest posts that I can set to be published while I am away.

So if you are looking for a creative outlet for your MMORPG inner thoughts, look no further.

There are a few of things to keep in mind.

1. You should keep on topic. This is a MMO gaming blog, after all that’s why you’re here, so writing about MMOs would be a plus. I don’t mind what you right about in this niche, but also bear in mind these will be posted in May - if you submit something about something happening now, it might be out of date later.
2. I don’t mind some shameless self promotion, a couple of links back to your site are okay, but otherwise please try and keep any links to sites that are on topic for your article.
3. Write well. Some basic grammar and spelling is necessary. Your grammar doesn’t have to be impeccable, mine sure aint, but it should be passable.

If you have an idea and write something up, you can submit it using the contact form. If you have any questions on this, or would like to discuss and idea over email, use the contact form to pose the question and I’ll get back to you.

Popularity: 11%

Poll Results - Game Ratings I’d Play

Okay, time to get down and dirty with the results of the February poll.

The question last month was asking what game rating would be the highest you’d play. I dropped in the ESRB rating guide to give you an idea of what each rating would entail.

The highest rating was AO where there may be prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sex and nudity. This incidentally was also the winning category with 8 of the 15 voters saying they’d play a game rated AO.

The second highest vote count was for the M rating where games in that category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language. Age of Conan is being aimed at this audience. There were 4 votes here.

With two and one vote respectively, were the E10+ and T ratings. T is anything suited for a teenage and E for everyone over ten. There were no votes for E.

One thing that is a pity about the Democracy poll plugin that I use is that I can’t set it up for multiple selections, nor does it give me an indication of the country of the voter. I’m assuming that the bulk of my readers come from the US, since that’s what my website stats indicate, therefore the bulk of the voters were US based as well.

While it seems that the bulk of respondents were quite happy to play a reasonably hardcore game like Age of Conan or harder, there were a couple of readers who want to be able to play with their kids and chose a lower rating.

I also wonder if those who voted for the AO would still have some limits. Would a MMO with hardcore nudity and sex be on their harddrive? How about a MMO with extreme violence, gore, and torture?

What do you think?

Popularity: 11%

Butcherblock Here I Come

My foray back into Everquest 2 continued over the last weekend.

Ssirius the dragon-like Sarnak Shadowknight finally completed the majority of the quests in Timorous Deep with the exception of one or two that I couldn’t find my way to. The Sarnak home city is Gorowyn and is located in a vast cavern inside a active volcano. Property values must be cheap there. Available quests in EQ2 are represent by a hollow orange circle on the mini-map. Try as I might I couldn’t find the way to the last one.

I also didn’t do the tradeskill quest chain. I’ve mined my way up to a skill level of 60 though I haven’t really touched the other harvesting skills. I figure if I end up working on tradeskills it will probably be one of the metalworking ones, either for armor or weapons.

The bulk of the Timorous Deep quests were about the ongoing struggle the Sarnak were having with the Haoaerans, one of the Aviak races. Seems the Haoaerans were horning in on the Sarnak lands, digging up Sarnak relics, and overall being bad neighbors. These quests effectively took me from level one and petered out around halfway through level 19. It was here that the last questgiver directed me to head to the Butcherblock mountains where I was to check out a possible alliance between the Haoaerans and the Aviaks there.

So like a dutiful Shadowknight I caught the first griffon to the Butcherblocks.

Apart from going back to Gorowyn, since I keep all my stuff there, the next time I’ll see the Kunark content is when I get to the 50’s or 60’s.

The problem now is that the Butcherblock quests are a little tough for level 19. Once I hit twenty some of the fights got a bit easier, but there are still a few ^ mobs that I have to kill as well as a few orange quests. I don’t really expect to progress quickly here, at least for a couple more levels.

That’s one of the differences between EQ2 and WoW. Properly geared in WoW, I normally don’t have much trouble with mobs 2 or 3 levels above me. Once they get above that my hit miss ratio heads more towards the miss. With EQ2 even two levels drops my hit rate drastically. That could be gear, but I’m wearing all the quest reward gear, and have picked up some nice drops as well, so I’m not sure it’s that.

One thing I know, is that it has been a while since I’ve everquested so I’m not necessarily up on all the knowhow, or all the changes. One thing though, EQ2 has a lot of depth, and a huge amount of content.

The downside of EQ2 is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of current content. The forums have some good info, but I haven’t really been able to find any good guides to Shadowknight AA, or just to Shadowknights in general. A lot of what I’ve found by googling is related to earlier content, or even to the original Everquest.

Popularity: 16%