Some News

Sorry I have not been so active these past few weeks. It seems that life has decided to turn its ugly head towards me and bend me over. College classes have ultimately taken there toll on my drive and my health. With some rest I'll be fine its just that the course I was taking was more demanding of me than originally thought. It's over now and this Monday I'll be heading back to classes.

So depending on how things go with this upcoming class I should be making up for lost ground.

In other news, I decided to take up Let's Plays. I just need to figure out how to go about it before I do it. More than likely it might be a combo of screenshots and writing as if it were a story, but I'll try playing with the Windows editing software and see if I can't do voice overs, which means you'll hear what I actually sound like.

Also, something has come up with Aron. I had to let him go so he could focus on college more (he needs it). If he'll ever come back is anyone's guess. So now, I am once again a lone wolf.

Musing: Gender Locked Classes: The New Sexism

I hate games that do this. I thought this world was becoming more progressive. Certainly doesn’t FEEL that way when you still got games that do this. This is ass backwards and as far as I’m concerned there is no feasible excuse for it. Mothers tell their little girls that when they grow up they can be ANYTHING they want and yet they can’t even get on a good deal of games and be what they want. Maybe little Susie doesn’t want to play a Priestess. Little Susie wants to go Xena on people and be a warrior. She finds out that only boys can be Warriors. Susie gets disappointed and uninstalls the game since girls can’t be warriors. Sure, the game LOOKED good, but she just can’t stand the gender barrier.

The problem also hits the male set too. Maybe little Timmy wants to be a Priest instead of a Warrior. He wants to play a boy Priest, but apparently only girls can be Priests. Timmy also uninstalls since he can’t be what he wants to be. Both Susie and Timmy think the developers are unfair and stupid for this choice, and so are a bunch of people. I had a talk with my mother that this was a practice in certain games and she was mortified. Sure, she doesn’t play any MMOs, but the very thought of this Gender Locking made her (figuratively) sick to her stomach. ALL THE CRAP women take and such a misogynistic practice not being halted in the virtual world. It could be a case of short sightedness on the developer’s part, but let’s face it…it looks pretty fucking sexist. The only time such a practice should ever be permitted is if the race only has ONE GENDER or you’re playing a premade character from the ground up like in Rusty Hearts. If it’s not a One Gender Race or a pre-made character then it can be argued that the person in charge of these things is either a wife beating man or some crazed man hating woman.

This sort of thing has stopped me from even checking out Aika, Prius and a few others that escape my memory at the moment. Why do people think this is good? Why aren’t people yelling at the development teams about these issues? Why are publishers agreeing to host games like this? WHERE IS THE MASS OUTRAGE!? Are people just so passive that they don’t think they can make an impact? Are these games really so good that anyone can just look past the underlying unfortunate implications of this? I know this sounds crazy to some of you, but I believe that more impressionable people will be left to believe that this kind of gender bias is actually an acceptable practice, and that frightens me to no end. I was hoping that sometime in my lifetime that we would be nearly finished sweeping gender bias off a cliff for good. This is just unacceptable.

I’m not going to go around chasing people off games that have gender locked classes, but I would at least want them to take notice of these issues. Even if I can get them to reconsider (no matter how briefly) supporting games with this “feature” I’ve done my job. This practice needs to stop. People need to spam the hell out of the inboxes of the developers and publishers of such games. Even if the publishers cannot do anything about it, you can be assured that they’ll get on the developers about it if enough people scream at them and keep screaming until it’s corrected.

I’ve heard some people reason that this is because they don’t want variety in classes is to ease up on the lag of the servers. I declare that these developers are lazy and cheap (you expect me to give you money and you can’t bother to give me a good amount of customizable options?), but that’s an issue for another time.

Tell me. What’s your stance on this?

P.S. I'll be starting this topic on as many places as I can think of to get some scope on this.

Ederon – The Card Game That Can, But Struggling To Get Uphill

I am a fan of card games. I love the social aspect behind them, even if it means exposing myself to a bunch of douchebags in the process (and BOY does it seem like I find them). I think of them as the RPG minus the tedium of the grind, though that is usually replaced with the money cards that are worth over 9000 dollars that you absolutely need to win, or you might as well not play. The online card game attracted me for a few reasons. One (provided the community is active and there are at least 500 or more people on at one time) you always got someone to play with around your level, two no cards cluttering up your room like an atom bomb hit it, three, trading could be done in a matter of seconds from anywhere in the world and finally, cards can be buffed/nerffed remotely to address serious issues.

The first online card game I played was Alteil, and those of you who read my blog frequently know how that game sat with me. Will Ederon be different? You’ll find out right…about…now.

Gameplay: The first thing to note this is a browser based game, so don’t worry about having to load up your computer with more programs. All players start off with 20 Life. To win you either have to reduce the foes life to 0 or your opponent has to draw a card, but can’t. The very first turn will be spent playing your class card. There are 8 classes in total and you can only play cards that correspond to the class (of course there are some cards that anyone can play). There are several kinds of cards besides the Class one and this list is courtesy of the main site (which will be linked to at the end of the review for those new here).

This game has no resource system. You just play all the cards when it’s allowed. These cards, once played end the phase you’re on, but some effects prevent the turn from ending then and there and those cards will be critical to your success if you decide to get into higher tier play, or just to avoid getting squashed like an ant (and squashed you shall be). The main site also has a tutorial video, and since they went through the trouble making it, I might as well show you it (also because I feel like they could explain it better, and first hand examples might be easier to grasp).

Now that we got how to play out of the way, I’ll head to another aspect, something that truly troubles me about the game.

Small Community: when I log in, I’m lucky if I see at least 50 people on at one time.  This reminds me of Alteil, and that’s in a bad way (except at times they struggle breaking 30). Anyone who really likes this game will probably go into two schools of thought. Either they’ll spend, get new cards and try to keep up regardless of size, or they won’t spend due to the game lacking in a fairly wide range of players. I would fit in the second school of thinking. Spending money just to get spanked (Alteil when I was stupid enough to back Refess) repeatedly because some people got more money and or more experience than you is a rather demoralizing experience. You can play for fun though to spare your RP, but you got to directly challenge or be challenged. The way they have ratting matches to be sought out is a nice one, either you can seek for someone around your level or far beyond it if you feel lucky but it feels wasted with the size of the community as is. In fact the message boards don’t seem to have a bunch of people on at once.

This problem can be fixed with time. They have a Facebook page, so this should help with getting some hype started but as of now, since it has 80 likes, its needs a real kickstart.

Features: The game has achievements and titles from said achievements. They also give you Gold for obtaining them. Of course some are worth more than others. It seems that the only other way to gain Gold is to battle other players in Ranked matches AND WIN when you have a Golden Feather which can be purchased with Gems, which you can get from buying with Gold (as of this moment you cannot turn Gems into Gold), and that only gives you 5 Gold a win. So it’s highly modest and grindy. If you can win Gold by playing against others without the Feather the amount was so small I hardly noticed it.

There is trading in the game. The Auction House is a rather misleading name since you can only offer cards for cards in there and the only singles you can buy from the game are the bids the staff sets up in the Shopping tab. LAME! Speaking of trading, you need to buy a Trader’s Contract in order to trade cards with other people. It’s about 300 Gold, so it’s cheap to get, more than likely a way to prevent people from opening up multiple accounts to trade off cards to their main. It costs about $5 to get a key, which will allow you to sell (to the system) cards in your deck and to trade them in the Auction House.

Speaking of decks, the system does allow you to restart with another deck in because you hate the one you picked. Keep in mind you’ll lose Gold, RP and cards by doing this. It’s awesome since you can play around till you find something you can stomp with.

Golden Matches are a nice chance to get more stuff, but if you’re like me and keep getting spanked its just a tease that makes you want to not play if you lose them.

Judgment: I like the game, yet I am wary of getting invested in it long term. If you’re looking for a good time sink why not give this a shot? I might pop back in now and then, but I don’t see myself staying committed until the population grows and assuming it grows before something else steals away my interest. If the staff of the game is reading this…start an ad campaign, and if you already have one make it more aggressive.

Aeria Games: Good Riddance to A Bad Company

Remember my Eden Eternal review? How I liked the games aspects, but was still on the fence about sticking around or not? Well, turns out I was pushed over one side of the fence. I wish I could say the grind broke me in half, but I didn’t subject myself long enough to the game to know that for sure.

What forced me out of the yard was the scandal I found relating to the business practices of Aeria. On a random Youtube binge I found this video.

Now this is just straight wrong. There is a link to his blog post recounting the events of this one victim from the video. What further added to this is that 100’s of accounts were banned under what appears to be under false pretenses. Since Aeria Games refuses to go public on this matter it only makes me feel more suspicious of them.

I had also heard that they (like Nexon) have horrible customer service from various forums and if that wasn’t enough, the bastards are manipulating their own Better Business Burial ratting to make themselves look good.

So I will no longer be playing anything from Aeria games. I will neither be reviewing anything from Nexon due to my personal experiences with them while trying to do the Mabinogi review. If you want to play their games, I won’t stop you. I won’t be going on some boycott against them either. I’m going to vote against them with my dollar. A dollar that will be going towards something more worthy.

I didn’t want this thing to run into too long, didn’t read territory (also they have not nailed me yet, so I don’t have anything more to add due to lacking first hand experience with their “methods”), so if you want to learn more here’s some reading material on the subject and other Aeria nonsense:

The Blog Post

Aeria Games is Super Strict

Stay Away From This Game (the first place I heard of the news)

Slow Company is Slow

Silencing the Masses

OH…and if Eden Eternal gets picked up by another publisher…let me know.

Musing: The Dream of A Gaming Shangri-La

After reading through a comment or two I found this comment about some person telling me to stop complaining. This is a review blog and obviously this person failed school since a review can be either good or bad, but enough about the terribleness of public schools and the dregs they bring out in millions.

He did have a point. So far I have had more bad things to say then good on MMO’s these days. So, I asked myself. “what would be your idea of a perfect Free to Play MMO?” and this is what it would be, along with the why.

Huge Character Customization: I hate it when I come into a game and see that the customization options are scarcely limited. I hate it even more when I can’t even go five characters over to see someone else with my exact, or near exact build. Making the character is a way to get someone involved with the game and amerce them into the world further. This is broken when you realize that you can’t truly stand out among the crowd in terms of physical or fashionable appearance.

I have seen too many games that skimp on hair style, eye choice, facial, body types and even skin tone. Seems like a good deal of games like to live in a world where either REALLY PALE or REALLY DARK people do not exist (which could be taken as unfortunate implications if the wrong person gets whipped into a frenzy even if it was just short sightedness as opposed to prejudice). I hate when a game doesn’t even let you alter the skin tone.

A game has bad character creation when every third character has near close to my build. A game as good character creation when only every 100^th person has close to my build. A game as great character creation when I could only see someone near my build every 100,000^th person. Running into someone who looks like me in game is always a possibility, but the lower the odds, the better.

No Gender/Racial/Alignment Locked classes: I always hated this and the people who keep thinking this is a “good idea” need to have their heads smashed in with a crowbar. Nothing annoys me more than me not being allowed to use a particular class just because of something like gender, race or alignment. That’s super restrictive, racist, sexist and makes things bland!

For the sake of argument, let’s say that only men can be warriors and only women can use magic. What if for whatever reason I wanted a male mage or a female warrior? This is a hindrance to the creativity aspect of making our own characters. We’re literately being TOLD how they want these things with no justification whatsoever and even IF justified it would still be stupid.

As for alignment, I hate games where everything is so Goddamn black and white. GIVE ME SOME SHADES OF GRAY, DAMNIT! Let’s assume there is a game out their which limits Healers and Demon Summoners by alignment. Healers would of course be automatically portrayed as good, while Demon Summoners are evil only. This is, again a hindrance in creativity not to mention insulting to my sensibilities. Do game developers think I’m so stupid that something like a heroic Demon Summoner and an EVIL Healer might be too much for me to handle? The Demon Summoner might just desire to use the powers of darkness for the greater good while the Healer could use their knowledge to more easily kill others, or steal life force from their opponents and use it to restore their allies.

The only time a Gender Lock is acceptable is if the species I’m playing as is of a single gender or story based where you control several different characters with different occupations.

No Grinding Required: I hate grinding, I REALLY. FUCKING. HATE. GRINDING! Some people think it gives them a sense of accomplishment to grind all the way to the maximum level, showing how hardcore they are since they can do all the endgame stuff. I view these people who have no lives, who pissed away God knows how many hours beating down all these mobs when they could have done something more productive such as writing a book, going on a date, cleaning their house or something else that actually matters.

The statement above doesn’t mean I’m some sort of self-hating gamer, I just don’t like to do what I feel is meaningless, boring work before I can play the damn game! If it takes me months of grinding before I can do the endgame stuff or PvP it becomes very unattractive like finding out your lovers private parts are really something that eats people after waiting forever and a day for them to bend over and drop their pants. Nothing is worse than working for what you want only while working towards it the trouble isn’t worth it.

Here’s an idea, how about rather than make us do all this grinding that you scale things like PvP and instances to our level? That way those of us who have lives can get to the fun stuff while the no life mouth breathers can grind themselves stupid, wondering what the fuck happened to their lives about a decade later. Nothing says that scaling has to make things less difficult it just makes it more accessible and any game that waits till the endgame to give us the awesome things to do, get the badass skills and the wicked cool moves isn’t a game, it’s a time sink.

Class Swapping On The Fly: I felt Eden Eternal did this right. I liked this idea, I could become whatever class I wanted, and I didn’t have to wait for a particular party member to come along, delaying the gameplay. Whatever we needed, someone else could become the role we were missing. This makes things run more smoothly and reduces frustration of someone needing to start from square one when they realize the class they picked isn’t working out for them. Give them a mulligan, you’ll retain them longer.

No More Dyes, PLEASE!: I’m tired of getting these items filling up my spaces as rewards. These aren’t rewards unless you’re a magpie! I’ve seen this stuff sell for prices that even rival EPIC GEAR in some cases. Instead of having these things, why not the moment you acquire something you can CHOOSE what color to make it? None of this restricting certain colors to premium content nonsense, it just goes to further show you’re less concerned about the players and more concerned about the money. Here’s a tip, keep the player happy and the money will come soon after. Which brings me to ANOTHER point.

No Overpriced Cosmetic Gear or Timed Gear: I know of some games which charge obscene amounts of money for ascetic stuff, and make it worse by having the stuff on a timer. I don’t like seeing costume pieces that do nothing cost more than say…$3. It’s virtual, it does nothing in the way of benefitting you other than make you look different (unless it’s really popular). Even in a bundle this stuff shouldn’t exceed $13 at most. Make the costume prices more sensible. If you want to have more elaborate costumes cost more, fine, but the average of all bundles should never exceed $10.

No Temporary Item Space Extensions: I don’t really think I need to go far on this other than space expansion should be for keeps.

So in short, these things would help bring me closer to the perfect game to play. Of course it’s not too likely that all these requirements would be met in a single game, but I would kill for it to be so. I no longer playing Eden Eternal, and that will be explained in my next post. But what would YOUR idea of a perfect game be? If curious, this is only a short list of my desires, but the most critical.

Ticks Me Off: Lost Saga

Ladies and Gentlemen, this game has set an all new speed record of making me not like it. How this game has people willing to play it is a mystery to me. Lost Saga is one of those MMO fighting games. The gameplay was fine, but the one thing that immediately made me drop the game was seeing that the characters in the game all had timers on them.

Yeah, they start you off with a single character, but the character has a time limit, at least 10 hours. The good thing is that it only counts down when the character is in use. Bad news is, you need to keep paying in game currency in order to keep renewing the timer (so this means there goes any sweet equipment you want if you’re a free player). What happens if you want one character for keeps? You pay $20. Want to flip the gender from male to female? MORE MONEY! Want to make them another skin tone? EVEN MORE MONEY! This happens to be a Korean game, so following the unfortunate stereotype, they want to rape your wallet dead!

If you run out of time on the character they give you a temp one for about 2 hours so you can attempt to get more in game money to renew the character you want. Good luck if they stick you with a character you hate and bonus fail points if it’s a character you hate and or can’t play to save your life.

I saw reviews after i got pissed off giving this game a glowing approval, but I’m convinced these people were tempted with cash, loose women (or men if they roll that way) or were people who worked on the game themselves.

In the immortal words of James (The Angry Video Game Nerd) Rolfe, “FUCK THIS GAME!”

To make matters worse, I'd go back to Elsword before looking at this game again, and considering what I said about that game, that speaks VOLUMES!

Eden Eternal: Not Sure How to Feel About It

Yeah, it’s another one of those Anime inspired MMORPG’s. Anime is pretty popular so why would it ever stop? Me, I don’t care if the game is made based off an Anime or Western culture. I’m only concerned about two things. Is the gameplay enjoyable and how big of a grind-fest it is before you can do the awesome stuff.

My associate Aron wanted to try this game so I decided to try it myself. MMO’s aren’t exactly keen on story (there are exceptions, but this isn’t one of them) so I skipped mentioning it. This one is especially generic, so more reason not to touch it on these grounds. Let’s see if it’s worth picking up in terms of game play, shall we?

Gameplay: The controls are the standard WASD movement and or point and click. Combat it click and watch your character beat the crap out of the enemy, so nothing new there, then again it’s not exactly bad, for all we know the developers wanted to keep accessibility high so they made it like that.

One thing I have to say is that I’m surprised by (and impressed with) the fact that you don’t need to make multiple characters (of the same race) because of the way the games class system works. You pick between Warrior and Mage to start with, but from there you can change classes as you level up on the fly. So you could become EVERY CLASS IN THE GAME! As of writing this the game has 15 classes available for us to fool around with, so yeah this aspect I REALLY ENJOY. But it takes more than that to keep me amused/committed.

The combat is the standard “click and enjoy” prevalent in the genre, so nothing more to say on that. Weapons and Armor have durability and speaking of which this game, like any douche bag does will ruin this for you at the worse possible moment. When you die everything on you loses 10% of its current durability and if that wasn’t bad enough death is also murder on the experience points front. I have no clue what the industry standard norm is for these matters (quite frankly I would like this to be listed under the constitution under Cruel and Unusual punishment on games with lots of grind), but you lose 50% of you experience points. No matter how you come back from the dead (except if you get one of those leaves from the Item Mall, AND the death was not in a Dungeon (nice to know Areia Games aren’t complete dicks, but who knows how long that will remain true)) you will always lose these. Some of you might think that it’s part of the challenge and if I don’t like it then I’m a scrub, but to you who think like that I would like to state I’m not fond of masochism and fear to see how you plan on disciplining your children. Here’s hoping that it’s not possible to actually level down as an end result.

Speaking of grind, it does start to feel like a drag around Level 30. I will say that this is the first MMORPG I have ever played that I managed to get over Level 20 in under a week, so congrats on that, but I’m really starting to feel it after beating the Vile Shark HQ (a five player Dungeon) after dying who knows how many times and spending three days stuck on it, going through several groups until I found one that I could work well with. I did find it funny that an Illusionist could use Mind Control on a boss and have it work, so it was worth every single misshape in between to see it.

The game has Guilds, but as it seems to be the norm the cost to make one is fairly large. I’m part of one on the Emerald server called Kaze (it means wind), all part of the reviewing experience, also I was curious how it would be, so I went what the hell and accepted the random invite. When I did most quests part of my reward would be given to the Guild, and no I had no say in it, but I would have liked one. They give you an option to donate Silver & Gold to the Guild so this feels like overkill. To expand on the Guild feature, you can have Guild Towns for the low, low price of 5000 Gold (or 5000000 Silver since 1000 Silver coins equals 1 Gold coin)! While the guild town can give you a place to buy & sell stuff and other functions I’m not sure of, it’s really only a good investment for a Guild that has zero life. The Guild town only sticks around as long as people are active and if something unforeseeable happens in real life (like a relative dying, house on fire or choosing to simply take a break from the game for a period of time) they take the town from you. All that Gold, all that grinding gone, for nothing which why I would never start a Guild in this game.

Speaking of grind, there is a lot more of it than in most MMO’s I’ve played. You grind for your character level and grind for your class level. In order to use some classes you have to have a class level in one or two other classes AND your class level can never exceed your character level, which makes a lot of sense but just serves to make the grind even more…grindy.

The interface can be quite cumbersome at times, especially if in a Raid and if you need to click on a person to target them it could be somewhat of a delay, or if you have a sizeable quest screen (not sure if they can be adjusted) it gets bothersome moving it out of the way to click on those alerts like Legend Acquired, and when you click on a quest to go to its location your character seems to go all over the place.

Land mass can also be an issue like the Vile Shark HQ run. Sometimes a pile of bones got in my way (that my character could walk over easily in any other game) and I couldn’t Oni Rush the enemy, or intercept a foe soon enough to get the mobs off our Healers. Here’s hoping they address these issues.

One thing did bother me that seems to enforce grinding and pressure you into going into the cash shop is that you cannot Power Level anyone. If someone in your party is more than five levels higher than you then you get no experience points or drops. This means I can’t help a friend level up fast and I’m stuck waiting or they can’t catch up, get discouraged and quit.

If that doesn’t make you quit then the limited bag space sure will. Those slots fill up fast, and the storage house/bank isn’t any better. You can buy other packs to give yourself more room, but the gold they take to get makes things more grindy, but you could purchase from the cash shop for about $3 if you wanted to add 10 more slots to it. Bank is far worse since its extra slots are temporary AND CAN COST REAL LIFE CASH AND IS ABOUT $1 A SLOT.

Judgment: This game to me is rather luke warm. I don’t exactly hate it but I don’t exactly like it either. While I love the ability to become any class the grind and death penalties really suck that out. If you want to check it out, be my guest. If you like it that’s fine, if not that’s fine too. I just feel so neutral on this game. Who knows, something will probably come along sooner or later and make me go one way or the other.