Because the internet needs another gaming blog.

I’m about to go insane over this Exarch Trulnariz fool. I was logged in as Ordeth doing some random adventuring with my wife when a friend of mine sent me a tell to inform me that a couple of guild mates were starting up a Sanctum of the Scaleborn group to work on Trading Information. My wife was just about to log off anyway, so I switched to Davyydeous and joined the group. Once more I found myself heading down to the Exarch’s chamber, praying to the spawn gods that Trulnariz would show his face. I’ll save you the long story, and just tell you that in almost four hours of killing the same stuff over and over, the group gave up (it was close to 2:00AM) without ever catching so much as a sniff of Trulnariz. Anticipating a long spawn I decided to keep track of how many times we killed his placeholder, the Herald of Dar. I stopped counting after the eighth time. By my count, I’ve now spent nine and a half hours in total trying to get this guy. Even more frustrating was the fact one of our group members mentioned he had been in another group earlier in the day that managed to kill Trulnariz four times. “He just kept popping,” he said. Sweet, I’m so happy for you.

At least Ordeth had some success this weekend. I was running him through the Commonlands when I decided to check on Rama’nai for the Return of the Light heritage quest. I wasn’t really actively working on that quest as it has long since turned grey, but I figured I’d try and get it out of the way. The placeholder, a wandering pride lioness, was up so I made quick work of her and settled into my spawn camp. Not five minutes later Rama’nai appeared before me and was dead even quicker. Next up were the orc captains, Gaer and Ogof. I spent about twenty minutes running back and forth between their spawn points and killing their placeholders (Reag and Fogo – very creative!) before they were dead as well. Knowing that the High Priest of Val’Marr can be a lengthy camp I decided to head over to his tower and see if he was up, and logged out when he wasn’t, leaving it for the next day. When I next logged Ordeth in, I killed the skeletons on the top of the tower for about fifteen minutes before Val’Marr showed up. I knew Ordeth wouldn’t be able to solo the next part of the quest, killing General Drull in Bloodskull Valley, but I thought I’d check it out anyway. I killed the lookout before he could tell all the other orcs of my presence, but after a few minutes they rushed me anyway, and I made a hasty retreat.

I then logged back into Davyydeous to check out the Warg mount quest, which took all of ten minutes for him to complete. I didn’t end up buying a Warg though, as it wasn’t that long ago that I got my War-barded Black Cavalry, and I’m completely broke. Besides, it seems like everywhere I turn I see the new mounts running around. Personally speaking, I would have liked to have seen a much more involved quest to get the mount, especially considering the difficulty of the carpet quest in comparison. Oh well.

I’m sure I’ll regret saying this, but I’m making a vow to kill that stupid Exarch by the end of next weekend. Any chance I get to play this week will be dedicated to getting Davyydeous into a SoS group. I’m not sure how successful I’ll be (well, I have an idea), but you’ll be able to read about it here.

I logged Davyydeous in quickly last night to do some self torturing… I mean transmuting, when I noticed one of my guildmates up in Sanctum of the Scaleborn. As mentioned before, I’ve been stuck on the SoS series of quests for the Claymore line for quite some time now, and it would give me no end of pleasure to have that part of the quest line done. I had just put the baby down and she was sound asleep with no signs of waking, and my wife was off at a concert, so I had some time to kill. I sent my guildy a quick tell casually asking what he was up to in SoS. “Heading down to the forge,” was his reply, “do you want to tag along?” I kicked my horse into high gear and screamed across the Commonlands to get to the overland portal.

Soon enough, Davyydeous found himself at the entrance to the Sanctum, the bane of his existence. We were a pretty powerful group and managed to work our way through SoS in what must have been record time for me. Our first stop was the room with Gylton so that one of the other group members could get his oak shaft for the Thorn of Old quest. It’s then that I realized that I could have done that part too had I simply talked to the frog at the bottom of the Tenebrous Tangle waterfall to update my quest before heading into SoS. Dang.

That done, we made our way to the Exarchs chamber with me praying to the spawn gods every step of the way that he’d be up. Davyydeous opened the doors, and anxiously watched them open at a snails pace. “Please be up, please be up, please be up…” No such luck. There stood the Herald of Dar where the Exarch should have been, taunting me, looking so very smug. I’m pretty sure I saw him wink at Davyydeous. We killed him, along with Relickeeper Zarinis who happened to be up (wrong spawn you cruel spawn overlords!).

There was business to be done at the forge for the other group members’ Thorn of Old quest so we headed there and took care of that before coming back to the Exarch’s room. Again, the doors opened slowly, I scanned the room… CRAP! The Herald of Dar again, all smug-like… again… winking and stuff. Oh, and looky here, Relickeeper Zarinis was back, and he was laughing at Davyydeous too. We killed the Relickeeper again and then the group called it a night. My conclusion? Exarch Trulnariz is scared of me and won’t show his face. I can’t say I blame him, but I hate him for it.

There appears to be a lot of excitement in the MMO community for the Lord of the Rings Online.  It seems like almost every blog I read these days has the author leaving whatever game they’d been playing to begin their adventures in Middle Earth.  From what I’ve seen in the few days since its release, LOTRO has had a very successful launch, both in terms of number of subscribers and server stability.  This launch appears to be a direct contrast to that of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, a game that I had quite a bit of interest in.

Keep in mind that I have not been involved directly in either of these titles launches; I’ve simply watched from afar, read the blogs, and played the betas.  Vanguard had captured my interest almost immediately after I had heard about it; it was going to be the next big MMO.  I managed to get into Beta 3 for Vanguard and my first impression was not favourable to say the least.  I didn’t think the graphics were that great, the animations were terrible, stability was suspect, and the performance was abysmal.  Even the gameplay itself didn’t do much for me; the quests were few and far between, and I just found myself not really knowing what to do.  After a couple days of playing I left, thinking I’d never see that game again.  I knew it was in beta, and was willing to be very forgiving, but it just did absolutely nothing for me.

I can’t remember why exactly, but I did go back to the Vanguard beta a little later and gave it another chance.  I was much more impressed; there had obviously been a lot of changes made to the game, and many fixes implemented.  The game had managed to make its way back on to my radar; it wasn’t necessarily a must-buy, but it was a maybe-buy.  That changed at the end of beta event when I snagged myself a griffon and began flying around the world.  Wow.  Flying around the massive continent of Qalia, visiting the volcano, and seeing the other sights, sold me on the game.  It had been a while since a game has made me say, “wow”, but Vanguard did it.  I was even able to ignore the fact that my flying mount kept bugging out and disappearing from underneath me sending me plummeting to the ground below.

After the beta closed, I think I felt like the majority of people.  The game had potential, but it was just not ready to be released due to the bugs, performance issues, and all the other issues that had been listed.  I had decided I was going to buy it, just not play it right away.  I’ve held true to that, as the game sits unused on my desk.

I also played the Lord of the Rings Online beta.  Unlike Vanguard, my first impression of LOTRO was very good.  The graphics were good, the game ran very well for me, and the quests were really fun to do.  However, the more I played it, the less I liked it.  It just didn’t pull me in like it would need to do in order to get me to quit playing Everquest II.  It didn’t leave me with a lasting impression; the world felt small, and the biggest deal breaker for me was the fact that it didn’t feel like anything new to me.  Maybe I didn’t spend enough time with it, but it felt just like World of Warcraft, only in a different setting, and I couldn’t get into WoW either.  The fact that I can’t think of anything else to write about it confirms that it did nothing for me.

I guess this all illustrates that every gamer has different tastes.  Vanguard had a crappy first impression for me, but left me wanting to explore its world in the future.  Lord of the Rings had a great first impression for me, but quickly became very ho-hum and routine.  Yet, it’s obvious that LOTRO is on its way to becoming a very successful game.  I keep reading accounts of people flocking to LOTRO, and of people quitting Vanguard.  I hear nothing but doom and gloom for Vanguard, with the occasional “perhaps it’ll be good way in the future”.

Why is that?  I won’t pretend to know, and Vanguards “failures” have been outlined elsewhere.  I do have a few observations however.  Whether the developers of Vanguard said it or not doesn’t matter, the perception was widely out there that Vanguard was going to be for the hardcore player.  If the developers didn’t want that message out there, they certainly didn’t do anything to remedy that.  The so called fans of the game didn’t help things either.  The beta forums were full of players telling “noobs” to take off and go back to their stupid WoW, this game wasn’t for them.  I personally believe that the early community for Vanguard did massive, irreparable damage to the game, scaring off many potential players.  Sigil finally took action and shut down the forums entirely, which was too little too late, and has left the game with no official forums for fans of the game to discuss it.

Secondly, and this has been said time and again by just about everyone, the game just wasn’t ready to be released.  There were still too many bugs and performance issues for it to be a retail product.  Yes, they were running out of money, or so they say, but then that’s their own fault for not planning the game well enough.  I think they’ll probably end up losing more money in the long run due to lost subscriptions (and lost interest), than they would have had they kept plugging away for another few months.  They also started their public beta way too early.  They’ve admitted themselves that the game was more or less in alpha state when they went public, and despite the non-disclosure agreement the beta testers agreed to, word still got out, and that word wasn’t positive.

Finally, releasing the game at the same time as the Burning Crusade was just pure and utter stupidity.  Of course, it wasn’t known exactly when Burning Crusade was going to be released, but there were many hints.  What better reason for the publishers to send the game back for some more quality control and delay release?  It’s just like back when Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was coming out.  All the other movie studios shuffled their releases around so that they wouldn’t be going up head to head with the juggernaut of Star Wars.  In addition to that, at least here in Winnipeg, I had to search all over to find a copy of Vanguard on store shelves, which I finally found buried on the bottom shelf (a whopping two copies too!).  I’m thinking this is an SOE thing actually, because I always had the same trouble trying to find Everquest II copies; either the original game or its subsequent expansions.  I had to search a fair bit to find two boxed copies of EQ2 for myself and my wife, and when the expansions came out, basically if you hadn’t pre-ordered you were out of luck as EB Games only ordered enough copies for the pre-orders.  To this day I don’t think I’ve ever seen DoF, KoS, or EoF in a Best Buy or FutureShop here; in fact, it appears as though the only version of EQ2 you can buy off the shelf these days is the EQ2 Classic box for $4.95.  Yet, a quick glance down the aisle reveals approximately forty-five billion boxed copies of WoW and the Burning Crusade.  Just yesterday I was in FutureShop and saw a whole whack of LOTRO boxes, and one single copy of Vanguard.  Which game do you think a casual gamer is more likely to pick up?  The one with a boat-load of copies on the shelf, or the one with a single copy buried at the bottom?

But I digress.  The point is (is there a point?), games like WoW and LOTRO seem to do the obvious things right.  They want to sell a product, so they make sure that product is well made, and widely available.   I’m no marketing expert, but isn’t that kind of what it’s all about?  I initially played a fourteen day trial for WoW, liked it, didn’t love it, then forgot about it.  Despite the fact I didn’t particularly enjoy my time with WoW, I eventually ended up buying it.  I think I got suckered in by all the cinematic movies released for it, along with its other advertisements – be it in print, on the web, or through fan websites.  The whole “look” of the game pulled me in and made me want to play the game.  I managed to reach level 30 before I realized I wasn’t having any fun with it and canceled my account.  Then the trailers and ads started coming out for Burning Crusade and it got my interest again.  Even watching FRAPS clips of in-game footage from my friends got me thinking about WoW, despite knowing I didn’t like the game.  There’s a “coolness” factor to WoW (I really didn’t want to say WoW Factor) that pulls people in, and I suspect LOTRO has something similar going on now.  This is what Vanguard and to some extent Everquest II could use.  Show us how cool your games are!

I sincerely believed Vanguard had the potential to be a deeper, longer lasting, and just plain better game than LOTRO, but there’s no way it’s going to have as many subscribers.  I’m someone who actually ended up enjoying my time in the beta, and yet I still can’t bring myself to play it.  I just hope the opportunity to play it at all doesn’t pass me by.

Gaff over at Trot Line tagged me the other day, and I’ve been asked to provide five reasons as to why I blog.  Not sure I can come up with five, but let’s give it a shot.

1. It’s a fun little hobby.  I’ve always had an interest in writing, just not big huge novels, or short stories, or for that matter, anything that makes any sense.   So here I am!

2. I like playing games, and in turn, talking about them.  This is an ideal forum to do so.

3. It’s a great way to show off Everquest II to all of my co-workers stuck on World of Warcraft.

4. Isn’t it mandatory these days for everyone to have a blog of some sort?

5. A friend of mine told me to, and I said, “Yeah, why not?”

So now I’m supposed to tag three others, but I’m a little late to the game here and all the other related blogs I read have already been tagged.  Plus, given that I’m new to this little blogging community, I can only imagine that anyone I tag would just wonder who this Timesink doofus was and reach for the delete key.

The reasons listed above are more or less why I do this, but I must say I was inspired mostly by Aggro Me and Journeys with Jaye.  Aggro Me due to its daily discussions of EQ2, and because it was the first EQ2 related blog I came across, and Journeys with Jaye because of its format following the writers in-game characters.

In all honesty, I never anticipated much of an audience and was quite surprised to see links to my site appear on other blogs.  That was almost nerve-wracking (uh-oh, I have to keep updating now!), but kind of cool as well.

I managed to arrange for some time to run Davyydeous through a raid on the Laboratory of Lord Vyemm with the guild last night. As I’ve mentioned a few times, it can be difficult setting aside the required time for these things lately, which makes me appreciate them all the more. It works out well for me because I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a raider. I enjoy going on the odd raid now and then, but I certainly wouldn’t want to do it every night. I’m fortunate that Davyydeous is in a guild that runs a fairly regular raid schedule that doesn’t require attendance. So it was with great excitement that I logged in, checked the broker, and headed to The Bonemire.

After disembarking from my transport cloud on to the Halls of Fate island, I made my way towards the bridge. There was an “interesting discussion” taking place in the level 60 to 69 chat that I was rather enjoying to the detriment of poor Davyydeous, who had been pointed in the direction of the bridge and set to auto-run. Focussed on the chat window, I failed to realize that my fearsome Berserker had been stunned and was now surrounded by many angry droags who were only too happy to chip away at his precious health. I snapped to attention and started running away, only to realize I had forgotten to mount up on my horse again after the cloud ride. After getting stunned for what seemed like the fiftieth time, Davyydeous’ health bar turned orange. “Sweet merciful crap,” I thought to myself, “I do not want the embarrassment of being a plate tank and dying on the bridge.” Fortunately I made it out okay, I guess my sprinting scared them off, and Davyydeous joined the rest of the raid force hanging out on the wall just outside the Labs zone entrance. I wonder if the Doomwings that are walking around the Halls of Fate island ever get a little curious as to why so many adventurers like to just hang out there on the wall. Also, what is it about the wall that scares them off? Can they not fly? “Get ‘em boys! … oh… forget it, they’re on the wall.”

Right on schedule we started zoning in, which seemed to be taking longer than normal, when I was presented with a game window telling me it was “trying login server #1.” Stupid internet connection. After a frantic reboot of my router I was back in business, and ready to go, just slightly nervous that my internet connection would take another holiday. The Labs have become quite routine for our guild, and we began cutting through the mobs like a hot knife through butter. We dropped The Slavering Alzid rather quickly, and painlessly, followed by the other named mobs as we ripped through the zone.

As for drops, the plate wearers weren’t getting any love. I didn’t write down what dropped, but going from memory, I can recall seeing lots of chain armour, priest, bruiser/monk, and scout items. It wasn’t until towards the end of the raid that I could even roll on a drop, a set of relic plate gauntlets. I rolled a mighty 14, but the only other character to roll on them said they could go to Davyydeous as they’d be more of an upgrade. Mediocre equipment for the win! The relic plate chest piece would later drop off Lord Vyemm, but I had to pass given that I had already looted the gauntlets. We actually wiped the first time we tried Vyemm, as we failed to separate him from Alzid Prime. You can see in the picture that he’s about to have me for lunch. Davyydeous actually went down almost instantly, but his Vision of Madness combat art kicked in and brought him back to life, which gave me some time to whip off a few screenshots.

The second try went according to plan, followed by a quick smack-down of Alzid Prime, ending our raid. Eager to equip my first piece of relic gear I quickly headed out to Solusek’s Eye to get my gauntlets forged. Sol’s Eye is easily one of my favourite zones in EQ2, but that can be a post for another day.