Fist de Yuma - August 6, 2002

Win at all cost There is an article going around about gaming. It mostly involves one-on-one game box type of games and how some people never learn to win. One of the reasons they lose is they think the skill needed to win is beneath them. They call such moved, "Cheap". It reminded me a lot of what I hear from PK's, "The guy has no skill, he killed me 10 times with drain and harm." Like someone who gets 10 kills over them has no skill. For this one-on-one type of games I agree. Whatever it takes to win, within the rules, is ok. In fact if you are to be good it is required. The problem is when this type of attitude is taken out of the one-on-one games and brought it into a multi-player game such as AC. (With the notable exception of PK.) Duping, macroing, chaining, fastcasting, speed hacks and all the rest of the cheats come from this type of "Win at all cost" attitude. What they forget is this is not a winnable game. All this attitude does is hurt the experience for others. In come cases it can destroy a game completely. AC is a game to enjoy. It is a fantasy realm where we can be things we could never be and do things we could never do in the real world. The last thing such a game needs is people who think it is a race to be won. The cursing kids, thieves and grifers are a problem. They are all problems that can be fixed. The, "Win at all cost" attitude could have been fixed if Turbine/MS had taken fast steps when warned. They didn't and now the game is suffering for it and is possibility beyond redemption at high levels. Those of use who play AC for fun and not the EGO trip over others can still do it. We mostly just have to avoid where the cheaters go and wait for the cheats to finish the quests before we start on them. It would be nice to be one of the "Heroes" from the past who did quests the first time and with little equipment and very low levels. Those days are gone. The new events will be dominated by the cheaters and we just have to learn to stay out of their way. Last on Chains I think chains have killed a large part of AC. It is still fun but nowhere near as much fun if the cheaters did not play. I took a lot of flack from friends over saying chaining is cheating. I'm sorry but that is what I feel it is. If you don't think so we can agree to disagree. Don't take it personal. There are a lot of great people in the chains. Many are good friends. A large chain just made Og II its monarch. There is no more levelheaded player in the game. Unfortunately there is also a lot of trash in the chains. It also attracts those with the "I can therefore I will" attitude. I mentioned last week how a handful of chain members were entirely hogging the new event kills. Turbine messed up big time with this quest. They put the monster in a set spot and a set timer. This let the people with huge EGO's log near the monster and only come on when it is ready to spawn. Turbine invited the type of play we are getting. One person has 7+ kills and is in a contest with another on who can get the most kills. The rest of us might as well ignore the event. Both are chain members and both are Sword. I'm glad Sword is the king of melee, as it should be, I'm sorry that some cannot handle the power. The two statements by the guy who is taking all the kills tells it all. This is taken from a screen shot. Yes, it is all about glory - I'll give you that much. It is also to piss you off. Without chains this would not have been a problem. Turbines poor quest management combine with chains and the "Win at all cost" attitude made this event more frustrating than fun. The damage I predicted with chains is done. There is nothing to do to fix it. Turbine/MS mess up. Pounding my head on the table will not fix it. So the chain members can applaud, I will not be writing any more about you. I'll do my best to ignore you. I know I'll be stumbling over you on any high level quest. I know you will continue to steal vassals from real alliances. I did what I can and can do no more. Evolving game and tools As a programmer I understand tools. Tools in programming are key to making changes. The time involved making changes without tools is measured in years, not hours. The feedback we are getting now from Turbine is they had few tools when the program came out. This meant that changes had to he carefully thought out and implemented far down the road. Over time the programmer were able to create the tools needed. At this time they can make changes far faster than they could before. This is one of the big reasons so many changes are being made to the game. These are changes that should have been made years ago. Drain has always been overpowered. The best they could do two years ago was reduces the range. Many don't like the changes but they are long overdue. Because they have the tools to do it we are getting a smarter War this month. Having more damage for higher skill makes sense. Unlike melee the only thing high magic skill does is let you land better. After a point the only reason to raise the skill is to land on Pyreal Golems. Having War do slightly more damage with a higher skill will fix that. This is a change I applaud. BM's I thought it was a bit moronic when someone posted to the developer board about stopping the War change. The poster thought BM's were overpowered and this would make it worse. If he was willing to go though the pain of making a BM he too could be overpowered. The reason I thought it was moronic was he was basically saying, "I don't want increased power because others would get more." Talk about stupid. My Og may have a lot less War skill than a BM of my level but I'm more concerned with how much I'll gain. What the BM gets will be meaningless to me. As long as I can take down a Vapor with a Vuln and blast who cares if a BM can take it down with a Vuln and blast and have a touch of overkill to boot. BM is a darn hard template to make. The wall between 30 and 50 is steep and slippery. A little more hitting power at high levels is rated. We BM I figured I would stay in the Citadel until 33lv. When I hit 29 it was far to slow. By 30 it was just not worth it to kill a Lugie. I figured the Giga's would make it better but they were only worth a few hundred more points. I tried one of the Quest dungeons but it was a touch boring. I also was having problems with mana management. I thought about it and touched on something. Fist de Mage on MT had not been inside a dungeon for leveling since 42lv. After leaving BSD the only reason for entering a dungeon was for quests or to help someone. All my real hunting is outside. The only real question was could the WE BM survive outside? To find out I took him to the Mountain shortcut near Arwic. I found that as long as I give Shadows and Grivvers a wide berth I could fight without danger. The monsters returned from 3k to 5k a pop. Most of the time I could work it to a one on one battle. The xp per hour was double what I was getting in the Citadel. It will still be a slow and painful progress but I understand outside hunting. If the xp gets to low I'll move to the Bandit portal. It is still going to take me months to get to 50 but I feel a bit better over the progress. Deadeye Fist I hit 55 with Deadeye after the pincer turn in last week. This had given me a decision to make. With seven credits I can do the credit quest for Creature or wait until 75 for Life. This is not an easy decision. There are a lot of advantages to Creature. I can use no drop GSA armor and drop the low AL Creature gear. With a little work I can have better spells than the Creature gear provide. Despite the advantages of Creature Life is even more useful. The main advantage would be mana/stamina recovery and not having balance issues. There are a lot of Life spells and a limited number of slots to place them. There is some duel items that would help this. I have an Armor V, Cold V shirt I'm looking forward to using. I need a touch more lore for it. Even with a few duel items, if I can find them, there are spells I would have to do without. There just are not enough slots. Creature spells on the other hand can be found on armor. This means that with Life you can have all the spells you need and not have to worry about "The Hole". In time I'll have both skills. Getting my archer to 115 is not impossible but a long way off. Credit Quest I decided to leave what magic skill to get with Deadeye for a while. With Mage providing the buffs I can wait until I'm sure which I want first. Meanwhile I decided to try and get the skill quest out of the way. I did this quest before but waited a day before turning it in. There seems to be a timer and I did not get the credit. The question was, did I mess up and make it so I could never get the credit? If the answer to that question was yes I might as well delete the player and start over. As is I regretted not taken advantage of the tinkering change to gain credits with some other restarts. I had stared all my new players before Tinkering was announced and did not want to restart. Now that my BM has hit the wall I think I would have been a lot better off re-rolling and having the two credits. O'well water under the bridge. I would have felt dirty for cheating the system anyway so it is for the best. After Mage buffed Deadeye I started running around the plateau edge. I would stop and kill a few things along they way. I found that the Elder Shamans were not worth trying to kill. They have a lot of hit points and I was only doing 14 to 33 damage. It took forever. With only 90 Item I was not going to be de-buffing that drum anytime soon, if I had the spell. I found that Gummies were the best thing to kill. They could not hit me and I was getting 9 to 14k a kill. I did find four Armored Tuskers standing around. I did not see the Virindi but assumed there was one somewhere. I found that my melee defense was up to the task of Armored Tuskers. I was only hit a few times. Of course those hits hurt. It was quite invigorating to be standing in the center of those four and not get hit. The new defensive bonus on the bows is really being felt. A short way past EVL I heard the singing. A quick search located the guy. The defenders charged but if an archer can hit, he can kill. It was over in less than 20 seconds. This time I took the figurine right to the little guy. I held my breath after handing it to him. Aaaaa, it was not broken. I got the credit and now have eight to play with. Still have not decided if I'll wait for Life but that would be the smart move. Tinkering I decided to forgo Healing and take the Armor tinkering skill with Mage. I may regret it someday but for now I'm helping a lot of people. With not that much into it I have a buffed 442. When I find an Armored Tinkering VII scroll I'll have 5 more points. It is very cheap but for now I'm spending points on magic. Fist took Weapon tinkering but there has not been much call for it. I'm guessing with Mars-hill having over 500 Weapon Tinkering they are using him. Fist's skill is over 450 but starting to cost. It seems like every time I log on there are people waiting with armor and steel. I did one guys set with five upgrades each. Adding 100 al put him at around 300 for the set. Better than anything there ever was. I'm more pragmatic. I'm not looking for super high al armor. I have good spell items such as al 125 gant with minor Life on them. Getting them to al 225 would make them useful. There is a diminishing effect on armor. Like many things in AC there is a curve. It would be nice to know the exact curve but we don't. I find that al 220+ items buffed with VII's keep the damage acceptable. Remember a mage is always hit, at last those without melee defense. Absorbing the damage is key to surviving. Fist made 125 this week. The temptation is to take Magic Item tinkering. There is not much left for the four points. The problem with that is two fold. Magic Item tinkering is based on Focus. With a 30 Focus start getting it very high will not be easy. The other problem is we have no idea what Magic Item tinkering will do. This was not put into the game last patch. There has not even been a hint from Turbine as to how it will work. I really wish Alchemy was 4 points. With the ability to make the new Atlan weapons out of reach of most mules it would be nice to have a player who could do it. I might as well wish for the moon as it cost 6 points. Of course I will take Magic Item tinkering with Mage at 125. That is a long, long way off. So right now it is a wait and see what the skill will do. If it is something lame I'll hold on to the credits and hope for a change somewhere. Mule leveling The mule I had been working on was not the best template. He trained Cooking. At the time it seemed like a good idea. He was made well before Dyeing came into the game and spec'ing ID skills was more important. Now dyeing is a key skill if you don't want to look like you play on DT. DT people think matching armor is bad. They are proud to look like mules and put us down for having good looking armor. From now on I'll label the mismatch-armored players as a DT look. If they had not used matching armor as an insult I would not be returning the insult about mismatch-armor. The reason I had to use that mule was the better template was on the same account as Mage. Mage needed to do the buffing so I had to have the mule on a different account. I still worked the other mule but not as hard. Well things have changed. With Jr maturing I have a player who can toss VI's and is close to VII's on the second account. This means I can buff both accounts and the other mule, "Cliff's Carrier Cook", can get buffs. CCC was 39lv and Fist mule Two was 44lv. Even with the difference in levels CCC had higher skills for cooking. Vassals who were doing re-rolls had leveled both mules. The vassals have left the game and I did not want to ask anyone to do that anymore. So how was I going to get them where they need to be? The goal for CCC is 50lv. Why 50? So I can fellow during a pincer turn in. When Mage and Fist do the Pincers I have them fellow with Deadeye. This helps him level without having to play him much. If I can get CCC to 50 I can use the Pincer turn in from then on. Of course unlike Deadeye he will not be getting a pincer on his own so it will be slower. With all points going toward the needed skills I should be able to do Atlan's by the late 50s to early 60. It might be a year off but it is doable. Who knows, I might get a major escort and get him a pincer someday. So how do I level the mules with no fighting skills whatsoever? I heard that people had leveled using gambling. I was not sure how as I had never gambled. It was not easy to get CCC to the Holtburg gambling site. Luckily there is a lifestone close by. Unfortunately it is a hot LZ and I'm sure to have a death or two from time to time. So far I have been able to outrun everything. The way it works is you gamble 10k chips at the high-stakes table. About one in eleven, or every 110k you get a triangle. Using Obsidian keys you can unlock them. Turning them in nets 75k. So for every million I gamble I got around 700k in points. This was one of those rare times I have had some cash. Others in Elder are also supplying me with notes and keys. I had Jr hunting in Metros for hearts. Slow going but carving three at a time helps. Fair Ellen told me a good place to hunt Obsidian Golems and I may take a run out there sometime. It looked like a great place to use Deadeye. I'll go there first with Jr and check it out. Using gambling I have CCC to 41lv. Using VI buffs I have Cooking and Alchemy over 340. By the time he gets to 50 I'll have a good Cook and Alchemist for the family. Of course now I have to raise a lot of cash. I figure a few days of hard hunting will give me enough cash for a million or so points on the mule, more with donations. That will not be fast but is will be sure. Why are they surprised? There has been a development that anyone with a lick of sense could have predicted. More and more traders are only taking sings for trades. No plats, SIKs, motes or Ms. People trade for value. They want something useful in return for giving up their rare items. If the trade medium starts to lose value there is inflation. An old saying is that bad money drives out good. It started with motes, SIKs and shards. When they first came out they all had value. The items pulled from a chest were some of the best in the game. Shadow armor was better than anything out there and was no drop. Atlans were in demand and everyone needed a full set for elemental attacks. As the loot system improved the chests did not keep up. When level VII spells came out SIKs retained their value for a while. More and more monsters started dropping SIKs and a typical hunt had 5 or more found. At one point I had 250 SIK's filling up my mule. As more and more people completed their spells the value of SIK's dropped and now you can barely give one away. Better weapons were put into the game and old Atlans were not worth making. Those that wanted the old Atlans had them. Now that Atlans are transferable motes have little trade value. The same thing happened with shards. Dual Fragments became more common and people got their armor. After a while there were enough sets of armor in the game that the demand for shards dropped. In fact they stopped being used in trades before SIKs did. It also hurt that loot armor started to surpass the Shadow armor. Remember when Shadow armor came out most of the loot armor had zero protects to many elements. The only reason for using Shadow armor today is no drop. For some time now Ms, plats and sings have been the traded medium. Then I saw something that I knew would destroy the value of Ms and plats: trade macros. The word I got was a good macro can make a million a night and up to 1000 plats. Within a few weeks of that the economy is flooded and the value starts to drop. After a few months Ms and Plats are so common that people are giving them away. The other problem was the loot change. There was a time when a C note was valuable. We could not even make a M note for a long time. Even a rich person might only have a million or so packed away. That has all changed. After a two-hour hunt on the Plains today I cashed out over 300k. That was with keeping the good tinker stuff and a couple of keepables. The biggest problem most of have is finding space to store all the high value stuff we find. So greater loot and money macros are making pyeral very common. The law of supply and demand fill force the value of M's down. I predicted that sing-only trades would quickly be the norm. It started on the boards last month and is quickly spreading. There have been a lot of complaints and calls for boycotts. Why they are surprised I'll never know. It is basic economics. Of course when you have people who think a 100% tax rate will raise lots of money and a minimum wage helps the poor I cannot be surprised that so few understand basic laws. Of course Plat's/M's will never be useless or have zero value, they will just not be worth much for trading. Conflict resolution There are times in the game where good people will get angry with other good people because of misunderstandings. How you resolve these conflicts is the sign of maturely. I got this story from a very pissed Elder. He needed to rant over it so I lent him my ear. He was hunting Acid for his mage. His mage is not ready to kill Grivvers as of yet so he is using his melee to kill them. He parked his mage at the beginning of a dungeon and sent his melee in to kill. After two hours of hunting he got some Acid to fall. He was in such a hurry that he let the other Grivvers kill the melee while he logged his mage. He rushed to the room and got there just in time to see another Elder picking up his Acid. Of course he was pissed. Given that I have known this person for years I'm sure his language was not had. He was pissed but his is not the cursing type. He accused the Elder of stealing his Acid. He was wrong to do that. That person had no idea what he was doing. He saw the Acid and picked it up. He may well have killed a few Grivvers before it rotted and assumed the Acid was off one of his kills. He reaction to be accused was to say it was his kill. Like I said he may well have thought it was. This was the point where he did wrong. He cursed out my friend and ported away. He kept cursing him in tells for a while. It would have been hard for my friend to not be mad at losing two hours of hunting and a death on his melee. The other Elder would have also had a hard time putting an accusation of being a thief behind him. So what should these two have done instead? Of course I have the advantage of 20/20 hindsight and years of regretting a loss of temper. This gives me a view advantage that they did not have. That said this is what I would have done. After cooling down I would say that this was a misunderstanding. I would apologize for calling the second Elder thief and explain what happened. The second Elder should have realized that he would not be called a thief unless there was something that made it look like he was. The resolution to all this was for the two to hunt together for more Acid. Two can find it far better than one. In fellow they would also get more xp. Instead of an enemy and conflict in Elder both would have a new friend and hunting partner. Instead stress and anger when I saw him he could have been talking about how much fun he had hunting with his new friend. He could have been planning to get his mage armor instead of heading back to hunt Grivvers. What it is really about A few months ago Liquid Assassin made an ill-fated excursion into the labyrinth of the Queens den. There he left a body with a prize set of Hollow armor contained within. He never recovered and has always lamented the loss. To use Liquid Assassin's words; But...I get a /tell from a EXTREMELY nice person that seems to have leggings of mine inscribed by HS. I ask him what does the inscription say on them. "Return if found" and I thought right away about my Queens Quest 2 monthish ago when I had lost my favorite leggings and hauberk. I then immediately asked if he had also found a hauberk with them with an inscription of LA in it. He said yes! We had arranged to meet in Sanctuary and he gave me my items and we continued to have a long talk about the quest. This is what it is all about. No greed or EGO, just people helping people however they can. Aliens? Ok, I have a little secret. I'm an Aliens fan. The first movie was ok but the second rocked. The other two were no were near as good but watchable. Some of the books were ok but the Alien vs. Predator books were better. They were more about Predators than Aliens but good nevertheless. So am I the only one that does not relate the Aliens with Olthoi? I admit that at first there was little relationship. As the story has advanced and especially when the Queen was put into the game, they started to relate a lot more. Of course if you combine Grivvers with Olthoi it really starts to click. Better part of valor After an hour hunt in the plains I ran into an Inquisitor. My buffs were dropping so despite being almost full of loot I decided to go another hour. I really don't need the red mask but it is a challenge to get one. Earlier I had connection problems. Normally EarthLink is solid. About my only issue is there anti-server code that forces a redial every 12 hours or so. If in the middle of a hunt it can cause a death. It had disconnected just as I fired a spell at a Magna golem in the middle of my first buff. I had heard it redial a few hours early while I was watching a TV show so I was surprised. I was not to worried as Magna golems tend to return to their spawn point rather fast and don't do much damage. I did not even have that worry as I logged to zero damage. The connection must have quit before I hit the spell. I hoped I was not going to have problems. About halfway into buffing I disconnected again. I got right back but figured I was pushing it to keep fighting. I was not going to be so lucky as to not be in battle if it happened again. After selling and doing a little muleing it disconnected again. This time I got a busy signal. It was 3am so I went to bed. Of course when I was up at 8am the connection was still down. It was lucky that it was Monday, my column day, as it did not stabilize until late at night. In other words I would have likely died if I had stayed on the plains and would never have recovered. I had not been able to play much this weekend as we had family staying over, again. Rosa is big on family and I'll have to admit family is more important. I had looked forward to some playing time. With luck I'll have Fist to 126 by next week. I got up at 8am with Rosa at work and the family packed up and gone. They are staying with us until their house if fixed up and the Air Conditioning is working. I guess they got up early to do more moving. I hit the dial up and got a busy signal again. I called tech support and they had me change to a different number. That connected but refused to log in. The tech said there were no issues with Yuma. I asked him to look again and got and, "Oops I should read this." I had them move Yuma from intermittent to down and started work on this column.