Fist de Yuma - January 13, 2004

This and That I never start out thinking, this week I'll do some rants. Somehow things pile up and before I know it most of my essays are negative. While I have done some work to tone down my rhetoric I'll have at last one part where I can blow off a little steam. If you want to avoid that then please don't read, "Goodbye to those who must leave." Bad timing I had decided that the rumor about xp passup was not true. Turbine had said nothing and no one seemed to take it seriously. If fact many were blaming the rumor on me! For those that have not heard Turbine is making changes to the xp passup. Direct vassal xp will go up while grandfather xp will go way down. So I stupidly kept leveling Owanda until he had passed up Cliff Bowman. This means that I cannot swear Owanda to Cliff Bowman like I planned. Of course a few days later Turbine says that, indeed, there will be an xp change. Fortunately for Cliff Bowman I have an out. He is not that far from 98 so I can go hunt with Fist's Armorer and get him the level he needs. Where I have a problem is Fist's Mule two. He is 100lv and will need a driver vassal. I guess this means Death Mute will not be a mule after all. Frustrating Morning I got an attempt to infect my system with a virus last week. With changing my e-mail address I cleaned out a lot of bad addresses and got away from the spam. I decided that this time I would send everyone in my address book a warning that someone had a virus and needed to repair it. I even tracked down what virus it was and gave out a link to remove it. I added everyone in my address book to the Bcc block and sent it out. E-mail crashed. Humm. Ok I put everyone in my e-mail address book into a group and tried it that way. E-mail crashed. I made a call to Adelphia and explained the problem. It seems that to block spammers they have limited people from sending more than 50 addresses at a time. Given that that will so little to stop the spammers the only real effect was to stop me from doing what I needed to do. A lot of bad management decisions are made with good intentions. So the next step was to create ten groups and start blocking the names into them. Well ten was not enough and I had to create three more groups. Yes, I have a lot of people who write me. I sent out the thirteen messages. That was a pain in itself. Then the rejects started coming in. The over quota messages are likely bad addresses but I hesitate to delete them. The redirected e-mails that are no longer valid is another problem. There is no way for me to know what address I sent it to. The message is that the redirected address is no longer valid but it never it told me what address it was redirected from. Another frustration came from an e-mail server. It seems that "an important message" in the title is bad language. I know that spammers will use that a lot but hell, there are important messages that are not spam. That required me to send those two a different message saying the same thing with different words. Again, bad management decision with the best of intentions. It will bother legitimate e-mail and do nothing to stop spam. Despite all that work I'm still getting infection attempts and redirected e-mails saying I sent e-mail to an invalid address. Of course it might not be anyone in my address book that is infected. It could well be someone who got my address off this column. That would be doubtful but if you have my e-mail address on your book and did not get the message about the virus, please check your system. Overall it was two wasted two hours because someone decided to open up an e-mail attachment. You would think by this time everyone would have anti virus program scanning their e-mails and know better than to open up an attachment, even is if said it is from Microsoft. Three goal morning Rosa has been sick as a dog this week. Not the greatest way for her to spend a vacation. I have not been all that well myself but she has been miserable. With all that I never got a chance to play AC last Tuesday. I was up until 4am working the column. I got up at 7am. I was ready for a nap around 2pm. That nap made me ready to go when I finally got on the computer around 10pm. I decided to take out Owanda and make some xp for the mules. I figured to make an all nighter of it. I set myself three goals. Number one was to add three points of strength. At over 20 million a point it was going to take some time. The second goal was to reach 95lv. I started at 93 and was not that far along towards 94. The last goal was to have a 100 million xp night. A 100 million xp night was something I had never even come close to. I think my best was 60 million. To begin with I got lucky. There was a slot in the fellow ready as I ported in. I was barely out of bubble when they recruited me. The fellow quickly closed so it was good timing. For a while that was where the luck ended. I guess school is still not in section as the fellow was filled with the immature children that have infected the matron this month. One was making slave jokes. Slavery is not a funny subject and his comments were not all the funny to begin with. It did not make for a good time. Schoolyard humor is ok if you're a kid on the schoolyard. For an adult it is just dribble. I made a few comments that went over like a lead balloon. I was not in that great a mood with taking care of Rosa and all so I was not as nice as normal. I would say that the bad atmosphere was at least half my fault. I should have kept quite and let them do their giggles. I let it pass for a while and tried to just hunt. I was fighting a mob of Muts on the east side. It is best to hide your back when fighting them so I was safely ensconced in a cubby. An archer came along and almost got me killed. When a melee sees a mob of monsters surrounding someone in a cubby he/she moves in close and starts attacking. If the monster someone is fighting turns to attack him or her, there is no harm. In fact it is a benefit in that the other melee gets a back shot. It would not be hard for an archer to do the same thing. Just get close before starting their attack. Will they ever do that? Not that I have seen. Instead they will always start shooting from range. When the monster the melee is fighting turns to attack, the melee is dragged from safety and everything attacking him gets an automatic back shot. I decided not to berate the archer. I have learned that many today just don't know what they are doing. Instead I waited a few minutes and sent the following fellow tell. "If a melee is fighting in a cubby don't start shooting into it from range. You will get him dragged into danger." Simple, direct and should not cause a problem. Instead the same guy who was making slave jokes started in on me. He had three points to make. Muts don't hit very hard, I needed to improve my melee defense and everyone knows that anyway. Of course Muts do hit hard, very hard. Good tinked armor will help. Most of us use sunstone gants, which cannot be tinked. With crits even tinked armor will take 20+ point shots. So his first point was him just being a moron. I ignored that one. His second point was also kind of stupid. While I was the lowest level there, at 93, my melee defense was 427 with a 27% weapon bonus. It will get higher but that is not going to help much against Muts. Fist has close to 500 melee defense, with around 635 effective. The Muts still hit him. His last point made even less sense as if everyone know not to do that then why did the archer just do it to me? I pointed that out to him but he kept on the Muts not doing much damage. A Mut hit him for 4 points in the back and he acted like it as the end of the world, as if that was what I had done. I said, "I'm sorry, I did not know school was still out, my mistake." That made him insulted that I would think he was in high school. Actually I thought he was in grammar school but I did not say that. I said I would apologize if I was wrong. He said he was studying Marketing, which inferred he was in college. I was sure he was lying but I apologized anyway. I was ready to call the night short but was saved when he decided to leave. At that point he admitted he was in high school. He said senior but, if true, a very immature senior. Just like that the fellow became fun. Aldreon V joined and we were talking a bit. It did not start out well as I was still ticked over the kid. He took something I said wrong and it was not looking good. We got over that and he found out I was Fist de Yuma. I was sure I knew him from somewhere and he did know me. We were in Elder together for a while and he was a member of HORD before I took it over. He thinks some of his players are still in the allegiance. After that I remembered him. We talked over old times and old friends. Each hour flew by as we had a blast talking while killing off the Olthoi. With the kids gone and the more mature players joining the fellow, the xp rate climbed. By 4am I had met all my goals! I added Aldreon V to my friends list and opened up the mansion to him. He said he would stop by to greet old friends. Aldreon V has been playing on DT for a few months. He did not like PKL so he moved to DT. It seems it is a good fit for him. He was back in MT just to relax and level Aldreon V a touch. When you deal with live people you are going to have good and bad days. While the bad was not so relaxing the good times more than make up for it. Of course getting a point added to my Weapon and Armor mule's skills was not so bad either. Must have program If you have two account that you swap between or two computers running different accounts, there is a must have program out there. I saw this problem in an earlier version and never like it much. I decided to take a new look at it after reading a post on the MSnews AC board. The program is AC Launcher. It allows you to input everything you need to log into an account with a simple screen. While I was wary about imputing my password into anything not under my total control this program has been around long enough that I trust it. Without having to open up Explorer or log into the Zone you can get into AC. It takes little effort to swap accounts. When MS reworked the passport a bit ago I lost the ability to open up two screens with two different passport accounts loaded. This forced me to log off one account and log on the other when swapping accounts. While this is not as painful now that I have broadband it is not fast or smooth. AC Launcher allows me to log off one of my accounts and log the other rapidly. No more typing in the e-mail address and password after clicking to log off and back on. As I do a lot of account swapping it is a god sent. Even if you only have one account I recommend this program. If you have more than one I highly recommend it. Frustrating evening I logged Wednesday at around 11pm to do some more hard-core leveling. This time I had a single goal of adding three points to strength. It would take almost 100 million to do get the three. I felt it would be hard but something I could make in about five hours. I got into the fellow right away. Unfortunately a lot of the same immature people were in it and this time the mature ones were not there. I got an insult from the guy who does not think Muts hit hard right off the bat. I decided to just keep my trap shut and let them chatter. The best I could do is get myself dragged down to their level. Instead I acted if they were mature players and helped whenever I could. One of the things I found strange about the 80+ matron, when I first got there, was how many people died. They die a lot! Given that at 96 I'm still the lowest person in many of the fellows it made no sense to me. It is rare that I get close to dieing. Like I said in the last column, melee tactics are easy to learn and simple to do. I hear from Abin that the 60+ matron is getting filled up with 90 to 110 players. He did not say if they were dieing in droves like the 80+ but I would not be surprised. Even given that the Matron is very hard on mages, one with any experience at all should do ok. I'm not the best tactician mage out there but I had little trouble surviving when I was there with Fist de Mage or Fist's Armorer. Still most mages came in and started dropping bodies in the first few minutes. One the other day left his fifth body in a hall for the night. I guess he lost count. It hit me that there may well be a good reason for this. It took me six months to learn to be a mage. Fast leveling, macros and chains make it so you can create a 100+ mage in a very short time. While they have one of the most powerful players in the game all they know how to kill are tuskers. I found this lack of game knowledge not to be exclusive among mages. An Archer said he died near the grub pit and asked my help to recover it. I thought he had only died once that hour and I saw his body at the entrance. I figured I had just missed one of his many deaths. In the first battle he charged into the attack but failed to team with me. This allowed Olthoi to get in front and back of us. This had him running and pulling a wand to heal with. In the next two battles he caused the same problem. After the third time of his almost dieing I gently reminded him, "Tactics!" I felt he was just in a hurry and not thinking. At the grub pit I set up at the corner and was waiting for the Olthoi to charge up the ramp. They line up nicely there and are easy pickings. He charged around me to the center of the ramp! I could not let him die. If I stayed where I was the ones charging me would get in back of him and he would be blocked. So I moved to his side to jam up the passage. As I was fighting the first one he backed up! Now I was covered with Olthoi, totally surrounded and had no escape. My health was flowing out like water through a strainer. I was totally defensive, sucking elixirs and barely keeping ahead of death. When my health recovered enough I tried to run out of the trap but there was no escape. All I could do was try to stay alive. He retreated to the hall and that opened up a hole for me to escape through. I grabbed a corner and started killing. He starts yelling for help. I learned in the first battles that he may not have healing. He had pulled a wand to heal. I ignored those attacking me and ran over to help him out. When the battle was over I said, "Try not to do that again." I tried to show him how to use a corner as I figured he must not have known. His response was, "I cannot believe a Macer is trying to tell me how to fight." Well, thanks for nothing. Die if you cannot learn. I can understand ignorance but stubborn ignorance is beyond me. I learn something ever day never figure I know it all. I decided I would help him find the body and go fight somewhere else. He said the body was not where he thought it was. I asked if he had tried to portal out when he was killed. That would explain the body at the start. He did not respond. Later I saw him at the start looting the body. He did not even say thanks. I did not bother to tell him that pulling a wand in battle is a good way to die. I did not tell him about stamina or heal rats. I did not tell him about escape gems or how to use the faster portal spells. After all, I'm just a lowly Macer and he is a god archer. As I approached the third hour I noted that the xp was very low. We were around four million an hour short of where we should be. People started leaving, which ordinarily will cause the xp to jump up. Instead it held steady or even dropped some. Finally there was just me and a 126+ Archer. I sent him a fellow tell, "I guess it is just the two of us." There was no response. I looked at the fellow screen and noted that his stamina or health never dropped. I sent him several tells and got nothing in return. I thought back and remembered he had not said a word in the three hours I had been in the fellow. The darn guy had been leaching the fellow for at least that long and likely longer. He was probable macroing. I had to drop out of the fellow as he was the leader at that point. I did not find him in the dungeon so he was hiding somewhere. I know the Marketplace will not return direct fellow xp any more so I have no idea where he was. All I knew for sure was he was not in the dungeon. I figured I would play out the buff alone. Without the leach, even fighting alone, the xp started to rise. After clearing out the west lower pit I headed to the upper pit. I ran across a three-man fellow of the more mature players. I joined them and spent a pleasurable hour in their company. I did not make my goal. I added two points to strength and was about a third away from the last one. The three were leaving so there seemed little point in pushing it. I have to ask myself, why, why, why is it that every time I find a pure @#$%#$#@ they have a bow in their hand. I have known some outstanding archers in my day. People like Wartorn taught me how to play. They are honorable and brave. Just why the @#$%@!$#@ of AC have to use a bow I'll never know but I wish they would stop. Great timing I had been working on getting some Sings together to buy granite. With all my melees, them using different types of weapons, each of which require 4 to 5 granite bags per weapon and each having up to 14 weapons, getting all the granite I need is a full time job. I had a ring of 24 sings sitting on Fist and was going to start a bidding process. I took a day off from AC to play some online poker. I had the MT Vault board in the background and would refresh it ever so often. I saw an advertisement for some Major Armor Tinkering Sleeves. I had finished up with Cliff Bowman as my new Armor tinker last month. The sleeves were not perfect but could be made to work. The two drawbacks were Race and 157 Missile requirements. Race could be changed with a tink from CCC. I was not so sure about the Missile. I had lowered Coordination and Quick on Cliff Bowman to get the points for Endurance and Focus. I was not sure how hard it would be to get 157 missile. Still it would be worth the effort. Cliff Bowman had 535 Armor Tinker skills. (Buffed without brilliance.) It cost over 30 million a point. The added 10 points (I had a minor) would be more than worth any effort it took to give him 157 missile. My only worry was if I had 6 skill points to train missile with. At worse I would have run to the temple and sell back Melee Defense. The buyout was 24 sings. Rather than wait and risk losing it I took the buyout. I met him a few minutes later in the Marketplace and had Fist buy the sleeves. The next day I gave the sleeves to CCC who changed the race requirement to Sho. I put them on Cliff Bowman and buffed his missile. To my surprise CB already had missile trained! I had forgotten that CB was created in 12/15/99. That was when Archers took missile. I had retired him before the temples came out so I never got rid of the skill. I have the gem to sell Missile but never bothered to use it. With the missile buff he was over 200, well above the requirement. So now I'm at 545 Armor Tinkering and well on my way to the 585 goal. I feel that is where I'll be able to get wms 4 armor another tink. Now I just need a major Endurance and Focus item. Dark Essence runs I guess it is a sign of the times that the worse places of yesteryear are considered almost safe today. We just got a warning from Turbine not to log out in Caul before the patch because it is about to become nasty. When Caul was first put in there was no harder place to hunt. It is still one of the hardest but many players have surpassed the monsters to the point where it is no real danger. A good example is the Dark Essence quest. 60lv players are making the run through Caul with little risk. When Caul came out the very top players were giving a chance to run through it. I only know of two who succeeded. That is not two on our server but two in the entire game! Even with the monsters being upgraded since then few fear Caul. So Turbine is going to change that. Just how bad Caul will be remains to be seen. All we really understand is any quest that involves Caul had better be done before the patch. I have hopes that they move the quest dungeons but that is unlikely. I had four players who did not have the Dark Essence bracelet yet. They were; Fist de Yuma Jr, Deadeye Fist, Owanda and Death Mute. Of the four I could pass with Death Mute as he will likely become a mule. (Written before the xp change announcement. Death Mute will become a driver for Fist's Mule two.) Early in the week I made an announcement about us doing the run. I made an error by saying EST instead of PST. That got us started early as I logged sooner than I though I would. The two leaders for this quest are Soul Riper and Nene Romanova. For the most part it is a simple one two three quest. We got those who needed flagging flagged. We ran to the dungeon. With Soul and Nene leading we plowed our way though. I thought I had been flagged with Jr but was wrong. Fortunately it only takes a few minutes to do if you know the way. Nene barely know I was gone before I was back. I think I literality took less than two minutes. After getting my three players done I made two trips with Fist's Armorer as a support mage. With more mages we even were able to get some low 60's players through it. A new vassal of mine, also a transfer, made the run within minutes of joining Casa de Yuma. Dolder played on MT a while back but moved to another server. He said he got bored and wanted to return to MT. He will have a bunch of co-vassals who have done that. Three other vassals under Owanda are transfers. I hope to make a few more trips next week as some people missed the runs. If you have the right people it is almost routine. We were finishing it off in 20 minutes from start to finish. If you are on MT and would like to get this item you are welcome to join us. We will start the runs at around 12 EST. The minimum level is 60. It would be best if you were flagged before joining us. Goodbye to those that must leave There are those in this world who think no one can get along with out them. Their EGO demands they be the center of attention. Many of this type will cheat and claw to become the center of attraction. Some use rude names. Some cheat and others just exploit. They have to be the best but are far to lazy to work at being the best. Many of them are to lazy or to lame to make friends who become vassals. Instead they joined a chain and were given vassals. Now that chains are going away their gift xp and vassals will leave with it. Being unable or unwilling to do it the right way they want to fight the change. With Turbines announcement that xp passup is changing many of these are trying for another shot at attention. They are threatening to quit AC if this is put in and want others to join them with a boycott. Their EGO is so big they actually think someone is going to give a darn about their leaving AC. In the Marines we explained things to those who thought themselves indispensable. We gave them a bucket of water. We told them to study it. Then put their hands in the water and pull them out. Now study the change. That is about as much overall affect to AC their quitting will have. So to those who must leave because they cannot live without a chain; Goodbye. Farewell. Adieu. Chow. Depart. Make tracks. Adios. Get out. Go away. We will not miss you. Parting is sweet with no sorrow. Please use the exit labeled exit. Don't let the door hit your bottom on the way out. What, you're still here?