Fist de Yuma - July 1, 2003

This and that Several things have conspired to keep this column short. One was a small computer problem. It has been building and could well be what trashed my e-mail list. Norton auto update was having big problems. Shutting it off not only repaired my current problems but repaired a few other problems I had been living with. The second was a long drawn out leveling process that I'm describing below. That took up a lot of time and effort. Next is my wife getting ready to take a three-week trip back east. We have had a lot of preparations to do and she also needed the computer to get ahead at work. She will suffer a three day train trip each way so I really feel for her. Sadly planes are way beyond our budget. Rosa left this morning. It is a family reunion of her Italian side. For those that are new readers Rosa is half Mexican, half Italian and all temper. She used the computer most of Monday so by the time I got to it, it was to late to get the column out. This is why it is being posted on Tuesday afternoon instead of early morning. With three weeks of no wife I might get more AC in. Then again the Tour de France starts next week so I'll be spending a lot of time following that over the internet. Lastly is Tiger Woods Golf. As you know from reading my column I finally got an xbox a while back. I got Tiger Woods Golf mostly to play with one of my brother in laws. I find it taking up a lot of my time these days. (grin) Right now I'm stuck on the north Scotland coast course with the angry Scotsman. The course is wicked and frustrating. I've come close to beating him but I think the game cheats on last three holes. (Or it could be I just suck.) Interesting event It started with a post on the VN board about a battle between someone named Exception fighting Parduck and The Crippler at the same time. The bet was if they lost they would swear to Exception. It quickly became apparent that the post was not real but a storyline. I think it is a great beginning. What is lacking in a lot of alliances is a sense of history and a good story line. The real story is both Parduck and The Crippler felt they needed a break from being a monarch. Exception is 125 mule that will head the alliance. Who the person behind Exception is not known, but I have my suspicion. I visited the alliance the day I found out about it with Fist de Yuma Jr. I was greeted warmly and with good humor. Many of my old friends were there. Some are under new ownership, which is disconcerting but an unfortunate part of the game today. For those not on the MT server Parduck and The Crippler were both strong PK alliances. I found far more PK's than you will normally see. How long this lasts remains to be seen. While there I was privileged to talk with Exception himself. Exception seemed like a nice guy. If he is whom I suspect the head will have good leadership. Of course with The Crippler and Parduck behind them leadership is a given. He surprised me by agreeing with me on the PK scene. I lamented that I liked the old PK wars a lot better than what we have today. Today everyone is a 126 and many have specialized PK templates. Many of the templates would have been almost impossible to play when we started. One controversy worried Exception. A third alliance dropped their mansion and asked to join Exception. What was unfortunate about this was the Monarch did this on his own without consulting with his members. This was compounded by the fact the original owner was not the one making this choice. He had given away the player. So a total outsider made a choice that affected over a thousand people without even asking anyone their opinion. So to say the least it created an uproar. Most of them broke and are reforming under a new monarch. I feel it was a really bad move. I got the impression that Exception understood there was a problem and was reluctant accept the new vassal. It seemed to me it was forced on him. Of course some of this is speculation based on what I read and observed but I bet I'm close on a lot of it. I talked with other PK's who are not in Exception. They felt it was a good thing for PK in general as it makes PK more polarized. The one on one dueling gets old really fast. Now they have a target. Out of the desert Out of the desert is coming a tribe of people we have never seen before. It is rumored they existed before the coming of other humans. They have tossed off the yoke of slavery that was enforced on them and are looking to expand and dominate. This is the opening lines of a project I have been working on for several weeks. It started weeks ago with a PM from someone, whom I cannot say. Other than my place in the tribe this entire thing is secret. Except for the person who invited me I don't even know the identity of those participating. All I do know it is some of the top players in MT. The first thing I needed to do was make a player. No one is allowed to use and existing player. As this is a role-playing project I wanted to do something different. I wanted something could get into. I decided to pick a handicap. He is a mute. Now playing a mute is not very easy. When in the fellow I had to come up with some way to communicate with others. I decided to do this with images. I send them a mental image if what I want to say. This is used rarely if I can get away with it. It helps to play with sharp mature players. Of course the inperpation is left to others, which can lead to some humorist results. Most of the time I used e-motes to get my point across. "Nod" and "Shakes head" are used a lot. Most of the time I don't say anything. I let them get the idea. Sometimes people were a little thick. After a while I would have to send them a picture. "You see XXXX XXXX standing with his month open but you don't hear any words, you suddenly realize, he is a mute." Fortunately most people got what I was doing right off and I did not have to spell it out for them. In case you have not guessed this is a PK project. I see it as a combination of the Arwic Mafia and the Hill People. Old timers will know what I mean with Hill People and many on MT will know about the Arwic Mafia. We already would be doing this but there is a small hold up. When that is repaired we will ready to start. The people have some great ideas and it should be fun. Of course those into PK for something other than fun might not understand but O'well. Starting stats were 100, 70, 100, 40, 10, 10. Spec'd Sword, Melee Defense, Healing and Run. This was one of the recommended templates, other than Sword. Most of the players are using spear. I decided on using Sword and think everyone will move to that in time. We'll see. Next was leveling him. I had no idea how long it would take to get him ready. It has been a while since I had leveled a melee. Six months ago I did Fist's Armorer but that was a mage. The below is an explanation on how I level him to 53lv in 25 hours. I was slow in that I would not take many of the short cuts players use today. I was able to be effective at the minimum level wherever I went. I did get buffs from Mage but that was it. Given that these players are made for total outside buffing support I did not consider that a shortcut. First thing I did was head to Old Mine. This was my original spot for leveling with Fist de Yuma. I have used it to get players to 15lv many times. That took about two hours to do. From there I headed to the Lin Citadel. Several hours there had me to 25. I then ran to Holtburg and did a cross-country run to the 20 to 39 Tusker portal dungeon. I did not bother to fight but just ran through. I ran south until I hit the dungeon I wanted. This is a 25+ with tuskers worth 12k. This was an improvement from when FA did this. Before balancing they were only worth 7k. The first day I found two 43+ players keeping clear so I did not get much out of it. The next day it was empty and it was easy to get two levels an hour. I kept pumping Sword until I stopped missing and Melee defense until I was not hit. Then I would pump strength. The idea was to increase my damage inflicted which can only be done with strength. One time when the 25+ dungeon was filled I tried the Slave Dungeon. While only giving a little more in xp per kill I was taking a lot more damage and missing far too much. I decided to keep to the 25+ until I could hit the Guard dungeon. Meanwhile I started pushing Sword and Melee Defense again. That meant waiting until 40th level before I could move. As most people that showed up were higher than 40 I did not think I was overpowering the dungeon. Still it was easy and totally safe. Of course that did not stop me from having my first death. I was really pushing the buff. During a fight I started running out of them. I had only three more Tuskers to finish off but decided to run and shake them. Of course all I did was run into bigger spawns. I would have been a lot better off just slowly fighting the last three. I was trying a lifestone recall after healing to full. They were able to kill me before I got finished. Later I found out the reason. Somehow I had not put on any feet armor! Any shot to a foot was deadly. It took a few more hours and I was ready for the 40+ dungeon with Tusker Guards. This was when I hit people that did not understand role-playing. One player insisted I stop so he could run the fellow better. He dropped me from the fellow once when I did not respond to his tell. "You want in fellow?" "Nods" "Is that yes or no?" "Nods" "Can't you talk?" "Shakes head" "Is that yes or no?" "Shrugs" I felt kind of sad for this guy. He told me he started playing AC last week. He was 51lv and had done nothing but level since he started playing. I felt he was in for a short boring stay in AC. New players getting picked up by the wrong patrons can really hurt them. The last goal was getting me to 325 Sword. There are a lot of great swords out there but most require a 325 Sword skill to use them. I'm not sure if I can use them much because we have to stay permanently Red and my swords are too valued to risk. I stayed in the Guard dungeon until I hit 50. From there I moved to the Plated dungeon. My damage was far lower and they could hit me but I was dam bored killing stuff that could not even hurt me. With making up to 8 million an hour it did not take me to long to get 325 Sword. Being able to join a fellow made it a lot faster. My former fellows demanded someone close to my level to be the key, a rare event. Some loved my role-playing while others tolerated it. So with 25 hours of play over two weeks I was set as far as level was concerned. Next was armor. I had already got the ok to use GSC. I added in the Shards I had collected over the month to that. Next was a feather to cover the head. Lastly was some cheap gant and shoes. The stuff I have is so low in cost that everything is covered with 2k mana stones and Scarabs. There might be some satisfaction in killing by but no reward whatsoever. With that all taken care of I only needed a Deadly Hollow Sword. I had little trouble soloing the dungeon. I did have one death, my second and last in the leveling process. (I expect to quickly surpass all my other players combined with deaths after we start this.) I had just fought and looted two Crystal Golems when I locked up. When I retuned I was at the LS with Vit. I was able to use portal recall to get back. I found I had been killed by one of the bigger Lugies. With housing portals and other short cuts we can really move around these days. It only took me an hour to complete the quest. Years before it took an hour just to run to the beach fort. The run through Crater Pathway was exciting. The only other time I did this was with a high magic resistance player. There was no risk at all. This player had little magic defense so it was mostly a run fast event. The last was a long boring run north to the LS we had picked for the Tribe. After that was done I headed to the alter to go Red. So I'm parked at the LS waiting for our little glitch to work itself out. When that is fixed I expect us to have a lot of fun. I'll keep you posted on what I can talk about. Guest Writer; John Kovacich I swear this is true and will relate it to the best of my recollection as accurately as I can. I started a mage a long time ago, I created a standard OG template and used macros to get him through the first 26 levels (the only macro I have ever used like this). I played him sparingly after that, especially when the skill transfer came out, and I concentrated on turning my Archer into a formidable weapon. I had so much fun transferring specs in my Archer, my Tinkerer and my UA, that I took him to the temple of forgetfulness to unspec life so he could spec War. My reasoning was that I liked the opal template (not to mention having a nice blue armor set for him) and I had hopes that un-spec'ing life would give back enough skill points to spec war. Well, not hardly, so he went back to mule status, now that he was fully gimped. Recently, however, I had decided to fix him up. I discovered the wonders of Virindi wands, and suddenly he was able to fight leeches, and dark revenants. These were suitable for me to raise his level up to the required 40 so he could go spec war. And this brings me to the beginning of my story. I got buffed by an allegiance bot, hit Qalabar, west to the settlement portals and headed on down the road and over the hill to the temple. After zig zagging through clusters of Shreths and skeletons. As I approached the temple and the seeing the big giant head triggered a memory for me. I never picked up any comps! Standing before the temple was a level 80 named Pursuit. As I typed out "I forgot my comps, do you have any extra?", he was typing "How does this work?". So there we stood, no comps in hand. I explained how it worked. I told him that when you click on the head it asks a question about a spell and you tell it which comp is used, and for an example I told him Equin is Mandrake. Not wanting to make the whole run again, I told him we might as will hunt the local critters looking for it. We took out the Malus Shreths, I imperiled them, though frankly, his UA was killing them faster than I could imp them. He yelped woot, and handed me a pea. I told him, nope, only herbs will work, he had handed me a rowan pea. Up the hill was a leech. This time I was able to blast it while he was still running up the hill (love those arc spells). Woot again I hear, but this time I got a hematite powder pea. So we continued further out this little valley that lies to the right of the temple slaughtering group after group, getting tapers, potions, powders. It was kind of funny that we got everything except an herb. Then finally we hit a jackpot and better yet, it was Mandrake, which I already knew (and is what I usually carry up there). I split the pea giving half to Pursuit and we ran back to the temple. On the way we passed another traveler re-killing the Malus shreths we had wasted earlier. As we were pulling away from him, we heard, "Hey can you help me? I forgot to bring any comps!". Well that had me rolling on the floor. I gave him some mandrake and off we went. It was lucky for me that Pursuit was there. I have no doubt that eventually I could have cleared all the creatures but solo, still struggling some with mana management, I might have been better off making the run again. I feel somewhat bad for my two companions, Pursuit did not have enough skill points to accomplish his mission and the other (sorry I have forgotten his name) had to wait 3 more days for the timer to expire. Only I came away improved. I have a good friend who has a high level mage. He recently started an archer. I like to think my raising a mage helps to bring balance back to the world. Well thats my story. Old Gandalf, lvl 40 Opal Mage, Leafcull a.k.a. The Greater IB, lvl 90 Archer, Leafcull Rebuttle by Eeriest Elk A few things to point out. AC2 is consolidating two kvk servers Snowreap and Coldeve. Snowreap never had much of a following, MSTurbine figured kvk would be more popular then it became. MSTurbine figured a lot of things wrong. The last few months have been fixing the game. Will the patient survive the Operation though? 1. MS didn't extend the deadline despite Turbines pleading that they do so. Turbine had to drop a lot of balance and game play issues to get the underlying structure of the game into shape. 2. MST did the worse job imaginable with the Chat in-game. The very code was written poorly and is being re-rewrite as we speak. 3. No direction for the game. AC1 had the background story long in place when the code was freshly typed. Locations in Dereth where bandied about by the Dev's and formalized early on, its one of the hallmarks of that game. The Depth of the lore. AC2 was the code monkeys dream without the heart of the storytellers. You get the impression that things where plunked down for no real reason other then it would look cool (which it does). So now they have a game that looks great. It is fun to play it and lacks a lot of the downsides of AC1 as well. People are leaving it because you could hit the level 50 cap in two weeks and then you will have a lack of reasons to log on. When you can solo the toughest baddies in the game consistently what's the point of hunting? So they moved to fix the game. Here is what I think they are doing right: 1. They hired someone with vision and knowledge to lead the charge. 2. They are not afraid to make the tough decisions for the overall good of the game. 3. They have a clear direction for the game and are making strides towards it. 4. The lines of communication are wide open in a way never seen before. You know they are there and you know they are listening. 5. Each change in the game is being detailed with an eye as to why and how. If you care to know there are no surprises. For me the one-year-old Birthday for Beta is going to tell the tale. The balance issues will be done, the level 50+ game will be working and a year worth of patches will be firmly in place. This will give a new player quite a bit to keep them busy. So before you jump on the AC2 is dead bandwagon you may want to recall all the AC1 doomsayers that where out there (and still are). Oh and by the way. Grouping isn't required to advance by any means. It's a viable choice now. I play solo with one of my character (Ranger) and groups with another (Healer). Both are advancing at close to the same rate. Like all games it's learning the nuances of your character rather then catching a ride that makes the game. -Eeriest Elk (the auberean Irregular)