Fist de Yuma - March 9, 2004

This and That AC is a fun game. I hear a lot of people say it is "just" a game. I have to disagree. Morwind is just a game. Madden 2004 is a just game. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic is just a game. Armed and Dangerous is just a game. All might earn the label, "just" but not AC. AC and the other live games have a significant difference. They deal with people. This means feelings can be hurt, anger can be raised and EGO's smashed. You can also make people feel good, raise your consciousness about others and learn about some aspects of life. Friendships can be made and lost. People can die and have real tears shed over them. Yes, AC is a game but there is nothing "just" about it. That is something we need to understand as we play. What we do affects real people. Calling someone a name in the game is the same as calling it to their face. It will cause hurt and anger. Two of the people I have in this column brought that out yesterday. They got angry and said some things should not have said. When asked to refrain they could not control themselves. In the end they caused enough damage that they could no longer be in the allegiance. Both players I like. Nevertheless I had to drop them from the allegiance. We also ended up losing our best PK player because he is a friend with one of the booted. We had to scramble to get other players back to the allegiance as they were under the booted players. I kept it all on a mature level so there was not a lot of stress to our members. Still a lot of people were hurt over this. Those that saw the cursing were hurt. Friends of the two players were hurt. I was hurt. Yes, AC is a game, but there is nothing, "just" about it. Harsh changes There have been and will be a lot of changes to the game. Some of these have affected me negatively and others positively. With each change I adapt. If Turbine made a change I felt was intolerable, I would move on. The latest change affects me a lot in terms of passup XP. I've gone from 10 to 30 million a day to around 500k a day. That is just Fist. My others have also seen a significant drop in passup xp. To me that only means things are going to grow slower. Nothing else. Instead of 10 days to my next Life point it will be a few months. Meanwhile I'm having fun. If you read the boards, you would think the entire AC population is leaving next month. The chain lovers hate not getting something for nothing. The macro players are mad at the stepped up enforcement. Maxed out players don't think they are getting enough loot from camping one monster all day. The PK players think the new changes will hurt them too much. On and on they go. Why create such a big fuss over this stuff? If it is so bad you cannot play, then move on. If you can adapt then do so. Turbine did not just wake up yesterday and decided this stuff. They have very good reasons for it. I hated it when sticky melee was put in. With an 18k modem and 400 pings I would dance in a circle for ten seconds whenever I started a battle. I understood that sticky was put in so melee PKs would fight a mage. While I hated it, I accepted it. I did not run to the boards and encourage everyone to quit. Happily the board people are a small percentage of those that play. I have half a thought of taking myself off the boards for a while. Bad change Turbine is bringing their thoughts on the game to light far earlier than before. The harsh criticism they got this month is making them more open to what is being purposed and letting us weigh in on the changes before they happen. They are giving us a chance to make our feeling known before applying the changes. In other words we can prevent something that we don't like. It will not be often but it is possible. There is one change being proposed that I absolutely hate. This is the elimination of housing portals. I was in the game for a long time before the portals came about and believe me they are a godsend. Those of us who really study this game can get about anywhere without a lot of boring running. Before the housing portals it would take forever to get anywhere. I had more long, boring and forgetful runs to the Crater than I care to think about. Now it is just a few portals away. Housing gems will only work if they are easy to get. As Turbine is talking about them being a trade item it does not sound like they will be. A lot of time I log into the game with no idea what I'm going to do. Spur-of-the-moment quests and just deciding to go somewhere is generally how I play. With the need to get gems for travel many things must be pre-planned. AC is one of few, if not the only, solo friendly games on the market. Getting somewhere without having to depend on others is a great part of that. Those that study the system can use it to great effect, so it rewards those willing to put in the work. The difference in running speeds will be another problem without housing portals. Many players have enough trouble keeping up on quests as it is. Having to run the entire way will only exacerbate this difference. If all you do is hunt in one place then this change will not affect you much. If you are like me and go all over the place, this is the worse change they will ever make. Turbine has said they are doing this to encourage exploring. I see it as discouraging it. With longer runs to get anywhere few will want to go to unknown places. Running is boring and I play for fun. Lastly this gives a small advantage to allegiances with Villas vs. Mansions. They will be able to buy and sell the gems. I'll admit that is a very small advantage except for a handful of villa locations, but it is an advantage. I expect Turbine to be giving Mansions some advantage in the future but for now it is just a costly Villa with no portal. I encourage my readers to contact Turbine and give your opinion on this change. I'll not call for you to be against it, you may well be for it. If so then make that known to Turbine as well. The Turbine site for feedback is; http://forums.turbinegames.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=4 Housing A guy took advantage of some flaws in Turbine's house system to make himself a nice pile of cash. He made a macro that detects when a Villa opens. The macro will then rush to the villa and buy it. Shortly after, the Villa is placed on Ebay and sells between 80 and 90 bucks. Some think that removing the housing portals will hurt this but I disagree. I'm not sure how the bot works so it may inconvenience it a bit. All the bot owner needs to do is collect gems from all the Villa sites to solve the problem. In the end the bot will be more effective, not less. The guy has made thousands doing this. It is not a one server thing as he has a macro setting in the subway on all the servers. (Possibly not DT.) This has created a lot of hate. Just today a guy lost a Villa because this bot stole it during the exchange. They made the mistake of dropping the Villa too soon and the bot ran up and grabbed it before they could get the items together. After it happened, the guy selling the Villa quit the game. Some have tried to stop him by creating a macro to buy his house. The macro would sit at the Villa he was selling and attempt to buy it during the transfer. This was brought to a head this week when a +envoy made an error. He did not know about the macro and did not understand the housing system. Because the +envoys are new things like this will happen. What the +envoy did was force the person trying to prevent mister macro from selling the Villa to back off and allow the transfer. The +envoy made a number of errors and believed some lies by mister macro. IBN hit the boards and apologized for the +envoy's actions. Of course mister macro felt no guilt as he stole a Villa during a trade a few days later. To him the system and people are just something to be exploited. Turbine had attempted to stop the macro last patch. The solution they came up with was not all that good for us but would have worked. Unfortunately problems prevented it from being installed. That let them come up with a different one that will be in this or the next patch. That solution is a 30 day timer for buying a house. The timer starts from the time you buy a House, Villa or Mansion. You cannot buy another building for 30 days. That might not stop mister macro and will likely not even slow him down. There is nothing to prevent Mister macro from using multiple accounts. He has at least 6 different accounts and likely more. (I might wrong about that. I was told he has a way to log one account into all the worlds at the same time.) As he sells a Villa on one world he needs only swap accounts. That means 6 villas a month times 6 servers or 2500 bucks a month. I'm sure if he will just get more accounts if he runs out of players. IBN said they will be looking to enforce this ban over all servers but currently don't have the tech for it. Even that will not stop him as he can just get more accounts. I for one feel they need to take steps and just ban people who take advantage of their system. This guy adds nothing to the game. He does not even play! He is in it for the money and nothing else. He is a pure parasite. Boards Speaking of the boards, someone put up a poll asking if people read my column or not. 42% said they read it at least sometimes. It broke town as 16 yes, 11 sometimes and 39 no. While I would take those numbers any day I had to wonder at the comments. It was clear that those who hate the column had never read it. Just how you can hate something you don't read I'll never know. In any case why post a flame about the column at all? Those that read it will ignore it and those that don't will ignore it. All I can think of is they want to see their names on posts and don't care how stupid they look while doing it. Disturbed people Browsing the DT board is generally good for a laugh. They say a lot of stupid things and act so proud of themselves. At times I feel sorry for the real DT fighters who have to put up with these children. Now some of them have gotten bored with pulling childish pranks on DT. They have decided to expand to other servers. It started with a post saying they were going to raid Frostfell. Now most of us might imagine them creating players on FF, going red, and proving they had enough skills to have an effect on the FF PK scene. While doing that would be a lot of work it would be what a raid is all about. Of course, that would be the mature thing to do, so it is out of the question. The first post I saw was how they had 30 people dropping a single pyreal over much of the landscape, trying to crash the land block. That did not work because an Admin showed up and cleared it. Their second idea was to go to the Marketplace and open up the trade screen on all the trade bots. They would tie up all the trade bots for hours and prevent any sales. I'm not sure if they got enough players together for that or not. The last one I saw might have had an effect. They went to the Marketplace and started using the /die command. One arranged his bodies into some lame message. He then went to the DT board to show off his artwork. Rather than getting laughed at for his stupid prank he got universal praise. I wish these immature thugs would just go away. They do nothing for the game and their loss will be our gain. Macro gets his due A guy set up his player with a macro the other day. It seems that he made and error with the location and died. Now that would be somewhat funny but the rest was even better. His lifestone was in a very unsafe place. Without buffs he did not last long. Of course that death was quickly repeated, so on and so forth. When the guy awoke the next morning his player was at the LS without a much on him. He was even dropping packs. I'm not sure but he may have died enough to stop leaving bodies. If that were the case his stuff would just drop to the ground. Now I cannot say how much stuff he had on him but his reward offer made it seem like a lot. He was offering 400 sings for the return of his items. Given his location it is likely it all rotted so all his post did nothing but give us a good laugh. With luck he will quit and there will be one less macro farming sings. Traps Ever so often, because of ignorance or EGO, we lead our people into a trap. I did this the other day with Richard II Al-Deremont. I was doing Tusks with Owanda. I think I had done some Tusks with Owanda once but he has been an Olthoi killer for most of his life. I have a need for a bunch of xp so I decided to do the Tusks after doing my Pincers that morning. I had just hit 100 and got Creature. With a 10/10 Focus/Self start getting so I can toss VII's is going to take a lot of xp. I figure that I'll need a base 245 on magic skills and 200 mana conversion to start with. My final goal is 260. I'll still be fizzling a lot but being self-buffing is very important to me. Just getting the minimum will take 700 million points and making my full goal will take 1.8 billion points. That is more xp than Owanda currently has. So I'll be pushing Owanda hard for a while. My idea with the Tusks was to push through the first dungeons as fast as possible. I wanted time to do the 80+. My fire mace is very low end so I would need the time. The first few dungeons went as I had hopped. The macros that were blocking my runs with Death Mute that morning were gone so I had a straight run. I hit the 80+ with 30 minutes to spare. As I hit the 80+ I got a hit on BS/2 for an allegiance member, Richard II Al-Deremont. I said hi to him and jumped over the trap. He did not answer. We cleared the Tuskers and I said hi again but still no response. I was worried he was macroing but I had forgotten something. Richard has a handicap that makes it hard for him to work the keyboard. He replied a short while later. I asked Richard if he was there for the tusk or not. He said he had never got one there. In fact this was his first trip to the 80+. Richard is in the upper 90's for level so I figured the two of us could fight our way with ease. What I was forgetting is not everyone has a lot of equipment and support items. With seven players, a lot of game time, and four years total play, I have items and tricks that not everyone has. I often forget this, to my regret. I missed timed the second jump and got the gift on me. I do not want to waste a gem if I can avoid it so I put my back to the wall and started fighting. With my new Niffis shield I not only take less damage, I have more melee defense. Richard was on the ramp at the start of the battle with me around the first bend. Richard started sucking elixirs right off the bat. I felt it was too early in the battle for stamina. That was my first clue that something was wrong. Then he started moving, a sure sign that he was in trouble. I was trapped and could not help him. A short time later he died. It turns out that Richard did not have any dispel gems. With his position on the ramp dispel gems were a must. I'm not sure of he has tinkered armor or not. In any case I had led him into a trap and was going to have to work hard to help him recover. I was hitting for around 100 points a shot, using a full swing. That meant I could just barely keep ahead of the spawn rate, if I could keep ahead of it at all. I was not taking massive damage, after the Gift wore off, but I was having trouble getting to Richards body. Finally I had a clear path. I looted his body while being attacked. I figured if I stopped to fight more would spawn before I could finish looting anyway. To make matters worse he had about 10 piles of cash on him. I got the body looted and started the run to the Tusk. I was lucky enough not to get trapped until the very end. I call it luck because even if you know the route a touch of lag or a misstep will get you trapped. I got to the last room, just before the tusk, and got trapped. I decided to fight there, as the Tusk holding Tuskers will come out of the room to attack you at that point. I killed three before finding the tusk. I had noted when I started this adventure that I only had one Tusker Recall gem on me. That meant I would have to run back to town to turn in the Tusks. Richard recalled there and met me. I killed one more Tusker to make a hole and ran to the portal. I returned Richard's stuff and gave him 6 dispel gems. We talked a while. A player with one of the new robes got close to us so I said hi. This name was Sinik or something close to that. I likely have the name wrong, sorry. After Richard left I asked Sinik if I could help him. He asked where the fellows were in the Tusker dungeons. I had only seen one. It was in the 60+. I told him that. He also asked where you could turn in the Tusk. As I was about to go there it was easy to show him. He commented that he had a hard time with some dungeons because of the traps. I asked him if he had any dispel gems. He didn't. I gave him six of mine and told him how to get more. With 7 players doing the EV Pincer, I have gems coming out of my ears. Between the fighting and the Tusks I got 16 million xp toward my magic goals. I've still have a long way to go, but it will be a fun trip. I think that is where the macro and chain people got lost. I feel the trip to high-level is move fun than playing the high-level. Coming Changes I'm 50/50 on the new changes with 1st level spells. The 1st level transfer spells will have a cap of 50. While I agree that stamina to health one was too powerful, they are killing any melee without Life. The time spent recovering mana with health to mana one/heal is painful to say the least. With it being capped a melee will have a hard time buffing if they don't have Life. For those that don't know, there is an old trick for recovering mana without having Life. You get a Life VI wand or use Creature to toss a Life spell on yourself. You then have just enough Life to toss a Level I spell, such as Health to Mana. With a 50 point cap this will have to be done far more often while buffing. There seems to be a fix coming for this. IBN posts I can say with, hmmm, 75% certainty that you will be spending less time buffing in April. Working on a few ideas on that topic -- making baning easier -- but nothing we're ready to announce. Later he expounded on this. Creature and Life self spells are changing to the speed of a first level spell. While that will reduce the time to buff the majority of spells used in buffing are Item. IBN said that they are looking at Item spells but don't want to improve other buffing, which a total reduction in Item spell time would do. I'm not sure what the answer to this is. While I like this change it will not affect the buffing problem all that much. I for one would be at a loss on how to make a Self-Item spell and not have it work for Others. I'm sure they will figure it out. Wand/Orb/Staff changes They are adding melee/missile and other bonuses to Magic Casting Items! (I think MCI is a great short cut that I will use from now on. Wand/Orb/Staff is so unwieldy.) This is great news. Currently pulling an MCI in battle is suicide. Even those with very high melee defense get hit if they pull an MCI out. While some think this will help only help the handful of Melee defense mages out there I see it helping the melees far more. A mage can escape a battle with a single key hit. Melees have to depend on tricks like a Tusker portal gems for the same ability. Now it will be possible to pull an MCI and still evade attacks. While that is a great change the ones really helped will be the Life/Melee/Archers. Jr is such and being able to evade melee attack after pulling his MCI will greatly benefit him. Some think that it will help the Life/Archers more but they have a distance advantage that a Life/Melee doesn't. More often than not Melees fight multiple targets and need to pull their MCI while in combat. I greatly approve this change. Hell, I would even love to see some Tank Mages running around. VoD Night Our VoD night went off very well. We had Soul Riper, one of our most powerful mages, with us. That meant two good mages. (Nene is on vacation.) We only had two others and they were low levels but it was a lot of fun. We only hunted two hours. When Rene gets back we will be doing it longer but we have to start late right for now. I have family time until 9 PST so we don't start until 9:10 PST. That is after midnight for our east coast brethren. One thing we need to watch is whom we pick up while there. After Soul Riper had to leave we picked up a 109 mage that should have been helpful. For some reason he was averse to tossing a War spell. With me having 429 Creature there was really no need for him to toss yield. Trying to talk to him was like talking to a brick wall. Normally someone who just wants to play support is a nice find. With only two mages we really needed him to change roles. Our Melee, Badboy, is getting stronger and stronger. He is still having a hard time hitting, but he is learning and gaining skills. Right now he is not doing much damage, but in the future he will be a key element to our group. The main thing about Badboy is you only have to show him something once. Wizard of the Hood played our healer and was doing an outstanding job. For those who have not had a great healer on their team it is a wonder to behold. You can go into the hardest fight with no worry about getting killed. The healer has your back. Walkover There is nothing like going to a place that was hard and walking over it like it is nothing. I took Deadeye Fist on a Tusk run tonight. Dread Lord was back from college and asked if she could go. I said to meet me at the 80+. I figured by the time she buffed and ran there I would be finished with the lower ones. The only one that needs teamwork is the 80+ anyway. I sweep through the lower dungeons with no trouble. I sometimes get held up in the 70+. There was a guy there hunting and I was able to get a Tusk off one of his kills. I did the same in the 60+ so I got to the 80 with little wasted time. Dread Lord was using her Archer, Dread Lord Exar Kun. She was at the start as I ported in. I had found out last time that my 435 melee defense was holding up well in the 80+. Dread Lord has a lot less melee but with our attack power it did not matter. I was surprised to see I was only hitting in the 100 range with 250 crits. That is about what Owanda was doing the day before. I guess Owanda's mace is not all that bad after all. It could be that his Bludgeoning Mace is that good. To call our battle to get the Tusk a walk over is a insulting to walking. We flattened them in record time. There was no need to run to the end. We were activity hunting them down. Deadeye is in the same boat as Owanda magic wise. He has all the skills but getting them to 245 will take a lot of xp. He will have it a little easer as he started with 30 focus. That added 7.5 points to his magic skills is a big help. He should be at self-buffing in a few months. My goal is go have him hunt with Abin. Abin is his patron and an outstanding Mage. He hunts solo in VoD and Caul normally. With him and I teaming, it will be more than fun.