Fist de Yuma - October 28, 2003

This and that Few people know this but I have had some minor health problems. The worst scare is a heart problem. I have had a lot of tests and they all say my heart is strong. One doctor joked that my heart was stronger than I was. I guess all that running and dirt bike riding went for something. Still I kept having troubles. My latest doctor decided to give me a sleep study. It seems that sleep apnea can cause the problem I was suffering from. Sleep apnea is where you have trouble breathing while sleeping. You will stop breathing entirely for a minute or more in bad cases. Whereas I had read about this problem I had never thought much about it. The study was not one I would like to repeat. I had to go to their office at night and sleep with about 100,000,000 wires attached to me. Well it was a few less than that but you get what I mean. The room was ok and a nice airbed. Not being in my own bed, forgetting my pillows and trying to sleep with all the wires attached was bad. Severe hip pain was another problem. I broke my pelvis when I was young and without my waterbed I have a lot of pain. You can imagine how miserable I was. It seemed like the night would never end. Finally at 6am they said I could go home. I was wishing they ended it at 3am. I spent an hour getting the gel out of my hair and removing the billion tabs stuck to my body. I grabbed a meal at Ihop to reward myself. Today I got the bad news. I have moderate to severe sleep apnea. Of course this is good news and bad news. The good news is it is something they can fix. I will not be tired all day. My heart problem will likely go away. I'll have more energy, which will allow me to play AC longer. (grin) The bad news is two fold. First I need another test. I'm sure not looking forward to that. Second I'll need to sleep with a mask on that will repair the problem. I have no idea how intrusive that mask is. It might be minor; it might make me look ready for Halloween. I will know in about two weeks when the test is set. For the record I have broken a lot of bones in my life. The last was my lower leg bones, again, when I was around 25 years old. The list goes; broken pelvis; fall, two toes; motorcycle, broken rib; bicycle crash, lower right leg, both bones, twice; motocross, badly sprained left ankle; motorcycle crash, badly sprained right ankle; motocross, left finger; bicycle crash, right arm; fall, fractured skull; fall. Now that I'm older these injuries are starting to bother with me. Remember, you will pay for your recklessness of youth, when you least expect it. Funny people A few people have written me messages. One was on the message board at Olthoi Lair and the others were on the VN board. They demanded I stop writing, as they do not want to read it. One even signed it, "The Asheron's Call community" I had no idea I had such power! I mean I can force people to read my stories! If I can only prove it to advertisers I can get rich. Imagine what I can charge. Who needs spam when I can force people to read what I write! Hell with that kind of power I can take over the world! I'll need to replace my hand with a claw and train my cat to stay in my lap but unless James Bond kills me I cannot be stopped! Dealing with griefers I'll admit that I'm not a role model for dealing with bad people. I've always has a short hot temper that I've worked hard to curtail. While I have gotten better I'm still not there. That means this essay is as much for me as the reader. Sometimes putting what you think you should do to paper makes it easer to follow the advice. The main problem we have in this game is the short slightness of Microsoft. In my opinion they allow things that other games would not tolerate because they are afraid to lose the money. I call this short sighted because I would bet my bottom dollar they lose one person plus a fraction for every griefer they let play. Macros and chains are only the most visible of what MS tolerates. Most people don't macro or chain. Those exploits have allowed players with zero people skills to make gains like they were Elder's clone. It makes it so a griefer can advance far above the normal players and laugh at others for not doing the same. To them those of us who don't cheat, macro and chain, are chumps and only worthy of distain. Remember I'm talking about your natural griefers here. There a lot of people whom chain and macro that are not griefers. They have other reasons. Just what those reasons are I have never understood but they are likely legitimate. So there is nothing we can do about the griefers. Our only defense most times is to report their unattended macros or cursing. Even then the punishment is so low that it is only a minor inconvenience. Of course MS has said they will increase punishment for repeat offenders but I have not seen it. So, other than reporting infractions, there is nothing we can do about griefers in the immediate. Long term we have other options but that is for another day. The first thing you need to do with you run into a griefer is to move. I know that is not fair and may well be exactly what they want but it is still the best thing you can do. The frustration of dealing with a griefer is not worth is. Let them play their little kiddy game and move on. I also recommend squelching their account. (Not person, always the full account!) If everyone squelches them it will restrict their future prospects. Of course there are times when moving is impossible. The place you are hunting might be small. The griefer might follow you. In these cased you might need to take proactive action. First try to contact their patron/monarch. I find the monarch is the best choice, as the patron knows their vassals enough that they likely approve of their conduct. Many allegiances are working hard to keep or gain reputations. A monarch is generally not happy to find someone griefing others and will deal with them. Of course most monarchs are not playing much. Many monarchs are only figureheads so the reporting option will not work very often. Next try to take screen shots of the griefers action. This is not easy because a screen shot can be open to interpretation. Chat logs are also useful but since they can be faked don't count on them. Find his allegiance board and "NICELY!" report the problem. If you make it into a flame fest you will not get results. Do not, I repeat do not, go to the VN board and complain. This anti griefer action I don't recommend but is a tool used ever so often. This is griefing the griefer. Bring in an even higher player to do what the griefer was doing to you might give you a feeling of revenge but in the end just hurts both of you. Use rarely and only to teach. It is more a lesson thing. You do this only if you think the person will profit from the experience. Sometimes people don't understand how bad their actions appear to others. By griefing them in the same way you show them. If they already know, in other words a true griefer, this tactic is useless. The last way to defeat a griefer is what I recommend, that is if you cannot move. This is to kill with kindness. You stay friendly no matter how bad they act. Of course if they start using words that are not allowed report them. Stay nice and hope they keep at it. Some admin will solve your problem. There are those that respond to kindness. They may well decide to leave you alone. I have met many who only grief others because so many have griefed them. Being nice will bring them around. I find this works more often than not. First Trip Owanda has fairly high skills now. Of course they are focused skills and he would not do well in a situation he is not made for. When faced with Olthoi he is king. When faced with anything else he is the court jester. While I was sure he is strong I was not sure how strong. I decided it was time to test him out with what he as made to fight, Hollow Olthoi. As you know Owanda was made with spec'd lock pick so he can carve sings. He has focused on bludgeoning damage and melee defense so he can kill Hollow Olthoi and survive their attacks. I've delayed his going for two reasons. Number one was a report of a griefer archer that is camping the Hollow Cave. He has everyone squelched and runs a macro for fighting and looting. He goes in, turns on the macro and ignores that others might want to gain something. The second was I was still having fun in the Matron. I want to push to 80 so I can go fight the big stuff. The Matron has far more XP than the Hollow Cave, if less loot. With a 126 archer one shooting everything there I felt it was not worth the frustration. I stayed in the Olthoi Matron cave until 70. At that point boredom started overcoming me. I expect the Matron cave will be boring to hunt until I reach 80 and can fight the M's. Not only are M's better for looting but also exciting to fight. Right now I can fight never-ending groups with little trouble. So I buffed up and had Fist make a portal for Owanda to the Hollow Caves. The run down was a little hairy but I got there with a minimum of de-buffs. I plan to spec'd magic defense with him someday and make the trip easer. When I got there I found a few hunters. These were your normal everyday people that had not let greed overcome their manners. We all moved apart and fought what attacked us. It was smooth, simple and enjoyable. I had a touch of a surprise. The first Olthoi to attacked me, I swung and it died. Humm, a one hit crit, nice. Next one, swing, die. Two crits in a row? Everyone that attacked me died to one swing. I even lowered the strength bar to three fourth and was getting most kills with one swing. In other words my 70lv mace can kill Olthoi, at least these, as fast or faster than an archer. My next trip had me running into the griefer archer. There were two other melees there that got maybe one Olthoi every few minutes. The macro archer was standing in the middle of the cave shooting at everything that spawned. I was not sure if I could compete with this greedy griefer but I was going to give it a shot. After studying the macro I was able to get around 40% of the kills. Not great but better than I would do if I were sharing with two other. After a few minutes the Archer moved way. He either logged or ported out. In any case he was gone and the three of us could take a deep breath, clear our anger, and have a good time. The three of us, an archer, swordsman and me, got a corner and waited for Olthoi to attack. We had this going for around ten minutes. While I did not get any Sings it was a lot more fun than dealing with the griefer macro. After that another archer arrived. This was another 126 macro chainer. His stats are not posted but I would guess he is around 150 to 180 in true levels. He did exactly what the other archer did. He got in the center of the room and started up his macro. He did not say hi or anything. He just started his griefing as if we were beneath his contempt. I have to wonder why he is still in the game as his name is one I expected to be deleted, but that is another problem. (His name is a disease that has a piece of intestines sticking out a rear.) As shortly after I left he logged off I'm thinking him and the other macro are the same person. The other two quit in disgust. They did not say anything to me but I assumed they were very angry over this guys actions. At this point things became a lot harder for me but more productive. I found it frustrating that I had to increase my workload a lot to compete with a guy who was just watching the screen. How to defeat the griefer macro I cannot say of this is true for all macros but it was true for the one the griefer was using. I could quickly see a pattern develop. It was work but I could use this pattern to get as many kills as the macro. First there is no way to beat him to the first kill. We both killed with one shot so it was a matter of who got the shot/swing off first. While I could cut my power back a little to increase speed, being a fraction of his level and him using auto targeting, he had too much of an advantage for me to overcome. The other disadvantage was he could kill at a distance while I had to get close. For this to work I had to be close to him. If I let him get distance from me I could not gage his target. He could also kill what I fighting and then turn on the ones attacking him. So I had to get right up to his shoulder if I wanted more than 10% of the kills. I had to wait and let him have the first shot. Most spawns are three or more Olthoi so my goal was every Olthoi but the first one. The key was to watch what he is targeting. The targeting macro seemed to move from left to right. When he targeted one I would target the one to his right. If I timed it right I would kill the second one just as he starts to fire at it. That made him waste a shot. Meanwhile I targeted the next one in line. With a little luck I could get every kill but that first one. The macro also tended to stay in peace mode when looting. I needed to watch spawns and quickly take advantage of his having to move back to combat mode. This was a lot of work. The rewards were about the same if the Griefer would share like everyone else. Given that all he has to do is sit back and watch his XP/Loot pour in the griefer macros have little incentive to stop. The only thing that would stop them is MS/Turbine. We just have to learn to deal with them. (I could not report him because it was attended. He saw what I was doing and tried to get distance between us. He still never talked but he knew what I was doing.) Strangely if I wanted to I could have taken most of the kills. By lowering my power a lot I would not kill but would do enough damage to gain looting rights. By rapidly changing targets I could have let him finish them off for me and loot. All I wanted was my share so I didn't do it. Sharing I tried to find a time when the Hollow was not camped. I hit it early Monday morning. I found one Archer there who knew how to play. Sorry I did not get your name but I know you're a reader. He and I shared the Olthoi. It was fun and relaxing. A swordsman came in a little later. He shared with us until Sawed off Sam showed up. Sam also shared but the Swordsman decided to come back later. Then the Archer left and it was Sam and I. Sam did not know that Owanda was Fist until I told him. He surprised me. He gave me a bunch of Maces he had saved up. I've been looking for a good one to give Jeff. With luck I can Rend one. Thanks Sam! I had to meet someone so I said goodbye to Sam and ported out. Despite it being very crowded it was a pleasant time. When people are polite and leave their greed at the door even the worst places can be fun. Bad Luck Luck is a big part of this game. From majors to weapons to armor you have to have a touch of luck to get fully equipped. Some things are very frustrating because it takes a combination of great luck before you have what you want. Lets take a weapon. First you need great luck to find an outstanding weapon. These are rare. You might hunt for six months before finding that 22 to 40 sword you have always wanted. After finally gaining this great item you have to have almost as good luck to infuse it. A 33% chance to Rend a weapon plain sucks. I understand that Turbine had to do something about the chains making 650+ skilled mules but why hurt the 90% of real players who don't cheat? So if you have a 1 in a 1000 chance of finding something you have a 1 in 6600 of getting something you can use. Given the large amount of hunting people are doing we do have great weapons in the game but they are mostly in the hands of the elite. One way people are trying to overcome this is Sing keys. The Sing chests tend to have a higher drop of great items we need so it will lower the odds against us. Enough Sings might enable you to win an auction and insure you get what you want. Of course that adds a double hit of luck against us as well. The first bit of luck you need is to find Sings. When I had the Hollow Caves to myself the other day I got seven Sings. That is much higher than average, which I think is about four an hour. If there are others there you get less and if there is a griefer macro camping you might as well go home. (There is a rumor of a dungeon filled with Virindi that has a better Sing rate.) After that there is another luck factor. While I have heard of people carving Sings with 280 lock pick skill I would not try with less than 320 myself. At around 350 I start feeling safe, or at least I did. Owanda added all the XP he got while hunting Hollows to Lock Pick. Buffs put him at 349 Lock pick. I figured if I had some bad luck I might lose one of the seven. First carve, broke. Second carve, broke. Third carve, success, forth carve broke, fifth carve success. So I broke three out of five. Talk about bad luck. Bad luck part II I have a few items I hope to find. Good weapons are one of the biggies. I have my full weapon set but some of them are less that optimum. I have a little granite bags set aside but I hope to find better weapons before using them. Finding swords, bows and UA weapons is my main goal. I have finally started hunting stuff with Owanda that might drop good weapons. So what have I to show for my hours of hunting? Four Dirks and two Tridents.