Fist de Yuma - September 21, 2004

This and that It has been a great week for me, but not a great AC week. They opened up a Best Buy in Yuma, and I had a guy's day of shopping. The end result was two new games for my Xbox and Xbox Live. One of the games is taking up a lot of time, but I'm having a blast. I should be back to having fun with AC after I beat it. While fun, I don't see it with great replay value. Bandit Monarchy The second thing to curtail my AC play is a new plug in. This is a program by Faile Bashere, the same programmer who gave us Bandit Sight. What is does is create a file with every member of an allegiance in it. The problem is it takes about 15 or more hours to get a moderate size allegiance like mine generated. The really big ones can expect to run it all week. I have had to run it twice, because of an update from the Beta. I might have to run it once more, as my current file is getting strange results. Isudus and others are working to create style sheets for this file. The end results will be outstanding! Faile Bashere, Isudus and the others are owed a big thanks for helping us out. It is really hard to know who is in a large allegiance. Now we will have a detailed list. Monarchy humor I was at the end of an allegiance build run. I was playing on my Xbox and glancing at the computer screen every so often. One time I saw a group of players around Fist. I walked over to see what they were doing. Each was putting torchs at my feet, while telling the allegiance how they are burning me up. (g) Of course, because of servers issues, torches will rot quickly, but they had a lot to replace them with. I saw that the program was locked in a loop. Players that Turbine deleted in a purge, are still listed as members, for Rank purposes. This was to prevent an allegiance disruption after the purge. The program has a problem with this, but it is minor overall. So I was able to stop the program and start typing. The players played like they were caught in something bad, making whistling text and saying, "What torch?" They had me rolling. Finding loot A lot of people get angry at Turbine when they find great spells on lousy items. The fact is, you are far more likely to find this happening than not. I do a lot of looting. There is seldom a kill that I don't check for loot. The reason is simple; I'm collecting salvage, which might be found on almost any monster, no matter what the level. So I have a lot of experience on what loot is out there. Think about this for a second. When you loot, how many armor pieces do you pass up? I think I might find a good piece of armor about 1% of the time. This is not one in a hundred monsters. You are likely to only find an armor piece every so often, and one in a hundred of those pieces that will be worth keeping. Lets take helms. You find helms a lot, but not on every kill. So you have to kill a whole lot of monsters to find a good helm. (Of course what I think is good may not be good in someone's else's view.) Taking the reverse of this, I find a lot more bad helms than good ones. So if I do find a helm with a major on it, it is far more likely that it will be on a bad helm. It takes two major luck breaks to get both a good helm and a good Major. The only reason we have a lot of good items in the game is the overwhelming number of item being generated. On a given day, hundreds if not thousands of items are being found. Most of them are tossed or left to rot. With that many items being generated, something nice is bound to hit. The bottom line for us is we have to generate the numbers of kills in order to find the good items, let alone good items with majors on them. It is not luck, but it is number of kills that give us the items we need. Items vs. XP There is no doubt that a good item is worth more than good XP. While XP can boost a number up some, a good item will make you far more effective as a fighter. Some might think there are exceptions to this rule. I tend to disagree, but it is more in a different direction and needs between classes. Major items can help a fighter far more than a mage. For the most part, a Mage just needs to land to be effective on offense. In the reverse, a fighter can get away with far weaker armor than a mage, because of that fat shield they carry. So it is not so much needing majors items as needing different ones. (Of course it is a lot easer to find good armor than a good weapon, and then 2 in 3 of them will get destroyed.) I found out about a mage's need very fast a few years back, when I created Fist's Armorer. I took him to a Tusker dungeon while wearing GSA armor. The dungeon was filled with Slaves, so I did not think I was in any danger. The first hallway showed me otherwise. With two bodies in the same spot, I was forced to move my tinked armor to him before going back for recovery. The difference between al 190 and al 400 was amazing. All the majors in the world would not have helped him, but good armor made it easy. I like it that different classes have different needs. It helps create a good marketplace. An archer with a good wand can trade for a good bow a mage finds. I think this might be more effective if people had fewer players per person, but I like the system we have. Turbine has also gotten smart with a lot of the new stuff in the game. Well tinked items for offense are not every effective in the hands of a low level player. They only start to shine when the skill gets towards the high end. Of course a Mage has a major advantage in that their major item, armor, can be used at first level. XP Hogs What this is all leading to is a small complaint I have. Many players are not looting. There are a number of reasons for this. Those who are not collecting salvage don't find many items in the short run, so they give up. Many of the people hunting in high level dungeons already have good items. Many are totally focused on the XP per hour, and not on gathering loot. While I lament their not adding to the stock of good items, I find it particularly disturbing when they strive to prevent others from looting. While there is a point where looting will lower the XP flow, it is shortsighted to take XP over loot. Most of the players have no trouble with killing and looting. It is only a small number of players who are totally focused on squeezing every last drop of XP out of their play. Unfortunately, these players have an expanded effect. XP Hogs get very vocal when they see someone taking the time to loot. Others will tend to support their view, because they are not looting themselves, but not to the same degree. So the looting player gets insulted and leaves the fellow. Getting them to rejoin the fellow, or getting them into the fellow at all, becomes very hard. What is pathetic about this is, a player hunting outside of the fellow will kill the XP flow far more than his hunting and looting inside of the fellow would. This is especially telling when the dungeon starts to fill up. I have seen the matron fellows with slots open; have to contend with three or four white dots. Of course it is the same bitter XP Hogs who complain the most about them being there. So when hunting, don't apologize to the fellow if you are looting. It is their choice not to loot, and they should apologize to the other AC players for not adding to the stock of items. If a member of the fellow starts to complain about someone looting, cut him or her off short. In the long as well as the short run, the XP hogs will hurt both the game items and XP flow, not to mention everyone's enjoyment of the game. Remember, the looters are looking long run, and the XP hogs are looking short run. You'll see the looters for years to come, while the XP hogs will quickly move on. - Fist de Yuma