Fist de Yuma - September 30, 2003

This and That I'm reverting to an old style for this one column. I use to have a lot of rants when writing. I have a volatile personality that is quick to anger but also quick to forgive. I have done my best to eliminate things written in anger from the column. This week I need to blow off a little steam. The rants are in the first few essays. If you would rather skip such then after the Tribute update skip to Olthoi Armor. That is the start of normal adventure stories. Just a reminder that the Olthoi Lair site has a discussion board. I check it a few times a day so it is a good way to get a hold of me or present a point of view. I encourage other points of view. My main rant this week is those who refuse to accept other points of view and will never articulate their own. If you disagree with me I'll give you equal time. Send it to me and I'll print it. Saying someone is wrong means nothing. Showing them how they are wrong and/or explaining why you disagree is far better. Rather than insult, threaten or slander to a few select friends, put your disagreement out to the same audience I do. Even if I disagree with you I'll be happy to print it. Tribute update I got a nice PK from someone who asked to remain anonymous. As you might remember I was praising the hard work of unknown people. They spend their time and money to get decal working. Here is what I was sent. I was reading your column, especially the Tribute section. I can tell you who the folks are that work so hard to find the changes. They are Gouru (MT_Gouru on vn), Hazridi, Greyed, Parad0x and Arkayas. Those are the people who do it now, different people did it in the past. They deserver a big round of applause. Microslop You expect a degree is stability in a mature game like AC. Patch problems have mostly worked themselves out and lag is less of a problem than when the game started. Few can remember or have experienced the really bad problems patches created when the game started. After going on four years you expect things like the servers and the Zone not to be creating trouble. And yet we have had an almost constant problem with the AC server this month and now a really stupid bug from the Zone. It started last week for me but could well have been a problem for longer. With three accounts and two computers I have to swap accounts a little more than before. When I only had two accounts I had to swap but not very often. The problem is when I log out off one account and on to another the Zone thinks everything is fine. When I go to the AC screen it shows the old account as loaded. So the only way I can swap accounts right now is to close the window and open a new one. Doing that tends to force me to reboot more often. At least I don't have the lock up problems with the new computer. With the old one I would have been forced to do a reboot if I had to close the AC window. Still such sloppy programming by the Zone people, combined with their inability to fix it after over a week, does not bode well for AC. Children "In 2003 America, in order to silence their critics an increasing number of people no longer feel it's necessary to debate with facts to prove their point. Instead, they choose to shout down detractors with infantile rhetoric, name-calling, and insults, because to them that kind of nonsense passes for legitimate "debate." In reality, though, such tactics only serve to cover up ignorance." - Jon E Dougherty Have you ever watch children fight. They call names, they threaten, the yell and scream. The one thing they don't do is make any coherent points. I saw a good example on the DT board the other day. It was brought to my attention that someone there wanted to punch me in the face for something I said. He never got around to saying why he was so angry until later in PM. I'll not to into it except to say he is an angry disturbed man. That is just my opinion of course. He said the reason he was angry was that I did not know to vuln and imperil before using a weeping weapon. Passing over the fact there was no way for me to know that until I used a weeping weapon why ignorance's made him so angry was a mystery. It seems that on DT everyone vulns and imperils before pulling their weapon. They seemed ignorance to the fact that they are the exception. Very few melees will do that on the OPK servers. (Optional PK) One reason is there are not many melees that have the ability to vuln and imperil even of they wanted too. That is mostly a very high level or spec'd life tactic. We mostly fight monsters on the Optional Player Killer Servers. The handful of PK's on our server likely imperil and vuln, just like the DT people. Most of them have templates geared toward PK and are not optimal for PvM. Those of us who play a different game would never think of using their templates. With an RR weapon I can kill two monsters in the time it would take to vuln and imperil one. Another good reason we don't vuln and imperil is the weapon melee bonus. When fighting a lot of hard-hitting monsters' pulling a wand is suicide. The only time I see a melee pull a wand in battle is to support other players. Even my spec'd life player has abandoned that tactic. Most players do fine as a melee until they try PK. It is a different game, totally dominated by mages and hybrid players. I knew that but had hopes when they introduced the Weeping Weapon. We were told the weeping weapon was to help melee with PK. They should have said "help hybrid melees with PK" because it did nothing for melees. Lets put that aside for a now. Just why my experience with testing the Weeping Weapon would anger the DT players I fail to understand. I was writing about a personal experience. I don't hit the boards to find out what things do, I go out and find it out for myself. Yes, that makes me do things out of ignorance. Until we learn otherwise we are all ignorant. That is not a crime or even possible to avoid. Despite repeated attempts to get them to articulate what they disagreed with me on they never could. It is funny when they feel compelled to say I'm wrong while agreeing with my every point. It seemed I was wrong because I was not a DT poster. That is all they need to know. What is totally ridicules was I did have a comment on DT that no one talked about. That was in total support of DT! I said I was wrong about the skills of the OPK PK's. Without their chains and support structure they would likely not do well on DT. There are a lot of exceptions of course. I'm sure we have a few players would do very well. Of course until the best of the DT player face the best of MT's we will never know. It is a moot point anyway as duels are said to be rare in DT and OPK servers have that as the norm. It turns out that things have changed since I last had contact with DT people. In the past they wanted more people to go there. They wanted a second server. Today, at least according to the board people, new players are not wanted. The feel they are a closed server. If they had it their way no one would be allowed to play on DT without their approval. They don't want a second server and would not use it if created. Somehow I think their attitude would sicken most of the players on DT who don't spend there day reading the boards. At the end of the day I did get a PM that reminded me of something I knew but forgot. The DT board is full of angry unsupervised children. It is easy to imagine a giggling kid in a dark room typing insults. DT itself has a lot of thoughtful mature people playing. They avoid the boards like the plague. One pointed out that his IQ drops after reading the posts there. I thank the thoughtful people for remaining me that the DT board people are not representative of the DT players as a whole. The best I can think of is the VN board people think were born with PK knowledge. Anyone trying to learn things for themselves they hate, insult and vilify. As one PM pointed out most of them are very poor players. They all have high post counts because they spend all day on the DT board instead of fighting. As a last point, I have seen ten year olds use better insults. The best they could come up with was STFU. Their reading comprehension looked to be scoring 10 on a 100 point scale, passing is 70. So I can see why their writing ability is so low. The bottom line is they feel no one is allowed to write about PK except DT board posters. Even reciting your own experience in PK will incur their wrath. If they want to flame each other that is fine with me. Threaten me with violence and I'll respond. The punk who started this is very lucky he can hid behind his keyboard. Put downs I have written before about how lame the rhetoric is today. I saw a perfect example in a boxing match this week. After a fight a fighter was asked about a possible opponent. He stated, "The guy is a punk." That was about as lame an insult as you can get, somewhat typical of the people on the boards. The next fighter to be interviewed could trash talk without being vulgar or even insulting. He was asked the same question about a fighter who had fought early. He said, "I was worried about the guy. Then I saw him fight for a few rounds and now I'm not worried." Not what is my kind of insult! Far to often I see the below on the boards; Poster1; The guy is a moron. Poster2; Ya, he knows nothing. Poster3; LOL you guys owned him. To me all they did was talk. Not one word to explain anything. What have we learned from what they said? Absolutely nothing. The problem is these guys really don't know any better. They think STFU is witty. They think insulting the poster wins them points in the debate. If that was the only place I saw it there would not be much worry. Sadly I see more and more of this in real life, especially politics. How can a presidential candidate get way with calling the president a gang leader? The key for us is to be aware when someone is just flapping their gums. Saying someone is wrong without saying how they are wrong or saying how they would do it different means they are irrelevant and likely ignorant. There is another problem that is showing itself these days. That is reading comprehension. If they don't understand what is written it easy for them to go off on a tangent. My debates on the DT VN board was a classic example. Those that bothered to read what was being debated missed two key phrases; "Test" and "Pure Melee." Instead of reading about what was written they had to spew junk about how I knew nothing about PK. Given that my essay had only related to PK in that I was "TESTING" the ability of a weeping weapon as a "PURE MELEE" in PK, PK knowledge/ability really had nothing to do with it. The concept of testing never could sink into their brains. They were to busy working out insults to actually try to understand what was written. One on the DT board sent me a PM saying that their board is harsh. From what I saw it was not harsh at all. It was childish, obscene, cliquish, intolerant and mean spirited but not harsh. Harsh was defined best when describing about how a Sergeant Major we know would chew people out. It was said he did not chew your rear end out but rather would nibble around the edges and let it drop out by itself. Olthoi Armor I feel one of the jobs of a Monarch and/or patron is to support the members. This is often a proactive type of thing. If you see someone in need then you try to find a way to help. Along the way you often learn new things and have great adventures. Silent's Rampage was blowing off steam as I logged a player I have. This is a player I have that no one knows. I might be writing about this new player later in the column. Silent's Rampage is a Crossbow player who had just spent an hour trying to solo a group quest. He was trying to get the 20+ Olthoi armor using a 29lv player. At the time I knew nothing about this or the bigger Olthoi Armor quests. I intend to go sometime but only to help. I prefer my tinkered armor. I might grab a set someday possibility for Fist as he is seldom hit with melee attacks away. It will be great armor for the Hollow Cave as banes don't work there anyway. I volunteered to help Silent's Rampage finish the quest. I loaded up Fist's Armorer and buffed up. He hit the buff bot while I was doing that. He told me the route to get there. We would go to Arwic, take a house portal and then run to the dungeon. I got to Arwic first but as normal had trouble finding the house portals. I really need to study the route so I can find these better. By the time I found them he had caught up with me. The house portal took us to the northeast edge of Olthoi North. I did not see any Olthoi so I assume it is outside the boundaries. I started to lag really bad. There are two types of lag. There is lag when everything will stop and we just have to wait for the servers to catch up. Then there is lag when you stop but the monsters have freedom to attack. This was the later. Fortunately they were mostly low-level monsters that could not do me much damage. Still it was frustrating to be on auto run but frozen in mid stride, while monsters would run up and start swinging on me. Silent's Rampage was not having the same problem so it had to be something in the Internet route. I have not seen it in a while and hope to never see it again. The Olthoi were mostly very weak and hardly worth my effort to kill. It was a good bit of knowledge anyway as it is a great place for my new player to hunt. There was nothing there, other than the Queens and Matrons, which FA could not kill in one shot. I'll say that these dungeons are a lot more extensive than what I'm use to. I've completely explored the 80+ Matron with little trouble. This is far larger. It took us a while to work our way down to the first Matron. Like I said before I had no idea how this quest worked. Silent's Rampage had only a vague idea himself, something I was unaware of. As the dungeon was so weak I figured the Matron would be likewise. I figured I would clear the Drones and Servants before imperil/vuln'ing the Matron for Silent's Rampage. I figured to help him defeat her but did not want to do it for him. This was a big mistake on my part. Silent's Rampage died before I even finished off the guards. The Matron was as hard as the 80+ Matron with the exception of magic resistance. It took a lot of blasting to defeat her. I was really surprised how hard she was, considering that this was a 20+ dungeon. He got rebuffed and did a dead run, without stopping to fight, to got back to me. I had Matron bodies waiting for him with two of the parts he needed. We did not know it at the time but there are nine parts needed. We moved down and found another Matron. This time I did not half step. I blasted the Matron and guards as soon as I could. The Matron had the one of same body parts we already had so we moved on. We found ourselves on a ledge overlooking the Matron we had just fought. We took another passage that led to a Queen Matron. She dropped two body parts. As we were at a dead end we decided to backtrack to the Matron. We got turned around a bit and instead found another Queen Matron. So we ran back and forth between the two. Silent's Rampage could not stand up to a Queen Matron. We had to be very careful when fighting. Several times he was running for his life. After a while we had it down to only needing one part. That part never would come so Silent's Rampage logged to checked Maggie's. Sure enough the part only dropped on a Matron. We backtracked to the last Matron. We lucked out and found one on the second kill. I have a hard time believing that they made a quest geared for 20 to 40 players so hard. Of course letting a powerhouse player in with them made it easy. Not every low level player knows a high level willing to spend several hours helping them. New Players I got a third account so I could play with a PK tribe we had hoped to set up. In hindsight it would not have worked. PK's today need magic and this was a no magic attempt at PK. When we started the idea it was before Tinkered Armor and other advances that have made a pure melee PK impossible. So now I have Death Mute. He is a 65lv sword with no magic, high endurance and fair melee defense. Of course holding to his handicap of not talking is not just hard but borderline frustrating. Most people understand, smile at my foolishness, and let it go. For now I have no idea where I'll take him. He has a pure melee PK template which is useless against monsters and PK. I'm thinking of going all defense, which means spec'ing magic defense in the future and teaming up with a PK mage. That would be the only way to make him work. Meanwhile I had other slots and only needed a few mules. So I sat down and thought about my needs. Jr just got sword and had to drop lock pick. Fist picked it up and will be doing the sing runs on the hollow caves. While that will be nice for sings there is zero challenge and the XP is not much use to him. Maybe what I need is a player created just for the hollow caves. Thinking about it a Hollow Cave player would be ideal! There are little magic problems. The run down and the ever so often spells from the Vrindi are it. Banes are useless and I seldom stay longer than an hour at a time. I might even be able to go no buff with the right items. So what I need is a high melee defense player with the ability to hit hard using a Bludgeoning weapon. This left two templates, Mace and Axe. I had never played either melee class and have no idea of the advantages or disadvantages. Axe is far more popular so I broke the tradition and went Mace. Stats are easy. No need for magic and I only need enough hit points to survive a hit or two. I went with 100, 10, 100, 100, 10, 10. Maximum defense and attack against Olthoi with little else. I spec'd Mace, Melee defense and Lock Pick. I might use some points to spec Magic defense in the future. That would help with the run down and the Virindi. Leveling When I level FA and Death Mute it was against Tuskers. That is still the fastest way to go but also the most expensive. Tuskers have little in the way of loot and, other than steel, not much salvage. I wanted to have the new melee pay for himself as well as get me some Granite. Low-level Olthoi tend to drop a lot more Granite than the high level ones. I have a lot of weapons in need of Granite. So many weapons need granite that it will be years before I get all done, if ever. Having a player that levels at a nice rate and get the salvage I need would better than one that levels faster. I want to swear him to Maddie's Revenge or Winter Raven. Neither was on so I have him under Cliff's Carrier Cook until I catch up with one. It will be a chance thing as to who gets him. The first thing I need to do with him is get a good mace. Right now I'm using the training weapon. I found a few that were ok but all had 250+ weld. I have a feeling that by the time I find a good no weld mace he will have a 250 skill. My first shot at fighting was around our mansion. Of course the Olthoi there had been replaced as the matrons were defeated so that was out. I tried a few other towns but they had all been cleared of Olthoi as well. I decided to head over to the first pincer dungeon on ML. By the time I got there I only had 30 minutes on the buff. Still I did ok and quickly leveled to 12. I also got three items of granite! I buffed up again and headed to Olthoi Arcade. That had higher-level Olthoi but less salvage. I'm not sure if that was just bad luck or a different loot profile. I'll monitor that but my true goal is the Imperial Grotto. I made it to 18lv and can see me hitting 30 in a week or so. It will depend on allegiance demands. Meanwhile I might try the low-end prop and see how he does against Legs. I figure to have him hit the Hollow caves at about 60lv. I have seen people there with lower levels but I would rather be a little stronger. I also want to have my LP high enough to carve what I find there.