Thursday, December 17, 2015

The Lonely Mage

Day 1


I am The Lonely Mage. I was created as a Battlemage in Asheron's Call. I will accept buffs from Holtburg and will use Rydia for Salvaging and Imbuing, but I will go my own way in this world.


I went through, doing the usual tasks and quests to get a character started in AC.


At the end of my first day's journey, I attained lavel 28 and now had to go visit some Olthoi.





Trann Blademaster - A new beginning

My name is Trann Blademaster. I started life today on a world called Leafcull in a town called Sanamar.

I intend to be a heavy weapons master and lay waste all over Dereath with whatever weapons I come across.

Once I entered the world and met with a few characters, got acquainted with the ways of the world and picked up some armor, I was ready to see what awaited me.

The first dungeon I ventured into was the Penguin Cave. It appeared to be full of these little penguins with a very short attention span. I ran to the end of the dungeon and grabbed a necklace out of a chest that a gentleman had lost in town. I returned to town and presented it to him and received a nice reward for my efforts.

I then talked to a lady nearby that indicated that a Beacon needed to be replaced at the top of some ramps. I grabbed it and headed through the portal. These ramps were occupied by Phytos Wasps. They were not happy to see me. I slashed my way through them and a couple of Water Golems and attached the replacement Beacon. Again, I received a nice reward.

Now it was time to hit Holtburg for a couple of items. I needed to get myself buffed up and go into the Drudge Dungeon. It seems that the Drudges had stolen a bunch of sacks of seed from a farmer and he wanted them back. He also wanted the head of the Dungeon as a trophy. I headed into the dungeon and retrieved 3 sacks of grain and the head of the boss and gave them to the Farmer for a nice reward.

A year has gone by

I posted in February that the players had started to get restless.

That restlessness continues. Still no word from Turbine.

Oh well, they are the ones in control. When it is ready, it will be ready.

In the meantime, I have been testing out theories on how to deal with characters when Decal is not part of the scene. I have built sone characters that do not use buffs and live or die predicated upon the armor they have or can obtain.

I am still experimenting but it seems like a War Mage with Void instead of War is a good starting character. A Bowyer with an xbow is also a good vassal character. I do drop the Finesse Weapon and Shield from the resulting character.

Creating the 2 characters at the same time and swearing to the Void Mage works very well. I want to keep them within 5 levels in order to maximize the XP passup between them.

That seems to work pretty well. I can push the Mage with the xbow. The xbow has MD to help stay alive. The mage can kill fast

I have no qualms against using the Fac Hub. It is part of the game now. I just try to avoid anything Decal related. It is not part of my game.

As there are no patches and nothing is changing from one month to another, it is a bit difficult to write about new stuff. .

Long Day of Maint

Well, all of the Turbine games have been down since 3AM. Not sure when they will return. This has something to do with improving the servers or operating systems.

We got an added bonus this afternoon. Sev left some forum info about the testing of he player servers and it was positive. A minor glitch but there is hope.

I saw some forum info about a classic group of players forming on Frostfell. I think I will start up a character or 2 and I may join them. No buffbots, no special equipment. More like when we first started.

I think I will start our with a war mage and a 2 hander. The 2 hander can help push the mage and they are very good against the right critters.

AC is being destroyed

I was really hoping that I would never have to write this post.

The facts of the matter is that Asheron's Call is slowly being destroyed. It is dying from a multitude of reasons. There are plenty of reasons causing its demise.

1. WB Apathy. Since the takeover of Turbine, WB has only been concerned with the $$$$ coming into its coffers.

2. Turbine Apathy. No one is left at Turbine that will stand up to management and get at least a small amount of support. The best that is received is a reboot of the servers upon occasion.

3. Stupid and Willful Players. These fools used to exist mainly on Darktide. As long as they left the normal worlds alone, they were tolerated. It was a pain to other Darktide players, but such was that world and they had the ability to self police.

4. Broken Promise. Coming up on 2 years ago, Turbine announced that they would release the compiled code, databases and instructions to the gaming community so the players could create private servers. This is a feature that we are still waiting on. With all of the bugs, duping, landblock crashing that currently exists in AC, we need the ability to fix these issues, not just police against them. It is time that the source code is also released. After 15 years, whatever special functions exist in AC's source code, is meaningless to newly created games.

Currently, the player community is voicing its problems with extreme lag on several worlds. This lag appears to be created by the above fools trying to dup items and crash landblocks. They want to create items that they can then sell to other idiots for real money. They do not care about what this does to the world and its availability to be used for its intended gaming.

Turbine no longer is providing resources to observe, ban and delete these fools. They continue to dup and destroy the game with impunity.

This is really a final plea for WB and Turbine to release the source cone, exe code, and whatever instructions that they may have to allow private individuals to create a private server and run the game as they see fit.

I know I wanted to play AC until the servers shut down, however, due to the erratic gameplay, I find myself avoiding entering the worlds.

One small item that WB needs to keep in mind is that their handling of AC reflects on the quality of WB as a trusted organization. I, for one, will find it hard to send money WB's way due to the way they treat their gamers and games. Like many that left Sony is disgust in the past over their poor handling of gamers and games, I no longer spent my funds on anything Sony.


Friday, August 21, 2015

Darktide is acting like Darktide

Once again, Darktide is down for an undetermined amount of time.

First, we had them dropping stipend rewards on the ground and then picking them up and getting to 275 in a short time. This issue boiled over onto other worlds and made Turbine address the issue. It was causing the worlds to crash.

Now we have them duping anything and everything in order to sell the special items for real cash.

Lots of Paragon weapons, special Orbs and whatnot. They then sell these items to other fools for real money.

Somehow, I am having a difficult time understanding which one is the bigger tool.The person crashing the world and duping or the tool that pays real money for a virtual item. Just another indicator of how stupid the world is getting.

Unfortunately, some of this is appearing on the other worlds and causing them to also crash. That is my biggest concern. Too many tools trying too many stupid things and causing Turbine and WB to just say - too hell with private servers. Only time will tell.

In any event, I am still playing and trying out various characters to see what I can do should private servers come to pass. I now have 14 accounts and characters on most worlds. It is really starting to become an administrative nightmare. What armor and weapons are on what mules??

I did kind of like Tings and its database, however, it is not real stable and doesn't quite do the trick. VT is a bit light also.

Several players are talking about 9 man fellows all in their accounts. That does sound like an awesome setup but I expect it takes quite a bit of horsepower.

I may geve a 4-5 person fellow a try. With all mages, they would clean house.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Thw Players seem to be getting restless

I have started to notice in the Turbine Forums that the players are starting to get restless.


There hasn't been any communication  from Sev or any other Turbine employee in quite some time. I understand that Sev is very busy and I doubt that the bosses give him much time to complete the delivery of an operational AC System.


Unfortunately, this is starting to have an effect on the expectations of players that do not hesitate to voice their opinions on the Forums. They are moving towards the expectation that the delivery will never occur and all they can do is play until the servers are shut down.


We are approaching the 1 year anniversary of the announcement that private servers were planned with the expectation that this change would occur before the end of 2014.


Since then, there have been 2 massive layoffs and transfers and Sev appears to be the only Developer left.


Right now, we have no knowledge of exactly what the hang up is. There has been some concern that it is with the WB Lawyers or WB Management. I suspect all may have a part in preventing the move to Private Servers from becoming a reality. The truth is that no one knows. It is all speculation. It may be neither group.


The result is that we have no information, AC has been static for a year and players are starting to question how much longer this situation will continue.


All of these comments can also be directed at AC2. There are many players that would love to get their hands on this system and see what tweaks they can do to it.


Meanwhile, I will continue to play these games, along with LOTRO, and enjoy trying out possible characters under a private server. With the expectation that I will have my own private server and no Decal, I an building characters that can survive and even thrive with no buffbots, no Virindi Tools, and no other crutches that many have come to rely on with the Decal System.


I may tend to be a little old fashioned in this respect, but the AC System was built to function as a standalone world. It is probably why there are very little automated functions in AC2. I have heard of some automated tools in AC2 for mining and a large number of players concerned about them.


I guess it is time for me to get off of my soapbox. If a person takes the time to peruse the Fist de Yuma articles that he wrote, one will understand what AC was in its prime years. Granted, there are now a number of changes that will assist a player in getting to level 50 quickly and allow them to acquire decent armor and even acquire good weapons and magic formulas without much effort. The essence of AC still continues and I hope, for one, to attempt to take characters from the beginning  to the end in a real AC.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The Players are starting to get restless

Well, it is coming up to a year since Turbine announced the major changes to the future of AC and AC2. The March 2014 Patch was the last scheduled patch for AC.

With this patch, the changes were announced shortly thereafter that AC would be going buy to play and they would be looking at turning over the executables to the players for player run servers in the future.

Unfortunately, WB laid off a number of Turbine employees and pretty much left a skeleton crew available for AC/AC2.

With that result, it has taken a very long time to try to package up the AC environment into a form viable for player run servers.

There have been quite a few players returning with this now model. The game is still very enjoyable to play and there are generally quite a few quests going on at any time.

I have been following the forums and one of the issues there that I have noticed is that the chatter on the player run servers has almost come to a complete halt. It is hard to plan and present futures when there is no information to base best guesses on.

We are getting to that point where the players need some additional info to get fired up on.

My take on building up some expectations would be the release of the SQLServer database, tables, views, keys, triggers, indexes, stored procedures, etc that exist along with any documentation that may exist. We don't need data. The raw layouts would be more than enough.

This would give the tech players more than enough info to allow them to go to town on understanding the structure of AC. We would then be able to load the SQLServer environment and develop the screens for maintenance to the databases and get that process out of the way.

With this release of information, the players would be fired up again and be very occupied for the next several months.

We all understand that, with the limited resources, it is taking an extra long time to package the actual system and get all the pieces functioning correctly.

There is also a concern that the lawyers are tasked with providing legal documents that are necessary to protect WB and Turbine. It's sad but that is the world we live in.

Meanwhile, I will continue to play and enjoy all of my characters on the worlds.

Its getting time to prep for private servers

While I do not plan on installing a public/private server, I do have plans to create a private server for myself and my son and grandkids.


With that in mind, I have a number of constraints that I plan on implementing on this server.


1. No Decal or 3rd party apps.
2. Tweaking of the database where possible for events and options from the past.


As we really do not know anything right now about the contents and formats of the database tables, that will have to wait until its time.


What I can do is build some characters and play AC without any Decal to see how characters can evolve and survive in these new worlds.


I have started out with a War Mage template. I kept the attributes standard and dropped MC from spec to trained.


Robins Mage started in Sanamar and hit the Penguin Dungeon and followed that up with the Wasp Beacon Quest. I looted everything of value and arrived in Holtburg with some coin to hit up the level 2 spells for War and Life.


I then hit the Holtburg Drudge Hideout to get some XP and loot. At level 2, the spells were taking down the drudges quickly. I picked up the seeds and the head and returned to town to turn them in.

I am now about ready for the Facilities.

Before that, I decided that I needed a second character to help me level and recover corpses. I went to anothe raccount and created a Bowmaster called Robins Archer. I retained the attributes but modified the skills to be a complete Missile character. I dropped the Finesse weapons and Shield and specced Fletching. Robins Mage had picked up a 130 Xbow that would work well to start out his journey. I also made this character a Tumerok.

I swore Archer to Mage and started him on his initial journey.

At level 12, I sent Archer into the Facilities to try his luck. He acquired the Ice Tachi and levelled. I then gate the Tachi to Mage for his levelling, Now I need a mule. Again, I went to another account and created Robins Mule and swore him to Mage. I then handed off some loot from Archer and Mage to Mule.

Archer decided to go to the dungeon and get the daggers. I had trained Alchemy on Archer in order to make oils. I had been able to get some Bloodseeker oils made and applied to some Frogcrotch heads.

I headed off to the dungeon from Facilities and started through the quest. I was doing pretty good until I got to the Sclavus at the end. They mopped me up quickly and I suffered my first death.

OK, I got a reality check that I needed a few more levels to be successful in there. I headed off to Shoushi to the Shoushi Grotto for some serious Drudge thinning. I was very successful and gained a couple of levels.

Players are getting restless

Its been a while since I have posted. So many games to play and so little time.

I have been spending a good amount of time in AC. My son and grandsons are even back into the game. They are finding that there is a lot to learn after being away for several years. Their characters were all there and waiting to get back into the world.

I have actually activated 11 accounts now. That breaks down to 110 characters per world outside of DT. It is really more than I can account for. These were old accounts that I had tried out over the years so they are eligible for the weapon tokens and weekly levelling.

I have found that I enjoy playing a mage when I use Decal and Vtank. I do not do unattended macroing as I would have to set the character up some place and walk away. I use these functions to run wild across the countryside and run XP dungeon quests. It helps in not having to maintain health and mana manually.

It used to be a few years ago that a 128 was a god. Then changes were and and a 275 was a god. Now you need to be fully lumed and outfitted to be able to even try the top tier critters and content. You can actually get fully set up and reset your level and start over while retaining much of your capabilities. There are several that are doing that very thing. Only time will tell how that comes out.

We have been waiting to find out the fate of the Private Servers and the lifespan of AC and AC2. WB had some severe layoffs this year and they did yet another one this week. Sev has been working on trying to get the Private Servers coding completed. We re hoping he is still at Turbine.

Players are starting to get very anxious about the future and need to see some results and know what the future is going to be for the next year.

Right now we do not know what will be needed for servers and software to run a Private Server and what kind of capacity and options will be available.

I just keep on playing AC, AC2 and LOTRO and hope for the best.

With LOTRO, they released Update 15 yesterday and it introduce the Boerning. They are a human like character with melee and an attitude. I have created a guy and have started to level him. Right now he islevel 12 and pretty much done with the Bree area. He does lay waste to any opposition and I have not given him anything yet.

I think he may be a lot of fun to play and will level fast in the game.