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.