Post EQ Grumble

Bah! Bloody GM events. So I log on and usually I'm swamped with requests to join LDoN groups within the first 5 minutes of arrival but tonight? Nothing. So I bimble around, chewing the fat with my guildies and friends when the message comes through that there's a GM event in the Butcherblock Mountains. Now I've been to several GM events before so I should have known better but I go anyway. And the usual happens, my framerate hits the floor, there's a bunch of people attacking anything that looks like a GM character, about a million retards are yelling "Gnomes are teh suck" or "Gnomes r0x0r" (depending on which kind of l33t they're playing) and a couple of people are trying hard to roleplay. Anyway, the nearly indestructible pair of GM controlled monsters finally hits the dirt and along comes another GM character to hand out some loot. As ever there isn't enough loot to go around and the air is filled with PGTs* yelling inanities and nobody can move because of the crush of bodies around the GM trying to get some loot (ok, I was there too but it's different for me). Eventually the loot is distributed and everyone departs. I get back to the Nexus feeling that I've wasted my evening just for the chance at getting some rather mediocre items without even having the benefit of good conversation or some challenging gameplay. I find myself angry at the other players, at the GMs for being so unimaginative and at myself for going along when I knew full well what it would be like.

One bright moment was in mid-feeding frenzy and the Fox rang me up to tell me he had just bought a new DVD player complete with a squillion speakers. Our conversation was rather bizarre (even by our standards) with large periods of silence when either I was dealing with a resurrection or he was fiddling about with some software problem or other. Eventually we reduced the conversation to bullet points and decided that we were both too preoccupied to sustain any kind of sensible chat. Shame really, in retrospect hearing the Fox waxing lyrical about his latest techno-whoosit would have been infinitely more entertaining that what I ended up doing. Ah well, time for bed now ... tomorrow is, as they say, another day.

*PGTs = Power Gaming Twats

My Word ... it's Day Two

Here I sit, somewhat bleary-eyed from work and utterly bloated after having eaten far too much Chinese food. By the way, please remind me that I do not like egg fu yung ... I really don't ... if you're ever with me and I try ordering egg fu yung please remind me of this post and warn me that although it may seem like a good idea at the time I will end up really wishing I hadn't bothered. Anyway, I'm about to log into EQ so this will probably be somewhat brief (stop cheering at the back there) but I did mention yesterday that I would write about Lost Dungeons of Norrath (LDoN), the most recent expansion to EverQuest, and so here we go ...

Anyone who's played Anarchy Online will probably be able to be very smug about this expansion in that EQ has adopted the former game's 'soft dungeon' approach. Of course (and rather sadly) AO did it better ... but more of that later. Essentially you go visit a bunch of 'Adventurers' who will offer you jobs to do for them. These jobs are (please forgive me if the list is incomplete) slaughter, rescue, assasination and collection and one can opt for normal, hard or raid level adventures. So far, so good you may say but where AO scored over LDoN is that there is a minimum number of people required in a group (I think 4) before you can go on one of these things. Now since my main character is a cleric, it's pretty easy to find a group ... the same can probably not be said for one of the less 'key' character classes. It also locks you away for 90 to 120 minutes during which time you can't invite anyone else to join you if they happen to turn up, this is pretty annoying when one's friends are not always on at the same time every day. This may sound like a very negative spin on LDoN but actually I think it's really good for the game, I just hope that the novelty will wear off soon and that we can get back to doing proper zones, just using LDoN as a time-filler if we fancy a no-pressure dungeon bash.

Anyway, it's 8.15pm and high time I was logged on.