You don’t need brain tumors to get free stuff

Although, if you have some, they could work in your favor. I only tend to loot them, not grow them in my own brain. I hope the kiddo gets better – I’m sure he will flame Blizzard for nerfing his crossbow or end up selling his character before the next expansion! SOE also granted a wish in the past, so it isn’t all about baby rabbit sacrifices and forcing new GM’s to drink crocodile blood out of paper cups there either. As for all the other jealous life-forms wishing for free stuff, they come in the form of patches.

Speaking of freebies, two new patches can be found flowing through the EQII and WoW patchers, thank you asses in charge of patch deployment for simultaneously releasing them, well close enough anyway.

World of Warcraft 2.1.0 patch notes and Everquest II GU35 patch notes.

World of Warcraft

I’m not a raider, I don’t plan on raiding, I don’t want to make the time to raid when I could be raising my skill in drunkard or procrastinating, so lately a lot of patches don’t offer my nubness much of anything. I’m not excited when WoW releases a patch, the whole development time drags on far too long. I know they have to test shit, but it wouldn’t hurt if they broke the shit down in little parts and had a regular schedule of releasing patch every two weeks. Each patch is like a fucking encyclopedia of changes and you have to sign up for a semester just to get through the patch notes. I am a bit biased, I dread the bigger clumps because it cripples my connection and takes me a lot longer for that data stream to complete and compile compared to the majority and their saucy speedy connections. This patch tends to stick out in my mind for stuff that actually matters to my playing style and not the end game or balance changes.

Removing gold spam:

Contrary to popular belief, the spam attack happens in the lower-levels. I think the biggest significance depends more on the area you’re in, rather than your level. My current character is level 31, I have 5 days played on this character, which I think is a lot for a character this low level and I before this patch I was inundated with illicit offerings – I’m not sure what it’s like now since I haven’t logged on in a week, but early reports indicate that the new process is working, which is a good thing.

New Battleground matching system:

The reason I have so much time played at level 31 is because of battlegrounds. So the new system will try and balance out the competition. If only if this had been implemented before I played all those hundreds of matches. Player skill is more of a myth, sure there is team tactics, but what matters most is not how you play, but what gear you have. If you have a basic understanding of how-to-play your class, which surprisingly isn’t that difficult, gear is the main factor and I would say about 90% of the matches I played were mismatched on gear alone. 75% of the wins came down to which side had the most twinks. Once in awhile, you would get an even back and forth game. In other cases it came down to team makeup, multiple priests versus no healer. There is a lot more team strategy in Arathi Basin, but gear still the biggest factor.

EverQuest II

I haven’t shared my thoughts or experiences in EQ II very much and I find that extremely disappointing, I regret not writing about my recent EQII experiences that lead to the cancellation of my account a month ago. When I started this blog, I didn’t want to write a journal because I didn’t like reading any, so why write my own, it would be too hypocritical for my liking. Well over the last two years my opinion on journals has changed, but I need to break that old habit of not writing more about my playing experiences.

I didn’t plan on returning to EQ II, I was going to play LotrO over the summer and see what happene. Well, a chum of mine who I used to catass with in my EverQuest days contacted me, it had been at least a year since we talked and they expressed their interest in leveling up a character in preparation for Rise of Kunark. I knew nothing of this Kunark expansion before ripping up my former contract with SOE and decided that I would rather play with an old friend than play LotrO and look for new ones. Kunark is not my favorite expansion, but I really enjoy the direction in content the game is focusing on: updating and releasing what is familiar to older EverQuest players. Now that the Neriak update is live, it’s time to start playing again.