10 Days of WAR: Day 8 (Live Events)

Merry Christmas!  For my eighth day of WAR I'm going to talk about Live Events.

10 Days of WAR: Day Seven (PvE)

For my seventh day of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning I did some PvE.

One of my first posts about WAR on this blog was about the importance of PvE:

WAR, without PvE, is just a mess waiting to happen.

I took a lot of flack for suggesting that WAR needed PvE.  WAR was going to be the ultimate RvR game, pitting throngs of players against each other in epic battles.  PvE was only a momentary distraction!  How wrong those people were.  It is suicide to attempt to push out a triple-A game that focuses solely on PvP-oriented conflict.  The player base is NOT there to support a game of WAR's budget size with only PvP.  Plus, with only PvP minded players, the battlefield becomes very stale, very quickly.

Ranting aside, WAR does have a good amount of cooperative PvE (I'm not talking about solo content today).  The end game features dungeons and loot progression.  The early game features a few dungeons and plenty of public quests.  Both ends of the spectrum benefit from an open grouping system that allows players to find groups on the fly in their current area.

With my time limited, I was not able to get into any dungeon groups on my rank 40 Ironbreaker.  I logged into my level 8 White Lion and journeyed to Nordland and Norsca to enjoy some public quests.

TIP: How to move Steam games to another drive in Windows 7/Vista/XP

With the Steam holiday sale blitzing everyone's wallets, there are plenty of people trying to find hard drive space to store all of their new games (seriously, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for only $1.99, Mirror's Edge for $4.99).

One of the quirks with Steam is that it only allows users to install games to the same drive that Steam resides on.  For many, that is their main C: drive, which often fills up quickly.  I will detail the process used to move 3rd party games to another drive.  This will be for Windows 7 and Vista (Windows XP users click here).

10 Days of WAR: Day Six (Crafting)

I was inspired by the furious pace of Santa's elves to meet the Christmas demand and for my sixth day of WAR I crafted.  The crafting in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has always intrigued me.  The concepts are solid, but the execution was lacking at launch. The basic premise is that most monsters and player kills would result in crafting components.  Crafted items are mostly consumable items.  There wasn't traditional blacksmithing or weapon making: there was apothecary for potions, talisman making, and cultivation (which is a gathering skill, but I consider it a craft).

Often times crafting far outpaced a character's progression in WAR due to the mismatch of ingredient levels to a player's level.  The result was often piles and piles of crafted items that were unusable for several levels.  This was not only frustrating, but also impossible to avoid unless a player ignored crafting until they were max level.  To highlight this issue, I created this screenshot a long time ago:

As can be seen, level 30-32 ingredients resulted in level 38 potions for a character that was level 30.

Unlimited Free Trials are the New MMO Hotness (Age of Conan, Champions Online, Warhammer Online, and more!)

Apparently I missed the memo.  Free trials with unlimited playtime, but level and gameplay restrictions, are popping up everywhere.

Age of Conan - LINK
Details:  Unlimited playtime. Players can play up to level 20, but only if registered for the trial before Jan 1st, 2010.  Trading and player chat limited.

Champions Online - LINK  
Details: Unlimited playtime. New players can create an account and play the beginning zone of Champions Online for as long as they want.

Warhammer Online - LINK
Details: Unlimited playtime. Players are restricted to the Tier 1 Empire vs Chaos zones, but can access all scenarios.  Trading and player chat limited.

Alganon - LINK
Details: Unlimited playtime. No leveling or zone restrictions, but trial characters are deleted after 30 days and must be re-rolled.  Limited skill progression and limited chat options.