NaNoWriMo...2 months late

I've been thinking for some time now about doing the NaNoWriMo challenge. As you probably know I had my final exams at the time when everyone else was undertaking it. Now after a good long holiday I'm thinking for having my own little NaNoWriMo challenge in January. I feel pretty determined, but as many have said it gets prettyterrible after the first two weeks.

My aim is to write around 50,000 words which will consist of Part 1 of my planned novel. Some of my long time readers will remember when I challenged myself to do 500 words a day, but that only lasted a few weeks before I grew frustrated. This time I intend to do two major things:

Have a good plan: I'm going to spend the next few days trying to get a really good understanding of where I want the novel to go, what I want to happen, and who I want the characters to be.

Stay motivated: This is kind of what I'm looking forward to. The way I plan to stay motivated is to create a unique soundtrack that will be exciting when I'm writing action stuff, and more soothing for the slower, story-focused stuff. I will probably watch a couple of my favorite action movies and animes to keep the ideas and concepts coming. I'm also going to take inspiration from characters from Baldur's Gate such as Minsc, because he basically defines what I want my characters to be like.

There's no easy way to break this

I bought the WoW battlechest a few days ago. Yup. Just a week ago I had no intention of trying out WoW again after 2 years of abstinence, but somehow I got lured in. A good friend of mine just resubscribed to the game and he offered to recruit me and level together with triple experience. As it happens we are both PvP nuts, and both planning on making 19 twinks. (I had 4 horde twinks on my old account) I took my computer over to his house for afew days and we played a fair bit and what suprised me so much was how easy Blizzard had made the game, I mean mounts at level 20?? The triple experience was incredible and we both hit 32 yesterday. I'm playing a fury warrior (soon to be arms) while my friend is rolling a frost mage.

It feels weird having been lured into playing WoW in such a short time, and I kind of feel bad because I was looking forward to playing Allods Online a lot and making videos. I am still planning on doing that, but I doubt I will have time to play the CB2 or OB, however I will definitely start a character at launch. Lastly, not sure whether I mentioned this earlier but I also bought COD4 last week when it was sitting at 30 USD, been playing that a fair bit, and boy is it fun. Mainstream casual gaming times ahead. :P

Exciting and engaging post title

Finally finished school. Now have 2+ months of FREEDOM (Conditions apply) May be time to get something that resembles a tan. :P So yesterday I finished downloading Allods Online and had time to make this video:



Pretty fun game and amazingly nice graphics for a free MMO so looking forward to release!
My computer slightly broke a few weeks ago, so I reformated it (Unfortunately lost a tonne of Photoshop files + pictures + word files + everything) + installed Windows 7. Everything is about 6x faster as a result so downloading big game clients is a joy. (For now at least)
Will be posting about the usual stuff at the usual irregular times from now on. :)

Youtube partneship and some more AFK

Just yesterday I received this + an email from Youtube saying I was able to apply for a partnership. There are benefits with going with it such as a ridiculously small amount of money coming in, and that my videos actually legally belong to me. At the moment I am thinking of waiting until I start playing Allods, then take them up on their offer. Mum, I'm moving up in the world!

Also have my final secondary school exams over the next three weeks so I'll probably trolling your blogs for a while but not posting on mine. :D

1/2 Done

Gday guys, well I'm halfway through my final exams. I've just finished my Mocks and now have two and a bit weeks before my final exams.
I haven't been playing any games really, I've been trolling the Allods Online forums a little and getting pretty excited about the game. There hasn't really been a great deal of information released on it but as the Russian Open Beta started today I'm looking forward to an influx of great screenshots and videos.

So time to go outside now :P
Really looking forward to getting into some gaming for the nest 2 weeks or so :)

Tis gone

Well, after getting the blue screen of death over and over again, my dad took my computer down to be repaired. A week later they sent me my computer back, saying that I can get all my information back, ie all my files, games etc, and all I needed to do was enter my windows xp product key. I spent a good deal of time looking for it but stupidly I had misplaced it, and now I have the disk but not the product key. So it looks like not only have I lost all my games and files, but also I don't even have a proper OP as I'm on a 30 day trial or something right now. Its a huge pain, especially considering all the files I had (WoW, RoM and all my Photoshop stuff) but that's life. Time to go through the trekload of posts from the past week in Google Reader. :P

One poor sonnet would kill it stone dead

That's the kind of thing you put in when you are thinking of a post title and a movie is playing in the background.
This post is going to be a random splurge, as I know how popular that is on the interwebs, but its my blog and I'm trying to avoid studying.

First things first: I have 4 weeks of school left! Surprisingly I'm not getting a huge amount of work, probably as all our teachers expect us to be studying/revising like crazy, which I'm not doing too much of. During the weeks leading up to my exams though I have committed to removing my computer and preventing myself from even checking my emails. As it is, I waste an insane amount of time on the computer and to get any work done I'm going to have to throw it out for a few weeks. If I get a TER of 80+ (In the top 20% of the year 12s) then I'll be able to get into most graphic design courses around, but my predicted TER mark for the first semester was at 77.5. This is extremely low compared to most people around me as some consider it a disgrace to get below 90. However, my marks for all my subjects have improved and hopefully, with a bit more effort I'll be able to get my desired TER. However, some time in the future the blog and my Youtube page will go quiet for a couple of weeks.


Boring stuff out of the way...I have been playing a fair amount of CoS over the past couple of days. The game kind of reminds me of the mood of LotRO, where sometimes I felt like just wandering around and exploring, content to put leveling aside for some time. As I discover more of the world I'm becoming more interested as the game is both extremely beautiful and wonderfully detailed. It would be nice if there were a few more NPCs in the cities to give it a bit of life as it can be strange walking into a city square and there is only a dozen people standing around in the middle of the day. I'm loving the quests more and more as a couple of times now I have been given a quest which requires me to solve a riddle which actually requires me to read the quest text and think about what to do. However, like I said in my previous post, this area has likely been polished like crazy to reel in potential subscribers. We'll see how it develops.

Lastly the game is now 100% free to play with no cash shop whatsoever, so it will be interesting to see how long it takes for one to be implemented. I heard somewhere that a new company was taking over the game so who knows...perhaps everything is going to change??

Lastly lastly, I have fiddled a bit more on my Youtube picture and hopefully it looks a bit better.

Till we meet again, my friends.

What I'm up to...

I haven't been playing many games lately and nothing really solidly at all. Unfortunately all my hopes of the RoM endgame have been dashed with my guild being a major let down. Apparantly I'm in one of the best guilds on my server but they are terrible at communication and have no real organization. I really want to do some of the tougher instances but not enough people are on when I play, so the only solution is to be on all day every day to raid. Its makes it even more frustrating when they don't have a fixed time when they try and raid. So RoM really isn't working out, as the guild is sucking, and the solo end-game is nonexistent.

In other news I have been playing Half Life 2 which I borrowed from a friend, and am having a great time. Unfortunately, all these years of junky MMOs means even the simplest puzzles often take a little while for my feeble brain to solve. :P Nevertheless, its hugely atmospheric, even though I have only played an hour or so.

Lastly, I'm in the closed beta of the long-coming MMOFPS: Huxley and enjoying my time quite a lot. The game looks fantastic and a whoel lot of fun at the moment. The Unreal type PvP is a lot of fun (When I'm not lagging to death) so this looks like the game I'll be playing the most in the near future. I might be breaking an NDA here but I made a first impressions video of Huxley on my youtube channel and in that I breakdown some of the things you can expect in the game.

My baby's first birthday

Well I'm a bit late but I just realized that this blog has existed for over a year now. It seems forever since I first began writing, and looking back I'm really glad I did. I'm not sure whether my writing now would have been as bad as it was back then if I hadn't done this blog, but I like to think so. :P
Hmm, that's assuming it has improved at all, eheheheheh.
It sure had its ups and downs, and long absences but we made it.
Normally people would go about quoting how many views they've got, and how many comments but I stopped using the counter on my blog a long time ago. So I really have no idea how many people visit this blog, but nevertheless its comforting to talk to empty space and imagine someone is there laughing at all your jokes. *cough* This is getting embarrassing...

Because its nostalgia for me I'm going to go through the ages, talking about how the blog developed and linking embarrassing posts.

June 3rd: My first post. An innocent beginning into the bright harsh world of the internet.
June 7th: My first venture on youtube, and added a short-lived feature of featuring youtube videos on my blog.
June 8th: Myself being an experienced blogger of five days I felt it necessary to impart my knowledge with the inexperienced horde.
June 18th: Realizing my destiny of blogging about games.
July 8th: Talking about WAR, and getting my hopes bloated on hype.
August 3rd: Only about 19 years now...
Sep 7th: It didn't work out. /sigh
Jan 21st: Mm, not bad, lotta brown buddy.
Fed 24th: Discovered the game that would make me a youtube celebrity :D (Yeah right)
March 15th: Still playing it, my record is 6 wins against my brother in just over a half hour. Great game. :P
April 9th: RoM marathon, good times
May 2nd: New record is over 12 million I think.
June 4th: I didn't do that well in those exams, and completely forgot it was my blog's birthday +1 day.

Well that was interesting. I'll see you in another year. :D

Sorry

Having massive problems with firewall, can't post anything but short posts...trying to fix it :(

WARNING: This post may contain some bizarre and nonsensical elements

Finished. Done dusted. The End. Exams are over but I begin school again on Monday so... :(
Yesterday while I was minding my own business and not doing any study I chances to hear some eerie music emanating from the study. I go and investigate and behold I find my little brother playing Runescape in all its wonder and glory. With. My. Dad.
Yup, my little brother playing Runescape with my male parental figure. Just thought I would share that as a little insight into my personal life.

But onto what I really want to talk about. If I had to draw a 'fun graph' of my time in RoM it would be like a kid on a trampoline who had drunk far too much red cordial. That is to say, big highs and big lows. And lots and lots of them. The reason for this is that the leveling system in the game is severely stuffed. As you level you will often hit huge leveling walls where you are simply forced to grind out daily quests until you level and more normal quests are made available. It would be alright if this only happened occasionally but, unfortunately, this happens continually in RoM. Almost every level now I get a massive boost as there are plenty of quests to do and the xp comes easy, but before long they all run out and I'm sitting halfway through a level with nothing to do. Then I have to spend the next 5-6 days grinding to the next level before I get another big xp boost.

The reason for this is easily explained: the developers want to make money. By slowing the player down they are encouraging them to buy some xp pots from the shop and hurry it all up. The longer the player plays the game, the greater the chance that they will buy something. However, there is a slight upside to all this; daily quests do give tokens which are essential in the end game. All the top players will tell you that you need to do as many as you possibly can to be prepared for the raiding and such. But while doing this daily quests may give us a benefit in the endgame, personally I would just like to actually reach the endgame before I die from smashing my head against the wall in frustration. Mum is already beginning to complain about the holes.

And in conclusion to this bizarre and convoluted post I leave you with another skull picture!

Updates

Exams in just a few weeks now so starting to get frantic with the study. Right now I'm spending almost no time at all playing any games at all except for an hour or so on the weekend. I've been languishing at the same level on RoM for a couple of weeks now and really feel that I'm not getting anywhere. Even why I do find the time to jump on I often get a ridiculous amount of lag and waste a lot of time when I'm killed by lag: it just makes the entire process a lot harder. On the other hand, I have started working more in photoshop as its easier to jump on that for a while and try and make something to relax. Speaking of which I have decided to most at least one of my photoshop efforts every week probably on a Saturday, just to track my process and hopefully motivate me to think up new things and improve my skills.


Time to go and do some study. *sad face*

Follow the meme

Just thought it would be fun, and because I always like to follow the crowd, I decided to follow the meme.

First MMO Played?
WoW...back in the days when I got the 10 day trial off of PC User nd started my entire MMO craze.

First Character Class/Role Played?
A dwarf Warrior which I player to about level 15 in WoW

First MMO Subscribed For More Than A Consecutive Year?
Technically my Dad was subscribed to it but there it is...

First MMO You Fell In Love With?
WoW wasn't really a love, rather an obsession and huge fun. LotRO would probably be the one where I stopped one moment and thought 'I really love this game'

First Guild You Really Felt Attached To?
Unfortunately I have a pretty bad experience with most guilds, but I did join an epically fun guild in WAR which closed down after a few months due to lack of players.

First Character/Game You Leveled To End Cap?
LotRO, Dwarf Hunter, possibly to only level 50 Dwarf hunter in the game. It was a huge achievement for me as at that time I played very little, but managed to get there in 9 days play time, which was very quick compared to the average time for most players.

First “Wow” Moment In A MMO?
Probably in LotRO. I had a rubbish computer at the time and so could only play the game with the very lowest quality possibly, in a way this was good because I wasn't distracted by the visual candy. I remember completing some quests in the Epic book line in a great group and I was thinking 'Wow, this is the most fun I have ever had.' To this day I haven't had more fun then I did at that time.

First MMO You Burned Out On?
Probably LotRO, there wasn't enough content at the cap except for the major instance which my guild didn't run often enough.

First MMO You Followed Avidly Prior To Launch?
WAR, I had such great hopes for that game. Someday I hope to return with that same excitement.

First Time You Felt Truly Noobish In A MMO?
Lets just skip this question...

First MMO You Went Alt-Crazy In?
WoW, had four crazy twinks and about 3 other characters

In review

Well, looking back at my previous posts yesterday I reckon I was getting pretty mad towards the end of it. I didn't manage to play for 24 hours, in the end it was less then 20, but nevertheless it did seem to take a millennium. By the time I went to bed I had gone 40 hours without sleep and when I woke up this morning I felt even more tired then when I went to bed. 40 hours may not seem like a huge amount, but I got to bed at 9 most nights and sleep for at least 10 hours every night, so it was quite a long time for me.

But lets talk about the game. I never really got bored of RoM as nearly the entire time I had some quests to do, likely thanks to Frogster adding a whole lot of content to the 30-39 bracket. At one point I just dedicated a few hours to grinding out 100 pieces of meat for my 10 daily quests. Towards the start I did pretty well for myself and didn't die once, and then all of sudden they came fast and furious. A few times I was killed by lag, once I was killed by an elite guy in a quest which I didn't realize was meant for a group, and I was also killed by an area with an INSANE amount of mobs. I'm talking about having to kill about three mobs to move a tiny distance, and these mobs were tough, very tough. As quests get sparser it grows more important to be able to hand them in without 70% of it going to your experience debt.

Throughout the whole time I completed innumerable amounts of 'kill x' 'collect x' quests but there was a good variety of mobs which kept it relatively interesting. I've said it before, but I must be different to a lot of other people because I prefer the 'kill x' quests to any other. I'm starting to think that I have already developed a habit of thinking that these quests will give more experience. At the moment mobs about two levels above me give approx 200xp, with mobs my level giving 100xp. This is tiny compared to the quests which require me to kill these mobs which doll out 8-13k experience. I enjoyed my time a lot, when I got utterly tired I put on an audio CD which got me through the tough times, and overall I went from 29(almost 30)/25 to 34(almost 35)/25. If it took that long to level that much, then I'm pretty apprehensive about 40-50 :P

Oh and:

My record is 22k :D

Its done (8.15pm)

After its ups and downs, distractions, and hallucinations I can now finally lie down and relax. I am done. Nothing else matters now. It was fun most of the time, at others utterly frustrating but ultimately rewarding. (???) OK, I can't write any more, I will talk more with more elaborate explanations of the goings-on, and expect a video soon. Lastly, you know all those people who tell you not to do this kind of stuff? Listen to them. And then do it anyway.

Rprtng n (2.15pm)

WAIT! Its not over yet! Only six hours to go. Unfortunately RoM decided to work again so once again I was drawn into the game. I'm really beginning to feel that the deep plot and storyline that follows the quest-lines are what keeps me coming back, and perhaps had a hand in forcing me into this stupid decision. I'm also finding the combat is incredibly varied, even if you only press THREE BUTTONS FOR HOURS ON END.

Soemthing, something, fail (11.00am)

Just got back and logged into RoM. Was immediately hit by 5k ping and a Cyclop monster on steroids. I helplessly hit a few buttons and waited to see if anything registered. I got my answer a minute later when I caught up with time and found my poor self once again KBL (Killed By Lag) something that is becoming all too frequent in this game. RoM is just getting unplayable for me during any time when other people are playing. Weekends are unplayable, and the holidays are likely to be unplayable and this is just ridiculous. Something needs to be done about the stability of the servers and there certainly should be more to accommodate the large interest in the game. I picked 'International English' as my ideal server type-thing but all the servers available to me are located in Europe....???
The amount of times I have been KBL is obscene and what makes it worse is the experience debt which is just getting bigger and bigger and taking longer to burn off. /rage
Thus I am abandoning my 24 hour vigil of RoM, and widening my horizons ie. playing Stronghold with my brother. Ah well, finally I get to play something that I am good at :D

reportign in (sometime around 9)

OK, taking a break to go to Church on Easter Friday. RoM was getting ridiculously laggy to the point where it was unplayable so hopefully by the time I get back it will run smoothly. Don't worry, I'll make up for it.

Repoorting in (7.15am)

Gone is the cold, cruel dark of the night as the sun rises and life begins once more. Have spent a lot of time riding around on my 1-day mount which is a life-saver. I think the problem is now enduring the game for another 12 hours, rather then the actual sleep deprivation/tiredness. Stupid impulsiveness and sibling rivalry. Going to have brekkie now, and strive forth again. Ah the wonders of sleep deprivation. Oh, I dinged 33 in the past while and about to ding 34.

Reporting inners (5.15am)

Ah, the joys of an early morning start. I recently finished grinding 100 pieces of meat for 10 daily quests ready to hand in later in the day. I'm feeling pretty samey once again, although I am barely halfway through this. Man, this isn't so hard! I thought being a hardcore gamer meant dedication, sacrifice, and stuff...doesn't seem that hard. Hmm, I feel slightly let down now, I thought this was going to be tough, but I am starting to wish that I had picked some other game then RoM. Time to make meself some brekkie. My marathon seems slightly tame now because some of my guildies have been on a lot longer prior to when I got on and they are still playing. *sigh*