Dreams, Warts and Punishing Games

One nice thing about being all grown up and feeling reasonably satisfied with one's job, love-life and financial situation is a complete lack of nightmares. I used to have those until just a few years ago. You know, those childish ones. Zombies and shit. The bad thing about not having any nightmares is how my subconscious makes up for it by dreaming up a whole lot of seriously weird shit. All the time.

One recurring dream involves me being seriously late for school. I'd get up reluctantly, hop on my bike and get my ass to school, only much, much too late. Heck, sometimes I decide I cannot even be bothered and I just ride to the nearest park to read comics and tell my parents I was in school all day. I used to do that sometimes. The fucked up thing is, I haven't been to school in well over a decade!
But I'm not just late for school. Some nights I'm late for work! I actually dream about driving to the editorial office, grabbing any random computer and finishing up my articles. But I'm a freelance games journalist and I can't stress the freelance part enough. I have never met any of my employers face to face, let alone set a foot into one of their offices!

And when I'm not late for stuff, I'm moving. With Claire. Into the most ridiculously large, luxurious houses, surrounded by miles upon miles of amazing landscapes. And every single one of these places come with a kickass kitchen. I know, because that's always the first thing I check. You see, I'm happy in Nottingham, I love our little home and I don't wanna move, but a kickass kitchen would be one of the things that would make me want to leave this place. My family used to live in an estate big enough to qualify each and everyone of us as the murderers in an episode of Columbo. I don't miss it, I don't care much for material goods that go beyond gaming hardware, but it looks like my subconscious has decided otherwise. Then again, my subconscious seems to be a bit fucked up these days, anyway. The most recent "we're living in a nice big house" kinda dream got interrupted when one of my friends I know through work showed up in those red Baywatch trunks, asking us if we wanna go to the beach. And no, I don't swing that way as far as I'm aware and I don't know wtf he was doing there, but I didn't go back to sleep for the rest of that night.

Speaking of things that are fucked up: My body. Now, if you've never seen me, but you know I write about games for a living, then you'll know what I look like. I look like somebody who writes about games. For a living. At home. It doesn't leave much to the imagination. I don't trim my facial hair to perfection like those guys in the homoerotic shaver commercials. I don't buy products containing Q10, Aloe Vera, bumblebee testicles or whatever the fuck kinda shit they're putting in that stuff today. I don't moisturise.
When I'm at home, my grooming habits leave room for improvement. But I draw the line at warts. One day I woke up with one of those fuckers right on my damn forehead. I can't deal with that kinda shit. I refuse to walk around like Obi Wan fucking Kenobi.

The real reason why Episodes I-III sucked

So I went and bought some Bazuka. What a fucking stupid name. The manual is actually a huge collection of warnings in red print. My favourite part is: "Do not put on genitals (sex parts)!" I dunno what's funnier. That they're telling me not to put wart medicine on my cock or that my cock is a sex part. Oh well, so much for my plan of applying it to my dick, then slapping it against my forehead a few times.

So I laughed at the instructions, chose to ignore them and put a load of that stuff right on Obi Wan. Holy shit. IT BURNS LIKE FUCK! Apparently the stuff is acidic and it just melts your fucking face right off. The next 5-10 minutes turned into a massive bitchfest, because the damn thing would burn like hell until it turned into a weird, crusty white booger. Well there's an improvement. Turn a small wart into something twice as big, gross and visible. Thanks, Bazuka!
You're supposed to just leave that stuff over night. So I left it alone for a day, damn thing went rock hard and then I was supposed to just pull it off. Now there's a fun sentence to quote out of context. Anyway...

The white stuff peeled off with ease on the edges, so I just grabbed it and pulled and pulled some more and OH MY FUCKING GOD I CAN SEE MY SKULL! That whole damn wart was completely dried up and stuck to the white film I was peeling off and suddenly I had this gaping hole in my forehead. And that wasn't even the fun part! You see, in order to completely remove the whole thing and prevent reinfection, you're supposed to apply a new layer of that shit after peeling off the first one. I filled up the wart-hole with burning, acidic goo!
I have stepped on broken glass with my bare feet once. Broken my wrist, torn my springs, got a huge-ass tattoo, watched the European Song Contest. But nothing quite compares to the sensation of putting Bazuka on a bodily crevice, which should not even exist in the first place.

I don't really know where warts come from or why the fuck I suddenly got one. And right on the god damn forehead at that. But that kinda shit made me think. I think next time, should I ever happen to get another one in this life, maybe it really isn't so bad. Maybe some off-looking bump isn't as awful as the sensation of searing, screaming pain that comes with trying to remove one of the damn things. I mean, it works for Christian Eyewart Bale, right?

He speaks through his wart when he's Batman.

Also, Dark Souls. Particularly this shit:

And that asshole:

But most of all this fucker:

You know, I really liked this game. The parts I have played so far were fucking difficult, but after enough practice, I managed to finish them all. Then I came across that stupid giant butterfly. It's a fucking butterfly for fuck's sake! What can it possibly do to me? That's what I asked. Damn thing came flying up to me and I asked: "What can you possibly do to me?" And it insta-killed me with some giant green laser beam.

The 'Wandering Demon' on the 2nd picture follows a relatively simple Zelda-Style pattern and mostly uses two predictable attacks. Easy, right? Well, that's until you screw up and get hit. You don't just lose a heart or some shit the way you do in normal games. You fucking DIE!
And don't get me started on that armored dickhead in the third picture. That guy's armor is about as difficult to crack as it looks and that giant, petrified cock he's swinging, is very capable of taking you out in a single hit. Which makes armor and health potions a bit pointless, but Dark Souls isn't exactly about fair boss fights.

I know I made fun of Claire for throwing her controller around when things didn't go according to plan, but last night I very much wanted to throw around my own controller a bit. The most infuriating thing is how insanely easy that last boss was when I finally got him. I'd run laps around him, he'd never hit me and three backstabs later he was toast. I had tried that exact same strategy all night long and he'd still get me every single time, usually taking me out with just one hit. Why the fuck he was so completely helpless on my final attempt, when I was about ready to give up for the day, I have no idea. And now I'm about to face an area, which, according to the community, is the most unfair and frustrating part of the entire game: Blighttown. I hope I have enough money for extra controllers...

On a happier note: Coop works and is awesome, within the harsh restriction of Dark Souls' summoning rules.

Claire summons me to join her game

...we defeat an invading player in much unwanted pvp...

...and then kill the boss. Yay!

Also, I think I need body armor for Hugo. Look at this:

-Cat

More Dark Souls

Ten hours and 31 levels into the game I'm seriously hooked. I can't remember the last time a game has made me feel so skilled, so powerful after beating a boss monster, completing a dungeon section, uncovering a new piece of gear. At the same time, I can't remember any other modern RPG, which is so sadistic, unfair and downright humiliating at times.

A happy moment would be pulling off a maneuver like this:

He bleeds a lot, for a skeleton.

While it's certainly easier and a lot more comfortable to just raise your shield and wait behind it to deflect an enemy attack, it's that much more satisfying to parry a blow at just the right time, then one-shot the bad guy with a devastating counter-attack. It's difficult to pull off, it'll cost you a ton of health if you fuck up and it's rarely ever worth the risk unless you're really, really good at this, but it's oh so satisfying when it works. Impaling that sucker and pushing him off my blade with the heel of my plated boot sure was nice.

And then there are the dark, frustrating moments, often initiated by something freaky like this:

If it looks harmless, it can probably kill you on the spot.

Look at this bug-eyed fucker! He looks friendly, almost cartoony and perfectly harmless. He also releases a weird, grey mist with no apparent effect on your character. That is, unless you forget to move the fuck away from it or it will insta-kill you in mere seconds. No health loss, no chance to get away, you're fucking DEAD and then some. Yes, you're actually worse than dead, because you wake up cursed. Which is what happened to me. Being cursed means your health is capped at 50% of its regular capacity. Removing the curse requires you to buy an (at that point) ridiculously expensive item, which is also miles away from where you will respawn and from where you need to go in order to finish off the next boss.

When the curse hit me, I had no idea how to get rid of it and I hoped to walk it off, so I went right back into the dungeon again. And got poisoned. And we're not talking some wussy WoW-style poison, which lasts for ten seconds, turns your character all nice and green and does no real damage. That shit drains your health a LOT and it lasts FOR FUCKING EVER!
So I was cursed, poisoned and had another player joining my game without invitation. Because under certain circumstances it's possible for people to invade your game and attack you.

So I ran for my life, chased by various instakill bug things and plagued rats and an enemy player, my health capped at 50% and constantly draining from poison and my maximum amount of health potions still capped at ten. And I ran and ran and ran some more until I came to a door and bumped into this asshole:

It's not rape if you shout 'surpriiiiiise!'

This picture probably won't give you a good idea about the guy's actual size, so look at this:

Just one of those legs could feed Fred Flintstone for nearly a week.

Charming.
With my health permanently reduced to half its regular amount, every encounter became potentially deadly. Strong poison at reduced health and a ridiculously small amount of potions? Relatively certain death. Some high level asshole with no such problems running after me to kill me? Stand still for a second to catch my breath and I'm toast. And suddenly: Boss. Now combine all these problems and the game doesn't simply become insanely difficult, but fucking unfair.

The funny thing is, I took that dragon down to half health before I kicked the bucket. The enemy player got kicked from the boss battle, the poison wore off when I was down to my last two potions and then it was cursed me on low health vs some fucked up boss known as the 'Gaping Dragon'.
My death resulted in a quick Google search about curses in Dark Souls, as the game doesn't do shit to tell you how to rid yourself of those or any other afflictions. Then I had to spend a whole lot of time running all the way back to the cheapest NPC who sells the item needed to break curses as well as farming enough to afford a second one of these items, just in case. Then I had to run all the way back to where I was.

And of course the very first thing that happened when I finally made it back to the dungeons was me getting cursed again. Thank fuck I had a spare cleansing thingie. And the fucking dragon kicked my ass. Fought him like a pro when I was cursed, the next time I had ten potions and maximum health and the bastard just sat on me, taking me out in one hit. So I respawned at the beginning of the dungeons and so did every single monster along with me. Again and again.
When I finally killed that damn thing I tore my shirt off and watched as an instant layer of thick, curly hairs grew all over my chest and I opened a window and waved my cock at strangers passing by our house, for I had become more of a man than I ever had been.

I have learned how to parry enemies and one-shot them in return. I have fought my way past those cursing, bug-eyed fuckers and looted a ring that drains life from my slain enemies. I have slain the gaping fucking dragon.

Every area I've been through up to this point feels like cake now. I'm definitely feeling progress there, not only because my character and my gear are getting more powerful, but also because I'm starting to learn what I'm doing. But a whole new portion of the game awaits and it's gonna be so much harder than anything I have done thus far. I foresee a whole lot of dying. I can't wait!

-Cat

The Slowpoke's First Look at Dark Souls

When being a freelance games journalist is your one and only job, it usually means you crave attention more than money. This is definitely the case for me. Unresolved childhood issues or some shit. Point being, I'm not exactly wealthy. My budget for non work-related gaming is rather limited. And when buying a brand new game means eating nothing but canned spaghetti and toast for a week or two, you think long and hard before any major investment. Which is what kept me from buying Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition.

The one thing I knew about the game, other than it being a very half-assed console port, is that it's one of the most difficult, punishing games in existence, aside maybe from crazy Indie stuff like Super Meatboy or I Wanna Be The Guy. And one thing I know about myself is that I have zero patience and a very low frustration threshold.
The game looked awesome. Videos on youtube, screenshots, it just looked incredible. The atmosphere, the item design, everything about it appealed to me. Expect, of course, how every review, every video, everyone who talked about the game kept stressing the fact that you will die. A lot. And not just that: You die and all monsters respawn. You die and you lose all the experience points ('souls') you had collected right before your untimely demise and the only way to get it all back is by fighting your way back to where you died. Without dying again.
And if you're the kind of guy who will repeatedly slam his fist into a once expensive, fully functional G15 Reloaded when a game pisses you off, then spending 40something Quid on the most difficult game of the decade is probably not a wise thing to do. And so I passed.
Until last night. Game's 11 Quid now, I had a bit of money on the side, I was bored, I went and got Dark Souls. Holy fuck.

Before I get into the actual game, let me say a little something about 'Games for Windows', which is required in order to play Dark Souls: If I had to choose between testicular cancer and having to use 'Games for Windows', I would probably need a few moments to make a decision. It took me several hours to get the fucking thing up and running, thanks to super awesome and helpful error messages such as this one:

"Oh hey, something went wrong. This is me giving a fuck! Hahaha! *shrugs*"

This is so unbelievably pointless and stupid, I couldn't make up a bigger pile of useless bullshit if I tried. Attempts to reset the password were interrupted by, "This is not a valid Games for Windows account". Using the same email to register a new account resulted in, "This account is already registered, please input your password." I could write another ten paragraphs about the shit it made me do, telling me my account was banned (it wasn't), my password wasn't secure enough, my password had too many characters or my password had illegal characters (spaces) in it. How Games for Windows forces me to play my English game with an English IP on an English Steam account on my English copy of Windows 7 in fucking German, because I registered my Xbox account in Germany about 7 years ago - and you can't change the country in your registered home address. But let's get into the actual fucking game.

After an incredibly cool, visually stunning intro, which made absolutely no fucking sense, I was greeted by this blurry, pixellated mess:

If you play PSP game on a PC monitor, the result will look more or less the same

While the game allowed me to go fullscreen from the default, ugly 1027x768 windowed mode, all it did was upscale the whole thing without giving me proper HD. It looked, well... shit. What's worse, the game is capped at 30 FPS, which is tolerable for a console game, but not so much on a PC game in the 21st century.
Strangely enough, the only way to get proper uncapped FPS at full 1080p is through user-generated mods. You'd think that a game, which had been out on PCs for nearly a year, had been patched in that regard, but the only way to fix this whole mess is a trip the the Dark Souls Nexus and a bit of .ini tweaking.

It was well worth the effort, though, as suddenly my game looked like this:

The game starts off with you waking up in some prison cell, surrounded by mindless, shambling zombies. You're a little less mindless than the rest of them, but just as undead and unpleasant to look at. Some mysterious stranger throws you a key, you fight your way through the prison and as the game progresses, you realise that you're doomed to rise from your grave, again and again, whenever you die. And dying is the one thing you do more in Dark Souls than anything else. The game didn't do much to tell me why any of this is happening. There's no hand-holding, no obvious pointers or quest markers. Just some guy telling me there are two bells hidden on opposite ends of the game world and I need to ring them both to end my curse. Or something to that extent.

You walk into other undead guys in varying stages of despair and insanity. You're not some unique, legendary hero, but one of many, trying to get out, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. In fact, the game is played online and every so often you will see other players appearing like phantoms around you. You get a glimpse at them, at what they're doing, see them like they're part of some parallel universe, only to watch them fade again.
That doesn't mean there is never any interaction with other players. You can leave notes in the game world for other players to read. You can warn them of traps, tell them about hidden treasure, make the journey a bit easier for those, who follow in your footsteps. You will see lots of notes from other players, some of them more helpful than others.
Sometimes you'll come across bloodstains. Inspect them and you'll see how another player died in the exact spot where you are now, helping you avoid repeating their mistakes. You may also temporarily summon another player to fight by your side. Less friendly and helpful players may decide to invade your game and seek to kill you.

I'm only a few hours into the game and I've already lost count of the many times I got killed. There's a well at the beginning of a game and some player left a note: "Try jumping". So I've spent the next five minutes trying to jump in there, which required quite a bit of effort and ended with me dying at the bottom of the damn thing. I don't know what I expected. A skeleton attacked me while I climbed up a steep cliff, I tried to fight the sucker off, got careless and fell to my death. No rails, no invisible walls to protect me. I got smashed to pulp by a minotaur. Got grilled by a dragon. Got trampled by a giant armored boar.
And every single time I had to fight my way back there, kill all the monsters again, re-gain every bit of progress. I can't remember the last time dying had felt so painful in an RPG. In most games you'd simply reload your savegame. Dark Souls autosaves. You die, the game gets saved. No quickload here. You spend half an hour sneaking past a dragon, surviving the effects of some nasty poison you caught from a plagued rat, only to get stomped by this asshole:

This bastard is incredibly fast and can about two-shot me.

Aaaaand respawn! Kill all the monsters on the way to the boar again, sneak past the dragon, survive the filthy rats, battle your way past the boar's minions, try not to use up all of your ten health potions (they're capped at ten at this point, I can't recover health any other way) and then win the fight against that god damn boar. Holy shit! It sounds insane, it sounds absolutely awful and atrocious and I couldn't blame anyone for not even wanting to give it a shot. But I kept getting up, I kept coming back for more punishment, again and again until eventually I managed to kill the fucker. And I took his god damn head!

I may look retarded now, but I made that damn pig my bitch!

The sense of achievement was immense! The first time around, just actually getting to the boar seemed almost impossible. The fight against that damn thing felt like something I couldn't pull off in a hundred years. Then I kicked that thing's ass. And everything I have seen after killing that sucker was so much harder than all the stuff I had to go through to get to this point in the first place.

I still fully expect to run into that impenetrable brick wall, where frustration gets so overwhelming, I just won't find the will to keep respawning until I figure out the right strategy to kill a boss, eliminate a huge amount of monsters or sneak past some deadly trap. I did need a break after the first few times I got my ass handed by some stupid minotaur. But for some fucked up reason, I keep coming back. I'm having fun! I can't really tell whether that's because or in spite of all the punishment. There's a constant sense of dread, I might run into an ambush or get killed by a trap at any moment and lose a lot of progress. It's a great adrenaline rush, which makes for a nice change from the cozy sense of security that comes with a quicksave button.

Things aren't going quite as well on the Bear front. She wanted the game, too. Controllers are flying through the living room. Cats have been knocked off the sofa by flying water bottles. Our living room is a scary, dangerous place right now. I'm offering my help (that co-op feature is there for a reason), but so far, the missus remains stubborn. Oh well.

-Cat

Baby Talk and Caturday Aftermath

Something weird has happened to me last night. You see, if there is one thing I hate more than Zach Braff, parsnips and the shit, which John Michie considers acting, it's children. They're loud. They're sticky. They ask stupid questions. They get away with pointing out the obvious ("Mommy, why does that woman have a mustache?") in public and I don't. I'm not saying I never had a go at creating my own family expansion pack in the past, but that's a depressing story for an entirely different blog. The point is, I'm not a fan and from day one, Claire and I had an understanding that there'd be no babies. Ever.

In fact, not wanting babies was our thing, if you can call it that. We'd watch stressed out parents as their kids throw one tantrum after another at the supermarket and we'd laugh at them. Yes, we're dicks like that. And there are plenty of great reasons why I don't consider the two of us suitable parent material. The whole sitting around naked and playing video games till 5 in the morning, every day of the week thing. The 101 ways of having fun with a toothbrush (you don't wanna know). Staying awake in bed all night, talking about which of our (female!) friends we'd invite for a threesome. Pissing contests. Buying bigger and scarier reptiles all the time. Our weird jobs. Our constant cashflow problems. Just to name a few.

But all trolling, stupid jokes and fretting aside, the whole thing is actually a pretty hot topic in our household, especially since the missus is notoriously late for her period. All the time. Every month. Or every two months, because sometimes she simply decides to skip one. I don't even know how the hell she's doing that, but it has happened a lot over the years and I just accept it without wanting to get into the science behind it. Some things I just don't wanna know.

But here's the crazy part. I had a lot of time to think about the whole thing, about us, our situation and when the whole conversation came up again, I said: "You know, if it were to happen, I'd just go for it. In fact, if you asked me if I wanted to, I'd say yes." And to my great surprise, her answer was: "You know, I've been having similar thoughts lately."
This is a whole new situation for me. I have never, not in a million years, felt any desire to start a family. I've been with a few girls in my life, but my feelings for them rarely went beyond, "I care about you, but if you died, I'd probably hump your younger sister."

But some messed up part of my brain was doing the reality check and assessed the situation with The Bear. We've been a couple for over a half decade now. We've been through every crisis together, be it financial, emotional or due to lousy health. And we're more in love than we've ever been. We tell each other every day. Not because it sounds nice. Not because it's what couples should do. We look at each other, when we say it. We kiss. We mean it.
And all cheesiness aside, why the hell not? We pay our bills on time, we have our jobs, we're taking good care of our home and our animals - the thought simply doesn't scare me or stress me out anymore.
Now now. There's no need to panic. We're not actually planning anything right now. But it turns out the whole thing is not as 'off the table' as we had thought it would be.

As for the whole Neverwinter exploit drama:

The official website has a funny new post, which contains this little snippet here: "...this past weekend, the Neverwinter community helped us to identify a major exploit involving the Auction House and Astral Diamond Exchange..."
Right. This past weekend. Ironically, this exploit had been in the game since day one and even then it was neither new, nor was it entirely unknown to Cryptic. Because the exact same exploit happened in Star Trek Online a year ago:

What you see here is a list of auctions, which have been listed at a negative buyout price. And, believe it or not, it works exactly like this: If you hit the buy button on any of these offers, you will receive currency rather than spend any. And get the item on top of it.
People could list these negative prices and generate currency out of nowhere by utilising a bug through the so-called 'Gateway', a website, which allows you to handle all of your auctions, among other ingame functions. It also fails to check whether you try to list stuff for prices below zero. And the exact same thing has now happened in Neverwinter.

Oh well. Last Sunday, the exploit had gone viral, every moron, their mothers and their dogs had abused said exploit and then they started handing out free cats, aka one of the most expensive, powerful pets in the game. The exploiters did. To random players. And Cryptic went for a 7 hour rollback, which undid the whole "Caturday" thing. They're handing out free capes as an apology, too:

Nope, not a joke. This is actually happening.
Of course this does absolutely nothing to stop players who were already abusing the broken gateway before the exploit had become public knowledge. Cryptic state they're going after these guys individually, braggarts on reddit claim they've not been caught and/or received 72 hour bans, while all their ill-gotten gains had been safely put away on mule accounts, which had not been wiped, banned or affected in any way whatsoever.

So who is telling the truth here? Are Cryptic actually capable of catching all the exploiters or are they as powerless as the supposed exploiters claim to be? Fuck if I know. And frankly, I don't even give a shit. Unfortunately, I'm feeling a bit lonely with that attitude right now.
When you take a look at the forums right now, the Neverwinter Facebook-Page or their twitter, you'll see a whole lot of raging nerds demanding a complete server wipe. And for all the wrong reasons.

Don't get me wrong. What they want actually makes sense at first glance. They argue that the rollback didn't affect those exploiters, who muled off their currency. They also argue that people have been (and still are) using other exploits, which allow groups to skip dungeon bosses, one-shot dungeon-bosses, do all kinds of shit to broken and bugged dungeon bosses for loot. They also claim that with so many people owning vast amounts of currency and/or powerful endgame items, they control the market, they set the prices in the auction house and they own the entire economy.

And here's why it's all bullshit:

Rollbacks affect all characters, mules or otherwise

When the entire game was rolled back to state before the exploit went viral, of course it affects every single character on every single server. For some messed up reason, people are under the impression that characters got rolled back individually. You can even see that in zone chat and on the forums right now: "Why did my character get rolled back when I didn't exploit?" "Why was only one of my characters rolled back?" It doesn't work that way. The entire game had been reset to an earlier state in time, specificially, seven hours before the servers had been shut down. And that affects every single account, every character, the auction house, the whole economy. If you haven't touched your character within these seven hours, then the rollback won't have any noticeable effect on you, but it still happened. And no matter, whether exploiters kept all their currency on their main characters or spread their stuff over a hundred different mule accounts - if they did any of this within the last seven hours before shutdown, it has been undone. The only mules who (supposedly) weren't affected are those belonging to exploiters, who have been abusing these bugs long before they had become public knowledge. And that's an entirely different matter. Cryptic state they're going after these players, while the exploiters say they can't be caught. And you want a rollback, because some random stranger on reddit claims he got away with it?

A wipe won't magically fix every exploit in the game

Many people on the forums demand a wipe, because lots of people exploit the crappy AI and the broken dungeons to their advantage. It's perfectly possible to skip 15 minutes of trash battles in the Lair of the Pirate King, simply by jumping through some rocks, which have no collisions enabled and allow you to take a major shortcut. The final boss encounter in the Spider Temple takes part near a gaping pit. I tanked that boss, got knocked down into the pit, the boss jumped after me, we both died, end of dungeon. Thing is, I get to respawn and the boss does not, so my group still won. Also a known exploit by now. People are rightfully pissed off at these exploits and demand a complete server wipe, because players abusing said exploits are gaining an unfair advantage.
See the hole in that logic?
THE FUCKING EXPLOITS ARE STILL THERE! What exactly would a wipe do to fix that? 2-3 days later people would farm the endgame dungeons all over again, use the exact same AI and map exploits and control the market all over again.

The value of gear on the auction house makes no difference to an individual player

Here's a fun one: Some people are annoyed with the huge amount of epic endgame items on the auction house causing their value to drop drastically. If there's only one Magical Longsword of Greater Kill Everything +12 on the auction house, you might be able to sell it for several million astral diamonds. But now there's a whole lot of people farming dungeons, there's a hundred of these longswords up for sale on the AH and as a direct result of the greater supply and weaker demand, prices have fallen from X million diamonds to something around 50k. Boo, right?
Wrong!
Sure, you might have looted one of these swords and now you're pissed off because you can't sell it for very much. But you don't have to! Let's say you want to sell that longsword, because you're a wizard and you'd much rather have an epic new staff or whatever the fuck you casting pansies are into these days. And you're in luck! In an economy, where magical longswords cost next to nothing, due to their massive supply, it's a safe bet that equally powerful magical sticks are just as cheap and available. Sell your longsword for a crappy 50k and go buy that fucking staff! No harm done! Just because you're working with smaller numbers doesn't mean you can't buy the same amount of stuff as before.
And this also works the other way 'round:
Let's say some greedy exploiter runs around with several billion diamonds and uses them to buy all the epic shit on the AH, then puts it all back up for a hundred times their original price. Nothing but ridiculously expensive items everywhere. Awful, right?
Wrong again! Go play a fucking dungeon. Loot some fucking epics. Takes about twenty minutes. Put the fucking epic on the fucking AH and BAM! Charge 20 million diamonds for it. If some rich fucker dictates the prices, you too can sell your stuff for millions. And when you sell off unwanted epix for millions, you can spend those on the stuff you do want. The only thing that changes is the numbers you're playing with, but you're still trading unwanted epics for wanted ones through the auction house. Low prices, high prices, it makes no fucking difference.

Of course this does not apply to people, who only spend cold, harsh RL-cash on the auction house. If you're too stupid and lazy to obtain the odd bit of epic gear to generate some AH-currency, then higher AH prices will effectively force you to spend more real money to gear up. But honestly - if you never run any dungeons, why the fuck would you want epic items in the first place? What are you gonna do with them, stand around in town or run the odd foundry quest, which is so easy to solo, you could do it naked?

And then there is the usual amount of self-entitled dipshits, who spend well over 250 Euros on a Free2Play game, then decide they want their money back and every excuse is good enough. I had a good laugh at this sucker.

-Cat

Neverwinter Exploit Paranoia - How did QA even miss this?

The Neverwinter shards are down in order to stop an exploit, which allowed users to generate thousands of real US Dollars worth of ingame currency through a bug within the official website. Thousands of dollars, because said currency can be bought with real cash both legally through Neverwinter's website, as well as the ever-present goldselling platforms that provide players with currency through not so legit means.

This isn't the first time the economy has been drastically altered by exploiters, though. Until recently, a certain armor set would provide a buff, which allowed characters to dish out enough damage to one-shot just about every endgame boss in all of Neverwinter. A bug which had been known for about a whole week, had been reported multiple times, but rather than actually fixing the exploit and halting regular gameplay until the problem had been fixed, Cryptic chose to delete all forum threads mentioning the exploit and let it run its course. So how would this affect the economy, you might ask? Simple: Every piece of endgame gear can be sold on the auction house. And that's what the exploiters did, some of them claiming to have earned enough currency to sell it off to goldselling platforms for well over 6,000 USD.

How much of that is actually true and what's just exaggerated bullshit from people craving attention is anyone's guess, of course, as only Cryptic really knows what really happened and on what magnitude. The fact, however, remains that the exploit was there, it was known and it had been tolerated and ignored for days. If you do a Google search for 'Neverwinter guardian fighter exploit' you will find tons of recently deleted forum threads discussing exactly this problem. Websites such as elitepvpers still discuss the exploit in full detail. It was there, they knew, half the community knew, and Cryptic didn't care to fix it for a whole week.

Today people tripped over a whole new exploit, which incorporated the use of the 'Neverwinter Gateway', an official website which lets you take care of things such as mail, crafting and auctions without actually running the game client. Lots of people created near endless amounts of currency up to a point where some wisecracks started handing out free cats to random people. Which sounds funny if you don't really play Neverwinter, but basically it means that exploiters have spread one of the most powerful ingame pets, which normally costs around 20 USD worth of RL currency, around the servers to random players for free. And then Cryptic shut down the servers. I wonder if they would have reacted at all if the exploiters had not begun devaluating Cryptic's very own cash shop right there.

If you take a look at the official forum thread, provided you can even get into the forums at all right now, you'll see people losing their shit left, right and center. Half the community demands server-wide character wipes, the other half already demands their money back, threatens to never touch Neverwinter again and of course there's the usual customer rights debate going on, with people threatening to take this issue all the way to their respective government if their characters will be in any way affected by possible wipes and rollbacks. Almost makes you wish people would get that involved when some real problems are going on in the world.

Personally, I don't think Cryptic would have bothered to make this problem official in the first place, had it not reached a point where the auction house came crashing down, people were being handed  free stuff by the exploiters and every last idiot realised that something was seriously wrong. The one thing that pisses me off is having to read stupid crap like this:
"Thanks for your support and patience as we continue smoothing things out during Open Beta!"
Open beta, my fucking ass! You're charging people 200 Bucks for founders' packs, 40 Bucks for a mount, five bucks for a respec, but when you fuck up and fail to cover it all up and/or delete all evidence in time, you apologise by telling your paying customers it's all open beta. Where's your fucking QA department? What the hell where they doing the whole time? What happened to all the tickets and forum threads which reported all of these exploits before they got out of hand?

It's not the end of the world to me if they wipe the whole thing clean and go for a fresh start. I had many hours of fun, for as mediocre and disappointing as the whole experience was. But I don't think I'd want to start over. There are countless other, cheaper, better games out there. But who knows. Maybe they're just gonna ban the exploiters (ban accounts in a fucking F2P game, DAMN that's gonna sting!) and leave it at that. Might stick around for a bit if they do. I knew Cryptic/PWE were scumbags when the lockboxes ruined Star Trek Online for me, so it's not like any of this is a huge surprise.

Oh well. Tera is F2P now. Bored me to tears when I tried the closed beta, but there's nothing to lose here but time. And I have plenty of that. Onward!

-Cat

If my pets could talk

If you're a regular visitor of this blog, then you're aware that I live in some kind of zoo. There's our cowardly python Choky, our giant monitor lizard Hugo Bosc, as well as two insanely annoying cats. Our black cat Jiji would follow you everywhere around the house, demand attention at all times and if you dare feed, touch or look at any animal in the house that isn't her, she'll go berserk on your ass. Then there's our slightly retarded Birman cat, who also happens to be one of roughly 25 billion animals on this planet, who had been named Kira. She's a special kind of stupid. She's the kind of cat that goes to sleep on a top shelf, then rolls off and crashes down on her face five minutes later. We're assuming she didn't get enough oxygen when she was born. She doesn't respond to her name. Or much of anything, really. We used to think she might be deaf.

But if I had to pick a favourite pet, my vote would go to our bearded dragons. If they could talk, they probably wouldn't. They're very simple creatures. If they're cold, they move to the warm side of the tank. If they're hot, they move to the cold side of the tank. Put food in front of their noses and they'll eat. If you pick them up and carry them around the house or even around town, on the bus, to the house of a friend or family, they put up with it. That doesn't really make them the most exciting pets around, but certainly the easiest. If you're the kind of person who would eventually return their bearded dragon to the shop, saying you no longer have the time to care for it, you're a lying scumbag. They're the easiest pets I've ever known, provided you wouldn't count fleas, roaches and maggots as pets.

The rest of our animals more than make up for the quiet, peaceful time we're having with the beardies. Every one of them is the center of their own little universe and they don't always understand or appreciate when you try to take care of their basic needs. I'm going to describe a situation with them as it happens all the time, every week. The added dialogue is entirely fictional, but you've probably guessed that from the headline.

Me: *knocks on the monitor lizard's tank a few times, waiting for a reaction* "Hugo? You awake in there?"
Hugo: "..."
Me: "Your water bowl is empty. Can I open the tank and take it out?"
Hugo: "..."
Me: "Okay, I'm going to open the tank now. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not bringing any food. I just want to replace your water."
Hugo: "..."
Jiji: *jumps on top of the vivarium* "Whatcha doin'?"
Me: "Not now, Jiji."
Jiji: "Whatcha doooooing? Hey! I'm up here! Look at me! Hey!" *bats me on the head*
Me: "Fuck off, Jiji! I'm busy!" *opens vivarium by a crack*
Hugo: *rushes out of his cave, attempting to jump me* "Who are you? IMA FUCKING KILL YOU! Get away from my tank! Get away! Now! I'm dangerous! I will bite your fucking hand off! I'M GONNA EEEEEEEAT YOUR FAAAAAACE....!"
Me: *pulls hand out of the tank* "For fuck's sake, I just told you! It's me! I'm only here to replace your fucking water, you moron!"
Hugo: "Oh hey, it's you! Got any food?" *flicks tongue at the glass door of his tank*
Me: "It's not feeding time, yet. I'm just here to replace your water. Can I come in?" *puts hand back in the tank, reaching for the water bowl*
Hugo: "FOOD!" *bites hand, refuses to let go*
Jiji: "Ha! Should have paid attention to me instead! I would never bite you!" *bats me on the head*
Me: "OW! What the fuck Jiji, you bite me all the time! Let go, Hugo!"
Hugo: *has difficulty speaking, what with him eating my finger and all* "Fhoogh!"
Me: "What?"
Hugo: *lets go of my finger and clears his throat* "Ahem... FOOD!"
Me: "AHA!" *pulls away finger*
Kira: "HELP! OH MY GOD, HELP!" *screams her head off in the kitchen for no apparent reason*
Me: *runs to the kitchen and sees Kira as she steps our of the litterbox, dragging a huge turd after her*
Me: "AAARGH! Get back in the litterbox! Get back in the fucking litterbox! NOW!"
Kira: *panicks* "AAAAAAAAAH!" *runs off, leaving a trail of shit down the corridor all the way to the living room*
Me: "Stop! Get back here! Don't go into the living room! Get off my desk! Get off the fucking rug! NO!"
Kira: *cleans her ass by dragging it across the rug, leaving shit everywhere, calms down*
Me: *grabs paper towels and disinfectant, proceeds to clean up shit stains on hands and knees*
Jiji: "Whatcha doin'?"
Me: "Fuck off, Jiji."
Jiji: "Hey! Look at me! Whatcha doooooing?" *bats me on the head*
Me: *sprays Jiji with disinfectant* "GO! AWAY! NOW!"
Kira: *casually walks by as if nothing ever happened*
Me: "Go fuck yourself, Kira."
Kira: *ignores me, doesn't even seem to notice I'm talking to her, eats cat biscuits*
Me: *finishes cleaning up, notices python wrecking her tank*
Choky: "FOOD!"
Me: "You have refused all food in nearly a month, stop putting up such a show."
Choky: "Nooo! I'm really hungry! For real!" *flicks tongue at me*
Me: *defrosts a mouse, offers it to Choky with a pair of tweezers*
Choky: "AAAH! Don't hurt me!" *disappears into her cave*
Me: "It's a mouse. You said you were hungry."
Choky: "..."
Me: "Look, are you coming out now or what?"
Choky: "I don't trust you."
Me: "We've been through this! You just told me you wanted food. This is your damn food! Come and eat it already!"
Choky: *pokes head out of her cave* "Wiggle it."
Me: "What?"
Choky: "The mouse. Wiggle it."
Me: "But..."
Choky: "Just do it! I can't eat if it's not wiggling."
Me: *wiggles*
Choky: "I'm not hungry."
Me: "But you just..."
Choky: "You're not wiggling it right. That mouse is clearly dead! I cannot eat a dead mouse! I need to honour my ancestors, hunt and kill my prey! You wouldn't get it..." *disappears into her cave*
Me: *slides open Hugo's tank* "Hugo! Food!"
Hugo: "FOODFOODFOODFOODFOOD!" *gobbles down the mouse in about 0.38 seconds*
Me: *proceeds to walk off*
Hugo: *scratches at the glass* "Oh hey! My water bowl is empty! Could you give me a refill?"
Me: *pets Jiji, who is asleep on top of Hugo's tank*
Jiji: *claws and bites my hand, hisses* "Fuck off, I'm trying to sleep here!"

I should have bought a dog and left it at that.

-Cat

So I had a first look at the endgame in Neverwinter

Epic weapon, shield, plate armor... I think I'm getting there! :)

After finally reaching the level cap, I had a chance to take a closer look at the endgame pvp and the 'epic dungeons'. While the former should be pretty obvious, the latter means you're replaying all of Neverwinter's dungeons on a higher difficulty for epic item tokens. A bit like grinding heroics on WoW, except once you're done, you're done. You're not gearing up for any super challenging raids. Some might cringe at that, personally I'm glad the game won't force me to team up with 9-24 morons for all the best stuff... yet.

The dungeons are split in two tiers, both of which require a relatively humane 'gear score'. "You must be this awesome to enter." I could queue up for all of the T1 dungeons the moment I dinged 60 and was eligible for many of the T2 ones, as well. The game really isn't very restrictive here. Having no idea what to expect, I queued up for the epic version of the Cloak Tower. Access was pretty much instant (yay for being a tank!) and the whole thing was a faceroll of Lich King proportions. People didn't talk, let alone greet one another, everyone just rushed ahead like crazy, the whole thing got roflstomped in about 15 minutes and I got my first ten or so tokens. The most "expensive" items, such as the plate armor, cost 60 tokens, so it's entirely possible to grind the full T1 set within a day or two. T2 items require 2-3 times as many T2 tokens.
Of course I cannot say how much more difficult the second epic dungeon tier may be in comparison to tier 1. However, there are no lockout timers or anything, meaning you can cherry-pick your favourite (or the fastest, easiest) dungeon and just farm it all day long, get all the tokens you need, gear up, done.

As an alternative to gearing up through dungeons, you may also farm glory points in pvp and earn your epic gear that way. Now, if you're expecting (somewhat) balanced pvp gameplay and varied battlegrounds the way you may know it from the more popular MMOs out there, you're in for a bit of a dissapointment. All you get is a handful of 5on5 domination-style (capture and hold) maps. Which, of course, isn't necessarily a problem in itself, if the actual pvp is fun, but in its current state, it really isn't. Neverwinter seems to be balanced around pve - which I like. Unfortunately, this also means that tanks can charge an infinite amount of times with no cooldown in pvp, certain damage dealers can two-shot other classes, whilst combinations such as tank vs healer are absolutely atrocious. It doesn't help that, for whatever reason, people crash and disconnect on a regular basis (only in pvp, what's with that?) or simply go afk and refuse to help when they're on the losing side. And sadly, it's relatively easy to tell you're losing straight away - your team might start with 0 clerics, the opposing team has 2. In most cases, this means certain defeat.

On the plus side, the amounts of glory gained are very generous, the required glory points for gear are very low. A day's worth of farming can easily net you the whole pvp set.
So, both endgame pvp and T1 dungeons are a quick and easy affair when it comes to gearing up. T2 dungeons? Gimme a day or two to find out.
I'm not entirely sure what to think of all this just yet. On the one hand I'm happy it's so easy to get all my stuff, because I HATE having to spend countless weeks chasing after stupid virtual crap, which gets outdated with the next content update, anyway. On the other hand... what am I gonna do when I'm done? Foundry? What for? Yes sure, players tell fantastic stories, blah, blah, blah, but at the end of the day I'm just hacking and slashing my way through a dungeon full of monsters which drop useless loot and reward no more experience points. And reroll? With a 100% linear story and no alternative starting zones? Not that great, either.

I fear for Neverwinter's longevity.

-Cat

Neverwinter: Endgame time!

FINALLY! I was about ready to plough on through to level 60 on Monday, but work came first. Then I got invited to a podcast the same night, so no gaming there, either. Tuesday? FFA open beta, servers dead, couldn't get in, then lag was so bad, it wasn't playable. Today? Broken quests, dungeons I could not enter, server dying in the middle of a boss battle, all queues for dungeons, skirmishes and pvp disabled, foundry disabled... THE PAIN!!

Now I'm finally level 60 and unlocked the cheesiest reward yet: The 'Epic Hero' title. Funny, but I think I'll pass. From here on out, it's pretty much the same thing you get in every MMO: Farm tokens for endgame gear, split up into two tiers thus far. This happens either through pvp or so-called epic dungeons, which are extra difficult versions of all the dungeons in the game. Sadly, as the queue system is currently disabled and I cannot sign up for any of this content, I can't really tell how fun this stuff actually is.

But I'm very positive about the whole thing. I feel confident with my character, I have tanked most of the dungeons on non-heroic mode and so far, I haven't heard any complaints. What's more, I'm actually having fun tanking! I didn't enjoy doing so on WoW, at least outside of the guild, because people are too whiny. They complain when you pull too fast or too much, they complain when you don't pull enough. They complain when you give the healer time to regenerate mana, they complain when you don't wait. On top of all the drama that goes with leading a bunch of morons through dungeons, a tanky playstyle usually isn't very fun. On Neverwinter, I get to charge from one baddie to another like a maniac, beat them all the way across the dungeon, send them flying and make them my bitch.

Is that gonna be enough to make epic dungeons enjoyable? Fuck if I know. Depending on how difficult they turn out to be, random groups might not be able to tackle them at all. The whole thing might be a huge faceroll if they're too easy. Can I actually obtain all the gear I want at a humane pace or will it take months to get all the good stuff? I really don't know what to expect and right now, all I can do is wait for queues to be fixed. Well or wait for the guild to catch up with me level-wise, but right now I'm not sure if they're really all that keen on staying on there. We'll see.
Another problem I'm facing right now is this: What else is there? The foundry is scaled hideously towards level 60 players right now, fighting boss baddies takes forever and makes user generated content somewhat tedious. Sure, they have to keep things interesting for when you're fully geared up and all, but seeing my most powerful attacks shave off about a pixel of some random pirate captain's health bar isn't very fun. And I have very little desire to roll another toon, simply because the story is 100% linear. No different starting areas, no branching storyline, it's all gonna be exactly the same, the odd foundry quest aside.
For now, I'll wait and check out the epic difficulty dungeons and see how I get on. I'm not too sure about this game's longevity right now.

By the way - I've done a lowbie dungeon-duo with the Bear. I'm converting the video right now, I'll put it on my channel over night and post it here tomorrow.

-Cat