The only ones who are allowed to shoot are those who are prepared to be shot themselves.

Lelouch Lamperouge, Code Geass

Hello, Hola, Konnichiwa and Grüß Gott!

It’s been quite some time since I last posted something here on my little blog. There were various things that I did or had to do besides blogging. I’m gonna tell you a few of these things here:

Age of Conan
I longed for so long for this game. It was hailed as the true alternative to World of Warcraft. It had stunning graphics and an innovative combat system (at least on paper). It had storytelling (at least for the first 20 out of 80 levels). It had a PVP focus with sieges and mounted combat and whatnot (at least it was planned). But what truly happened was this:

May - the game comes out and 1 million players subscribe. Magazines give it the highest rankings. It is a blast to play the first 20 levels, with voice acting for every quest. As players realize that after level 20 all the voice acting is gone they are really disappointed though they cope with it. I for one didn’t really expect to have voice acting after the “tutorial” that was the first 20 levels.

June - players have to grind a lot, an aweful lot to get to the maximum level of 80. From level 50 onwards there were practically 5-10 quests per 10 levels that would give you 2, maybe 3 levels. The rest was pure, unfun, grinding.
Players at or close to level 80 want to do what Age of Conan was focused on: PVP. Yet there is no reward, no nothing, for doing PVP. Plus sieges are buggy as hell, world PVP is practially dead with every zone being instanced. Funcom says “dudes, we will get the big PVP patch out in june!”. Players wait.

July - while at the start healers seemed completely imbalanced, with having high dps and survivability through heals and tank classes couldn’t kill anything because of low dps, things changed when players discovered gems. Soldiers who socketed only +damage gems could one-to-two-shot everything in the game bar other soldiers. I had fun with my soldier for a few days doing this but it got boring pretty fast. PVP patch is still to be seen. Funcom says, early August is the new release date.

August - no PVP patch, no fix for the completely unbalanced gems. Players start to cancel their accounts. I do so too.

September - I only read the forums for this one but it seems sieges are still buggy as hell, PVP is unbalanced for healers again with gems being completely nerfed, all damage cut by 40% in pvp, but heals stayed the same. Plus raids are broken because tanks needed the gems to survive.

October: I am back to playing World of Warcraft and enjoy it a lot. Although I don’t want to raid anymore, I now focus on having fun with reallife friends in the game, doing the occasional 5 man instance, and a lot of PVP.

Work
Got a lot of programming to do with the new project. About 2 weeks every month I work for 50 instead of the normal 40 hours. Although that is most of the time only because I go home early most of the time in the first 2 weeks of each month, so I have to do the minus hours on the last two weeks so I will be at +/- 0 hours at the end of each month. The joy and pain of flextime.

Anime
I have been watching a freaking lot of anime in the last half year. Too much to count actually. Lucky Star, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Monster and some I forgot to mention (damn short term memory!). Especially Code Geass is the best thing since… a freaking long time. The storytelling is at the same level as Lord of the Rings and Babylon 5. I will write a post about the anime next probably.

Other stuff
I have been reviewing anime for Anifreak for some time now also.

You can count on more (more or less) interesting posts from now on again on this blog.

Sayonara!