Soapbox #3: Busy...Busy...Busy....

Busy..Busy...Busy...
By Ima Drizzit

Wow the last few weeks for AC2 have been busy. We had a great patch with minor problems, Hero content information, and a server merge coming up.

I know quite a few people were saying they liked the patch and the changes were better than they thought they would be. Personally the most surprising thing to me is that the quests weren't solved in the first few hours of the patch. I think the new Artefon catacombs one took most of the morning to finish and one of the other one took a few more days than that. I know the low server populations make it harder to solve big quests, that have group creatures, but overall I think the difficulty is nice. It keeps us players busy for a while. Well those of us who give a rat's ass about the game at least.

Well we almost had a patch that with no hot fix. The issues were very minor this time thankfully. I personally feel this shows that Turbine is making an effort to eliminate any bugs in the patches. They made various pyreals stackable (thank Asheron for this) and unfortunately there was a small issue with Ferrous pyreals not stacking properly. There were some new Prismatic Guardians spawning on a land block near Arwic when they shouldn't have been. I was out there fighting them and those bastards are tough. The last thing that was fixed was a rouge Bloodstone portal ganking people near sanctuary. I never saw anyone complaining about this personally, but I am glad that they took something like that into consideration. I guess all the griping about Turbine not listening to the players is making them a bit more pro-active in some cases.

Last Friday night Citan posted the preliminary Hero system information. I like it and hope it really adds new depth to the post fifty game. It sounds like it has a lot of promise to keep people playing and enjoying their progression in the game. One thing that does upset me is that the level cap will not be raised. I was kind of hoping to be able to gain experience for some of my regular skills to get them to fifty, but I suppose being at forty-eight my attacks will have to do. So far the passive skills that were mentioned appear to be complementary to the characters and that is a blessing. If I can get my Berserker with some major max health and get that bad boy to 1000. That is a great step towards me living longer in a group. Add that 5000 health to my existing 1300 and maybe I will only need one healer to keep me alive instead of three. I know these skills are not set in stone and they could change them somehow, but at least they gave us the info and we now have a chance to comment and try to help shape the system for the good of the game and our enjoyment. I can't wait to get a list of some of the active skills they are kicking around. I just hope that they are worth it since each class only gets three active skills each. I have this small wish for a seven hit attack to round off my combo line with a twenty-five hit combo. I doubt that Berserkers will get that, but if I had a vigor healer I could do a lot of damage. As it stands now with someone healing vigor reliably I can do a lot, but I like the idea of an endless twenty-five hit chain, makes me kind of giddy.

The server merge is a topic that I am not to sure about yet. I am very glad that we will have more people per server after the merge. I am just afraid of how the merge will take place. Right now there are two options for it.

Option A: Change the appended text from CharName#CE to <Character Name> of <World name>. The major concern here is that some character names are long and appending world names will probably drive some of them over the text character limit of the UI. We can probably make adjustments on this so it displays properly. Players that are moved would have to make a decision on whether to change their name or not, but at least they wouldn't totally lose it.

Option B: Create two new worlds with two new world names, use the naming process in Option A, and let the rename option be used for everyone. Of course, this means there would be a huge scramble to claim names and people are already writing macro programs to do that, but at least everyone would start from zero on the names. We would also need to pick a time for the restart that gives both Europe and US players an equal chance at names on the new servers (many Euro players also have characters on the US servers).

I find that since I play on Thistledown anything I really say about wanting to stay there makes me come off as selfish and non-sympathetic to the servers that are being merged into mine. I mean, yes I want to stay on the world I love and have played on since I started AC1. Yes I want to keep my allegiance (what is left of it) in tact. But so do everyone else and that I can understand that completely. To me option A seems to be the easiest and less risky of the two. Option B turns me off because I don't want to have two brand new servers' names. The server names are like a piece of the games history, they have always been what they are currently and if we get new ones, then it should be because they added more servers to alleviate over population. It sucks that we have to shut some down for the time being, but hopefully we will see them all come back to us. Option B does seem to be the most fair, but the huge scramble for names when the servers come back up will most likely cause all kinds of authentication issues. That will just upset the player base more than they already are. I am leaning towards Option A, but I also want it to be fair to everyone so I kind of feel that I am being selfish in my choice.

I think cloning all characters on all worlds is kind of defeats the purpose of multiple servers. Yeah the two characters can become independent of each other and can end up being different, but I feel that it is a way for people to not have to level their characters again.

I am not sure why anyone would be a kingdom they don't want to be at this point. I mean they told us in advance when they were going to start charging for the reset and you had plenty of time to make your switch. I suppose people have their reasons, since this really does not apply to me, I have just accepted it.

I hope they really do find a way to merge Allegiance also, even if they go with option A and my allegiance stays together. I think this is the second worst side effect from the merge personally. Some allegiances are huge even though a lot of their players are inactive and are just there to provide rank at this point. It is not like we don't have the tools to put them back together provided everyone in your allegiance is active. We can export the allegiance tree to an xml file and print that. Then we can also setup a place to meet such as an allegiance hall and put things back together again. Yes it is a lot of work, but it is not like you have to write the whole tree down manually.

The worst side effect from the merge is the player name situation. We as players are all fond of our names. Some of us take pride in them and have had them for quite a while. They identify us to our virtual friends and families just like our real life names do to our real life friends and families. Appending the "of [server name]" is a good idea. I can see how some people would find that annoying, but thankfully we will get a chance to rename our characters. This was never possible in AC1 and I think it shows they planned ahead for stuff like this. Now we need to get MS to not ban people for bad names, but give them a chance to rename and that function becomes handy. I know some people are worried that griefers might try and steal their name. Some people are writing Macros to go into the game and get their name back for them. It is sad that we have to worry about these things at all. It is unfortunate that massive multiplayer online games have players that log on to solely make life miserable for others is a reality, because of this these fears are understandable.

This article has pretty much just recapped all that has happened. I felt that all these things have caused enough arguing already and decided to not gripe about them, but to give my opinions on them instead. Not that my opinion counts for much these days :-)