Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl Coming November 2021

We heard back in February that the next Pokemon title for the Switch would be remakes of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl, something my daughter and I had been waiting for.  As a follow on, we have now been given a date for the launch of the remake.

Sinnoh is returning

The launch date for Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl is November 19, 2021.

The Nintendo site has an updated descriptions of how they plan to recreate the original Nintendo DS experience and what to expect.

In addition, the other upcoming Pokemon title, Pokemon Legends: Arceus also got a launch date this past week.  We will be able to experience this “bold new direction” for the Pokemon series come January 28, 2022.

So we have some old and new Pokemon experiences coming up.  I am definitely up for Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, though I hope the release doesn’t overlap too closely with Diablo II: Resurrected.  While we don’t have a firm date for the Diablo II remake, it was said that it would be available near the end of 2021, and no studio wants to launch after Christmas, so November seems a likely time for it as well.  We shall see.

Punching Trees Once More

I posted about Minecraft last week and this week we are playing it again.  My blog posts can still exert some influence I guess.

Specifically, Skronk and Ula saw the post and it stirred a bit of the desire to play again in them as well, so Skronk fired up a Minecraft Realms account and created a fresh world.  I may have written about the immersive nature of the more distant horizon when playing locally, but playing with friends tops that.

Skronk sent me an invite and I was able to pop in and find the town he had set up shop.  It was nestled in a taiga biome.

Finding Skronk

In a fresh new world you have to start from scratch.  Gone was all my diamond gear and that bow with the infinite arrow enchantment.  I had to beat on a tree to get some wood to make some tools to harvest some stone to make some slightly better tools to dig a mine to start looking for iron.  And then there is food and shelter to find and the monsters of the night to avoid.  Things are more deadly when you’re just waving a stone sword about and have no armor.

Creeper got me

I helped build things up a bit in the new town, doing what I always do.  I dug down to level 12 to start mining.  I put in a couple of rows of potatoes away from the villages for food.  I built an auto-furnace down in the mine once I had enough iron for hoppers and some buckets.  Lava was readily available.  With some iron I made some clippers to shear the local sheep.

Once things were settled a bit I decided to go on a walk about.  I packed up some supplies and headed east, then north, then back around to the west, coming over a hill to find a village in the plains to work with.

A new town discovered

It had water, animals, horses, and even some sugar cane near by.  So I starting in on my usual tasks, digging a mine, making some beds, and walling up the place to protect it.  Protection is necessary with the pillagers about.

Pillagers show up

I had done an okay job on the perimeter, but a couple found their way in and I had to fight them.  Fortunately, by then, I had iron armor on and a shield, so was able to block their crossbow attacks as I closed in to fight them.

Skronk had turned raids off, so the big pillager event did not happen.  That was a bit of a relief as, even armed up a bit, I wasn’t sure I could manage that.  A pillager raid was a handful even back in my diamond armor on the old world.

So it goes.  A new world to play in.

Another Minecraft day passes

There is some joy starting fresh and building up again.

WoW Classic Stress Test Redux

Last week Blizzard ran a stress test for WoW Classic, inviting thousands of players to try and log in to see how their new server architecture would stand up to the kind of loads expected.

Classic is as classic does

And while lots of people pounded the server, and problems were found… which is why you do a test… those problems meant that not everything they wanted to test got covered, so they announced another test, which started yesterday.

We have just wrapped up the first stress test for WoW Classic and while we understand the concerns that a number of you have mentioned, it helped us in many ways. Testing the login process is certainly an aspect that is very important for us to explore and we did gather some valuable data yesterday, so we appreciate everybody who logged in or even attempted to do so during the testing window – you have helped us prepare WoW Classic for release.

That said, because of some of the issues that were encountered, we were not able to test other aspects that we’d planned for. As a result, we will be doing another stress test on Wednesday, May 29 from 2-4pm PDT. The stress test realm will become available at 2pm PDT and the level cap will be increased to 10. For access, we will be including everybody who was invited to the test on May 22. Similar to last time, the stress test realm will continue to be available until 4pm PDT on Thursday, May 30 so there is additional time to check out the starting experiences.

Please keep in mind that while more issues could impact the play experience, it is very important to perform these tests so we can learn about and fix as many of them as possible before the release on August 27. We thank you for your continued support and we’ll see you back on the WoW Classic stress test realm very soon.

Last week the test kicked off at 4pm Pacific, which is just about when I get home from work most days, so I was able to jump right in as it started.  Yesterday the test had been going for nearly two hours before I was able to join.  But clearly I wasn’t late, they held a queue for me to test.

More like the good old days

I gather from reports I saw later that things did not start off very well, but they had settled down by the time I got there.

The queue started big, but kept on counting down.  I let it sit while I got myself a snack and did a few other things.  It took 24 minutes, or about half the estimated time, before I landed on the character select screen.  I don’t know how things were going for the first two hours, but that didn’t seem like an unreasonable performance.

However, in trying to select my character from the last test to join the game I was given the error that the world server was down.

The world server doesn’t like me

I exited the client, deciding to go through the queue again, thinking that I might at least help test that again, but the queue was gone.  I went straight to the character select screen.  I was there so fast I thought something was wrong so I quit the client completely, relaunched, and logged in again.  Still no queue.  I guess the queue was done.

Back at the character select screen I saw the “World server is down” message on the first couple of attempts to get on the server, but then it let me in and I was back to running around the night elf starter area.

Running around

Running is the operative word.  The experience, as you have probably heard, and no doubt expect, is very different from WoW today.  It definitely moves at a slower pace and a lot of what now helps you along with quests is absent.  I had to remember how to get quests to even show up in the on-screen tracker (shift-click) so I knew what I had going.  However, it isn’t as slow as it feels at first.  You will notice that you are moving along.

Getting to quests requires to to read the quest text and figure out where you might need to go… and some of the descriptions are a bit vague.   I largely worked on distant, foggy memories of where I recalled going back in the day.

And, of course, it was crowded.  The new layering system limits the total people you are competing with on quests, but it still (rightly) allows a lot of people to show up around you.

Lots of people in the spider caves

This has strange effects.  For kill quests you can group up and share the credit.  For quests that need drops you can group up, but only one person can get a drop per kill, so that is sort of break-even.  But if you need to go collect something on the far side of a bunch of hostile mobs you don’t have to worry about having to cut your way through, the path will likely be clear.

As mentioned over at Blessing of Kings, the first rule or WoW Classic seems to be that you can only talk about WoW Classic.  Thee general channels were full of people gushing about WoW Classic or complaining about the state of the live WoW game and so on.  This does get tiresome and I ended up leaving most of the general channels just to avoid it.

But in the groups I joined the talk, while also on the topic of WoW Classic, was more interesting.  I ended up at one point with somebody who had not played since classic, somebody who quit at Cataclysm, somebody who only started during The Burning Crusade, and another who started during Wrath of the Lich King.  The latter two were especially keen to be able to experience something they felt they had missed.  I was the only one who had played all the expansions.

I am certain my grouping is not a statistically significant sample size, but it does seem that WoW Classic isn’t going to simply strip people from the live servers.

I got through the quests in the first area and moved along to Dolanaar.  There I found the crowd ahead of me, as well as the expected set of quests.  They did just dump quest givers on you at random back in the day.  In live they have that honed down to just a few quests that guide you along.

Standing in Dolonaar

I wasn’t sure I wanted to just play through the whole started zone to level 10, so I ran on to Darnassus to see that.  There I decided I would try the traditional run through the wetlands to see if I could make it to Ironforge, then take the tram to Stormwind.  That was probably where the real crowd was.

I was only level 5 at that point, and couldn’t remember when that run used to be viable, but I figured I would give it a shot.  I went through the portal thingy and down to the dock to wait for the boat.  I was joined by a group of three naked night elves.  I had forgotten the “get undressed so your gear won’t take damage if you die” part of the run.  Oh well.

Standing at the very end of the dock I managed to end up inside the boat model and fell off the end of the pier and had to swim back to land.  My naked friends at the end of the dock encouraged me by yelling, “Get Rekt Alioto!” but I made it back to the boat in time.

The boat waited for me

One of them also offered to sell me gold, 100G for just $5, which I promptly reported.

Get Rekt Yourself Beeflicker

It looks like we’re going to get all of the aspects of the old days in WoW Classic.

The first boat takes you to Darkshore, where you have to grab the boat for Menethil Harbor.  It was even there waiting for us.

The boat is over there!

However, it was just a tease.  It sailed off before we could get to it.  But I am glad it was there when we arrived if only to remind me where it docks.  And it doesn’t take much time for a round trip.  The first boat takes longer as it doesn’t zone for most of the trip.

Soon enough I we were on the boat to Menethil Harbor and I was running into the Wetlands.

Into the Wetlands

I did not get very far before I got caught.

Barely out of Menethil Harbor

But dying right away wasn’t all that bad.  That puts you at a revive point that is well down the path to your destination.  If you’re willing to take the 25% hit to gear durability, you can carry on from way down the road, well past those raptors and such.

However, I attracted the attention of mobs past that point as well.  I was so much lower level than the mobs that they didn’t display their level, just a skull.  That meant that my aggro radius was huge… another WoW thing, aggro radius based on the difference between your level and the mobs level.

Why spider? Why do this?

I was starting to think that maybe level 5 was too low of a level to attempt the run.  Maybe it was a level 10 thing.  Still, I did move the ball forward a bit.  I just had to get back to my corpse as wisp and could start from there.

Corpse got pretty far

Another run and another death and I figured I might be better served trying something else lest my gear go red before I made it to Ironforge.  I only had 2 silver in my pocket.  So I went back to the night elf starter area and tinkered around there for a bit.

Given a taste of WoW Classic, I am still eager for its official launch in late August.  It is, as I said, a different game in many ways, and much slower and more deliberate.  We shall see if Blizzard can handle the load, though I expect that we’ll see another stress test before launch.

Plans for a Summer FML League

The time has come, the spring Fantasy Movie League season is coming to a close, and the summer season is upon us.  It is time to fire up the TAGN League for summer blockbusters.

I actually feel like we’re a week too late.  Maybe two weeks too late.  Regardless of what the calendar makers say, for me summer runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day in the US.  That is certainly when the big summer movies hit the screens and have their runs.  A big Memorial Day release can sometimes still be found on budget theater screens at the far end of summer.

For whatever reason, FML ran the spring league for 14 weeks, putting it through Memorial Day and the weekend beyond.  That means the summer league doesn’t get to start with big box office draws like Aladdin, which launched last week, and Godzilla: King of Monsters.

Add in John Wick 3 and Avengers: End Game having already launched and you start to wonder if we’ve been robbed of the big weeks one expects during summer.

But we shouldn’t fret.  I think we got all of those early because the summer is still full of titles that will no doubt bring in big numbers.  Headliners for some of the summer weekends include:

• June 7 – X-Men: Dark Phoenix
• June 14 – Men in Black: International
• June 21 – Toy Story 4
• July 5 – Spider-man: Far from Home
• July 19 – The Lion King
• August 2 – Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

That is a lot of sequels, spin-offs, and remakes.  But there are also the smaller titles that could break out and become horribly over-done dynasties of their own some day.  And then there are the horror movies that always seem to do much better than I predict.  Will they fool me again this summer?

Anyway, my tentative plans for the summer league include the following:

• Thursday night lock so we all have to pick before the preview numbers hit
• No empty screen penalty
• $2 million bonus for the worst performing film

I am sold on the first one, while the other two I am putting out there just to shake things up a bit.  If people scream in the comments about either I may put them back the way they were.

Otherwise things will be about the same as the last season I ran, including the main an alternate scoring method.

I had mentioned possibly breaking up the summer into three shorter sprints.  However, just because FML gives you a field that shows the duration of a season doesn’t mean that you can edit it.  It looks like we are stuck with 13 weeks unless I am missing something.

In the mean time the spring league looks like it might have a surprise winner.  Goat had led the whole season, only to be upset last week by Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex.  Goat (and I) bet against Aladdin, which went on to do better than expected, with an exceptionally strong Sunday.

I will post the winners for spring next week in addition to the opening week post for the summer season.

If you are interested in playing, I will post a link to join the TAGN league in the comments on this post and in next week’s post.  The links expire after a few days and you will need to create an account at the FML site to play.

I am also considering creating a Discord server for the blog where, among other things, movie discussion could be a channel.  Discord is light and, if you already have it, one more server on your list isn’t a big deal. (I actually created one ages ago, I’ve just never invited anybody to it.)

As always, if you have any suggestions for the season let me know in the comments.

Summer Fantasy Movie League – Now With New Rules!

The time of transition is here.  Our Spring Fantasy Movie League ended yesterday and the final scores were posted earlier today.  Now the Summer League is upon us, a time for new picks, new deadlines, and new rules.

Thanks to the changes that FML made earlier this year, leagues can go their own way.  Going with my whim and the results of a poll I posted l two weeks back, the TAGN league will be departing for the FML default to charts its own path.  I give you the summer season!

The rules for the season, as you can probably guess from the graphic above, are:

• No bonuses – Raw box office take only
• Early lock – Thursday at 9am Pacific Time

The early lock will keep people from being able to pick based on the Thursday night previews that are usually available before the standard 9am Friday lock time.  It will also keep the final theater count out of the running, since that usually doesn’t finalize until Thursday around noon Pacific Time. (New arrivals usually have a theater count before then, but you might not know which older titles are going to drop theaters.)

And then there is the no bonuses thing.  People seemed in agreement on cutting out the $5 million weekly perfect pick bonus.

But I also decided to go against the grain and kill the best performer bonus, which is $2 million a screen, so capable of adding as much as $16 million to a weekly pick, as it did with the Baby Driver lineup last summer.  I can see the upside of it, but I felt a no bonus league would be better, or at least more interesting.  We shall see.

There is still a $2 million per screen penalty for blank screens, but I did not add in a penalty (or bonus) for getting the worst performing pick each week.

The hope is for there to be more volatility and variety in the picks with less time to research without leading to insurmountable scoring gaps with the absence of the bonuses.  We shall see.

So if you are up for it, let the summer games begin.

The opening week of summer, coming after the three day Memorial Weekend is a bit of a let down.

Solo                    $514
Deadpool 2              $325
Adrift                  $215
Avengers: Infinity War  $167
Action Point            $143
Book Club               $126
Upgrade                 $62
Life of the Party       $49
Breaking In             $36
Overboard               $30
Show Dogs               $25
A Quiet Place           $21
Best of the Rest        $19
RBG                     $15
Rampage                 $7

There are three new movies on the list this week, Adrift, Action Point, and Upgrade, but none of them are in the summer blockbuster league.  The best of them, Adrift, only made it to third on the price list.  Instead Solo, now condensed to a single day, tops the list for the weekend, followed by Deadpool 2.  And I feel like Avengers is a better pick than Adrift for the pricing.

At the filler end of things is almost all of the same old stuff we’ve been looking at for at least a few weeks… aside from Upgrade, which made the filler end of things in its first week.  But it might be the wild card if it does better than the $2.5 million that the long range forecast has it pegged to do.

This week’s surprising bit is the return of the Best of the Rest at $19, putting it ahead of two picks.  When Best of the Rest isn’t the cheapest pick, it always makes me wonder.  If there is some movie that they expect will be better than others already on the list, why not just put that movie on the list?  And if there is not, what justifies Best of the Rest being more expensive than RBG and Rampage.

So those are the choices for week one of the summer.

If you want to join in, now is the time.  I will put a link in the comments that you can click on to get into the league.  You will need to create an account, but that doesn’t take much.

You also have an extra day to join.  On weeks that start with a Monday holiday all lock times are pushed back a day, so the lock time for the league this week will be the usual Friday at 9am Pacific Time.  Starting next week the league picks will lock on Thursday at 9am.

Spring Movie League – Kessel Also Ran

The time has come, the season has drawn to a close, the last week is over, it is now time to count up the final scores.

Yes, our Spring Fantasy Movie League ended with Solo: A Star Wars Story over the US Memorial Day weekend.

Alas, poor Solo, what went wrong with him?  Was Marvel Universe still too much of a draw?  Have we become over saturated with Star Wars movies?  Did The Last Jedi sour too many fans on the franchise?  Is Han Solo just not that popular?  Were there no back story questions we felt needed to be answered?  Did the whole thing feel like an expensive attempt to again validate that “Kessel run in 12 parsecs” gaff from A New Hope? Was everybody just out camping over Memorial Day?

Yes, there is something odd about the headlines decrying the failure at the box office of a movie that brought in over $100 million over the four day weekend.  But this is a Star Wars movie, and that means that there are expectations.

Still, some of us were not fooled.  Liore and I were discounting Solo in MCats Slack early in the week, where I was calling it $100 million over four days due to a lack of excitement in the force.  And I stuck to that, opting to anchor on Deadpool 2.  Liore couldn’t resist Solo though and anchored on it all the same.

In fact, in the MCats League I was the only one not to bet on Star Wars, which is why I won the week there.  In the TAGN League there was less enthusiasm for Han Solo, so seven of us went with Deadpool 2, though a couple hedge with a Monday Solo pick as well.

But in the end, while Deadpool 2 wasn’t even the winning anchor, it was The Avengers backed up by five screens of Book Club.  Deadpool 2 was second best and Solo was in third.  How crazy a week was this?

Sure, it was the pricing and studio predictions that set this course, but who would have pegged a Star Wars movie only running to $103 million on an opening 4-Day weekend?

And then there was the filler picks.  There was a lot of discussion as to what would be the best performer.  Rampage, A Quiet Place, and Life of the Party all had their fans.  Even Show Dogs, which was causing some controversy, had supporters.  But in the end, Overboard took the best performer slot, acing out Life of the Party.

But that didn’t make it a good pick.  It was better to have as much Book Club as could, it held strong from last week, then fill with just two screens of Overboard at the end, a choice it looks like only two people made.

Spring Week Thirteen – Perfect Pick

Nobody in the Meta League had the perfect pick.  The winner for the week was SynCaine, one of those who anchored on Deadpool 2.

1. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $91,661,374
2. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $85,559,599
3. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $84,922,565
4. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $82,869,211
5. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $80,463,749
6. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $80,463,749
7. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $79,848,296
8. Kraut Screens (T) – $78,075,953
9. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $77,414,439
10. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $76,334,572
11. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $76,334,572
12. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $75,485,422
13. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $74,869,036
14. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $72,970,209
15. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $71,451,624
16. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $69,176,242
17. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $68,730,172
18. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $66,575,638
19. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $65,051,142
20. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $62,496,157 (Did not pick)
21. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $60,209,580 (Did not copy picks)
22. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $41,139,005 (Did not pick)

The Meta League Legend:

• TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)
• MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

That was a pretty crazy shake up of the usual order of things, with Biyondios, Ben, and Corr way down the list.  SynCaine took the week, his Life of the Party filler lineup giving him the edge.

But the final season standings, with came out as:

1. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $1,461,821,220
2. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $1,436,682,416
3. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $1,420,901,968
4. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $1,405,745,374
5. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $1,388,655,028
6. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $1,381,421,102
7. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $1,365,385,176
8. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $1,357,376,973
9. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $1,342,783,242
10. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $1,302,008,386
11. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $1,289,493,645
12. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $1,286,471,231
13. Kraut Screens (T) – $1,226,445,994
14. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $1,216,573,742
15. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $1,178,875,806
16. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $1,173,846,467
17. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $1,166,013,150
18. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $1,152,016,914
19. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $1,122,435,526
20. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $1,108,293,580
21. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $1,095,907,569
22. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $994,744,898 (Adjusted for main pick)

Given far down the weekly list some top players were, there was very little change in the final ranking.  The week just wasn’t big enough to let people jump more than maybe one spot on the list.  Just $105 million for the perfect pick on a four day weekend with a Star Wars movie opening was not what I expected back at the start of the season.  Sorry Solo, you just didn’t give us the big, dramatic finish we were expected.  A metaphor for the film?

Anyway, congrats to Biyondios who won the spring season after passing Ben a couple of weeks back!  Victory is yours!

This is the end of the Spring season and the end of the Meta League.  With rule changes everybody seems to be going their own way.  So, if nothing else, I won’t have to color a bunch of letters every week.

A post will go up a little bit later for the Summer league plans and rules, with a link if you wish to join.

The Grind of Aslan

As I moved into the next zone at level 20 the game wrapped up its attempts to introduce me to things and settled down into some good, old fashioned quest based grinding.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but it is clearly THE thing for this point in the game.

I had finished up in the Silverspring zone, with its big city of Varanas… well, finished up to the extent I could, but more on that in a bit… I had at least started to out-level the quests… and moved on to the Aslan Valley.

No lions found so far

The first quest hub in the zone, Qilana Camp, set the tone for the zone by offering up two flavors of quest.  There are some story line quests that have you running about picking things up or interacting with various NPCs.  And then there are the daily quests which have you out grinding mobs for drops.

The story line quests add some variety, though they two generally include a step or two that involved slaying one flavor of MOB until you have acquired the specified number of drops.  The big problem for me with them is that they almost universally lead up to an end quest that requires a group to finish… a fact that the quest text doesn’t always clue you in on.

For example, after running a few errands for one NPC I hit a quest that was basically “cover me!” that, when accepted, dropped a group of aggro anteaters on me, including one elite.  I ran for it but there was no getting away.

Anteater swarm!

Death has a sting of sorts, in the form of xp and tp debt.  The game does give lower level players a daily item to clear out said debt in the form of an Atonement Voucher.

Debt be gone

Pretty much every story line quest has ended up with me needing to use a voucher.  Unfortunately, those quests are also the ones with the gear upgrades I could really use.

Unable to finish those up… grouping isn’t really an option as the zone has also been pretty empty for me as well… I have fallen back on the daily quests.  You can collect those from a couple of places, including the board in Silverfall.  There is a limit to the number of those you can run, but there is also a limit to the number of those I can tolerate in a single session as well, and the latter number seems to be smaller than the former, so the limit hasn’t really been an issue.

These are classic “grind for drops” quests.  Some of the drops are generic.  Killing boars drops tusks, killing anteaters drops scales, and so on, so that if you’ve been after that sort of mob for one quest you might have collected enough such items to immediately finish a quest from the board that wants those.

At other times you need to slay a specific variant of a given MOB in the zone.

Just Demon mane boars

The game does help you by putting red dots for those MOBs on the mini-map to help you find the right mob.  And with the Quest Tracker addon, you can look at the big map and get a sense of where you should be hunting.

Where the right anteaters live…

But one flavor of MOBs is generally mixed in with others of the same type… boars, bears, anteaters… so you may need to clear some of your target’s cousins out of the way.  And the variation in models is often subtle enough that you might not notice that you’re running after the wrong MOB.  The anteaters… what oddly aggressive and heavily armored variations of the species live in Taborea… are so close in model as to be indistinguishable to me, so I found myself running towards what looked to be the next one only to get into combat and find that it was not going to drop the item I needed.

So grind you likely will in pursuit of these quests.

Not that grinding is, as I noted above, necessarily a bad thing.  There can be a Zen-like peacefulness to it, just fighting one MOB after another, clearing a path around an area in search of drops, unworried about anything else.  Well, anything save your bags filling up.  Every MOB seems to drop something, and every quest drop goes into your bag, so inventory management will become an issue sooner or later.

I can do that for a while as I listen to a podcast or some such.  But it isn’t something that I can keep going at for hours on end.  And it isn’t something that entices me to log into the game.

So the time between my logging into Runes of Magic has been getting longer and longer as the prospect of hunting yet another flavor of boars or anteaters fails to spark any flame within me.

Is that Gevlon?

As such, I suspect that my time with the game might be drawing to a close.  I haven’t really found anything else in the game that holds my interest.  Crafting means a long harvesting grind, and why trade one grind for another?  The housing is mediocre at best.   And while I did give the dual class option a shot, I wasn’t too thrilled.  When you go into your secondary class, your character is effectively the level to which you have advanced it.  So while in my warrior guise I was level 20 or so, swapping out to the priest class… I thought having healing might be nice… put me back in gear and skills only suitable for the starter zone.

I went back to the started zone and did daily quests there, but my heart wasn’t in it really.  I tried finishing a few quests as a warrior, then swapping to the priest, and turning them in.  That helped move the priest along to level 10, but I decided I was better off just focusing on the warrior and buying potions to keep health up.

But the game is free to play, so coming and going as I feel the urge is part of the plan, right?  With no recurring subscription nagging at me I am free from worry!

Only Runes of Magic has found a way to simulate that all the same.

As I noted in my post about how they get money from players the RMT currency, Diamonds, figures prominently.  This issue gets forced because there are some things you cannot buy outright.  One of those items is bag space.  As it turned out, the extra bag space I rented ran out as I was playing over the weekend, prompting an immediate inventory management crisis.

So the question became whether or not to invest diamonds, which cost money, in another rental period or let things sit where they are.  I opted to let things sit until I felt the need to get back into the game.  And so it goes.

Still, I did have a decent time exploring a bit of an old MMO.  We’ll see if I get back to it again some day.

Memorial Day 2016

Reality in Afghanistan

My pain feels cold and selfish
My anguish very small
My reality insignificant
Compared to ones that fall
Young men with broken bodies
Their Comrades lie in sacks
Devastated parents
Their sons will not come back.

My pain will ease and lessen
My anguish slip away
Reality in Afghanistan
Two brave men died today
Young men with shell shocked faces
Growing old before their time
Are living breathing testament
To this shallow pain of mine.

Phil Williams
Bastion 1, July 2009
Posted at War Poetry