Filed under “What the f- are they thinking?”

I got an e-mail a bit ago from SOE informing me that they are releasing a new all-inclusive box set of Star Wars Galaxies.

Really?  A new box set?  Seriously?  All-inclusive?

It has been 4 years since the last expansion to SWG.  Trials of Obi Wan, the expansion that introduced the NGE, was released in November of 2005.

Since then, there has been at least 1 other box set that was all-inclusive.

And nothing as been released since then… but they feel the need to release a new box set?  And what do you get for buying it?

A new 2-person vehicle.

An old 1-person vehicle that was given out with the last box set.

An instant travel vehicle… which is just a graphical fast zone mechanism… of which several are already available in game for free.

That would be kind of like them releasing a new all-in-one box set for the EQ Mac server Al’Kabor.  “We’re not giving you any new content, any new patches, any new expansions, or any new reasons to play the game, but we reeeeaaaalllllly think you should buy it anyway.”

Looking back looking forward

For some reason, I woke up this morning with a song stuck in my head.  That is not overly unusual in and of itself.  What was strange was that the song stuck in my head was the old piano theme that played during the install of Scars of Velious.
 
I have always loved that melody and I even copied the files off of my old Velious CD.  There have been times when I am sitting at the computer writing or doing research where I will put that song and many other midi’s from EQ on a loop and let it run.
 
I haven’t done that for a long time though so I have no idea why it was stuck in my head this morning.  All I do know is that it stuck me in a nostalgic mood for EQ.
 
Things are quiet here this morning for a change, so I have relaxed a bit and spent some time surfing old EQ websites.  It is always sad to me when I do that.  No game before or since has inspired the kind of online community that EQ did.  I’m not talking population here, so all the Warcraft people untwist your panties.  I’m talking about the eruption of online websites dedicated to the game.  I don’t mean blogs.  I mean sites like castersrealm, allakhazams, everlore, eqatlas, bilgehunter, eqstratics, eqdiva, graffes, monklybusiness, steelwarrior, and countless others.  Those sites were everywhere and new posts and comments sprung up by the second.  You could post a reply and, in the 30 seconds it took to do, 10 more topics could spring up.  It wasn’t unusual to see hundreds of people on these sites at any given time and they were all active participants.
 
Games since don’t seem to inspire the same internet presence.  Maybe it’s because so much is handed to you in the game and you don’t have to actually figure things out for yourself.  Whatever the reason, the massive website phenomenon that EQ created seems to have vanished.
 
Anyway, I was hitting a lot of these old websites and it made me sad.  Many are gone.  Others haven’t been updated in years.  A few are still around and still get updated, but it is almost like the people who run them just can’t bring themselves to let the sites go.  They make occasional updates, but there is no outside contribution.  Message boards are dead and abandoned.  Sites that used to get 200 new threads a day haven’t had 20 new discussion threads created this year.
 
I was on a site called EQLinks or something like that.  It is just a webpage with a bunch of links on it.  On the left side of the page is a bunch of EQ links and the right side is EQ2 links.  I was pretty much clicking down the list and getting increasingly sad at how much things have changed for EQ even in the time since I quit playing just 3 years ago.  I found myself thinking about how much I would like to reactivate my account temporarily just to go run the roads one more time… see everything that I miss about the game.  Of course, the last time I did that, it only increased my sadness over how much the game has changed.  I’m not saying it is bad the way it is.  It just isn’t the game that I loved.
 
But then it happened.
 
I accidentally clicked a link on the wrong side of the page and ended up over at eq2traders.
 
Mum has posted a write up about the next GU, posted about a new monthly event coming soon and posted a write up about Frostfell hitting Test.
 
And just like that, my sadness over EQ-that-was evaporated and I started to get excited about all the things on tap for EQ2.
 
Nostalgia can be a fun thing from time to time, but staying in the present is much more enjoyable.

A Little Gratitude with a lot of Attitude

I don’t know that I could call it “triumphant,” but it was a returning.  That is to say that I spent more time online over the last 4 days than I have over the last 4 months.  Part of it is that work is starting to slack off a bit so I’m less stressed… which makes me more open to things like gaming.  Part is the holiday season coming.  If nothing else, the holidays are more or less synonymous with gaming for me.
 
That being said, I don’t have a whole lot to report… at least, not a whole lot new.  I did a lot of running around.  It seems that shard missions are starting to die down for the most part as people are definitely getting tired of the same old offerings.  Some of the harder missions are still fun, but there is that whole stigma attached that “you have to have the perfect group” or people won’t go.  Unfortunately, that misconception that you have to have a perfect group results in an awful lot of people and classes getting left out on the fun.
 
And that is just one of the things that bothers me about EQ2.
 
If the whole “perfect group” ideology bothers me, the press release for the next expansion absolutely disgusted me.  The whole basis of them billing station cash and LON card packs as “bonus items” for pre-ordering makes me realize that my days of having faith in SOE are definitely starting to come to an end.  Hell, even when I cancelled my second account a few months ago, the new exit survey was kind of like, “We’re sorry you are canceling.  We don’t really care why.  Did you use the Marketplace?  You didn’t?  Well, why the hell not?  If you come back, will you use the Marketplace?  No?  Why the hell not?  Did you buy LoN booster packs?  You didn’t?  Why the hell not?  Will you play LoN now that you are quitting EQ2?  No?  Why the hell not?  Screw you then… good riddance.” 
 
You think I’m kidding?  I’m obviously exaggerating, but I’m not kidding.  Most of the exit survey revolved around the marketplace and Legends of Norrath.  Very little was actually concerned with game play, game bugs, content, classes, balance, raiding, tradekilling or ACTUAL parts of the game.  It was all about the “cash now” element.
 
With their increased emphasis on the marketplace and LoN, I am definitely taking the game with a grain of salt.  I might be playing a bit more right now and I’ll even admit that I am enjoying myself, but I’ll be watching every corner for the shifty eyes.  I’ll have my fun and do my thing, but I won’t be ruled by or bullied into RMT assiness that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual game.  If they try to force it down my throat, I’ll ram it down theirs by taking my money elsewhere because no matter what people like Brenlo might like to believe, we are not all zombies who are ruled and fooled by the soft glow from the LCD.

Assorted Nuts

I think I have probably spent more time playing this week than I have for months.  I don’t claim to understand the ebb and flow of my interest in the game these days, but there are times when it is there and times when it isn’t.  Right now, it seems to be more present than it has been for a while.
 
Maybe it is the things I’ve been doing that make it more fun though.  I haven’t seriously tried to join a group for several weeks now.  Groups happen, but I’m not going out of my way for them.
 
There are still frustrations of course, but rather than trying to push through the frustrations, I now just log off when they hit.  If I’m not in the mood to play Rao and I immediately get asked to, “Sorry.  Not staying online.”
 
I’ve mostly been running around by myself, mostly on alts.  I’ve been chasing some achievements and collecting shinies.  I’ve stopped by the dudes that will lower your level and send you off to old zones, but I end up waving at them and continuing on.  I’ll do them some day, but I’m just not driven right now.
 
On other fronts, work has been so busy and so crazy the last few months that… well, I honestly don’t even know how to articulate it.  Suffice it to say that I don’t think I’m going to make it to my vacation at the end of December.  Between that vacation and the first I took, I didn’t actually schedule my full 80 hours this year.  I was planning on carrying over the rest so that I could take some 3-day weekend biking trips in the spring, but I’m starting to feel that it might be more important for me to take a couple of days off now rather than carry them over.  We’ll see though.
 
Which leads to the biking.  I won’t go into it here much.  If you are even interested, I expect you have already checked out my other site where I talk about it in more detail.  All I will say here is that it is continuing to be of growing importance to me and I am now riding every day of the week… and I love it more each time I climb into the saddle. 
 
Finally, there is NaNo.  I wish I could say that I was enjoying NaNo as much this year as I did last year, but I have to be honest and say that I have pretty much hated every minute of it so far.  I picked a story that I wasn’t too excited to write, I quickly learned to hate all of my characters, and completely lost what little interest I had in the story after about 500 words.
 
I’m still plugging away though.  I’m determined to finish regardless of how much I would rather just quit.  I’m nearing the halfway point in my word count and expect I will hit that tonight.  Then it is just a matter of pushing through to the end and then I can strike this whole NaNo year as a bad experience that I survived.  I don’t expect I’ll even keep this story once it is done and I have kept nearly every word I have ever written in my life.  I hate this one that bad.  Once it is done, I just want to delete it from my hard drive and put it out of my mind.

Harumph

People keep e-mailing me or shooting me tells online when I log in saying that I can’t quit this site.

So, here’s the deal.  I’ll keep posting, but I’m no longer going to try to post every day.  I might post a couple of times a week or I might post a couple of times a month.

We’ll just see how it goes.