Sunday Odds And Ends

I haven't listened to as many podcasts as I usually do, although I had a couple of thoughts while listening to The Instance #164. The one I'll address today is the presence of developers on the forums. Scott and Randy's take on the story of Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street's latest actions on the World of Warcraft forums is priceless for everyone who has ever gotten irritated at the negativity on official forums.

The problem that many point out is that while many players want an official word about changes or problems in a game, the nature of official forums tends to drive developers out of them. As Sister Julie Whitefeather from No Prisoners, No Mercy likes to point out, Mythic Entertainment head Mark Jacobs opposed having official forums for Warhammer Online because of the abuse that forum users heap on developers. For those who don't want to wade through pages of posts looking for word from their game's developers, dev trackers are available. Eve Online is unusual as they actually have a dev tracker on their forums because CCP wants to get their word out. In an extreme form of irony, in order to find dev posts on the official EverQuest 2 forums I go to a pretty vile forum, EQ2Flames.

In what I'm playing, I actually was drawn back into Runes of Magic because of the introduction of elves and the druid and warden classes. From what I can tell druids replace priests and wardens replace knights as playable classes for elves. I played for a couple of hours last night and got a druid up to level 6. Not enough time to evaluate the druid class, but the tradeskilling is still as grindy as I remember.

I haven't done too much in EverQuest 2. I am at 199.3 AA points and I should have 200 by the end of next weekend. At that point I can really concentrate on my tradeskillers, although I'm thinking of leveling another adventurer up. I hear that druids are going to be receiving some healing love from the devs, so I may work on my warden. Druid? Warden? Yes, in EQ2, unlike RoM, a warden is a type of druid.

Finally, in Eve Online I'm starting to move from newbie checking out the game to someone who intends on playing for awhile. I'm now seriously looking at joining a corporation. The first corp I'm looking at is Eve University. I've been lurking in the Eve-Uni chat channel asking questions occasionally. I've also found the Eve University Class Library and I've been listening to a couple of classes instead of my usual podcasts. Now all I have to do is actually apply. I should probably hurry up because it looks like the upcoming change to create an 11% NPC corp tax rate are pushing people to find a corp.