Category: Games

Game shareware utility programs or discussions on gaming topics.

GW2 Is Not Fun and FFXIV Is Fun

GW2 is great fun, but I don’t like playing it.
FFXIV can be boring at times, but I love playing it.

Here’s a large group of folks in the Crystal Desert doing bounties and me crossing the 9000 mark in Achievement Points. Yeah for me. Great Fun. I love it. And I hate it.

Sound strange? Let me explain.

Early in my MMO experiences I played a lot of GW1 and was looking forward to GW2 when it came out. As an early player, I suffered through the early teething pains and grew to love it. I quickly made many alts of all professions and races and played through to the end of the core game, and cleared the map on most of my characters. Loved it.
But then came Living World Season 1. I played some of this. Most noteably I climbed the Tower of Nightmares in Kessex Hills. But alas I was doing other things and missed the war that Scarlet made on Lion’s Arch. But I did come back and see the devestation over the next couple of years until it was rebuilt.

The core game areas are all solo-able by a level 80 character with “Exotic Gear” which can easily be crafted by you and your alts for all the classes. Exotic gear is only 5% less powerful than the much more difficult to craft Legendary or Ascended gear. There are tons of attractive armor skins that can be earned through dungeon tokens or purchased with Karma or Gold. All my alts have attractive cultural or dungeon skins over crafted exotic armor.

I love rocking and rolling with large groups of folks, sometimes 50 or more, doing open world events. BUT

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Palace of the Dead – Red Weapons

Above are various low level weapons in Palace of the Dead. Pink is a lower level, and green is approaching powerful for the floors you are on. Bright White is appropriate for the levels where you are playing.

When you start playing in the Palace of the Dead, your weapon is pink or green and eventually, as you trigger more Silver Chests, it turns White. I could not find any place that this was carefully described.

Here’s a play guide for the Deep Dungeon aka Palace of the Dead.

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More Adventures in Palace of the Dead

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Palace of the Dead. Here are some recent adventures:

Leveling

Leveling my Warrior / Arcanist is working pretty well.

The first couple of levels of the PoD don’t give much XP, but the 3rd and 4th levels give more than one level of XP. Level 41-50 has longer wait times and the boss is quite difficult so I usually just back up and start over when I reach that. I’ve cleared level 50 a few times, but I’ve been with groups that have wiped too.

Sale of Loot

And here are some sale prices for loot on the Market Board.

These are not frequent drop from Bronze Wrapped Sacks, but I’ve seen the hair style a couple of times in the last few days. Almost 1 million Gil!. And the Housing items aren’t too bad either if they sell.

Enjoy,
:ww

Palace of the Dead – Some Hints

 

I’ve been having more fun in the Palace of the Dead. While you can find lots of detailed guides online for the PoD, here’s a few hints that may organize your experience.

Palace of the Dead is way more fun than the normal dungeons. Killing goes much faster. You’re not just standing there wailing on trash mobs over and over. A few hits and they are down and you are moving on. Stuff is always popping up and changing. Floor to floor and within a floor. Normal dungeons don’t have re-spawns. Once the mobs appear and you kill them that’s it for those mobs. That area is cleared. You kill the mobs and move on. But in Palace of the Dead, stuff re-spawns all the time. Way more interesting.

Rewards

The XP rewards are the primary reason you are here. You have lots of classes / jobs to level and this is the way to do it. Forget leves. Do your roulette’s once per day, but you can grind PoD all day long and there are no limits. Your mileage will vary based on your “Rested” status and whether you have “Road to 60” but typically each run of 10 floors will get you 20% – 30% of a level, and maybe a lot more. So you can put on a level in less than an hour typically. While the Main Scenario Roulette gives more, along with a lot of Tomestones but that’s only available once per day above level 50. But PoD is all day all the time and it starts at level 1 once you enable it with a battle class at level 17.

Continue reading “Palace of the Dead – Some Hints”

Palace of the Dead – Tons of Fun

The Palace of the Dead, or Deep Dungeon, is a multilevel auto-generated dungeon that is designed for leveling your jobs. One of the odd things about FFXIV is that quests and Levequests don’t really give very much XP. Up to now I’ve avoided the Palace of the Dead since it can seem a little intimidating from the descriptions. But don’t let that worry you. I found a series of videos that cover the whole thing in seven short videos that describe what is up. Here is the play list for these guides.

The PoD is not that intimidating. I’m not going to dive deep into the description here, since the guides do a great job of doing that. I’m going to give you a sales pitch so that you don’t wait a long time, like I did, before you start using it.

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Blizzard Trolls Private Server Users

 

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I received a DMCA Copyright Violation Notice from my ISP and when I called my ISP, they reported a date and time and the program “World of Warcraft -name of private server”. I have removed the name of the private server that I was trying to use.

It turns out that the Client that I was trying to use was an old copy of the Legion 7.3.5 client that had not yet been modified to not reach out to Blizzard resources. So this client was trying to update it self to the latest client. But Blizzard had changed the resources to update the latest client, but is watching these old resources for accesses and then reporting those accesses back to ISPs with DMCA Copyright Violation notices. This of course has a chilling effect in my use of World of Warcraft private server since I could lose my internet access.

Ok. So apparently Blizzard cannot take down the private servers themselves – maybe because they are off-shore, or for some other reason Legally Out of  Bounds to Blizzard.

So now Blizzard has gone after the users of WoW Private Servers.

Well since I am not playing WoW as provided by Blizzard, not because I refuse to pay, but because I don’t like the new features. I restarted my subscription back in the early days of Legion – middle 2017 – but left when the PTR [Private Test Realm] showed the direction that Blizzard was going with Level Scaling. I refuse to play because of Level Scaling, as I’ve pointed out several times before. Private servers have choices of other releases, such as Warlords of Draenor, Mists of Pandaria or Wrath of the Lich King.

Vanilla or Classic is not interesting for me. It’s too primitive. I wish Blizzard and the users well with Vanilla, but Warlords or Mists are the patches that I would choose, or I’ll play something else.

So I’m back to FFXIV.

Happy Gaming. Take Care.
:ww

Wow – Where I’m Playing Now

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I’ve found a private server that provides the Warlords of Draenor patch of Wow. That’s where I am now. These Private Server folks provide choices of patch levels – Wrath of the Lich King, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords and Legion. I chose WoD for two reasons.

  1. I love the zone design of the areas of WoD. Garrisons are neat, but I never got into the whole “Missions” thing. But having a pet buddy along on your questing can be cool. We’ll see if those functions are implemented when I get there.
  2. The Legion patch level is 7.3.5, which wiki’s indicate implements world wide level scaling, which I am definitely not a fan of. I may give it a try later, but for now I’m good with WoD.

Continue reading “Wow – Where I’m Playing Now”

Why I left Wow and How I’m Back

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In December 2017, Blizzard released details of their Game Wide Level Scaling and I was able to play it in the Public Test Realm [PTR]. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t articulate just why, but it seemed to be a betrayal of the nature of the game for me.

Now I understand better why I felt that way after watching a talk from the recent Game Developer Conference on Youtube. Here is that talk:

Published on Oct 3, 2018

In this classic 2012 GDC talk, Naughty Dog’s Kaitlyn Burnell explore games that break autonomy, competence and relatedness in powerful ways to inspire developers to think outside the box.
This talk covers the importance of game players feeling Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness as they play the game and how the game design in these areas greatly effects the engagement that the players have with the game.

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Tera Server Merge Theft

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A company called GameForge is the publisher of Tera in Europe. Oddly, they are going through a server merge too. I guess the the Tera population is collapsing worldwide. And they are screwing their users too. Apparently even worse than Enmasse here in NA.

Notice how they talk about character slots. Empty slots on the least populated- by your characters / slots – servers are just tossed out. So, apparently if you have server toons / slots as follows:

5 characters and Open 3 slots on Bahaar, 6 characters and Open 2 slots on Mystel, then you LOSE 3 characters and 3 Open slots.

And Unlike Enmasse, Gameforge did not give you a gift of 8 free slots to make up for some of your loss. Not sure where Enmasse came up with 8, maybe that’s the total number of GIFT slots that have been given over the years as new classes were introduced.

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Tera’s Unnecessary Screw Over

Like I said in the previous post, Tera has figured out a way, in laziness to just mess over almost every player. And it’s even worse and more unnecessary than is first apparent. This Server Merge is a big mess and it’s self inflicted.

Let’s look at what happens to characters. And then we’ll look at the implications for bank storage.

I thought it might be nice to start with some nostalgia from way back in 2014. Remember those server selection and character selection screens? Those were the days. Right? Remember the Island of Dawn? The Old start up area? Sigh.

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