video-games – Windy Weather

Whitemane Frostmourne Experience

I’ve found another Wow Private Server. For Wow, this one looks, and works very nicely. I’ve played it for a few hours. But I’m going to move on from Wow. I’ll get to that later.

Whitemane can be found at Whitemane.org. I was most interested in the Wrath of the Lich King [WotLK] expansion since it adds the Northrend continent, and flight in both Outland and Northrend. I found the Frostmourne experience very stable. No constant reboots as with Project Ascension. No crashes. There were a couple of funny behaviors but only a few in the week or so that I played.

The signup is a little odd. You sign up at PlayerID.me, whatever that is, and you must have either a gmail or another well known email – I forget which one. And they send a message to verify your email. No surprise. But it went smoothly.

Project Ascension is a Waste of Time

First Discovery

About a year ago or so I found the Project Ascension private server and played it for a while. This server is a Burning Crusade Classic server with class changes and other innovative changes.

https://ascension.gg/en

I like several things about their ideas for a Wow Server:

Extremely flexible class idea where you can pick and choose skills from any of the classes.
Ability to tame pets from Elemental, Dragonkin, and Demonkin as well as Hunter Pets.
Easy and free rank up of your skills.
Reasonably fast progression – at least at the time of my starting.
Good population so dungeon queue times were reasonable.

However, after a few weeks, I stopped playing. After I was able to level a couple of characters to level 70, and obtain flight in Outland, but then something changed and progression was so slow that everything felt like a grind. When I play a private server on any game, I don’t necessarily want an instant progression or boost to max level, but I don’t want a grind either. I expect a better progression than the original / retail game tho. If I were wanting a normal level of progression then I would just play the retail game. I didn’t figure out what changed at that time. So I know there are folks that enjoy the “Hardcore” experience where one death ends the character and you start over. I’m not a Hardcore kinda guy.

Tera Private Servers

Recently I’ve found three Private Servers for Tera. If you are an MMO buff and if you have nostalgia for Tera, or if you’ve never tried it, you might find these interesting.

All of these are free of course, and they take donations for benefits. All but one provide free “Premium Buff and Bennies” such as a flying mount and Town/Village Teleport Tome, and all are easy to install. In some order they are:

Tera Classic. They just had a security breach. Not sure if they are up and running after that yet. The early Tera Experience. Starting in the Island of Dawn and with no level 70 boost – at least not gifted at the start. So this is Tera Old School and you can expect from the title.

Tera Agaia. An advanced server with a level 70 boost, and you get a level 70 set of gear as soon as you use the boost. The Story has been trimmed – maybe like some of the later releases of Tera. Very reliable. But only Three Character slots built in and no clear way to buy more, although they say so.

Tera Starscape. By far the most fun of the list here. Gives you eight character slots, a level 70 boost and then a 20 min run through the Velika Banquet gives you level 70 gear for your journey.

DDOS and Breaches

So, shortly after I tried these servers in late July, DDOS attacks began and didn’t let up for more than a week. Also Classic was Breached. I’m not sure they know who was behind the DDOS or Breach attacks. There was speculation that Kakao Games was behind it, but Krafton actually most recently owned Tera, so that makes more sense. DDOS the private servers rather than taking them to court for copyright? Well seems like a waste of time for a game that has not been active for a few years.

I played for several hours yesterday on Tera Startscape and had no problems. So looks like the nonsense is over. I’ll try Classic later and see how it looks.

Skyrim Should Be Better

Skyrim Anniversary Edition is on sale now.

So I bought it. Wrestled my way through the Microsoft Store – And success. I am playing Skyrim. Welllllll… It’s not all it’s cracked up to be TBH. The main game and story are fine, but I have some gripes with the execution. I know. I know. There are lots of folks out there that are gonna beat up on me for having these opinions. But see. I’ve played some other game before this and I’ve gotten spoiled. Let me layout my gripes. I’ll be comparing Skyrim to a couple of other games in particular.