Enter the Tangle

Just a quick update

2009-04-19T18:08:53Z

You've probably noticed the CoX vs. WoW vs. LotRO articles have stopped a while ago. Well, with the coming of issue 14, I'm completely back into City of Heroes. I'm busy writing many other things, my own missions, mission review, articles for the City Scoop about making missions. So if you're interested in what I have to say, just check out the City of Heroes forums, that's where I'll be for quite a while. And check out Arc # 3369: Matchstick Women and tell me what you think!

Cox vs. WoW vs. LotRO part 13: Character

2009-03-05T23:36:15Z

This week's topic is a little ambiguous. As when I say character, that means the character you're playing, which I personally never refer to as a "toon". It includes backstory, roleplaying, progression, and anything else it might include. I think I'll go a bit more freeform, jumping from game to game here and there. Also, I'll note it now that all my opinions refer to "some" characters, many people feel widely differently about their characters

Some people think of their characters as an extension of themselves. They give it their own name, online or otherwise, make it look similar to their self-image or ideal-image, and give it abilities similar to their personality. This is their main character. And all the games support this to some extent or another.

Some people think of their characters as characters in a story. Whether comic book, fantasy novel, or tv show/movie it doesn't matter. This is a character that you make and you want to watch what happens to them, with complete control along the way, more or less.

Ok, let's approach this a slightly different way. The biggest difference is immediacy. You have a character in mind that you want to create. In City of Heroes, you can create that character in its entirety from the very start, the only limitation is their abilities. In the other two, you create a fairly standard character in the beginning, and your character evolves into what you want them to be throughout the course of the game.

One of the most telling indicators of this difference is alts. In CoX, your character is nearly fully realized upon the moment of creation. This leads some people to create for creation's sake, having many different characters for every mood of the rainbow. Where in the other games, your character doesn't differentiate themselves for many levels, so it requires a much larger effort to create a character that feels more personal, or comes closer to the ideal that you have in your head. With greater effort, comes fewer characters. Where someone in WoW that has 6 or more characters could be considered as having a lot of characters. Someone on CoX that has around 6 character is seen by many people as having very few characters. It's not unheard of for someone to reach the 12 character limit if they play only on 1 server, and CoX even added purchasable character slots for those very people. There are some who even have dozens of characters.

There is another side of the immediate gratification of City of Heroes. With immediate gratification can sometimes come with immediate boredom. When you have the exact character you want from the very start, what's the motivation to continue playing. I'm not saying there's no sense of accomplishment, but for some people there's no sense of improvement, as you can have a character that looks exactly the same at level 50 as they did at level 1. The exception being the number of powers they can use. There are level restricted costume options, like capes, auras, and roman armor, but that's only a minor portion of the available customizations.

Another aspect of your character is their goal. For many it's reaching the level cap, whether it's 50, 60, or 80, in order to do the endgame content. For many in CoX, it's the enjoyment of playing on its own. Your goal can be loot, it can be finishing a certain in-game task, it can be badges/accomplishments/deeds, it can be all sorts of things.

Individualization is very important to many people. Similar to what I mentioned earlier, in CoX your individuality comes right out of the gate. Rarely will you see another character with the same costume as you, unless you use everything from a matching costume set. And in WoW and LotRO your individuality is earned. And although there is a lot of loot, when you get to the highest of high end, there are select few options that will fit your class and specialization in WoW. LotRO gets away from this by allowing cosmetic outfits. Outside of your loot driven gear, you can also equip purely cosmetic costume items to show instead of your gear. You can also choose not to see any piece of gear outside of your shirt/dress and pants. CoX of course trumps this by having up to 5 outfits which all of them are completely customizable outside of your powers.

Which brings me to another point of contention. Because of gear limitations, in WoW your character type is almost directly tied to your gear. Magic users can only wear cloth, so they have a range of robes and shirts. On the other end, if you see a character wearing heavy armor, you can be assured that it is a tanking melee class. In LotRO, there is pretty much the same association, though you can have a heavy armor tanking class wearing light cloth cosmetic clothing. In CoX however, your look is absolutely separate from your abilities. You could create a huge buff knight in heavy armor with flames along his armor and have a fire aura and have them be an Ice controller. Also you could create the most evil looking thing with horns, an evil grin, and spikes all over their clothes, and they are an empathy defender. You could also have the smallest, thinnest girl with pink bunny ears and have them be a superstrength tanker.

So there are some aspects of character in all of the games. Next time I think I'll cover the levelling process.

CoX vs. WoW vs. LotRO part 12: beginner's PvP

2009-02-23T00:11:34Z

I'm gonna make this a shorter one since my original reason for wanting to write it has kind of been deflated, but let's have a quick go at it.

In City of heroes, there is arena PvP and zone PvP. Arena PvP is where you can set several rules for matches, like teams, no diminishing returns, etc. There's not a whole lot to choose from, and many people would like to see the devs open that portion up quite a bit, but that's another story. There are 4 PvP zones in the game for different level ranges. When you are in a PvP zone, you can attack anyone from the other faction freely and vice versa, and Warburg is a free for all zone where you can attack any player at all freely. Each zone has somewhat of a mini-game aspect to it. In Bloody Bay you can collect samples from the six meteors across the zone, then destroy all the defenses of a base to get a powerful shivan pet with 5 uses. Siren's call has a bounty system, etc. When you enter the PvP zone your powers act slightly differently than in PvE, also every player in a PvP zone is set at a specific power level. For example in Bloody Bay you can enter at level 15-50, but every player is the equivelant of level 25, with the exception of setbonuses, and anyone less than 25 would have fewer skills. In my extremely limited experience I've enjoyed Bloody Bay's shivan hunting, and I've had some enjoyable friendly duelling in Warburg, and I've had my share of fruitless attacking in Recluse's Victory. There's often not many people around, depending on the server and time of day, but it hasn't been too bad. (note: I've also never tried the new PvP introduced in Issue 13).

In World of Warcraft, there are PvP servers and other servers. Even on regular servers, if you are flagged for PvP, you can PvP anywhere with a member of the opposite faction as long as they are also flagged for PvP. Even if you're not flagged for PvP you can be temporarily flagged if you attack a PvP target, and possibly a few other conditions. I didn't know this until today, as several weeks ago I was in enemy territory and got too close to a guard who came after me. My pet was on defensive and attacked back while I tried to run, I didn't realize this flagged me for PvP and a few minutes later I noticed an enemy nearby which I didn't give much thought to since I thought I wasn't flagged for PvP, then he stunned me and killed me. There was also another time when my wife's character was in a neutralish area, and just about the only level appropriate area. And somehow she got flagged for PvP without knowing it and someone kept killing her over and over again several times. Also, there is a /duel command where you can do a PvP match with someone in the same faction as you if they agree, and you are autorevived if you lose. This does have its share of annoyances of getting the continued /duel requests even if you decline every one of them. But I have accepted a small handful of /duels, and I must say they were fairly enjoyable, even if I lost, which was about half of the time.

In Lord of the Rings Online you can choose Monster Play when you have a character at least level 10. Otherwise called Creeps, there is a selection of about 6 different monsters to choose from and they all are level 60. One of my thoughts was how fair it was that creeps were all level 60, but if you don't have the Mines of Moria expansion, you can only get a regular character up to level 50. I don't know how true it is, but I was told that a level 50 free people, or freep, could be a match for a level 60 monster. But I have my doubts. Anyway, you can play as several different monsters and you can do quests as the creep to earn destiny points instead of XP. You can use the destiny points on your creep to gain new abilities and increase their stats somewhat. I didn't spend a whole lot of time playing it, it was an interesting diversion. I got ganked pretty quickly by a team of 2-3 freeps, but aside from that, I didn't see any other players at all in the time I spent. There is currently only one zone that you can PvM. And you can also just PvE play there as well. And that's pretty much my entire experience with that.

So there you have it, a fairly short and sweet look at my beginner's experience with PvP in all three games. Finally! I've got no idea what I'll write about next time, so hit me up with some ideas. Catch ya later!

CoX vs. WoW vs. LotRO part 11: Organizations

2009-02-22T03:04:12Z

Yeah, there's a little change here. Partly because I myself have switched over for the most part to Lord of the Rings Online for my fantasy MMO of choice. And also because I was looking at how LotRO handled their kinship window, and I am really impressed with it and wanted to write about it. Even though I did have a paragraph about organizations (orgs) in an earlier article, I realize that there is much more to talk about.

Anyway, let's start out with a look at the one that inspired this article: LotRO. Their orgs are called Kinships and you can create one at level 5 for a small fee, and you have to have a minimum of 5 members or it will be dissolved after a few days. There is a limit of 1,000 players which can increase over several months to a cap of 1,500 players after one year of creation. You have access to kinship only chat, and there is an option of an officer only chat as well. After 3 months, your kinship can purchase a kinship house which is a good sized two story house located in one of the player housing communities. I believe all the kinship also gets more or less a free teleport to the kinship house, or at least the area the house is in, and there are several items you can buy with regular game money to decorate the house. There is also the option for item and gold storage for kinship members.

Aside from all that, let me get around to what really impressed me about kinships. The social kinship interface. That's just the fancy way of saying the window where you can see all the kinship members. By default, you can see the name, level, class, kin rank, and area of all the online kinship members. You can uncheck a box to show all the offline members as well. Every member also has a player note, which our kin uses to see which are the player's main characters, alts, and what crafting they do if any. This is a great resource for org leaders so that if they want to kick a member for personal reasons, they can go through and easily kick all of their alts as well (as long as the player doesn't change their notes first), or if there is an inactive player they want to kick, but see that is the alt of an active main, then they don't have to kick them without talking to the player first. The final thing I want to mention is team status. If you are on a team, there is a team icon next to your name. Three blue people if you are on a team, three red people if you are on a full team, and a crown on the middle person's head if you are the team leader. I would LOVE to see this functionality added to City of Heroes supergroup window. I am on a Trick Arrow superteam and this would make team coordination sooo much easier. We could easily see if anyone is not on a team, and if there are teams with open spots.

Ok, from the best org I've seen to the worst org, let's talk about World of Warcraft. Guilds as they're called in World of Warcraft has the fewest ameneties of the three games I'm talking about tonight. You have guild chat, and I believe officer chat. The guild social window is very similar to LotROs only without the team status (and I can't remember right now if there's a player note option right now, I'll edit this if someone corrects me). And you can have guild storage at the bank, and guild money available for equipment repairs. I believe that's pretty much it.

Now for City of Heroes' Supergroups. The supergroup window shows the player's name, rank, online status, zone, date joined, and prestige earned. Prestige is an interesting choice. It allows lower level members to contribute to the SG without losing any of their hard earned money, and higher level members can contribute by trading off some of their earnings, or they can switch off SG mode for a time to contribute when and how much they want to. The only downside, if you can call it a downside, is that you can't recruit a rich player and allow them to donate a large sum to the SG. The rich player has to earn their contributions like everyone else. Prestige is basically SG money and at the moment is really only used for basebuilding. City of Heroes' base building is not perfect, but is a very detailed and robust editor. There is a large number of decorative and functional base items that can be bought and added to your base. You can add storage for enhancements, inspirations, and salvage which can be traded between SG members with the right access level/rank. You can also create a coalition with another SG to be able to access their base as well, and chat with the other SGs through coalition chat. This is useful as CoX has a mere 150 player limit for supergroups, though coalitions help get past this limit if used correctly. There is also a PvP element to supergroups, although I believe this was put on hold with issue 13. But when it comes back, the idea is that you can flag your SG as PvP and another SG can declare an attack on your base and your SG has to defend it, and there are base items like gun turrets which you can add to help in the defense. This is a fun idea, though it's previous iteration was underutilized, and from what I understand, not done very well. They have promised that a revamped version of base raiding is in the works, but nothing else has been announced yet.

So there you have a closer look at player organizations... wait a minute! I was supposed to do beginner PvP, wasn't I? Ok, Ok, Ok. I know no one has said anything to me about skipping it, but I will write one up tomorrow, how's that? You happy now? And when I ask that, I'm apparently talking to myself because I doubt anyone reading this really cares what I think about PvP. But it's gonna happen and it's gonna be good, so stay tuned. 'Till next time!

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 10: Unlockables

2009-02-14T01:50:58Z

Unlockables, Achievements, Badges, Deeds, bragging rights, easter eggs, whatever you want to call them, they're little rewards that you get in game for doing something. Awfully vague description, because they cover such a wide variety of things from the very easy like reaching level 10, to the very difficult like an end game raid/taskforce.

I just realized that this is a bit more difficult than I thought to quantify as they go through such a vast range of goals through all the games with all different sorts of rewards. I suppose I'll start with typically the easiest of all to earn as you just have to walk in the right spot. And even something as simple as exploring is handled so differently in each game. In City of Heroes, there are many exploration badge locations that are tied to a small area around a little compass you see on the map, and you get a miniscule amount of XP, a title you can see above your name, and a badge icon in your character screen. In World of Warcraft you get a miniscule amount of XP for each section of the map you step foot in, and it also appears on your map and when you get each section of the map, you get an accomplishment for exploring that region, and you get accomplishment points, which you can see. There is also an accomplishment for exploring every region on a continent, and for all the continents. In Lord of the Rings Online there are points of interest in certain areas and when you find all of them in a group you get a trait which is a small group of stat bonuses that you can equip on your character.

Alright, alright, I think this will take forever going this way. I guess I did it all wrong and now to correct myself, I will go one game at a time. I will start off with the high point of unlockables, even though I spent little time with it and probably won't explain it very well. Warhammer Online has the best reward systems I've seen in my limited experience with MMOs. It is a giant book that has many tabs and chapters. You can see all of the titles you have been awarded, every type of enemy in the game has rewards associated with them, including in-game information, story background, and artwork. I could be wrong, but I think you can even get bonuses for when you are attacking them. There is a lot more to it, but I wasn't able to delve very deeply into it during my short in-game time.

Next up is Lord of the Rings Online which I believe also has a very well done unlockable reward system. They are called Deeds and they reward you with titles and traits. They are divided into virtue, Class, Race, and Legendary traits. Many deeds are region specific and can be completed by defeating certain mobs, completing quests, and finding all points of interest in a related group. The mobs and quests often have multiple tiers, the first tier will get you a title, then the second tier gets you a trait. Traits are small bonuses that you can equip on your character, there are about 20 or so different traits that each have 10 levels and you can equip up to 6 of them on your character based on your level. Most of your class deeds are earned by using your skills several hundered times, also there is a cap to the number of times you can increment your skill deeds per day. Those earn you class traits which improve your skills. The skill traits are also divided into three categories, and equipping multiple traits from the same category gets you setbonuses, similar to the IO setbonuses in CoX. And there is a legendary trait available if you equip 5 traits from the same category, which are the only legendary traits that I've seen anything about. And there's also social deeds that you get when other people use certain emotes on you which unlocks titles or special emotes. So it's definately an interesting way to have the unlockables mean something in-game outside of just bragging rights.

Third up is World of Warcraft and it's Achievements system, which I believe was only just recently added to the game shortly before I started playing. There are a ton of Achievements available and this is the only one I've seen where you can view them all in game and how to earn them right out of the gate, all the other games have the unlockables hidden until you begin making progress on it. They each have a number of achievement points associated with them which adds to your achievement score which other players can see. I don't believe anything can be done with your achievement points at the moment, but I could be wrong, and some Achivements I believe also have a title associated with them as well. World of Warcraft definately has some of the most amusing unlockables that I've seen, such as "Tastes like chicken" for eating 50 different foods. Or "To all the Squirrels I've loved before" for performing the /love emote to a wide variety of harmless animals, each one listed and your progress can be trackable. And of course, they also have ones for defeating certain bosses in dungeons and raids, and several others, although none for defeating any number of regular mobs like all the others.

Finally, there's the badge system in City of Heroes. Every badge in CoX gives you a title except for the gladiator badges. And the gladiator badges unlock an enemy gladiator which you can use in a special Arena PvP match. There's also accolades which you have to earn a group of badges that can give you permanent bonuses or powers. I guess there's not much else to be said about CoX's badge system. It's simple, but effective

Well, there you have it, I guess. Seems like I finally found something where CoX comes up on the short end of the stick even if it is on something that's completely optional... at least compared to other MMOs, back on the original topic: CoX vs. WoW, I'd say they're fairly even. CoX has much more options with the titles, and WoW lets you see all the achievements from the start. But if you don't care about them, they are completely pointless. (For the record, I care about them) Next time, maybe I'll finally get around to talking about beginning PvP like I've mentioned a few times now but have skipped over it every time. Catch ya later!

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 9 : Death

2009-02-07T15:36:38Z

Ok, unless you play extremely safely or are just pure awesomesauce you will eventually come to the point where your character dies. Now there are many ways to handle this problem, and various ways to give a penalty, so let's take a look at them, shall we?

First off, let's look at the penalties associated with death. In City of Heroes you get XP Debt. At it's most basic, it's a time sink on your journey to 50. When you die, it takes you a little bit more game time in order to reach level 50. Although there is a slight boon added to this, since you're still gaining inf at the same rate, you actually end up with more money than you would at the same level if you hadn't died. And once you hit level 50, XP debt is even considered a boon because it progresses towards a badge. Also, there is a small time sink when if you choose to be teleported to the hospital and have to run back to your mission. Although if you choose not to go back to your mission, you can just go somewhere else instead.

Now, in World of Warcraft, there is no XP penalty, but there is a money sink. When you die, all equipment you have on or are carrying suffers 10% damage which costs money to repair. Even when you reach level 80, your death is comparatively more costly as the higher level equipment costs more money to repair. Also your ghost is sent to the nearest graveyard and you have to walk as a ghost back to your body to be revived without any further penalty. The other option is to talk to the spirit healer and have your body be brought to your spirit, but this option costs another 20% damage to your equipment and it also comes with resurrection sickness. This is a 75% reduction in all of your abilities for 10 minutes. This makes you nearly ineffectual unless you have a combat pet.

So both games send you off somewhere and you have to run back to where you were before to get back into the action as soon as possible. Although in City of Heroes you have the easy option of choosing to go somewhere else instead. But what if you need to be back in the action as soon as possible? Yes, I'm talking about resurrections. In City of Heroes the easiest option are the inspirations which drop somewhere around every 10 enemies or less. If you get an awaken, or wake as it's called, you can revive with a small amount of health and 30 seconds of being stunned, which can also be cured with a break free. Even if you don't have a wake, if you have 3 of the same type and level of any inspiration, you can combine them into a wake. And if you're on a team, you can be given inspirations. Also many support classes have a revive power, and any character can take the pool power revive, although few do. Also, some melee armor powersets have self-revive powers later on if you choose to take them.

In World of Warcraft, I'm not quite as familiar with the classes, but I believe most healer classes have a resurrect spell available. I know that includes Priest and Druid, and believe it includes Paladin and possibly Shaman. Also I'm not sure how many of those allow you to resurrect yourself. At level 30, I have yet to see any items that allow you to resurrect yourself. Although the Warlock does have a somewhat unique spell available. You can conjure a soulstone item and when you use the soulstone on yourself or anyone else, then the soulstone can revive you if you die within the next 30 minutes. So it's somewhat of a pre-revive if you're heading towards a sticky situation where you think you might die. And then you can't use another one for an hour afterwards.

And of course, let me not forget Lord of the Rings Online which I've been growing less fond of, then more fond of as I've been playing it. When you die in LotRO you retreat to... I'm not sure what they call it, but it's a small round clearing usually just outside of town. And you have the 10% equipment damage like in WoW. And I'm not sure how prevailent revive spells are outside of the two primary healer classes: Minstrel and Rune-keeper.

Alright, there you have death... in MMOs... in a nutshell... from a nut? Uh... nevermind. Well, next time maybe beginner's PvP. Catch ya later!

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 8: Friends

2009-02-01T00:24:44Z

Friends

First off, I just wanted to say thank you for the warm welcome to the community. I expected to get a few more comments here compared to on my own LJ, but I was really surprised at the amount. I was also reminded of one very important thing about MMOs that I have yet to touch upon: Friends. And also, I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online for just a week or so now, so it will rear it's head into the discussion every now and then when it's relevant.

Friends are a very important part of MMOs, whether it's your real life friends who invite you to come play their MMO, or the friends that you make while playing an MMO. The important role that the MMO itself plays in this is how it lets you communicate and get together with your friends in the game.

There is one common practice with most MMOs: a friends list. Typically you type /friend *name* to add someone to your friends list. Another option with City of Heroes is to type /gfriend *name*, which will make a global friend request which has much more info about your friend's character. On this list you can see: (all) if they are online or not, (all) what zone they are in, (all) what level they are, (CoX, LotRO) the size of their team and if they are on a team, (CoX, LotRO) Their class/AT, (CoX) What server they are on, (CoX) What character they are on (even if it's a new character), (LotRO) when they were last online if they are not currently online. Note: This refers to CoX's global friends window, the regular friends list only shows whether they are online or not. You usually also see a note in your chat window when one of your friends comes online or goes offline. Also, your friends list is characterwide and serverwide only, so if you are on another character then you would have to /friend one your other characters as well, and if you are on another server then you can't talk to your /friends at all. The exception to this is of course City of Heroes' global friends list, which is account wide and will show you info about your global friend's character no matter what server they are on, even if it's a brand new character they just created.

There is another common practice with most MMOs aside from the friends list, and that's the player organization (org). This is a something that one player forms and many other characters can join as well. In City of Heroes it's called a Supergroup or Villaingroup, in World of Warcraft it's called a Guild, and in Lord of the Rings Online it's called a Kinship. I don't know the exact limits outside of CoX, but they can all hold over 100 members. Orgs have their own member chat, and CoX also has coalitions where you can chat with friend supergroups. CoX and LotR both have bases or kinship housing where your org has their own personal space to decorate and meet with members of their own org. All three also have org storage to keep certain items available for all members that have the right access level. In WoW (not sure about LotRO) the org can also place restrictions on how much pooled money each individual member can use for repairs, and restrict the number of items each individual member can remove, based on access level. Orgs are as different as players are and have a wide range of purposes, interests, and anything else you can think of. It's wise to find out as much about your org as you can before joining, but there's always the option of quitting whenever you want. Also, both WoW and LotRO have a minimum number of members to start an org, so you often see people offering money to join their startup org. Although I haven't seen this practice much in LotRO yet, it probably happens to some extent at least, and it is widely prevailent in WoW.

Now that you can see your friends online, you also want to talk with them. The most simple way is to send them a /tell, or a /whisper to send a message directly to them and only them. In City of Heroes, there are also global channels that anyone can make and you can use it like a mini-chat room. There are many popular global channels that have various purposes and are mostly for teambuilding, badges, and even general chatting. Or you can form your own and invite your own personal friends to. These global channels are based on your global name and are all cross-server. I believe WoW has a similar channel system except that it's serverwide not cross-server, and I don't know if there are any popular persistant channels. Also from what I've heard, LotRO has an excellent voice chat system tied directly into the game, but I can't comment beyond that as I've never used it.

Finally, you can see your friends online, and you can talk with them, so what's left? Of course, to play with them! Silly me, that's probably the most important part of having friends in an online game. So what options do you have to play with your friends. In WoW and LotRO, if you're near the same level you can team with each other. Although if you're starting new characters that start in different areas, you might have a long walk in order to meet up with each other. And in LotRO, you have to solo your intro mission (I believe), which isn't very long at least. But if your level range gets too wide, then it's a lot harder to team with each other as the lower level character is greatly underpowered compared to the higher level character. So if you're fighting higher level enemies, the lower level character isn't helping, and is probably dying a lot. And if you're fighting lower level enemies, the higher level character is bored because they prove no challenge, and is probably not getting any XP for them either.

Now City of Heroes gets around this problem with the excellent sidekick/exemplar system. If your level gap gets too wide, and you want to fight higher level enemies, then the lower level player can get sidekicked and becomes essentially one level lower than their mentor, with the obvious exeption of fewer powers. Alternatively, if you want to fight lower level enemies, the higher level player can get exemplared and become essentially the same level as the lower character, even power choices and enhancements get reduced to the lower player's level. The exemplar gets double the money in exchange for lack of XP, and can also work of any XP debt they had from dying. And recently they also added a level pact, where two low level characters can form a level pact and from then on, or until they break the pact, they are always at exactly the same level.

Personally, this is one of the biggest drawbacks for me. As my friend was level 80 when I joined WoW, and he didn't want to start a new character since he was in the middle of the new Wrath of the Lich King level 80 content he didn't want to make a new character. So there was really no way we could play together. And even if I did make it up in levels, I would have to buy an expansion pack to get to level 70, and another expansion pack to get to level 80, which in my opinion is completely ridiculous. Even starting LotRO, he had about a week head start, and I'm going to have a hard time catching up to him unless he slows down, he's at level 20 and I'm at level 11, on top of the fact that he's a mainolomainiac and I'm an alt-a-holic. Even though WoW and LotRO have curbed my alt-ism a bit, I still have my wife's characters that she likes to have me play for her (and I do enjoy playing as well).

So that's pretty much all there is regarding your friends and your MMO. Next time I'll talk about Death. Catch ya later!

World of Warcraft vs. City of Heroes pt. 7 Travel

2009-01-27T04:02:08Z

This is one area where City of Heroes wins over most any game no contest, with only one minor caveat. So let's just get down to it shall we?

Starting out, your run speed in both games is about equal. However, City of Heroes has an innate toggle power called Sprint which about doubles your run speed at the cost of a small amount of endurance (power/mana/etc). Then at level 6 you can get your travel speed pre-requisite power. Leaping has Combat Jumping, which is somewhat faster than sprint, Flight has Hover, which is extraordinarily slow but allows for vertical movement at level 6, Teleport has recall friend which is an extremely useful power that in mere seconds can teleport a teammate from most anywhere on the map to right next to you, and Superspeed's pre-requisites don't involve travel at all. Then at level 14 you can get your travel power. Teleport is the fastest, but costs the most endurance and has the least control. Superspeed is the next fastest, and with only minor enhancements can easily cap your run speed, which is supposed to be the equivelant of around 90 mph. Superjump is the next fastest, and gives you excellent vertical movement, but you have to constantly be jumping. And flight which is the slowest, but you get to fly! At level 14! And to use your power, just click and in less than a second, you're moving faster. No need to pause at all.

Aside from your travel power, how about getting from zone to zone. There are two monorails which take you to any zone on the line. The yellow rail has about 6 zones, and the green rail has about 9. Then at level 25 there's also Oroborous, the time travel zone which has about 5 available zones and you can get to Oroborous from anywhere as long as your portal is recharged. Also, if you're part of a good Supergroup, you can use the base portal to teleport to any zone your base has porters to. And there's also Pocket D, a dance club which also has portals to 3 or 4 different zones. If you know the right ways to go, there's very few paths that take more than 2 zones to get to. Also, the monorail, and pocket D are clearly marked on your map, whether or not you have uncovered it (except in a few zones).

Now let's look at World of Warcraft. You start out at walking speed. Then at level 30 you have the option to learn riding... at a cost of 35 gold. On my and my wife's hunter, we had around 20 gold at level 30, and that's including some lite market play. So realistically, you could save enough money to learn riding by level 35. And then you have to buy the horse, which is another 10 gold. If you are just casually playing, there is no way that you could earn 45 gold by level 30. But you know, we were lucky enough to get a rare axe drop off a regular mob which we were able to sell on the auction house for 20 gold. So by level 32, we had enough money to get a mount. Now maybe we should have looked into this further, but my wife had her heart set on getting a horse. Not just a mount, but a horse. Elves ride horses, don't they? Even if they are Blood Elves? We look around and see other players riding around on horses, so we must be able to get a horse, right? Wrong! The only mount option for a blood elf at level 30 is a hawkstrider. Death Knights and Paladins get their horses from their class quests/abilities. The only other option is a skeletal horse, and the only way to get one of those is to raise your reputation with the undercity to Exalted. And the only way to do that is to do a couple hundred quests for the undercity. Our reputation for Silvermoon, which we've been doing quests for from the start isn't even at the level below Exalted. Anyway, at level 30 you get your mount and to use it you have to stand still, wait 2 seconds for your character to get on your mount, and then you can move at about double the speed. You know, about the same as turning on Sprint in City of Heroes, maybe a little faster. Wasn't that worth it? Of course, you can always get a faster mount, in another 25 levels, and you can get a flying mount, in at least another 30 levels which can only fly in the new higher level zones.

So, before you get a mount? How do you get around in World of Warcraft? You know, besides walking? There are a few options. There are the flight paths, which take you to any other flight master... that you've been to before. So they can't take you to any new places, for those you still have to walk. The other way to travel is by boat or zepplin. There are a handful of these paths, usually from the major cities, and there are a few other cases. Like there is an orb of translocation which can teleport you from Silvermoon, the Blood Elf city, to Undercity, the undead city. And at the higher levels, I believe there are other portals, as well as the Mage class can learn the ability to create portals to some of the higher level zones. But for most of the low levels, you better keep an few extra pairs of boot soles, 'cause you're gonna wear them out an awful lot.

Oh, I almost forgot the one minor caveat I mentioned in the beginning. You get to have an actual mount in WoW, some of them look pretty nice. Next time, I'll be voicing my opinions on the Market systems. They are both quite different from each other. Until next time!

Sketch Idea: Racers

2009-01-20T22:52:39Z

A tight shot of a businessman pulling to a stop next to another business man, both in small four door family cars.

Close up of the red light.

Close up of man 1 looking at the car next to him. He narrows his eyes and revs his engine.

Close up of man 2 looking at the man 1. He narrows his eyes, adjusts his grip on the steering wheel and revs his engine in response.

Quick cuts back and forth between the two men taunting each other loudly and revving their engines.

Close up of the red light.

Light turns green.

Wide shot of the rest of the scene. The two businessmen's cars are both behind many other people and they slowly drive off as if nothing had happened.

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 6 Teaming

2009-01-18T23:46:37Z

Ok, you've been soloing for a little while, or you're playing a support character and now you want to find a team. So what's the best way to do it? Let's take a look and see...

In City of Heroes, the simplest ways to go about it are to send a message to the area where you are and see if there are any teams willing to pick you up. You can type a message in [local], which is seen in the nearby area where you are at, or you can use the [broadcast] or the [request] or [help] channels which are seen by the entire zone where you are at. Of course depending on the zone, the server, and the time of day, there may or may not be all that many people in the zone to see your message. The next option is to set your "looking for team" flag. There's a little drop down box in the team window where you can set a flag to show you are looking for any team, or there are several more specific flags, like looking for Task Forces, Patrols, Trials, Arena, etc. Setting that flag puts you at the top of the list on the team search window.

Now that I mentioned the team search window, let's go into more detail about that. Aside from the methods I mentioned in the last paragraph, which are spotty for finding a team, this is one of the best ways to find a team in City of Heroes. You open up the team window and click the search button and a large window pops up where you can search all the players on your server and on your side (hero or villain). You can also set many different filters for what you are searching for. Let's say you are wanting to do an Ernesto Hess Task Force, which is around level 30, and your team could use a tank for it. You can search for all the tanks who are between level 25 - 34 and it will show you up to 50 results. You can also tell if they are already on a team or not. To be more specific, you can filter for Archetypes, origin, zone, and level range. And as I mentioned earlier, the players who set their LFT flags show up right at the top of the list. Also, when you filter, you can select any number of options from any type of filter. So you can look for all Controllers and Scrappers in Steel Canyon and Skyway City who are any level except 1-10. And from the team search window, you can select any name and send them a tell and/or invite them to your team.

Another way to look for teams are to use Global Channels. This is probably the next best way to find a team in City of Heroes. First you have to find a good Global Channel, the best way is to search for the server you're on and look for the one with the most people in it. There are a few that are private and can find out about and usually easily get an invite to by looking on the CoX message boards. These Global Channels go by your global name, and not your character name, but you can still be easily invited or messaged just by clicking on your name in the chat. These Global Channels vary on purpose, but most focus on finding teams for Task Forcers, Giant Monsters, and just general chatting. Some more than others. Two of the servers I frequent, Pinnacle has the Pinnbadges channel, and Liberty has LBx (which is currently private) both are excellent places to find teams for whatever you are doing, and for finding information and help.

In World of Warcraft, it has pretty much the same first paragraph. You can /say, /yell, or send a message in [general] asking for a team. (and I have no idea if there's a menu option or a slash command to speak in general, the only way I've figured out how to is to scroll up until you see the "entering [general - [i]zone[/i]] channel" which shows up every time you log in or change zones, and clicking on that to speak. And there's the looking for group where you can show that you are looking for a group, and what types of groups you are looking for, and it enters you into the [looking for group] channel. I haven't found much reliability to this method so far in my travels, but I believe this feature is more useful for finding teams for late to end game raids and instances.

There is also a "Who" tab in the social window which at first glance may seem similar to City of Heroes' team search window, but is very different. This is a list of players which also has the 50 player limit on results. You can see the player name, their level, and their class. There is also a dropdown box where you can choose to see their zone, guild, or race. The only way to limit your selection is to use the search function, which only searches for a string of text. This is immeasurably more difficult to use than CoX's team search for many reasons. First, the best way to find characters near your level would be to search by zone. The problem is that you have to know the correct spelling of the zone, and the right level range of the zone. There's no way to filter out high level or low level characters. Though you do still have the ability to send a message or invite the players from the social window. Also, you can't search through multiple categories. It's possible to search only for priests, but it would show all priests across all zones and all level ranges. Or you can search through a specific zone, but it will give you all classes through all level ranges.

As for chat channels, I've heard that they exist, but I haven't had the chance to find out how well used they are, or if they are useful for finding teams. Also, both games have the option to click on the player, or their name in the chat box to invite them to your team/group. In City of Heroes, you can have 8 members in your team, in World of Warcraft you can have 5 in your group, but there are also raids where you can have as many as 40 together in a raid group. In CoX, any combination of ATs can make a good team. In WoW it is more important, especially in later levels, to have a balanced team with each team role filled: DPS, Tank, and Healer. Both games give bonus experience for teaming. For example, when you're on a team of 2, you actually get more than just 1/2 experience for mobs.

Well, that's pretty much all there is to teams for the most part. Next time, either death or lite PvP (have a big annoyance with that in WoW right now).

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 5 Combat Mechanics

2009-01-15T02:03:35Z

Ok, today it's time to look at what happens when you are actually fighting mobs, how combat flows and what tactics are used. At least in the early game. Both games are similar with a row of spells/abilities that are ranged or melee, have cast times or are instant, and have recharge times before you can use them again. But there are massive differences in how and where they are used.

In World of Warcraft, there are instant cast, timed cast, and channelled spells. The names might be wrong, but here are the concepts in a nutshell. Instant cast abilities are exactly that: Instant. You click, you go through the effects animation, it happens, nuff said. Timed cast abilities have a cast time associated with them. You click and a bar pops up which slowly (or quickly) fills. When the bar is full, the ability goes off. If you are in combat and get hit, it can push the timer bar back to make it take longer, or if you get hit with some status effects, it will cancel the ability altogether. Also, if you move it will cancel the ability. And channelled spells have a similar bar as the Timed cast spells except it starts full and slowly depletes, and the spell is ongoing while the bar is visible. Also similar to timed cast spells, getting hit can push the bar back, and moving, some status effects, or casting another spell will cancel the channelled spell. Also with most, if not all, timed cast and channelled spells you have to be facing your target during the entire cast time. Also, there is the autoattack with your weapon. When you are in range and in combat, you automatically attack your target with your weapon during any time you are not casting spells/using abilities. The speed and damage is based on your weapon.

In City of Heroes, most powers are treated the same with the exeption of snipes and a couple other powers which make up 5% or less of available powers. The snipes are similar to the timed cast spells only without the visual bar. You click the power, your character goes through a windup animation, usually looking like they are aiming, then they fire the power. If they get hit or if they move, the power is cancelled. All other powers are like instant cast spells, you click, you go through the effects animation, it happens, nuff said.

Now that we've looked at the types of abilities, let's look at the timing. Combat speed from my point of view comes from a few different factors. Let's look at them in the order that they happen. Cast time obviously is first. It is the time from when you click the power, to the time when it starts happening. In WoW it definately depends on your character class and ability choices. My Warlock, for example, has many Affliction spells available that are instant cast spells. There are also just as many Destruction spells which almost all have cast times associated with them, each around 1-3 seconds or so. And summon spells and other non-combat abilities have longer cast times associated with them. As stated earlier, over 95% of City of Heroes' powers are instant.

After the cast time comes the animation time. This is the time from when the power starts happening, to when it finishes happening leaving you available to choose another ability. Most animations in WoW are fairly short and simple as far as I can tell. In my estimation none are much longer than 1 second. In CoX, the animation times vary greatly ranging from less than 1/2 second to nearly 5 seconds for snipes. Most are less than 2 seconds. Animation times in City of Heroes can also be seen in the in-game real numbers information before selecting the power.

In World of Warcraft the next step is the cooldown phase. This is the time from when your last power has completed, to when you can use any other ability. I believe this is about 1 second more or less. I don't know if this time can be adjusted through in game abilities or gear.

Finally there is the recharge. This time is individual for each ability and it is the time from when you fire off that ability, to when you can use that same ability again. In WoW, most combat spells have no recharge aside from the cooldown phase, weapon abilities are more often the ones that have some recharge. The recharges have a very wide range and I'm not sure what they all are. In City of Heroes, all the powers have a recharge associated with them, usually based on the amount of damage they deal. The higher damage powers have longer recharges and the lower damage powers have shorter recharges. Also, each power can have their recharge reduced through the use of power enhancements, or global recharge reduction through buffs or enhancement set bonuses. In either game, recharge has little impact on combat speed as long as you have enough abilities to choose from, which happens pretty quickly in both games.

Now if you look at all this together, let's look at a few examples of how combat actually plays out. WoW gets to go first with my typical level 26 (out of 80) Warlock tactics. The Warlock class is a DoT class and has summonable minions available, which you can have one out at a time. I have been focusing on Affliction, which favors instant cast damage over time tactics along with a demon minion who tanks for you. My favored minion at the moment is the Voidwalker. He has the highest HP and Armor as well as an AoE taunt, which is very useful for soloing tactics using him for my personal tank. I keep him on defensive so he will attack any target that attacks me, or that I attack first. When I start combat, I usually start out with 2 or 3 of my DoTs in short order, then I often use my wand autoattack to conserve mana. Sometimes I will use my drain life attack/heal if I'm getting doubleteamed, or use my fear along with a DoT to make the other mob run away while I focus on one enemy. There does tend to be a lot of sitting around waiting for the mob to die, especially when I'm using my autoattack on a single enemy.

Alternatively, let's look at combat with my level 50 (out of 50) Robotics/Trick Arrow Mastermind. The mastermind AT is a pet/buff/debuff class. At level 50, I can have 3 low level pets, 2 mid level pets, and 1 high level pet out at the same time. And with /Trick Arrow (/TA) I have many debuff and control powers to use. When I start combat with her, I usually start off with and AoE slow on a group of 3-6 enemies and AoE defense/resistance debuffs while my pets attack. On this character, I chose to not have any personal damaging attacks for the most part. If there is a troublesome enemy, like one with a mez attack, then I use my own mez attacks to hold him. As I have many different debuffs available, I'm always running around for the best position to fire them off.

I've been going on a long time, so let me just throw in a few more comparisons in quick succession. In WoW, many attacks require you to stand still while they are being cast, so if you attempt to cast a spell while moving, you get an error message. In City of Heroes, you are forced into a standstill for the short period while your powers are animating, so if you attempt to fire a power while moving, you immediately stop and fire the power, then continue moving. In WoW, if you attempt an attack which you can't do because you are out of range, don't have enough mana, or are still waiting on a cooldown the attack is cancelled and your character says an error message. In CoX, if you attempt an attack which you can't do because you are out of range, don't have enough endurance, are still animating a previous attack, or are still waiting on the recharge that attack is queued up and fires off as soon as you are in range, get enough endurance, after your previous power finishes, or when it recharges. (You can only have one attack queued, and if you select another attack before the queued attack fires, the newly selected attack replaces it in the queue)

In City of Heroes, one character can take on 3-8+ minion rank mobs, 1-4+ lieutenant rank mobs, or 1-2+ boss rank mobs. 1-3 characters can take on 1 Elite boss rank mob, and 2-8 characters can be needed for 1 Archvillain/Hero rank mob at the same level as the character. Enemies more than 3 levels below your level (-3) give no experience and the are no longer hostile to you unless you attack them first. Even if attacked by many low level mobs, they pose practically no threat to you. Enemies more than +5 levels (and each rank above minion counts at +1 level) are nearly impossible for a solo character.

In World of Warcraft, one character can take on 1-2 mobs near their level, and 1-5 characters are needed to take out 1 Elite mob. Enemies more than -5 give no experience, but are still hostile as normal and 2-3+ low level enemies are still able to kill you if ignored or taken lightly. Enemies +4 or more can be very difficult for one character. Often it's difficult to deal with even one extra attacker.

Well, combat turned out to be a big can o' worms, and I still haven't covered everything I wanted to. But I covered some of the basics. CoX's combat system isn't perfect, but in my opinion, it has many advantages over WoW's system. Next time, either death or teaming depending one which one I'm in the mood for. Till then!

WoW rant

2009-01-08T23:05:04Z

Not an official entry, just felt the need to rant a little bit. One of the things that really bugs me about WoW right now is travel. I think I've mentioned it already that I've heard the game called World of Walking, and with good reason. But it's also, World of Walking with little direction. Now I'm playing my level 22 Warlock and I get her Warlock quest which is available at level 20. I assume that if it becomes available at 20 and it's not noted as (group) then you can do the quest at level 20, and I'm even a couple levels above that.

Anyway the quest basically just says "flavor, flavor, flavor, talk to the Seer in the Barrens in Kalimdor near Camp Taurajo, flavor, flavor." From what I've played of the game already, I know that Kalimdor is another continent, the Barrens is an area, and Camp Taurajo is a city. So I know that I have to cross the ocean, so I go to the nearest port in Stormwind, the human city since I'm a human. Nothing, then I ask my level 80 friend how to get to the Barrens. He tells me to go up to the port in the wetlands. In order to get to the wetlands, I have to take the tram in Stormwind to the Dwarf city. Then I need to walk across 3 entire regions and the first two have enemies that are so low the don't give me any experience. I find the port where there's two docks and I'm trying to figure out which one goes where. There are no signs, there's no obvious NPC saying where the boats go. I finally notice that one NPC has a speech bubble instead of nothing and when I talk to him he says where it goes (don't remember exactly right now, but it didn't have "the barrens" or "kalimdor" in it anywhere) and mentions that it's a dangerous area for the alliance. I go to the second dock and don't see anyone at all except a couple players until I realize one of the players is blocking the NPC with the speech bubble, who is actually named "dockmaster" at least. This one is going to Northrend, which I know is a much higher level area. So I head back to dock #1 and take that ship. I'm the lowest player by more than 10 levels, but I go anyway.

I get across the sea and look at the map and I'm just one zone away from the Barrens so I head out along the road to try and get there. When I see the first mob, it's level has a skull on it, which means it's more than 6 levels above my level at least and I have no chance at defeating it without awesome gear/buffs, which I don't have. So I just stay on the road and make a run for it. I almost bite it once, but I make it all the way through in one try. I head up to Camp Taurajo, fighting some mobs along the way as they are near my level, get a little too close to the Horde guard at the entrance (level ??) and get attacked and killed in short order. I start circling Camp Taurajo looking for the ? on the map showing where I need to go. I see a couple Horde players and one waved at me. Then I see an Orc Rogue go into stealth near me, I get mezzed and killed shortly thereafter. I was under the impression that I could not be attacked by other players since I had PvP disabled, and I was not on a PvP server. Apparently, if you're opposite factions, all bets are off. I'm glad that was made clear for me beforehand, especially in the quest text </sarcasm>. So I've been circling the Camp for over an hour before I finally get fed up and look online for where this contact is, since there's a possibility that the contact has been killed by a player, which is another annoyance for another time.

After looking at the website, I find the contact I'm looking for finally. I complete the quest and get... another quest, sending me North to another region. I follow up to that region, and I've died a couple times so my armor is starting to wear out, and since I'm in hostile territory, there are no Alliance friendly shops for me to repair my gear anywhere that I can find, and again this quest gives me no direction other than I have to find "heartwood" in this region. This time it doesn't even narrow it down to a smaller area. The mobs in this area are higher level, but still managable as long as I keep my cool and only face one at a time... which doesn't work so well and I die a couple more times, completely breaking my weapon (it can still be repaired, and it's not my only source of damage, but still annoying) before finally finding an Alliance controlled city. From there I had to call it quits for now. My only consolation is that after being there once, I can use the flight paths to get back much easier the second time.

Wow, that went on far longer than I had intended to, but next time I'll talk about travel... well maybe I should at least get a mount (level 35) before talking about WoW's travel, so I guess I'll talk a bit about combat. Starting with general tactics before getting into mechanics. 'Till next time!

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 4 Community

2009-01-03T06:24:55Z

As a qualifier to start this off, when I say community I am limiting it to the forums on the official websites of the respective games. And as usual I will also mention again that I have spent over a year spending way too much time on the City of Heroes forums and I have only spent a small amount of time looking through the World of Warcraft forums.

And what I have seen at the World of Warcraft forums is a hive of scum and villany. In other words, people that use words like nub, retard, and #%$&ing stupid $#*%er. I tried my best, looking at different sections, different posts. No matter where I looked I would find what looked to me like an intelligent post asking for help from the community. And consistently it would be met with utter mockery and ridicule for being a nub, posting in the wrong forum, not being high enough level, on and on and on.

But, maybe I just wasn't looking at the right posts. Let's take a look at some. How about Arathor, the realm I'm currently playing in. It seems like a good start to find some players that I might end up teaming with at some point. Let's see: Retard of the Day, I like little girls, You're gonna love my nuts. I bet there's a wealth of intelligence and information in those posts. Maybe it seems like I'm being unfair and just showing the bad posts. Let's try another one teams To sum up, someone is looking for a player to team with, and the response is "Normally I would tell you to roll your face all over your keyboard, but since you have no hotkeys I'm at a loss" I'm really glad there's kind helpful people there to help him out. How about an innocent, friendly looking topic Happy New Year!... alas, not what you would expect from that title. And finally one final gem to leave you with before I leave the Arathor forum.

Let's move onto another section of the forum, maybe I just have a bad realm. How about Warlocks? That's my highest character at level 20 currently, maybe I can find some useful information on playing her. Well, I surprised myself and found an honest question with helpful advice. Maybe there is some hope after all. Oh here we are: here's the bitterness I've come to find here. Also it seems many people are upset at a percieved recent nerf to warlocks. But looking again, it wasn't quite as bad as my trip to Arathor had geared me for.

Ok, let's take a look at one more section before moving on to City of Heroes. General Discussion seems like a good place to go to... and it's a mixed bag, but I did find someone who points out exactly what I am seeing today. (10th post down) There were a couple interesting posts, a couple helpful posts, and still many annoying posts mixed around everywhere.

Now that I'm done dipping my toes in the fowl waters of the WoW boards, it's time for me to go back to what I'm used to and hopefully try and paint a balanced picture without being too biased. Let's be somewhat fair and choose a server forum, just like I started in WoW. I'll even choose Pinnacle, which has the nickname "the drunk server". How about this one: someone looking for friends. Coming from my short experience in WoW, I'd expect to see "roll a DK nub". But shockingly the thread is full of people giving out their global contact names and names of supergroups that would be willing to take him on. Not a single unfriendly comment in the bunch. How about finding an inane topic like the several I had found earlier... the closest I see is one called *snickers*... I'm not gonna comment on this one except to say that it's completly silly.

Now onto the Mastermind forum, as I do have a level 50 mastermind. Let's look at a question from a self admitted n00b, his question is answered in the first post then it degenerates into an argument about the percieved recent nerf to /traps. I guess there are some similarities after all... except in City of Heroes it does not degenerate into namecalling, it relies on people intelligently discussing the pros and cons of the change while mentioning supporting evidence to their own point. Here's an interesting topic especially when "healer" is considered a bad word to many CoX players, although more notably in the defender's forum. And again there is helpful advice and friendly discussion.

Instead of going onto General Discussion, I will mention the PvP section of the forums, notably the PWNZ section, which does have an "enter at your own risk" warning right under the forum title in the index. This is where the scum and villainy lurk in the City of Heroes's forum. I have seen some occasions where they will filter out of the PWNZ section into other parts, but the CoX boards have a small team of dedicated moderators that are evenhanded with the mod stick, locking and moving topics to the appropriate places, and deleting when the flames get too hot.

And even though I am no longer playing City of Heroes at the moment, I still frequent the CoX boards quite often as there are many interesting topics and friendly and helpful people. As for the WoW boards, there might be some friendly and helpful people, but it looks like it would take a lot of effort to slog through the mass of trouble in order to find it. And I don't want to take the time or effort to try. Also, I know of people who keep their CoX account active even if they're not actively playing just to keep their forum posting privledges, and honestly I can see why.

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 3 loot

2008-12-30T10:22:18Z

CoX vs. World of Warcraft pt. 3 Loot.

For those of you who don't know what loot is, you probably don't play MMOs. But anyway, loot are items that you get from defeated enemies that your character can use. In City of Heroes, it comes in the form of enhancements and more recently, Invention Origin (IO) recipes and salvage to create much better enhancements. In World of Warcraft, it's equipment and materials. For a change of pace, Instead of going with one game's pros and cons, I'll go with each portion of the system and how it pertains to each game, and which one I think handles it better.

First, let's start out with how they drop. In City of Heroes there is a chance for every enemy to drop a piece of loot, sometimes two, very rarely any more than that. You typically get a few drops per spawn. You also get merits for Taskforces, somewhat similar to WoW's Instanced dungeons, to choose some of the better IO recipies. There are also chances for drops on each mission complete. And at the end game, any mob that can drop level 50 enhancements has a small chance to drop Ultra-Rare Purple IO recipes, with the best stats and bonuses.

In World of Warcraft, every enemy (except some beasts) drops 1-6 pieces of loot (at least in the lower levels). Once you get higher level, enemies have a chance to drop Uncommon (Green) loot with better stats and some stat bonuses. And elite mobs, most often in instances, can drop Rare (Blue) loot with even better stats, and in the high end game there's also Epic (Purple) loot. In both games, the rarer the loot, the better it is, and the more sought after it is. Now at first glance, they seem somewhat similar. If you want the best loot, you got to be lucky enough, rich enough, or patient enough to get the ultra-rare drops.

Very similar to how the loot drops is how to get the loot. You might think that it's the same thing, especially for a City of Heroes player. But it's not... Not quite anyway. To make the most out of this, let's assume you're on a team players. In City of Heroes, you defeat a mob and everyone has a chance at getting a loot drop. You don't have to do anything, it just happens and shows up in your inventory as long as you have enough room. I don't know the behind the scenes specifics if every player has a chance for a drop, or if every mob has a chance for a drop and it goes to a random, or specific member of the group. But it doesn't really matter, you defeat the mobs and move on as if nothing is happening, and later on you can worry about your loot, or when one of your inventories get full and you have to decide if you want to make room for better drops than what you have.

In World of Warcraft, every mob that you defeat has a chance to drop loot, and it's your job to pick it up from them. The group leader has to set the looting rules whether it's a free-for-all fastest clicker take all, or if you play nice and take turns, or if Santa Leader collects everything and distributes it at their whim. Then there's other rules for the special loot where every item pops up and you can select: Need, Greed, or Pass. It seems more or less self-explanitory the way I understand it. If you need it you click need, if you want it you click greed, and if you don't want it you click pass. Typically those who click Need get the first shot at the item based on percentile rolls, if no one clicked Need then it moves onto Greed rolls, if no one clicked Greed either then it stays on the mob and anyone on the group can change their mind and loot it themselves. I believe there's also ways to change the Need before Greed as I described it, but I haven't looked into it myself so I don't know.

If you want to look at it in concept, World of Warcraft is closer to the typical pen and paper RPG style of party where everyone is usually good friends and they will usually work out a fair way to distribute the loot to the person that it will benefit the most. Unfortunately most groups are not good friends and many groups are perfect strangers. The chance element is a way to make it somewhat fair, but there's definately the opportunity for abuse, like the person that clicks Need for every drop whether they need it or not. Since you can see what everyone chose it's easy to pick that person out, unless they wait for the best drops, or start doing it closer towards the end when they would be less likely to be kicked if they are essential to the team makeup. In City of Heroes, the game automatically distributes the loot evenly, for the most part. And besides that, no one else sees your drops. If you get a purple drop, you don't have to let anyone know. But in World of Warcraft, if you select Need for a Purple drop that your character can't use, you will draw the ire of the rest of the party. Especially if one of them really needed it.

Next, let's look at how to get the drops you want. For many people, it's farming. It happens, some people like it, some people hate it. Me? I don't participate, but I don't knock it either. In City of Heroes, you have a few choices, you can farm a mission or hazard zone area with an easily defeatable enemy group for your character and reset it over and over to try and get as much money and chances for a purple drop as possible, or you can farm Taskforces or Oroborous Story Arcs for merits to buy the loot you need. Of course, I will mention this here now that if you do a Taskforce as a level 50, you are levelled down to they maximum level for that taskforce, so there's no risk-less walkthroughs. In World of Warcraft I can't comment on high level farming, since I'm obviously not high level yet and I haven't looked into any of it either. What I have seen a lot of is Instance farming. I would often see people advertising deadmine (DM) runs. They seem about as common as Katie runs before i13. And every time I saw one run, it was a high level character probably running one of their friends and they offer up the rest of the spots on the team with anyone else that wants in, occasionaly for a price. And from there, the high level character easily kills all the mobs in the dungeon and the rest of the party just follows clicking dead bodies. Only slightly more entertaining than a PL session in City of Heroes sitting at the mission door.

Finally, there's the aesthetics aspect, which I'll only cover briefly here and probably expand on it in another topic. In City of Heroes, aside from the obvious gameplay benefits, the only thing different about your character that other people can see are the setbonuses listed in your character desription window. In World of Warcraft, aesthetics is half of loot. The best loot is often the coolest looking on your character. This is a major drawback for people driven by looks. If you equip the best drops you get, you are often wearing a hodgepodge of different looking armors. Or you may be disappointed that the armorset that looks the best to you, isn't nearly the best suited for your character. In City of Heroes, mixing a combination of the some of the better drops from different sets is often encouraged, and is called Frankenslotting for those who don't know. You could even be running with Single Origin (SO) enhancements, I suppose roughly equivilent to Uncommon loot in WoW, and most everyone would never know the difference.

So there you have two varying degrees of loot. I vastly prefer City of Heroes' method of drops, but I do admit that there is a certain small allure to physically seeing your character evolve in front of you per their equipment. And occasionally finding a new outfit that especially suits your character, but can often be deflated by later finding a statistically better outfit that doesn't look as good.

City of Heroes vs. World of Warcraft pt. 2

2008-12-24T03:28:42Z

Instanced Missions vs. Open World Quests

In City of Heroes the majority of story content and advancement comes through contacts and paper/radio missions (generic missions) are instanced missions. In other words you get the mission from your contact, the contact sends you to a door (cave, manhole, portal, etc.) and that puts you in a mini-map where there is only you and your group and mobs spawned at exactly your level, modified by difficulty settings. There are other types of missions, talk missions where you merely have to find another NPC and talk to them to advance the mission, and like the instance missions the NPC is lit up on your map with a star and a yellow arrow that points you directly to them. Finally, there's hunt missions where you have to defeat a certain number of mobs from a particular group. Sometimes the hunt missions are restricted to a certain area of the map, but they are never restricted by level or mob type.

One of the biggest pros is that you know exactly where your mission is. You open the map and it's marked with a yellow star, clear as day. It even shows up in the world as a yellow marker in the compass that even tells you how far away it is. You don't have to worry about other players getting in the way, making things more difficult for you. You don't have to worry about the mobs being too high or low level for you. Also, after a few missions from a contact, you get their phone number and no longer have to go all the way back to them to get your next mission.

The downsides are that it does disconnect you a little bit from the rest of the playerbase, as there is no one else in your intstance other than your team. Though you can invite more people into your instance, and a team can be up to eight players. It also could be viewed as a bit easy for the hardcore gamer, though the highest difficulty is often ample challenge for most players. And finally while there are many different maps out there, there are only a few too often used textures. The office building, caves, sewers being the most used. And the most interesting maps are reserved for task forces which are not something that the casual player can often get a chance to play.

In World of Warcraft the majority of story content and advancement comes through quests. Quests come in basically three types that I've come across so far. The talk to quest where you have to find a certain NPC based on rough directions in your quest text, which can be difficult especially for newer players that don't know the names of the areas yet. The only help you get is if you are close enough, typically just outside of viewing range, a yellow question mark shows up on your map. Then there's the hunt quests, where you have to go to a certain area on the map and defeat a certain number of a specific type of mob. Or sometimes just a single boss or leader mob. This isn't always as easy as it might seem since if your quest says "go kill 7 goretusks" and you kill 7 "young goretusks", they don't count. Mind you "young goretusks" and "goretusks" look nearly identical to each other, the only difference is their level. The final type is the collect quest, where you have to collect a certain number of a certain item. Often this item is only dropped by a certain type of mob in a certain area. And the drop rate, from my limited experience and completely from memory, is around 50% more or less. So if you have to collect 5 gnoll paws from the area gnolls, expect to kill around 10 more or less. There are also some instanced missions in World of Warcraft that require a well balanced team that I've heard are something special, but I haven't had the chance to experience one myself yet.

The pros of these types of quests are that they are a bit more immersive as they get you to explore the surrounding areas in more detail, getting to know the knooks and crannies of the map to know where everything you need is, more than you might in City of Heroes where it's often a mad dash to the next mission door. The world is also immense and very well detailed. I've played several of the different race starting zones and been to a couple other zones besides and they all look very different from each other and are quite visually striking. My wife occasionally finds a place where she just wants to look around and explore the zone, which rarely happened in City of Heroes. There are also areas that almost have a feel of an instance in the open world, like the other day I found a half sunken ship guarded by Murlocks that was an interesting little place to run through fighting the mobs and getting a treasure chest at the end. Also, there are some talk to quests that have mini-events associated with them which I think are a really nice touch. For example one quest has you finding a book in a river, the next quest asks you to take the book back to its owner and take the blame for getting it wet so they didn't get into trouble, you take it back and tell the whole story so he sends you back to them for retribution in the form of a spell you can cast on them which actually turns them into a boar. The closest thing City of Heroes has to this is the Lost Cure, which is fairly new and I hope it is a sign of more things to come like this.

The cons of these type of quests are that they can end up being tedious, especially if you are having lousy luck on a collect quest and not getting that last goretusk liver from any of the goretusks you are fighting. Also it can be frustrating, especially for newer players, to find what you are looking for, whether it's a contact, or a named boss, or an area on the map. You either have to wonder around on your own, ask for help, or download a quest helper mod (which I personally don't think should ever be necissary on a game). Another thing that adds to the repetition is if you go on a hunt mission and you find a difficult named boss and kill it along with your quest required mobs as you would want to, Then you head back to your contact only to find that your next quest is to bring them the head of the named boss that you just killed with no simple effort. And on top of that, if you're on a high population server, or if you're just unlucky, when you fight your way back to where the named boss is, he's already been killed by another player. Then you have two options: either drop the mission with no rewards, or wait for the boss to respawn, however long that might take (my low level experience so far has been no more than a couple minutes, and hasn't happened very often either). And finally, the walking. I've heard the game called World of Walking and I absolutely know why. There are no phones so to complete a quest (aside from talk to's which are completed by the person you talk to) you have to walk all the way back to the quest giver. The upside is that you can have 25 quests active at a time and most quest givers are in town areas so the oft used method is to gather all the quests while you are in town, then go hunt/explore until you complete some/all of your quests or fill up on loot to sell and turn them all in at once. This isn't always as effective as it appears to be though, and I've found myself spending more than enough time walking from place to place on my slow two feet as I'm not even halfway to getting a mount to make things go a bit faster.

So there you have my first writeup. I definately enjoy both forms of quests/missions, and I also think both have room for improvement. I like the fact that no one can mess up your mission goal in City of Heroes, you can find it without outside help, and you can get there very quickly. I don't like the repetitive mission maps and the mad dash to the next mission door. I like exploring in World of Warcraft, finding little interesting areas and fun quests. I don't like spending my time looking for one more red bandana to drop, or looking everywhere to find where the defias bandits even are in the first place. I don't like the fact that you can fight your way to the boss only to have some player come by and kill him out from under you. But you can't have everything and next week (or day, or whenever I feel like writing it) I'll look at what you can have: loot. Until next time!

World of Warcraft vs. City of Heroes pt. 1

2008-12-23T06:07:06Z

To start off, let me say that I've been playing City of Heroes for 18 months and I just recently tried World of Warcraft, many of the classes/races, highest is currently a level 15 Human Warlock and my wife's level 13 Blood Elf Hunter. I'm planning on writing a series of posts comparing and contrasting the two games from my point of view. Partly for myself to help decide if I want to play one or the other exclusively, and partly because I want to put it out in the world. I'd like to link this somehow on the City of Heroes' boards, but my account is currently inactive, and they also disallow any compare/contrast posts.

Since this is my first post about this, and I don't have a whole lot of time, I'll just use this space to introduce the idea and spell out some of the topics I want to explore in greater details later on. There are a whole lot of things that I like about both of the games right now. There are also some things I don't like so much, as well as more things that I'm indifferent on and I probably won't cover those in detail or at all. I'm looking at you PvP. But I'll definately be looking at the low level game, the quest/mission system, team building, community, ease of solo play, and any other topics I can think of. If you happen to come across this post for some reason and want to hear some thoughts on any other topic about WoW from a City of Heroes' player's perspective, just leave a comment and I'll see what I can do.

Obviously, I won't be able to comment on the high level game, or even the mid level game for quite a while if I even make it that far. But I hope to space these articles out far enough so that I'll always have some topic to cover every time I get the urge to type one up.

Cerulean Archer - Origin Story

2008-08-25T01:11:03Z

Note: This is an origin story for one of my City of Heroes characters: Cerulean Archer, a Trick Arrow/Ice defender. It's been a while since I've posted anything here, and City of Heroes is part of that., but here's something new, and who knows, maybe I won't leave this for so long next time. Enjoy!

Celina Artemis was a simple scientist and archery enthusiast. She spent many days well into the midnight hour fiddling with gadgets and gears, studying chemical compositions and mixing formulas. In her spare time when she needed to get some fresh air, she was never without her bow and arrow. Making her way to the archery range on many occasions. Firing arrows for hours on end. And when no one was looking, firing her... test arrows. Her other passion, creating new, improved arrows using her technical knowledge.

It was just another one of her research sessions. Deeply entrenched in a cryogenics book the idea struck her for a way to use cryogenics in her gadget arrows. Never one to let her thoughts catch up to her actions, she immediately went to the lab to experiment. Her mind was racing at the possibility to create an arrow to completely incapacitate a criminal without harming them. It could be an absolute boon to the overburdened PPD, helping to give them a leg up on all the villains roaming the city. Even with the extreme population of heroes, it seems like the villains still outnumber the good guys 10 to 1. This lab alone has been broken into more times than she could count.

An all too familiar crash rang out from the room next door. Not this time. Not now. She felt like she was too close to a breakthrough.

Footsteps coming closer. She had to do something, she let herself be the victim too many times already.

Darkness. The power must have been knocked out. A sharp rapping on the laboratory door made Celina start, knocking over some of her tools. Suddenly a burning sensation ran up her arm. Reeling back, she thought she had run her hand over the flame on the bunson burner. Her chest felt like ice as she realized that those outside must have heard her and now knew someone was here. Her mind raced through the possibilies of what might be on the other side of the door, for all she knew it could be vahzilok looking for spare parts. She couldnt' let that happen.

Through the dim, flickering light of the still lit bunson burner she could see the doorknob start to turn. Without thinking, she flung her arm out in front of her, maybe she could find a weapon, something, anything. What she did find she could have never imagined in her wildest dreams.

When she reached her arm out, the same arm that she thought she had burnt on the open flame, she saw what looked like diamonds fly out through her fingertips. But it wasn't diamonds, it was ice crystals. As she looked closer she realized that she had sealed the door shut by encasing it in solid ice. Curses rang from the other side of the door, then footsteps. They were running away. Her heart still racing, she went to sit down and collapsed. Her head was spinning. Everything went black.

"Celine. Celine. Wake up Celine."

A voice reached through the thick haze in her head, bringing her back into the world. What had really happened? When she could finally open her eyes, she saw Carl, her co-worker.

"Well good morning Celine. It looks like you went through hell and then some. I see we had some unwelcome visitors yet again. How can we be expected to do any serious research when this place is getting broken into every other week." Carl was a welcoming face to wake up to. He was the only other person that had been working at the lab as long as Celine. Like he said, how can anyone be expected to work with these kind of conditions.

Carl helped Celine up and she could look around. The lab looked pretty normal. Her experiment was knocked over, but there was no other damage. Looking at her hand, there were no burns, nothing. The door looked perfectly fine as well. Did she just imagine what had happened to her and she just got lucky. Maybe one of the many wondering heroes came by and distracted her pursuers.

"Are you ok Celine?" Carl looked into her eyes with an expression of genuine concern.

"Y..." Celine coughed, her mouth was incredibly dry. It was a few moments before she could bring herself to speak. "Y... Yes, I think I'm ok, just a little shaken up. I think I just need to go home, can you give me a ride?"

"Sure, no problem." Carl offered her his hand, and led her outside to his car. During the short ride to her apartment, she spent the time convincing herself that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something wrong.

Despite the fact that it was the middle of summer, but she could have sworn that she saw her breath when she stepped out of the car. And when she got inside, she turned the heat on without even realizing it.

some background info

2007-04-30T02:30:25Z

I just felt like putting out some background info about what I'm writing. First off there's the interrupting boy sketch idea. This is just something I was thinking about and I wanted to put it in writing. Even though it seems like it's not as funny when I put it in writing. It's like an idea for a recurring character in a sketch comedy show like Kids in the Hall or Mad TV. I feel like it was slightly inspired by a mix of Stuart from Mad TV, since that's similar to the way I imagine him looking like in my head. And there also seems to be a bit of the know it all kid from Kids in the Hall, I forget his name, but he's played by Bruce McCullah and he has a hat and a backpack. The way I imagined it is that when he first shows up, he would get a little bit of a laugh, and also would be a little confusing since he would only be onscreen for like 3 or 4 lines then disappear. I thought it could be an annoying character so it would be important to keep him onscreen for a short period of time, and each time he would show up, he would get more laughs.

As for the fiction posts, that's a bit of a longer story. Several years ago, I started writing bits of fanfiction for SaGa Frontier, I had a website for it. It slowly expanded to other RPGs, preferably the less popular series. I ended up coming across a very long, well written fanfiction for the Breath of Fire series called Reborn Again. That story inspired me to start writing my own fanfiction based on Breath of Fire. I called it Dragon's Breath. I wrote it in a somewhat stream of consciousness way, where I just start at the beginning and start writing. Then I would type it in with slight revision. I got to about 125 handwritten notebook pages before I wrote myself into a corner. I didn't really know how to continue from that point, and I didn't have the urge to go back and rewrite large sections of it. I eventually left it for several years and hadn't really given it much though.

Now, I'm a bit older and my job gives me several hours of time by myself as I drive to my different locations, so I have time to think about ideas in writing, and as a side note, that's also when I came up with interrupting boy. Maybe it just seems funnier after an hour's drive. But anyway. I felt like I wanted to revisit Dragon's Breath, even though I'm not very fond of that title anymore. I also have a daughter, so I don't have lots of time to myself in front of the computer, so I wanted to just write things in smaller chunks. Just take an idea, or a short scene in the middle of the story and write it, taking account of where the characters are in the story. I might try even writing out an outline of the story, but mostly I just have an idea for the setup and part of the journey, and I've got nothing for the climax or resolution.

Also, one character that I really enjoy (even though I killed her off in my original version, one of many choices I'm no longer happy with) I'm not sure if I can write for her. It's weird, I first thought of the name Jena for the female character in Secret of Mana and I fell in love with it, as much as you can fall in love with a name anyway. I used the name Jena for a character in pretty much any game that had a female character you could rename. And she was a character in Dragon's Breath. She was Ryu's childhood friend/love interest. They were going to the Dragon academy together and were roommates. My daughter's name is Jena, she's almost six months old. And now it feels weird to use that name for a character in a game, or a character in a story. I don't know what it is, it almost feels like I'm trivializing it instead of paying it tribute. But anyway, that's a lot longer than I was planning to write on this so I'll shut up now.

interrupting boy pt. 3, the payoff

2007-04-28T06:08:17Z

setting: right at the end of a sketch towards the end of the show. The same man again is a part of this sketch. All of the actors go off in different directions, all away from the man. He turns around to go offstage, immediately interrupting boy jumps in front of him from OS.

<interrupting boy> (loudly, in a high pitched voice) Hello!

the man jumps back, clutching at his chest.

<man>You aga-
<interrupting boy>What's your name?
<man>You wouldn't have to ask every time if you would just listen.
<interrupting boy>(talking over the man's sentence) My name's CHEWBACCA!!
<man> (getting completely fed up) No it isn't! (grabs the boy)

one of the cast walks by just as the man grabs interrupting boy.

<cast member>(concerned and shocked) What are you doing to that poor boy?
<man>(looks over) This boy has been bothering me all day.
<interrupting boy> (interrupting, as usual) Don't touch me! (starts crying)
<cast member> (pulls the boy away from the man and talks to him softly) Where's your parents?
<interrupting boy> (doesn't interrupt the cast member) I don't know.
<cast member> Here, I'll help you find them.

the camera pans over as two people dressed in Wookie costumes rush over and hug interrupting boy.

<Wookie couple>Son!
<interrupting boy> Mom! Dad!

the man gets so confused by this revelation you can almost tell his head is about to explode.

end scene.

Ryu's transformation

2007-04-18T04:41:38Z

Ryu closed his eyes. He reached out with his mind's eye, looking back at himself. His body. His surroundings, the ledge of the tower, his teacher.

He focused closer, just on himself. He was standing silently, his eyes closed, arms crossed in front of his chest. The patch of scales on his arm shined a deep, dark green. Closer still, each individual scale overlapping each other one after the other then slowly fading to skin on his forearm. No. Back to the scales, dragon scales, the reminder of their clan's more powerful form. Deeper, past his arms, inside, into his soul. His heart, his power.

He could feel it now, pulsing inside his body, he need only let it out. He tried, but he wasn't sure how. He could feel all this power inside himself, like it could just burst out at any second, but try as he might, he couldn't find the door, the release. He searched with his mind's eye more frantically. It's right there, he can feel it, but it is just beyond his sight, just out of reach. He could feel himself breathing more heavily, his legs starting to sag. He couldn't take this much longer.

At last he saw it. It was like a small shaft of light inside her very soul. He reached out to it, tried to widen the hole, make it big enough to let this power out. Some of it at least. He wasn't sure how, but he could feel it working, the light was becoming brighter. It was almost wide enough for him to see inside.

Suddenly it changed. The light grew darker, yet stronger at the same time. It was bending, reaching.

Ryu's eyes shot open as he was shocked back into reality. A terrible pain racked his entire body, yet he still stood straight, as straight as possible. In fact, he felt taller, though it was also strange for him to think about that while he was in so much pain. His eyes moved down towards his legs, they were getting longer, thicker.

A jolt knocked Ryu to the ground. He could barely see through the haze of pain that blinded his eyes. But he was able to make out what he thought was his leg, but it was too far away from his body. It looked like his leg was completely severed and flung from his body, but no. His leg wasn't severed, his bone had grown extremely fast, ripping his skin and muscles in the process, and Ryu could feel every bit of it. But then his muscles started growing, climbing vine-like up his new bone to connect back with each other. His skin grew as well, but grew dark brown, crag-like, spreading out in a wide, sturdy base. There was a new sensation in the middle of his back, one he couldn't quite describe, it almost felt warm, like he could sense where the sun was in the sky.

The pain grew too much for him, he shut his eyes and tried to curl up, but he couldn't even move his misshapen body. For several minutes that seemed unbearably long, Ryu stood as his body underwent this gruesome transformation. Finally, the pain began to lessen and Ryu could open his eyes and take in his new found form. But when he looked around, he was no different than before. Ryu opened his mouth as he could barely croak out "Wh... what happened?"

Clyde, Ryu's teacher stood calmly next to him, as he had been through the entire ordeal, came over to Ryu and tenderly patted him on his back. "Here, eat this." he said as he handed him a large chunk of bread. At first Ryu could hardly look at it, but at the urge of his stomach, he reached out and took the bread, practically inhaling it as he devoured it. He realized how hungry he really was. "You didn't really think you would be a full grown dragon on the first try, did you? Come on, let's go back, you should get some rest after what you've been through." Clyde helped Ryu up and led him back into the tower.

As they walked back inside, Clyde thought back to the sight of Ryu, a giant green dragon, a plant dragon. He had never seen such an advanced form on a first try, even if it was for a mere moment. Clyde hesitated for a moment as a stray thought entered his head. "What's wrong?" asked Ryu.

"Oh, it's nothing, you just worry about yourself right now."

Late that night, Clyde was in the library, books strewn about himself in a wide disarray. He slowly looked up from the page he was reading and thought to himself "May Ladon help us all."

intro and idea for later

2007-04-06T05:56:35Z

Just feel like putting out a few thoughts today. I decided to make this journal just to write down some of the ideas floating around in my head and put it out for a few people to see. I enjoy getting comments as well as constructive critisism, I like hearing if you like my writing, but I also don't mind if you point out something that doesn't seem quite right. That way, I know what I need to work on more.

I also wanted to put out a couple thoughts, even though I don't plan on putting too many personal posts on here. I watched Penn and Teller's Bullshit yesterday, and I really enjoyed it, and I was really surprised at their episode on Recycling. I encourage everyone to take a look at it, it's on the second disc of season 2. The real truth is: recycling costs more that making something new. Recycling paper creates more waste that making new paper - bleaching the old paper creates this chemical sludge, where new paper is made from trees grown... to make paper, not from virgin forests as recycling proponents would like you to believe. We are nowhere near running out of room for landfills, and methane from landfills actually create a great deal of energy. And when a landfill is full, it's covered with earth and landscaped into a park or golf course. Nothing bad there. It does create jobs, but not very good jobs, just people in practically hasmat suits sorting through garbage. The only real thing worth recycling is Aluminum, which is why that's the only thing they actually pay you to recycle.

And finally, this is just for myself, notes for something that I don't want to write tonight, but I don't want to forget about it. Ryu's first transformation into a dragon. His bones stretch out, ripping his skin and muscles which worm their way towards each other as they reform. His skin growing thick, green, and leathery. His legs grow barklike. His mouth is like a venus flytrap. His wings like leaves with their leafy veins. That's it, look for the full storylette(?), novella? prose poem? I'm not even sure what to call this stuff. Anyway hopefully I'll write it in the next few days, prolly after Easter.

writing exercise: swordfight

2007-04-04T04:52:48Z

Clang!

the two combatants tested each other as the sound of their two swords rang out in the emptiness of the lush grassy field. A strand of Ryu's hair dances across his vision, but he doesn't waver in the face of his opponent. They face each other as shadows matching blow for blow. Each strike parried deliberately.

Wyndine stands mere inches away from Ryu, the light from her sword dancing on Ryu's shoulder. She flaps her wings subtly giving her the extra room to just feel the wind from Ryu's blade across the tip of her nose. The navy feathers drew a stark contrast upon her pale skin, making gentle waves from the wind in concert with the grass around them. It made her feel one with the world around her, the wind, the grass, the earth, the metal of her opponents blade, the shock of each impact, pushing her feet into the earth just barely enough to leave her presence after her feet have moved.

Suddenly, Wyndine moves her wings forward, sending her flying back. At the same time she prepares the rest of her body so that as soon as her feet touch back down on the ground, she launches herself into a forward somersault, bringing her blade with her to slash downward towards Ryu's shoulder. She hit nothing but air, Ryu seemed to have anticipated her move and dodged to the side bringing his sword around for another strike. Wyndine barely had enough time to plant her feet to shift her roll to the side, but the blade still caressed her cheek, just below her eye. A crimson flower slowly blooming at the bottom of her vision. Through that crimson, she can see Ryu's eyes, his pupils drawing into narrower slits and his mouth, curling slightly just around the edges.

interrupting boy pt. 2, the return

2007-03-31T04:27:58Z

setting: the middle of a sketch later in the show, the same man is a part of this sketch. Again, the camera switches to a shot of just the man and interrupting boy leaps into frame from OS.

<interrupting boy> (loudly, in a high pitched voice) Hello!

the man visibly jumps then turns around to look at the boy smiling wildly.

<man> Hel-
<interrupting boy> Is that your real hair?!
<man> (reaches up to feel his hair) wh-
<interrupting boy> What's your name?!
<man> You asked me that already (getting exasperated but finally finishing his sentences even though interrupting boy still asks his next question without waiting for the man to finish his sentence)
<interrupting boy> My name's Luke!
<man> (confused, looking around as if for answers) But you said your name was Ben.
<interrupting boy> (in the middle of the man's sentence) Do you like Peas?!
<man> (seriously) Why yes I do.
<interrupting boy> OK bye! (jumps OS)

as soon as the boy jumps OS, the camera switches back to frame the rest of the sketch as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Whoever else is in the sketch acts as if they were continuing on without the man and not noticing he was no longer participating. The man is on the edge of the frame, looking very confused and bewildered and slowly joins back into the sketch in progress.

interrupting boy pt.1, the setup

2007-03-28T17:35:07Z

setting: in the middle of a sketch already in progress, a man and a woman are having a conversation. The camera switches to a one shot with the man, leaving a little bit of empty space on his back side.

A man dressed as a young boy jumps into frame from OS just inches away from the man's backside.

<interrupting boy> (in a loud, high pitched voice) Hello!

the man starts, then turns around and looks at the boy
<man> Hel-
<interrupting boy> (begins speaking in the middle of the man's word) How are you?!
<man> (flustered, but keeping his cool) I'm o-
<interrupting boy> What's your name?!
<man> (beginning to get irritated) My name-
<interrupting boy> My name's Ben!
<man> (getting flustered not even able to spit out one sentence) You're not eve-
<interrupting boy> OK bye!

the boy jumps backwards OS leaving the man alone, the camera switches back to the two shot of the currently running sketch. The woman in the sketch is still talking as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. The man looks around, bewildered as the boy is nowhere to be seen. He slowly turns back to the woman and continues on with the sketch.