The Dark Side of Management

Sucks to report to a Sith Lord.

Recruiting Friends

My wife and I became disillusioned with Age of Conan not long after launch, and as time passed we found ourselves logging in less and less.  We’re mildly interested in WAR, kinda in the same way we were interested in AoC; it’s always interesting to see how the game design pushes MMOs forward, and how it fails.  For now though, we’re back in WoW.

Some of our friends are on a PvP server and so we decided to start fresh there (no character transfers from PvE to PvP realms are allowed).  Neither my wife nor I were looking forward to the grind, but both of us enjoy world PvP and want to experience the WoW endgame.  So I recruited my wife, linked her new account to my pre-existing one, and away we went.

Triple experience really changes the feel of the game.  WoW is, as pretty much anyone will tell you, quite polished and full of content, but there’s also a fair amount of tedium to be found – the worst of which is often found in quests requiring you to obtain items dropped by monsters you’re supposed to kill in the dozens or hundreds, securing the items you seek every tenth or twentieth kill (or even less frequently sometimes).  Thankfully, with triple exp, we’re quite able to choose which quests will be fun for us, and ignore the others.  As a result, we’ve skipped probably 95% of the quests in the game that require you to farm monsters for drops.  They just take a lot longer and are often a lot more frustrating than our preference: the kill quests and vector quests (a vector quest is one that sends you to another location to talk to an NPC there, usually to direct you to new quest hubs).  Kill ten thingies?  Sure!  Fly across the world to go talk to some guy?  Sure!

It’s most efficient of course to find a series of quests you can do in one area, so though the vector quests are quite easy, they’re not always optimal experience.  We love having five or ten or even more quests at once – our biggest run to date was in the Hinterlands, where we completed a record 18 quests in one pass, going from lvl 48 to 53 in one sitting a few nights ago.  Sadly, that kind of quest density doesn’t come very often, and we’re lucky to get half a dozen quests in the same general vicinity.  I expect that to change once we hit Outland, which we’ll do after getting to 60 in Azeroth.

It’s hard to overstate how much more enjoyable the leveling is now; I wasn’t looking forward to it terribly, having leveled a dozen or so characters to the 40s and 50s previously.  This time, however, leveling is a lot easier and more relaxing than ever before, which I have to imagine is helping secure subscriptions for Blizzard.  It’s surely a clever and effective marketing ploy to combat WAR.

Now if only we got triple experience on our lockpicking as well.  Dang, that’s a tedious skill to raise.

Groove is… on the table?

The reactable is a spiffy machine for music synthesis.  It seems ill-suited to melody but is a surprisingly cool-looking toy for producing funky grooves.

Better late than never…

This has apparently been cracking people up for 3 years now.  Go figure.  I just found out about it yesterday from my wife.  Charlie has a real Carl Brutananadilewski feel to him.

Oktapodi

This delightful little film made me smile start to finish.