Lounge L33ts Episode 12: The Crater

Northern Gun meets up at The Crater, the best bar in town! Well, the ONLY bar in town, thanks to the apocalypse. Ed, aka "Drenivian" joins us, as well talk about our experiences so far with Defiance from Trion Worlds. The conversation soon turns to other topics such as MMO budgets, insider trading, and games that remind us fondly of other games.

Lounge L33ts Episode 10: The Wyvern's Tail

Each of us had played a little of WoW a long time ago, but it never managed to keep us interested. Now, Barry, Matt, and I have gotten around to playing it again, including some of the new content in Mists of Pandaria. So what is it that has us hooked now? Grab your racing ram and let's all head on over to The Wyvern's Tail and Brewfest 2013 to find out!

Lounge L33ts Episode 9: Bastion Guild Hall

What's this? A serious discussion on the gameplay and storyline of Scarlet Blade? Well sort of...Ran shows up in his Weefleboy persona again as we discuss our favorite classes, the plot behind the warring factions, the ideas behind adult MMO's, and the affects of gold farming in general.

Lounge L33ts Episode 8: Reets Retreat - The Glass Floor Room

     For the second season premiere, we try something a little different: and improvised (kind of) RP session. Weefleboy schools us on the professions available, shows off his shiny new smurf suit, and refuses to address some intimate questions on the details of his operations. Meanwhile Pinqi wonders if he/she's chosen the right path in life, and Mad Matt shows off his gun. It's anarchy, I tells you! Anarchy Online!
    Also make sure to check out our Youtube channel!  https://www.youtube.com/user/LoungeL33ts/about

State of Blog 4/29/2013

     Hello all! I just wanted to let everyone know what was going on and the plans for the future of the blog.
     Some bad stuff went down this past winter for both my self and my friend, Randy, with whom I do the Lounge L33ts podcast. Around the end of January, my mom suffered a severe heart attack. She thought she only had the flu, even though my dad felt there was more to her symptoms. She wound up waiting three days to go to the Emergency Room (it's commonly recommended to seek aid within ninety minutes), thus more damage was done to her heart. She was in Bay Area Aurora for a few weeks, and had a triple bypass surgery that turned into a double bypass. Then she was transferred down to St. Luke's in Milwaukee and stayed there for another couple of weeks. Before all was done, her heart had gotten down to ten percent strength and there was talk of a possible transplant. However, with help from a pacemaker/defibrillator she has gotten stronger and is at home now. In fact, she has recovered so quickly that the doctors don't think she'll need a transplant anymore.
     During all this, I dropped everything thing and was planning on moving back home, but my friends and my aunt helped convince me otherwise. Madison is decent city with a lot of culture, and I have built up a support network of friends and co-workers. I have a life down here that I'm not quite so willing to give up. While I'm a little apprehensive when it comes to affording this life, I at least have steady income from a reliable job. I just need to budget better.
     And here we get to Randy's troubles. I won't go into too much detail, but Randy lost the roof over his head and has had to move in with my friend Bob and Bob's parents. He is trying to get on Social Security while at the same time working on his resume and, hopefully, job hunting.
     I have posted a brief video on the situation with the Lounge L33ts podcast here:

http://blip.tv/LoungeL33ts

We have the episode filmed, and I am currently editing it. In addition I have set up a Lounge L33ts email and Youtube account which will soon be seeing activity. I'm planning on uploading the latest episode, then going back and posting the first season episodes in between to help people get caught up. We're going to try something a little bit different: roleplaying sessions. It won't be every episode, but every now and then, we will hop on as our characters and give their point of view on what's happening within their world. There will still be regular episodes where we talk as our selves, but this will help provide a little variety.
     I'm still working on the final part for "The Way to Kumas." I was planning to have it finished quite sometime ago, but then my mom had her emergency. I want to have an ending that wraps up the situation for the characters but allows for further stories to develop off of it. My aunt has told me it's "like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, except much better." I have yet to see the newer movie, but there does seem to be some similarities. I'm planning on being able to write my next short story within a month.
     And so that's what has been going on lately. Between my mom's heart attack, possibly moving back home, and helping Randy move, the blog has been a bit empty. It's time to get back to work.

Lounge L33ts Special 2: Frostbluff

Our resident expert on all things Tolkien, Sarah Bloy, takes us on a tour of the newly renovated Bree on Landroval server. Then it's off to Frostbluff to part take in some of the Yuletide Festival activities. Ran momentarily gets into a kegger of a problem, while the rest of us try to save up for a pony. Afterward, we go to see a play at the famous Frostbluff Theater, where Sarah becomes the Star of the Show and Matt finally finds a use for all that rotten fruit and flower he's got laying around. Finally, we don't play enough MMO's to warrant a Top 10 list, but we do go over our most favorite MMO's and the biggest disappointments for 2012.

Lounge L33ts Episode 7: Home for the Holidays

We spread some holiday cheer from the Home for the Holidays dimension in Rift (Faeblight server). Joining us is our friend Bob to explain why he's chosen Rift to fill the base building hole in his heart that City of Heroes left behind.

Master of Imperious Task Force

Something a little more upbeat than the previous video! The Legendary super group and I run through the Imperious Task Force on City of Heroes. We were going for the "Master of the Imperious Task Force" badge, went meant we couldn't use any of our temporary powers. Also, we lost our chance at the badge if anyone in the group died.

Lounge L33ts Episode 6: The Loft

We eventually get around to talking about our experiences so far with the super hero MMO Champions Online. But first, so more geeking out over Anarchy Online!

Lounge L33ts Episode 5: The Horned God

     I've been playing The Secret World off and on since it officially opened up, and so far it's been a lot of fun. It has it's faults, though. Every time my friend Barry comes over, I have a brief moment of fear that he'll ask to play the game with me. Lately he's been picking Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I don't currently have installed and have informed him of this fact last three times he's been over.
     I'll get to SWTOR again in the future. Right now my plate is already piled high with my friends' latest surge into LOTRO, trying to find solace in that sweet bosom before the closure of City of Heroes. Have I told you yet how Ran-san (aka "Namiru" in earlier posts) pledged to never play LOTRO? Have I mentioned that he just bought the Riders of Rohan expansion and is currently marching his way through the Lone Lands on a level 30 toon? Of course, Matt, Sarah, and I have been there with him.
     But to get back on topic, it's not that Barry is a bad gamer. He's saved my skin quite a few times. It's not that TSW is a bad game; I've been enjoying myself. It's just that certain teams of people work better in certain games. Barry and I work pretty well together in Champions and City of Heroes. However, get us to try to work together on even the most straight forward of TSW's missions and we're usually slaughtered at least once. Usually from some misinformation gleaned from a website, or faulty memory. When I teamed with Matt and Eric, I didn't die once.
     What I enjoy most about this game is the immersion. It sounds silly, but I'm the kind of person who loves to approach random NPC's and see what they have to say, read their back stories, watch practically every cutscene, and follow every dialog tree I can for them. I want to know the whole story, explore the entire city without leaving any trace of fog of war, gather all the exploration badges, and do as many side missions as possible to unlock further information about the world I'm playing in. It comes down to a love of miniature things. I used to love collecting dollhouse furniture and stuff like the original Polly Pocket and Littlest Pet Shop toys. Maybe it's a craving for control over something. Maybe it's a creative outlet for building my own character's backstory. Either way, TSW satisfies this curiosity in a way that CoH, AO, and even LOTRO haven't. The illusion always seems to wear thin in those games, but not so much in TSW.

Lounge L33ts Episode 4: The Prancing Pony

We manage to get Randy to play LOTRO, Sarah Bloy joins us to bestow some Tolkien wisdom, and we hear the Tale of the Bag of Devouring (it involves a dragon).

Liunge L33ts Episode 2: The Ski Chalet Part 1

     I think we spend more time reminiscing about City of Heroes/Villains, than we do berating NC Soft for...well...being assholes and shutting down the game in late November. I'm sorry if you're tired of hearing the CoH community voice their disapproval over the game's closure. I disagree with Ran-san (aka "Nomiru" in previous posts), I know the game wouldn't have been around forever. Eventually everything ends. This was not the way to end it though, and NC Soft has only themselves to blame for the bad PR. However, even after all that, I'm still going to play Guild Wars 2. I figure I paid for it, there's no subscription, and I'm pretty sure I can enjoy the game without paying into the cash shop, so why not? I've only managed to log about 2 hours of gameplay, but it was fun enough to make me want to return.
     This episode, I also introduce Eric "Setzer" Craig, the current Head of Registration for Geek.Kon 2013 as one of our guests. He's been playing CoH for quite a while and I hope I can have on in future episodes to discuss other MMO's.
     We wind up touching on a wide variety of topics this episode including Tabula Rasa, Korean Grinders, esports, The Secret World and other Funcom games, etc. As always, polite, constructive criticism is welcome, as this show is still very much a work in progress.

Lounge L33ts Episode 1: The Grind (Pilot)

Well, here we go! The very first episode of Lounge L33ts. There was a bit of trouble with recording for this episode. Like I said in the inroduction, this was an episode of firsts. If FRAPS shows numbers in a magenta/pinkish-puple hue, it may not be recording properly. When we finished, I opened the file to find that only the last three minutes had been recorded. Then Matt let me know FRAPS should be loaded (although not necessarily recording) before the game is loaded. In order to get the backup footage to me through the dropbox folder (restricted to 2GB in the free version), Matt converted the file to an flv file. Unfortunately, Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD doesn't read flv's and I had to use Total Video Converter to convert the file into a wmv, a file type I knew the editing software would recognize. After editing, it was rendered into one of the "Internet HD" file types offered and sent through Total Video Converter to become an flv file again. At 1.9 GB, it was too big to post on Bliptv. So I went back into Sony Vegas and rendered the edit into an "Internet SD" file, which was small not to have to be converted in TVC. It was a bit of work, and hopefully the next episode will go more smoothly. Anyway, in this episode Matt Winchell, Ran-san, and I meet up in Anarchy Online's The Grind where we discuss  how we all got caught up in MMO's, the news on Game Director Fia "Lindelu" Tjernberg's departure, and the prospects on the future of the game:

Lounge L33ts Introduction

     So why am I doing this? Well, I've been sitting on the sidelines for a while, enjoying other people's webseries and podcasts, always with an itch to try something of my own. I have always wanted to do a Let's Play series, however I don't feel that I could bring anything new to this over saturated field. At least not just yet. Video games are my latest interest, but I wanted to do something I felt hadn't been overdone. I don't know of any webseries that focus exclusively on recording  podcasts/vlogs from within taverns and bars in MMO's. I'm sure they exist. I know some shows will do a live streaming broadcast of at least one episode from within an MMO or other web based game. But when compared to the glut of Let's Plays, Playthroughs, and Walkthroughs out there, it still feels like a novel idea. At least to me, anyway.
     When I have a question about a game, "Mad" Matt Winchell and Randy "Ran-san" McCullick are usually the people I go to along with Robert "bob" Laib and "Drenivian." So I naturally turned to Matt and Ran-san as guests for the first episode which took place in Anarchy Online's The Grind bar, Atlantean server. For now, the series will probably just focus on me and my friends sitting around in various bars and taverns in our favorite MMO's. I have no idea how people will react, though. So far, I'm assuming people with either like it, or think it's boring and move on to something else.
     There are quite a few bugs to work through still. The pilot episode was the first time I uploaded a video to Bliptv (I've only ever uploaded one video to Youtube before this). It was the first time I tried to record video game footage with FRAPS (it failed and I wound up having to rely on Matt's backup footage). It was also the first time I'd used Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD (or other video editing software) to edit a video, and the first time I used Total Video Converter (rather than TsunamiEnc, which I used in 2006 to make my own DVD's). Bliptv also wanted me to come up with promotional materials, which I was kind of expecting. However, screencaps of the episode, while they worked well for filler on the Facebook page, would not do for the actual show's webpage. Fortunately I came up with the basic idea of the beer and martini glasses lit up in neon under the "Lounge L33ts" title. We'll see how this goes.
     Monday (10/1/2012) Tuesday (10/2/2012), I plan on doing the show again with Ran-san and Matt, and maybe a couple other people. We'll be in City of Heroes, Pocket D, Virtue server to discuss last month's shocking reveal of that game's shut down at the end of November. You can tune in to new episodes on Bliptv:
http://blip.tv/romeomoon

I also have a Facebook group set up here: http://www.facebook.com/LoungeL33ts

"The lounge is open 24 hours with no age limit."

Let's Play Borderlands Episode 9

Surprisingly, Sledge was a lot harder this time around. When we first fought him, he went down pretty quickly with my Soldier and Matt’s Hunter. It could just be that our load outs weren’t the greatest, or that we pretty much just charged in there thinking it’s be easy again. We may have been a higher level in first playthrough, too. I did notice a lot of henchmen around Sledge that didn’t seem to be there the first time. In other words, we wind up dying…a lot. I haven’t sat down to watch this episode yet, but I’ll post if I see anything which may have caused this.

Let's Play Borderlands Episode 8

This one…This is still a pip to get through, although we had more trouble with the bandits this time rather than the skags. I also have to remember to let the tank do their job and re-release the turret in a timely manner.

Fight for City of Heroes!

     If you had asked me which game, City of Heroes or Anarchy online, was most likely to shut down first, I would not have guessed City of Heroes. And yet here I am, writing about something I never figured I'd be writing about. I was on Skype when my friend “Namiru” messaged me: “GW2?” which was the status on my profile. I told him that I had picked up the game at the behest of one of my coworkers, despite also playing both The Secret World and World of Warcraft. I was interested in the fact that GW2 had an open world system in place, rather than the persistence based world from GW1. To which Nam responded: “I'm not TOUCHING anything NCSoft made after what they pulled today.” That's when I found out they were shutting down City of Heroes/Villains/Rogues in November. You can read the official notice here:

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/news_archive/thank_you.php

      I was totally shocked, as were many other devoted players. I did notice a decrease in population between when I joined on May 19, 2008, and when the Dual Pistols power debuted (for those who pre-purchased the Going Rogue expansion) around March 2, 2010. After that, the population seemed to spike and fall again until Going Rogue finally hit. I noticed yet another spike ending in a plateau in November 2011, when the game went Free-to-Play/Freemium. At first, nearly all the servers were in the red, but by the time I came back to game they had returned to either green (low) or yellow (medium). Occasionally on the weekends, Freedom and Virtue would reach red or be grayed out as full. Still, after the conversion to the f2p model, the population on Virtue seemed to remain substantial and never dip as low as it was in mid-2009.

      Once the rage around the fact that I had just spent $143 for a 1 year sub, only to get about 7 months of game play out of it had subsided, the questions started surfacing. What was going to happen to all the proposed content? Hadn't the team at Paragon Studios just added the new Staff Fighting, Water Blast, and Plant Affinity power sets? Weren't they working on new content for Praetoria? Might there actually be a City of Heroes 2 planned that would make them do this? And most of all: “Why?”

      Most people I've talked to suggest that it's financial. I find that hard to believe, though. As stated before, several new and intriguing power sets had been introduced, along with new enhancements, inspirations, travel powers, emotes, and some very detailed costume sets. There was also the Blockbuster Summer event where the players participated either in gladiatorial combat in an arena, or in a casino heist. LOTRO has done a similar thing during their Yule Festival at the theater in Frostbluff. I saw many players partaking in these activities with cash shop products. Why keep developing an unsuccessful game for nearly a year instead of simply axing it and cutting losses?

      I think the most likely reason (cited by ChaosD1 on MMO Grinder:

http://mmogrinder.net/2012/09/02/r-i-p-city-of-heroes/#comments ) is to try to push players off of an old acquired IP on to Aion, a title more inline with the company's Korean “grindfest” themed MMO's.. Some people are suggesting in the comments of the above post, that Nexon may somehow be responsible. This theory is based on their buying up a significant amount of NCSoft's stock, effectively making them the biggest holder:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-08/nexon-buys-685-million-stake-in-ncsoft-becomes-biggest-holder.html

http://gamepolitics.com/2012/06/08/nexon-buys-nearly-15-percent-stake-ncsoft

      For NCSoft's financial earnings, check here. I've not been patient enough to really sift through this information:

http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/quarterly.aspx

     I was on the Massively website looking up articles on this closing, and came upon one that asked what the reader's favorite memories of the game were. One of mine was when I first started playing and was running around a park to the North of Kings Row. Spotting a purple named enemy below me, I made a quick escape. Then out of curiosity, and the fact that it wasn't following me, I returned to carefully observe what I'd stumbled upon: the Clockwork “Paladin.” Over the years, I would catch a glimpse of someone fighting this Giant Monster, or see alerts of it's impending assembly. Once I even saw a solo level 50 controller take it down with pets.

     Kings Row was one of my favorite areas, although even Galaxy City had some fun nooks and crannies before the rock slammed into it. Gemini Park was where I first encountered my dreaded enemy, the Vahzilok Eidolan. At least in the lower levels. Valor Bridge in Independence Port was another favorite hangout, especially when you Super Jumped off the top down into the bay. Another fun place was Croatoa, the monsters there having also been used in the Halloween Event. They would jump out of the door every time you got a “trick,” whereas a “treat” earned you temporary costumes, inspirations, special salvage, etc. I'll also miss the Ski Chalet and trying to earn the special badge from the ski jump ramp. It was fun slipping and sliding all over the place! And the lodge at the top was great for sitting around and chatting with friends.

      Then there are all the things I never got to do, such as get a character to level 50, explore the Incarnate abilities, do a Task Force or Trial, not to mention fully explore the new Dark Astoria or Praetoria. Hell, my Praetorian is only level 15. There were ideas for future characters and rerolls of current heroes and villains, too. I was also working on a few CoH themed projects for the blog here such as a “Grand Tour” themed series where I explore various parts of Paragon City that might fly under people's radar, probably linking to Paragon Wiki for people looking to collect the exploration badges. Hopefully I can get a few screen caps of the House of the Wayward Soul super group base. I was also working on several character profiles such as the Vellum one posted.

      It seems most of the Legendary super group and my friends are giving Champions Online another try. Namiru says it's a bit better than when he last tried it. I have only just fired it up on the new gaming desktop, and am out of the tutorial zone with a CO version of archer extraordinaire, Elsie Dracona. I'm also going forward with the “Grand Tour” series, only it'll probably focus on LOTRO now, with maybe whatever I can get of CoH before it shuts down. I'll be taking screen shots of all the CoH characters I can unlock and putting up profiles of them.

      A lot of people also seem to be holding out for a last minute save for CoH from someone willing to buy the rights to the IP, the characters, and the engine. There is also talk of a fan run server. Author Mercedes Lackey, apparently a long time player, has thrown her support behind the campaign to keep the game going and there has recently been a large protest staged by players across 30+ instances of the Virtue server. TonyV has organized a special message board found here:

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/board,134.0.html

      A writing campaign has been organized on the Titan Network forums. The etiquette guidelines and addresses for CEO Mr. Taek Jin Kim can be found here:

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,4879.0.html

     The heroes of Paragon City have always been there me. It's high time I be there for them.

Gamepadding Through The Secret World

     I've been playing The Secret World off and on for the past month, or so. Everything was going well until I reached the first combat sequence after watching my character fall unconscious outside London's Ealdwic Park. This was when things got rather difficult, and painful, fast. The shooter style combined with the hotbar commands and tab targeting put a bit of a strain on my wrist. The result is that I stopped playing, did a little research, and found the following link on the TSW forums:

http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=34982

      From there, I downloaded the Xpadder program for about $10:

http://xpadder.com/

     Now I'm sure more than a few of you reading this know of other, better (free) programs and techniques for getting a gamepad to work with The Secret World. I'm also fairly positive the layout pictured isn't the most efficient. However this is my first time trying to set up a gamepad to work with a PC game, so this layout is very much a work in progress.

     What we see here is Set 1 of 3, where I try to put the most useful buttons such as main attacks, movement, tab targeting, and camera. When you first create a new layout, you can select from a list on the Xpadder website to load the image of the controller you are mapping, in this case a Logitech Gamepad F310. I made sure to register the movements of all the analog sticks and buttons with the program. I then went through and assigned key(s) from the keyboard to each button and each direction of the analog stick. The sticks can be assigned as few a 4 direction functions and up to 8, as well as defaults for W,A,S,D and the arrow keys. Clicking the little wrench will show you more options. In order to keep everything organized, I named the buttons after their function by clicking on the green “Abc” area in the Xpadder UI.

     I was able to also bind multiple keyboard functions to one button/analog direction as well. You can do this by clicking on the initial key you want to bind in the Xpadder keyboard interface, then going into the “Advanced” menu to add a second key bind. This helped in setting up the camera movement, since I could map the right click mouse button along with a direction:

     Now here comes the tricky part. Since there are a lot more keys for TSW than just the primary ones featured in Set 1, I needed to make a second Set. Once I created Set 2, I had to link it to Set 1 to be able to switch between the two. The forum post recommended using the “When Held” assignment to one of the triggers/bumpers. Instead, I played around with the “One Way Click” and “Two Way Click” options before realizing that all of these functions needed an anchor point between the sets involved. I decided to stick with the “When Held” function as it was the easiest to work with. I then went through and, still using the TSW forum post as a guide, assigned the next round of commands to Set 2:

     Finally, Set 3 focused on the basic functions of the mouse in interacting with the GUI:

 

     I plan on using this program to assign keys for Age of Conan, as well. Considering that game relies on tab targeting and directional assault on the enemy's flanks, it should come in handy. I hope this this post has been of interest.

Let's Play Borderlands Episode 5

I'm not sure I remember what we did in this episode. Did we do anything? Oh yeah that's right! We beat up some bandits and skags and find the pieces to a not so wonderful sniper rifle:

Let's Play Borderlands Episode 4

     In which Matt and I search down the memoirs of a lonely, misunderstood recoding device and have another bout with Bone Head. This time on film :D !