10.12.09
Puzzle of the Week
This screenshot was submitted by Rer.
10.05.09
Puzzle of the Week
Quick announcement prior to the puzzle, this is the last screen shot I have set up for a jigsaw puzzle.
Fear not puzzle enthusiasts! The puzzles will not stop, but they need your help, so clap your hands and pose in game for a shot you’d like to see featured in the upcoming months puzzles. Anything showing off the beauty of Atreia, your character, or anything else you can think of is eligible, but all submissions must have the UI hidden (Press F12).
Submit screen shots to us at quirkyquiescence@gmail.com for consideration.
09.30.09
The NCSoft Launcher…
I’m going to try and keep this short, for your sake. However, as much as I’m enjoying Aion at the moment (and I do think it’s a great game), I really despise the NCSoft Launcher.
In my opinion, it is useless overhead we are incurring each time we wish to load our favorite game. You could argue that it does keep your NCSoft games up to date and it is able to repair corrupt game files, but I think these two don’t nearly make up for the shortcomings of this annoying little program. First, most games these days do a check for updates when you launch them or, in the case of MMOs, when you log on to the game servers. Second, although a repair shouldn’t be necessary, it would be easy enough to incorporate this into a standalone program that users can run as needed.
The launcher itself seems to be the cause of many of my issues lately. I can’t count how many times in the last week it has thought that Aion was not up to date (when it was) or that it encountered an error the last time it was run. Both of these have made it necessary to choose to force the game to play without checking for updates or repairing, since I know damn well that nothing is wrong with it.
Aion has crashed on me on occasion, but I don’t find it bothers me as much as the fact that when you log off or get disconnected from the game servers, you end up back at the launcher and have to reload the game in order to log back on. The game takes a considerable amount of time to load, and if it was already loaded why do I need to head back to this annoying little program to reload it and make sure everything is just peachy before I can play again?
I’m happy that NCSoft decided to remove GameGuard from the Aion release (for now anyway, we’ll see about that later on), but I really don’t like their launcher. I don’t own any other NCSoft games*, and I don’t really understand the purpose of this program other than to annoy me each time I want to play Aion. Why should I have to load a program before I can load my game? Especially if it provides no added value to the experience?
* As an aside, I may have once described in great detail how much I disliked Guild Wars and it’s expansions to the developers and NCSoft PR folks at E3 one year.
09.21.09
Head Start Update
In case anyone was interested…
I’ve been in game… A lot to say the least. Four hours of sleep >.> Not by design, work going on in the house and it’s going on “very loudly with much banging and drilling.” Not exactly conducive to sleep. Which leads to the next part, I fear I’ll be joining the dreaded queue, power is going off for an hour or so while they work on rewiring.
What have I been up to? Well from levels 1-6 I played with a friend (irl!) and we quested a bit and tried to get ahead of the pack, then he had to go eat pizza, rough life. I pushed on doing mainly only the campaign quests and gathering every single plant I could find. Ascended, chose Cleric, and slowed down, worked on extracting Aether, leveling up Armorsmithing, and just generally goofing off for a bit to let the crowd pass me a bit. Currently level 16, 86 gathering, 57 aether extraction, and 61 armorsmithing.
I’m forcing myself to stop and sniff the roses, enjoy the process. Every time I start pushing myself to level faster, I literally have to tell myself to slow down. It does seem to help. At this time I’m about 7 level behind the highest level Asmodian (Calix, a 23 SM and no level 22’s on either).
Aether Extraction Hint: Find a spawn location for your skill level with a nearby safe landing zone. Gather the spawn completely, land, switch to the next channel. Rinse repeat. With the 3 minute cooldown on channel switching and the time it takes to regain your full wing flight time, it’s a pretty golden method, assuming someone else isn’t camping that same spot.
Crafting hint: This may seem a bit silly, but do Work Order 1p over and over, until it isn’t in the options to do it anymore. Why? It is the only free skill ups you will get, and it gives you free mats/designs that will last you until you hit around 100 skill level. So skill level 1-50 do Work Order 1p.
Why do you want to level up gathering, crafting, and aether extraction skills? Well, they give you exp. Free experience to gather/make things you will do in the long run… Plus it will help you keep up with the expected leveling process. If you don’t gather you might find yourself running out of quests. And later on there are many more “Go gather x items!” and then if you aren’t up to the appropriate level you’ll be kicking yourself!
And the queue… the lovely queue. Before you curse at it, ask yourself, would you rather play in a stable environment or play in a lagtastic one? I’d rather be sitting in a queue for a pretty accurately estimated queue than be lagging/dying in game personally. Massively also posted a survival guide for the queue, my choice for passing the time is MindJolt games on Facebook or chasing the dogs around the house.
Kudos to NcSoft for a brilliant head start launch, spiffy new forums and keeping servers/factions all relatively balanced. I love that they share that information with us rather than us having to speculate. And don’t forget, “real” launch is tomorrow, might be a bit crowded in the beginning zones again.
All in all, I’m having a blast! Nothing is feeling grindy to me yet, players are being courteous for the most part (some channels actually formed a line to queue up for their turn at Cute Ribbit), and it is amazingly lag free.
Only negatives I have at this point are that we are missing several key emotes (sigh, hug, giggle, etc), crafting really does take a long time and is quite expensive (though that should sort out the dedicated)… Nothing game breaking woot.
How is your Head Start experience? Having fun? Any memorable moments so far? What do you do to pass the time in queue?
