April 28, 2010

We Have a Winner!

I don't know if no one is entering the contests that I do, but I seem to win more than my share of cool prizes! Yesterday I won a free mount from GM Eres. She ran a screenshot contest on her Twitter page and I submitted the one of me overlooking the city of Dalanis and I got first place.
So then I was offered a choice of one of the three new mounts: donkey, broomstick or flying rune disk.
I already bought a donkey for Sister Agatha so that one was out. The broomsticks I think are kinda hokey...although I could see them being fun if you were determined to appear very witchy, rather than mage-y.
I chatted with my guildies for a bit and they all agreed that the Rune Disk was the coolest. So I decided on that. But then, I started thinking that I really love Spazzy and he's totally unique. What would I need a Flying Rune Disk for?
So I offered to give my free mount to one of guildies who had just finished building our totally new and awesome website. Too late! He already had one!
Well, I ended up sending the disk to one of my alts, a Knight/Rogue that I play every now and then. (Who shall remain nameless.) 
Have to admit, that is pretty cool. Now he's an angry surfer dude. Totally RAD!

April 27, 2010

Interesting Developments

Two new messages scrolled across my RoM screen today. I'll paraphrase them here:
"Players buying gold from gold spammers will be permanently banned."
"All players will receive a TP reset on Thursday."

On the first announcement: it's nice to see that the Powers That Be are working hard to solve the problem and also that they're taking things seriously enough to threaten players. They probably can't do anything against the offending websites, but they can discourage people from buying the damn gold and therefore shut down the demand.
I imagine that there must be some sort of benefit for them if they get rid of spammers, probably money, but all I know is that as a player I find the constant bombardment of advertising extremely annoying. I'm not too sure what the spammers do to the RoM economy, but I imagine it's not good.
Today I wrote down one of the addreses of the gold spammers and went to their website to see what I could do to stop them from harassing us. I was seriously debating spamming their Help Desk inbox with scathingly witty comments such as: "You Suck!" :)

On the second announcement: This is a result of the recent nerfing of skills that dropped the max level from 55 to 50. I have been posting on the forums about this. The obvious problem with this nerf was that many high level players had spent TP to raise those skills to 55 and now they are back at 50. That TP was wasted!
So the reset seems to solve the problem. However, it is unclear if the reset is for all players or just level 50s and up.

I started a chat with my guildies about these things and it was interesting to see the variety of responses. Some were confused, some outraged, some blase.
I was most impressed with the level-headedness of one of guildies who assured me that the TP issue would be solved. He showed me how to check how much TP I had spent on my character. You just mouse over the TP available square at the bottom right of your skills page. It shows how much you've spent, which I take to mean that the total amount listed there will be available for redistribution on Thursday.

My next problem is...how do I redistribute! Man, I'm gonna hum and haw over that one, for sure. I'll probably sit for hours pondering my choices and calculating how best to distribute it all. What a lovely dilemma.

April 26, 2010

Watch Your Step in the Sascilia Steppes

Here is undeniable proof that the programmers of Runes of Magic are messing with us!

You know what that is? It's rhinoceros poop. Yup, that's right. Good ol' feces. Just lying around stinking up the Sascilia Steppes.
What's even funnier, you can't see it in this picture, but there are actually FLIES buzzing around the poop pile. Hilarious!

April 23, 2010

Thunderhoof Hills

I was almost giggling with excitement when I logged on last night after uploading the huge patch for the first part of Chapter 3. I had read a bunch of the patch notes while I waited for the update so I was rip-roaring-ready to get to Thunderhoof Hills.
First thing I did was to check my map to find out where the entrance to TH was. But there were no hints. Usually when there's a new area, a path opens up from an old zone to the new zone. I checked Aotulia, Savage Lands, even Weeping Coast. Nothing.
So I asked my helpful guildies and they pointed me in the right direction. I had to first talk to a Mysterious lady next to Snoop in AV, then she sent me to a dragon. Eeps! Lucky for me, he was friendly and he just told me a story and sent me to Thunderhoof Hills.

The terrain looked pretty average when I arrived there. Ruins, grass, rocks, the usual. The first thing I killed was a Confused Deer. Not too sure why he was confused. Maybe he was trying to keep all the programmers' instructions straight in his head: stand like this, walk like this, and don't forget a dramatic death fall.
Oh and guess what the Confused Deer drops? A LINK RUNE!! Woot! Thunderhoof is freaking awesome.

But in all honesty, it's such a wonderful feeling to explore new areas! I was playing with a smile on my face and I was so excited to come up over a hill and see a fresh view. I guess I'm a born adventurer, a regular Dora the Explorer. Hola!
But new worlds are so thrilling to me. I found strange fanged hippopotomus beasts in a pen in Tomara. I think they are called Pangos. There were some wading in the river near a waterfall too. There were pretty pink deer, strange goat-dogs and, surprisingly, a huge Rhino dressed in armor sitting in a bar.

But best of all, there were Anubises! Anubi? More than one Anubis. Dog-headed people, you know, from Egypt? There were just sitting around like normal people. So very cool! And what's even more cool is that they have different faces...different doggie faces. Like some are hounds and some are retrievers. Can't wait to find a Chihuahua Anubis.  :)

Not too far into the wilderness, I reached a cliff that overlooked the main city, Dalanis. Wow. So stunning. I raced down the hill towards it, then veered quickly to the side when I saw there was a big fight going on in front of the main bridge. Snuck around that and at last enetered the beautiful stone city.

I wandered around the place, gawking like a tourist, for at least an hour. If it had been a real city, I'm sure I would have been arrested because I kept walking up to NPCs and zooming in on their faces. How rude of me!  But there were just so many new...breeds? Species? Races?
There were the Anubis guys, the Rhino guys, regular humans and...wait for it...cat people! They were freaky looking. So muscular that their heads looked kinda small. And they stretched and wiped their ears like real cats. I think I only saw two of them, but it was wicked sweet.

Dalanis had so many interesting details: laundry hanging overhead, people sweeping, goat-dogs wandering around, vendors haggling, lions etched in the stone walls, nobles and handmaidens and tourists, an usher to explain where everything is, and Lion Knights patrolling everywhere. I also found two weird NPC's called Man Dressed as a Knight and Woman Dressed as a Knight. "Dressed as"? Are they preparing for Halloween?

And the city center...wow. The Dalanis palace is right at the base of a huge semicircular waterfall and waaaaaaay above it there's a gigantic statue overlooking the whole city. Here are two pictures. The first one is looking at the palace, the second is looking away from the palace while on the steps.
Beautiful, isn't it? And I didn't even have my video settings at the highest level.
So after I finished my staring, I did a few quests and rejoiced at actually receiving XP for the first time in ages. My bar is moving again! Yay!
Then I went and found the Snoop, thinking he would take me back to the regular land, Candara. But Snoopsie was rude and said he couldn't, or wouldn't, transport me. Huh. Fine then. He told me to go find some Order of Dark Glory dudes and ask them.
So I did and they transported me back to the Obsidian Stronghold. I didn't have a choice where to go, that's the only place they send people, I guess. Anyway, in the OS there are guys who will send you back to Dalanis so I guess there really wasn't any need for me to talk to the lady in AV after all. Oh well. It's nice to know there's a free way over there so I can go whenever I want.

So a fantastic time gaming and many, many wonderful new areas to explore and beasties to kill and quests to complete. I almost don't want to finish the quests I have left in Candara. Boooooring. But I will cuz I hate having them sitting in my quest list, like undone chores.
So here's to the first part of Chapter 3, hip hip hooray!

April 21, 2010

I'm Not Ready!

I've been away from the game for a few days and just jumped on to the RoM News page to find out what's up.
To my excitement and dismay, I read the announcement regarding a patch next week to begin Chapter 3, The Elder Kingdoms. When this patch is released, the level 55 cap will be raised to 60.
All I have to say is: I'm not ready!! :)
Maybe I'm slow, but it took me a YEAR to get to 55. I was just feeling like I had accomplished something and now they're raising the cap. Woe is me!
Don't get me wrong, I'm super pumped about the new level cap and even more so about the new areas, the Monster Card stats and other cool changes to my fave MMORPG. But I was also kinda hoping to have more time to max out Spiral's TP and skills, get purple gear (or at least all blues) and pimp the gear out.
I imagine my lack of preparedness won't be that big of a deal anyway, since I already can't complete many of the level 50+ quests currently in the game. So the crazy idea that I will be able to move confidently into the new zone is pure hooey!
At any rate, I'm hoping to find more time to game soon. My guild just started trying to do seiges each night and I haven't had a chance to participate yet. And when the level cap comes off, I can try to complete some more quests and actually gain XP from them for a change!
Hopefully I will have more exciting adventures to blog about real soon.

April 14, 2010

Quests Everyone Hates

I saw a thread on the forums the other day about Quests We Love to Hate. It was quite a good-natured look at all the quests that really suck. (And we all have to do them.) It was funny to see the comments from some folks: "Oh, I had forgotten all about THAT one! I hated that one!"
Playing my new R/Wd on Reni I stumbled across a quest that I loathe. It's the one where you have to capture the Evil Balloon Monsters. So very annoying. And you have to catch so damn many of them. It makes my teeth hurt.
Evil Balloon Monster
So cute....NOT!
I also found Bump In The Night to be an unpleasant surprise. I think it's like a level 6 quest and that evil plant kicked my scrawny butt the first time I went in there. And then of course no one tells you that if you try to go back in the instance too quickly, those swarming plunderer guys are waiting at the door like puppies for a treat. That treat being your corpse!
Those two quests actually didn't make it on the forum posting. Perhaps all the posters were too high level to remember it. But other than that, I pretty much agreed that all the quests the forum guys posted stand out as frustrating, boring, or seemingly endless. Here are some of the winners in those categories:

Excellent Boar Meat. Ah, who doesn't have fond memories of slaughtering hundreds of innocent boars looking for three excellent boar meat? PETA would be ashamed.
Ent Root of Power or something like that. Once again, a rare drop that makes you want to drop-kick an evil developer. (kidding!)
Even worse than that, Elder Reindeer. A rare spawn in the frigid wastelands of Ystra, where men are men and Elders are elusive. Lucky for questers, people on the zone channel are quite helpful about where an elder has spawned. We band together in our misery.
At least Alfred has the decency to spawn frequently...if only he would not be so darn nervous around people. Someone give that bat some Valium.
And Blackie, poor lost Blackie, who somehow has a teleportation spell that whisks him from one hidden corner of Dust Devil Canyon to another. This is another quest that brings out the good in people as Blackie's coordinates come up frequently on zone shouts.

So all in all, while these quests cause much irritation towards the makers of RoM, they do also cause helpfulness amongst the players. Perhaps more difficult quests would make all of Taborea a friendlier place?
Hmmmm...probably not! I think they would have to invent the word "Quest Rage" to describe RoM players who repeatedly ram their mounts into the castle walls in frustration!

April 13, 2010

All the Pretty Little Ponies...Except One

I haven't been blogging much because I am working on a big project that hopefully I can write about soon. It's been sucking up a lot of my time but I'm very excited about it!
In the meantime I thought I would post up pictures of the various horses that my toons ride in Taborea. None of these horses are exactly the color they were when I bought them. I altered the body color in the first one to make a Palamino, and altered the mane color of each of the other ones to make them just a tiny bit different from the regular mount. I hate being ordinary! Although as I'm looking at some of them now, it doesn't seem all that obvious. Oh well!
But the weird thing I think is that the white horse, the one of the far right, is so blurry! I wrote a post on the forums about it and somebody told me to change my graphics settings. But I don't think that's the problem because all of the other horses look just fine. I think that somehow the original graphic for the white horse is just not sharp. Like in the RoM program itself, the resolution is messed up.
The white horse was the first one I bought, for Spiral, and I don't even use it anymore cuz she has Spazzy. But it's a strange little thing that I noticed.

April 8, 2010

Trying Out Reni

I started a new character on the Reni server. I usually play on Osha but I thought I would go see what it's like over there.
Of course all the scenery is the same and the quests are the same and it's all pretty boring to me now that I've leveled at least 10 characters to 15 and above.
But it's strange seeing world chats that aren't the regular folks I know on Osha. You just get used to seeing the same names coming up all the time and the banter between them. There are a few toons on Osha that are quite vocal and therefore well known.
A few things I've notice on Reni...
1. People seem to be named rude things. I've seen a few toon names that were kinda offensive. I won't list them here. Maybe they don't have as strict GMs watching that server?
2. I saw a healer advertising his services for sale for instance runs. I don't know whether to applaud or critcize his sense of capitalism. I've never seen that on Osha. On Osha healers stand on Varanas bridge and offer free buffs.
3. There are just as many gold spammers here as on Osha. What do they pay those guys to do that?

Anyway, my toon's name is Pinkpepper on Reni if anyone is over there and wants to say hi!

April 6, 2010

Sitting Down on the Job

Found out a neat thing today that I don't think was in the game when I started. Your character can sit on furniture in your house!
Now I don't mean stand on the furniture and then sit. I mean click the furniture and sit on it. Here's a photo.
The one of the left is me sitting on my Violet Lady's Couch by clicking a little chair icon that comes up when you mouse over the couch. The one on the right is me sitting on the couch by jumping on top of it and then choosing the Sit emoticon or pressing X.
I tried it on the furniture in our guild castle and it doesn't work there. But I don't remember ever having seen that chair icon before. I think this must be new. Or newer. Or newish. :)

April 5, 2010

Scary Bedtime Story

I’ve been playing on some lower level alts and I find it very interesting to go back to areas that I haven’t visited in a while. Doing some of the quests over again causes to remember just how strange some of them were.

For instance, let’s talk about Distine, a lovely lady who lives outside of Lyk (Today’s post is brought to you by the letter L.)
Poor, poor Distine has a killer headache and would really just love it if you could cut the vocal cords out of all the damn noisy wolves in the neighborhood. Sure thing, Distine. I’ll get right on that. But only because Taborea has not yet discovered the joys of acetaminophen. (Alchemists, come on now!)
Click to see more of Jisel's artHaving slaughtered 15 howling wolves for the fair maiden, I return triumphantly to her house. Hmmmm. Distine still has a headache. I ask her if it’s a tumor. She says, “It’s not a tumor!”
Through gritted teeth she requests that I silence the local grizzlies whose fur makes such an irritating noise in the wind. Okey doke.
15 grizzlies take a dirt nap thanks to my amazing prowess and I return again to Distine’s side. She’s still obvious distraught, which I can tell by the way she has worn a path through the snow with her pacing.
She leans in close to me and whispers, “It must be the town.” She grabs her hair in her hands and shouts, “Kill the noise from the town!!”
Okay, so this is the point where I’m thinking this chick is two sticks short of a beaver lodge, if you know what I mean. So I nod and smile and back away slowly and then boot it over to talk to the mayor of Lyk.
The dear mayor, bless his helpful little soul, tells me that most likely the girl is a ghost and would I be so kind to deliver this notebook to her so that perhaps she can move on to the other side or whatever.
No way. Uh-uh. I am so out of here! It’ll be a hot day in Harf before I go tell some crazy ghost she’s dead. Call Ghostbusters. Call the Ghost Whisperer. Heck, call Dog the Bounty Hunter, I don’t care! But don’t be asking me to step foot anywhere near that undead freak!
And that’s the end of that quest. I’m going back to Silverspring to kill some nice boring Cow Beetles.

April 4, 2010

Secret Place #2

The Obsidian Stronghold is a huge, wonderful city that is usually empty of players. It seems as if the city was built as a starting point for new toons but no one actually starts there. It's very strange.
However, there are a few beautiful corners of this deserted city and this is my favorite. It is the hall of the crafting instructors.

April 1, 2010

This Is a Real Post Now, No Joke!

OMG, I did it! I found the wabbit!

I logged on tonight at 9:10 and the event leaders had already started the wabbit hunt. I raced over to Logar and ran through the first portal I saw. I actually came out behind Pioneers Village, not far away from my starting point. I jumped on Spazzy and raced into the nearby mine.
Turns out I ran RIGHT PAST the wabbit and only saw him when I came back out of the mine. I didn't realize that it was going to be an Event GM dressed like a rabbit so at first I was confused. But another guy was approaching fast so I leaped up on top of the shed where the purple wabbit was and said, "Hi."
Nothing happened.
My heart started freaking out! Did I miss it AGAIN? Not again???
But it just took a second and suddenly the screen said, "You have received Item Shop Celebration Egg III." Woot!!
The Event GM said, "Congrats." I literally jumped up and down with glee. I did it! I won!!
Sheesh, I'm so lame, aren't I? Silly little egg and dumb contest and I got so excited. But I finally won and that puts such a big goofy grin on my face. :)

Oh, what was in the egg, you ask?
10 Potion of Luck
10 Experience Potion
1 Advanced Experience Charm

Not a bad little Easter present! Thanks, Event GMs!!

What I Really Want to Say

Dear justin bieber
 i love you alot you are the sexiest thing on earth.what you need to know is i love you and yo fans love you alot to. but the ones who doesnt like you their hatin on you because you have more swag but all i know is i lov yo and care for yo always ill never let yo go i will keep you in my heart always i kno everything about you and im that kind of girl that yo want i definetley have a great personality i lov makin people laugh and i love goofin off its fun i just want to let yo kno that i lov yo babe forever.


APRIL FOOLS!!!
Had ya going, didn't I? 
This letter of undying love can be found here plus many other gushings by little girls.