Just finished running two back-to-back Maraudon Purple-side runs on Temza, and saw this in Stormwind.

Pretty standard display, level 1 human warlocks lying down in order to spell out the name of a gold-selling website.

I’ve always been impressed at the ingenuity of gold-sellers. Blizzard stops then from using the chat system to advertise at every turn, so they stop using the chat system entirely. In the past, they used to use dead bodies to spell something out, but now Blizzard catches them quickly enough that they don’t have time for that. Now they just lie down instead.

So I was in the middle of writing out a quick GM report, and then…

WTF They're actually floating in the air!

I reported them anyway, then went to get shots of this from different angles.

This was just crazy. Everyone was milling around staring at it.

Then, they suddenly shifted back to being on the ground (all in one instant movement), but this time they were sitting down instead. We’re pretty convinced they were using some kind of hacking program to make such instant movements and to float in the air.

I think they're missing a piece.

The rest of them disappeared simultaneously no more than 20 seconds later. Khoa said they probably banned one of them, then traced their IP address and banned the whole IP in one go.

I am in no way endorsing actually visiting that website, I just wanted to share pics of their most recent technological advances.

So I’m messing around with a variety of free-to-play games in my downtime. Every time I try out a different game, it will either be really annoying and solidify why I love WoW so much, or give me more variety in my day-to-day activities. Sounds like a win-win to me.

My latest experiment is Earth Eternal. I’ve been hearing a lot about it on Massively lately, and it was included in a top-5 F2P games list this week. Basically described as having really simplistic graphics, but with an incredibly flexible class system.

I’ve been really quite slow in getting started with the game, because I’m just poking around with it during my breaks. I tried to start playing on my lunch break a few days ago, and it just happened to be having maintenance at the time. I finally know what it’s like to be playing a game for the first time during maintenance and not having a clue what’s going on. “Server temporarily unavailable, check schedule.” What schedule? I don’t see any schedule!

I poked around on their main site for a while, didn’t see any messages telling me that the game was scheduled to be offline. Eventually found a “Server Status” forum near the bottom of the list of forums (after checking through the equivalents of “Game Announcements” and “General Forums” without any mention of server downtime) where they did indeed have a post about the downtime and the fact that the server was scheduled to be back online at 1:30 PM, precisely when I was scheduled to end my lunch break. Damn.

During a later break, I logged in and made myself a character, looking through all of the various races available, and reading all of their colorful descriptions. No humans or elves, though there are dryads and robots and demons and a hell of a lot of furries. I was pleased to discover that one of the races was a lizard “furry”. Not quite a dragon, but I’ve been undecided about my possession of wings for years now. I was then able to customize the exact colors of the various parts of my character’s body, so I made myself a gray lizard-person with bright green eyes. Yay!

The four classes are warrior, rogue, mage, and druid. Except that the druid is basically all of your nature-based classes rolled into one, in that it is a bow-wielding class that summons wild beasts and casts nature-themed spells. Sign me up!

Meet Kiryn Silverwing, the lisian druid.

I test games for a living, so I am cursed to forever find bugs in the games I play in my free time. I often find a variety of bugs and annoyances within minutes of logging in to a new F2P for the first time. Now, most of it is because of the little things that are different in this interface or control scheme.

Earth Eternal had one initial annoyance: strafing. This is a big one for me, as it is the #1 reason why I stopped playing Free Realms after a couple of weeks.

I’m not sure how it happened, but for most of the time I was playing WoW on my powerbook, I was using both the WASD keys and the arrow keys to move. I don’t think I could have mouse-turned if I’d wanted to, touchpads are horrible for that. So what I ended up with when I got a real PC and started using the mouse more, I consolidated the strafing back onto my normal layout and ended up using A and D to turn, with Q and E to strafe. Soon after, I played another game that used A and D to strafe, with no turn keybindings at all. I then changed my strafe keybinds in WoW to match this, started turning with my mouse, and started using Q and E for useful spells.

Ever since then, no games have been able to agree on which keys are used to strafe. And the ones that don’t match my preferred control scheme, and don’t give me any way to change the controls, will fail every time. When simply moving around the game world is an annoyance, I’m not likely to keep playing the game past the first night. I have not yet acquired the ability to rewire muscle memory temporarily. I can make permanent changes, but switching back is really annoying.

This game has A and D set to turn, with Q and E set to strafe. Luckily, I was able to find a keybindings menu and change the scheme myself. Dodged a bullet there!

Bug #1: I log into the game, go talk to the very first NPC. With the default window size, the popup “completed quest objective: talk to so-and-so” was overlapping the quest dialogue window, preventing me from reading the NPC text for several seconds until the popup faded out. A little annoying, but playing from the client and resizing the window to be bigger has fixed this issue (though only because it has caused a different issue where the UI text does not scale very well with the window size).

Bug #2: Strafing is actually some weird strafe-turn combo. This has since mysteriously fixed itself, I think maybe my keybindings were stuck somehow such that it was actually pressing turn and strafe simultaneously.

Bug #3: Okay! Let’s go do this quest we just picked up, and kill some of those mobs! Coming from a WoW background, I thought it was a little strange that my druid was using a sword. Though I guess if she’s actually supposed to be a hunter, it works a little better. But then I actually looked at the tooltip of the sword I was equipping.

It's a sword! No wait, it's a club!

Bug #4: Okay, fine, it’s more of a suggestion, but I think this is dumb. Keybinding 1 is for melee auto-attack. Keybinding 2 is for ranged auto-attack. I can’t move them off of the 1 and 2 slots. I had to rebind my keys simply to be able to use whatever skills I want in those keys. And when I did so, the first two buttons still had a 1 and 2 on them, right next to the 1 and 2 of the buttons that were actually bound to those keys. Ugh.

Okay, so I continued on and did a few quests, leveled up a few times, got a few skill points. This game’s skill system seems to function on a sort of dual energy system with matching dual combo points. There is a “bar” made up of blue circles above your health bar labeled “Might” and a similar green one below labeled “Will”. There are ten circles on each “bar”, and they seem to regenerate in combat, so it’s limited, but not mana. I approve. Physical attacks cost Might, while magical attacks cost Will. I think I saw some attacks that cost a combination of these. Then there are two matching sets of combo points called “Physical Charges” (which I am going to call PCs) and “Magic Charges” (MCs), on the left and right sides of the little status circle on the left.

That sword symbol in the center changes into a raccoon face when I'm out of combat. I was a little disappointed that it didn't match my chosen race at all.

Despite there only being four classes, the skill system is surprisingly deep. Only about half of your class skills are actually limited to your class, with the other half available for anyone to take. There are several other categories of skills that are open for everyone, including weapon proficiencies and teleport, defensive, and healing skills. So theoretically, you could be a healing rogue. You could be a heavily armored warrior with a shield who lobs frostbolts.

So as a druid, I started out with two attacks: a basic bow attack that cost Might and gave 1 PC, and a finishing bow attack that cost Might and 1-5 Physical Charges, dealing more damage with more PCs. Oh, and I can shoot my bow from melee range. Once I reached level 4 and had plenty of skill points to spend, I grabbed a few more attacks. From the Druid tree, I learned a basic magic attack that deals death damage and debuffs attack and casting speed with a 30 second cooldown and grants one MC, and a reflective damage shield that costs MCs. From the rogue tree, I picked up a ranged attack that causes a slow effect with a 30 second cooldown and grants 1 PC.

I put my magic attacks on my secondary bar, keyed to the F keys like I normally do in WoW.

So now there is a rotation! Initiate combat with a slow, then hit it with magic, then pop a bubble and start building up more PCs to spend on my finisher. Sweet! At level 6 a ton more skill options open up, including an entire healing tree that isn’t tied to any one class. As far as I can tell, there are no prerequisites for the higher level skills. There’s a handy respec button on the skill panel that just costs in-game coins to reset your skills, so theoretically I could remove my points from lower-level skills in order to have more to spend on the higher-level skills.

Well, moving on from skills, I discovered a quest that basically said “hey, there’s this item in the cash shop that’s completely free! You should go take one!” It turned out it was my first 4-slot bag expansion, unique so that I can only take one of them. This is brilliant! It wasn’t located in the first tab, so it made me go and search through the tabs of the cash shop for the no-cost item, becoming more familiar with it in a fun way. I probably would never have glanced in the cash shop until I had been playing this game for a long time otherwise. I wish more games used this kind of “free stuff in the cash shop” idea.

Well, it looks like I’m going to have quite a bit of fun with this game. I look forward to seeing more of it in the future.

I know, I know, not a lot of updates here from me. Basically, I got a promotion at work, which is great, but it also means I’m busy as hell when I’m at work and struggling to keep up to date on reading all of my other blogs during my little amount of downtime, and I’m obviously too busy squeezing every last minute of relaxation and enjoyment (i.e. actually playing games) out of my evenings when I’m at home to bother writing blog posts.

I tried healing from my computer at work a couple weeks ago during my dinner break when I was staying late one night, big mistake as I didn’t have any of my mods installed. Healing with the default UI is a nightmare. I can barely see the bar because the text is covering most of it, and if I hide the text, I can’t tell how much health they have. I can’t even tell what class these people are! What, you expect me to REMEMBER that the third guy on the list is a shaman? WTF.

Eek! Default UI!

I’m terrible at judging when someone needs healing based on current/total, as my UI at home has bars that are quite large, change color based on how much health they have, their names are color-coded by class, and their health numbers show the deficit from full in nice red letters (mods often call this “healer mode”, but I find it useful on my non-healing characters if only so that I know when I should bandage myself while soloing without wasting anything.

My actual current UI.

Khoa gave up on his druid, once again. He told me a story of one of the guys he plays D&D with. This guy only ever plays a specific build of a specific class, some kind of dwarven berzerker fighter thing. People make fun of him for it because most people who play D&D make a wide variety of different character races and classes. But Khoa says that he is that person in WoW. Paladins all the way — particularly protection paladins. He’s leveling a paladin now, and he’ll be leveling a paladin in Cataclysm.

I am continuing to play with him on my new draenei priest, disc/holy to toss the occasional heal on him and spend the rest of my time spamming Holy Fire, Smite, and Holy Nova. Since he’s an uber tank and I’m an uber healer, I don’t actually have to work at healing unless he pulls an entire room, or unless I’m one level away from learning my next rank of Heal, causing it to cost twice as much as it used to but still heal for the same amount. (Cataclysm will fix it!™)

When I started leveling my druid, I felt a lot like druid healing was vastly superior to priest healing. Maybe it was just the fact that druids gave up a lot of the miscellaneous utility spells I never used on my priest, or never liked using, like Shadowfiend, Mind Control, and Mass Dispel. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of Mass Dispel. I just don’t like being forced to use it in precisely the right place two seconds ago when it’s a ground-targeted AoE, that’s all. If it were a smart dispel that worked on my target and things within a certain range of it, things would be different.

But druids didn’t have to worry about any of those things, while giving me fun cooldowns like an instant heal and a crazy-powerful channeled AoE heal — and another crazy-powerful channeled AoE damage spell for when I felt like killing things instead. If anyone doubts the value of Tranquility, I’ll just remind them of how I saved the group from wiping on Sartharion almost every time by channeling Tranquility while the fire elementals were running chaotically all over the place.

However, at the moment, I’m really having fun with priest healing again. There’s a simplicity about it at this level, just trying to match my heal to his health bar without any of this stacking of HoTs. Khoa chuckles to himself whenever I announce how close my last heal was to topping off his health perfectly. “BAM! Only 4 overheal!” Healing is so slow at this level that I can afford to play that game, only using spells other than Heal when things get tight.

But to be honest, I’ll probably be a druid again in Cataclysm. A worgen one, at that. One of the things I hated most about healing as a druid at end-game was the stupid tree form, and how I never got to see the awesome armor I was wearing if I was actually combat-ready. But Cataclysm will fix it!™ Hopefully worgen females get some sweet hairstyles. I was a little disappointed at first at their lack of tails, but then I realized worgen males don’t have tails either, and never have. Somehow the females look more out-of-place without them. Possibly it’s because their models appear to be reskinned draenei females.

Anyway, we didn’t manage to get Blizzcon tickets in Wednesday’s round of sales, maybe we’ll get lucky tomorrow morning!