Afternoon, broad daylight. Mr shineypants just entered the apartment and took a vacuum XL out of his pocket (let's say it was his pocket, really) and started absorbing the mirror (yes the mirror, apparently the PC wasn't hot enough for him, or the mouse pad with skulls scared him off).
Now I thought I was well prepared for any kind of intruder with my aggressive cat (of which the tooltip read that it would catch any burglar) and my brave granny (of which the tooltip read that she would fight any burglar). However, Lady didn't have any interactions available with the burglar, whereas she usually can at least sniff a person she hasn't met before, and Granny had a moment of instant senility and was just staring at him in disgust, unable to do anything.
A quick search through the internet taught me that this has happened to other people before, and it's probably a bug. Because it was pissing me off, I went back to the latest save game and tried again.
This time it took three whole days before a burglar visited the 11th floor, and it wasn't some shineypants from the next century, but your regular classic burglar. He was called Blake. Blake didn't get past the hallway or Granny ran to him, the two circling around each other (appropriate music) and deeply staring into one another's eyes.
Things became a bit disturbing when the text "Blake thinks Vanessa is okay." turned up, while Granny got a positive moodlet from being "near an attractive Sim". Soon there was nothing to be seen besides a lot of dust and stars in the hallway.
I'm not sure how she did it and if she played it by the rules, but Granny totally won the fight and Blake dived into the elevator to get away. I hope he's going to take some time to rethink his life, because he was just totally owned by a granny like a boss. In her pajamas, that is.
Sadly, no exciting romances were initiated as the fight left a negative affection rate with Vanessa. Perhaps this is a good thing, as a relationship of this kind could prove a bit too adventurous. For Blake, that is.
So the new sorcerer representative went to the devs and got three answers to his questions. Yay! ...right?
Here's a quick recap:
1. Defensive Cooldowns (PvP/PvE)
"The biggest problem the sorcerer faces is one of survivability.
Currently the sorcerer takes the most damage by a sizable margin, one
that is noticeable in raids and PvP (our guess is around 20%). While we
have some tools that assist in keeping us alive, they are insufficient
and inferior when compared to other classes. (...) So with all this in mind, do you think that this very obvious disparity
between sorcerers/sages and every other class’ defensive cooldowns are
fair?"
"There may be a little room for improvement here,
though comparing a Sorcerer to a Marauder or Sniper is not exactly a
fair comparison. The fact is, Marauders and Snipers cannot heal
themselves to full. Sure, you cannot deal damage while you are healing,
but knowing when to heal or when to deal damage is part of playing a
Sorcerer. (...) As a Sorcerer, you must play defensively and make them pay for trying to kill you."
TL;DR: Sorcerers should heal themselves in between the DPSing to make up for taking more damage.
It is interesting how the devs don't think having to stop DPSing to heal yourself doesn't give your class a disadvantage over others such as snipers/slingers and marauders/sentinels in a raid, who can just keep DPSing with their defensive cooldowns up. Especially considering that these other classes already generally score higher on DPS without either healing themselves in raids (cause yeah, nobody actually does that). Why would you then bring a sorc to your raid?
It is also interesting how the devs only seem to have considered DPS sorcs in their answer, while this problem is even more apparent for healing sorcs, in PvP specifically. Healing sorcerers/sages are too squishy to survive arenas, but more about that in this post.
"A big problem we face as sorcerer/sage is that our specs (all of them) are very easily shut down. For example; madness and its dots are too easily cleansed, corruption has far too many casted abilities and is extremely prone to interrupts, and lightning falls victim to severe LoS. Thundering blast and AoE heals being the biggest offenders. The other classes/specs we compete with on the battlefield have some sort of protection against a lot of what might be detrimental to their jobs. (...) Given the current state of PvP, is it intended for our class to be so easy to shut down?"
"It is not intended for Sorcerers to be easier to stop because they can heal while specialized to DPS or vice versa; however, the ability to heal is considered to be part of a Sorcerer’s overall survivability. (...) Sorcerer’s are an “easy to play, hard to master” class, in that most of their abilities are rather straight-forward and easily understood, but getting the most out of those abilities may require a higher skill level than many players are comfortable with."
TL;DR: Learn to play. Also, something unrelated about being able to heal.
While I think sorcs aren't in a terrible spot in PvP DPS wise, the representative does make valid points regarding the ability to cleanse DoTs and interrupt channels (also for healing!) in PvP. It's mind-boggling how the dev just ignores the whole point about DPS and heals being shut down and instead babbles something about survivability and learn to play.
"In the current state of PvP and soon to be 4v4s it is going to become a challenge for Corruption and Madness sorcerers to maintain force. In long, drawn out fights which we can expect to see in 4v4, madness and corruption will likely run into force issues. As corruption and it’s fairly easy spec to shut down, it will become increasingly difficult as the fights drag on to keep yourself alive and your teammates (most likely the tank). As you start to fall behind in force trying to keep some of your cast’s instant, it will not be optimal to start sacrificing your health. (...) Is there any plan to add some force management abilities/talents/mechanics to our corruption and madness trees? (...)"
"We currently have no plans to add any extra Force management abilities, skills, or mechanics to Corruption or Madness. (...) In PvP, healers should not be able to keep everyone alive either because too much damage is being done (...) within a short timeframe – not because they are running out of resources. If this is not the case for a well-played Corruption Sorcerer, then we will make necessary adjustments when it becomes more apparent." "The Critical Rating stat is currently adjusted to a level that grants a critical chance with which we are not completely satisfied, and this means that some specializations lacking a built-in auto-crit are at a disadvantage (...). We will be working to rectify this issue with the Critical Rating stat in the future, and that should alleviate some issues (...)."
This reply is actually answering the question, makes sense and even gives the impression the devs understood what was asked. An unicum!
I'm happy to hear that something will be done about the crit stat being broken at level cap, even though it doesn't sound like it's going to be anywhere near in the future. As a healing (corruption) sorcerer force management in PvP is indeed challenging and I believe arenas won't prove survivable (but again, more about that in this post). In PvE my highest annoyance is that consumption (skill to get force back) costs a global cooldown, in PvP it is that it is dangerous to use. Try gaining some force back while there are two marauders jumping on you in an arena... you'll just run out of health.
Heal to full
Save the last one, the devs weren't exactly taking any of the questions seriously. In fact, it seemed as if they didn't understand them at all and answered with different topics. The hard-to-master comment is especially cynical since the devs have recently shown they could do with some learn-to-play themselves (they got annihilated by players over and over in arenas on the public test server).
So over the past weekend, the dev's ignorance rapidly developed into a micro-meme, complete with guild and numerous character renames (of which one in my guild). The devs have reacted that players should "deal with it" and respect them. Seems to me like that didn't work the other way around in the first place.
But hey, what do I know, I should probably first L2H2F*...
Rakuno's hilarious posts about his Sims 3 household following the Immortal Dynasty challenge made me want to play the Sims again and try a challenge myself. And so I did, but I started with a normal little household without challenge, because it was years ago I last played it and I needed some catching up first.
I was immediately absorbed into the game and didn't do much else than play the Sims 3 this weekend. Tiger surprised me with four (!) Sims expansions (I only had the vanilla version) that were on sale. He is such a sweetheart! (There, now it's official.)
Meet my two teen girls: Delilah (left) and Elaine (right) McKay running to school. My deep plan was to play around with two rogue party girls, living together. But the game didn't allow me to start a household without a grown up, so I got them Granny (aka Vanessa McKay) who will hopefully die of old age soon so they're left alone after all.
Hey, that's not heartless, that's Sims tactics. You need a certain amount of craziness to spend your time bossing around imaginary characters in the first place.
Besides, I bought Granny a cat to have someone to talk to. See how nice of a God-like creature I am? Following her
dream to become a master chef, her day and night rhythm isn't exactly
compatible with that of the girls. They mostly get remembered of her
existence by the leftovers she leaves for them in the fridge. *picks away tear*
The girls live in Riverview town and Delilah decided to follow in my footsteps and started a blog. It's
called "A wild girl in a boring town". She already has over 100
followers or something now. I obviously should've called my blog like
that instead!
She did not know that her blog title would be outdated very soon, though...
For Tiger gave me the Late Night expansion pack and the girls moved from their Riverview rustic house to the big city for MOAR PARTY!!! However, this caused some frustration because their new apartment was on the 11th floor and there was no garden for Vanessa and Elaine to go nuts on their gardening skillz. Elaine went all rebellious and now leaves tags all over the city.
What I forgot
...is that it's so much fun to design a house!
I totally stressed out when I saw how small the new apartment was for three people to live in, but it was actually a nice challenge that ended up looking quite well.
It's easy to overlook what exactly the house looks like in reality if you're viewing it from above all the time. Making screenshots makes me realize what's still missing. The top picture: cushions on the chairs and something to cheer up that wall.
When I move into a new house in real life, I should definitely recreate it in the Sims first and try out the paint on the wall. I might just end up with a less crazily coloured house than I'm living in right now.
I can't do else than be happy with my teen Sims, though. Even though they are party girls, as soon as they're done with school they start doing their homework. They're as hardcore as to just go sit down outside school on the pavement and do it right there if I don't watch out (I rather let them do it together at home so they pick up some social as well, though). If only real people would be this motivated (starting with, for instance, me)!
I've been playing way too much Sims lately. I hope it's going to be a source of inspiration: some real-life homework would actually be in order.
Okay, so my LotRO posts lately seem to be all death-related, but it's not all my fault, really!
Questing with Tiger in northwestern Wildermore. All of a sudden we are surrounded by dead people, ghosts of those who have passed in this land due to the terrible winter ad orc attacks. I really hope we are able to help the people of Wildermore for real soon, because the body count is getting quite high. With the death of each new NPC I forget the name of the previous one. This probably makes me a bad player, but there's just a bit too many for me to remember them all.
The quests go slow and are frankly quite boring (kill x this, collect x that) and there are a lot of them in Wildermore. So we slowly continue finishing one location a Saturday. Talk about immersion: at this pace it really feels as if the winter will never end.
I was a bit shocked when I caught myself red handed while thinking that this was a beautiful scenery. The moonlight drawing the shadows of the trees on the snow made me catch my breath. Then I remembered that I was looking at the fresh grave of a young warrior surrounded by dead orcs, giving the presence of my raven a morbid taste. And I thought: when something terrible turns into something beautiful we can't help but stop and look with fascination.
Recommended listening to get in the mood: Ruins of Alph tune.
So this is me catching pokémon! I'm super awesome because I apparently have blue hair in ponytails (hey, it was either a dude with a cap or a girl with blue hair - easy choice, right?). The maniacal laugh is what you get when you've spent too much time looking for Unowns - or listening at the tune posted above, for that matter. It has nothing to do with me being unable to draw healthy looking human beings, believe me. *cough*
Unowns, I say? Yes, those are them pokémon vaguely resembling letters, introduced with 'Generation II' (using the proper nerd word here). They are all called identically "Unown", but as many different appearances exist, I thought it was time to catch all different looking ones, and see if something special happens (if you already know, please don't tell me, I'd like no spoilers!). These are the ones I've caught so far:
ABCDEGHIJKXYZ
Catching Unown is actually pretty boring, because you run into the wrong ones you already have all the time. Also, I need to check the paper lying next to my bed at each Unown encounter to check whether I've already caught this particular version. Nevertheless, I will prevail! I'm looking for Unown each evening when there's some downtime, so I'm bound to get the collection complete one day.
I think this is the best part of the bounty hunter event. Have you run into these little jawas yet?
They're in the bounty hunter event area of the fleet, though it seems they themselves have no clue where the hell they are. Presumably that's their ship out there, because one of them continuously bonks his little fists on the window, as if he wants to say: "I want out!" It's the cutest thing I've seen in ages.
For the rest, I'm not very impressed by the bounty hunter event (I mean, "bounty contract week", totally!). This is partly because there are no rewards that appeal to me*, probably because I don't play a high level bounty hunter myself: the armour is clunky, the weapons don't fit my characters. There's a hat with scarf that looks good and a funny bow caster, but I can't think of any of my characters that could wear them.
For the most part it's because the event itself isn't that interesting, though. There's one bounty hunter questline per involved planet, but the quests are very generic and grindy. The cutscenes feign uniqueness, but the fact that you have to repeat the same action over and over again makes them all feel the same. I have yet to collect my fifth data thingy so I can try the next 'tier', but I'm doing it slowly in between things. I'm not grinding the shit out of this event.
These are the things I do like:
You can get your informants to talk either by torturing them with an interrogation droid (dark side points) or by giving them a cocktail to feed them drunk (light side points) - thought that was a pretty creative idea
If you don't want to kill your bounty, you can freeze them in carbonite - looks pretty cool to have that carbonite thing floating behind you.
There's a floating cocktail 'pet' ("drink server probe"), perhaps something for mistress Fárah? Shame you have to have Legend reputation to be able to buy it.
How have you been enjoying the event so far?
* There's a good overview of all rewards of the event on Dulfy.net.
My friend Rakuno spoke some wise words in his latest post:
In the MMORPG side [as compared to single-player games, red.] things are more complicated. You see, to me the fun with a MMORPG is dependent on two factors: the game itself and the people I play it with. If one of the two is lacking I quickly lose my desire to play it. Usually what happens is that the first one will become the problem for me. The game just loses its magic, becoming dull and uninteresting. Then I just keep playing because of the people I met there and eventually even that isn't enough to compensate for the game's faults.
When I read this, it struck me that he had hit the nail on its head, and I realized that this was exactly what happened to me in LotRO. I had always thought that I would stay in Middle-earth forever, so much in love was I with the game, my first MMO, when it was launched in 2007.
Over the last couple of years, I started to become increasingly annoyed by the extreme marketing strategies of Turbine with its Store. Then I started to lose interest in the repetitive nature of the quests and the increased grind needed to gear up your character the best. At this point, I was just logging in to raid with my kinship and didn't do anything else. Eventually, the new raids didn't turn out to be much fun and our raiding group somehow lost the lust to decipher the new challenges. We've now arrived at the end of the quote.
The social factor of MMOs is both amazing and terrible. I love to have fun with friends in-game, but I hate dragging myself into a game I don't enjoy anymore as much as I hate not doing so and feeling bad about not being there for my friends. There is no easy solution. An MMO you used to love is like an ex-boyfriend: its pretty tough to find the right relationship.
I don't want to part with virtual Middle-earth totally, so I log in to the game each Saturday morning, when most MMO players are still in bed. No obligations or anything. Just me, Tiger and our horses in a world to discover.
