Arcana

I'm a newbie too. I think that, if I'm sandwiched in between hordes of awesome, my track will be awesome simply because I'm in the presence of so much awesome.

Still working on listening through this one, but the opening track turned my head. And Vampire Hunter Dan's track me really look up and check that I wasn't transported back in time to when I was playing Xenogears. It's awesome so far, and very nostalgic.

Would it make me look back and think, "The rest of the world is sure damn nice" or do you think it would actually be any fun?

/livejournal mode I'm trying to think about how to express what's annoying me right now. So as some of you might know there's this game called "Aion" that's released in North America now. The art is pretty and the game is new and my girlfriend wanted to try it so I decided to sign up for it with her and play it. We both used to play WoW, it was my first MMORPG and I used to play it quite a bit, probably 15-20 hours a week (which is something like the amount of hours the average MMORPG player puts in a week). Anyway, Aion is neat. It's not as fun or as addictive as WoW was, but it's not bad and it's interesting and it's a new game to try out. But I think what's killing it for me is the community. The forum community especially. See, Aion is a game designed by Korean developers, and there are a few differences in the way that so-called Western developers and so-called Asian developers make their MMORPGs. I'm going to describe this with my intense amounts of bias right now because this is my own rant thread and as a result I get to twist the argument how I want. In any case, let's outline some of the qualities... Korean MMORPGs: - Meant to be more time-sink oriented - Money is very valuable, lots of money gets you ahead - Botting is acceptable, as it's one of the ways to get you ahead of others - Levelling is "grind" oriented. What people like to call the grind where you simply kill the same few mobs repeatedly in order to get a level - Death is punished severely - Very pretty and customizable - Usually somewhat linear and story-focused Western MMORPGs: - Player friendly - Measures are put into place to prevent gold from being so valuable that someone who gets it (or buys it) is able to get ahead - Leveling is usually quest and objective oriented - Very focused on small steps Anyway, this ends up boiling down to World of Warcraft vs. Aion. One thing I've learned now from playing a bit of Aion is that WoW is a very, very, very solid game. They've done a lot of good things (and some bad) in WoW to make it a game that you want to play. It's very casual friendly, it invites you to come and make mistakes and not punish you for it, it gives you a carrot that keeps luring you a little bit forward every day so that you never really want to quit. There's a ton of content and a ton of stuff to do. Also, I have come to realise just how bored I am of WoW. It didn't really come to me until I started to play some Aion but WoW is... well, I've been playing the game for 3 years or so and now I'm bored of the same raids and the same dungeons and I guess it just took playing another game to make me realise it. So I go play Aion and I go to one of their forums and look around so I can learn a bit more about it, learn more about the game and what it's about and how to play. So if you know WoW's forums, WoW's forums are pretty terrible as was alluded to in my first thread upon my brief OCR hiatus. They're hostile, people troll each other a lot, people call each other bad and are downright mean to each other. You cannot really get worse than WoW forums. ... or can you? I think I've come to the conclusion that the Aion forums are just as terrible and it makes me wonder if this is common to all MMORPGs. There are a few prevailing complaints in Aion. Outside of the many technical issues there are two issues that are getting to me. First, it's the idea of "grind". Someone complains about how the game is too "grindy". Invariably someone else says, "I like the grind" or "Well, game XYZ is more harcore than Aion, Aion's grind is easy." or "You should work for it" or "Did you come from WoW you stupid lazy shit?" However, people keep coming back and keep coming back to complain about the grind. The second is the idea of death penalties. Aion's death penalty involves four things. First, you lose 1% of the XP for that level you gained permanently. Second, you lose 2% additional XP, which can be "bought back". This starts cheap but gets gradually more expensive as you level up. Third, you get to res at a "home point" that you choose to set (it costs money to do this). Fourth, you lose a bunch of stats and start at half life/mana and run at half speed (if you opt to buy your XP back, it'll clear this debuff too). Note that, as a "money sink" this is relatively ineffective because at maximum Level you don't have any XP to lose and therefore no money to pay. I, among a bunch of other people, think that this death penalty sucks and that permanent XP loss AND moneysink AND having to walk all the way back to where you were questing (which can take a long time) AND getting a debuff altogether adds up to too much. My rationale is that dying sucks, yeah. But when you die, you know you screwed up. You know you are going to waste time running back and healing yourself and redoing your buffs. You know that you'll have to pay money. The problem I see is that by taking away XP and exhuberant amounts of money, the game is basically kicking you when you're down and then teabagging you while it stomps on your nuts with stiletto heels. When you die you feel terrible and the game rubs it in your face. Someone recently posted saying that dying sucks and immediately you get a bunch of people who say things like, "Death should hurt" and so forth. "In this game, death is nothing; in XYZ game we DE-LEVELLED IF WE DIED!!!" and "If you're dying in a group, stop grouping with idiots. You should have checked the other group members' gear before you joined them." When I quoted a number of magazines that stated that permanent XP loss on death is an outdated mechanic, someone told me "Well then if your dad told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it too?" He totally misused that analogy. It's not the fact that they disagreed. It was the fact that everyone's so hostile about it and are ready to hop on the asses of people who think that permanent XP loss on death is an outdated mechanic and call them crybabies and claim that they're not hardcore enough. It's not the internet arguing (because we all know that getting butthurt over Internet arguments is really no way to get around in life) but the fact that there's so much elitism over things that are so absolutely insignificant. Great job, you don't die much in an MMORPG and can call people who die bad and deserving. It doesn't change the fact that dying in a game isn't fun, and it sure isn't fun when you realise that you have to pay assloads of money and permanent XP loss when you just wanted to try to relax and have a good time. And even though the WoW forums sucked ass, I think part of the reason they were somewhat amusing is that you don't realise who's telling other people that they suck ass quite as clearly as you can see on the AIon forum... so you get kind of this illusion of general asshattery going on without connecting it to faces. I think on this Aion forum (where people have custom usernames, sigs, and avatars) it's easier to attach a face with assholes and when you start realising that it's the same 15-20 asshats who are being mean to newcomers, you start to wonder if there's any hope in the world. And before you ask, I don't know if I plan to keep playing Aion, I think I'll play it if my girlfriend is having a good time (it's fun playing with her) but I probably will avoid doing any soloing in the game. And yeah, the forums suck and I'm going to start staying away from them because reading the opinions of dense, idiotic morons who can't ever see the other side of an argument is beyond infuriating. So I don't know exactly what you guys at OCR will tell me. In a way it's kind of the wrong place to complain (I should have used my Livejournal LOLOLOL!) but on the whole, I have really really high respect for the people on OCR because even the worst trolls here are more intelligent than the average person on other forums. Even the most hostile people here (even in the old Unmod days) at least had some sense of respect for someone out there in the world. Okay I'm done. /livejournal off TL DR version: MMORPG forum posters suck because they can't possibly see two sides of an argument for the life of them.

Why is link a 404 now?

If you can get laid during compo, you're the Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. edit: I just noticed today that I totally forgot to put snares into my track.

Someone was programming in Java or C++ recently.

I was curious if it was a project, or just listening to the OST, or what. So cooooool Not sure if I can go to the party though got a submission deadline next week.

What Xenogears listening to what exactly?!??!

http://www.aionsource.com/forum/aion-discussion/73017-spam-filter-block-goldspam.html I advise you to read all 8 pages before proceeding, since as the thread goes on there's a GUI version as well as very instructional screenshots about how to set up a SOCKS client to redirect the chat port to the filter program.

The thing with Aion is that it's new and shiny and isn't the same old going-to-the-heroic-daily-we've-seen-a-billion-times routine. And there's less elitism over there than in WoW at the moment, where if you sneeze while you're doing a heroic someone calls you a baddie and comments on your gearscore.

I um, downloaded and installed Aion >.>

FLStudio is pretty cheap as far as music software goes. Just a heads-up.

Level99 is going to be a star. In five years, I can say things like, "Oh yeah, I knew that Steve-O guy... I even talked to him on IRC and did Compos with him."

I've began to surf some forums and there's apparently some proxy applications that monitor the ports that Aion uses and actually filters (using Regular expressions) some of the chat messages the game client receives. Ever play with those?

Well keep in mind that I'm also used to playing on WoW where there's a few thousand people online at any given time, so seeing "only" a hundred or so in the starting area seems quiet. More telling is the fact that the General/LFG/Trade channels are really quiet (once the spammers are blocked). I don't know if that's just because people aren't really chatty on Yustiel or if it's because the gold spammers really have hijacked the general chats in the game. That's something I really, really want to see fixed. I really could care less about the ethics of gold buying and selling or even their effects on the server economy and an individual's "competitive edge". What I do care about is the endless spamming of the 3 channels to the point where they're unusable without having to block people every hour.

Was this one played and recorded live? There's some signs that this particular recording was sequenced (or played using samples). I'm not really experienced enough to tell. The interpretation is amazing though. This is a very solid piece and I think it would have no problems passing if, as Rozovian said, there are no production issues with the recording.

Hey Starla and Brendan. Happy birthday! woo woo

I bought Aion this weekend and rolled with my GF on Yustiel (Elyos). We're still kind of exploring around with the game. The server is actually pretty quiet, which in a way isn't a good thing because low-population servers are harder to find groups on and so forth. But it's still a bit early to tell, we only played for a few hours and hit Level 7 last night before the server crashed. This game is really pretty. Character customization is great.

Maryland is the centre of the OCR Universe. It's also too far away from me to be convenient to attend any of these.

I haven't actually really played it, but Touhou is an indie game series with an incredible fan response.

That was a BAD movie. Bad dialogue and bad acting and and bad plot and bad connections to the video game... not entirely unexpected. The most disappointing thing is that the action sequences were bad too, they were a bore, no fun at all. Terrible movie.

Damn it, I'm trying to remember what that keyboard's called. I've played with one and it is pretty damn cool but way out of my price range. It's the pitch-bend knob on the top-left that is totally distinctive....

That doesn't count. (I already have that addon).