Ah, but that's the stuff of fantasies, isn't it? No-one keeps notes on what hapens in the video games they play. That would be crazy. And anyway, what would you even call it? Some kind of gaming log? A glog, maybe? Well, that sounds dumb! No wonder no-one's doing it.
Evidence from the past notwithstanding, there certainly seems to be a glut of giveaways in the games I'm "playing". I just did a whole post on the massive hand-outs in EverQuest II and this morning I logged into two other MMORPGs to pick up my rightful dues. (Also, that little ironic meta-conceit about the non-existence of game blogging does kind of fall apart when I link to a post right afterwards, doesn't it? If I had a decent editor they'd just put a blue line through the whole of paras 1&2 and tell me to start over. Lucky I'm self-editing this thing...)
I am now in a position to add some detail to the aforementioned post, although not as much as you might expect. I claimed the one-per-account crate plus the one everyone gets on my Berserker but now I'm wishing I'd read up on it a bit more first because it turns out that not everything in the one-time crate is Heirloom. That is made clear in the announcement but looking at the forum thread I'm not the only one who didn't bother to read it carefully.
Luckily, I did at least claim it my "main" so none of it is going to go to waste. Had I been paying better attention, though, I'd have claimed it on the character I'm working so hard to turn into my new main, my Necromancer.
On the bright side, EQII's ceaseless vertical progression escalator moves so ludicrously fast, anything with stats is going to be replaced in a matter of weeks anyway. We've got Pandas soon and then it's the expansion, so even though the gear in this crate is a huge upgrade (It is stat gear after all, not appearance as I wrongly suspected.) I don't imagine I'll be wearing it come Halloween, let alone Christmas.
As for the rest of it, I haven't sorted through it all yet but it sure looks impressive. But there's no time to sit around admiring my unearned goodies, not when there are more to be grabbed.
Game #2 on my loot list, quite unexpectedly, is Lord of the Rings Online. I have MassivelyOP to thank for this one. They PSA'd the offer yesterday and I logged in and claimed it this morning. Well, after I'd waited half an hour for the game to patch, naturally. Is there any other online game that takes this much time to get back up to speed after only a few weeks absence?
I last logged in on 16 June, when I moved my characters off their old 32-bit servers and onto the shiny new lag-free 64-bit upgrades. (Golf clap...) I hope you've done the same because if you haven't it's too late now.
No! Wait! No it's not! You still have a couple of days! Go! Go! Go!!!
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Out-of-place illo. The one I took of the LotRO store somehow vanished. Thanks SSG! |
Possibly because their entire year has been such a roiling, heaving mess, Standing Stone decided to throw some bones our way and they're pretty big bones, too. Oliphaunt bones, maybe. (Oh, look! I know what an oliphaunt is and I didn't even have to look it up. I guess I must be right-wing now. They do say it happens as you get older.)
Not as far to the right as all that, though. I have no clue where Gundabad is, although I suppose it's worrying that I even know it's a place not a person. Or a weapon. These people name their weapons, don't they? Have you ever done that? Can't say I have. I might start but first I'd have to have some weapons. I suppose I could name my garden spade. Digger. That's be a good name for a spade.
I seem to have whimsied myself into a hole here. Hang on while I dig myself out. Now, where did I put Digger?
(See? If I had an editor you wouldn't have to put up with any of this. Not that I imagine there are many of you left by now...)
The code for the giveaway is EXPLOREOURWORLD, all in caps, which presumably is some kind of GenZ thing, judging by half the bands I listen to these days, who all seem to think all capitilization is nothing more than a style choice. You wouldn't have thought the devs at SSG would be so cutting edge...
It gets you a huge swathe of content, all the quests and expansion content up to about three years ago. There's no particular rush. The code, which you have to redeem in the in-game store, is valid through to November. Why they do it this way, rather than just make all content before a certain date free automatically, the way every other game does, I have no idea but that's Standing Stone for you.
Specifically, it's Teen Titans Homecoming, a big party the Titans throw for Starfire to try and cheer her up after her sister Blackfire confirms her exile from Tamaran for another year. I don't know what it says about my politics but I could explain all the italicized words in that last sentence, in more detail than you'd want to hear, without having to look anything up, just like a Tolkein fan could tell you all about elves. (That's the remake of the old Bette Davis movie, starring Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler, with Sydney Sweeney in the Marilyn Monroe part, by the way.)
Focus, dammit! Focus!
Since it's a seasonal event not a giveaway as such, you do need to do some missions to get the currency to buy the rewards off the special vendor and I wouldn't normally have bothered only one of the items you can get is so weird...
It's Starfire. You can buy Starfire and she'll come live at your base and talk to you about her life. You can ask her about her Homecoming party, her team the Titans, her adopted planet Earth, her home planet Tamaran and who knows what-all else. I'd like to know what she thinks about her sister for a start.
I'd also like to know if she thinks it's appropriate for a Princess of Tamaran to be sold like... well, I guess we'd have to say like a slave because if she was a servant she's have working hours and I'd have to pay her, like I pay my mercenaries. I've played plenty of games where NPCs come to stay in my character's houses and work for them but it's always assumed to be on some kind of contractual or apprenticeship basis. (In EQII there's literally a contract involved that you have to hand over for some of them.)
There's a kind of precedent for it in DCUO in that I have Krypto flying about my base but although technically he isn't my character's pet he is a dog. People do buy dogs. That's how Mrs Bhagpuss got Beryl.
When I read about it (Again on MOP although I'll most likely get an email from DI about it at some point.) my first thought was "I'm having one of those!" Me and the Teen Titans go back a long way. As I've mentioned before (More than once, most likely.), I once interviewed Marv Wolfman about the New Teen Titans comic he was writing at the time and for me Starfire will always be that golden-skinned alien with the wild hair he and George Perez created but I've also watched all seasons of the Titans TV show, so I'm very comfortable with the current version, which is of course the one you get in DCUO.
I did the very easy mission Raven hands out first. That gives four
tokens and takes about a couple of minutes. Then I did the
Miss Martian one, which is an On Duty, meaning you have to grab
a group from the group finder and let them carry you play
your role to earn eight more tokens.
Doing daily group missions in DCUO is about as painless as it gets. Mine popped in seconds and lasted maybe five minutes. I do have some idea how to play my character but certainly not after months away so I just button-mashed through the whole thing. No-one died, not even me, and at the end, when you get a scorecard, while I definitely did the least DPS (As a DPS character, too.) I didn't do none. No-one complained, anyway. No-one even spoke. So that should be fine.
You can also pay some currency to reset the dailies and re-do them on the same day. Don't ask me which currency. There are sooo many. Whatever it is, I had plenty of it, so I did Raven's easy one again. If I did that each time it would only take me five days to get Starfire but there are quite a lot of other things on the vendor that look interesting so we'll see. (You can also just buy the tokens in the cash shop, which seems like a great idea to me, espcially given how much DBC I have lying around doing nothing.)
I will make the effort to get Koriand'r at least. (That's her real name. Didn't have to look that up, either. Not even the spelling.)
The Homecoming event itself has some kind of progress bar you can complete to get other rewards as well but I just want Starfire. When I get her, if she has anything interesting to say, I'll let you know.
Until then, where's my next freebie, game devs? Don't you know it's Giveaway Season?
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