What I'm Playing - And What I'm Not

I missed a day posting the day before yesterday, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen. I had my second in-hospital chemo session, which only took up the morning, but then the car broke down on the way home. It stopped right on a busy junction and I had to get out and push it into a nearby car park. Not exactly what the doctor would have ordered.

With great good luck Mrs Bhagpuss managed to get it going - just about - and with even greater luck we were only about a quarter of a mile from the garage we usually use. Mrs Bhagpuss managed to limp it in and the mechanic diagnosed a shot clutch. It was set to take a couple of days to replace in the end they got it done a day early.

I felt somewhat out of it that day. My hands were affected and typing was a bit unpredictable, although it didn't stop me commenting on a bunch of blogs, so I decided to skip a day. It's not like we're in Blaugust after all.

Yesterday, when I was a couple of paragraphs into this post, we got the call to pick up the car. When I got back a couple of hours later I read the news about Daybreak and Amazon, which looked a lot more interesting than what I had planned (this post, so I'm really selling it.).

I thought I'd do a little "what I'm playing" number. I always consider these to be fillers although for many bloggers they seem to be much more like regular features. It might be useful for me, anyway, because some days I'm really not quite sure what I'm doing and everything seems to be even more random than usual.

The MMORPGs I'd consider myself to be actively playing this month:

Guild Wars 2
EverQuest II
Riders of Icarus
Secondhand Lands
Final Fantasy XIV

Games I thought I'd be playing but don't appear to be:

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Secret Worlds Legends
Black Desert Online

Games I keep telling myself I should be playing but never do:

Dragon Nest (the mobile version)
Villagers and Heroes (mobile and PC cross-platform)
Occupy White Walls
DCUO

Games that are nagging me to play them but which I am resisting:

World of Warcraft
Rift
Elder Scrolls Online
EverQuest

Anything not on one of those lists is probably out of luck, although FFXIV would have been nowhere near any of them a week ago and now look at it.

 Riders of Icarus

As far as time spent goes, Riders of Icarus is probably getting the most hours logged. It's the first game I fire up most days. I'm very keen to hit all 31 this month for the login rewards. They are without doubt the best I've seen anywhere.

This morning I got a Legendary mount, my first. The other login Legendary Familiar I got was a combat pet only, because you can't really ride around on the back of a maid. Actually, I wouldn't put anything past MMO devs but in this case they've restrained themselves.

The mount in question turns out to be an inflatable dolphin of the kind you see people drifting out to sea on at holiday resorts before being rescued by the coastguard, hopefully at considerable personal expense. At first I thought it was just a ground mount but then it occured to me it might float over water like a skimmer in GW2.

I happened to be in Divinity Shore, the fishing beach, so I tried that out and the dolphin, whose name is Black Dooly (might be its species, actually), promply poofed, dumping me in the water. I took it for a spin around the Hakanas Highlands and after a while I noticed it was floating in the air whenever I rode it over a drop.

Turns out not only is Black Dooly a flying mount, it has a huge ceiling of 1200 meters, making it by far my best performer, Vulkanus the dragon being a distant runner-up at 450 meters. I'm just beginning to hit the point where the game takes off - literally - so it couldn't have come at a better time.

The more I play Riders of Icarus, the more I like it. I'm wary of making it sound better than it is because it's very much what you probably expect it to be. It's currently the game I'm enjoying playing the most, though, so there will be more posts about it, at least until I inevitably stop playing suddenly with no explanation or comment and don't mention it again for months, if ever.

 Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has seen a resurgence of interest chez Bhagpuss almost entirely off the back of Dragon Bash. I like most of the activities the event has to offer, the achievements are largely achievable and there are some rewards I quite want.

I've finished the metas on one account and I'll get them both done on a second account before the event ends. I've ditched the third account for the duration to prevent burnout but I did log in the 4th, free to play, account to get a few AP there. I've particularly enjoyed the mount race (ironic, considering my well-documented loathing of mounts in GW2).

Dragon Bash ends next week but its immediate replacement is the very quick return of the World Boss Rush event. I really didn't do this event justice last time it was around but it's exactly the kind of thing I enjoy and this time there are significantly improved rewards, including tiered community targets, which should keep the whole fizzing.

I'm very happy to see that someone at ANet has finally recognized the importance of giving people plenty to do between Living World instalments. Shame it took them nearly seven years to work out what every other MMORPG seemed to understand from the get-go but better late than never.

EverQuest II

EverQuest II gets played most days. I have a ton of stuff to do there, not least finishing the Signature Questline from Chaos Descending, something I still seem to be subconsciously avoiding. I'm on the final step, too, but that step is, as they say, a doozy.

As has happened before, in commenting on one of Telwyn's posts about a bottleneck in EQ2 I did some research that told me stuff I didn't know. As a result I took another long look at my Berserker's gear and now I have some kind of plan on further improvements. That needs work.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might even go back to Test and pick up a couple of questlines I never finished - or I might start them on Live. That would be a project because one of them is sixty steps long and took me weeks the first time around.

Secondhand Lands

Secondhands Lands is my EQ substitute right now. I log in and grind some mobs to fill a quest quota. Now that I'm in areas where the creatures are aggressive I have to find a safe spot and pull singles carefully, which is something few games made after about 2006 require you to do. It's very satisfying.

I got a large number of hits to my original post on the game after Massively:OP gave me a lovely plug in the piece they did off the back of the tip I sent them. No comments though and I don't know if it's resulted in anyone actually downloading and playing the game. It was interesting to see the effect on numbers here from a main article on M:OP as compared to a mention on Syp's Global Chat column, which barely registers.

FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV came out of nowhere. Like Syp (him again) I had pretty much decided I would never play this again. I even commented to that effect on the post. I haven't even logged in for any of the recent free welcome back weeks. Then I read about the Trust system (Endgame Viable. whose post I entirely agree with, is just the latest to weigh in on the topic) and next thing I knew I was patched up, in and playing.

And enjoying it. As often turns out to be the case, I find the extended free trial version of an MMORPG more to my taste than the full game. cf World of Warcraft. I've been pottering around and leveling up. I'd like to get to the trial cap of 35 and then do a second job.

The Rest

Of the games I'm not playing, the one I really should get back to is SW:TOR. I had absolutely no intention of stopping but there's a specific reason why I'm not playing this month. TOR has a lot of voiceover. It's quite well-voiced and I like to listen to it.

But not while I'm listening to the Cricket World Cup on the radio. There's been a match virtually every day for the last six weeks and it quickly became too annoying to have to keep tabbing in and out to pause the commentary so I could hear the quest dialog. There's cricket all summer with the Ashes coming up so it might be the autumn before I get back to TOR.

SWL and BDO just fell off the radar after their events drew me in. I had plans for both but they faded. I've been watching the entire eight seasons of Monk on DVD in bed on my portable DVD player so I haven't even had the Kindle Fire on for weeks. That's put paid to both Dragon Nest and Villagers and Heroes. I did get as far as recovering my login details for the desktop version but I don't see any characters there so I'm going to have to start again and I can't be bothered right now.

Everything else is thoroughly on the back-burner. I'm undecided about WoW Classic but I imagine I'll resub for a month just to be there. Not expecting to hang around long.

I do have one new (to me) title downloaded and ready to start, Eternal Lands. It's an old game I thought I'd already tried but looking at the screenshots and some video, I don't recognize it at all so I imagine I'm confusing it with something else. I'm trying to resist starting it yet for obvious reasons but when I do there will be first impressions here.

That's where things stand. Next week it will probably all be different. Or tomorrow. Or this evening.

Who needs a schedule? Not me, apparently.

It's Yours To Take, It's All For Free : GW2, DCUO, SWL

What is it about free stuff? Yesterday I patched and logged into two MMOs I haven't played for quite a while, just because I heard they had free stuff. Then, when a friend logged into GW2, the first thing I said to him was "There's free stuff in the Gem Store!" (To which his reply was "Thanks!" followed by a brief pause, then "Uh, what's the Gem Store?" He's been playing for five years. Anet must just love customers like him.)

I'd already taken my freebie from Evon Gnashblade's Emporium of course. It was a box of fireworks. I don't need a box of fireworks. I don't want a box of fireworks. I spent over two hours in GW2 yesterday just trying to clear some inventory space because one account bank is full and most of my characters have scarcely one empty bag.

But, hey, free stuff!

The main reason I was clearing inventory space was so I could run around and around The Mad King's Labyrinth hoovering up drops like it was an ARG. Bearing in mind I don't even like ARGs. Not to mention I already had 2000 Trick or Treat bags banked from last year.

When I hit 3000 it occurred to me to open some. Mainly as a way of making space. Of course, that would mean my inventory filling up to overflowing with all the food, finishers, candy corn and plastic spider fangs. None of which I could remember the use for.

Much of my Sunday afternoon was taken up with reading the wiki, trying to find out what you could do with all this stuff. Presumably it has some purpose. You'd hope.

It took me another couple of hours but I finally worked out that most of it could be converted into other stuff at a rate of about 1000:1. Moreover, the concentrated versions go in the material bank. Well, so do the ordinary versions but of course I already filled those slots about five years back.

I opened about a thousand bags. That was fun. I started off opening them slowly and looking at the contents then clicked faster and faster until by the end my mouse finger hurt.

I got super-lucky opening the first stack of 250. Out popped the Touch of Madness, a "torch" weapon
that consists of a fire effect surrounding your bare hand and which, not surprisingly, goes for big dollar on the TP. Not that I'll be selling it.

It's unusual for me to get anything I immediately know I'll use. I just checked my main account bank and I currently have one hundred and eleven unopened boxes of armor, weapons or other items that require me to make a choice. If you add in the unopened boxes where no choice is required I have seven hundred and seventy four.

Let's be honest - I have more stuff in every MMO than I want, need or know what to do with. I frequently bank reward boxes unopened because not only do I not have any use for their contents but I don't have anywhere to put them. If opening a box will clear an inventory space (because the box doesn't stack but the contents do, for example) then I'll open it. Otherwise it goes in the hole.

And despite all that I still run towards free stuff, waving my arms and yelling "Gimme!" I logged into DCUO yesterday because I saw there was a free cat scratching post. Wait a minute? What!?

Yes, for Halloween the superhero MMO chose to give out pet furniture. Do I have a cat in the game? No. I don't think there even are cats in DCUO, are there? Well, other than Streaky, and I'm not sure Streaky's canon any more. There aren't any kind of vanity pets as far as I know. Well, there kind of are but not really...

So what? It's free stuff! And there's more. Stuffed bats! And dead tree branches! Wait, I can't breathe, I'm so excited! Also a free aura that makes me glow orange, which must be a Halloween thing because I got a trinket in GW2 with the same effect.

Next thing you know, there I was, in my base, trying to remember how the UI worked, looking for a good spot to place my bats and my cat toy and my tree parts. They won't go with my free Flash gym workout gear, that's for sure. Lucky I have this massive, empty secret lair!

Actually, it turned out to be more fun that it should have been. Hanging a bat, I hit twenty placed items, which removed the trainer wheels from my base-decorating skills. Don't have to use hooks any more. I can put things wherever I want.

Looking at the forums I see base decorating is very much a thing in DCUO, just like house decorating is in EQ2. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's probably the same people - both games are on All Access after all. And the bases are huge. So much potential...

No time to ponder the possibilities - there's more free stuff to be had. I left the one I thought would be the best to last. It's not every day you get offered a free motorbike but there's one with my name on in Secret World Legends.

Not, sadly, literally with my name on. That really would be cool. Still, I have never had any kind of mount in TSW or SWL so it's a big deal. Also more patching because it's been a while. And more googling because I've forgotten how to take screenshots or where to find them after I've taken them. And I can't remember which key is "Sprint" (because riding a motorcycle is sprinting, of course it is...).

I got it all sorted in the end. Then I revved up and roared off down the open road.

Okay, no I didn't. I had Sprint 3 in TSW but that didn't copy across, apparently. I'm stuck with Sprint 1 for now, which means I putter along like a 1950s district nurse on a sit-up-and-beg pushbike. Also, the motorcycle handles more like a yacht in a stiff breeze than any kind of wheeled vehicle.

But it's free stuff. Free stuff! And look, it had exactly the intended effect. I logged into all those games and I opened the cash shops in every one. Didn't buy anything but, hey, I might have!

Hmm. I wonder if there's free stuff in any of the two dozen other MMOs I'm nominally still playing?

Better go check.

P.S. I nearly titled this post Cat Scratch Fever, which would have been so perfect, but then I realized people might think I actually liked Ted Nugent...