Aion 2.7 went live Oct 19th, new armor and more.

Still playing catch up with the news. Oct 19th was the release of Aion patch 2.7. This patch offers The Crucible Coliseum a new 1v1 and free for all style arena, a new instance, some skill DP cost and cooldown reductions, and new gear. None of it looks like it really pertains to me as I don't pvp or do instances so I won't be getting any of the new gear but for those of you who do OMG it looks so hot. New Crucible Coliseum armor and weapon concept art. I really might have to get back to game and start PvPing in Aion and get me some of THAT! Here's the full 2.7 patch notes.

WoW real money vanity pet and Annual Pass mount

As I mentioned before I'm going to be playing catch up for a while but I feel it's my duty to post about this because, ummm they're cute.

Wow added a new pet to their Pet Store which is where you can purchase vanity pets and mounts for real money vs. in game gold. The Guardian cub. A baby version of what many people call the "Disco Lion" mount. The thing that is different about this pet is that it is tradeable and can be sold on the auction house. Perhaps Blizzard's way of reducing the purchasing of gold from gold selling sites. Many players thought this would be their pay day and from what I heard on some servers the first cubs sold on the AH for 20-30k gold. This however didn't last long as on my server within a few days the cubs were down to 6k gold. Some people feel in the future there will be fewer people buying them in the pet store and selling them once the "New SHINY" wears off causing the price to go back up and make them a viable source of gold again. I however feel there isn't an infinite number of people who are going to want to buy these cute little buggers off the AH. Once a lot of people have them they won't be buying any more. Only time can tell. Read More.

The other new item available from Blizzard is the lovely Tyrael’s Charger. To obtain this beautiful flying mount you must commit to subscribing to WoW's annual pass. This doesn't work like many games annual passes where you are charged all at once for the full year. Instead you choose. You can agree to subscribe for a full year and continue to pay your $14.99/month and in that full year you cannot cancel your subscription or you can choose other full year payment plans. In addition to the pretty mount you also get Diablo III for FREE and you are an automatic in for the next expansion's beta. Not too shabby. Read More.

EQ2 is epic again, and what happens to your characters?

This trailer makes me wanna smash Vox in the head with a giant stick. One thing I do wish they would have done in the trailer is say something like "customize your character your way" and show character creation for a few seconds and show how you can switch to SOGA models because if I was a new player seeing that trailer I'd think the character models were out of date as I'm partial to SOGA for many of the races. But in any case I feel revitalized and I hope it does the same for new players and brings them to the wonderful world of Norrath.

On a side note many are concerned about what will happen to their character slots when the F2P model goes live if they choose to not resubscribe and take advantage of the FREE.  Smokejumper has addressed this and ZAM has the write up. It says something to the effect of...

Character slots. There are several situations that people have asked about. Here are all the answers at once:

• Do I keep my character slots after the changeover?

The answer is "yes". If you paid for it on the marketplace, we don't take it away. You keep all character slots.

• If I was grandfathered in with the Station Access extra character slots when Station Access was changed last year, do I still keep those extra (grandfathered) slots?

The answer is "yes"

• If I was playing on EQII Live *and* on EQ2X, and have tons of characters on both servers, what happens when the conversion occurs and all my characters are visible on the character selection screen all at once?

This answer is a bit more complicated, and I'll explain, but the answer is "We're giving you extra character slots to compensate." Here are the details on this. Please read them carefully.

1. Everything you read below pertains *only* to characters that existed on your accounts on 11/10/2011. Characters created later than that date are *not* included in this solution.
2. This solution *only* pertains to players that have characters on *both* a Live server *and* EQ2X.
3. That being said, here's how it works: You have a number of characters on Live. You have a number of characters on EQ2X. Total those two numbers together. This is your total number of characters. Now subtract from that value, the total number of character slots that purchased for your account on both EQII Live and EQ2X. Now, further subtract seven from that value. (Seven is the base number of slots that a Gold membership grants you by default.) The resulting value is the number of character slots that we will grant you for free so that you can still access and play all of your characters. Make sense? (There's an example below, in #4, for clarity).
4. Example of #3 : Bob has 11 characters on Antonia Bayle (purchased four character slots) and 8 characters on Freeport (purchased one character slot). The total number of characters is 19. The total character slots purchased is 5. (19 - 5 - 7 = 7) So Bob will receive seven new character slots on his account on the day of conversion so that he can access all 19 of his characters without further purchase.

The ZAM article also addresses a few other things like Platinum subscribers getting "Age of Discovery" for free and the Freeport server becoming a normal server eligible for veteran rewards. 

Oh and did I mention... FREE STATION CASH! That's for players who continue to subscribe to the game after the switch over. 500/month. *kermit flail*. You can read all the details over at ZAM

WoW 4.3 Nov 29th?

I've been looking forward to WoW patch 4.3 as all I ever want is a little more content so I can come back to game. 4.3's new Darkmoon Fair might be able to hold my interest for a little while. Yesterday WoW Community Manager Bashiok posted on Twitter with a hashtag "hinting" that the 29th would be the 4.3 patch. Here's hoping.

Kristin's Adventures in MMOland episode 1

Another thing I'll be posting about here in my blog is what I have been doing lately in different games.

Currently I've been playing a bit of DCUO. I went back to it shortly before the F2P conversion. The first few days after the switch to F2P were basically a train-wreck but I stuck it out and tried not to complain too much. SOE had issues keeping the servers up and when they were up there was queues and some players were getting stuck at a never ending loading screen when they did make it past the queue. They have since worked out a great deal of the bugs as well as putting in a queue priority system where Legendary and Premium members get priority in queue. Legendary members are the players who choose to pay a subscription fee every month for full access to everything in the game. Premium members are those who have spent at least $5 (500 station cash) in the marketplace store. These members still have some restrictions to their bag space, how much in game coin they can have at one time and stuff like that. So I honestly am not sure if anyone is still experiencing queues but as a Legendary subscriber I have been able to log in game instantly since they implemented the priority system.

I played DCUO at launch but only stuck around a few months. There were few places to find information on the game at that point as everyone was still learning. The journey to level 30 was very fast and once I hit that point I didn't know what to do next besides the few raid quests I had. I am unable to raid due to my ninja afking so I felt I had nothing left to do and decided to drop the game for a while.

Anne Droid, Hero, Gadgets

When I came back to the game I was able to find a lot more on the now information loaded wiki site as well as the public forums. This helped me find many things to do as a soloer. They had also added the new Fight for the Light expansion which added a new "Light" power I could play around with. I first started out grabbing my old lvl 30, Anne Droid, and taking her out to do the Stryker Island dailies and the solo challenge dungeons for Marks of Triumph to get some T1 gear but then I decided to make the perfect character. I decided to do this by leveling each power for a while and respecing a lot to test out different abilities. I eventually decided for me the most fun is Sorcerer spec'd into Summoning taking mostly healing abilities. As a soloer this seems to work really well. I then tried out all the different weapons I was interested in. I decided staff is my favorite. Even though healer classes usually choose a ranged weapon since I solo I figured I'll just do what I feel is the most fun and besides I like smashing good guys in the face with a giant stick. I also determined flight is my favorite movement type.

Sinfully Sweet, Villain, Sorcery

After all this research I created Sinfully Sweet, a villain who takes the form of a hot pink demon, flies, is a Summoner and uses a staff. The only thing I was sad about is that by creating a new Sorcerer, since my original one was a hero and I wanted to be a villain, I lost out on all the free marks and things I got in the mail on all my old characters. SOE had sent items to returning players and after the Sony hack etc, but they were only sent to existing characters and are no-trade. The marks added up to be enough to purchase 1 piece of T2 gear which in order to obtain otherwise I'd have to group which as discussed before is sort of impossible for me. So she misses out on a free piece of T2 gear. Oh well. She's been a blast to play so far.

I also did a bit more research as to what I can do as a soloer once I hit lvl 30. Besides the Stryker Island dailies and the solo challenge missions I can work on races, try to complete as many soloable feats as possible, and search for holo-tokens to complete collections, briefings and investigations. So hopefully DCUO will keep me busy for a while this time around.

EQ2's 7 year Anniversary.

This info is a few days old but since I just started this blog yesterday I'm going to be playing catch up for a while. Everquest 2 is celebrating it's 7 year anniversary! This offers a few things for the players in honor of the occasion. One being a Lucan D'Lere statue house item which you can claim by visiting the station marketplace and purchasing it for 0 station cash.

You can purchase as many as you want. The anniversary also adds a new veteran reward for when the people who started on day 1 hit 8 years. The new 8 year reward includes.

• "Veteran Revival" : A spell that allows you to rez your group once a day. It is not usable while dead.
• Your choice of an elemental hover disc mount (flyable if you are 85 or above, ground mount otherwise).
• "Vision of the Thulosian" : A green particle effect on your eyes, like the Thulosians have in the Moors of Ykesha.
• Six XP potions (+110% xp, 1-hour duration (go alts go!)
• A new title: "The Veteran"

Important info for Steam users- Database Compromised

As you may have heard a few days ago the Steam forums were hacked. At the time there was no confirmation on whether or not information like passwords and credit card info were accessed. Today there is a new letter on the Steam User Forum and when logging into the steam application stating...

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

I'm pretty sick of hacker a-holes but such is the technological age, so please just be safe and use different complex passwords for each of your online accounts be it banking, gaming, email, whatever. Hopefully no one's personal info will be taken and they catch these creeps.

To change your Steam password follow these steps:
1) Log into Steam with your old password.
2) In the top left of the Steam application window click ‘Steam’.
3) Select ‘Settings’.
4) Click the button that says “Change password or secret question…”
5) Toggle “I want to change my password”.
6) Enter your old password and click ‘Next’.
7) Whichever email account you have associated with Steam should now receive a reset code. Find the email and either type or copy/paste this code into the required box and follow the on-screen instructions.

To enable two-factor authentication in Steam, go to “Settings” and you’ll find instructions under the “Account” section