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

EQ2 goes F2P

Today's biggest news is the announcement that Everquest2 will be going Free to Play like many other SOE games. Now EQ2 has had the option to play F2P for a while but the F2Pers had their own server separate from the subscription players. This will no longer be the case. All servers will be able to be accessed for free and they are changing the F2P model that they had been using on the F2P server to be a bit easier to understand. Current EQ2 subscribers should they wish to continue to pay their monthly fee will remain unchanged. The Free members will have limits on things like available classes and races at character select as well as fewer character slots and chat limitations and you can gain access to more items by spending $5 (500 station cash) in the marketplace which raises your member level to silver.  To gain complete uninhibited access you can choose the gold plan which is just like the current subscription plan of $14.99/month . To see what is available with each plan hop over to the fancy chart. You can also see if any of your questions are answered on their FAQ page or in the letter from the producer SmokeJumper.

FIRST!

Welcome to my new blog. You can read a bit about me and my gaming history on the "About" page. But A quick introduction, Hi, I'm Kristin. I don't have a cute handle to go by for this blog because I game under a trillion different names. I'll have a list of my screen names somewhere at some point for anyone who wants to contact me in game. You can follow me on Twitter @TwinklinEQ2.

Currently I play DCUO, EQ2, Free Realms and WoW. Though I tend to let my WoW subscription lapse until major content updates. I'll also be posting about Aion and perhaps Guild Wars 2 since I've been impatiently waiting on it for 4 years already.

My focus will crafting, mounts, vanity items, player housing and other fluff stuff in each game but of course will write about whatever I think is "news". I hope you enjoy!