A Gaming Journal

Lord Of The Rings Online

2010-10-20T22:38:00.002+08:00

Currently I'm focusing my game time on playing LOTRO since it turned to Free2Play. My character, a hunter, in now level 38. For initial few weeks I was on free account, grinding TP to buy quest packs and traits, then I turned to a premium account because there was offer on TP. I will update this blog with a screen shot of my character some time not far away in the future.

At least this gane will keep me busy while I'm waiting for Guild Wars 2.

New Game : Legendary Champions

2010-09-16T22:56:00.003+08:00

Wow, it has been a long time. My gaming has been limited by my work commitment and my daughter who has taken over my PC, watching her favorite videos on YouTube. However I managed to try a new game called "Legendary Champions" by Aeriagames. It is a F2P game just finished their closed-beta, now on the phase of starting the open-beta very soon.

The game asks you to choose one of the warring faction to be in. For the level 30 and under, the quests are still PVEs, but once you reach level 30, all the quests from then on are in the open PVP areas, which means you are forced to do PVP if someone attack you. This is one aspect that I personally think a let down. I just can't accept that you are being forced to be a punchbag for the money spender in a F2P game.

I'm still waiting for the release of Guild Wars 2. I don't mind they take their time to release it actually, because that will buy me some time to get the money to upgrade my PC before i will be able to enjoy the game when it is released.

Gaming Time Out

2010-05-11T00:32:00.003+08:00

It has been a while since I last wrote in this blog. It was due to me concentrating on my Microsoft Certification exam. Also partly because of Runes of Magic has temporarily blocked the sales of diamond via the Auction House, thus making the acquisition of diamonds for the F2P player impossible .

Recently my Guild Wars account was hacked by gold seller. Twice it was hacked. In the first hack, all my golds are gone and my equipment are salvaged, virtually left me with nothing . In the second hack, they get smarter; they deleted all my characters and replaced it with their own, making me impossible to log on to the gaming account. In both cases I had to contact the GW support for help. Nowadays I change my GW log in password every time after I play. Tedious, but that's the best I can do for now.

RoM : Upon Reaching 55/55

2010-02-09T16:23:00.002+08:00

My Mage/Priest has finally reached the level limit of 55/55. At this level, it is pointless to do the normal quest as the character will not benefit from the experience gained from completing those quests. What I do nowadays is just the daily quest i.e. the "Hunter Raid" to farm TP for levelling up my skills. 10 daily quests per day will get me around 120k TP. Usually after doing the hunter daily I will kill the swallow walkers for the meat. They sell around 4.5k a piece. The only problem with swallow walker is that they are quite far apart, and they are not that many like the crab. Farming crabs at 55/55 is just pain because the spawn does not drop like they used to be at a lower level. I could kill 10 crabs and still get no drop of the spawn. That is not a very efficient way of farming.

Recently RoM has been updated to patch 2.1.6 . Came with that patch is a durability issue where casting a skill now will eat some of the weapon durability. My testing from doing hunter daily quest shows that weapon durability wear out very fast. After complaints from players across the game servers, I think the issue is now fixed for all, except knight. I read from the forum that knights are still facing this issue.

RoM : Wings & Black Pegasus Mount

2010-01-12T13:29:00.003+08:00

My wish for a pair of wings has come true. Recently Frogster made an offer through the item mall a pair of Wings of Divine Incarnation, bundled together with a Black Pegasus mount, for 499 diamonds. It may sound a lot, but at the current price of diamond (6k per), the bundle cost must less than the cost of wings alone in the auction house, at around 6 million gold . Here is a screen shot of me sporting the wings and the Black Pegasus.

I also bought a couple of yellow statted mana stones, but with Intellect VI dirty to be used as stats for the wings. However after installing the Advanced Auction House AddOn for the game, I found that there is no more desirable yellow statted mana stone with such dirty. I found another dirty that gave 4 matching mana stones. I'll have to resell the mana stones i have before i can buy them. Lately my farming of gold has been distracted a bit due to the server instability.

Speaking of addon, I have also installed the ComeOnIn addon for party autoinvite. This is very useful for making daily quest raiding party.

RoM : Extra Firepower

2010-01-03T04:12:00.005+08:00

After much farming of Ravenfell earth shell crab, I finally managed to buy myself a very good staff : A Tier 8 Overdura Staff of Admiration +6. The magic damage of this staff is 1391, enough for me to one shot a mob with Flame. It cost me 7.2 millions gold coin. Here is a picture of me holding the staff, skinned a sword.

Recently Frogster has introduced a new type of upgrading CS item : Attribute Purifying Stone. It serves to clear an equipment of it's unwanted stats so that it can be stats nicely later. However the cost for each stone is around 199 diamond. I may need to buy some of the stone later, as I foresee myself clearing up the dirties in my magic Vahtoh's set. some people do that, and are selling their overdura clean magic Vahtoh's accessories at a very high price, around 8 millions gold.

Currently I'm saving up my diamond for a pair of wings.

ROM Operation Upgrade Updates

2009-12-16T00:25:00.007+08:00

Finally I have completed the upgrade of my armor. Basically I use the lvl 53 overdura white armors. Only the cape is lvl 49 but that does not matter, as long as it is overdura. Below is the screen shot of the resulting armor set. Each armor (not accessories) have the same stats as shown :

I also managed to refine all armor equipment to +6, thanks to the jewels sales in the item mall. All the diamonds used to buy item from the mall are obtained from auction house, using the money earned from selling the Meat of Earth Shell Crab .

The next in line for upgrading are the accessories, but before that, I think I want to get a Tier 7 Staff of Admiration +6. Extra firepower is good.

Runes Of Magic (US) : Cash Shoppe

2009-11-23T16:02:00.003+08:00

One feature of the so- called "Free-to-Play" games is their Cash Shoppe aka Item Mall. Here you can buy game item that can enhance your experience of gaming. Runes of Magic is not excluded from such feature. To buy items in the Cash Shoppe (CS), you'll need to buy some sort of point that can be used to do the purchase of items. The purchase of the item mall point is usually done via game card or credit card payment.

There is a way in Runes of Magic that enable you to play the game without spending a single cents of your hard earned money. However this will involve extensive farming of in game gold. The virtual point used by Runes of Magic in their CS is called diamonds. These diamonds are tradable via the in game Auction House. at the time of this writing, each diamond cost around 10k-12k gold. So by farming gold in the game, one should be able to then purchase the diamond via the auction house and then use it to buy the CS items.

Currently, the most effective way of farming gold in Runes of Magic is by farming daily quest items and then selling them via the auction house. I'm currently farming the Earth Shell Crab Meat . They sell for around 2.4k each. So for a stack of 100pcs, I can get around 224k gold (after deducting the Auction House admin fees, duh !) . I hope I can do this most of the time so that I can get as much diamond as I can .

Runes Of Magic (US) : Operation "Upgrade"

2009-11-11T16:50:00.002+08:00

My main character on RoM (US) has now reach level 47/42 mage/priest. So to move on, I need to upgrade my armor to the ones that give me high defense and high HP. So I have started buying the Stats X and IX armor in the Auction House (AH) , and then transmuted it with purified fusion stones to make the clean Stats X (or IX) mana stones. The mana stones are then used on the armor I bought from AH to make a better armor.

The purified fusion stones are only available from the cash shop. Luckily I can use the phirius tokens obtained from doing daily quests to buy them. So, to make use of the game system, i created a couple of alternate characters to feed the main characters with the mana stones. So far I have created only 2. Later in the future I may need to create more to speed up the purified fusion stones supply.

In fact, i have a few option on how to get the Stat X mana stones. I could make them using the method above OR i could farm daily quests items and then sell them on the auction house to get the gold that i can use to buy the mana stones from the auction house itself. Of course, mana stones from the AH can be very costly....

Runes Of Magic (US)

2009-10-28T17:06:00.003+08:00

I have found a new addiction. The Runes Of Magic. It's a new experience for me since the game concentrate on questing for you to gain experience and level up, unlike most MMORPG where you will normally grind killing monsters.

The game also urges people to party to achieve the common goal, especially towards the end of a series of quests. This is due to the Raid Boss having really insane health point (HP). There are raidable instances, where you can form a group of max 36 player to finish a series of quests.

The game looks and play like World Of Warcraft, except that it is a F2P game, though one must not be fooled by the word free since nothing is actually free. It is free to play, but to have a really nice experience of playing it, some purchase from the cash shop (CS) is required. I only bought the mount so far... lol .

I have now ditched the RoM MY-SG Server and move to US Artemis Server. Playing in the US server is really nice indeed. The community is very nice. That's one of the most important feature for a succesful MMORPG. The in-game event organised by the GMs are also enlightening the players.

Uninstallation of Games

2009-10-08T01:26:00.002+08:00

In the recent weeks, I have uninstalled a few games, i.e. Last Chaos and Lineage2 SEA. There are few reasons :

1. The Last Chaos publisher here is closing down their servers, so no point of playing the game anymore.

2. A lot of people in the Lineage 2 SEA have moved on to playing Aion USA, and the game has turned to a ghost town, again no point of playing the game anymore.

A friend of mine has even resort to a greater extend; formatting his PC since his interest in MYLC has gone, lol.

Nowadays, I'm concentrating on playing Runes of Magic (USA) . I've even invited a friend to have a try at the game, and copied the installer DVDs for him.

MMORPG : USA/EU vs Localised Server

2009-09-29T11:58:00.002+08:00

After playing various MMORPG for more than 2 years already, I can now make a few comparison between the servers located in the USA/EU and those located in SEA. Few games that I played in the SEA servers are dying, and one has already declared server shutdown .

Player Base :
1. Servers in the USA/EU are fairly populated and the population numbers last long.
2. Servers in the SEA are only populated at the beginning , but slowly dissipated in numbers.

GM Support/Event :
1. GM in the USA/EU servers very heavily involve themselves in the game and frequently conduct events that cheer up players every now and then.
2. GM in the SEA servers is almost non-existent. It seems like they throw servers at us, and leave it to ourselves how to make fun with the game.

Game Patch :
1. Servers in the USA/EU are always updated to the latest patch from the developer of the game. This make the game interesting as there are new things to do in the game.
2. Servers in the SEA are usually not up to date, lagging behind about 2/3 patches, and this makes the players become bored after a while. The reason could be on licensing etc, we don't know, but as a game publisher they should have expected that every game patch may/will require license payment to the original producer.

Community :
1. Players in the USA/EU servers are very helpful to the newbie, no matter where you are from. They just want to have fun playing the game with friends. They like to party when leveling up or doing quests. Botting players exist but not very serious, as the botters are usually killed by legit players.
2. Players in the SEA servers are not very kind, arrogant, and selfish. They don't like to help newbie . Bots are infesting the game. It seems like they are leveling a character with a view to sell them in the future.

RMT ( Real Money Trading)
1. RMT is definitely banned in the USA/EU servers. RMT shouters exist but immediately removed from the game by the active GMs . RMT is destroying a game as it will make price of items in game go sky high and uncontrolable .
2. RMT is having a field day in the SEA servers. With the help of botting software, the RMTer can stand in the crowded area and spam the RMT adverts for days without being removed by GMs.

Runes Of Magic : A WoW Clone ?

2009-09-25T21:19:00.013+08:00

Recently I have been introduced to a brand new MMORPG that looks familiar , but with a different name. The first time I looked at it, my conscience says I have seen this game but cant remember where. Then quickly I remembered, World Of Warcraft.

Runes Of Magic certainly have the WoW look, and plays like WoW. The only advantage is that it is free to play. So for those who wanna try WoW, but dont want to pay over the nose, this game is certainly a nice option.

Below is the game login and character selection screen :

The following are the screenshots of the game user interface and character info:

Lastly, a screen shot of my character in a Town called Varanas :

I'm playing the game on Singapore-Malaysian server, just for the sake of trying the game. As usual, those looking for a a stable game server support and gameplay should try the American servers.

Guild Wars : Vanquishing Tyria

2009-09-14T15:45:00.012+08:00

Vanquishing Tyria is continued eastward, starting from Deldrimor Bowl. The process was done non-stop, i.e. a 6-man caravan party moving eastward towards the Eastern Frontier. This had to be done so that the vanquishing of the areas normally done with 4-man party can be done with a 6-man party. The Eastern Frontier and neighbouring areas usually have groups of grawl with 2/3 Grawl Udolytes (monk). It is almost impossible to tackle the area using 4-man party. Even with 6-man party, my party experienced wipe-out and need to be resurrected at shrines few times.

The vanquishing was done with"Heroes & Henches" . My heroes are all necros with slight modification from the Sabway. They all spam spirits so that corpses can be generated early to be used to raise minions. Eventually all areas were vanquished. At the moment my Vanquishing of Tyria is at 25/54 . Below are the screenshots of area vanquished :

Meanwhile I received a news that Last Chaos MY servers will be closed down permanently on 31/10/2009 . It is a sad news for the Last Chaos MY community, especially to those who spent so much into the game . Lucky me, I sold my gears and pet in the game for RM230 early in the year. One player said on the game forum that he spent RM500 a month on the game. Not sure if there is any truth in it, but if it is true, what a waste ! For RM500 a month, it is better to play a game that has it's server based in the USA. More stable, less hack.

Shaiya : A New Adventure

2009-09-09T13:52:00.003+08:00

Recently I tried a new MMORPG called Shaiya. It is a F2P game with item mall. I never played WoW but from the experience playing Shaiya, i believe it inherit the gameplay of WoW and Lineage2 .

The characters in Shaiya are typical MMORPG games where u have damage dealers, tankers, and healers. What interests me is that there are 2 opposing factions in Shaiya, each with 2 races, and each races can only be configured to play certain character type. Certain character in Shaiya can solo quickly, while certain others need a party setup to farm XP to level up .

There is also a feature that make Shaiya very interesting, the PvP field. The PvP is divided into level range i.e. 1-15 , 20-30 etc which means u can always PvP without feeling too weak as compare to the upper level character. It was fun too, I managed to joined 1-15 PvP.

I'm playing on USA version of Shaiya . There is a local Malaysian version of the game but from the forum , i learn that the gaming community is dying because on the imbalance between the opposing faction where not many people joining the Union of Fury (darkside) as compare to those joining Alliance of Light (lightside).

Lineage 2 : Manoring

2009-09-02T11:49:00.008+08:00

Last week I discovered something quite useful in Lineage 2, and that is manoring. Basically manoring is where we plant a seed prior to killing a monster, and then use a harvester to harvest the fruit from the killed monster. The fruit can then be sold to a manor manager, and we can gain rewards in return, in the form of crafting materials. There are quite a few guides on the internet on "how to do manoring", but I'm not going to explain it in here. They can be referred to at l2stratic or l2vault or pmfun.

What is tricky about manoring is to get the seeds, and to sell the fruits. This is because, there is only a limited number of seeds sold in a day for a particular region, and they only restock at 8.00 pm. Not only that, the number of fruits bought back by the manor managers is also limited for a particular area, in a day , and also only renewed at 8.00 pm. So we basically need to be the first one to deal with the manor managers so that we can buys most seeds or sell the most fruits. For the time being I'm manoring just outside Goddard, killing bandersnatches and antelopes. I'm manoring "blue coba" in return for mold glue as the reward. My low level Scavenger is currently at level 50, and I'm thinking of using it to manor at the Oel Mahum area, and get the mold hardener as the rewards . I need to get the seeds first.

Meanwhile, in Guild Wars I continue my vanquishing . Below is a screenshot of my success in vanquishing North Kryta Province :

Lineage 2 Catacomb Party & Guild Wars Trapper

2009-08-24T08:57:00.005+08:00

Finally I managed to enter Catacomb of the Witch with my Scavenger, BD and SE. Muting all sounds and setting to hide dropped items enabled me to run the game smoothly when opening 3 client. However due to the small size of the party, I was only able to bot in the first small room in the first entry into the catacomb. Attempts in entering a bigger room resulted in deaths, due to the heavy healing pressure put on my SE . In the second entry, I formed a party of 8 with an online friend. LOL, he was controling 5 characters . This time we ventured deeper into the catacomb. I was able to gather quite a lot of mithril and oriharukon ore, and top grade B accessories parts. Another good thing was we did not have to use soulshot. We left our bots running for the whole night .

As for my trapper in Guild Wars, I use him only for Alliance Battle, due to its being only a PvP character. Some people I saw very sceptical about teaming up with trapper in AB. My guess is they never played trapper in AB before. Then again, the trapper build is used only when fighting in Ancestral Land, because of the linearity of the path among the shrines to be capped. I was laughing when I saw the opponent capping team slowed down by my traps. I'm very sure they were cursing after got hit by any one I set. My point for running trapper build is to delay the opponent team. Of course sometimes it doesn't work, but most of the time it does. Below is a video of my trapper in action :

Adventure Continues

2009-08-13T23:12:00.007+08:00

It has been a week since I last wrote in this blog. Between then and now I had been very busy with my work commitment. Went to Penang to do some hard disks replacement for our customer. It was really tiring because I didn't get enough sleep, the work had to be done at night.

Ok now back to gaming. So I loaded my BD and SE with daily unlimited access. Their vitality start from level 4 (300%). It took me almost 24 hours to take it down to level 0 (100%). Leveling outside Goddard, I simply took on the antelopes; the bandersnatches seems too much for my BD and SE due to its stunning ability. My BD died few times.

Now that I have taken my BD and SE to level 65, I can make a party of 3 to enter catacomb next week. I need to get some ancient adenas.

As for Guild Wars, I saw on the logon screen that this weekend is a Kurzick/Luxon Double Factions weekend. I think I'll do some AB. I need to work on my Allegiance Title. It will be fun, I guess.

Video : Lineage 2

2009-08-06T18:45:00.004+08:00

Here is a video of my characters leveling just outside Goddard. Pardon for the poor video quality.

I had a strange feeling during that time. The game felt a little bit smoother than usual, although , I feel that when I was running, it was a bit slower.

The video was recorded using fraps . Not sure why it doesn't record the sound.

Gaming Characters

2009-08-04T23:20:00.008+08:00

Here are the screenshots of the characters I am currently playing in Lineage 2 :

The one on the left is the Blade Dancer , while the other is a Shillien Elder. The next screenshots are from my characters in Guild Wars :

The one on the left is a Monk character, while the other is a Ranger.

Guild Wars : Adventure Continues

2009-08-03T15:17:00.005+08:00

After stopping for quite a while, I continued my adventure in Guild Wars. This time I managed to vanquish 2 more areas using heroes and henchies. The fire imps there gave me quite a problem, so i had to play hit and run, pulling little by little.
Then I played the alliance battle, AB, using my PvP character, a ranger, and my main character a monk. We won a few and lost a few. I did try few builds for the ranger, i.e. splinter barrage, and the other is the condition heavy build. It was quite fun. I played only few round with my monk but a bit bored though so mostly I played with my ranger for AB. My ranger's name is very explicit malay words so I managed to get attention from a malaysian who was also playing at the time. Till later....bubye !!

Latest Development

2009-07-26T23:51:00.003+08:00

I'm still levelling up my SE and BD in Lineage2. Few weeks ago, for a few days my internet experience was disrupted by the intermittent disconnection. Some says Jaring got screwed up by TM. Not sure if there is any truth in it but i realized the routing is very different from last time.

Now the connection seems back to normal. Also a friend told me that I can reduce the lag by hiding dropped item and set to lowest graphic details and turning off sound. It works actually...

Lineage 2 : Catacomb Party-of-3

2009-07-07T10:38:00.005+08:00

Setting up party of 3 to enter catacomb turns out to be quite hard. Few times my toons experience disconnection. Much of the hourly game time wasted to fix the disconnection.Not sure whether it is my internet line or the server congested. In the end I concluded that I can only enter catacomb with only 2-toons at a time. This time its ok. Also I found out that the daily unlimited time card is most suitable for farming in catacomb.

May be I need a PC with much better specs... lol. For now i'll try to contend with what is available.

Lineage 2 : The Seven Signs Competition

2009-07-06T09:25:00.006+08:00

So I waited until today to play Lineage 2 so that i can enter the catacomb with my squad of Scavenger, BD and SE . Levelling in catacomb give nice exp and ancient adenas which i can use to buy good consumables . Plus, my Scavenger can spoil the mob there to get the Stone of Purity. I just checked yesterday that to make a B-grade dual sword, 450 pcs of SoP is needed, damn ! Thats about 27m, assuming 1 SoP sells for 60k. 27m for a B-grade, urgh..!!!

Vitality consuming has start increasing, or so i realized. This time i'll make it drop to level 2 before i stop and continue 2 days later. Or should i make it level 1, so that i can farm AA ? Urghh... let's see how it goes.

Guild Wars : Vanquishing Kessex Peak

2009-06-30T14:06:00.003+08:00

I continued my vanquishing mission on Prophecy, this time in Kessex Peak. Moving from Temple of Ages with a team of 8 (H/H), i have to cross one area before arriving on Kessex Peak. Initially I tried using the smiting monk team, becoz i expected many undead there but I was having problem in the final area where there are so many Verata's people. The later I tried using the Sab's necro heroes. This time i succeeded although i resurrected few times becoz the number of foes are just so enormous.

Still many areas need to go, before i can get the title Legendary Vanquisher.

Lineage 2 : Game Time Loaded

2009-06-26T01:10:00.007+08:00

I loaded a gametime for my Shillien Elder for 10 hours. After giving it a try run of vitality consuming, i realized that at this stage of levelling a short gametime if not suitable becoz the vitality consumption is still at slow rate. Either i give my support units longer gametime or i stop levelling when vitality reach 250%. Stopping at 250% I think will slow down the levelling very much. Now I wished they have the 30-hours gametime option. If I load them full month gametime, I will have to fully utilize the hours so that by the end of the gametime both support units reach level 70+. At this time, my BD is still on trial hours.

We will see how it goes....

Lineage 2 : Creation Of Support Unit

2009-06-24T10:34:00.009+08:00

In my last post I wrote that I created a Bishop and a Prophet. Then after reading in a forum I fou out that Shillien Elder is the best all around buffer/healer. So I created a SE and level it up to level 37. Then I decided that i need a melee support unit in form of Sword Singer(SwS) or Blade Dancer(BD). After comparing the skill I created a SwS. I leveled it up to lvl 37. Then i realized that i made a mistake . I noticed that most of the skill of SwS doesn't benefit a party when attacking a mob. Only the Songs are the benefits. The rest are only self-sufficient. So again, I created a melee support unit in form of BD. Up to the writing of this blog, it has only be levelled up to lvl 30.

With the vitality system of Lineage 2, i guess i don't need to have the monthly rate. Hourly is enough. I'll stop the levelling process when the Vitality reach lvl 2 (200%). This way i can save up my game time.

Lineage 2...and Botting

2009-06-11T14:42:00.002+08:00

Finally I managed to get hold the L2Walker IG botting software, and learnt how to operate it from a clanmate. Levelling my Dwarves Warsmith and Scavenger is so much easier with it, and I can at the same time play with my lovely daughter. However I still need to micromanage the playing of my Spellhowler due to the lack of physical defense and the AI sometimes make unexpected action which lead to death , lol. Also, taking advantage of the botting, I created 2 more accounts , each for healer and buffer respectively. Soon I can open 3 boxes and enter catas with my botted toons... hahaha.

L2SEA already infested with botters to the extend that you'll feel too shy to ask for hunting party. At first I feel disgusted but then I say, why not...lol.

Once in a while I do level up my healer character for Last Chaos game. The economy of MYLC has already been destroyed by goldhacker, so much so that the price of in game item has gone beyond imagination. This has discourage me from playing the game more often although it is free2play.

My Guild Wars gaming has becoming less and less. I only go online if I think I want to do some vanquishing. I'll be active again when GW2 comes, I think.

Welcome To A Gaming Journal

2009-05-05T14:47:00.001+08:00

Hi there,

This is my first attempt at "blogging", so there will be flaws here and there. This blog will basically be based on the realm of gaming, mostly my gaming experience.

Currently I'm playing Lineage 2, and sometimes play Guild Wars as well. I'm very much into online gaming since 2 years ago. Before that I play various types of (PC) games, mostly RPG or action. I'm not very fond of shooting game , since I have very bad reflex , lol, and it just gives me dizzy when playing it. Strategy games, well, I used to enjoy Warcraft very much, but since playing RPG, I'm not much into it although I know some of my friends still very excited about playing Star Craft ( it's an old game damn it !) .

Well, that's all for now, tadaaa !!!