Well, all I can say is that my game play has suffered for the last few weeks due to the ongoing problems I've had trying to RvR and entering zones in the Catacombs portion. Finally tech support came through and may have resolved what was happening.

It seems the I needed to upgrade the chipset, and add AMD to AGP miniport files. I never would have thought of this even though I'm no noob when it comes to computers. The tech support person said it was like pulling eye teeth from Hewlett Packard to get this information. All I can say is that I'm very grateful to finally be playing in areas I have fun in.

With that note, the gameplay didn't stop even with the problems I had. The past few weeks were typical for me, leveling my champion, making potions, raising money, and chatting with friends.

My champion is coming along quite nicely and seems to be my choice for PvE, though RvR will be the test. I finally made Lv48 with the help of the task dungeons. They can be very boring at times, but are terrific for leveling purposes. I had to stop for awhile though, to farm for aurulite since I needed a bracer that increased my strength cap to 274. That and having a large weapon skill of 46+10 makes him quite handy, not to mention having a very nice sword garnered from doing The Lost Seed quest.

I'm hoping that I'll cap my Valor and Large Weapon skills by Lv50. I think I'll make it though unless I have to respecialize Parry and lower it a bit to get some extra skill points. We'll see as I get closer to Lv50.

The new respec purchase has been a god send for my main character Foremond.
Before the new respec purchase you had to buy a stone from players, which was very expensive. Two platinum to redo a skill the first time is cheaper in my opinion. even a second skill change is cheaper at four platinum. After that I think buying a stone will be cheaper, but if you need to redo skills three times, then you've made some serious mistakes.

I had been wanting for some time to change blunt to blades, for two reasons. Aten's Shield provides a nice weapon that can be used with the blade style, as well as the Sun Belt which creates a sun sword. I also have the Malice artifact which can be used as a sword, but still need a couple of scrolls to activate it. The second reason is RvR combat. Going after Mids with a blunt weapon means no weakness to blunt on the armor versus weak with a slashing weapon. To me that makes a big difference.

The new changes to the guild interface and having the ability to collect dues automatically has been a big help as well. Two percent contribution is a drop in the bucket, but yet adds up fast when you have very active members. Ever since it's been added I've made extensive use of it as a GM.

I've been slowly creeping my way to the 900 skill level as an alchemist. Currently I'm at 816. My main problem is the timer, which I have big issues with. I've played lots of online games that had crafting as well, but they never had timers. It was all dependent on your present skill and the random chance roll. Adding a timer is just a study in frustration and boredom. I've said from the beginning that you play these games to have fun, and there is no fun sitting around watching the timer fill up.

That's the wrap up for now. Have a great time and stay healthy!

Just wanted to let you all know that I am hosting a mirror for Derida's UI. http://larianlequella.com/derida_v1.80_ENG.exe Righclick and save link as. It is probably the best UI out there, bar none! The maps alone make it worth the effort of installing it. The file is about 27MB, so it's a big one. If you want to see screenshots of the UI, just head on over to http://www.derida.de/ and have a look. Happy Gaming.

I don't know about anyone else that is playing DAoC, but for the past few weeks I've been unable to play in a lot of zones. Mostly Catacombs and New Frontiers, but lately a task dungeon I was able to enter won't let me now, and even held my avatars hostage till I got a CSR to pull him out.

In most cases the zones would load 3/4 of the way then instantly shut down and drop me to the desktop. Other times the load meter would load so fast that only half the zone would load, (see picture below.) You have no idea how frustrating it has been to restart the game and find your avatar unplayable while the game shuts down again.

I thought maybe the video drivers were the cause, but I used every driver set the ATI website had and still have the problems. Finally I called Mystic and ask for help. Other then that it would be a full install again, which I really hate to do, since it's such a pain.

What we will do is load a trial account and play without ToA and Catacombs and see if the problems continue. So this is about it till I see what kind of resolution comes up.

Back again with the second part on DAoC's crafting system and some solutions for enhancing this aspect of the game. But first I want to show what Foremond looks like in the classic and catacombs styles as promised in a previous post. Both pics speak for themselves, the first is classic and the second is catacombs.

The second one looks like I had one to many and was angry about it! In either case, if you didn't know, this is a Firbolg. They are tall, furry, and smell bad if you wet them down.

Getting back to my previous post, I feel that there are better solutions then what Mythic has developed. When you make one part of your online game a chore instead of the player having fun, then you've lost something in the translation about what an online game does.

I want to recommend the following changes to the timer when crafting. Also I'm changing a second to a tick to cut down on the dialog:

1. Remove the timer completely and increase the failure rate. Ingredient loss would be lowered to yellow as well. The exception is grayed out items which never fail.
2. If Mythic needs a timer, reduce the count so gray items would only be 5 ticks, and scale the rate till red items take only 30 ticks to cycle. Adjust the failure rate accordingly. Ingredient loss would be unchanged.
3. No timer for gray/green items, then reduce the tick rate for the other colors. Don't adjust the failure rate.
4. If no changes to the timer, then lower failure rate so you don't get five plus failures in a row.

Ok, this is just an idea for changing or eliminating the timer which turns a fun game into a boring chore. Next on my list are needed changes an improvements for crafting and salvaging. Till then have fun.

Link: http://camelotherald.com

If you go to the Herald, you will find information on the new graphics that were mentiond in that article I posted about last week. Not only that, but you can also get a tutorial/intro movie (with nice voice overs) that will help a new player to the game. Now, what makes this graphical upgrade so special is that you can get one for your old SI client or your old ToA client, and make it look like the Catacombs client. Yes, you heard right, the Catacombs client is open for you!

Just go to the herald to find out more. I can't access it from work 9where I am posting this), but it will be well worth the visit.

Link: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/features/gameID/11/loadFeature/67/page/1/from/

Instead of copy/pasting the entire writeup, I'll just link you all to this article on mmorpg.com: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/features/gameID/11/loadFeature/67/page/1/from/

I think that the screenshots are really showing a lot of promise to some of the basic upgrades. I can't actually read this at work right now (where I am stuck), but there is mention of their next expansion. I will be reading it indepth when I get home, in the meantime, I leave you to read it.

The more I see the more it grows on me. Anytime there is change, human nature is to resist it, but the Catacombs expansion has really grown on me.

When the New font for names came out, I was one of the first to compaign to get the old font back as an option. Well, one day I played with the new font for grins, and since then, it has really grown on me. The new character models I have ranted and raved enough about, so I won't go further into that.

I must say that the new engine does run a lot smoother. I had the opportunity to go on a Master Level raid with over 100 people, and it ran incredibly smoothly. Not a single LD for me, and everyone else on the raid that was running the catacombs engine reported simmilar smooth performance.

I am still dissapointed about not getting any personal mounts in this expansion. I perposely left off saying anything about that in hopes that with the new January changes we'll hear more, but to be honest, I am not hearing any rumours. Maybe theis summer? Of course, by then they better reward us with flying mounts on top of it all!

Well, time to go try to kill some Albs... Well, probably die to some Albs is more like it.