Here's a political update on the various conflicts and the Justicar's office for the lovely 101 server I call home.

The major war that is raging right now is Reincarnates (Reins) fighting Ancient Dawn (AD). It's been going on for a few months now, with a combined kill count wayyyyy over 100 people, a really good pace. The war goes back and forth, with both guilds declining and expanding. I'm not part of this war, so I dont have alot of details, but of course, a conflict of this scale involves pretty much everyone.

I am in PeaceBringers (P, a neutral guild. We don't participate in the war, but both sides feel the need to attack us. It's a pecking order it seems, AD and Reins fight each other, but if one side isn't online, the side that is online attacks us with their murderers. We had some bad times with both guilds using their reds to attack us, but we've been able to put our differences aside with AD. That allowed us to pool our votes together and win the Justicar's office, preventing Reins' murderers free... reign... over ourselves and many other unaligned people on the server.

As it stands now, we've been able to broker a good deal of peace for our members, since we have a truce with AD and Reins' ability to PK has lessened. We let the loud ones battle it out til their brains hurt, while we play our own game

Here's a character concept I've dreamed up but have yet to build (and may never, since im a casual gamer). Once again, I want to illustrate the fact that building a character from a skill-based system lends itself towards creativety, originality, and mitigates the whole treadmill issue since you are creating, not duplicating.

This might be a long one...

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I've been working on my 2nd character slot for my account and I'm getting close to done, so I thought I'd unveil my new wrecking machine:

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Lone Fey Dirhai

edi planned a negative Vale node run yesterday at 2pm EST. Previously we had tried for a guild only version of this, but not enough people showed up, so this time it was for everyone on the server. Looks like everything went well. I say looks like, because as on most weekends, 2pm is just a bit too early for me to wake up and make it.

Being the lucky person I am, around 10pm EST Khan started broadcasting about when the negative Vale node run was going to start. After I informed him of it taking place earlier in the day, he decided to put together one himself, right then and there.

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The servers had a hiccup recently, calling the Gods to intervene to restore order. Our resident developer, FattyMoo, left behind his calling card in the bar Familiars, a nice steaming pile of dung. Of course, I'm inept at taking screenshots. I actually did take a screenie of Fatty and his fresh fecal matter, but somehow managed to save it inproperly. And now the Dung is gone

FattyMoo did return a day later and ran another orc invasion event. Again, I screwed up the screenshot deal, but there were easily a hundred orcs in the valley of ileria. A few people lost their lives to the orcs, and a few to PKers prowling the entrance to the valley. It was a fun fight for the community and the prize at the end was a shrunken head mask, a nice piece of dressing that makes your head shrink like in the movie Beatlejuice.

My personal highlight was getting a kill all by myself on Saturday. Out at the very end of the Island is the Avar village, home of the bird-like race of NPCs. Its a great place to hunt, but its rather secluded with only one entrance/exit. There were quite a few people hunting in there, including one of my enemies who had sworn allegience to Jonas and wore his shield, meaning I could fight him since I am carrying the Duke's standard. The fight wouldn't be easy, since this person had friends around.

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First, I wish everyone a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I unexpectedly went on a hiatus for the past few weeks. This is due to my switching over DSL providers, which continues to leave me without an internet connection of my own for another 2-3 more weeks. Thankfully, this past week my neighbor has been kind enough to let me jump on his wireless connection.

Right before my connection went down, there were events to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Meridian first going online. I was supposed to do an update about all of it. I had a whole bunch of pictures and even made a movie of the tournament. Instead, I’ll just link to the movie which Q was nice enough to put up on NDS hosting. Take a look! http://www.neardeathstudios.com/images/Tournament.wmv

Now that I’ve got my Meridian legs back, it seems as though there have been an influx of new people since the holiday break began. If you take a look at the Meridian Pulse, an on-going thread on Gilroy’s about how many people are logged on at a certain point, you can definitely notice the difference. These numbers aren’t even from events either.

I’m not too surprised though. As I stated in a previous posting, from Thanksgiving through Christmas, the population always drops pretty low since people get so busy with the holidays. This is contrasted by the time after Christmas when many people become less busy and students are on break, so the population rises.

What is surprising is that a bunch of people are actually completely new players! If any of those new players are readying, welcome! Hopefully you haven’t been PK’d yet.

Now what’s going on with me? I’m still doing Qor... I put the casual in casual gamer it seems. I’ve got approximately 360k in the bank and will continue saving up till I hit around 500k or so. Obviously most of my time is spent on the island doing bow runs still. If you’ve been reading this blog since last summer, you’ll have noticed the status quo for me entirely seems to be doing bow runs on the island, and then switching over to casting spells till I hit 99% on the mainland.

But wait, I did do something out of the ordinary for me! As I was buying some regs from Frisconar before I headed back to the island, I got this tell:

Frisconar tells you, "Thank god you’re here! I think I’m dying! I’ve got miriatetosis! Go to Yevitan and ask him about a cure for it!"

It’s been awhile since I’ve received a quest from an NPC without asking, not counting Moxal of course. I thought to myself, what the hell, why not? Now why would Yevitan, a banker, be offering medical advice to Frisconar, an herbalist? I don’t know, but anyway off I headed to Jasper to speak with Yevitan.

Once I reached Yevitan:

You say, "miriatetosis"
Yevitan tells you, "Ah, he’s dying, eh? Well, why don’t you go to Joguer and say that Frisconar needs another Sacchaqua potion."

Ooo, Yevitan sending me to Joguer, a double fetch quest. Off to North Barloque I went to see Joguer, finally arriving there:

You say, "Sacchaqua potion"
Joguer tells you, "How very amusing. You would think an accomplished Apothecary like Frisconar would know that this is nothing more than sugar water. Well, take this to him."

Pretty amusing, it’s just a plain old vial of sugar water. You can even read the description.

This is where probably the hardest part of the quest came. That’s right, getting through Joguer’s door! I don’t know what was going on, but there must be a small area where it responds to the open door command. You can read the log. I’m not holding down spacebar, these are each individual attempts where I back up and try a new section of the door.

You are unable to go anywhere.
You are unable to go anywhere.
You are unable to go anywhere.
You are unable to go anywhere.
You are unable to go anywhere.
You are unable to go anywhere.
You are unable to go anywhere.
You open the door and walk through.

Stupid door! Finally, I make my way to Tos and speak with Frisconar:

Frisconar tells you, "Oh, thank the gods! I ... I was seeing stars! The light at the end of the tunnel! I’m alive! Here, take this scale armor - I owe it to you for saving my life!"

Let me get this straight, I take a quest that brings me from Tos, to Jasper, to Barloque, through the trap door of doom, finally back to Tos, and all I get is scale armor?

HELL YEAH! Check out this sweet picture of the scale armor on my other mulish character:

Seriously, what did you expect, a magic spirit helmet? :-p

Till next time everyone,

Hi everyone, long time no see! Sorry about the lack of updates. I was busy through most of November with various things. Also during that time I had taken up another project in creating a wiki for Meridian 59. In fact it’s online right now and you can view it at http://www.meridianwiki.com

Putting up a wiki site is actually pretty easy. The version that’s up now only took me about an hour to setup completely, yet the entire thing ate up two whole weeks in getting it up. The main reason is that I was trying to put it on another hosting plan I had as an add-on domain, but it just wasn’t working as I would have liked due to the page forwarding the software tends to do. In the end I just decided to shell out the few more bucks for a different hosting plan. It also gave more disk space, which I was worried about anyway.

For this past week I’ve been working on updating MeridianWiki with content. BlackMolly has been kind enough to volunteer helping me with this. I suppose the hardest part of working with the site right now is just determining what categories to divvy up the information into, and then how they should look.

Well, besides the MeridianWiki, I have been playing some. I hit 99% in Vampiric Drain a little while ago. Now I’m just focusing on the fourth level Qor spells. I have Hold in the low 60’s as of writing this. It’s pretty simple to get it up high, just park by the Queen Spider and cast. It’ll get up there eventually.

After Hold I’ll be moving onto Shal’ille Bane and Splash of Acid. Shal’ille Bane shouldn’t be difficult as I have enough money to just buy all the regs. Running that screenshot contest the other month and doing Vampiric Drain in the Avar Village really fattened my bank account it seems. After the fourth level though, I doubt it’ll be as large.

I imagine Splash of Acid will be a bit annoying to do as it uses Entroot Berries. Neither will it be the last time either. Once I hit the fifth level, Blind requires the use of Entroot Berries too. Oh well, it’s not difficult to do.

Until next time, which may be soon since there's a bunch more entries I have.

After finishing up Kraanan last week, I headed down to the Qor temple to start on my next school. An interesting thing about the Qor temple compared to all the others is that it has two separate entrances. There's a catch though, in that only one entrance is open at a time.

This isn't so bad if you're heading to the entrance in the Cragged Mountains, because the next entrance in Under the Shadow of the Sentinel is in the same direction. The only time this does become a problem is if the first entrance opens while you're already on your way to the second one. Then you have to simply have to run all the way back around.

I remember one time back on the Russian server I was heading to the temple. When I arrived at the second entrance, where you have to jump down some stairs to get to, I saw the opening starting to close up. So I made my down immediately, and just cleared the entry way before it was blocked off completely. In fact I recall getting pushing a little into the ceiling before fully getting through. A small facet that some may consider annoying made this instance a little fun and out of the ordinary. Not to say there haven't been many times where I saw it closing and haven't made it.

Maleval visits the Qor temple:

The entrance is't where the fun stops with the Qor temple either. When you get inside you can't quite reach the priestess. There's a steep gap between you and her, filled with lava at the bottom. You're just far enough that you can't buy anything from her. Back closer to the entrance are several tapestries on the wall, one of which leads to a hidden passageway, which in turn leads to bridge that crosses the lava and goes to the other side where the priestess is.

Hidden passage:

The party's over on this side:

Early on in Meridian's history, I remember going into the Qor temple for the first time. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to buy anything from the priestess like I could all the others. It was only until I saw someone on the other side did I even realize that you could go over somehow. Luckily that person was nice enough to tell me how to cross over, which back then this was quite a gesture of kindness.

Qor's probably my favorite school since it has a lot of fun spells which are both useful and flashy at the same time. A prime example would be Invisibility. Casting the spell allows you to turn invisible with a "Predator" like cloaking field surrounded you, and completely wiping your dot off the map. Not only is this extremely useful in many situations such as sneak attacks, it also looks pretty damn cool. Sure, these days Kraanan can counter many of these spells, but at least they look cool...

One of the reasons that many Qor spells had to be countered by Kraanan, is because the spells were not created in mind of later features added to the game. This is precisely what happened to blind and hold. Previous to the Revelation expansion, there was no such thing as targetting, so if you wanted to cast hold on someone, you had to cast the spell and then target them with your mouse. Therefore it was actually quite difficult to use these spells, as people would be zipping across the screen. Back then fights actually lasted quite awhile since no one side could incapacitate the other. Oddly enough, with all the counters now, that's what combat has reverted back to.

Another fun spell of Qor is Darkness. Darkness increases the spell power of any Qor spells cast in that area. That's great and all, but you could easily accomplish that with a robe and orc shield. What makes Darkness interesting is that covers the area in....you guessed it, darkness.

Pre-Darkness spell:

Post-Darkness spell:

Alright, so maybe not so interesting after all, but unique spell abilities like that are something I have yet to run into in any other MMORPG.

I'm already on level 2 Qor, and will more than likely be level 3 by tomorrow. Rather than keep this post going on forever and bore you to death, I'll write on how exactly I've been using the spells sometime tomorrow....maybe.