The Secret World Archives - Page 6 of 8

Making Horrible Choices

June 5, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I sit here typing as a truly insane torrent of rain pours down on our house. Apparently over night this massive storm system has blown in, and the deluge we are experiencing is the end result. Luckily the “T” word has not been mentioned at all, just lots of rain and the potential for flash flooding. Still instinctually I turned to channel 6 or on digital cable… 706 and have been watching it as I get ready this morning. This is a reaction to weather that is just engrained in Oklahomans from a little age… and even though I rarely if ever watch the evening news… when weather happens I am glued to it.

Unplanned Adventure

Yesterday I was just feeling absolutely horrible, and while I made it into work… by noon I was wishing I had not. I was suffering from what I tend to term “giblet” problems… everything just felt all wrong. So I took a half sick day, and went home after I got out of an important series of meetings. When home I pretty much went to bed, or at least laid down. I ended up falling asleep and sleeping roughly three hours, and when I woke up I was feeling a bit better.

I got up and around and checked email… remoted into work and did a few things. At this point my wife who is on summer break tells me that one of her coordinators called, and as a result she would need to go back to school this evening to pick up a text book. Summer School starts today, and she would no longer have access to her room to grab it. At first I groggily agreed, thinking man that sucks for her… then she informed me that she was wanting me to go with her.

I quickly saw my evening going to absolute crap before my eyes. I already felt horrible, but the thought of having to leave the house and go off on a jaunt just felt almost unbearable. To her credit, we had a stack of errands that needed running… and her thought process was that we could just do them on the way to or from the house. The negative part however is that her school is 45 minutes away on the exact opposite end of Tulsa. She said we would do it later, but as time ticked past… I ended up insisting that we leave as not to wreck the entire night.

Making Horrible Choices

This timing and path we ended up taking was a bad call on my part all around. We ended up venturing out into the tail end of rush hour and wading knee deep into bumper to bumper traffic. It turns out there had been a wreck in the middle lane of 169 at 51st street, and as a result traffic was backed up past 11th street. What should have been an hour and a half trip at most, ended up being a three and a half hour slog. All the while I am fuming that I even have to be doing this in the first place. My wife gets an unbelievable amount of credit for dealing with me last night at all. We bickered back and forth during the whole trip, but it could have gotten so much worse.

I was very much an asshole about the whole ordeal. I felt like crap, my migraines have been getting worse, work has been stressing me out… and adding on top of that was getting drug back into the world for something that didn’t really involve me. Had I needed to run get something from work, I would have just run in by myself and gotten it, I didn’t understand why I needed to be tagging along in the process. All of this snowballed together to turn me into a bundle of unfettered rage… or at least angry sulking. I was an absolute bear to deal with all of last night, and I greatly apologize for it. Her thought process made absolute sense, but she is the logical one… I tend to be the one driven by my passions.

Making everything worse was the fact that we were both pretty hungry at this point. She had not had any lunch at all, and the combination of both of us lead to a pretty crappy car ride. The one glowing silver lining is the fact that we got to eat at Ron’s. For those not native to Tulsa, Ron’s is this awesome chain of hamburger joints. They specialize in several things, including the sausage hamburger… but my absolute favorites are their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. Figuring it would put both of us in a better mood that is exactly where we went, and at the end of all the frustration it was truly glorious. I had way more calories than I would have liked, but enjoyed every bite of the buffalo flavored ambrosia.

Defiance

Between waking up from my nap and after doing some work that had stacked up while sleeping, and our horrible jaunt out into the real world I sat around on our amazingly comfy sofa trying to get “ungroggy”. As a result I decided to boot up defiance and give it a spin for a few. I have been sitting on a copy for awhile thanks to my early alpha testing ways, but have not really spent much time playing the game. Honestly I had created my engineer, and gotten him to the Earth Defense force base… and that was just about it.

Yesterday I decided to start working through the first few quests. I remember thinking in alpha that this was really not “my game”. While there are definitely elements I like about it, I am just not much of a shooter person any more… and in fantasy MMOs I very rarely if ever play a ranged class. All of that said there is something undeniably enjoyable about the game. It seems to tweak what ever section of my brain that loves the Fallout series. I feel like in order to really tap into this I need to find myself a shotgun, since essentially I play every Fallout game wielding a Combat Shotgun, or whatever equivalent that game has.

I wandered around for a bit and managed to knock out one of the quests that was horribly bugged in early testing… the whole rescue men that leads to recover supplies from the hospital mission. During testing this ended up with essentially endless waves of mutants spawning on top of you until you could no longer keep up. This time around, while there were a lot of mutants that spawned… they were definitely a finite number. The gameplay feels better overall, the game less laggy and the controls more responsive.

I hope as I move further through the content that I will find myself caring about it a little more. Having watched the television show, I find myself actually caring about the game world quite a bit more. The only problem I have however is that the starting missions feel extremely uninspired. The mutants you end up fighting, seem like the most generic possible mob you could end up fighting. I don’t care that I am slaughtering them, they are completely meaningless… to fall back on the Fallout analogy… I found myself caring more about killing mole rats and rad scorpions.

There are some neat random side effects that happen, like saving EREP forces from mutants. The only problem is that this loses all sense of urgency when you realize that this spawns in exactly the same place on a pretty regular interval and almost every time you ATV through the area… those damned EREP soldiers have been captured again. I have yet to encounter an Ark Fall, so I am hoping that those will really spice up the gameplay as I love Rifts. All it all it feels like something that I will play every now and then… just like Guild Wars 2, and Neverwinter… but not a game I will likely ever get seriously into.

Reaches of Inner-Outer Space

I will admit that likely a good chunk of my bitchiness earlier, was the fact that I figured I would have lost my chance to continue on in The Secret World. That by the time I managed to get home and watching IM again… that the Elite Dungeon train would have long left the station. I really enjoyed Monday night, and was looking forward to being able to roll around as a prebuilt team of five last night. It turns out that my friends had for the most part been patiently waiting for me to show up. So as soon as I got home and fired up my laptop, they were beckoning me to join them in game. After the ball of frustration I had just experienced, I was in major need for venting it all into killing random bad things.

Much like last night we started running the next few elites all in an attempt to get Rae the achievement needed to unlock the gatekeeper fight. As a result we burned through Hell Fallen and the Facility, making short work of both. We decided to skip Hell Eternal since it is an extremely long dungeon, and make an attempt at the Slaughterhouse since it is comparatively short. I am not sure what it was… either that the fight had changed since we were last in there… or the fact that we were probably getting tired at that point… but for whatever reason we could not push through the NKL-107 encounter.

After doing some research, apparently there is a bug currently in place that causes some of the buffs from nightmare to bleed into the elite version. This also happened to us in the past when they rolled out the nightmare version of The Ankh. We went from being able to roll through that place without issue, to not being able to defeat the final boss at all. It was the same kind of feeling we had with Slaughterhouse in the robot fight. Ultimately we needed a more reliable purge, which was not something we really had at that moment. Both myself and Rae had the ability to do a 33% of the time purge, but this was just not regular enough to keep the tank alive with the nightmare buffs.

It was still a really fun time, and the best part is that once we finish these last two elites… Rae should be geared enough to face the Gatekeeper and hopefully survive. Granted getting past him was a mind numbingly frustrating experience as a DPS, so it might take her awhile to come up with that magic formula that allows her to defeat him. The fact that she picked up her 100% purge should make the fight overall easier, since I did it with only my 33% of the time purge… and it introduced a random element into my success. I really look forward to trying Nightmares again, to see if we are any better equipped to handle them than we were before.

Wrapping Up

The other awesome thing that happened last night is that I finally connected with Rylacus and got his two characters invited to the Outcast Misfits in Rift. I am sure he will appreciate having some “green spam” while he is leveling, and it will definitely be easier to determine if he is actually online… or just playing the scratchers. It is still pouring down insanely outside… and I am not looking forward to making a wild dash out to my car. However the hour is getting later, and I need to be getting on the road. I hope you have a great day… and you also can admit when you are being an asshole… more gracefully than I did last night.

A Secret to Everybody

June 4, 2013June 4, 2013 by Belghast

So this morning I have fallen prey to one of my least favorite morning time scenarios. I woke up naturally, and after realizing that the alarm had not gone off… I attempted to go back to sleep. Just as I was starting to drift back into slumber… the alarm went off rudely waking me. I should have just gotten up as apparently my body thought my battery was done charging. As a result I am mostly awake but the part of me that was trying to go back to sleep is still groggy and vengeful.

A Secret to Everybody

My evening was absolutely nothing like I had planned… though quite honestly I had not really planned much of anything. My intent was to go upstairs, eat some dinner and then get back into Rift or SWTOR. However upon arriving upstairs I got a message form a friend asking if I wanted to be the 5th in The Secret World. The best part about this concept was the fact that this was the core group that I experienced The Secret World with initially. It felt like getting the band back together as it were.

Basically what has spurred this recent interest in TSW is the fact that they seem to have fixed blood as a healing spec, or at least fixed it enough to where it is enjoyable once more for our healer. Previously we burned through the elites and started banging our heads against the Nightmares before our healer just could not take any more. This is the ultimate Achilles heel of the Secret World experience, it goes from being super open to all possible specs and experimentation with new ideas… to requiring this one certain thing in order to survive in Nightmares.

When I say we got the band back together… this is not entirely true. The original five were nightmare ready and geared up in half purples. This time around we have a Rae in place for Warenwolf, and as a result last night we had to start working through the elites so that she could unlock the Gatekeeper fight… and ultimately unlock Nightmare content. This was a pretty good idea since none of us really know what we are doing anymore. I have played Secret World once or twice a week, but I have limited that to my roflstomp sword/shotgun build.

The problem with higher level content is that melee is just not viable. The Secret World is far too punishing to melee characters, and if you choose to dps as melee you essentially end up harming your group in the long run. As a result I ended up abandoning my beloved blade/shotgun build for favor of shotgun/pistols in order to dps elites and nightmares. Essentially last night was a matter of us all trying to remember what the hell to do with our characters.

Greenshot Down

I am having to swipe images from other websites this morning. Like a tourist without film, I thought I was snapping pictures all night… but not a single one of them turned out. Awhile back I had switched from Fraps to Greenshot… and had pretty good luck with it. However recently I have not gotten a usable picture from it. When I attempt to snap a picture it acts like it is working, but the end result is either a black screen or a picture of my desktop. I have been using Razer Game Booster as a backup… but for whatever reason it does not like The Secret World. The above image is an example of what I am shooting… it seems as though for whatever reason it is alpha transparent.

The long and short apparently is that I am going to have to switch back to fraps and just deal with its idiosyncrasies. The additional takeaway is that I really don’t have pictures from my adventure last night, which is a shame… because in theory I took some good ones. I am completely open to other suggestions if you guys have ideas on a better universal screenshot program. I prefer using fraps or something like that rather than the in game screenshot functionality, because it aggregates all my screenshots into one place. This makes it easier to sort through when I am pulling together a blog post.

All Roads Lead to Rome

We burned through elites last night like a five player wrecking ball. That was another problem we ultimately had with the Secret World end game. You go from absolutely demolishing content in normal and elite mode… to having the bottom completely drop out from under you in Nightmares. However the best thing about their content is the fact that they do not believe in trash… and only place it in front of you if you are supposed to learn a mechanic from it. Teaching players your game through the introduction of trash mobs is a concept that every game needs to take to heart.

I thought after the release of Cataclysm that Blizzard had maybe learned this lesson. During the Baradin Hold fights, you learn the concepts you need from the trash leading up to the bosses. The problem is, this is the one and only place in Cataclysm that they really do this. Introducing players ton concepts with learning trash is far superior every time to throwing an encounter at them, and leading them to google it. I will get off this particular soapbox… as the hour is getting late… but this is seriously a concept that needs to be propagated.

Over the course of the night we cleared Elite Polaris, Hell Fallen, Darkness War and The Ankh. I think we got Rae a few drops, and I myself managed to pick up 347 damage versions of the two weapon slots I did not have a blue for. After all that dungeon grinding however, we decided we needed a break. I thought initially we were going to just break up for the night, but Tam quickly suggested that we grab one of the newer investigation missions. He remembered seeing one in the Haitian Market area of London, so we all headed back that way.

This is the point at which we remember why we really fell in love with the game in the first place. The content is deep and creative, and leads the characters through a series of imaginative puzzles. This investigation quest personifies why this game works and why players should be playing it. I wont go into too many details… because spoilers. But essentially you retrace the steps of roman explorers through Ancient London. Make sure you brush up on your latin… or at least have a translator handy.

Wrapping Up

Last night made me extremely happy. Returning to grouping in The Secret World was like picking up a familiar book and re-reading it. While the mechanics have changed slightly, it is still the same solid game and story under the cover. I really hope that in the coming weeks we can return to this world as a group more often. I would really like to finish getting Rae geared, and through the Gatekeeper fight so we can get some revenge on all those nightmares. I hope you have a great day, and too discover an old friend.

Reverberating the Praise

August 9, 2012 by Belghast

So honestly… I started writing this out over on a friends blog. She posted something that resonated with me so much, that I just had to respond. However as I cleared the end of my fourth paragraph, I came to the realization that I was not posting a response, but writing an entire damned blog post on her site. Granted it is not unusual for me to rattle off a two or three paragraph response… but this was entering the territory of the ludicrous.

The Spinoff Post

I’ve been pretty lousy at keeping up with Google Reader lately. So after a busy morning I sat down to read a few posts, trying to grind down the massive count a bit. I know I have said this before, but my blogroll is literally what I read, so I try my damnedest to read each and every blog that I am in essence “advertising”. It was to my pleasure that near the top of the stack, MMOGC had thrown up a brand new post.

First off you have to go over there and read it right now, because it covers a topic that has become very near to my heart. In her post titled “Funcommunication” she goes into a length how amazing Funcom has been at bringing us, the players, into the experience. I have to say that I agree completely, and she managed to put it into words far better than I have done to this point.

A Bigger Shout Out

I mean I have given shouts out to the Funcom staff in several posts, but I don’t think I have really covered the magnitude of the experience. I’ve thought a few other companies in the past have done a great job interacting with the community, but that said Funcom has really taken it to the next level. Players tend to have completely unrealistic expectations for games companies, I am just as bad as anyone about this. However having this level of constantly interactivity, has been extremely humanizing.

So while we get frustrated about the bugs, seeing a constant effort to try and fix things makes the pill a little easier to swallow. As a programmer I know, that you have to pull off a lot of layers of false assumptions about a bug before you can really get to the root of it. In the case of the chat system issues, they were basically occurring in a way that could not be lab tested. There is no real way to get hundreds of thousands of players to connect to your development server.

While it was annoying, and I am glad that time is behind us I cannot describe how much I appreciate being “kept in the loop” about what was going on. So much marketing babble and spin works its way into patch notes and announcements, that it is really refreshing to see the equivalent of “we thought we fixed it, but I guess we didn’t, we are trying something else”. No one is all knowing, and as a programmer we usually operate on our best guess. When dealing with extremely complex systems, the wrong answers are often times more telling than the final solution. Be it through the forums, live streams, official blog posts, or twitter, I am always impressed with the level of candor shown towards the community.

Amazing Customer Service

Another point that I have to harp on is just how great the customer service has been. GC writes in her post:

Honestly? I was pleasantly surprised. On a Saturday evening, right smack in the middle of a busy celebration weekend, both my husband’s and my tickets were answered by a helpful in-game representative within ten minutes, and within another five we were all fixed up and ready to go. Let’s face it, bugged quests are irritating as all hell and no one ever likes running into them, but the sting sure is lessened by a prompt response and swift resolution to the problem. I was very satisfied.

Granted, based on the inevitable complaints on the forums, not everyone has been as fortunate. So maybe you can say that my husband and I just happened to hit the GM lottery.

I can say without the shadow of a doubt that she did not win the GM lottery. It might be because of the level of evolvement with the community, but for whatever reason I have simply cared more about The Secret World than I have most games in the past. Always in the past it felt like my petitions had little to no effect on the game world. I am notorious for figuring out a work-around to avoid bugs, and then just ignoring the fact that they actually exist rather than reporting them. In this game however I have been a bug reporting fiend.

So far it has not mattered what I have reported, be it a problem with geometry or the chat issues not actually being fixed… I have always received a prompt and courteous response. I’ve put in somewhere between five and a dozen petitions since launch, and in every case I have had a tell from a GM within ten minutes. The vast majority of these times, it was far closer to five minutes. In one instance, I reported a bugged encounter in a dungeon, and we moved on to the next boss. The GM responded before we were through the first phase, and patiently waited for us to finish the fight so I could more properly respond.

I remember one night, I had petitioned a GM about a geometry issue or as I call them ‘”The Potholes” of City of the Sun God. There are a few places in the world, with gaps that you cannot see before accidentally falling into them. While I was typing up my petition, another player fell in the hole with me and used /reset to get out. I could have done the same, and ultimately I did to free myself, but I figured that if I didn’t report it, it might not get fixed. The GM took the time, and asked me to go back to the hole, so they could properly document the problem, and make sure it was on the list of known issues. This little attention to detail really gives me hope for the future of the game.

Phenominal Community Team

I know specifically I have harped on this before, but if I am going through the process of making this post anyways, I have to take a moment to talk about Ragnar and Morteia. Other companies have been involved with the community, but Funcom really sets the standard here. They are constantly responding to players, and answering questions directly. Maybe it is silly, but it feels somewhat awesome to have the Creative Director or Community Manager share your post with the community.

Thing is it goes so much deeper than just rebroadcasting links. It feels like we are getting let in on some secret, like they are leaking little bits of information to the diehard fans. So when they answer a question, or hint at some upcoming feature we get all giddy with excitement. MMOGC gives the great example of Ragnar talking about upcoming work from Peter Stormare. I mean that is awesome, while he might not want to be known for this, I cannot picture Satan without thinking of his amazing performance from Constantine. This man belongs in The Secret World so much it almost hurts!

Why This Matters

The Secret World still has a lot of bugs, and there are a good number of features that have been frustrating to deal with. In most other games, these would have been deal breakers, because the layer of clinical distance from the user community gave the impression that they frankly did not care about my gameplay experience. Normally my tolerance for frustration is pretty low, I have trouble looking past a bad UI or controls to see the story underneath. While I really like the UI and controls, you can read my original review of beta weekend and see that I was less than favorable.

So upon reading that, you might ask yourself what changed? In many ways the game has changed drastically since beta weekend, and improved in almost every way imaginable. But I have to say that a good chunk of why I can look past the rough edges at times, is thanks to my experiences with customer support and the community team. They are the face of Funcom to me, and my regular dealings with them has allowed me to handle the quests going wonky, and getting stuck on geometry. My frustration is always tempered with the feeling like they actually care, and are working to try and make the game a better experience for everyone.

Not Just a Love Song

So it is pretty easy to write this post off as a love song towards the company that runs the game I happen to be playing. I mean I have rambled on for 13 paragraphs at this point, about my awesome experiences with them while playing their game. For me it goes deeper, as bloggers it is so easy to dwell on the negative aspects of a game. It is so much easier for me to pull myself away from a game I hate, to write an angry rant than to log out of a game I am really loving. The problem is, all this negatively just turns into a wall of sound, where every opinion, dissenting review and frustrated plea becomes a indistinguishable from the mass of angst.

Instead I think we are better served spending our time, pointing out the things that are going well, the individuals that are in fact doing right by the community. Each week it seems like we hear of another game flailing, another round of layoffs, and more pox upon the industry. We need to highlight the good in gaming, and make sure those people feel appreciated. So here you go Funcom, I really appreciate your efforts, and that of the amazing team that has created The Secret World. While I am somewhat angsty, about not being able to get the nifty Steam swag, I wish you all amazing success with that new venture.

Good Job!

106 Miles to Chicago

August 8, 2012 by Belghast

It seems like the Secret World community as a whole is still coming down off the high that was the Monthiversary celebration weekend. As a whole I think the weekend was a rousing success. It gave several friends of mine time to get in and see if the game was for them. I know of at least four converts, and two of those are now proud holders of a lifetime account.

Coup De Grace

Honestly I think the concept behind the weekend was a master stroke. The 24 hour buddy passes are just simply not enough time to decide whether or not the game really resonates with you. There have been some discussions in my cabal, namely between myself, MMOGC, and PaganRites… and the basic idea is that it takes at least 10 hours of gameplay for you to really “get it”. That is to really understand why this game is so unique, why it is worth playing, and grasp the deeply intricate combat system.

Sypster over at Bio Break theorizes that the celebration weekend, is essentially a way to offer a “free trial” without actually saying those words. I totally think this was the core of the weekend, it let anyone who has a Funcom account try the game. But even more than that I think it was a great way of building customer loyalty. While getting to your 30 quest mark, might have been a daunting task for someone brand new to the game. For those of us who are veterans, we were able to easily cut a path through some of the easier quests.

As a result it also made Kingsmouth an extremely active place. For all that activity, I was pleasantly surprised in the relative lack of “asshattery”. People seemed genuinely helpful to the new guests inhabiting our servers. I know I answered more than a few “newbie” questions, and in my time trying to knock out some of the easy quests, jumped in and saved more than a few overwhelmed players. So while this was a great trial weekend for new players, for us veterans it became a really easy way to earn enough item shop currency for some spiffy items. The positive is that there are very few items on the cash shop that cost more than the 1200 points you earned from the quests. The only negative however is that they are in fact “bonus” points, and will expire in September.

A Mission from God

They’re not gonna catch us. We’re on a mission from God. – Elwood Blues

Over the last several days since the release of Issue #1, I’ve been on a mission that has completely consumed me. Essentially I decided that while everyone was off doing the brand new content, and trying to get in their thirty quests for the celebration weekend, I would start my hunt to kill all the rares in the world. I still have a long ways to go, and some of them have been rather maddening (Mr. Freezie I am looking at you), but I’ve made a pretty massive dent in the total. I have no clue if I actually get anything for doing this, but it is one of those things that I am obsessing over.

So far I vanquished 27 of the 38 total “achievement rares” in the world. Here are the ones I have found and destroyed (minor spoilers):

Nattfari – Draug in Kingsmouth
Mr. Freezie – Zombie in Kingsmouth
Soloman’s Omen – Undead Bear in Kingsmouth
Father Appleby – Undead Priest in Kingsmouth
Dunwich Road Horror – Mud Golem in Kingsmouth
Coach Roarke – Zombie in The Savage Coast
Lurking Revenant – Revenant in The Savage Coast
The Collector – Scarecrow in The Savage Coast
Umbral Brood King – Ak’ab in The Savage Coast
Penumbral Elevated Caste – Ak’ab in Blue Mountain
Algernon – Wendigo in Blue Mountain
Bastard of the Brine – Deep One in Blue Mountain
Billy’s Muse – Shadow Thing in Blue Mountain
Gronarch the Exiled – Sand Golem in Scorched Desert
The Lost One – Ghoul in Scorched Desert
Deathstalker – Scorpion in Scorched Desert
Ainn the Harbinger – Plague Golem in Scorched Desert
Corrupted Egyptologist – Filth Infected Cultist in City of the Sun God
Kiya, the Pharaoh’s Concubine – Tomb Guardian in City of the Sun God
Emissary of the Dead Nations – Ghoul in City of the Sun God
Cretaceous Shisocerca – Wasp in City of the Sun God
Village-Eater – Troll in Besieged Farmlands
Ursine Horror – Undead Bear in Besieged Farmlands
Demolisher – Siege Breaker in Besieged Farmlands
The Nameless One – Deathless in Shadowy Forest
Traitor of Basarab – Vampire in Carpathian Fangs
General Blasius – Filth Infected Human in Carpathian Fang

I won’t lie, some of these have already been a massive pain in the ass. There was one specific spawn that I essentially camped most of the weekend, killing the placeholder every 15 minutes. It took two full days of doing this off and on before the rare I needed spawned. Others like Mr. Freezie and The Lost One, spawn in such high traffic areas, that essentially as soon as they are up they have aggro’d onto someone. I am sure I will take a break before too much longer, since I too would like to se the new content. Up to this point however, I have had a blast tracking down all these dangerous beasties.

The Nightmare Begins

A few weeks back the little five man team I have been running with, finished all of the elite dungeons and with much effort especially on the part of the dps, managed to get through the Gatekeeper encounter. I have to say, that even looking back the dps version of The Gatekeeper was insanely difficult, and I am still shocked I managed to get through it without lowering my standards and changing to one of the more standardized builds. I still plan on doing a write-up for exactly how I managed to down The Gatekeeper as Shogtun/Blades, but I just haven’t had the time to finish it up.

Getting our Asses Kicked

As difficult as the encounter was, I have to say it really did nothing to prepare me for the difficulty of nightmare dungeons. This week our little team finally started attempting the hardest mode of the dungeons currently available. At first we decided to dip our toes into Darkness War, since so many of the instances have a number of little painful bugs right now. We were completely overwhelmed by the amount of damage taken, and the amount that we needed to output.

After some regrouping, we decided to start working on the first instance, Polaris. I think we were a bit gunshy in trying to assume that the first dungeon was going to be the easiest. We attempted that login in SWTOR, and found out that honestly The Esseles ended up being one of the most difficult of the hardmodes. Thankfully Funcom did not do this to us, and we’ve managed to make a pretty big dent in the dungeon. It is funny that we are treating this 5 man as though it were a raid essentially.

OHGODSQUID

On our first night, we struggled our way through the encounters, learning the mechanics as we went. All of us are pretty reluctant to try and look up strategies for the encounters. It is so much more enjoyable to have those “aha” moments for yourself, than to try and do things the way someone else says you have to. Honestly most of my raiding career was this way as well. We invested in taking the time to find a strategy that worked for our specific groups makeup.

Last night we returned and had most of the bosses “on farm”, as it were. We are still struggling massively with the “OHGODSQUID” as I refer to it. I think towards the end of the night we were formulating some new ideas on how to beat the encounter. Hopefully we will go back in tonight, make some adjustments and dine on some mutant calamari. Then of course will come the real challenge, but I won’t go into it for sake of spoilers.

I Has Purplez

The awesome thing that makes the struggle worth it, is that pretty much everything in the zone drops much better gear than we have seen to this point. So only going in and being able to kill a few bosses is completely worth the effort. So far we have managed to outfit our tank in a number of really massive upgrades, and our healer in a new headpiece and weapon. The amount of difference this has made has been significant, in the difficulty of the encounters. They have gone from “OMGWTF” to hard but manageable with a lot of work.

Last night we got our very first purple dps item, and through the luck of random numbers I managed to win it. So I have a little purple tint to go with my blue tones. The funny thing about gear in this game, is that always before people would link the item and dressing room it, and there would be a chorus of “man that looks cool”. In The Secret World, these items are just better stats, so in a way you just don’t get nearly as attached to any one item as you did before.

Honestly I am completely okay with this. My emotions are wrapped up in my outfits, my cosmetic items, and the ability to mold any weapon to look like whatever happens to be my current favorite. The talismans, simply become a means to an end, a way to perform better and make life easier on your friends. Always in the past I was reluctant to upgrade out of full sets of gear, because I hated looking like an unmatched hobo. But now when the gear comes down, with slightly better stats, swapping it out becomes a completely no-brainer.

Linkspam

Going to wrap up this post, since I have the development live stream going in the background. I still have to give a shout out about how badass it is that they have been giving us a semi-weekly view into the inner workings of the game team. In closing going to throw out a series of links. There have been some great articles posted about the game, so these are definitely ones you should read. Please note, not all of these are super positive about the game, but that is completely okay. I’ve always said this was not going to be a game for everyone.

First up we have a review of the weekend by Kadomi at Live Like a Nerd. She went into the game expecting nothing, but got completely hooked. Talks about the “missing time” concept many of us have experienced while playing the game. I swear it was only thiry minutes!!
GC over at MMOGamerChick, also a guildie, does a great write up about her post celebration “hangover”. Great read, because really the weekend was so much fun it was draining.
Maeve over at Multiplaying, gives a great review of the game that has become her latest addiction.
Kotaku gives a pretty even-handed review of the game. You can tell the writer actually played it in production, unlike some of the other reviews I have read.
Psynister and Fynralyl are a husband and wife duo that tried the game together this weekend. While they liked some things, they were overall turned off by the game. Both are well worth the read, because a lot of the things they mention, are things some of the TSW diehards love the most.
Rowan over at I Touched the Sky, posted a rebuttal of sorts. Not in the sense of trying to state that Psyn and Fyn are wrong by any means, but to answer some of the points they brought up. Also extremely worth the read.
The new episode of Enochian Frequency is ready to go. I highly suggest listening to the podcast regularly especially if you are interested in the real world lore behind the lore.
Lastly I wanted to give a real quick shout out to Scarybooster and Feliz. Feliz has created a beautiful new skin for Scaryworlds.com, I highly suggest you check it out and tell them what you think.