Dulfy.net has an achievement guide  that has everything you need to get all the achievements (Consortium Rewards club member  southsun Setter Support, southsun sightseer, southsun VIP meer and greet, Southsun Volunteer fieldwork/sample collection, crab toss and so on).

I’ve managed to do most of the achievements today. The Southsun Samples all are flower that will have you going all over the island. One thing to note is when you get to the lava pit, near the top is a pair of goggles. If you grab them and jump you’ll get the achievement The Goggles Do Nothing, which i thought was rather funny. You’ll see a line of people jumping to their deaths in to a lava pit.

Crab Toss kind of annoys me, your in an arena with about 8 other people. And you attemped to hold on to the crab the longest. What i found with the game is most people’s first or second time they don’t get to many point. (like 1-30). There will be one or 2 people who really know what they will be doing that will get like 100-150 of the total 200 points (i think its a total of 200). At the end of the crab toss there is a chest, but i haven’t really got anything good out of it. I also haven’t been in the top 3, so i don’t know if they get better items or not.

So I’ve decided to try out a Mesmer in Guild Wars 2. Right now i do have 3 max level characters in the game (A Guardian, warrior and Thief). Mesmer will be a big difference.

For my Mesmer i started off as a human female, and i totally forgot that the game throw your right in to the middle of the action when you start, including a fight with a boss just minutes after starting the game. Which was fun, but you do feel very overpowered when you do fight this boss at level 1.

The shatters build i plan to use for this character is here. http://www.gw2builds.org/view/312055/shatter_2. I’ve never played a Mesmer before so I’m not sure if this is a good build or not, but from what i see it look good. Any advise would be good. My plan is to just solo this charter, i don’t really have any plan to do any or much grouping with this Character.

Just starting out in The Plains of Ashford i forgot how nice Guild Wars 2 can look.

So back to The Secret world, i honestly had never heard about this game until one of my guild mates in GW2 who’s as board as i am with GW2 said he was going to try this game. And so far i like it, i mean what is there not to like about a game that you can kill Zombies. I do see already see what John Smedley (previous post) has said about this game and every other MMO. I’m going to reach the max level and most likely leave the game.

In The Secret world no matter which side you pick (Illuminati, Dragons or Templars) after you leave your starting city (which you’ll promptly leave once you find out London is the only city with a bank), you’ll be in Kingsmouth to start the game. There are a couple of time of missions in the game.

• Story Missions — By this point you already have this. This is the only mission that in unique to the 3 factions. You can only have one of these (but you’ll never find these out in the world)
• Actions Missions (main Mission). These appear as red. These are longer quest in an area, typically have 2-8 parts, and you typical get a weapon/armor award.
• Side Missions (you can have 3). These are all over the world, they are short missions in the area
• Investigation Missions (main mission) These have a computer screen and count as a main mission. These are your puzzle missions
• sabotage Missions (Main Mission) where you sabotage something.
• Dungeon (Group) Missions)
• PVP missions

The first mission your going to see is “For a Fistful of Zombies” the main goal of this quest is to have your kill zombies on your way to the main quest hub. Along the way there is a side quest that i missed the first time i went through the game, but make sure you pick that one up as well (as it also is going to the main quest hub).

The main quest hub in this area is the old police office, were what is left of the town has barricaded the area to protect them self from the zombies. There are 3 quest gives (one in the police station, one on the side ,and one on top, each giving different difficulty of quests). My first time through i didn’t see the guy on the top of the police station, he’s the dude that give the easiest quest to start off with. Which starting off since you have no armor is a good idea to do his first quest (and wait tell later to do his second as it is much harder.

Over all I’m liking this game already.

So at least 6 years of my MMo gaming year (11 years of playing MMo’s) has been in everquest, so i would love to go back, but i want to see how SOE plans to do that. So a few months ago John Smedley did a interview of EQ Next, which you can read here, and there were some interesting thing in that interview.

Once we made that shift, everything else had to follow. And what we saw was RIFT. We saw the writing on the wall with SWTOR. We saw The Secret World. We saw all these games that we knew were in development and very high-quality, but we saw what was going to happen — this big spike and then it goes down. That’s the truth of what’s been happening with MMOs. The fans need to realize that if you don’t change the nature of what these games are, you’re not going to change that core behavior. We want to make games that last more than 15 years. That’s why we made the decision to change it.

The funny thing about this quote is i played each of these games and had issues with each that i talked about in this blog. So that got me thinking, what did i like about the game, and why did i leave them.

Rift

So, by the time i was playing rift i was using Raptr to keep track of my game time. I put 449 hours in to Rift (or 18.7 full days worth of time (56.1 work day). What made me stay? Well i enjoyed leveling up, and i enjoyed the next content, those keep me in the game. Looking at my own blog, i reached 50, 3 day later i made my last post about Rift and quit. Why did i quit, well i had reached the end of the content (quest) that was keeping me engaged, and i pretty much played the entire game with zero social interaction. Unlike Eq or Eq2 there really wasn’t much content to go back and replay (in eq1 you could go from 1-65 and only vist 1/10 of the world, so there was so much to explore and see). Some will say, but Ogrebear, you could of done group rift, dungeons  and then raided. Which is true, but i didn’t really feel like rading, and since i had zero socail interaction with people in the game, i had no one to join a dungeon with.

SWTOR

So Raptr also keep track of my game time for this game, i ended up putting in 480 hours in to this game (second highest on my life, only TF2 has more hours in it). I really really loved the story of the game, and the world had so much potential, but what happened was each world was for 5-10 levels, and then there no point in ever coming back to that world. Which is sad (rift had the same issue). There is so so so much you can do with a world, but if you leave it so that it only for a certain level range you kill a lot of the fun of having a massive world. Unlike Rift i didn’t quit when i got to level 80.  I was much more invested in the game, and the world, and i was social with other people. We did group Dungeons, which were pretty fun, but there was a problem. Most of us had already crafted better Armor than what you could get from a Dungeon. And so at some point i asked my self what was the point in playing the game? I was out of content, i had reach the highest level i would with my armor, and i really don’t enjoy doing the same thing over and over unless i’m doing it for a reward. And so i quit the game.

The Secret World i just started to play so i won’t say anything about it.

What is SOE going to do?

That hard to tell. I’m going to make the assumption they gone through the same thing i’ve had. You make it to the top level of the game, and your bored, there nothing to do, and a lot of people don’t like the armor grind that is the top level. At the same time i do not want them to take the GW2 approach where everyone can solo there way to the top gear. Because i did that and once i got there i ran out of content and had the best arrmor, so i had little will to play that game after that.  I really don’t know what there planing.

I started my city pretty much like i start all my casino city. about 1/2 the land is used for people to live, and the other 1/2 is used for the casino area. Straight off the bat i’m not seeing as much traffic issues as i did the last time i tried this. I think the last time i tired this i quit after 5 minutes in to making my city, because i had 5000 people living it it and a traffic game 1/2 way across the city.

So faster forward a few days. I have a population of mostly low income workers, most of which work in the city. At first the casino city seem to be doing pretty well, but over time i started to see less and less people coming to the Games, and to the casinos. During the morning hours 6AM-noon, there would be like no one at the casino, or any of my tourist spots. While i had some traffic, traffic wasn’t bad in the morning. It would only get bad when i would have a big game at the large coliseum.

Overall Option after patch 3.0. EA/maxis made the game a little bit better to play, i feel the game has reached the late Alpha, maybe early beta phase, but still needs 3-6 more months of work to get to release quality. If you are thinking about getting the game, don’t it  currently not worth 59 buck. It better than it was before, but still has a long way to go.

One of my real life friends told me he had started to play The Secret World, and so i’ve decided to start playing as well. So far i like the game. More to come…

For my new region i have desired to go with Discovery Delta, all the other Region’s I’ve played have always been Viridian Woods or Titan Gorge, as these 2 maps have the most of the flat cities in them. A lot of Viridian Citys are also flat, but there a lot more water way through city which should be this a little bit interesting.

For my first City in the Region i went with Spooner Plains, which i plan to make a very very low income, industry area.

My hope by not have all the streets connect and just having a few main streets traffic will not get to bad.

And so far so good, traffic is doing pretty well in the city, but right now most of the building are only Medium, or low density. I’m expecting traffic to blow up when some of the high density builds come in to play.

Traffic has become horrible. I started a new city, and with in 2 minutes i had 2000 people, and a traffic jam that went 1/2 way through my city. WTF. And it wasn’t like i had 20 street connect to my main avenue. I had 2 avenue going to people houses, and one to people’s jobs. Only 3 places where there were stop light. and traffic pilled like i had just made an inner city with 1 lane roads only.

I’m sorry EA/Maxis i’m done, i might check in every once and a while to see if you’ve made the game actually playable. This is just a bad joke.

It So bad at the moment, i’ve made a promise to my self not pre-order any more EA game, and to wait 1 or 2 month after the game has gone out for other to review if the game is worth it or not.

EA your dead to me.

So far 10 minutes of this… I’m going to kill it and try again… Sigh

Update: so in was able to play. It appears any time I switch town, the loading screen never goes away and in have to restart the game. Which is rather sad EA. This game has been out for over a month. Patch 2.0 was suppost to fix a lot of the issue people were having with the game. And honestly it does not appear much was fixed.

I just recently got an Android tablet. So I’ll probably start having some post about android games android programming for the Android that’s another thing I plan to do. I’m trying something new with this post. The entire post is me talking to the Android having it the words there. Since I believe I speak better than I type my grammar should improve from this. Anyway that’s worth in last few months.