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Justin Uncategorized MMO, SWTOR

Hasbro released their newest version of the long running Monopoly game franchise today.

I managed to get in and register and actually buy a few streets i was hoping to get. Tho its been slow and annoying.

Many people are suffering worse than i did, not being able to get the site to come up in the first place, let alone create an account or buy any property.

It seems Hasbro didn’t quite expect the turnout they generated, i’d guess that whoever was in charge of scaling, didn’t have any idea of what the power of the internet had in store for them. Maybe Google should have lent them a few servers to get this thing off the ground.

They have promises of having new servers up and running to make the game smoother “In several hours” but its not smooth yet, and its been a while.

I think it can be fun, even tho its only for four months. I look forward to the game smoothing out so i can continue to pick up more streets and buildings and see where it all ends up.

Justin MMORPG, PC Google, Hasbro, Monopoly

I just received an email from DDO telling me that as of today (09/09/09) DDO is unlimited free play, woo!

Sadly, the game has 2 big strikes against it in my book. Its set in Eberron and its not fun.

needless to say, even tho it is free, i will still not be playing this game…

Now where is my Diablo III and Star Wars: The Old Republic!?

Justin MMORPG, PC DDO, Diablo III, SWTOR

So a couple months back I posted with my initial thoughts on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. I figure its time I give a full account of my experiences with WAR and my current status with it. I currently do not play WAR, I cancelled my account a few weeks ago. Somewhere in the middle of my second month of playing I just lost interest.

I ended up playing my main character a ‘Bright Wizard’ into the mid 20s. Enjoying tier 3 content. The game was fun, but there just seems to be something missing. I felt burnt out already by tier 3. How much more fun could tier 4 have been?

Keeps were fun, but repetitive, it took a huge force and decent cooperation from everybody on that force, especially if there were any defenders for the keep.  The influence gains and experience didn’t seem to be worth the time/effort put into taking keeps or defending them. which leads me to Scenarios

Scenarios were fun at first, but also got very repetitive. So much in fact that the opposing faction on my server had started screwing with the scenario queues just to fake the system out so they could get a huge lead on the next scenario. Which made it quite annoying for my side since we would start a scenario, and get kicked from it for unbalanced team sizes, then join into the next scenario and its already been going for 5 min and the opposing faction has a significant lead.

I found a great  guild, and loved playing with those guys. The game was just not what I need in an MMO. Good PvP though, I will give it that. It just didn’t feel much like an MMO to me.

Justin Uncategorized

Last week I finally caved-in to that nagging desire to play an MMO again. Instead of going back to one of the many I’ve played before, and burning myself out in a week, I decided to try a new fresh game. Enter Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning (WAR).

WAR is a PvP oriented MMO with a substantial amount of PvE content as well. From what I’ve seen so far you could play from level 1 to 40 purely PvE or PvP and only ever play one segment of the game. Not that you would want to, there seems to be lots of great content on both sides. I’m enjoying playing equal amounts of PvP and PvE currently.

One thing I don’t get about EA/Mythic is the term ‘RvR’ meaning Realm Vs Realm. They use it like its some crazy new feature, but from what i can tell RvR = PvP in any other game. The “Realms” fight against each other for control of zones and objectives within zones, much like Planetside. Otherwise, its just plain old PvP from any other game that has more than one faction.

In WAR you have “Order” (Dwarfs, Empire, High Elves) vs “Destruction” (Greenskins, Chaos, Dark Elves) and in a RvR portion of a map, you can freely kill people of the other Realm. This is exactly the same as EQ2, with the exception that on a PvP server for EQ2 there are no specific portions of zones that are for PvP, any zone can be PvP freely. EQ you have the Citizens of Freeport (and other cities) that are the ‘bad guys’ and the citizens of Qeynos (and other cities) that are the ‘good guys’ and they fight it out. I’m pretty sure WoW is the same as well.

So unless “RvR” means the addition of fighting for control of zones and objectives, I don’t see a point for it. Granted, I’m still new to the game so there might be something I’m missing. I’ll keep you posted if I find out anything more. As for now as far as I can tell RvR = PvP.

All that said, I’m having a great time playing WAR; I’ve managed to find a good new guild that is growing, with some great people in it, I’ve done some hefty playing and leveled up my character (an Empire Bright Wizard) to rank 16 with a renown rank of 14, I’ve participated in several Battlefield Objective take overs, and even the claiming of a few keeps in Tier 2. I’m excited to play any time I log in, and always have a blast and can’t wait till the next time I get a chance to play.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for more info on WAR as I’m playing my way thru.

Justin MMORPG, Warhammer Online EQ2, MMORPG, PVP, WAR, WOW

Today’s deck is one I’ve spent a little time tuning, and really enjoy playing, it can go off really fast, and it can sustain decently if it gets a slow start. This deck fits in the format that a local store here puts together called “Creature Feature” which is basically Legacy, with the restriction that your deck must be at least 1/3 creatures, and all the creatures must be of the same creature type, and you cannot have any card in the deck that could produce creatures/tokens of a different creature type.

And so I present to you:

I really like the Stigma Lashers in the deck, as they are a good way to deal with heavy healing decks, the Power of Fires enhance that ability if I’m unable to attack with the Lashers. The Thunderblusts are great for some hasty damage and the persist makes him even cooler, add in the Incandescent Soulstoke’s ability to throw in elementals, and he can come in a turn earlier and still stick around because of the persist.

Overall I like the quantity and quality of creature destruction in the deck as it allows me to have an answer for a good chunk of creatures, it plays well, and wins fairly often (pending my own mistakes while playing, which can and have cost me games with this deck before.)

Justin MTG

Whew! I’m finally done sorting thru all these new cards! Last new box of boosters for a little while at least. Heres what i got

Got a lot of stuff, first booster box i’ve opened and not gotten a single duplicate, quite interesting. Now its time to start building some decks.

Justin MTG

As part of the previously mentioned draft, I had picked up a box of Shards of Alara for prizes for that draft. After the prizes packs are handed out, I get the rest of the boosters, and as such I will be showing you all the rares that came from the last 2/3rds of the box.

 I'm super excited to have gotten two planeswalkers, let alone Elspeth! Alas, Shards in general is kind of a let down, there are a few cool cards but the set as a whole just doesn't seem to be up to snuff. Lets hope Conflux fixes that.

Justin MTG

I've ordered myself a box of Planar Chaos, and we decided to draft it this weekend, and now i have a ton of new Planar Chaos cards and so now its time to share with you the rares that were pulled from the box.

Turned out to be a very good box of cards, the Damnation I opted to give away for the first place prize in our draft, i'm excited about a lot of the cards in this list, you should be seeing some of them in deck lists soon.

Justin MTG

Okay, so I've been busy playing Rock Band 2 lately.

What do I think of RB2 in one word? Awesome

Now for some details…

Characters
RB2 does not import your RB1 characters that you have created, which I think is kind of lame, if you can import the music why can't you import the characters? Especially since there isn't a whole lot of difference in the customization of them. Not that I want all my money and items that I’ve unlocked but the name/hometown and all that start up stuff, it’s all the same why not import them? Aside from that I love the new feature that a character isn't tied to a specific instrument now I can play the drums sing or strum it up without having to re-create myself! Big plus!

Tour Mode
I love that the tour is no longer locked down to multiplayer. You can create a band of one person and still play a tour, and have your friends jump in whenever they are around. Big bonus again! The downside to this is: they removed the single player straight thru the track list mode, which made it easy to unlock every song and know when you've unlocked it all. I still keep randomly unlocking songs in RB2 and I have no idea if I’m even close to the end!

Import RB1 Music
I haven’t done this yet, but it’s a great idea, and I plan to soon. I'm just sad that Enter Sandman won't make it across the journey.

Downloaded Music
All of my previously downloaded music shows up immediately, no work needed – that’s a great feature, good job on this one Harmonix!

New Songs
New songs are always a good thing, there's a ton in here, and I’d argue that on the whole the track list is much better in RB2 than it was in RB1.

I love the new things in RB2 although I wouldn't say it’s quite enough to justify the '2' they could have put a little more into it I think, it’s more of an expansion. The price is great if you think in terms of tracks to dollars. You are getting way more music that $60 would buy you in the music store.

Justin PS3