Deeeeeeeeead

This place is dead.

Oh so dead.

So completely dead.

Dead.

As for the blog aspect; what I've currently been up to:

Playing tanks

Being driven positively insane by someone.

Waiting for c86.

Not playing AK(because the game has no updates and so many internal problems I can't even fathom it).

Music:

Aura Kingdom Founders Beta starts tomorrow

Oh boy.
Oh man.
Oh geeze.

Actually I'm not that excited since I actually played the TW version a good bit, and this is just the opening CB phase which really isn't that big of a deal.

But the plus side is that it's actually progressing and starting somewhere.

Down side is that I still have no idea what I'm doing in terms of guild/gameplan of actually playing the game.
The other down side is that Aeria is still trying to force Ignite and packaging all of their downloaders with Akamai, which is a dumb and incredibly bad thing to do(seriously, bandwidth is cheap, all akamai does is piss people off).
Also that it's a paid beta for an f2p game, which I have extremely staunch grounds against and believe will have a strong negative impact on the game, but I can't even talk since I paid to get in(even if only indirectly from GS AP pay from back in the day).

But whatever. It's starting finally. And only 4 months since it was announced. Take that, Lime Odyssey.

Anyway, time for music.



If you like the song, you can download the album here. Fair warning though, the album itself is incredibly ranged and diverse in sounds, so don't download it expecting vocaloid, most of it's just solid EDM/trance/house.

Aeria announces Aura Kingdom

aka Fantasy Frontier.

95% chance I'm going to end up playing this game. Or something along those lines.
You can sign up for the beta here.

Anyway, time for some music.




If you enjoyed that song, you can either buy the album(or download for free) here.

I'm out of Grand Fantasia

Pretty sure people have noticed by now, but I stepped down from tags on Grand Fantasia.

There's a few pretty simple reasons for this.

First, I had tags for over a year and a half and the past 2-3 months have been, by far, my most inactive period. So I just decided to take a break. Because you know, not having any form of obligation is nice.

Second, Mokona got moved. Okay this is actually a really minor reason, I'm just putting it up here because reasons.

Third, Grand Fantasia got AVA'd. And this is really the most important/largest reason for my departure.
Basically, Aeria NA no longer handles GF EN. Sure, they host the servers and they have two GM on staff for it, but the promotions and update schedule/etc. are all handled by Aeria EU offices. That means there's no formal PM, there will be much less transparency between staff and players, and overall it's a huge change that most people probably won't really understand.
But the biggest reason among those for my leaving is how EU handles the CS. They do both very good, and very, very bad things with it. They're actually aggressive with their CS which I completely approve of - what I don't approve of though, is how far they take it. As of now, the GM enchants/tiered spenders are pretty much a thing of the past. Instead of cashing in on those, they're focusing entirely on putting out as many GM wishes in as many high tiered spenders as possible.
And this ruins the game. In many, many more ways than one.

I'm sure anyone who's reading this and playing knows how much the economy has been  fucked over in the past month, month and a half or so. Where everything is climbing sky-high in price and all of that. Well, guess what. GM wishes did that.
No, it didn't do it directly. It's through  indirect market manipulation. I'm sure others have also noticed the gigantic spike in how much AP pins are selling for. The major buyers that are causing the price to increase so much are inflating the price in an attempt to get someone to sell to them over another major buyer. Why? Because they want to spam GM wishes.

But back to the point, because of all of this, AP pin sellers are getting a stupidly huge amount of gold out of nowhere in comparison to before. That gives them a larger buying power. So the basic consumables that aren't flooded into the economy get a massive spike in worth. Not just because there are players that want them, but because the players who can  buy them don't value their gold as much as  they used to.

So yeah. GF's economy is fucked. And fucked beyond all form of repair.

But uh. Yeah. I'm out of GF. And there's plenty of good reasons behind it. But I'll be back? Probably? Well, not for GF. But some other game down the road I'm sure.

In the meanwhile, have some music.





Oh right, and I changed the address for the blog since, obviously, it's no longer about GF or the economics therein.

Holy shit a new post

So, I'm alive.
And sort of around.

Stuff that's going on:
Still playing tanks.
Grand Fantasia's economy is in a massive inflation period. Like, holy shit. And I am making so much gold off of it.
Taaaaaaaaaanks.
TW GF just got an absolutely huge patch, which I'm sure most people already know about.
My birthday was sometime last week, apparently.
etc.

Oh right. Speaking of tanks.
The tourney team I'm on has recently secured, at minimum, 3rd place in an nVidia cash tourney, which is neat. Which means I'll be getting at minimum around $200~ and a 660TI GPU. For free.
Whether I get better than that or not won't be decided for another 2 weeks or so since we need to wait for the losers bracket to catch up.


Here's some music:

Other than that... I've just been chilling, doing non-game things and playing Persona 3 finally.

This is a blog supposedly

So yeah.

This is technically a blog. About what, I'm not entirely sure anymore.

And I don't even do anything.

But whatever.

What I've been up to:

TANKS

TANKS AND TANKS AND MORE TANKS

Also tanks.

As far as Grand Fantasia is concerned, don't worry - I still do stuff there, too. I just can't talk about it.

Because that's how I roll.

Also there has been music. Oh god, so much music.

You just. You don't understand, just how much music.

Seriously.

You just don't.

I'll just leave this here in that regard:

Oh, right.

Also, since I can't really post or make a real mention of it anywhere else;

Friendly reminder that Grand Fantasia's community is terrible and its overall toxic nature will inevitably be its downfall.

Wait.

I forgot something.

It appears a line of cyber suits is approved for the global market out of Japan.

Why does this matter? Well.

The company that's making them is named Cyberdyne. And do you know what they named the suit? They named it "The Hybrid Assistive Limb" or, HAL for short.

There's also other implications, if you happen to be watching Robotics;Notes. But I won't go into those.

If I were to design an MMO... Part II

Part deux go. (No I didn't expect to write this today but I've got time so whatever)

Ok so, so far my imaginary MMO I'd design so far is f2p, has a hybrid of EE's and DoMO's multiclass system, a level cap of 30 and is built on the backbone of micromanaging goals to carrot on a stick people into going further and further, thus making themselves more attached to the game and likely to spend into the game and to remain there.

I could decide to go on about classes, but those aren't really that important - they'll mostly be cliche, honestly. The one exception is that there will be a musician/bard class, that's the only class that matters as far as I care. So instead, let's talk about combat, combat dynamic and the planned "grinding" scheme.

First, from experience in TERA, "action oriented combat" seems to be the new thing now and for a good reason - it's a lot more immersive, you feel like you're actually doing things. It's also not very hard to design around, at the end you're really just making every skill a limited range self-centerpoint AOE and setting in a limiter on how many targets it hits(and its preference in proximity or via cursor tracking), the only con with this system is you lose out on targeted area AOE's unless you turn them into an enemy centric targeted AOE or you have it fire a set distance in the direction you're aiming. Well, actually, I suppose it's possible to have it run on seeing through everything and landing exactly where you aim at the floor(think of it like how a rocket launcher functions in an FPS), so I guess that works.
So with that, we now have that this will be an action oriented MMO. Neat. But let's move on to that whole grinding dynamic. DoMO did one thing amazingly well - it was an entirely party centric grind for a very long period of time, and it made the game so much more than it was originally for that. For those not versed in how it worked, your party would be made up of 4 different types of roles within 6 party slots. There'd be the tank, there'd be the support, there'd be the AOE  classes and then there'd be the puller - of course, pending skill level some players functioned in more than one role. Mobs in the game had no set run distance, if you pulled aggro on them you'd have aggro the entire way until you either changed map, "trapped" its tracking into running into a wall where it couldn't follow you further, killed it or died yourself. This system made the party dynamic that much more since you could actually have some gigantic mob pulls, which meant more XP by the end of it. Now, clearly, I'm enamored with how this worked, so I'd definitely run it similarly. Only real difference is unlike DoMO, there'd be more than a single channel for areas if it weren't entirely instanced.

Ok so, we have action oriented combat and extremely party intensive grind. What about mobs? Well, I think I'd honestly take the non-lazy approach and have unique values for every mob type. In terms of HP, stats, XP payout, etc. DoMO did this and when it worked well it worked amazingly, but had a flaw in area design. Primarily, while regardless of whether you copy/paste values between mobs of each level or make them unique per mob type, there'll always be a "best" place to grind. There's a way to counteract this with proper design - if there's a mob type with a lower XP value, there should be tons of them in a clustered area and a slightly increased respawn rate, while larger XP value mobs would be slightly more spaced with a slightly slower respawn. If nothing else, it would create the dilemma to players to figure out which is faster, which is fantastic for community cooperation.

And with that, part two is done. Part three whenever I'm bored enough.