This blog is officially terminated

Dear readers,

Since my time has become very limited, i haven't had time to play AoC for weeks now. That means that i have also grown tired of them game, and i will therefore stop playing until i feel an urge to come back again.

Right now, i really don't feel like playing anymore, why i am officially terminating this blog since i won't write anything.

I wish all of you the best of luck in AoC, and i hope that we see eachother either in AoC in the future, or in another game.

Kruella

Proof of Anatolian Hun Empire exploiting

Thinking of duelling someone from Anatolian Hun Empire? Then know that they are expoiters, and that they have gained PvP-exp (with resists etc.) unjustly:



If you want more proof, go here:

http://forum-scum.afktime.com/index.php?topic=1305.0

Fair play?

The few readers who reads my blog knows that i very often write about PvP, and that's of course since i think that PvP is the main enjoyment of this game, even though it's flawed and imbalanced.

I do understand why the PvP is imbalanced class-wise, which is a problem that affects the very many of us. But what i don't understand is the exploiting of the PvP system that's currently going on amongst many guilds. Im talking of course about guilds who farm eachother for PvP-exp, "secretly".

We all remember how it went a few months ago, when you got loads and loads of PvP-exp by farming eachother (it was due to some big patch if i remember correctly). I even tried it myself for an hour or so, to see how it was.

And today, people are still doing it. The two guilds i know has done this, is Anatolian Hun Empire who famred eachother in their own Battlekeep, but got "cought" by a S.C.U.M member who actually took pictures of this (if anyone has these pictures, send them to kruellanecro@gmail.com and i will make them public here). I also heard rumours about Argonauts doing the same thing in The Main System. Note that i have yet to see proof of this, but my sources are very reliable.

All of this contributes to high PvP-levels, making people who utterly suck in PvP very hard to beat.

On the one hand, i really condone this sort of behaviour, but since the largest guilds on the server are earning unjust PvP-exp, shouldn't the rest of us also join the fest, in order to save us from insults from morons who keep sending tells after siege-battles, minigames and 1 vs 1:s?

If you take a guild like S.C.U.M for instance, where the top-notch players (Galadh, Chigo, Svartie etc) have earned their PvP-levels, you see how skilled they are versus people from AHE/Argonauts. I don't like S.C.U.M too much, but they are very effective in PvP.

But eventually, people who stryggle with their PvP-levels will gain level 5. I just hope it's possible before they launch the next 5 levels, where the history of exploiting will repeat itself.

I really hope that Funcom will do something about this, however, people who exploits will always find new ways to exploit.

Celestial siege aftermath

Last night Nova Krepusko, Band of the Grey Clover and Exalted went head on for the Celestial battlekeep with one single objective: burn it all down.

It started out very well, with 58 minutes remaining every single building in the russian BK was burned to the ground, except for the main building. This was where the problems started. Even though Celestial did a good job defending the keep, i can't help to feel how incredibly flawed sieges still are.

For example, how is it possible to get a siege weapon running, when you have 30 or so people respawning 20 meters away from it, and doing their utmost to destroy it? Every time we went in together we pushed them back to their spawn point, but once there, they could easily cripple out our force. Funcom should either make more siegeweapons able to target the keep than the one closest to it, or move the one the curently is closest to the keep. Or they could move the defenders spawnpoint once the inner wall falls.
Another thing was the default resspoint, which isn't the closest one to the BK (for attackers). Lots of people realized that when it was 20 minutes left :).

But all in all, it was a really good siege with some good fights.

Guildies on hiatus

Even though it's quite natural, it's also frustrating when your guild's activity decreases severly. This has recently happened to us in Nova Krepusko, as we went from a constant 25-man online to the current 10-12 people.

My main focus with this game is PVP, and it's close to impossible to play "fair" when you're facing 20 or so people from enemy guilds. Therefore, i am forced to resort to more lame methods, such as casting spells from a high vantage point, send pets and run and so on, in order to gain some PVP exp at all.

But make no mistake, Nova Krepusko will be back and stronger than ever soon enough.

I'm back!

The blog has been resting for a while, due to a vacation i had last week. Now im back however!

I will start posting once Funcom resolves my account issues, which should be tonight or tomorrow.

Funcom censoring

Yesterday i started a topic on the official forums about zerging on this server, which was filled with (constructive) criticism towards Anatolian Hun Empire and The Empire (since i am biased). This topic was removed without any notification, which i think is outrageous! What happened to freedom of speech?

Oh yea, the blog will not be updated for a week or so now, as im going on vacation to Austria i the next week.

If you can't win, do like Argonauts and HUN!

Ever since the patch PvP has become much more versitile and fun. Some people have moved from Keshetta to Thunder River and Border Kingdoms which makes for way better PvP, ie larger areas to move about in.

The Keshetta drama remains the same though, and im always amazed on how fucking worthless Argonauts and Anatolian Hun Empire are at PvP. Last night, about 20 Argo/HUN's camped 5 Nova's on the resspad. This was after the 5 man Nova team obliterated the 10 man Argo/HUN team who fought eachother, prior to the moment they realized how much they sucked so they doubled in size (and decreased even more in their PvP-skills). So there they were camping us at the resspad, and as soon as we changed instance, they followed.

Is this FUN PvP??? I cannot for the love of god understand WHY people are such cowards, unable to face people in true PvP, but has to resort to resskilling and guardhugging (which is very common in Argo/HUN).

Necromancers remains the same...

...more or less, but as other classes has gotten a major boost (conqs are damn good now) the balance is better.

After PvP-ing as a necro for a few hours i realized:

- Spellweaving from start doesn't matter much.
- The LoS check of GoD doesnt matter in 1 vs 1, and hardly in minigames either (on actual results)

However, rumours are that all the dot-damage has been lowered. Yet, it remains only a rumour.

Necromancers are fixed

Today the new patch was implemented (or still is), where necros supposedly are fixed:

"Necromancers should no longer automatically receive the Spellweaving buff window upon entering Spellweaving state. Necromancers now have the same chance to receive the Spellweaving buff window as all other Spellweaving classes."

This means that we no longer can get Death God (100% crit chance) instantly, as it has been corrected. Even though this is a correction of faulty programming, it will have a major impact on the necro-PvP.

I would guess that GoD now also has a LoS-check, even though it wasn't in the patchnotes.

All in all, this will make necros more fun and challenging to play, cause let's be honest - necromancer is/was the AoC ezmode class.

S C U M, not SCUM

When Funcom banned the word "scum" out of the AoC dictionary, something seemed to happen to the guild. From being the most fearless and original, quirky (i could go on and on) guild on the server, who completly owned everyone in PvP, they have become a guild like everyone else. They're PvP-skills are mediocre, and the "edge" which they had over all other guilds is long gone.

This, of course, has mostly to do with the fact that other guilds has become better, and S C U M has stopped evolving.

We need more drama on this server! Who will take S C U M:s place?

People are returning!

Seems like alot of people are returning to AoC! Maybe it's because Darkfall sucks hairy man-ass or maybe it's because Funcom are shaping this game up (slow and steady).

It was fun to see Aziraal running about, and even funnier to see that Deranja is back, which of course opens up a whole new scene of drama :).

BRC Wing 3 open on Test Live!

Finally!

Funcom has opened up BRC wing 3 on Test Live, and not a day too early either... This is of course great news for any player interested in the relativly small amount of end-game content AoC has to offer.

However, shouldn't they have fixed Wing 2 before they opened up Wing 3? There are still several bugs in Wing 2 that needs to be fixed, as the dungeon crawl is a major timesink for many guilds due to this bugs (Ahazu-Zagam specificly). And it also seems you need items from the 2 end-bosses in each wing, Sabazios and Chatha. Last i heard Chatha was bugged and pretty hard to kill... But i might be wrong about this.

Anyway, knowing Funcom, we probably wont see Wing 3 on the live servers before the summer...

A thing i ponder about though is; what will the loot be like in Wing 3?

Nice PvP event in Noble District

With the intention of trying out some new PvP-grounds, NK challenged Sanguis Attexo and Condemned yesterday, in an RP event in Noble District.

RP-wise, NK was holding Conan prisoner in his castle. SA/Condemned played Royalists witht he objective to free him.

We had some really nice fights on the Conan bridge, which was a nice change from the Keshetta chaos. No guards, no place to hide!

Oh yeah, SA/Condemned won over NK 4 out of 4 times. We were lagging, people were wrongly specced, a few people had there period, and excuses are like assholes, everyone has one, mostly full of crap.

Before the fight


NK mocking the royalists


Amazing syncronized bow!


Riding together out of Noble District

Class imbalance and chaos theory

Everyone who has played this game more than one week knows that a major problem is the class imbalance, as it mainly ruins PvP.

Balancing the classes is the greatest challenge for any MMORPG, and usually it takes years before perfection is reached (im not a fanboi of Funcom, bear with me). For example, a class in WAR was so overpowered in the beta (i forgot witch one, Chaos Knight?) that they simply removed it instead of balancing it out.

Class balance is much like chaos theory, as if you change one small coefficient for one class, it usually impacts the entire game (as chaos theory states that picking up a flower on one side of the world, could mean the end of a species on the other side of the world. Like the movie Butterfly Effect).
Lets say for instance, that FC would nerf Necromancers frost-damage, from 100% to 80%. That would affect all classes differently, as some classes has cold-resist buffs and so on. FC would then have to tweak the cold reststance of some classes, while some classes would have their cold-resistance reduced. This would of course cause a ton of other problems that will affect even more classes and the wheel imbalance is in motion.

Let's take WoW for example. In the dawn of the WoW-era, class imbalancing was of course a problem. But as WoW managed to have their playerbase more or less intact during this development period (whioch of course had much to do with that fact that there wasn't many MMO's around when WoW started up), they managed to pull it off well and today it's the worlds largest MMO/computer game.

So to sum it up, class balancing is indeed complicated, but once perfected it's a major success-factor for a MMORPG.

The Conan image capture contest!

Below are five images from the Conan-movies. Write your best caption for every image in 1-2 sentences , either as a dialauge or thoughts of Conan himself. Example:


You told me this I-Phone supported 3-G!

In your comment, you will write one caption for each picture (1-5). You will also provide your ingame name.


The winner gets 5 gold from me. The contest ends in the middle of february, and i will decide who wins! Creativity, wackyness and some connection to the Aquilonian playerbase are major pluses!

Number 1:

Lady: I in peed in that. Conan: Kinky - Tsuniko
"Indeed, milady, yet the subjectivity of emotional prejudices cannot in itself be deemed..." - Quadronus/Istaira

Number 2:

Stupid motherfucking bear shamans - Tsuniko
Proposed new emote: Happy cimmerian. - Quadronus/Istaira

Number 3

When conan tried to get in touch with his feminine side - Tsuniko
Janet! Doctor Scott! Janet! Brad! Rocky! Ugh! - Quadronus/Istaira

Number 4

Not the face! *chomp* - Tsuniko
Living food diet, cimmerian style - Quadronus/Istaira

Number 5

"NOBODY TOUCHES MY LOINCLOTH AND LIVES" - Tsuniko
This is my sword. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My sword is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Also, seems to be made out of latex. - Quadronus/Istaira

WARZONE!

Wow, i haven't been online for a few weeks, and when i finally get to log on (in Keshetta of course) i see an seemingly endless amount of people fighting eachother. There we bodies everywhere, and one tombstone withing every meter. Necros were Grip-of-Deathing, Barbarians ran around in a bloodcrazed frenzy stunkilling everything in their way, the bear shamen seemed invunerable, the guardians fought side by side with assassins and the DT:s sat watching everything, wondering how their class became so neglected.

A whole new concept of lag introduced itself; cast a spell - lagfreeze - bam you're dead. I got a pretty good computer, and i have never experienced this before. I FEAR the DX10 patch, will put a dent in my wallet if i want to keep this game running.

Other than that, it's all the same. SCUM is still SCUM (even though they spelled it out like S C U M now with spaces, cool!) and the Empire are still the Empire (however now recogniceble, as all Empire guilds have the "Empire" tag next to their guildname.

Btw, they reason we merged was...

...Funcoms financial problems, covered up with some story that Funcom wanted to increase the vividness of the servers. My source (which is reliable and will remain anonymous) also tells me that Funcom are really struggling financially now, and that they are thinking of terminating AoC. We will see what happens there...

The merger has been complete

So recently the servermerge was complete, and i (and probably many with me) had high hopes of a new infusion of players, RP and social life in general.

Has anything changed, really?

I don't think so. The only noticble difference is that there are a few new guilds out there, and alot more people in the duelarea of Keshetta. The latter is nothing but bad news i think. It also seems like the crappy guilds of this server, Argonauts for example, has gotten more members since the merger.

Oh yeah, global chat is now more annoying than ever.

I can't help to feel sorry for the ex-Corinthians. Corinthia, which probably was more heavy on RP than Aquilonia ever will be, got incorporated with mostly gankers and other morons. I wouldn't be surpised if they are looking at us as "white trailor trash", a description which fits many players here, such as players with Celestial and Argonauts tags under their name.

I hope we will see more of a change with the next big patch. We need CHANGE! CHANGE! Go Obama!

The reason for my few posts is...

... WORK! IRL sucks ass right now, i haven't been able to log on properly for a week now, hence i haven't been able to follow the gossip as of late. I will be back shortly though, with some provokative news!

Argosploit the Movie(s)

Courtsey to a anonymous donor who sent me the clips where Argonauts are taking advantage of the PvP-EXP system.

Argonauts PvP-XP leeching

This was actually a pretty funny little gem of entertainment i found on the official forums, which was banned short after it was published. And since the topic was naming and shaming Argonauts, i felt an urge to write something about it here :).

A member of BotGC witnessed a few Argonauts exploiting the PvP-EXP in Keshetta the other day, and as they didn't seem to care about what people thought, they were talking openly about it in /say. Unfortunetly, the pictures and the vids of this was removed from the official forums before i got my hands on them (if anyone could send them to me i'll gladly publish it all here).

So, some Argonauts used the flawes of the PvP-EXP system, does it really matter and who cares? I wouldn't make much of a fuss about it, unless it involved one of the bst Bear Shamen on this server which i held in great respect; Theli. From my point of view, he is just another lamer now, trying to reach PvP level 4 before anyone else so he can 000wnZZ-L33T-M0DE in duels. I will immidietly stop duelling him, as i have done with other cheaters. It's a damn shame, he was really good.

Next time you gonna leech PvP-EXP, do it somewhere else than Keshetta, and don't use /say :). But im sure Argonauts doesn't care... ;)

Happy birthday Kruella!

Today, Kruella turns 28 years old! I don't know how many years that is in Stygian years, probably 287 or something, though Kruellas sexy arse doesn't look a day over 20.

So how will i celebrate this remarkable day? Slay a few Celestials, hunt down and mock Theli in tells or hope for some nice T3-loot courtsey of Funcom?

Nah, i will celebrate it offline with beer and cake!

The incentive to log on grows smaller...

I can't help to feel that the interest for AoC is growing smaller :(. It's basiclly the same story each day; you log on, find yourself in Keshetta after a few minutes, where you duel the same people over and over and you get killed by the same zerg. It's fun for about an hour, after you gotten 4-5 tells about how OP necromancers are, and that Grip of Death should be banned from the game. It's just boring.

There's a few entertaining parts left in this game, but they are getting really old and dusty as well;

The raids: sure it can be fun to crawl trhough the Kylikki instance in record time, however these types of raids are really lacking surprises and demand of skill so you can do it in your sleep. BRC is probably the most fun so far, and Wing 1 still is a challenge, but since you only can do it once a week there isn't really that much of a dungeon crawl. Wing 2 is way too bugged, 3 tries at the poison-boss and then you have to reset the instance, damn boring.

The grind: even though i probably would enjoy another character to grind, i really cba to level another character to 80.

The PvP: well, since it's ZERG or DIE in this game nowdays, there isn't much to do regarding the PvP.

That being said, i really hope that the next patch will bring some major updates making me eager to log on again. Now it's more out of old habit than anything else.

How many Celestials does it take to kill a Kruella?

Answer: 3-4 of them.

Yesterday, me and a few Condemned and Exalted had some very nice fights with mainly Celestials outside of Keshetta City. It was as even as i could get i guess, 8 vs 10 or so. The best part was the sneakattacks which both sides managed to pull off several times (ress and sneak the Onyx-way). I was actually thinking that Celestial are an honourable bunch of people, liking to fight with even odds where they (read: The Empire) usually zerg you to death.

Short after (when the ineviteble zerg began) i headed for the duel area for some PvP. But as soon as i started to queue for duels, several Celestials popped out of stealth and killed me. I ressed, stealthed and was heading back to the area when 3 of the Celestials had me on track and killed me. This happened several times, and it got quite frustrating. Celestial tried to take me on alone, but failed miserably over and over. Any Celestials who would like to prove me wrong, please contact me for a private duel.

The reason for this stalking is actually this blog, according to Henker who said something like "From Russia with love, right?" as he referred to a post made by me here earlier.

So the blog has provoked reactions from Celestial, and my "I WIN!" button is pressed down :). Keep it up Celestial!

Ahazu-Zagam dead!

Ahazu-Zagam, a.k.a. the poison boss of BRC Wing 2, fell yesterday on the first try when me and Arigold of NK joined the finnish forces of Band of the Grey Clover. Where Nova Krepusko failed, BotGC was victorious mostly due to finnish sisu and a very solid tank (Ashurst).
NK has had problems with the aggro management mostly, where hungry DPS-classes has unloaded their arsenal resulting in a room filled with poison and lots of dead people.

All in all it went very smooth and two PoM wrists dropped.

We moved on to the next bosses, Incubus and Succubus, had a few unsuccessful tries before we ended the raid. It seemed to me as these two bosses are very easy, once you figure it out.

It's all about The Oasis

Im getting quite pissed and bored with the post 80 content of this game. When i log on, i always turn up in the Keshetta Oasis for PvP, as PvP is what i really enjoy about AoC. However, i feel that the game right now is all about this god damn Oasis which no one seems to be able to leave. Sure, it's fun for an hour or so, to kill someone, get killed, ress, kill, get killed and so on. But thats about as far as the open world PvP reaches.
On rare occasions, you can have fun, somewhaqt even battles between an equal 6-10 players. But it's always ruined by the zergs who takes all the fun out of the PvP by massing in numbers making it boring/impossible to leave the guarded area.

What this game needs is more viable options for world-PvP, free from guards and zerg-tactics. I really doubt it will happen though, especially since the number of alliances and NAP's seem to grow larger by each day.

Back!

As i have been celebrating x-mas and new years IRL (new years on the hospital, in fact :)), the blog has been out of updates. But now that im back i will start writing again.

I have been getting some critique on the content of this blog, that it's too much gossip and too little information about stuff such as end-game etc. Even though my intention is to write more about the people and the happenings on the server (which some interprets as gosspi) i will try to document raids etc better this year :).

But first off; a MMO-serverfirst for me. I have never gotten an IRL-threat in an MMO-before, until today. Player Kimaro (alt. Pooko) of Argonauts (formerly Nova Krepusko, until he got kicked out) went psycho on me and on Nova Krepusko, first in global:



It translates: "i feel honoured being attacked by Nova Krepuskos whole guild, that they are not better hahahah... Fucking loosers". Thats one of many caps-locked idiocies he ranted on about for an hour.

Then he started sending me numerous of tells:



It translates: "If this would have been real you would have been so fucking dead, fucking bitch, fucking stockholm-faggot". After that he said that if i came to his hometown he would kill me, and later on he said he would look me up and come bash my skull in :).

So what to do about this? Petition it? Not sure how Funcom deals with threats etc made in swedish, but they are norwegian so i guess they will understand.

Anyway, if you see this guy Kimaro/Pooko, kill him. I will ^^.