eFriends Make Me Wiggle

It happened today. The point where you meet one or more people within an MMO and that seals the deal. You will be playing it for a while just for the simple fact that you want to hang out with them.

Judging by all the previous MMOs that I stayed playing for more than a week other players were probably the deciding factor. The kind of people that will play with you until the wee hours of the morning regardless of the fact that you are drunk off your ass and incessantly typing retarded ass jokes (hey, they were funny at the time). That's how I met a good interwebz friend of mine named Zeathen. That night was a little fuzzy but we were on Vent talking all kinds of shit. All I have to say is that pizza guy was one great American that night. I loved him six ways from Sunday. One of those nights of supreme nerdness that will live on forever in the halls of dorkdom.

Amazingly I met my new found eFriends in my second group since I started playing. My wife likes to call me a social butterfly, which makes me twitch (not to be confused with being made to wiggle, more on that in a second) but it could be an appropriate label.

For the most part I like my friends to be in my computer. That way when they do something stupid, become annoying etc. I can just turn them off. Something about MMOs brings out the chatter box in me. /shrug

So we were in some place near the human city, Ahkma I think, and just jibber jabbering about whatever came to mind when a female Dark Elf runs by. I have always liked the Victorian look on a woman. The corset top thingy majigger and the big dress just do something for me. I felt the need to just blurt out my idea that Dark Elf females were hot and they make me wiggle. The rest of the night was all about this new expression. I think that is what set it off and really broke the ice with the group.

All in all it was a fun night. I haven't had that sort of social interaction with a group of fellow gamers for a long time.

Regardless of the game play and innovative features a developer includes in whatever MMO if you don't ever make friends it will truly never be fun.

Monster Kill and You

First off I would like to say that Monster Kill, or M.Kill, is your friend. What it essentially does is reward you for grinding.



Some people may cringe at the 'grind' word.



/gasp

You GRIND!? Terrible game! BAD!



Well, so far Cathaal is level 20 and I have been grinding almost exclusively. There is something about Rohan Online that makes grinding not that bad. The devs implemented this great system that lets you take baby steps in terms of XP. Essentially the M.Kill number gives you intermediate goals to look forward to throughout a level. Every 20 mobs you kill a HUGE XP bonus is thrown in your direction.




20th kill = 7 times the XP

40th kill = 10 times the XP

60th kill = 13 times the XP

80th kill = 16 times the XP

100th kill = 19 times the XP


So, while you are leveling you end up looking forward to those huge jumps in XP and will actually seek out a mob that is very hard in order to get the biggest jump possible. Under level 20 you will get as much as half a level or more on your 100th kill.

The funny part is when you are one kill away from getting your M.Kill bonus a bell rings to let you know that the next time you kill something you are getting the bonus so make it count. When that happens I start to salivate.

MmmmmMMmmm, Pavlov.

Rohan: First Impressions

So, I fired Rohan Online up and decided to create a mage with aspirations to eventually go down the warlock path.

Why warlock?

Warlock just sounds awesome. Slaynn the mighty WARLOCK of dOOm!1!!one!1!!eleventy!!!!111 MuahAHhAhAhAH!!!1!!!

I ended up using Cathaal for his name. I suppose that will do. Correction to the above, Cathaal the WARLOCK of d00m!1!!1!

Anywho, the noob area is pretty bland but effective. With some of these free games the translation is pretty ghetto fabulous and you walk away from some of the quests thinking to yourself, "WTF am I supposed to do?." Not so with Rohan. The translation is pretty good. It's done well enough to get the reader involved in the quest lines and story.

The clicky crap still irks me, however. Clicking to do everything is just so limiting and frustrating. The play style is a lot like Diablo except for the fact that the camera doesn't follow your character so you can click on a mob, run away to get some distance, hit your attack skills and your character will turn around and engage the target without the screen moving. This makes you have to manually move the camera so you can see whats going on.

Overall, so far, it's a pretty good game. I would have to give my first impression rating a 6 out of 10. Enough to keep me interested for a while longer but nothing to write home about.

Gonna Give Rohan a Spin

I spent last night perusing many of the MMO sites that are out there. Here are a few that I use to keep up on the ever expanding free to play or F2P games out there:

Free MMO Gamer

MMOFury

MMOHub

There are more but most of em will have the same stuff that you can find on any of those.

So after checking those sites out looking for my next addiction I found a game called Rohan. I was only able to log on for a minute this morning before real life called my name and I had to leave for work but it looked pretty decent. The only thing that irked me in the beginning is that it uses the typical Asian made click-to-do-everything interface that I hate. Maybe I'm not used to it but you always end up running near mobs (monsters) when you are trying to select them and they move. It adds such a clunky separated feel to the game interaction compared to using WASD to move.

Regardless I'm gonna give it a spin after work today to see if the rest of the gameplay makes up for the awful clicky stuff.