The Dallemagnes → Games

The Case for Adding An Experience Gain Toggle in the WOW UI

World of Warcraft Loading Screen
World of Warcraft Loading Screen

When I first started playing WOW, during Wrath of the Lich King, the previous expansions weren’t yet bundled. This meant that I had to purchase each expansion if I wanted to enjoy them. Because both myself and my husband were playing, this was a bit expensive as it meant buying each expansion pack twice.

So, we decided that our best course of action was to play each expansion to it’s fullest before purchasing the next one. It worked out great for us. Since we didn’t yet have Burning Crusade, our level was capped at 60 until we bought it. Once we hit level 60, rather than immediately purchasing the next expansion we continued to quest and do content available to us in order to fully experience things. Granted it wasn’t exactly a vanilla experience, but it gave us time to enjoy things before moving on and being inundated with new zones, crafting, and features. It was actually quite an enjoyable experience.  We got to enjoy the storylines and dungeons without fear of quickly out leveling the content and we maxed out our characters as best we could before moving on.

I specifically remember have a blast in Burning crusade, the stories have stuck with me and the hours we spent exploring the various zones in outland were very memorable. We didn’t feel pressured to move on since our levels were capped at 70 anyway and we were able to take our time and really get a feel for that part of the game.

I don’t recall exactly when Blizzard began bundling previous expansions into the base game, however what I do know is that this bundling had the effect of removing an obvious solution to problem that some new players face, leveling too quickly & missing content.

While the option exists to go to Stormwind or Orgrimmar and disable experience gain, it is not at all obvious to new players and for players leveling alts its inconvenient. I can’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be an easier way to disable/enable leveling built into the user interface.

Personally, I know I enjoy the leveling experience and I enjoy it most when it’s not a cake walk. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Given the option the disable leveling in an easily accessible way I would most likely use it much more often to enjoy the available pve content before moving on to higher level content. Level scaling is great at giving you the option to level in a variety of more places, but it also compounds the issue of missing out on content because it’s no longer relevant to you. Recently while leveling an alt, I was able to skip the whole of cataclysm because I chose to spend that time in Pandaria. Had I been a new player I would have never really even known about those zone because they were made irrelevant to me.

I understand that a lot of players simply want to get to the most current content and that’s fantastic, however, I believe that some tools for those of us who enjoy the journey a bit more, should be made more easily accessible and explained it bit better.

Perhaps upon reaching level cap for a certain expansion you get a notification informing you that you can disable experience gain in order continue the zones with an easy to toggle option in the character panel.

WOW has a ton of content and seeing it now, even if it isn’t the most recent or current content, is still an amazing experience for new players as well as those of us who really enjoy journey, giving us the ability to disable experience gain in an easily accessible way would really go a long way to ensuring some of the content is enjoyed by at least some new players as well as those players who still really enjoy experiencing the content (even for the 50th time).

Enjoying a Week off School & Playing WOW

World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth Logo
World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth Logo

So I’m between semesters at the moment. Summer just ended, and fall starts next Monday. Lucky for me since the World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion just lunched. That means I can spend some time enjoying the game. Mark has been busy enjoying an event in Overwatch, so it’s just me. I had three Max level characters during legion, all alliance, a mage, warlock and druid. I only level my mage with Mark so I’ve been focusing on my Warlock. I haven’t started BFA with my druid yet.

Just the other day I was fishing in Boralus, and managed to fish up a Great Sea Ray, which in turn gave me the achievement We’re Going to Need More Saddles. It wasn’t necessarily something I was actively working but I’m happy about it none-the-less, the reward for getting that achievement was the Jade Pandaren Kite String Mount. Then not more then 10 minutes later, I fished up another Great Sea Ray which I decided to send to Mark.  I do enjoy fishing, so if I get another I’ll be posting it on the Auction hall.

All in all it’s shaping up to be a pretty relaxing week with some enjoyable game time.

 

Screenshot of Warlock in Wow Fishing up mounts.

Screenshot of Warlock in Wow Fishing up mounts.

 

LFG

Trying to find a tank and/or healer when your DPS is a pain in the ass. That said I do love playing….

Zentia

Lately I’ve been finding myself perusing the MMO Market. Maybe it’s just a listlessness because for the most part all MMO’s are starting to feel the same, just with a different lore behind it. I’m trying to be as patient as possible but the more information that is released about Guild Wars 2 the harder time I’m having being happy with my current MMO choices. I have been quite happily playing Lord of the Rings online. Just being in Middle Earth more than makes up for the games quirks. Since I already have one max level character I haven’t really been playing so much.

Recently I read a review over at Massively about a little game that is both quite new to

LOTRO Going Free to play & pylotro

Well Lord of the rings online is going free to play on the 10th of September. Some of us over at the Ubuntu forums were wondering if pylotro would be updated. So I email the developer and asked him and he has since posted over at the forums that he indeed plans on updating pylotro for the change. So good news for all you linux loving lotro players, including me!

LOTRO & DDO on Kubuntu 10.04

I wanted to share how I have gotten both Lord of the Rings Online & Dungeons & Dragons Online Eberron Unlimited working on my Kubuntu 10.04 install

My Methods will require you to either have a copy of windows running in virtualbox or a dualboot with a working LOTRO install.
First I downloaded pylotro Though the program is called pylotro it is a launcher for both LOTRO & DDO. I also download and installed wine. My current working version is 1.2-rc1

  1. I used the regular download manager from turbine in Virtualbox and downloaded both LOTRO & DDO . You should make sure to do full download of all game files, be forewarned it could take a while.
  2. I created a folder called Turbine in
    /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/
  3. Using grsync I copied everything from
    C:\Program Files\Turbine\
    to
    /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine
  4. Using winetricksI installed
    • win2k
    • gecko
    • vcrun2003
    • vcrun2005
    • vcrun2005sp1
  5. I then installed pylotro in wine
  6. Once I ran pylotro I had to go into the settings and point it to my LOTRO and DDO installs. While I wasn’t able to patch DDO I can play it just fine. With LOTRO I was able to patch and everything runs just fine.
  7. Note You’ll have 2 folders(1 if you only play LOTRO or only play DDO) in your /home directory called
    Dungeons and Dragons Online
    and
    The Lord of the Rings Online
    These would generally be the folders that would appear in your Documents
    folder in windows.This folder will normally hold your
    UserPreferences.ini file along with your lotro.keymap file. For reference HERE is a copy my UserPreferences.ini file

I haven’t had any sound issues and my game seems to run fine. Of course I
don’t use pulseaudio being on kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. One thing I
did notice is that settings aren’t saved to the ini file so if you say
adjust your sound one session then log and come back later your need to
readjust them. I worked around this but just editing the volume settings
in the actual UserPreferences.ini file instead of using the in game
options.

NWN2 On Ubuntu

I’m running Neverwinter Nights 2 with wine on my new rig

  • Systemax PC
  • CPU: AMD Athlon 64×2 4400
  • RAM: 3 GB DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)
  • Display: Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS

I installed using the 7 Disk PC/CD version in order to get it working I had to use winetricks I installed the following with winetricks:

  • DirectX9 (not d3dx9 but the actual DirectX9)
  • dotnet20
  • vcrun2005
  • vcrun2005sp1

in order to update to the latest version I ran

/home/angel/.wine/drive_c/windows/regedit.exe

and changed the value of

HKey_Local_Machine>Software>Obsidian>NWN2>Neverwinter>NWUpdate

from 0 to 1

The only issue I had was that the game only recognized a resolution of 1024×768 so I had to edit

/home/angel/Neverwinter Nights 2/nwn2.ini

manually and put in my 1600×900 resolution. All this info I found at The Wine Appdb.

I hope this information helps other people.