Bookahneer’s Geekwatch (December 12, 2011)

Welcome to today’s Bookahneer’s Geekwatch! The place about miscellaneous interesting news related to gaming (will most likely include at least one piece about Guild Wars 2 ^^).

Let’s start today’s Geekwatch with Lotro. We’ve just received update 5 which gives us the second half of the expansion that launched in September. Since I’m not playing Lotro much, I haven’t actually cared about what’s in the update too much. I know it’s new instances and a new raid. In case you’re interested and for some reason haven’t found them yet, here are the patch notes (and the known issues). An interesting bit of information is hidden inside and fortunately, Doc Holiday posted about it: The plugins finally got a plugin manager! That’s one thing I really wanted Turbine to add. It’s just not so nice to have to use a third party plugin for all that stuff. I’ve only tested it shortly and one plugin worked while another didn’t but I guess that’s because I haven’t updated them in quite some time. ;) I guess that also means that I’ll have to update my Lotro plugins guide. If you want to have a look, ignore the part about needing a plugin manager and ignore the part about the plugins leading to crashes. ;)

And finally, a giveaway posted at Casual Stroll to Mordor: Win Turbine Points! I am not going to participate because I don’t need any points. But I’m sure it’ll make a few players out there very happy. :)

Next on the list: Warhammer Online. Though the poor game isn’t getting any good news, I’m afraid. Or maybe they are good news for the remaining players. Mythic announced two more server merges on Wednesday. After that, we’ll have 1 US server, 1 European server, 1 German server (technically European as well but we do like our own language too much… ^^) and 1 Russian server (not operated by Mythic, I think). Werit has posted a bit more about WAR. Tobold also writes about this and poor SWG. I found this spot-on. SWTOR kills SWG and maybe even Warhammer Online. We’ll see in a month or two. ;)

Let’s switch over to Everquest 2. This game just went “free-er to play” after having had a f2p server for about a year or so. Now you can access all servers. I returned, especially because they made a few changes to their f2p-system. This now is the third try I’ve given EQ2, by the way (in case you remember me asking How many chances do you give a game? some time ago). I wasn’t too happy with any of the available free races but started playing one anyway. After Sony’s hacking fiasco, I’d gotten 400 Station Cash, though, and figured that I could upgrade to silver and buy myself the race pack that includes ratongas. I couldn’t find the silver pack anywhere in the shop and was disappointed only to find out that apparently, Sony had granted all accounts, including previous trial and f2p accounts, the upgrade to silver! So I already do have all those benefits. I quickly bought 500 more Station Cash and am now the happy owner of three races: ratonga, Iksar (lizard ladies! I already made my “Gechi” – and was very happy to see that this name wasn’t taken yet on Freeport and ogres. I was certain I wouldn’t care about the ogres at all but they do have a certain charme. I might make one later. So far, I have Tenedra (whom you can see on the picture on the right), a wizard ratonga and a ratonga swashbuckler. I also have said iksar (guardian) but haven’t played her yet. I’ll most likely continue playing Tenedra. If you’re curious about all the pros and cons of EQ2’s f2p version, head over to Player vs. Developer who wrote a great post about it. This is also the first f2p game that I ever spent money on, I think. And Guild Wars (though it doesn’t count because it’s not a real f2p game to begin with… ^^).

Last but not least: Guild Wars 2 and their lack of news. Sadly. Though I’m just impatiently shuffling my feet here. Hunters Insight reminded me of Eric Flannum’s post again:
“All that being said we’re definitely getting closer, we’ll be revealing the final profession before the end of the year, and we’ve got a few other things to talk about in the coming weeks as well.”

There aren’t too many days left and as Hunters Insight says, they probably (hopefully?) won’t want to tell us all about the last class during the holidays. I also got curious when I saw Massively announce the IRC chat with Jon Peters and Johnathan Sharp on Wednesday. Maybe there’ll be a lot of questions to ask then? Maybe we’ll finally get to hear something new about Guild Wars 2?

All I know is that I don’t care much about SWTOR. It’s not my kind of game. Instead, as you might have noticed, I got sucked into EQ2 and am now exploring this game while anxiously peeking at Twitter, waiting for some official tweet from GW2. ;)