Month: April 2013

Adding some torque to my storages

by Tharius

Well after a miserable showing in Shadowport I figured it was time to dress my storages so that they can at least come and help out in the nomagic maze.

So what to dress them in right?  Why not start with a newbietar set and build from there, after all it’s a lot easier to get 20 golden torques from Cernunnos than it is to get 20 devout scales of the alpha and omega.

I have to admit it was fun to get into Dunhill for a while, it really is a signature Herne area full of great descriptions and interesting details.

With a 15 minute repop Cern’s a pretty easy stake.  He’s tunnelled to 2 but of course you can fit a 3rd in once you’ve killed him once. Lots of things like spiders and wolves around to stay neutral on after the kill (Cern’s devout).  If you’re a new av, this run is well within your reach, even solo, just watch how much you flee since he’ll heal.

I was tempted to go hit Gaelcath for the fun of it, but maybe another day, time to do some more work on the item database 🙂

To Lord Xy .. Xyr … X!

by Tharius

So I’ve spent a little time playing with reroll scripts, some time playing with an item database, some time playing with levelling triggers, sorting storages, re-learning skills … one thing I haven’t been doing much of is getting out and stretching my legs on a run.

Now normally when I used to run it was somewhere that I had been with someone else, learned the run and then gained confidence by leading runs there myself.  That meant that if I didn’t know a run, I generally didn’t do it.

Shadowport is an area that is full of runs I didn’t do.  It’s a long way from home, it’s almost all no-recall, there’s DT’s and really, I’ve always been able to buy the equipment cheap enough, so why bother?

So today I set out to smack Lord Xyranthas around.  Wiz rings are still cheap, so why?  Well precisely because I never have.  I made it as far as the no-magic maze before I managed to kill off my entire crew.  A few supplications (oddly some of my characters finally used up their pre-shattering favour by supplicating without a new deity!!) and some healing and walking back and we’re ready for take 2.  This time … leave the magic users at the gate!!  Well, it started getting better, but still, not enough hitters to drop the mobs fast enough to avoid flees, deaths and repops.  After about 2 hours of trying to find the right rhythm I called it quits for today and let Lord X gloat.  It only motivates me to dress my storage rangers and warriors up in some dev gear to lend a hand at the no-magic maze and even though I didn’t come home with anything to show for it, I had fun trying something that I’d never done before.

In my past adventures it always seemed to be about the destinations … get into a guild, then an order, run the big mobs to get the seth equipment, try to stockpile it to trade for clan so that I could be good at questing and start glorying on insane DR and HP …. so I could sit idle and afk but very buff in my boredom!  I’m not saying that I intended it to be that way, it just seemed to happen that way.  Even imming was more about getting the level than it was about having something I wanted to contribute.  It was a destination not a journey.

Today was about a journey.  It doesn’t matter that the equipment is pretty easily bought, it’s not about increasing the numbers on the score sheet.  It’s the fun in going out and getting that equipment to make the score sheet improve.  When I think back to the old runs, the Guild of Druid Danbala runs really stand out even above the Seth, Merlin and Sin Olsen runs because they were a lot of fun.  Sure, we never came home with a sight, but it’s still there waiting for us to go have some fun and maybe it’ll show up.

I think that this new (to me) perspective will help keep the game fresh for me.  There are many, many challenges for me to explore and I hope to meet more fun people who want to explore them with me along the way.

Cheers!

A little sausage with your quest…

by Tharius

Destre thought we were all looking a bit peckish and she invited her friend Dibbler to come out and play with us.

Dibbler the sausage vendor says ‘Greetings hungry traveller’
Dibbler the sausage vendor says ‘I make sauage to die for, the finest sausage in all of Realms’
Dibbler the sausage vendor says ‘Just bring me the best quality body parts, from selected parts I can make you a Dibbler sausage on a bun’

 

Bring body parts back to Dibbler and get sausage on a bun, turn them in at the end, but only one of each part counts.

 

An eye sausage on a bun created for Tharius
A finger sausage on a bun created for Tharius
A hand sausage on a bun created for Tharius

 

Your glory has been increased by 3.

 

The lesson of today’s adventure was if you quest on a neutral character be prepared to zap and realign a lot … So I need to put some quest eq aside on a storage so I can fast realign and slice and dice next time 🙂

 

Thanks Destre!

A conference or meeting to discuss a particular subject.

by Tharius

Oh what’s the title about?  You’ll either have to ask Romani or bear with me a minute.

Once upon a time in the Realms of Despair I was part of both mortal councils simultaneously.  Tharius had been in the Newbie Council for years and Raemakoin became the Guild of Druids Symposium representative.  Later after imming and deimming, Tharius became the Symposium rep for Dragonslayers.

In casting about for ideas on how to participate in the Realms I remembered how much I enjoyed The Symposium so I had no hesitation in asking Romani if I could become an “at large” member.

I didn’t know how this would go over, certainly it’s been a long time and a lot of things in the Realms have changed that I am still not aware of, so a “not now” would not have been all that much of a surprise.

The mudmail went off to Beleth and Sunday night I logged in hoping to meet up for a quick interview after the regular meeting.  By the end of the meeting I was back in the Symposium and eager to get caught up.

Thanks Romani, Beleth, Stoneheft and anyone else who participated in this decision.

If you have ideas that you’d like to help develop and get into the game, feel free to drop the Symposium a line either by mailing one of the members directly or by posting on the TS board in the Town Hall.

The conversion is DEAD!!!

by Tharius

When you look inside the corpse of the conversion you see

a SQL database containing 2500 items up to 2002

(This is just a short note to say that the conversion was fairly labour intensive, but it went very well.)

I should cover this in case it’s interesting to someone in the future approaching the same sort of problem.  As far as I can see, and I’m only in the very earliest stages of verifying data, the decision that was made during the change over from “anti-” to “allowed: ” seems to have been as follows

  • Alignment conversion is trivial, it’s obvious how this works.
  • If an item was anti a particular class make it anti the new genre the class belongs to.  If something was anti-warrior make it allowed everything except fighter and so on.
  • Some items need touching up, the one that leaps to mind is “Sun, Moon and Stars”, but that was because it used a wear program to enforce it’s restriction against warriors but allowed rangers and paladins – from the conversion point of view, this is something different than anti’s.
  • There will be items that have changed over the last 10 years.  Again, not a conversion issue.

Now that the homework’s done, down to business!

by Tharius

For the last week or so I’ve been absolutely obsessed with my final homework assignment, so other than a little socializing and running reroll or semi-afk golding scripts I haven’t been doing very much on the Realms.

When last we checked in I had started working on modernizing an item database that I used extensively when I played before.  This program was originally written by a player named Daltorak (a close friend, I’ll respect his privacy here) and was shared with me when I started playing.  It didn’t take long before we added a ton of useful features to it.  One of the most useful modes of this program was the ability to play “Mr. Dressup”.  Put in your character’s stats and start choosing equipment to dress them in.  This mode was invaluable for setting goals or planning different builds.  This program was collaborative, both Warren and I would share databases via ICQ and merge them.  This was years before Alexian started sharing his database with anyone.

The fact that I can use this program today and still get tremendous utility out of it is a testament to Daltorak’s original design.

What else was this great for?  Oh, any “find the item” type quest.  With nearly 2,500 entries spanning from old clan to (at the time) current, it was very hard to stump us for an item… foods, drinks, keys, scraps, whatever, we probably had it.  When we started importing the output of c ‘locate object’ and auction channel the database ballooned (these were the days before donation rooms were no-locate).

So where am I at?  I have set up a SQL database with the structure of what I think will model Realms items nicely.  Today I installed Turbo Pascal 5.5 into a VirtualBox session so that I could convert the existing database out to a comma separated spreadsheet.  You don’t appreciate how far OSes have come until you go back and do some serious text manipulation in a DOS editor… I’m telling you!!  This is almost complete and then I have to try to write an import script to the new database.  This won’t be too hard, but might be labour intensive and might reveal some flaws in my otherwise perfect plan 🙂  The item formats are in the pre-Shattering format, that is items might be “anti-good” instead of “allowed: good neutral” so a tremendous amount of verification will be needed to bring it up to a level I’ll be satisfied with it, but for now, not so bad.

Oh, yes, it is my plan that most of the database features will be available publicly … why wouldn’t I want to share and collaborate?  Exactly what form that’s going to be in is still to be determined, but feel free to comment and let me know what YOU’d like to see.

 

Rediscovering the Realms

by Tharius

Over the last few days I’ve been reading a lot of websites; RoDpedia, Nelkum‘s, Tokai‘s, GoV and Silverwolf sites all get a shout out here.

I saw that set items have come into the Realms and being a collector of such things in Diablo 2 and 3, this immediately caught my attention.  The Guise of the Falcon set in particular, with a piece of useful face equipment seemed like a reasonable goal to chase; designed to be handled solo and a not bad reward for the effort; the downside, coughing up 5 million gold coins and a jade strand!!

I’ve been getting to know some people over at Arete, one of them, Raja, was up for a run so I suggested we go hit Jade.  In short order Raja, Feitt and I schlepped over to Seth’s Fortress to layeth the smack down.  I managed to forget to switch styles and start quaffing heals when she switched the tank to me and I died on the 2nd kill, but c’est la vie.  Jade took a real shine to Feitt and loved on him for most of the 3 kills but kudos to him for staying alive on his first “big” mob run 🙂

Thanks guys!  Looking forward to doing it again soon.

Getting my feet on the ground

by Tharius

It’s amazing how many of the commands and how many details of the Realms I instantly recalled.  It didn’t take too long to track down Arca who has been keeping my chars alive for years.  Only a few autodeleted, like Raspberry the Paladin and Darhma the Thief (Darmha and Tharius were mudmarried back when she was Julie’s thief).  A big thanks to Raveyn and Kyrna of the Order of Arete for helping with that.

Unsurprisingly in the years that Turlough held the characters and the years since that Arca has held them, a lot of the equipment has been shuffled around, used elsewhere, traded, sold or whatever.  In all fairness, if I held someone’s characters for a decade I’d think of them as mine and do pretty well what I pleased too.  Notwithstanding, by shuffling things around I’ve got several very usable characters ready to use.

So the big question was do I rejoin the Order of Dragonslayer?  I felt at home there, once upon a time, and since I still had Claws of the Wyrm on my hands I thought it was a no brainer to go ahead and rejoin.  I remember Sophie and Joe from Guild of Druid runs to Danbala (and elsewhere) and think well of them, I’ve had no problems with either of them and I haven’t been around if there have been controversies.

Something I realize in coming back to the game is that I’m looking for a social environment.  I joined and left Diablo 3 clans for that reason, I can play well enough alone but I am looking for some comradeship.  When it comes to Realms I enjoy exploring and running.  It’s ok to spend 3 hours and only come home with a green line of text because that’s the game.  Not really all that different than Diablo farming in that regard, you’re building up characters and using them to take you further into the game.

In the first few days back I was very excited to be back and active.  I wanted to jump back into running and to help rebuild Dragonslayer.  Hell if I had my way I’d also build a Facebook app out of the Flash MUD client on the Realms main page and herald a new flow of players into the Realms.  I got re-inducted, asked for and got wiki access and proceeded to straighten out some of my characters.

It’s times like this that I get myself into trouble.  I take on too much, get disappointed when I don’t get big results, give up and move on.  I’ve learned a few things along the way and I have to take a breath and acknowledge some things to myself; the current situation is not my fault and no one expects me to fix it, I contribute best when I am engaged and that it’s okay to just want to participate and set my own goals in the game.

While getting organized I chummed with Raveyn and Arca a fair amount, naturally.  I came to acknowledge that in the time I was online there were always a number of active Arete around who have been pretty friendly thus far.  Simultaneously with the exception of 2 old friends, I have seen very few Dragonslayers online.  Lounging at the Summit was a frequent activity, back in the day, but there were always people coming or going.

When I was asked if I’d like to apply to Arete I really had a moral crisis.  I want to help Dragonslayer rebuild, the order was good to me and I think it’d be very satisfying to see it active but I’ve come to question whether I am at a point where I’m able to help.  Yes, I can be around and be active but with my current commitments to family, school and work I don’t think I should make any serious time commitments.  Next, I need to relearn the runs and learn to play at competitive level like I did in the past.  That means I need mentors to learn from or else it will be a very long process.  As much as it stinks, I don’t see a mentor like that in DS for me.  Yes, some of the players who are playing in DS could fill that role, but if we’re not on at the same time or miss each other, then it doesn’t work out.

I understand there’s been some housecleaning of old, inactive characters (ha, like me!) but more than that, there seems to have been an exodus a little while ago to Arete.  I have heard bits and pieces about this and I believe there are hurt feelings among those directly involved, so all I’ll say here is that my decision to leave Dragonslayer and join Arete was purely based on my own situation and not a reflection of what has gone on over the last few months (especially).  If I could have kept a foot in both orders I would have but neither order allows it.  Perhaps I should have held off on the request for re-induction or for the wiki access so that there’d be no question of my motives.  I wish DS all the best and if I can still contribute from Arete, I’m happy to help.  Creemore, Sophie, Joe, I hope there are no hard feelings and I hope that we will run together soon.

 

There and back again …

by Tharius

After many years away I decided to check out what’s been going on with the Realms of Despair.  I was active in the game from about 1998-2003 or so and returning after so much time has been quite the experience.

I logged in on Thursday April 4, 2013 and created a new character, hoping to find either someone I knew or perhaps even the keeper of my old characters.  It wasn’t long before I found Zistrosk, the Guildmaster of the Guild of Druids, who has been a friend of many years.  With a loaner avatar from him I was freed from the constant need for food and drink, a simple but annoying part of pre-avatar life!

Even logging in and sitting at Guild of Druids recall brought back a flood of memories.  When I regularly played in 2002 I was engaged to a lady who also played the Realms, known as Aurale.  When we broke off our engagement I simply left the realms and didn’t find a way to play the game on my own again.  It seems odd after all this time that I would have to face that, but that’s exactly what came to the surface … mourning an old relationship that we both have moved far past as if it was still fresh.  I also had memories surface of the time I spent with the immortal Julie off the MUD and my grief when she died but I did mourn her back then and so while sad, the hurt was an old one and perhaps better healed.  I have to admit, it was the hardest part of rejoining the Realms.

There are many, many friends who are no longer in the realms; people from the Guilds of Druids and Rangers, from the Order of Dragonslayers, from the Symposium or the Newbie Council, the immortals I was acquainted with, heck even people who were just characters everyone knew.  So here’s a little shout out to some of them, drop me a line if you ever visit: Alisia, Illiana, Shingo, Pheayre, Hoerkin, Xopus, Forgrim, Dirca, Hawpch, Linda, Edmond … The list grows all the time as I wander the Realms, wherever you are, I hope you are all doing well.