Cav's Place

With my characters at level 44, I thought it was time to follow up on my previous post on the issue and answer some more of the questions people who end up here after searching for information about Forsaken World seem to have, judging from the keywords used. Then again, it’s also time to do it because yesterday was the first time I seriously weighed the frustration the game causes against how sorry I’d feel for all the work so far if I’d quit. The frustration lost, but just barely, so don’t think it’ll be long now. Then again, this moment came after about three weeks back when I played Perfect World International, but it was three or four more weeks until I actually quit, and since it only came after about seven weeks now, who knows how long it will really be… But the rule remains that me and MMO games really don’t get along, so the end result is inevitable and I knew that all too well even before deciding to start playing.

By far the most common questions are about the locations of elite monsters, for gem shards, the Fleet of Myth merchants and gearing up in general. Out of those, I think I need to say a little about the first, since I didn’t cover it in the previous post: If you want the exact locations of elites, go look on some sites dedicated to the game, such as those I linked to in the previous post or some of the better guild sites, but I quite frankly don’t see why you’d need them. Elites are always in an area where other monsters of the same type also are, usually in a spot that can be indentified in some way, such as next to a landmark or somewhat more unusual object or in a cul-de-sac, they’re slightly bigger, aggressive and don’t wander around. And each of them seems to have just two possible spawn spots on the first maps, though I’m finding more starting from Lunagrant Woodland, and the spots are usually close to each other. It’s really not hard to find them, and you generally only need to know of one or two to get what you need anyway.
As for the other two common issues, all I can think to add to my previous post is that there are some other Fleet of Myth merchants on top of the “main” ones, those I noticed so far being one that wanders on the road in front of Fort Rotulor and one that stands on a pier in the Sea of Oblivion area, on the side with the Water Observatory and very close to an elite spawn spot. The first one sells all of three items, but the second is extremely important to artisans, weaponsmiths and armorsmiths, because he seems to sell pretty much every blue recipe for those professions. Otherwise, though I think I covered gearing up well enough already, I forgot to mention that, as far as I know, off-hand items can only be obtained through crafting, or of course by purchasing them from artisans, as they can’t be bought from any NPC and no monsters or bosses drop them.

The fourth most common question deals with an issue I haven’t bumped into so far. I may be able to answer, but since I’m not perfectly sure I understand I’d rather not, and won’t say what it’s about either so I won’t have even more people coming here for that answer. So let me move on to the fifth, which is another weird one, specifically the location of Charlie’s Tavern. Admittedly, it can be a bit confusing if you look at the map because for some reason it’s listed as Toteu’s Tavern, but you can get a quest the moment you end up in Freedom Harbor to go to the Tavern, so just click the target’s name and get there. But if you want details, it’s on a ship moored in Freedom Quay, next to the Fleet of Myth merchants and Matthew the teleporter. In the previous post I was saying that these NPCs are next to it, assuming everyone knew where the Tavern was, but it seems I was wrong.

Moving on, let me quickly go through the other issues mentioned several times, though noticeably less than the ones listed above…
If the launcher won’t start, open Task Manager and see if you have a process called patcher.exe in there. If it is, end it and try again, as sometimes it simply decides to freeze for no reason. If you keep trying to open it without ending the previous frozen process, it will just keep freezing each and every time until you either go to end all of the frozen instances of patcher.exe or reboot. If you have any other problem that has to do with the game not starting, really, check the forums. There are plenty of topics there about it, some even set to “sticky”, which can offer some solutions. They don’t seem to work for all, but they do appear to work for many. Just know that the game uses an outdated engine and therefore will have issues with new hardware and software, so you may notice worse performance with a new and powerful CPU and video card than with older ones and should expect some odd behavior under Windows 7 or any 64-bit operating system. Some people were saying that the engine the game’s based on is no less than eight years old, so go figure…
About the artisan job, as I said above, it’s very important because, as far as I know, it’s the only way to get off-hand gear into the game. But, like any crafting job, it’s notoriously difficult to level. Unlike weaponsmith and armorsmith, you can level it without actually producing gear, since you can make medals, but it also requires far more job experience to gain a level than those do. For example, if you just want to take it to level 2 by crafting medals, you need to make 125 of them, which means mining or buying exactly 1875 copper!
Another issue had to do with crafting, more or less in general, and yet another with soul gems. Yes, crafting gear is very difficult in this game. Not only do you need a lot of basic materials, but some very rare ones as well every single time you try to craft something. For artisan, you need the rare soul gems or the even rarer soul crystals, depending on whether you want to make green or blue gear, while for weaponsmith and armorsmith you need various items that can only be obtained by scavengers, so you need something to be broken apart in order to make something else. Now don’t ask me where can one obtain soul crystals because the only ones I saw so far were being sold for utterly insane prices, but some monsters can, extremely rarely, drop soul gems, and it also seems that you can earn some if you do the Battle on the Auriana (or Harbor Crisis) event plenty of times. I only got exactly one soul gem so far, after killing a Desert Robber, but there is a forum topic that points out the other options.
Next, there seem to be some questions about the Harbor Guide (or Find the Place) daily quest… Really don’t know what’s there to ask about that. You get the picture and the locator and, if you know where the place in the picture is, you go there and activate the locator. Something like a piece of parchment will appear, slowly spinning in the air, in the exact spot where you should activate it when you do, so if you’re close but not close enough for it to count you’ll be able to see just where you need to stand. Otherwise, if you don’t know where the spot is, you can keep activating the locator and it will tell you in which direction it is, so you can then check the map and try to figure it out better. There aren’t too many spots you can be sent to find, maybe around 12 or so, but it provides some experience and helps you get some footprint cards.
And now come the questions about leveling… Quite frankly, I’ve been having these characters since the open beta launched, made them as soon as the servers were up, and I’m just level 44, so don’t expect any advice on how to level quickly from me. In fact, what you’ll get from me when it comes to that is raised eyebrows and various phrases along the lines of “stop and smell the roses”. But, if you insist, of course the main way to level is God’s Trial. Do that every day, with a Lionheart Scroll active the whole time you’re inside, and you’ll go a long way, at least until level 40 or so. Past that, do your daily quests, look in the quest finder and go through everything with “Experience” as type, starting from those with a starting level closest to yours and working your way down through the rest if you still have time, and then you also have kill orders and, after level 30, the random adventurer quests and adventurer’s guild scrolls. And, since somebody was specifically wondering about leveling a vampire quickly, all I can tell you is that you’ll need a huge amount of drinks and possibly also mana potions, because vampires are outstanding at taking care of themselves and doing a whole lot of things alone, but they do so slowly, burning mana like crazy if you try to do anything quickly.
Lastly, people seem to also be wondering about the merchant job and merchant runs. All the merchant job does is allow you to learn merchant skills, which will allow you to earn more from merchant runs. As for those runs, it seemed to me that the little tutorial received during the first one should be enough for anyone to understand what they need to do, as long as they pay attention. You simply buy an item sold cheaply by one merchant and sell it to another who buys it at a high price, so you need to learn what the best places to buy and sell are and also keep an eye on the price variations, as they can make a difference even if they generally seem minor. You can’t teleport using normal trackstones and can’t use Town Portal while on a merchant run, and I believe you can’t join instances either, so know your way around and keep going from one merchant to the next until you hit the goal listed in the trade tab in your inventory. At that point, head back and talk to Christopher, who’ll see what profit you made, deducting the starting capital he gave you from your funds at the end. The reward consists of soul coins, merchant job experience and Mercury reputation and depends strictly on the profit you made, not being fixed per run or anything else along those lines. Keep in mind that you can store somewhat more than the goal, but can’t keep buying after you meet the goal, so if you want to truly make the most of it, try to complete one trade when you’re just short of the goal, being able to do another in order to take yourself to the maximum possible profit and therefore the maximum possible rewards.

Meant to go through some of those that were mentioned less too, but this is far too long already so I’ll continue some other time perhaps.

As usual, if the first post of the week is a personal one, it’s even harder to write anything non-personal that week. So, once again, I won’t. Countering last week’s two proper posts with these two this week I guess. Maybe next week I’ll manage to write two proper ones again, but who knows. Looked through my drafts and saw one that’s been sitting there for some three and a half years that I’d like to get to write about alongside the one about Forsaken World that’s already scheduled for next week, but if I wouldn’t have liked to write about it before as well it wouldn’t be in drafts in the first place, yet since it’s still there after all this time…
But speaking of Forsaken World, I should be playing it right now because, though I rushed last night to finish all the Sea of Oblivion quests with Kalee as well, I didn’t even do my dailies for today and it’s evening already. And I should also quickly run to do a little main quest part so I’ll get another weapon too, because her weapon is badly damaged, God’s Trial opens shortly and losing your weapon during that is a pretty bad thing. Not that there’s any moment when losing your weapon wouldn’t be a bad thing, but you know what I mean, right?

Meanwhile, this crowd brings tears to my eyes. Unfortunately, as usual, I can’t actually cry, but that’s another issue. Ended up there after Remus Cernea started promoting Blind Guardian‘s concert that will take place here on May 1st and I snooped around a little. Mostly just reminded myself why I quickly gave up on the idea of listening to them when I tried to a few years ago, but they do have a few songs that I actually like, one of them being just The Bard’s Song… And then you have such crowds that just take your breath away. You know that you have a truly legendary song when you have tens of thousands of people practically singing it for you perfectly in tune all the way from start to end! And there’s also what happened when they sang Valhalla in that concert, with the crowd repeating the chorus, which admittedly consists of only a few words, for basically three and a half minutes straight, bar some 20 seconds after they supposedly ended the song.

I’ll be leaving you now. This was just something thrown here to get two posts in this week, after all. Not that I’m doing much of anything today. Didn’t even clean my room as I tend to do when I’m alone, especially if it’s been more than ten days since the last time I did it, since I just don’t feel like doing anything. Even started whimpering and said “just leave me alone already” out loud when I saw the note my parents left on the kitchen table when they left to my grandparents this morning… And keep putting off spraying something on the areas where mold appeared again for over a month now, especially since it’s not in all the areas it usually appeared in anymore and it doesn’t seem to be spreading any further.

You’re used to Sunday rants, but this week I’ll make it a little early. Maybe I’ll manage to write a non-personal post as the second one, but I wrote three of those in a row so I guess I’m entitled to just rant a little more now. And I will even if I’m not anyway, because I feel like it. Or, more exactly, I don’t quite feel like anything else and if you’re going to more or less be curled up in a ball you may as well write about it, right? So that’s what I’m going to do, though it’ll be written in bits and pieces over the course of the day and you’ll just get the result when I decide it’s done.

What I should perhaps be doing right now is adding Portal 2 reviews to the MobyGames aggregator, since I’m sure there are lots and lots of them already published. In fact, there are a few other games that have recently been submitted that I should be submitting reviews for, but keep putting it off and I guess it’s only going to get worse. Not that the approvers seem particularly concerned with approving such additions, since I currently have 61 in queue, the oldest from April 8, despite slacking off lately. Then again, there were times when I had well over 100 in queue even though the approvers were getting to them rather quickly, so if you think of it like that it does show that I’ve been slacking off.
Otherwise, I should be playing Forsaken World. My characters are level 42 now and only Calad finished the whole main quest chain from the Sea of Oblivion area, though even he still has a few side quests to do there. Kalee is just starting the level 36 part of the main quest chain and has several more side quests left to do on top of that. Then again, it’s been far worse before, so I’m not particularly worried about that, but do want to explore the Lunagrant Woodland area before I completely lose my interest, because I want to submit two screenshots of landmarks from that region as well for the game’s entry on MobyGames. As for today in particular, really need to have Calad gather some plants and brew potions for the Rosemason Collection quest for both of them, since it requested something that I can do so there’s no reason not to. His alchemy needs any help it can get anyway, since I don’t use it for anything else, being as stingy with my potions as I am in any game. Actually even started to sell food and drinks that I got for free, from the daily Cooking Tutorial quest, because my inventory is just full of them and, as expected, I rarely use any.

So why am I not doing those things? Because I feel like crap, as expected. Also as frightened about the usual things as expected. Shouted for help a few times and got nothing in return, so I’ll just be here curled up in a ball and going crazy. Or more crazy than I already am, that is. Can’t get myself to even say anything to anyone, but it’s not like I have to anyway. A couple of details may be different, but the general idea is the same, so it’s known anyway. Basically haven’t even been checking my e-mail at all in a week, just logging on twice during this time to delete the messages I had no reason to fear reading… And I tend to fear pretty much anything these days.
What’s currently making all of that even worse is the drilling that once again started in the building as soon as it warmed up again outside. It was really bad a few days ago, when they went at it nearly the entire day, but now somebody started going at it again just as I wanted to take a nap, since I only slept for perhaps some five and a half hours. It feels like it turns my brain into minced meat! Not to mention the simple fact that it doesn’t let me sleep if it starts in the morning, as it did a few days ago, or in the evening, when I may want to nap, as is the case right now. If I’m at the computer I can put some music on and turn the headphones up to cover that dreadful sound, even though that’s not healthy either and implies that I can’t watch something or that it may be a little hard to play Forsaken World during that time, but at least it’s manageable. But if I’d like to sleep or perhaps to just sit and think, this makes it impossible!

If this is this week’s first post, the second should come before Sunday for once, because it seems very likely that I’ll be alone this Sunday and it’s therefore even less likely that I’ll manage to write something properly then, when I’ll try to make at least a little out of the time alone. At best, I could perhaps manage to write an environmental post tomorrow, for Earth Day, but that doesn’t seem likely right now. It may be a better idea to have my “monthly computer maintenance day” tomorrow, since it really should be this week and I keep putting it off, and then really struggle to cover one of the other issues that are currently swimming through my mind on Saturday.
Next week I should write another post about Forsaken World, trying to answer some more questions implied by the keywords people used to reach this site, but it will need to wait until then because I want to clear Sea of Oblivion with both characters first, which will take at least a couple more days. I mean, except the basic daily quests from Freedom Harbor and God’s Trial, I didn’t do anything at all today so far, so at this rate it’s not looking good at all. Either way, once I’ll do that I’ll start thinking about perhaps writing a review for it, since I don’t see myself hitting the level cap and can’t find myself caring for the “end game content” anyway.

One of the arguments those who oppose the concept that on-line content must be free most frequently make is that it costs more and more to deliver it because of all the multimedia elements in general and the video ones in particular that more and more sites rely on. Which, not counting the fact that many sites don’t have to and likely also shouldn’t make use of so much rich content, seems to be true. But what if it doesn’t need to be, or at least what if those costs could be significantly reduced in a pretty simple way, by storing such content in a single place?
This idea came to me while watching some game trailers. It’s true that lots of sites post their video content on YouTube and then embed it from there, washing their hands of all associated costs in a way that’s completely fair for those that obtain no revenue whatsoever as a result of the visits they receive but seems very wrong for those that have as much as a single advertisement on the page where such a video is embedded, but quite a few actually host even such generic content on their own servers. This of course also applies to all other sorts of trailers, music videos, newsworthy amateur footage, documentaries and pretty much any other type of multimedia content that’s likely to end up unaltered on a relatively large number of sites.

How would this work? Quite simple. There would be this company offering multimedia hosting to all such sites that use such content in order to generate income, including simply by having as much as one advertisement on the page it’s displayed on. Or, if you really want it done properly, it shouldn’t be a company, but a non-profit entity that would simply split its operating costs among its users according to the amount of bandwidth and services each made use of. Each piece of content would be available in the highest possible quality, and if someone submits the same piece in higher quality than what’s currently available the particular piece would be replaced with the new and better one, but also in all possible qualities below that. So you’d have video content available in anything from full HD or even better to the quality produced by early camera phones, audio content in anything from perfectly clear full surround to something barely suitable to play plain speech and so on, without allowing duplicates.
This company or organization should provide a basic open-source player that all sites that use its services would be able to embed on their pages, but also allow such sites to make their own players according to their own needs, as long as the method of accessing the content stored on its servers remains the same. The basic player should be quite like what YouTube currently uses, but allow each site to set a maximum quality it’s prepared to pay for, making only the options up to that point available for that site’s users. This way, each site would also be able to add its own captions to the content it displays even if it’d only use the basic player, while those that create their own custom players could perhaps add even more features, if they’d see any need for them. In addition, there would be an unified rating system, allowing users to rate the content, on an one to ten or perhaps one to one hundred scale, regardless of the site they view it on, resulting in an overall rating that sites would be able to display. Of course, adding this piece of code would be completely optional for each site.

This shouldn’t significantly affect the existing free video sharing services because it wouldn’t be addressing regular users, which are usually the primary target of these current services, instead only dealing with “official” content. In fact, regular users wouldn’t even be able to directly access the content hosted by this organization, as it would require a paid subscription. Or, more exactly, especially if we’re to go with the non-profit idea, anyone would be able to register and then search through the available content once it’d be confirmed that the information they provided is valid, but anything viewed or listened to would be considered as having been played on that person’s site and therefore the person would need to pay at the end of the month for the bandwidth they used, unless the owner of said content would pay for all such usage as a form of advertisement. This latter scenario could most likely be seen in the case of trailers, which are advertisements, meaning that some content could be available for free directly from the organization in question, but users should still need to register in order to access it in such a manner and there could perhaps be other methods of discouraging such behavior anyway, as this wouldn’t be the point of such a system.
The point of all of this is to reduce costs while also providing users with a potentially richer experience, without taking anything away from the sites that specialize in offering such content. In fact, it would help such sites, not only by reducing costs but also by guaranteeing access to the content, as this organization would use extremely reliable connections and equipment, with a high degree of redundancy. The total amount of bandwidth used wouldn’t decrease, and it could in fact even increase if site owners would notice that they could afford higher quality content thanks to the reduced costs, but we’d move from having the same piece of content stored in thousands of data centers paid for by thousands of site owners separately to gathering everything in a single place. That way, some site owners could get much cheaper hosting for their actual sites, as they would no longer have multimedia content on their own servers, while also paying less for said multimedia content but being assured of the highest levels of reliability and security. At the same time, users would be able to enjoy such content, perhaps in even greater quantity and quality than they’re currently used to, while staying on their favorite sites, likely reducing the need to search through various places.

As you should already know, today marks the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight. As such, for some it may be a time to remember the past, but for most it should be a time to think of the future. After all, though currently we are the Earth’s and our own only realistic enemies, so many things can happen in a more or less distant future that’ll require us to go to the stars in order to have any future at all even if and when we will finally manage to get our own destructive nature under control.
For example, we know the Sun will start noticeably increasing its output in about one billion years, first turning Earth into an inhospitable wasteland and then, perhaps some three billion years from now, into a completely dead world, possibly even engulfing it entirely when it’ll turn into a red giant. Around that same time, Andromeda may collide with the Milky Way, which may or may not have any direct adverse effects on any specific solar system that a sentient race, including our own, may inhabit at the time. But the greater threats are those that may come far sooner than that and are far less predictable, such as anomalies that may cause the Sun to significantly change its output on short notice, runaway stars, planets or even black holes that may be heading our way, our own solar system ending up in a “bad neighborhood” of the galaxy, the Earth becoming geologically inactive and/or losing its magnetic field, as well as many others that we perhaps can’t even currently imagine.

Still, let’s not go quite so far into the future. What we should be thinking about now is what direction should space exploration take over the coming few decades and what part, if any, should human space travel play in it. That is because, while the first manned space flight and, only a little more than eight years later but more than three centuries after the first plans, the first Moon landing were momentous achievements for the entire human race, there currently seems to be little point in putting people past Earth orbit and almost none to get one past the Moon.
At least that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. Back then we needed to have people out there because we were not yet capable of creating machines to do the same kind of work, yet now our machines can do infinitely more than a human could ever do in any environment other than the nice, cozy and so terribly fragile one found on the surface of Earth. As such, if we also keep in mind that it’s so much more difficult to put a human out there and keep them alive and well than it is to put a machine out there and keep it functioning properly, it simply makes no practical sense to keep pursuing this goal at the present time. And, though this is the focus of most of those who oppose manned space flights, and perhaps space exploration and most other scientific endeavors in general, I’m not even taking the financial aspect into account when I say this, because money are purely a human invention and have absolutely no meaning and no value in realistic terms.
Quite simply, space exploration is extremely important and a huge amount of effort and resources should be put into it, but its purpose should be, in fact needs to be, solely to gain knowledge. It needs to be a scientific endeavor in the purest sense, not concerned with short-term practical applications or any direct relevance to our current life on Earth, and certainly in no way connected to any economic interests. And it’s just that scientific point of view that makes me say that, while there are still valid research goals to be met by putting humans in Earth orbit and likely even by building a permanent manned research facility on the Moon, it’s highly inefficient to use our ingenuity and limited resources to send manned missions to other planets when, with even less effort, we are currently capable of building machines that will gather so much more data with far greater speed, accuracy and efficiency.

In short, my opinion is that we have already reached the level of development currently required for any manned space missions that make scientific sense. In fact, seeing that the first Moon landing was achieved, nearly 42 years ago, with technology that was perhaps at a level found in today’s pocket calculators, I’m absolutely certain that we wouldn’t even need any significant new developments in order to also go back to the Moon and perform any research and experiments that actually require human beings to live in an environment so different from anything naturally found on Earth.
What’s more, focusing in the near future on the development of manned space travel in general and on plans of colonizing other planets in particular can actually be dangerous. I’m saying that because it could easily be seen as a potential easy way out of the grave we keep digging for ourselves here on Earth at least ever since the advent of civilization, and such an option must never become available! We need to be able to travel great distances through space and colonize other worlds in the future due to the reasons I mentioned in the first part of this post, which are completely out of our control, but we must not be allowed to get away with destroying a world and so many of the other species we currently share it with only to move on to another and, most likely, repeat the cycle all over again. If we as a species won’t decide to start living in harmony with the environment that currently shelters and nurtures us simply because it’s the right thing to do, that decision must be forced upon us, and what better way to do that than ensuring that our very survival depends solely on caring for this one planet, without any chance of moving elsewhere until we’ll learn to be stewards, guardians and nurturers instead of mere parasites, and dumb ones at that?

Perhaps, within the next 50 years, we will learn what we need to learn and start behaving as we should have behaved all along. And perhaps we’ll also learn our place and what we are. If that happens, we will be able to look towards other worlds for the right reasons and we will also be in a much better position to reach them, as we will have far fewer concerns here at home. Yet, until and unless that does happen, we should stick to sending machines out there, certainly putting far more effort and resources into it than we currently do, but not worry about following them ourselves. It simply makes no sense to put humans on another planet purely for research purposes and, even if we’d develop the technology to permit this, we’re far, far from being worthy of colonizing another world, not to mention making use of its resources in any way.