Sorry for missing the update for Episode 17. I was still in debate as to whether or not I wanted to do these vlog style yet, but I’m not entirely sure where I’d want to host them. Eh, this is still easier.

First off, a quick thing from last week, the views on World of Tanks were fairly low, but then again, I didn’t expect them to be that high. World of Tanks, at least outside of Europe, isn’t all that well known and it doesn’t sound like something most people would want to play. They’ve gotten a bit better, but it was just an odd thing I noticed. Still not nearly as bad as Fantasy Tennis. Tonight, La Tale goes up on TGWTG, so we’ll see how that pans out.

Speaking of La Tale, I really do enjoy it. It’s yet another game I want to keep playing but have no time for. I am having issue with the gamepad not working well, especially if my computer is being heavily taxed at the moment. I even bothered to downgrade Skype, and I forgot how terrible the old version is, when it comes to speed. So it’s either render it useless when playing La Tale, or work with an inferior version.

And of course, since La Tale landed so many reference to Maple Story, I did start hearing about the planes again. Yes, I know about the planes. You do know that cutting 10 minute flights to 5 minute flights are still about 4 minutes too long. It’s still a pointless repeating cloud background, right? At least in… yeah I’m going to say it.. World of Warcraft… At least in WoW, when you ride a gryphon, you’re given a nice scenic tour of the landscape. The longest possible gryphon flight you can take in the game is only 9 minutes long comparatively, and that’s travelling from the top of one continent to the bottom. And no one takes that flight if they know a mage or understand the boats. Speaking of, the boats of WoW are a ton more like the Orbis travel system in Maple and they only last a minute. You spend more time (usually a minute or two) waiting for the boat, and once it arrives it takes off fairly soon, travel slightly away from the pier and then.. amazing concept here, a loading screen shows your map marker travel to the next area and you arrive seconds later. And please please PLEASE stop telling me I can just walk through Aqua Road to El Nath and up Ludibrium tower or whatever (don’t correct me. I don’t care.) and it’s “much faster”, well if that doesn’t make the game’s travel sound even MORE broken I feel the players are just trying to rationalize an obviously broken system and pretend like it’s no big deal. When walking around the FUCKING PLANET is “faster” than taking a boat to a neighboring continent, something is seriously wrong with your travel design. I really wouldn’t mind it if it happened ONCE, but every time you need to go back and forth is utterly ridiculous. Long story short, shit’s broke man.

Of course, Maple Story and La Tale isn’t my next game, so I need to get onto working on the next one, as well as my side project coming up.

A couple questions for the site-going public…

1. Would anyone mind terribly if I deleted all the comments from the Suggested MMO List once I finally get around to updating it?
My reason for this is WordPress, as far as I can work it, doesn’t have a way to group comments properly, and since it seems most people would rather tell me what to play, instead of commenting on my videos themselves, (Seriously, Suggested MMO List has nearly 200 comments to my second highest commented page of 26 comments.) the page is FLOODED with comments, many of which are repeats, and cause WAY too much to load for anyone clicking the page. I’m not saying I don’t want anyone to comment on that page anymore, but at least read the list before making a suggestion. Hell, I’ve had more than one person asking me to review games I ALREADY REVIEWED. See why I doubt the sincerity of some of these suggestions?
What I’m getting at is… every time the list is updated, all comments below will be deleted. Yay or nay?

2. Would anyone object to or have interest in a “Terminology” page?
Speaking  of projects I’ll probably never do, some might have noticed that I use terms in MMO Grinder that don’t always get defined. This is due to two reasons:
A.) I used the term in several episodes already and defined them previously.
B. ) I forgot.
So I figured the best way to get around this is to have a terminology page on here, where people can familiarize themselves with terms that MMO players, or perhaps even just myself, use on a common basis. Not entirely sure how I’ll set it up, but something I wanted to gauge interest in.

Oh and Aion is going free to play. I know Aion is going to free to play and it’s all I can do to board up my windows against up the storm of people who will spam me with “PLAY AION IT WENT FREE TO PLAY” that I’ll have flooding my inbox in the next week. Well I’m going to tell you two things right now.
YES. I will be reviewing it.
NO, it won’t be the minute it comes out.
Trust me, you have to let the initial fervor die down or the game will be completely unplayable. It’ll be choked with more gold farmers and new players looking to play and/or troll until the servers crash, and I don’t want to review a product when it’s learning the free-to-play ropes. I have previous experience with Aion, and those who watched Episode 0 might have noticed more than a few clips of the game in that video. Like Champions, and STO,  Aion was another game I fell for the fervor of playing at near launch. While I did enjoy the game to pay for another month when first starting out I had a bunch of issues with it, and I’m very interested to see what’s changed over the years.

One final thing: The very first MMO I reviewed on the Grinder will be shutting down on the 27th. Say good bye to LUNA Online for me, ok?

Ok, that was an unexpected rush. Well. Ok, it was a little expected, considering how many people asked me to look at the game.

I tried to field some questions about the STO review through Formspring and didn’t get many results back. At least nothing I didn’t answer. Honestly, I really mean it when I say I know pretty much nothing about Star Trek. I did watch parts of the new movie when it was on SyFy last week. I do want to see all of it. That counts for something, I hope…. probably not.

A major thank you for everyone who clarified the issue with character slots. The game made it seem like I had no more than one slot per account, and wasn’t clear on the system of how it was supposed to work. For those who watched it early on and didn’t rewatch it, I stated that one slot meant you’d either have to buy a new character slot, or possibly delete your original character. THE TRUTH is that you have 2 character slots, but the second is only unlocked once you reach level 25, so you can make a Klingon. Character slots in general are still quite limited, though. Sure, every “class” in the game pretty much extends to “guy with a laser gun”, but it’d be nice to give a quick look to all available bridge specialties.

I also had a lot of people informing me about the differences in the Klingon missions and ships. While I did outright state I wasn’t going to look at the Klingon side at all, I’m not entirely opposed to making a supplemental review to go along with this one once I reach level 25 and try out Klingons.

…but considering the next game I’m playing that might pose a problem… HOLY HELL this game is addicting. I picked it simply because I knew there wouldn’t be too much to explain and I’d be able to knock it out in a few less days than normal, considering it wouldn’t have nearly as much to talk about. But I have been pumping HOURS into it, and I don’t think I’ll be able to stop. Such a simple game, but such an amazingly interesting system. Oh, it’s not for everyone, I can assure you, but it’s something that you can pick up and drop at your leisure… provided you can drop it.  The video SHOULD be out next week, but I really need to peel myself away from it. It’s that much fun for me.

Any other questions about the STO review, please ask them here. If not, let me know if you’d be opposed to me possibly doing a vlog version of the off-week update. I have some ideas on how I’d do that.