Hey all, I have not played Allods for 3+ weeks now. And have no motivation to do so as my friends have also quit - some to go as far as uninstalling. :P Perhaps I'll be back in the future when there is more content or what not, perhaps not. After 2 years of WoW and plenty of other misc mmorpgs, I think I may just be growing out of / getting bored of the genre... Right now I have far more fun logging in for 1-2 hours of FPS/TPS than several hours of mmorpg grinding.

So here's to wishing everyone a good summer and fun on Allods!

Hope this blog was interesting/useful to some people... bye for now! :D

Hey all, I haven't played Allods for about a whole week now - was preoccupied with the EU All Points Bulletin beta (which was pretty fun, but like many MMO betas: has its imba and glitch issues). So how is everyone with Allods? Still having fun? I have a lot to catch up with but we'll see if I'm even up for it... Just redownloaded a psx emulator so I might be MIA for a few more days. ;)

My most important question is: is endgame still boring as usual? Perhaps I'll spend some time with my league now...

With that being said, here's my rep grind music of the day (instrumental!):

As of this entry, I'm only 80% away from dinging 40. I'm not too fond of Dragon Ring, after dodging 2 geared 40s with warbanners patrolling the whole map for the entire banner duration... so I've decided to check out Yazes Shard. Fortunately that place has a lot more quests and the terrain is a bit easier to navigate... aka, not filled to the brim with 39 mobs that I can't kill without using spectral assassin.

Posted this screenie because I believe this is the official Xad psi cape! ;D I could be wrong, but it certainly matches the color/symbols from the character creation screen.

Pretty tired of browsing the forums because it seems like every other thread is raging about one thing or the other. I can't believe the "omg do something about teh AT ganking!!1" stuff is still going on. Come on people, this is a WORLD PVP game, what the heck are you expecting? How come I have a feeling most people who complain about that stuff have never experienced world pvp games? It's nothing new, world pvp is never fair and even I have come to accept that. When I was leveling up my priest during the release of TBC, I think I died like 13 times within an hour in hillsbrad. I died even more in STV, the AT of WoW. Except unlike Allods, you had no unflag option in contested areas in pvp realms and you had to run back to your body so level capped players could literally CAMP YOU FOR AN HOUR. Did we have the option to stand on a res pad and teleport out? NOPE! When I was leveling in outlands I was ganked from ABOVE - by players on flying mounts completely epic'd out. Did I go on the forums and cry that this was unfair and something needs to be done about it? No.

Now I'm ranting, but yeah... Really tired of seeing that issue keep popping up. I'm starting to believe the only way to make people happy is have PVE and PVP servers.

Although it took them almost 5 days to fix the crash - at least its done. The latest patch has cleared majority of users from the annoying memory leak that made many aspects of the game unplayable (notably instances and astral). Even I got a taste of it - ran tt2 with a few new 40s and we wiped on a boss soley due to the fact that all 3 40s managed to crash during a boss encounter. That aside, I can't imagine doing tt2 with a legit group of 35s, it seems quite difficult.

There has been no word on whether or not fixes will go out to heroics and astral. From what I've read and heard ingame, new 40s will have an extremely hard time completing heroics because of aggro issues - it seems like aggro ranges have increased significantly along the 20% damage increase. As we all know, psi's spectral assassin has been nerfed for bosses so I'm a bit bummed since I'll be fairly useless dps-wise on red rings. As for astral, the drop decrease seems a bit dramatic... I will agree that previously it sounded way too easy, but now it seems like they went overboard with nerfs.

As much as I am all for "challenging" in a game, anything extremely time consuming that provides little rewards goes opposite of that belief. There is a difference between wasting time because the game mechanics said so, and wasting time because people in your group just don't know how to play. People should be able to finish heroics in a timely manner without needing to be already in epic gear... it kind of defeats the purpose of progression. I would say that a geared group should be able to clear all heroics for the day given 5 hours. Since this game does not have that many heroics yet, and 5 hours is quite a span of time, I think it's a good goal to shoot for. If it is taking people longer than this to clear, then something is wrong. (We aren't even counting the hours they need to do dailies + farm money + whatever)

I'm not far from 39, but I will probably get to 40 just doing my dailies every day... more or less postponing 40.

I've been meaning to draw more art of my characters, but I never seem to get around to doing it. :P So here's a  quick doodle of my league healer... Yup, I rolled a male elf! Although, if you ask me, it's not much different from rolling a female elf... just I don't have the flimsy Disney-like fairy wings. ;) He's only level 8 right now, but I'm out of fatigue for the day. If you see me on Tensess, be sure to say hi!

So far I'm not having too many problems with crashing. My psi (just dinged 37!) has arrived in Avilon and is actually almost done with it since the zone is so short... I'll probably hit 40 this weekend, and we'll see whether or not the QQing about heroics is justified!

Oh right,  I wanted to mention it felt like the first few levels of League were more... finished. At least, I felt like it was more interesting than Empire's waddling around Nezebgrad. Granted, League side also felt longer since there was more travel time + actually completing a zone by level 6-7.

As far as I know, there is currently no fix for this. The crashing is caused by a memory leak - the longer your client/game runs (AOgame.exe) the more memory it eats until it crashes. It seems like for most people this is somewhere around 1.5gb of memory. Basically, the game isn't crashing "randomly" and it only feels like its lagging because it's using up so much of your computer's resources.

I have actually not experienced any crashing because I restart my client when it hits the 1gb mark, and it takes approx. an hour of running before it gets that high. Now I've read on the forums that it crashes even faster (less than 30min) for some people, so keep an eye on your taskmanager (or whatever you use) and restart accordingly. Their latest patch (the 16mb one) seems to have done absolutely nothing to fix this error.

I'm not sure whether or not Gala-net really operates during the weekend - probably not - but they need to get a fix out for this as soon as possible. This is one of the few reasons why releasing patches late in the week is a horrible idea for a game prone to bugs and glitches, we usually end up having to wait a whole weekend before support resumes.

That aside, I'm liking the anonymous psionicist-only channel!

For people who need the 16mb patch (1.0.06.36.1 -> 1.0.06.37.1) due to peer searching issues, I've also uploaded that at this link:
Filefront: http://www.filefront.com/16321601/1.0.06.37.1_.zip
Megaupload: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9SJE7F1U

If you are getting the launcher corrupted error, don't forget to run this!
http://allods-ftp.gpotato.com/repair.exe