We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

Moustaches are back in fashion. In fact, they never left.

Even though I had to download another 600MB patch, I finally got to play Age of Conan last night and it was quite exciting to get back into it. I didn’t actually manage to accomplish much because I spent over two hours trying to decide on what race to play, what name to use, and constantly creating and re-creating my character until I was happy with his appearance (I wish MMOs would give you a little trial area to try your character out before confirming them). Eventually I decided upon a Khitan Dark Templar called Hongjun on the RPG PvP EU server Aquilonia. As it’s a roleplaying server, I also created a backstory for him:

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This is not an Aquilonian in Hyboria. It's actually a Glaswegian on holiday in Ibiza.

I’m writing this article now because I can’t play Age of Conan as the servers are down for the second consecutive day in a row (well, actually they were up for a bit this morning by all accounts but are now down again during prime time). Unless you’ve been trapped under Jabba The Hutt or locked in a hotel room with bikini clad Princess Leia, you’ll know that yesterday was the “launch” of Funcom’s first AoC expansion, Rise of the Godslayer. And I put the word launch in quotation marks to signify sarcasm as actually very few people have had a chance to play it yet.

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Patching in MMOs is the perfect opportunity to take a night off from playing

The Internet is a pretty fun place to live. Everything is on demand, downloadable and streaming at you with a click of a button. I utterly adore the idea that all of my favourite movies, songs, games and images are all available online for my pleasure. The only problem is trying to get them because, unless you live in South Korea and happen to be downloading from a South Korean website, you’re likely to be getting a pretty slow connection. And it’s not just your ISPs fault either. In fact, it’s probably the fault of the distributor who doesn’t have the bandwidth, platform or money to give you a high speed download. Yep, that’s right, I’m looking at you Funcom.

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My wife spotted a funny article on a Japanese website called Gadget Place that really highlights the power of Twitter and social media in the modern age. I’ve been a fan of Twitter for a long time now and thoroughly enjoy using it but I never thought it would ever help me get out of a sticky situation.

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I give it about a week before the lawyers come knocking at my door...

Another week has past and it’s time to round-up some of the best articles from across the Net. This week was especially exciting for World of Warcraft as it saw a lot of hoo-ha (official term for a fuss) over leaked Cataclysm info and images. A few sites are already showing Alpha screenshots whilst MMO-Champion has gone full hog and shown, well, everything. Yeah, I don’t know how that ties in with the NDA and apparently neither does anyone else as proven by the 83 pages of comments on MMO-Champion, filled with opinions ranging from, to paraphrase, “Boubouille better get used to the company of men as he’s going to end up in jail” to “serves Blizzard right for having a NDA in the first place”. All I can keep thinking is thank goodness Blizzard’s Alphas are more polished than most companies released products otherwise the leaks might put people off the game.

Anyway, time for the link love:

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PHP stands for Hypertext PreProcessor. This is what happens when you let geeks name programming languages.

Oh what exciting times we live in. Ever felt like building your own MMO? Well with the recent news that six year old French MMORPG Ryzom has gone open source, you can. In fact, if you’re already a fan of the game, you could even build your own expansion or features for it and have it incorporated into the official release. Awesome sauce.

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Need a way to make Lord Of The Rings even better? Create a musical version!

I got an unexpected email from Codemasters today telling me that my Lord of the Rings Online account will be reactivated for a week, from 10th May 10th until 17th May. As far I know this is for the European version of LotRO only and doesn’t affect US players as they already had a similar offer recently at the end of April.

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