Killed in a smiling accident.

There’s an annoying… feature, shall we say, in GTA IV, which also happens in previous GTA games that I’ve played, if I recall correctly. You take your shiny sports car on a little cruise around the block, stopping off along the way at the local supermarket to slaughter some innocent geriatric trying to select a zucchini from the vegetable counter.

As you do.

Why your Russian crime lord boss, owner of half of downtown pseudo-New York, wants you to kill an incontinent old man with a penchant for squashes, I’ll never know, but we in the hired gun trade shoot first and ask questions later.

Questions like: “Can I get zucchini and blood stains out of my suit at 40 degrees?” and “Where the hell has my car gone?”

Because every time I take a shiny car to a mission in GTA IV it’s never there when I come out at the completion of said mission. Gone. Not a trace to be found. It’s as if someone stole it! There I am, standing in the middle of the street like a complete lemon, looking up and down and wondering how the hell I’m going to get home. Strips of zucchini dangling from my forehead. I’m gutted, I feel violated. Robbed.

It took me bloody ages to steal that car.

So what with hitting the level cap in World of Warcraft with my shaman and not feeling the Love of the Lich King enough to want to do the whole thing over again with my level seventy druid or paladin, I was left somewhat hanging by my fingertips from a small shrub atop the cliff of MMO ambivalence, a glance down past my dangling feet showed the jagged rocks of end-level reputation grind, around which was wrapped the angry endless repetitive wash of the Sea of Raids.

Luckily for me there were many hands on, uh, hand, to reach down to my precarious position and lift me up and back onto the enduring yet precarious path of MMO enthusiasm that we brave adventurers wend our way carefully along as we negotiate said cliff of MMO ambivalence; sometimes we step from the path and the sharp drop into ennui awaits, but there are always stalwart folk who can be relied upon to reach out to us and pull us free from our gloom, to once more tread the endless enjoyable path of MMO experience.

Such a time was this, and this time to mbp and Khan who encouraged me some time ago before I even realised I was veering from the path, and more recently to blog commenter unwise, I offer thanks for the encouragement to try Lord of the Rings Online again, because I’ve been following the path for a week or so now, and I’m very much enjoying its winding and meandering ups and downs.

Also thanks to Van Hemlock, Jon, Shuttler, Teppo and the others of that collective whose constant tweets, blog posts and podcast musings were as a siren song guiding me away from treacherous MMO time-sinks and towards safer terrain.

And also thanks to anyone whom I may have forgotten. And sorry. And hello, how have you been?

So that was, in my usual rambling way, an introduction to the fact that I have returned to Turbine’s take on Tolkien’s lands of legend, and that I have been enjoying it a great deal. Having a level twenty six dwarf Guardian and a level twenty four dwarf Minstrel I did, naturally, roll an entirely new character for my return to the middle of the earth! Wait, wrong adventure; a new character for my return to Middle Earth! Having rolled a couple of support classes previously, and having nobody to support in my surreptitious return to Lord of the Rings Online, I decided to roll a DPS class, specifically one that could a) do a little bit of many things, and b) shock horror, be a dwarf. The obvious choice, and what I plumped for fairly quickly, was the Champion, a class which can dual wield; use a bow, albeit for nothing more than pulling duty, or perhaps finishing off a running, low health straggler; wield two-handed weapons; wear heavy armour and use heavy shields and thus, at a push, off-tank in groups. In short, they can do a little bit of everything, but one thing they do very well is damage. Lots and lots of damage.

Attentive readers of the blog will know from previous posts that I’m a healer at heart, I love undertaking that role of doing the job that many others don’t like, combined with the fact that I’m keeping people going, being a team player, and a shoulder for others to stand upon to attain greater heights. Listeners of the podcast will know that I sang a great deal when playing Guitar Hero World Tour with Zoso, Elf and our other mutual friend, not because I like singing particularly, and certainly not because I’m good at it, but because it’s something I can do well enough to allow others to take on the front line roles. It’s possibly altruism, a learned perversity as opposed to genuine generosity of character, but it makes me happy and allows others to be happy, and so I don’t fret over the fact too much.

However, when going solo, do as the soloers do. Roll a DPS machine.

My Champion is level seventeen at the moment; I’ve covered old ground, but it was fresh enough that although I knew where to go and what to do it was anything but dull. The class is new, and that keeps things interesting, and I’ve taken a more active interest in crafting, although it’s still not really my thing. Last but by no means least, I’m soaking up the formidable atmosphere whilst enjoying the many tweaks and titbits that Turbine have added since I was last here.

I’ll be sure to report on the ups and downs as I go, hopefully with some comparison to my recent levelling experience in Blizzard’s latest offering. As to what I’m doing in World of Warcraft - and to be sure I’m still poking and picking at the scab that has formed over the wound that is WoW’s idea of end-game content - I’ll save that for another time, and perhaps another format…

After a couple of weeks of heavy drinking, it’s time for festivities to cease as everyone gets back to the daily grind. And in Warhammer too (ahhhh!) The Keg End festival in WAR is coming to an end, and I’m back at work in real life, t’ch.

Keg End was something of a mixed bag. Like the previous event, Heavy Metal, there was a nice long list of activities you could participate in for event influence. Visiting pubs in Altdorf was easy enough (*hic*), and the addition of new “boast” and “toast” emotes set up a couple of fun tasks, /boast-ing to 20 dead enemy players and /boast or /toast-ing a member of each career (easy enough, once you could find a Blackguard in Tier 4). The other tasks revolved around spawns of new mobs added around the place for the event, and unfortunately tended a bit towards the grind of Witching Night. On the plus side, there were plenty of the improbably titled Brew-Thirsty Ogres and Drunken Gnoblars around the place, several spawns in every zone, and although the Explosive Snotlings did explode (the clue’s in the name I s’pose), they at least hung around a bit longer than the Witching spirits. Killing 50 of each of them was a bit dull, but you could break it up, do a few groups here and there as you rode around the world; I got a fair number in the process of questing up to level 40 (handy extra XP as well), and after hitting level 40 I spent a while going back to lower level zones for tome unlocks, and nuking the odd Keg End spawn on the way (a couple of times I tried to nuke goblin players, mistaking them for snotlings or gnoblars, but fortunately they weren’t PvP flagged at the time, saving me from en-chickening). Fireworks dropped from the mobs often enough to make collecting them for another three tasks pretty easy, but beer kegs seemed to drop at a similar rate; ten fireworks, no problem, one hundred beer kegs… Hrm. The final task was to kill 20 hero class Massive Ogre Tyrants, who hung around the RvR lakes, and that didn’t really make much sense to me. I’m fairly sure the usual warband/party tagging rules applied, wherein only one party of a warband gets kill credit, so if you were thundering around attacking objectives and keeps and stomped an Ogre or two on the way it was a lottery as to whether you got any credit. More to the point, when thundering around the RvR lakes in a warband, everyone was usually far too busy heading for the next objective to even bother stomping the Ogres on the way, leaving them about as busy as a fruit seller standing next to a dual carriageway with a couple of manky-looking punnets of strawberries. I’d managed all of zero kills by last night, but fortuitously a guildmate needed a few to complete the task so I tagged along with him and another guild member, then we bumped into three more Ogre hunters and merged groups, and everyone was kind enough to stick around as we ran between two spawn points in Praag to rack up the full twenty I needed. I don’t really get the point of sticking PvE encounters in the middle of RvR lakes; if you’re there for PvP you’re probably not going bother with them, and if you’re just there for a PvE objective, with nine T4 zones, of which six will be locked at any given time, it would take an incredibly busy server not to find a nice quiet place to go Ogre hunting untroubled by the other side. As the Ogres are hero level and need a party it’s not even like a Witch Elf/Hunter could hide near a spawn for a few cheap kills. Still, ale’s well that ends well. Cheers!

In what we believe is an unprecedented move, we at Killed in a Smiling Accident thought it might be interesting to try and send our voices through the internet in what we’re calling a “podcast”, combining the everyday words of “cast” from “broadcast” with “pod” from “podophyllin”, a brown bitter gum extracted from the rootstalk of the May apple (Podophyllum peltatum), so, encoded using fruit extract, it’s episode one of the Kiasacast!

In this episode, we take a look back at the events of 2008, or “flip back through the blog and talk about a few posts”. It’s our first time, as it were, so it’s a little shaky, but we get into the swing of things.

Subjects covered include:

• Hellgate
• Subscription numbers
• The recurring cycles of MMOG blogging
• Lack of giant robot MMOGs
• Bonekickers!
• The reason Age of Conan and Warhammer haven’t done too well
• Guitar Heroism

Intro music: Galaforce for the BBC B microcomputer
Outro music: Galaforce remix by Heartcore

We’re not sure if it’ll become a regular thing, if nothing else watch (or indeed listen) out for a review of 2009 in a year or so!

Download Kiasacast Episode One

With the New Year upon us, I’m given to understand that predictions of what the forthcoming year may hold are the done thing, so here we go:

• The combination of ever-increasing subscriber base and world economic collapse will lead to the World of Warcraft becoming the richest nation in the world, with the dollar and Euro being pegged against the Azerothian gold piece. Primal speculation will replace hedge funds, but the next expansion will trigger hyperinflation as new daily quests offer ever increasing rewards, sparking riots, ore hoarding and armed mobs besieging Blizzard headquarters. CSRs will describe it as “not as bad as that time Warlocks got nerfed”.
• In related news, CCCP will take over Iceland, which will do very well for a while until it comes out that the massive increase in herring exports were due to a dupe exploit.
• Richard Garriot’s Richard Garriot(tm) will announce a new MMOG, in which the entire player base will be launched into space, servers being stationed on the moon. This will turn out to be a Sontaran plot to recruit super-warriors based on a somewhat literal interpretation of the game forums, and the players will do rather less well in hand-to-hand combat with Rutans than hoped.
• Having exhausted the possibilities of fantasy, and with the superhero and sci-fi genres getting crowded, companies will look to new settings for MMOGs. Cyberpunk and steampunk are both tempting options, but I think the the breakthrough genre will be insurancepunk. Actuarial work with an edge.
• The industry will get bored of RMT and move on to a new revenue source, SMT: Surreal Money Trading. You’ll be able to equip your character with a vague sense of underwear in exchange for purple.
• Finally, I’m really going out on a limb with this one: a new game will be released. Some bloggers will like it. Some bloggers won’t. Some bloggers will be cross at the bloggers who like it. Other bloggers will be cross at the bloggers who don’t like it. Other bloggers still will be cross at all the cross bloggers. The game will both succeed and fail, depending on which measures of success are used.

Not really, the headline was ruse, a fallacious gesture of felicitations for the new year unto you all, in a thinly veiled drunken attempt to get in the first post of 2009 on the blog.

Take that, m’colleague!

Oh go on then, and a happy new year to you all from KiaSA.

Phthtphthphthphhh.

There are some new screenshots of the Tier 8 gear in World of Warcraft over at MMO Champion.

Tier 8. Tagline: Now you can look more like everyone else than ever before!

Hi! We’re Death Knights! Grr!

Hi hi! We’re Death Knights too! Grrrrr!

Oh wait, no. We’re Hunters. Although the guy on the end in red is probably a Death Knight. Grrr?

Good day to you, we’re all Magii. Magus. Mageses. Whatever.

Good day to you, we’re all Magii.

Oh lordy no, sorry. We’re priests. You see, because our ludicrous shoulders go ‘up then out’ rather than ‘down then across’. And we don’t wear a hat, because we’re wearing a face mask these days. Like a Rogue.

Well met! We’re druids.

Warlocks! I meant Warlocks. Ha ha ha, oh dear. Come on lads, we’d better get out of Moonglade.

Q: How do you tell if someone is a hardcore raider?

A: Easily. It’s telling them apart from all the other hardcore raiders that’s the tricky part.

Two thousand and eight, or 2k8 as the sassy marketing people would have us call it, was possibly the best year in the recorded history of mankind. Unlike its predecessor 2007, 2008 was the year to be seen participating in, with an updated graphics engine as clearly evidenced by the Beijing Olympic Games, and improved live events provided by a wealth of volunteers, such as the drama of the US presidential election and the thrilling “Will it, won’t it?” speculation extravaganza that was the first circulation of the proton beam of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Now, some reviewers may be quick to highlight the few teeny tiny bugs in 2008, such as the collapse of the world economy and the escalation of hostilities in Afghanistan, but I think these few and far between minor defects can be overlooked when one considers the vast array of great entertainment that 2008 provided.

2008 was a great year, fantastic value for money and comes highly recommended, and what’s more it’s unlikely to be improved upon by the vastly over-hyped 2009.

9.5/10

This review paid for by Year2k8 Games, developers of the year 2008.

A free copy of 2008 and a one year subscription was given to the reviewer.

And some cash in a brown paper bag.

The author would like it known, however, that only three prostitutes were provided as a review incentive. And two of them were mingers.

Maximum levels in MMOGs are like buses. They’re big, have wheels, and carry lots of passengers. And then two come along at once. No sooner has Melmoth hit the big eight-oh in WoW, I made rank 40 in Warhammer (which might only sound half as impressive, but he did have a 70 level head start…)

No screenshot I’m afraid, partly ‘cos I rarely remember to take screenshots, and partly ‘cos I hadn’t really been keeping much of an eye on the XP bar and it caught me by surprise in the middle of some random quest. Things were a bit slow in the late 20s/early 30s, but whether it’s the tweaks made in recent updates, or just that time off work has given the opportunity for some major play sessions ’til ludicrous times of the morning, the last few levels positively flew by.

Like Melmoth I’ve also been thinking about what comes now, though in my case the answer’s a bit easier: carry on regardless! I’ve been mixing up general questing, public quests, scenarios and open-RvR while levelling up, and other than cutting down on the general questing (unless there are particularly shiny rewards on offer) I reckon there’ll be more of that as WAR rages across Tier 4, with zones flipping back and forth most days. How much longer I’ll keep going I’m not sure, but WAR certainly reinvigorated my MMOG habit, given me a few good months, and a third game with a level capped character. Huzzah!

The question is: what to do now? I’m certainly not interested in raiding, I just don’t see the point in running the gear treadmill when the next expansion will, in all likelihood, negate all that effort in an instant. Although it would be nice to see these raid dungeons, the amount of repeated effort required to be a raider just doesn’t appeal to me. Heroics could be an option, the new reputation system that’s in place allows you to wear a tabard of a certain faction and any rep. gained goes to that faction, which is nice. Again though, I’m not massively enthusiastic about reputation grinds, but at least there are nice mounts that can be gained from doing them.

Mounts are something that I think is worth working for, because they are always with your character and never lose their worth; my shaman pictured above still has the Mist Sabre that she bought at level sixty and rides it wherever flying mounts are not allowed. I like the look of the bear mounts, and could pay for one easily from a vendor in Dalaran, but getting something a little more unique appeals to me, so I may do the daily quests at Brunnhildar Village for a chance at Reins of the White Polar Bear. Then there are the flying mounts. Oh what flying mounts there are. The achievement I worked for when I had hit the end of the leveling game with my shaman in The Burning Crusade was to get the artisan riding skill to allow my character to ride the faster flying mounts, so with that under my belt there are a raft of drakes and other very fast flying mounts in WotLK that I could work towards, all of which look fantastic. There are also the really quite bonkers mounts such as the Reins of the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth and with several areas in WotLK that I haven’t quested in at all, such as Icecrown and Crystalsong, I could potentially earn the money for such mounts through questing without a hideous amount of effort.

Speaking of places that I haven’t been to yet, there’s also the PvP zone of Wintergrasp. I’m not entirely adverse to PvP these days, and being a Restoration spec. shaman ‘4 life’ (as I believe the cool kids say down in the ‘burbs) - and yes that included my time leveling the character - I find world PvP to be less of a series of one sided battles where I’m getting my arse handed to me on the end of some rogue’s daggers, and more a chance to annoy the enemy intensely by healing my teammates just as some rogue is about to serve them Cul au gratin à la Poignard.

Other than that, I could play one of my other level seventy characters, but I’m in no hurry to do that either. Wrath of the Lich King was an enjoyable expansion and added a lot of fun elements, and combined with impressive graphical tweaks meant the game felt fresh and new again for a while, but having played one character to level eighty things are starting to become repetitive again. I may well pick up an alt if any of my regular leveling friends come back to the game (I’ve mainly solo’d and PuG’d with this character), otherwise I’ll leave those characters where they are, perhaps for a rainy day.

So there you have it, I’ll probably pop WoW on the back burner soon, pop in to do daily quests; the daily research on my Inscription profession to get that to 450 and finish finding all the non-trainable inscriptions; a little bit of PvP perhaps, but other than that, I think I may have to look elsewhere for my next MMO fix.

I likes me some fresh leveling.

Have Mythic sorted out a dwarf melee DPS class yet?