Nuggetty Goodness

Picked up some Shineh Dragonneh Canthan Elite armour for my baby warrior Cao Ying. I love how 'Oriental' it looks; (since it doesn't really look like any specific Asian culture's armour, ceremonial or otherwise, Oriental's the best word I can find).

I like the front of the Elite Canthan pants, but the red sash thingie at the back makes her bum waggle in a slightly disturbing fashion. >.>

Which is why I think I'm going to stick with Non-Elite Sunspear for the legs. Waggle-bum as she runs is just too distracting!

(Oh, and I didn't originally intend to buy the Elite Canthan pants... I misclicked at the armourer. XD)

Lazy nugget this week. Got so carried away with tinkering my Guild Wars builds that I forgot to start the colour study until it was too late, too late Gromit!

Hopefully I'll be motivated enough to finish the rest of the study this week, but for now, here's a half-done sop to my weeklies! *shame*

I figured out a failsafe way to squish the giant bug in Dalada Uplands! No more will he make pancakes of my animated love dolls and me!

It's very simple, any group can do it, and it doesn't require a team build.

How to Squish the Bug
Just do two things, and no one should die, not even in Hard Mode.

1) Attack from the WEST. This is very important, because if you attack from the east, the Rockshot Devourer popups will mess up the pull.

2) The moment you see Molotov (without any pesky Charr standing around him), have your entire party run straight towards him. If using H/H, flag them all on top of him. Molotov will waddle forward a bit, so be sure to stop (unflag) your H/H if they run past him. The idea is to have everyone 'hug the bug'. 

3) SQUISH THE BUG!

...that's all there is to it, really. 

Why does it work?
Molotov can't siege stuff in melee range. ;) And siege takes a while to cast. As long as you clump around him fast, he'll either a) never get a siege off, or b) the siege won't hit your people, since they'll be running like sausages towards the bug. And in melee, he's pretty harmless.

Composition is more or less done. Next comes the colour study - or studies, then the rendering.

Need to be done by 15th August, let's hope I can move my lazy nuggetbum! =)

As Psychochild says, somewhere in that stream of comments to this post by Larisa from Pink Pigtail Inn, someone coming from a text (MUD/MOO/MUSH what have you) background comes with a different perspective from someone whose first experience with a virtual world (however deep, or shallow) was an MMO.

As someone who came from MU*s, I think one of the things that is often overlooked when the cry for harsher death penalties goes up, is that MU*s, even the largest ones, are much smaller than MMOs.

In MU*s, if I stayed long enough, I cared not just about the inhabitants, I cared about the *world*.

The fact that these worlds were free - really, truly free, rather than being tied to some payment model, mattered a whole lot. I'm leaving out Iron Realms because I think, though I may be wrong, that even today, most MU*s are free. That these worlds were labours of love mattered to me. And that aspect was, and is, intrinsically bound up with their being free. Art for art's sake, if you like.

As a result, it's like the difference between going to a local restaurant, owned by a husband and wife, who greet each of their patrons by name... and going to a McDonalds, or any other franchised food establishment.

The death penalties that many MUDs had, which seem horribly harsh by comparison to our themepark MMOs now, were appropriate to those MUDs, precisely because of all those things I mentioned above.

In LegendMUD, my longest played (8 years) MUD, and what was, I think the *only* virtual world I ever lived in, there were Deathtraps.

To those unfamiliar with the term, Deathtraps are 'rooms' that, when you enter them, eat all your gear. It's gone. Just like that. POOF!

If an MMO had deathtraps (hacking doesn't count, and EVE is an anomaly) players would be screaming bloody murder.

And they'd be absolutely right to.

Deathtraps served a few purposes on MUDs - the purposes varied depending on the architecture and design of the MUD, but broadly speaking, Deathtraps were there to:

• Get rid of grandfathered gear, or old, overpowered gear no longer available, thereby putting newer players on more even ground with older ones
• Foster community through having the players come together to support one of their own
• Serve as gold sinks, because everything is gold, eventually, and deathtraps eat that, too. Gear is just transmogrified gold! XD
• Impart a sense of risk to some areas where they fit with the atmosphere
• Increase immersion by forcing (or trying to force, anyway!) players to pay attention to their steps

In an MMO, I don't see Deathtraps fulfilling any of those functions. Because MMOs aren't free. Especially not the F2P ones.

Once money enters the equation, it brings with it a sense of entitlement. Throw a 'massive' franchised feel into it, and there goes the sense of community. Help the other guy? Why should I! I'm not paying <Subscription amount of your choice> here a month, or I didn't spend <amount of your choice> in the cash shop to be at someone else's service, Nosirree! Yes, I'm generalising, how else are nuggets supposed to frolic on their soapboxes? 

In LegendMUD (and others), I'd risk my hard-won, oftentimes customised gear, to help a friend with corpse retrievals. Because in the smaller communities that MU*s encourage, the human connection is worth more than gear or stats. You *know* those people. And even if it's just a newbie that happens to have their tragic death announced on a MU*wide channel, if they ask for help, if people are around, they tend to help gladly. Sometimes, the newbie doesn't even have to ask. There isn't a culture of 'L2PN00b!'. I believe it's because in MU*s, the communities are small enough that there's always the thought that this newbie could become a friend. That you're proud of your world, and you want them to love it too. Because the world itself is a labour of love.

In a context like that... Deathtraps and harsh death penalties make absolute sense. MMOs are not the same beasts. Just something for those who consider harsher death penalties the Holy Grail of MMO excitement to ponder.