Doddler's RO Journal
WoE Video Double Post
By Doddler on November 18, 2008 in category 'War of Emperium'
Double woe video post. Sorry for the delay on posting these, these are videos from the last two war of emperiums.
Admittedly, war of emperium is a bit unbalanced at the moment. Despite the challenge of defending 10 separate forts, guilds simply are unable to currently match our attendance, supplies and organization. Most of the problem stems from zeny though, and the fact that we get a lot of zeny from our forts... more than any other guild could hope for. Ten 60-70 econ forts tends to do that. Its not that other guilds aren't skilled or high level, but most of the guilds we're fighting in our forts are bringing 6-12 players to the battle... with the odd one bringing maybe up to 20 players. Unfortunately that doesn't compare favorably to our guild attendance of 40, or our alliance attendance of 60+ players.
I'm unsure how to make things balanced though. Splitting war of emperium times (woe2 on Tuesday, woe1 on Sat) is definitely going to help, because I think its unreasonable to expect that we can defend even when our forts are the only ones at stake. I was hoping our position on top would encourage startup guilds to band together into alliances that can fight against us... and as players became higher level they would be better suited to fighting (level 60 characters taking on level 80 ones is way less fair than 80 versus 90), unfortunately its looking like players are simply giving up. I don't want to drive players from the server though, I want to see it become a competitive battlefield.
I know it sounds conceited to say these things, but I think the fact that we control as an alliance 18/30 of the castles (the Valkyrie guild itself has 13 of those), it gives us some right to say such a thing. What can we do to even it out though? Obviously we're going to give up some woe2 castles when the split comes, which will help the issue to some degree. I don't want to engage in a server wide non aggression, even though our policy to date has generally been to let guilds do what they want to do as long as they're not in the forts we want. I still want woe to be about fighting and controlling forts, but more and more guilds are just stepping to the side and letting us do our own thing, which isn't really fair. Not that many of the guilds could stand if they chose not to anyways. So how do we do it? How do we help guilds become competitive, so that woe can stay fun and exciting, without simply giving up what we have?
Anyways, more about the wars themselves. On the 12th we attempted to give one of our woe2 castles to our ally, Libido. Libido's fort unfortunately was broken last minute by a breaker cloaked in their emperium room. The woe of the 15th involved attempting to re-take the castle from Inertia, defending our other forts, and then attempting to wrestle away the Meginjard forts from those who had it (as well as a good fight with RageQuit). Overall the woe was fairly fun, though as I mentioned before fairly one sided.
On a technical aspect, I played around with the resolution and rendering on both of them. The first one is a 640x480 rendered FLV at 1600 kbps. The second video is a smaller resolution MP4 rendered at 800 kbps. The MP4 came out to only 70MB though, while the FLV 175MB. Let me know what you think about the two videos.
High resolution versions (about 210MB 640x480 H.264 encoded) of both videos are available as well.
November 12th WoE
November 15th WoE
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War of Emperium - Nov 8th 2008
By Doddler on November 9, 2008 in category 'War of Emperium'
So now that I'm actively participating in War of Emperium now I decided to create a new WoE category on the blog. Damn that category list is getting pretty big.
Technically speaking, being able to record woe has been a series of hurdles. My system had some issues related to out of date chipset and sata drivers that basically slowed my hard drive write speed to a point where it couldn't accurately deal with the throughput needed to handle recording for a long period of time. You can see the result of the Orc Lord video I recorded a bit ago, the choppiness was due to this problem. I nearly toasted the system during a bios update gone bad, because apparently the asus windows bios flash utility is absolute garbage, and my system wouldn't even turn on, but luckily removing the battery from the motherboard allowed it to boot again. The weirdest thing is that the newest (and best) drivers for the sata controller were not available from the manufacturers web site, but only via windows update. Weird.
So I was able to record the entirety of woe at a steady 40 frames per second. Its clear that there's some tweaking to be had, running fraps on 1/2 screen size when running at 960x600 resolution doesn't generate the highest res video possible. Also fraps had some issues during the recording process at the very start, and you can see the unusual issue where the video appears to sometimes jump between slow-mo and fast forward. Unfortunately no post editing can fix it, but its not too noticeable and only occurs for a short period at the start.
About the battle itself, I think woe was pretty well everything we expected. We managed to retake our lost Nidhoggur fort from Inertia without too much trouble, and managed to hold off attacking guilds from our other WoE2 forts. Holding 10 WoE2 forts at once isn't easy, and sometimes glaring mistakes can be had, even when you are as coordinated as we are. In particular, the Promise guild managed to take one of our forts before we even realized it was under attack. Oops. All I can say is that someone was supposed to be watching it for attackers.
The dead branching was another in a line of rather unfortunate but distressingly common low tactics employed by some of the enemy guilds. Last woe they took a low level acolyte and tried to place warps to deadly maps over our existing warp portals to castle forts and attempted to break kaite and other effects out of forts before we entered. This woe they memo'd directly onto the portal and spammed dead branches outside so no one can go in. Unfortunately for them their trick wasn't particularly effective. While we killed the branches after we removed them from the fort, the GM team responded to an email inquiry in a near record 2 minutes in game to take care of the branches, though we left no work for them. While I have particular beef against Ragequit's Jambalaugi, I don't have anything really against most of the other guilds we're facing, so I don't want to judge their members, but it does seem as though their leadership isn't above cheap tricks.
At present Valkyrie Guild holds 13 castles, 9 woe2 forts and 4 woe1 forts. An impressive hold by any account. I'm unsure how long we'll be able to hold basically half the server's forts, especially considering there doesn't seem to be any shortage of up and coming guilds with decent players behind them, but either way I'm expecting to have a good time.
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First Ktullanux on Valkyrie Server
By Doddler on November 4, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Who says you need to be 99 trans characters to do some of these MVPs? All it takes is a little smarts, some gear and coordination. While it wasn't a flawless run, there were still some deaths, we did fairly good and the run took only about 10 minutes from summoning to his defeat... a time that at times we failed to match even on Loki (don't ask!).
Interestingly enough I think we had more deaths to atroce before than we did to Ktullanux. Many of the deaths were simple mistakes, like meleeing the boss, hitting the boss before it gets to the tank, etc.
The gears I used to tank were as follows:
+4 Magni Cap
Robot Eyes
Evolved Pipe
+5 Aqua Silk Robe
+4 Brutal Stone Buckler
+4 Genie Muffler
+5 Wonderer Boots (Green Ferus)
2x Safety Rings
The guild only had 3 unfrozen armors available, which we used for the bard, high priest, and safety walling wizard.
More exciting things to come!
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Time Passes
By Doddler on October 30, 2008 in category 'General'
Its hard to find time to write entries on here sometimes you know? You'll find today's entry is probably quite disjointed, because I'm quite tired while writing this. Sorry!
Anyways, carrying off from last time.
The grand circlet we got from orc lord. 
Somehow I still haven't found my Thara Frog card, despite many hours of hunting. These days the bots, and other bad things are wandering around down there. Some things are a bit much for a solo knight.
This is one of those bad things!
Long image is long! But yeah, without the Rachel Sanctuary open we can't obviously enter Rachel Sanctuary, but it also means that we can't complete the quest for Nameless Island. The whole 500m in donations thing doesn't work so well on a new server.
Well it looks like its going down somehow. My guess though is that its only 12 player donations and some 3000 'mysterious' donations. The GMs are suggesting that the other citizens of Midgard and Arunafeltz are also making donations. I say they're just paying it down over time. Either way it means we will eventually see the sanctuary on Valkyrie, even if it will probably be another month or so before it happens.
It appears as though my 50k donation was worth this apt reward. No wonder no one donates!
Its nice that the price of enriched elunium is so much cheaper now on the Valkyrie server. However, with the near requirement to use it to get any safe upgrading (on all but the most common gears), I wonder how much cheaper it really turns out in the long run. Rumor has it that the regular upgrade rates past the safe point, and even enriched elunium rates are also nerfed. That would be pretty bad though... even 30 points it would be a lot of equipment, and money to get good items.
...The least they could do is put the enriched in boxes so you can gift them or at least not have stacks of individual stones.
Obviously 4/4 success to +4.
Half down 4 to 5, rest gone going +6. Well I didn't do enough to make any real conclusion about the rate anyways.
Just a random mob that seemed to spontaneously come out of nowhere. Almost died due to trying to take a screenshot!
Guild treasures graced me with this rather entertaining item.
It didn't take long of killing hordes of easy monsters to pull together a small stockpile of potions. These guys are pretty useful, and the card certainly made it much easier to get than actually potting them. I guess the actual rate is about 0.5% for each type of potion.
Dead branches are a common issue on Valkyrie, and occasionally we get asked, or simply feel like taking them out. Unfortunately its quite possible to summon monsters that are very dangerous.
2k damage short! 
Probably not the best one of my ideas I've ever had.
War of Emperium has generally been quite exciting on Valkyrie, and we generally get some pretty good turnout. While we still hold the majority of the woe2 forts, there's still some good times to be had.
While we are not directly allied to Crissagrim and Destrado, we did help them out on the Saturday war to defend their woe2 fort. The alternative, Inertia or Ragequit holding those forts would have been much worse.
At this point, emperiums are still fairly resilient objects, taking even a group such as this at least a minute to break. Its my opinion that the emperiums should probably be stronger because while its fairly balanced at this point, later some classes can get some pretty obscene break times and it makes the emperium seem laughably weak.
I've been tasked with checking castle treasures some times when the guild leader is unable to do so. Generally our woe2 forts don't drop much interesting beyond the elemental bows since most of the gear they drop is fairly common, trans only stuff. We do get a decent number of treasure boxes and OCAs though.
The best we've gotten so far!
Of course we've been continuing to MVP still. Some other players are stepping up to kill the Atroces... my guild mates say its probably because I've posted about how to do them! Regardless, we still usually get the opportunity to take out the Atroces when we look for them.
The new zombie event is pretty cool! I have to give them props for the idea, because its fairly unique to a game like RO. Basically, you get warped to a copy of the Payon map, filled to the brim with zombies and ghouls. You can't bring any gear with you (have to be on 0 weight before entering), and can't be using a peco or cart. You can't use any skills on this map, and your HP is set to 1%... generally any attack from one of these monsters that lands will kill you. You have to make your way to one of the exits of the town while avoiding the angry undead.
The concept is actually fairly original and it is pretty fun to do for a bit. I can't help but think the execution is a little lacking though... Payon isn't exactly a scary place. In fact, its fairly wide open, and the zombies while being fairly sparratic and being quick to switch to the nearest living creature, they're easily predictable and its quite easy to simply get agi up before entering. AGI classes definately have an advantage here, because while those of us who don't dodge usually die instantly to a ghouls 300-400 damage melee, its still a ghoul and most agi characters don't have a problem evading their attacks. Also the randomized exits while sound like a decent idea at first, it usually just comes down to sitting and waiting for someone to activate one of the other portals and waiting for the exit you're at to become active. I suppose that does make it so people are always going to different exits though.
The rewards, since they improved them during a surprise maintenance are alright, the event probably isn't worth a whole lot beyond getting your event pumpkin hat (+3 to all stats for the week) and the novelty of being chased by undead through payon.
I got my hat! It takes 20 runs through to get it. The other rewards aren't really that worth it. The Pumpkin Pie is merely passable as a recovery item, and while its cool that it gives SP, even after the patch I can't justify two runs through payon for an item that gives you 5% HP and SP (about 4-5 mins of running). Well I got a few since the zombie run is pretty fun but its not really practical, nor desirable to really keep doing it for the items. A nice distraction though.
iRO has just recently added these little guys to the Kafra Shop, and for a decent price I might add (10 for 50 points). If only all kafra shop items could have similar price to value.
I actually do really like the idea of the Convex Mirror. What it means, is that it takes the weight off of actually finding the boss monster (or when it spawns) and makes it about killing the boss monster. At times you find you spend much more time actually looking for the boss than you ever do actually killing it. All too common on Loki and other servers, is that the actual act of finding the boss, and finding the boss before someone else does is actually the real battle.
Certainly a handy little tool.
While our orc lord run last week went fairly smoothly, it doesn't always go as nice. Sometimes, if people simply don't pay attention, then things can go drastically wrong. In this case a certain killer ignored us when we told him to ease off and caused us to get hit by his powered up earthquake, something we rely on avoiding. 50 DKP Minus!
The Ahlspeiss is certainly a handy spear! Bypassing defense on boss monsters is cool. I'd prefer a brocca personally, but I'm willing to let it slide for now.
I can't say exactly why we decided to do so, but we decided to take on Vesper. We didn't really expect it to be easy, and certainly like half our party dies in 2-3 hits to Dimiks, but we decided to give it a shot.
Of course it goes without saying that the Juperos quest is actually quite cool. I'm quite fond of it really, there's very few party oriented quests such as this one.
Actually killing Vesper didn't go quite as smoothly as planned. Part of the issue was due to the fact that we had intended to bring a dedicated safety waller... however he accidentally returned to town while we were already in Juperos Core. Having our main killer also be the main safety waller doesn't always fly with Vespers massive mob, when Vesper also has the ability to deal fatal crits that one shot the tank.
Still, when we actually got it rolling it wasn't so bad.
Victory! No drops of value though.
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