Quick Ramble - NXP, some links, and Syfy

Heya! So I have like 10 minutes before I need to get up out of this chair and get ready for work. I've been grinding Nautical XP in game this morning solo.

Oh Bad Pedro . . . look at you . . . level 58 in Aquila and you've had to rush back to MooShu to grind on ships to level. tsk tsk.

I really don't have much to write about today. I would like to share a couple more selfish links to posts I've written for the KingsIsle blog:

Realmscon Visit
Writing Update Notes and more

. . . I want to go back to the beach! That was a lot of fun there in Corpus Christi for the fam. I was tweeting pictures of Zoomer getting soaked in the ocean hehe.

As for real life, the one show Uber Wife and I really love to watch religiously is Syfy's FaceOff. There's nothing quite like watching stressed out Creature Creators racing against the clock to put together really cool make ups.

CREEPY STUFF. That'll help you get into the mood for Halloween costuming!

It's pretty fun looking through their photo galleries. There's a Pirate Gallery from Season 3 that's awesome!

Ok, I'm out of time.

Happy Dueling!

Happy Birthday Pirate101 from TFN

I'm tired . . . it's been an exhausting year, but that's not why I'm tired. *yawn* I just woke up. Let me see if I can string together a few sentences here about Pirate101's birthday from my point of view.

It seems like in life we like to plant flags in certain dates because it helps us separate time. HERE ENDS THE PAST! HERE STARTS A NEW BEGINNING! Missing that opportunity would be incredibly unfortunate, and so I'm very happy that we were able to do that yesterday, and I think we did a pretty good job, and it's been a pretty spectacular year at KingsIsle IMHO with both games rocking out stuff.

We didn't throw a grand party at KingsIsle -- too much work to do! We did, however, gather together at one point during the day where Josef Hall gave a short speech about how impressed he was with all the Pirate101 team had worked on this year. We haven't slowed down since launch. Marleybone and Aquila was a huge undertaking, and we've been working hard on . . . other stuff yet to be released. :)

Then Jay and Mike passed out cookies. Wheee! Cookies! nom nom nom.

I won't rehash our birthday too much since you're all well aware of the hat (hehe, leaking the hat on Puppet Pirates with Jeff Toney was fun ;)) and the decorations and all the Halloween stuff happening simultaneously. You guys all know that, and if you haven't seen it yet -- log in! Whatcha waiting for! :)

The best part of yesterday for me was playing Pirate101 with my youngest after work and watching him get excited over the Parrrty hat and pumpkin eyepatch for his level 5 character and getting him the new Haunted Galleon. He loved his spooky new ship! :)

And that was awesome . . .

Happy Dueling!

X and Y invade the Friendly Household!

Saturday afternoon we went to Gamestop to pick up our reserved copies of Pokemon X and Y for the kids.

Woo woo! There was some intense bargaining from the kids at first about who was going to play which version . . . Amber wanted X and was very staunch on that stance, and this made Kyle want X as well. It took a bit of talking, but everything worked out based around fairy-type Pokemon and Yveltal, the dark/flying type pokemon (if I remember right . . .uh yes, thank you Forbes), and Kyle became convinced that Y would be his game. whew. Crisis averted. ;)

Since we pre-ordered, the folks at Gamestop were nice enough to give us this cool timeline poster showing all the Pokemon games throughout history.

:) Timelines are awesome. I can now coordinate the birth of my children to a specific Pokemon game. LOL!

After a couple of days here, they're both around the 3rd or 4th gym battle and chugging along. My daughter proclaimed her Pokemon X to be the best Pokemon game evar! I trust that endorsement.

Happy Dueling!

Missing Reagent Maps--Call to arms?

Yesterday one of the designers who sits behind myself and Professor Greyrose, spun around and yelled "I need Scrap Iron!" HAHA! It was awesome to see that real-life reaction that pretty much every player has that undertakes crafting. Greyrose and myself were like, "Marleybone!" and "Bazaar!" He went on to explain he had been trying to snipe reagents in the Bazaar by refreshing every 30 seconds, but it was driving him a bit nuts.

Then I remembered! Oh yeah! We started making awesome maps of where all the reagents are out there in the world . . . hmmmm.

I linked him to my posts, and he jokingly said, "The Friendly Necromancer? Who is this guy?" Sadly, none of the maps I ever made *had* the wonderful scrap iron spawns he was looking for. Then I linked him to Evil Theurgist's Reagent Map site. And that did have some good info, but I could clearly see just from looking at the map to Regent's Square that a lot of the spawn locations were missing or incomplete. Fail.

Are these the best we have?

Really?

It seems like every person (myself included) that has begun to take this task on has crumbled at the sheer amount of work it involves or lost interest in continuing the project. Where's the Celestia, Avalon, Zafaria, Azteca, Wintertusk, and Aquila maps?

Looks like Jester has the maps and is willing to work with someone based off of this thread (hehe, someone tried to repost my maps here, which in this case I am totally ok with btw.)

If there's a site out there that's good for this kind of information, please let me know about it!

Happy Dueling!

Riffing . . . Old Times, New Pet!

I logged on this morning and played the good ol' dance game a few times to level my Frakenbunny a bit.

Yay! Old enough to hatch!

I stopped by Professor Falmea's office yesterday and told her that I liked the new Halloween quest and we talked a bit about it and had fun riffing on possibilities. I love that. I don't know one Wizard101 fan that doesn't love riffing on the possibilities of how to improve the game. In fact, I don't know a fan of anything that doesn't love riffing on the possibilities of whatever it is they are a fan of. It's just ingrained in each of us. I highly doubt anything will come of our discussion because it's all in good fun, but it is fun!

Speaking of being an old fan of things . . . I was digging through some old CDs this week because I'm desperately trying to track down a CD that contains the files I need to run my Halloween Light Show (and failing btw *sobs*). I found a great old CD full of old Everquest screenshots. LOL, this was my less-than-uber Female High Elf Cleric back when I'd take up the phone line for the entire evening using dialup to play with my friends online:

Oh how that game has changed over the last decade plus!

Happy Dueling!

Rethinking Angus for Celestia?

The announcement that the rules on Reshuffle in Wizard101 were changing happened several months ago, and with it I mentally signed off Angus Unicornpants. I logged him on this morning and did a couple of Halloween quests and a couple of old quests I hadn't done yet. I noted that it was pretty funny he didn't look out of place doing his battle training quests at all even though he's level 49.



I have several old side quests in his quest log that I never finished, and perhaps now is a good time to look back at those and finish them off in an attempt to level him a bit before attempting Celestia. After all, my real interest in Celestia was the Polymorph spells with Angus, and I think going back and padding his level a bit might just be the key that will help me progress. Defeating Malistaire with Angus has definitely been my most grueling pve experience in Wizard101 to date, but Celestia would be near impossible for Angus because of the difficulty ramp. Polymorphs seemed to be the answer to wearing no gear since they supposedly have their own statistics, unfortunately, I don't think crit block and critical are amongst those statistics.

Perhaps it's time for some new rules for Angus as well . . . maybe a larger deck is now allowed because of the reshuffle rule change? Maybe he can only equip a base set of crit block and crit gear? I don't even know if that exists! Meh, or I could just keep him au natural and just see how it goes.

Hard to say. What do you think?

Happy Dueling!

Nosferabbit . . . it's spookies!

Hallowe'en is a big deal in Wizard101. It was their first and only really big holiday content season. Sure, there's vendors and fun stuff for the other holidays, but when Halloween hits, there's towers, and quests, and decorations a plenty! It's fun, but after the hour or two of fun is finished, you were kind of like . . . yeah, I've done this before. yawn. next! However, that feeling coupled with all the in game legends about "what's behind the door next to the storm drain tower", and there's just a lot of awesomeness about this new holiday update for Wizard101!

Mmm hmm! It's a simple quest (at least for level 90 characters) that's cute and short, but it's awesome and a lot of fun too.

Sorry Professor Diapermancer, it took a few years, but now your answer to Bailey Firesword's question is incorrect.



It was Bailey's Skystaff's birthday yesterday, and (for a little bit of fun) we decided to give this new content a run through.

Dworgyn gave us the skinny.

Eek! Sure enough there was a sigil right there in front of the doorway that had been abandoned for so long.

Who knew it would be fortune seeking moles to break in there first and awaken the thirst of Nosferabbit and his undead veggies. After we entered, I ran ahead to check things out.

Bailey calmed my fears *cough* and in the end, we were just a couple meteor strikes and a Deer Knight away from Defeating Nosferabbit and getting to the real prize of this instance! Cheep Bird transformations and a Frankenbunny pet!

I think the Wizard101 team did a great job on this quest, and it was a lot of fun to play through with Uber Wife on her birthday.

We tried to run through Aquila as well, but we ran out of time before we needed to pick up "Professor Diapermancer" from school. :) I'll just save any discussion of Aquila for later.

Happy dueling!