I've read a few guides on the intarwebs about Poupee, but a lot of what I learned about Poupee came from trial and error. I present to you the "extra gift" information I know in hopes to educate and make your Poupee experience more enjoyable. This post won't cover the basics as there are so many pages on that already. A knowledge of Japanese is not particularly necessary but it helps. I will add more to this guide when I find out more things, naturally.
Go! Go! Piyo Balloon!!
Poupee's only game on the website costs 30 ribbons to play. The aim is to use your mouse and click your piyo (baby bird) around the screen and pop the balloon of your choice. Obviously the higher you go, the better the rewards when you do finally pop a balloon. There's no discernable difference between the yellow, blue and green birds as far as I've experienced. PROTIP: In the beginning, start navigating through balloons like normal. When the counter in the lower righthand side starts getting towards 40-50-or-60, it's usually safest to either park yourself beak facing off-screen on either the left or right side of the screen, at the bottom. The caveat about doing this is that you may find yourself trapped come 70-80-90. If you see an opening, you can navigate yourself to the middle where I've found many times there to be no balloons during the higher numbers. Expect to see decent to rare rewards past 100.
Your Friends' Birds, Closet Item Comments, Ribbons, Shells & You
Common knowledge that your friends' birds can often times give you shells (keep your eyes peeled!) but your chances increase when you comment on their closet items. Your chances are increased even more when you comment AND suteki. Comment clubs (places where people arrange commenting circles in order to get ribbons and shells) will have you comment on five or more items of one particular person to increase shell chances, with people reporting one or more shell "GETs".
Another advantage to commenting is that you will receive 1 ribbon per comment given. From the Poupee website: "The number of ribbons you can get by making comments each day is 20 ribbons! *Usually up to 20 ribbons.* Also, you cannot get ribbons if you received comments from poupees who have already got the maximum of ribbons that day."
You receive seemingly nothing for suteki'ing a person's closet item. But it does increase your chance for hott bird-on-shell action.
CTRL+F, ALT+N = Your Real Friends
Do you find yourself spending too much even though you're buying a whole bunch of seemingly cheap stuff? Comparative shop aggressively! Open your "FIND" option in your browser, usually CTRL+F, enter the name or partial name of the item you want to sell or buy, then click next page. Press "ALT+N" (find next) for every page you go to, just keep on loading those pages! This way you can absorb more information about item pricing, or even open new tabs for every differently priced item you want to buy. Don't spend 100+ ribbons on something you can find on the 64th page for 35!
Deal About Shells
Some people tell you shells are worthless, just sell them in the furima (fleamarket). Others will tell you they stand hardily by their luck with the shell spring. I have not found any sort of method of putting shells in the spring to get anything better than wallpaper (time of day, etc). I've scoured Japanese search results even. There seems no method to the madness. What you decide to do with your shells is your own business, try your luck if you want.
Best advice I can give you in regards to shells: If shells are your thing and you just are
not fast enough at buying the cheap ones, try visiting all the other
item pages (bags, shoes, tops, etc) and just buy up comparably priced
items instead and shell those for yourself.
Uploading Closet Item
Do not try to post up more than five or six closet items in a twelve hour span! No matter how great the item is, or how fancy the brand, you will get shell-shocked!! Past a certain number of posted items, Poupee will start giving you mediocre ribbon counts and no item besides shells! I've had to limit myself to only five items per twenty-four hours for fear of being innundated with shells! If I post five items at 10AM, I may be able to post one or two more things at 11PM the same day but normally I will get rofled with shells past that. Just be patient and wait until tomorrow!
Drugstore & Mall Brands Available (incomplete list)
Feel sad that most of the items you own cannot be branded due to the prevalence of Japanese or haute couture brands? Never fear! Here is a small list of easy to find brands that are featured on Poupee and are probably in your closet as we speak!
- Forever21
- EXPRESS
- Aveeno
- Irregular Choice
- Johnson's (like the baby powder and stuff)
- Diesel
- Hush Puppies
- Kenneth Cole
- Kitson
- iPod
- Baby Phat
- L.L. Bean
- Lancome Paris
- Fubu
- GAP
- Hollister
- Maybelline
- Bath & Body Works
- Claire's
- Dickies
- Free People
- American Eagle (Outfitters)
- Urban Outfitters
- Anthropologie
- Loreal Paris
- American Apparel
- H&M
- Sanrio
- Disney
- San-X
- Aeropostale
- Abercrombie&Fitch
The news is in! Your GM has decided to take on a fellow colleague's challenge to fly around the world in 80 days, and therefore can no longer be the GM of your raiding guild. Chances are high someone else in the guild will be anointed lord of the flies, but chances are even higher the guild will disband. You will now enter the five stages of grief.
Denial. The guild is still alive! We can do it! Who needs that schmuck anyway? Sure, you and your chums may try to raid for a few more weeks, but the odds are against everyone. Other things to consider: small server size making new recruits hard to come by, time of the year (people going back to school), new arena season, expansion and patch dates, and general trolling. There are tons of reasons why you could disband as opposed to picking up the pieces, refocusing and burning through progression. Most guilds do not survive for long under new management.
Anger. When one realises there is no reason to go along with the guild's facade any longer, the seventh ring of hell shall open. People will jump ship and take everyone with them. This usually involves trolling, drama mongering, and general bickering. Oh, there will be words exchanged!
Bargaining. Those who haven't left due to harassment or being gkicked for poor behaviour will bargain means in which to keep the guild together. Maybe they'll nominate themselves to become next guild officer? Maybe they'll take it upon themselves to find new, but useless, recruits to fill the ranks? None of this works, however. And no, you cannot be guild officer.
BAAAAAW. This is essentially the time everyone realises that the guild is doomed (if they haven't left already). Some people may not log on for a while as they're so overcome with baaaaw. Then hopefully the GM is a reasonable person who reminds everyone it's JUST A GAME.
Acceptance. Usually the part where everything in the guild bank gets divided up among those who went through the ordeal. Though everyone has secretly been applying to other guilds, this is the step where it is usually made official that it's OK to app without fear of retribution. Everyone thinks fondly of times spent together, or times spent hating each other, then the guild disbands.. hopefully with your bags filled with [Sunmotes] and [Hearts of Darkness].
Step 1: Find a new server/guild.
Transferring is serious business. Especially serious depending on how much crap you have on your Auction House alt. Now is the time to hope there's a tailor on to make you [Imbued Netherweave Bags] for free.
Responses kept for posterity should Funcom close the thread:
10/10 for the first 2 1/2 months. Now, 0/10. Nothing to do.
was 9/10 till my tos got nerfed 5 times, after that 3/10.
tos used to be able to solo.
now at lvl 73 tos is so squishie that you need a body guard just to harvest mats for your guild.
10/10 till about mid July.Then it slowly went downhill as they "fixed" OOM issues, which only got worse on my end with each patch. Went to having almost zero OOM issues to having one an hour with this new patch. And not to mention total lock ups
From Mid July - Aug 1st 7/10
Now...3/10
As for me - about to hit 70 and I'd give it about a 4. It would have been much higher had you asked last month. Now the thinning out of content and just ongoing nagging but very visible bugs are starting to tick me off. Like everytime I get cotton from a level 70 mob I think, "I can't beleive they haven't fixed this yet."
level 1-79: 8/10
Level 80: 0/10Levels 1-20 (Tortage): 9/10
Levels 21-79: 6/10 (if those new zones that FC promised were already in, this score would probably be higher)
Level 80: -5/10
5/10 Not painful, but not enticing.
6/10 when it launched. 0 now
As a pay to play game - 2/10
6.5 hoping to see a 8-9 within a year though
Working on my second 80. 4/10.
9.5/10 - Only level 50 right now and I've been playing since the start. As a casual player I'm having a blast and I probably will continue having fun for some time.
9/10
I am really satisfied with the game, as my experience with mmo's has shown me, it only gets better with time. Unless the company is Turbine, completely screwed up AC2. Everything else has been great. Heck, I'd still be playing AO if it weren't for the fact that I moved to North Pole Alaska after I had started playing it right when it came out and had only dial up.
In the past 30 days my enthusiasm for this game has taken a huge nose dive. As of yesterdays patch it is even worse. I'd have to say 2/10 as it stands today
For the record, I've had an 80 since about late June sometime and now a pair of 60's.
Yesterdays patch may be the straw that breaks my back as now the client locks my machine up solid instead of just crashing, therefore requiring a hard reset/power down about every hour to hour and a half.
That is intolerable behavior.
Yeah, yeah, WAR is upon us. The juggernaut of EAMythic has been
stirring for how long and soon we'll see if the hype was warranted.
With North American closed beta NDA lifted (read: take the following
with a grain of salt as the game is still changing), one can now scream
from the highest mountain tops the following:
- Crafting in WAR,
while initially full of win and delicious cake (I was excited, at
least), has been nothing but a let down in-game. While not as
completely useless, full of nonsense or broken like Age of Conan,
crafting in WAR does absolutely nothing to bolster your game experience.
Now,
what's the point of crafting? Time tested tradition dictates that
crafting is a great way to make money at end game, while proving to be
sometimes a money sink while leveling. For crafting to actually make
you money, you need to be able to make things that people need.
Sometimes games go crazy and have a bazillion gathering professions and
only a few creation professions, making them dependent on one another.
This causes a complicated web of crafting economy that can either fail
completely on small servers or win on large ones. The thing about WAR's
crafting is that it is not important nor does the economy rely on it.
After
watching the developers' podcast, one couldn't help but get stoked at
the idea of passive renown gain by helping aid the war-effort via
crafting. I saw none of this in closed beta. A lot of people were just
taking up crafting to sell stuff to the vendor for their mount. The
majority found that at level 20, they were making potions for level 35.
I was making level 20 potions when I was still level 10ish. Healing
potions are underpowered and almost everything is completely useless. I
found some use in the area-slow potions, but it was too much effort to
use them during PvP or I'd forget most of the time.
What can
improve crafting in WAR? We don't need some sort of complicated system
like mentioned above, but simply an improvement in items, an
intelligent placement of the mats needed, and actual RvR quests that
ask for certain items in lieu of renown like we were first told.
Another thing that needs to change is make Cultivation its own major
profession (currently only Apothecary is, with Butchering, Salvaging,
and Cultivation as singular lower professions) and either get rid of
entirely Butchering or buff it because currently everyone is rocking
Salvaging as firstly, you can skin PvP players (awesome, amirite?) and
there's a higher percentage of humanoid mobs in WAR than nonhumanoid.
People who take up Cultivation currently cannot get the materials
needed to level as they already filled their single gathering
profession. A lot of the mats they need are gathered through
Butchering/Salvaging. Essentially this is one big mess but it's still
early in the game so this problem can be solved through patching and
further testing.
- RvR in WAR,
the big attraction and rightly so. If you've hit end-game in WoW, tired
of raiding, and all you do is play Arena, head over to WAR. RvR andScenarios are so interesting in themselves, that self-imposed EXP halts are the norm between Tiers.
The
first time I finished a scenario, it was like a light bulb went off. I
seldom PvP in other games because I have issues with balance and
credit. I usually don't like the rep/honor/reward systems because
either they're confusing, poorly conceived, or completely broken. By
the time I had reached the highest level for Tier 1, I was raking in
high healing credits and receiving great renown for it. Yes healers,
you receive full credit for healing! This adds something different to
Warhammer, as now full teams can better attempt PvP without the fear of
no heals. How many times have you, maybe as a melee class, rushed past
a crowd of friendly ranged to pick off a running enemy only to get
killed by the runner themselves? That's less of an issue in WAR because
people actually heal you (given they're paying attention.)
If
no one is holding back because they have no fear, PvP experiences
become better, last longer, and are more fulfilling. This is how RvR
and Scenarios feel like in WAR. Everyone does their job, battlefield
objectives get taken, and keeps go down. Forming warbands with complete strangers isn't as horrible as it sounds as the curse-of-the-PUG becomes a slight non-issue.
Mythic
has continuously strived to balance classes through closed beta and are
doing a great job so far. Naturally one-on-one will always follow the
same logical rules, but warbands are dynamic. Comparing all the other
healing classes in Warbands, you get a good feel that each class is
really unique.
- Classes in WAR,
conceived safe but also it's the little differences that make a huge
impression. While you might have a rogue-like class on both faction
sides, they aren't completely the same so you have no idea what to
expect.
During closed beta, I played three Destruction
healing classes, focusing mainly on Disciple of Khaine. The idea of
being a melee-based healer stroked my epeen so I was looking forward to
it. While I felt I couldn't adequately heal MTs far away from the
chaos of RvR (therefore forcing me to get into the battle), I had great
survivability so more than half the time, I had nothing to worry about
running into a large group of enemies (unless someone noticed me and I
got focus fired, ocourse.) Other Destruction healing classes were
ranged healers with their own unique class mechanics. Greenskin shamans
need to balance their offensive and healing spells to incur buffs to
either. So for every offensive spell you cast, you get one credit buff
for healing (and vice versa), and as you continue to throw offensive
spells, your credit gets higher. It's a see-saw battle but done right,
you get incredible healing and dps results.
A lot of people
moaned when they cut a few classes from the release but really, it was
the best idea possible. With the current classes in a mixed atmosphere,
everyone has something to contribute and everyone has their weaknesses.
Surely after the game's release and solid numbers are put on the table,
class imbalances might come to light but Mythic has shown a great
dedication to balance (I mean, it's a game built on PvP) so tweaking
will be always.
- Public Quests in WAR,
take out the pressure of having to advertise for an instance/dungeon
group. You're running down the road and see a bunch of people
attempting a multi-stage public quest, jump right in. Depending on your
contribution, you may even get loot.
The purpose of PQs
in WAR is to gather reputation with that PQ's associated chapter
(camps/towns in WAR are numbered chapters), at which that rep can be
handed in at certain levels for set rewards. You can also win an end
roll at the PQs themselves and receive a loot bag of a certain quality.
Remember skipping certain quests in games because the loot was nothing
you could use? All the reward tables in WAR are dynamic to your class,
so there's always something you can use.
There has never been
a time during PQs where the people already there have spurred me away
or generally been unhelpful. Tanks will kindly tank, healers will heal,
and everyone gets along. This could be possibly because the stress of
PUG'ing is gone, or maybe the CB testers are nice or something. But
everyone does their share in a PQ because they all want the rep. And
just like in RvR/Scenarios, healers get credit for healing in PQs.
PQs
consist of normally three stages (though I've come across some with
even more stages), each stage progressing in difficulty. While you
could probably solo a first stage yourself, you would probably need
help on stage two, and a decent number of people for stage three which
prevents the uneven solo farming of PQs. The developers were smart
enough to insert quests that overlap with the area of the PQ, so while
you're there doing your quest, you'll be more likely to be sucked into
helping the PQ if there are already people there.
PQs are
quick and fun, and definitely repeatable. And because they're in open
space, you can walk away at any time and go do something else. Try to
do that on a dungeon run or a regular grouped quest and people will
yell at you and maybe blacklist you from the server, heh.
- Other things in WAR, yes there are closed dungeons, gear customization, capital city RvR, siege weapons, guilds, and mounts.
Siege weapons
can be used at special pads littered around keeps and inside them to
aid in taking the objective. Defensive teams can use oil to protect
their keep door, offensive teams can use battering rams and catapults
to take down the door and enemies. Siege weapons are working as
intended currently and I haven't ran into any issues with them.
Mounts
are attainable at level 20. As of this writing, the price was steep but
not impossible. I had my mount at 21 even though I was spending money
on dying my gear and etc. The speed increase is noticeable but not as
much as you would probably like considering how large RvR lakes
sometimes are. After you purchase your mount, basically all your income
thereafter is free to be used however you like.
Gear customization is not yet totally awesome in WAR but it's getting there. You can dye your gear at any non-warcamp merchant
and usually each piece of gear has two dyable sections so you can mix
and match colours. Also a part of WAR is the trophies. Trophies are
little doo-dads you get from various quests, Tome unlocks, and other
such things that can be placed on your person with placement options
built right in.There are a few other things in the works, but I don't know enough details about them to share.
Guilds!
Guilds are awesome! WAR, being RvR based, really isn't the game to be
guildless in (power in numbers, you know.) But being in a guild has so
many perks that even if you hate your guildmates, you won't care
because the guild standards, guild lounge, and other things are so
crazy helpful that it doesn't matter. Guild standards can be used even
outside of your guild in regular PUG Warbands, so later on when guilds
make alliances (which they can in WAR), everyone can arrange their
standards in advance to achieve maximum effect. Having a guild lounge
is like having a hearthstone/recall spell that's never on cooldown.
From the guild lounge, there's a merchant that sells all the things
you'd need for crafting or whatnot and a flight path that can take you
where you need to be. The guild pit recall scrolls are cheap enough
that you can stock up on them and never get stuck in the middle of
nowhere. They also provide a quick route to wherever the RvR action is
occurring.
What to gather from all of this?
Warhammer
is on its way to launch soon (Sept. 18). My overwhelming feeling is
that the RvR and PQ experiences will temporarily make up for the
short-comings of the crafting system which hopefully get fixed as soon
as possible. There's nothing incredibly wrong with the crafting system
(it works at least), but there's no incentive. Classes are looking good
currently, scenarios are being balanced and the RvR lakes are perfect
as is. There are no gaping holes in the PvE experience, the code for
WAR has been improving greatly over closed beta and a lot of the
technical things that were going on (getting stuck on things, floating
NPCs, client crashing to desktop, etc) have been solved at least on my
end.
One cannot help but compare this upcoming release to Age
of Conan and gloat. We won't know until head start and then the
official release how stable things are, how people react to game
mechanics, and if people feel like this is a decently completed game
that has successfully finished beta. If you put a hundred monkeys in a
room, surely something is bound to break so a few thousand players all
at once is unpredictable. Mythic has been stress testing the servers
for a while now and are generally concerned about lag, especially in
large scale RvR.
If Funcom is that insensitive boyfriend who never listens and hangs out late with his friends without calling, Mythic is your emotional tampon feeding you bonbons, absorbing as many suggestions and input as humanly possible. We will see.
I haven't been posting much, mostly because I stopped playing AoC a long time ago, went back to WoW to raid, and am currently under NDA for a certain something or other game. But today, I had a fantabulous surprise in my inbox from the glorious people at Funcom. After, something like a month and a half, Funcom has finally activated their Buddy Code system. Oh joy! I wouldn't wish that game on even my worst enemy. But regardless, there's icing on the cake. Let's see if you can spot what it is!
Dear Age of Conan gamer
As you may know, every owner of Age of Conan may invite a friend to come play free of charge for seven days. At last we are happy to announce that we have enabled this functionality. This means that now is the time to invite your friends to come play Age of Conan and see what all the buzz is about!
The invitation process is easy:
Log-in to your account page, and choose "Buddy program". Follow the on-screen instructions, and then write a personal message to your friend if you so desire.We are certain you will make a friend happy with this token of appreciation, and what is better than chopping of Pict heads together with your best buddy?
We recommend that you lend your install DVDs to your buddy to get him or her ready to play as fast as possible. Alternatively your buddy will be offered a $2,99/€2,99 client download with 3 additional days of playtime to cover the download time.
We still highly recommend the personal touch of going to your friend's house with the DVD install though. Not only does this make it completely free for your friend, it also allows you to show them the ropes!
Sincerely,
Funcom
This is extremely strange, if you don't know. Never in my entire gaming life have I had to pay to use a Buddy Key for a game. Usually you just end up cursing how slow your client download is going and thinking, "well, this is seven hours of my free time I'll never get back." Not only does it aggravate me that Funcom took so long to enact their Buddy Keys system (should have been up sooner, two weeks after launch would have been prime), but they're being the lousy douchebags that Age of Conan players (the non-fanboy majority) have come to expect by charging you just to try their game. In any other genre, this might be okay. Maybe if this were Xbox360 Marketplace, I'd understand.
What gall Funcom has. Too bad no one wants to play their failure or tolerate their customer abuse.
It's amusing to me to see the wheels of PR turn and turn and turn again. I've seen hype for MMO releases before, but soon after the release, all word about the hyped games (that were utterly rubbish of course) came to a halt. All these great reviews for Age of Conan are based off the first twenty levels which are very immersing and well done (they have voice-acting!) but once you leave the island, you get off the super happy fun time boat and land straight plunk in the middle of crap. Of course companies aren't ignorant, Funcom must have known that investing the money in the first twenty levels of the game would result in good reviews all around.
Reading the forums, you'd think the atomic bomb of rage was unleashed. People are mostly angry. And for every single vocal customer, there surely has to be nine others who aren't on the forums.
Personally, the tech horror stories have managed to leave me unscathed. My new prefab rig runs Age of Conan fine within reason. (I'd like higher frame rates than 40-70, but whatever.) I can log into my account. But what's the point.
- Crafting is a joke, if it even exists in a state of tangibility that we're accustomed to.
- I can kill mobs my level and higher while completely naked because most +stats do not work, there is a stat cap, and even if stats did work, armor is still poorly itemized.
- Healing is a joke in this game. The novelty of being able to pewpew while playing a healer has mostly worn off and real questions are being asked about just how practical it is to heal in Age of Conan. You have HoTs, AoE HoTs, then "oh-shit" heals that have long CD but heal the most the soonest. I feel like a janky HoT-based druid.
- As previously stated, this game is instanced. That is fine and good if I were able to 1) pick what instance of a zone I was going to zone into based on population, 2) able to easily switch instances without having to run fifteen minutes to the nearest graveyard.
- Auction House currently doesn't work. There is no way to really view all the listings of a particular item type, there is no preview armor paperdoll option, and there is still a lot of categories MIA. Not to mention, once you list something on the AH, the item loses all value and therefore cannot be sold to a merchant if it doesn't sell on the AH which is incredibly likely considering chances are stacked against you from even having that item be viewed by others.
- Not user friendly or intuitive. Chat box is uninformative and hard to manage. Quest book does not tell you what the amount of quests you're allowed to have is (I've wasted items that grant quests only to be told my quest log was full, then had to struggle to get another copy of the quest item). Quest book does not give you information about the exact level of the quest, so you never know when a quest's colour will change from red to orange and etc. Though the map is informative somewhat, there is no way to view full map of other areas unless you are in said area already. Only recently have they added the ability to tell which instance you are in (though it's moot since you cannot reinstance.) Tooltips don't give you much information at all.
- Merchant system has no easy way to undo purchases. Once you've closed the window, you've lost whatever you sold, which has resulted in many people accidentally selling their hard earned mounts and not being able to retrieve them.
- Bag system is impossibly difficult. You get ONE bag slot. To place things from page 2 of your bag onto page 1, you have to click, drag, wait, then place it down. Right clicking in this game will not put things from your bag into the bank, instead you will use whatever it is up if it's a consumable. I learned this the hard way. So essentially you have to individually drag things from your bag into the bank and a lot of items are bugged and will not stack, therefore taking up more space than necessary.
- Funcom has been quiet about game mechanics because their motto is, "it's best to let the players figure it out." That's literally their motto. It's been stated numerously in mod posts on the forum and in interviews. What it really comes down to is that Funcom doesn't even know how game mechanics work, since stats are imaginary, itemization is poor, and your abilities/feats don't work more than half the time.
- Incentive is gone. End-game raiding is underwhelming (game has been out for two weeks and three out of the five 25-man raiding instances have been cleared) with the realisation that gear is moot (as stats don't work, remember!) and there is no glory to be had. You level to 40 to get your mount only to be slapped in the face as quests only start giving you enough money to do anything once you hit 50ish. Then you get your mount and make sad face as it barely works, gets stuck on things, and doesn't go much faster than running on foot. Did I mention all the gear looks the same?
This game depresses me. I know it's hard to make an MMO. I don't remember Anarchy Online being completely dreadful, it had its shortcomings but it wasn't as horrible as this game. Did Funcom get in over their heads or something? Did they waste those four or five years in development trying to secure more money and not actually working on the game? What were kids doing during closed beta? Did they even get past level twenty? Funcom lays promises on the table that I would like to believe they will sooner or later get to but people are jumping ship because all the things I've listed above are things that probably should have been working to begin with. Bugs with quests, guilds (lols no GM, no problem!), NPCs, areas are negligible and will get fixed. Fine tuning is great to expect after a release and also supplemental gameplay (expansions, patches that open up areas, more content) but come on.
What DOES work in this game:
- Hitting things. But not supplemental abilities acquired through feats or anything that has anything to do with +stats.
- Quests and quest givers for the most part. However, if you attempt to do an escort quest (which normally takes ten+ minutes) and someone hails your NPC in the middle, it will reset the quest and you'll have to do it all over again!
- NPCs have a lot of dialogue, not even the important ones. Immersing, I guess.
- You can link guild information in the chat box to be broadcasted over channels. People then can click the link and view your guild's recruitment information, etc. Nice.
- Areas in general. No one has reported falling through mountains or anything. You will still get stuck walking on ground but whatever. Everything is there at least!
- Map does a good job telling you where you go for quests.
One more week and I am done.
There's been a lot of talk about certain (read: a lot) stats on items not being noticeable during gameplay. Some people have even stripped down and noticed absolutely no difference in killing people. Out of sheer curiosity, I stripped down to my little thong and attempted to kill things. I unequipped everything but my weapon (need it for combos) and yes, the time it took me to kill things was the same. I had no drop in health, stamina, or mana. The only thing I noticed was that sometimes I got knocked down more often than usual, but that was against mobs I had never killed previously, so the percentage could be the same and therefore not affected by "knockback resist", unless that stat actually works.
tl;dr version: You can level naked in Age of Conan. Stat bonuses from armor mean almost nothing currently.
- Age of Conan is an instanced game. "Instanced" means that there are multiple versions of the same area to compensate for the amount of players currently attempting to quest in said area.
- As stated, instances are suppose to prevent you from having a difficult time finishing your quests, as over-population will lead to people killing quest mobs you so desperately need.
- Sounds good on paper until you realise this was a clever ploy done by Funcom to save work actually making zones that make sense and have the right congestion of mobs (named, for quests, etc.)
- When faced with no quest mobs, instead of waiting for them to respawn (10-20 minutes), I decided to take it upon myself to change instances. Makes sense, amirite?
- Apparently someone over at Funcom read my quantum leap post and has now prevented players from reinstancing unless they are 20 meters (or less) away from a resurrection point (those little nipples on the map.) This completely killed my brilliant and perfectly sensible idea.
Needless to say, I am livid and it's only been five minutes logged in.
