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Asheron's Call Review: 6/14/10
Spector88
Member UncommonPosts: 112
Hello all,
I have been playing Asheron's Call off and on since 2001 every couple years I come back to check it out, if you havent played in a long time here is some info for you:
Yes, Asheron's Call is still going, Turbine still releases patches monthly, and right now is actually a semi-exciting time in AC.
Tomorrow I think is the patch with another new race, they have already released Shadows as a playable race. The rumor is the new race will be lugians.
Highest population white server: Frostfell
Darktide has about 350 logged in to 400 logged in per day.
Returning players come back all the time.
Armor level restrictions are 150, and 180 now for a lot of good armor, there is now Epics which surpass Majors and give +20 to stats.
There is also going to be a new GROUND TEXTURE graphics update within the next month or so. This is also very exciting, TWO Handed Swords is also out now.
The game is old, but quality is quality. This game can be a little wierd to get for someone who is not firmiliar with AC but if you find some helpful people on Frostfell you should be Okay, Darktide is still alive and kicking there is still people all over PKing.
Honestly with a fully epic'd Lich King Citadel raiding level 80 on WoW I still feel with Ventrilo, Friends, and a good guild AC can keep up with WoW fun wise. Don't be afraid to try this game, there is a 14 day free trial.
If you need someone to talk to, I play X-Legend mostly on Darktide. Im not currently on Frostfell.
If you played any other servers goodluck, for the most part they are kindof empty, you might see like 100-150 online though.. MAYBE.
Comments
Should point out with the patch today we got:
New landscape graphics and fog (both are a big improvement and look nice).
Gearknights (also look very nice and get a good racial skill).
And a town network, which is very convenient and fun to use.
picture of the new gearknights (one of their screenshots).
Alright.. enough dicking around, I'ma try this one out.
If anyone has advice or has a guild I could join, pm me.
I'll be named Deathage on Frostfell.
CONTINUTED FROM ORIGINAL POST***
m not gonna bull crap anyone there is some strange aspects to this game, for instance, there is a program called Decal, it runs in the background and it facilitates many bots, macros, and programs you customly pick for your gaming needs.
PERK OF THIS: Asheron's Call is one of the few games you can macro while at work, while doing real life stuff and it will play the game almost better than you can, it will know when to buff, what items to loot ect.
*Even though Turbine says you should be AT your PC when you macro, no one really is.
CON: Everyone macros but a lot of people are still around to talk and chat, the game isn't a ghost time, also a con: sometimes popular dungeons will be full because its already full of macroers. Its not anything like these new asian games with 15,000 bots though its nothing like that.
Just in all, this game would really suck without Decal, but with Decal this game is really fun, just be ready to use it pretty much anywhere past level 50 unless you hunting by hand.
ALSO: The new Gear Knights are cool, they come with Mace which is a nice weapon for free, they also look very cool and the graphics update is sweeeeeet.
DARKTIDE: Kinda screwed up because they destroyed a lot of portals to get around the world in favor of a central portal location in town, its nice for newbies sure but on Darktide where you can die anywhere anytime, going to acentral location makes newbs prey for the powerful, it sucks.
Once again always looking for people to play with, X-Legend of Darktide.
If you're going to mention macroing, you should mention how a few weekends ago they banned something like 100 people for that very thing.
People who do it always try to make it sound like everyone else does it...... until they get banned for it and then they spend a week in game on another account crying about how it isn't fair that they got banned for breaking the CoC.
Also contrary to those who never learn how to play the game, it is very easy to play the game without decal.
Finally, the TN didn't screw up DT, it helped correct DT. There is an overwhelming support of this feature on DT because it helps cause a lot of fights, which in turn causes a lot of fun.
Well me and my 20+ friends I know have been macroing for about 8 years and have never recieved a single suspension, *shrug*
About TN: I dont know anyone who enjoys it except the level 275's.
Keep in mind there is the Tugak spell which does about 400+ HP damage instantly when someone enters a room, also guilds can circle a drop and make it so that you cannot even move when youe nter the room, now create a scenario where you pretty much HAVE to go somewhere to travel,
Hmm instant death and ringed in doesnt sound like a "fight" to me, it sounds like griefing for newbs, they already have a highly traffic'd area where people duel all day its called 150 lifestone, I just think it sucks for lower level people who need to travel, they are gonna hate Darktide, I dont see to many level 50's camping the drop.
Also back in the day yeah Decal wasn't really needed, but now that level 150+ is really where the game begins for most people, especially if you want to duel or pvp, you pretty much would have to play foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr without decal to level to 150 solo. I never said you CANT do it without Decal, but its about the difference between purchasing a car off the lot or purchasing the parts and putting it together for 2 years yourself. Just way harder considering you have to fight in a dungeon for like 6-12 hours per level at high levels.
CHARACTER BUILDS:
All around melee: 100 Strength
60 Endurance
100 Coordination
60 Quick (I think its 60)
10 Focus/Self, Specialize your Melee Weapon/Melee D
Train healing, mana c, life magic
HP/PVP Mage/
10 Str, 100 Endur, 10 Coord, 10 Quick, 100 Focus, 100 Self
Specialize only War Magic, train Mana C, Life Magic, Critter if you can
Melee Mage 10 Str, 10 endur, 10 coord, 100 quick, 100 focus, 100 self
Specialize War Magic, train Melee, Mana C
Bow Recommend Aluvian, 10 str 100 endur 100 coord 100 quick 10 focus 10 self
Spec Bow/Melee D, Pick up Healing/Mana C
I've been interested in trying AC, but this Decal program has always been a huge turn off to me as I won't break a EULA to use a macro program regardless of what the risk is of being caught.
If the company fully supported its use I'd be OK with it, but as it stands it appears the legality of its use is questionable at best and I agree, leveling up 275 levels solo while many others might be taking short cuts doesn't hold a lot of appeal to me.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
As I said in another post on these forums: It is very easy to level, solo, without any third party programs.
You start out at level 5. You run a couple quest and you are level 10, which gives you access to the facilty hub.
You complete the facility hub and you will be about level 45 (the hub is very easy to use and follow). Or you can join an allegiance, have them hand you all the facilty hub quest items and complete it within a couple minutes. So now you've gone from a brand new character to level 45 in under 30 minutes total.
From level 45 to level 80 there are a bunch of quests that award 1 level (or more) for completing. From level 80-100 there are a bunch of quests that award half of a level. From there on there are a lot of quests that award anywhere from half a level to 25% of a level.
There is no need for decal in completing ANY of this. With the new town network it is nice and easy to get where you need to go to complete them as well. They are also doing more quest xp upgrades in the July patch = even more options on leveling up.
Hunting/dungeon grinding requires no third party plugins and even a monkey could do it. You stand in one place and kill creatures as they respawn, healing when needed.
There is NOTHING in this game that needs a third party plugin to do. You can make it to level 150-180 easily in a month, 150 is the level restriction on epics and some hunting areas. Level 180 is the restriction on set pieces, there are no restrictions higher then 180. So without using plugins you can be up in the same area as everyone else quite quickly.
The person who made this thread has a very narrow and jaded view of how the game actual is, so take it with a grain of salt.
I would try AC for sure but the whole trial with you having to use your credit card is kind of turn off, especially since i dont have one
Thanks for reiterating the point and outlining the progression path, that certainly sounds very reasonable after all and perhaps I might just give this one a go afterall.
Only real question that remains, is Darktide or PVE server? Is there consensual PVP on a PVE server, or is the only combat on Darktide?
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Darktide is the only full on PvP server. It is setup so that the moment you log in, someone can run up and kill you (and often will). The only safe part of Darktide is inside of your housing barrier, and the 5 minute grace period after you are killed. The rest of the time it is FFA PvP anywhere/anytime.
The rest of the worlds have the ability to go PK or PKLite. PK means you suffer the same penalties (people can loot you) as on Darktide, only other PKs can attack you. PKLite means that you can be attacked by other PKLites but there is no penalty for death. It is what is seem most often on the other worlds and is done mostly as challenges/duels.
Asheron's Call is one of the founding fathers of bots/macroing in MMORPG,
Decal/Macroing IS NOT AGAINST the CoC Turbine, endorses the use of these programs, you are supposed to be AT your computer when using it, thats the fine line.
Regardless of what this smuck says, I promise you, I garuntee you that 95 out of 100 players on Asherons Call use decal. I also would bet money that 97 out of 100 on Darktide use it,
Decal is as big a part of the game as any other component for the vasssssssst majority of players, and it is not confusing or complex, to act like Decal is nothing is just ignorant, YES you do not NEEEED it, but I garuntee within a month or two of playing your guildmates will have you using it,
Doing things by hand in this game takes a long time,
Asheron's Call was my first MMO. I loved it! Yet I got bored of it, as usual when it comes to me and MMOs.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
"Your pride, good sir, far exceeds your worth." -x3r0h
Oldest mmorpg.com member with the least amount of post counts. That counts for something, right?
I believe the term you were looking to insult me with was schmuck not "smuck", not sure that helped your cause.
Attended Combat Macroing (aka ACM) is allowed by the CoC, this provides zero advantage over another player. All it does is have a program hit the attack key and next target keys instead of hitting it manually. It takes the same amount of time to kill creatures this way so there is no gain. Unattended Combat Macroing (UCM), is 100% against the CoC and is a bannable offense, and everytime someone gets banned for it they go cry on the officialy forums about how it isn't fair that they got banned for UCMing.
And no 95% of people do not macro, only macroers think 95% of people macro. It is a delusion they tell themselves to make themselves feel better about it.
I don't pay money for any game that is designed to play itself. It does not matter if only *some* people use the feature or not. That's one of the major reasons I don't play asian mmos like Granado Espada.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
He didn't say 95% of people macro. He said 95% of people use Decal. Perhaps the number of Decal users isn't quiet that high. However, the majority of people do use Decal. Third party utilities are a part of the game.
And yes UCM is against the rules, but it is rarely enforced. You can go into EO nearly any time of day and find people UCM. UCM is an advantage. It's hard tot beat 200+ mill an hour in EO when you can do it for several days straight and with little or no effort.
One of my only memories of using Decal was to put my character in one of those mana pools in the meeting houses, and set up a spell casting macro to keep casting spells over and over, in certain order, in order to gain experience and raise spell level.
This must have been a long time ago, because I recall I would have to load all my inventory up with tapers, etc. all the things that would be used up sometimes on both successful and unsuccessful spells.
I would just leave that thing on all night long when I slept. Funny thing is, I never ended up using that character to actually PLAY!
Anyway, when I left AC, there was a buff bot near every portal, trade bots lined the walls of the market...it was crazy. You also had to buff every single piece of armor individually, as well as your weapon, so before you would start to do something, you had to go through like a 5 minutes "buff-up" session.
I realize this has all changed, but this thread got me remembering what it was like in the old days.
Still one of my favorite games.
Funny i played AC for 3-4 years straight from 1999 to 2004 or so and the highest char i ever achieveved was my BM around level 105. And that must be with almost a month of /played time, that's 24hours x 30. Now you saying you can play a few hours a day and be level 150 in under a month ? WOw lol.
Yeah seriously... I played a few years and only got to 225 I think, haven't touched it since 2002?
-Caz
Yes on top of the things I mentioned in the previous post, they have revamped a lot of quest XPs. Under level 80 a lot of quests just award a level of xp. So run out and go through a quest quickly and boom you just got a level. 80-100 a lot of quests give half a level or more. 100+ they tend to start giving 33% of a level.
They also said they are adjusting all the low xp mobs in the November update so even more xp is coming the players way.
The speed at which a player can level and the amount of things to do, along with all the features added in the past year, make the game really exciting to play.
You know this is sad, that AC has revamped the quests so that you end up level 80 within hours of logging on. I mean half the fun of your character was finding a few groups of Lugians that spawned in a static location with roughly the same types of lugians each time. Then setting up a kill route to kill each group before buffs ran out in order to level from 15-20. Hours to get to 80 I remember it taking days to get to level 20, and that was playing for 6-8 hours a day, but there was alot to do then, more community to chat with get advice from..etc. Still I remember when I first found out that the max level was 126, and that the experiance to get from level 125 to 126 was equivilant to all the experiance it took you to get from 1 to 125. We thought it was impossible to get to 126 back then, and then a guy did it on one server. He had created one of the biggest experiance chain guilds on all the servers with him being the top guy, and it still took 2 years for someone to max out the levels.
If you play and get to 80 within 3 hours there is something wrong, they they WOWified it, I feel so betrayed.
I played this game a long time ago, and I wouldn't mind firing it up again just to experience the old days of MMORPGs once again, but the last time I tried it, i couldn't get the installer file to work. It downloaded fine, but I never could get it to do anything upon clicking on it. It looked like it was loading for like 3 seconds then nothing happened.
That is only because you were always ahead of me in the xp chain ya slacker
You stay sassy!
If you are doing everything without help from others, no hand me downs, no buffs etc. Then you will be at ~ level 30 in 3 hours and you probably wouldn't hit 80 until the end of a weekend at best.
The level cap is 275 now so it doesn't make sense to keep the super slow progressions that existed when the cap was 126. Once you get past ~180ish it starts to slow down so getting to 275 still takes a while.
You've got to remember that in a game that is 11 years old you can't keep the super long grindy path it had before. People who try to return or decide to try it for the first time would see a 275 and then find out it took a year of daily grinding to get there and would just turn and quit. Progression has to be sped up over time so people aren't hopelessly behind the curve.
As much as people fondly remember how long it took to level in the old days who don't happen to be playing anymore. Those same people would come back and hit the grind and quit, every time, no doubt about it. People think they want something that grindy but they actually don't and they prove that be leaving the grindy games over time. If your thoughts on AC are truly that strong you'd of still been playing it.
Yeah I played AC when it came out in 99... loved it till decal came out, ruined my AC fun experince. I played Grando espreda(sword of the new world). That reminded me of AC when u click spacebar to auto fight for u and watch it to make sure ur still alive.
I want to shoot someone who invented decal!
Kain_Dale