Barbarian's Curmudgeonly Rantings

I've been trying out DC Universe Online for the past week. I've been having a lot of fun with the heroes, but decided to play a villain. (I even sprung for the points to buy the 'light power' set so I could be a member of the Sinestro Corp -- the major foes of the Green Lanterns.) I think my normal day to day operation is probably much closer to the hero side; help people out when I can, don't cause problems without a reason, etc., but there's something very amusing about playing a bad guy, especially when I'm playing as an alien with a bent for chaos.

I've been purposefully taking time out of my missions to cause traffic accidents. This has absolutely no in-game benefit, but I've gotten to where I know how to cascade about eight cars into a huge string of crashes, fires, explosions, and even running over pedestrians. (Although the cars do not actually harm the peds, even when said car explodes while it's intersecting them.)

Some of the missions are the same ones as the ones you come across when you're a hero, but with different stated goals. (Save the things that those invaders are stealing, but as resources for Lex Luthor instead of as medical supplies, etc.) I had a particular laugh, and an acknowledgment to myself that I do role play even these kinds of games with one of these missions. I was supposed to be 'rescuing' people trapped by Braniac's robot invaders - the goal as a hero was to save the people, the goal as a villain is to save the 'Exobites' - a game world concept / resource that happened to be in the people. The people are trapped in an orange force-bubble; you pick them up and transport them to the rescue spot. I'd just picked up one when I was attacked by a robot. When this happened as a hero, I immediately rushed the person to safety, thinking to keep them out of harm's way. As a villain, I instead turned and threw the force-field encased human at the attacking robot, resulting in a robot almost completely destroyed and the bubble person bouncing away like a super-ball (no pun intended.)

You can guess what I spent the rest of the fight there doing, although I did rescue my quota!

... or at least the webcomics. Apparently I provided an idea for a comic.

Cool!

At least this weekend, I'll be playing on Pinnacle. That seems to be where my most played characters live at least. My universal chat handle is (surprise) "Awfulhorrid" so feel free to ping me. I might even be able to figure out how to respond!

I spent some time today poking around and seeing what characters I have scattered around. I could remember my main character of Guye Fawkes, of course, but I'd forgotten some of the others: Tanstaafl (android or battlesuit? No one knows for sure), Nail Hazard the Spike-throwing scrapper, and several characters off on one server that I won't ever log in again, but I just can't bring myself to delete. (BondageBoy, The Magic Fluffer, and Rawhide Chew ...)

I played with the new costume options with several of my characters. I may as well, they each have 15 - 30 free costume redesigns! I really like some of the options, particularly the ability to tune the colors of at least some of the powers. I had to scrap all of my keybindings since I couldn't remember how to use ... well, much of anything. My highest level character, Guye Fawkes, just has too many powers available for me to remember how to use them all right now. I'm starting small: I have a low level hero, Small Big Bob and a low level villain, Baneful von Baneful. I'll play each of these guys for a while until I remember more about just what the heck I'm doing!

So a few nights ago tarrestrial suggested finding some online game we could play together and be able to chat, etc. I don't really have any MMORPGs installed right now and we'd have to get them set up on both computers and have accounts and all that jazz. This is possible, of course, but we wanted something immediately, not several days later. I thought about suggesting a MUD or MOO, but honestly I haven't been near one in years and don't know if I'm up to walking someone through setting up a MUD client or using Telnet unless I'm being paid for it! As I took a quick peek through my bookmarks not really seeing anything multiplayer, I remembered something I tried years ago ... Puzzle Pirates.

Hmm. Pirates. Puzzles. Yeah, that just might do the trick ...!

Anyway, I've been poking around there a bit and doing some of the puzzles. You can certainly play for free and even get to play most of the games, just not all the time. (Some of them are free on some days.) If you sign up via this link, you get some in-game money (Pieces of Eight) for yourself and I get a referral bonus. (No, you don't have to be a paying member for this bounty!) When you sign up, look for the part on your account settings where you can pick your ocean -- I'm playing in the Midnight Ocean under the name "Woofus."

Friedrich Nietzsche said "Beggars should be abolished entirely! Verily, it is annoying to give to them and it is annoying not to give to them." Obviously Nietzsche never played World of Warcraft!

In the real world, I can think of many reasons why a person might not be able to earn money, get a job, etc., but in an online game, everyone really does have the opportunity to make money, get ahead in the world, and all that kind of thing. You may not doing it all as quickly as you'd like, but even the worse player can eventually earn those gold pieces for which they're begging. In the real world, "Get a job you bum," may be considered callous (although sometimes appropriate), but your WoW character isn't going to starve and certainly doesn't have children to feed: go out and earn your gold like everyone else.

Or to put it another way: Why would I pay $15 a month so I can give you (a random stranger) the gold / equipment / quest answers / the time of day?