NCsoft Woes and Getting Realms Roll'd

Trying to get Guild Wars set up for both of us has been an exercise in patience to the point where the other half was ready to give up on playing. When we originally played, our Guild Wars accounts weren't tied to NCsoft in anyway. But we did have NCsoft accounts from when we both tried CoH and more recently for Aion beta. The game now requires you to log in through NCsoft and tie your Guild Wars account to it. Long story short, it was impossible to get the previous account up and running so I just had to create a new account and start new characters.

My husband upon attempting to log into his Guild Wars account received a popup stating they believed his account had been compromised and he needs to contact them. He then logged into NCsoft and saw a big red "banned" next to the Aion link. Considering at least two games under his account had been hacked, he decided to just start over as well. Then you get to the log in screen which makes you go through more hoops just to get in. The whole process was beyond annoying so we played only briefly.

On a more lighthearted note, after a DAOC marathon weekend taking advantage of bonuses, I spent a little time in Free Realms for stress-free fun. I've had some Station Cash accumulated that SOE gave away as rewards when I was playing EQ2 and decided to buy something in Free Realms. Along with mounts, pets, and clothes, some of what they sell are items that can be dropped on the ground for a few minutes for other players to enjoy. It might be a clickable illusion, balloons, temporary pets, and then there's boomboxes. One box was called a Realms Roll'd Boombox. I honestly had no idea how this was different from the other boomboxes but I bought it out of curiosity.

The box looked like a typical one. The music started playing like a typical one. Then the music scratched and cut off and was replaced with a fancier boombox. And then it began playing "Never Gonna Give You Up". Everyone nearby turned into Rick Astly and did his cute little dance. This was probably one of the funniest things I've ever seen in any game. So kudos to SOE on this one. Unfortunately the young ones weren't getting it and were asking why they were dressed like a boy in ugly clothes. Ah well, I had a good laugh anyway.

Guild Wars Trilogy on Sale at Steam

This week only Steam is offering a $19.99 deal on the entire Guild Wars Trilogy. Considering there is no subscription fee and you get all this content for the same cost as Alganon, this was just too good a deal for me to pass up.

I played the original Guild Wars, but never had picked up the other campaigns. I really liked the early game, but the content toward the end game had just gotten more and more frustrating for us to a point where we couldn't proceed any further as a duo. So we'll see how far we get this go around.

Guild Wars Hoax

A year ago I came across a blog from a supposed ex-employee of Arena.net, the developer of Guild Wars. He claimed Arena.net had ties with the gold farming companies and would initiate account bannings to pacify the gaming community. Supposedly, however, they would inform the gold farming companies of the upcoming bans so that they could create new accounts. I came across no other sources to substantiate this anywhere so just filed it away to look at again in the future.

I was clearing out some old bookmarks (yeah I have way too many), when I came across this blog again. It seems recently this fellow came clean and admitted it was a joke. He was bored and wanted to see how gullible people might be. Wow, talk about attention-seeking. The whole series of nonsense can be found here. Ah well, one less bookmark in my clutter.