Fighting Them Damn Dungeons
Back at the beginning of May, I switched from Linux Mint back to EndeavourOS. Great change, but I forgot to back up my install of ZZZ before I switched. Now, before I redownloaded ZZZ, I had a thought - What if I have DFO another shot? I love the game; it just sucked being spammed with Captcha. Maybe some time away let them fix the issues? So I downlaoded DFO on Steam again and gave it another go.
The Good news - DFO works on Linux still. The Bad news - I still get captcha’d.
Now, as I currently understand it, the actual reason I’m getting captcha’d is supposedly behavioral. I don’t just play the game and get captcha’d. I’ve gone weeks without being captcha’d. But, if I do certain things, the game will flag me as a bot and spam me with Captcha as I try to do dungeons. By certain things, I mean clearing normal dungeons too fast. If I just take my character and one-shot everything like they’re supposed to, I am going to get captcha’d. If I slow-play or just genuinely have to actually fight the mobs and boss, I’m in the clear. This really sucks because a lot of DFO is farming; having to slow-play while farming sucks. I’ve gotten around it to an extent by just unequipping my weapons while farming; I’m fast enough to not lose my mind, but not so fast the game thinks I’m a bot. I’d feel less bad about all this if this was a universal problem, but not many people, if anyone else at all, seem to be plagued by this in recent times. It may legitimately be related to being on Linux. Making a new account and trying my old account both ended up with me getting captcha’d after normal play. I just went back to playing on Steam. Also, this captcha shit only happens during normal dungeons; I can play in Advanced dungeons, legions, and Raids just fine, which helps a lot, honestly. probbaly would’ve dipped otherwise.
The gameplay in DFO is still great. I love beat-em-ups, so a MMO with beat-em-up gameplay is an easy sell even without all the great music and fighting-game references. The game had some Boost events going on when I came back, allowing me to make new characters and immediately get them to max level with some basic, and I do mean basic, gear equipped. I made a Dragoon, a Dark Templar, a Muse who I deleted after I triggered Captcha while trying to learn her, and Female Crusader, and a Female Nen Master. I had a Dragoon and a Dark Templar on my OG account, so getting them up and running on my steam account felt good, and they’re currently my strongest characters. The Muse, and later Crusader, was me finally trying a buffer class. Endgame dungeons are done in parties, and the enemies’ HP assumes that you are in a 4-man party with a buffer. Buffers give amazing boosts of power and keep the party alive during tough fights. It’s objectively a good thing to have one in your back pocket, even as an alt. They are also given very silly buffs for solo play, so they are unironically the comfiest characters you can play solo. I made F Nen because I picked her up in DNF Duel recently and she’s been a lot of fun. That carries over here, too. I love playing her. I do eventually want to circle back and get my older characters up and running. They already have gear for the most part; I just have to level them and get them some budget gear so they can run some advanced dungeons.
I am a bit more involved in endgame than I was the previous times I played DFO. Before, I just made characters and had fun leveling them up and experiencing the story. This time around, I’m actually farming and doing endgame dungeons. In this current level cap, you really want to do the Venus Legion dungeon and Mu and Nabel Raids. Venus is a difficult weekly dungeon that rewards special gear, Mu is the previous level cap’s raid that still gives good rewards towards progress, and Nabel, which just released a week ago at the time of writing, is this cap’s newest raid, being a difficult multi-boss encounter that rewards special gear and the ability to upgrade your weapon. I don’t have a character strong enough to do Nabel proper, but my Dark Templar, who’s basically main, can do the solo and matchmaking versions just fine, and is more than strong enough to run Venus and Mu. My Dragoon can run Venus and Mu, but not Nabel. These dungeons are pretty fun. Killing mobs like Looney Tunes characters is a lot of fun, but proper fights with bosses, especially with other players, is really fun.
Also, while it is definitely not what people play the game for, I am very glad that DFO’s story is still fun to go through. I’ve come in at a weird time. in the middle of a story arc basically, so I’ve missed out on a lot of adventures and context, but I still enjoyed what I was fast-forwarded to. I’m glad that DFO’s story still feels fun to do and worth my time on the game. It’s not some Final fantasy or tales-level thing, but it’s an enjoyable story with plenty of lovable characters. They even still have class-specific dialogue; My Dark Templar has different Dialogue in the Temple of Death storyline than my Dragoon and Nen master because Dark Templars actually worship usir, the goddess of death. The other templars treat mine with more reverance compared to if she was another female slayer like my Sword Master. I like this stuff. Also, while I was away, they made a little anime on youtube. I don’t know what it’s about, but I’m definitely going to watch it at some point. I love DFO’s world, man.
Now, all that said, i gotta talk about the negatives, because there are plenty. So much, in fact, that despite the fact that I just spent the last three paragraphs talking about how much fun I’m having, I actually wouldn’t recommend DFO to anyone right now, not unless they’re like me and “Beat-em-up MMO” scratches a deep itch in their mind. First off, the BS bot-detection system. This game has a very lazily-implemented anti-botting feature. It is so bad that it regularly flags new and returning players as bots, spamming them captcha. trade-banning them, and oftentimes banning them outright, forcing them to contact support, which leads to the 2nd problem - the Customer Support. The Customer Support will only ever give you automated replies. The people on the backedn will unban you/chill with the captcha, but they will only ever send back these replies that say stuff like “Next time, make sure you’re not running any 3rd-party software” or some other BS. They also do not work on weekends, so if you got banned on Friday, you are shit out of luck until Monday. Next problem - the current economy. This one requires some context. DFO is a free-to-play game. It makes money by selling cosmetics and premium items/equipment. It also has in-game systems that are very taxing on someone’s gold supply if they’re trying to max things out. So what happens is that people buy packages, and because the package contents are tradable, they sell them on the in-game auction house for large amounts of in-game gold. This is how F2P and low-spenders like myself can get Avatars and creatures outside of events; you save up gold, and buy it off someone selling it to fund their gearing min-maxing. During the previous level-cap, there was a rather lucrative place to farm gold. It was a great time for people with lots of alts; they could stockpile some gold and get some premium items without having to break the bank. This current level cap has a nice “premium” gold dungeon that requires a ticket from a randomly occuring shop to enter, but the normal gold farming dungeon is absolutely horrid. You can burn an entire FP bar on it and walk away with only 400K gold. For context, one run of that premium dungeon nets you around 200k, and a lot fo things worth buying in the Auction house are in the millions. It’s a rough time if you didn’t already have a lot of gold, so it’s hard for people, especially new and returning players, to get up and running without events handing them a lot of the stuff they’d have to spend gold on, and even then, repair costs pile up quickly. I currently don’t deal with repair costs, but that’s because this game’s shitty anti-bot tech forces em to run most content without my weapon equipped, so I rarely ever have to repair my things. lastly, the RNG - this cap’s method of gearing is running the Disciple of Doom dungeon, which will randomly drop gear of 12 different sets at varying rarities. There is no guarantee anywhere that you will get a certain piece of a certain set at any time. Basically, think of a Hoyo game, but instead of bitching about substats, we’re bitching about rarity and slot. There is a sort of “pity” dungeon that you can access after enough runs, but again, it does not guarantee any specific piece of rarity; you will either get some pieces of the sets you chose at random or a bunch of souls. The non-rng ways to get progress are few and most are expensive. You can brute-force your way to a certain set by tuning, but it costs a large amount of souls,which you get from dissambling gear, and gold. You can purchase pots of certain rarities to get a random piece from a set; they’re very good, but you are limited to buying them monthly. There is also the Infinite Florescence dungeon, which reguarly drops pots for its unique set. This set isn’t super crazy, but you get it from just running the dungeon. The catch is that you can only run this dungeon 4 times a week unless you’re lucky and catch a secret shop to buy another entry ticket. Finally, there is the Mu weapon. Rember the Mu raid I mentioned earlier? Run this enough times and you can turn a lvl 110 weapon into a Mu Weapon, an enhanced weapon with special effects and a lot of stats. It’s outclassed by Epic and Primeval weapons of this cap, but is still a powerful and non-rng gaited option. I’m personally going to put my older characters on Mu weapons since they’re already using older weapons. I’m also going to get my Dragoon one, since he’s been stuck on his legendary weapon for about two months now, and crafting a Mu weapon is cheaper than tuning the weapon.
All that said, I’ve still managed to have a good time. I’ve managed to make good progress on a couple characters, and I have fun playing the endgame stuff. Maybe playing Hoyo games just desensitized me to this shit. Either way, while I cannot recommend DFO to anyone right now, I do want to say the community is very helpful. They’re very jaded because they are aware that the NA server is smaller, and therefore less of a priority in terms of addressing complaints. Still, they’re all very helpful; there’s even a dedicated discord group for lerning and running raids and answering questions. There are still people making guides and doing communtiy stuff. The DFO heads are pretty cool; they’re just a bit annoyed these days. And can you blame them when the game they love keeps scaring off new players on regular basis?
ZZZ
Now, at the urging of my arch-nemesis good friend, I did eventually re-install ZZZ, just in time for Caesar King’s banner. If you’re familiar with Genshin, she’s basically this game’s Zhonghli, complete with people questioning her value because part of what she gives to a team is something you can’t quanitfy. I love the character, so I went pretty hard on it by f2p standards. Got her m1 + weapon. She feels great to use. 10/10 would pull again.
I’m less hype on the game overall, but not because of any decline in quality. If anything, ZZZ is doing the opposite of DFO; it listens to its playerbase and keeps trying to keep them around. I’m just preoccupied with DFO, so a game that explicitly asks me to login everyday, even if only for 30 minutes, is a little annoying.
That being said, ZZZ’s in a great spot. I would still never actually recommend it to another human being, but that’s entirely due to the business model, not the gameplay.
Comics!
The Ultimate Universe
The Ultimate Universe is an experience. Last year, Marvel put the Ultimate Universe into action, starting a very gripping storyline with a very grimm man at the center.
An alternate version of Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic himself, known as The Maker, escapes captivity and looks to either return to his original universe or make a home for himself in a new one. Before he dips out of the main marvel universe, he asks our Reed one question - If he could start over, would he erase him(The Maker) from existence? Redd answers yes and the Maker basically goes “bet”. He goes to a new universe before our heroes can stop him and takes it upon himself to stop the creation of damn near every Marvel hero throughout time. He stops the spider from biting Peter, he makes sure the Fantastic 4 never get their powers, he helps Loki take over Asgard, the list goes on. But even in that world without all its right heroes, hope still pops up. Eventually, even if they’re not quite how we normally know them, in one way or another, we get Iron Man and Dr. Doom to start a rebellion of sorts, and they set out to get the world its heroes back.
This a very fucked up story with some great titles in it. I’ve checked out every Ultimate title so far(The Ultimates, Spider-Man, Black Panther, X-Men, and Wolverine), and they’re all super interesting with a lot of moving parts. The stories make good use of the new setting they’re placed in and we have some great charactr work being done, especially in The Ultimates and Ultimate Spider-Man. I absolutely love the Ultimates being revolutionaries and actually doing revolutionary work. Captain AMerica and Luke cage have to set them straight a bit, but they start doing legit work on the ground to get people to believe in them and rally them to their side, and that’s just a great thing to read in this current state of the world.
Ultimate Spider-Man has done very fun things with Spider-Man’s usual suspects, Black panther has been a fun read, X-Men is giving me a new look at quite a few characters, and Wolverine is pretty basic, but still good. The one thing that hurts all these titles is the way they’re structured - There is a month time-skip between every issue, so if something ends on a cliffhanger, you will never see the immediate resolution to that. It honestly gets more and more annoying as it goes on, but not annoying enough to make me disengage.
These are great titles. They got the stamp of approval.
The Absolute Universe
DC’s Absolute Universe is actually pretty similar. Darkseid merged himself with another universe, and the result is a world where everything is grimmer, darker. However, the heroes aren’t outright gone like in Marvel’s Ultimate universe. Batman’s still around, but he ain’t rich and he’s a lot more willing to beat the dogshit out of you. Wonder Woman is still here, but she was raised in hell instead of with her Amazonian sisters.
A lot of what I like about Absolute is the same as what I like about Ultimate - genuinely interestind dynamic shakeups between characters(Batman is friends with a lot of his usual rogues, for example) and good messages being sent(Superman is running around earth freeing oppressed people).
Also, Absolute Wonder Woman’s design has me in a chokehold. I need her to step on me.
yes, nigga, you read that right. This is my blog; I’ll be down bad if I want to, goddammit.
ALl the books are pretty cool, but Batman is probably my favorite.
Read Radiant Black
This series is so dope. I can’t talk about comics and not show it love. If you’re like me and fuck with Tokusatsu stuff, give it a try .
Guild Wars 2
I went down a MMO youtube rabbit hole and what I found was a game called Guild Wars 2. It’s a long-running MMO with a pretty unique business model(You buy the expansions as one time purchases instead of constantly renewing a sub) and what is now a hefty free-trial. It works perfectly on Linux and is known to be pretty lax, so I gave it a spin. I’m still very early, but the game runs perfect and I can make a black person, so the game has the stamp of approval so far. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played so far, but I gotta get to the meat of story to have a stronger opinion. But again, smooth sailing thus far. I’ll let ya know how it goes.
Also, because this game has been around for so long and my name is so basic, I had to give this nigga an african name. It’s Yoruba for “God brought this one”.