9 Months In A Nutshell (Babies/PayPal/SWG/Eve)

Yes its been 9 months since my last post, no I'm not going to apologise and heres why....

For those of you who don't have children allow me to let you in on a little secret, you've no doubt heard all the jokes about sleepless night and so on, not only is this all true but [at least in my experience] its much much worse than you would ever expect (which is probably why no one really tries to warn you, either you'd never believe them or they wouldn't be able to explain just how bad it can be)

I'll try and keep this short (yeah right!) because we have alot of ground to cover

Being a parent is very very very hard and very very time consuming

Short enough? Good!

Moving swiftly on, some of you may remember my ongoing beef with Paypal here http://ash-ridley.blogspot.com/2006/02/and-now-for-something-completely.html well having gone round the houses with them I ended up complaining to the Financial Services Ombudsman, while the main thrust of my complaint was either ignored, misunderstood or overlooked they did managed to get PayPal to agree to refund the money _IF_ I took the item to an independant 3rd party for a repair quote, if the item was economically repairable PayPal would pay for the repair or, in the event the item was worth repairing, they'd give me the 'full value of the item'

So off I trot and get a repair quote, unsurprisingly the item is beyond repair and a new one will cost £1174.99, I fax this to PayPal and they agree to refund the original eBay purchase price of £316.00 once I fax them confirmation that the item have been handed to Trading Standards for destruction.

The first problem is that £316.00 is not the 'full value of the item' but rather the 'eBay purchase price of the item' needless to say that I don't make any headway on that front.

So I give Trading Standards a ring.......only to find that they don't actually do what PayPal are telling me they do (this takes me back to their handling of the complaint which was to tell me to get a stamped statement from the Police......only to find the Police had no interest in a civil matter) so I'm currently waiting for the Ombudsman/PayPal to decide the next hoop I need to jump through - I was hoping to have the refund within 1 year of the original sale but I guess thats just gone out the window.....

SWG's NGE had its first birthday, as far as I can tell the player count is lower than its ever been, most of the devs have gone (either jumped or been pushed) but SOE still aren't (at least publically)talking about giving us either a rollback (personally can't see that ever happening) or classic servers (and I doubt they'd do a character transfer and if they did it would probably be crap).

Interestingly the Traders are still getting the short end of the stick because the game keeps moving further and further away from the one in which Traders were designed to exists (the game is now hugely loot based and the new younger-twitch-happy-lightsabre-wielding players can't stomach the prospect of having to intereact with another player in any capacity other than grouping with them (to get more xp) or killing them - thus the thought of having to pay a non-combatant for a service is totally abhorrent to them!

The only good news is, despite a number of set backs, the emulator team seem to be making some good progress and I'm still hopefully the old SWG will become available again - unfortunately you just can't expect a 'virtual world' to work very well on private servers with only a few [hundred tops?] people playing - though population wise I'm guessing this would be like playing on the official NGE servers :-)

Been back in Eve almost a year now and I'll admit I'm starting to burn out (mainly because theres alot of 'work' and not much 'game' right now).

We joined one of the major alliances with the intention of getting a foothold in 0.0 space but unfortunately, due to a number of issues (not all of which were aliances fault) most of us ended up in empire (with alts most of the time to avoid war targets) and 0.0 was more hassle than it was worth (i.e. was costing us more than we were making). This unfortunately caused problems between the players of my corp (all of which are interestingly RL friends) and we have subsequently left the alliance and the corp and joined 2 different member corps or another alliance - hopefully the new corp(s)/alliance (since its a different area of 0.0 space) will renew my interest (especially if I start making more money than I'm spending)

Unfortunately there aren't any MMORPG's on the radar for a while that I can see getting my interest, Warhammer online is a way off (and since moving to Mythic holds less interest for me than previously - I'm expecting another DAOC grind fest with little to no RP), Huxley is looking weaker the more I learn about it (instanced PvP areas with low headcounts) & Pirates of the Burning Sea is a way off.

There are a couple of free games that I'll try out (Archlord, BOTS & Exteel for starters) but reviews of Archlord are almost universally negative (but hey its free) and the other 2 are currently in beta and employ micropayment systems (so yes its free but you resign yourself to being worse than all the other guys unless you put your hand in your pocket) on and BOTS is pegged as being a huge grind (unless you pay!) and you should know that I personally hate grinds - don't get me wrong its not that I object to having to 'work' (relative term) for a reward but the amount of 'work' needs to be acceptable, Eve is the only game where this doesn't present me with this problem as skill training (levellign up) is time based

Interestingly Anarchy Online just gave previous subscribers a free 30 day subscription and (once the 'first MMORP nostalgia' wore off) while the game hasn't changed enough for me to pay-to-play it again (for too grindy, [hard to obtain] loot orientated and pitched mostly at the uber-guilds) it did make me realise I should probably log my free AO account in more often - but then thats true of any free game I have (such as Planetside) but the problem is that, when I'm online but not playing a/the game I'm currently paying for I kinda feel that I'm wasting my money paying for something I'm not playing.