JE finally got his 1,600 gold and promptly spent it all on a Red & Black Dragon Pet. But he'd also dinged lvl 10 so for 560g he could have bought a bigger Spelldeck allowing him to field more Spell cards, meaning instead of going into Battle with 40 Spell Cards to choose from, he could have 50. (Those number might not be accurate, they just exist to illustrate my point.)
After the happy little Dragon Owner went to bed I logged into his account and played some of the Minigames to get him some more gold, and I discovered an interesting thing about one the minigames that I normally wouldn't have played. I could play it using the chaos theory, and I could make more gold in less time than by playing one of the mini games that I'm actually good at it. Just rapidly & randomly clicking and moving my mouse cursor around was more successful than actually playing the game properly. But also very boring. And tiring if kept up for extended periods.
I'd made JE about 460g when I gave up on the Minigames and decided to do some quests. But I decided to be sneaky about it. I was already logged in on JE's account, so I Alt-Tabbed out to Windows, fired up a second copy of W101, and logged in on my account. This is known in the MMO world as dual-boxing and with graphically intensive games like WoW, Everquest, Warhammer, etc, it takes a decent gaming rig to be able to do this without suffering severe slowdown.
With a game like W101, dual-boxing is a piece of cake. I looked at our quests. We needed to talk to a Witch a couple of streets over. I ran my Wizard over there and...remember I mentioned that Friends in W101 can Teleport to each other? Well, I ran my Wizard over to the Witch, Alt-Tabbed to JE's Wizard and Poof! Teleported him straight to my Wizard and the Witch, who wanted us to talk to her apprentice on the next street over.
I ran JE's Wizard around the block to the next street, found the Apprentice, Alt-Tabbed to my Wizard and Poof! Joined JE's Wizard next to the Apprentice. The Apprentice wanted us to collect some items from barrels in the nearby Cave. I ran my Wizard into the cave, found the barrels, collected all my items and Poof! Teleported straight back out to JE's Wizard and turned in the Quest. Alt-Tabbed to JE's Wizard, rinse & repeat. We...I mean I :D I did this all the way up to the end of the Quest, for which the final step was defeating a Boss Mob.
And that's when the slower-paced, card-based, turn-by-turn combat of W101 works brilliantly with dual-boxing. I'd select my Spell, then Alt-Tab to JE's Wizard and select his Spell. You get up to 30 seconds to choose a Spell so even if my PC was a slow & clunky machine (which it's not) I'd have still had plenty of time to Alt-Tab between our two Wizards and choose their Spells. With another MMO, the few seconds a slow machine would take to Alt-Tab between two open programs could be enough to cause the death of one or both Toons. With W101's turn-based combat, a few seconds is irrelevant.
The Boss went down faster than Divine Brown, and the Gold we earned from completing all the Quests in the series meant JE's Wizard now had the 560 Gold he needed to buy the bigger Spelldeck.
Actually, that also highlights one aspect of W101 which exists as a double-edged Sword. My Wizard has over 2,000 gold. JE needed 560 to buy a new Spelldeck. In almost any other MMO I could have just given him the Gold, but W101 does not allow any Trades between Players except for Treasure Cards, which cannot be sold to Vendors anyway, so there is literally no way to move Gold between players.
/sad Panda :(
This means W101 will never see Gold Sellers (which is a good thing), but we may see some companies farming high quality Treasure Cards and selling them. But even if Treasure Card Farmers/Sellers do immigrate to W101 they'll have a lot of trouble hawking their wares because of the limited chat features. W101 will never suffer the plague of Gold Farmers/Sellers seen in other MMOs, but it also means there's no way to loan a friend some Gold, thus it came to me dual-boxing in order to make some Gold for my son.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
5 comments:
I have a friend who five boxes WoW. I mentioned a couple days ago that he should really check out the new awesome W101, because it's totally going to be the WoW killer. I told him it would be perfect to dual-box too (All sarcasm, I know next to nothing about the game that didn't come from this blog). Next thing I know here you are championing dual-boxing a kiddie MMO. What has this world come to?
Ask your friend if he runs five Dranei Shamans (maybe 4 & a Priest) on the Bloodlust Battlegroup?
If so, he killed me and single-handedly destroyed Frostwolf Keep during one of my last Alterac Valley matches.
Five-boxers who really know what they're doing are very scary people.
Aye, the design of W101 is great for multiboxing/multiclienting.
Speaking of minigames, I found that I got a higher score in Potion Motion when I just randomly fiddled around, and only slowed down when that stopped working.
...tangentially, that minigame is apparently machine-solvable, as evidenced by the high score table. That makes me almost as sad as not being able to trade between my wizards.
He has been almost exclusively Horde until about a week ago, so I doubt very much that it was him. His 5 group shaman is all orcs.
This is old but I just started dual boxing yesterday. Not sure if I'll keep it up, but it was fun. I actually didn't alt tab I played in windows mode and had both windows up.
One thing that I found was fun was hitting autorun on each screen, they'd run in slightly different directions making me dizzy :) But yeah, it is awesome for dual boxing, plus it lets me try out new schools of magic without feeling the same drudgery of soloing yet another character.
The only thing is I can't use my shared bank between them all though.
Post a Comment