Ricky's Mu Online Blog

Devil Square!

2006-12-06T17:34:00.000-08:00

Just last night I have finally successfully created an invitation to the Devil Square! (after around 5 tries, each try have a 55% success rate). In order to create a devil square invitation I need to hunt for 2 items that is in my level range which is 5 in this case. The items are Devil key+5 and Devil Eyes+5, once I have these two items I can try to create the invitation at the Chaos Machine in Noria.

Click here for more information on Devil Square.

Here's me in the Devil Square Event (my first time too):

*Here's me at the Chaos Machine in Noria trying to make the invitation for Devil Square.

*Wrapped in the Devil Square, waiting for it to start.

*Walked around a bit while waiting for the 5 minute countdown..

*My Blade Knight performing the combo skill on the first batch of monsters that appeared during the beginning.

*Harder monsters started to appears..and my hp bar is decreasing rapidly..!

*I finally used up all my mana (used for performing skills such as combo or death stab) so I have to gave up on this battle.

Devil Square is not as fun as Blood Castle since there's not much clear goals for Devil Square, monster just keep appearing and I have to kill as much as possible in order to earn more experience bonus at the end. One lesson I learned through my first time in Devil Square is that I need to bring more mana in it so I can last longer. The monster there are not as hard as the Blood Castle's ones so I have to fix my "HP/Mana" ratio when entering Devil Square the next time. Overall, I guess Devil Square is a alright event for leveling up. I still prefer Chaos Castle or Blood Castle more since it's a lot more intense and entertaining.

Who am I in MU? Answer: Kyo

2006-12-03T18:34:00.000-08:00

I wanted to spend a little time to talk about who am I in Mu Online.

My character name was "KYO2K5" and now it is currently "Kyo2005"
(due to the new restrictions they introduced during the account migration process)

I choose the name Kyo2005 is mainly because this is just one of my nickname I usually use for games and many other online account nickname such as in various forums, instant messenger, etc.

Why kyo? The name Kyo came from a popular arcade fighting game called "King of Fighter" that I once was very addicted to back in my high school years. Kyo Kusanagi is one of the main character in the game series.

Click here for background information on Kyo Kusanagi.

Here's a picture of how Kyo looks like in case anyone is wondering:

Ok, so that's explained the first part of my name, the 2005 part is just the year of when I started playing this Mu Online game.

So how I act in game with my character?

Well, how I act in game really depends on my mood and many other factors such as time of the day, in-game situations and real-life situations. Let's say like it's in the middle of the night around 2am and I am about to log off and sleep and some random player tried to piss me off by calling me names or doing other things, I probably won't brother with them and try to fight back or talk back. Another example will be like if I'm really bored and have nothing to do, I'll try to find some chaos in the game in many different ways to keep me entertain. To be honest the best part of playing a online game is player to player interactions, there's not much things to play without any interaction with other players besides killings monster with simple AI and leveling.

Most of the time, I just like to hang out and play with my close friends in the game and not mind other people's business. I tend to not talk too much while playing the game since I can't really focus on attacking and chatting constantly at the same time, I'm just very bad at multitasking. Another reason why I can't really chat a lot during game play is because my character class is Blade Knight and it requires constant key pressing in order to perform certain skills. Other character class such as Soul Master/Dark Wizard do not requires constant key pressing to cast spells, just a simply right-click will do the job.

I will sometimes argue with other players if I'm in the mood for it, but most of the time I choose to ignore them if possible since I feel that I'm one of the more mature player in the game and I feel that most other players are both younger in age and have less education than me. By less education, I do not mean they are stupid or anything, it's just that many players do not speak very good English (English is not their first language) and they are mostly in high school so their understanding of English is not that good.

F2P --> P2P !!

2006-11-30T01:31:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to tell everybody that I have finally joined the P2P side for this game. I have planned to P2P ever since they announced the "merge" and the decrease in membership fees from $12 to only $5 a month! Obviously at $12/month they didn't attract too many people, therefore forcing them to take a big step and decreased the fees and merged all the players together in keep the game going.

I will probably never pay for this game at $12 a month since I don't think this game is worth that much, especially when comparing to other popular MMORPG games that charges similar rate such as the World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, or even GuildWars (GW don't charges money per month but players have to buy the game and the expansions. All three of the above games I have mentioned have way better graphics than Mu Online and probably a lot more quests and game events so therefore I don't think this game I am playing worth anything close to the $12/month that they proposed earlier from the start.

Since they have reduced it quite a large amount down to $5 I feel that is it reasonable for me to pay for it for a month or two to test out their new stuff during my Christmas holiday which is coming soon in about 2 week!! (after all my projects and exams-___-).

Although I have already paid my $5 through my paypal account for a couple of days, I haven't really get a lot of time to play it yet due to my heavy load of school work since it is close to the end of the semester. I did have a chances to test out a few of the new P2P events such as Blood Castle and Devil Square.

Blood castle trailer:

Now let's look at my little journey to Blood Castle for the first time:

*So here I am at this church trying to get into "Blood Castle 6" with my already made "Invisibility Cloak+6", I have to ask another player in the game to found out that I have to go to this church and talk to this "guard with wings" guy to enter.

*So after talking to this guard, I have the option to select which blood castle I am able to go to. The blood castle is seperated into 7 part and since my player's level is between level 281-330 I get to go to Blood Castle 6.

*This is what it looks like once I'm in waiting for it to start.

* The time limit is 15 minutes and because I am alone and not in a party, I only have to kill 40 monsters before destroying the gate at the end of the bridge.

*Killing the 40 monster at the beginning was quite easy and now I am starting to break down the gate so I can go inside as soon as possible.

*The gate took me quite a while to break through, when I'm in the actual castle there's only around 8 minutes left. Once I am inside, the display on the bottom right corner indicate that I have to kill two of these monster inside.

*The monsters inside the castle is way too hard for me to handle alone so i struggled for a bit and finally got killed by the monsters.

My own Game Analysis

2006-11-26T19:21:00.000-08:00

In one of my previous class (IAT-313), my friend and I did an in-depth game analysis on Mu Online for one of our assignment.

Click below to view/download the document:
Game Analysis - Mu Online

See the game in action!! (MU Season II videos!!)

2006-11-21T01:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a few video clips that I found lately, it has the newest patch (Season 2) of the Mu Online game. It's a lot newer than the one I am currently playing on Global Mu Online since we are not even on Season 1 yet. Countries such as Korean or Philippines are the ones that are currently at Season 2. I hope we will have it soon too. Check it out.

Why & How I started playing Global Mu Online...

2006-11-16T23:46:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, my friends and I started playing this Korean online game called "Slayers". This "Slayers" game is the first online game I played and I still remember how much fun I had back then. It was also a free to play game or else I wouldn't have played it since as a high school student I don't have too much spending money.

Due to the fact that it is a free to play game, their support is very bad and one day this game finally closed down due to a mass numbers of players have hacked the game in many different ways. As far as I remember, I think the game was up for around 2 years and then got shut down due to hackers.

This is the time I found out about this Global Mu Online game. I started playing around Christmas time on year 2004. Ever since then I play it regularly especially during my winter and summer vacation when I have no school. After around 2 years of playing, I am one of the highest level on my server. Back then, there was only 2 server, Wigle and Maya. I was in Maya and I'm currently around level 310 before their server merge begins. The max level is level 400, but in our server, it is impossible to reach such level since the exp rate is always at 1x. So anybody over level 300 is consider the highest level in the game.

the 'merge' is happening...

2006-11-14T02:03:00.000-08:00

During the last few days, Global Mu Online are having a BIG change to their services that affects every players in the game. This is basically a transition from the three servers (Wigle, Maya, Valhalla) to two brand new servers, also known as realms, named Helheim and Midgard.

Click here for more info on the new changes

On November 14, all players have to register for a new account and then have the option to migrate our old characters back into this new account.

More details on the migrate from K2 Network

This process took me around 3 hours to get through mainly due to the huge amount of people trying to create an account the same time all over the world. Their offical website were really slow and everybody have to refresh a million times to get through this process.

The reason why everybody is so desperate to create an account as early as possible is mainly because of two reasons:

1) The character name is first come first serve.
2) K2 network has increased the exp rate by two during the moving process.

MU Season I Trailer!

2006-11-11T15:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a cool trailer for MU Season 1:
(Global Mu Online should be applying this season 1 patch in around 3 months)

SEASON I:

Info on Mu Online

2006-11-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure many people never heard of this Mu Online game that I'm talking about so here's the wikipedia link that covers the basics (and goes into deatails too) of the game:

Mu Online information on wikipedia

Below is a short little advertisement of Mu:

Topic feedback!

2006-11-04T22:45:00.000-08:00

To anyone that is looking at my blog...
feel free to comment on my three topics ! (you guys can even start a vote!)

Which one of the three topics you are most interested in?
Do you have similar interest as me?
Which topics do you want to know more about?

As of now...

I am leaning toward my game topic on Mu Online.....
mainly because I am still closely connected to this game and I feel that
a topic like this, which is about online gaming, can expand into quite a lot of interesting
side discussions such as the addiction problem, cultural apsect, virtual world, etc....

and here's a video of the southpark cartoon that's talk about the popular WoW (World of WarCraft) online game. If you haven't see it yet..GO WATCH IT NOW! trust me it's really funny and it actually points out a lot of the major problems online game are causing on players.

Choosing a topic for my blog...

2006-11-03T00:40:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! This is my first post here and I am trying to decide on a topic to blog about on here. The following is three of my top topics that I am very interested in:

MMOG (Online games)

I enjoy playing MMOG ever since I own my first personal computer back in my high school years. Up to date I have played at least five major online games. I usually plays F2P (Free2Play) MMOG games since when I was young I do not have to money to actually play any of the more popular P2P (Pay2Play) games out there. I realized that most of the F2P games I have played are originated from Korea. The most recent game that I have played for almost 2 years now and I am still currently playing is called “Mu Online”, it’s one of the most popular MMOG games in Korea and many parts of Asia and Europe. I feel that MMOG games defines me quite a lot since I feel that my character and I are closely connected to each other since I almost log into the game everyday. There are also many activities I do that is closely related to the online game that I’m playing such as looking through forums, researching items and stat build, or chatting with other players in the game through instant messaging. I could basically spend hours and hours playing this game or just researching/planning about the game.

Below are a few screen shots I took from Mu Online:

Anime (Animation)

Anime (Animation) is another big part of my daily activities since I love to watch them whenever I have some free time. Anime is kind of like my childhood since almost every children watch some kind of anime when they are young but I just started to watch anime again around a year ago when the popular “Bleach” series is out and my interest in anime are slowly growing again. Right now, I am currently watching Bleach and Death Note regularly. I feel that anime can fulfills people's fantasy about the world and it can also have a very strong cultural aspect on how other people perceive me since anime is so popular in japan and other parts of Asia.

Import Scene (modifying imported brand cars)

The import scene is probably one of the most direct way how others perceive me since they can see I like to modifies my car. I am very interested into modifying Japanese cars, I have spend at least 5 years modifying my old car and my current car. I really enjoy making my cars looks different from all the other’s car out there since I feel that a car can represents a person’s style and taste of many things. There are numerous of styles to modifying cars and I feel that how somebody modifies their cars can tell a lot about what type or styles of that person likes. How a car looks and performs tells a lot about the driver inside it.

Below are a few photos of my current car (2003 Mazda Protege 5):