Azeroth on a Toaster March 10, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, Hardware, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft.Tags: Acer Aspire One
11 comments
My mother flew over from Maui for a surprise visit last week much to the joy of my daughter. She is always happy to have grandma come and visit, but that was heightened by the fact that they have been playing World of Warcraft together for the last few months.
To ensure that we could all log on while she was here to visit, my mom brought along her little Acer Aspire One, which is a subnotebook, if I read the information about it correctly.
It is also one of the few remaining platforms that is still allowed to offer Windows XP as an operating system.
So my mom setup the Aspire on the table next to our 20″ iMac and she and my daughter played WoW together.
Juxtaposition of Screen/Person Size
I mentioned a certain blogger who complains that people want games to run on their toaster every time somebody balks at game system requirements. (Though said blogger does not have any form of search on his blog, so I cannot link to a such a statement. No link for him!) Her computer appeared to be about as close to a toaster in specs as I had seen so far, though she said it was more like a George Foreman Grill.
Tiny though it is, with a 1024 x 600 screen driven by the rightfully maligned (by gamers) Intel GMA950 GPU, WoW was surprisingly playable on it.
Lean Mean Murloc Killing Machine
You can get lost in crowds with the little screen, so Dalaran is probably a pain, but out in the open countryside things look good, if small.
My mom said she also tried EVE Online and Lord of the Rings Online on the Aspire One.
EVE had the problem I rather suspected it would, which was window management. I have trouble with window clutter on my 20″ monitor in full screen, so a 9″ model hasn’t a prayer.
The bigger surprised was that LOTRO ran at all on this rig. It was apparently akin to watching a PowerPoint presentation about the game at times, but it was enough for her to get through the first couple of levels before the slowness took its toll. I would rather expect the machine simply to catch fire trying to render Middle-earth, but it lived.
So the little Aspire One seems to be viable if you want to play WoW. Of course, once my daughter went to bed, my mom moved over to the iMac to play. Viable isn’t the same as optimal after all.
So my daughter had her best weekend ever it seems. There was extra time playing WoW (normally not allowed on weekdays) with grandma. Plus there was the extra bonus of being read more stories, movie time, and just generally having a lot of fun. Many tears were shed when my mom had to head home.
To get my daughter’s mind off of my mom leaving, I had to bribe her with a blood elf.
She made a blood elf at one time on my account and has been bugging me ever since about wanting to make on her account. Blizzard’s 10-day Burning Crusade trial saved the day… but I’m going to end up having to pick up the expansion eventually I bet. And only after blood elves were on the table did I find out that the two year old expansion is holding its price point pretty well.
Maybe they still have some of those heavily discounted collector’s editions sitting around at Fry’s.
It’s Down March 9, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Apocrypha, Classic Graphics
11 comments
I saw the last seconds tick off before the big shut down for the Apocrypha expansion in EVE Online.
Of course, things don’t go away instantly…
But after a few seconds of that, the connection went down and I was out.
Good bye classic graphics! You’ll only be the stuff of legends and screen shots now!
Soon we’ll say hello to skill queues, wormholes, tech III, and all that they will bring to the game.
I hope that two day skill is enough.
Apocrypha is Coming! March 9, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Apocrypha
3 comments
Apocrypha, the latest EVE Online free expansion is coming, and it is bringing many wonderful things.
Some of them are easy to grasp, like a skill queue of sorts that will allow you to pile up all those 8 minute to a couple hour skills into a batch to run overnight or while you’re at the office.
Others are more complex, like the wormholes and probing, which Kirith Kodachi has been exploring in depth on his blog, to tech III ships which… are… a whole new ball of wax.
Apocrypha is upon us, showing up tomorrow. You have to love CCP; about the time we’re all starting to understand something new is coming, it is here! No long waits.
Of course, that means system downtime, the announcement for which has been posted:
Deployment of the free expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha will begin at 03:00 GMT on 10 March. We anticipate the extended downtime for the deployment may take up to 13 hours and we expect to be back up at 16:00 GMT.
We recommend starship pilots prepare for the unveiling of that which is hidden by setting a long-training skill.
During this time Tranquility will be offline, our forums and news section, the EVE API and Secure (login for EVElopedia, Account Management etc) will be taken down at about 02:30 GMT. Secure will return at 05:30 GMT and the news section and the forums will be partially up at 09:30 GMT to provide players with a feedback channel.
The EVE API will remain down until downtime 11 March. We will activate a back-up news system to provide updates during the time our news section is down.
03:00 GMT on March 10th is 8pm Pacific time on March 9th (today) out here on the left coast, where daylight savings time is also now upon us.
And, like the man says, make sure you queue up a nice long (multi-day) skill before the down time.
CCP has been very good about not going long on the last couple of expansion, but I still remember a couple where the downtime went into the following day. So be prepared!
That Sixth Screen Shot Meme Thing March 7, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, EverQuest, memes.2 comments
Scott / Talyn over at Pumping Irony tagged me with that “Sixth Screen Shot” meme thing that has been going around of late.
Like a game of telephone operator, as the meme moves along the rules seem to morph. Not that I am sure the rules were that solid in the first place… the sixth screen shot in the sixth sub folder of the sixth son of the sixth son or some such.
Anyway, there appeared to be some wiggle room in choosing pictures.
As I counted it, EverQuest ended up being the sixth folder of screen shots on my hard drive, and after I sorted the folder a few different ways, I ended up with a sixth picture I liked.
Crushbone Keep
Having fulfilled the bargain, I now get to tag some other people. I choose Karen at Journeys with Jaye and Gaff at Trot Line because neither has posted anything in months as well as Potshot and Darren just because it will annoy them.
Light Missile Price Supports March 6, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: EVE Quirks, Markets
5 comments
There is a system near my base of operations with lots of stations in it and lots of agents of various levels residing therein. I decided a few weeks back to corner the market in light missiles in that system. An experiment in economic manipulation and artificial price supports.
Light missiles sell very well in the system, but I noticed that the price for light missiles was very low. Lower than my cost to produce in many cases. While my incremental cost to produce light missiles in quantity (materials + production fees) is around 5 ISK per missile depending on the flavor, if I include the need to pay off buying the the BPOs and doing material research on them, that number is really closer to 8 ISK.
From my point of view then, any light missile for sale under 8 ISK is an alternative to production. So I bought up pretty much all of the light missiles in the system, since the price point seemed to be around 7.50 in most cases.
The joys of having a lot of ISK on hand.
I relisted them all at 15.00 ISK initially. Missiles sold quite well when I was the only supplier. I also put in a buy order much higher than the local buy orders to encourage people who just wanted to dump stuff after a mission to sell to me rather than listing the item for sale them self. For two flavors of light missiles, the high buy order was 0.10 ISK, which is enough to encourage anybody to get into the resale business. I wanted to discourage competitors, not fertilize the ground and cause them to grow.
Inevitably though, competitors showed up again, listing below my price and sales dried up. Oddly enough though, in most cases, they listed their missiles back down at the old prices.
I rather suspect that they are operating under the illusion/delusion that for something as trivial in cost as a light missile you must consider the price of light missiles for sale in other systems. I did not buy up missiles in surrounding systems, and there were low prices to be had one or two jumps away.
But almost nobody will even move to another station to save money on ammo, unless there is a huge price differential. Light missiles in other systems are, for all practical purposes, in other markets. My brisk sales well over the regional average bore this out.
So I bought up all my competitors again. I have the trade skills to buy and list items up to 10 jumps away which allows me to do this all from the comfort of my home station. Sales surged again even though, for one flavor of light missile, I had to raise the price to 18 ISK per because somebody actually listed close to my price.
Light missile sales in this system have turned into a reasonable money maker. I lost control of one flavor of missile in the market because somebody came along and listed at my price. I could have played the “undercut each other until the price gets low enough for me to just buy him out and relist high again” game, but I didn’t. This operation has paid for itself over time, but it isn’t a huge addition to my bottom line.
Meanwhile another person shows up every couple of days and lists a pile of light missiles at 7.5 ISK each, which I promptly buy up. They are like my contract supplier. I hope they aren’t actually producing those missiles, because I would have to guess that they aren’t making much money at all.
And so my experiment churns along bringing a constant trickle of ISK.
Once in a while though, I get a big score, usually because somebody else is trying to scam people.
There seems to be a time-honored tradition in EVE of listing an item on the market for much more than its going rate in hopes that some careless person will buy it. In line with this, somebody listed a single flameburst missile in my target system, in one of my stations, for 50,000 ISK.
Now there is a quirk with the market in EVE Online that I have noticed over time. If several people are selling the same item at a station at different prices, if you buy from the highest priced vendor the market will often (but not always) sell you the item from the lowest price vendor, but pay them the higher price.
Remember this next time you think you’ll punish the guy who is undercutting the competition by 0.01 ISK. If you buy from the higher priced guy, it will still likely be the undercutter who benefits.
When I buy up all my competitors in a system, I am always very careful to buy the lowest priced goods first. Otherwise I find I end up wasting ISK by inflating my average price.
So somebody decided to buy that 50,000 ISK missile. I don’t know if they were being a good Samaritan and trying to protect noobs by pulling it off the market or if they thought it possessed magical powers, but they tried to buy it. Repeatedly. They hit that button seven times before they gave up, which looked like this in my transaction log:
That was enough to ensure the profitability of my missile operation for some time to come. If we take 8 ISK as the base production cost for a flameburst missile, those seven buys generated the same profit as selling 35,000 missiles at 18 ISK per unit.
A tidy profit, but not as lucrative as selling 250 medium Antimatter charges for 9,999.00 ISK each, something that happened that day as well. Again, the same market quirk paid off.
Some days it is good to be in business.
The Tyranny of Professor Oak March 5, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in DS, entertainment, Pokemon.Tags: National Pokedex, Pokemon Diamond, Pokemon Pearl, Pokemon Platinum
7 comments
With Pokemon Platinum coming out near the end of the month and recent Shaymin and Regigigas Pokemon events, there has been a resurgence of Pokemon activity at our house.
The Nintendogs and Cooking Mama cartridges have been set aside and Pokemon Diamond has occupied the Nintendo DS of at least one young person around our home.
When it comes down to it, I only ever really play Pokemon Diamond on my DS, so if I am not playing that, my DS is sitting on the charger and waiting. Sure, I might be up for Mario Party DS once in a while, or maybe Mario Kart, but Pokemon is where it is at for me.
We started playing Pokemon Diamond about a year ago, my daughter getting a DS and a copy of the game on Valentine’s Day last year while I got me own DS and copy on my birthday, a little less than a month after that.
My daughter and I enjoyed the main storyline of the game. It takes you through the Sinnoh region where you catch Pokemon, challenge other pokefans, defeat gym leaders, fight the nefarious Team Galactic, and fill out the Sinnoh Pokedex for Professor Rowan.
It is Professor Rowan who starts you down the path in this game.
And, at the end of the main storyline, when Team Galactic is thwarted and you have defeated Cynthia the regional Pokemon League Champion, you run off and fill out the last entry, the 150th, in the Sinnoh Pokedex and earn a star on your trainer card.
The essential part of the game is done at that point. You can say you have played Pokemon Diamond (or Pearl).
There is a follow on story and some more to do along that line. There are contests to enter, people to challenge, and a few more places to explore, but you have that star. You could walk away satisfied.
The thing of it is, you can get more stars.
Stars. Why is it always stars with Nintendo?
And the next and most obvious star to get is the one for completing the National Pokedex. Professor Rowan hands you over to his mentor, Professor Oak, who upgrades your Pokedex so you can catalog all of the known Pokemon.
You think you’re ready for the National Pokedex just because you’ve finished up the Sinnoh Pokedex?
Think again!
Here is a way to measure what you are up against.
There are two Prima guides to Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.
The first one, which is 269 pages long, is devoted to teaching you how to play the game, including how to do all the side activities you run into along the way, as well as guiding you through the main story through to that first star.
The second one is 456 pages long and it is mostly devoted to completing the National Pokedex.
You see, Professor Rowan is a softy. He let you fill out the Sinnoh Pokedex by just “seeing” the 150 Pokemon native to Sinnoh.
Professor Oak though is a cast iron bastard of the old school.
To complete the National Pokedex you have to personally capture or otherwise obtain and have in your possession all of the Pokemon. That is 493 Pokemon, and you gotta catch em all.
And many of them aren’t even in the game!
And I am not talking about the few that are in Diamond but not Pearl and vice versa.
I set out to master the National Pokedex.
Some Pokemon are just evolutions of the Pokemon you already have, though sometimes you need a particular stone or situation to bring on the evolution. I have farmed the underground for such stones and worked to develop friendship levels that would all evolution to occur. I am lucky that my daughter and I both play, as some Pokemon need to be traded to another person via wireless for them to evolve.
Some Pokemon you need are actually in the game, but are rare or only show up at special times or under special circumstances. I have jumped through hoops to trigger events. I have set my Outlook calendar to remind me of special dates. I have checked the game every day to see if today was the mass outbreak event that would yield an as yet uncaught Pokemon. I have spoken the owner of the Pokemon mansion regularly to see if there was a needed Pokemon in his garden that day. I have stalked the Pastoria Great Marsh in search of the daily rare rotation.
Some of them can be brought into the game via an Pokemon breeding program that involves putting two Pokemon in daycare. The an egg mysteriously shows up and you have to get it to hatch. This does not involve sitting on it, but rather traveling with it as part of your Pokemon team. I have hatched many an egg now.
Some Pokemon only appear in game if you have one of the older GameBoy Advance versions of the game inserted in the front slot of your Nintendo DS. I initially scoured eBay for low cost, used copies of those games. I found that there is such demand that they go for almost retail. So I have purchased some new off the shelf when I have had a Toys R Us coupon or the like. I have hunted down all of those that could be obtained while having FireRed, LeafGreen, Emerald, or Sapphire inserted.
Some Pokemon must be migrated from those older games. That means you have to have played that game and captured that particular Pokemon. In a bit of luck, the copy of FireRed I got used had a game in progress on it and I was able to snaffle a couple of Pokemon that way. My daughter also played quite a ways into Pokemon Emerald and picked up a couple of needed Pokemon.
Some Pokemon you can only get through special Nintendo events, all of which I announce here to help spread the word.
You can obtain Pokemon via an international wireless trading network that Nintendo has set up, the Pokemon Global Trade Station. You can visit the website for it and see statistics on how many Pokemon are being traded on a given day, which ones are popular, and so on. From the Global Trade Station I have obtain Pokemon from all over the world. Japan is the most common location, but I have Pokemon from Australia, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Antigua, Egypt, South Africa, and places in between. I had quite a long string of success farming Meowths from FireRed and trading them for rare Pokemon. People in Japan will trade you anything for a Meowth it seems.
And after all my end game work… I “finished” the game and got that first star back in May 2008… I have obtained 358 Pokemon. (I have seen 403, but that won’t get my anywhere with Professor Oak.)
That is 134 short of being done.
And while there are another 40 I could get with a little work on each one… get around to hatching another few eggs… get a few more levels for some… trade a few with my daughter… that still leaves me nearly 100 shy of being done.
I am sure I am not alone in failing to complete the National Pokedex in Diamond/Pearl. I have never met anybody who has completed it. Not honestly, anyway.
I always ask the kids hanging around at the Pokemon download events if they have finished it. The only one who said yes also said he had to cheat to do it. I did not ask how he cheated, but I have no doubt there are ways.
I just have to face it. I am not going to complete the National Pokedex, not before Pokemon Platinum comes out. I am worn out from trying. Once Platinum shows up, I look forward to starting a fresh storyline, unconcerned with finishing the National Pokedex, at least for a while.
But once I have finished the main storyline in Platinum I bet Professor Oak will be there, waiting for me, ready to upgrade my Pokedex, ready to send me out in to capture nearly 500 Pokemon.
Will I be ready for the challenge?
I’ll have 358 in my pocket, so to speak, ready to transfer into the game.
There will be a new and improved Global Trade Center with which to obtain those final hundred and thirty four.
I’ll have a couple of years before the next version of Pokemon comes out.
It could happen.
Being That Guy With the Truck March 4, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Charon, freighter, Mining
12 comments
Everybody knows somebody with a vehicle that is useful for hauling things. (If you live in the US, it is the curse of owning a pickup truck.) They may not be a close friend, but they are surprisingly dear when you need to get a dining room table home or a couch moved and you aren’t keen to pay a steep delivery charge or rent a truck for the day.
For our corp, I am now that guy. I own a freighter, and with great cargo capacity comes great responsibility.
Not that I mind. That is what I bought the ship to do, haul things.
And, as usual, I have been allowed to learn new things in EVE Online.
Wanting some stuff moved16 jumps from our main base of operations without having to make the trip with me, Gaff figured out how to create a contract that allowed me to haul it at my leisure so it was there for him to pick up at the destination the next day.
It turned out to be pretty easy. At the hauling end of things you get a freight container with the destination as its name.
It would be nice if you could right click on the contain and set the destination, but you can’t have everything.
Potshot also went the contract route so I could move some goods for him.
In addition to learning about contracts and hauling, I have also learned a couple of things a freighter cannot do.
You cannot, for example, take a freighter through a mission gate.
You also cannot use a freighter for near infinite mining storage.
Darren and Jonathan were mining the other night and I said I would haul for them. I wanted to show off my new ship and surprise them with its immense size, so I did not mention I would be flying out in the Charon.
When I warped in they were suitably impressed. But when I went to start emptying their jet can, I got a surprise message.
My dream of, say, hours of travel free ice mining were dashed.
So I got my alt out and hauled for them in a much-less-impressive Badger while I flew the Charon around hoping to scare off any can flippers with the sheer size of the thing.
I brought it up and over in a loop, which looks unnatural.
Slowly over the top...
When in the verticle position monolith quotes from “2001 – A Space Odyssey” began to come out. It might be full of stars, but it was not full of ore.
Still, having the freighter there ended up being handy. When the mining was done I was able to haul the whole take from the station to market.
A Child of Warsong Gulch March 3, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: Arathi Basin, Warsong Gulch, WSG
14 comments
The other week, after finishing up the run through the Deadmines with my mother and my daughter, I was about done with World of Warcraft for the day. Corralling an eager 7 year old over Skype can be a chore. My mom was also done for a while.
My daughter, however, was still keyed up to do something in Azeroth.
She wanted to do something fun.
Since she had already hit level 20, I decided to let her try out Warsong Gulch.
She plays a hunter, which is one of the classes that can get away with being at the low end of the level curve in battlegrounds in my opinion, so I figured she wouldn’t get completely pounded. Being the level 20 in the 20-29 group means that people often make a bee-line straight for you, but if you can hang back and snipe, you can do okay.
I showed her how to get to Stormwind Keep and which NPC to speak to in order to join the queue. And, rather surprisingly to me, the wait time for WSG was pretty short. She was in a match in a about a minute.
I left her there with instructions to “kill the people with the red names” and then went off to watch a TV show with my wife about twelve paces away.
The match started and I could tell she was having a good time. She was cheering and obviously felt like she was doing well. When the match was over she took off her headset and ran over and bounced around while telling us that her side had won the match. This was something new and exciting for her, this online team sport.
Her side won the next match. More cheering!
Then, in the next match, her team lost.
She came over and complained about how the other team had more people and they were all higher level and they ganged up on people and it wasn’t fair!
I got an angry look when I laughed. All she missed was claiming they were using hacks. If she had said that I would have declared her ready for Counter-Strike.
I told her that you can’t win every time, a phrase that cut no ice with her. She is not a good loser, something she does not get from me.
She went back to play another match and was mollified by victory, that which salves all wounds.
At the end of the evening I took a screen shot of her achievements. She had a couple none of my characters ever got. Plus, it seemed that she went off and tried Arathi Basin as well. I did not even know that was available at level 20.
Last weekend gave us a nice stormy Sunday afternoon to play on the computer. I was mucking about in EVE Online, but she wanted to go back to the battlegrounds. She brought my mom along as well, who at least had gotten her character up to 27 and so could hold her own in the scrum.
I heard her giving my mom lots of advice while they played, some of it of rather dubious value, but several quite insightful bits. But after she was done for the day I checked her achievements again.
She may officially now be better than me in WoW Battlegrounds.
I think she just needs the typing skills to harague people in raid chat (Don’t just stand there! Got get the flag! We don’t need so many on defense!) and she’ll be an expert.
Spelling skills are, of course, not required.
None More Black? March 2, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Hardware, Humor.Tags: ATi 4850, Spinal Tap
7 comments
It’s like, how much more black could this be?
And the answer is none. None more black.
Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap
A co-worker asked me just how black the packaging was that came with my new video card.
How black is it?
I’ll let the readers decide the answer to Nigel’s question.
ASUS EAH4850 Matrix March 2, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Hardware.Tags: 8800GT, ATi 4850
5 comments
I needed a video card, and I needed one in a hurry.
Over the years I have upgraded my video card many times. I always keep the old card handy just in case something goes wrong with the new one. I like to have a fall-back position.
However, I was in a bind this time around. My current system is PCI-Express and all my old video cards are AGP. There was no fall-back position. And while the 8800GT was still operating in a minimal functionality mode, so at least I could do something on my computer, all video functions were set to “Slow & Painful.”
I did some quick research over at Tom’s Hardware. They had their “Best Graphics Card for the Money” feature updated for February 09. At my price target was the ATi 4850 based video card with 512MB or RAM. It offered performance on par with my old card and was a design that had been on the market for a while, so should be stable.
But which version of the ATi 4850 to select?
I hunted around a bit, looking for the model with the best cooling arrangement. I just wanted the card to last.
Finally I found a review over on Firing Squad that had potential. The high-end ASUS version of the ATi 4850, the EAH4850 Matrix looked to be just about the thing I was after. A quick visit to ZipZoomFly.com and it was ordered and on its way to me.
Friday the package arrived.
I opened the shipping box and picked up the contents.
I removed the black sleeve from the black box. I opened up the black box and began to go through the black cardboard inserts. Inside of the biggest black insert was a static bag held close with black tape. Inside the bag was a video card built on a black PCB, covered with black integrated circuits on one side and a large black housing for a cooling system on the other, in the middle of which was a large black fan. Once installed, little black lights labeled in black on a black background lit up black to indicate the black video card was now operational.
Okay, except for the last sentence, everything in that last paragraph was true. ASUS has a black theme going on with this card. This is truly Hotblack Desiato’s Video Card.
The card itself is a double-wide. You need to open two covers on the backplane of your computer case, one for the video connectors and one for the heatsink exhaust. That doesn’t bother me, but some people may resent the space it takes up. Somewhere over the last 10 years I stopped needing to populate every last slot on the motherboard.
And how does it run?
With my in-game video settings left over from the 8800GT, things feel about the same. Of course, I spent most of the weekend playing EVE Online or World of Warcraft, neither of which really taxes a video card. But I did go run around in Lord of the Rings Online for a bit, and things felt about the same there.
As for heat, the ASUS iTracker application that comes with the card let me keep an eye on that. I used it to change the cooling settings to be somewhat more aggressive in spinning up the fan on the card.
The fan itself is reasonably quiet. I can hear it quite clearly when it comes on, but it isn’t loud and it just joins the chorus of fan noises that eminate from the computer case under my desk.
We shall see how the card operates in the long term, but for now I am back up and running.
