Spending All My Gold June 8, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: auction house, epic flying mount
9 comments
Unlike EVE Online, where I keep a close eye on finances, I tend to not think too much about currency in World of Warcraft.
Every so often I go on an auction house binge. I get Auctioneer installed and running, then go looking for stuff to sell. But that does not happen very often.
So I was a bit surprised to notice my gold count running past 3,000 pieces a couple of weeks back. It turns out that running all those daily quests for the Kalu’ak, as well as the Dalaran and Shattrath cooking and fishing daily quests, started adding up.
And then the Dalaran fishing daily paid off big with a gem that sold at the auction house for 800 gold. (I considered keeping it, but I have no socketed gear at all right now.)
That put me within striking distance of something I never thought I would have: The epic flying mount. It was time for another auction house binge.
Vikund, my main, is an engineer, which is not a particularly lucrative profession. (You can make a bunch of stuff other people have problems using. How like real life!) But he does have the mining skill to go along with it, so I started going out of my way to mine. Outland ore, fel iron and adamantite, were especially good to me. Nagrand has ended up being the best zone for me to mine in, being rather sparsely populated most of the time.
Last week I got close enough that I sent a couple hundred gold from another character and took the plunge.
That is the achievement you get for spending 5,000 gold on the artisan riding skill. Then just another 200 gold for the actual epic flying mount and I was… broke.
It has been a long time since I had only that much gold. In fact, I had to dig some soulbound stuff out of the bank to sell to a vendor to be able to finance ongoing auction house work. But it was worth it.
The epic flying mounts boost your ground speed by 100%, the same as the level 60 epic riding mounts, and in the air it acceleates you by 280%. Add in the extra 20% speed boost Vikund gets from his paladin Crusader Aura and you have a pretty fast ride indeed.
I suppose, being an engineer, I should have gone for the Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, but I was selling all my raws to pay for the artisan riding skill. So, instead, I went for the Swift Blue Gryphon.
High Speed Paladin
If the flying mount gave a feeling of freedom in the game, then the epic version multiplies it. The gryphon seems to be about as fast as the ones used to go between the various flight points in the game. I have not tried racing one from point to point, but I have followed a couple of people in flight and have been able to keep them in sight.
Now I have to carry on with my auction house binge though. Vikund is closing in on level 77 at which point he will be able to get the Cold Weather Flying skill which will allow him to fly around Northrend.
Fortunately, the boosted flying speed makes harvesting ore in the Outlands just that much quicker.
Eight Pieces of Paper June 6, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, In Person.7 comments
Monday morning I went out to get the newspaper off the driveway to find that it consisted of exactly 8 pieces of paper.
There was a light breeze blowing and I am surprised it did not pick the paper up and blow it away.
The doubled up rubber band was in danger of damaging this frail publication.
The whole package consisted of 7 full sheets that add up to 4 pages when folded and one half sheet that was just 2 pages.
So the San Jose Mercury News, the self-proclaimed paper of Silicon Valley, which bears the name of the 10th largest city in the United States, managed to fill out all of 30 pages with the news it considered essential to print.
Well, not 30 pages of news.
I estimate that 10 pages of the paper was ads, which is a somewhat low percentage for a newspaper. They make most of their money off of ads rather than the $230 a year I pay to have it delivered daily to my house.
But this is the trend these days for general news publications. Time and Newsweek, which both get delivered to our home are also thin shells of their former selves. They should merge. Editorially they ceased to be distinct at least a few years back. And visually, until a few weeks ago, they were almost indistinguishable past the cover page. Somebody at Newsweek must have noticed this because they redid the layout to emphasize opinion pieces and remove actual news reporting. It has become Opinionweek.
Of course, the dependence on reporting actual news damns them all, the paper, the magazine, and any other print media outlet that takes a generalist line, because I’ve already read about almost any key story on the web before a periodical can reach me. The front page of the paper is often a checklist of things I saw on the web yesterday.
And even general media in specific areas has faded. Remember Byte Magazine? A general magazine to cover all computing! It was great in its day. But is there room for a general computing magazine any more? And general magazines in even smaller domains still have faded, like Games for Windows Magazine. They couldn’t keep that going with Microsoft behind them.
So what is the future of print media? How do you keep going when the web is reporting stories first and stealing all your ad revenue? Do you have to go completely niche to survive?
AviationWeek, another magazine that comes to our home seems to be doing okay. It serves a very specific audience and delivers news that almost never makes it to any general web media outlet. You won’t find anything about the ongoing delays in the Airbus A400M program on the front page of Yahoo.
Air & Space and National Geographic seem to be chugging on, the same as always. I hear that Oprah’s magazine isn’t having any problems. On the other hand I just got the most pathetic plea from Smithsonian Magazine asking me to resubscribe. I’m not even sure how they found me, since it has been at least 10 years since I was a subscriber.
So what is all of this going to look like in 10 years? Will the paper go the way of the horse and carriage? Or will the Mercury News find a niche (like, say, local news) that will keep it going? Will Time and Newsweek be able to soldier on, or will they give up and go the way of US News & World Report and begin the slow fade to obscurity?
Something to think about on a Saturday morning when looking at the biggest edition of the paper this week, which totals out to a bit over 20 pieces of paper, plus the Sunday ad supplement, which hasn’t shown up on a Sunday in the last 20 years to my recollection, so I should probably stop calling it that.
Which Game Was I Playing? June 5, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, polls, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft.45 comments
Based on a true story. Sanitized for your protection.
I had an assignment from a non-player character.
I had to proceed to a specified destination and obtain something.
The destination was staffed with hostile non-player characters, as these sorts of destinations invariably are, which I had to eliminate before I could achieve my goal.
While dealing with the hostile non-player characters another player, who was much better equipped, arrived and rendered the assignment impossible to complete.
The player also made it quite clear that this was not an accident. It was the player’s intention to deliberately create a situation where I could not complete the assignment.
In frustration I submitted a ticket asking for redress of the situation.
Many hours later a representative of the game company responded via an in-game message that the behavior of the other player was within the allowed rules of the game and the company would not take any action on my behalf.
I had been griefed and the company in question was okay with that. All part of the game they said.
Which game was I playing?
The answer will come next week, but feel free to support your own response in the comments.
Ahn’kahet What? June 4, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Instance Group, World of Warcraft.Tags: Ahn'kahet, The Old Kingdom
7 comments
We were back as a full group again last Saturday night, Earl having finished of the spate of weddings that sprang up in late May. Our group, together in Northrend, was:
74 Warrior – Earlthecat
75 Priest – Skronk
75 Warlock – Bungholio
76 Mage – Ula
76 Paladin – Vikund
We had been sneaking away from Earl a bit in his absence, but not too much. And now it was time to get back on the pathe to the Northrend instances. Our target was Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom, which most people see to just call “The Old Kingdom,” no doubt because it is easier to say (or spell) than Ahn’kahet.
We had visited the instance once before, after our successful (and rather quick) Azjol’Nerub run a few weeks back. We even made it to the first boss, Elder Nadox, but wiped on him a few times then called it a night.
But now we were back and in the mood to see the whole thing through.
The composition of creatures in Ahn’kahet made for some interesting game play: Elementals, undead, humanoids, beasts. Essentially, Ula, Bung, Skronk, and Vikund each got to use their own brand of crowd control in various fights. I suppose, technically Earl did as well… but then he always does, since the tank’s crowd control is called “holding aggro.”
We took it carefully coming into the instance, probably over-using crowd control, but keeping everything easy. That got us to the first boss in good order.
We’d had three runs at Elder Nadox before. While we did not bring him down, we knew what was coming and what we needed to do to defeat him.
Ah, Elder Nadox! We shall teach you a lesson you shan't soon forget!
And so in we went. The routine with everything being immune to damage while his guardian was up was a known quantity. Yet the fight ended up being a near run thing with only the healer and the mage left standing at the end.
We won, right?
Nadox did drop an interesting looking weapon, the Blade of Nadox. Nobody really “needed” it, but we all bid greed just for the style aspect. Bung ended up with it.
Bung and the Blade of Nadox
After that, the instance was all new to us. Time to explore.
I will say that I do like the fact that the instances in Northrend actually have in-game maps. That helped us along. Ahn’Kahet is full of twists and turns and platforms and alternate paths. Not that you can actually stray far off the correct path, but it sure looks like you could. But when you try, you find you cannot go that way. Invisible barriers block you. Some of them keep you from taking short cuts. If you could jump off platforms and such, you could probably skip Elder Nadox for one. Most though seem designed just to keep you from doing something silly, like falling off the edge of a cliff.
It makes sense for the type of game that WoW is and given what we know about so many players. We will often try to get to a place we can see just to see if is possible. So you are safe from falls here, but you will never get to that strange altar in the distance.
Forbidden Altar... Forbidden to you, anyway
We moved along well enough. The next boss, Prince Taldaram, was barely a speed bump once we figured out how to release him from his holding chamber. He went down and we moved on through a tunnel into a whole new area.
Bright lights, big room
At the itersection of those two beams of energy, at the base of the ‘V’, floats the next boss, Jedoga Shadowseeker.
Jedoga is an interesting boss fight, though just getting to her proved to be a challenge. The floor between where we are pictured above (at the top of some stairs) and where she resides is swarming with groups of NPCs. Clearing a path through that caused us to wipe once before we even got within site of Jedoga.
And then when we got to her, the fun really began.
We did our usual routine and took her on with no prior research. As often happens, this lead to a wipe, but we sort of figured out what was going on.
Jedoga shows up, you fight her for a bit, then she floats up in the air, summons one of her adherents, whom I forgot to mention are all hanging around the fight area kneeling in reverence. The adherent walks over to her, stands beneather her, and gets consumed, giving over his health to her as well as giving her a short duration, ass-kicking buff.
So the idea is to kill the adherent before it gets over to her, or at least knock down its health a lot, since the amount of health it has seems to be directly proportional to how big of a health boost she gets. And if she gets the buff, stay out of her way until it fades if you can.
We failed on that last bit the second time. Wipe.
Oh, and don’t run out of the battle area because a bunch of hostile NPCs will kill you. The area is visually obvious, but that part about being killed only became obvious when Earl ran out of bounds while trying to avoid Jedoga during her buff. Wipe.
On the fourth try we managed to stick with the re-revised plan and bring her down. It wasn’t super easy, but it was managable once we knew all the steps.
She also dropped what was probably the most useful item of the night, the Cloak of the Darkcaster.
This actually led to a “need-off” between the casters, though I cannot recall at the moment who got it. I remember when I used to take notes on this sort of thing. Ah, well.
This left us with just Herald Volazj, the final boss, who has a nice little chateau on a floating platform (off of which you cannot fall as noted above), just off of Jedoga’s area which you reach by yet another spiderweb ramp. Back in Azjol’Nerub we thought those spiderweb ramps were so cool, but we were already jaded by the next instance. How difficult to please we are.
I peeked ahead at this fight, so we did not go in blind. We knew that at two points we were going to be afflicted with insanity and have to fight shadow versions of ourselves, but that otherwise the fight was straightforward.
The first bout of insanity almost did us in. We had a lot of trouble getting through it. Oddly enough, the second round seemed to be no problem at all, we shook it off quickly and stuck it to Volazj in short order, giving us the achievement.
Which only left the usual last boss victory shot to be taken.
Victory in The Old Kingdom
Another instance down. Next on the list: Drak’Tharon Keep.
EVE Online – The Places I’ve Been June 3, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, memes.5 comments
Kirith Kodachi’s EVE meme, The Places I’ve Been, has been spreading around to the extent that it even got a mention on Massively. So I felt the compulsion building and decided to find our where I have traveled over the last 2.5 years.
Of course, I can never just take one of these meme straight. I always have to change it a little bit. So I am going to answer three questions.
Where have I been?
All the places I have been
As an avowed carebear, I have stayed mostly in high security sections of empire space. Still, that leaves a lot of places to roam. The more red-shifted the dots, the more times I have been there.
Where am I welcome?
To all the agents I've run missions for...
I have run a lot of missions which has given me an 8+ standing with the Caldari State and the Amarr Empire. So the map above shows, in green, all the systems with agents which are available to me. They love me in Caldari space.
Where is my stuff?
Where did I leave my glasses?
Buy orders, sell orders, missions, deliveries; all of that means stuff strewn all over the place. Or in my case, strewn all over space. Each red dot on this map represents a system with a station where I have left something that belongs to me.
This, by the way, is the argument against region-wide buy orders. Going out to pick all that stuff up takes a long time, and it is tough to get motivated enough to go pick up 17 flameburst missiles that are 17 jumps away. CCP should offer a once-a-year consolidate your crap option for people like me. I’d pay some big ISK for that.
Comrade Opposes Imperialism June 2, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, Other PC Games.Tags: Age of Empires II, Age of Kings, GameRanger
8 comments
Last night EVE Online went down with database problems (and looks to have just come up as I am writing this… no… wait… it just went down again, never mind) so Potshot and I weren’t able to do anything in New Eden, like try out his shiny new covert ops ship.
So it was suggested we forgo outer space and return to the Age of Kings.
And on the subject of suggestions, it was suggested in a comment on my last post that we try GameSpy’s game matching service which is called Comrade. We’re all for retro Soviet chic, which Comrade seems to have in abundance, so we thought we would give it a chance.
Unfortunately Comrade seemed much more interested in overthrowing those capitalist running dog lackeys over at X-Fire than helping a couple of techno-kulaks like us play our little imperialist games. After another round of configuration, adjustments, and failure we consigned Comrade to the dustbin of history. The high point of Comrade was that it let me make a “Microsoft .Nyet” joke.
Which brought us back to GameRanger.
I can say nothing but good things about the people who designed GameRanger. They get it. You install it. You create an account. You log in. It works.
Seriously. This is important. If you’re running a game matching service and part of your configuration includes something like, “Now open up ports 2300-2400 on your firewall,” you’ve lost a good chunk of your potential audience right there. And don’t say, “But you have to open those ports for us to work.” (And when I do open all those ports as recommended and your service still doesn’t work….)
Go look at GameRanger. That is how it is done.
In case it is still not clear who I am now recommending for Age of Empires II: Age of Kings internet game play, let me make it clear:
Endorsed by The Ancient Gaming Noob
So we opened up GameRanger and started a game.
And now we had to remember how to play!
We set up a game on a small coastal map, I drew the Vikings and Potshot drew the Turks. I used to know what strategy worked best for all of the empires, but all I could remember about the Vikings was… um… nothing.
While completely lost on combat, I at least remembered how to get my economy going. Potshot beat me to the feudal age, getting there before I even started training it, but once my gathering was in gear I hit both castle and imperial ages first. He began to harass me in the castle age, but at imperial I build a castle on his doorstep and started burning and pillaging.
And, in the grand tradition of the game, I had to hunt down his last unit before victory was mine. I am so glad you can train a skill that lets you see enemy units in the castle. I remember games of the original Age of Empires where we spent long stretches of time trying to find somebody’s lone peon hidden away somewhere.
So we had our first successful over-the-internet game of Age of Kings! Go us!
Now I have to get out on the net and see if there is a nice guide to the strengths and weaknesses of each of the empires.
Retro Imperialism June 1, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Diablo II, entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Age of Empires II, Age of Kings, The Conquerors, Total Annihilation
8 comments
After getting StarCraft out the other week and giving it a run, Potshot and I started discussing one of our more favored RTS games, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings.
Not to diminish StarCraft, which is an incredibly polished and well balanced game, but to me there was always a greater sense of depth and immersion when playing Age of Kings. And the variety of different empires represented lent themselves to different strategies.
So after a bit of searching on Friday evening, I came up with the CDs for both Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings and the expansion, Age of Empires II: The Conquerors. They installed smoothly. Getting them patched to the latest version was not hard either. Looking a the Microsoft sites for Age of Kings and The Conquerors, you can tell that they have not done much with the games over the last seven years of so. You especially have to love the banner ads on the Age of Kings site.
Both the game and the expansion installed and ran fine, neither taking up too much space or resources. System requirements have come a long way since the game shipped.
- Multimedia PC with Pentium 166MHz or higher processor.
- Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5 operating system.
- 32 MB of RAM
- 200 MB of hard disk space; additional 100 MB of hard disk space for swap file.
- Super VGA monitor supporting 800×600 resolution.
- Local bus video card that supports 800×600, 256 color resolution and 2 MB of VRAM
- Quad-speed CD-ROM drive.
- Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device.
- 28.8Kbps modem (or higher recommended) for internet or head-to-head play.
- Audio board with speakers or headphones.
- To access the MSN Gaming Zone you need Internet Explorer 3.02 or later software or Netscape Communicator 4.0 or later.
I like that they felt the need to specify a mouse in the system requirements. It reminds me of a Windows 95 class taught at one of the local Community Colleges back in the day. The class was to be taught on machines with no mouse attached. The instructor was a bit old school and was not convinced of the long term viability of the mouse as a computer input device, so he wanted to make sure his class was prepared for the day when we got over this mouse thing and got back to the only input device that really mattered; the keyboard. But I digress.
A test run against the AI showed that the game itself ran very well on my current machine. And, unlike StarCraft or Diablo II, Age of Kings actually supports a game resolution of 1280×1024. I actually have an LCD monitor in a closet with a native resolution of 1280×1024. So the graphics are less pixellated that the other two games.
Later in the evening, Potshot caught me online and we started trying to coordinate a game, and then the fun began.
Blizzard has run Battle.net for the last 12 years to facilitate the connectivity of their games over the internet despite the fact that they haven’t shipped a game that has required that service for the last six years. So when the retro urge hits, you can get out Diablo, Diablo II, StarCraft, etc. and get connect with your friends in an environment that simulates all the lag and issues you remember from the good old days. But at least the option exists.
By comparison, Microsoft has been less resolute. The so-called MSN Gaming Zone referred to in the requirements, and which has had a variety of names, ceased supporting connectivity for games like Age of Kings about three years ago. So unless you are on the same LAN as the person you are playing, getting connected for a match can be a challenge.
Still, there are a couple of services that have attempted to pick up the ball dropped by Microsoft. The first one we tried was International Gaming Zones.
That did not go so well. Their client didn’t seem to like that I installed the game somewhere other than the default directory. There was a good deal of tinkering with routers required. And when that was done, there was some sort of problem with the Age of Kings client application. To their credit IGZones had a write up and a patch regarding that last problem, but even with the patch applied and verified we could not get a game going. After an hour of that we moved on.
We then spent some time trying to establish a direct connection between our machines. That involved a lot more fruitless tinkering with routers and putting machines into the DMZ and generally not getting anywhere. After enough of that I grabbed the next site that promised to support multiplayer Age of Kings game play, GameRanger.
GameRanger seems to have focused on simplicity of function because we were able to download it, create accounts, and get it to work in about five minutes. We were actually playing.
Again, I almost remember my build order...
Then, after about 10 minutes of play, when we were poised to get stuck into each other, we got disconnected.
Overall, an uncanny recreation of the original Age of Kings “over the internet” play experience.
At that point it was after midnight. We declared limited success and vowed that our empires would clash again at some future date.
So now I have had out, on successive weekends, two of my three favorite RTS games of all time. The only one that remains is Total Annihilation.
But even getting Total Annihilation installed is a challenge in and of itself, assuming you can get your hands on the various patches and updates. A task for another weekend I think.
