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The Warcraft movie due out in 2011 to be directed by Sam Raimi promises to be horrid.. Sorry.. Live action wont do the seriese any justice..

The Stormlord Thorin

Yep.. This is a World of Warcraft post.. And one in which I plan to complain to Blizzard about the recent rounds of nurfing.. But firstly let me say that Thorim is dead!  Long live Thorim.

My guild on Whisperwind is now only the second horde guild to kill Thorim in Ulduar.  He’s a VERY tough fight.  I love it.  It took 25 people with their heads on a swivel, 100% focused with zero screw ups to make it happen.  (And even then it took us 17 tries.)

But we killed him and it was glorious!  It was an extremely difficult fight and I’m sure everyone will have a fun time with it..    Until they nurf him, of course.   Blizzard has taken it into their heads to nurf all the hard content and I wish they would STOP!

Blizzard, stop nurfing the stuff in Ulduar.  As hard as he is, he’s doable. Don’t change it!  Let us scale to the instance instead of bringing the instance down to us.. He’s just right the way he is!

He’s doable..  Just as Ignis, Razorscale and Deconstructor were doable before you nurfed the hell out of them.  (Okay, Ignis had a bug with people in the pot.. fine that sucked, but he was still doable.. )

They were hard mobs that people bitched about so you caved and made them a cake walk!  You even nurfed the Ignis trash mobs to the point of pointlessness.. I mean why even have them in there?  They werent that hard to begin with..  Why are you doing this?!

I read that some guilds couldn’t even get to Ignis cause the trash was wiping them, then the issue is with the guild — not the mobs.  Stop caving..

Don’t  you understand that we don’t want another Naxx?  I mean seriously my guild can do 25man Naxx in a little over 2 hours.. it’s boring.. I’m sure really top notch guild can do it faster..  It’s not fun when you have the content on farm status so quickly.

After the first round of nurfs, you guys went on and nurfed the Antechamber to the point where we one shot everyone.  Auriaya still takes some finesse but she’s cake compared to how she first was.. Kologarn and Iron councel are a joke..

I fully expect you to nurf the keepers next.  Freya isn’t hard, again just a finesse issue but I’m sure you will reduce her spawns..   We usually drop her on the second or third attempt.  Good times!

Hodir we one shotted the first time we went in there, he’s stupidly easy yet I bet he’ll get nurfed even more.. We don’t even use frost resist gear.. sheesh.. this guy needs a buff not a nurf..

We haven’t tried 25 man Mimiron yet.. I’m told that it’s another gloriously difficult fight.. *gleee*  I just hope we can get in there and give it a go before he gets pummeled with the nurf bat..

Long story short.. stop making the content easier.  It’s supposed to be hard!  What’s the point of making top notch content only to then nurf it so that anyone can do it.. Believe it or not it’s going to drive players away from your game.. and you don’t want that..  Let the players scale up their performance to the point where they can do the content.. Don’t bring the content down to players who have no business being in there..

Whack a Seal!

So, on Saturday the 11th of April, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) held an awareness gathering in World of Warcraft where they killed four quest NPC’s as a form of protest for the unethical killing of seals in real life.  Some how it got into their heads that by focusing on protecting the digital seals in a game and instead performing the far more ethical act of killing the would-be digital seal killers, it would bring awareness to the unethical killing of real world seals.

So.. let me sum up for those who can’t put this together — what they are saying is..   Kill the people who are killing the seals.

Are you fucking kidding me?!  How is that more ethical?  They honestly are saying that it’s more ethical to kill humans than it is to kill seals?  That’s their stance?  Really?

I’ve always heard PETA was a bunch of psycho douche bags but damn.. But to their point; Apparently a lot of seals (between 100k and 400k this year depending on which website you go to..) are killed annually by the Canadian government..  Or rather, their killing is sanctioned by the Canadian government..

PETA’s website goes on a very graphic tirade about how awful it is and how each seal “must look on as fellow pups are bludgeoned to death before meeting the same bloody fate.  The anguish that a mother seal feels as she watches her baby being beaten to death just a few feet away from her is horrifying and can be heard in her desperate cries…” Wow.. Nice spin.. Complete bullshit, but a good spin all the same..

In doing research for this, I have watched a lot of videos.. And in each video I have seen it has had some lone guy run up on an individual seemingly adult seal that was alone on an ice flow and repeatedly whack the seal in the head with a hammer on a pole.. Kinda gruesome true.. But PETA paints this as mass murder where all the baby seals are gathered up and executed Auschwitz style.. That simply isn’t true..

Firstly, I have no idea why the Canadian government has an annual seal season.  And from what I have read, no one else knows either..   There must be a reason, and despite what PETA thinks its not because they are all evil evil communists who hate children..  Thats how PETA paints it, but again.. not true..  That’s propaganda..  There must be a reason it’s legal — what is it?

Apparently I’m willing to look at it a bit more objectively than PETA is;  It could be just like the deer season here in the US.. I simply don’t know.  All the websites I have found on the issue are one manner of propaganda or another..  Finding hard facts is near impossible at this point because of all the inflammatory crap being flung back and forth..

The simple truth of it is;  If it’s legal, then it’s legal. You can be offended by it, but that doesn’t mean that its against the law.  You can delve all you want into the morality pool and every one of us will come up with a different opinion on the subject.. But from a legal stand point, you can’t say that killing seals is illegal.  It’s not illegal.

I personally think the primary difference is that seals are endearing..  It’s sort of the same difference between a rat and a squirrel.. Squirrels are cute, we love them!  Rats are ugly, we hate them!  When the simple fact is they are both rodents that carry diseases, only one has a fluffy tail and lives outside which people find endearing thus squirrels are thought of more positively..  Seals are cute and as such we are offended by their early demise..

I’m more than willing to concede that there are baby seals being killed out there on the ice flows.. Probably more than a few.. but to say that all the seals being killed are just cute cuddly wuddly baby seals is pure propaganda plain and simple.  Most folks that look at a picture of a seal have no idea how old that seal is..  Hell they all look like babies right?  I’m not 100% sure, but I thought seals out on the ice flow alone (as in the videos I saw) are adults, no baby seal would go out that far alone..

Here is one of the videos I saw of seals being clubbed to death, and yes — it’s pretty gruesome.   But I would say it’s no more gruesome than a deer getting shot during the annual hunting seasons here in the US..  How is that different?  It’s an animal being killed by a superior species..  Just like a lion that chases down and kills a gazelle for it’s meat..

I eat meat.. The steak, pork and chicken that I consume also was once alive.. and is now dead..  And according to PETA I’m a murderer for it?  Really?  It’s been going on for a long time.. And my maxillary permanent canine teeth sort of imply it was meant to go on.. So why does PETA think that this sort of activity is so bad?

They would answer that a lion wouldn’t kill for sport, or wouldn’t kill for just the skin.   To which I say; Sure they would and do all the time.   Dolphins are one of the more intelligent animals on the planet and they kill for sport..

Frankly, this is just propaganda by an organization that has no power.. You see,  PETA wants to bring your attention to what they call, an injustice.. Something they call unethical..

And since PETA has the word “Ethical” right in their name they must be good right?  The words right there, therefore they must be the ones doing the ethical and moral thing..  So if you disagree with them, then you’re unethical!!  You bastard.

The problem is, it doesn’t work that way.  Ethics are a system of moral principles governing an individual or group.  Those principles are discussed and agreed upon by that group.  No one individual or group can decide what those principles are for another individual or group.  Meaning, what’s ethical here.. may not apply there.  What’s moral and ethical for you may not apply to me..

In this situation you have PETA trying to tell another group what’s ethically right, and if you don’t do what they think is right you’re wrong.   PETA is trying to control you and your way of thinking..   And they think you should DIE for disagreeing.  That’s right..  Remember from above, they think the people killing the seals, should be killed…

Frankly, I find that PETA is nothing more than a terrorist group (or even religious cult) that is extremely vocal and is very good at crafting sensational, vivid, graphic and even horrific language and imagery in order to manipulate people.  They do it in such a way as to make you feel bad if you don’t side with them, and if that doesn’t work they will intimidate, harass and threaten you..

That alone to me seems unethical.

The issue here is, like so many other animals in the animal kingdom (and yes, WE are animals) we tend to think animals are good to eat.. Most PETA members are vegetarians and as such have a moral stance that killing an animal of any kind for any reason is wrong.  Oh and they’ll tell ya about it too.. We have differing ethical stances when it comes to the killing of animals.

I’m all for not killing critters if we can get around it.. but sometimes it’s necessary.. Like for food or for other products that we deem necessary.. Where as PETA paints this picture that we are torturing animals for our food.. Or that these seals are being tortured to death for their fur.  I haven’t seen that.  I have yet to see where they hook up the car battery to the seals teets just to cause pain.  Or where they derive some sick pleasure from slapping a seal around..

In every video I have seen, they kill the animal in very short order.. It may take two or three whacks but its over and done fairly quickly..  How is that torture?   Torture to me implies the repeated infliction of pain over a period of time from which you derive some sick sadistic pleasure..  Walking up to an animal and bludgeoning it to death with intent to use it for one purpose or another, isn’t torture..

I have seen horrific and evil video of animals being tortured.. (Just watch the PETA website..)  Yeah that shits awful.. But that stuff is illegal and there are laws in place to stop it.   The seal hunts are legal, and not in the same category despite what you think.

Look, I love animals.. I do.. I always have..  And I think the torture of animals is wrong and the people doing it should go away for ever.. But it’s pretty clear to me that PETA loves animals more than Humans..

PETA will try to tell you that animals are todays “slaves” and that what happens to a cow or a chicken today is morally identical to what happened to the Jewish people in the holocaust..  And that shit is fucking offensive as hell.. And I’m not Jewish!!  To actually trivialize the holocaust like that is just unimaginable and goes a very long way to prove that anyone who belongs to PETA has no basis in reality.

Hrmm.. maybe they belong in a game?

Firstly, what it’s not;

The blizzard folks over at their forums, as well as those you get ahold of on the phone.. and via email will try to blame everything on you.  The reason for this will come clear shortly, but in a way they are right and in a way wrong.

The World of Warcraft #134 error is so vague and broad in scope that it is the support equivalent to, “It broke!”…  It could be any number of things, but the thing they just about always tell you it is, is memory.  Read the forums and you’ll always see some asshat chiming in that it must be your memory..  The issue I had with that response is that I had run tests against my 4 gigs of memory both in linux, and in windows using multiple tools as well as testing each stick individually..  My memory was flawless every time.. even using the test blizzard suggested I use.

Once I proved that, they suddenly tried to blame some other facet of my hardware..  Long story short, everything they suggested WAS WRONG.  Period..

So I got to looking into why they always insisted it was memory.. And how the MPQ files which should be read-only archives of data were getting corrupted.    Why the hell was blizzard writing back to those files..

(Note: most of this is what I have gleaned while looking into it as well as relying on my own and coworkers programming knowledge.. it’s not 100% for sure, but an edjumikated guess.)

The MPQ files that WoW uses contain all the various objects, models, textures and what nots that the game needs to play.   The majority of those things are textures that the system needs to constantly load to display..  The problem is the MPQ’s are many gigs in size, and as of yet no graphics card has that much on board memory..  Nor do most systems have enough space to load the entire game into memory..  To get around this blizzard employed a technique called memory mapping.

Without going into too much detail, the addresses for the chunks of the data it needs is mapped directly to the hard drive and stuffed into the graphics card memory.. (Or more likely into main memory, then replicated into the graphics card memory.. but thats not important.)  These functions are controlled by windows entirely and out of the games control.  That’s why there is writing going on. For the most part they use this technique to speed things up other wise your computers hard drive and bus would be completely hammered trying to shuffle all the textures around.. And WoW is nothing if not texture packed..

Any time anything changes in memory, it writes those changes directly back to the file — this is simply due to the nature of memory mapping in windows..  (playing WoW in Linux will not have this problem, it will have a completely different problem if the ultimate issue is the same)

If there are no changes, then nothing gets written back — this is what’s supposed to happen as blizzard knows (or assumes) that the textures wont get changed.  But lets say something did change and blizzard knows that their client didn’t make that change.. The only thing that could have happened was something broke.

This is the reason blizzard naturally tells you that your memory is bad, and often why they say virus scanners could play a part too, or even a hard drive.. If the memory went bad then a couple bits would change forcing windows to write back to the MPQ corrupting it.. Or if there is bad sectors on the hard drive where the pagefile is, same problem.. etc..

What it actually was;

What they fail to tell you about is.. what if the memory on your graphics card is bad? That’s much harder to test..

My problem ended up being a bug with the EVGA built nVidia 8800GTX graphics card. Apparently the fan on the graphics card wouldn’t correctly auto-increase in speed which meant my graphics card over heated at some point.. (You can download the EVGA Precision tool to fix this manually) Which ultimately meant the memory on my graphics card started to corrupt.. It only got worse as time went on because the heat problem continued to be an issue, eventually causing the card to die completely.

The 8800GTX was a great card and it worked for me flawlessly for 2 years before this issue showed up so I can’t complain about it at all.. The main issue with it was it routinely operated around 80 degrees Celsius.. With an operational ceiling of 105… that’s pretty slim margins and almost begs to overheat..

But, In a weird way, the blizzard folks were right; it was a memory issue. Just not in the way they were insisting it was.. What they didn’t realize and probably still don’t realize was that it wasn’t system memory that was causing the corruption. More over, none of the tests they suggest would have ever revealed any of those issues.

From my perspective, my system was working flawlessly because unless a software package actually tried to use any of the faulty memory on the graphics card, everything appeared to work perfectly. I still have the 8800gtx card and can plug it into a system right now and so long as you don’t try to play a game on it, it works perfectly in windows and linux.

For me the fix meant I had to replace my graphics card.. I pop’ed the 8800gtx out and installed a nVidia GTX 285 and everything works peachy.. My system is back up and happy and so am I. For a while there I was dreading playing the game because I knew it would crash any second..

My new card under full load operates at 51ºc (thirty degrees cooler than the 8800 at idle) and all is well…

The thing I really take out of this is how poorly I was treated by the blizzard support folks. I’m actually aghast at how bad their support is. Not because they couldn’t come up with a fix, this was a tough one.. but because they were so nonchalant about it and didn’t seem to remotely care.

After all, I’m just one of eleven million subscribers.. who gives a crap if I’m happy right?

If you’re having #134′s, check to make sure your system isn’t over heating.. Run the various memory testers, but keep in mind that you have memory on your graphics card that as far as I know, you can’t test and it could be the culprit. If you have tried everything else, try swapping in a new graphics card..

Good luck.

Not Malygos, but cool

So we have been playing a LOT of World of Warcraft of late.  I must admit I’m very much enjoying it for the most part.  But we have gotten to the point where we are farming the end game content because by and large, it’s way too easy.

All that is except Malygos.   We have beaten Malygos before but for whatever reason our guild can’t seem to pull it’s collective head out 9 times out of 10.  Things just go wrong.

That’s fine and acceptable except they all seem to think we are going to one shot him and move on. Over confidence is our down fall, but not our only one.  The real issue isn’t our guild or our game play, but rather the fucking lag!

We have the same issue in 25man Nax killing Thadius..  The server always lags out on us at exactly the same time, every time.  It’s almost like this is blizzards cunning plan to make the content more difficult..

Pretty hard core burning hatred from me when we get in there and the game lags out.  Malygos is probably the easiest boss in the T7 content, but the lag during phase 2 screws us every time.. (Or just about — it took us like 8 tries tonight to kill him due to lag.)

Blizzard needs to fix this.  I can’t tell you how many times we have failed at Thaddius too for the exact same reason.. just lag.  It’s pretty darn hard to fight a boss when the timer keeps counting down but the game stops for everyone..

I have a lot of time but most of it has been spent playing World of Warcraft. Pretty much since Wrath of the Lich King launched that’s all I have been doing.

Now I also find myself playing multiple accounts at once using KeyClone. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Now I’m in my wives guild CobraKai (Sweep the leg!!!) and raiding end game content it’s a good time had byall. The wife and I play constantly. We are always in game — even as I write this from my iphone (while away from keyboard) I’m in game.

So maybe lazy is a bad description. Destracted is probably better.  Still lazy, just this sorta sounds better.

I have been using linux quite a lot at work, and really like where Ubuntu is going. Pretty much everything about it leads me to think that Microsoft should be worried. (Apple has nothing to fear, simply because they are a hardware company..)

Anyway, after having XP tell me for the umpteenth time that I had “unused icons on my desktop”.. (Yes I know.. I PUT THEM THERE..) I decided to install Ubuntu on my game machine and try to get WoW working. I figured I’d be in a long and protracted fight, an impossible up hill battle with a colossal fight at the end! I couldn’t have been more wrong — but I get ahead of myself.

Getting Ubuntu installed on my game machine was cake. I installed a new hard drive, partitioned it to have a /, a /home and a swap.. Installed Envy to get the nvidia drivers running.. and fiddled with the xorg.conf file for hours on end trying to get my dual monitors to work correctly. That was the only part that was hard to be honest, I screwed it up a couple times.. heh. That and I had to correct some oddity with the alsamixer being muted.. not sure what that was about.

So with that, my game machine is now dual bootable into XP and Ubuntu. Synergy works nicely on both installs which gets me to my email goofing off box (also ubuntu) and all the peripherals work nicely.. (er.. I haven’t gotten the G15 keyboard stuff working in Ubuntu yet.. but haven’t tried either)

So next, I installed WINE. I really didn’t know what to expect here, but was pleasantly surprised.. It’s very simple, clean and works nicely.

Next I dragged the World of Warcraft install off my XP C: partition into the .wine directory.. and typed “wine Wow.exe” via command line..

And holy shit if World of Warcraft didn’t launch first try!! I was shocked and stunned beyond describing.. I mean I didn’t expect it to work at all.. little alone the first damn try.

Now the truth is, it didn’t work fully the first try. It got to the loading in screen, got to 100% and locked up. But a couple of config file changes later (I had to enter 3 lines into the WTF config file) it worked and I played on it for several hours.

What amuses me the most about this is that the game actually played in Linux at roughly the same frame rates as my windows XP box or HIGHER frame rates depending on what I was doing.

I have no idea how they do it, but the WINE folks are awesome..Awesome I tell ya. Wine you’re the bomb!

I don’t know how it would handle a much more intense game.. Lets face it, World of Warcraft doesn’t exactly push the envelope here.. So if I tried the same trick with say, Crysis… I doubt it would work. But still I’m damn impressed.

Except one major detail — the game looks like ass.

But I get ahead of myself. I have played MMO games for a long time, so I have a pretty darn good idea of what a good game is. And just about across the board, World of Warcraft (WoW) has done some very nice things. I think blizzard did a great job in capturing everything that makes a game fun to play. Since my wife has decided to play the game again, that meant I was going to have to play the game too.. (I swear Scott Kurtz has a camera in my house..)

Now there are a lot of people (especially in EVE) that hate WoW just because they need something to hate. They hate everything about it, and when you complain that they are doing something stupid they will tell you to; “Go back to Wow!” Or some such rubbish.. These people are the opposite of fanboi’s in that they hate WoW with a fervor and passion unparalleled (and unexplained.) I’m not one of those folks.

For some reason, however, I have never liked WoW and up until very recently I didn’t know why. I thought the reason was due to the stylistic game play (read: the cartoony nature.) But since I love TFC2 that can’t be the reason — It’s all cartoony. But finally, after much thought and reasoning I have come to the real culprit.

The game just looks terrible. It’s extremely low-poly and frankly, unimpressive. I am not one that usually puts graphics before gameplay, but they have the game play.. Now fix the graphics! Wheels should have more than 5 sides.. I mean seriously, this game looks like it was put together with lego blocks.

I realize its an older game, but so is EVE and they are constantly working on their graphics.. (Trinity = good!)

It really needs an overhaul. At this point it looks extremely dated — sorta like looking at EQ1 now compared to EQ2 or any other game for that matter. WoW is of the EQ1 generation. It’s time for an upgrade.

I realize the game was designed with the lowest common denominator in mind with regards to hardware — and maybe that’s smart and the reason its as popular as it is.. but I personally don’t like it.

Especially considering my game rig.. I have a game machine that can play Crysis at 1680×1050 with ALL the settings maxed and still get 20+ fps. (Try it some time.. If you get more than 10 fps you’re doing good — I still prefer to turn stuff off and play it at lower settings.. anything lower than 40 fps seems laggy to me..) So it seems wasteful to play WoW with all that hardware.. heh..

So that’s it.. That’s my big problem with the game.. It’s too low-poly at this day an age. It just seems klunky. And I’m not keen on the klunk.