Blizzcon2009

Well the wife and I are back from Blizzcon..  I have to admit she had a pretty good idea of going and now that we have gone and come back I’m glad we did it..

I have some complaints and observations but by and large it was a great time..   I got to hang out with lots of cool folks to include several blizzard employees, who stubbornly refused to release any information… or did they? =)

It was a good time had by all.. now that I’m back and at work I realize how unrestful my weekend had been.. heh but largely worth the trip as I got to meet some great folks.

Speaking of the folks, I have come to the conclusion that I am a thin man.   Don’t get me wrong, I’m heavy..  I’m most assuredgly over weight, and if you go by the government standards I should be a whole person lighter.. But compared to average (likely) weight of the folks walking around that convention center.. I’m doing just fine.

It really did seem like there were very few average build people walking around.   Everybody was either rail thin and pasty or extremely heavy.   Sad really.

The one thing I was plesantly surprised about was the lack of smell.  I went expecting the unwashed nerds problem you typically see at comic-cons etc..  But clearly the blizzcon attracts a higher class of dork, as we all know how to use soap.  Yay us!    (Yes, I fully include myself as one of the dorks.. High class dork thank you..)

For me the major disappointment in the whole trip was that no mention was made of the new MMO that blizzard is working on.  It’s been in the rumor mill for a while now that they are working on some brand new MMO with completely new IP.  Some folks say it will be a Starcraft MMO but most say that’s not the case..  Beyond that.. nothing.

I really had hoped they’d give us a clue as to what it would be, but I guess that will be next years blizzcon.. heh  I have lots more to say about this whole event and I’ll get to it eventually but right now I’m tired.

I will say that it was a good time, and I wouldn’t mind going again.   I hated the flights of course, primarily because I don’t like flying but that’s hardly blizzards fault..  I also wished there weren’t thirty thousand people there as it was silly to have to wait in line, in order to get in line to try something.. yeah not kidding.. it was like being jammed in an elevator..  (An elevator that has over 813000 square feet of space.. Yes its that big.. and yes it was that full..)

But those things aside.. it was good.

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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..

Wow versus War

I love the Warhammer universe.  I have been an avid player of the various table top miniature games as well as the couple RPG games in the same universe.   So when Warhammer Online came out a year ago, I was stoked!

I figured it would be pure liquid awesome and finally give me a computer version of the game world I have enjoyed playing in for so long.

Of course I was let down quite a bit in that the game was lacking..  but I get ahead of myself.

When I learned that Warhammer online was licensed to Mythic Entertainment, I was less than thrilled. Their only other game of note is Dark Age of Camelot which was a one trick pony (realm versus realm combat) that has no long term play associated with it.. And while the game is still around, it’s just not fun. There is nothing there to keep players like me playing the game.. I just don’t enjoy it nor does it have the massive fan base that it could have if they had bothered to keep innovating.

WoW on the other hand has gobs and gobs of things to do long term as well as lots of mindless achievements and other end game elements to keep players attention.  They are adding new content and new fun things to the game all the time and this is from a guy who really doesn’t like WoW..

When it comes to long term play, WoW is the clear winner. I play it still today and have for a while now. My guild has killed the end game boss (Yogg) many times at this point and is starting to work on getting to the next guy..

I’m playing WAR too at this point, but it’s just not that fun and my interest is waning.. As I played WAR originally (and as I am relearning more recently), I realize it is exactly the same game as DAoC just in a slightly different universe. It suffers the same issues that DAoC did and really brings very little new to the table..

What WAR does wrong:

• The PVE aspects of the game are absolutely horrible.. The questing is painfully linear and just about always forces you to venture into PVP areas even if you don’t want to.
• The zone’s are confusing and poorly laid out which makes navigation with out the flight system near impossible.
• The flight mechanic from zone to zone is long loading and lame — considering that you must use it, it needs an overhaul.
• The models are pretty bad, but the animations are down right dreadful…
• I can go on and on but will leave it be as otherwise this list will be too long…

What WAR does right:

PQ’s, SC’s and PVP.

The public quest system is neat and I wouldn’t be surprised if blizzard “adopts” such a system in the near future.. It’s well thought out and works quite nicely. This I think is likely to be the single innovation that folks will remember WAR for in several years..

So far the majority of the scenarios (SC’s.. Think battlegrounds for you WoW players) are a lot of fun. Again way more so than any of the BG’s in WoW which I find to be tedious and boring.

DAoC’s big plus was the Realm versus Realm thing.. Mythic of course followed that same model in producing WAR and as such their PVP model is excellent. The realm versus realm thing is a lot of fun.. for a while.. it becomes tedious and boring fairly quickly, but still the PVP is very good.

The PVP in WAR is far far far better than what is offered by WoW. Period. Full stop.

The reason for that is how the classes are balanced as well as the fact that blocking is turned on. In WoW it’s perfectly reasonable for a frail clothy to stand toe to toe with a fella in full plate and win. Generally in WoW PVP any one class well played, can defeat any one other class.. What’s the point?

In War, this is unreasonable and usually punished harshly. As a bright wizard (weak clothy) I know that if a tank (guy in plate) charges me I have only a few seconds to react before death.. I better make them count! Each class in the game has a specific function and is only really good at that function!

With blocking turned on (collision detection) the tanks can stand in front of the more frail classes and prevent them from being slaughtered..

The only place that this fails WAR is you have a lot of WoW players playing WAR who don’t realize their place and as such just charge in and die, or refuse to block, or simply wont heal..etc. I can’t fault War for the players being stupid..

The problem here is that the game somewhat encourages players to play stupidly in that even if they don’t work together in a SC the losing team still gets’ a lot of experience for it.. but that’s an aside.. again I really can’t fault Mythic for morons..

What I can do though is fault Mythic for producing a game that is so completely unrefined. There are so many little things about War that is a complete fail..

The Macro system is bad.. The map system sucks.. The models are lame.. The animations are really bad.. The PVE content is tedious.. Some of the classes seem out of balance.. The crafting system is horrible and pointless.. etc.. It’s just not that fun of a game and a lot of that is due to these little things..

Let me be perfectly clear.  I don’t like World of Warcraft.  I don’t enjoy the universe at all, the stylistic game play, the mindless grinding, the life sucking raiding..etc..    I play it solely because my wife enjoys it..  Fine I’ll play for her..  But I don’t really like it.   I do however have to say that Blizzard has made a good game.   It’s very refined in that stuff works.  It has it’s own problems too.. (the inability to launch more dungeon instances is a big one.. )   But over all WoW is a good game.

Mythic with WAR however isn’t all that good.  It really seems like they doggedly stuck to their one trick (realm vs realm) in the hopes that it would make a WoW Killer and not bother to innovate.  Okay fine, PQ’s.. but that’s ONE thing..   And of course just as DAoC’s one trick failed to make the game a success, the exact same trick on WAR also failed..

The real issue I have is, it’s been a year..  the game has done nothing in that time and at this point it doesn’t look like its going to do anything..  If they don’t care enough to fix their game, or innovate and make it better.. then I don’t care enough to play it..

Can’t fix stupid.

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?

Windows 7 Beta

I’m generally slow to change operating systems..  When it comes to making one of those sweeping changes, traditionally I was the equivalent of an old man on his porch yelling for “you kids to get off my lawn!”   I was a curmudgeon and quite often would refuse to budge.

I didn’t switch to Windows 95 until sometime in 97.. I didn’t switch to 98 until 99.. I didn’t go to NT at all, and stayed on W2k Pro until well after XP was out.  The only reason I went XP was because it was on the new computer I had purchased already..

My reason for not wanting to upgrade to the newest version of windows was usually because it’s painful, the upgrade sucks and quite often I have to go back.  (I wont even go into my Windows ME story.. I had one of the Microsoft Windows ME tell me to go back to 98 because ME sucked…  Yeah.. It happened..)

More over upgrading isn’t the way to go.. you should wipe fresh and start over..  I usually dreaded this..   What cured that?  Funnily enough, Ubuntu..

I have installed and reinstalled ubuntu so many times I’m an old hat at it..  It’s really easy.    So I went into Windows 7 thinking it was going to be back to the pain..  And was pleasantly surprised..

Firstly what Windows 7 isn’t;  It isn’t a new OS.  Lets be clear here.. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.  It’s more than a reskin to be sure, but mostly it’s a refactor of Vista and a general rebranding to get away from the down right awful publicity that Vista rightly deserved..

Having said that, I like W7 quite a bit actually.  I have had some issues getting my sound card drivers working, but now that I do everything’s peachy.   Because it’s entirely based on the Vista core just download and install Vista drivers for it and asa rule you’re good to go.

The install process was simple and clean, and since I installed it on a new drive it correctly put the windows bootloader on the main drive (though it did overwrite my grub loader so now I can’t get into linux.. will have to add the linux install to windows bootloader..)    The install was fairly quick all things considered, and it configured all my hardware correctly.

I had World of Warcraft up and running within about 3 minutes of installing the OS because I had precopied it to the drive heh.   Yay I have DX10 now!

My biggest complaint at this point is two fold;  1. the alt+tab functionality seems really slow and clunky in W7.. In XP its instant.. but for whatever reason in W7 it takes a couple seconds.. Minor complaint though really.. it is a beta after all..

Secondly, I want to know what will happen in August when the license expires..  Will I just be screwed and have to reinstall all over again?  They have already stated that you wont be able to install the automatic updates beyond that point and that the OS will die then.. I find that… Odd..

OH well.. I can say that I would likely purchase this OS if it continues to perform as nicely as it does now.  Since it’s the premier gaming platform for PC’s at this point I don’t have much choice.. heh

I still very much like my Mac.. I still very much like Ubuntu.. but the games demand Dx10, so Vista.. er,  Windows 7 it is..

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 love those little green bastards but I have a billion of them to paint.. (Okay, a billion might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.) Over the years I have had Necron, Tau and Orks as my 40K armies, and Orcs & Goblins, Skaven and Tomb Kings as my Fantasy armies. I played the role playing game for years and really preferred it to D&D or any of the other traditional role playing systems..

I tell you this so that you will come away with the understanding that I have a pretty good idea about the Warhammer universe and to convey to you how absolutely excited I was about Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning. I had long thought this universe was ripe for computer games.

I was proven right when Blizzard pretty much raped the Warhammer universe for all of it’s games — but that’s for another post..

Needless to say, after doing a lot of looking, I’m a little disappointed in the direction the Warhammer Online game is taking. Firstly, it looks terrible. The graphics look extremely “Last Generation” in my mind. My first thought was, wow.. it looks like Dark Age of Camelot. I then learned it was being put out by the original DAOC creators.. that gave me a chuckle, and worried me. If their mark was to make a game that from launch looks 4 or 5 years old, then kudos boys, ya did it. If you’re intent was to make a modern looking game then you failed.

It has a wonderful Cinematic Trailer but that doesn’t tell you anything about the game play — and that trailer is over 2 years old at this point..

It really looks like they are trying to duplicate Blizzards World of Warcraft art style, all the while blizzard is basically using clones of their intellectual property.. It’s just sad. Especially considering one of the Q and A presenters when asked how they would deal with competition like World of Warcraft responded, “Kill them!” But.. you’re imitating them.. OH.. I see.. kill them, then you can say what you’re doing is original.. Got it.

More over in the modern era of dual and quad core machines they are intentionally keeping the system spec’s dreadfully low. They haven’t released the system requirements yet, but I bet you I could play it on my phone.. It doesn’t look any more advanced than Everquest 1 was.. To be honest, World of Warcraft actually looks a little better.. (I shun myself for saying that.. ) The Beta footage of Warhammer Online looks extremely lack-luster. They are talking about not wanting to make users need “liquid cooled super computers”, but from the looks of it don’t come anywhere near close to that. They may be very high poly count models, but they use the blizzard art style and thus they all look flat with sharp corners in an almost cartoon style.

During the Q and A session one of the devs was bragging about how he plays it on his old laptop and has zero problems.. *sigh* I can’t help but feel the game industry is going the wrong way here.. This is yet another case of “Blizzard did it so, it must be right!” I’m not saying go extreme high graphics like Crysis or Vanguard, just more than WoW cartoon blockiness.

They claim to be looking to the future, but it doesn’t appear that’s the case with regards to the LOOK of the game. Now I will be the first to stand up and say that game play ALWAYS comes first.. But why start with it looking old and outdated?

I do appreciate that they are looking to the future with content though.. they have 2 years of content planned to include the first 2 major patches, as well as being in planning and pre-production of the first expansion.. that’s nice.. That usually means they have budgeted it and that the game wont be here today, gone tomorrow. But, When do we get a graphics update? (Even World of Warcraft desperately needs one at this point and is my major sticking point with Wow. I hate the look.)

They are all proud about how their game doesn’t start until you have gotten to the end of your leveling. Meaning, you play the game from 1 to 50 and at 50 the game “really starts”. They tout that as being original and exciting when that’s EXACTLY what World of Warcraft does, the WoW game doesn’t start until you get to 70.. Period. All the grind to get there has nothing to do with WoW.. Its actually true of most games..

They are excited about all their “unique” advancement systems, but none of them sound unique. WoW gives you all the armor stuff, EQ1/EQ2/WoW gives you the alternate advancements and traits.. D&D Online gives you stat advancements.. City of Heroes gives you the badges, awards and trophies.. etc.. It’s been done. Move on.

And what the hell, if you want to customize the look of your character above the standard 2 or 3 sliders you have to buy the special copy of the game?! Fuck you! That’s just asinine and is the first HUGE red flag for me. Talk about nickel and diming the hell out of people.. I can’t think of anything that will make me not want to play the game more than being forced to play the same looking toon someone else plays simply because I didn’t want to fork over the extra $40 to get the “special” edition of the game. I want to be able to customize and I should be able to using the standard edition of the game.

It really seems the ONLY thing that Warhammer online has going for it is the realm versus realm, and player versus player game play. To be honest, I could give a crap about that. I didn’t enjoy it in DAOC, and I don’t know that I’ll enjoy it here. From what I can see, it doesn’t look like they have any end game PVE?! Are you kidding me? Of all the shit to NOT copy from WoW or EQ, you miss this one?

In the end, if I wanted to play world of warcraft, I’d play world of warcraft — if I wanted to play DAOC, I’d play DAOC. I have yet to see anything that makes this game stand apart from blizzards blatant IP theft of the Warhammer Universe or DAOC.

This game seems like nothing but DAOC 2 using the Warhammer IP. And that’s sad, it could have been so much more. Games Workshop, you should hang your head.

It’s a good game, and a good starter game for those who aren’t really sure about the whole MMO scene. It’s very simple to play and enjoy, and doesn’t bog you down with many of the more complex MMO aspects. For new comers to the market, its perfect. It’s how I got my wife into MMO’s and now I can’t get her away from the computer.. heh (“I just have this one last quest to do..” “Uh huh.. sure honey.. ” heh)

After a while I moved on to other games, but found myself reactivating my account from time to time to give it a try. For a while I played my City of Villains character almost exclusively until it once again just tired and I moved on.

Well I’m back at it. They have added a lot of content and depth to the game that really is interesting. Firstly its not like your more modern / typical MMO in that there aren’t characters standing around with question marks over their head letting you know there is something to do. Lets be honest here, World of Warcraft is a good game but its seriously “dumbed down” in that it almost holds your hand while it plays itself.

City of Heroes hearkens back to the days of EverQuest 1 whereby you didn’t know if someone had a quest or something for you unless you talked to them. Accomplishments were hidden from you, and thereby meant more to you when you actually accomplished it.

Death in CoH means something too compared to modern day MMO’s. CoH has debt! Now I played Ultima Online and EverQuest 1 for years, so extremely painful death was the norm for me. In UO each time some naked PK ran up and killed you, you lost EVERYTHING! It sucked. In EQ1 though they changed that a lot in that you just had to make a corpse run and lost exp. But you didn’t lose your stuff.. When CoH came out and they made it so you just got a little bit of debt, I was stunned. They made death meaningless.

HA! Look at what modern games do. In the most recent MMO, Age of Conan, death means absolutely nothing. You just get shot back to a respawn point.

But I get side tracked — the CoH is a good game and I’m finding I really enjoy the new Rikti invasion stuff and I hope they will let us “counter invade” at some point. It’d be really cool to go to the Rikit homeworld or whatever and attack them back!! (maybe you can do this already and I just havent gotten to that content.. I dunno)

Something else they have added to the game is a pretty thorough marketplace and crafting system. I like that — thats pretty darn cool. Well, one of the tricks of old is to watch your prices on that market. I mean I dont understand why players, in game after game, will put stuff on the market below what they could sell them to the merchant for!!

I spent about 4 hours last night just running goods from the market to the local merchant to sell. People would put stuff on the market for 10INF, that they could sell to the merchants for 4500+INF. Seriously.

In 4 hours I made 2 million INF which just goes to show you, super heroes is st00pid. Or lazy. I prefer to think of them as stupid.