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New Rig Bleg

It has been a couple of years, and this computer has seen more abuse than most of my PCs, including physical damage to the motherboard. It still runs mostly fine, but the loading times are getting to me, so I am moving to 64-bit and gorging myself on RAM this time.

I would like to get a new system sometime in the next five months. Sadly, I know jack about current hardware and price points, since I need that information once every few years. Conveniently, some of you know a lot about hardware and good deals on it. So I turn to you. Any recommendations? (“Let’s see what’s available on Black Friday” is a fair recommendation.)

My goal is a system that will be able to play the next holiday season’s games on high (not necessarily ultra-high) without issues, although the most demanding games on my list right now are StarCraft 2 and Guild wars 2. I suppose that is mostly a graphics card question, an area where I know even less than usual, since meeting their recommended specs is not too hard. I do not take my PC on the road enough to justify the higher costs of moving to a laptop, although maybe I would start doing so if I could (plus a docking station for full monitor and keyboard at home).

My previous rig came from CyberPowerPC, which was a good mid-high end PC at a sane price. The only downsides were the huge Coolermaster case and problems resulting from the failure of the liquid cooling system; I am pretty sure that I caused most of the damage troubleshooting it and poking around afterwards. That is a separate story.

: Zubon

Peek at Guild Wars 2 Dungeons

The November issue of the UK PC Gamer came with a handful of pages on Guild Wars 2. One of the posters at Guru went above and beyond in tracking down a copy of the newly released magazine to disseminate any exclusive info to the masses. Big thanks to Lyssa for taking that time, and then taking the time to do a “live”-posting of info as he read. I would expect a couple official dungeon articles from ArenaNet in October, but in the meantime, let’s look at this new information.

Dungeons are instanced content nodes in Guild Wars 2 that tie heavily in to a player’s personal story and then branch out into repeatable content. It seems that to attune to the dungeon, the player has to get to that point in their personal story. The dungeon’s first phase overlaps with the personal story, and the player is joined by a NPC’s (and any supporting players) to finish this phase. Once the personal story phase is completed, the dungeon opens up into an explorable mode with follow-up adventures that are designed to be repeatable. It is unclear now, but I would expect the explorable areas to mostly be group oriented and not part of the personal story.

Continue reading Peek at Guild Wars 2 Dungeons

Online Game Backup

The hoarding and collecting impulse is deep in the gamer heart, driving us to get that last achievement or finish out a dungeon, character, or game after it has stopped being fun. One tool I like for reducing my meatspace clutter is having an online distribution channel. As long as I can trust them to stay in business and available, an archive somewhere will hold my stuff. All the things that can happen to your physical copies no longer matter, from losing them in the move or house to soda and pet messes to figuring out how to read 3.5″ floppies these days. Someone out there, with better backup practices than me, will let me download a copy if I ever need them again.

The same applies to the Steam Cloud and my saved games. Horrible things happen to my computer more often than they happen to my Steam access.

I had not explored Battle.net before StarCraft II. They have a place to input your keys for Blizzard games. Conveniently, I still have every CD and every key; I am best situated to use the service because I do not need it (irony). But I do not need to bring my CDs to LAN parties “just in case.” I need this service for all my old games, so I can input a code and stop hoarding physical media, although I am likely to keep and protect my Master of Orion CD and manual forever.

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 Dye-atribe

The puns abound in the latest ArenaNet blog post. I love Kristen Perry’s enthusiasm though. I just can’t help but smile and be excited as well, even if the information is small or tangential. In blog post we get a pretty thorough review of the dye system along with a lot of new and confirmed information.

The biggest advancement, in my mind, is that dyes will no longer be physical items that are crafted or dropped by mobs and then sold on the auction block. Instead, each account gets an unlockable palette of colors. Automatically from the start of the game, when centaurs are attacking and you are supposed to be saving villagers and killing big earth elementals, you can stand there for ten minutes playing around with your unlocked starter area colors. There is a great video from GuildMag of some player “wasting” gamescom demo time doing just that (more colors, etc. were unlocked for demo purposes).

Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Dye-atribe

Opportunistic Actions

Opportunistic actions are less precise and certain than specified goals and intentions, but they result in less mental effort, less inconvenience, and perhaps more interest.
— The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

This is a throw-away line that contains much, particularly in the “perhaps more interest.” He is talking about running errands and “oh, if you stop at the grocery store, could you pick up some plums?” but by now you should be familiar with the parallels between MMO quests and chores and errands.

“While I’m here” has long been the reason I get to bed late. Because we are finishing up this dungeon, oh maybe one more run to finish the achievement, and a resource node just respawned near the exit, and ooh is that a rare mob over there, and then I want to hit the vendor and the vault, and I can pick up another quest while I am here, and maybe I should process those crafting resources I picked up, and just two points to the next tier, and my plans ended before bedtime but it is now much later. A couple of those steps are embracing the illusion of scarcity, because you never know when you are going to find that rare spawn or when you are going to find such a good PUG, so gather ye rosebuds while ye may.

Opportunistic actions prevent the feeling of grinding. Even if you run through 20 of them, they are 20 unplanned opportunities to exploit. When you have a plan, you have a “to do” list, a set number of times to run the dungeon and earn badges or an expected 2% chance of getting that rare drop. You know what you are doing tonight, and it is just a matter of getting through it. “Getting through it” is not a mindset you want in your entertainment.

Of course, we are MMO players. Given events or public quests in random starting states, we will plan out grinds to make the night more efficient. You have these four events to complete to fill the bar and get the achievement, and you are really annoyed about needing to wait another 4:30 for the bandits to reset so you can get those wolves.

: Zubon

Now Playing: StarCraft II

I found a good enough sale to overcome the DRM risk, and I do not know that I have anything useful to add to what has been said before. The campaign really is that good. I have not tried the multi-player, and I am unlikely to spend much time in competitive play, but I look forward to some cooperative play in my future.

There are enough reviews, so I will go with idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive comments. And it turns out I have a lot of them, after the break.

Continue reading Now Playing: StarCraft II

World of Darkness and Disappointment

It was before GenCon that White Wolf (maker of table-top RPGs and upcoming MMOs, owned by EVE’s CCP) was alleged to have told a friend of a friend that some people would be happy and some people would be upset by a coming announcement. This was refuted by White Wolf, and GenCon passed with very little big news from White Wolf. Later at the Grand Masquerade, which is an officially sanctioned World of Darkness convention, White Wolf released their first teaser bit about the World of Darkness. Our blogger in arms, Ardwulf, posted some pretty breaking news and the video of the teaser over at his site. The news hit the floor, and I realized that the alleged statement rang pretty true for me.

The quick news run down is that it will be launched at the earliest in 2012, and it has been in production for about 3 years so far (with 1.5 years of design/planning prior to that). The game will be called World of Darkness Online (WoDO), and it’s first iteration will be based on Vampire: the Masquerade (Masquerade). Later on, it is hoped that the other splats like werewolves and changelings will become playable characters, but for now it will be vampires and possibly human characters, such as hunters (vampire killers) or ghouls (Blood-addicted humans).

CCP is also making “official” some playstyles, which WoDO will contain in an interconnected manner. They are coffee house (Second-Life chatroom), theme-park (World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online), and sandbox (EVE, A Tale in the Desert). However, the game is going to have a very mature slant with little room for immaturity, some sort of self-policing, and inclusiveness to the LGBT audience. There will be combat, but it won’t be the core of the game. So that’s what we know so far. My thoughts after the break.

Continue reading World of Darkness and Disappointment

Scaling

If you hit for 5 damage each time and your opponent has 100 hit points, you are weak and low level, and combat is slow. If you hit for 500 damage each time and your opponent has 10,000 hit points, you are powerful and high level, and combat is epic. I hypothesize that most people have trouble conceptualizing division.

StarCraft II has an armory where you can upgrade your units. Everything is in the thousands. There is never a point at which the “,000” matters. There are no single thousands either, so you could divide everything by 5,000 and nothing would change or even need a decimal place. But it might not seem terribly epic if the Moebius Foundation offered you 2 credits per research point.

: Zubon

Boatorious on Bonding

Bad/Unforgiving games tend to have very tight communities in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of way. You join a guild in WoW to raid some dungeons and get some loot. In old EQ or UO a guild was more like AA or a cancer survivor’s group or something, and naturally tight bonds formed.
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So I guess the question I have about UO, and FFXI, and EQ, and all those great old “social” games is this : did those games have great communities because they created social interaction, or did they have great communities because they eliminated non-social players?
— Boatorious

A Different Near Life Experience

Did you know that resetting your Paypal password isn’t bad these days, if you have a good recovery method set up? I went long periods of time without access before getting mine together. Since my bank information was there, I was very careful about following the ideal password guidelines, not using a shared password, and not writing it down. I would even give it some clever relationship to other passwords I use so that I could keep remember it. Then I forgot it. Every. Time.

The e-mail service I had for my primary address seemed to auto-spam or -delete anything claiming to be from Paypal. Really, what could Paypal send you that you would not think was spoofed? I do not know if they did not have the current recovery system set up or I just was not using it well, but it was too annoying for me to bother for months or years. I apparently did not use it that much.

One day, I sat down to try the password variations I thought I would have used the last time I recovered it. I failed. After getting my account locked, I called and talked to someone there. When she apologized for the inconvenience, I thanked them for locking it down. I mean, I would have wanted them to block it if anyone other than me was trying a series of variations on the actual password. She had never heard that response before.

: Zuon