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description=Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;

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Text of the page (random words):
alers have to die or gear playerscore have pushed the game in different directions for example blizz has taken playerscore simplified it into the current gear rating and incorporated it heavily into the game the old go to dal fountain for gs check has been replaced with minimum gear rating required if you could scan a prospective raiding partner for currently used mods would you perhaps you might say that s too much intrusion into a player s personal preferences maybe you might say that it s not needed skill trumps gear as the saying goes and the same ought to go for mods but if you were a raid leader and you could just how great would that temptation be and would you like what you saw without having seen the player in action and civ iv and lego star wars iii i pretty much had to install civ iv complete and the kids like lego star wars iii for the battleground games you d be a noob no more as soul once put it posted by redbeard at 8 40 pm 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels mods musings wow saturday november 17 2012 lurching toward civilization i managed to get wow running on the new laptop after having played for a couple of hours that way i wonder how people can handle playing mmos on a laptop long term i can t possibly be that old but my hands were cramping after a pair of battlegrounds and if i didn t have a wireless mouse i don t think i could have handled using the trackpad at all the minor annoyances of dealing with a new os win 8 in this case i can handle in stride after all i work in it and i know a new os means some bugs in the system as all of the other apps get stressed in ways that beta testers never seem to get around to you just check frequently for patches and move on considering my wife isn t cursing up a blue streak like she does when she tries to use my work laptop i ll take that as a sign of approval however one minor annoyance that i did find was that when i installed wow and logged in it wouldn t let me jump to the server listings directly i had to first allow the game to select a server and then i could back out and find my usual haunts it would seem to be a minor thing that on a new install the game would check to see if you already have toons available and if so it would allow you to select the server i know it used to do that back when the old machine lost a drive and i had to replace all of my apps that d be late wrath early cata so blizz must have made a conscious decision to change the opening sequence into this server selection on rails system still it was good to be back i ve got several days worth of downloads ahead of me but at least i can lurk around warsong gulch once more posted by redbeard at 1 49 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels computers wow thursday november 15 2012 are you ready for some football starcraft so we now have a release date for sc2 s expac heart of the swarm however unlike blizzard release dates of years past hots has been announced four months in advance on march 12 2013 the typical blizz release announcement is 1 2 months in advance so more than doubling that is more than a bit unusual i don t think i can read too much into the release date unless it s not quite stable enough and blizz is confident they ll make the release date if they push it out far enough but what is likely is that blizz took christmas and sports into consideration when announcing the release date if hots is ready for the traditional 2 month release date a mid january release date is too close to christmas to attract attention from the casual player who most likely got a stack of games for presents mid february is possible but there s a little holiday called valentine s day out there that might provide some competition finally mid march is right in the middle of the men s and women s college basketball tournament march madness and right after the nfl season concludes okay what s the big deal about sports right well i ve noticed the past several blizz releases are promoted heavily on u s sports broadcasts cata mists d3 and sc2 have all been promoted heavily on espn fox sports and regular network sports broadcasts blizz would be crazy to not try to capitalize on the sporting events over january through march i ve been seeing ads for assassin s creed iii on baseball the olympics and american football since the summer and believe me blizz took notice they want that gamer demographic that sports broadcasts provides which also begs the question why didn t other mmo game companies such as funcom bioware or arenanet go for the same advertising target as heavily given the discussions in gen chat during the olympics you d think that the sports viewer is a large part of the audience for tor star wars or no star wars and the secret world would be perfect for that subset as well particularly given all of the crime dramas that the cbs network promotes on their sports broadcasts it seems that these companies as well as turbine relied more upon social media rather than going out and promoting their game in the same manner that blizz does social media is great but it has to be one part of a more comprehensive advertising plan well here s to the next several months and seeing a lot of sarah kerrigan on the small screen hots yeah that ll work for an acronym i can see the youtube video now going out with your s o on valentine s day or playing a video game you decide posted by redbeard at 9 09 pm 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blizzard musings starcraft tuesday november 13 2012 thank you sir may i have another i was going to write about how i have to shake off the cobwebs when i switch toons around and how i have to make sure i have my buttons aligned up across toons and potentially even mmos but technical difficulties got in the way this saturday i was down in the basement insulating the rim joists when i heard an argument break out among the kids upstairs dad one of them called come up and fix the computer i shook off the foam insulation shavings on me and marched upstairs expecting to have to power cycle a locked up computer the kids know all about the old three finger salute and can navigate the task manager to kill a hung program so when i get called it s either for a a password or b to power cycle something when i arrived in front of the computer however i was confronted by a solid color screen uh oh i said what did you do i didn t do it steph did it my son replied i didn t do anything she wailed i was exiting lotro and the screen came up well i said reaching around the pc s case let me hard boot it after a hard boot i got to the login screen only to have it disappear behind a solid tan color crap this isn t good can you fix it i can try let me boot it into safe mode and make sure we don t have any disk trouble or malware but i think we lost a graphics card several hours and many reboots later i m convinced that it s either the graphics card failing or the cpu overheating once the second or third fan kicks in during the boot cycle the video goes crazy i almost wished it was malware because i can fix that more easily than a hardware problem sighing i got up and wandered over to where my youngest was sitting on the couch wearing a melancholy expression on her face it wasn t your fault i told her it s a hardware problem and nothing you did caused that can i help she asked brightening no i ve got to figure out what to do like anna over at too many annas i m confronted by a failing aging pc with obsolete architecture in my case 32 bit architecture and if this is the graphics card a replacement might require me to replace the power supply as well and if it s the cpu finding a replacement motherboard might be more trouble than it s worth the pc is over five years old and it was only a middle of the pack machine back when i bought it therefore i guess that means it s time to replace the old warhorse as a corollary to this it means i m kind of out of an mmo machine for the time being i suppose i could install one of the mmos that the kids and i both play on the new laptop i d gotten for their schoolwork but it s not an ideal situation besides i d prefer keeping as many games off of a supposedly work school machine as possible yeah and maybe pigs will fly without the aid of a trebuchet so i guess i m going to write about things that have already happened as opposed to anything recent but really i m not a bleeding edge kind of guy the last time i did that with the pc industry was 1999 when i plunked down way too many dollars to get one of the first amd athlon machines which then went for half of that price within six months and as for gaming ever heard of the game darklands that was the last time i got a game right as it came out and immediately dove into it and ow were the bugs bad having learned my lesson i merely aim for something reasonable and waiting patiently for any bugs to shake out for the curious here s a link from the online version of the family handyman and for the record their estimate of a day for how long it takes doesn t take into account actually moving any crap in the basement around depending on the amount of crap you have it can take many days if you re remember when cata was released i didn t enter into any cata zones until three months later when the i m bored refrain was in full swing and yes eventually darklands got the bugs worked out and was an excellent game but the damage had already been done to microprose s reputation even sid meier s civ 2 and colonization couldn t save the long decline of microprose eta fixed an autocorrect error what is it with those things anyway posted by redbeard at 11 56 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels computers family musings tuesday november 6 2012 anybody remember shorthand one thing that has always amazed me is the ability of some people to type messages on the fly while playing an mmo perhaps i m showing my age but i have to stop what i m doing and type with both hands in order to respond to something i m watching if i m in a bg and we get jumped by 4 5 people in arathi basin i basically have to sacrifice myself in order to warn everyone else all i can do is marvel at the people who raid and can type while they re casting or playing whack a boss i once carried on a conversation with a blogger friend while the blogger was in the middle of progression icc when i mentioned that i ll let him do his job he kind of laughed it off saying it wasn t a big deal i suppose that s were a multi button mouse like the razer naga comes in handy of course you still have to be able to type with one hand and i m kind of lousy at that what would be nice would be combining voice recognition software with an mmo so that you can speak into a mic and have what you re saying pop up in typewritten chat of course i can see some readers saying there s this thing called mumble or vent and it really works yes i know all about those but when do you use that when you get into a random bg or an instance pug without guildies or any other guild to provide vent access last i checked most non raid pugs just roll with it and get going without much more than a howdy the thing is the more you play the more complex things are the nicer it is to communicate without these artificial barriers for example discussing which enemy to dps down when confronting the opposing faction team in mandalorian raiders helps that encounter go much more smoothly likewise working out strategy in gundrak helps make fighting gal darah that much easier i ve found that more wipes come from a lack of coherent strategy such as in halls of reflections or magister s terrace than the inability to get the job done perhaps the worst place for a strategy breakdown is in the long run to get away from arthas in hor because if not everybody is on the same page that increases the likelihood of a wipe exponentially that loops back to the need to communicate and the disadvantages puggers have over guild runs i can type and type quickly not everybody can i can t type on the fly in the middle of a fight while others can that means that other forms of communication such as audio chat are superior because people can communicate without changing what they re doing however the current setup of using a third party tool often paid for by a guild who would naturally be reluctant to share with a non guildie is a barrier that ought to be examined yes i know about wow s built in audio chat but really who does use that anyway here is an opportunity for either an entrepreneur or an mmo company to fill in a communication gap and reap some nice profits well unless i m stealthed as a rogue even then if i m low enough level people will find me easily posted by redbeard at 2 13 pm 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels mmos musings friday november 2 2012 all crossed up maybe it s just me but i m starting to wonder how useful the cross server lowbie zones have been lately sure there are more people in the zones but i ve been surprised at how quickly the zone population plummeted a month after release i ve been cruising the lowbie zones up through arathi highlands and stonetalon mountains and if there have been more than ten other toons in a zone with me i d be surprised and before you point out that i play at odd hours i ve also been on in the evening and midday this past week and found no difference to the zone population if anything i ve found more people on darkshore in the early morning than in the evening which is also typically raid time what bothers me is that i ve seen even fewer horde than alliance in ashenvale and that used to never happen why have i been out and about leveling skinning and leatherworking to fill in the gaps in my gear of course leveling these professions means that i have to range far and wide to collect skins and or leather so i see a lot of the zones i ve also seen my fps drop as soon as i enter a new zone not the official fps mind you but there s a visible slowdown on screen on some zones that i can only attribute to the cross server manipulation i was hoping that the lack of toons in darnassus was just a blip on the radar but that seems to not be the case this whole cross server change has made me wonder just how many servers they merge at one time in a zone and whether this is dynamic or not while i do have to admit from a technical standpoint it s pretty impressive i m kind of disheartened by the knowledge that things would be even worse if blizz wasn t performing their wizardry let s call the cross server zones what they really are lowbie server merges they re indicative of an increasingly visible problem that wow has most of the toons are at or close to max level and there s a lack of new blood coming into the game okay now with that declaration there is a...