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A single gamers valentines day.

Feb14

So anyway once again it’s that time of year where people feel compelled and guilted in to paying exorbitant amounts of time and money to reinforce their declaration of love for each other.

I am not one of those people.

Today I’m spending my time with me.

Last night I was in a dungeon run in guildwars 2 and I mentioned about the day, strangely enough all five of us were single.
The general plan today was to game and generally relax.

So I woke up at 3pm. Came in to the city for an appointment, and now am sitting here waiting for a movie to start.

The one thing I noticed most on the way here was the number of people holding hands.
It was completely abnormal and proved more of a challenge to navigate.
If they were zombies it would have been awesome.

I plan when I get home to finish it as I started, guildwars 2.

Single gamer all the way.

System protections, or are they system restrictions.

Jan17

So years back, 20 or so, gaming was a different beast entirely.
CDs were a new thing and people still used 5.25 inch floppy disks.

Back then the closest you got to copy protection was referencing the manual on the spot.
They were the good old days.

Of course then with the advent of CD burners piracy became viable to perform at the home level.

Companies decided they had to do something to make it harder for us to copy their products.
So they started an elaborate chain of events.

Physical method were devised, and shortly after defeated.

Keys were created, but shortly after generated.

Reliance on CDs was made pointless with disc emulation.

Eventually it shifted to a system where our game keys were tied to online user accounts, the media only used for installation.

Of course with people spending so much time and effort on games like World of Warcraft it became worth the time to gain access to these attacks.
Characters end up stripped of gear and money.

People complain and companies add even more strict measures to protect account access.

So we end up with external authentication by generator or mobile phone.

The problem is when password recovery becomes a serious struggle.

Tonight I have that struggle.
Tried logging in to diablo 3 for the first time in my new place.
I discovered I changed my password at some point, so after a couple of different attempts I get locked out.

Recovery of course requires me to either answer a secret question which I have no clue about due to different frame of mind, or inputting a key from a physical copy of a game.

Can’t locate my war3 or war3x cases as I moved recently, no idea where my diablo 2 keys could be, but I did find my copy of StarCraft 2.
The system denies that key is attached to my account.
Thus I am screwed.

Can’t play my games, can’t remember the answer to an obscure question from years ago, and when the next StarCraft 2 part is released I won’t be able to play it for this reason..

Guess who’s dissatisfied with Blizzard right now.

Pure White, purely offended by technical issues.

Nov10

So I was hanging out in Lion’s Arch yesterday afternoon and I received a whisper from a character named Mz Pure.

I was asked if I’d be interested in joining a casual/hardcore World Vs World guild that did regular runs based in Australia.
So I agreed to do so.

I mean their definition of hardcore was 3 nights a week at 4 hours each. Pretty easy for a guy who’s generally home in the 6-10pm timeslot on most days of the week.
I mean I have no issues with doing that, especially since the monthly award requires a bunch of WvW kills as well as granting loot and money.

So I ended up as a trial soldier.
I managed an entire run with them yesterday (this being a friday evening) that appeared to have no issues.
No technical issues though I think my drivers flaked momentarily at one point.
No negative comments or feedback.
In fact my only feedback was to go to various locations to capture points and collect supplies as a group.
I did it all.

So today I log in around an hour later than intended, but still well within the required timeslot.
I changed my colours to white (or close enough, it was pretty damn white) even though there were others in the guild in WvW who were not in white or even any near approximation.
I fire up Vent apologise for lateness and ask if they were on Sanctum of Rall, to which I received a yes.
This was all I sent during that half an hour to my knowledge.

Then out of nowhere I got disconnected from Vent, but my game was still functioning, I was still running and fighting and everything.
I mentioned it in Guild Chat and someone else mentioned they were having trouble.
I switched over to vent to discover that I’d been banned from the server.

Switched back to GW2 to query what was up, and found I was no longer registering as being in Pure White.
As there have been issues in the past with the guild back-end I checked with one of the others, named Muka.
At the time he (I say He, as I’ve heard his voice and that would be a pretty manly girl) was advertising and asked what was up.

It seems that as soon as I joined the vent channel I “fukken blasted everyone’s headsets” while they were defending an area.
Nobody said anything on vent at the time, nothing about my audio stream being too loud or anything.
If they had of said something I could have just flicked a switch on my headset muting me.

But no, instead they wait half an hour and boot me and ban me without so much as a word about anything relating to it or why.

So to Muka and Mz Pure, I would like to give you a collective Fuck You.

And to anyone else on Sea of Sorrows looking for a guild, if you’re after one that does pure world vs world with no tolerance for technical issues with no social aspects whatsoever, then give Pure White a shot.
If you’re looking for people to have fun with, who can take a joke and will actually talk to you about problems that they might have with you and your play-style, then I suggest looking elsewhere.
You can even join me in The First Legion, it’s been pretty quiet since Crashes left us to get back to his real life.

AmK.

Another Year, Another Time.

Jun9

So it occurs to me I should start posting stuff here more often.
I’ve been slack about using this for anything.

So it’s been a week since my birthday and what have I got to show for it? A rather bitching battlemaster sniper rifle.

I’ve been working up to full columi level equipment on my agent for a few weeks now and today when I checked I noticed that it’s not all better than equivalent PvE gear.

In fact when it comes to rifles the battlemaster is superior in all but 2 stats.
Those stats are only a minor improvement so not sure why I’d bother with it.

At least my new guild appreciate my sniping to the point they invite me specifically for things.

Gaming hardware evolution dead-end.

Feb15

So lately I’ve been planning for my next system upgrade, and it made me wonder if these days there’s any point to it.

It used to be you had to replace your system about every 3 years, or at least upgrade every 18 months.
This was in order to stay relevant and able to keep running all our various programs and games.

At what point did this become useless?

Hardware these days is god-like compared to what we used to have.

In my eyes the turning point came when gaming went mainstream.

Years back the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were considered powerful.
Games started being created specifically with these in mind.
At the time PC’s had to work to keep up.

The problem is now many years later after many generations of hardware improvements, games are still being made based on old console specifications.

Basically these consoles are ancient in terms of capabilities.
Yet until we get their next generation there is no chance modern games will really make use current hardware.

This makes me a sad panda.

I have been infected.

Feb7

So anyone paying attention would have noticed I haven’t posted anything in quite awhile.

This is simply as I’ve been playing games such as Deus Ex Human Revolution and Skyrim.
More recently it’s been The Old Republic.

I have been playing quite a lot of TOR over the past month and a half and don’t think I’ll be stopping any time soon.

For anyone interested I play on the Vrook Lamar RP server on the Imperial side in a guild called Ghost Division.
If you like heavy roleplay with a great group of people do a Google search for us.

Anyway my train journey is about to end.
Until later.

DC Universe Online – You will not be missed.

May4

So anyway, back at the beginning of things I bought a copy of DC Universe Online, since you know being able to be a superhero or villain and beat shit up is pretty cool.
It was fun to play, but then the problems began.

Like all MMOs, after the initial free month of included time (not really free if you think about it), the huge surge of players that lead to the need for server queues dropped off.
And with the plethora of servers available we ended up with veritable ghost towns.
This being a problem when on a PvP server wanting to pwn people.

Of course this doesn’t take in to account the number of people using exploits, which were driving people to PvE. Exploits which just weren’t being addressed.

Major issues and bugs kept cropping up, but none of them were getting fixed.
New content was promised, and what we’ve received has been fairly lackluster, as well as being very buggy.

Of course what’s really happened that will kill this game is major security breaches have happened, first with the PlayStationNetwork, and now with SOE.
Breach 1 happened, we got informed that everything was fine and there was no problem with SOE and our information was secure since it’s in a different location. This shook our confidence.
Breach 2 happened, and we’re informed around 24.6million user’s information may now be out in the wild, as well as over twelve thousand user’s direct debit and credit card information.

It may not be a lot in terms of things, but come on close to 25 million people?
And there’s a good chance I’m one of those people.

So naturally I do the obvious thing and try to cancel my subscription, but I can’t get in to do that.
I doubt anyone can.
The game’s also down for however long, and apparently we’re going to be granted 30 + 1(each day service is unavailable) days of free play time. Somehow to me, and no doubt many others, this isn’t enough.

So the short of it is this, when I can end my account I will. It’s too much of a security risk.
DC Universe Online is a low grade product, and can’t compare with much else out there.
It’s just not worth the time or money any more.

DC Universe Online, and how I fixed a small issue that Sony Online Entertainment caused with the Steam Release.

Jan16

So anyway I’ve been really peeved over the past couple of days.

I bought DCUO via Steam despite it not being released in Australia, and no matter what I tried, the Launchpad application was totally useless.

Tonight I finally solved the problem, which was outdated URLs in the Launchpad.ini file.

This is the file that’s meant to tell the Launchpad.exe where the latest app data is located as well as the interface code.

So below are the offending two lines that I replaced:

webapp=http://launch.soe.com/lp3/index.html
digestURL=http://manifest.patch.station.sony.com/patch/manifest/launchpad/launchpad-all/lp3-dcuo-live.soe

And I replaced them with the following lines:

webapp=http://launcher.station.sony.com/lp3/index.html
digestURL=http://soecontent.station.sony.com/patch/digest/launchpad/launchpad-release/live/launchpad.soe

Now if you’re observant you’ll notice that while there may be some similarities, the domains are totally different!
There was no way possible for the program to function when using entirely wrong URLs.
Thus it could not check for the latest release, could not login, could not do anything other than sit there looking useless.

So if you have that small problem I had with it doing absolutely nothing but showing the SOE logo, go in to your game directory and fix that one small file.
And feel free to thank me 😀

AmK.
Looking forward to finally playing the game.

MMOs, and the state of them these days.

Jan14

So anyway I’ve been a long time player of MMOs and such over the past decade and then some, back in the beginning with such things as The 4th Coming, and Dark-Ages (no, not of Camelot) so some people could say I’ve had some experience and have played a decent number over the years.

So I figured time to talk about how they’re going, or at least the ones that catch my interest.

Guildwars, was there from the beginning and it’s been going strong over the years, but I lost touch with all the friends who were playing it, and there’s not been much new since Eye of the North that I’m aware of.
So I haven’t been playing it much over the past year or so.
Guildwars 2, on the other hand is looking spectacular. Even checked out some of the gameplay footage and it looks amazing and I cannot wait to get my hands on it. I’m expecting Arena.net to pull off a masterpiece with it.

World Of Darkness Online. Well other than knowing it’s set in the old world of darkness setting like masquerade and such, I really can’t make much in the way of statements as White-Wolf/CCP haven’t really shown off anything other than some animated artwork. Curious to see what they do with it, and if it’ll all be night based and vampires, or if there will be other stuff.

Star-Trek Online, kinda got side-lined with that, and I imagine when I finally get back to it the content will have built up enough with all these new episodes. I’m just hoping the player base is still there when I do.
I do want more detailed ship interaction though, such as arranging the location of hardpoints and such, and being able to spend time tweaking values and settings to get the most out of it.
I still intend to go back and get my carrier for my klingon borg 😀

Global Agenda. Was there also at the beginning. Problem is that it stopped being able to run on my machine, and the updates are huge, in the manner of gigs. So I haven’t been able to play.
Nice concept and execution and all, but it’s not a good sign that they shifted to a free to continue playing model.

City of Heroes/Villains.
Well I started in this franchise years back with the release of Villains with the collectors box set and spent some time playing it and enjoying it, problem was too many games to focus on like guildwars and so on.
It was so much fun. Then a friend of mine convinced me to get Heroes to upgrade my account so we could play together. So I did and all was fine. Fine that is until a couple of months later when they made Villains available to owners of Heroes, and vice-versa. They basically cost me money there which I didn’t have to spend, so I guess they cheesed me off resulting in me walking away.
Come now to the very end of last year and the Steam sale, Going Rogue was on sale for $10, figured I’d pick it up and see how things had improved. Suffice to say over the past week I’ve been having lots of fun.
I probably will subscribe again. My challenge now being to find people to play it with as well as an active supergroup.
Any Arachnos Epics out there on Victory?

Dungeons and Dragons Online.
I guess I decided back in September or so that since I’d heard it had gone free to play that I might as well check it out. So I went to ddo.com, created an account and downloaded the client.
And the fact I keep pumping fundage in to keep buying quest packs and things, shows it’s a winning model for me.
Come on, it’s worth a shot, is essentially free to play, and you can buy what you want. Or if you so choose you can pay each month and get access to all the account unlocks up front.
I play on the Argonessen, Khyber and Sarlona servers.

DC Universe Online.
So yesterday I decided what the hell and purchased the game through Steam and set it downloading all 13gig last night.
Tonight I went to try it out, and the account creation progress Sony have got, while it may be good if you play things like Everquest and so on, is not really up front and clear.
I could tell you what it’s like, but the furthest I get is the Launchpad application showing SOE, and that’s all. Apparently according to the Steam forums the servers are down.
Not good for them this lack of communication. Even Hellgate: London (RIP) had more of that. We could at least see in the launcher that the servers were down.

So this is more or less it all for now.
And before you ask, no I do not play WOW, it’s not worth my time or money. I just don’t enjoy it, I’ll not play it, Sam I Am.

Get game trials where possible, and if you want to get in contact with me in these games, let me know and we can set something up.

 

AmK.

Dungeons and Dragons, an adventure.

Sep20

So anyway, growing up I was never really got in to D&D, but this year seems to have changed all that.

First I got involved in a 3.5 edition game  of Planescape using the various different f20 games. Been fun using stuff from Monte Cook’s World of Darkness.

And now I’m playing in a 3.5 forgotten realms expedition to ravenloft campaign.

And of course for the past weeks I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Free to play more or less.
Though been spending a bit of real world money on it.

I’be come a long way from the CRPGs of old like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale.
But I’m enjoying it.

And tonight i play Call of Cthulhu with some friends.