Pumping Irony

Been saving this rant since yesterday; may as well click the Publish button.

FYI Huntards: you have no idea how far down the list you are when it comes to sharing power on my Lore-master in an instance, but I’ll give you a hint: you’re damn near dead-last.

If, however you are a notorious tool who has been booted from 5 kinships (and counting) and you dare scream at me to give you power (on the first pull, no less) in all caps then over VOIP, well, I’ve got news for ya bub… I will wipe the group before I give you one single iota of MY power!

Oh and yes, I know I’m a few days behind on my obligatory LOTRO::F2P post. It’s coming…

While Arwellyn has been adventuring in Lothlorien, working through the Epic Book quests there and into Mirkwood, while running Moria instances for more Radiance gear, there is still the question of alts.

In the Shadows of Angmar game, I created a hobbit minstrel, Myrra, solely for the purpose of group content. Between the kinship I had her in and the raid group Arwellyn was in, Myrra was just about as close to being power-leveled as I could get, given my job and time constraints. I also had ample opportunity for solo work and, at the time, was a pretty decent minstrel. Now, however, we’re in the Siege of Mirkwood game, and Myrra is really taking a beating in Eregion and the beginning stages of Moria. I’m not sure I have it in me to take another light armour, slow combat class leveling through Moria this soon, even though I’d really love to have Myrra at least 3 levels higher where she could easily get into groups if no one’s in need of a lore-master.

So I have Veldorran, the new warden. He’s currently level 28 – I really had a blast putting some work leveling him up last week – but I decided that if I want to have him become my new “main alt” that I wanted to make things easier for him down the road. I have a rule about never giving alts money, but I have no problem feeding them items such as crafting materials and recipes or reputation tokens.

I got to thinking perhaps I should park Veldorran at 28 for now and dust of my hunter Sethryndil to essentially be a farmer for the other alts. Hunters have the highest single-target dps in the game, and their Guide skills make it easy to travel anywhere at a moment’s notice. So last week, in between high-level sessions and instance runs with Arwellyn, I logged in Sethryndil for the first time in well over a year, and took him from level 37 to 43, finishing off with completing the entire chain of quests in Aughaire for the Vestments of Fém medium armour set, which should carry him to 50 or higher before any dire need of upgrade.

Then it occured to me, why not just use Arwellyn to farm those lower-level materials and reputation tokens? For my own personal role-play reasons, it has become important for any characters I actually care about playing to have the full set of Lossoth armour, which requires kindred reputation. Arwellyn has it, Myrra has it, and I want Veldorran to have it. Other regions have certain benefits to reputation, such as Rivendell and Angmar, then of course Moria for both the fast goat mount and the Legendary Trait book, although honestly tokens drop like confetti in Moria so that’s less of a concern. Things change after Moria, however, as all reputation tokens for both Lothlorien and Mirkwood are bound to one character so all token farming will cease after Moria.

On the one hand, I already have Arwellyn who can easily fight in Forochel, the Trollshaws, Angmar or anywhere else I would want reputation tokens for Veldorran. The downside to that it will likely still be a bit time-consuming since lore-masters fight slowly. As an experiment, I traited Arwellyn for the first time to the Master of Nature’s Fury which is a high dps trait set. It really is high dps and she’s killing those Gauradan in Forochel very quickly. However the overall experience is still slow because of skill cooldowns. The Gauradan die and I’m ready to work on the next but Improved Sticky Gourd – the heavy-hitting AoE Legendary skill of the set – is still on cooldown so either I wait it out of engage the next few mobs without it. Then there’s the problem of storage. Being an end-game character, Arwellyn’s bags are always nearly full with needed gear, potions, salves, etc. not to mention all the various tokens. A rabid, frothing at the mouth rant post about Turbine’s lack of handling of the storage issue will be coming soon.

On the other hand, if I choose to level up Sethryndil into his 50’s, I don’t have to wait on cooldowns for anything other than melee skills on a hunter. By that point, most mobs he’ll be farming will be grey or close to it and he should be able to easily kill them before the reach melee range unless he pulls multiple mobs. I’ve never really necessarily wanted Sethryndil as a group-content character, though i’ll admit LOTRO is still the only MMO where I routinely see groups “looking for dps” and “looking for hunter” for instances, so I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to learn to play him in a group setting, it’s just not a specific goal I have for him. I wouldn’t mind getting him a nice glowing legendary bow, for sure. Side note: why are hunter legendary bows friggin’ awesome-looking while Arwellyn’s legendary staff looks like a giant Q-Tip? I’m just sayin’…

So, decisions to be made. I’d love to get Myrra going but have been so disheartened at how minstrel’s are soloing these days I can’t bring myself to bother. I’m really enjoying the warden class but would like to help Veldorran as much as possible by having his reputation tokens taken care of ahead of time as well as a ready supply of hides, etc. for his tailoring profession. The hunter seems the obvious choice except for the required time to get at least 10 more levels in order to efficiently do the farming…

This morning and afternoon were glorious. I took Arwellyn on a complete clear of The Grand Stair in Moria, which freed up 12 slots in her quest log, and earned enough Medallions of Moria to get the Stone-Reader’s Trousers, which makes 4/6 on the +10 Radiance set.

Then this evening I decided to take the advice of @Longasc and other people, including a few kin-mates, and skip ahead to the Mirkwood content even though I’m nowhere near finished with the Moria storyline.

So I ride Arwellyn all the way down to the docks in Lothlorien and talk to a few NPC’s then ride the boat over to Mirkwood. Very cool look and feel to the whole place, by the way, and kinda enjoying the music as well.

Apparently, if I am understanding correctly, this is similar to the tutorial for LOTRO where you’re in an instanced part of the world; Mirkwood, in this case. Only by completing the Forward to this quest/storyline will you be put into the real Mirkwood. The NPC asks that I complete his three tasks. Ok, no problem!

Oh, wait. Major problem! These quests were designed for lots of people being there to complete them! Obviously when Siege of Mirkwood launched, there were tons of players to do these and get through the gate into Mirkwood. Tonight? Not so much, they’re all already in Mirkwood doing quests, instances, and working on reputation. No one but Arwellyn and her pets in the not-really-Mirkwood area to do these introductory quests. People who have already done the Forward cannot go “back in time” to help, either. So, essentially, I am cut off from continuing in Mirkwood until I just happen to login when there are other people there.

Remember in WAR how Public Quests were useless if you were the only Public? That’s exactly what is happening here. The plus side is that these are truly Public – no need to actually get into a physical group, although that makes Fellowship-only skills useless – but again, without other people this type of setup slams you into a wall that there’s no going around.

I was looking forward to this, but now I’m playing my low-level Warden instead because he isn’t being cock-blocked from content…

…because I’m breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law…

I haven’t had all that much time for gaming because of my work schedule, but the past week I’ve put the majority of my efforts into LOTRO. That’s “home” after all, and I need to get reacquainted with my kinship as well as continue the journeys of my lore-master, Arwellyn.

When I built my new PC and decided my MMO Burnout was over and I thought I could return safely, I made a rule: No Alts! I didn’t want to immediately burn myself out again. Of course, rather than multiple alts in a single game, I’ve had one character in multiple games. But they’re all adventuring through unique content, so it’s not the same as leveling and alt through the same content I’ve already done.

When I took my break from MMO’s last year, Arwellyn had achieved kindred status with the Iron Garrison Miners and got her goat. She’d done all the initial set of quests in Lothlorien. So I took the past week to get kindred with both the Iron Garrison Guards to get the Friend of Nature legendary trait and with the elves of Lothlorien, the Galadhrim.

Yesterday, however, I hesitated at the login screen. All those other characters were there, looking up at me despondently as they vainly tried to shrug dust off their armour. No! I said “no alts” and I mean it. Hey, leave that mouse alone! Don’t click tha… d’oh, too late!

So I logged in my captain, Gared, first. He was the only alt I was actively leveling at the time I hit my burnout. He’s level 44 and had most recently gotten the Fem armour set from Angmar. I took him to Bree then Celomdim for some Spring Festival quests and completed the horse race so he’s eligible to buy the Blue Roan horse now but if he does that will take his purse down to 200 silver or less, so I’m hesitant to do it. He is also without a kinship; apparently I forgot to put a note saying who’s alt he was and the officers of Eldar thought he was missing in action and gave him the boot. A great friend who started with me in Exodus, then raided with me in The Stoned Alliance then made her own kinship, Lords of a Fallen Empire, with her husband has been harassing me daily to join her kinship so I put Gared there. It isn’t Arwellyn, which I know is who she really wanted, but now I can technically get away with saying “but I am in your kinship!”

Next I checked my hobbit minstrel, Myrra. When I was raiding back in the Shadows of Angmar game, Myrra was my “main alt” who I practically power-leveled for the sole purpose of group content ie. instances and raids. I could feel my burnout starting right about the time Mines of Moria launched so other than taking Myrra to Eregion and doing just enough of the new content to get her first Legendary Weapon, I parked her in Forochel still working on her Lossoth reputation to complete the armour set for cosmetic purposes. I discovered Myrra was suddenly an officer in Exodus! Wha? Checking the membership log, it seems only a scant handful of people have actively played in the past six months or more. M’kay… a dead kinship is the same as no kinship, so I quit Exodus and put Myrra into TSA with Arwellyn, which is who she raided with anyway so they all know she’s my alt. I did take her out for a bit of solo combat just to try to get a grip on the minstrel class again. All the ballands and songs can get complex and I’d totally forgotten how to play the class. I’m still shaky but by the time I was done I was feeling a bit more comfortable in her hairy little feet. (Started to say “in her shoes” but hobbits don’t wear them!)

I clicked on my hunter, Sethryndil but opted to not log him it at that time. I was already annoyed that I logged in two alts, then put an hour or more into relearning how to play the minstrel. I was not a happy camper about this so what did I do next?

I made another alt! Aaarrrgh! Yes, I made a Warden this time. During all the pre-launch hype for Mines of Moria I was just itching at the chance to play the Warden because I loved how the class looked on paper. Excels at both melee and ranged combat, has multiple muster points around Middle Earth similar to the hunter class, can support the group as either an off-tank or “evasion tank” as opposed to the guardian class who has the traditional tank role of taking the beating for everyone, and an all-new fast-paced combat system? Sign me up! Unfortunately, as I’ve already mentioned, by the time Moria arrived my burnout was already picking up pace so I never got around to the Warden.

Here we have Veldorran the Warden at level 5. Yes, that makes three elves now. Oh, shut up, you! They’re paying Hi-Rez Studios protection money from their Global Agenda snipers, ok?

Veldorran is level 14 as of this writing, and I must admit I’m really having a blast with the class, though I have my doubts whether the reality of its “evasion tanking” will match what I have in mind. We’ll see, but from the little I’ve seen, they appear to be largely a class for soloers. I’ve only grouped with one so far with Arwellyn, and he was just doing ranged dps with his javelin since we had a guardian to tank. The Gambit combat system is fun and complex with a gradual learning curve that makes it easy to get into. I enjoy complex classes, though I’m not sure how I feel about the various Gambits being memory-based. Age of Conan makes their combos easy by showing a reminder in the UI. Even LOTRO’s Fellowship Maneuvers have a UI gude – if the group leaders sets one – so I suppose the Gambits could be directly compared to completing a Fellowship Maneuver by memory, only you’re doing it all yourself.

This is also giving me a chance to see the revamped content. I’ve already run into several instances where content and quests were either completely different and new or have been changed to make more sense.

So, I had a day of breaking my “no alts” rule. Rules were meant to be broken, right? I still like the idea behind it though. I’m giving attention to 3 MMO’s at the moment, plus trying to balance them with my games and friends on the 360, plus real life and work. The main concern is avoiding burnout again at any cost, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. My attention shifts at the blink of an eye so by the time I get home next week I may be hardcore anti-alts again.

Arwellyn acquired a Second Age Loremaster book last year before I took my break but she’s been working with her original Third Age staff this whole time. She also had a few other LI’s slotted just so they could gain IXP and level up.

This morning I crafted a batch of the best jeweler scrolls for a kin-mate and in return he crafted a Second Age staff for Arwellyn! It maxes at level 60, but that should be fine. Now that Siege of Mirkwood is released, two new “tiers” (my term) of LI’s have arrived, 61+ and 65. Quite frankly, leveling is typically so fast in LOTRO that I plan on using this staff until Arwellyn gets a level 65 staff. If she just happens to stumble upon a 61+ along the way, fine, but I have no specific plans on getting her one.

Once she equipped the new staff, she deconstructed all the LI’s she’d had slotted, which were in the 20′s and 30′s so she got a couple Tier 3 and 4 upgrades out of them. I also burned a few of the level 60 IXP runes on the staff to get it a couple levels before I take Arwellyn out adventuring with it next week, so here are the Day One stats on Arwellyn’s first Second Age staff, Ceridain:

Sorry, still no screenshots. Too busy installing and playing all these games to remember to take screenshots then upload them anywhere. I’ll do it next time! (That’s probably what I said last time, right?)

In the MMO Department, I’ve installed the obvious: LOTRO because I’m a Lifetime member and it’s “home” then Age of Conan because I kept my subscription active the past few months and *gasp* the game has come a long way since beta; it’s quite a blast now, and a shame more bloggers aren’t coming back to it.

I took Longasc’s advice and turned DX10 back on in LOTRO but disabled the dynamic shadows. Honestly, I can’t tell it from DX9 like that, but I’m sure there must be some differences somewhere that I’m missing.

Otherwise, despite being either on break or having a broken PC for the majority of last year, LOTRO was almost like I’d never left. I’m still busy grinding daily quests in Lothlorien for reputation so I can get into Caras Galadhon. I also never got to kindred with the Iron Miners so I’ll have to go back and work on that too so I can get the Friend of Nature combat pet. Then of course, I need the last few pieces of Radiance gear to complete the set then continue to the new set for Mirkwood which everyone is saying has crappy stats but the Radiance is required. So other than learning Skirmishes and grinding up my little Soldier — how the hell do I change classes or make it female? All I can do so far is trait him for Warrior (dps) or Protector (tank) — and the fact I’m getting XP again, it’s almost like nothing’s changed for me since I’m essentially still playing the early Moria game where I left off.

Age of Conan, as I mentioned, is a lot of fun! I’ve been plugging along quite nicely, just putting an hour or two per day in running quests. The XP is a bit over the top, though. My Bear Shaman reached level 28 and is already 80% to 29 just from turning in quests and only a few combat encounters. Maybe I’m just spoiled from having a mount in LOTRO but I’m really resenting being locked out of my mounts (I have two War Mammoths) until level 40. I’m assuming (hoping?) that the Bear Shaman will be a desired class for grouping and raiding, though. My primary goal in AoC is participating in end-game, so I want a class that I enjoy playing and is also in demand and can get groups easily. Really looking forward to the expansion!

Guild Wars is installed and up-to-date but I did not install using the -image switch so all I really have is the login screen. I’ll have to fully load each and every zone one by one once I decide to actually jump in and play the game, unless the -image switch also works after the fact?

I was planning on installing DDO but the little installer program doesn’t seem interested in running at all in Win7, even under compatibility settings. I’ll come back to that one, it’s rather low on the priority list, although I’m extremely curious to see how it’s changed since the business model shift.

In F2P Land, I installed that Allods Online game, and not sure I’ll be sticking with it. I do like that they totally ripped off Mythic’s font from Warhammer, though. That font was probably my favorite part of WAR’s UI. Otherwise, yeah, the art style in Allods is very WoW-ish so far. Due to that, framerate is excellent although the engine seems to falter a bit when it comes to loading in players.

I also installed Runes of Magic and spent a few hours today trying to remember how to play my character and how some of that game works. Despite being quite “standard” there’s something I rather like about Runes of Magic. I kinda wouldn’t mind having a regular F2P title as a secondary MMO; something that I like enough to be willing to support the developers by actually spending a little money here and there. It’s been well over a year since I last played, and my character is only level 11 now, but I never understood why Darren raised such a stink over the price of mounts. Compared to other F2P mount prices, RoM’s are right about in the middle; I’ve seen cheaper but I’ve also seen much more expensive in other games. I figure if he liked the game that much (and he seemed to until he saw the price of the mounts and then changed his opinion of the entire game) what’s $10 or whatever towards supporting a game you like that you never had to pay a dime for the box or a subscription? Darren has never struck me as an end-game kinda guy but the prices to play end-game at the same time he was complaining about the horse was the real crime. I think it was something like twice the cost of a full year in a subscription MMO in order to play RoM’s end-game. And he was complaining about a horse? That’s missing the forest for the trees, right there.

Finally, I saw Steam had Champions Online which is now setup as a permanent trial. So I logged into my Cryptic account and got a trial key and put a few minutes into it last night. Graphics are nice and I love the art style but the controls were a bit wonky and unresponsive. I was into comics and superheroes in high school, and I love the superhero movies of today, but I just don’t know that I’m into superhero games, MMO or otherwise. I bought City of Heroes at launch, and I think my character is perhaps level 9? Maybe slightly higher. I sub for a month every couple years, and CoH never manages to hold my interest the full month and after a few minutes in Champions I can tell it would probably be a similar story. But I’ll keep it installed since it’s a never-ending trial so I can pop in at my leisure.

In non-MMO territory, I started things off with my favorite PC shooter, Battlefield 2142. Installed it, patched it to 1.40 then installed the expansion then patched to 1.50. It runs fine but I keep getting PunkBuster errors and kicked off every server I’ve tried playing on. I have the manual PunkBuster updater but it’s not helping. So, no luck with shooters so far. It crossed my mind to pick up Bad Company 2 for PC but I only know two people who have it on PC. I run a Friends of Friends list on XBL that currently has 70 members of the 21+ adult gaming group I’m a member of so it’s not hard to do the math and figure out where I’d get the most bang for my buck. Bad Company 2 is arguably the best shooter I’ve ever played, but playing with the general public rather than squadding up with friends gives a much weaker experience and I’d most likely be stuck with the public if I got it on PC. Plus I get achievements on 360!

Speaking of that, Oakstout talked me into buying Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 yesterday. I know the hardcore PC-only guys bitch about the whole Games for Windows LIVE thing but I love it! Not only can I chat (both text and voice) with my friends on XBL but I get achievements too! So far the game is pretty fun. It’s more of an RTT than an RTS, which is more my style, and the bosses are much more active and scripted, similar to a console game boss or an MMO raid boss, which makes for an interesting experience. Apparently DoW2 has a co-op mode too, so Oakstout is looking forward to getting me into a match. JayeDub saw me playing yesterday and said the same thing, and I think both Hudson and SmakenDahead have the game so maybe Oak can get a whole blogger or Casualties of War group for DoW2.

I also installed World in Conflict, another RTT. I bought it launch day because a buddy and I were interested then we ended up only able to play once. That was, what, two years ago? Turns out Oakstout and Aaron both have WiC too, and have expressed an interest in making some rounds there.

Finally, Aaron has spent the past year or so trying to convince me to get Battle for Middle Earth 2, so I bit the bullet and ordered that yesterday as well. He says it has an excellent co-op campaign and I’ve heard good things about the game overall, despite being 3 years old or whatever now.

So, now I’ll be back to bouncing back and forth between the PC and 360 again; between MMO’s and real games again. The challenge I face is whether I can flit from game to game as much as Stargrace or not! Watching her status on Raptr can be entertaining all on its own and makes me wonder if I’m not the only blogger out there with an extremely short attention span!

Before I sign off, non-gaming question: Rather than making backups of important files, settings, and media I bought a new hard drive for this PC. I have the other hard drive installed as secondary, and eventually after I’m satisfied I’ve pulled all the files I need off of it, I’m considering formatting that drive and making the entire drive into the My Documents partition. I could do that easily under XP but does Win7 support that type of thing? And would you recommend doing it or should I leave well enough alone?

Three months and one week after placing the order for all the parts for the new PC, it’s finally working!

Other than the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, it’s decidedly a last-gen (ie. DirectX10) system for now. The new DX11 cards were tempting but I’m simply not willing to spend that much just for a video card any more. On a side note, I find it interesting that when I was younger and living paycheck to paycheck I had no problem sacrificing and saving up for the brand-new hardware and now that I can afford it without batting an eyelash, I have a difficult time justifying it. My PC gaming is pretty much relegated to MMOG’s only now, and I think 2009 painted a grim picture for how I am feeling about the MMOG genre as a whole in its current state. At “bleeding edge tech” prices, a DX11 card just isn’t worth it for MMOG’s alone, to me.

This PC has been nothing but trouble from the moment it was assembled, so it was with great joy Monday afternoon when it finally booted up and Windows 7 was installed. After installing drivers and a few other applications, I naturally set out to get my MMO on. Age of Conan was first since it had less updating to do than LOTRO, which took all night to finish updating through two expansions and content patches.

So yesterday I’m enjoying the new PC, it’s noticeably faster overall and games were running faster, yet I’ll admit to being disappointed that I wasn’t seeing quite the speed increase in the two MMO’s. I could tell they were running smoother but I was only getting +10-ish frames per second more than the previous PC. That just didn’t sound right. Not to mention I have a DX11 OS and DX10 video card, yet the DX10 option was greyed-out in both games. Something was amiss. I know AoC is a resource hog but I was expecting to be able to crank up the graphic settings more than I was able to. Didn’t stop me from playing several hours and it was far more stable (from a playability, not technical, standpoint) than it had been but there was still a deep-felt sense of disappointment of “nearly $1,000 and this is all I have to show for it?”

So I made a few comments along those lines on Twitter yesterday and some of the gang went about trying to find out specifically how to enable my DX10 options. Unfortunately none of them worked, for a very special level of noobness on my part, but I want to specifically thank Openedge1, BlueKae and Avery78 for their help looking into the problem. Openedge was even digging through the LOTRO forums looking for solutions — and he utterly despises LOTRO and everything about it — so a special thanks for your efforts, Edge. We’d covered everything from multiple installs of the ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers, multiple installs of the DirectX Web Setup, checking compatibility settings on the .exe files, and checking a few configuration files, all to no avail.

With great horror and shame, I finally discovered the problem. As I said, this was an entirely new realm of noobness and hell, it’s just embarrassing. Edge tried to get me to fess up and I said “no way!” Then thinking about it, not only does it give me an excuse to write something on my somewhat-neglected blog here but also it’s healthy to be able to laugh at yourself. So here’s the brief history of the past 3 months wrestling with this beast.

I placed the order for the parts on December 1 but it was probably the third week of December before I had a chance to assemble everything and run into the first hitch. It all started with the motherboard’s power LED lighting up but nothing else would turn on. No fans, nothing, and it certainly wasn’t going to consider booting. Turns out I’d had the cables to the power switch, etc. installed vertically like they were on the previous motherboard rather than horizontally. Then again, the manual for my previous motherboard had illustrations and the new one does not, so it took a couple weeks to discover that mistake. It’s mid-January at this point.

Now we’ve got full power to the system. Pressing the power button brought life to all sorts of fans and LED’s and… that was all. No signal to the monitor and from the lack of any sounds other than fans (ie. hard drives, etc.) the system didn’t seem to actually be doing anything resembling booting up. Argh! Is the video card faulty? The monstrous fan came on so it’s getting power so perhaps the GPU is bad? Or is it the motherboard that’s malfunctioning? Maybe it’s just the PCI-X slot? Unlike the other parts, I ordered the video card — an ATI Radeon 4890 HD (my first ATI ever) — back in July after reading Openedge gush about it. So now my freshly-opened video card was well beyond the 30 day return point and I was going to have to spend more cash having it replaced if it came to that.

Over the next couple weeks I did a little troubleshooting [make a note of this, it will be important soon] I learned that there was an extremely high probability that I was one of several customers who ordered this particular motherboard and CPU as a combo package from Newegg, only to discover that the BIOS had not been updated to actually support the CPU yet, preventing the system from booting at all. Hey, that sounds familiar, no? It’s mid-February now, and I spent nearly a week playing phone tag with people from Asus but finally having them send me a replacement BIOS chip (free but I had to pay shipping). The Fedex tracker says it’s going to arrive the first day of my next trip so I took the morning off work so the chip wouldn’t be sitting outside. I hung around the condo all morning but lunch time I was starving so I ran out for 20 minutes and left a note on the door for the Fedex guy. Anyone care to guess when he shows up? Yep! Exactly while I’m out. Oh, and unlike UPS, Fedex pretty much refuses to just leave your packages for you, even if you sign a note for them. Seriously, do they just expect everyone to stay holed up in their homes every second of the day awaiting their arrival with bated breath? I called the support number and in between ripping the girl a new one was informed that no, the driver could not simply come back (he’s only been gone a few minutes, grrrrr!) and I’ll need to sign the door sticker card he left in order for him to leave it. Great! Now I’ve taken unpaid time off work for no reason and the BIOS chip will be sitting outside anyway!

So, I get home Sunday night and sure enough, there was a Fedex package waiting. I dig into things Monday and learn I don’t have space to do the small screwdriver trick to remove the old BIOS chip. I’m going to need to buy an IC removal tool. Crap. I drove to three different stores and no one has one for sale. Crap. So I lugged the case to my car and drove to SmartPC and paid the owner $15 to replace the BIOS for me. Just to be certain it would work, he offered to power the system up to make sure I had a monitor signal and the motherboard would attempt to boot. Sounded good to me. So he plugs in the power cable to the video card then lugged it over to the monitor. I told him there were two power inputs, not just one. He stopped and double-checked and told me no, just the one. A little red flag went up in the back of my mind because I remembered full well that the 4890 had two PCI-E plugs, but hey, he’s the owner of a shop that does nothing but build computers; he should know his stuff right? Sure enough, the BIOS update was all it took so I happily paid the man, shrugged off his jokes about how messy my PSU was (seriously people, no matter how good the price may be, do not ever get a non-modular PSU) drove back home and excitedly installed Windows 7 which brings us back to the beginning of this article and trying to discover why DX10 options were disabled in my brand-new PC.

Remember a few paragraphs ago where I said I had attempted to troubleshoot why there was no signal to the monitor? Part of that troubleshooting involved replacing the new ATI 4890 with my old Nvidia 7950GT to see if a card I knew worked would have the same problem. Partly because I was still wondering if I was going to have to send my 4890 back for replacement and mostly out of disgust and dismay for the whole situation, I never put the 4890 back in! By the time the BIOS was replaced I had completely forgotten about it and thought it was good to go, 4890 and all. That explains the red flag for the guy saying my video card only had one power input. Naturally, having a DX9 card in the PC guarantees that all DX10 options will be disabled as well…

Like I said, that was a whole new level of noobishness!

All is well now. The 4890 is installed, and DX10 has become available. I haven’t gotten around to installing image editing and FTP software yet so I’ll have to wait until next week or so (rough schedule this month so “or so” is likely) to post screenshots.

I fired up LOTRO and… honestly couldn’t tell any difference. I thought there were supposed to be all kinds of shaders for even better-looking water but it looked the same as it has since launch. I finally noticed that the branches of all the trees in Lothlorien cast shadows on the ground and followed the light sources, which doesn’t happen in DX9. However, in short order every fan in my case was running on overdrive. So, for now, back to DX9 for LOTRO. It isn’t worth sitting next to a turbojet engine just for tree shadows and extra-hitchy movement through Middle Earth. Seriously, what is with that game’s engine? They really need to look at changing the tech for pre-caching textures, etc.

Then I logged into Age of Conan. Character select screen shows up and of course I have an even higher framerate while my Bear Shaman impatiently shifts from foot to foot waiting for me to log him into the world. So I oblige him. I think I bruised my jaw when it dropped onto the desk. This is my first time seeing what DX10 can really do live and in-person. Welcome to 2007 right? Whatever! Age of Conan was already a good-looking game in DX9 but had the type of art and textures that could look fairly ugly at times when some options were scaled down. DX10 is night and day, and Age of Conan’s graphics truly shine. Performance is noticeably better with the default DX10 settings and I’m sure with tweaking I can get even better framerate without detracting too much from the gorgeous visuals.

So a year after I started saying I’d build a new PC, 8 months after buying the video card, and 3 months after initially assembling the new PC… I have a new PC!

I’ve been bitching for a few months on Twitter about the extremely unstable state of my PC, but I haven’t been in the mood for any PC gaming at all, so I’ve just let it go. I’m slowly getting back in the mood to play a single MMOG — which will be LOTRO, naturally — and maybe a couple other normal games.

This all started awhile back when I first had the bright idea that maybe I’d upgrade my PC this fall, so I went ahead and bought an ATI 4890 card. Unable to resist temptation, I popped it into my existing system and all hell broke loose. RAM chips spontaneously flash-fried themselves and things in general just stopped working. I had to cut the power several times — while the PC was booted — just to get any control over the system. I eventually put the crusty ol’ 7950GT back in, which is still in today, but I can never trust the system to work correctly, even when it seems things are ok.

Random apps will crash; sometimes it’s a browser (or all browsers); sometimes apps simply won’t load; sometimes I’ll get a memory error or a .dll not found error; sometimes it decides during booting it’s discovered major errors on the hard drive so it runs CHKDSK. Despite saying quite plainly on the screen that the disk check can be canceled, this is a blatant lie, as it refuses to respond to any input whatsoever.

Yesterday I had an all-out battle when it rebooted itself for no apparent reason, then for over an hour decided that the 7950GT could only handle a maximum of 640×480, 4-bit color. It took several (yes, several) vanilla boots into Safe Mode and re-installing NVidia drivers before finally the thing booted back into native resolution, mere nanoseconds before my head would have physically exploded and my body would have alighted with hellfire as I summoned the minions of Satan himself as my black temper consumed the last vestiges of humanity — and, indeed, sanity — to utterly destroy the misbehaving electronics causing me such stress. Think I’m exaggerating, do you? Ha! You mortals…

Games can get interesting when the system otherwise appears to be “normal” for a change. I apparently lost (or failed to take) screenshots in Guild Wars where enemy 3D models were replaced with white 2D bitmaps. It was like fighting swarms of blind (they had no eyes, after all) Spongebob Squarepants. On the one hand, I could see those white squares from miles away so there was no hiding from my party’s wrath, but on the other hand it was quite immersion-breaking. Feel my QQ! Sorry, I just love poking fun at the Immersionites out there.

The one that truly scared the shit out of me was a few weeks ago I decided to check back into LOTRO to see if I was ready to start thinking about MMOG’s at all again. I logged in (it was one of those rare occasions that the unstable system didn’t crash the client), was happily chatting with a few friends and kin-mates then decided to hop on my horse and ride around to do a quest. The icon for my mount was missing. What the hell? My finger stretched up to click the ‘i’ key to bring up the inventory, where I would just click the mount icon itself, only to my horror the inventory was empty! I had nothing! Had my account been hacked? Amid my panic, a few neurons managed to fire and I realized that if my account had in fact been hacked, the password would have been changed and most likely the characters would have been deleted and totally naked. Arwellyn was still wearing her gear and not shaming the elves of Middle-earth by parading around in front of dwarves — dwarves! — in her unmentionables. A few reboots later to get apps (including the LOTRO client) to stop crashing, it was just a graphical glitch where no item icons would load.

I did manage to get two glitched LOTRO screenshots recently:

My client refused to load anyone’s mount graphics, but the mounts themselves worked fine. Everyone was just gliding bow-legged through the air. Amusing, but aggravating nonetheless.

Running around the Ettenmoors, none of the distance imposters in the entire zone worked, they just showed up as glitchy bitmaps. When I was in range of the model they were replacing, the imposter-to-model transition worked fine.

I’ve just about had it, though. Especially after fighting with it yesterday and my temper very nearly getting the best of me and unleashing a severe bout of violence upon the offending electronics, which as you know never accomplishes the desired effect. I was hoping to hold off until the holidays were over but I think I’m going to end up spending some money this week and ordering the remaining parts to build a new Windows 7 64-bit system…

Working! But aside from that, I am once again on break from LOTRO. I was fine and dandy when I returned in April with my focus on PvMP but of course I had to go check on my Lore-master. I did some of the Moria instances with my kinship and got one more Radiance piece. Then, against my better judgment I dusted off my Captain and took him to Angmar where I worked to get him the full heavy Fem armour set. Sure enough I felt the sizzle, which was quickly followed by the fizzle, of burnout again.

It’s not specifically that I’m burned out on LOTRO, however, I think I’m just burned out on DikuMMORPGs as a whole. I thankfully have that Lifetime membership to LOTRO which has always allowed me to guiltlessly come and go as I please. But I am finding it impossible to get interested — much less excited — about any upcoming DikuMMORPG at all.  Aion? Pfft! Please. World of Animecraft with a zone for flying but invisible walls everywhere else? Straight up DikuMMO with all the same old Diku features as every other DikuMMO the past decade? No thanks. To paraphrase Bartle, “I’ve already played Aion, it was called Every Other Frickin’ DikuMMO Ever.” BioWare is working on WoW: The Old Republic which at this point in time isn’t doing anything for me, though I won’t eliminate the possibility that BioWare may actually surprise me and put out a quality game that is fun and different, but honestly I’m just expecting the same old Diku stuff but with the best animated and synchronized Diku combat ever seen. The only MMOGs out there I have even a slight interest in are decidedly non-Diku. I think I can safely say I am Done with Diku. LOTRO will still be my main traditional (and therefore Diku-derived) MMORPG, and I will still tour some now and then that I already own like Age of Conan and Vanguard. I don’t have any faith that Mythic has the ability to suddenly turn Warhammer into a fun and compelling game to get me back there even for a brief visit, but stranger things have happened. But right now I just don’t see myself jumping on the bandwagon of any more Shiny New Sameness from here on out.

So I’m back to the 360 primarily. I still have Fallout 3 to work on. A friend was replaying Mass Effect so I popped that in and started a new campaign with my existing character, and got him to level 50! Plus my usual suspects of shooters, an RTS (Halo Wars) and an RTT (EndWar) to work on, I’m pretty happy.

I also picked up Too Human on the cheap. It received less than favorable reviews, and the demo wasn’t exactly spectacular but I have to say the full game has been extremely fun! I finished the campaign in a few days (it’s short, but I also played a lot) at level 29, then promptly restarted it. I’m pumped up to get level cap and work on the elite armor set and get the elite plasma rifle for my Commando. I will say that for me, the Commando class pretty much solves the iffy attempt at 360-degree control that causes so much confusion with the melee classes. The Commando pretty much sucks at melee and I only do it to knock an enemy in the air to juggle them with my rifle to crank up my combo meter. It’s a ranged ballistics class and is much, much easier to aim just fine and shoot things. Now I know what Pete meant the other day when he complained about Too Human though. It was designed from the start as a trilogy, and just when the story gets really cool, game over. Literally. A story cinema was playing and just as I said “oh, cool!” it all faded out and the credits rolled. Queue up a Darth Vader “nooooooooo!” yell and you get the picture. I’ve got a few AGE guys who’d like to co-op too, so I’m really looking forward to that.

On the PC, I’ve been playing Guild Wars again after close-ish to a year off from actually playing. The new Zaishen Bounty quests have been a blast and I’ve gotten over my fear of PUGs (well, somewhat) and just jump in with my Monk. Everyone runs them on Hard Mode which I have very little experience with, and it’s been a real eye-opener. I normally run Benjeth with the Healer’s Boon build, with a slight personal tweak, but Hard Mode has made me realize that I need to stop merely occasionally dipping my toes in the Protection line and just jump in and learn it. It seems that in Hard Mode — and PvP! — it’s more efficient and important to prevent the health bars from going down than it is to bring them back up. So there’s my project: Learn Protection and PvP. It seems every time I manage to make it for one of Van Hemlock‘s Tuesday Noob Club sessions, it’s PvP week and, as I discovered yesterday, he’s come to expect me to sigh in disappointment and vanish once I learn it’s PvP week. No more! I’ll give it a shot again, although I reserve the right to use the Shock Warrior I made just for the occasion in addition to monking with Benjeth!

In the interest of PvE emergencies and learning PvP someday, I started working on getting Benjeth a shield and spear. His current spear is a normal blue with a +19% enchant bonus, so I’ll still need to get a perfect one, but I did get a unique (green item) shield for him: Keht’s Aegis!

I have some more items that I want to get for Benjeth, but he’ll need to start going into Domain of Anguish, Fissure of Woe and the Underworld for them, which are some of the game’s most popular elite areas. Heroes and Henchmen cannot enter elite areas so I’ll have to learn who’s who in my new alliance to get into some groups.

It looks like Turbine is finally stepping things up and developing tech simultaneously for DDO and LOTRO. For the past year or so, it’s been a situation of one team coming up with tech for their game then several months later it was added to the other. DX10 appeared in LOTRO, then awhile later in DDO. Some new rendering tech to reduce hitching appeared in DDO then eventually made its way to LOTRO (and still needs improvement! Badly!) LOTRO shipped with the ability for users to make their own UI skins, DDO added that much later. Just a few examples. But now it seems Turbine may be getting the engine builds in both games up to parity and developing new technology that will appear at the same time in both games – namely scalable instances.

Reading through the massive (I’ve heard it’s around 40 pages printed!) release notes for the upcoming Module 9, all quest instances (except solo and raids) will scale to the size of the group. When I first heard this mentioned on DDOcast, I initially thought they were eliminating the whole mechanic of selecting a difficulty level (Normal, Hard, Elite) in favor of scaling, but the release notes say otherwise; the group selects the difficulty then the scaling occurs on top of that when entering the instance.

Similarly, in Massively’s interview with Jeffrey Steefel for LOTRO’s 2-year Anniversary, Steefel mentioned that the Book 8 update scheduled for June will also have new scalable instances; the current working name for them is “skirmishes.”

I also noticed Steefel mentioned Book 8 will have “customizable soldiers that you can train and bring into these skirmishes,” which seems to have escaped most readers’ notice over the excitement of skirmishes and the post-Book 8 hints. Why do I have a sneaking suspicion they might be moving DDO’s Hireling tech over to LOTRO? I was a little skeptical of the need for AI companions in LOTRO but it sounds like (for now) they may be limited for use in the new scaling skirmish instances. Probably a good thing, the tech and the AI is still very much being worked on in DDO, and quite frankly LOTRO is having enough problems already with AI and pet pathing since Moria launched…

In other Turbine tech news, one of the big changes to DDO in Module 9 will be the new “soft targeting” system. Players can toggle this on and off, but when enabled will have a targeting system similar in some ways to Mass Effect. Just moving your cursor or the mouse reticule near a target will select it (though I think you can simultaneously keep another target hard-locked?). DDO is also getting a first-person camera. Previously the camera would only scroll right up behind your character’s shoulders, and for screen shots players would have to scroll all the way in then click the Hide skill to make the character duck below the camera. But that’s not all! DDO is also getting a new “shooter-style” control scheme, selectable in the options, which will remap a lot of the controls to make the game control and feel similar to how shooters do. I’ll hazard a guess that the control scheme will work in both first and the normal third person view.

Not only will the new camera, control and targeting scheme provide a whole new feel to DDO but I also can’t help but feel DDO is being used as a guinea pig to test various schemes for Turbine’s secret in-development console title. Despite all the rumors of DDO or LOTRO being ported to the 360, I just don’t see it. LOTRO is a traditional DikuMMO with all the hotbar and inventory aspects to the UI that would be extremely problematic on a console. Despite its emphasis on fast, visceral action, I find DDO to be even more cumbersome to deal with because it has so many abilities, “clickies” on most gear, switching items constantly… that just won’t cut it on a console. At level 8, my wizard in DDO already had as many hotbars onscreen as my druid in WoW did at level cap and raiding! I’ve only bothered to put a fraction of the stuff available to my wizard on the hotbars, otherwise it would be even more cluttered. LOTRO is Turbine’s cash cow right now, and they’re still working on a new UI sytem for their engine and games. As Steefel mentioned last year at, the core of their UI subsystem was written in 1997! Yet I’m supposed to believe they have a fully functional and brand-new UI system for consoles to handle their existing games? Sorry, not buyin’ it. Until proven otherwise, I’ll continue to believe that their console MMOG will be a whole new game, not a port of one of their PC MMORPGs.

Slight tangent, but I’ll just say that in the spirit of getting both DDO and LOTRO up to parity, the DDO team needs to get crackin’ on the UI. Out of all the UI’s I’ve ever had to work with in any MMOG, DDO is by far the fugliest. It’s functional, yes, but it’s obvious from all the work the team has been putting into DDO the past year (and Module 9 is proof of that) that they’re looking to reboot the game. It’s being given an all-new look and feel, starting with the new tutorial area added in Module 8 (Module 9 is adding full voiceovers to the entire Korthos experience, thereby fully realizing the Age of Conan-esque “the tutorial was a lie!” comparison. ) and the makeover to the Harbor. Module 9 is continuing this trend, with a makeover to the Marketplace. I know a lot of people who like to scale their UI intensely dislike LOTRO’s because it actually resizes rather than scales, which leads to a blurry and pixelated appearance. That’s one of the many things Turbine will fix in their UI 2.0 system but there has been no news whatsoever of when we might actually see that. In the interim, I’d at least like to see DDO’s UI get brought up to the same as LOTRO’s, so that when UI 2.0 does come out it can be fit into each game at once.

Speaking of rebooting the game, Jerry from DDOcast posted this morning that briefly, DDO.com was showing the game under the name Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unleashed. It’s been changed back now, but a quick search on the ESRB site does in fact show DDO under that name! (Interestingly, they also have the Forsaken Lands expansion that was instead released as one of the Module content updates.) Turbine has been hinting for quite awhile now that something “vast and mysterious” was coming to DDO. While I’d love to see them switch to the LOTRO engine tech for a huge seamless world that would probably bring in a lot of new players, doing that would be the equivalent to the NGE and I don’t think they’ll go there. What this probably means is now that Module 9 finally brings the game to D&D’s level cap of 20, they’re putting even more emphasis on new content and moving the focus away from the city of Stormreach into even more areas of Eberron. I’m hoping they make a compromise and take some of the existing zone tech from LOTRO, as well as Moria’s “dual height map” tech and give a nod to Age of Conan, adding population-limited public zones to adventure in.