Wednesday, June 29, 2005

v7.4 - The House Search

Morning folks,

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Well, one more day (after today) of this hell hole and I get to sit back and enjoy an extra long weekend. I''m so looking forward to the 4 days off and I''ve only been back in the office for 2 days so far. Sad isn''t it?

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So far, I''ve had 5 cold calls since I placed my resume up on Monster (almost 2 weeks ago). I''m not actively looking for work, but I put my resume up to see what would happen. God only know what would happen if I checked off the willing to move button.

{shudders}

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Ahhh.

So today we are going to look at a house. Recently there have been some bad goings on in our neighbourhood and it just doesn''t feel as safe as it once did. People spray painting racial hate messages on buildings and holding up the Shell on the corner is really starting to piss me off. The whole neighbourhood is going down the toilet and the cops are always everywhere. Unfortunately, the cops are never around when there are actual problems. Funny how that seems to work.

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Anyway, we have an appointment tonight to go see a place. Let me start off by saying this place sounds too good to be true. I will be very surprised if we go there and it is everything the guy says it is. The monthly rent is perfect for us and in the long run will be cheaper per month to live. We''ll have an entire house in a nice residential neighbourhood. As always, I''m a bit hesitant, but I''m going with it and hoping. Of course I''ll write and tell you all how it goes tomorrow. :)

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WoW vs DAoC

Yes, I''ve reactivated my DAoC accounts. Main reason for this is the new severs coming out in early July. WoW is a great game and I''ve had a lot of fun playing it. Unfortunately the key word there is HAD. I won''t sit here and write a review on WoW, but I will say that after level 60, the game slows way down. Personally, I don''t mind leveling alts and working on other 60s. I have 4 level 50 toons in DAoC (almost 6) and I was one of the slow pokes. :) I think my 2nd highest toon in WoW is level 23 and I don''t ever see myself actually finishing him off.

WoW used to be a lot of fun for me. However, there are a number of things that make it not as fun as I would have liked. The game mechanics being a major flaw in the game. The limited number of people allowed in a group is too low in my opinion. In DAoC we were allowed 8 (rumored they are increasing to 10 sometime soon) people per group. In WoW we are only allowed 5 per group. Yes, you can create a Battle Group, but most of the quests you can do in WoW will not work if you are in a Battle Group. Design flaw or working as intended?

World of Warcraft is a graphically amazing game. The scenery and attention to detail is unmatched in the industry today. Last night I was playing with a couple friends and I made the comment on how it was maintence day (every Tuesday) and we hadn''t experienced one blip of lag or latency. Did they finally fix it? I think so as my lag and latency in the game has been very veyr minimal of late.

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So why even consider DAoC over WoW? Mainly because the major things that made me leave DAoC are going away with the new servers they are releasing. For starters, removing the ToA expansion from the game is a HUGE +++++++ in my books. I hated ToA with several hundred passions and I would refuse to go there. I was so happy when they released Catacombs because I felt that should have been released instead of ToA. So Mythic has decided to create new servers without the ToA expansion.

They are also removing the "easy mode" buff bots from the game. A buff bot (for those who don''t know) is another character on a different account that is speced and designed for nothing more than giving your character buffs (castable enhancements). People will leave these characters at a border keep and buff up their primary toons so they will have an edge (turns out you need one to be on par, so no more edge). These characters do nothing more than stand there while you are out fighting in PvP zones. If that bot is disconnected, you lose your buffs so they need to stay online. This can create a little bit of lag and it makes the game more expensive to play because now you need 2 accounts instead of just the one. These new servers will still have bots, but there are a couple catches. The buff bot MUST be in your group. For some this wouldn''t normally be an issue, but for those who are used to playing 8v8 and using a bot to buff themselves, this could be an issue. :) The other big kicker to the buff bot is the range buffs will work. I can''t remember the exact number but I believe it is in the 5000 unit range. For those used to playing DAoC and measuring out units, 5000 units isn''t a heck of a lot of range. So, YES you can still have a bot account on the new servers but you''ll have to carry him/her around with you everywhere you go. For stealthers, this can be a pretty big problem. I''ve seen it done on normal servers, so it is possible.

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Lastly, but not least, you can''t /level a new toon on these servers. While it was a good feature of the game, it killed the < 20 leveling areas. New players to the game would login to an empty area where nobody was fighting. You see, if you have a character on your account that is level 50, you can type /level on any new character you create and they will be bumped to level 20. Nice feature, but killed the new players coming into the game. This new server will create everyone at level 1 again and we will all have to climb the full 50 levels to the top.

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Some great changes have been added to the game. You can tell people are submitting ideas from WoW to the Mythic team. I''ve seen things like pop-up dialogs when you hover over items and buttons (tool tips?) and things like the new social window which shows all your online/offline toons in the guild/alliance. You can even see news in the this panel that tells you who recently dinged 50, who recently hit 1000 points in a craft, who recently hit a realm rank/level and which keeps/towers have been attacked, claimed and all that stuff. VERY cool feature and very WoWish.

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Unfortunately a lot is still the same. There will always be cheaters in any game you can play. Mythic has done a lot of work (I truely believe this) in trying to stop the number of cheaters in the game. There is only so much a company can do to eliminate these cheaters and I think Mythic is doing the right thing at this time. No longer giving people warnings for using a cheat program was a step in the right direction. I know of at least 5 people who were perminately banned from the game due to cheating. I won''t name names, but I''ve know these people in-game for several years. I''m hoping we''ll leave assholes like this behind when we move to the new servers, but I highly doubt it.

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Anyway folks, I should have named this musing WoW vs DAoC instead of The House Search :) Oh well.

I''m going to run now before my computer locks and I lose everything (again). I''ll write tomorrow on what we find out with this house, so keep your fingers crossed for us. We really need to get out of the neighbourhood we''re in. Either that or get a dog. :)

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Take care all and remember to check under the toilet seat for spiders before you go.

Cheers,

Al

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