Going AFK
Thursday, February 23rd, 2006I’m taking a nice needed vacation as of tomorrow, so no posts for a little bit longer. Then I’ll be back, rejuvenated, and ready to talk geek!
Archive for February, 2006
An Alien Viewing
Monday, February 20th, 2006This weekend I saw the movie Alien for the first time. I know, I know, the movie is almost as old as I am. It’s been around for a while. I, however, have never been one to watch scary movies of any ilk. In part, it’s because of my mom. Growing up, not only did she never watch scary movies, she didn’t even allow them in the house. She said they “gave off bad vibes.”
I remember the first horror film I ever saw was A Nightmare On Elmstreet on a rainy day at sleepaway camp. I actually left the room, it was way too freaky for me. But I was probably 8 or so at the time, so hopefully my tolerance for such things has increased just a little.
Alien is not actually a horror movie, at least by today’s standards. It’s more of a thriller, I’d say. It’s such an iconic movie, something that has become a part of our cultural consciousness that I felt like I was really failing as a movie buff in not having seen it yet.
The first thing I noticed was how dated their vision of the future was. Here’s a shot of the cockpit (with Tom Skerritt looking young and fine).
Battlegrounds, the Bad
Saturday, February 18th, 2006I’ve been running a lot of WoW Battlegrounds recently. It’s sort of become my favorite part of the game. I have several characters at various levels who I use with interesting results. But the main thing I’ve realized is that my long ago post claiming there was no battlegrounds problem is very very wrong.
I used to only run BGs on the weekends, and that was part of my blindness. It’s during the week that the twinks come out. (Sidebar: Just looked up that term on Urban Dictionary and was surprised to see the original meaning of the word is “An attractive, boyish-looking, young gay man.” And keep reading to find out why. *sigh* Why is everything homophobic in the MMOs?) A twink (in the MMORPG context) is a character who has totally maxed out gear, the best of the best, probably afforded by sending money from a higher level character owned by the same player. In WoW specifically, there are a couple of obvious ways to twink. If you can afford it, by the best gear - blues all the way. But a much worse problem is enchanting.
World of Warcraft Patch 1.10 Tidbits
Thursday, February 16th, 2006We just got Patch 1.9, everyone is working hard to open the Gate of Ahn’Qiraj (well, some people are working harder than others, the rest of us are just trying to see what they’re up to). The first pieces of information about Patch 1.10 are starting to trickle out, mainly via the official forums. What we know so far:
- Priest is the next class to get revisited
- No new instances
- New Tier 0.5 armor set
- More endgame non-raid content
- Weather effects will be added in Patch 1.10
- Relics for Druids, Shamans and Paladins
That’s not all that much info, but I haven’t seen it summarized anywhere yet. I’ll keep updating as I learn more.
UPDATE:
There’s been a post on the Blizzard forums (note that this link may go dead, forum posts don’t last forever) detailing some more of the 1.10 content. Apparently they’re adding more high level casual content. Non-raid, level 60 content, in other words. Here’s a direct quote, in case the forum post goes away.
We’ve been hard at work at Patch 1.10 and I’m excited to bring you a small sneak preview of some of the content. We’ll be offering a series of quests for maximum level players so they can obtain a really good, class-specific armor set. This should prove to be a great way for non-raiding players to upgrade their gear. Here are some highlights:
- Characters follow a new quest line to obtain an armor set
- The armor sets contain 4 rare and 4 epic pieces
- Some of the pieces can be obtained by soloing (including one of the epic pieces)
- The most difficult pieces to obtain require a UBRS level group
- We are adding new bosses to existing dungeons
- Some of the existing dungeons are being re-itemized
Also, there’s now an interview on 1up with some more news on the patch. Talks a bit about new armor and the fact that they’re making priest changes, but the most interesting actual information was that they’re adding weather effects in this patch.
UPDATE 2:
Blizzard has put up the official patch page. There’s nothing there that I haven’t already read about, except for some videos of the weather effects we’ll be seeing if we have good enough machines. But more news will come soon, I’m sure.
UPDATE 3:
As posted on the official forums by Blizzard, they are adding items to go into the currently unusable ranged weapon slots for druids, shamans and paladins. Woohoo! First post here, get it while it’s hot. Or read below:
As posted on the official forums by Blizzard, they are adding items to go into the currently unusable ranged weapon slots for druids, shamans and paladins. Woohoo! First post here, get it while it’s hot. Or read below:
We’re in the process of implementing a relic slot for the Paladin, Shaman and Druid. Ideally, this will be live upon the release of patch 1.10. Basically, this slot will allow these three classes to equip a relic item, since currently these classes are unable to reap the statistical benefits associated with equiping a ranged weapon…and we’re tired of seeing you run around with Egan’s Blaster.
Second post with more details here, or read (note that all spelling mistakes are not mine 
):
Below I’ve listed the description of three different relics (one for each applicable class). Idols are the Druid relics, Totems are for Shamans, and Librams are for Paladins. These relic items will be live in patch 1.10.
Druid
Idol of Rejuvination
Relic
Requires level 57
Equip: Increases the healing per 3 seconds on your Rejuvenation by up to 10Shaman
Totem of Rebirth
Relic
Requires level 57
Equip: Reduces the cooldown of your Reincarnation ability by 10 minutes.Paladin
Libram of Hope
Relic
Requires level 57
Equip: Reduces the mana cost of your Seal spells by 20
Considering I have a druid, paladin and a shaman, this is very good news!
UPDATE 4:
WOW Insider has a summation of more info on the priest changes. It can be found here. It seems they are revisiting the priest racial abilities as well as really revamping the talent trees. I’m looking forward to it! (Yes, I also have a priest, ok?)
Woman Gaming Panel
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006As I mentioned, I was on a panel last week. Been a bit busy so haven’t had a chance to talk about. It went quite well, I thought. There were about 50 people there, and the group was about evenly split between WITI non-gamers and gaming people. Mostly women. There were about 10 women from Harmonix, which was nice to see since I very much admire their work.
First was an hour or so of schmoozing - meeting and greeting. I’m not the best at this area, so walked around with a male co-worker who asks to remain nameless (some people don’t want their doings blabbed on the internet for some reason!). The interesting part was that in two separate encounters we met women, said we work at Mad Doc and the women turned to him and said, “So are you on the panel?” Discussing it later, he said he hadn’t even noticed. But it’s very interesting that there is always this expectation, even in a forum for women that men are the leaders.
The other two panel members were very interesting women. One is the Executive Producer of D&D Online, Judith Hoffman, the other works at a PR company, Laura Tomasetti, currently working on the D&D Online project. They were both at least 10 years older than I am and have had much more of a breadth of experience. I feel quite expert in understanding the jobs that I have held at an independent PC game developer for the past 5+ years. But some questions came in asking how the industry has changed from 10-15 years ago, and I certainly couldn’t answer those. I was in high school then.