donderdag 30 september 2010

This is not MyLotro

lotroclient 2010-08-09 21-10-46-43

A recent "One Shot" on Massively, called Peacefull Protest, reminded me of the fact that, in the EU we're still lagging behind compared to the US players.
There is still no MyLotro and of course we are still waiting on the F2P move.

Information has been lacking from Codemasters and many people are still wondering if/when things will happen, i have yet to come across an official announcement containing a definate date, the latest word was they will be "aiming to release within the next few weeks".

Personally i am not effected by the F2P much (or at least i don't think i am) as i have had a lifetime sub for LOTRO since launch, but i still think this is a major dissapointment and to me it clearly shows Codemasters is not capable of running an MMO of the caliber of LOTRO.

The way this game has been run by Codemasters from the start has definatly effected my interrest in playing LOTRO (wish i could change my EU account to a US account), i am sure things are not as smooth on the US side as they probably have their problems but i think the EU side has definatly been run worse. As of today i am still waiting on an email with a link to download my "Mini Prima Booklet" that was suppose to be part of the collectors edition (last email about that dates from April 24th 2007, not that i really care about that booklet, but still if they can't run something like that properly, how are they gonna run an MMO..

When i first read about LOTRO going F2P, i was actually suprised, but definatly had my hopes up that Turbine was going to take over the EU side and we would finally get the same features and support the US side are getting, but i guess there will still be no MyLotro community for the EU players.

Still think LOTRO is a beautifull game and i do occasionally log in to play, but i just wish it had nothing to do with CM.

And to get back to where i started, the "One Shot", i noticed that this was actually taking place on my server, if i had been playing at that time i would have definatly joined them, not that it would have mattered/changed anything, Codemasters probably doesn't care and likely didn't even noticed it, but it is the thought that counts and probably the only thing you can do to show your dissapointment in CM.

It's the little things

You often get quest where you have to gather a bunch of items but you never see anything change, but just today i got a quest called "Creature Comforts" where i had to gather 20 pieces of Dead Thornwood, so that they could light a fire to dry the troops.

And to my surprise, when i finished the quest, a fire was lighted and some troops gathered around the fire :)

WoWScrnShot_093010_023603

Often it's the little things in a game that makes you feel good, much better than downing some random boss in a dungeon, but maybe that's just me.

dinsdag 28 september 2010

WoW mobile armory app broken

The latest update to The WoW mobile armory app brought 3D view for character portrait, which is nice, but it also broke one of the most critical parts (IMO) of the app, and that was the automatic import of an authenticator code if you are also using the Battle.net authenticator app.

WoW Armory app Blizzard fail

Normallu when you claim gold from your mailbox, post bids or post auctions it asks for your password and then it would automaticly detect that you have the authenticator app and offer to import a code, you'd click yes and that was it, your done.

However the way it is at the moment whenever you're doing stuff in the armory app that requires you to log in, you have to close the app, open the authenticator get a code, write it down (you can copy the code to your clipboard in the authenticator app, but the armory app doesn't have paste), then open up the armory app and try to get it all to work and filled in before the code expires, as you can imagine, that's a major pain in the ..

Blizzard is aware of this issue and has said it will be fixed in the next armory app update. Hopefully that will be very soon, as the last update took almost 4 months.

I have praised this app and definatly thought it was worth the extra costs to use it, but if they don't fix this soon i will be cancelling my sub for the auction house app.

maandag 27 september 2010

Really, i have not been drinking.

WoWScrnShot_092610_233427

I have been playing a ton of Warcraft lately and really enjoying it.
Brewfest has been a lot of (drunken) fun and i finally reached my goal (getting 200 tokens) and joined the Brew of the month club and had a drunken stupor :)
Although i have to say that by now i am getting a little tired of those daily quests, but i am still 3 Brewfest achievements short.

Also been doing a lot of dungeons through the dungeon finder, which is a great help to find groups to do them with, granted you don't always get a great group, but when you do, it's a lot of fun.

But i have been leveling so fast now that there are not many dungeons left i can do through the dungeon finder, when i reached lvl 76 i could no longer do any of the older dungeons, only the Wrath dungeons are now available to me, which sucks because i had just started doing dungeons on heroic and buying keys for them.

At the moment i am lvl 77, so i am hoping those dungeons open up again to me at lvl 80 (heroic or not) so that i can do them, as i am still missing a lot of the lower level dungeons and i would definatly like to experience them all.

I have also joined a guild (called: Just For the Tabard) which at the moment is a leveling guild, but who knows i might be able to get into some of the old world dungeons that way, definatly a fun guild (with a great name).

WoWScrnShot_092510_185340

I have also been "achievement hunting", hence why i want to do all dungeons at least once, and am now at 182 achievements, but at the moment my main push is for gold :)
I need to get a total of 6000 gold so that i can buy my artisan riding skill and get cold weather flying, so that i can fly at Northrend, ever since i got my flying skill at Outland i miss flying whenever i get to Northrend (or the old world), but progress on that i quite slow as i am also working on getting my enchanting profession up to max, which has now become a pretty expensive profession to level, i easily loose 300 gold in a day trying to level, i am currently at 367 out of 460, so also a long way to go.

Other professions i am still leveling are Cooking (417/450) and First Aid (427/450), but those are a lot easier to level as i get most of the stuff i need for that from questing or dungeon loot.

WoWScrnShot_092710_030430

On another note i still have those memory/crashing issues and still have to turn the graphics options down quite a bit (Ground clutter, shadow and viewing distance) which is a major bummer as, some of the areas in Northrend and Outland look awesome, but if i am constantly crashing it's no fun either, so..
Although turning viewing distance down ads some "fog" to the envirement, that sometimes definatly gives a cool look to the scenery, other times though, like in cities it's pretty ugly, as in you actually see stuff "being drawn" in the distance as you move (like mountains).

I am still trying to narrow down what's actually causing this, at this point i am close to saying it's the viewing distance that's causing it, as i tried turning up the viewing distance to max at Northrend yesterday and withing 10-20 minutes i crashed, although it might still be a combination of other things, like addons that, in combination with viewing distance is causing the game to use to much memory.
But than again i still think it's odd, there are people out there that run way more addons than i do and have graphics set to max and they are not having any issues..

woensdag 15 september 2010

What's in a name

My first character on WoW was actually named Hauntshade, however i never really played Hauntshade much, she was still stuck as a lvl 18 Night Elf Hunter.
Somehow i never really enjoyed playing the Alliance side.
When i started playinga Blood Elf Hunter on the Horde side i never went back and Cynheiddon became my main character.

However i always wished my characters name to be Hauntshade but since i allready had a character going by that name there wasn't much i could do.
Sure i could change the Night Elf's name to something else and than take that name for my Blood Elf, however as soon as you change a name the old name becomes unavailable for 90 days.

So i decided to bite the bullet and delete my Night Elf, afterall 18 lvl's isn't that much to do again and i started the namechange process for my Blood Elf.

I have to say i never saw something changed so fast, all in all i think it took Blizzard less than 10 minutes to process the namechange.
I actually thought it was gonna take some time before the change was done and i would be able to log in (during the process you can't log in) but after 10 minutes i recieved an email that confirmed the namechange as being completed and i was able to log in as Hauntshade.

Talk about being fast, kudos to Blizzard!

So goodbye Cynheiddon, hello Hauntshade :)

maandag 13 september 2010

WoW: Explore new worlds and CTD

WoWScrnShot_091310_002448

I've been playing a lot of WoW lately and having lots of fun.
Basicly trying to get through the old world content before Cataclysm comes out.
There is still plenty to do as i am only lvl 71 now.

Another thing i am really enjoying is the random dungeon finder and have been running many dungeons and after reaching lvl 70 finally some of the Wrath of the Litch King dungeons opened up (as the screenshot above shows), so new stuff to do :)

However since i have been leaving the old world more and more and went into Outland and Northrend i have also seen a major increase in CTD's.
I have been getting a lot of crashes that seem to have something to do with WoW using to much memory. Apperantly the gameclient is set to a 2 gig max memory use and when it goes over that 2 gig it crashes. When i first heard/read about the 2 gig max i was kinda annoyed, since my comp runs with 4 gigs of memory so there should be plenty of memory there, but when it is actually the gameclient that's setting the limit to 2 gigs, well that explains quite a bit..

It was really getting annoying i would almost guaranteed get a crash when using flightpaths and by moving a round busy areas. Funny thing is going back to the old world all problems seem to dissapear and there would be no crashes (no crashes in dungeons either).

One of the first things i started to do was go through my addons and see if there were addons that i could do without and started disabling them, most of them had no effect on the crashing, as a final effort i turned down a lot of the graphic settings like the "ground clutter" settings, shadows and viewing distance and i also turned off a mod called "Handy Notes".
So far it seems the game is running quite smooth again and i have yet to see a crash (of course now i am jinxing it).

By the looks of it i think it was both the graphics and some addons combined that used to much memory, to me the graphics look like they might use some more memory in Outland and Northrend than they do in the old world (Outland and especially Northrend are definatly cool zones).
So i am hoping this fixes my crashing problems and i can finally enjoy playing again without the fear of a CTD.

Still think it's kinda wierd that the crashing only occurs in Outland and Northrend and not in the old worlds.

Hopefully Blizzard will come up with a fix for these problems, searching google with the error messages, showed that a lot of people are having the same issues as i am having, so there definatly is a problem somewhere.

But i think another positive thing is that i removed some addons that were there but that i didn't really use so my addons folder looks a bit cleaner now :)

vrijdag 3 september 2010

The WoW Armory Mobile Auction House App

My initial reaction to the Armory Mobile Auction House was: why the hell would i pay extra for a feature that i can use in game.
But since i allready use the armory app, i decided to give it a go for a month and actually thought i would cancel it after that first month.

WoW Mobile Auction House 1   WoW Mobile Auction House 1

However i found this app to be surprisingly fun/easy to use.
My first thought was that i would really miss my Auctioneer add on, which helps in checking out prices to figure out what price would bring the most profit, but the app has a price check build in so with a little ectra effort it's posible to look for the best price.

Now one of the things i like most about it is the fact that you can log in from anywhere and do your auction house stuff, whenever you've got 5 or 10 minutes.

You have instant access to your bank, mail and inventory and can list items from all three, so relisting expired auctions is very easy, in game i would have to find an auction house first than go to the bank pull out the stuff i want to sell and go to the mailbox to retrieve any expired items and than go to the auction house to start listing.
With this app it doesn't matter where your character is in game (or where you are for that matter), as long as you've got the items in your inventory, bank or mail you can list it.
You can also claim your recieved auction house items or gold in the mail through this app, so i don't even have to go to a mailbox to retrieve it.

Now i do still miss the auctioneer addon but still think this Mobile Auction House app is awesome in it's use, the way Blizzard implemented the whole thing is simply amazing.
I now use this app to list my stuff, buy stuff and recieve my stuff and when i get home i can just jump in game and don't have to waste any time doing my auction house stuff.

So in short, is it worth the 3 dollars a month?
Considering the amount of time i save by using this app, time i can now use for questing/adventuring, i think it is :)