Category: Opinion

IMHO, or the opinions of others.

Guild Wars 2 – Grinding on Champions

Kaetlin Stormcaller
Kaetlin Stormcaller

Guild Wars 2 was developed with new ideas like eliminating the Holy Trinity, no backtracking to quest givers, everybody is a healer and so forth. But one thing they haven’t eliminated is “Grinding”. By Grinding I mean repetitive game play that is the most efficient way to move forward in the game.

I’ve played 6 characters from level 1 to level 40’s and recently started one – an Elementalist. When I reached level 17, I wanted to level to 20 to wear armor that I’d crafted so it seemed that Grinding Champions in Queensdale was the most efficient way to level quickly. I kept track of the progress and here are those results.

This is not a complete description of champion grinding in Queensdale. The GW2 forums or wiki will provide better descriptions. It’s an overview of what’s required to level in this way, with examples and my observations about how GW2 really does seem to include a lot of Grinding. Continue reading “Guild Wars 2 – Grinding on Champions”

WordPress.org – Trust Violated

MMOx_2013_10_00002

The last update from WordPress.Org has left us all with less trust in WordPress. They released 3.7 with a nasty bug that caused images in the “Visual” display of the edit post windows to be displayed wrong. Easy issue to test for.

They have now fixed the bug with a 3.7.1 update.

We all trust WordPress.org a little less this week.

– ww

Guild Wars 2 – Disadvantages Low Level Players

Asura Mesmer
Asura Mesmer

Guild Wars 2 is hard to play. Compared with World of Warcraft, or Tera, both of which I love and do not complain about.

The reason appears to be that ArenaNet is designing the game for the end-game players. For example, the recent update notes stated that they have upped the health of the champions [bosses] and reduced the time required to kill them. These are the events that show up in all areas, including low level areas and that you can do once per day, per account to get mid level loot and exp.

I think the problem is that the “Down-leveling” math is not fair and they are compensating in other parts of the game rather than fixing “Down-leveling”.

The ArenaNet folks are not happy with any criticism on their forums, so I need to post this here. Continue reading “Guild Wars 2 – Disadvantages Low Level Players”

CMS – The Agency Model

CMS_Levels of Abstraction_1_1
Level 0

Over the past 15 years or so we have seen several levels of abstraction develop in the evolution of tools for the web. At this point, there are WYSIWYG website builders that model the page and it’s high level elements and allow building of entire websites. Among these site builders are SquareSpace, Weebly, and several others. There are also other tools such as Joomla, Drupal and other CMS schemes that solve more flexible problems.
However, as far as I can determine, none of these CMS schemes to date solve what I am calling here, for lack of a better name, “The Agency Problem”.

There is a natural extension to the abstraction that we have thus far reached that does solve this “Agency Problem”. It occurs to me that this problem is of sufficient generality that it deserves consideration as the next level of abstraction for CMS systems to solve. In this paper, I’ll present my take on the levels of abstraction in the technology of building websites and present a scheme which solves “The Agency Problem”. Continue reading “CMS – The Agency Model”

Be a Superhero

Defender - Champions Online
Defender – Champions Online

So you want to be a Super Hero? Well there are a few choices out there. Here are three, and my choice for Best of Breed. All these are Free to Play, so you can easily try them all.

Marvel Heroes is of course based on the Marvel Universe. But I’d give it a pass. It’s a pretty game, but only 2.5 D [Dimensions] in this age of 3 Dimensions.

DC Universe Online is a very pretty 3D game and is a very good choice. But it has a complicated overloaded control scheme that I didn’t like.

Champions Online is a full 3D experience in a new Superhero world. Cell shaded, with Roll-Your-Own heroes and Costumes, it’s a great game if you want to be social, or if you don’t. Brought to you by Cryptic Studios which is owned now by Perfect World. Continue reading “Be a Superhero”

Creeping Obsolesence of Media PCs

Video Netcast on Tablet

In early 2011, I made a media PC to watch netcasts on my TV. At the time the system was connected to a plasma display and was running at 1440 resolution. Also at the time, it was perfectly able to play the netcasts from the Twit.tv network, as well as other videos.

Currently the jetway atom PC is connected to my new TV which is full HD and it has been upgraded to Linux Mint 14. Also I’ve noticed that it will no longer play live broadcasts or recorded shows from this site. So what has changed? Continue reading “Creeping Obsolesence of Media PCs”

Tracking SSD Activity

Your SSD
Your SSD

After upgrading my system with a shiny new SSD, the HD light was blinking like a heart beat every second or so, and that concerned me. SSD’s have a limited lifetime, for writes, so it occurred to me that Windows might be burning up my SSD by continually writing to it.

After checking around a little on the web, I found the SysInternals windows utilities on the Microsoft techweb site. At first I tried DiskMon, which showed disk activity,  but didn’t show which files were being accessed. Then I found Process Monitor, which showed which files were being written and  by how much. Continue reading “Tracking SSD Activity”

Aerocool Coolpanel III

I finally got around to installing the AeroCool Coolpanel III in the gaming machine. I purchased this back when I got the battle chair machine.

CoolPanel III
CoolPanel III

The coolpanel 3 has a media card reader, 3 channel fan controller/ temperature display, audio ports, USB ports and ESATA port. At this point I’m using the USB media card reader and temperature display. The rest of the functions don’t make sense in my current system. There are no more USB connectors on the MB and there are USB ports on the top and front of the case. The temp display is way cool tho and I really needed that media card reader.

Cheers,

– Windy

SSD Migration Success

Samsung 840 250GB SSD
Samsung 840 250GB SSD

The SSD arrived today!

The first problem was that I neglected to order the package with the 2.5″ > 3.5″ HD bracket. So mounting the drive was an issue. I had taped the Laptop drive during my testing using a cardboard platform, so after not finding any bracket when calling around to places in town, I did the same, and then ordered some brackets from NewEgg. Continue reading “SSD Migration Success”