I was working Diessa Plateau in the North West corner in a quarry being attacked by the Dredge. The Dredge and their vehicles are popping up around the area and I’m working on an event to kill them. At one point, I think I was killing a vehicle when I suddenly fell through the world. I immediately hit Print Screen to capture the screen as I was falling.
I wandered around for several minutes taking pictures and trying to find a way back into the world. I was unable to get back into the world from below. After several minutes I took a nearby waypoint to return to the normal area of play.
It has been a busy week. We have been working on our personal stories to get ready for the upcoming update. A future update will be changing the storylines One of the changes will be to the last segment of the original GW2 story – the Killing of the Elder Dragon Zhaitan. Briefly, the story segment will go from a 5 man dungeon, to a 1-5 man instance that can be solo’ed. I wanted to experience the original before the change. There are no plans to change the Explore mode of the dungeon.
In a few days, Tera will release an update with the Dreadspire Dungeon. The content of this dungeon shows that they are beginning to lose any semblance of creativity at Bluehole. This dungeon is merely an excuse to allow level 65 players to hammer things that they have to work at and to get some re-hashed gear and skins that Bluehole hopes you will find interesting.
To see what I mean, have a look at the stream that shows you the dungeon. Dreadspire Intro Stream. The dungeon is described here. Basically it is a 20 level stack up of the same circular arena over and over with a different Boss at each level. Crack the crystal in the center to start the battle. End of story.
The bosses are all those that you’ve seen before. Of course after you go through all the ones from the original game – like Basilisks and Jesters – you see the ones from the Fate of Arun expansion. Big deal. And they have all the same hack, yes hack, that makes them more challenging. The skill bar resets over and over as you fight them. These bosses need to have so much HP that a single health bar would be boring, so the bar has all the colors of the rainbow which count down as you wear down the boss to zero. Sigh…
I use the Qt Framework to develop portable software for Windows and Linux. You can find my software on sourceforge. This post is going to record the installation instructions for Linux and Windows.
Linux Mint 17
I use Linux Mint 17 at this point and the installation differs slightly from the installation that I found on the net. See below.
Windows 7
Primary development of my software is done on Windows 7 and then the sources are moved to Linux to be compiled there.
Check the rest of this post for installation instructions:
Sky Castles are for the .000000001% of Tera’ns. Wonder why they didn’t make them for all, or many more, of us?
Read more to see the Enmass Twitch video that describes the castles.
Basically there are 20 castles. Two factions – PvP and PvE, but to have access to one, you must be in one of the top 10 guilds in your faction. Castles are awarded each quarter based on a complex formula, and if you lose ranking, then you lose your castle. Apparently you don’t lose all those customizations that you bought for your castle, and there are a boat load of them, but you have nowhere to display those since you no longer have a castle to show them off.
What a loser.
This is sort of like the Elitist Vanarch thing that was in force when I first joined Tera. Back then, maybe two years ago, there were a few – 3 or 4 – Vanarchs that were elected to “govern” areas of Tera. Basically the only power they had that meant anything to the vast majority of voters was setting the taxes that the NPCs charged on transactions, and Duh, everyone voted for the guild leader that promised zero taxes.
So, eventually, Tera scrapped the whole Vanarch thing.
But they seem to have this thing for Elitist features that benefit the largest guilds and their leaders rather than building in features that benefit the large populations in the game.
I’m doing a project at home where I need 3ft long T8 base LED Florescent bulb replacements. These are hard to find. 4ft long T8 replacements are easier to find.
The problem with these bulbs is that they don’t work at 120 volts. The specs say they work from 85 > 265 volts. This is presumably because in China, and Europe, the supply is on the 240V 50Hz standard rather than North America 120V 60Hz standard. However, either the design or the quality control of these bulbs is wrong and they don’t work at less than 127V or so. My house power is 120.5V so these bulbs decided to blink at 1 second intervals.
My gerbil died last night. He looked pretty sick yesterday. No way to tell what happened of course. I got him on May 31, 2012 so I guess it was his time.
David Cameron has announced that he intends to try to prevent encryption in the interests of protecting Britons from terrorism. It seems to me that he has not thought this through. In less than 10 minutes I came up with at least one plausible method to not only provide encryption, but to provide it in such a way that David’s spooks can’t detect that you are using it. At least they can’t be sure that you are using it from watching your traffic.
All the MMOs I’m playing are providing ways that separate how you look from the Stats of your gear. People want to dress up, Either for the current holiday, or in keeping with their character self image.
Wow added “Transmogrification” which changes gear to look like other gear. And of course then began providing “Templates” which were stat-less gear either for $$ or for achievements.
GW2 added a similar way to change the look of gear. Every piece of gear that you own locks that look into your whole account so you can modify any like piece of gear to have that look. And you can mix and match pieces of gear.
Tera had a scheme similar to Wow’s Transmog, but removed it and now has Costumes which are special templates that are overlays for your entire armor set or weapon. No mixing and matching with armor pieces for this scheme. Costumes, both weapons and armor, are purchased with points from Achievements, like the Battlegrounds [aka Arenas], with “Fashion Coupons” that are farmed from large monsters, or purchased in the store.
Tera and GW2 both provide these Costumes. GW2, it seems, cannot make up their minds about whether to have transmute or costumes. They have both. Costumes are primarily obtained from the store and cover up all your armor. Weapon and armor skins are obtained as achievements or in the store.
Elin in Wintera Costume
Here’s a particularly silly example of a costume for Wintera. An Elin dressed up in a snow suit. Don’t get me started on all the swimsuit costumes for both male and female characters. You get the idea. There’s even an achievement, in both Wow and Tera for killing a Boss in a swimsuit. Of course any costume will do to get the achievement. Continue reading “Tera – Fashion? Where are we going?”
Another way to get great fashions, if you like black, is Battlegrounds. I’ve been doing the Corsair Stronghold over and over to get costumes. To get a costume, you need 7000 points, which you can get in about 3 long days of work in the Corsair Stronghold. Starting at level 30 you can queue for the battlegrounds. I’ve tried the Kumasylam, and you may like that one. The Corsair Stronghold is sort of Storm the Castle kind of event where each team of 20 toons alternatively tries to storm and defend the castle. Each run takes 10-25 minutes and gives you from 150-500 points depending on Lose or Win. And once a day you can do the Pirate Daily quest, which gives good loot and 200 points.
So as it turns out it doesn’t take that long to get your 7000 points, and along the way you’ll get a couple levels, and maybe a couple of hundred Gold in loot mailed to you for your wins.
But don’t take it very seriously, because you are going to die enough to get the Black Death achievement for dying 100 times and the “Death Eater” title.
Windy Weather 