Showing posts with label Real Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Real Life. Show all posts

News: A Legend isnt Born (World of Warcraft)

Saturday, February 20, 2021

[The following is a spoof of a post I made YEARS ago, written to help blow off some steam.]

Last week after a year of effort, a couple long grueling months of trying to find a raid group, and several mental break downs, my raid group "40 Man PUG" and I finally didn't get got me my Legendary item done. The Legendary staff "Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian" for my Priest. It's amazing for me as seeing all I had to go through, and the extraordinary amount of effort I had put in along the way in order to get this all done.

I started my quest for this staff in the winter of last year, when was able to start playing WoW Classic again. Before that, I wasn't even playing WoW Classic past the launch, and didn't even really plan to. Part of me wished it wasn't purely for that staff but it was, and the fact that probably the thing I miss the most from WoW retail was doing my Rogues legendary quest for a great weapon and the experience shared with the amazing people I did it with (or other events shared with people who cared about me). WoW Classic didn't have that for most of the time so far, and even when it did, my main class was excluded. I could talk about the difference of Atiesh and Thunderfury, mostly stating how I put in countless hours helping countless other people farm their Thunderfury. But in the end, no one returns the favor for me!

First Impressions - CV1

Monday, September 26, 2016

Today I finally got my head into a CV1! It's been a couple weeks longer then I expected, but still is early since I don't have all of my hardware yet.

Not counting the things I'm not upgrading right now, like Power Supply and non-SSD HDD, this is my part list. Not top end, but way above the level I'm used to! I'm still waiting on the MB, RAM and SSD, but I did install the GFX card into my current system to see how well the CV1 works. I expected the USB 2.0 of my current system to bottle neck it, and I'm sure it is, but surprisingly it works quite well as is to allow me to dev, try some demos, and form opinions. And I guess that last one is what this is about.

News: My Break

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

It seems I finally got around to letting myself take that break I've been really needing to, as evident by my lack of activity the past 2 weeks.

I said I needed to take a break, then went right back to work on ZNI, fixing bugs and trying to make some improvements. I should have released it sooner, but a few days ago I released a bugfix test version of Z-Net I on one of the bug report threads. As soon as I hear back with positive results on that, I'll likely release at least it. But there are a few other bugs I need to work on as well.

During my break the past couple weeks, I've been filling the time playing a couple SNES game on bsnes to give that emu a full try. I've been raiding on WoW just as I have been (4/8 Heroic!). And I've been trying to get back into playing Magic the Gathering again (away 4 years, and so much has changed even in the Eternal formats I play in).

With SNES, I've been mostly trying to get a Megaopolis in Sim City, something of which I never achieved when I was younger. Figure nowadays with the internet and guides being so easy to find, maybe I could do it now. But the guides suck really because they're incomplete and/or inconsistent. And most of the info I already know. I hate constantly restarting a map over, but the best I got recently was around 430k/500k.

With WoW, I have 2 raid groups. The main one with my Rogue, and the alt raid with my Druid tank. My rogues raid was stuck trying hagara for weeks. We had a choice between trying zon'ozz or hagara next. I felt zon'ozz would be easier, and the majority of the rest thought hagara would be. So we worked on her. Weeks and weeks later, after little progress on hagara we try zon'ozz for a change of pace. 3-4 attempts later, we kill him. I was right. It was a relatively easy fight for our group. Our alt group was stalling at 6/8 on normal for several weeks. We have to pug a few to many spots to often. But we did start getting the last 2 done as well the past few weeks. For heroics, all we've done is try ultra a few times, but that didn't go to well. That group only goes 1 day a week though, so we don't want to try to long on heroic bosses.

The Eternal format scene in Las Vegas died a few years ago. I only play that, as in my view playing the more common standard is more expensive, and a waste of all the cards I've collected since '93. Sadly, as far as I can tell, it's still dead. I'm only getting back into it because a friend reopened up a shop a few months ago, and in any variation of the game, I miss playing it. Hopefully I will still get to play plenty of Legacy casually though. I'd preffer tourneys, which I may see one soon, but casual Legacy is better then nothing I guess. Though I can't really expect the best competition with the best decks which is a bummer. Maybe in time something will work out. =/

For now I'm trying to get into various forms of PC based MTG. Sadly though the best program for it is the official MTGO with its unattractive pricing plan, and by some annoying miracle, no emu server has even been attempted for it yet, let alone made. There are other homebrew programs available, but they have a very clunky feel for a PC program due to lacking rules enforcement and automation like that of a game client like MTGO. And they have a bit of a learning curve as well. They seem best used/learned with friends, of which I no longer have any in which I keep in contact with if any would have the desire to try using such a program. Currently, OCTGN and MagicWorkStation seem like the best. I played OCTGN for a few games. It seems alright if I had a friend to play with. I played against someone random who described himself as the Legacy guy, and he played something random compared to my decks that are/were at worst "Rogue". So without finding a friend to play with, I won't be able to expect much from those. If anyone out there is into Legacy MTG and wants to try using one of these programs with me, let me know. Hopefully I will at least be able to setup some contacts with some real life people from my friends store, as I won't be going down there every week.

News: CPU Issues and Games

Monday, September 12, 2011

Las Vegas weather sucks some times. Its mostly known for its heat, and wind, But yesterday in the span of 30m it went from somewhat sunny, to completely cloudy, to thundering, to a sudden heavy rain, to a wind driven sideways hailstorm. Just lasted long enough to knock out our power for a few hours. Seems when our power went out, my comps PSU kicked the bucket. Spent most of my evening yesterday after the power came back on figuring that out and getting my comp working again with borrowed/old parts. Borrowing a PSU for now, but the PSU doesn't have the power connector for my video card, so I'm having to use my old card for now. With all this, and all the comp stuff I'm fixing to buy soon, I probably won't be working on much to soon. Anyway...

I haven't been working on much. Just more tinkering with blog layouts, in hopes of getting setup a base custom layout of my own that I can use to make a few other themes I've been thinking of.

Mostly I've been getting bored and wanting to play something. I was playing EQLive some on the Fippy server, cashing in my 40 free days at the last minute. But I lost interest in that. Newbie exp rate for my Wizard seems way more harsh then when I played on live. I leveled up a wizzy at the start of luclin era, so exp may have been faster at that time. But I also leveled up a wiz into the teens once or twice in the velious era, and a sk to around 10 in the kunark era. So when I don't think the exp rate is correct, I may be right. Granted I've also played on the ProjectEQ emu server (8 level 65's, most near top end gear) which is faster, though not much faster then live. And I've played WoW. After WoW, anything slower will seem extremely slow.

I haven't played WoW since Dec 2010, more like Sep or Oct 2010 since after that I just paid and played to finish out the year long achievements. I got so tired of it, I didn't even want to talk about the game. Guess I've finally had enough time away, and have been getting somewhat interested in it again. Just the time doesn't seem to be right for now. Have to either pay $95-$105 to end up on a PVP server I don't in anyway want to, or $55-$65 to stay on a server in which I don't know anyone I care about. For me, my fun in that game is heavily reliant on family or friends. Both options just aren't appealing, as their just to much money for something I can't guarantee I won't quickly lose interest in.

To satisfy my interest in playing WoW again, I decided to look into WoW emus. Never played one before, and never seen one mentioned enough to know the quality. Heck, I didn't even know if they ever got off the ground in terms of development because the few times I've heard about them, was when they were getting shut down. I was surprised to find that there seemed to be tons and tons of packed servers. But that's just the phony aspect meant to trick you. In actuality there's only like 1 server cluster with packed servers, and they basically all suck due to insane exp/gold/rep/etc rates that make an already easymode game easier, and custom content I don't give a crap about, and in fact will most likely make my experience worse.

I considered, and even tried a vanilla WoW server. Claimed to be the best, but was PvP. Tried another that claimed to be more about accuracy, but that had 3 people playing on it. I never played past 42 in vanilla, so missed a lot of content. Playing that, or cata would be interesting to me right now as I haven't played them. Most emu servers are using patch 3.3.5, so stuck in the WotLK era, which I've had my fill of. I found the best cata server I could, and started some chars there. 1x rates, PvE, little if any custom content. Certainly none staring you in the face in the form of NPCs in the newbie area in shameless attempts to get you to vote the server up on server ranking lists. I understand the desire to get votes, as it helps you and others in the end by drawing in more players, but that's to much.

Server I'm playing on is AstralWoW Cataclysm. Doesn't seem perfect, but good enough. I don't know how much cata content it has. I think of a lot of the quests you level up with from 1, and maybe a few instances. For it you can currently patch to blizz servers, then just modify the realmlist and run the astralwow exe.

If this is something you may be interested in, and you may seriously try and level a char up, please sign up using this link with my invite code. Helps me out as you level by giving me some virtual badges, so to speak. I've been using what I get to buy heirloom gear for my Rogue there. Still have tons more to go.

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