Friday, September 25, 2009

NC Soft: Aion to reduce private store timers



I got this blurb from a Titans member so I will post it here
In case you missed it they are bringing the servers down at 6:00am PST on September 25th for maintenance so that they can apply a 30 minute timer to private stores to hopefully reduce or eliminate the queues.

There we go. Should fix a ton of issues. Of course my other thing would be to move the private stores to a large slab of concrete off to the side somewhere and make it so people can only setup there. Much like the Bazaar in EQ1. You know…a game that was doing this 10 years ago.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Champions negatives with tried and true responses

Bio Break has a great post up today nailing everything that is wrong with Champions (besides the fact it’s a clone quest engine game):

http://biobreak.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/champions-the-negs/

(And no Syp I am not trying to say you are all negative on it now however it is good to see SOMEONE point this stuff out).

To be predicted, which is why I am not playing, however we still have people creating excuses for a game that was shoddy at release which I recognized in beta and convinced me not to buy it.

As I have preached over and over I am no longer in the business of instantly buying any MMO because it is released let alone fall like a sucker for a lifetime subscription. Complacent comments? Sure thing. Lets make more excuses to justify wasting money right now:
The rubber banding caused by high latency in CO is litterally like sitting at the end of a rubber band with someone extending and contracting it quickly. When it’s bad, it can make you feel quite ill.

I agree wholeheartedly about the UI being unresponsive. It basically takes a click-spam to activate any of the change-zone buttons, and I’ve noticed quite a bit of UI lag when it comes to blocking.

I think that if they address a lot of these issues in the first quarter of their release Champions could become a very solid if not great game. – HUDS NOTE: Nothing like forking over money to be a beta tester, good job!

In my opinion, Champions could turn out to be a great game, but they are in the same boat that Mythic was in just after launch (HUDS NOTE: which was…RELEASING A POOR GAME yet you still all bought it didn’t ya!?

I am sure that a “Positives” post will follow on some blog (because people cannot say bad things about a game and leave it at that) wherein they mention cool costume creations and “combat that is NEAT!” however I am no longer sold and wasn’t 4 months ago. I still don’t see any cool blog posts about people’s adventures in the game or how much neato fun they are having. Could it be because you are simply being led from quest to quest with predictable results? If not, prove me wrong.

Let the backlash build. I don’t buy into a game to hope it gets better and neither should you.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Late Summer hard drive cleaning



Here is where I stand trying to consolidate everything on my gaming PC. I run Windows Vista 64 bit and usually when I buy a new computer or have one built and shipped from Dell I immediately reformat it upon setup in my office. The last time I bought an XPS however I did not do this. I did REMOVE all the Dell software put on there as a pre install (which wasn’t much because luckily ordering a XPS gaming machine is very customizable) but no hard drive format occurred. The reasons for this were numerous but much of it revolved around being lazy. So I have had this machine for a year now (as of June) and it has not failed me yet. Despite the atrocious amount of games, software apps and all around junk I have put on, taken off and moved about the machine still works pretty quickly.

I finally went over the list of games in my second chop session and found quite a few that still lurked in the dark corners of my hard drive. Among the things I removed:

Perfect World International

Chronicles of Spellborn

Older DDO client

Lord of the Rings Online

Company of Heroes online Chinese client

Aion and that annoying NC Soft launcher

Champions Online closed beta client

League of Legends closed beta

UFO Afterlight

Everquest 2

Vanguard

Universe at War (one of the WORST RTS games I have ever played)

Men of War demo

Theatre of War 2 demo

Sim City 4

Guild Wars

Atlantica Online

Surviving the cut yet again:

Half Life 2


I was actually quite amazed at the amount of junk games still leave behind even when you tell them to UNINSTALL. So for now, my hard drive is pretty clean again and I hadn’t even remembered I had set it to defrag once a week at about 3am on Wednesdays.

I still have the majority of my shooters on my drive as well as some MMO’s and tons of wargames. I am tempted to do a wipe and reinstall of the OS but right now re-patching Company of Heroes and all the trouble I went through would just not be worth it. Yes, it was that bad.