My paladin is breathing down the neck of Level 80, and I’d like to try tanking a bit with her. It was the original purpose for levelling her. But I read accounts like the veryvery funny pass my soapbox from Tam at Righteous Orbs, and I have to think: Who in their right mind would ever, ever want to be a tank or a healer? Seriously.

I did some tanking in Aion on my Templar Ravven, and although legion runs were a lot of fun, pugs were not. On my very first tanking experience, the first time in a new instance, the first time I’d ever tried marking and pulling and keeping aggro, we had the group from hell. Higher-level players who had run that instance before, and wanted to get through it as fast as possible. It was one of those “GOGOGO” type of runs, with one of the players impatient enough to start pulling his own mobs.

You pull it, you better be able to tank it. Not wearing plate?  Sucks to be you.

I admit that I’m not the most social of people, anyway. I just generally think that a large percentage of the people you group with will turn out to be asshats. Now, I’m just speaking from personal experience, mind you – your mileage may vary. But I have terrible, terrible luck with pugs. And the thought of tanking one…

*shivers*

I happened to be in the Teen section. Aside from my lamentable taste in vampire fiction, I am firmly of the belief that you find some of the best fantasy books there, just because they’re afraid to market them to adults. I have no problem whatsoever with buying kids books. And what do I see?  A very, very Twilight-esque cover. On Wuthering Heights.

Oh, come on – that’s funny. The Amazon blurb (because I yoinked the cover image from them) was also very funny: 

One of the greatest love stories ever told, beautifully repackaged for a modern teen audience. Love the Twilight books? Then you’ll adore Wuthering Heights, one of the greatest love stories ever told. Cathy and Heathcliff, childhood friends, are cruelly separated by class, fate and the actions of others. But uniting them is something even stronger: an all-consuming passion that sweeps away everything that comes between them. Even death!

Even Death! hahahaha….

]]> http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/03/sassy-gay-friend/feed/ 0 http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/03/warcraft-time-for-a-graphics-update/ http://www.ravven.com/blog/2010/03/warcraft-time-for-a-graphics-update/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:55:47 +0000 Ravven http://www.ravven.com/blog/?p=2331 Due to the fun of hanging with Single Abstract Noun, I’ve gotten back into the game in a big way. I haven’t played so much Warcraft since I virtually quit the game when I stopped raiding. Even though the game is fairly old, everything considered, the graphic style has held up quite well. There are a few areas, though, where it’s really starting to bother me a bit.

1. It’s time to redesign the character models.

I love Kit above every other game character that I have spent endless hours with. But when I look at her awkward spade-shaped hands and triangular fingers, it really bothers me. Mouths are bad. Male characters are creepy and ugly – most of them seem to have harelips, and they all look kind of pissed off and constipated, as though they’re in need of a good poo. I could never play one. Blood elf males are better facially, but still suffer from the grotesquely overwide shoulders. Human models are boring, and human females are saddled with the worst dance in the game. It just won’t do!

Now, everything doesn’t have to be as beautiful as, say, Aion. I quite like the look of the towns and outdoor environments, and the very stylised Warcraft art direction works for me. But please, please, please – redo the avatars.

2. The older armor and weapons need an update.

I get the starting out in rags and gradually acquiring better gear thing, that’s fine. But again, the older textures are really showing their age. They’re so low-res that you just get a vague impression of broadly-sketched in texture. Give me more modern textures, where the cloth looks like cloth, and metal actually looks like metal. Newer high-level armor sets are fine, a lot of work has gone into those. But the really old textures are pathetic.

When interviewed, the developers and designers at Blizzard are pretty honest about not really knowing what, exactly, give Warcraft the magic that it has, that indefinable quality of “fun”. And I would never wish anything to detract from that. But surely, better character models would only increase pleasure in the game, without diverging too much from the look and feel of the environment.

That said, though, I am having an enormous amount of fun running around with my blocky, floppy-footed troll hunter with the vacant, somewhat retarded face. She’s smarter than she looks…and a lot more fun. :)

P. has been playing Star Trek Online, having discovered Klingon pvp. Our computer rooms are on the top floor of the house, with a connecting door so we can yell at each other. It’s rather nice. Quite often we play together, when we’re playing the same games. When we’re not, then we go off and do our own thing. We always have something to talk about, and have an outlet for our geekiness (gaming is something that I mostly just don’t talk about at work, aside from casual references).

The cats have their favourite spots around the rooms. Occasionally they insist on quality time, usually by sitting in front of the computer screens, being obstructive. My room is dark blue, filled with a wall of books, several computers, a squashy reading chair and lamp, and a poster of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow.

This is my homespace, this is where I relax. Where the sound of space battles meets clashing blades, where the air smells of my favourite Nag Champa, where we can call to each other from our separate universes.

On some characters (not all, just some) I experience very low fps (9-12) and drawn-out, stuttering sound – to the point where the game is unplayable. I’ve tried everything:

• Full reformat and reinstall of my operating system
• Full download and fresh reinstall of Warcraft
• Playing without any addons at all
• Updated all drivers, including scary motherboard drivers

At this point, I’m out of options. :( It’s possible the powersupply isn’t powering the graphics card sufficiently, but aside from that I’ve no idea. It’s a decent spec, with a good graphics card and a lot of RAM. Frustrating in the extreme.

I joined SINGLE ABSTRACT NOUN, and they’re a very social, literate group of gamers – I highly recommend stopping by and saying hi if you can. I’ll be the one getting killed because of my terrible lag. :D

EDIT: And after weeks of frustration, and not one but THREE support tickets, I seem to have fixed it. (Please don’t let me have jinxed it by saying that!) For some reason, enabling 3D sound fixes the low framerate. Thank all the gods for Teh Internets and the ONE PERSON IN THE ENTIRE WORLD who had the same problem and posted how they fixed it. One. Person. Bless you.

As Tamarind says in the post, one of the rules is that you “Leave your wowcock in the stand by the door”. It doesn’t get much better than that. That’s pretty much why I stopped raiding, and then stopped playing my mains…I was so sick of having to list achievements, and playing the “my gearscore is bigger than yours” type of games, that it just wasn’t fun any more.

And it’s on a roleplay server! That is so tempting. I miss RP servers. I may have to reactivate my account and join them. :)

Allods Online, as I’m sure you have all read, has fixed their cash shop prices and I think shocked everyone by their fairness – they really did make some reasonably substantial cuts in the laughable original prices. They’re still more expensive than the Russian shop, of course, but they’re better. Fear of Death will evidently still roll out in a future patch, which still gets my panties in a bunch. It’s a nasty mechanic and I hate being held hostage by a game mechanic like that – even if the price is more palatable now.

Like many other people, I’ll support a game that I like. I’ll buy things. I don’t like the venality, or the mistrust of the customer base, or whatever you would call it – the logic that says that we’re all a bunch of cheap bastards so they need to force us to pay. If that is your opinion, just make it a subscription game. But let me feel good about buying fripperies and mounts and xp potions.

Well, it’s now 5:00, and it’s time to go home. To play, most probably. :) Thank goodness for escapism.

Due to deciding that I didn’t want to raid anymore, I’ve fallen out of step with my guild, and feel like a stranger there most of the time. My Horde paladin has a bizarre problem with low framerate and sound stuttering, which makes her unplayable. She’s the only one on the account who is affected…addons, no addons, removing all the usual things, clean install of WoW, nothing helps. Customer service just sends me form letters telling me to delete my WTF and Cache folders and delete addons, which I’ve done. Since she’s the only one that I’m currently playing, it’s a bit frustrating.

I’m currently spending time in Allods, still playing a tiny bit of Star Trek Online, and I’ve re-subscribed to EVE Online, so I think I might cancel temporarily. I don’t know why it should feel like the end of an era…but I’ve made so many friends there, and I have many good memories going all the way back to Vanilla WoW and Molten Core, BWL, and so on.

Perhaps we always feel sad about moving on, and putting old, much-loved toys away in the closet.