Wow! Belated Gratitude.

The title of this post is more than a terrible pun.

Perhaps a month ago it was a typical workday, but I had a meeting scheduled at around 9am, at an office closer to home than my normal base of operations. The net result was that I had an extra hour or so to kill before starting work. Jules had already shot off for the day and I had nothing better to do, so I fired up WoW and logged in to my brand new Shammy.

I was dicking around near the edge of the Northern Barrens, perhaps level 8 or 9. All of a sudden I get a wisp from somebody I don't know. Shift-click, what? An 85 Orc Shammy. What does he want with me?

I don't remember the dialog exactly, but it basically boiled down to this guy claiming he was leaving WoW and wanting to spread his accumulated assets around before he left. Admittedly I was pretty skeptical but I figured since he wasn't asking for anything in return, what was the risk? All of a sudden out of freakin nowhere, this giant drake descends from the skies, with him riding it. Keep in mind I'm a practically naked Tauren in greys/whites slaying wandering wildlife. Him coming down and landing next to me was fucking majestic.

Up pops the trade window, and with no questions asked, a bunch of greens, level-appropriate gear appears. I grab it, and it wasn't until the trade was completed and I open my inventory that I notice the cash. 30,000 Gold. Thirty Thousand.

Now I'm not some mad farmer or hardcore player, so even 1K is a big deal to me. But Thirty Thousand G? Jesus. It's like somebody handed me an envelope with.. Christ, I don't know how much. Let's get some perspective. Depending on where you shop, WoW gold is valued at around $0.01 USD a piece. So in that sense, it's like somebody handed me $300. But in game, Buying the parts and tipping for assembly for, say, the motorcycle mount, is around 12 to 16,000 gold. He gave me enough money to buy two motorcycles.

In the end, he was really nice. He was moving on to Rift, he'd been a part of the WoW scene for a few years, and it was time to move on. It seemed to mean a lot to him that I was an enhancement shammy, as he was, and he asked to follow me around and slaughter a few beasts with the new gear I'd been gifted. I was more than happy to oblige. It was part RP, part charity, and all awesome.

I'm not going to post his name here, in case somebody stumbles across is and starts bugging him for free stuff. But for what it's worth.. I don't know how many others got gifted that day, but I feel that in some way I'm his in-game spiritual successor.

So thanks, friend. Thanks for the stuff, thanks for the cash. Thanks for being so friendly. And most of all, thanks for creating an immersive, amazing experience that will stay in my memory for years to come.

A Brief Sabbatical

Hello little blog.
Did you think I had forgotten you?




...well, I had. For a while, anyway.
But lately I've been streaming things through my mind that might be worth writing down, if only so I can consult them later. Had a few things brewing up in the back of my head that I should really get around to putting in action. Or at least put into words so I can hash out my processes a little.

Things to do:
1) Fix the boot.ini on my work laptop (eugh, maybe I should just backup and request a reimage).
2) Load up the other partition on my personal laptop with Snow Leopard again, and see if I can't track down a fix for the lack of Mac support for Intel integrated video chips.
3) Set up J's Chumby properly.
4) Level a toon to 85 in World of Warcraft so I can say I've at least seen endgame content.
5) Sniff around for some digital copies of the textbooks I'm going to need for SP1 of my OUA course. I have a horrible feeling that saving %25 by ordering from Amazon is going to burn me in the delivery window.

Resetting my TF2 Stats: The Great Purge (and Inevitable Analysis)

I've got a couple articles in the pipe at the moment, but I've been on holidays (and also hideously lazy, though that's a given, really).

Something I've been tossing around lately is the idea of resetting my TF2 stats, and I just took the plunge. So for the sake of posterity, here are my old statistics up to the 8th of August 2009.

See the bizarre Pyro score anomaly? That's what screwing around on farming servers gets you. It's half of why I reset in the first place.

Clearly I'm a career medic, but in the days before reset I became hellbent on getting the Pyromancer achievement, and as such wound up accruing lot of extra Pyro time, almost 20 hours worth, in order to get it.

The Pyromancer effort, coupled with my compulsive decision a few months back to delete all my unlockable items, has really renewed my appreciation for the Pyro as a class in general. They're almost universally panned as a nub class, but who else gets ludicrous close range damage, decent health (175HP), can extinguish teammates, return explosive projectiles, disrupt the aim and movement of even the heaviest enemies, guarantee melee crits, inspires terror in every single other class, and has generally awesome taunts and characterization?

You know it to be true. Turn to the dark side, and let our power engulf you.

Anyway, with that tangent out of the way, I thought I'd analyze my stats a little. My hours were as such:

Medic - 253:54:01
Pyro - 140:45:33
Engineer - 105:00:46
Scout - 74:57:08
Soldier - 46:26:49
Heavy - 33:47:39
Demoman - 26:01:19
Spy - 15:02:15
Sniper - 5:44:11

This calculates out to a total playtime of 701:39:41 - or a little over 29 days straight. Offensive classes (Scout, Solly, Pyro) earned over 262 hours, Defensive (Demo, Heavy, Engy) got about 165 hours, and Support classes (Medic, Sniper, Spy) rang in at roughly 275 hours.

Clearly I'm more inclined towards confrontational classes, which is evident even in my weighting towards Offensive and Support class roles (with Medic being my main, Spy/Sniper left in 8th and 9th slot, and Pyro/Scout taking 2nd/4th).

There is plenty more analyses to be done if one was so inclined; but I'll leave you with this: at the time of my reset, TF2 had been online and playable for 668 days (one year, 9 months and 29 days). This works out to me having played, on average, a little over one hour per day since release. Truly, this is the mark of an enjoyable and well-designed game.

My extended statistics are available below. Much respect to ImageHosting.com for permitting a 1048x3075 PNG file without any resizing, and not requiring an account.

Of Hardware Hacks and Interface Issues

So last night I tried a new type of problem-solving when it comes to getting software to work for me. I've owned Assassin's Creed for a while now, and never really got into it, which is a real shame. The storyline is interesting, the graphics are lush, the environment is fascinating, and it's always fun to leap from a belltower onto an unsuspecting mark as you bury your concealed blade in their throat.

Mister Stabby, this is Randomdude Abouttodie. Randomdude, Mister Stabby.

The problem I'd had with it was primarily a matter of interface. Assassin's Creed, while not technically a port per se, it does seem to have been designed more with consoles in mind. As a PC user, the basic control setup seems simple enough, with movement and camera control intuitive, thanks to the WASD/mouse input system every third person game ever has taught us. Where it really fell down was the functions; target locking, fighting, talking etc. Even onscreen, the function icons are arranged in the classic four-items-in-a-diamond-pattern. It seems fine, but in order to translate that to a PC setup, the default keybinds were all over the place, using LShift, Space, E and Enter (among others) - messy, slow and difficult to get used to. It might not seem like the biggest problem, but I play for immersion and experience, so to stop and have to think about which controls I need to be using every ten seconds is a dealbreaker for me.

Rather than spending half my night screwing around with variations on the binds, and wind up with something that was clumsy at best, I decided to try another approach - a console controller. At it's core, AC is a glorified 3D platformer - and we all know the native home of the platformer is the console.

I dusted off one of the old Xbox Controller S units that we had lying around, and lootedmy brother's USB adapter for it. Ten minutes of tinkering later, I had a fully functional input device in my hands. Credit paid where credit is due, however - the driver package that permitted flawless function was released by a gentleman known as redcl0ud, and the rebuild of said drivers that enable x64 function was done by a couple of guys at the PlanetAMD64 forums; Driver and BeAvErMaTiC. So thanks, guys :)

An Xbox-to-USB cable. They replace the small cable between the breakaway point and the console plug, so you can use the controller in standard USB ports. You can lay hands on one of these babies for about $10, but if you're feeling adventurous, making one yourself is a pretty simple hack.

The install process was relatively simple (I had to hunt down a custom .DLL for x64 compatibility), and the game itself detected the device with no trouble. I was worried that I'd have to map the controller, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover the game had a set of defaults that worked perfectly. Nice work, Ubisoft.

So after a few minutes of brainstorming, googling and troubleshooting I had a controller that intuitively suited the playstyle of the title, and an evening of quality gaming ahead. And guess what? Assassin's Creed really is as much fun as I'd hoped it would be :)

What I'm taking away from all this is that while no game is perfect, sometimes a concept or idea native to a different platform is the only thing needed to complete the equation. I know I'll certainly be keeping this solution in mind the next time I face a similar issue.