Free Torchlight? Great game, shitty distribution.

A free copy of Torchlight sounds good to me, so when the offer below ping’ed my email I started jumping through hoops to get it. Several resets, installations, and such later and I still have to wait for a key. Stuff it.

My advice to people is: unless you’re already using Arc (a steam style launcher, which is perhaps used for Champions Online or the StarTrek game?) for games don’t bloody bother.

When you have a problem – try their facebook link, which tells you to try the Support site, which has a different login to be created (wtf?), or open a ticket, which then links to an article which confirms that you’ll have to wait for a key AFTER you login to the game. Huh?

Too many hoops to jump through, a process too unclear, and frankly there are better ways to run a promotion than this malarky. Skip this and do something else.

I’m willing to bet thumping your head on the wall while listening to One Direction’s back catalog on a freighter ship bound for Iceland in winter is better than this crap.

Aside – Why in a god’s green earth does each game, game distributor, reseller, or whatever need a separate “launcher/service” to star their games? Blizzard get a pass because you can run the apps from the icons easily, and they’ve got 3+ games in the market that are current. I accept Steam happily too, although I’ve only two games on Steam at the moment.

Especially when they try to run in background and start when the PC does by default. We don’t need 5x different launchers sitting in the background chewing CPU and bandwidth, so stop frakking making these games use them. At least make the “optional” check boxes deselected.

TLDR = IF I WANT TO PLAY YOUR GAME I’LL CLICK THE ICON. DOLT!

See you online in a game which knows how to give things away, understands that hoops are painful, and at least tries to help. But Torchlight is (apparently) free at the moment, and you’ll need to see how much pain you’re willing to go through. I certainly think the game itself was great when it was released. Great game, shitty distribution.

Grumpy TyphoonAndrew today. I pity the virtual monsters I’ll meet tonight.

Slowly leveling, very impressed

I’m about 5% away from level 93 now, and still loving Shadowmoon Valley. As a zone it is well put together. The rares spawn often, they drop interesting and sometimes useful things, the monsters are squishy enough (especially if you overgear the zone), and the travel time between hubs and quest locations is enough to get you “into” the zone and exploring without being tedious. There are the odd special things found along the way, like the quest to kill animals for steaks, or the special events for the garrison.

It is also a little morbid to look at this zone and think about what we know of the alternative from our character’s own timeline. I can see parallels in the geography and that helps make the story’s impact stronger. I wish I was able to level faster, but not at the cost of missing the experience.

More WoW Round-up

• Subscriber news – Polygon is reporting that WoW is back over 10 million paying players at the moment. That means Warlords of Draenor has returned WoW back to The Burning Crusade subscriber numbers. Fantastic. More players means more diversity and options. 3.3 million sales at launch.
• Observation – Local Australian severs have made a huge difference in the game to me in terms of latency. No longer to monsters infrequently “stagger-jump” or rever to a place slightly when they are fighting. I love it.
• Observation – It appears that the massive login queues are (mostly) gone too.
• WoW’s 10th Anniversary event starts soon in Molten Core – see rant below… It contains foul language, so you’ve been warned in advance.

Quick WoW round-up

Fair to say WoW is aborbing my thoughts and time again, so here are a few things which happened recently.

• A WoW periodic table of personalities, because re-thinking organisation of these personalities is kind of fun. Good stuff.
• Subscribers have been gifted 5 days free from Blizzard for the launch issues, which is a nice way of saying thanks and sorry. Good on them. I want to say to that the posts and comments everywhere ranting about how this is “expected” or somehow not enough make me a little ashamed to be the same species as the whiners. Just a little.
• Garrisons are fun, even for the short period I’ve been in mine, at level 91. What I seeing and what I’m reading are looking good.
• A WoW Paladin guide for preparation for Warlords, how-tos, and such.

Happy hunting, farming, killing, looting, and roleplaying – TyphoonAndrew

Wow ain’t dying.

WoW Nagrand oceanic. Position 3642 in queue, 126 mins. Dead? Right.
I’m kind of happy it’s like this: we have players everywhere.
Perhaps the Ddns attack affected times, perhaps it’s all the returning players. A bit of realm maint and the odd tweak we might see more capacity. I’ll wait. The content isn’t going anywhere.

Updates:

• Position and time flings around a bit; from 45 mins to 450 minutes. Yikes!
• 2 hours later, still a 2+ hour wait estimated.
• 3 hours later, 45 min to 1.5 hours to wait. And I think the queue is going down because we all need to go to bed to sleep.

WoW subscriptions and resubscription

After a day of chatting about WoW to the nefarious gamer who first recruited me to World of Warcraft; I’ve resubscribed. It took a day to break my will, which means one of my favourite sayings by Oscar Wilde applies totally, “I can resist everything except temptation”.

Last night I ran Karazhan’s first boss five times to try to get the mount, UP once, and solved the archaeology Horn which makes your character bigger. It was great.

Related old news says WoW subs have increased again too as players return for Warlords (MMO Champ 14 Oct). We’ve seen this increase occur once before with the pre-Mists subscribers. It isn’t news in itself, but I think we will see a slightly different result from the Mists pre-sub drop off. My hunch (based upon only my gut feel) is that this time the subs will take significantly longer to drop away. They will drop away, but I’d not be surprised to see them climb upward again before doing so, and certainly expect the initial downward drop to take longer than it did in MoP.

Why? Part of my hunch is that the simplification from the item changed and the squish will remove a gearing attitude, and thus make it easier to maintain multiple sets, and therefore grant flexibility. There is also the appeal of WoD as something new, which is also a return to something that was popular back in the day. The Burning Crusade really built the WoW player-base, and many of us look fondly on Draenor.

Lastly I think they know how to make reasonable content, and many players and companies know that this formula works well. Yes, it is grindy, and a themepark, and often unbalanced, and also affected by a vocal minority … but everything is, especially in computer games. If Blizzard deliver quality the players will play. So far it looks promising.

A great garrison overview by AskMrRobot

AskMrRobot’s blog has a great guide for Garrisons (thank you Ask Mr Robot). I knew almost nothing about them, but after skimming through the basics I think it will be a major feature I’ll use in Warlords. Truthfully I can see garrisons being played on many alts and mains from day one, to acquire what they have to offer. It appears that Garrisons will have a straight up advantage to using them (very much like the Farm in Mists) and a wide breadth of game-play too. The fact that you could have a main with a raiding garrison, then alts also generating gold and materials is excellent.

Impressed, especially the chat sheet at the end which shows which garrison feature selections are better for raiding, farming, alts, or pets. The guide indicates that a full garrison will cost around 39,000 gold. Holy snap!

Thoughts on the pre-WoD events

An hour in the Blasted Lands of questing to kill a few generals, gather some (un)important items, and harassing the new (old) baddies didn’t feel especially profound. I kept wanting to understand why what we were doing would actually help in the long term. Sure, a strike at a few generals and supply lines will hurt the Iron Horde in the short term, but not stem the flow of the attack; or will it? Did it?

Were the quests enough to push them back through the portal, and then take the fight to them on the other (new?) Draenor? I know that is what we are doing, but the landscape didn’t change after the quests were done. A switch might happen when the expansion is released, but it would have been great to see a phased approach to the area akin to the Death Knight starting area which used phases to change over time as the quests were completed.

If we can shove them back through the portal, or control at least this side of the portal, then why not just destroy the damn portal? Or bury it, or nuke it with a manna bomb. I’m sure more will come from the release to help answer these questions.

So effort wise the quests were a little short. Great for people with multiple alts though.

The rewards were good – a boost for new level 90s, but nothing to make the current end gear redundant, which is good. In a few days there will be “green” gear to replace most of the high level items anyway so its really zero impact in the long term. I’m doubly thankful to have an heirloom weapon to carry through the expansion leveling. I just need to decide when to buy Warlords. At the moment I’m looking forward to it, but not in a mad rush kind of way. I know its (soon to be) there to be experienced, and I get to pick when I eat the cake.

Garrosh Defeated

I hate Garrosh’s storyline, but I had the chance to join the Ex-Tenebra guildies in a casual run to kill the last few bosses in Siege of Ogrimmar. I must say it was a thrill to see the content I thought I’d miss out on.

The plan was to return after the expansion launched, but a few free days gets you motivated; and with that small effort (large effort by the guildies to do it each week which made it look easy) I’ve now got a Heroic Heirloom two handed axe for 90-100 and a few other items of nice loot – probably far too late to be of large benefit.

I’ll add a few screenies of the axes – it had me set for tanking and dps now.

And of course I died early in the Garrosh fight and watched the rest play out – not much more to be expected for a player who’d never seen the Garrosh Hellscream fight before, and only been in Siege LFR once before, and left that run in disgust.

Happy killing folks. See you after the expansion hits.

More on Adventure Era

I’ll admit to playing this little IOS game too much. So much so that I think I can offer some tips to other players.

• Plan your login/play times so that you match your expected gapto the work effort of tasks. For example there is no point using an extra worker in a task to get it completed faster if you won’t login till after the longer of the two times. Especially important for research and major upgrades which can take 8-24 hours. Click a long task before bed, and sleep happy.
• You will need to reshuffle where your units are placed to fit in the new ones when land gets tight. I can see why the game does this (to drive in-game purchases) but so far it can be played without spending real money.
• Stockpile your gold as a priority, because everything costs gold in the end. I made the mistake of having plenty of resources, and then struggling to pay to open up a new area of land. The next area of land I want is a steep purchase at 200,000 gold, but thankfully I’ve been focusing on gold as well as other resources so I can afford it. Plan to always have around double the gold of your next land purchase, because it seems relative to the cost of each research task  and the cumulative cost of upgrades.
• Once you open the Trader, check it often. It is a great way to buy resources cheaply. The Trader becomes active a few moments after you login, and seems to be in sync with the gold leprechaun about half the time.
• Research costs a hell of a lot too, so click through the next items you can see but not research yet, so you have an idea of what is coming.
• The Pet serves no purpose. I read somewhere that it opens a new area of land at level 12, but mine hasn’t. Meh, disappointing. Perhaps it only opens when your level matched the pet?

Happy clicking.

Free game time delayed; scared fit

I had all intent to start the free 7 days of wow, and play this past week. Typical for my gaming lifestyle there was a hitch to starting on time and this time the reason is a doozie.

The house was going to be quiet and evenings clear of work distractions. I had cleared my work schedule a bit, and the kids were to be in bed early.

However I didn’t content with getting seriously sick, in fact a heart attack.

While going to bed late last Saturday I suddenly felt the tell tale numb left arm and hand, chest pain, dizziness, sweats, sore jaw, etc. A few minutes later we called the ambulance and it was straight to the hospital, all lights and sirens…no waiting. Paramedics confirmed the reduced heart function as we zoomed to the emergency department. A few scary hours later the incredible doctors had sussed that the heart attack wasn’t normal, especially given my youngish age; and they scheduled me for an angiogram (a camera on a long wire which is fed up inside your heart) a day later. Crap eh.
In the interim I sat in the hospital having a nerve wracking wait to find out if I was in real trouble, how much, and thanking my dumb luck to live near a good hospital.

Thankfully the angiogram confirmed it wasn’t a typical heart attack. Instead of the cause being blocked arteries and poor diet which is darn serious and totally life shattering, what I have is an infection in the heart and surrounding tissue; called myocarditis.

So now I’m home and recovering strength gradually. It’s been a week since the event and my strength isn’t back to normal, but it’s close; nor has my fear of exertion. Knowing that the anti inflammatory drugs are in my system should give confidence, although I can still hear the words of warning from the cardiac doctor very clearly – “take it very slowly. Or next time it’s likely worse.”

I’m told my recovery for this type of heart attack is far faster than normal heart attack, but it’s still two weeks off work and medication for three months. Little pain really compared to what it could have been. The minutes before the ambulance arrived and the experience of being wired twelve different ways to an ECG machine was harrowing. Tubes everywhere.

So I’m writing as a way to reinforce a promise I made to myself during the few days where I didn’t know what the diagnosis was – to improve my health and diet. Considerably. Permanently. From that day forward I’m going to reduce weight (I’m built like a typical nerd, round in the middle), eat better, and avoid junk. Where I choose to indulge it will be moderate. Controlled.

I don’t want to be one of the folk in the bed next to mine on Saturday in the Alfred Hospital. Triple bypasses, life long medications, painful processes, and scary procedures.

Saying it online gets it out into the world; where friends and family will see and understand. If I start to stray a little I hope folks will help reign me in a bit too.
Not that I think I’ll forget what a heart attack was like any time soon. Hopefully back to normal and continue to get fit next week.

Happy living, TyphoonAndrew.