MMO Ipsum Generator

Posted by FelizB on Jul 31, 2012 in Blog | 7 comments

Writer’s block’s been hitting you hard? Need to fill a new blog with some basic content? Hope this lorem ipsum generator will help. It will produce a couple of paragraphs of MMORPG related, randomly generated filler text. It is based on text collected from my fellow bloggers, all listed in my blogroll. As an added challenge, find your own quote. Enjoy and produce many articles 🙂

Generating 3 paragraphs.

Please consider to include the link to this generator at the bottom of the generated text.

We should just accept the fact that the game will quickly disappoint us and we will look to Blizzard to save us once again. Other than my lack of interest in Guild Wars 2, I suppose I'd be the kind of relatively inactive annual pass player that they might be targeting with this launch window. The first one will come out this December and the second a year after, in 2013. Then my enemies are on me like white on rice. I’ve decided to go down the Blades and Pistols route and am going for the Paladin deck as that seems to suit my play-style pretty well.

Draenei have a fairly extant commitment to being Lightsworn children of the Naaru, as well as being universe-wide diaspora. As my hunter slowly picks her way through the Mines of Moria, I decided it was about time to get my alt on and roll up another character. Additionally, a guild designed from the outset for WvWvW can focus on specific perks that help in those specific situations, unlike a smaller guild which often has to also suit folks who like some PvE or crafting or whatever. Given the way things work out, I guess we're looking at late August for the pre-release patch.

The controls do everything you would expect, even allowing you to touch the characters and enemies you want to perform an action without forcing you to utilize old school menus. When we finally managed to be online at the same time and chat with each other, he asked me one question: “How do you get new skills in this game?” That meant ditching my Sentinel soul, scaling back on my Shaman talents, and weaving in a very strong dose of Justicar. The good thing is that if you decide to unlearn a crafting discipline and pick a new active one, you do not lose the progress you already made in the old one.

Generated by MMO Ipsum Generator.

The Dimski Rule

Posted by FelizB on Jul 25, 2012 in The Secret World, World of Warcraft | 3 comments

Over at the Secret World Forums people are starting to complain about the elitist attitude of some players when it comes to creating groups for their dungeons. “QL10 only !” Most MMO players know this as “must have gearscore >5000”. A couple of people just don’t want to fail in their dungeon run, or just want to rush through it, because they are farming this or that.

What they fail to see is that they make things harder for themselves by having to wait so much longer for a matching candidate. Plus gearscore, or whatever measure your game of choice offers is just a single measurement out of a lengthy list of parameters. On top of it, it can be easily falsified. Who hasn’t fudged their gearscore by equipping that piece of purple PVP armor, or dps gear when running as a tank or healer? And of course it leaves one major component untouched: a player’s skill and knowledge.

Which brings me to Dimski, the shining beacon of light, aaaahmm, death. Dimski was the second death knight I had leveled. We had transferred servers and my wife had been raiding with a guild for a while. In the meantime I brought Dimski up without much haste. Eventually I joined my wife’s guild, mostly in purple dungeon gear plus a piece or two from the Wintergrasp vault. That guild certainly took their raiding seriously, fielding three 10 man raid teams and of course 25 man raid. Of course they had gear requirements for raid participation and of course I didn’t qualify by a good amount.

But rules go out the window when a raid is one head or two short and I didn’t have to wait for long to be a part of the my first 25 man raid. They modified the raid rules afterward. Have a gearscore of 2700 or generate 4600 dps.  (number’s are made up, i really don’t remember the exact numbers). 4600 dps was the number my little death knight had created in inferior gear beating 2 other guilded and geared deathknights. And all I had done was reading Elitist Jerks, using the proper specification and a good spell rotation.

It certainly wasn’t that much work for me to learn what was taught by the players at  that website. But it was already enough to overcome weeks of raiding for better gear. I don’t want to show off with this post what hot shot I am. I am certainly not. But it shows me and now hopefully a few more people, that a pure gear or experience requirement, like it is requested in many games, just doesn’t cover everything.

In fact, players should be happy that our games of choice aren’t gear dependent in a way that it blocks a player with less time invested, but that it allows to make up for this time investment by deploying smarter or more skillful play. This actually broadens the base of players to pick from for any one dungeon or raid, or any other undertaking for a group.

Of course there is a “downside”: A min/max player doesn’t have choices, or only a very limited number, since he can only pick the best choices. Which lead to Ghostcrawler’s decision to limit the number of talent choices in Mists of Pandaria to, in the end, allow for more choice.

My friend Nolan Dalla

Posted by FelizB on Jul 24, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Be warned right away, this has nothing to do with online gaming, but at least the internet is involved.

The setting is Las Vegas, the Mirage Poker room, shortly before midnight in early August. I had been playing limit Texas Holdem for a while already, when a new player comes into the room and is sent to our table. He looked familiar from afar, and when he sat down across from me, it became clear. It was Nolan Dalla, the poker author. I knew him, he didn’t know me, nor did he know that I knew him. So I was waiting for a chance to introduce myself. In poker, the best chance to introduce yourself is after you beat somebody in a hand. Which I did. I think. It’s been a while.

A good number of years ago, make it 20, I was bitten by a bug. The gambling bug. I had come across  a few articles on the internet telling me that blackjack was beatable and how to do it. Some research brought me to the usenet group rec.gambling. Blackjack lost its charm quickly, since the casinos don’t like you if you know what you are doing. Which brought me to poker, the other subject the usenet group was discussing.

At that time, say 1995, you weren’t a serious poker player if you didn’t read Cardplayer Magazine. One of the columns I read regularly was “Tales From the Felt” by Nolan Dalla. It was only a small surprise to see him participating in the discussions on rec.gambling.*. The group of people discussing poker in a serious, almost scientific approach was small and if you were halfway internet savvy, you’d end up in this group.

To top it off, this group’s been meeting annually in Las Vegas for 22 years now. It’s called BARGE. Most of the time we’ve met downtown, since the majority of people were students on a budget when it all started. Not so much anymore, since a couple of them have become rich and famous, winning World Series of Poker bracelets, becoming poker commentators, .com millionaires or are helping out on Wall Street. Some of them succeeded in more than one field.

Over the years I’ve met Nolan at every BARGE I participated in and a few times on other occasions. He’s always come across as a smart man with many interests and a career in the US foreign service. Which gives me the European connection to him, since he’s been stationed in Romania in 1989 when their regime came down in a bloody conflict. What are you going to do in an embassy while the world outside turns upside down? Host a poker game and make contact with the rebels. And meet his future wife Marieta, a Romanian native.

Nolan is now Communications Director for the World Series of Poker. He’s  published the biography of Stu Ungar, 3 time winner of the World Series of Poker main event and tragic genius. It’s titled “One of a Kind”.

I am glad to help Nolan Dalla with his next undertaking, a blog to publish his writings of many years. Writings that go far beyond the poker essays I know, travel reports, the events of the Romanian revolution, politics (after all, he has a degree in Political Science) and much more. I am looking forward to read many more of his essays and to learn more what’s going on in his mind.

See for yourself at www.nolandalla.com

Zombie Apocalypse Survival Tip: Mountain Bikes Rock

Posted by FelizB on Jul 22, 2012 in Blog | 2 comments

Last week I touched on travel and several important reminders on who and how to travel. This week I pose a question; What is the best mode of transportation during a worldwide epic crisis, such as a zombie apocalypse? Here’s a hint; the motor is you. That’s right, a bicycle. More specifically a hybrid or mountain bike. You do NOT want a road bike because you might not always have the luxury of having a road to ride it on. A hybrid bike will have a little slip off road and the mountain bike will have a little drag on well paved roads. The street (or road / speed) bike are almost unusable off road, thus why it’s a bad choice for even short travel. Bipedal locomotion is always a good alternative, but for speed and distance a good well maintained bike will save the day. But why no motorcycles or cars… maybe an ATV? Unless it’s 100% solar powered and silent I’d suggest thinking about where you’d get the gas or the amount of noise you’d make attracting every hungry mouth within listening distance. Under different circumstances one of those might make more sense for the short term, but ALWAYS bring at least 1 or 2 bikes with you unless the trip is short enough to walk… then walk.

 
Photo by: Ktos

How to Exploit the Chain Subtype with Ranged Weapons

Posted by FelizB on Jul 17, 2012 in Blog, Guides, The Secret World | 0 comments

English please. I realize this title is completely meaningless for somebody who’s not playing “The Secret World”.  But hopefully it catches somebody’s interest who’s gotten a bit deeper into the workings of the combat abilities in TSW. For the record: this is not an exploit in the standard MMORPG sense. This is using a game mechanic in a way the developers intended.

Each weapon group in TSW has its own way to build resources: Melee weapons build up with each use of a builder attack and slowly out of combat. Which means, for melee, you can open your attack with a finisher using maximum resources. Magic is building up resources only when builder attacks are being used. And finally, ranged weapons build up resources with each builder attack, but they are bound to a single target. If the target dies, the resources are lost. Magic and melee attacks are independent of the target. They remain usable after a target’s death.

However, with chain attacks things become interesting. A chain attack hits a first victim and then jumps over to up to 4 more targets. Imagine a lightning bolt not only hitting you, but the 4 people right next to you. If a ranged resource is built through a chain attack, it is built up on each target hit by the chain. Which means, you can execute a finishing attack with maximum resources, switch to the next target and execute another maxed finisher. Rinse and repeat.

Only pistols, elemental and blood magic have chains as part of their standard abilities, but the use of this mechanic is not restricted to these weapons. Some passive abilities can turn certain attacks into chains. As long as the resource building is done with a chain attack by one of those weapon types or triggered by a passive ability and the finishing move is using a ranged weapon, this mechanic can be used.

Caveat: Right now, my pistol/elemental character delivers pretty good dps. I just don’t get around to tab target through 3 or 4 enemies and dispatch them one by one with finishers. They are down way earlier. That’s why it took a while to notice this great option.

Conspiracy Theory of the Day

Posted by FelizB on Jul 14, 2012 in The Secret World | 0 comments

It looks to me as if in this alternate reality the Orochi Group or one of its subsidiaries has the population convinced that keypads, accepting three digit codes, are safe enough to protect the deepest mysteries of secret societies. They did convince the Illuminati in Kingsmouth. You either spend some time googling the code. Or an hour or two trying all 1000 codes. Okay, you may have to bring a gun for the zombies. I bet there will be more of those easy to unlock keypads throughout this world. Its cheaper than back doors or little holes in the frame to reset the device with a pin.

I should mention that the code they protect their own facility with is 6 digits?