Have you uninstalled WoW yet?

I just uninstalled WoW.

Quite surprised I still had it on my HD, but I was cleaning up and found an extra 25 GB of data now :)

Backed up the WTF, Screenshots and Interface folder, then performed the deletion. Seems I got space for other things again now (*cough*), you know, movies.

Blizzcon was recently up, and you'll be able to find most info about the announcements on MMOC.
* New expansion will be called Warlords of Draenor
* New character models ARE coming (and looking good, except for tauren)
* Level cap 100
* Few to no daily quests. - wtf?
* A WoW movie is in fact coming - no high hopes on it being good yet.


Wii

Getting a Wii soon. I've been postponing that, since, well, I've always held up the thought that a PC can do anything a Console can and then some. But my GF came home one day very enthusiastic about "a few games", then you know it's a good idea to get one :p

It's a fun machine to play Bomberman on with a few coworkers as well. *cackle*


Steam

Meanwhile, I've been collecting some steam cards - I must say Humble Bundle is insanely nice. 1$ for 4-5 games. So and then you can pick up a few for free because other people already got a bunch of them. Let's just say my collection has been growing rapidly of late!

Some recomendations:
* FEZ, It's 2D, it's 3D, you won't know till you play it. Very well done.
* Bastion, hack n slash :P  Always a favorite genre.
* Batman, Arkham Asylum - they said it was good, and it IS good!

I'll go ahead and try some more later,. it seems the F2P genre is growing steadily on Steam as well - a very nice thing I must say. Let's hope WoW will be on there eventually. Or at least UO, just for kicks.


Also, Path of Exile as mentioned in the previous post, is now on Steam as well!

Diablo 3, Reaper of Souls

Diablo 3 expansion upcoming, titled "Reaper of Souls". This expansion has been awaited and predicted (just not the name yet) since before Diablo 3 eas released.

No doubt you've seen the cinematic by now,. but if not I'll help you out. Of the many things Blizzard does, their cinematics are among the few things nobody can really complain about.

But in short there's a "2.0" version of Diablo 3 coming up.
The game seems more like WoW than Diablo 2 in a number of aspects, and many Diablo fans will tell you that's a bad thing. I'm one of those. Boss timers, level 60 cap? Well,. I'll leave that can of worms for now. It's an obvious method of uninventive developers to try and milk the players in a similar manner that's "succeeded" with World of Warcraft.




Personally, Diablo 3's expected fun was so lacking that it's just put me off from really worrying about buying an expansion or not for the time being. Of course that's not just purely the fault of Blizzard-activision. It's that there's just so many things that can be wrong with a game before you stop trying to make the excuse "but it's diablo, it has to be good" and quit playing the game.

There ARE greener pastures out there! But more on that in a minute.

Diablo 3 LoD... Or rather RoS will feature a beta sometime this year (2013)
* New class "Crusader", strength based so start hoarding barbarian gear.
* Level cap increased to 70.
* One extra act added.
* Paragon levels will become account wide, rather than per-character. And have no limit (meaning level 99999 and above if you wish to spend that much time) So, character advancement points much like everquest. If you thought bots were bad now, just wait until people start farming for this!
* Paragon levels will allow you to allocate stat points. Respeccing is under review, no promises as usual. (Yeah that means +50 int, etc)
* "New" (The mystic) artisan added which will allow you to change the appearance of your gear (much like WoW hierlooms)
* New Gem "diamond" - probably gives resist all.
* Bigger and better loot, more DPS, more fireworks, you name it.
* Random dungeons with random floors for "loot runs", to improve replayability.
* Most game changes will be free for all players, new act and class will require the expansion to be installed.

So, out of those things, which interest you the most?
Personally, I'd say the paragon levels. Strangely, since the highest paragon level I've got is 3 or 4. I stopped bothering around then. No friends to play with and no desire to make new ones due to a horrible lacking chat channel. You know, the bot ridden pissing pond filled with bots that they thought would be a GREAT replacement for the old Diablo 2 chat channels. (Though nowadays those are 90% bots as well, blizzard does a really bad job at cleaning those cheaters up.. Ban "waves" just do not work people,. get it through your thick gold plated skulls)

But anyway,. one of the major issues with Diablo 3 is the Auction house. They've said so themselves even. Why is it a problem though? Well, if you have a game which focuses heavily on loot and items, and then makes all those items including the "very best" ones available for simple gold or dollars, then people will focus on that place where those items are available for gold or dollars rather than going out and "playing the game", because the chances of finding the items they want while "playing the game" are so slim as to have better chances winning the powerball lottery. You might as well not play, or send a bot to farm gold for you and then simply buy the item you want.

Luckily blizzard has realised this issue themselves by now, and we can only hope they'll be smart about fixing it. (Don't get your hopes up though, ever since the Activision merger any hopes of something smart coming out of Blizzard are about as small as EA ever publically admitting they're greedy idiots)

What do we have to really look forward to nowadays?
Well, there's a team of developers who actually bothered to look at what gamers enjoyed when playing Diablo 2, then looked at everything they didn't like in Diablo 3. And then, rather than copy everything Blizzard did wrong and shoot some poor excuses at the fans about having made bad choices and other blah blah blah, without actually fixing anything... They went ahead and made a GREAT game (which is still in beta, mind you) that is completely FREE to play!

I'm talking about Path of Exile. And if you haven't heard of it before now, then you should stop whatever you're doing right now (but please finish reading this post first) and go install this game right now! Download link is Right Here. Or you can keep reading while it's downloading.. It'll take a while.

Some highlights:
* Atmosphere. Nice gloomy, dark, drab and some might say boring looking. No rainbow fairy blinking eyesores here like in WoW and D3. Dungeons are dark, and sometimes it's hard to see. That adds to the suspense and it's lovely just like that.
* No gold. You don't need to farm gold to repair your gear for 500.000g or bid 240m on that one sword you want, this game has no gold. Armor is always durable and will not abandon you in the middle of an intense fight. This might seem very strange to some RPG players, after all, gold is the one-all thing that is shared with nearly every single game ever made. Money pays for things, and things make the world go around.
Instead of gold, you get scrolls, and baubles and misc items which can be used to enhance and upgrade your gear, re-roll sockets, imbue magical effects or simply identify new finds. I assure you, it works. But, I'd recommend saving up everything you find until you can get a better understanding of the trade values.
* Socketed gems can be removed whenever you want and re-used. Your gems grow as you level, can be handed to alt characters, used and reused, swapped out and so on. Gems give you skills, and using this you can make a unique build for your character that is nearly guaranteed to be unique. Unlike diablo 3's cookie cutter builds. (even though blizzard said there wouldn't be any cookie cutter builds) There are even gems which enhance other gems!
* Skill tree bigger than life itself. It is HUGE. 1350 skills, lots of passives. If the gems alone didn't make your character unique enough, this thing will.
* Frequent updates, perhaps because it's still beta but, 1 patch a week sure beats 1 patch every 6 months like we get with Diablo, if at all.
* BIG community, very active forum

Just give it a Try, if you don't like it, you won't be screwed out of 60 bucks, but just a bit of time and HardDisk space. And you can always uninstall the game afterwards.

Coz I'm the admin, yo!

So, I've got this strange fascination with analyzing data. Collecting info from a dozen places, and putting it into a neat orderly table for everyone to enjoy.

But, it doesn't stop there. Nowhere NEAR even.

It's in my genes I guess. And it goes back to my grandfather (rest his kind soul). I've collected stamps, coins, Magic the Gathering cards, E-books, and a dozen other things. In Ultima Online I'd gather Runes (location bookmarks) and together with a friend we made the biggest library the game has ever seen. We even ended up needing two houses in the game to store them all. All the while I was gathering weapons, reagents, cloth, and order and sort everything neat as you may. Then came along World of Warcraft and lo and behold I'm having a hard time selling anything still because I've managed to collect 3 guild banks + a few alternate characters full of stuff. Of course I did sell some things - but at some point you just spend more time in the game organizing and sticking stuff on the auction house than actually "playing" the game.


Wiki

So, here's my current disfunction, wiki making. Alas it's to be on Wikia, I know many have a disliking for them, and personally I'm none to keen on some of the policies of the default skins, but logging in and setting "monobook" goes a long way.


At any rate,. I've been Admin on Rusty Hearts Wiki, that one is up available for adoption if anyone wants to carry the torch on that one. I've gathered quest data, text, stats and more. It's all there still so feel free to continue the work. I no longer play that game because it got tiresome. It's free to play though.

Also, I've just been made Admin on Motor World Wiki, and have been happily chugging out more data for a big list of cars you can collect there. If you want to try that game, It's for iOS only currently (at the time of writing), but it'll be available for android as well soon. Feel free to enter my referral code / friend code when you see fit: HNGG410 - It's quite an amusing little casual game and I can recommend giving it a try.

And then there's the big one, again I'm currently the Admin. Dark Summoner Wiki. This is a CCG, which means Collectible Card Game. Oh hey that sounds an awful lot like Magic the Gathering doesn't it?

Well, I suppose it does at that,. but on a smaller scale. (I've quite lost count on how many cards MTG has right now) The fun part however is that this game is on iOS, and to top it off all the calls to the game server can be "sniffed". Oh yes, pure html data straight into my parser, output as xml, csv, sql, or.... you guessed it Wiki tables :)
That's not all though! It turns out Wikia supports XML exports and imports (goosebumps here) , all you need to do is setup the proper format. And behold, Individual pages are as easy as 1.2.3 or a.b.c. All thanks to the wonderful strengths of Delphi XE.

I managed to put a little program that chugs out pretty much any data format. So, that is kind of what I've been working on the last few weeks. fun fun fun. And it gives a lot of players a very useful data source for all their card info. Before, the page was quite a clusterfuck of unsorted data, with so much information missing.

It feels good making stuff orderly.

The F word, and a big oops

CK,. !

Well, that was a bad night for me.
I was cleaning up some old junk from my PC. Zipped software, old images, mp3s you don't listen to anymore, code references, steam games you don't play much anymore.

I guess somewhere along the line windows must have put it's selection on the left side of the default explorer and I deleted it, thinking I had selected something on the right side of the screen.

Well, I went along without much clarity I guess, because I zipped a few folders, deleted more stuff, then emptied the trash can. A good 30 minutes later (while utorrent is stilly happily chugging along) I notice "huh, where the f is my Projects folder gone?" Less than a second later that cold sweaty shiver comes crawling up your back when you KNOW you did something irreversibly STUPID.

I checked the windows trash can, and obviously it wasn't there anymore...
I checked for undelete programs, and ran about two of three of those with the same result.

Any files that could be found had been overwritten permanently in the space of seconds.
What was lost? Any and all programs I had written and kept on my own computer (and not backed up - except for one).

Sure, the whole file was in "Git", but it turns out Git doesn't keep a separate storage for files, it just dumps those in the SAME FOLDER...

Le Sigh.

So anyway, that's my evening ruined.

It makes you wonder why you can't set a "lock" on folders in windows. Critical files for the system have 3 checks and warnings already. Why can't you set a triple lock on folders that are critical "to you"?

Slacking off

Ok, so I'm totally slacking off currently. I bet some were hoping for a post more recently than this one - or some won't care much.

At any rate, I've been busy with an assortment of the following - in no particular order:
* iOS Games: Dark Summoner, Lies of Astaroth, Clash of Clans, Tiny Tower and a bunch more.
* Guild Wars 2. Though not as much as of late. funny but not quite fully accurate.
* Girlfriend! <3
* Work.
* Expanding the Dark Summoner Wiki.  Nearing 10.000 edits (I can mostly thank the auto parser I wrote for that though) XML imports are awesome!
* Ebooks, reading. Anyone finished the Dune series? It's awesome. Currently doing The Vampire Chronicles. Not that pissy 50 shades junk or sparkly vampire crap, but the proper "interview with the vampire" thing and it's follow ups.

Personally I'm quite done with Diablo 3, and it seems out of the 12+ million copies sold, less than 1 million players are currently active... Funny, in this case it IS accurate. Also see Auction house hurt the game,. well yeah,. duh? Why bother going out there and finding your own items, when the best items can be bought. The only way they can fix that mess now, is by adding new, bigger and better bind on pickup / bind on account items.