Monday Mourning – Nov 17, 2008

To be honest I don’t get what most people hate about Monday mornings. I tend to work weekends, so there is definitely no rest for the wicked at ihaspc. My to-do list on Mondays is as long as any other day but I tend to ease into everyone else’s typical work week – check blogs, prioritize tasks (I know, the irony, considering that comes second) and catch up on emails. Usually Multitasked. I decided Mondays will be my little themed post where I ramble off a bunch of randoms. What better way to “start” the week?

RIP – Burning Crusade: Much how mauve is the new pink, Burning Crusade is the new Azeroth. Empty. Of every class except Death Knights. If you play by your tune and have a healer alt in the 60’s now is the optimum time to level that toon up – there are hundreds of Death Knights begging – and paying – for healers to work with them through instances. One group offered 100 gold for a basic Ramparts run. Of course, his name was Chucknorus so you might hold out for 200 gold. With everyone in the mad dash to be the first 80 (most classes/races have already hit that mark on server firsts on Whisperwind) I wonder if destroying old content areas such as Azeroth and BC gives Blizzard cost savings on server loads, etc. – that resources normally held to hold high populations in those zones. Perhaps abandoning that content is as much a business as a stupid move? On a side note, how in the hell is the Wow Armory service STILL in beta?

More after the break.

Left 4 Dead: Released tomorrow. If you have steam you can preload the purchase (such a snazzy idea) and be the first to save the world from teh Zombie Apocalypse – or have your brain eaten. Mindless fun for sure but as a first person shooter this is going to be good times. Fun is fun, mindless or not. Developers don’t design for Co-op as a priority much anymore, and some of my best memories are co-opping through the Rainbow Six series with other terrorist killers. Planned co-op instead of masquerading as a MMO gets games points in my books these days.

Vista Haters 1, ihaspc 0: I have often argued with Vista haters. My Vista x64 runs smoother than XP ever did. I love the OS (all the bloat aside) and everytime I read a ‘Vista sucks’ post I bite my tongue. Because I realize I have a special copy of Vista blessed by the almighty Bill Gates himself, which is why mine runs perfectly while others have terrible experiences. Bill – see you for lunch today at the Country Club? Same time? First round is on me! This weekend I ran into my *first* bad Vista experience after I Steamed an older game – Bioshock. I can’t get it to run. No big deal, that is what google is for, right? The 4 or 5 fixes available for people who have had similiar problems don’t work on my system. I’ll figure it out because I am SMRT, but now I have finally tasted (a small taste, mind you) the frustration so many other people have explained for longish times. I expect a slew of “I told ya so!’s”

WAR Population: I wonder when they will release “new sub numbers”. A bunch of CoW’s are dropping like flies, WOTLK launched, and I am super curious when (if) Mythic is going to release sub numbers anytime soon. In their defence, I probably wouldn’t at this time. At least now with AOC, and WAR, developers should take notice that you can’t try to do what WoW does and win – you have to think outside the box and develop a new angle.  Grind ™ for Blizzard is what MMO gamers want to get away from, not see twisted into something “new”. This isn’t to say WAR won’t be a revenue generator but it will fall far short of what MMO Manager Mark Jacobs expected, no doubt.

Gas Prices “Plummet”: $0.86 cents a litre here at the pump, yesterday. When the prices topped out a while ago they were at $1.40. Goes to show the danger in a Supply and Demand commodity when the provider has full control over the Supply to price market fix. Good news is I don’t suspect it will raise much over the next little while as people are really hunkering down on consumption with the recent crisis – and the more they push their billion dollar gas profits the more people find alternate sources. The fact they ramped up the value of gas months ago to rediculous rates has created a market that is less dependant on it – which is a good thing. What they did do smartly is train us to think that $0.86 cents a litre is actually a “good” price, since they were so much higher before so people won’t balk at the “deal” they are getting. My next car will be a Hybrid.

Heavy Metal: Not the big hair type. Mythic launches their Heavy Metal event today, where if you participate every day on tasks listed in your Tome of Knowledge, you get to create a Knight of the Blazing Sun or Black Guard first. Each event they say will take about an hour. The first half of the events MUST be done daily. I am guessing that is going to hurt the casual player a bit, who may not be able to log in every day, but will be interesting to see how this event goes.

Time for a coffee refill, and work to do =)

8 comments / Add your comment below

  1. I need to get in there with my druid. Sadly, my typical playing time is 7:00-9:00 am. Not a ton of people begging for instance runs at that time slot. 😛

  2. Pope: You would be surprised, every group is currently 4 DK’s begging for a healer – betting during the day too.

    I thought about dusting off my 63 priest but I really don’t want to do BC content again. Even on the new class it is painful. At the same time, I don’t want to start the Northrend content yet – will be too populated.Plus I am only going to do the NR content ONCE this time, so trying to choose if I do decide to stick around it again for a bit (should take less than a month to level, by the sounds of it) which route I am going to take.

    To quote you – “Blarg”

    So, in light of all of that, I downloaded Bioshock after watching a work associate play it on a 10′ HD projector Saturday night, and I can’t get the sound to work (see above) with Vista. The whole ambience is with the sound. I spent a bit this morning on google (funny how official support forums NEVER have the answer you need) and got it to work – for cutscenes and main menu only. Le sigh.

  3. And I don’t know how the litre/gallon conversion works, but we’re down to $1.59/gal here… and my next car is most likely gonna be a hybrid, too. Possibly a hybrid SUV… but still a hybrid, dangit.

  4. 1 Gallon = 3.785 Litres. Yes we always pay a lot more. It is kind of silly, because we are a net exporter on gas – meaning that sell more gas than we buy. Yet our prices stay high.

    Alberta, for example, sells the crude oil to the USA, who refines it, and sells it back to us. Canada needs more refineries!

    I am not a diehard Environmentalist either, but truth is whenever you end up working to help the environment you actually save money – which makes it a no brainer.

  5. ha… I have pictures that would suggest otherwise… 😛

    And for the most part, I agree, but I don’t have time to expound on that… stupid French class…

  6. I think people overstate the Vista problems and how magically perfect everything in Mac land is. My wife has a Mac and I still get to fix it all the time.

  7. I agree Lars, I even read a fun little online article (damned if I can find it now, was over a year ago) where hackers were asked how Apple was so “secure” – to which they said it absolutely wasn’t, but because of who uses them and their lack of being mainstream in compared to PC’s, they didn’t want to waste their efforts on it because there was no value to them in comparison.

    It could have been ficticious, but I wonder how much of that sentiment holds true.

  8. If nothing else, the numbers suggest that such a mentality is sensible (or as sensible as one can be when dedicating resources to anarchy). There just aren’t as many Mac users as PC users. Why bother hacking a system that doesn’t return a good investment on the time involved?

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