Was it fun? Yes.. I quite enjoyed the stress of no-one but the healer (aka me) crowd controlling, apparent lack of tank. I can’t be sure, but certainly no-one was specifically tanking, and there was no “focus-fire”. I actually thought we were going to wipe a couple of times! Partly due to the other players moving on leaving the one and only CC’d mob to come after me!

It was still fun, and I appreciate the efforts of the level 18 smuggler who at least knew to pull mobs off the healer when they went wild. I wasn’t so keen on people breaking my CC.

Nevertheless I shall be trying to find groups more often when I’m of a reasonable level (i.e. at least one level above the quest level)!

I’ve been playing a fair bit of SW:TOR when I’ve been finding time. My progression has been slow, mainly due to the server queues. I’m quite a causal player and seeing queue times of half an hour or more makes me play on a different server. I’ve now got characters spread over three servers;

The Red Eclipse

I have just one character on this server, it’s my guild (The Casual Travellers) server. This is my “main”, a level 16 healing Smuggler. Until recently she’s been neglected due to the queue times, but finally these seem to be settling down and so I’m finally getting to play on here more often.

Eye of Ashlanae

Two characters, both Imperial. This server is the unoffical second server for my guild, and you can often find our guild leader on here. Many of us retreat to this server when the queues become annoying because it’s never full. I’ve a couple of level 10 ish toons on this one.

Hidden Beks

This is the Munqui Tribe server and I’ve a couple of very low level Republic toons parked here. Unfortunately this server also suffers from queues almost as badly as the Red Eclipse, so, with regret, I nearly always hit the “Eye” instead of coming on here.  I say with regret because I know the Munqui’s and a finer bunch of people you would be very hard pressed to guild with.

–

Having so many characters means I’m leveling much slower than everyone else.. I know of at least one TcT on Red who now has two level capped toons, and I’m pretty sure that by now there are some Munquis on Beks with near capped characters. But, I’m here for the scenery, and I’m not going to rush. At least my “main” at level 16 is finally getting enough healing capability to actually start feeling like I am playing a healer of sorts, And I’m starting to engage more with the game. Even to the point of running a couple of dungeons Flash Points, though these are with pickup groups as I’m right at the bottom of the “leveling” ladder within the TcT.

I remember the first couple of times I read it, many years ago, I thought it was a jolly good romp with goody’s and baddy’s human and very alien. I re-read it earlier this year and the book I read was word for word the same, and yet what I read was a book about disease, and despair, and bullying and resilience. Even a “love” scene near the end was coloured differently.

Most odd, more than a little strange.

I wonder if I would encounter such a peculiar perspective shift were I to revisit WoW? Certainly the colours would be very different! The game for me became much more than pixels, and without the people it would become much much less again.

I am aware with SW:TOR that I’m taking a gamble and hoping that I will bond with the guild I’m in to the point where once again a game becomes “other”, because at the moment. I’ve played about 10 hours of Beta and I can say…. “it’s a game”.. I’ve played better and I’ve played worse.

Of course I played, not quite as long as I’d like, other Real Life commitments meaning that Saturday was not a play day, but I did play to level 10 (just). And without seeming too grumpy, WoW is the game I would compare it to. More so than Mass Effect 2.

So, first off I present Fflowers the Bounty Hunter, I was worried initially that the characters would be very samey… but this isn’t too bad, soon to disappear into the bitbucket.. ah well.

How did I find the game 1 month before release?

Well, I had 1 main complaint.. there are no subtitles except for the “foreign” language sentients and (usually though not absolutely always) the very last thing said. If you disable sound there are interactions where you see lips flapping for minutes and are then presented with a choice like “Yes, I’ll do it”, “You can stuff it”, and “what do you think Meko?” And I’m pretty sure I saw at least one without any subtitles showing at all!

Correction… my guildies have pointed out that there *is* a subtitles option… it’s not on sound, it’s on the general preferences:

End correction.

Here for my own personal reference are a couple of screenies of the settings I’m likely to use for my smuggler. When it gets rolled.. can’t be sure whether I’m rolling mel or fem yet. I’m fairly happy with the look of these, I’ve found that although I can create characters I don’t like the look of, I can usually get along with most, in fact it tends to be the more “perfect-human” ones that creep me out worst!

Also this weekend I downloaded the GameString adrenaline game client. Now *that* really is a beta. But for your edificati0n I do haev  a photo of it “in action” as it were, playing on a couple of devices .. A small netbook, an Android phone, and the main laptop. Not perfect by any means, the aspect ratio is wrong and I think the sound is missing though I didn’t have it turned on. Also the mouse control is more than a little difficult. Yes you *can* drive them main laptop from the remote device! Lag is about half a second.. so clearly work needs doing!

Guild.

TcT (The Casual Travellers), still there, not been scared off by the other members.

It’s awfully little to report, but then we have no game and so no drama, or even much interesting.
Wanting game now please.

Next up: Faffing around

Vent:

I have a spangly smartphone that can run Ventrillo, unfortunately it looks like T-Mobile block ventrillo, the bastards! I’ve done a fair bit of hacking to try to get around this problem, using my home linux machine (a pogoplug) as a “relay”, but although a small amount of progress was made using a program called socat, I haven’t yet managed it. Ah well, these things are sent to try us.  So no vent on my mobile, not that I actually want it yet.

OnLive:

Theres a game service out there called OnLive, it’s a fairly clever concept… you actually run a game on the OnLive servers and it just sends the video to your machine (and of course reacts to your keystrokes and mouse). This means your home pc can be a really weak machine without any Uber memory or Uber graphics card.

I tried the new UK servers and it works surprisingly well, it automatically adjusts the video quality if your bitrate drops a little, 1.8 Mbit is about the point where it gets unpleasant.

The lag doesn’t seem bad at all, certainly its quick enough to play an MMO with its enforced 1 Second global cooldown.

Unfotunately OnLive don’t have any proper MMO’s, a huge shame.

Anyway, if you read posts on forums about OnLive (and there are a couple of other startups looking into this area) there’s an awful lot of uninformed poo poo-ing that simply doesn’t agree with my actual experience. The fairly usual people sounding off authoritatively about a subject they know nothing about. A shame, they could easily trial games for quite a few minutes on OnLive to get a real impression of how it works. Warning I think OnLive is highly dependent on your broadband line, torrents, YouTube, less than 3Mbit or being in a different country will probably severely impact your experience.

StreamMyGame:

This is sort of similar to OnLive, only within your own house. So you have a game running on a PC and actually control it from another PC in the same house. It sounds pretty stupid, but actually with the advent of netbooks it isn’t as stupid as you might think. I’ve tried it and it kind of works. Unfortunately it is nothing like as slick as the OnLive experience, it does work, and might at a push be enough to play WoW, lag seems worse. I’ll be doing a little more experimentation. The company isn’t quite dead, but there was a over a year between major upgrade versions and they’ve only recently released 2.0 which I guess is only an incremental update to 1.9.

I’m thinking of bunging them 10$ just to try a less crippled version — 640×480 video isn’t enough to play e.g. WoW.

The biggest downside is that you have to have your own PC dedicated to “serving” the game.

Why:

Now, that’s 2 reviews of services that let you play a “power-game” on a netbook. You might just be asking yourself “why”? Well, I have a girlfriend who doesn’t play with me, and she only has a netbook which is incapable of running any modern 3D games. I’d like to try to get her playing an MMO with me, but that makes for hardware outlay, either a bigger laptop (which I doubt she would like), or a desktop, and both of those mean a $$$$ layout in time of recession.

Now a desktop means core hardware, monitor, keyboard and so on. If I can skip stream a game from a PC to a netbook I can skip the cost of a monitor and also retain portability WIN-WIN.

No-Conclusion:

Yup, no actual conclusions…. just ramblings.

Beta, I’m sure this is of very little interest, but there’s been a host of flak about the Beta testing phase.

Bioware originally said that there would be some Beta Testing weekends in September, there was one weekend, and since then nothing. Now Bioware have claimed that it was a success and that they postponed the other beta testing weekends because there’s another build in progress and it would be unfair to have people download a huge file twice.

I’m not buying this..

1. New client releases don’t come out of the blue,
2. They originally said that if you were in the 1st weekend you wouldn’t get into another (I think that’s what they said)

So it doesn’t stack up!

What I think happened is they ran the weekend and maybe found some issues with the game client. But I think these are minor. What I think happened is that they found the back-end load was much higher than expected.

I think that previously they’ve been running @ 10% expected logins and seen 10% server load. And the beta weekend they cranked up to say 50% expected logins and saw a non-linear server load, e.g. they expected to see 50% load and instead saw 85%!

This sort of thing wouldn’t impact what was seen at the client end, but seriously impacts what would happen on release day.

*That is what I think has happened, and Bioware are spinning everything around and hiding back-end system stuff because the testers at the front end never see it so it’s easier to hide.

Interestingly I’ve recently heard mooted a release date in 2012, and that doubly makes me think it’s a Back End issue. If, for example, it’s a database restructure that’s required this would be massively easier to do with before release (0 users) than attempt to migrate 1 million users later.

I declare the Download Client size a red-herring!

It may seem pointless what with the game still being a good few months off, but I’m bored, so whatevs.

The main SWTOR site has a “search for guild” page that lets you see what guilds have been created according to your criteria. Thing is, it doesn’t really seem to help.. So I started to trawl through the thousands of pages listing guild recruitment. Well, trawl is a bit strong, I dipped in and out.

Now theres a difficulty in trying to find a nice guild…. all you can ever really see is the guild charter, the membership posts are usually well hidden away and inaccessible until you join, Catch 22. Anyway the 99% of the charters say “no arseholes” (in summary), and that doesn’t really give you much idea of what the guild is like… fair enough you can also tell a lot by other requirements like “must be prepared to raid 20-30 hours a week”, but once you’ve cut the obvious hardcore out you are still left with 200000000000 billion guilds.

So “pot luck” time it was.

I joined the SUNRIDERS and took a week long look at their forums etc, and got a feel for how things were. And decided it might not be for me. Now, my leaving is NOT a criticism of the SUNRIDERS. They are a nice bunch of people, and I could certainly have gotten along with them. As a guild they’ve not decided if they’re going to PvP, PvE, RP or not and so on, they won’t be deciding that until much closer to the game. I left because my general feeling was that there was quite a strong lore contingent, many of them are more into the SW Universe than I personally am comfortable with. My feelings to SW are based very much on the few hours of films, and a couple of books I read 10 20 years ago (or more). It’s fun, but not anything I’d bother trying to remember. Take the name, apparently SUNRIDER is someone from the SW Lore.. which almost certainly has a bias on the joinees.

Another thing that put me off was how, when I mentioned that I blog, the Guild Leader immediately started another thread reminding us of the “no disrepect” rule. Now that’s already in the guild charter, and frankly I don’t do well with being reminded of something I’d read no more than a couple of days ago….

So onto “The Casual Travellers“..
I’ve been in this guild for an entire day, so can’t comment much, but so far, they seem friendly, not overly concerned with the SW universe as far a Lore goes, and already specifically aiming to be a “casual” guild that will probably casually raid. So far they come across not unlike the Munquis, even down to a pan-european membership. There are a couple of differences from the munq’s … at the moment there seems to be a few hardware junkies, discussing headsets, machine specs and the like. The average age is is surprisingly high, and a high “male” contingent, moreso than in the sunriders and much moreso than the Munquis. I’m not letting this freak me out, in fact it conforms to my expectations (read sterotypes), after all this is a pre-game guild and all of those are going to have a membership bias (read obsessive?).

We’ll see how it goes. Who knows maybe next week I’ll be in yet another guild, though this one looks like it should be comfy with a some banter appearing in the forums already.

 meanwhile… back to playing Mass Effect 2, a surprisingly decent game!

But I’ve pre-ordered my copy of the game.. not that I really needed to, but since I know I’m going to buy it anyway I thought I might a well do so now.

Anyway, I’m listening to the Darth-Hater podcast and there was a discussion on classes, and which ones are going to be oversubscribed. One of the more hard-core contributers (that’s player, not fanboi) said he didn’t care, because he was going to be one of the best whichever class he played.

Soo not me!

What I want to know which class isn’t going to be ridiculously popular and still reasonably easy.

In World of Warcraft this was the Healer, not needing quite so much situational awareness as the Tank, and not as popular as “DPS”. The middle ground as it were… Being a Tank is too hard, DPS is quite easy, but is too easy to be replaced. As a healer I was useful even if I wasn’t too good at it.. As a DPS I would probably simply be so rubbish that I’d get kicked from most groups. Also DPS were “measurable” and I’m not keen on being ranked any more significantly than on the scale of rubbish, competant, excellent.

I stopped playing a bit ago and now i’m waiting on swtor – it’s going to be a long wait….Long enough for me to get jittery.

you see I don’t really get excited anymore when I hear about codexes with added data-chrons.
It no longer does anything for me. All I hear is “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”. Gobble-gibble-gabble.

It scares me, possibly because I can feel a repressed part of me prick it’s ears up and pay far too much attention.

I’m still looking forwards to it, but I know I’m going too be both attracted and repelled by it.

It arrived last friday and is now up and running and hooked into my pogoplug so I can see the what the weather is at home even during the day!

Yeah, I can guess what you are thinking…. either

a) cool!
or
b) NERD!

but since I consider myself to be something of a cool Nerd – not cool, nor a nerd, but a nerd who is a bit cool while he’s being nerdy – I barely care.

So here is the weather at my home! Wee hee!

Pogoplugs look like, I got mine for a snip at £50. I love the colour, though mine is stashed away in the cupboard under the stairs, so I don’t get the full effect.

My weather station looks something like the image below. I ordered mine from gadgetsUK.com, though I won’t be using them again.