Inspired by Anna over at Too Many Annas, I’ve decided to start up a second blog dedicated solely to my addiction to World of Warcraft. So head on over and check out Achtung Panzercow, currently under construction.
Inspired by Anna over at Too Many Annas, I’ve decided to start up a second blog dedicated solely to my addiction to World of Warcraft. So head on over and check out Achtung Panzercow, currently under construction.
…at 1 o’clock in the morning, looking at my brand-new copy of Wrath of the Lich King, shiny little DVD poking out of its paper sleeve, account properly upgraded, patches pre-downloaded and ready to go.
Meanwhile, my computer is downloading the 1.9 GB content of the Lich King expansion from Blizzard, which even on a good cable connection like mine, will probably take another hour.
Why?
Because my freaking DVD-RW drive door won’t eject so I can’t put the DVD in.
WELCOME TO MY WORLD.
PS: The download just stopped at 432 MB out of 1.9 GB. Go me.
…oh, never mind, that was last expansion.
Yep, tonight, about 11:30, I will brave the predicted yucky cold rain here in Nifongville and head over to the mall to hang out with the other losers awaiting the midnight release of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.
The sad part is, I won’t even be able to play it tomorrow. I have to work like a good little family provider. I’ll get it installed in the morning before I leave and then sit at work all day wondering whether most of my WoWfriends will be level 71 when I get home. That’s assuming Arthas doesn’t one-shot the servers into a pile of ichor, the way they’ve been the past two days.
Northrend, here I come.
PS: Gharr, go the hell to sleep.
Following up on my little World of Warcraft hacking incident over the weekend…
I called Blizzard not long after they opened at about 11:00 Eastern yesterday, and after waiting on hold for 20 minutes, I got a customer service rep who just could not have been nicer or more professional. I told her my tale of woe, gave her the account information, and she immediately changed my account email address to the right one, mailed me a temp password, unlocked the account, and sent me some extra security information as well. Top-notch service on the phone.
So as soon as I got home, I logged in, and I found that the situation was simultaneously better and worse than I thought it’d be.
I got up a little early this morning, while Wife Unit was peacefully snoozing away at about 7, and tried to log onto World of Warcraft.
“The information you have provided is not valid.”
Hmm. Retype the username and password, aaannnnd.
“The information you have provided is not valid.”
Ruh roh, Raggy.
(Now with updates below the cut!)
In the fine tradition of my good friend Itanya Blade, let me present a one-item “list” of World of Warcraft Things That Annoy the Moose.
Questing on Quel’danas flagged.
Look. If you’ve got the balls and the roleplaying understanding to wander around on an RP server permaflagged, go for it. You’re a gutsier person than I am. Me, I can’t do it. I turn my flag on when I want to PvP, which is fairly rare, and then I turn it back off and go on about my business with my happy carebear-blue name over my head. I started WoW on a PvP server three and a half years ago. I’m not going back. No thanks. I don’t know very many people who do it, but those that do (at least on Feathermoon) tend to be outstanding roleplayers in addition to being pretty good at PvP.
But I know most of you chuckleheads running around flagged on the Isle of Dailies only think “RP” are the two letters around “Q”. You’re running around flagged trying to trick people into blueflagging you so they can get pwned. I’ve seen it too many times. And yesterday I finally had it happen to me on my failhunter Illithanis. I rode up into the inn to get the bloodberry quest (sweet zombie Uthas, lady, you don’t have enough of the damn things yet?) and right as I right-clicked on the questgiver, a flagged Alliance cut in front of me and caused me to right-click her instead. At which point, of course, the guards jacked the shit out of me because I attacked her.
I groused about it for a minute, toggled /pvp twice to make sure I had a 5-minute timer on my flag, then decided to play the odds and went out to the demon-infested area while waiting for the flag to drop. Sure enough, while I was plinking away at a demon, a feral druid jumped me from behind and used me for a chew toy. (As an aside: Dude, we’re surrounded by agents of the fucking Burning Legion and you decide to nomnom on an undergeared blood elf hunter instead? Priorities, nelfboy. Priorities.)
Later on, after my flag dropped and I was on my merry way, I had another odd incident. A flagged human priest kept pulling Wretched and then standing right by my hunter’s pet. Illy has a windserpent, which has no AOE attack fortunately. But it damn sure looked like the priest was trying to have me accidentally target her instead of the Wretched that were beating on her shielded arse. Or maybe she just wanted me to kill them and do her work for her.
Cobags.
After a highly successful Karazhan raid in WoW last night, Wife Unit and I got to bed pretty late, around 1:00.
We were awakened at the stroke of 5:00 by two things–Fat Cat trying to lie down on my skull to crush it, again, and Nublet having her first genuine night terror.
Between the two of those, I never could get back to sleep. So I ended up grinding out Quel’danas dailies and some Netherstorm stuff on my druid Amakawa, and shifting money around to get him on the way to his epic flight form.
All this is to say, if I post something today and it makes even less sense than usual? It’s sleep deprivation, baby. The cheapest buzz there is.
Oh, and I get to tank a Tempest Keep run tonight. GO GO GADGET CAFFEINE.
The new computers are both officially up and running. Some random notes from two days of building, installing, and downloading…
- Technology does not necessarily make things get smaller. When I built our old systems in 2003, it was easy. Put the CPU in the socket, swing the lever down gently, clip the cute little heatsink and fan on top of it, slam in the memory, bolt it in the case, rock and roll tiemz. Graphics cards were small and had tiny little fans on them. Contrast that with our 2008 systems. The heatsink/fan combo I bought for these Core 2 Duo CPUs is almost the size of my closed fist–a machined hunk of aluminum and copper that’s got 4700 square inches of finned surface area and a 4″ 1800 rpm fan to blow air across the fins. The video card is 9″ long, completely covered in a plastic shroud, takes two slots (one for the card, one for the shroud) and is so big that it blocks one of the hard drive slots in the case. The internals are one hell of a lot more crowded then they used to be.
- I want to find the sadistic bastard at Intel who designed the mounting method for the socket LGA 775 heatsink that goes over the CPU, and I want to gouge his eyes out with a spork in front of his horrified family. If you’ve never seen one, I can’t do it justice with a mere physical description, but basically it’s four plastic push-clips that fit through holes in the motherboard. Mounting requires that diagonally-opposite legs be pushed through the holes, then black plastic plungers be pushed down to spread the legs apart and click them into place. It’s complicated (especially when the directions are in Engrish), and it requires a hell of a lot more force to seat the plungers than anybody is going to feel comfortable with around a $200 CPU and a $90 motherboard. I can’t even imagine doing it with the motherboard still in a case.
- Microsoft Vista thinks you’re an idiot by default. You can make it think you’re not an idiot, if you know how to Google “disable UAC”. If you don’t, Vista keeps asking you “Are you sure?” “Are you really sure?” “Are you REALLY REALLY sure?” “Are you REALLY REALLY DOUBLE EXTRA SPECIAL sure?” whenever you do horrible and controversial things like, say, create a folder anywhere else other than under “Documents.” It’s a ridiculous bloated pig of an OS, but, eh, I need Microsquish for gaming. If Windows is inevitable, lie back and make the best of it.
- 60 frames per second in World of Warcraft with all the graphic sliders maxed, on the Isle of Quel’danas, during peak hours, in widescreen 1680×1050 resolution, is sick. My raid is hitting Serpentshrine Cavern tonight, and I can’t wait to see the trash pulls along the bridges that used to bring my ex-machine to its knees at 7 frames per second. I may still suck as a tank, but at least I’ll have one less excuse.
I don’t replace computers very often–after all, they’re fairly big-ticket items, and money’s been tight the past few years. The systems that Wife Unit and I both run are five years old and close to identical: Athlon XP 2500+ processors on Asus A7N8X motherboards, 1 GB of RAM, and currently, Geforce 6600GT AGP video cards. Mine has 100GB and 40GB hard drives; hers has a 70GB hard drive. Both have floppies salvaged from our old Gateway Pentium III boxen, and both sit in attractive Antec Sonata gloss-black cases.
These are basically the computer equivalents of a ’72 Dodge Dart. They work…barely. They weren’t even cutting edge five years ago when I built them, and nowadays, they’re so far behind the curve that they’re off in the median somewhere. Both of them are having significant issues. Mine doesn’t like to reboot. My wife’s won’t power off. Both of them will frequently drop ground textures in World of Warcraft, and screw up running other games. My main 100GB hard drive is down to 4 GB of free space. Hers has eaten its BIOS settings a couple of times.
Well, thanks to the magic of having a daughter and getting those tasty child tax credits (om nom nom nom), plus the $1500 stimulus payment we got back last week, our computer problems are, hopefully, about to be over. I’m building us two new machines this week, out of these bits:
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. A cheap, reliable, simple motherboard for those of us not really interested in running SLI/Crossfire. This seems to be a frequent hobbyist and overclocker choice.
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 “Wolfdale”. The E8400 was the first of the new 45-nanometer process line of Core 2 Duo chips. I don’t know what that means, except it runs cooler and pulls less power than the previous Core 2 Duos, and is supposed to be one mother of an overclocker. Even if I don’t overclock, it’s an excellent gaming chip, and at $200, is cheaper and easier to work with than the quad-cores that start with the Q6600. I ordered them with the stock heat-sink and fan, but then decided to add an Arctic Cooler Freezer Pro 7 CPU cooler on. Cheap at $26, and very good for the price. And if I have trouble fitting it in the case, I can always go back to the stock fan.
- Memory: 4 GB (two 2 GB sticks) of G.Skill DDR2 800. Relatively inexpensive yet solid memory that’s gotten good reviews, is supposed to work well with the picky Gigabyte motherboard, and still lets me push a 20% overclock out of the E8400 if I feel frisky. Plus, since I’m getting 64-bit Vista Home Premium, I definitely want at least 4 GB and the ability to go to 8 GB later–hence, 2 GB sticks.
- Video Card: ECS Geforce 8800GTS 512MB PCI-E x16. I was originally going to get one of Geforce’s newest cards, the 9600GT, but users on Tom’s Hardware Forum convinced me to go with the 8800GTS; same core processor, slightly more oomph, and better cooling. The ECS is a brand I’ve never heard of before, but good Lord, I couldn’t ignore the price–$219, and a $50 mail-in rebate on top of that? Yes plz. The only thing that scares me is that this card looks bloody gigantic, as all the dual-slot 8800GTSes do. I sure hope it fits.
- Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA. 500 gigs should hold me for a few months. I think.
- Optical drive: Asus DRW-2014L1T SATA DVD burner. I know damn all about optical drives. It’s SATA so it should be fast, and it’s fairly cheap.
- Case: Antec Sonata 550 Plus. The current rage is what I call “riced-up” computer cases–lots of clear side panels and blue LEDs and stripes and weird shapes and whatever the geek equivalent of “GT-R” stickers are. The Sonata is the antithesis of that. Deep gloss black on the sides and top, brushed metal on the front with copper highlights around the bezel and the drive bays. And it’s built like a tank…cold-rolled steel and heavy as hell. It’s an S-class Mercedes in a world of Honda Civic DXes with coffee-can fart mufflers. Plus it comes with a good quality 550-watt power supply already installed. That’s more than enough oomph to run all this stuff, and I’m adding on one or two extra fans in the front for better cooling.
- Monitor: Chi Mei CMV221D 22″ widescreen LCD. I’ll admit, I’d never heard of Chi Mei before. And color me skeptical about cut-rate monitors, especially if I’m going to be spending a few hours a night staring at it. But those reviews on Newegg are awful positive, and the price is hard to ignore. $240 for a decent 22″ widescreen monitor is mighty hard to pass by. If I had unlimited money I’d think about one of the Samsungs that get absolute raves, but this looks pretty good for now.
Hopefully all this stuff will be arriving at the Landfill of Love tomorrow. I’ve already asked my boss for Wednesday off…I expect I’ll need it, since I’ll be up half the night assembling my machine, and will need some sleep before I tackle my wife’s on Wednesday. Watch this space for updates.
