Horizon Zero

My Old Republic Experience So Far

I'm two hours into the "SW:TOR Experience" and I'm not particularly enamored yet.

Perhaps because I've yet to actually get to play the game.

It took 45 minutes to install the game. "No big deal," I said to myself. "There are a lot of files, and WoW takes a long time to install from scratch too." So I figured I'd use the time to poke through the manual, get a feel for the character types and controls, maybe soak up some of the lore.

Oh. Manual. Right. Dunno if they included one in the $150.00 CE, but we latecomers get a four page installation guide, most of which is legal disclaimer and warnings about epilepsy.

Anyway, the game finally finishes installing, and I whisk away to the website to set up my account. Now, being a Mass Effect/Dragon Age fan, I already have an EA/Bioware account for DLC. But when I try to log in, it's no go. "Funny," I think to myself, "surely the account information is centrally located and shared for all their titles." But no, apparently not. So I have to register a *second* account with Bioware in order to set up my SW:TOR Experience.

I finally get an account registered (and is it nit picky to point out that if you are going to insist on certain character/numerical constants in your password that you should perhaps point those out BEFORE people hit submit for the first time?) and the site asks me for more money. "Wait a minute," I ask. "Don't I get 30 free days to try this baby out?"

Well, you do, (although technically it tells me I'm already down a day) but not until you give them a way to bill you for next month, either through a credit card or a game time card. Does WoW do this? I honestly have forgotten, although I seem to recall not getting hit up for recurring payment plans immediately after registering.

But fine, I can always cancel my card info if I decide I don't like the game.

So the account hoo-haw is all taken care of, and I can now log in and get to gaming! Yay!

Except not. Opening up the client for the first time, I go to type in my login/pwd info when suddenly the text all goes dark. I put my info in anyway, hit Login, and what do I see but the following ominous message:

"You are attempting to login from a region we do not support."

Now look, I know Missouri isn't the most glamorous location on the planet, but it's not exactly Terra Incognita, you know? Puzzled, I close the client and try to start it back up again. Apparently it takes a few minutes for it to actually close even after the window has closed because Windows keeps telling me I can't have two instances of this program open.

Finally, the client starts back up. This time, it doesn't seem to think I'm trying to access the game from Greater Greater Lesser Trucial Abyssistan or wherever and accepts my login and password. Yay! I can has Game Time now?

Well, of course not. This is a MMO and there's patching to do.

"It just came out," I say to myself. "How bad can it be?"

Reader, NEVER ASK THAT QUESTION.

The patch itself isn't that bad, like 150 mb. No, the trouble begins when it goes to integrate itself with the install and reports back that my installation - which has already consumed 45 minutes of my day - is somehow borked and that it needs to try to "Repair" things.

BY DOWNLOADING 11.6 GIGS OF FILES!

Seriously? Why the hell did I bother to install this thing if it's just going to insist on doing it again, only more slowly?

So anyway, long story short (tl;dr version): I'll see you online tomorrow. Maybe.

One thing for sure - I'm definitely more inclined to go Sith at this point. Force choking people sounds pretty theraputic.

Hell Is Other Peoples' Logistics Networks

I find it incredible that I can ship computers from The Middle of Nowhere, Missouri all the way to a combat zone in Afghanistan in under three days and yet I can't get a freaking HDTV from Best Buy delivered five miles to my house without waiting two weeks and going through the "sorry we missed you!" dance.

And no, I still don't actually have the TV.

Blergh

Was under the weather yesterday, as the expression goes, and ended up crashing pretty much right when I got home.

Today's been kind of the same - except I started with an early morning meeting. Also, we're all literally under the weather now as it is raining outside. (I guess I shouldn't complain about that, though, given how badly other parts of the country need rain right about now.)

I really do just want to head back home and sleep, though.

Pottermore Is... A Web Site?

Really? And one that requires a YouTube channel, a Twitter feed and enough press to make lesser Presidential candidates green with envy?

I'm sure this would have been a Big Deal back in 1997, but so far all the talk I've encountered has been how overwhelmingly underwhelming the whole thing is.

But you can finally buy Harry Potter ebooks.

Real Ultimate Power

My city electric grid does not have it.

Bet you thought this post was about ninjas, didn't you?

A Decade of Dabbling

According to ebay, I set up my account ten years ago today.

In all that time, I've never sold a darned thing. I had my account broken into once, and I've been burned on an auction once. Beyond that, my experience as a buyer of things I probably didn't need has been good.

Still, ten years. Ferris Bueller was right.

Fighting The Treadmill Syndrome

I'm finding it difficult to stay hyped about raiding in Cataclysm.

In many regards the raid game is no different than it was in Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King. You start as a pumpkin scrub and for each tier of content you perform x process to kill boss y for z number of times until you get your shiny new epix, at which point a new tier of raid content comes along and you start the whole thing over again. Eventually, you hit the end of the expansion, kill the Big Foozle, and can rejoice in how you 'beat WoW'.

Until the next expansion comes along and you turn into a pumpkin again.

It's a formula that has served Blizzard well, and the effort/reward treadmill is the bread and butter of the MMO industry. But for whatever reason, this time around I find it difficult to care.

Admittedly, I didn't get very far in the TBC raid scene. My guild at the time doggedly decided that we were going to clear Kara - which we did - but we never had the numbers to move on to SSC. Truthiness raided the heck out of Wrath of the Lich King (we were one of the best strict 10 man guilds on the server) but it seems common wisdom now that Wrath raids were too casual oriented. (Not that I ever trust common wisdom.)

But it wasn't OMGEZMODE!LOL that kept us raiding in Wrath. There were some spots - especially in the early days of Naxxramus and Ulduar - where weekly raiding felt like smashing my head into a brick wall. And while I might have felt frustration or despair or elation at finally moving past something (I'm looking at you, Mimiron!) the emotion was strong.

With Tier 11, the best I can generate is a meh.

And I think the reason is less mechanics and more story. In Wrath, I cared about the plot. I wanted to see Arthas dead. Titan lore intrigued me. It went off the rails a little bit with Tirion Fordring's One Ring Circus but they recovered with Icecrown Citadel. (Ulduar was still the best raid in the expansion, though.)

With Cataclysm, I just don't care. The twilight cult bores me. Cho'gall bores me. The promise of more Troll dungeons/raids at least manages to raise an emotion in me - too bad it's revulsion. For all that T7 Naxxramus was a rehash of previous content, it at the very least presented a consistent theme. (And was new to 90% of the player base anyway.) Whereas in Cataclysm, I don't feel any continuity between Skywall and the Bastion of Twilight and Blackwing Descent at all. They're just a bunch of fights Blizzard had ready for launch, smushed into a raiding tier. Yeah, they're all apparently stooges for Deathwing, but that just points out another problem.

I don't care about Deathwing.

I could get behind killing Arthas. He was a traitor and a fallen paladin and a gigantic force for undead evil. Deathwing is just Another Insane Dragon, and we just had one of those in Wrath, you know? He fails to inspire dread. Arthas didn't really get down to the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor much, but everyone lived in fear of what he had cooking up in Northrend. Meanwhile, Deathwing flits about endlessly nattering on about destroying everything, and yet for all his bluster and random assaults on random zones the people of Azeroth aren't even sufficiently rattled to cancel Noblegarden.

The thing is, I don't think that Cataclysm needed a Big Bad in the way that Wrath did. I think Cataclysm was the perfect opportunity to showcase a lot of smaller threats that were ignored or overshadowed by the threat of the Scourge.

All I know is that I'm sick to death of Twilight Cultists, and a diversion through Trollville is not exactly filling me with joy.

Thought For The Day

"I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." - Marcus Cole, Babylon 5

My Head Asplode

There are a number of different ways of telling Spring is here. Budding plants, migratory animals, the switch to Daylight Savings Time.

My own indicator is slightly more unusual. And unpleasant.

Yes, headache season is here.

Actually, it's inaccurate to call it an indicator for Spring alone, since it hits me in the Fall as well. For whatever reason, the passing of those two seasons do a whammy on me.

Fortunately, so far I've been spared the harrowing Full Vertigo incident I experienced last November - that is something I definitely do not want to repeat. I'm just dealing with the "normal" effects like ice pick to the optic nerve and auras. And at least the auras can be fun if you throw in some music.

I managed to get another box of books unpacked last night, which didn't kill nearly as much time as I thought it would. I could have started putting together my last two bookcases, but that requires hammering and I thought it might be a tad too late in the day for that. Maybe this weekend.

A Spark Deferred

It seems that for my phone service to actually start working, the phone company has to physically come out and flip some magic switch.

Which they can't do until tomorrow, of course.

At this point, I'm really starting to lean towards the idea that they're just Messing With Me.