ellilion

"That's why we play a game like Guild Wars, where the battlefield is just for you and no dumb ass can follow you around a steal your stuff. Dragon" I hope the "we" wasn't talking about the voices in your head, As your the only person on the board that I know plays Guild Wars, I could be wrong but I have to wonder. I guess I'm asking if your in the beta? as it doesn't come out to march 22 2k5, It does look good and has some interesting ideas for quests and stuff but let's see if they can pull it off. Look at all the problems WoW is having with some of the stuff they are trying to do. " never play this one, but heard many good things (mee hates the MMORPGs) mmorpg are not my favorate gerne"-- Conan4Life I was pretty much the same way about MMORPGs(as well as carcass and hefty and both of them now own WoW or should I say it OWNZ them, hehe) I probably would have never bought the game if I hadn't been in the closed beta and got to try for free.

Hey glad you didn't have to sell your gaming rig. I thought it was a fairly reasonable price for the full rig w/ LCD, but most of the people here are looking for crazy deals and such and don't consider the time and effort of putting a system together. And man there's alot of HATE in this tread and kicking a man when he's down Where's the LUV ? Oh I petition to get Juddog to reduce the size of his SIG, I'm getting tried of having to scroll a half a page to get past his posts, plus like pursuit said when's the last time he's been to a LAN party? I only remember 2 and that was a long time ago(over a year ago I think, actually longer if I remember correctly) I guess he could come if he wasn't paying for 3 evercrack accounts plus WoW. :rotfl: Sorry for the Hate Juddog, I guess I wouldn't rag on you if you came to a LAN party once in awhile.

I was thinking about what you said in the post hefty and was laughing cause it's only the 2nd vavle game you could of bought, lol. I think we as game consumers have gotten way to picky in some cases, If a game isn't 100% awesome from head to toe we deem it to be a bad game or failed attempt by the company. I think HL 2 is a great game from a tech. and story stand point, my only real complaint is that the MP side was lacking but we knew that it was gonna be, they told us before the game came out!! Doom 3 the MP was lacking as well and still is. These games were made with SP experience in mind first and fore most, they did kinda of did rope a dope us into getting the collector's edition for HL 1 source which I thought was gonna be redone with alot better graphics and still retain the MP aspects of the game but sadly it didn't and that is one of my biggest complaints with this title. Oh yeah I tried the new drivers I posted above and they have been working pretty good, seems to run HL 2 real smooth and looks great and it has awesome options for dual display and using the dvi connection to hook up to HDTV. Just for those options alone it's worth using the drivers, for me anyways. I would also try to remember the game industry about 5-10 years ago and some of the horrible games we were sold in that time. Killer games were few and far between, HL 1 was one of the games to really change that. As well as diablo 1&2, warcraft II, Starcraft, Descent 1&2, X-wing vs. Tie Fighter(what ever happen to this great series?? or anytype of good space/combat flight sim for the PC? RIP), baldur's gate series, etc. I'm sure I'm missing some other great titles and I didn't want to go to far back in gaming history but I think the game industry has come along way in most aspects, except for the fact that 80-90% of titles are FPS or RTS. We could use some other styles of games aka diablo, NWN, and some good old space or combat flight sims. Oh well I think I've babbled enough, :dork: :rotfl:

I don't need the cd/dvd to play after the one patch they took out the cd/dvd check, I agree that HL source is a joke, at least they could have included MP with that. HL2 DM is'nt what I'd hoped it to be, like you said it seems that they are leaving it to the mod community to make maps for it which is disappointing to say the least, they should release at least a couple of maps for it since they made the game. I'm not sure on the studdering issue, I thought it was more of a sound card issue than a video card issue last time I was researching it. I know they have new beta's for the 6800 series which I haven't tried yet 71.25 WHQL'd http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=966 which might help. I will post later, I've been meaning to put them on and test. They also released a new version of NVtweak 1.71 (coolbits + alot of other tweaks) http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=40820 that seems to help tweak alot of options you normally don't have access too.

http://www.gamegossip.com/pressrelease.php?id=11694 Well they just won't stop until they have everything will they! DICE falls victim to EA buyout :vomit: The co-creator of penny-arcade made an interesting comment this morning on the site " One can hardly keep up with the level of consolidation and treachery in the industry anymore. My interest lies more in what these companies produce, so by and large I'm content just let them slink around in the dark and kill each other. Product, not production. To cite just one example, I'm interested in fruit - but not botany or agriculture. So there you have it. Eventually, it's not going to be the kind of thing I can avoid, because I'm going to walk into an Electronic Arts retail location here in a couple years and purchase a white box with the word "Game" on it, and that's going to be the industry. " -- Tycho

Hey this a copy and paste from www.penny-arcade.com with current issues they have asked Blizzard about that made them revoke the game of the year award they had given WoW, I would have just linked but there website is running real slow right now and I figured it would be easier to just copy it and post it here. Here you Go------------- Blizzard Interview Mon, January 24 2005 - 4:35 AM by: Tycho I mentioned last week that we sent a fairly terse set of questions over to Blizzard. They're a lot more direct than developers are used to receiving. The crazy thing is, the answers we got back were a lot more direct than the interviews out there usually receive. Funny, that. Without further ado: 1. You say that you sold six hundred thousand units. Is the game not capable of supporting this many users? The short answer is "The game is capable of supporting this many players," but it would probably be helpful to provide some background information. Based on our market analysis, we made some initial calculations about the size of the massively multiplayer online games market in the United States. We then accounted for new customers to the genre based on our previous games. Looking over this data, we did believe that there was the potential for an extremely sizable interest in a Blizzard MMOG. According to our research, other successful MMOGs in the U.S. had achieved roughly 300,000 subscribers after 12 months of operation. What ended up happening with World of Warcraft is that we achieved double these numbers in approximately the first six weeks of launch. We absolutely can support the number of copies we put on shelves, but we believed it would take us longer to get to this number in terms of players purchasing the game and logging on. We had not anticipated this amount of growth in such a short time; however, we did have a backup plan that was deployed rapidly. In the first week of launch, we more than doubled our number of game servers and server infrastructure to accommodate the demand. The fact that we had planned to grow the service over the first 12 months of operation was evident, as we had server hardware waiting to be deployed. We just anticipated that this server rollout would be gradual. Copies of the game were being purchased at a much faster rate than anticipated, so we had to abandon our slower-paced plan and go into rapid deployment to accommodate these additional customers. This meant we also had to advance our timetable for additional server purchases. With such a rapid growth of the network, we started to see several bottlenecks in the infrastructure that exposed themselves very quickly when the expanded hardware immediately took on massive load. These bottlenecks were solvable, but they required additional upgrades to the backend systems to accommodate the load—which, again, we hadn’t planned to see, even with the extreme estimates, until later in the year. Regardless, server stability has remained our number-one priority, and so we acquired and deployed even more equipment as part of the process of addressing these issues. All of this new hardware also required additional software and operating system upgrades on the backend. The problems that some players on the 20 or so most populated servers (out of the current total of 88 servers) have been experiencing are related to some of the upgrades not functioning as desired. We are working diligently with our vendors and internal technical staff to get as quick of a resolution to the problems as possible, and we believe there should be noticeable improvements soon. When our community team commented that people are working 24/7, they weren't exaggerating. 2. If it's true that the server problems are related to the overwhelming number of players, why was no effort made to better distribute players evenly across realms, or allow players and guilds to transfer to less populated servers? We actually did have a number of checks in place at launch to distribute players as evenly as possible across realms. When a new account logged in, the game would ask what realm rule set and time zone the player preferred, and then it would suggest the realm with the lowest population that matched the selected preferences. That said, we're definitely working on resolving the overpopulation problems that ended up occurring on some realms despite our preventative measures. A realm-transfer option that would allow players to move from their high-population realm to one with a low population is one of the things we’re investigating. We’re exploring this option fully and hope to be able to communicate more detailed information about it to our customers in the coming weeks. 3. Currently, large scale player raids involving large groups of players experience a huge amount of latency. How do you plan to compensate for this in your upcoming PvP Battlegrounds feature? The player raids often have hundreds of people per side in one area; that area is on a server that is also running the rest of the continent, and that can result in the latency you describe—depending, as well, on the total population of that server. We’re continuing to look into the issues surrounding this dip in performance. Battlegrounds, on the other hand, will run on the instance server, so there should be no such issues. Additionally, players will be unable to "zerg" in Battlegrounds; there will be a limit to the number of players per side. 4. What accounts for the frequent "emergency" maintenance downtime? What issues are you attempting to resolve? The emergency maintenance periods are to restore stability while we continue to narrow down the cause of the problems. Some of them are also to deploy temporary fixes to various in-game systems while we continue to develop a longer term, more stable solution. World of Warcraft delivers many complex features that are unique to MMOGs. Features such as the in-game mail system, auction houses, player inventories, flight paths, quest states, etc. use a lot of server bandwidth, which makes pinpointing problems on the server infrastructure much more complicated. Recently, the extended emergency downtime for a certain number of realms was needed in order to better accommodate our growing player base. Some of the upgrades that we planned for all of the realms were made to these realms first, as they are among the most populated and thus most in need of aid. We set the realms up on the latest top-of-the-line hardware and made the software upgrades accordingly, but some unforeseen issues cropped up with the database that resulted in the problems players currently see. This is no fun for our player base, of course, and we don't want to keep the realms running in a condition that frustrates our customers when we can attempt to fix things . So, these downtimes have been used to change hardware and apply fixes that will hopefully alleviate the issues. We have not yet resolved the problems, but we're working on this around the clock. 5. What issues are you experiencing with your login/authentication servers? It is often the case for myself and the people I play with that we cannot access realms our friends are already logged into. These types of issues stem from the problems described above. Conflicts occur between some of the internal applications running in the background, and the end result can take the form of temporary login issues. We're working to resolve these conflicts so that they are no longer a factor. 6. When do you expect to have the worst of these problems resolved? We’ll be constantly working on these issues each day moving forward until they’re resolved, but we don't currently have a set date for when that will be. We're doing all we can to make sure these problems no longer occur -- it's our top priority, and we hope to have the issues fixed as soon as possible. We’ll continue to provide players with regular updates on our progress. 7. Will the European launch utilize the same realms, or will these players be hosted on all new equipment? If they are hosted on new servers, what have you done to ensure that the launch will be free of the problems mentioned above? They will be on their own set of hardware, as with our Korean release. Our teams are learning from the experience of our North American launch and are applying that knowledge to the servers in Europe. We hope to provide them with a smooth launch. 8. What would you have done differently? It would be easy to speculate about what we could have done differently, but that wouldn’t turn back the clock. Right now we’re extremely focused on the issues at hand, and this focus is helping us methodically chase down the problems that are causing frustration for some of our players. The foundation of our company is based on providing a top-notch game experience and an equally top-notch level of customer satisfaction; we won’t be happy until we feel we’re consistently meeting those standards.

Blizzard was talking about the character switch between servers in their next patch, but it would be a one time deal from what I understand. Meaning you would be able to switch a character from one server to another and that would be it, So if everyone switched you could run into the same problem on the server you just switched to if alot of people joined that server also. They have removed the boats causing the problems with dropping people in the middle of the ocean and replaced them with a character that will teleport you over to the other area :doh: It was weird holding your breath just to see if you could make over to the next area. The one thing that is very nice is the leveling of characters, if you can only play once or twice a week your character gets exp. from resting and added exp. when killing stuff if well rested 200% for a length of time which is longer the more your character is rested, and vise-versa if a person grinds and plays hours and hours non stop they will hit a point where they will take a lost on exp. down to at least 50% maybe lower depending on how long they play without resting their character, so they do try to even the playing field a little more. They also want to start a honor system which would help stop high lev campers killing off low lev characters, if such players kept doing it they could find themselves not wanted by even their own faction and would have to get their reputation restored by doing more honorable stuff like killing monsters or opposing players of equal levels. So Blizzard is trying to do some great stuff with this game but right now it's almost too popular with too many players and blizzard I think is in over their heads right now with trying to resolve alot of the issues with the game and a amount of players they didn't expect. But to give them some credit every MMORPG has had simular issues when they first start and NO other has come close to the amount of players WoW has seen in it's first 2 months out. I fully support this game and love it even with the issues which I think will be fixed(hopefully soon) but I also would wait if I didn't own it already till the dust settled down a bit before buying it.

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html An interesting read.................... :popc: I also like the end part about how this could really hurt microsoft in the long run.......... :rotfl: Can't wait to see how this technology will effect the computer industry :bump:

http://articles.filefront.com/Electronic_A...;;/article.html Yeah another EA move!!!!! man I hate them :evil:

To many people to quickly!! I've had the boat drop me in the ocean 3-4 times during the transfer from one map to another along with 3-4 other characters on the boat, let's say the first time it happen it was kinda of funny, we all kinda of looked at each other and were like "WHAT THE F*bleep*K JUST HAPPENED!!!!" but after having to rez 3-4 times before I could get my character to shore without dying from fatigue(which happens if you try to swim out in the middle of the ocean) I was no longer amused and this was with my druid which had his seaform(let's him transform into sealion) which let's him swim alot faster without having to come up for breath, most characters would have a harder time of making it to shore. You can rez without having to come back for your body but at a cost of 25% of your equipment's duribilty which cost money to fix and rez sickness which reduces you to 25% of your stats and ablilities for 10-15mins. Let me also touch on the login server issues I've had also, all the sudden you get booted from server and can no longer login while other players are still on and playing(my one buddy with dail up was on and playing, while I was having issues). Plus when you go onto blizzard's website to see what's going on it's either not working too or you can't post because login servers are also used to login to forums. Oh let me also touch on lag in certain areas like the Auction House or when you try to use the in game mail system, It's so bad sometimes it unplayable or you have to wait 2-4 mins before the mail or auctions come up. Let me also say I LOVE the game but these issues are getting frustrating but hopefully blizzard will start telling the players what's going on instead of the generic reply of "We are aware of the issues and currently working to resolve them as soon as possible". Let me also touch on getting help in the game from the GM's, I've only had to ask for help once and once was more than enough, it took them over 5 hours to get back to me on an open ticket. I had stopped playing for a couple of hours and started back up on some other quests before I got a reply from a GM to only find out the quest was not finished by the developers yet and not sure when it would be completed and that was 2-3 weeks ago(still not fixed) and it's only a 24th level rogue quest not some high lev quest. I can find more info about the stuff that's going on in a 3rd party or fan site forum then on blizzard's site most of the time. OK now that I've ranted a little about the issues I've experienced with the game as well as many other players, I must say it is a great game but it comes at a price at this point. Some players on lower population servers are not experiencing most of the issues but most of us don't want to switch servers and start all over with new characters and guilds so hopefully they can either allow characters to switch servers or put more muscle behind the high pop. servers to help fix these issues and let the players know what's going on. :bonk:

I know it looks quite a bit better than that on my 6800gt, Not the best screenshot I've seen. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/screensh...eIndex=66&Set=0 There is a ton more screenshots to look at, also you have to remember that it's an online only game so that graphics can't be as good as HL2 or Doom3 with 100s to 1000s of people playing at once, you don't see UT2k4 supporting over 100 players at once do you now?

on Bloodhoof Ellilion-night elf rogue 30th lev - skinning/leatherworking Saihar- night elf druid 15th lev - herbalism/alchemy Nestorian- human paladin 14th lev- blacksmithing/mining Darby- dwarf hunter 8th- mining/engineering(really not playing) Lightning blade- Balinor- human fighter 8th lev- not playing at all Azgalor- YoMoMz- orc fighter 9th lev- not playing much

Well it looks like we have about 6 people interested in starting a guild, 4 of us I know are playing Alliance not sure about some others. I'm playing on bloodhoof normal server now along w/ juddog,carcass, and lilkev. I know Hefty is planning to buy WoW after finishing some stuff on his new house(congratz by the way) hopefully in the next week or 2. My main character is in a guild already but have a couple of ALT characters that aren't (only around 15 lev). I figured on waiting till the new patch comes out that allows the server switching and maybe wait till the dust settles from that to try to pick a lower traffic server for us. I'm also thinking of staying with a normal server to avoid the PvP griefs of camping groups/guilds as much as possible. You can still do PvP on a normal server it's just not on all the time. And leaning towards Alliance unless everyone else wants to go Horde(sorry I almost always play a good character in any rpg I have a choice). And we'll have to think of a cool guild name, so any suggestions pm me or post here. Oh yeah I seen some stuff on some guilds which there main objective is to camp and grief other players as much as possible, The one I know of that's on the alliance side is Kali Compton not sure what server they are on, haven't seen them at all on bloodhoof. I think once we get up and started and get a good base going we could make our objective to not to do this kinda of stuff and maybe go after groups/guilds that are.

Seems to be down right now. Is that URL still valid? not sure what happened to it? I haven't been able to get to it for a about a week.

I'm on a normal server right now and at least if a bunch of 20 lev characters group you can fight some of them off(that's what we did in redridge). What I'm talking about is 3-4 50+ level characters doing that in a starting area!!!!! where the characters are 5th level and under, you know even if the characters won't bite on to fight them they will follow around the characters and kill the quest NPC's to make things difficult for the noobs. I been starting some new characters with some friends that are just starting to get into game and seen it a couple of times now. I'm sorry to generalize not all horde players are lamers and that's not what I meant to say but some players horde or alliance doing this kind of stuff is very lame. It is even worst when characters that are the same level show up to fight them they take off and run or move to another area w/o any high lev characters. I guess it's a problem on both sides but some of the players I've seen aren't even looking for a good fight just going after the noobs to be annoying. Like I said these players aren't doing this in an area where it would be a challenge for them just very low level areas where there are no characters close to the same level.

That's one thing I noticed a lot of high lev horde people are very lame, More and more I noticed that 50+ lev horde are coming into very low lev areas. Going around killing people under 5th lev. in starting areas like northshore abbey, dolinaar, etc. on PvE or carebear servers, I hope blizzard starts putting heavy penalities on these players or stops it out right. I don't mind doing PvP but come on what's the challenge in killing 5- lev players when your 50+ lev, I would find better things to do with my time. The funny thing is when some high lev characters come to help they turn off PvP and run like little babies Don't get me wrong i've had alot of fun doing some PvP, in the one area a tauren shaman(around 45-50lev) came in and the area had characters around 18-25lev and a group of us were fighting him off and I had a blast with that but as soon as a 45th lev paladin joined the fight he shut off PvP and took off. I mean if you want to do PvP fine but don't be a baby when you run into a challenge.

1) HL2 DM 2) Tribes 3) BFV

I know we have some World of Warcraft players out there and was wondering if we had the players and interest in starting a Guild up? Alot of things would be talked about once we decide if were gonna make one as far as rules/servers and such. I know I, PerFecTioN, Juddog, kalvinclyde, lilkev, Carcass, and maybe Paroxysm are playing now. Hoping maybe some other people will also get into this great game. I know Hefty & Dragon might be interested. But for people unsure about the game, I'm a person who is strongly against pay to play games, I have tried games like ultima online, everquest, dark age of camelot, etc. and never liked any of them very much. I probably would have never bought the game if I hadn't been in the closed beta to be honest with you. But because of the excellence of the game and the effort blizzard has made to keep the game fun for all styles of players I fully recommend this game to anyone interested in it. (Circuit City has the game on sale right now for $40 but don't have any in stock but you can get a raincheck, can also get online for $35-40. It can be hard finding a retail copy, their only selling so many copies at a time to make sure they don't overload the servers(which only had 23-24 servers when the game first came out and now up to 80+ servers, pretty good considering the game has only been out a month & 1/2)) :popc: :popc: :popc: :popc:

Good all around info sites ---- http://wow.thotbott.com/ http://wow.stratics.com/ http://nymbulus.com/news.php http://www.koaworld.com/ http://wowvault.ign.com/ http://www.worldofwar.net/ http://wow.warcry.com/ http://wow.warcraftstrategy.com/ really good one for quests --- http://wow.goblinworkshop.com/ This one is great for Trade Skill trainers and where to find them --- http://www.worldofwar.net/professions/trainers.php here you can download a program to customize a lot of the interface options ---- http://www.cosmosui.org/ P.S.--- it is a legal utility, there is a link right off their page linking to blizzard's page about that

S3-cards- I had a couple of these and don't remember all of them( I had one that had 8mb ram, 2 different types 4mb for 3d & 4mb for 2d , and it still sucked) Voodoo 1 - diamond 4mb ram-- yummy, anyone remember Quake GL? Voodoo 2 -- diamond 8mb ram - had 2 of them running SLI, kinda of sick thinking about have 3 video cards in 1 system Voodoo Banshee - 16mb ram - one of the worst cards made voodoo 3 3000 - AGP 16mb ram Rage 128 -AGP 32mb ram - worst drivers ever made, I think this is the card that ATI got their rep for making bad drivers Geforce 2 gts - AGP 32 mb ram Radeon 7000 - AGP 32mb ram - ATI drivers still not the greatest here but getting better Radeon 8500 - AGP 64mb ram - ATI drivers finally getting descent Geforce 4 ti 4600 - AGP 128mb ram- had it less than a week before it broke, sent it back to newegg for refund and got my next card Radeon 9700pro - AGP 128 ram - great card for ATI finally but them on top Geforce 6800GT -AGP 256mb ram - great card, don't plan I getting another for awhile now man, this makes me feel kinda of old building my own systems for close to 10 years maybe longer. And I'm sure there were other cards I had I forgot about. must be the old age kicking in

That is awesome, I can't show my wife that or she'll want that camera too.

More details about the GPU for the PS3 http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/di...1228125957.html

My main is up to 20th lev on Bloodhoof, sorry we haven't played together at all Juddog but the lightning blade server character i made is only 8th and I knew I wouldn't be able to catch up to you in level no matter how hard i tried. But if you can powerlevel your dude on Bloodhoof maybe we can get on some quests together, in the redridge area right now. Also thinking of starting a horde character with tom but i forgot what server he started on, i know it's a tauren shaman. I was gonna make a warrior tauren i think but at least we can lev together for once. I could also play my dwarf hunter(Darby) with your preist on bloodhoof he's only lev 7-8 I think. Man I haven't been addicted to game this much since NWN :dork: but i let you know either way, might not be able to play tonight with you, me and tom are trying to get together a party for van cleef in westfalls on bloodhoof tonight. also lilkev is coming over tomorrow and thinking of picking up a copy of WoW so we can play together tomorrow night but might not be till late(after 10pm)

with that card you should be able to run everything at 1280x1024 w/ no problems, I have the EVGA 6800 gt oc@ 400/1050 and everything runs smooth and stable using the 67.02 drivers. Everything looks amazing esp. HL2, the only thing I have to turn my settings down from max is in Need for Speed Underground 2 but the game is brutal even in reviews they get low framerates.

Well if you get him milk and make him gingerbread cookies he gives you gifts. He gave me leather, yummy leather I always need more leather for my leather working. Plus he sent me some other gifts in the mail mostly snacks that help heal me like candy canes, cheese wheel, eggnog, etc. I never liked a MMORPG before WoW and now it OWNZ me.