I really don’t get it. Blizzard is sitting on the patch notes, etc… if they’re getting the PTRs up ASAP as Zarhym has been saying tonight, then why not just release the patch notes in a blue post and be done with all the idle speculation as to when the PTRs will be up, what will be in the patch, etc…
And to be honest, it’d make my job 100% easier. At this point it’s Friday night around 9:45 p.m. and I’m sitting infront of my computer waiting for some updated information – all because it needs to go up on WoW Insider fast, as soon as it’s released. Now I’m not saying that my fellow writers and I shouldn’t get this up right away – we should. What I’m saying is that Blizzard should give us the notes early, place them under an embargo until a specific time, and let that be the way they communicate with the largest WoW sites out there (WoW Insider, MMO-Champion, World of Raids). This constant “oh lets play the waiting game” thing is kind of getting old.
And to further illustrate how out of touch Blizzard is with their communication, which I’ve written a lot about at WoW Insider, is the fact that they don’t usually post the patch notes on the forums until a few days later. It’s obvious that they, to some extent, rely on the official fansites (like WoR) and other news and info sites (like WI and MMO-C) to disseminate information. When we get a few million people visiting WI in a single day because we’ve got patch notes up and stuff, well, it just goes to show where we exist on the information chain – and that chain really needs to be fixed.
It’s a little rusty.
I picked up a new BFG made GeForce GTX 260 graphics card today. It’s got 896Mb of GDDR3 RAM in it, and has two DVI ports in the back. It is so damn fast and fricken huge. In fact, look at the pictures below for comparison. The thing reminds me of the old SVGA cards that I put in my IBM 386 pizza box machines. Just so awesome… so awesome.
Woz is going to be on it! As an Apple nerd, that’s just fracken great. I mean, Woz is sort of this god like figure in the nerd community. He is the ying to Jobs’s yang. (/rimshot).
I have no doubt the majority of people out there will go “Who the fuck is this guy?” But for those of us that know who he is and have followed his life’s work, it will truly be a sight to see.
I’m trying my hand at level design.
Before World of Warcraft came along I was a huge Baldur’s Gate fan. I played BGI and BGII all the way through several times. Neverwinter Nights was also on the top of my list, although I never felt it got to the story telling level that the Baldur’s Gate series did. I currently am playing through Neverwinter Nights 2, and while I’m enjoying myself, I’m longing for my BGII Mage to come out and start kicking the living crap out of everything, all the while getting an amazing story told me to.
So I’ll be using the NWN2 framework for my level design. The DND ruleset isn’t too hard to understand, and I think that overall NWN2 should provide me with a good creative outlet.
The backend story for the campaign will focus on a Human from a tribe of bandits. He’s going to go through the typical Drizzt transformation and emerge at the end of the story a complicated character that, while partially dedicated to the ways of good, cannot completely get rid of his seedy past. I’ve decided on this overall story arc since while the Drizzt series is up there with the Lord of the Ring series in my all time favorites list, my one major complaint is that he seems to shake off his upbringing a little too easily. So, I say, why not change it!
I’ll use this blog, in part, to chronicle my own adventure while making this campaign.
Oh, and I want to reprise Boo, the hamster. That’s the real reason I’m doing this.
Massively, one of my favorite online sites, posted a news article today about EVE Online finally implementing a skill queue.
EVE Online works by allowing players to “level up” over time instead of leveling up based on experience. It’s an interesting concept and is a rather major departure from other MMOs.
You have to decide which skill you want to level up, or train in. Sometimes this means changing skills at odd times, and often means having a count down on your desktop someplace.
With this change you can now place any skill you’ll learn in under 24 hours in the queue. That rocks. I really can’t wait for this change to go live. It’ll finally encourage me to learn some of those lower level skills I’ve been putting off.
I hate writer’s block. I’m currently suffering from a mild case of it myself. Since I cover mainly day to day news, the block isn’t as much as what to report on but ways to report on it creatively and in a manner that most people will find enjoyable.
And it has to be most people, and not just my nitch of SciFi/Fantasy/KevinSmith fanboys.
According to the source of all things in the universe, Wikipedia, writer’s block is defined as: “Writer’s block is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity. Writer’s block can be closely related to depression and anxiety, two mood disorders that reflect environmentally caused or spontaneous changes in the brain’s frontal lobe. This is in contrast to hypergraphia, more closely linked to mania, in which the changes occur primarily in the temporal lobe.”
I find that quite interesting, especially since right now I’m deep into my psychology studies (and god only knows if I’m actually going to go into that field after I graduate, it sounds more and more like I’ll be writing or producing entertainment for a career). But I digress. The fact that my writers block could be attributed to depression or anxiety gives me pause. I’m not really depressed about anything (quite the opposite actually, yay promotion). And I don’t have any higher-than-normal level of anxiety, at least I think.
So putting that aside the psychological issues for a moment, there’s a few tips I found at 43founderes.com. Google is win after all. Some of the best:
- Listen to new music
- Write the middle
- Take a walk
- Take a shower; change clothes
- Talk to a monkey
Instead of talking to a monkey – which is just a funny way to saying talk about what you’re writing to an inanimate object, I think I’ll talk to my cat Max. Yes, that’ll work. NOTHING is wrong me. Nope, no need for psychological evaluations here.
“So Max… what do you think about gamer addiction and the economy?”
I’m going to do some personal blogging on here. Figure I should start doing something other than stuff about World of Warcraft.
This be just a test post for now. So…test!