Play With Me Gamer Tags
Guild Wars 2
- Ogrebears of Northern Shiverpeaks
Retired Characters
The Old Republic
- Ogrebear of Lord Praven
- Meve of Lord Praven
Rift Characters
- Ogrebear of Faeblight
- Ogrebears of Faeblight
Everquest 2
- Ogrebears of Kithicor
- Ratbear of Kithicor
Everquest
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Since i’ve been configuring my own Gaming rigs, and helping friend with their for the last 10 years, i’ve decided to make a quarterly guide to build systems. So i’m making some assumptions here for these PC guild.
- You have a Monitor
- You have Speakers/headphones
- You have a Case
Everything else i will be including in my builds.
$500 Gaming System build June 2013.
Total cost $497. I’ll be honest here i wouldn’t recommend this to any of my friends. If your going to buy a gaming computer and can afford it you need to put down more than 500 bucks. With this for all the part except the CPU and Powersupply i looked for the cheapest that had good rating. For the CPU and Video card i had a hard choise. I could of gotten a I5 at 3.1GB but then i would have to get a Geforce 650. I went with the higher end graphs card over the CPU.
$1000 Gaming system build June 2013
Total Cost $989. Now this is a system i could recommend to my friends. Unlike the 500 bucks system were i felt like i made a sacrifice between the CPU and Video, we have a high end I5, and a high end 670 on this system. If i was willing to spend more i’d up the ram from 1600 to 2400, and keep it at 8GB (most games still don’t use more than 4GB of ram, but that might change when the new console come out). With that said ram is cheap, so it one of the cheapest components to switch out.\
$1500 Gaming System Build June 2013
Total Cost 1484. This is a system i would get. Though i might splurge and replace the hard drive with an SSD, but other than that, this is pretty much a top of the line system.
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So Sim City has release patch 4.0, you can view the patch notes here.
The important parts of the update
- New park — sigh would be nice for them to fix the broken parts of the game before adding new stuff.
- New Region: Edgewater — same as above fix the game first (i’ll try to play a game with this map though)
- Turning on launch feature on Month later – Global market price will dynamically change as you play. There turning on leaderboard (only for some server with the other to come on some time afterwards), Region Filters (you can now pick the map you want to play on with other people).
Other than that there wasn’t much done. Now to play Patch 4 and see what i think…
I made 2 cities in Edgewater, the first was in Gardner Valley. This first city i made to be a oil producing city. And it honestly worked out pretty well, traffic didn’t appear to be much of an issue, and i was able to get pretty far with the oil producing business (to the point i stopped selling oil and started working on plastic. I got my population up to 81,000 with out much traffic which is nice.
The second city i made was in McKenzie Point. This was my Gaming Vegas style city, unlike the oil city i had much much more issues with this city. The biggest issue was traffic, even at just 70,000 people my city was swamped with traffic. I had Buses, street cars, trains, boats, airplanes, i couldn’t get over the traffic issues. The issues are the results of just a couple 5 or 6 huge commercial buildings that seem to have 1000 cars going to it (like 1/2 the city is employee in that 1/2 block). I ended up rage quiting at that point as nothing i did seem to have any effect on the traffic.
After playing the first city i was going to say that Sim City had finally reached Release quality as that first city was rather enjoyable to play and i really didn’t have many issues… BUT then i made a gambling city and ended up having worse traffic than New York city when the metro down… and with only 70K people. For anyone thinking about buying the game, its still beta quality, even though it been out for month…
I probably should of asked for my money back instead of waiting and hopping it would get better.
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So there was a big Guild Wars 2 update today (The Secret of Southsun). This is a large update that move the story of southsun cove forward. It also added a huge amount of achievements for the area.
Dulfy.net has an achievement guide that has everything you need to get all the achievements (Consortium Rewards club member southsun Setter Support, southsun sightseer, southsun VIP meer and greet, Southsun Volunteer fieldwork/sample collection, crab toss and so on).
I’ve managed to do most of the achievements today. The Southsun Samples all are flower that will have you going all over the island. One thing to note is when you get to the lava pit, near the top is a pair of goggles. If you grab them and jump you’ll get the achievement The Goggles Do Nothing, which i thought was rather funny. You’ll see a line of people jumping to their deaths in to a lava pit.
Crab Toss kind of annoys me, your in an arena with about 8 other people. And you attemped to hold on to the crab the longest. What i found with the game is most people’s first or second time they don’t get to many point. (like 1-30). There will be one or 2 people who really know what they will be doing that will get like 100-150 of the total 200 points (i think its a total of 200). At the end of the crab toss there is a chest, but i haven’t really got anything good out of it. I also haven’t been in the top 3, so i don’t know if they get better items or not.
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I know I’ve been jumping from game to game like a crack addict, hell i even put in 10 hour in to Euro Truck Simulator 2 this weekend But at this point i think i’m going to stick to Guild Wars 2, and maybe a bit of The Secret World.
So I’ve decided to try out a Mesmer in Guild Wars 2. Right now i do have 3 max level characters in the game (A Guardian, warrior and Thief). Mesmer will be a big difference.
For my Mesmer i started off as a human female, and i totally forgot that the game throw your right in to the middle of the action when you start, including a fight with a boss just minutes after starting the game. Which was fun, but you do feel very overpowered when you do fight this boss at level 1.
The shatters build i plan to use for this character is here. http://www.gw2builds.org/view/312055/shatter_2. I’ve never played a Mesmer before so I’m not sure if this is a good build or not, but from what i see it look good. Any advise would be good. My plan is to just solo this charter, i don’t really have any plan to do any or much grouping with this Character.
Just starting out in The Plains of Ashford i forgot how nice Guild Wars 2 can look.
 
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After seeing the EA logo when i loaded the game, i was about to ask for my money back, but after reading some of the forum it looks like funcom made the game with zero help from EA, and EA is acting as the publisher. So i’ll give the game a chance. (note to anyone from EA, your are still dead to me for how bad Sim City came out, i will only ever buy something that comes out of your company after it comes out and if it has good review after it comes out no pre-order ever again).
So back to The Secret world, i honestly had never heard about this game until one of my guild mates in GW2 who’s as board as i am with GW2 said he was going to try this game. And so far i like it, i mean what is there not to like about a game that you can kill Zombies. I do see already see what John Smedley (previous post) has said about this game and every other MMO. I’m going to reach the max level and most likely leave the game.
In The Secret world no matter which side you pick (Illuminati, Dragons or Templars) after you leave your starting city (which you’ll promptly leave once you find out London is the only city with a bank), you’ll be in Kingsmouth to start the game. There are a couple of time of missions in the game.
- Story Missions — By this point you already have this. This is the only mission that in unique to the 3 factions. You can only have one of these (but you’ll never find these out in the world)
- Actions Missions (main Mission). These appear as red. These are longer quest in an area, typically have 2-8 parts, and you typical get a weapon/armor award.
- Side Missions (you can have 3). These are all over the world, they are short missions in the area
- Investigation Missions (main mission) These have a computer screen and count as a main mission. These are your puzzle missions
- sabotage Missions (Main Mission) where you sabotage something.
- Dungeon (Group) Missions)
- PVP missions
The first mission your going to see is “For a Fistful of Zombies” the main goal of this quest is to have your kill zombies on your way to the main quest hub. Along the way there is a side quest that i missed the first time i went through the game, but make sure you pick that one up as well (as it also is going to the main quest hub).
The main quest hub in this area is the old police office, were what is left of the town has barricaded the area to protect them self from the zombies. There are 3 quest gives (one in the police station, one on the side ,and one on top, each giving different difficulty of quests). My first time through i didn’t see the guy on the top of the police station, he’s the dude that give the easiest quest to start off with. Which starting off since you have no armor is a good idea to do his first quest (and wait tell later to do his second as it is much harder.
Over all I’m liking this game already.
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If there is one video game that i’m excited for coming out is Everquest Next. I was a big Everquest 1 player in my early college years. I played on Kane Bayle starting a few month before Plane of Power came out in 2002, until late in 2004 (i think i quit a month or 2 after Omens of War came out). I think i loved most of the expansion that came out during that time except for the Gates of Discord. The moment Everquest 2 came out i jumped ship to that game, and spent countless hours in that game, it also the main reason i started this blog. And that was my game of choice for almost 4 years.
So at least 6 years of my MMo gaming year (11 years of playing MMo’s) has been in everquest, so i would love to go back, but i want to see how SOE plans to do that. So a few months ago John Smedley did a interview of EQ Next, which you can read here, and there were some interesting thing in that interview.
Once we made that shift, everything else had to follow. And what we saw was RIFT. We saw the writing on the wall with SWTOR. We saw The Secret World. We saw all these games that we knew were in development and very high-quality, but we saw what was going to happen — this big spike and then it goes down. That’s the truth of what’s been happening with MMOs. The fans need to realize that if you don’t change the nature of what these games are, you’re not going to change that core behavior. We want to make games that last more than 15 years. That’s why we made the decision to change it.
The funny thing about this quote is i played each of these games and had issues with each that i talked about in this blog. So that got me thinking, what did i like about the game, and why did i leave them.
Rift
So, by the time i was playing rift i was using Raptr to keep track of my game time. I put 449 hours in to Rift (or 18.7 full days worth of time (56.1 work day). What made me stay? Well i enjoyed leveling up, and i enjoyed the next content, those keep me in the game. Looking at my own blog, i reached 50, 3 day later i made my last post about Rift and quit. Why did i quit, well i had reached the end of the content (quest) that was keeping me engaged, and i pretty much played the entire game with zero social interaction. Unlike Eq or Eq2 there really wasn’t much content to go back and replay (in eq1 you could go from 1-65 and only vist 1/10 of the world, so there was so much to explore and see). Some will say, but Ogrebear, you could of done group rift, dungeons and then raided. Which is true, but i didn’t really feel like rading, and since i had zero socail interaction with people in the game, i had no one to join a dungeon with.
SWTOR
So Raptr also keep track of my game time for this game, i ended up putting in 480 hours in to this game (second highest on my life, only TF2 has more hours in it). I really really loved the story of the game, and the world had so much potential, but what happened was each world was for 5-10 levels, and then there no point in ever coming back to that world. Which is sad (rift had the same issue). There is so so so much you can do with a world, but if you leave it so that it only for a certain level range you kill a lot of the fun of having a massive world. Unlike Rift i didn’t quit when i got to level 80. I was much more invested in the game, and the world, and i was social with other people. We did group Dungeons, which were pretty fun, but there was a problem. Most of us had already crafted better Armor than what you could get from a Dungeon. And so at some point i asked my self what was the point in playing the game? I was out of content, i had reach the highest level i would with my armor, and i really don’t enjoy doing the same thing over and over unless i’m doing it for a reward. And so i quit the game.
The Secret World i just started to play so i won’t say anything about it.
What is SOE going to do?
That hard to tell. I’m going to make the assumption they gone through the same thing i’ve had. You make it to the top level of the game, and your bored, there nothing to do, and a lot of people don’t like the armor grind that is the top level. At the same time i do not want them to take the GW2 approach where everyone can solo there way to the top gear. Because i did that and once i got there i ran out of content and had the best arrmor, so i had little will to play that game after that. I really don’t know what there planing.
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Ok not long after Patch 2.0 has come out, EA has release patch 3.0, which you can read what has changed here. Just quickly looking at this patch it looks like they did (at least in the patch) a lot of stuff with Traffic. So i’m going to be trying my luck at a casino city to see if they’ve made things better or not (i am not to hopeful).
I started my city pretty much like i start all my casino city. about 1/2 the land is used for people to live, and the other 1/2 is used for the casino area. Straight off the bat i’m not seeing as much traffic issues as i did the last time i tried this. I think the last time i tired this i quit after 5 minutes in to making my city, because i had 5000 people living it it and a traffic game 1/2 way across the city.
So faster forward a few days. I have a population of mostly low income workers, most of which work in the city. At first the casino city seem to be doing pretty well, but over time i started to see less and less people coming to the Games, and to the casinos. During the morning hours 6AM-noon, there would be like no one at the casino, or any of my tourist spots. While i had some traffic, traffic wasn’t bad in the morning. It would only get bad when i would have a big game at the large coliseum.
Overall Option after patch 3.0. EA/maxis made the game a little bit better to play, i feel the game has reached the late Alpha, maybe early beta phase, but still needs 3-6 more months of work to get to release quality. If you are thinking about getting the game, don’t it currently not worth 59 buck. It better than it was before, but still has a long way to go.
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So originality i was going to try to play the MMO Tera, as it was free to play and from the graphic it looked pretty good. I spent maybe a 30 minutes trying to play the first area and left rather confused at what i was doing. It just ended up feeling like i was button mashing and wasn’t sure what i was doing.
One of my real life friends told me he had started to play The Secret World, and so i’ve decided to start playing as well. So far i like the game. More to come…
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I know the post right below this is blew EA a new one, and i still feel that way. But at the moment there are no other game to play, and i did spend 79 bucks on this game (if you can call it that). So i’m going to attempted to play again. Instead of creating what we would consider a real city i’m going to try to create a city that works based on the rules that are in place in Sim City.
For my new region i have desired to go with Discovery Delta, all the other Region’s I’ve played have always been Viridian Woods or Titan Gorge, as these 2 maps have the most of the flat cities in them. A lot of Viridian Citys are also flat, but there a lot more water way through city which should be this a little bit interesting.
For my first City in the Region i went with Spooner Plains, which i plan to make a very very low income, industry area.
My hope by not have all the streets connect and just having a few main streets traffic will not get to bad.
And so far so good, traffic is doing pretty well in the city, but right now most of the building are only Medium, or low density. I’m expecting traffic to blow up when some of the high density builds come in to play.
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I had hoped patch 2.0 would make the game playable… You know the games been out almost 2 month, they done tons of patches, and this was the first really big patch, and i was hoping that this would really make the game playable.
Traffic has become horrible. I started a new city, and with in 2 minutes i had 2000 people, and a traffic jam that went 1/2 way through my city. WTF. And it wasn’t like i had 20 street connect to my main avenue. I had 2 avenue going to people houses, and one to people’s jobs. Only 3 places where there were stop light. and traffic pilled like i had just made an inner city with 1 lane roads only.
I’m sorry EA/Maxis i’m done, i might check in every once and a while to see if you’ve made the game actually playable. This is just a bad joke.
It So bad at the moment, i’ve made a promise to my self not pre-order any more EA game, and to wait 1 or 2 month after the game has gone out for other to review if the game is worth it or not.
EA your dead to me.
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