EQJunkies

With the slated release date of September 18th, Warhammer Online is fast approaching.  While the hype for this game has certainly matched the level that you would expect from a so-called “WoW Killer,” many folks are still questioning whether WAR will finally be the game that takes down Blizzard’s dominance in the MMO marketplace.

The bigger issue at hand, however, is not if the game succeeds - but rather, what if it fails?  WAR represents the last game “in the queue” for quite some time that could possibly stand a chance at competing with WoW.  If WAR follows in the footsteps of Age of Conan, it stands a chance to quickly fizzle as the critics tear any small problems to bits.  Indeed, if some of the comments coming out of the NDA release from closed beta hold true, it looks like WAR might actually provide some fairly large targets for the critics to hit.

Here’s hoping that Mythic has done their research and realzies what Warhammer Online can do for the MMO industry… and the consequences of an epic failure come launch time.

CNN is running an article about how there is no video game associated with the new batman movie, “The Dark Knight”.

This brings up an interesting question: what video game have you always wanted to see that was just never created?

Personally, I could have gone for a “Honey a shrunk the kids” game when I was younger.  How about you?

With Warhammer is scheduled to release these September many people are trying to find way to get into the Beta.  Some of the ways seem to be more work than they are worth: either writting up a lot of lore or creating a professional looking fan art piece.  Personally, I would like to take the easy way: Preodering the game.

By preordering you get the following:

• Invite to the beta.  You are guaranteed a spot.
• Live game head start.  No you don’t keep to keep going with your beta character, but you do get to start playing a few days before everyone else.  If you are a casual gamer this is great because there won’t be 10 million people running around taking your kills, etc.  If you a hardcore gamer these few extra days can give you the edge over the other insane people.
• In game item.  Which item you get is determined by which store you pre-order from.  You can visit this site for more details on what store gives you what items.  Personally, all of the EQJunkies pre-ordered from Amazon:

Does this mean we are giving up EQ2?

• No, not yet.  Landuran brought up a good point: we were going to give Warhammer a shot at some point, so why not give it a shot in the beginning?

After trying multiple times to get MythTV working with Ubuntu 8.04 I kept running into problems.  It seemed that the majority of the problems centered around getting the latest ivtv drivers to compile correctly on the system: I just was not able to get it to work.

I am a very stubborn person, so trust me when I say I tried lots of different ways to compile the driver.  For whatever reason, it just would not work right for me.  I even tried Mythbuntu, which was gave me even more problems with database passwords and such.  That being said, I started to look for alternatives.  The hardcore geek in me turned to Slackware Linux, the stubborn guy said “lets give Ubuntu one more shot”, the adventurous spirit insisted that Gentoo Linux looked like fun, and finally the practical guy said that MythDora seemed like it would just work.

I have had a Slackware install before; it is an awesome distribution with a very cool name & logos.  When I installed it last it seemed all the configuration stuff was done command line style and they kind of just set you loose on the system - I ultimately wasn’t in the mood for this much work.  I couldn’t bring myself to try Ubuntu again - it was obvious it was just becoming a time sink for me.  It seemed that every new way of installing my PVR-150 would just end at a new type of error.  I have only heard good things about Gentoo Linux, including Myclawz compiling it completely from source to get a server working.  Again though, I wasn’t in the mood for that much work.  I know I could have just installed it the easy way, but what is the point of installing Gentoo if you don’t compile for source?  So, if you have been keeping track, you would know that left me with MythDora 5.0.

I had tried MythDora when I believe they were on release 3.0 (maybe).  It installed, but was giving me lots of issues - not something I wanted out of the “easy way”.  It was time to give 5.0 a shot.

I downloaded the DVD ISO and burned it to a disk.  It was at this point that I remembered that the old system I was dealing with only had a CD drive - I had to wait another 20 minutes to download both CD ISOs.  On the first attempted install everything was going smoothly - they even had an option to install the ivtv drivers during the install process…I was impressed and encouraged.  About 50% way through copying the files over my system restarted - I don’t know why exactly, but looking back on it, it was probably because something shorted out (I had the board resting on a book with wires all over the place).  I restarted the install and everything went smoothly.  I didn’t have to enter passwords for the database or anything too special - just a root password.

At the end of the install it had a button to configure MythTV - I just had to tell it I had cable and sign up for a SchedulesDirect account (20/year) so I could get the listings.  After configuring everything it automatically asked me to run mythfilldatabase, which puts all the channel listings in the database.  Once the computer finished doing this, I was off and running.  MythTV worked perfectly with my old PIII 933 on 384 MB of RAM.  The real trick was having a hardware encoder for the TV stream: PVR-150.

I must say I was really impressed with MythDora this time around and would recommend it to anyone.  All I have left to do is to buy a remote and also a video card with a TV out.

Like always, if you have any questions about exactly how I did this just leave a comment.

Last night Myclawz and myself hopped online to get into some long awaited playtime.  Since he was only level 8, I traveled over to DLW to help him quest a little.  As I zoned in I turned on mentoring so he could continue to earn exp as we did things.  I met him just a little outside of the city gates and we immediately moved over to a hut to get a bunch of quests.

This was about the time that I remembered one important fact: I am not an evil race.  A level 25 heroic guard came over and killed me.  Great - I think I deserved that for being stupid.  The really sad thing is that it gave me a few options of where to spawn, one of which was 0.0 meters away.

Without putting much thought into it I clicked revive; I spawned in the center of the huts.  The guard ran over and immediately killed me again.  Being stubborn I kept spawning in this spot until I was able to run away from the guard…it took me about 3 trys.

This reminded me of back in the EQ1 days where you could literally bind yourself anywhere (including over lava).  I had a few friends who decided to keep killing themselves until they were low level again (but with awesome weapons).  I also had a few friends who found themselves on PoFear corpse runs which never ended well.

What is your best corpse recovery/death loop story?

Archangel has started a debate on the EQ2 forums - we wants to join a guild purely to buy a mount and then immediately disband.  He is being honest about it.

The conversation on the forums seems to be directed towards ‘would you let him do it?’  To me it is more of a question of ‘why would you want to do it?’

When myself and the other EQJunkies came back to EQ2 we had a major decision to make.  Do we join an existing guild of casual players or do we create our own - we chose the later for a few different reasons.

So, how do you feel?  Would you want to take the easy way out and join a guild for a quick mount?

Would you have any interest in letting someone leech of you?  Would you charge them?