The Skuz Blogs

RIFT: PvP Gear Cost

skuzfoz — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:20:36 +0000

I wanted to put up a quick guide to what you get at each Prestige Rank and how much it will cost to get all of your PvP gear at that Rank. It’s only specific to the thousands and the prices are as of 15/3/2011.

Rank N/A – PvP Soul

Rank 1 – This is what you get.

Rank 2 – F50,000 – Boots, Gloves, Ring

Rank 3 – F85,000 – Helm, Belt, Necklace

Rank 4 – F136,000 - Chest, Legs, Shoulders

Rank 5 – F230,000 - Boots, Gloves, Ring, Belt

Rank 5 – F128,000 - Purple Weapons

Rank 6 – F458,000 - Chest, Helm, Legs, Shoulders, Necklace

Apologies

skuzfoz — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:43:46 +0000

I’d like to use my somewhat-visited blog to share with the WAR community my apologies. For the past 6 months or so, I’ve been unpredictable and largely I failed our community in several ways.

My duty within the community as a moderator is to keep it a safe place from posters who decide to act in a way which the community will find undesirable. Unfortunately there have been times within the last 6 months where I have either failed to do my (volunteer) job at all, or in an unprofessional manner. There have even been times where I myself have had to be moderated because of the way that I was acting on the forums towards another person. I had even been removed from the Core Tester program due to an outburst.

I think everyone that will read this can understand that many people have issues that keep them from keeping their waaagh together from time to time. For transparency’s sake, what caused my temporarily unprofessional manner was my Manic Depression.

I’m ecstatic to say that I am once again steadily under control though medication, and I’d like to express my sincerest apologies for failing the community when it needed a Fozee the most.

Rift Review Part 1

skuzfoz — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 01:51:44 +0000

I found myself wading through waist-deep framerates in an effort to familiarize myself with the ways and habits of Rift: Planes of Telara. This issue was the focus of my first 20-30 minutes in Telara, which I can’t say is a good experience to log in to. I knew immediately that the engine being used was Gamebryo. I can identify this hideous bastard anywhere it’s used – usually because of the stench of the senseless framerate issues it plagues games with – especially if anything is displayed on-screen. I was able to improve the framerate by disabling Ambient Occlusion and Shadows.

Here I was, in this large stone building of sorts, accepting my first – fuck off, hint system – my first quest from some manner of being with wings. I immediately went “Shit, I hate characters with wings in my RPGs” and, through questionable quest design, jumped 20 meters to the accepting NPC. Turning in this pointless quest gave me my first… well, class. I think they call it soul or something, it isn’t entirely clear or easy to remember. I picked druid. I was able to look out of this jello-like magic gate of sorts and see out into a very busy world. War was apparently upon me.

The starting experience was basically like any other good starter zone. The first few batches of mobs were yellow-con and the quests were incredibly straight-forward. I didn’t read any of the quest text because like in most games it’s likely incredibly shallow mixed with a bit of filler. “Oh noes, exactly 14 bad rats attacked my farm! Could you go and kill exactly 5 of them for me?”

As I made my way through the first 10 levels of my little druid life, I was deeply impressed with the rifts. Let’s get the comparison out of the way: it’s Public Quests. This is a good thing, since the single best mechanic that WAR is known for is PQs. It’s that one mechanic that not only hasn’t been drastically changed in 2 years, but it’s finding its way into most other aspects of the game. The bottom line here is that the best products out there aren’t necessarily original products, they’re products that have looked at previous products and learned about what not to do and what works. In general, the more unique MMORPGs have sucked ass. I’m very happy with the rift mechanic, but I’m somewhat afraid of what will happen when the lowbie zones become largely deserted.

Overall, the art style reminds me of EQ2. No, I have never played EQ2, but that doesn’t stop me from making the comparison. This is in no way a bad thing, as EQ2 appears to have some very immersive environments.

Another thing that I was very impressed by was Rift’s crash handling. When the game inevitably crashes (see: Gamebryo usage) I get a prompt that allows me to send an error report to the developers and it actually restarts the client. That’s not all, it skips the intro movies for me, and logs into my character automatically. Color me fucking impressed.

That’s all I have to say about Rift: Planes of Telara so far. The server is coming back up right now from a tiny beta fix and I’m eager to get back to leveling.

Re: The AddOns I Develop

skuzfoz — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:49:46 +0000

I want it known that the AddOns I produce for the community are all proof-of-concept, there are 2 reasons for this behavior:

1. I don’t quite have the time or skill to flesh out some of the AddOns as much as I want to.
2. I’d much rather the community collaborate on AddOns.

The most important thing to note is that my new AddOns are under the Kopimi (read: copy me) license. This means, in terms of my AddOns, that they’re completely open source. I’m explicitly commanding Curse to allow users to upload variations of my AddOns without explicit permission from me. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be around to give permission, it just means that I want my AddOns to be COMPLETELY open source. The way I see it, if you have to ask me, it’s not as open as it should be.

My vision of WAR’s AddOn community is one of… well… community. If you wish to add 1-300 lines to your favorite AddOn, you should be able to do so without asking permission. You should be able to upload it as a variation of the original, or if the community agrees, as the primary version of the AddOn.

My favorite example of this is FozAuction. It’s a simple modification of the default auction UI. It has been downloaded just under 500 times in under a month, that’s very good for WAR AddOns right now – especially from an author that just popped up one day – unlike someone like Aiiane. People ask me to flesh this out further, but that’s not what I want. If you like multiple different auction AddOns PLEASE, for the love of the community, merge them together. Get together with other AddOn users and mix things together.

The more the community works together, the healthier it will stay and the greater we can all continue to make Warhammer Online.

Humie Followa

skuzfoz — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:13:37 +0000

We were somewhere near the Order Warcramp in Praag when the WAAAGH began to take hold. Regicide was requiring much Green that night, even more than usual, because Tuttun was pulling Order out of the Warcamp like a gorkdamn pro. There was much renown to be had.

I had pulled the Order Warcamp champs because I’m me and don’t die, when all of a sudden this insane bastard starts following me. I ran for a solid 2 minutes before I came to the conclusion that he was now my pet.

Why 1.4 Is Great

skuzfoz — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:04:07 +0000

This will be short, because it doesn’t require that much explaining.

1.4′s ORvR mechanics, although currently unfinished, bring constant fighting. They also bring ways for the little guy to sneak around and take things – although the BO timers, IMO, seriously disrupt that and should be removed again.

I can only see 1.4 becoming more fun in the future as we get chances to test it in more population configurations and as more people learn exactly what’s going on.

If you think otherwise, I’d love to hear about it.

How To: Avoid Streaming the Free Trial

skuzfoz — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 21:57:07 +0000

It’s no secret that WAR as an endless free trial. It’s a little bit more of a secret that it’s streaming. A bit more of a secret than that is that there’s an ongoing bug which causes the client to be buggy if you disable streaming.

I’m writing today to reveal a super awesome secret that lets you play the trial without streaming and all of the issues that come with it. With my method, as of the last time I tested it, there were no problems with client performance or stability of downloaded data that are not also problems with the retail client. Note that this will be a full sized download of Warhammer Online, and that it will not correct any issues that may be either your fault or your computer’s fault.

All of these instructions are also for the Mac client, you just need to know where the files are within the funky Cider file structure. I’ll update this post as soon as I hear back from the guy that runs the Genius Bar section of the forums.

This method does add load to Mythic’s fileservers. Because of that, I ask that you not follow this guide if you aren’t planning on, or don’t already pay for a subscription to the game.

This is a notice that I will be linking files to make this easier on the end user. Please be cautious of all files you download on the internet, especially if they’re MMORPG related. As a higher profile member of the WAR community, I promise that these files are safe, but I will include a Jotti file scan of all of the files. The site that I’m using to host the files is DropBox, and it’s perfectly legit and CANNOT give you any sort of malware.

Step 1

Find your WAR file directory.

This is where your primary WAR files are. The default install directory is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning

Mac: Find WAR in your applications, right click it, and “Show Package Contents”

/Applications/Warhammer Online.app/Contents/Resources/transgaming/c_drive/Program Files/Warhammer Online

If you can complete Step 1, you’re ready for:

Step 2

Download the provided replacement files.

patch.cfg

Security Verification
File size: 821 bytes
Filetype: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
MD5: 4f18b229b502e993e8c88aa04b59cd4f
SHA1: 65a0b08dbf8c5f60a0f16085e17268ff6526c409

patch_user.xml

Security Verification
File size: 194 bytes
Filetype: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
MD5: 9e4a707897eb0c98e5278463eaf0f1be
SHA1: f92c767ca4e08f2a69f26fdae930b38912cea540

Step 3

Place the downloaded files in WAR directory.

You found this place in Step 1.

Accept the file overwrite, you may want to keep your old versions somewhere safe.

Success!

Start the patcher.

The download will take some time, go watch a movie or sleep.

When the download is finished, you should have a fully functional Retail client. The same as paid accounts receive.

Yo Dawg

skuzfoz — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 19:34:28 +0000

I heard you liked to suggest features for the game, so I put a greenscreen in your game so you can just make your own.

Our Suggestions: Heard

skuzfoz — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:23:30 +0000

If you visit the forums at all, or even log into the game and read chat, you’re probably familiar with the common complaint that Mythic (or Mystic to some of these people) does not listen to player complaints and suggestions. Today, I set out to prove that wrong with a very short experiment that I ran on the forums. I went to the back of the Suggestions forum and skimmed through exactly 10 pages. These posts were spread out from as long as 1 year ago, to as little as a few months ago.

Except for a large number of wild ideas and complaints, I was able to find quite a bit of items that were actually taken in by Mythic and put into the game in some form. Enjoy the list.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3412223

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3415807

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3413759

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3431678

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3631103

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3491837

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3559165

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3438588

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3378172

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3402235

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3423227

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3560443

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3495163

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3507963

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3645435

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3395067

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3733242

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3669498

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3545595

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3615483

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3485435

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/231/index/3705850

Remember that some of these suggestions are only loosely related to the changes that followed in response to them, because players simply aren’t game designers (although, the game designers do play).

You may not have personally suggested these changes. You may not have had the changes you suggested implemented. However, a good number of suggestions have been put into the game.

Keep that in mind next time.

Internet Police vol. 2

skuzfoz — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:49:40 +0000

So after Volume 1, I sent the dude an in-game mail, to set his facts straight. I’m all nice like that. I explained the ToS quite nicely to him, but his response wasn’t very nice in return: