Tag Archives: Guild Wars

Games, Personal

Realizations on Modern Day PC MMO Gaming.

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Boredom is a powerful and deadly drug in this modern day world… It can cause us to view some rather awful things that our human eyes were never ever meant to see. Great example was the viral “2 girls 1 cup” video that many laid eyes to and lead to some great “reaction” videos on YouTube. However… It has lead me to a rather interesting cross-road. I have lost quite a number of friends from the ex wreaking her drama around town which is a terrible shame really. In turn, this has caused me to play with an odd thought my cousin Sol tuned me to…

Zero, I dare to say that that your laptop could run World of Warcraft… I know you are getting cabin fever when people call out and cancel to your hang-outs. I have had friends who couldn’t even run Guild Wars with low settings on their machines, but somehow World of Warcraft runs like a champ. Plus you may have some fun on top of everything. Just hit up Blizzard’s World of Warcraft site and get your free trial key.

I would give it a shot and see what could come out of it… but sadly… there was one thing limiting me from playing. The updates. World of Warcraft’s base install from a v1.0.0 DVD took 20 minutes and about 2GB of hard disk space. Then add that there are several patches that lead to v2.4.0 that are about 450+MB a piece and NOT a direct “update to 2.4.0 patch” upgrade… Over a base DSL connection, that’s a rather agonizing download… I am on v2.0.1 updating to 2.4.0 currently at 24%, the patch being about 1GB in size, and my speeds from P2P downloads reading at 26 kb/s to 76 kb/s. The estimated time of completion being close to 5-6 hours. I could deal with slow updating, but that’s a rather hefty lot to be downloading almost 3-4GB of compressed game data just to enter the game. At the same time… Guild Wars has it’s own share of things… If you install the client, it does have to sync up with the server to download client software updates which can be agonizing as well. I assume that having to download all of the data before playing is much better than entering a zone and being prohibited from playing until the zone data completes, which is a slight issue I have with Guild Wars.

Why?

I would try to go somewhere like a zone after entering a town and my in-game friends would message me to death but due to the zone loading, I couldn’t see squat. I digress…

I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a long while, save for the one time Cousin Sol let me have a taste early on just to see… I didn’t care for it much then, as I had liked how polished out Guild Wars was with regard to errata. It should be interesting to see how things are now in the game after so many “nerfs” that have balanced/unbalanced (depending on your take) the game play.

It’s a shame my family doesn’t want to step into Verizon FiOS but I don’t have much choice. I will say that if World of Warcraft does run on my laptop, albeit crudely… 1) I will probably be seeking a dedicated Windows laptop for gaming and proprietary program use. Even if it does mean I have to donate Suzaku to my family and means I may not be using Linux too much… I don’t mind charity for them. 2) I will probably ask family to consider FiOS for bandwidth reasons.

I will say that I don’t plan to have World of Warcraft take over my life, I have decent self control from working out and knowing I only have a few years left in my pharmacy studies anyhow.

Personal

MMO’s are one hell of a drug…

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Where do I begin…

I remember living the alone life and watching my life depressively fall apart. I was the low man on the totem pole at the office. My course-work was a shining example of a guy who had too many things to worry about and school could hit the back-burner. I will admit that I had a bad problem with alcohol addiction and only because I lacked supportive and close friends to break me from the slump. I only found one outlet for my loneliness and that was through online gaming. Sure, I was drunk most of the time I played, but for the few hours of my evening… I could be a character who was kind and sympathetic to other travellers of a fantasy world with mythical beasts and denizens. However… with how much computer gaming has changed with the years, my gaming computer can’t even barely play Guild Wars anymore. My laptop had a shot with the game, but the graphics chips just couldn’t handle splitting processor power to display the game and processing the game data at the same time. I have had to take a forceful retirement of gaming all because of dated hardware.

With my status change to an “eligible bachelor in training” (quoted from my boss) and with my reputation in Dallas being a tad tarnished… It’s been a little hard to try to do damage control to re-establish myself as a reputable person. With friends in summer school and some of my distant friends unable to take vacations to Dallas, I have been at a rather odd loss to going to the bars and wine parlors to only drink alone or watch my attempts to strike conversation only go so far. Then there are days where misery makes me yearn to put my time into a game… but I have lost my gaming consoles save for my PSP and DS and I lack funding for the new generation systems as well as a TV. I lack a digital SLR camera to fuel my hobby of macro photography.

Sad to say… I almost want another gaming computer. I know that there’s college for me around the corner… Lots of laptops on the retail market at the entry prices of $600 have GeForce 8000M series or ATi Mobility Radeon cards with supple processing power and RAM to boot. Not that I have anything against my loyal Linux laptop Suzaku, but booting into Windows bogs down the poor 1.73gHz Centrino from doing its job and I am damn near close to scrapping that partition… In essence, I’d rather have a dedicated Windows machine for gaming, Windows Mobile phone back-ups/hacking/modification, and proprietary academic programs that do not play nice in Wine or Virtual Box. I almost want to fork out the cash for a modest machine to play an FPS game, Guild Wars or even, dare I say, World of WarCraft. I have hated the cabin fever of staying in with nothing to do and even more so that my machine is so limited and my old gaming tower is damn near useless.

I guess ultimately what I am saying is… LOL! When friends turn me down to go out on the town to enjoy the night life over a pleasant drink and maybe dinner… I’d like to have an alternate plan to bask in the greatness of MMO’s and maybe feed my gamer side when no one online feels the need to talk to me. (I can assure you that I would not be neglecting ZeroXR 13mg in any form of fashion.)

I think I know what my next purchases will be, should I be able to hobble up my expenses… a new Windows laptop for strict use that minimize it from being a full time machine and a Canon Digital Rebel XSi with a 4 or 8GB high speed SD card as items celebrating my liberation from debts. I have just a little more to go before I am free from the biggest financial bondage… To be free of personal debts is something that I am so very close to concluding. I cannot thank my family enough for giving my that one chance to prove my filial worth as as son and to start over as an upstanding man in society.