Monday, June 25, 2012

Friday (24 Jun) - Hell Hath Arrived

Friday (24 Jun) - Hell Hath Arrived

At level 45, Wild's barbarian, Barbedwire, had apparently met his match at the Nightmare level of Diablo 3. I was running from mobs more often than killing them, and once my health got low it took forever to restore it even if I got away. Frustrating, to say the least. Silver took a look at Barbed's ability choices and offered some suggested changes. The changes made quite a difference, and Barbed was soon crashing his way through Diablo once again.

I've only spent an hour or so a night playing since then, but progress has been steady. However, loot drops were worse than useless. Rare drops have been virtually non-existent, and the odd rare that did drop offered nothing better than what I already had. So I had to turn to the Auction House. Gold from kills and unusable gear helped fill the coffers, and I was even able to start selling some gear on the Auction House for even more gold. Each night I'd pick through the AH gear and buy upgrades. No, I didn't have anywhere near the gold needed for the higher end stuff - prices of a million or more gold are pretty common - so I settled for good stuff in the under 20,000 gold range. The AH search feature is laughably poor, so the best way to find bargains is to wade through page after page until coming across something worthwhile at a good price. It's time consuming, but it works.

That gear kept Barbed going right up to the final encounter with Diablo himself, which I arrived at on Friday night. Of course, I've killed Diablo once before on Normal level, and now I had a chance at Nightmare level. I gave the big baddy a shot, but came up a little short. I felt that I had enough DPS, as well has a pretty deep health pool, but with little crowd control other than my stomp, I took pretty constant damage and did not have the health regeneration needed to survive such a long battle.

I made another trip to the AH, looking for gear that had high health regeneration. Fortunately, there were many to choose from, and I was even able to upgrade other stats as well. My "life per second" stat improved from 60 to 171. With five new pieces of gear Barbed went at Diablo a second time, and this time Diablo died. Barbed made level 50 as well. Barbed previously completed Normal Difficulty, and has now completed Nightmare Difficulty. Hell level is next, followed by the last level, Inferno (assuming I keep at this).

It was still mildly disappointing that even the Diablo kill didn't get me a rare drop. It was just junk blue level stuff. You would think that a Diablo kill deserved more than that. I suspect that now that Blizz has their real money Auction House operating, they're hoping players will spend hard cash on gear instead of gold. That won't be me.

In a little WoW guild news, Wild spoke with guild leader Bd a few days ago. Wild was in game to do a little crafting and Bd was getting ready to logout. It wasn't a long conversation, but there wasn't much news. The three raids are still in place and still raiding at least part time. With a 25% reduction in difficulty now in place, normal Dragon Soul is pretty heavily nerfed. No word or expectation that the guild is going after the Heroic level of DS in any big way. I've thought about bringing Wild back out for some raiding, but ... Wild's gear level is i393, and even maxing his gear with normal DS the best he could achieve would be i397. Even JB seems satisfied with her i384 level gear. Those gear levels will be meaningless the second the new expansion hits the street, so continuing to gear up makes little sense.

Even as Cata winds down, new players keep popping up in the guild, so the guild is doing well with it's memberships. That has certainly helped with the raids. I even saw an old friend come back into the game, Bf. I think this is the third time he's quit the game for months at a time and then come back. I'm sure the rope is tightening around Wild even now, trying to pull him back in. Wild still /shrugs at that.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Thursday (14 Jun) - Pinto's Home Movie

Thursday (14 Jun) - Pinto's Home Movie

Diablo 3 has been kicking Wild's barbarian butt something terrible, so I let my demon hunter, Rat, play for awhile yesterday. It was fun, but it was hard to get really excited about it.

So, for a complete change of subject, lately I've been doing some pretty massive organizing of our home movie collection. Our first exposure to home made movies was in 1989, when we borrowed an 8mm analog movie camera to take pictures of our cats. Back then we had only two. Cats, that is. I was immediately hooked. On making home movies, that is. We soon got our own camera, with which I happily recorded years and years of home movies. That camera finally bit the dust (literally) when I fell out of a chair while filming. I was fine, but the camera was in pieces. My next camera was a digital camcorder that could use both my stack of 8mm tapes as well as record digital video (on DV tapes). I was soon back in business.

Those stacks of tapes continued to grow over time. I went through a number of video editing programs and eventually settled on Pinnacle Studio for making videos of those tapes. I still use Studio today (currently at version 15). This stuff was all new to me, and hard drives weren't what they are now. Converting the tapes for use on a computer created AVI files that were so huge I could not afford to store more than a few at a time. Instead, I copied only what I needed at the time to the computer, edited and built my home movie, and then burned it to DVD. The edited files were deleted to make room for the next home movie project.

At various times I made attempts to organize my video collection, but with somewhat haphazard labeling and lack of consistent dates on the tapes, DVDs, and files, those attempts were only partly successful.

The result today is that I have boxes and boxes of old video tapes: 8mm, digital Hi8, DV, and miniDV. Of course, I also had to have a digital camcorder that uses SD cards, not to mention video from our digital camera and even our smartphones. And a whole lot of DVDs, from those original efforts back in the 80's to sometimes multiple backups on other DVDs and on removed hard drives now taking up space in more boxes.

I do have a "mostly" coherent set of DVDs in chronological order that we consider our family video album. As hard drives progressively got cheaper and larger, I also have accumulated a pretty large collection of digital files based on what was not edited out of the original video tapes they came from. And that is where the problem is.

Yesterday I completed a comparison of every digital video file I have with the original source tapes, based on whatever information I could glean without actually having to put tapes in the camcorder to see what was on it. I was pretty happy with the results, which matched up far better than I had any right to think it would.

All of this work had a purpose beyond just getting a handle on our video collection. One of the cats born in our house and given to a very good friend of ours is going to die soon. His name is Pinto, and he went to live with his "forever family" when he was eight weeks old. He was one of ten kittens born back in March 2000. It was a hard birth for the Mom (who is still with us), and required the help of a vet. Even with help, one kitten was stillborn, and two others perished in the first week. That left us with seven mouths for Momma cat and us to feed and take care of. We found homes for four, and kept three.

When Pinto was born, his "starter" name was PW. Long story short, it stood for the "pink and white" one, which helped us tell the kittens apart and figure out who had been fed and who hadn't. His new family named him Pinto, since his coloring was like a pinto pony.

We learned last week that Pinto has cancer. It's located on his tongue, it's aggressive, and it's not treatable. He is deceptively fine right now (we went to see him last night, and stay in close contact with our friend), but his quality of life will rapidly deteriorate beyond help in as little as a couple of weeks.

I'm making a video of Pinto's life right now, and have been pouring over all that old video, putting together those first few precious weeks that he was with us. There is also a videotaped first year birthday party at our house when all of the families who adopted kittens from that litter (with their pets) came over to celebrate. That party belongs on Pinto's video as well.

It's that few minutes of birthday party video that is consuming most of my time. It should have been in the digital source files that I so laboriously collected into one archived hard drive. But the file that should have had it did not. Most likely, it was edited and included on a DVD, but the original avi files were deleted to save space, as was my practice at the time. Yes, we have the DVD that includes the party, so it's not lost. There are ways to pull that information off of the DVD and I've spent considerable time working with various programs to do that, but every single result has been flawed. Even today, manipulating video files is still somewhat of a hit or miss thing, and I've been mostly missing.

The obvious next step is to go back to the original source - the DV tape itself. One way or another I'll get there. It's frustrating, though. The only way for me to be sure that I have ALL of my video content available to me is to digitize all of those original source tapes in unedited form.

Pinto is my first priority right now. The video project helps keep me going even as we worry about Pinto and what his family is going through.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Weekend (10 Jun) - Falling Back to Diablo 3

Weekend (10 Jun) - Falling Back to Diablo 3

Wild, Silver, and DB made loose plans to try to get together for some group level Diablo 3 over the weekend. I have two characters at very different points and level in the game. They have even more characters, and we weren't sure which characters we should be grouping with. On Friday night Wild popped into Diablo 3, still wondering if I had any interest left in this game. As much as I liked my level 13 "machine gun" demon hunter, I just couldn't bring myself to dial her up to play. Instead, I grabbed my barbarian. He's level 34 and has completed the first level of the game. I had barely touched the surface of Nightmare, which is the next level of difficulty. I started doing quests, and was blowing through them at a pretty steady rate with little to no serious opposition. I knew my way around now, having done all of this before, but it was actually fun so I kept at it.

About an hour into the run Wild's friends started popping in around him. The portal system is one of the coolest I've seen, and Blizz should implement it in WoW. Silver and DB were in group with another player I didn't know. Wild was now in the group, as well. I guess that's what is meant by a "ninja invite." That was cool, though, we were all together. Silver was also a barbarian, at level 33, and DB was running his level 42 (I think) monk. The other player was a max level 60 and could pretty much destroy anything and everything around him without slowing down. So of course we moved pretty fast, blasting and destroying everything our path.

When I played the first level of the game, I would keep all of the "blue" level gear I would get to help improve my gear, or to sell for gold. In Nightmare level, the blue level gear is little more than trash, and the only gear of worth picking up is the yellow/gold gear, which is relatively rare. Wild also picked up the "letters" that are used to level up the jewel crafter. Silver gave Wild some truly awesome gems to use in his weapon sockets. I want to be able to make those!

Later, our level 60 friend had to leave, and the battles got a little more challenging. We picked up a level 30 player not long after that. That is how groupings seem to work. Players can come and go, with groups of 2-5 changing all the time. Where in the game the group is seems to be depends largely on the lower level players, who have to complete required quests to catch up with the higher levels in the group, which means the higher level players are repeating things they've already done. Nobody seems to mind.

Toward the end of the evening DB had to leave and our group consisted of now level 36 Wild, level 34/35 Silver, and the level 30. Despite Wild's gear and higher level, Silver easily out DPSed Wild and rarely came even close to dying, while Wild almost died several times. Almost. That would have been embarrassing. Silver took a look at Wild's gear, gave him some better gems, and suggested that my one hand weapon/shield combo was what was holding me back. I liked my shield. It made me feel safer. I took the advice seriously, though. The shield may be nice in the first level of the game, but in Nightmare high DPS and fast kills are the way to avoid dying, not heavy armor.

When we broke up for the evening, I checked the Auction House, thinking I would buy another even more awesome weapon than the one I'd bought some time back. I was a little surprised that Wild's weapon still rated among the highest of any weapon for sale. I couldn't decide, then, whether to buy a second one hand and dual wield the two weapons, or go with a two-hander. I'm going to make that call before I roll Wild in again. I'd really like to see how much that changes both his DPS and his chances for staying alive.

Weekend - On Saturday night Wild hit up Diablo 3 again, and I again grouped up with Silver and DB (and others) over the course of about three hours of fast and furious play. In between Friday and Saturday's runs, Wild made a pretty major shift in his gear, spending about half of his 200,000 or so gold on upgrades. Wild changed out eight pieces of gear and found a two-hand polearm that he liked. It was tough to turn in his shield, but the gear and weapon changes made quite a difference. Before the changes, Wild's Damage rating was 492. Now it's at 784.

The Saturday run was awesome. We had a level 60 and/or a level 54 in the group for most of night. Wild helped where he could, but things died so fast ... Somehow, Silver's level 60 demon hunter managed to "die from something I never saw" according to her. That in itself was something of an event on the night. As the evening pushed past midnight and group composition fluctuated, Wild and DB were the last standing. That made for more challenging battles, but DB's level 48 monk was a pretty devastating one-man wrecking crew all on his own. All of that made for some extremely fast leveling, and Wild advanced from level 37 to level 42.

Sunday - Wild did some solo hunting in Diablo 3 on Sunday, and found it very difficult going. I've had to return to my "attack and then run strategy" to keep from dying when encountering large groups of mobs. In Nightmare difficulty, every group of mobs are large - and more dangerous. I still have little feel for what gear stat levels I should have. A comparison with DB's monk really highlighted the difference. The monk had a DPS rating of around 1500 when he was Wild's level, while I sported a 900 DPS rating. That is a very large difference. In Nightmare, healing pots do not drop as often, and healing regen is quite slow, at least on my character. So the attack and run strategy becomes an "attack, run, and wait for health to regen" strategy. Which, frankly, quickly gets pretty boring. I've tried the Auction House, and made improvements, but obviously the gear is still very lacking. Gear drops are very chintzy in Nightmare, as well. Usually I can fill my inventory with magic items for use or sale several times in an hour of play. Now, I can finish entire segments and come away with more than half my inventory still unused. Bad luck with rare drops hasn't helped, as all Wild seems to see are bows and quivers, instead of the barbarian items he needs.

Right now Wild seems a bit over-matched, and for the first time I've had to quit the game more than once in between checkpoints, meaning I've had to go back and start over at an earlier checkpoint, redoing what I'd already cleared. Gear drops are even worse when doing content that has already been done before. Wild is currently in a cavern that he will be trying to clear for the third time. I sure hope I can get by this rough spot soon.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Tuesday (5 Jun) - Checking In

Tuesday (5 Jun) - Checking In

Is it over for Wildshard and family? I have not missed raiding. I miss our pvp family, but my own availability is still pretty sporadic. I was entertained by Diablo 3 for awhile, but discovered that I wasn't all that interested in running the higher levels of the game. WoW isn't even on my radar at the moment.

Happy still keeps up his storefront. He even dickered with a player who insisted on underbidding him on a satchel by one copper. We are the only sellers, and it was silly. Eventually he agreed, and we now sell our satchels at an equally silly 221g 99s 99c instead of the easy 222g. The price of compromise, I guess.

Happy has been trying to sell darkmoon card sets for the past two Darkmoon Faires with no luck. Players are willing to sell the sets at a loss, apparently, as Happy can't make a profit on what the sellers are asking. Happy still sells an occasional card, but may decide to work himself out of that market.

Mostly, Happy buys enchanting mats and stocks them away. With every expansion everyone thinks they won't need these mats. What really happens is that people stop farming the mats and when the supply runs out, guess who makes a tidy profit? Anyone wanting to level the Enchanting profession needs these mats in large quantities. I'm sure there will be plenty of players to sell to, with their new monk class alts and cute Pandas who will want to be enchanters.

A bigger question is whether there will be anyone in the Wild family to make use of the gold Happy is making.

Current predictions are that the Mists of Pandaria expansion will be released sometime between July and September. This is based on patterns of release from other expansions, but it is still mostly conjecture. Maybe the urge to play WoW will reassert itself by that time. I just don't know.

Random thoughts  . . .

Did you know that head enchants are gone? Yep, kaput. Blizz decided that the rep grind for the different head enchants was a dumb idea. So, instead of coming up with a good idea for the head enchants, they just got rid of them. No, not for the expansion, but right now. It's already done.

Wild's replacement in the RG2 raid has four normal mode wins in the final Dragon Soul encounter, Madness of Deathwing. That was six raids/weeks ago. Wild's timing was perfect - he stopped raiding two weeks before the guild started to get DS on farm. Funny and sad, both. Wild is still better geared than the druid that got Wild's spot.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Friday (1 Jun) - Strat-o-Matic Baseball and Sporting News Online

Friday (1 Jun) - Strat-o-Matic Baseball and Sporting News Online

This weekend The Sporting News (TSN) plans to officially turn over it's online baseball simulation game to the Strat-o-Matic Game Company (SOM), the game that the TSN Online game was based on. TSN could no longer support the game (nor did they want to, apparently), despite a still solid base of fans paying $25 per team. On the other side of the transaction, SOM has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance as it attempts to hoist itself into the 21st century. SOM is taking over the online version of the game, with a lot of promises about all of the great new features being implemented. Knowing that the TSN employee who runs the game has already become an employee of SOM is a very good sign.

The TSN Online game was a passion of mine for several years, often played during breaks at work (with more than a few peeks during working hours as well). I haven't purchased a team in about three years. I'd like to support this new endeavor, and I am keen to try my hand at building a winning team against some really good competition once the new SOM site is up and operating.

The problem is that I currently have a tiff with SOM. It's a problem mostly of my own making, and perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but the issue galls me and I can't let it go.

First, remember that SOM baseball has been around since the 1960s. It started as a board game using paper cards to represent ball players. My 13 year old self fell in love with it in 1969. Eventually, SOM created a computer game version. The game and season data came on a 3.5" floppy disk. Remember those? The disk held a license key that authorized the use of that game/season. You HAD to have that disk whenever an installation was required. It was a pain. SOM was well behind in the computer revolution, so their next evolution was to shift to CD, while still using the license key approach, and while still putting only the annual game upgrade and a single season on that CD. Once they figured out it was cheaper to load ALL of their products on one CD, they jumped on that idea but still required the use of the floppy disk license key for installation. Players like me complained that we still had to hold on to all of our out-dated 3.5" disks and had to keep an old 3.5" drive around to use them. 

SOM thought about that, and their solution was to take the license key off the disk and put it on a piece of paper, which they now called a product code. For products already purchased, we were required to MAIL ALL OF OUR FLOPPY DISKS to SOM, and they in turn would send us the unique product codes for them, a slip of paper for each product. The funny thing is that when I wanted to buy a new product, it was right there on my desk on a single disk, but SOM had to MAIL me my product code - that slip of paper, which cost me $2.50 for what SOM called postage and handling. I still have all the correspondence associated with that somewhat monumental effort, but the end result was that I got rid of the disks. Those slips of paper with the long string of letters and numbers were now treasures. Sadly, I didn't always treat them that way and over the years and several moves a few got misplaced. I paid for those mistakes by having to buy those products again. In some situations SOM graciously provided me a replacement product code, but for the most part I kicked myself and then paid up.

After having to fork over those extra dollars a few times, I finally sat down at the computer and made a complete, thorough check of every product I'd bought from SOM, and matched it to the product code. That wasn't an insignificant effort. Each of my more than eighty team rosters and other products had to be installed on the computer and tested to see if the product code could be activated. If activation failed, the game would crash, and I'd have to restart it for the next test.

I made a stunning find. I had no product codes for the seasons 1996 through 2005. At first, I could not understand why. I know that I bought them, but I could not find the slips of paper verifying that I'd bought them, and without those codes I did not have access to those seasons. The reason I didn't have product codes for those years turned out to be a simple one. Those were the years when the annual computer game upgrade came on CD instead of floppy disk. I always bought the annual upgrade along with the latest season roster. For some reason, I stupidly didn't consider mailing in those CDs. I thought of them as "game disks." I never put two and two together; ie, that I couldn't get a product code for those season rosters unless I mailed in those CDs.

I never thought about that, though. Literally, for years it didn't matter. I had those seasons already installed with the key from the CDs and I could play those seasons - as long as I didn't have to re-install them. Which, of course, I eventually had to do when I finally replaced the drive they were on and tried to use those seasons.

Now, you may be thinking that I've thrown away those old CDs. Nope, I have every one. So it's only a matter of mailing in those CDs and getting product codes, right? No again. SOM's offer to replace floppy disks/CDs with a paper product code was in place for two years, but it expired in 2010.

I asked SOM if they could make an exception. After all, I've purchased more than a $1000 in SOM products over the years, and I'm a very, very loyal customer. In addition, they know that I purchased those teams. The answer was a curt No. The offer had expired. There were no exceptions.

With no product code I cannot use those seasons anymore. Buying them a second time would cost me over $200. It's certainly a lesson learned for me. But I'm stubborn, and SOM's intransigent position angers me. I'm working around those seasons right now. There are about a dozen other season rosters besides these contested ones that I want to buy in order to complete the set of more than a hundred years of baseball seasons.

Even more irritating is that SOM has finally entered the 21st century (ok, so maybe they've only dipped one toe into the water so far). Floppies and slips of paper are no longer needed. Product codes are maintained by SOM now, instead of by each individual, and installing a purchased product requires nothing more than access to the internet. SOM still won't authorize those lost seasons.

I refuse to buy another SOM product until SOM relents on this. That includes the new SOM Online game, which I dearly want to play. But I won't.

PS - SOM reported on Friday that TSN and SOM have delayed the release of SOM Online until "later in June."