http://166.70.210.114/nucleus/ en-us Nucleus CMS v3.71 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://166.70.210.114/nucleus//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://166.70.210.114/nucleus/ xml-rss2.php?itemid=6 So on with the write up. I have spent time playing SWTOR, Tera, and Guild Wars2. I have also been playing other games like Diablo III. The only reason I mention them is because I want the write up to be have some prospective to other MMOs. The game graphics are somewhat dated in WOW and I wish they would updated some of the models. That said the game has defiantly been updated with the MOP expansion. The phasing is almost flawless now. They can phase NPCs buildings and other items. You can be in a town with other players and they are working with NPCs you cannot even see. For them it's a town and for you just getting there its a mess that needs help. Unlike other expansions or any other MMO that I have played you can work for an NPC that stays with you to progress the storyline. This gives much more meaning when you are later helping them in a heroic or instance. The questing in the new land Pandaria (levels 85-90) is second to none in any game I have played. Cut seens, vehicles, and just some fun and unique story telling. Leveling/questing in the new land is fun (at least the first time through). Loot from quests are items you can use for whatever class you are playing and how you are spec. I leveled my druid and I had the choice or feral gear or casting gear. Also if you are on a PVP server then get ready for some world PVP. You cannot fly in Pandaria until you are level 90. Most of the questing is The Horde and The Alliance side by side. Blizzard has gone out of its was to setup conflict between the two factions.

The Looking for Group (for instances or heroics) and Looking for Raid has been updated and works better than ever. In addition to those they have added Looking for Scenarios. Scenarios are kind of like an instance except there are only three players and they can be any class. You don't need a tank or healer for example. These are normally quick to run and you get Justice points from them. Besides the justice points you also get a gift box which always contains gold but may also have gear in it. If there is gear then it is something you can use (if you don't already have something better).

The issue with MOP comes when you reach 90. For some reason Blizzard decided that you need to grind rep before you can spend any Justice or Valor points for epic gear. When I say grind I mean grind. You have to do dailies. I used to like dailies when they meant extra gold or unique items like mounts. It's not so fun when you have to do them to get gear. This has caused a fair share of complaints and I am not sure why they are doing it this way. Because of the complaints they just made a change where you can share your rep with your alts so you only have to grind it once. The dailies aren't bad and the way it opens a land or tells a story is kind of interesting. But they are dailies and they get old fast when they are required. The dailies do give Justice points which is a plus.

In addition to the dailies the amount of Justice points given for a heroic run or scenario is not as much as before. You also cannot store as many. So once you get the rep you have to run more heroics than ever before. Just like before you have to reach a certain item level in order to use the Looking for Raid. The heroics are fun for the most part with interesting mechanics. Like before they have taking some of the older low instances like SM redid them and made then level 90 heroics. This is another place where Blizzard shines.

If you are not to burnt out on WOW I recommend MOP. Most of the expansion is awesome The quests, artwork, music, instances, mounts, and boss mechanics are the best in the business. I admit that I am not happy about the required rep grinds. It's kind of like hitting 90 and then leveling another 5 levels doing dailies. I am glad I bought it and it has been worth playing to me. Overall I like it better than cata.]]> Gaming xml-rss2.php?itemid=6 Thu, 13 Dec 2012 07:55:00 -0700 xml-rss2.php?itemid=5
After reading the book I was very excited to see the Scenario in the game. Last night I played through it from a Horde prospective and I was very disappointed. Not only did it not tell the story at all but it was just boring to play through. I don't know if they are going to release something else to tell more of the story or not. The book was fantastic and in the book this is a very big event that destroys any tentative peace between Horde and Alliance and sets up Garrosh Hellscream as the number one threat to the world. In Mists of Pandaria there is all out war between the Horde and Alliance. Baine Bloodhoof, Vol`jin, Sylvanas, and the rest of the Horde leaders follow Garrosh only because they feel they have no choice. The book really focuses on Baine and Vol`jin struggles to keep their people safe from Garrosh.
In the book Garrosh starts by building a big Horde army of all the Horde races. He then uses the army to take out Northwatch Hold. Before this starts an artifact of the blue dragons that is used to focus magic is stolen. Even though the Horde army was more than enough to take Northwatch Hold Garrosh uses dark magic enhanced by the artifact to summon fire golems to strike more fear into the Alliance. This of course pisses off the world so Thrall is aware something is wrong. Garrosh makes it clear that Theramore is next and then all of Kalimdor.

Instead of attacking Theramore right away with the big Horde army Garrosh waits until the Alliance builds up the defenses. The Alliance sends in all of their top generals. The buildup also includes Rhonin and Vereesa and others from the Kirin Tor. Baine and Vol`jin are very upset that they did not attack before the buildup. Garrosh sends them away without any explanation of why he is waiting before the attack. Also Garrosh has a new order of guards to protect him lead by a very evil orc. They start killing, kidnaping, or torturing anyone that questions anything about Garrosh leadership. Baine and Vol`jin are in danger all the time because they continue to speaking out. Once the buildup is complete Garrosh sends in the Horde army. The Horde army is defeated and many in the Horde army is killed in the attack. Baine and Vol`jin are very upset about the great loss of life.

The Alliance in Theramore were happy they won battle. Jania is very upset at her friend Baine Bloodhoof's involvement. The Horde army did some key things like it took out all of the air defenses. At the time no one thought anything about it. One of the Kirin Tor was a blood elf who was a trader to the Alliance and his actions allowed the Horde army to enter Theramore to take out the Griffons. He was later rescued by the Horde during the fight (which is in the game Scenario). With all the key Alliance generals in town Garrosh sends in a weapon of mass destruction. It is a giant mana bomb that is enhanced by the Blue Dragon artifact. The Alliance cannot stop it because they have nothing to take out the blimp. Rhonin's wife Vereesa and some other well know NPCs are not in town when this happens but they are close enough to get killed. To safe them Rhonin ports to the top of the tower with Jaina. He forces Jania into a portal and makes the bomb's magic go through him. The bomb kills him and everyone in town but Vereesa and the people with her is saved. Jania is saved but she is altered by the blast.

Jania goes insane and decides her father was right and all the Horde must die. She ports back to Theramore and gets the Blue Dragon artifact that was part of the bomb and hides it. It was not damaged in the blast. She tries to convince Varian and the Kirin Tor to take out Orgrimmar. She wants to kill everyone including the children to the horror of her very good friend and pupil Anduim Wrynn. When they refuse she gives up and decides to take it into her own hands. While this is going on Garrosh sets up barricades around all of Kalimdor blocking all Alliance traffic including the Night Elfs. Varian builds up a big fleet of ships to attack the bay by Orgrimmar with hopes of taking out Garrosh in Orgimmar. Meanwhile as the Varian lead fleet gets close to attacking Orgrimmar Jania with the artifact is on a nearby island starting her attack to kill everyone in Orgrimmar. She is using water elementals for the attack and they are very upset so they call on Thrall help them stop her. Thrall comes and with the help of Jania's new love interest (which you will have to read the book to find out who he is) they convince her to stop the main attack at the last minute. She gets back some of her sanity but tells Thrall they cannot be friends as long as Garrosh leads the Horde. Varian's attack is a total surprise but Garrosh has another trick. His warlocks call up krakens that quickly start taking out the Alliance ships including Varian's. Four Horde ships wipe out almost the entire fleet and just when everything was almost lost Jania using the artifact kills the krakens and saves Varian and one of Alliance ships. The Alliance re-takes Northwatch Hold. Baine gives Garrosh another warning that he will not fight a war with un-honorable tactics. After the Horde are defeated what remained of the big Horde army breaks up and goes back to their own cities/lands. But by far the Alliance took the worst of it loosing most of their army and generals.

Years ago Krasus had left Rhonin with a number of prophecies in a box. The prophecies are riddles that Rhonin has studied of the years. Rhonin saved Jania because one of those prophesies was being fulfilled during the fight as Theramore and so he knew that Jania was supposed to be the next leader of the Kirin Tor. Jania knows nothing about the prophecy and part of the reason she went so insane is because he saved her instead of himself. He had a family and was the leader of the Kirin Tor and she felt he was more important than her. He died so she and his wife would live. Anyway Vereesa finds the box with the prophecies and after find the one about Jania the Kirin Tor make her the leader.]]> Gaming xml-rss2.php?itemid=5 Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:04:00 -0600 xml-rss2.php?itemid=4 There are some things that at first really threw me. One is different kinds of weapons give you different abilities. So you are questing along and find something cool. You equip it and your skills change. Get a good offhand and it adds some cool new abilities. Equip a two hander and you lose the off hand and it's abilities. Kind of throws you off to have to learn a new way of fighting so I ended up sticking to the same kinds of weapons. Also when you swim underwater your above water weapons are swapped with underwater weapons and your abilities are changed.

Questing is somewhat different. When you fist enter a new area you look for a spyglass on the map. You go talk to that NPC and she/he shows you that general area of the map. You will see hearts on the map and the spyglass NPC will circle them and give you a brief outline of what help they need. You run to one of the NPC with the heart and they will give you tasks/quest to do. The difference is they will give you a number of tasks but it doesn't matter which ones you do. As you do them the heart will fill in. Once the heart is full you are done and you can move on to the next NPC with a heart. While you are doing the heart quests events spawn up and you can work together with everyone else in the area to take care of the event. Event quests will pop up for example "kill the lead spider". Events spawn up regular so if you complete the heart you may want to stick around for that hearts event.

Travel is very portal centric. There a way points clearly marked on the map as a box. You run by one and the box fills in. Once you have filled in a box then you can port to it whenever you want. The way point boxes are revealed by the spyglass NPCs. There are portals to get from land to land or city. The portals seem to work even if you have never been to an area before. I was able to port over to where my kids were leveling and level with then even though I was a different race.

My kids who are all adults loved the World VS World pvp BG. I wanted to try it but never got a chance. I wish I had so I could report details about it. World VS World is realm against realm in a BG that they explained as AV on crack. It would be like the realm "Spirestone" taking on the realm "The Forgotten Coast" in WoW. Anyway they loved it. The only issue was one of them was on a different realm which by chance was the one the others were fighting against. So everyone in the room kept pounding the crap out of the poor one off player.

To sum it up the game looks interesting and I think it will be a hit for a while when it comes out the end of next month.]]> Gaming xml-rss2.php?itemid=4 Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:59:00 -0600 xml-rss2.php?itemid=3
Check it out at http://pi.qcontinuum.com/]]> QContinuum xml-rss2.php?itemid=3 Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:56:00 -0600 xml-rss2.php?itemid=2
To start out with I never had formal computer training and did not even play on with computers until I was married. I always kept my day job through the history of QContinuum. Most of my computer experience at the time was programming in Fortran and running VMS on Micro VAXs. I knew about a little about different Unixes but every time I started reading about them the commands seemed at the time confusing and not intuitive. Someone had introduced me to Slackware Linux and I had successfully installed the floppy distro. I got Xwindows running and Mozilla which I was using to browse the Internet. At the time it was much better then Windows 3X running winsock.This may be shocking to the kids but Microsoft was slow getting on the Internet. I took out a loan against my 401K and bought a Cisco 2511, white box PC to use as a server, csu/tsu, and a pile of modems. At first I tried to bring up the ISP using FreeBSD but I could not get TACACS working with the Cisco so I ended up using Linux on the server. With in a few months I had my server all setup for email, DNS, TACACS, web (cern), ftp, shell accounts, and everything else I needed. I had the modems setup to log you into the shell or make the appropriate SLIP or PPP network connection. Many at this time were doing text based Internet access using shell accounts at there ISP. I got a Class C of public IP addresses and registered my domain name and domain server.

For the most part it was my friend doing the accounting and book work and I was doing all the rest including technical support and all of the technical stuff. I did this keeping my day job which help pay for everything. Many of our early clients were employees that worked for AOL in the Ogden Utah area. Even though they got AOL for free they paid me for a real connection to the Internet. I did have other volunteers that helped as we went along. I had a number of clients that were hosting successful websites. Back then instead of Myspace or Facebook you would get web space from your ISP that you could use to create any web site you wanted. There were many personal web sites in the early days of the web that worked like blogs or just sharing information about yourself. I also hosted virtual web sites for some companies that were my clients at the time. This is how I gained contacts that later would lead to a better day job. We never grew very big but it helped launch the careers of a number of us involved with it. Over time big companies started offering services I couldn't match and my friend lost interest in it. For years I maintained the servers that where hosting web sites and other services for a number of people and companies. Overtime everyone moved on but I still maintained the servers for stuff I was doing.

QContinuum for the last 10 years has been a LAN center I run mostly for my kids and friends. For years it was the hangout place for a number of College kids around northern Utah. Over the years most have moved on with there lives getting married and having careers. So now everything seems kind of empty and I guess in a way it is time to move on to something different. I am a big technology nut. I have built many systems that do all kinds of cool stuff with hardware and software. For the most part I am open to almost any kind of technology and I don't understand why people have near religious feelings about software types or hardware and software companies. I have Microsoft computers, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Apple (iOS, OSX), and Android running on everything from Sparc, Intel, ARM, AMD, and VIA. I have stuff I have built running on everything from normal PCs to devices. I have the Apple iTunes environment with AppleTVs mixed with Mythtv. I even have a Ardurino and a Raspberry Pi. This is all just stuff I have running at my house. I love learning and teaching Technologies.]]> QContinuum xml-rss2.php?itemid=2 Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:43:00 -0600