| The Big Problem with Champions Online and Star Trek Online |
[Nov. 20th, 2009|02:20 pm] |
When Champions Online was new...indeed, between the beta test and the retail version being available in stores...they offered lifetime subscriptions.
Plenty of people thought it sounded crazy to buy a lifetime subscription for a game that wasn't even out yet. Especially since they changed a few things radically(much for the worse they later admitted) just as it was being launched.
I bought such a subscription. Maybe I'm crazy. After all, I bought a lifetime subscription for Hellgate: London, too. That game failed, by the way, taking my lifetime subscription with it. Fortunately, the man behind Hellgate was hired by Cryptic to work on Champions Online...
Man. I'm an idiot. :(
I'm not here to say Champions Online is dying. I don't think it is.
However, one of the extra benefits you got with the lifetime subscription was, "Guaranteed Star Trek Online Closed Beta Access".
That closed beta began October 22nd. It's been a month, I'm still not in. The closed beta ends no later than January 12th, since that's when the open beta begins. That's less than two months.
Of course, there was also the problem where their main community guy said that people who had purchased the special subscriptions would get in first. Later he said he had been 'mistaken'.
Well, that's just great. Some people will probably want to say "But they never said you would get in to the closed beta early! They could let you in for the last 20 seconds and still live up to the bargain! HAHAHA!".
I know that, because a lot of them are already saying it. I wouldn't bother saying that here. It's not going to make me any happier with the company to think they found a clever loophole to screw people than if I think they're just shirking their end of the bargain generally.
It's such a disappointment. I bought a lifetime subscription in large part because I wanted them to have time to make the game work. Most MMOS these days don't work all that well at launch. This one certainly didn't. Three of my friends also bought lifetime subscriptions. We don't really play anymore, we're just waiting to hear that the game is actually fun again and it's easy to do missions with your friends.
Of course, we waited on Hellgate, too. The only reason we aren't still waiting is that the game is dead. |
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| New Year's Eve |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|10:40 am] |
Perhaps I had bad timing with the last post.
I'm having a New Year's Eve party, as I always do. It is on New Year's Eve, as it always is.
For my local friends, who will come? Who will not? I need to know. Please comment.
Those of you from other states, or who already said you weren't coming in the previous post, do not need to comment unless you're coming. :)
I do need to start planning and knowing who and how many will be coming would be really handy. |
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| White Collar |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|03:48 pm] |
I don't think I mentioned this previously, but I've been watching White Collar. It's a rather interesting crime show, not particularly gritty...
I like it quite a bit. The main character, the sorta reformed criminal, reminds me a lot of Dauber, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ochaos's character from my D&D game. A classic rogue. |
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| Dollhouse is no more |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|02:08 pm] |
Why does he keep putting shows on Fox?
To quote from A Man Named Jayne by The Great Luke Ski(lukeski):
And if I ever get another Sci-fi TV show,
I think I'm gonna show it on...
UPN! Or the WB! Anywhere but Fox!
I still hate that network! They cancelled Wonderfalls too, those rotten bastards! And The Tick and The Lone Gunmen and Dark Angel and John Doe and Tru Calling and Tru Calling again and probably Tru Calling for a third time! Even Greg the Bunny... (fades out)
Or that's as close as I can get from listening to it. This makes me sad. I liked that show quite a bit. even if it caused some fairly bitter arguments about ethics and morality between myself and anghouedd. |
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| The Next Iron Chef (spoilers) |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|02:57 pm] |
anghoeudd and I have been watching The Next Iron Chef. I like this program because I like Iron Chef and also because...it's a competition rather than a reality show. No focus on people crying, breaking down or human misery.
So...
( spoiler spoiler spoiler ) |
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| Top songs from the past |
[Sep. 6th, 2009|03:19 pm] |
I've had a Napster account for some time. Once upon a time I bothered trying to rip their protected music to something I could put on my ipod... yeah, that was a pain. Since then, I probably should have cancelled my account, but I have not.
Recently I was looking over the site and saw a feature where you can get(and make a listenable playlist from) various Billboard charts(Hot 100 and so on) from a wide range of years, from the 1950s to the current day.
I was reminded that Bohemian Rhapsody was on the radio when I was a senior in high school. I was a big Queen fan...and it wasn't because of Wayne's World, though I liked that movie and have a story or two on the subject...
No, what got me into Queen was Highlander. That led me to purchasing A Kind of Magic and then Classic Queen and then...more stuff.
Where was I? Oh, right. I think it's interesting to be able to look at the kind of music that was popular on various chart types during different years, whether in my life or not. |
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| My Champions Online experience |
[Aug. 18th, 2009|06:43 am] |
Patching...
Have to go to work.
Work!
Come home...
Patching didn't quite work.
Patching...
Talking to voider...
Patching...
Talking to voider...
Trying various crazy things...
Patching...
Patching...
Sleep time!
Waking time!
Hey, patching is done.
Verify game launches. Gee, that's a lot of power sets and costume options.
(2 minutes pass.)
Time to go. Maybe I'll actually get to play the game tonight after work! |
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| For my Champions Online open beta friends... |
[Aug. 17th, 2009|09:36 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Animaniacs - US Presidents | ] |
Just a note, if you used the File Planet download(as I did), you need to patch before you can play, after you unlock it.
Seems to be wanting to download three GB of data. So at your first opportunity, unlock and start the download.
Then, when you actually have time to play later, you might actually be able to! |
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| So much to do! |
[Aug. 15th, 2009|06:24 pm] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | The Great Luke Ski - House Party At Arkham Asylum | ] |
Most of my friends who play WoW have been busy doing stuff in the game recently. Me too. Lots of fun stuff going on. But if you play WoW, you know. If not, you probably don't care.
Work has been quite busy. In addition to all my scheduled projects... CVE-2009-2692. If you have Linux machines you are responsible for, you have probably already soiled your pants over this one. If you haven't heard of it and you ARE responsible, go read it. If you're not a Linux SA, you probably don't care.
I downloaded and played part of the demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum. Seems neat, but my sound crashed and since it's a demo, I'll have to start all over again. No save game. Oh well.
I went back and gave Pox Nora another try. It's basically a collectible fantasy miniatures game online. I hadn't played since briefly trying it in 2006. It's gotten much better and they now have single player campaigns. Some are even free! It might be worth picking it up again, I'll see. No co-op play.
Having preordered Champions Online I get to the be in open beta next week. This is great, except that I'm also going to BlizzCon next week.
Obviously the rather expensive convention I already paid for wins out over the free beta test. :)
Speaking of BlizzCon, we'll find out about many neat things there, I'm sure. Including the next WoW expansion. I think most of the crap floating around about the expansion is just that...crap. Even if some of it turns out to be right, there have been so many conflicting ideas someone was bound to get something wrong. |
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| People are too violent |
[Jul. 31st, 2009|01:50 pm] |
I'm not talking about war, or kids playing video games...not talking about robbers robbing, police policing or various other things of that sort.
I'm talking about the people who say things like "If someone said that to me, I'd punch them in the nose."
Or insert another, more violent act here.
Really? It's not that I might not bust out the ultraviolence on someone who said something to me... If what they said was "Any last words before you die?" or "I'm on my way to murder your family." for example.
Though I must admit, there are only three times I've been violent in my entire life that I can recall and that's despite getting picked on and beaten up all the time. I generally never lifted a finger to defend myself. It's just how I was.
( The three times, which most people have probably heard... )
I'm just not violent. I must not be playing enough video games. |
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| A sign of what, exactly? |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|09:44 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Jimmy Buffett - The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful | ] |
I just purchased a Jimmy Buffet album on the iTunes store. I blame my mother for exposing me to this stuff when I was little.
Jimmy Buffet, that is, not iTunes. |
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| Trouble at school! |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|01:06 pm] |
Read this story about how terrible it is: Story
Except...that's my senior year they appear to be talking about...and I don't remember that at all. |
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| Not again! |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|11:19 am] |
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I didn't get paid today. I should have been paid today... |
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| Ongoing matters of politics... |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|08:38 am] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Draconian Crackdown - Rasputina | ] |
No, I'm not here to talk about a missing governor. Nor is this post about the current clownish antics in my state, whose Republican governor is to the left of the President on some matters.
I'm here to talk about Iran. Things there seem to have moved to the "arrest them all" stage. If they follow the standard script, they will get around to trying to arrest the opposition leader soon.
I'm not sure what would happen at that point. I'd imagine there would be at least one rather large rally, which might be an occasion for doing a lot more arresting and headbusting. Would things escalate from there, or die off?
It's uncertain. My sympathies go out to anyone who thinks their presidential election was stolen. I guess having the Supreme Leader say everything is okay isn't quite as soothing as a real investigation.
So...I don't know what's going to happen. I can't really predict anything. But I am concerned for the people there. Not a light sort of concern that they might continue to be oppressed in a general way, but a direct sort of concern that a lot of people might get hurt. |
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| Birthday Party! (again) |
[May. 22nd, 2009|07:08 pm] |
Just a reminder, I need to know if you'll be coming to my party if I haven't heard from you. I want to start doing up the plot and the characters as soon as possible because I've never done the genre or used the system this game will have.
Fun!
So let me know. |
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| BlizzCon tickets, part 1 |
[May. 16th, 2009|10:32 am] |
I was in the queue within the first 30 seconds, at least.
They sold out when I was #941 or so on line.
<sigh> |
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| Also, it plays games... |
[May. 14th, 2009|11:01 pm] |
With my new, faster Internet connection, I decided to try the Netflix->Xbox 360 setup. I already had the 360 and the Netflix subscription, so why not?
It looked great and it performed amazingly. We watched an episode of Weeds, one of Dr. Who and have the entire run of Fawlty Towers queued up as well.
This has promise! |
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| Now THAT was way more than I expected. |
[May. 12th, 2009|10:29 pm] |
Sometimes, when all the pieces fall into place, there are a LOT of pieces.
I imagine even the non-WoW-players out there(the majority of readers, I think) can appreciate that it's pretty funny that doing one thing lead to so many achievements at the same time. |
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