Finally!

After 6 days, Blizzard finally got around to returning my mounts to me.

I can finally get back to doing daily quests in Shattrath, and I can also try to finish off some of the achievements that I’m near completing as well.

Headless Horseman FTW!

Epic.

It was just plain epic.

After traveling to Southshore – fending off the Horde from killing a brewmaster, riding to the Scarlet Monastery, and wading through the Gauntlet of Horde that was in the entrance hall to the instance – the Level 70’s in our group finally went to defeat the Headless Horseman.

After finally reducing the Horseman to 1 HP, we figure out that we need to target and kill his head to defeat him.  Well after our 5^th TPK, we almost called it quits.  But I piped up. “I think we need to do one more run.  What do we have to lose except time?”

And so began the defeat of the Headless Horseman.  On our sixth time, we finally kill the beast, with only 1 casualty (our Guild Leader).  2 Achievements, tons of Tricky Treats, and a few loot items (Arlilith got the riding broom), and we called it a night.  An epic way to finish off a weekend.

Still no word on my mounts/pets. Grrrrr…. L

ArkInventory - Why didn't I get this before?

Ok, I don't think I've ever posted this much about WoW before.  But with the recent patch, the headaches, and the cool stuff about it, I figure if I'm going to blog, I'll blog abut stuff that interests me.

ArkInventory is a incredibly cool add-on that basically allows you have and infinite number of bags at your disposal.  It doesn't give you extra bag slots (that is control by how many bags you carry and the amount of slots in each bag), but it does allow you to create inventory slots in a new panel based on your criteria.

For instance, I have a slot for Cloth/Leather, Potions, food, Ammo, quest items, and one for weapons and armor drops.  It takes your existing inventory slots and gives you a fully functional way to sort them in a way that's easy to manage.

And it's not just your personal inventory that can be sorted.  Your personal Bank slots and the guild bank can also be sorted in this fashion.  Another bonus is that if you open your Bank, it saves a copy of the contents.  So someone decides to ask me to craft something (like Grothen did yesterday), I don't have to travel all the way to a bank to see if I have the materials available to do it.  It pops up as a separate window, and I can see if I need to farm the materials, ask for them, or buy them off the auction house.

A really amazing add-on.

Muppets! (Cheers!) and Mounts (Jeers..)

Well I finally found a program that will convert my Muppet Show DVD's into iPod movie format - without the annoying 6 second audio delay.  DVDFab is a great conversion utility that allow you to basically convert DVD's into ANY format conceivable. And it works like a  charm, and I'm planning on finishing off the 7 DVD's I have left.

My mounts on the other hand are still nowhere to be seen.

I received an in-game email from Blizzard saying that I would be receiving an e-mail with all the mounts/vanity pets that I had.  That was over 36 hours ago.  Now it's not something that I'll quit the game over, but it is something that annoys the frickin' hell outta me.

The Achievements however are starting to be a lot of fun.  Today I basically toured Azeroth and Outlands, collecting Hallow's End Candy (and 3g 75s on the side from each inn) , and I earned 50 achievement points. 10 points for all the inns in Outland, Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, and a bonus 20 for completing all there.  It's pretty dang fun. :)

Trouble in Azeroth

With the latest patch (3.0.2.), Blizzard introduced many new features and classes, tons of new things to create, and new ways to manage our characters.

Sadly, it seems, they have been have a tremendous amount of difficulty getting it to work.  Considering it's the basic groundwork for WotLK coming next month, it needed to go smoothly.

It's been anything but.

Among the affected things are vanity pets and mounts.  I loaded up Gillrisper (my Level 70 Night Elf mohawk), and proceeded to put all my mounts (all 5 of them) and my vanity pets (all 6 of them) into the new Mounts/Companion window.  This allows you to carry an almost infinite number of mounts/pets in the game without taking up any of your valuable inventory slots as it used to.

The problem came when the server crashed.  It crashed, and when I logged back in, ALL my mounts and pets were gone. Not just a couple.  ALL of them.

So I opened a GM ticket and told them what happened.  Turns out it happened to a LOT of people.

That was 2 days ago.  I'm still mountless, and I'm really hoping they fix the bug before this weekend.  I'm not buying a mount to ride (I'm not wasting money) - I want my mounts!

Now I see a lot of people on the server blaming Blizzard.   Yes, they are partially to blame, but run the numbers.

They pushed a 1.2 GB patch (the largest in MMO history) to 11 MILLION players.  Everyone downloaded it, installed it, and then logged in and started doing new stuff.  I figure Bleeding Hollow was completely full 2 days ago - the servers crashed. All of them.  And Blizzard knows that they have a lot of fixing to do. 

So to all the people complaining to Blizzard - cut them some slack.  They are working as hard as they can to fix the problems.  The least we can do is show a little patience.  After all... it is just a game.

Patch 3.0.2 nerfed?

Unreal - I just got finished installing the lasted patch for World of Warcraft, and sadly, I haven't been able to log on to my server for 2 hours.

According to WowInsider.com, most if not all servers are still down.  But all of them are listed - except the server that I play on Bleeding hollow.  Which is terribly frustrating.

It is mentioned that this patch is probably the largest in MMO history (over 1GB in size!), and that this probably wasn't going to go off without some pain involved.  Even still, Blizzard is hyping us up for Wrath, and I'm hoping that they iron out all the glitches in 3.0.2 quick.  I'm really looking forward to some of the UI and Hunter changes!

Trackmania Nations Forever

I accidentally loaded up Steam last night.  Normally, I don’t load Steam when I’m playing Portal or any of the Half-Life games, only because it’s a hassle to wait to get up and running.

But I accidentally click on it last night, so I figured I’d see what they had available to download and play. I found a great racing game called Trackmania Nations.  It’s not realistic at all, and the controls are as simple as you can get – up arrow to accelerate, down arrow to brake, left and right arrows to steer.  It’s pretty simple. But the game is a really fun, really fast, racing game with tons of level and a thriving on-line community.

Not only does it have a bunch of tracks to win medals on (an subsequently unlocks more tracks to race), but it has a full-fledged level editor, which allows you to create, validate, upload and race your own tracks of your own design.  Tons of track pieces, obstacles galore and lots of features, it’s a great download.  And the best part is that it’s completely free.  The only downside is the clunky UI, but other than that it’s a great, simple, racing game that can provided unlimited hours of entertainment.

Retronauts Redux

Well, I’m now listening to the new and slightly improved Retronauts from 1up.com.

My fears were for nothing! Woohoo!

Turns out that the “new format” was just a tightening of the subject matter of the current format.  Instead of tacking an all-encompassing vague-ish subject (like Adventure Games), they are focusing on one particular game per show.  Episode 51 is all about the original Fallout game (in relation to Fallout 2 being released later this month).

I like it.  Even though 1up no longer has a PC game side to their website (which is a damn shame), having them focus on one game make much more sense than trying to do “histories” or “evolutions” (although I still think that an Ultima History podcast would have been cool).

Here to another 50 Retronauts episodes!

Testing... testing... 1.2.3... (take 2)

Sadly, my work has pretty much closed off ALL social networking sites (myspace, facebook, flickr), including blogger.com.  I can’t even READ a blog now.

But thankfully, blogger has a “mail-to-blog” feature that should work.   Unfortunately, yesterday I attempted to mail a test blog to the e-mail address they provided, and….

NOTHING.

Nada.  Zilch. 6 hours later I got the dreaded “Undeliverable E-mail” e-mail.  Turns out I was trying to e-mail to blogspot.com and not blogger.com. 

So hopefully this one works!