Roessing dot CA

New blog

I’ve decided to create the subdomain mike.roessing.ca for a more personal blog.  I figure most visitors to Roessing dot CA, namely family, won’t care so much to read about my thoughts and opinions on video games and WAR specifically (or whatever I happen to be playing at the moment), so I’m going to keep this blog more family related and use the new blog for my personal thoughts and what-have-you.

~MikeR.

Electronic Arts brings out the chopping block (again)

News is out that Electronic Arts is shutting down Pandemic Studios, half of a $775 million purchase that also included BioWare, putting up to 200 people out of a job.

Not to detract from what the people out of a job are going through now, but is it any wonder what happened to Mythic and WAR, knowing how EA treats its studios and developers?  Origin Systems, creators of the incredible Wing Commander series, was acquired by EA and then shut down in 2004.  Chris Roberts was the man that first got me heavily interested in computer gaming (and lit the spark that got me into programming)… EA’s “touch of death” killed them off not long after Wing Commander 4 (the only one in the series produced under their influence).  Westwood Studios, creators of the venerable Command & Conquer series, was gutted in 2003.  At least EA allowed any willing employees to assimilate under EA Los Angeles.  Now, another studio is going under and I can’t help but think Mythic is next on the chopping block.  They’re losing 40% of their staff, up to 80% of which is content developers.

I knew it was a bad sign when Mythic announced the EA buyout, as did many others.  I knew it was a bad sign when shortly after, Sanya Thomas left the studio.  More recently, Mark Jacobs left EA after the BioWare acquisition.  I can’t help but feel that Mythic, as well as Warhammer and DAoC, would have been much better off if they simply stayed independent and true to their vision.  It may have meant a later release of WAR, but given how things have turned out under the (mis)management of EA, it certainly could have meant a much better game as well.

Here’s hoping BioWare doesn’t come under the death-ray gaze of EA’s (mis)management in the future.  Dragon Age may have been a huge hit, but it seems that as soon as a studio has a mediocre release the chopping block comes out.

~MikeR.

A Trial by Fire

No, I don’t mean the remake of Quest for Glory II (or the original).

Yesterday I rolled in to work to something that I didn’t want to see; our server monitor was showing one of our server sites with a downed email server.

Great

I SSH in to the server to try to fire up the mail server.  Failed.  Not much to go with in the logs, so I figure rather than running the init script to start it, I’ll work with the executable itself.  It at least gives me some more information; it can’t locate one of its .db files on the MAIL volume.  Ok, no big deal, I’ll go poking around in the volume and see what’s up.  Next discovery, no MAIL volume.  In fact, no volumes at all.

WTF

Checking the disk partitioner shows that the EVMS container no longer exists.  Long story short, I spend half the day rebuilding a broken partition table on a live server then recovering the lost data from backup tape.  I learned a lot, and can honestly say I feel a fair bit more comfortable administering these SLES servers out in the field.

On a bit of a tangent, I don’t think I’ll be getting Bloodbowl.  It seems that despite an earlier projected September release date for the XBox 360 version, it’s not coming anytime soon.  If the October release date is more on target we’ll have other things to spend money on at the time, namely stuff for the house such as wall decorations and other neat things (Lisa took me to Home Sense this week and I really like some of the stuff they have).  Besides, Dragon Age: Origins is coming out in November and it’ll be hard enough juggling my games with that.  Oh yes, I do intend on getting it and I think Lisa is looking forward to it as well.

Speaking of the house, the basement is poured, dried, and level so I believe things should really move along.  All of the trim around the doors and windows are up and stained, and the baseboards were laying in the kitchen when I was there on Monday.  The sales agent with Qualico has a meeting with the site supervisor tomorrow and should be letting us know a firmer possession date either Friday or this coming Monday.  I really hope it’s good news, such as “You can move in 3 weeks from now”!

Finally, Lisa and I have moved on from Warhammer.  Too many people are leaving (Venustus and Beargrim from Royal Dwarven Marines are heading to Champions Online and Fallen Earth respectively, and I haven’t seen many guild mates in CoF on lately at all) and the Tier 4 experience seems to mostly be getting run over constantly since there are so little Order players out and about willing to actually defend anything.  It’s really just getting frustrating seeing less and less people out and about, and reading blogs that used to be very much about WAR either coming to and end, or moving on to other things because the bloggers are done with the game.  It’s sad because Mythic had such potential with WAR, having learned from mistakes made in DAoC and it just seems they blew it with any changes and fixes coming out being viewed as too little too late by the ex-playerbase.  We’re now playing EverQuest 2 again, so you can find us as Sslizk and Kovanya on the Antonia Bayle server.  I recommend giving the 14 day trial a shot, Sony has really made a lot of changes to the game to make it more friendly to new and returning players alike.

~MikeR.

It was Inevitable, part 2

Tonight Lisa and I decided to try out some alts for kicks. She rolled a Bright Wizard just to try out the Ranged DPS role, while I rolled a Runepriest. I’m terrible at healing, but I like the look. We tooled around doing quests and scenarios for a while (and really, I didn’t do too bad; the lowest I came in for healing was 5th overall in any scenario, and I even topped one or two). Soon enough, however, the call came out that the Inevitable City was under siege. Regardless to say, we logged out of our little ones and came back with Baelgur and Lannerea.

While the instance we got in the siege was devoid of any Destruction players at all, making for a somewhat boring evening, it sure was a farm-fest doing the Public Quest and eventually killing Adell the Corruptor… over and over and over again. Some people just couldn’t get it through their thick heads not to taunt him (he does a massive AoE, killing anyone not appropriately warded instantly) so I died a plethora of times and racked up a bit of a bill for the healer. However, in return I was awarded with an Onslaught Trollsplitter, and 6-8 Invader’s Crests. Lisa got her fair share of crests as well, plus she got lucky and won a gold bag, netting her an Invader Highmantle. I think she already has the Invader Braces, so that makes a nice 2-piece set right there when she’s able to equip them.

All in all, not too shabby. Too bad it was all PvE.

~MikeR.

It was Inevitable

Inevitable City

This weekend, late Saturday night to be precise, Lisa and I were finally able to participate in a siege of the Inevitable City.  The Maw, the Chaos fortress, had already fallen earlier that day to the forces of Order, and a call rang out in our Alliance chat that Thunder Mountain was going to lock soon.  Lisa and I headed out there to help with the defense, as there were some Destruction players showing up to hassle the Battlefield Objectives and trying to prevent a lock.  We saw little action in the open, but were able to help lock the zone through Victory Points by participating in some scenarios and Public Quests.

After Thunder Mountain locked, all of Order quickly pushed into Black Crag.  This occurred so quickly I might add that we barely had enough time to make it to Ironskin Skar before it fell (in fact, I don’t think Lisa made it in time), and Badmoon Hole fell just a minute or two before.  Only one Battlefield Objective was left to be had, so we all pushed south leaving small contingents to guard what we had captured.  It took a little while, but we eventually locked Black Crag through Victory Points as well, since Destruction was trying to push out of their warcamp and gave us lots of Skirmish points.  Butcher’s Pass, the Greenskin fortress, fell within 45 minutes after the lock.

The rush was now on!  It seemed like nearly everyone level 30+ was on their way to the front gate of the Inevitable City, and what a crowd there was when we got there.  I wasn’t sure what to do at this point, so Lisa and I joined up with another open warband and got into a city instance.  Rushing around the city capturing the two points (the Monolith, and the Temple of the Damned) as well as destroying stuff and lighting crates and barrels on fire was pretty fun.  We sure got a lot of renown from killing enemies (particularly since many of them were obviously well over Renown Rank 40) and I walked away with an Invader’s Crest and Lisa and I both got a few Conqueror’s Crests.  After completing Stage 1 of the Public Quest (capture the points, kill 150 enemy players, destroy a bunch of stuff), Stage 2 began and I’ll tell you, this was a real challenge.  You need to kill a Lord named Adell the Corruptor, as well as his four Hero guards which look like giant mutated raven-dogs.  Lisa and I stuck with it for three attempts, and then had to log off since it had gotten so late.  There seemed to be a few people who knew what they were doing and were trying to organize everyone to drop Adell, but I’m not sure how many people were listening to instructions since the Lord and Heroes were all resetting fairly often, negating any damage done.

All in all it was lots of fun, particularly since it was our first time.  I understand that plenty of people on the Warhammer Alliance, VN, and even official forums have gotten sick of the PvE’ness of the city siege.  I can see their point, especially if you have done it over and over and over again (believe me, Lisa and I have been there from our WoW raiding days).  Either way, we’re still looking forward to doing it again.

We still have a long way to go in our enjoyment of WAR; we’ve just hit Rank 31 this weekend and are hoping that Tier 4 on Phoenix Throne won’t be the bore that it was on Ostermark.

As an aside, I should have my computer back on Wednesday.  I took it in to the shop I bought it from on Friday after work, and after venting a bit of my frustration they said they would straight out replace the video card for me.  I would have had it back sooner, but it was late Friday afternoon after all, so no parts were coming in until Monday at the very earliest.  I can live with that.

~MikeR.