The Real Reason Apple Is Leaving Macworld

Posted by Wolfen in General, Mac

You might have heard that Apple will no longer be participating in the yearly Macworld event.  They spewed forth some token excuses as to why they are doing this, but I don’t believe what they say.  It has nothing to do with Steve Jobs’ health or any other wild notion I have read about latley.  No, I believe it has more to do with production time and having the need to no longer be held hostage by hard deadline dates imposed upon Apple by these big conventions.

The iPhone 3G was not ready for release when it went on sale.  Many promised features were not available or pushed back to a later date.  The iPhone OS was very buggy and slow.  Apple usually does not make mistakes this large, but they had to have a product ready by convention time, so they released it as-is.  I also believe that the App Store was meant to launch at the same time as the iPhone 3G but it was not in a shippable state at that time.  Also, the release of OS X 10.5 had many problems at release and needed to be corrected with several updates.  Again, it had to be released at a keynote convention.

Apple has done a fantastic job at creating good products and growing the company like never before.  They have more products in more categories than they have had in the past.  All of them require major R&D, programming, testing, and production time.  I believe that Apple no longer has the ability to release products and services in time for all of these conventions.  To appease Apple fans who seem to demand greatness from Apple at each convention, they have had to rush products to market to meet these hard deadlines.  Because of this, more bugs, errors, and problems are introduced into released products, causing bad press from the media and complaints from loyal customers.

Now that Apple has removed itself from most major conventions, they can now release products on their own timetable.  They don’t have to rush production and release things before they are ready.  They will no longer be expected to have an amazing new product available each time a convention rolls around.  This will benefit customers in the long run because the item they buy at release will be more polished and refined.  All the parts and pieces can be ready at the same time so that the whole user experience can be had right away.

Apple has grown, and maybe they have grown too fast and expectations are higher than ever.  This will make it much easier on them going forward to get things right, and in the end, will please their customers greatly.

Dumpster Diving For Tabula Rasa – Literally

Posted by Wolfen in MMO General

From Kokatu, this picture shows where the left over game boxes of Tabula Rasa go to die.  Myself and most others who tried the game didn’t like it very much.  Still, I always hate to see an MMO fail.  I wouldn’t mind having one of those boxes to keep for old times sake.

Alienware M17 vs Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Posted by Wolfen in General, Hardware, Vanguard

As earlier mentioned, I bought an Alienware M17 gaming laptop.  A quick listing of the specs shows a 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb of RAM, and most importantly, two ATI 3870 graphics cards in SLI Crossfire mode.  I was interested to find out how this beast of a machine handles Vanguard.  To be honest, I am a little disappointed in the performance it gives in this game.  Turns out, there is a good reason why.

First, I don’t want to give the impression that the M17 is not a good gaming machine.  It is a great one.  The 3DMark ’06 score is well over 12,000 and it plows through World of Warcraft at max settings while running at 1920×1200 resolution.  WoW has a very refined graphics engine, however, while Vanguard falls far short in this cateogry.  It also plays Crysis and other games extremely well.

I expected to be able to run Vanguard at Very High settings while keeping to my screens native resolution of 1920×1200.  In reality, the best I could do and still get a smooth experience was set it to High and tweaking it from there.  One of the biggest performance killers are shadows, and I had to set them to low quality.  I wanted to use full drawing distance but I had to set it at around 70%.  Turning on HDR made the game flicker like crazy, so I had to keep that turned off.  I also had to lower tree detail at long range.

I am not a FPS numbers kind of guy, so I don’t have that for you.  What I find important is how the game feels and flows as I play it.  If it hitches or stutters, that is all I need to know that the game isn’t running well at the current settings.  With the above modifications to the High graphical settings, the game runs very well while I am out in the field adventuring.  Things get much worse when I go into a town.  The game struggles to load NPC’s and buildings, which causes major stuttering until all the objects are loaded.

I had read that Sony had made some improvements to the graphics engine that they claimed would improve performance and reduce the “chunking” effect.  The Vanguard world is cut into many squares of land, or chunks, and when you pass from one chunk of land to another, the game freezes and churns away while it loads the contents of the new land area.  My experience since returning to the game is that there has been no improvement whatsoever.  My character still freezes in mid-stride and I have to wait a few seconds before he moves again.  Many times my character will start moving again but his legs are stuck in place, which makes him float over the terrain instead of running over it.

Keep in mind that all of this is happing at a high screen resolution.  Sure, I could lower it down to 1650×1080 or even lower, but I bought this computer in order to run games at high rez.  Other games are not a problem, but it is painfully obvious that Vanguard still has a long way to go before it will run well, even on high-end computers.

Now here is the kicker.  After being disappointed in the performance of this game on the M17, I did some research and discovered that SLI in Vanguard is not supported if you are using two separate video cards.  Bingo.  This is the reason for my troubles.  It boggles my mind that it doesn’t.  Here we have a game with extremely high hardware requirements and yet it doesn’t support SLI.  Fah!

So, the fault isn’t with the M17, it is with the game itself.  With this information in mind, the M17 plays Vanguard amazingly well.  I am not so disappointed after all.

Vanguard: Saga Of Frustration

Posted by Wolfen in Vanguard

Edit: Please see the end of this post for an update.

My first night back in Vanguard after not playing for eight months turned out to be a very frustrating evening.  I logged in, fully expecting to have a good time, and re-learn all the basics about the game that I had forgotten.  I ended up logging out after several wasted hours and experiencing no fun at all.

To get back into the swing of things, I decided to get started on the many quests in my quest journal.  The quest that I picked is called:  URT: The Undead Envoy.  This is a United Races of Telon quest that has several stages to complete and has a nice equipment reward at the end.  I picked it up at Arlinora’s Retreat from Elkisa Harok.  The idea of the quest is that they want to start diplomatic relations with the undead of Telon and they think that the best way to do this is to build their own undead envoy.  The thing is, they don’t know how to build one.  So, Elkisa gives me the quest “Background Knowledge,” so that they can learn how to do it.

Things started out well enough.  She gave me an Invisible to Undead potion and told me to run over to a nearby graveyard.  I am to use the potion, sneak past the undead that walk there, and steal a journal from the local necromancer who resides in the graveyard.  The location sits atop a nearby hill and it is full of undead skeletons.  There are three small buildings in the middle of the graveyard.  My first assumption is that the journal would be found inside one of the buildings.  It turns out that I was correct.

I popped the potion and ran over to the nearest building.  I opened the door and found myself face to face with a big, named skeleton.  Luckily, the potion was working and it did not attack.  No journal was to be seen.  I ran to the next building and found two skeletons and the necromancer himself inside.  Still no journal.  Third time turned out to be the charm.  The journal was sitting on the floor of the third and last building.  No skeletons were inside.  I snapped it up and ran back to town to turn it in.  Everything was going great.

Here is where my night turned sour.  Elkisa takes the journal, reads it, and then gives me my next task, which is the “Harvesting the Parts” quest.  I need to go back to the graveyard and kill skeletons for their body parts.  I also need to find some zombies and get their body parts.  Two body parts in particular ruined my night.  They are zombie skins and broken hand bones.  I killed what seemed a million skeletons and zombies and yet all I had was five skins and two hand bones.  I kept at it, hoping the next kill would give me what I was looking for.  After more than an hour, I was frustrated and pissed off.  I finally asked in OOC who I needed to blow in order to get these things to drop.  The answer I got ticked me off even more.

It turns out that the quest is screwed up.  If I want to have more of these items drop, I must first put what I have in the bank.  What?  The nearest bank is Veskal’s Exchange, which isn’t exactly close by.  In desperation I decided to try it, so I put the items in the bank and started killing again.  Two hand bones dropped immediately and then stopped dropping.  Five skins dropped right way and then stopped dropping.  In the end, it turns out that only two hand bones and five skins will drop if you have any of these items in your bags.  Now, the quest requires 15 skins and 10 bones.  If I want to get that many, I must run back and forth to the bank time and time again.  This is amazingly ridiculous.  This quest has been in the game since forever and it is in this condition.  Totally unacceptable.

I ended my night with an unfinished quest and frustrated beyond belief.  Nice job, Vanguard team, nice job.

Edit: In fairness, I want to pass along a note I received from an SOE community manager about the issues I encountered with this quest:

Hi there! I’m a Community Relations Rep at SOE and I just stumbled across your blog post here about your frustrations with Vanguard. I wanted to let you know that this quest issue has been reported to the team, and we hope you’ll still come back to Vanguard and enjoy adventuring in Telon. Have a great day!

That is great news!  I am sure that others who try this quest will be very happy.  Thank you!

Happy New Year!

Posted by Wolfen in General

Happy New Year to all of you!  I hope all of your New Year’s resolutions come true!

My new resolutions are:  devote more time to playing MMO’s, win the lottery, and have sex with Jennifer Aniston.  I wonder which will come true?