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EverQuest II: Age of Discovery is due to go live next Tuesday and the NDA lifted today. I see my last post was something of a rant about the launch-day blues that Destiny of Velious went through, so it’s a good time to look at the new launch while looking back at how things have gone since Velious. Overall, my opinion of Smokejumper has risen quite a bit. He’s been at the helm long enough now to see the effects of his leadership and, overall, I like the direction he’s steering the game. The launch-day miseries of Velious were resolved over time and the expansion has proved to be only the first installment of a major roll-out of the EQ II’s take on Norrath’s biggest and baddest continent. Seems there’s still a lot to reveal there. The upcoming AoD expansion is also going to take the game in new directions and I think the change is for the good. So EQ II seems to be on track and in good hands. I’m glad to see this. Even as I continue to play EQ II, I continue to try out other games to keep my perspective fresh. So far, none of the others (like WoW or Rift) has really called to me. Each has its attractions, but EQ II still has more of what I want out of a game. And given what I’ve seen in the last few months, I’m more assured than ever that it will stay that way. -= G =- EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious was supposed to launch today. As of this post, the servers are still locked, which means the 6 hour downtime has grown to 10 hours. Official announcements mention “CDN issues” and later, “one more issue.” The server should be up RSN. But they aren’t, and this is the reason I’m writing this post instead of playing the game. Hell, it’s the reason I’m writing this post instead of trolling the forums. As of five minutes ago, I couldn’t get into the forums because of traffic. Destiny of Velious is Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson’s debut as Producer of EQ II, and it isn’t looking very good as a resume item. I’m trying to cut him a lot of slack because he’s trying to fill enormous shoes. He also has to do his job in the toxic cloud of irrational corporate goals for prying every last copper piece from the players regardless of the long-term cost to the game. But this goes with the territory. That said, I’m disappointed. The problems we are seeing with the launch of DoV are almost certainly due to the sloppy haste with which the expansion was produced. It may not seem like much that the patch for a major game update is running long, but it didn’t have to happen and it should not have happened. This expansion is more ambitious than any that came before it. Besides the new content, there is major surgery going on to the core network technology that delivers the game to the players. But that is no excuse. EQ II players are savvy and cynical. Their expectation set is very high. Let them down and you’re going to pay. And I feel that the EQ II player community has been let down by this experience. The game will go on and the players will go on, but I hope SmokeJumper learns from this so the the next launch doesn’t go like this one did. -= G =- I finally got around to looking at the blog after a long hiatus. I’ve made a couple of changes to reflect current reality. I’ve taken out the resume. It has long been settled that I’m out of the job market for good, so there’s no point to having a resume page. I’ve also updated the About Gryphon Himself page. We moved 300 miles to NY state nine months ago and Wilton NH is a another place and another time. I also edited the note about hoping the doctors can fix me up to go back to work. It’s been nearly two years now that we figured out that nobody was going to be able to do that. So the note now mentions my current focus: learning how to live according to a whole new set of rules. I don’t know if I’ll get back to posting more often. I’ve stopped making promises about that, and life is changing too much too fast to be sure about anything. As with everything else, we’ll see. -= G =- Ginjhur, Jen’s Ratonga Monk, dinged level 83 last night. That makes her the second highest adventure level in the guild. Congratulations! =- Therendil =- I’d really like to post more about my EverQuest II guild Gryphon’s Keep, but the web site that Sony provides has limited and rather clumsy tools. This makes posting or editing articles tedious, which means it almost never happens. On the other hand, it’s pretty quick and easy to write a quick post in Windows Live Writer and fire it off to the blog. So we’re going to try posting guild news that way and see what happens. -= G =- Therendil, level 90 Ranger of Tunare, The Bazaar server Guild Leader, Gryphon’s Keep guild I have recently been trying out Arch Linux again. After working with Slackware Linux for some time now, I felt a need to explore another option. Basically I decided that what I needed for a server system might be quite different from what I needed for a desktop workstation. Slackware is awesome for server work, but is somewhat conservative. This makes is less attractive for desktop systems where having later versions of software is more desireable. Arch Linux is also compiled for i686 architecture from top to bottom, as opposed to Slackware’s i486 default. This makes a difference in performance that I notice. What I did not expect was a crash course in just how different two flavors of Linux can be. Slackware uses System V structure. Since I’ve used mostly Slackware, that’s what I’m most used to. Arch Linux uses BSD structure, and that is a totally different way of organizing things. It has been quite an adventure learning how to do the same things in the different environment. I can’t say that one is better than the other, but they are definitely two distinct species. So the next time someone claims to be a Linux guru, I will nod and ask, "but which Linux?" -= G =- I took the time tonight to browse old posts according to category, in the hopes of remembering what the missing categories might have been called. After staring at the screen a lot and searching for what each group of posts had in common, I did finally remember. Two of the categories were named for blogs that got folded into this one: ‘Gryphon in the Wild’ and ‘Gryphon Looks Out.’ A third was called ‘Technoid’ because the posts dealt with the crunchy bits of some computer topic. The fourth was an old iteration of ‘Site Admin.’ I’ve now added the missing categories, reassigned the posts, and deleted the ‘Lost Category x’ series. While I was at it, I re-categorized some of the posts. My scheme has changed over time and it was a chance to retrofit the changes over at least some of the posts. Now that I have that straightened out, I need to find some other mischief to work. Hmmm. WordPress has posted a beta version of the next release…. -= G =- I finally got around to exporting the posts from the old Geocaching blog and moving them here. It took a while because the blog ran under an old version of WordPress that did not support export. Soooo…. it had to wait until I felt motivated to upgrade the blog to the current version to export the posts so I could delete the old blog. But it’s done. The old posts are now here under the old categories. I’ll leave an anchor post in the old blog until I feel energetic enough to write a redirect to make it come here automatically. -= G =- We seem to have finally figured out that my wife’s computer has some problem that disrupts some network communication just often enough to mess up posting to her blog. I figured this out by taking the post she was trying to publish and doing it from my system. No problem. So I guess I need to do some detective work to find out what’s going on. That should be fun. In any case, I don’t think we can blame Windows Live Writer for the issue, nor Zoundry Raven for that matter. This is actually good, because WLW looks like a really good package and a real upgrade from the capabilities of Raven. I’m using it to compose this post and I’ll be testing it more in the near future. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to figure how to catch the invisible gremlin in Jen’s computer. Wish me luck. -= G =- Well, I’ve tried tags and I prefer categories. I really did not like the tag cloud as a way of presenting category data. I also discovered that Live Writer has a nice pop-up for selecting categories, but not for selecting tags. The built-in WordPress editor at least has that. So it’s back to categories for now. -= G =- |
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