A Kiwi in online worlds

Test to see how zscaler captures this session

2011-07-04T09:05:00.001+10:00

Rift, playing a lot, waiting for SW:TOR, riding a lot, spent a weekend out in Bathurst, bloody cold.

Motorbikes

2011-04-09T18:31:00.001+10:00

I love them, I love being out on my bike, out on the road on a sunny day. However I am completely crap at doing anything at all mechanical. I changed my battery today and on my way to the mechanics to have the bike serviced, it died. I have no idea why, initially I thought the PCV had died which left me with a bike that was I'm possible to start.

Thank god I signed up for 24/7 roadside assist. I called them and they had a truck out to pick me up in less than an hour. The frustrating thing was I got the bike home and into the garage and just for shits and giggles I turned the key one more time to see if it would turn over.

What do you know, it fired up perfectly first time and ran with no issues for 5 minutes. Why?. I have no fucking idea. I am planning on taking the M out for a run tomorrow and I have bought a new battery to put in it. The battery is juicing up now and I am hoping that I will put it in and it's all going to work perfectly. However referring back to my original comment, I am crap at anything mechanical so I reckon it will all be fucked tomorrow morning.

If the bike gods are happy with me it's all going to work perfectly, the new battery will get the bike started and the trickle charge will have provided enough power to get me started again once I stop for lunch in kulnura.

Update tommorow, hopefully a good one.

Woot the M is back

2011-04-07T18:34:00.001+10:00

Going to head out to kulnura on Sunday. The M is finally back on the road and needs to go out for a serious run. If anyone wants to go out for brunch, see you there at midday.

The Malazan empire

2011-04-07T18:32:00.001+10:00

I have started reading a series by a guy called Stephen Erikson called the Malazan books of the dead. A lot of review will say things like "comparable to Tolkein at his best" and after reading the book you are left wondering if the reviewer read the same book you did. Stephen Eriksons series is not only comparable, it exceeds Tolkeins work in many ways.

In short I am convinced of Eriksons genius.

The trick with this weighty series of tomes is to keep reading. Erikson doesn't explain things, he doesn't give you a quick potted history of a new character or race after introducing them, he simply assumes you know as much as he does and moves on. The beautiful thing is the way he unveils information. You will be reading through the 3rd book in the series and he will explain something that was originally mentioned in the first book.

Everything has meaning, a cast off comment or what you think may be a passing character may turn out to be critically important hundreds or even thousands of pages later. His history covers, literally hundreds of thousands of years with races, characters and even gods coming and going over that period. Some characters have in fact been around for the entire history of the world.

His writing is in some places simply stunning. The fate of Coltaine at the end of the Chain of Dogs literally had me in tears. There are hundreds of characters of varying importance and you can never be sure if a character has truly gone even if they die.

The Malazan books of the Dead aren't easy to read, but the reward in persevering is substantial.

Love the iPad but I think the integration to google would make android better for the office

2011-04-03T22:32:00.001+10:00

Seriously loving the iPad, now I just have to figure out how to make it work in a business environment.

Or not to ride

2011-04-02T10:58:00.001+11:00

Crap, bike won't start and the rain is coming over, maybe no ride today

Trying to get the M back

2011-04-02T08:57:00.001+11:00

Going for a ride today as I finally have the M back. Really looking forward to it but I have to charge the bike first. It's a beautiful day finally. Just trying out this new mobile blogger

The big ride to canberra

2011-02-25T16:34:00.001+11:00

Set off from Sydney at 8am, made it to Oberon by 10am and had a spot of brekkie. Went on down the Taralga road and through the 12k of dirt road. The gorge before Taralga was an adventure as ever, always come into that first corner too hot! From Taralga to crookwell then gunning. The crookwell to gunning road is great fun!Gunning to Canberra and into the Sundowners Best Western. The most unfriendly place I've stayed in yet.Signs everywhere saying "don't do this, fines for that"Walked up to the Harmonie German club and having a nice beer, waiting for everyone to show up.

Shopping

2010-05-23T15:05:00.001+10:00

I hate doing the weekly shopping. Most guys refuse to do it but Jick insists I come along. I think I should have said no right at the beginning of our relationship instead of trying to look "caring and sensitive".

Something that moved me as a child - Remember Them

2010-05-19T19:48:00.002+10:00

If you are able,
Save for them a place
inside of you
and save one backward glance
when you are leaving
for the places they can
no longer go.

Be not ashamed to say
you loved them,
though you may
or may not have always.

Take what they have left
and what they have taught you,
with their dying
and keep it with your own.

And in that time
when men decide and feel safe
to call the war insane,
take one moment to embrace
those gentle heroes
you left behind.

Major Michael Davis O'Donnell
United States Army
1 January 1970
Dak To, Vietnam

Major O'Donnell was Killed in Action in Cambodia on March 24, 1970

I hate rain

2010-05-18T17:17:00.001+10:00

Goddamn it we came to Sydney to get away from the bloody rain. Aargh at it's been raing here all bloody day!

Southern Armada Raid blogs

2010-03-06T18:28:00.003+11:00

Half way there. I have now got week 40 up and done. There were a total of 86 weeks so I am about half way through. It has taken me a week to go from 31 to 40. I wish there were a neat little import tool for me to suck in all the data from the original HTML files, but there isn't so it all has to be cut and paste by hand.

I want to get it up into blogger tho so its safe and I don't ever have to do this again. One other distraction this week has been that I have purchased, had installed and picked up my new pipes. They fucking rock! Pics to go up soon!.

Damnit

2010-03-06T07:39:00.002+11:00

While fucking around with my blog design last night I managed to wipe it out completely. Guess what, no backup so I am stuck with this one till I can find a new template. Actually I am starting to like the design, if only I could figure out how to get rid of the image in the title bar.

Quotes from the old days...

2010-03-05T17:33:00.006+11:00

On the old Domain Admins web site we used to maintain a rotating quote selection. Each time you logged in you would be presented with a new quote at the top of the page. This blog doesn't have that functionality but Ive saved all the quotes for

"Where-ever you go there you are"

"God created Arrakis to train the faithful"

"Thank god for Beer!"

"You cant handle the Truth!"

"Thats it, game over man, game over!"

"Houston we have a problem"

"What do you despise?, by this are you truly known"

"Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around now and again, you may miss it"

"I guess they would rather be alive than free, poor dumb bastards"

"Well there's something you don't see every day"

"I don't feel the need to wipe out everyone, just my enemies"

"May I ask why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die?"

"Hello, my name is Inego Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die."

"Assimilate THIS!"

"If there is a bright center to the universe you are on the planet that its farthest from"

"I find your lack of faith, disturbing."

"We are on a mission from god."

"Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe?."

"In this world there are two kinds of people, those with loaded guns and those who dig, you dig?"

"There is no spoon"

"I'm not a witch I'm your wife!"

"When I was your age television was called books"

"God may be dead but you still have to kiss his ass"

"Its never done that before!"

"This isn't flying, its falling with style!"

"Do I look like someone who cares what god thinks?"

"Surgery is open!, whats today's agenda?, ah yes, evisceration!."

"Unbearable, isn't it? The suffering of strangers, the agony of friends. There is a secret song at the center of the world, Joey, and its sound is like razors through flesh."

"Hell is more ordered since your time, Princess. And much less amusing"

"Cheers make girls do stupid cartwheels. Orgasms make people feel good."

"Everyone thinks I'm this big dyke because I wear baggy pants and play sports and I'm not pretty like other girls. But all I really want is a big, fat weiner up my..."

"Her yabos scoff at gravity."

"Noah was a drunk. Look what he accomplished. And no one's even asking you to build an ark. All you have to do is go to New Jersey."

"What He really hates is the shit that gets carried out in his name. Wars. Bigotry. Televangelism."

"We call this next item The Fecalator. One look at it, and the target shits his or her pants."

"I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier."

"Mass genocide is the most exhausting practice one can engage in. Next to soccer."

"When the going gets tough, the tough go cyclic"

"When Someone tells you your butt is on fire, you should listen to them."

"There is no such thing as a bad donut"

"If you want results, press the red button."

"You may think it's easier to de-ice your windshield with a flamethrower, but there are repercussions. Serious repercussions."

"There are some things that just aren't meant to be eaten."

"The intelligent man wins his battles with pointed words. I'm sorry - I meant sticks. Pointed sticks."

"I don't need a surgeon telling me how to operate on myself."

"Never leave your keys in a reactor core."

"I may not be the richest man on earth. Or the smartest. Or the handsomest."

"My favorite color is chocolate."

"When that guy turned water into wine, he obviously wasn't thinking of us Beer drinkers."

"What kind of fool would leave a pie on a windowsill anyway?"

"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs."

"I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time"

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain"

"My computer is bigger and faster than yours"

"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously"

"The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks"

">SELECT*FROM users WHERE clue > 0 0 rows returned"

"The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from the red people"

"What goes up must come down. Ask any system administrator."

"Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk?"

"Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad."

"If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing."

"Bow before me for I am root!"

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."

"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it"

"No I will not fix your computer"

"Go away or I will replace you with a small shell script"

Sydney Mardi Gras

2010-03-01T15:00:00.003+11:00

Ive heard about the Sydney Mardi Gras for the last 20 years or so. The circles I used to travel in it was considered a big deal and one of the best parties in the world. Having now seen and experienced the Mardi Gras I have to say, Aucklands Hero Parade was better.

Sydneys party is definitely bigger, involves more floats and more people both in the crowd and involved in the parade. However it seemed to me that the Sydney parade handed out the right to join the parade if a GLTG person had walked past your offices in the street. What the fuck does the RTA have to do with Mardi Gras or gay rights?. No idea, but they had a float.

Hero was LOUD, I mean really seriously fucking loud. You couldn't have a conversation with someone standing next to you at any level below a shout. The music and light shows on each float were awesome. Because there were a lot less floats they tended to be of better quality both in presentation and enthusiasm. The Hero parade was a lot less political than Mardi Gras seemed to be and the participation of those in the parade a lot more enthusiastic.

Hero was a lot more sexual. Lets face it, the various Gay parades around the world are at the end of the day about a choice which involves the loins. Celebrate that fact, flaunt it in the citizens face, get RUDE!.

Maybe if I was circling the parade on pills it would have been a lot better. Maybe if I had any gay friends in Sydney and had been invited to a party it would have been more enjoyable, I don't know. I just wasn't that impressed.

PS: Bobby Goldsmith Foundation I am not paying you 130$ for a seat again. The seats were bloody uncomfortable, too small and didn't at all feel safe. Charging 7$ for what was effectively a 1/2 glass of beer and 10$ for a sausage roll was also well on the nose.

Guys I understand it all goes to charity, but that doesn't give you the right to rip people off.

Southern Armada Raid blogs

2010-02-06T11:07:00.002+11:00

I am still slowly doing them, I have fixed the text in the weeks up to week 32 and now just have to hand paste the images across. I will get a few more done now as I can do this while playing EVE.

General Custard

2009-11-01T19:15:00.006+11:00

Its been a hell of a long journey but she is pretty much complete. As soon as I posted the pics she was dubbed "General Custard" on the M109 forum. So here she is, the day after Rocket and I put her back together from paint.

Having now been riding her for a couple of months since these were taken, and having scratched the tank and taken in some suggestions from a few people, the tank is going to get a re-paint at some point with true flame in black.

I am also purchasing an Air Ride as the bike is just too low to have the wife on the back and ride safely.

Before

After

A new direction

2009-09-22T19:49:00.008+10:00

Its been a while since I have updated this blog, I used to keep it to describe my adventures in Massively Multiplayer Games. However a hell of a lot has happened in the last 3 years and my focus has changed from the computer MMO gaming which has really dominated my spare time for the last decade to Motorcycling.

I got into Motorcycling almost by accident. Like most guys I had always wanted a bike but had just never gotten around to getting my license. About 9 years ago, on a whim, I bought a 200cc scooter off a mate who needed the cash. I rode that little beast through the traffic of Auckland city for 2 years. It was on that scooter I had my first road accident when I was knocked off because a taxi decided he wanted to run a red light and took me at right angles as I was turning into work. The impact threw the bike about 20 meters up a hill and I rolled off his bonnet into the road.

I had just gotten it fixed and back on the road when it was stolen out of my garage one night. I had a bike cover worth about 400$, they left that behind and took the 2000$ scooter, go figure. I reported the theft to the cops but I knew I was never going to get it back, I figured it was already down a bank in the bush somewhere, or in pieces and being shipped to Hamilton.

I didn't ride again for a year or so until I decided I wanted to go back to school. The class I wanted to do was night school and was in the city. It also managed to fall outside of the public transport hours to where I lived. The perfect storm of you cant get there and back. So after much thought, I decided I wanted to buy a little commuter to get me to and from class. After looking around and a little research I found a Hyosung GV250. Hyosung is a Korean manufacturer and are very new to the scene of motorcycle making. They have been the primary parts suppliers to Suzuki, Kawasaki et al for many years, they have just never made bikes under their own brand till about 2004.

Lots of people give Hyosung shit, as the first year or two, the quality of manufacture was less than stellar. However they have consistently improved year on year and they now make a motorcycle to match any of the big 4. The GV250 is affectionately known by its riders as a "Hyobag" or a "Hoglet", the little bastards have tons of torque and like the advert says they just keep on going. I loved my Hyosung and rode everywhere on it for about 18 months. Too and from school and work, weekends up into the hills around Titirangi, off to parties etc.

When I bought the Hyosung a mate of mine decided he was going to buy a bike as well. He had previously ridden Suzuki Marauders and was determined to get another one. At the time I wasn't a big Suzuki fan and was considering my next bike to be a Hyosung GV650. So we took off one lunch time to go up to the local Suzie dealer and he took out a 10 year old Marauder and I wandered around the shop having a look.

First thing I saw was a C50. The 50 is a sexy little bike and fell exactly into the Cruiser style of bike I love. It looks a lot bigger than its engine rating, I sat on it a bit and chatted with a sales guy. Then I saw it, at the back of the shop was this giant yellow monster of a bike. The nose cowl looked down right evil, the paint shone, the gigantic rear wheel taunted me, the engine just looked like it wanted to howl. I walked over to it absolutely entranced and quickly attracted the attention of a sales guy who told me that was the new Suzuki Boulevard M109R. I was utterly in love. Unfortunately at that time in my life in NZ there was next to no chance I was ever going to be able to buy the 9 so I put it in the back of my head and decided my next bike was going to be a C50.

A little while later everything changed. My wife was offered a new job and to cut a long story short (told in more detail elsewhere) we ended up in Australia, in Sydney. I had sold the Hyobag in NZ when we left, but it only got me enough to basically pay off the existing debt. But by mnow I had the biking bug, I wanted another bike to get around Sydney. I did lots of reading on the web about NSW licenses, road rules etc and prepared myself as much as possible for riding in another country. I was still on a 'P' license thanks to a dick head in the first RTA office I went to to get my NZ license swapped over, so I couldn't jump to a big bike. However I couldn't bring myself to ride a bike on the LAM's list which I knew I was only going to have for a bit more than a year till the full license came through.

The other bonus to working in Australia was that I could now afford a bigger bike, so I walked into a Hornsby Suzuki dealer and bought myself a C50. The C50 was a nice bike and a lot of fun. I quickly realized it was going to be a nice commuter, but when I took it out on the freeway and wanted to give it some go, it topped out really fast at about 130KPH. I took it out for a few rides up to Newcastle and once or twice along the Old Road up to the Pie in the Sky.

Whille I had the 50 I had been debating and researching the 109. I had been reading and dreaming about it from the first time I had seen it in that shop in Auckland. I read all about its weight (315kg dry) its size (1800cc Vtwin), I debated with myself whether its power was too much, was it too big a bike for me?, could I control it, was it just too powerful?. I went back and forth like this for months. I looked at a M90 when they were released but it just didn't have the same soul as the M109 for me.

A year went by and my full Australian bike license came through. I continued to ride the C50 for another 6 months or so until I saw an advert for an M109 at 16,995+ORC. I wont go into all the details but essentially I walked in with cash at exactly the right moment in that salesman's life. I walked out with a brand new black M109R for 16,000 flat.

I think I was terrified the day I picked up my 9. I had never been on anything remotely as powerful as this beast, I hit 100kph in second coming down the Pacific Highway back to home, I cornered like an old lady cause I had no idea how to lean the damn thing. But I rode it every day, to and from work, up to the shops, out to PITS and up to Newcastle. Every time I got on it I was a little bit better and every time I headed up a new road it was a little bit more fun. Even now 9 months after purchase, every time I look at it, I cant help grinning, I want to get on it and go for a ride every day.

While I was looking around and learning about the 9 I had come across a website in the USA which seemed to have been built around a community of 9 riders from around the world. They even had a sub forum for Aussies!. The day I bought the bike I posted there proudly proclaiming I had joined the owners club. About a day later I got an email telling me about a website for 9 owners specifically built for Aussies. I was invited to sign up and come along and have a look. That was the first time I met Big Bad Baz and found the Oz M109 riders site.

Through the site I have met up with a whole lot of fellow enthusiasts through the OzM109 riders forum. I have found some awesome people with fantastic knowledge of the 9 and a real passion for the bike. I have developed an itch to mod, an addiction you might call it. I have started going out on a number of weekend as well as longer runs. I have been off to Uralla and Urunga and I am planning to head down to the Snowies for a big charity run on the weekend of the 7th of November.

The biggest ride I have been on was the Big 109 ride to Victor Harbor South Australia. That has its own blog entry and is going to take me a while to write as its huge and was an awesome experience. I also have some piccies lying around of the Urunga and Uralla rides. I will put them up as a single post at some point.

Will I play MMO's again?. I still do now and again but I just haven't found one that has gripped me in the same way that EQ did. I might go back to EVE for a bit. Who knows.

The Big Ride

2009-09-21T19:39:00.041+10:00

The Big Ride.
The big ride had been proposed and started to be organized about 9 months before I found the OzM109 riders board. When I first heard about it I was so new to the 9, the idea of doing a run all the way to Victor Harbor was a little scary, hell the idea of going up to Newcastle was a little scary. Oz is a big place and doing a 3000km round trip when I had only had the bike about a month was more than a little daunting. So, over the next couple of months I started to participate on the board, I went on some small weekend rides and met a few people, riders and their pillions. I went on two larger rides, Uralla (600km) and then Urunga (500km) with over night stays in each spot. I began to learn what I didn't know and how much I still had to learn about riding a bike as big and powerful as this one. I was also learning what the physical requirements were of doing 500+km in the saddle and what you need to take when doing a long weekend away on a motorcycle.

I got to know several people a lot better and had a blast on each ride. I learned what I wanted to do to my bike ( I got the mod bug) and with the help of BigBadBaz I started to make some additions to the bike. each change made the bike handle better, easier to spend time on etc. Each change incrementally improved the bike and I got more and more comfortable with it. It was on the run back from Urunga that I stopped with Gazza at the Twin Servos for petrol. We had split off from the others at this point and we took some time, had something to eat and had a chat. It was then that Gazz said something that really resonated with me. He had been in Aussie 30ish years and he had never done the Great Ocean Road. It was something that he had always wanted to do, but he had never got round to, the Big Ride was his opportunity.

I really thought about this, I didn't just come to Aus to work and make money, I came here to have a different life, to see the country, to meet people, to experience and do things that I would not have done back in NZ. It was that conversation that convinced me to do the Big Ride. That night when I got back from Urunga, I posted on the board that I was coming and I paid my money for the "Ticket to Ride". From that moment on I was excited and just wanted to get on the bike and go!. I knew I was going to have to do a lot of stuff in a very short time (It was only about 3 months to the ride date) and it was going to cost me a bomb.

I sorted out new tires, I organized a service, I bought a new pack rack, new knee braces, boots and gloves, organized time off and I was good to go. While I was sorting all of this out, I was following the process of the ride organization on the board. It became very clear to me that this wasn't just a "get on the bikes and go" kind of ride. A backup truck was being organized, specific roads were being discussed, spare parts were being sorted, prizes and media coverage were organized, notice was sent to the Police in SA (who have particularly draconian anti bikie laws) to let them know we were coming. This ride was being very well put together and I felt more and more comfortable with the decision to ride 3000km across unknown roads.

Ride day came closer and closer. I think I was boring the shit out of the people of work, all they heard for 2 months was "big ride is coming!" Finally the day arrived and I was good to go. The first stop was Chris's place to meet up with all the people who had headed down from Queensland and were crashing the night. There were LOTS of cameras around, unfortunately the one thing I forgot to organize was a camera so almost all of these pics were taken by other people. I was the first to arrive in the morning and met Rockethead and Col for the first time (actually I had met Rockethead a few weeks earlier at Roadwarriors). They were only just awake after having a really big night the night before. Col was not feeling 100% and he was beginning to wonder if all that scotch was really a good idea. I had originally been planning on coming down to Chris's place the night before and crashing on a coach to get an early start. Looking at Col I was bloody glad I didn't.

Rockethead was up and cheery as hell, when I got there he had the coffee machine fired up and the BBQ going with bacon and eggs!.

Me and Coffee 1st thing

I got there early, about 745am. I had some of the breakfast that Rockethead had kindly made, had a coffee or 5 and waited for everyone else to arrive. They dribbled in one by one till we had the usual suspects gathered around their bikes and a whole lot of new people I hadn't yet met. It was a great start to the day so far!.

Everyone having breakkie, coffee and a chat

Just before we all set off, Chris pulled everyone in for a chat and we talked about the road rules. We were using the Sydney Knights pack ride rules for stopping, indicating turns etc. I wont go into detail but it was fairly simple. It turned out to be an imperfect system as there were a couple of turns where we basically had to rely on peoples GPS to know which was the correct turn. For some reason, occasionally the corner marker either didn't drop off, or didn't wait for the truck to pass and took off before the whole pack had passed. Having said that, it did generally work and I for one was really happy to be looking out for the corner marker, see them and know I was generally on the right track. As someone who is never in the lead and usually cruising along at his own pace at the rear of the pack, knowing that a corner marker would be there was a real comfort.

One of the things that I was both really surprised at, and really happy to know was that there was a truck accompanying us. the truck was used to not only carry every one's gear (yay no heavy bag hanging off the rear of the bike!) and to allow us to take on the bike of anyone who may have broken down. there was also a shit load of spares, heavy duty tools etc all of which would have been very difficult to carry balanced on a bike.

Mannie putting the finishing touches to the truck

Bowjet

Taking off, leaving Chris' place

Waiting for everyone to form up

The Truck, always the last of the pack!

NSW Impressions This is a road?
We left in the morning, it was cool start to the day but the sky was clear blue and you could feel the heat coming on already. We headed off down the southern freeway and then off onto side roads. It was a beautiful day, nice roads, nice curves, then suddenly we turned off onto what I can only describe as a track. I was headed up it thinking "In NZ this would be called a driveway. Where the fuck are we going?" Shit road, really tight, only barely enough space for 2 cars side by side. Oddly enough, half way up it a beautiful customized roadster passed us going the other way.
The road wasn't long, only 5 or ten km and we were back onto decent tarmac.

Oh Fuck I'm going to die
I was behind Chris (the last time that happened) and he indicated for me to mark a corner. It was an off ramp from the freeway, so I pulled off onto the shoulder and sat and waited for the rest of the riders. I considered completely getting off and taking gear off etc but I figured I wanted to be able to take off quickly once I saw the truck, so I stayed sitting on the bike. I was sitting and watching traffic coming from my rear in my rear vision when I noticed set of about 5 cars coming towards me. About 3 cars back there was a BMW who decided he was going to pull off the freeway early and head up the off ramp using the shoulder.

So I am sitting on the bike, watching this happen in the rear vision mirror, the BMW is about 750 meters behind me traveling at 100kph when he starts to pull into the shoulder. I had no time to do anything, I couldn't get the stand down, it was hop off and drop the bike and dive out of the way, or hope he notices me and pulls back in. My system was absolutely flooded with adrenalin and my heart was beating like a jackhammer when he noticed me, swerved violently back into the line of traffic and I realized I wasn't going to die.

1st bad corner
Coming down the Kings Road following Gazza. Its an old trucking road, or feels like one, pretty rough and ready concrete, however no one else on it but us. Coming down a hill into a left hand turn, wooden bridge across a small creek at the base of the hill. Coming into the corner and realize I had been watching Gazza too closely and not preparing for the corner. Have to lay the bike over hard and go wide across the bridge. If anyone was coming the other way I would have been wiped out.

1st town stop
I don't know exactly where we were but it was the first town we had a major stop in. We pulled over and discovered that Rocketheads C109 had moved around inside the truck. In fact it had fallen over and damaged the rear vision mirror. While 5 of the lads were in the truck trying to get it sorted to not move about everyone else stopped and had a drink and some food. It was a pretty little town and a beautiful blue sky day.

Batemans bay - knackered
Pulled over at a gas station in Batemans bay only about 2 hours from Eden. t was at this point I began to realize how physically hard this trip was going to be. It turned out this was one of the short legs, but towards the end of the day I was aching and my hands were killing me. I had developed a bad case of "grip of death" and this was causing me serious pain.

Eden - Wheres my Bed?
We got to the hotel in Eden. It appeared that somewhere along the line almost all of our booking information had gone missing. I had paid but they had no record of my booking, I wasn't the only one. I ended up crashing in a room with about 5 of the boys. I settled in, went down and had a Pizza at the local Pizza joint and then headed to bed while everyone else got stuck in at the bar. Had a good chat with Rockethead as we were both dozing and settling to sleep.

I fell asleep trying to relax my hand and stop the tingling in my hands. My fingers were curled over and I couldn't straighten them out. I dreamed of roads, long curving roads bounded by dark green trees and riding at speed along them.

Leaving Eden

We left Eden about 930 in the morning. When I first got up about 7am it was clear but you could see the thin gray clouds rolling in from the south. By the time we got our shit together and left it was beginning to drizzle. I made sure not to follow Gazza out of the car park to avoid both the smell and the flying chunks of squid!. We tried to head down to the Eden Harbor to get some photos of all the bikes but it just started to drizzle harder so after a while we said sod it and headed out of town.

When you leave Eden you are pretty much straight into a national park and heading up into the hills. The weather continued to threaten but for the first half of the day it basically remained as the occasional drizzle. Enough to wet down the roads and make them slippery but not enough to actually be called rain. We road hard through the national forest and up onto the plains where we started to encounter real rain. It hammered down for about an hour while coming across the plains east of Victoria, that wasn't too bad as we were by then on long straight roads, if we had had that sort of rain coming through the hills there could have been some crashes. By the time we pulled over for a bit of food in Bairnsdale we were all wet and pissed off.

We hit the Melbourne freeway system and I for one thought "Thank God" and opened the throttle. I haven't so far (touch wood) had a ticket from that run into Melbourne. To be honest I'm a bit surprised as I hammered it along a lot of that road. We had planned to get on a ferry on the south west side of Melbourne, cross the harbor and we would only have been 15 or so minutes from our next stop at Torquay. We pulled over for our last fuel stop at a gas station about 45 minutes from the ferry landing. It was at that point that we discovered that the last ferry was at 6:00pm and we weren't going to make it. So the decision was to head back around Melbourne to Torquay along the freeways. Now considering we were talking about 140km in city freeway traffic on heavily monitored roads we didn't know, I was a little apprehensive.

Now Eden to Sorrento was about 597km. By doubling back to Torquay we added 140km to the run making the day nearly 750km. By the time we got to Torquay I was desperate to get off the bike. I had well and truly had enough. It was pitch black, I was hungry, very cold, my hands hurt and I just wanted to get the fuck off the bike. Torquay was another spot where our bookings had been lost and we were all reduced to begging and borrowing rooms from each other. I joined Gazza in a cabin and gratefully dumped all my shit and had a shower. Three of us headed up the local pub only to find out their kitchen had closed. All the Victorian boys had met us in the pub so at this point it was a large contingent of bikers. The guys from Victoria all looked so fresh and comfortable!. Little did they know what they were getting in to.

So we headed up the road and had a very average Chinese dinner. I ate about 1/3rd of mine, Gazz had about 10% and threw it away. Its always a bad sign when neither of the staff in the establishment spoke any form of English at all. So after spitting out the food, we had a few beers at the pub and headed back to the camp ground

Victoria Impressions
State Highway Open roads, pine forests, gas stations
Leaving Eden and straight into the pine forests, tall straight pines, clear open roads for the most part with the occasional hilly, twisty section. The roads reminded me a lot of some of the roads around Rotorua and Taupo in New Zealand. We passed up into a hilly section and it started to piss down, with all the rain and the coffee I had been drinking I badly needed a bathroom. Gazz and I were alternating leads as we headed through the forest, as we entered a small open section in the forest we found a gas station. Quite literally a small clearing of red earth surrounded by green forest with a gas station and a cafe. We pulled over and I lost about 4 gallons of fluid and we moved on into the rain.

Crossing the border
Coming down a long straight through the forest I looked up and there was a sign saying "Welcome to Victoria". Being from NZ it was weird passing into a territory where I knew everything from road laws to the colour of police cars was going to change. It was nice to know we had left NSW tho, it felt like we were actually on the way!.

Pissing down with rain
Coming along the plains towards eastern Melbourne. Long flat, straight roads, flat green fields. The weather had been threatening and spitting, then suddenly it hammered down. Everyone was soaked within minutes. I slowed right down as it was getting difficult to see. At one point the Triumph sprint passed me and I could see the water coming off his wheel as high as the pillion.

Pissing down with Piss
Coming into eastern Melbourne. 3-4 of us had teamed up and were coming through the freeways together. A couple of the lads were following a truck ahead of me when I noticed them suddenly swerving violently into the lanes to either side. At first I couldn't figure this out, then I noticed a waterfall of yellow liquid coming out the back of the truck and spreading across the lane. I too took quick evasive action to avoid the large spreading puddle of piss which was pouring out of the back of what was now obviously a live animal transport truck.

Melbourne traffic
After 8 hours of open roads, getting struck in Melbourne rush hour traffic sucked.

Get me off this fucking bike
We had pulled over for gas 45 minutes out from the Ferry and discovered that we weren't going to make the last ferry. It was decided to turn around and head back around Melbourne to Torquay along the motorways. This was a 140km back track. We set off through the traffic, largely we kept together but there were a few times we all started to get pulled apart by the traffic. I remember going over a bridge and cutting hard through traffic to catch up with the pack. We got lost at one point and did a U-Turn on a freeway entrance. By the time we pulled into Torquay i was desperate to get off the bike. I was cold, damp, my body ached all over and my hands were worse than the day before. I desperately wanted off the bike.

The Great Ocean Road
We woke up in Torquay to a beautiful day. When I poked my head out of the window it was blue skies with only a hint of clouds. That was about 730am. It was going to change, oh how it was going to change. This was the first time we all got a good look at everyone's bikes as the Victorian boys were here and all parked up outside of the cabins. I had exchanged emails with Paul from Twowheels.com before but this was my first look at his bike and boy is she a beauty. If you ever get a chance to meet up with Paul in Victoria, do so and have a good look at his 9. We all formed up across the road from the cabins at a gas station. As we were waiting for everyone to get sorted the clouds started to come across heavier and darker. Eventually it started to spit so it was decided we would head to the GOR and get underway.

Leaving Torquay

As we made our way down the coast and along the GOR the rain got worse and worse. Several times I passed people who had started out with no wet weather gear on who were now pulled over on the side of the road in the pouring rain trying to dig their wet weather gear out of their racks.

About 60 km down the road and just before the official start point of the GOR we pulled up at a little town called Lorne. Everyone was standing next to a little cafe warming up with cofee and bacon and egg rolls. It was a hell of an impressive site with 30+ 9's all pulled up and parked outside of the cafe. We all ate drank, pissed, hoped and prayed the rain would pass and hopped on the bikes. Now the GOR was the primary reason I came on this trip, it is regarded as one of the greatest bike rides in Australia. I have to say that I agree with that statement with one amendment. The GOR is one of the greatest bike rides in Australia - In Fine Weather. The further we got into the GOR the wetter and colder it got.

Leaving Lorne

Riding in hard twisties on a 400KG cruiser, with wet helmet, wet glasses and unlined leather gloves is not actually a lot of fun in my opinion.

The RATT bike

The Great Ocean Road

The Weather - Thanks Victoria

Pauls Bike

Gaz
Gaz parked up on the side of the road, a few miles into the GOR. I slow down to see if he is OK and I see him racing off into the bush waving a toilet roll...

GOR Wet
It hammered down. I'm from New Zealand, I have ridden in heavy rain and that was some of the heaviest weather I have ever been on the back of a bike in. Hell just going to work in NZ in winter could be an adventure. Ive ridden to work twice in hurricanes. The rain was coming in big and hard, the temperature had plummeted from a cool but comfortable morning to easily being able to see your breath. The GOR is cliff on one side, cliff on the other, hard narrow 180 degree twisties, do all that in pissing cold rain.

GOR Spectacular scenery
The weather may have been shit but the GOR is absolutely amazing. In some cases the weather actually improved the scenery. For example I came around a corner and could see the coast road for about 6km in front of me. The sea was breaking on the coast and the spray was coming right up the cliff, over the road and blowing over the tops of the cliffs and across the bush. It was like a spray curtain running along the road.

GOR Wind
Coming uphill into a 120 degree right hander, leaned over hard to my right, just as I hit the peak of the hill I also clear the cliff which had been sheltering me from the wind up until then. I get hit with a massive gust, pushing the whole bike back down the road and even further to the right. I am on the verge of both falling over and stalling. I lean harder, gun it and zoom round the corner with the back wheel sliding out, just a little...

GOR Cafe Guy
After the GOR you start to climb up into some hills. Apparently it reaches about 1000meteres and at the top of the mountain is an intersection with half a dozen houses and a couple of coffee shops. I am so cold I pull over into the parking lot of one of the coffee shops to wait for the truck that I think is only about 10 minutes behind me. A chap comes out of the closed coffee shop to have a chat and have a look at the bike. We get chatting, it turns out he has owned this cafe for about 9 years and has just sold it. He once had a business doing Harley tours along the GOR. His plan is to buy a bike and ride around Australia and he goes back into the cafe and comes back out clutching a wad of magazines with articles about the 9.

He loves the bike but is torn between it and a full blown Harley Tourer. So we chat for about 15 minutes and eventually Tony turns up in the truck. I waved him down, he gave me his sweater and we took off again, leaving a cafe owner staring after the freedom of the bike with envious eyes.

GOR Nirranda - WARM
Finally made it to Nirranda after been alternately rained on and blown off the bike. I pulled into Nirranda desperate for some warmth. I saw Chris's MT01 parked outside the Nirranda Suzuki place and I stopped in the driveway. First priority was a piss closely followed by buying some warm glove slip on's for my hands and a hotdog. The guys at the Suzuki place were awesome. I was well and truly late by then as I had only been there about 10 minutes when I found out that I had missed the press conference and we were all leaving. So I only had a really brief stop.

South Australia
We woke up in SA after a great night and a great dinner at the Mount Gambier Motor inn. The guys at Mount Gambier were awesome and I would recommend any biker to stay there. They put us all on one side of the building so we were together and the bikes were safer, they put together a private room and did us up a 3 course meal. We pulled out of Mount Gambier, happy, fed and warm. Initially we thought we were heading in to more rain but we mostly rode past or through the rain clouds so there was very little wet all the way into Victor Harbor.

Mount Gambier : Dinner

Leaving Mount Gambier

Gassing up at the Big Crayfish - Kingston

Chris on his MT01 ran out of gas just outside Kingston. I think he was only a couple of km from the gas station. While he was waiting for someone to come past and help him get some gas, a nice policeman pulled up to ask him a few questions about the large number of motorcycles that had been roaring up his roads. Apparently some of the local folk had complained to him about some 'bikies' traveling very quickly. Now the SA police had been warned in detail up front that we were coming, however it appears that this nice policeman didn't get the word.

So once it was explained that we weren't a bikie gang and we were in fact on a charity run the nice policeman called his friends up the road to spread the word we were on the way and left Chris with 10$ as a donation to the Charity and a request to "tell the boys to slow down". 3 cheers for the SA police!

Chris getting a donation from the SA Police department
See I let it go, its not a bribe!

We pulled into Wellington where the SA boys were stopped to meet us. We got about 35 9's on the ferry and pulled into the Wellington Hotel car park. That was cool, we got to meet new people, all the SA guys most of us had never met before, we got to drool over new 9's we hadn't seen before and just generally hang around like the smelly bikers we were.

Wellington Ferry

We pulled into Victor Harbor about 3pm, I think it was the shortest day we had spent on the whole ride. I was so looking forward to a bed, a shower and time off the bike. It took a bit of time but the folks at Victor Harbor Holiday camp got us all sorted out and assigned to rooms. I ended up bunking with a chap from Melbourne called Tibbie. Initially I thought we were going to have a bit of a break and the big photo shoot was going to be the next day.

I was surprised to realize that in fact we had to get to our rooms, find water and cleaning rags, clean (and polish ) the bikes and get them lined up for the big photo. I was the last to get in line as you can see from the long line of bikes with the yellow seat up front. We had about an hour and a half to get all that done. As tired as we were this was actually quite a big effort and there was much grumbling and "oh my aching back's" but everybody came through with flying colors. The bikes when all lined up looked stunning.

Finally Victor Harbour!

Wating for a room

Parked Up

The Big Ride: Parkup 1

The Big Ride: Parkup 2

The Big Ride: Parkup 2The Riders

South Australia Impressions
Open Roads
Long Straight clean roads, slight curves, good quality. It wasn't as thrilling as some of the heavy twisties we had been through, but I still enjoyed it. It gave me time to look around and just enjoy being out on the bike, the huge cloud banks were amazing, SA is really "Big Sky" country.

Speed
Long open roads, few curves, no traffic. Speed. Pissed off locals.

Silver Lakes and Curves
We came through a section just as we were left Wellington, I think it was Langhorne Creek road. The road was nice and had some great open curves but to the left hand side there were these beautiful lakes of mirror smooth silver. We knew the sea was close on the left but the water people were seeing wasn't ocean. I found out later they were slat flats with just an inch or so of water in them. Lots of people stopped and took photos as it was a stunning and temporary phenomenon.

Tired
I didn't realize how tired I was till the next day at the end of the big ride. I got back from what was supposed to be a short run (10 hours on the bike) and when I finally got to the pub all I wanted to do was sleep. I was utterly exhausted.

Wellington Hotel
Coming across on the ferry, catching up with all the SA guys, seeing all the bikes finally together, knowing that a hot shower and cold beer were only a few hours away was awesome. We picked up a couple of Harleys for the big ride in and I found it quit funny that they both seemed to struggle to stay with us.

Speed
We had been traveling so long and so hard that I began to realize that the average speed (or at least mine had crept up). I think I left Sydney averaging about 100-120kph. I left Wellington and rode into Victor Harbor about 130-140 and felt really comfortable doing it.

After the big lineup we all headed up to the Victor Harbor Suzuki dealership where Camp Quality had set up a big welcome for us. There were lots of kids, parents and Camp Quality dolls and puppets around. As we pulled up I realized the place was smaller than I thought and on a much steeper hill than I thought. I honestly didn't believe we were going to get 40+ 109's in there. But the boys from VH Suzuki guided everyone in and like a jigsaw we got all the bikes in. Allan who owns VH Suzuki had set up a BBQ with drinks, snags etc and all proceeds went to Camp Quality. There was also an auction of gear donated by Suzuki and by some of the people who were on the ride.

The big items were the Suzuki Waistcoat (man I wish I had bought that) which after a fierce tussle between Tony and Col finally went to Col, and a hand made clock kindly donated by XXX. That eventually went to Chris for pride of place in his M109 Barn.

Doc and the Clock

Doc and his mates

The official BigRide started the next morning. We all set off to Breakfast at a little local spot where the owner had kindly put on more staff as we had told him there was going to be 40+ people turning up for breakfast that morning.

Breakfast!

A blessing of the bikes had been arranged and a minutes silence was held for Peter Gundry, a 9 rider who was lost to us early in 2009. I have never experienced a blessing of the bikes and although I am in no way religious, having the words said and the final blessing of "ride safe" was a great experience.

Blessing of the Bikes

The Padre

Heading off on the Big RideThe rules were announced, no over taking for this ride, no one was to overtake the lead bike and no one was to drop behind the rear bike. We were going to ride in a safe convoy.It was supposed to be a simple cruise up into the Adelaide hills. We had riders of all different skills, ages and experience levels. So the rule was in place to try and keep the run from turning into a race. The first stretch of the run was about 60km or so and ended up at an intersection surrounded by lots of pretty buildings. Not quite a town, I couldn't figure out what it was. There was a Telstra stall there trying to sell mobile services in the car park. I think we scared the crap out of them when we first showed up as they probably through we were big bad bikies.

NFI where this is but it was pretty

After we took off into the second section it seemed to me that the lead bike absolutely took off. I was about 1/3rd of the way down the pack and I was riding well and truly out of my comfort level. I kept waving people past as I was taking the bike way further and way faster than I ever had before. I know that's how you learn, but its not a good idea to be learning at 80kph going through a 45 marked corner with three bikes hammering right up your ass to get round you. I was trying to stay up with the guys in front of me and keep out of the way of the guys behind me,

I went into one hard uphill left hand corner, first the pegs scraped, then the rear frame scraped, I realized really quickly I was also in the wrong gear for the climb up the hill, I checked in the rear mirror to see a bike coming hard round the corner and decided this was a really bad spot to be in. I dropped a gear and took off, waving the biker behind me past. After that I slowed right down and rode much more to my skill level.

We got to the top of Mount Loftus where prize's and giveaways were handed out and then took off for lunch before entering "the Gorge".

Mount Loftus

The gorge was a hell of a ride. The rules got changed at lunch to say that the gorge was open slather, ride to however you felt best, overtaking was allowed. We headed in and I waved a lot of people past. the incident with scraping the frame on the corner earlier had led me to slow right down so I let everyone go in front of me and I quietly made may way through the twisties. I'm glad I took the gorge slowly as it was a spectacular space and I just enjoyed the view and cruised down to the gas station at the end of the road.

From the gas station I elected to head back to Victor Harbour. There were 5 of us and we managed to get thoroughly caught up in the Adelaide traffic which, after racing around through the hills earlier, wasn't a lot of fun. As I was coming around a roundabout heading for the Motorway my back tire unexpectedly jumped about 6 inches to the left, I felt it go and put my foot down and pushed the bike up hard to keep it upright. Scared the shit out of me and impressed Popeye who was behind me. When we got to the campsite he said he was impressed I had managed to keep it upright.

That night was the official Big Ride Dinner. We all got home, showered and headed up to the local Hotel where a room had been set aside for us all. Food was great and company better. Alan from the Victor Harbour Suzuki got up and said a few words and Camp Quality had brought along a family who were there to show us what all the hard work was about. Both Alan and the father of the young boy from Camp Qality got quite emotional in thanking us for our support.

Longest Ride award 3800KM (he did it in two days to get back!)

The prizes!

Doc and Baz

The lovely family from Camp Quality

Speeches

The next day was a day "off" so me and Crazy wandered into town, had a very long and leisurely breakfast and just wandered about a bit. Eventually we hooked up with a few of the lads who were having a few quiet beers outside the Hotel.

Keeva and Jerone

Tony and our gracious Lord Wazza

Victor Harbour Impressions
Wind!
Woke up in the morning to a tremendous bang and the sound of howling wind through the trees. It was so loud I thought it was a bike falling over against the cabin. Shot outside to find it was a huge branch having come down and the bikes were fine. The wind was massive that morning, it was hard to stand up straight against it. It went on most of the day and didnt really start to drop away till late in thre afternoon. It wasn't a good omen for the ride home starting the next day.

People set off and turned back
Several guys had decided to set off for home on the morning the wind started. A couple pushed through but a lot turned around and came back. You know its dangerous out there when Gazza turns back, he is an absolute machine when it comes to riding, nothing (well almost nothing) stops him.

Barbeque night
On the last night we decided to have a BBQ. Everyone bought stuff to share and we used one of the free BBQ's at the campsite. It was a great night with 10 orso of us just hanging around, sharing experiences and just generally bullshitting. I got a chance to talk to some of the people that had been around for the whole ride but I hadn't been able to talk to and made some new friends. It ended about 11pm and everyone headed off for an early night. The next day was a big day!

The Trip Home
Wind and the Hay Plain
We weren't lucky, the wind didn't drop the next day. About 5 of us set off across the Hay plain with the intention of stopping at Hay for the night. This is easily the toughest piece of riding I have ever done. The wind always seemed to be coming from the left and I was constantly on a 20 degree lean into the wind. Passing B-doubles was potentially lethal as you would have to get into his wind draft, then pass him, get into a clean spot of air and then back out into the wind and the 20 degree lean.

I was going down a straight piece of road and got pushed so hard in one gust I scraped my pegs.

I thought maybe I was just being a pussy but talking that night with the guys I was riding with, they all said that was the toughest day they had ever done in the saddle.

Exhausted in Hay/Dinner
We reached Hay and stopped at the first Motel we saw with a "Vacancies" sign. It was 750km run from Victor to Hay in with that massive wind pushing us all over the road all the way. We all got a room, dumped our stuff and gathered outside for a beer, a smoke and a chat. After an hour or so we went back to our various rooms for a wasshup and a venture into town for dinner. Hay is an interesting place. If it wasn't for the truckies passing through I don't think it would exist. It seems to be there purely for the purpose of being in the middle of Sydney and Adelaide.

We had a very nice dinner in a seafood restaurant that was about 1000km from the nearest ocean and headed back to the rooms. TonyTwoshoes and Wazza of course, found some girls and partied until the very wee small hours.

The Freeway
After 6 days of back roads, tight curves and a sore ass the Freeway near Goulburn was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. It meant we were close to home and an easy run all the way back into Sydney. Keeva had peeled off and headed into Melbourne leaving only myself and Rocket still running together. We couldnt go to fast as Rockets bike was literally loaded so high at the rear I couldn't see his head.

We cruised into Sydney and Mark peeled off for the last run home, another 300km from my place.

Me and Keeva on the way home the day after stopping at Hay

Home
Nearly dropped the bike, after 3500km from Sydney to Adelaide and back, the closest I came to actually dropping the bike was as I turned into my driveway.

It was a huge experience and I loved it. I was exhausted when I got home but if someone had said we are going to keep going and head to Cairns, I honestly would have jumped on the bike the next morning and just kept going. It took me two days to get my head "off the road" and back home.

When is the next one?

Iphone's

2009-01-05T16:52:00.001+11:00

I spent months humming and hahing about buying an iPhone. I've had it about 5 days now and I'm on love. I've bought 3 apps through the store which is super easy and learned how to blog from the phone!

Oh and nearly finished watching Battlestar Galactica over the Xmas break, loving it so far.

Test iPhone blog

2009-01-04T20:51:00.001+11:00

We are Live!...

2008-08-27T08:54:00.009+10:00

Current Killing Blow count: 22

Well we finally got SA formed last night. Southern Armada now has a presence in 3 games, WoW, WAR and EQ2. I must admit I had a fall back, if we hadn't been able to get enough SA people on-line to be able to actually form the guild, I was going to join TOG. The Older Gamers are a very large Aussie based organisation who have a presence in multiple MMO's as well as Clans in FPS games, tactical ladders etc. They have been around for a while and I have seen them in several games in the past. When I have encountered their members they have always been decent people and if SA wasn't going to get off the ground that was basically going to be my new home.

However we managed to easily get enough people on-line and in The Inevitable City and Southern Armada went live in WAR. At the moment obviously we are only very small but we will use the same sort of recruitment system as Shinrai has adopted in WoW. Basically we make it a lot easier to get in, but its also a lot easier to get booted. We want to expand, but not at the expense of the SA way of doing things. Unfortunately Zarthaz has chosen to side with the forces of Order on an open RVR server and he will not be joining us. If we do get to a decent size who is to say we wont have an Order branch as well for Alts and something different. I was actually thinking we could call an order Guild "Northern Armada" :)

A very very small part of
The Inevitable City

I've been busy levelling up as fast as I can to get past all the stuff I have already done. I've made my way to level 15 and completed all of the current quests available in my Tier for Chaos and Greenskin. I was considering a little trip across to the Dark Elf lands to both have a look around and to check out their quests. Don't get me wrong I have still skipped hundreds of quests as I have outlevelled them, I've just managed to clear the quest lines in the particular areas that I have inhabited.

Beta was fun and this is how I looked at the end of my last day in the Beta before go live.
Some of the most fun quests I've done so far have been the ones in the Troll lands. The Troll models are just awesome looking with different colours and skin textures on each one, the quests are fun with a decent mix of fedex, kill that, PQ's etc. Its enough to keep you entertained and running about the place.

a Plaguewood Troll

I had an excellent couple of nights in Stonetroll Crossing both in open RvR and scenarios. I actually had 2 scenarios run to full term and time out. For those who haven't played WAR, Stonetroll is a chaos human scenario where you have to get a flag in the centre of the map and then take it to 3 different map areas to "capture" those areas for your side. There are a couple of caveats:
Once you have the flag you have two minutes to make it to and capture an area, if you don't the flag reseats and you start again
It takes 3 seconds of uninterrupted time to capture an area, if you are interrupted by attack you have to start the 3 seconds again.
The entire scenario takes 12 minutes.

So basically neither side could force the scenarios and they timed out, 12 minutes of battling the enemy!.

Usually stone troll is dominated by one side or the other and won or lost easily, so people are starting to learn how this stuff works and its getting harder.

Now I'm not saying this game is perfect, it definitely has bugs. One of them is Biletongue. He is the boss at the end of one of the Stonetroll PQ's. We completed the second stage and Biletongue became attackable, I engaged and he one shotted me. Just a touch over powered!.

Biletongue

I have also had several one on one and small group battles in the open field areas. In one I got utterly ganked as I ran into 3 bright wizards, one snared me, the other two smacked me down. Its ok, I took careful note of their names and I will see them again, oh yes I will!. I am hanging out for the anti snare buff BO's get at some point, snares really really drive me nuts as there seems to be at least 3-4 Order classes with a snare including a nasty one that the Bright Wizards get which is also a substantial DOT. As soon as I can break snares, the bloody bright wizards and Engineer's are toast.

I am a kiwi, but on the SA-WAR KOS list I have added a Guild called "fluffy kiwis" just cause the name is so stupid. Much like the guild "The Elite" on Darklands I take great pleasure in smacking any of them I have met during scenarios or RvR.

RvR stories
I was happily killing npc dwarves in droves when I noticed what I thought was a named Dwarf, so I charged him. He took off and I realised he was a player trying to sneak in amongst the NPC's to get some sneaky attacks in on us. He took off back to the cover of his warcamp and I didn't quite have the legs to catch him so I let him go, but I decided to keep an eye out for him as i figured he would be back. Sure enough a couple of minutes later he starts to sneak back. I kept an eye on him making like I didn't know he was there.

As soon as he was in range I made sure I had my snare up and charged him, I got the snare on him straight away and started to hammer him. He took off back to his base, but I made sure the snare stayed on and I followed him all the way into his base. I had 3 NPC's on me by the time I got the final blow on him, I'm sure he thought once he was inside his warcamp he was safe. I turned around, hit sprint, outpaced the npcs and went back to the PQ. About 15 minutes later he was back, this time with buddies and it turned into quite a long protracted battle. RvR rocks.

I got involved in another battle across a wall where Greenskin and Dorf PQ's are on opposite sides of the wall. We were happily outpacing the Dorf killing speed and they kept losing their PQ's. So they decided that it was going to be easier to come across and try and stop us. They attacked en mass while we were heavily engaged with large numbers of NPC's. The battle raged for a good 15 or so minutes with Dorfs and ourselves rezzing and racing straight back into the battle. We finally managed to complete the PQ with about 30 seconds to spare and the Dorfs at that point backed off. It was an awesome battle with no quarter given on either side. Kudos to the Dorf Skum for a great fight.

Undead Dorfs

Ulaa at 10th Level

I will update the screenie every ten levels so I can track how the 'look' changes.

No one is reading me!, Its a beautiful thing!

2008-08-26T20:06:00.000+10:00

I have checked my blog stats and since I posted that SA has left VG, I haven't had a single reader. That's right not one!. And you know what, I'm bloody happy about it. When I originally started blogging, or as it was known back then "learning to write HTML code so I could write a website so I could put some shit in the web" there was never an anticipation of having actual readers.

What I was laughingly referring to as my website went through several iterations over the years, from my own personal one written when I was a student, to domainadmins.com written with a SQL back end and CSS. Eventually I moved on to this blog in the last year or so, because Google make it so much easier than I was ever able to code it myself. Plus its all backed up and available on Googles servers forever. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if I'm dead and you are still reading through this 100 years on.

I first started to get actual regular readers when I was writing the EQ raiding blog for Southern Armada. People started to ask in game and through emails "when's the next one going up?". What freaked me out most was when a couple of people posted from over seas. One guy posted from an Internet cafe in Spain. He was an Aussie touring Europe and he had found the raiding blog and read it end to end. Apparently it cost him an absolute fortune to sit in the Cafe all day but he wanted to see what happened at the end. I don't think I've ever been so complemented in my life!, someone actually paid real money, and money they couldn't afford, to read my words!.

When SA moved to World of Warcraft I tried to keep up the blogging but for various reasons that I have discussed in depth elsewhere, I simply couldn't find the commitment or the time. Again we moved, this time to Vanguard, I really enjoyed blogging Vanguard Raids, but again it came down to time availability. Its impossible to find enough time to be committed to actually play the games and raid as well, let alone spend the time to do all of that and spend 4-6 hours a week writing up an entertaining and reasonably intelligent blog.

I found it harder and harder to enjoy. We would have a good night in VG and get a good or particularly hard kill and I would get tells "This will be up on the blog tomorrow wont it!" which put all sorts of pressure on me. Now I don't mind pressure, I work in a very high pressure kind of job, but the pressure was starting to intrude on the relaxation time. I was feeling like I couldn't enjoy the game cause I wasn't spending time on the blog. Then I started to get weeks behind with the raids and I felt even worse. The issue got so bad I stopped blogging and I stopped playing which pleased nobody, least of all me.

What I am getting around to in all of this, is that with no more readers, the pressure is off. I can update when I want, about what I want again. I may blog regularly about WAR, or not. If I can get an SA chapter going in WAR I will and I may even blog about it. Whether we do start a chapter or not will depend on how many regular SA members decide to give the game a go. There may be none, in which case I will be very sad and I will be looking for a Guild as a new home in WAR.

I will however wait for the inevitable collapse and shakedown. What usually happens is that the quick to organise "pre-release guilds", in my experience usually fail spectacularly in a welter of recrimination and abuse.

I am trying to find a backup of my old website which had all the sigs that I ever made for anyone on display. I really hope I can find them cause some of them were really good and I would like to show them off again.

We are at the dawn of a new age

2008-08-26T08:41:00.000+10:00

We are at the dawn of a new age.

Five years ago there was a term thrown around a lot by marketing people to describe those who were liable to pick up on new technology as soon as it arrived, that term was "early adopters" As with most things on the rapidly changing face of the web this term is already out of date. I believe there are so many emerging new fields that a blanket term like "early adopters" simply can't be applied.

Look at the rapidly changing tech behind blogging. This is a field that 2 years ago didn't exist. Blogging was something us geeks did in the privacy of our own homes, throwing ideas and concepts out into the virtual ether as fast as we could develop them. Fast forward 24 months and the parts of the 'Net that deal with Blogs and Bloggers even has its own name, the blogosphere. Politicians take it seriously, News organizations discuss the death of the Newspaper and both the political sphere and professional News organizations are debating whether Bloggers are Journalists and should their activities be protected by law?. All this because a couple of Geeks liked to tell the world how they were feeling via the medium of HTML.

Back to "early adopters" and the evolution of gaming. Currently we are eagerly awaiting what is generally accepted as being the 3rd generation of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. 3rd generation?, in Europe that's barely time to claim you have started a successful business, in genetics you haven't even started to see any sort of true variation, even in the development of something as new as the automobile, the third generation would only put us in the 1930's. As gamers and game developers we are only just beginning to explore the very edges of the massive virtual worlds that well eventually explode out of the development studios.

Men like Raph Koster, Peter Garriot (Lord British) and Brad McQuaid (Aradune) we will some day look back on as contributing to the foundations of the worlds of the future, both virtual and RL. Thanks to the efforts of these men and others like them in the last 5 years we have experienced an evolution of the English language the like of which hasn't been seen since the Angles ran into the Saxons a thousand years ago. The Leet of hackers became multiplayer FPS jargon, became MMO speak and has moved into the world as TXT language. The makers of games like Quake and Half-life forced a massive and rapid evolution of 3D video cards, the MMO makers took the expanded graphics capabilities and ran with them to create worlds that became more and more immersive.

People said there was no more space in the MMO market for another player, that the MMO genre was a limited one, there were even articles about the death of Massively Multiplayer gaming and then came Blizzard and the World of Warcraft. In the space of one day Blizzard blew all previous business models out of the water when they claimed a sell through of 600,000 units in the first 24 hours. A year earlier nobody would ever have believed that such a thing was possible. Within a year they were claiming 2,000,000 players in the Western world and talking about another 2,500,000 in China, within 3 years they are talking in terms of 10 million players.

Suddenly the MMO wasn't just an American phenomenon, the bulk of the cash flow was coming from outside the continental USA, people all over the world, mothers, fathers, grandparents, bankers, mechanics were switching on to this new thing called massively multiplayer and they were having an absolute blast. Those of us who had already played through Ultima On-line and Everquest watched this sudden eruption of new players with a wary eye. Would they stay?, would they change the genre? would all the carefully built social norms we had evolved from our previous gaming experiences disappear?.

The answer to all of these questions appears to be Yes. They have stayed, the genre is changing and so are the social models we had evolved. And yet we are only just starting, even Blizzards massive player base of a claimed 10 million accounts is minuscule compare to the largest selling games of all time. Biggest selling game of all time is Super Mario Brothers with sales of 40.24 million boxes. Final Fantasy (series) 32,000,000 Gran Turismo 17,000,000 Legend of Zelda (series) 36,000,000 The Sims (series) 100,000,000

More information can be found at: http://www.video-games-survey.com/software.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling_video_games

Suddenly we are talking about serious money. When you consider the current business model of buy and then pay to play, executives at companies like Sony and Microsoft look at game sales like that and probably start to dribble. Imagine everyone who purchased Halo and Halo 2 signing up to pay Microsoft 10US$ a month to play on-line. The growth and decade long dominance of Sony as a player in the world of electronics was started with the Walkman but was continued with the Playstation. Its only in the last few years with the emergence of Microsoft into the console market that a true competition has evolved, something which is all good for gamers.

Once the big boys start playing, things tend to get moving fast, competition brings development (second only to war) throw the gaming toys into the mix with the world of the on-line warrior; fighting to keep the corporations out of your hard drive and TV, the fighters for digital freedom and open source , the communities of players itching to get their hands on the tools to modify gaming platforms and take them to places the original engineers simply could never have conceived of. Mix all of that into the emergence of broad band, into a world were data and money moves faster than anyone would have believed a decade ago.

The world wide web, once a place for freaks to download porn and share small programs they had written with their friends, has now broken into the homes and businesses of everyman, the modern business world would virtually collapse without the ability to push huge amounts of data around across international boundaries at high speeds. When all of those things come together in the heads of people who are programmers, bean counters, hardware and network engineers, artists and writers, all of whom are fundamentally Gamers, the future is unleashed. Give these teams access to faster CPU and GPU's, more and faster RAM and FSB, bigger and faster drive space and the bandwidth to push all this data around and the possibilities of what can be done with this tech become limitless.

Seamless, immersive living worlds become a reality. Gaming goes beyond simply being a "Game" and becomes a way of life. I think we will look back in 20 years and from our comfortable force feedback seats, wearing our 3D display cups over our eyes and we will remember that there was a time Before Warcraft (BW) and time Post Warcraft (PW) and that the time Post Warcraft evolved in ways we couldn't even begin to imagine as we sat in front of our desktop monitors and read actual text on a 2D flat screen.

We will come to a time where we are always on-line in our virtual worlds from our personal mobile networks. Software will flow from us like expelled breath, businesses will fight wars across binary battlefields of data and people once regarded as freaks and geeks, people who once proudly wore the tag "Gamer" will stride across the digital medium as Warriors and Wizards of the new reality, only now they will be working for countries, intelligence agencies and Corporations.

We are at the Dawn of a new age...

WAAAAGH! - Again

2008-08-21T08:55:00.005+10:00

One of the things I've seen a lot of bitching about on various web boards is a perceived "imbalance" of sides. The usual whine goes something like "Waaah Order has 2x as many players, there is no way destruction can win". I have to say bollocks to that. I'm 15 now and I've been participating in PQ's, scenarios, solo questing, open RvR and battleground RvR. Every single thing that you do generates influence points, completing a questing, participating in a PQ etc. So even if you don't directly participate in RvR, you are still contributing to your sides victory simply by showing up and playing. You can PvE all the way to the top, apparently you can PvP all the way as well.

Influence points go to a running total of "who owns the zone". Battlegrounds and open RvR tend to generate more direct influence, however I've been in a lot of fights now and "who has more peeps" on the ground has sod all to do with victory. If a battleground has a massive imbalance it will shut down and send the players back to their start points.

Open RvR is a little different, if there is a massive imbalance it can make a considerable difference, however this game is strongly tactical and a well organised team will decimate a zerg rush. The focused fire power of a number of DPS classes will crush any target its directed at. Once you add in the use of siege weapons, which can change a teams advantage in seconds then there is a lot more to it than just the numbers of people engaged.

Once guilds start to get seriously involved (and they are beginning to) and people sort out how the game is played, RvR will be dominated by tactical squads of skilled players. A team that knows what they are doing will beat a zerg rush every time. I was involved in a keep siege last night where the enemy were using boiling oil to defend their gates and we were using siege weapons (buy able from your friendly local neighbourhood dealer for only 20silver!) to attack the defenders at the top of the towers. Open field RvR is one thing, fighting inside a building is a completely different experience and I'm really looking forward to large keep sieges and city fights!.

I went and had a look at The Inevitable City last night, the Chaos home town. I have to say WOW. I have no idea how it gets taken by the enemy but its HUGE. Ogrimmar looks like shite next to it and it stands up against even best of the VG dungeons without the corresponding hit from framerate.

One of the things I'm enjoying is that there is always a choice of things to do, you can PvP (solo or groups) you can PQ (solo or groups), you can run scenarios (groups), you can run battlegrounds (groups), you can solo quest or you can just explore. This is all without the advantages of a guild to chat and learn with. I ran around between all of the above last night, both in green skin lands as well as Chaos lands. At the moment all the good PvP is in Chaos territory as the cowardly Dorfs don't seem to want to defend their own lands. This is going to be a game that will be better the more people that play. If every PQ is full, every open RvR field is raging, battlegrounds are restarting every 10 minutes and players are everywhere this game will rock.

My one concern would be a lack of people. If a server is half full I think the experience will suffer as, like VG the world is truly massive. It wont feel "empty" like VG did as the world is very cleverly designed to keep your horizons low, there is always a new village or war camp just over the horizon. The fun in the game tho comes from its interaction with other players and without them the game will suffer. I certainly hope they have the technology to be able to run 10,000+ players simultaneously on a single server, then WAR really will be everywhere all the time!.

I really hope we can get an SA presence going in WAR. It will be a huge amount of fun to share the battles of this new world with my comrades in arms of the last decade.

WAAAAGH!

2008-08-19T08:41:00.008+10:00

Ulaa Da Black Ork Level 14 beta

WAAAAAGGH! The NDA is down!.
I logged into Warhammer Beta last night and had an absolute blast. I fought in 5-6 PvP battles both in Battlegrounds and in open RvR zones. Now PvP is something I've never, ever done before and I loved it. After each fight you can see the "zone" capture tabs swaying one way or another between Order and Destruction as to who owns the area. Initially Destruction was dominant and the zone capture was definitely moving towards Orkies, then the Order guys started to rally and by the end of the night although order hadn't gained ground, destruction had definitely lost ground.

Reading the manual also showed me a lot of stuff they are planning for guilds and it all looks really cool. Being in a guild is going to be a lot more than just a shared chat channel, Guilds have levels and can affect and be affected by the world. Guilds will be able to design their own Heraldry and the Standard bearer for a Guild will provide the Guild with a definite advantage on the battlefield.

Public quests are cool, I participated in 3 different public quests, you can end up in a PQ without even realising it just by joining in a group that's in an area where a PQ is ongoing. All the quests I did come with a real sense of humour, the gobboe wolf rider wants you to kill the orcs boars to feed his wolves, the orc boar boy wants you to kill the gobboes wolves to feed his boars. Every thing that you do contributes to zone control and the War, from joining a PQ, fighting in PvP, to making and selling goods to other players.

PvP is going to be interesting, the green skins seem to have lots of Tanks and DPS, the Dorfs have lots of DPS and healers. Those bloody Dorf tank/healers are HARD to kill. PvP is easy to enter and a fight (at the level I'm at) is about 12 minutes. I have entered a couple of open PvP zones and had some small battles, Im really looking forward to getting thousands of people on line and having huge battles. I got XP and a title for dieing so much in one battle :). I got an achievement for the numbers of criticals I had done in PvP. The lorebook is fantastic, its a game unto itself and ALL the lore/knowledge for the game is in there if you want to read it.

Orc quests are fun, yes there is the usual go and get me X, but there is always a twist. Go and get the head of this dorf, take it back to town and put it on a spike cause it will make this gobboe laugh, talk to the gobboe once done. Go and find unconscious dorfs, put them in this barrel and then kick it off the side of the battlements , we are having a competition to see who gets the barrel furthest etc etc

I am seeing higher level Black Orcs around, I can tell they are Black Orcs because of the model and I know they are higher level because of the cooler gear and adornments they have. I also know whether a BOrc has gone down a defensive or a DPS path from their gear.

Graphically, the world has a sort of WoW look, but I wouldn't mistake one for the other and the models look utterly different. Think WoW landscapes, burned, strewn with debri and corpses and Vanguard models. I have this nasty feeling I am going to be spending a lot of time killing filthy dorfs, then filthy humies, elvses etc. I knew from the minute I stepped into the world that I was in an orc encampment and that I was in the gathering of the next WAAAAGH and exactly who my enemies are.

This game rocks and I would highly recommend peeps giving it a shot.

I've been playing for about 5 days solid now. I haven't found any of what I would call major bugs yet. I've seen one graphics anomaly (one mob in a bunch of about 20 was all warped) I have had one CTD. That wasn't to do with the application, it was related to the authentication server crashing. I had one piece of equipment that I couldn't equip till I logged out and back in again.

The PvP and PvE streams are beautifully integrated. You get PvE quests in PvP areas and vice versa. There are PvP quests around the killing of different enemy classes (they say it much better in the quest but its like kill a dorf priest, engineer and warrior) and you get gold and XP as a reward. You get a PvE quest to scout an area (such as a remote tower) in a PvP area. There are literally hundreds of quests.

I have finished Tier One (thats a PvP tier) in Orc lands, so now whenever I enter a PvP zone at level 12 I get a warning and then I get turned into a chicken!. So I have moved up a Tier to Tier 2 and I am starting to PvE and PvP in there. To give you an idea of how much content there is, I would guess-timate that I have done maybe 30% of the content in the Ork/Gobbo PvE T1 zones (about 4-5 "zone areas" in each zone, about 2-3 PQ's per zone area). I have done about 20% of the PvP content and participated in only 2 of the battle grounds in those areas. I spent some time in the Chaos Zones doing PQ's, quests and PvP and I've done maybe 10% of that content. I could easily create alts in each area cause they are all so utterly different.

PvP seems to be run in two ways. There is zone based PvP where you sign up to a battle queue and when there is enough people a battle is created. This can have as many as 36 players per side involved. I've seen 3 battlegrounds so far, one in Chaos, two in Green skin lands. Think WOW battlegrounds but with different objectives, in some its hold certain points, in others its kill the messenger etc. Then there is open world PvP, where you are warned when you enter the area that you are in a PvP area. each area will have multiple objectives to take and hold. There will be quests in the RvR area (Both PvE and PvP quests) you can choose to do them or not. Two I liked were "Blood on your hands" and "Green Faced Killa" which are repeatable and involve killing enemy players for an xp reward.

The designs of the battlegrounds are the same of the open world PvP, so after doing an instanced based battleground, eventually you will reach the real world area which is the same place and recognise it. The PQ's work in the same way, you will get a PVE quest to go to a certain area and kill stuff and on the way there, or while there, you may run into an area that's a part of a PQ. Joining a group in a PQ or anywhere in the world is as easy as "show me open groups" button and "join" button. PQ's have their own rewards based on something called "reknown" which you earn by taking part in PQ's. PQ's also have RvR elements. You may be doing a PQ to kill the Dwarf attackers and be busy killing NPC's. The Dwarf PC's will have a PQ to kill Ork Attackers. Whoever finishes first resets both of the PQ's, so you could be interfering with the enemies plans. War really is everywhere.

Some players may flag themselves RvR and attack you while you are doing a PQ under cover of the NPC's (I've had this several times) so then you are fighting PC's and NPC's together. Its a blast.

And the awards go to...!

2008-08-13T19:35:00.003+10:00

The credits for my new looking blog go to Btemplates for the Banner Image. The image comes from a blog template called ITAdvance. The actual blog layout and color scheme comes from a template called Batman The Dark Knight at Blogspot Template. Normally I like to do my own coding and would spend the time to learn layouts and how the templates where all constructed. I spent a couple of hours trying to make my existing template look pretty and improve the layout, but when I looked at the creative work of those who are already making free templates and distributing via the web i gave up. I just don't have time anymore and I'm just never going to be that talented, so I turned to the two sets of very kind folks I have named above. All creative art and layout credit goes to them, the ravings are my fault. I may have made one or two little changes in layout.

I have also re-developed a curious little hobby completely outside of MMO's and computers. I have started to collect wine. I blame this obsession on one of the people who has had a massive influence in my life even though he doesn't know it, a chef I worked with called Richard Genn. Richard is a Kiwi of Chinese heritage and one of the best Chef's I ever had the honor to work with. Richard's two true passions in life, were wine and food and putting the two together. I worked with Richard during a year long stint at Veranda Bar and Grill in Auckland's Parnell restaurant district. Richard was the co-owner and head chef.

I loved working with Richard. For the first time in my hospitality career I learned that food could not only be good, it could be great. That the right wines when paired with food could be mind blowing. Richard introduced me to the world of wines by allowing me to taste into his collection. Richard had one of the finest collections of wine in NZ at the time, so I was able to taste things that otherwise I would never ever have been able to drink. I had 2 bottles of 1973 Henschke "Hill of Grace" Museum Release at various points. I was able to drink Dry River Pinot, Coldstream Hills Chardonnay, bin 389, Grange, Spanish wines, Grand Cru vintages, reserves of almost everything. I learned from Richard about the great regions, the great wines, the great wine makers. Richard would show up, put a glass of wine in front of me and challenge me with it, if I got it right or close, he would then pair it with a meal to show me the connection. If I was his wine student, Braden in the kitchen was his food student and together they worked magic.

Richard taught me to love wine, to appreciate it and to understand its complexities and beauties. Before Richard wine was wine, after Richard, wine had depth and structure, I fell in love with the delicate flower that was a great Pinot Noir, I tussled with the great Australian Syrahs and I was extremely surprised by the chocolate complexity of great Spanish wines. It's not often you can point to a single person and know the influence they had on your life.

Unfortunately, due to a run-in with Richards ex-wife and an unfounded accusation of theft by a drunk, I was forced to walk out of the VBG. I didn't miss Richards partner one bit, but I have always regretted the way I was forced out of Richards life. I tried to talk to Richard a few years later but I definitely got the feeling that I wasn't welcome, so I never tried to contact him again. I don't know where Richard is now, Ive actually tried to look him up on the web, but for a world class chef, very little seems to have been written about him. I truly wish him well and would hope I could have a conversation with him again one day, maybe even re-ignite a stifled friendship.

I don't know if Richard would be happy to know this or not, but I still have a thirst for great wines. I put the obsession down for a while as I simply didn't have the income to support it. But since moving to Australia I have picked it up again. I am still very much a learner again and I don't have the advantage of Richards incredible knowledge and refined palate to aid me anymore, but I am starting to build up my collection. I am using an online tool called Cellar Tracker to keep track of my wines and I am looking at professional storage for what I am showing you below.

I still have a yen for Reds, particularly Pinot and Shiraz but I am trying to expand and open my palate to Semillion (The Hunter Valleys strength) and Chardonnay. I don't think I will ever love Sauvignon Blanc but I'm willing to try. My next purchase will be a case of D'Arenberg "The Laughing Magpie" Shiraz/Viognier 2006 and a half Case of Dry River "The Lovat" 2008 Gewurztraminer.

If anyone knows Richard or where he is, please say hi from me and tell him I will always have great memories of him and that he has inspired at least one person to follow his road towards Wine.

Dry Wines White Australia

New South Wales, Chardonnay
2006 Scarborough Chardonnay Blue Label (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2006 Scarborough Chardonnay Yellow Label (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Riesling
2007 David Hook Wines Riesling The Gorge (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Sémillon
2004 David Hook Wines Sémillon Pothana (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2007 Scarborough Sémillon White Label (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2003 Tranquil Vale Sémillon (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Lower Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Viognier
2006 David Hook Wines Viognier The Gorge (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

Red Australia

New South Wales, Merlot-Syrah Blend
2005 Tranquil Vale (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Lower Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Pinot Noir
2005 Scarborough Pinot Noir (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)

New South Wales, Syrah
N.V. David Hook Wines Shiraz Pothana Belford Hunter Valley (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley) - 1.5L
2005 David Hook Wines Shiraz Pothana Hunter Valley (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2006 David Hook Wines Shiraz The Gorge Hunter Valley (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2003 De Bortoli Shiraz (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2005 De Bortoli Shiraz (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
2006 Hungerford Hill Shiraz - Viognier Orange (Australia, New South Wales, Central Ranges, Orange)
2003 Scarborough Shiraz (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley)
South Australia, Cabernet Sauvignon
2005 Hungerford Hill Cabernet Sauvignon Coonawarra / McLaren Vale (Australia, South Australia, Coonawarra / McLaren Vale)

South Australia, Cabernet-Shiraz Blend
2004 Penfolds Bin 389 (Australia, South Australia)
2005 Penfolds Bin 389 (Australia, South Australia)

South Australia, Syrah
2006 d'Arenberg The Laughing Magpie Shiraz-Viognier (Australia, South Australia, Fleurieu, McLaren Vale)

Victoria, Merlot
2006 Snow Road Merlot (Australia, Victoria, North East, King Valley)

Victoria, Syrah
2005 Chrismont Shiraz (Australia, Victoria, North East, King Valley)

Sweet/Dessert Wines
White Australia New South Wales, Sémillon
2006 Pokolbin TAFE Sémillon (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Pokolbin) - 375ml
2006 Scarborough Sémillon Late Harvest (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley) - 375ml
2007 Scarborough Sémillon Late Harvest (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley) - 375ml

New South Wales, White Blend
2006 Tranquil Vale The Old Luskie (Australia, New South Wales, Hunter Valley, Lower Hunter Valley) - 375ml

A new look...

2008-08-12T19:17:00.004+10:00

As you may have noticed there is a slightly new look here. This is actually a cut and paste of the work of 3 different blogsters and I will be crediting them with links as soon as possible. Unfortunately I am sitting here freezing my ass off and I wont be doing it tonight.

Southern Armada has left Vanguard as you may have guessed. I still think its the best game no one ever played but, probably unsurprisingly, I feel deeply betrayed by both the game and its makers. I think the new guys have done really well to get VG to where it is and in 12-18 months its really going to be superb, but I wont be there.

Currently I'm in EVE, I'm playing a little bit of WoW. Oddly enough I'm really enjoying the current run through WoW. I have a regular group Sundays and Wednesdays and we are playing through the classic content and just taking our time with it. Its actually a lot of fun to not be blasting through content as fast as I can just to reach 'raid' level.

I have also been seriously looking at WAR the soon to be released Warhammer MMO from Mythic Entertainment. I have never been a big fan of PvP ever since the days of getting repeatedly ganked by 12 year olds in the early days of UO. Two reasons really, there has never been a game (apart from EVE and Lineage2) where PvP actually mattered. In most mainstream games, EQ, WoW are the two main ones I am thinking of, there is no real point to PvP. Its simply something that has been thrown in to keep a certain portion of the populace happy. WoW definitely has done PvP better than EQ ever did and EVE and L2 have proved that you can provide meaningful PvP in a mostly controlled fashion.

Now the chaps who are making WAR are the same people who really introduced structured PvP to MMO gaming. Mythic Entertainment built a little game called "Dark Age of Camelot" (still around by the way) which encouraged players to PvP in a structured way using an architecture which they called Realm vs Realm (RvR). The idea was that you would join a side and battle other sides for control of points throughout the world. Even in DAOC there was no early point to the RvR apart from the glory of owning a control point, little by little they added in reasons to fight with buffs and gear which could be gained from PvP in the world.

WAR uses the same RvR structure but has taken the lessons learned by Mythic as well as incorporating the Iron Grip(tm) that Games Workshop maintains over their IP and built a game where PvP and RvR matters, where every single thing that you do contributes in some fashion to the war effort and the 25 years of Warhammer history and backstory is honored. They have built a game where you are introduced to PvP right from the start instead of racing to the top levels and finding 'Oh now is when I start to PvP'. Its not out yet and the NDA hasn't lifted so all this is pure speculation, but from what I am seeing so far in the various public utterances of fans and Mythic is that the game is fun!.

WAR won IGN best game of E3 2008, Gamespy top ten game of E3 2008, Voodoo Extreme best game of E3 2008 so it seems like its not complete crap and what the devs are telling us is true.

The proof is of course, in the playing.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Fifteen

2008-04-20T19:14:00.008+10:00

Sunday 13.04.08
We were very low on people for this fight. Sundays are an optional raid night for us so some weeks it can be a little low on available people. We waited a lot longer than we normally would for people to log on but in the end we engaged with only 16 in the raid. I had some link problems with repeated link deaths, so I was put on the left side as back up off tank and we had a Pally and a Warrior as primary pickup tanks. Now the APW loot must seem somewhat lopsided to anyone who has spent any time in there. The ratio is definitely on the side of Medium wearers, then Heavy wearers and finally the Lighties get a look in. Now the mighty Wavebreaker appears to be on the other side of the fence, he drops almost exclusively light stuff. So it surprises me that we get so few light wearers showing up for the Sunday fights.

We engaged Wavebreaker and the right side pickup tank and his backup went down very quickly against the first set of pops, due to very unfortunate positioning. So I left my spot on the left and and picked up the adds. We stayed like that all through the fight and the big boy gave up his lootz very quickly.

We then did more scouting work on Warders. I know we have to learn the fight, but it just feels like we haven't got this at all. We form up, pull one, wipe and do that repeatedly. Its just not a whole lot of fun. We have never even dropped a single Warder or even managed to get one under control.

Monday 14.04.08
I started to crash out repeatedly again. For this night it seemed my disk issue was sort of back. At one point I was repeatedly losing both disks to "Unexpected removal of the device" errors. Its like when you pull out a USB drive without removing it properly. Its the same error message and its bloody frustrating to see when its being applied against a SATA2 disk which is in use at the time. In the end after repeated reboots and running chkdsk multiple times it just sort of came right and its been good ever since. I have this feeling I will be going through bouts of disk problems, probably until I rebuild my PC again

We decided to have a bit of a retro night and we were a bit all over the place. First we cleared the entrance, X77 first then an easy x83 kill. No problems with X83 at all this time. The Enraged is definitely on Farm status.

x77

X83

Then it was backwards to the hub and a back clear to Shadowsoul and then Travix. We had one small issue where one of our Bards forgot to call the curse and we had a large angry skele pop in the middle of our raid during the Travix fight. He was quickly off tanked and Travix went down without any problems. We are definitely getting the hang of this APW thing.

We turned around and headed back to the Hub where Zaraax proceeded to show us his ass repeatedly. The problem we are having is the adds. Do you charm them?, kill them?, AOE them? he didn't go down this week but we are definitely getting closer. Lots of debate though on which are the right tactics to use and where exactly to engage him.

Thursday 17.04.08
Cartheon, Izemgelki the Lorekeeper goes down first. We had some serious glitches in the cages with multiple pulls, almost wipes and waaaaaayy to many mobs in camp. In the end we comfortably cleared out the Lorekeeper and Bookkeeper and took it to Vahsren. We had an accidental aggro of the two books and had to off tank them pretty quickly without any real prep. We got down to healing Garbar the MT with a single healer, but in the end Vahsren dropped.

Subjugator, dead again.

We engaged Palnepipe very late. It was almost 1130pm before we pulled him for the first time. No real issues with the fight and he was snuffed by Midnight.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Fourteen

2008-04-08T19:08:00.010+10:00

Sunday 06.04.08
This is going to be another late update, the reason for which I will explain in this post. I'm a week behind all the time and I'm trying to catch up. I may not achieve that till Anzac weekend but I will try.

Wavebreaker goes down again. It was a long and ugly evening. For some reason we just couldn't put it together for the first couple of fights and his adds kept escaping us. There was much debate on the usage, methodology and usefulness of counter casting, but I think the fourth run at him proved the point. The counter casters kept it up and he only managed to get off two waves of adds, both of which were handled quickly. It took so long to kill him that we never really moved on to anything else and that was it for the night.

Monday 07.04.08
All the healers were asleep. Tanks were dieing left, right and center. The Inc would be called, mobs in, tank picks it up, positions it and dies. Next tank up, starts to build aggro, dies, third tank up, finally kills the mob, and this was on the trash!. It got better later on but from a tanks point of view the early part of the night sucked. Izemgeli the Lorekeeper decided to leash a few times but he died in the end.

We set up and raced through the cages. The Cartheon Lorekeeper was the first to go down and we headed further into the Cartheon Bookkeeper.

The Bookkeeper was a nightmare the whole raid was bouncing around the room like a box full of rubber balls. I actually ended up on a flaw in the wall at one point and sat and watched the fight from about 30 feet in the air. We spawned and nailed the Librarian in one sitting. I know there are better, faster ways to kill him, but we do it with one tank and non physical DPS. It may not be the best/fastest but it works for us.

The Subjugator gets snuffed. We have never lost to this guy so I don't know what it is he is supposed to subjugate. With a name like that he should be the boss mob of the entire zone!.

who went down without a reset on our third try. Meanwhile myself and We get to Palnepipe, set up and pull him fast. Its one long fight and we seem on the verge of failure all night. Mortewalon reset twice as the Pally in charge of him kept getting knocked back, so the raid leaders called the switch to Tremeeli and we killed him instead. Back to MortewalonGarbar are sitting on Palnepipe and keeping him occupied. Once we began to dance with the Gnome it all started to go wrong. Sanfy died with aggro and Garb picked Palnepipe up again. I crashed at a 10% threshold, Garb went down as I came back in, Nym went down and I picked it up again. I died at 40% and we played aggro bounce with the Sorcerers till the end of the fight. It was a hell of a fight but he did give up his phat phat loots in the end.

Palnepipe in the middle of room after bouncing all over the damn raid.

One thing that's seems to have come back for me since GU4 is really bad LOS issues. I took the screen shot below of me fighting a mob that is at least 15 feet away from me and facing the other way. I'm really glad I have "Shadow Step", an ability which ports me behind the mob, other wise I wouldn't get a hit on about 10% of all mobs pulled as I would be trying to find where the mob is really standing.

I was running North from the Guild hall when I came across the shot below. Looming out of the mist is a huge tower I had never seen before. Sitting on the edge of the jungle just offshore, it looked absolutely amazing in game.

I have been doing lots of diplomacy lately. I'm trying to build up my skill to make me that little bit more useful to the guild. Unfortunately the Diplomacy fan site VGTact's information is largely wrong. I spent a lot of time running around looking for quests/mobs that didn't exist before I realised that. They have a Wiki which hasn't been updated since the last big Diplomacy changes, sometime around GU3. I was lucky enough to chance on about 5 diplomacy mobs all close together in the Dwarf City of Bordinars Cleft. Ive out-leveled them now and I'm trying to find another decent spot to do diplomacy at level 13. If anyone can point me towards a good diplomacy resource please let me know!.

I had to take a shot of the Entrance to Bordinars Cleft. Its massive and hugely impressive as you approach it. They maybe short but they know how to build stuff!.

Cool Models in Vanguard file #768: Axle the Necromancer pet.

Thursday 10.04.08
home 6PM, now Okay. The reason all this is getting slow is that I got promoted this week. I was approached by my manager and then by his boss last week, and I took over running a team of 11 guys this week. Its a hell of a lot of new work as my current role isn't being immediately back filled. So I am trying to run 5-6 large projects, manage a team of extremely different personalities, keep my new boss happy, deal with normal problems and do large chunks of my own old job as well. I'm not getting home till well after 7PM. Considering I start at 7:45PM its not a bad days work. It will take me a bit of getting used to until I can sort things out but at the moment my freely available time has just disappeared.

DPS sucked again. We started off with only about 14 in the raid and headed into the Entrance wing. It actually took us two attempts to drop X77. That hasn't happened since the first time we tried to kill him!.

R5 snuffed it in the blink of an eye and we moved into X83's room. Now as I'm sure you remember we had our asses very thoroughly handed to us buy this guy the last time we met. We were determined not to let it happen again.

We set up and got x83 to 20% then wiped again. We spent so long getting ready and making sure everyone knew the strat that we had a spark roamer pop mid fight. Unfortunately he took out half the healers before we knew what had happened so we took the wipe and started again. The second run was a lot smoother, we took x83 to 15% but then wiped again. Just like last time when we completely failed to drop him after about 8 runs, we were having problems with aggro bouncing off the tanks onto DPS and healers. Now everyone was being extra careful, so we were sure that it wasn't our team, it had to be some in-game mechanic. I'm not sure why but it was decided that we would run past him and set up in the next room, to get more space for maneuver maybe. So he was trained away and the raid ran through the doorway and set up in the next room.

We set up and pulled him again. This time the kill was perfect and now we know his secret. Its the simple things that screw you up and in the case of x83 this is 100% true. This fight is a lot tougher than we expected because we overlooked one simple thing. Basically we assumed something and overlooked the possibility that he was doing more than one effect at a time. Anyway without explaining it in detail and spoiling it for those who haven't done him, we got him and he is on farm status.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Thirteen

2008-04-01T09:28:00.011+11:00

Sunday 30.03.08
As usual I placed myself on the top of the hill above the Wavebreaker kill zone and logged out, leaving myself ready for Sunday. I logged in a bit late and everybody was already there and ready for buffing. We got set up and pulled Wavebreaker very quickly. It was all going really well until me (right side off tank) and my back up off tank got snuffed simultaneously. The adds have a freeze type stun which seems to turn you into what looks like a block of ice. Wavebreaker also has an AOE foot stomp called Shatter, my advice is don't be freeze stunned and in the radius of Shatter, as it took two tanks out in less than an second!.

We setup and went again. This time it all went beautifully and we managed to keep him down to two waves of adds. It certainly took a while to whittle him down, but over all the whole fight was as smooth as silk. The first wave of adds were handled and positioned quickly and efficiently. We wiped them out and moved straight back to the big guy. I stayed off to the right, in range to add DPS but ready for the next set of adds, which in the end never came. Dropping him was almost an anticlimax!. The loot was definitely in the Dress Wearer sphere which was great as the loot we are getting in APW is definitely medium/heavy leaning so far. I think we will be back for this guy several times over the next couple of weeks even if just to make the dress wearers happy.

Since we had time, we figured we would go and have a shot at the Warders of Nusibe. Now we had a go at these guys a couple of months ago, just before APW came out and they spanked us good and hard and sent us home. Now we have a lot better gear, some upgraded spells and improved DPS we thought we would give it another go. After an hour or so and never even looking close to dropping any of the Warders we left it and I think we will come back to these guys in another couple of weeks. This is one tough encounter to figure out.

Monday 01.04.08
We formed up and headed into the Entrance wing again. I think at this point we can say we are still in farming mode. When APW was first released there was a lot of talk on the VG forums about how fast some of the first APW kills occurred and how fast APW was completely cleared. The forum cowboys declared that APW was now "done". They decided that since APW was all finished, VG was now going to be boring again. I think a lot of that kind of overly aggressive talk comes from people who have never raided at all, or people who are only just getting into raiding for the first time. Those of us who could be called veteran raiders, and this goes for any group of raiders who have spent a few games playing at this level, would agree that the first kill is only the first step. Every time a raid fight is released, its nice to have the first kills sure, but what you are aiming for is the next expansion. You go into every raid with the idea that when you have conquered this expansion, the next one will require you to have spent several months gearing up in order to conquer the next expansion.

I would suspect that when the next raid level dungeon is released, it will be balanced around the idea that you and your guild have already spent several months gearing up in APW first. If they build a raid expansion and balance it against non-APW guild power, then the APW guilds will tear through it like its not there. This of course will cause all those people who haven't spent any time in APW to claim its unfair and that they should have equal access to the new content the same as the long experienced raid guilds. I'm here to tell you now, it just doesn't work that way. If your guild plans on Raiding Vanguard for the long term, then I would suggest getting into APW as soon as possible and for as long as possible. You will need to hit mobs repeatedly in order to get the specific pieces of gear to power up your tanks, to get the spells for your casters etc.

I suspect these are the primary reasons we are spending so much time in the Entrance and Cartheon wings of APW. We could probably begin to push into the other wings now, but we want to make sure that every member who wants an item or a spell from these two wings, has that item or spell. The more DPS, the more healing power the more mitigation, the better for the next set of mobs we tackle.

We smacked X77 like he was made of butter.

Rather than fight through to the Enraged x83 and the General, we turned around and headed back to the portal. We gated back to the hub and began to fight our way back into the Entrance wing. First up was the Shadowsoul. I might stop mentioning him, even for a mini named he is pretty weak. We took down Archon Travix without any problems, looted, and moved back to the hub for a shot at Zaraax.

This was really our first serious try at Zaraax. We have had a go at him before but never with any serious intent. Its usually more along the lines of; we are here, lets give it a go. Now although we never got Zaraax to less than 80%, this one has to be counted as a win. We found a way to slow his adds and roamers, we found a much better spot to kill him and we were definitely improving against him every time. This looks like its going to take some time to learn but its going to be a satisfying kill when we get it.

Thursday 04.04.08
Straight into the Cartheon wing, smacked Izemgeli.

Thursday raids are a funny one for us. We swap Wednesday and Thursday to give as many people as equal a chance as possible to comer along to the raids. For some reason Wednesday is DPS night and Thursday isn't. I check the raid window at the start of the night and apart from our one Monk, we had no dedicated DPS classes, no bards. We were also short our usual Necromancer as his PC fell down and went boom, so we are down about 2K hp on the tanks. This makes killing anything in APW a hell of a lot harder. We headed in as fast as possible and considering our lack of DPS, it really wasn't very fast at all. We headed into the cages, went left and smacked the Cartheon Lorekeeper with the anticipation of spawning Vahsren the Librarian. Once the Lorekeeper was down, we headed back to the start room and began the pulling to clear through the middle.

We never moved from that spot for the next 1-2 hours. Without the DPS, we just couldn't keep up with the spawn rate in the cages. Add to that the occasional wipe and it was just a long hard grind. When we saw the server down message from SOE I have to admit it was almost a relief to get it over with. Rubbing your nose against a grindstone is a quaint saying, its not a lot of fun to actually do.

Servers went down at 10:30 and we were out of there.

Vanguard Southern Aramada Raids Week Twelve

2008-03-28T11:49:00.014+11:00

Monday 24.03.08
I know, I know I'm a week late. The week of hardware problems put me behind in my writing, so I am going to try and rush this one a little more than I normally would and get it out a bit faster. Monday was the last day of the Easter holidays here in Sydney so we were a little short on people. I believe the Sunday raid was called off completely as there weren't enough people to attack anything at all. I had every plan to attend the Sunday raid, right up until I found out we had people staying overnight in my computer room. That made it a bit hard to sit here with the speakers going, TS blaring and have people trying to sleep at the same time. Ah well.

Initially we started Monday with two groups only. We headed in to the Entrance wing, more on a "lets see how this goes" than any sort of expectation we would get too far. Surprisingly we ended up doing really well. We quickly cleared through to a Malfunctioning X77 and with about 14 people in the raid, engaged and dropped him. The fight was as smooth as silk and we continued on without a backward glance.

Next up was the not so mighty Guardian R5. He snuffed it in what I suspect may have even been record time.

At this point it's a long grind to get to Enraged X83, so it was decided we would backtrack and head to the storehouse for a run at Archon Travix. We headed out from the storehouse with the anticipation of a quick run through to Travix and with only 2 and a half groups we were quickly smashing our way though the Entrance wing. Akym the Assassin was the first in line to die.

Akym was closely followed by the Shadow Soul. Even for trash named, these guys both drop some nice gear, it is of course mostly /grats Rot with us which is sad, but occasionally we get a newbie come along and its usually decent upgrade gear for them.

Finally we get to Archon Travix, Nym is up front and we smoke the tall, skinny swine. This was clean a kill as we have ever had on Travix.

This time he was kind enough to drop one of my 'wanted' items. The Drape of the Coalition is a great back piece and a nice upgrade from my Hegnarians cloak. No one else rolled on it!. I couldn't believe it. I gained some mitigation, but I'm maxxed out anyway and I gained 155 HP!. Actually I think all the other tanks already have it so its not so surprising that no-one else rolled. I am slowly approaching my goal HP of 12k. I think at this point its time to start looking at carefully dropping out items I have gained purely for the mitigation and start looking for items which will increase my melee damage percentages. It would be nice if it was possible to see what your true mitigation was instead of just 65.01% against level 50. I'm fairly sure my true Mit would be up in the 80's but I cant tell.

We had several shots at Zaraax, more to see what the fight would involve than any real expectation of killing him. It was getting late at this point and I think we had 2-3 attempts before we decided to call it a night. This guy intriques me I must admit, he is supposed to be the toughest fight in APW, tougher than the General, but we keep bypassing him. I'm not so intrigued that I want to stay out of the Cartheon wing, I really want to clear that whole wing. I reckon we should be able to get Cartheon done in one night and put it on farm status.

That was really it for Monday night, I think we all signed off about 11:30 or so and headed to bed.

Thursday 27.03.08
A full raid this time. All set up and good to go we headed straight in for Palnepipe. Izemgeli the Lorekeeper fell down and went boom. He dropped the Plated Boots of Izemgeli which, again, no one else rolled for!. Woot another 114 HP!, dropped a little bit of Mitigation and picked up some additional damage!. I'm at 11,409 hp now when fully raid buffed.

We cleared quickly through the Cartheon Wing with only one major wipe. Basically we pushed a little too far, too fast when we were passing through the cages. We were in the middle of the second room when we started to get roaming adds, now normally this would not be too much of a problem and the CC team would have them nailed down as fast as they are inc. Unfortunately we seemed to get unmezzable after unmezzable. To start with, the tanks were picking them up nicely and they were being off tanked with the raid smacking them down one by one. Then we ran out of tanks as each tank was already on a Mob and we still had unmezzables roaming in. We almost had it and I think we possibly could still have survived with each tank on multiples, but the wipe was called so we took it and reset quickly.

This time we were a little bit more patient and we waited till we had a good clear way through the main cages. We made it to Variumus the Subjugator in about the same time it took us to reach Palnepipe's room last week.

Once Variumus was out of the way we began the process of clearing through the rest of the wing to Palnepipes room. We definitely have the multi pull thing down now, its a lot easier with 3 tanks that's for sure and doesnt involve lots of Necro sacrifices on the mob split. So we set up for Palnepipe and quickly have the little swine inbound. The brains of the outfit have modified the plan a little and we are going to drop the body guards before Palnepipe the Mastermind. To avoid the stun we are keeping Palnepipe above 90% while the bodyguards are killed.

Sanfy is on the Cold Bodyguard with Nym on the Fire bodyguard, Garbar is primary and I'm secondary on Palnepipe. It all starts pretty slowly as we get everything positioned and begin to wind up damage on Sanfy's target, I think everyone was trying to be really careful about their aggro control. We have wiped in front of this guy too many times and everyone was determined he is going down. The first bodyguard drops and the raid moves across to the second. At this point Garbar is doing white damage and taunting, no specials, I have auto attack off and I am just taunting. Palnepipe seems to have some kind of radius damage though and he is still hitting me with some kind of damage, every now and then I get an aggro reaction special pop up, which should only happen if I am getting hit. However at no point do I actually see any damage land on me, so Im not sure why I am seeing the specials.

The second Bodyguard drops and the raid heads across to Palnepipe. At this point I start to ramp up the damage and aggro. I am throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him, nukes, dots, debuffs, snares, attacks that ignore mitigation, anything I can do to piss him off. He drops through 90 and he is still stuck on Garabar. At 80 I see the aggro switch to a caster and know Garb is stunned. I pick him up and we continue on with his HP slowly dropping. *SPOILER AHEAD READ NO MORE IF YA DON'T WANT TO KNOW*

I think you can guess where this is going, roughly every 10% he lands a one minute long stun on the main tank. So each tank in turn has to be ready to pick up aggro as the last tank is stunned. We quickly adjusted the fight, the brains of the outfit were rotating tanks through MT duties as each one was stunned. Palnepipe dropped like the little girly man he really is and we had him dead first run!.

What a blast!. This is a fun fight!. I have to say I used to think PoP was possibly the best series of raid fights I had been involved in, followed by some of the GOD fights (both EQ references for those who aren't sure) but I have been converted to APW. The designer of these fights and this dungeon needs huge kudos for the way the whole thing is put together. I look forward to each new fight as each time we have no idea what we will encounter next. By the way if you are ever in Palnepipe's room, Look up!. I have a screenshot here but it really doesn't do the view justice.

Next up its Athriss, we can see her through the doorway once Palnepipe is dead, we have shadow diamonds to do some summoning in the Portal room but we really want to push through to the next Boss. We enter the room of Athriss Essal which in itself, is well worth the journey. She stands beneath a huge square that hangs from nothing in the middle of the room, she emotes that she summons energy from this huge cube during the fight. She has some of the coolest looking spell animations, golden spheres which jet out of her hands and explode on her target.

We have NFI about this fight so the first couple of engages are just about learning what it is that she does. We didnt spend too long here, I think we got 3 engages in before we called it a night and headed to bed. I can see us spending some time with her as this is looking like a complicated little fight.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Eleven

2008-03-18T17:55:00.007+11:00

Monday 18.03.2008
I made it to the Sunday raid in good time and after the success they had last week in getting Wavebreaker to 10% I figured this was going to be a push over. The great post GU4 patch gods had something else to say about it. I wont go into too much detail other than to say, don't schedule raids less than 2 days after a major patch. We got hit with every glitch and problem you could think of, from the lag monster beating us repeatedly, to the log off and all the buffs you cast disappear to the I cant attack bug etc etc.

After last weeks hardware fiasco I am all raided up and good to go well before 7:45pm on Monday Night. There seemed to be a lot more tanks than usual tonight. Normally its Me and Garbar, or Me and Nymeria. Tonight we have both of them AND a Pally. Filthy do-gooding interloper be off!. So after the traditional "Good a pally to sac, it will be a great loot night!" jokes, we head into the Cartheon Wing and we are progressing pretty well to start. We power into the early stages of the tunnels looking for Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. We only had one small glitch in an other wise smooth ride when Garbar got hit with an knock back while facing the wrong way. He looked great as he sailed up and over the balcony and down into the water below, like a little Dwarvish falling star. Zel actually managed to get smacked over the edge as well, I'm not sure how Zel went over, but we had to wait for both to die before they could be rescued. Its easier to pull a tombstone up a level than it is to use /rope apparently.

As well as rescuing Zel and Garbar from their watery deaths, we also managed to kill Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. We decided to bypass the first side room in the cages and head straight for the second side room so we could set up for the Librarian. As we passed through the second cage room things started to get exciting. We managed to pull 2 mobs as we moved and were working on taking those out. As they were going down we picked up another roamer, then another, then another!. At one point we had at least 5 mobs in camp 2 of which were unmezzable, the tanks picked up the unmezzables fast, the healing never dropped, the crowd control was beautiful and the DPS never pulled a mob away from a tank. It was one of those fights that when you finish, take a deep breath and realise everything had just gone perfectly, in what could have been a very nasty CR. Unfortunately for us, after such a great fight the Librarian wasn't up. This is actually the second time we have come through and he hasn't been roaming the corridors. Either he is on some weird timer we don't know about, or he is bugged, you choose.

So we clear through the cages, drop down the lift and lay some smack on Varimurus the Subjugator. I like Varimurus, he is a fun fight, short sharp and just a little bit sweet!.

We cleared through the multi pulls on the way to Palnepipes room like they just weren't there and very quickly we were set up for Palnepipe. We had all roamers down, just him and his bodyguards waiting to die.

So its INC!, we split em and have them nicely positioned. The raid leaders have decided that we will kill each body guard slowly first, then take on Palnepipe. It was all going beautifully at first, Palnepipe was in place with Garbar holding him, we whittled down the first body guard and headed over to the second. He was about half way dead when we lost control of Palnepipe. We didn't realise at the time that Palnepipe has a nice long stun, as soon as Garbar was swaying in place the swine ran over and started to smack the healers around. Wipe.

So we set up and get ready again. At this point we are under a bit of time pressure as we really aren't sure of when the first re pops will begin. The split happens and we are good to go. This time we decide to change the order the body guards die in, we form up on the first bodyguard and start to cream him. He has an annoying knock back but seems to do a lot less damage than the other one who seems to have a hell of a lot more HP. He is about 50% down when Nymeria succumbs to the beating of the other bodyguard and its a wipe.

Third run, This time I stayed with Garb on Palnepipe so that we could try and get a tank transition happening. Its all going really well, Garb got stunned I picked up the named and we kept at it. We were just working on the first bodyguard when Nym died again, wipe. I don't know why Nym went down, he had good healers and he has more HP than me, maybe there is a damage spike in these bodyguards that we don't know about.

One thing we did learn. There is no safe spot in this room. As we were rezzing back in, the re pops began to appear. Repeated attempts to re-break the room failed and in the end we were forced to give up. The raid ended around 1145 and it was beddy bye time.

Thursday 21.03.08

Bad lag issues, bad post patch issues, No librarian, hows that for a summary. Actually there was a little more to it than that or this would be a damn short blog. We headed into Cartheon Wing and dropped Izemgeli the Lorekeeper.

The librarian isn't up again, so its straight through to Varimurus the Subjugator.

We are ready to rock in Palnepipes room by 9:40pm. We are all happy with this as it means we have all night to plug away at him. Its only an hour and forty minutes from entering the zone to his room. We form up and get the split happening. This time we decide to attack Palnepipe the Mastermind directly instead of his bodyguards. Garbar tanks him to start and I am picking up the rotation when he stuns, we easily get him down to 50% when Nym goes down again. More than likely caused by the nasty server lag we had been experiencing all evening. We wipe. Just as we are rezzing in to get ready for a second run at him, a server restart is announced. We hung on for about 40 minutes but the server didn't come up and there was no message on when it would come up. So the raid was called. I don't mind losing to a mob, I really don't, I HATE losing to lag, server glitches, restarts etc.

The Southern Armada logo, has for years been a crest of a sailing ship against a background of stars. We have used it on web pages, in custom Sigs, hell I even tried to get it onto a T-shirt. I lost a lot of images, including my complete collection of every custom sig I ever made when I came over to Sydney. Unfortunately this means that I don't have a copy of the old SA logo to work with. However as we were passing through APW we found the image below repeated all over the place. I am going to play with it and do my best to create it as a new logo.

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Now playing: El Barto & Liam B - Don't dance
Now playing: Lobsterdust - Marley Maiden (from Exodus to Revelations)

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Ten

2008-03-17T08:38:00.004+11:00

Monday 10.03.08
Why, you ask am I late in posting this? The short answer for those of limited attention span who want to skip any non raiding content, is that I didn't actually get to go on a Raid last week.

The much longer, and if you are technically minded, slightly more interesting answer, goes back to when I came to Sydney from New Zealand. Before we found out we were moving to Sydney I had begun the process of building a new PC. I was researching every part, ensuring that I wasn't buying a dud and that I was getting the best price as I bought it. It took me months but I finally assembled all the pieces that I needed to build my Dream PC. Then we found out we were moving and in a very short period of time. I packed all my PC bits up carefully and consigned them to the not so gentle hands of a shipping company.

The day we had worked hard towards finally arrived, we jumped on a plane and we were in Sydney in 2.5 hours. Our possessions took slightly longer and arrived about 2.5 weeks later. The first thing I did when all my stuff arrived in Sydney was start building my new PC. Unfortunately after many hours and quite a bit of blood ( Custom PC cases are sharp!) the bloody thing wouldn't boot up. I couldn't even get it to POST, thats Power On Self Test for the non technical, thats what happens before all the text that scrolls up your screen, before the Windows screen. Basically a PC that won't POST, is very broken. So after a week of struggling with it, I ended up taking it to the local PC hardware guy to have a look at. 1000$ later I got back a working PC. Yay, sort of.

So some months go by, occasionally I have problems with boots, it hangs in BIOS load, sometimes Windows hangs, and freezes, I get little pop up error messages etc. Lots of niggling little problems, but no one thing I could pin a problem on. Then we get to last weekend, I fire up the PC, its Sunday and its raid night!, I'm getting pre-positioned for the raid, I'm halfway across Qualia when the PC freezes. Oh well, reboot and continue. Only there is no continuing. It hangs at boot, reboot, does it again, reboot get it into Windows, check the event viewer, the event viewer is solid red with disk errors, I get a pop up message about a disk error and being unable to flush to cache, disk hangs again.

This goes on for hours, I manage to get into the game briefly to tell everybody I wont be able to make the raid and go back to checking cables, I check the seating of Drives and Drive cables into the motherboard, running hardware level tests against the drives, heat tests against the CPU, RAM tests etc. In fact this goes on for days.

I talk about this with people at work trying to get some inspiration as to what may be causing this. I read constantly on drive faults, cache faults, anything about drives, I update all my drivers for graphics card, motherboard chip sets, sound card, BIOS, hard drive firmware, Direct X, in fact anything I can update, I do update. I am turning hardware caching on and off, moving page files, setting page file dynamic vs static, checking and replacing cables, changing power management profiles, anything I can think of or is recommended to me. At the end of it all I come to the conclusion that the motherboard is about to fail and I am going to have to take it back to the local hardware guy. I no longer have the space, the tools or the inclination to do this sort of work myself anymore.

At this point I have now missed Sunday, Monday and Wednesday raids. I have been off line for seven whole days, I'm beginning to feel bugs crawling under my skin.

About a week later I am deep into a Google search about the following error:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D."

This is the error that has is being generated every 30 seconds in my logs. This is the error that precedes every hang/crash. About 6 pages into the Google search I find this set of errors as part of a knowledge base article on Microsoft.com. What do you know!, this describes, exactly, all of the errors I have been having for the last 12 months. So I sign up, download and install the patch.

I haven't had a crash, hang or an error generated in any of my logs since. If I had upgraded my hardware I may have ended up with exactly the same error as the original fault was extremely rare and Windows related to start with. I make my living from computers, have done for a lot of years now and some days I just fucking hate them.

----------------
Now playing: DJ Le Clown - In Da Black (AC/DC vs. 50 Cent vs. Scissor Sisters)
Now playing: DJ Payroll - Daft Prayer (Bon Jovi vs. Daft Punk)

The First Dungeon Master

2008-03-05T13:41:00.004+11:00

E.Gary.Gygax left us today to join the great gaming table in the sky. The creator of Dungeons and Dragons has died. I cannot say where my life would be today without him and the genre he created. His influence on my life has been massive.

May you roll the dice forever mate.
/mourn

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Nine

2008-03-04T19:49:00.008+11:00

Monday 04.03.08
A short night this one. After last weeks fiasco we decided to go the other way round this time and approach the entrance wing from the rear. We have never done this before and figured it would present us with some challenges. We headed in and handled Akym the Assassin quickly.

Past Akym and straight down to Archon Travix. Perfect kill.

If I can give anyone any advice about General Vicus at all, its approach him from the other side. Its painful to grind through to him, but he is a hell of a lot easier to handle.

We formed up, figured out a strat for the slightly changed conditions and pulled him. The big issue with where we were fighting, was a very limited floor space with which to work. The first time we engaged it seemed that someone was breaking the mezzes and we wiped. The mezz rules were very carefully explained and we formed up and went again. However it appears that we aren't the only people experiencing unexpected mezz breaking.

One of Vicus little tricks is a forward punt of the main tank. He pushes the tank hard, in the direction the tank is facing. So if you don't hit the forward surface dead on, you ricochet and can literally end up anywhere. The first couple of punts I was fine, ended up in exactly the right position against the wall, ran back and kept at it. Then the first adds appeared and just as they were being handled, he punts me, I ricochet and end up inside the little tunnel where the slimes live. I don't have time or options, I run back and re-engage him. Of course the little slime comes with me, peels off and starts to beat the shite out of the healers. Now I should say we are trying to do this with only two tanks, me MT and Nym off tanking, so there wasn't anyone available to pick up the slime in time. Wipe.

The third time we were getting very very close to repop time. We pulled and had him under control, he was slowly dropping when we lost control of an add. Wipe and now its so late there really isn't a chance for another shot at him. Like I said, take him from the other side so that you have space to work with him, pulling him into the slime filled tunnel is definitely painful.

Thursday 05.03.08
So weeks are just weird, last week we couldn't kill Enraged, he just would not stay stuck on the Tanks. This week we breezed through the Cartheon wing with no problems. Only place we got stuck was in the cages with the rapid re-spawn. First to die of course was Izemgeli the Lawkeeper. He is quite a fun fight, of course you always want to fight him in a tunnel...

Initially I think we were going to blitz straight through the Cages and on to the Librarian. However it was decided that we would clear to the first safe room, drop the BookKeeper and use that room to fight the Librarian. Of course then the Librarian decided not to path past us and we had to fight through to the second room. This is the longest part of the dungeon so far, it took us about 45 minutes stuck in room one, before we made it to room two.

We dropped the Lorekeeper and prepped for the Librarian. I like the Lorekeeper fight, flying through the air! weeeeee...! These models are really cool!.

Finally after much cajoling by Zarthaz, the SA pull team, he was inbound. Vahsren the Librarian gets stuck on everything, if there is the smallest obstacle he gets stuck and heads back on his long walk, the best way to pull him is to wait for him to path past the room and then kill him. The problem of course is that he is on such a long path, that waiting for him is very boring if you get the timing wrong. Not really a lot for me to do in this fight, life tap occasionally, if I'm feeling daring I will drop a dot on him, that's about it. I am hoping that with the new spells coming in GU4 I will have a few more tricks to throw at him.

Vhasren gets boinked first time and we move on down the elevator to the lower levels. Its starting to get harder down here with the mobs mitigating better and hitting harder. We ganked Varimurus the Subjugator and headed west towards Palnepipe the Mastermind.

I really don't see why Varimurus is classed as a major named, he is one of the easiest kills we have had so far in APW. We headed towards Palnepipe and after some trials and travails (The splitting of Mobs gets fairly interesting in places) we made it to his room, but without time to engage him. We had a look around his room and it definitely looks like he is going to be an interesting fight.!

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Eight

2008-02-26T09:54:00.004+11:00

Monday 25.02.08
We have visitors!. I received a very pleasant note the other day from Jelaza Binjali a Ranger of the Nova guild on Seradon. Apparently she has been following the adventures of Southern Armada for quite some time and stopped by to say she enjoyed the blog. Thank you very much Jelaza, its always nice to know that someone's actually reading this thing!.

This screen shot was taken on the way to the Jagund the Wavebreaker raid. It was one of those moments that occasionally happen in Vanguard when you round a corner or come over a hill and the view is just breathtaking. One of the great things about this game is that anything you can see you can reach. Everything in one of your views is an object you can travel to, its not one of those nasty backdrops that hints but doesn't deliver. I've said it before and I will say it again, this is definitely one of the best looking games on the market today and easily the prettiest MMO.

We have decided to do an extra raid a week. So for those who are interested we are going to start tackling the overland bosses of Vanguard. Its not for loot nor glory as they have all been killed before and the loot isn't that fantastic, its just for the sheer fun of killing something new and interesting. We were quite short of people for the Wavebreaker encounter and knew sod all about it, so we pulled him the first time with no expectations of actually killing him. I think we got him down to about 90% before he popped adds that we weren't ready for and we wiped. Over the course of the next few hours we pulled him repeatedly and wiped repeatedly. I'm not going to go into too much detail for the sake of those who haven't tried him out yet, suffice it to say we were a tank, a healer and some DPS short. Everyone had a blast and I'm really looking forward to go back and giving him another shot. I don't think he is a tough fight, we just need the right mix of people.

For those who haven't tried them, I can highly recommend the overland raid mobs for a bit of fun. They don't require the investment of time that APW does and they can be knocked over in fun couple of hours in an evening. Pulling Jagund is an adventure in itself!.

Formed up into APW and headed into the Cartheon wing again. Someone cast a Kobold illusion on me which I thought was really cool!. So here I am as Ulaa, the kobold Dread Knight!.

We headed in the same way as last time and quickly met and dealt with Izemgeli the Lorekeeper. As we were moving towards the cages we ran into a new named. Now this new Boss wasn't up the last time we came through so we have no idea where he came from. We engaged Vahsren the Librarian at the entrance to the cages. I think he went down to about 86% before we wiped against him. Once we were back in and ready we tried again and wiped again. However after the second reform he didn't roam back to us. We didn't know where he had gone and Zarthaz couldn't see him anywhere. So we shrugged, said "Welcome to Vanguard" and moved deeper in.
The cages are an interesting space, obviously someone in the Vanguard design team really doesn't like the 'sit, pull, kill' method of raiding so there isn't a lot of places in APW where you can do that. The cages take things a step further again, its a space where the spawn time is so fast you have to keep moving through. Everyone needs to be on the ball and everyone needs to do their job. Mobs are coming at you thick and fast here and you really cant stop and hang around. The first safe spot is occupied by the Cartheon Bookkeeper. He isn't a tough fight and drops nothing, so we aren't entirely sure of his purpose. When you engage him he seems to be reading a book and chanting, we think there is a possibility that killing him weakens something further in, but we don't really know.

Move through the cages a bit further and you run into the Cartheon Bookkeepers twin, the Carthon Lorekeeper. He has a huge knock back and is a pain in the ass as a tank. I actually enjoy the fight tho, there is something about flying through the air that makes me think of kids and swings. Once we had the Lorekeeper cleared we decided to use his room to try and pull Vahsren the Librarian who seemed to be roaming in the area. It didn't take long to have him inc and Nymeria the little pink tank, soon had him engaged. I can't remember how many shots we had at him, it may have been 2 or 3 before he died. Again not a spectacularly tough fight but with the usual APW twist. I don't want to spoil it for anybody so I will just say, there isn't a lot for the melee classes to do in this one.

So we moved down the cages and made it to the down lift. I remembered my mistake from last week and managed not to wipe out the entire raid again. We formed up and cleared forward from the lift entrance. There seemed to be a quest NPC to the north of us and there was a named ahead so it was Onward we go!. Zarthaz had Varimurus the Subjugator inbound very quickly and he died very quickly. Again not a spectacularly tough fight. It's not the Bosses that take so long for us to conquer in APW, it's all the trash clearing. To be honest that's fine with me, you have to wade through a lot of dross to get diamonds. The boss fights are generally so good, such a great balance between difficulty and frustration that the trash clearing isn't quite so painful. Its not like in EQ in the Planes of Power expansion where you literally (in some cases) had hours and hours of trash clearing to do before you go to the boss encounter.

Thursday 28.02.08
You aren't going to believe this. To break up our week it was decided that we would go back through the entrance wing. We had a couple of APW newbies who were going to need some arms and there are a couple of other things in the entrance wing that people still want. So we formed up at the entrance lift, buffed up and headed down. The plan was to clear the whole wing in one night and at first it was looking damn good for it. I am seriously looking forward to the day we can just breeze through the entire entry wing without pausing. The usual suspects died fast and clean. Malfunctioning X77, Guardian R5, were smacked like they deserve to be. Then we got to Enraged X83. Not a problem I hear you say, you have already killed him repeatedly, he died on your second ever shot at him. Well tonight wasn't our night.

Malfunctioning X77 hanging about waiting to die

Guardian R5 giving up more Rot Loot

We wiped against this guy repeatedly. Initially I was getting quite angry with the rest of the raid. The tanks were doing their level best, we were throwing every aggro tool we had at him, everything including the kitchen sink was being used. The first time he left the tanks at the transition and went to smack the raid, I figured it was just someone being enthusiastic with the DPS. The third time it happened I was getting pissed off, why couldn't these people pay attention and just do their damn jobs?!. By the 5th time we were realizing something was wrong. He was aggro-ing on people who were FD and had never actually engaged him. No damage, no healing, no spells, no nothing, yet that person managed to pull him off the tanks during the change. By about the 8th wipe we began to figure out we just weren't going to beat him that night. It was beginning to get seriously depressing.

The 10th wipe?...

Now we know we can kill this guy, almost every kill has been flawless, until tonight. SOE is stealth patching some of the upcoming changes for Game Update 4. This means that on the actual day of release there is a lot less for you to download and a lot less load on their servers. However we have already seen a number of accidental releases of test code onto the live servers and I believe that this is an ongoing problem. As proof I have a buff in my tool bar which isn't supposed to be live yet, but the icon and tool tip were patched for Dread Knights several months ago, replacing an already existing ability. I am beginning to think that some of the "test" code is ending up live, so we are in a position where some abilities, some mobs, some game functionality is being changed, however not all of it. So a change may be on test which is supposed to affect ability A, or a mob has been buffed up to be tougher, or a spell function has changed to counter a new Mob ability. So they stealth patch the ability code and files in, and somehow several of the changes are somehow going live. I cant prove any of this, but I've been noticing changes in some of my abilities and I have noticed changes in the abilities of some other classes. Things that once were rock solid, that haven't changed since beta, are no longer behaving in quite the same way.

Like I said no proof but there is no way we were unable to control aggro on Enraged X83, unless some functionality somewhere had changed.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Seven

2008-02-19T08:01:00.007+11:00

Monday 18.02.08

What a Night!. We absolutely blitzed the Entrance Wing!. I don't think anyone else needs the Arm pieces for the class armor quests, so apart from Travix and Vicus I don't think we will be back here for a while. We may head back in if we need to equip people with the Arm molds, but apart from that I think its time to try something new!. We absolutely slaughtered everything on our way through the Entrance. We were at Vicus and ready to engage by 9:30, an hour and a half to drop X77, R5, X83 and have General Vicus inbound is a record for us!. We were just absolutely creaming our way through the trash and the names only delayed us by a few seconds more. We were trying something a little different by having the Tanks call the aggro. Its an old-school EQ combat trick and it seemed to work well for us in VG.

Basically the idea is that each Tank class has different methods of generating aggro and the build-up of aggro is also different for each class. So each Tank was responsible for noting their own aggro and calling the DPS on for the raid. Up till now we have been letting the DPS classes join in as and when they felt like (with a suitable delay) and sometimes, if a tank has missed a few times, or they haven't had any decent aggro reactions the Mobs lock on the Tank can be shaky and the dress wearers die. Once people start to die the whole raid slows down as we need to buff and get them back on their feet. This way everyone knows where we are at in relation to aggro levels and DPS know they can lay into the Mob with relative safety.

X77 Preparing to Die

R5 about to give us phat loots

The R5 Greatsword dropped again with no other Dreads in the Raid, it went to a Warrior. What a waste!.

X83 waiting to Die

We got vengeance for X83 smacking us about last week. We pulled him slightly before we were ready but we adapted, got him in position and laid the smack down.

Vicus wants to play!

Vicus is getting smoother and smoother. He only managed 2 Pops of adds before he went down. Beautiful aggro management by the Warriors and Mezzers and fantastic healing on me. He didn't have a hope in hell. This time he was kind enough to drop the Spear of Devotion!. I have spoken with Dreads in other Guilds who have dropped him over 20 times and have still only seen one of these!. No one else put their hand up for it so I now have the two best 2 handers in the game at the moment. The Spear and the R5 Greatsword. In Game Update 4 there are huge changes to the Dread Knight class coming and one of those changes is the ability to tank while using a 2H weapon, as if you were carrying a shield. This 2h Tanking specialist was my vision of the Dread Knight class from day one. I fought for this in beta against people who didn't want to be "forced" to wield a 2H. Its taken a long time but it will be here at the end of the month. I can turn down all my 1H skills and sell a whole lot of junk weapons that I have been carrying around forever just to practice my skills.

Even with the Spear equipped and putting myself into DPS stance I was taking aggro (unintentionally) from the Warriors. The Spear is another 800-1k damage per hit for me and will completely change my aggro profile once the new Dread Knight changes go in.

My Pointy is Pretty!

We turned around from Vicus, headed back to the entrance and ported to the Hub. We spent about half an hour in the Hub to equip 7 more people with Arm slots, Woot!. A huge grats to everyone and a massive upgrade across almost half the raiding guild. Once everyone had their shiny new Arms, we began clearing trash to get to Akym the Assassin for his dagger. He came in beautifully and died equally beautifully. Oddly enough, just as we were clearing more trash he popped again almost on top of the raid. We dealt with the trash and wiped him again, two loots within about 15 minutes of each other. Shadowsoul also died in here somewhere but I was getting tired at this point and neglected to get a piccy. Bad Dread Knight!.

Akym the Assassin

For some reason Nymeria, one of our Warriors decided to Tank the entire night Naked. I have to say she did a pretty damn good job of it as well!

Nymeria the Nekkid Pink Tank

Thursday 22.02.08
Our first night into a new wing!. We formed up and headed into the Cartheon Wing, west from the Hub (I think). We were making our way slowly into the wing and encountering some new and interesting trash Mobs when the call we all wait for went out, Named!. Woot!. We have no idea about this guy, don't know his special abilities, don't know how to fight him, so its pull and see time!. We pulled him into the tunnel and fought him which turned out to be a good thing as he has a decent knock back. Turned out he's not a tough fight, a fairly simple Tank and Spank.

Izemgelli the LoreKeeper

So we fought our way deeper in. Its a fairly standard dungeon, until you reach the cages, this is where it gets interesting. The re spawn here is fast, very fast. There is no sitting in one spot and pulling to the raid or you just wont go anywhere. We crawled slowly into the area and made it to a new named, a Cartheon Book Keeper. We fought him in the passage way with tons of Mobs roaming all around us. I was put on watch out duty to look for anything that was likely to roam over the Raid and off tank it. In the end nothing did and the Book Keeper died. He drops nothing so it wasn't a huge loss.

Cartheon Book-Keeper

The next fight was a bit more interesting. We had cleared the roamers and were prepping for the pull when he was accidentally aggroed. I was watching him at the time so I grabbed him and started to tank. The healing rota came on smooth and we basically adapted straight into the fight. It was all going well until he bounced the entire raid about 100' into the air. I'm not kidding his knock back is massive. We decided pretty quickly to fight him in his room but that knock back continued to be a serious pain in the ass. He snuffed it pretty quickly and we ground our way onwards.
Finally we made it to the downwards lift, well almost. We would have made it but us tanks managed to wipe the raid. Well technically I managed to wipe the raid. We were set up for a tank split, grab one, pull another to another location and tank em separately. I didn't realize quite how far back the healers were, when the mobs were incoming I stepped forward about 6 feet, literally, and I was slightly around a corner and out of LOS. Raid wipe. So we set up for the recovery. Just as we were going to be good for login the server crashed. Everyone was bounced to desk top and had to sit waiting for the damn thing to come up again. Normally it was pretty quick but for some reason this time it still wasn't letting people in 10 minutes later. At this point it was about 11:15 and I was knackered so I logged and picked up my corpse the next day.

This guy is cool, he is one of the named Mobs in the Nusibe Necropolis, I think he is an awesome looking model. The whole Necropolis is pretty cool as its all one long crawl to get where you need to go with ups and downs, twists and turns and mobs all over the place getting successively harder the deeper you go in.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Six

2008-02-11T08:15:00.001+11:00

Monday 11.02.08
Monday night prior to the raid we flagged a few more people. My regular group of players all needed a flagging (A flagging!, a flagging!) so we headed to Jharru Flats and killed Lord Fumbeso in one clean encounter. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that lord Fumbeso is an easy, one group encounter. While its not particularly difficult for experienced raiders, you are definitely going to need a minimum of 2 full groups to take him down. 3 would definitely be better.

Lord Fumbeso

One of my old gripes in EQ was Green things aggro-ing me. I couldn't get XP from them, they didn't have a hope in hell of killing me, so why in the hell did green mobs like goblins insist on the Suicide option and throw themselves at me. Its annoying, all they do is get in the way and slow you down. Unfortunately VG has followed the same path and little grey things insists on my providing them with the assisted suicide option. Hell in EQ we were regularly killing Gods, Goblins didn't have a snowballs chance. Here's a little grey bug annoying the hell out of me just outside APW.

Kill me Please!

Initially I thought we were going to jump past the entrance and straight to one of the Hub points. Instead we headed in via the entrance wing.

Dead X77

One of the more interesting graphical bugs I have seen so far. The facial effect is from a de-buff that a Warehouse Firesoul casts on anyone in range. For some reason Zarthaz has retained the effect, but only on his face. I actually think it looks awesome, I would love a face mask with that effect!. A word here about Zarthaz, he has been pulling raid mobs for SA since the early days of EQ and was a core member of the legendary EQ pull team. He is currently the only member of the SA Vanguard pull team. If he doesn't show up one day, we are going to have some serious problems. At the moment we have 2-3 people in each role who can fill in in the event of someone being away, tanks priests etc. The only exception to that rule is Zarth and the pull team. Raid pulling is an art and is different in each game. Zarthaz has been learning APW for the last 6 weeks, he has no substitute person to train up or to learn with. Without another Monk or other puller in place there will come a day when we are going to have serious issues...

We got our asses handed to us big time. We simply could not get past Enraged X83. We were actually tracking really well for a shot at Vicus. We made it to X83's spot at about 10:00pm and set up for him.
First Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe
Second Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe
Third Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe

I think you can see where this is going. For some reason we just could not get him down. He kept smacking us down and smacking us hard. This sort of thing happens to SA occasionally and I don't really know why. We know the encounter, we know what the mob is going to do, we know how to kill him but we just cannot get it together to drop him. He died in the end but he certainly took all the fun out of the kill by repeatedly wiping the floor with us and delaying us past a point where we had time to drop Vicus.

Enraged X83 beating us up (again)

Thursday 14.02.08
We sneaked in the back way and headed straight to the Hub. We were there for about a half hour to sort out armour quests and get those who were capable of it, set up in Class specific Quest arms. I was lucky enough to be one of three people to be in a position to finish mine. They are rather hard to see unfortunately as they sit between the large shoulders and huge gloves, but I get the feeling the full suit is going to look awesome!.

Once we were done with questing we headed in the back way to go and see Archon Travix. I cant remember this being a difficult fight. I'm fairly sure he died clean with no faults.

I don't have a lot more for this raid as it went quite late on Thursday night and I had to be up early the next day. We went up to the Hunter Valley to go and see the Raggamuffin Concert at the Wyndam Estate Winery. We had an absolutely awesome weekend and will definitely be going back for next year!.

However it did put the kybosh on the regular note taking I normally do for these blogs. I would normally sit down the next day and make notes of what happened and when, how the raid went, sort out and edit the pics etc. As I was sitting in a pub in Raymonds Terrace getting pissed on Friday night, I missed out on doing all of that. So bugger it, its a short post :)

Next time come with me to Raggamuffin!

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Five

2008-02-07T08:48:00.000+11:00

Monday 04.02.08
Short and Sweet.
Some of the models that Sigil have developed (actually these are probably built by SOE) are just awesome. This is one of the guard Mobs outside APW, giant mixtures of beetles and lizards. One thing I have noted is that screen shots simply don't do these models justice. You have to be in game to appreciate how well put together the models really are. VG is definitely one of the prettiest MMO's on the market.

R5, Vicus. Fell down and went splat.

Unfortunately we only got two runs at Archon Travix. He isn't hard, he is a simple fight, we just seem to be rushing him a bit. We are definitely getting better at this, our fifth week into the zone, our Ninth raid, our 33rd-37th hours, Travix will die soon and we are traveling well for a push into the Hub. I think next Thursday we will definitely make it, as there won't be a lot up for us we will try and push on for the Hub just so we don't have to grind through the trash night after night.

Archon Travix Waiting

Southern Armada would also like to thank whoever made Lisani's boobies. Due to a bug (one of the many) Lisani was shown stripped back to her base model, and what a base it is!. The entire guild took great delight in running over to have a look before the bug was fixed. Well done I say!.

Lisani, what an Elf!

Thursday 06.02.08
Formed up and straight in. It takes us about 1.5 hours to grind through all the trash to get to Travix. Its not that the place is swarming with trash, its not. But each trash fight has different nuances, each fight has different needs and we are learning new things about each fight as we repeat them. We are getting better and faster with each push but it would be nice not to have to do this grind every night, lets get to the Hub!. At the start of the fight we had a hitch hiker with us, a Knight from another Guild who for some reason decided to tag along on our little jaunt. At the beginning he was spouting out all sorts of useful things like "/say this mob has a knock back so only fight him with ranged". Yes, thanks, very helpful. We will use what works for us. He stopped and seemed to disappear after the boss asked him oh so politely to shut up. So we fought on without the benefit of all that knowledgeable advice and made it to Travix in very good time.

R5 Kindly dropped the Greatsword he has been holding on to for the last 4 weeks and as there don't seem to be any other 2H wielders in the Guild at the moment I won the roll!. Now if only Vicus would drop his Spear I would be in Dread Knight heaven!.

Travix waiting for a spanking

This time we took him down slow but steady. This becomes a very boring fight for the non main tank unfortunately. I switched to my 2H, I went into evade mode, I didn't hit any specials, no damage or aggro attacks. I simply stood there, did white damage and watched for the Curse. Thats it, takes about 5 mins to kill him and I cant do squat apart from base damage *Yawn*. I also got yelled at, naughty naughty Dread Knight!. The Boss called for DPS off and as I was just doing base damage (I mean really, I couldn't be generating less aggro if I was offering him a cup of tea and a lie down) I just let the damage run. The boss very correctly and forcefully reminded me that when he calls for DPS off it means everybody!. So with my ass red and feeling much chastened, we moved on past Travix and into unexplored territory.

Travix being spanked by a naked Pink Tank

We continued to fight on through, deeper into APW. There was some new and different trash and some new scenery until we reached the Warehouse. Now you have to remember we have NFI where we are going. We have no spoilers. no maps and we are learning by doing, so basically we are just wandering aimlessly while looking for the Hub. Its lucky that the dungeon is fairly linear or we could be lost for weeks!.

Just as we had engaged two mobs, the Wednesday lag hit us. Its amazing, whatever the process is thats occurring on the servers, it happens at 11PM AEST on the dot and lasts 2-3 minutes. This time, to make it extra special fun, it not only lagged us out on the pull, the zone then crashed and the whole raid was booted to desktop. We were dreading having to log back in to a fully populated zone, this time we were lucky and it seems the zone didn't re-pop on us the way it did last week.

It was getting late at this point, around 11pm and I think, like me, people were beginning to get tired and their feet were dragging. As we made our way deeper into the warehouse we ran straight into Zaraax. Now this is one huge ass mob and he hits like a Mac Truck. Even though we ended up with him more or less accidentally, we still managed to get him under control and in position. He was at about 90% when we started to get adds. We don't know if they were roamers, he summoned them or they just popped in the wrong spot, I guess we will learn next time. We elected to take the wipe and bypass Zaraax for a further push towards the Hub. Awesome Model, kudos on the design of this guy.

Skulls for hands!

Once we reformed we headed in again towards where we could see a faint blue glow, the hub maybe!. As we were pulling trash we also ran into Akym the Assassin. He hits hard but seemed like a fairly straight forward Tank and Spank.

Once he was out of the way we made it to the Warehouse hub and we were going to log it out there. For various reasons unrelated to APW raiding, one of our Clerics had managed to get bonded to the Hub portal, so he ported back to the Hub just so we could check how far away the Hub was from where we were. Surprise, surprise it turned out he was only about 150 yards from where we were standing. So taking his direction we pushed on. It was after midnight at this point and everyone was getting damn tired. But we cleared through some more trash and voila!, we made it to the Hub! Everyone attuned to the two portals and we are now in a good position to pick up the hub quests and to explore into the surrounding wings.

First things first however, Zaraax must die!.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Four

2008-01-29T08:43:00.000+11:00

29.01.08

I was late again dammit. I was all sorted out to be at the raid by 7:30 and for some reason my ADSL link dropped for about 15 minutes, repeated reboots of the router and NIC didn't help so it was after 8:00pm before I made it to the raid. We formed up quick and moved in even quicker. It was easily the best start so far. We were almost at the x83 before we lost anyone at all. The timers weren't up on X83 or X77 so we didn't get a shot at them. R5 died in the usual fashion and we headed straight for the General. R5 has an awesome sword. I have seen another Dreadknight carrying one and the Graphic is fantastic. He just doesnt seem to want to drop it for us.

We formed up and I was designated Main Tank for this fight. Ive revised my reasons for that, I think I'm main tank because the Warriors have better snap aggro and its them we have to rely on to maneuver the Adds as they pop. Who cares, MT'ing this guy is an absolute blast, in fact MT'ing anything is huge fun, I'm so glad I decided to switch back to tanking from being a caster. In this fight all I have to do is stay concentrated on pumping out as much aggro as I can generate and watching my HP for the occasional use of a Rune.

The first run against Vicus was really a tester, getting out feet wet to see how we would handle the fight. He went down to 56% and we wiped when I died and Vicus got loose in the healers. Once the healers go down its a dead raid. This fight got a bit exciting as someone aggroed him off me and I had to do some fast taunting and maneuvering to hold him and get him back in place.

The second run was a lot closer. We re-set and pulled quickly after the first wipe. This one just felt better from first aggro for some reason. It got lumpy in parts, especially when the Adds dropped two healers due to unfortunate positioning. However we got the bastard down to about 36%.

You know the saying third times the charm?. We set up and pulled. Mezzers had the adds as soon as they popped, the off tanks put the adds exactly where we wanted them and the DPS laid the serious smack on Vicus. We got through the first wave, Vicus is down to 50%, lost two healers, its all good, battle rez and keep going. Sort the adds and lay the big bang down on him again. At the end of the second wave he is at about 10%. So with a pet, me , dots and nukes from everyone else we stay on him as they deal with the third wave. The raid drops the first add and its decided that we would lay the smack on him and just keep the add mezzed.

At 3% I finally took a screenie, he seemed to have been hanging there forever, healing was really good and DPS was beginning to chop into him. I knew we had him. Its a weird feeling, I had been so concentrated on holding him in place and maintaining aggro for so long that when he finally dropped I had a massive surge of adrenalin. What A Buzz!.

Dead Vicus.

One of the two best 2h weapons in the game drops from Vicus. The Spear of Devotion is what all well dressed Dreads are wearing, unfortunately much like the R5 Greatsword we didnt see it on this run. The heal team did a superb job in this fight with at least 2 of them going down during the fight. they managed to keep the bulk of the raid (and me!) alive all the way through. Ive been a raid healer, it sucks. I bow down to anyone who can do it well and consistantly. All of us are learning our jobs and all of us recognise that. By the time I made it to Prexus in EQ I had already been playing a Necromancer for close to 5 years. I knew that class inside and out solo, what I really had to learn fast was grouping and raiding skills, but they were just changes in methods I had been using for a very long time. Most of us have only been playing Vanguard for a year at this point so we all have a long way to go before those reactions, those things that became close to "inherent" in our reactions within EQ start to happen in this new game.

Since we had about an hour to kill at this point we decided to push further in to the zone and see what we could see. We made it up to Archon Travix and stopped there to set up to engage. He has a tricky pull to clear the entrance to his lair. I think we were all getting tired at this point and we couldnt quite co-ordinate the effort effectively. We wiped twice and at that point it was time for me to turn into a pumpkin and head for beddy byes.

One of two Quotes of the week:
" That was so much fun I let a little bit of pee out"
Aegis after the death of Vicus

Thursday 30.01.08

We formed up quickly (I had parked myself outside so I didnt have to run for miles). The devs have stated that in GU4 they are planning on re-arranging the Riftways to make them more useful. I so hope they put one down near APW. The run all the way from the northern elf Village everytime for raids is a pain. I can understand wanting to make the world seem bigger, absolutely, I'm against insta ports everywhere. But having to run down there 2 days a week is making me want to stay there and not log on for general play. So Ulaa stays parked outside the APW Gates all the time. X83 , X77 and R5 died easy and fast. We lost one person on X83 apart from that they were all perfect kills.

Enraged X83, being enragey

So with Vicus still on lockout we headed up to Archon Travix again. This time clearing his guards was flawless and we very quickly had him standing alone.

So with no idea how this fight goes, I lie, we had one idea, we engaged and started to smack him down. We had him postioned, DPS was on and all was going well until the first add. Even then we handeled it and he was under control. We got him down to under 80% first run and we only lost it when I died. His damage is really spikey, I had been throwing in Runes to stay up and mitigate as much of his damage as possible. Unfortunately he spiked when I had no runes refreshed and down I went. After that he was in amongst the raid and it was all over. So we formed up again and headed back in.

This time I died almost instantly. I had over 11500 HP fully buffed, max mitigation and I snuffed it anyway. I have been called recently on criticisim of Healers. I've gone back and read over my old stuff and I haven't criticised anybody. What I have done is tried to be honest about what I see happening within an engagement. The heal team is shaping up to be really good. We have gone through encounters where they have worked their butts off, throwing out fast heals to save dress wearers and keeping the MT's up at the same time. In this case that didnt happen. Nym picked up the fight and held Travix in place. Kuurgen went down.

Standing outside a zone, waiting to see what happens in an engagement sucks. You cant see whats going on or how everything is going, you can hear whats happening in the voice channel but cant contribute. I imagine its like listening to sport on the raidio, its a very poor subsititute to actually being there. We had an add, it was offtanked, Nymeria went down. Garbar is now tanking named and add.

Quote of the Week Two:
"Get a Tank on that add"
Xardan, not seeming to realise 3 of his 4 tanks were standing at zone in...

It didnt matter, we had the skinny bastard, he was going down. He was at 20% when we had back spawn adds pop and take out our heals within seconds. That was that. It doesnt matter, we know we can take him and hopefully once he is down we are fairly close to the hub!.

Say Goodbye to New Zealand (Part 3)

2008-01-28T17:47:00.002+11:00

I am loving Australia, I really am and to be honest I cant see us going back to New Zealand in the foreseeable future. Its possible that Sydney may not remain home forever, but I think Australia will be. Don't get me wrong, I love NZ, its a beautiful country and has a lot of really good things going for it, but at the moment we just cant afford to live there. I'm not pointing the finger at any one political party or politician as the blame needs to be laid across all of them.

For the last 20 years, pretty much as long as I have been working full time, all I have heard from NZ politicians is that we need to keep wages low to compete with Asia/keep inflation down and that the "Trickle down" theory will work, we just have to let corporations make even bigger profits. Now like me you can probably see the holes in this argument.

1. Corporations don't pass profits down to workers. They just don't work that way.
2. Even if corporations wanted to raise the workers wages (this will occur when the snouted ones become airborne) the government has a policy of keeping wages low. Corporations cant raise wages as it will lower profits and raise inflation.

To make a long story short, this has led to en extended period of New Zealand workers getting the shaft. If you are getting a wage rise which simple grants you cost of living increases you are doing really well. On top of the wages issue is the problem of massive immigration and a large immigrant student population fuelling a house prices boom. So the NZ worker is making very little money to allow NZ to compete with Asia. Meanwhile the Asians are moving into NZ in huge numbers and bringing all their money with them.

So now NZ workers, whose real wages have risen something like 20% in the last 15 years cannot afford to buy property in their own country as property prices have increased on average by 200%. Meanwhile corporate profits have increased 300% and politicians salaries by 100%. The cost of living in NZ is massive. They have screwed up, they have created a system whereby they cannot raise workers wages, but if they don't raise wages they will lose all their educated, experienced and skilled workers to other countries.

Ignore all the politicians and accountants and what they will tell you; this is my experience as a New Zealand worker.

1. The cost of living in Sydney (one of the most expensive places in Australia) is lower than it is in Auckland. I pay less for food, power, transport, petrol, gas, water, clothing, shoes and going out.
2. I get more money in my pocket at the end of the month in Sydney than in NZ. I pay less tax, and what tax I do pay I can claim back and end up with a cash bonus at the end of the year.
3. I make 30% more NET in Sydney than I was making in NZ.
4. One of the politicians arguments for staying in NZ is that its a beautiful country. I can assure you that Australia is also beautiful. we have done a lot of driving in NSW and I can assure you there are some fantastic places to see.
5. The weather. You don't realise just how much it rains in NZ until you don't live there. I hate rain, I love warmth.

I saw a statistic recently that 40,000 New Zealanders a year are leaving the country. I cant believe that the Politicians don't look at numbers like that and ask themselves where they went wrong.

Having said all of that, there is a place in NZ that is my little piece of Heaven. If I had my choice this is where I would love to be.

Manganui Harbour.
'Manganui' is a Maori word meaning "Big Fish"

The view south from the deck at Coopers beach

2 minutes from Manganui.

The view North from the deck at Coopers beach
2 minutes from Manganui.

Coopers beach is my little piece of Paradise and always will be. In order to ever be able to afford to live there, I will have to spend the next 20 years working in Australia. There is something wrong with that.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 3

2008-01-22T08:25:00.000+11:00

22.01.08

A new week and a new raid. Until we get to the APW Hub there isn't going to be a whole lot of variance in what to say. Ooo look we killed Enraged X83 and Malfunctioning X77 again!. Ah well, they are still fun fights.

Monday we didn't have a lot to do as the X83 and X77 don't spawn till tomorrow so we cleared through and headed straight for General Vicus. It took us about 2 hours to get to him so we knew we were going to have time to have several runs at him. Nymeria the Pink Power Ranger had been tanking all the trash and mini named's all the way into the zone till we reached Vicus. Its actually harder to off tank than to main tank in this game. You want to stay on the aggro list, but you don't want to get into the habit of stealing aggro. This presents a conundrum as you can take aggro simply by pumping out damage and you cant really tell what the MT's current aggro level is like. So all you can do is hit the occasional aggro inducer and your specials and wait for him to turn. If he turns to you, all you can do is go defensive and wait for the other tank to take it back, or if he turns to someone squishy, you hit your rescue and start to pump out aggro.

Warehouse Firesoul hits us with an AOE

We caught the Guardian R5 on the way into Vicus. He was extremely nice to us and dropped a whole lot of goodies, rather than the 2 or three he usually does.

Guardian R5 on the way in

The boss man put me front and center for the fight against Vicus, mainly I think cause I had done it before and he has a nasty knock forward. I describe it as a reverse Punt. Basically whatever direction you are facing is the direction you are going to go flying about 50 feet every 30 seconds to a minute. So you have to tank him facing a wall and be prepared to be running back a lot to try and keep him in position. I think that at a particular percentage he also switches the punt to another direction and you start to fly to his left, instead of straight forward, so there are some interesting tanking mechanics to cope with.

On top of that he has several adds. He spawns two 53 6 dots to help him out which you also have to have a strat for. So we setup for the first run. We've got the room cleared, we have a strat worked out and communicated, everyone knows what they are doing and we are good to go. Inbound.

Engage!

We got him positioned and started in on him, gentle to start with as we need his adds and we don't want to pull aggro onto the casters. So the adds pop and we have them dealt with. This is where we start to see some new effects on him. The casters are getting massive damage against him, huge crits, the mezzers have the adds under control so we lay into him. I'm holding aggro fairly well, I'm throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him to keep him focused on me. He is a tough bugger as on top of everything else he is life tapping me for a 2k heal every round. Using this strat we got him down to (I was concentrating so I think) about 60% before we got overwhelmed by his adds.

Bugger, close but no cigar but its all good as we have now learned a couple more things about him. We refine the strat and set up for another go. Unfortunately we weren't 100% sure on the timing of his adds so we stopped for a bit to wait for his room pop. It turned out to be quite a long wait as his room guards seem to be on longer timers than most of the rest of APW so far. We had just cleared the room when everybody lagged out. Really, really lagged out. The the whole raid gets dropped and we are all sitting at the logon screen. Zarthaz logs in to check it out and we have a full zone reset, with a full pop. Damn it, now we have to clear the whole damn thing again in the face of active opposition from roamers. I thought we had the log on timed really well. We avoided most of the roamers and got everyone back in and in place to start the event again.

So we hit the roamers and get them out of the way. We start to clear his guards. The last bodyguard is inc and we are set to have another go.

errrr, suddenly I'm dead with the guard at about 3% down, the guard is rampaging, Nym picks him up, then hes dead. It all went horribly wrong and we have a Guard inside the raid beating on casters. I think the healers were asleep or possibly afk, all the tanks died so damn fast. So that was it for Monday. It was after 11pm and there was no way we were going to get in and get set again before midnight.

Wednesday
We formed up at 8:00pm and headed in. We blitzed through the early parts of the dungeon clearing our way though the trash almost like it wasn't there. The Guardian R5 stood in our way for about a minute before he fell down (he?/she?/it?). Once again he failed to drop the Greatsword.

Guardian R5 from an elevated perspective

Apart from the usual suspects cough*sorcerers*cough we hadn't lost anyone by the time we reached Malfunctioning X77. The X77 dropped easily and smoothly, we didn't even lose a tank during the transitions.

Waiting to die

We smashed him down without even pausing for breath and headed on for the Enraged X83.

Enraged X83 inc for a bitch slappin

We dropped the X83, looted up and moved on to General Vicus. Now I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail but the strat is definitely coming together. This time we had Vicus at under 40% and he id definitely killable by us. Its not the fight against Vicus we are losing, its the fight against game mechanics and bugs. If everything in the game worked the way we expected it to with no faults and no bugs, he would have died, unfortunately a few things didn't quite fall into place and we failed on him.

This is where the night turned to complete shit. We didn't have any one in place with a rezz stone. The only person to survive the encounter had no stone at all. This isn't the first time and this is really basic shit everyone should have learned in grouping. Every FD class should always have a rezz stone from every single priest class. So now we are a 2 hour grind away from another shot at General Vicus and naked. Basically at this point we got rattled. this is where we should have dug deep, said ' we can do this' and headed on back in. Instead people just seemed to lose confidence or simply stopped paying attention I don't know.

Basically the next two hours sucked. in the first run in we cleared every encounter like a knife through butter. In the second run in we were rattled, people were dieing, over aggroing and generally running around like idiots. We didn't even get back to X83' death spot. We wiped for the second time in very quick succession about 3/4s of the way back in and it was declared over. Vicus would have to wait for another week

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 2

2008-01-17T08:31:00.000+11:00

17/01/08

What a complete turn around from our last raid. We went through the opening stages of Ancient Port Warehouse like a knife through butter. There was no raid wipe after every mob and only a very few people pulled aggro off the main tanks.

I was late due to being told by the wife that as there was a raid break, there was also a play break, so I haven't been online at all since late December. I logged on to find myself in Martok on Kojan where I had been practicing Diplomacy. So to reach the Southern Swamps, especially now that Rudolph no longer flies, was going to be a long run!.

I was so excited I forgot to get pics of the first Boss!. Never mind I will pick some up next week as we will have a full pop next week for Wednesday. This was only a very short week as we really only came back on the Wednesday night. We cleared through the early part of the zone extremely quickly. The only deaths we had were from the usual suspects *cough* sorcerers*cough* who weren't keeping an eye on their aggro.

One thing I think people don't quite understand is that each tank has an extremely different way of gaining and holding aggro. Warriors have a lot of snap aggro, Paladins have a lot of powerful rescues and Dread Knights take some time to build rage. Each tank classes aggro abilities need to be handled differently by the raid. Once I have good aggro it becomes very hard to take it off me, but it does take me some time to build it up to a level at which the DPS classes can unleash.

Our first target of the night was x77 (which I forgot to get photo's of) he dropped as clean as a whistle. Next up was an enraged x83. Now I really like this fight, theres a tank rotation and you get bounced about 40 feet in to the air. Its a fairly straight tank fight with a twist. Hell I'm just loving the tanking. Raid tanking really is everything I thought it would be. I get butterflies every time we engage and a huge buzz when the target goes down.

Enraged X83

After some more clearing of trash we got to General Vicus. We haven't killed him yet but we get closer with every try. I suspect that we will find when we finally get to the central Hub of APW that there will be a shortcut to most of these mobs and we will be able to avoid a lot of the trash. However we haven't raided together, in some cases for years, so all the trash clearing and general raid discipline is very good practice. We are definitely getting better at it and its getting a lot easier to clear through the crap. Everybody is learning their classes a little bit better and what they can and cannot do. We are learning about aggro control in APW (very different than WoW and EQ) , how the game handles different scenarios and where the bugs are.

We will get there, its all good practice and its all good fun!.

General Vicus in the dim distance

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 1

2007-12-18T08:19:00.000+11:00

Monday 17.12.07
Finally its here!.
Vanguard Game Update 3.2 and 3.3 were delayed so long they were ultimately released simultaneously as a single patch. The whole of SA was absolutely chomping at the bit to get into the zone and get killing. Its been a hell of a long wait, for me its been nearly 3 years since I last raided with SA, but everything that I have read about the APW raid game says that its a lot of fun.

Before you can zone into the Ancient Port Warehouse you have to find and defeat a wandering named, this guy is up simultaneously in 3 different zones across each of the 3 continents. They dont seem to be too hard to find. Once you have the quest for the gateway you are given a little vial of poison. Now here is an Southern Armada super sekret strat (tm) for ya. Use the little vial on the named BEFORE you attack him. This weakens him and turns him into a new mob type which is eminently killable. If you don't, much like a silly pink Warrior of my acquaintance, you will find out that he does about 95,000 damage per hit. Thats not even a one shot!, even fully raid buffed thats like a 0.1 shot!.

To make a long story much shorter, we found heem we keeled heem. Actually we killed him with 15 people and only 2 healers as we were a bit short of people that night.

So after the hand in and clutching our shiny, newly minted keys, we rolled into the much vaunted, long awaited Ancient Port Warehouse. Would it be as good as our anticipation?, would it be horribly buggy and lagged out beyond playability the way the VG boards had been claiming? would it be full of hundreds of yard trash to pull?. Well first off you zone into a kind of entry room with 2 Gnomes and a large metallic statue. The Statue is named Cerulean and hands you a number of quests which can only be completed by killing named's deeper into APW and then finding an NPC even further into the Zone.

One of the Gnomes does sod all and just gives you some text, but the second Gnome serves a vital purpose. He lets you repair armor and weapons right at the spawn point. Now this is a well placed Gnome, without this guy Raiding and learning in the zone would be a hell of a lot harder. So a good layout to start with. At this point in time we didn't have anywhere near the people we needed online to start a raid so its good bye for now and we will see you real soon...

Cerulean

So, its a couple of days later and we are formed up for the first raid on Monday night. I had run down and parked myself right outside the gateway on Saturday, knowing I wouldn't be online for several days and wanting to be there well and truly on time. Note to self, don't fall into the damn harbor. There is quite literally no way out of the damn harbor once you get wet. You cant climb out of the water anywhere, I spent an hour swimming around the edges of the damn pool trying to find a ramp or ladder, or some way out of the water before I gated out and ran back.

Anyway, we formed up, buffed up and headed down the elevator. The first mob we saw died pretty cleanly. A Guardian B27 stands at the entrance to the zone, we saw, we pulled, he fell over.

Now its not all that easy and I have to admit we wiped several times on the way to our first named. So far, I have to say huge Kudos to SOE for this zone. Even the trash is challenging. If you are an experienced raid guild this wont cause you too much pain, but its going to throw you some serious curve balls as you learn. If you are a Guild new to raiding, this is going to be a hell of a lot of fun and a huge challenge!.

Little things like Fire mobs which, if you cast fire spells on them, the fire actually heals them for the damage dealt. These are only small things but they add some nice twists to the genre and as almost every mob has some twist like that, it adds up to a challenge on each fight and makes each fight different. Rather than every single fight being simply pull and clear the trash till you get to the next boss, each fight has its own unique signature and needs to be planned for.

So finally we get to the first Boss. His name is "A Malfunctioning X77" and he stands alone in a huge hall, the X77 himself is actually in a small alcove surrounded on three sides by archways, this should have been a hint. So we clear around him and then have a wee conversation about how he is going to die. The brains in the guild make the call, and we move in. (I'm not the brains, I'm a tank, I stand where I'm told to and get hit a lot!)

Now I don't want to actually talk a lot about the specifics of this fight. This is still a really new experience for almost everyone and I don't want to provide any spoilers for future people coming through this zone. Suffice it to say this guy has a surprise in store for you!.

Engaged with A Malfunctioning X77

The first attempt we wiped early when he sprung his trap, second attempt he went down to 13% and 3rd attempt he died smooth, if not easy.

Our first dead APW Boss!

I got loots!. X77 was kind enough to drop a quest piece for my Dread Knight armor set. I am determined to get a complete Armor set out of APW. I have seen a couple of links of some awesome two handers which drop in APW as well. With the changes coming down the pipe which will make Dreads 2H tankers I am looking forward to getting to play with some of those. One of the images Ive seen was a sword which looked like a flaming version of the swords issued to the Uruk Hai in the movie Lord of the Rings. As a 2h sword it looked damn impressive.

We continued onwards after dropping X77 and made our way further into the zone. We have no idea where we are going so we were really just exploring and trying to get our bearings. We came across a mob that looked like it might be a named, called Guardian R5. The raid stopped, we rebuffed, made sure the engagement instructions were clear, carefully positioned tanks and healers and pulled. We were very careful with our aggro and the raid leaders were extra cautious on engagement and damage. We had no idea what this guy was going to do or what he was possibly capable of. In the end he did nothing and we dropped him like an orc pawn. I didn't even take screenies, I didn't think he was important!.

We then wiped on the very first trash pull after R5!.

Its all good. I'm thoroughly enjoying APW so far and if this is a taste of things to come I can see us enjoying the zone all the way through!. We will be raiding Wednesday and Thursday this week so there will be lots more update goodness and dead bosses!.

Wednesday 19.12.07
One thing I would like to say first off is a HUGE thank you to my own personal Tank Crack dealer. Zarthaz has been making me awesome weapons since my mid 20's, every time I am ready for an upgrade he is there with one already made or asking me what Procs I would like on the one he is about to make. 2 thumbs up for the mighty Monk Weaponsmith!.

Second raid, we formed up pretty quickly, buffed up and headed straight in. We knew that the Malfunctioning X77 was going to be dead to us but the zone so far seems pretty linear so we basically headed in the same direction. We were definitely moving better than we were on Monday night and we had the strat for the trash mobs down pretty tight.

Quote of the Night
Aegis: "We are moving a lot faster tonight folks, after learning a bit about the zone last night I plan to treat this place with a little less respect"

And we did!. It only took about 15 minutes to reach the Malfunctioning X77 room and clear past it. We dropped the Guardian R5 again easy peasy and learned a bit about how to split multiple mobs. The Fire and Ice guardians are Evil if pulled together. Basically a Fire Guardian hits you with an AOE fire DOT which is also a debuff for Ice damage. So if you pull them simultaneously you get debuffed for both the types of damage you are about to take and wipe quickly. Trust me we know this. (Does that explanation make any sense?, I hope it did) So we figured out a quick and easy method of getting the two types separated and happily smashed our way through.

I think one of our major weaknesses as a Guild at the moment is having only one Monk. If Zarthaz cant be available for a night we are going to find this zone a lot harder to deal with. So we finally made our way to an "Enraged X83". There are a couple of really cool looking traps along the way and at least 2 levels to the zone that we could see, at least one of which was partially submerged. I guess we will go back and explore downstairs at a later date. So we form up around the X83. He is standing in a doorway with several roamers on fast pops, both in the room beyond him and in the room you have to kill him in.

Enraged X83 waiting to die

Now we haven't read any spoilers on these encounters, in fact information on this encounter was offered and was turned down repeatedly. We are here to learn it for ourselves and beat it on our own merits. Garbar and myself were nominated as Main Tanks and set ourselves up in the corner for the pull. We had no idea what was coming but pulling this guy was going to be fun!.

So Garb pulls and has aggro. I'm sitting there, got my debuffs on him, hitting him a little bit, ramping up the aggro slowly. I want to be on his aggro list but not take it off Garb. This can be a bit of a balancing act with various abilities and types of attacks but is really a lot of fun. We are kind of expecting something to happen at 80% and it does. POP he hits me and Garb with a massive push back which pops me about 20 feet up the wall and does a complete aggro wipe. I'm still hitting him and I grab aggro. The tank swap goes fairly smoothly, I blow both my Runes to compensate for healing spikes and stay up. Ok, if thats all hes got we have this motherfucker.

Steady and smooth he drops to 20%. At that point it all goes horribly wrong. Garb and I drop to 30K damage hits and he proceeds to smash his way through the entire Guild roster. Bugger.

We form up and try again. We engage and POP a Chaotic Spark appears in the room and aggros the healers at about 90%. That one didn't count, we didn't have a chance to even do any serious damage. So we wipe, form up, clear the re pops and off we go. The Brains of the outfit have a theory that this is all about the speed at which we drop the mob. He has to die inside of (I think?) 10 minutes or he goes on a massive damage rampage.

Waiting to Pull

Being a Raid Tank in VG is very different to both Soloing and Grouping. I am learning little bits about how to use various abilities that get very few usages during normal play. For example, to make it easier for Garb to take aggro off me as we go into Tank transition I pop my Bleak Foeman ability which stops me attacking completely and blocks all attacks for about 10 seconds. I am still on the aggro list, but as soon as he does his wipe its so much easier for Garb to get the aggro he needs. Another ability set is are my two Runes. I have 2 of them, a 25% all incoming block and a 100% all incoming block. I'm learning to use them to smooth out damage/healing spikes during fights. There are other things I'm figuring out uses for as well, its all a huge learning process as I have never MT'd Raid mobs before. I get butterflies before each boss pull!.

Everybody is learning tho and I think Southern Armada are going to become a raid force to be reckoned with.

A Tanks view of the Enraged X83 fight. Smack those knees!

This time it went perfectly. We sped up the damage and he never had a chance to Rampage. One dead X83.

Even the corpse shows the lockout timer

We actually had roamers pop as we were looting and almost wiped again to stupid Guardians and Sparks. But we gritted our teeth, put out some damage and survived. We continued on through the zone clearing away the trash until we finally came across General Vicus. Now Im not 100% sure on this but I think this guy has an extremely good 2 Handed Sword drop. The one he was holding certainly looked extremely cool but whether its something he drops or a model I don't know. I'm trying to find an image I saw a couple of weeks back to the sword I described earlier to see if its the same one.

We cleared his Guards and formed up to have a go. It was getting really late at this point but we were determined to have at least one crack at him. I don't know what went wrong here. He seemed to pop 2 adds at about 86%, so maybe they are on timers. We tried various tactics of Mezzing, off tanking, kiting etc but in the end we wiped with him at about 80%. Its all good, its all learning for the next time we meet.

General Vicus proceeding to eat SA

Thursday 20.12.2007
There are days when Southern Armada is superb. There are days when everybody does their job perfectly and the mobs fall before us like wheat before our scythe. This was not one of those days, in fact I would more aptly describe Thursday night like one long suicide run. The night went something like this:
Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill 3 mobs, Wipe. You get the idea. I don't really know what it was, maybe it was that several classes were missing due to the Xmas schedule, maybe it was people being asleep ( and I was guilty of this as well) maybe it was a lot of things I dont know.

All I know was that it was just damn hard work. We basically took 4 hours to reach exactly the same place it had taken us 2 hours ( and a boss mob kill) to reach the night before. Thus there are no pics and no points to make, other than TS can be a really good tool and a bane at the same time. Having officers argue over a proposed strategy for 30 minutes just left me confused about what it was we were supposed to do.

Vanguard Month 7

2007-08-07T12:59:00.000+10:00

I found some old pics of some of the Skawlra Rock mobs which I thought I would share. These models are brilliant. Multi colored, up right bird men walking around a series of platforms within a giant water filled crater. Its a brilliant spot and the Hunters League is a really cool series of quests. I'm seeing LOTS of people with "of the Hunters league" titles around so I'm guessing its pretty popular. I think possibly the rewards are a little over powered for the level you can complete the quests, you can start the quests in your early 20's and you will wear some of this gear up into your late 30's.

Some more old pics, this time of Trengal Keep Mobs. TK was a lot of fun and really well designed. I remember in Beta it was horribly bugged and the level 50 flying drakes would swoop down on you from miles away and promptly slaughter the entire group. My regular group is thinking of starting an Alt group once we get our mains to 50, so we can go back and experience some of the content we missed as there is just so damn much of it. As an alt group we will try and go through some of the non-standard dungeons and avoid places that we have already been through, like TK. There is SO much content in this game, we think we have at least one solid groups worth of content to experience without going anywhere near places we did the first time round. The pics below are of a named, "Deranjir The Gulthergor Stormlord" dieing just outside the entrance to "TK4".

One thing I did wish I had known the first time through TK, you can harvest the big floaty stone guys for Minerals and skill ups, DOH!. TK is where we tried to get Kez to come in and group with us. We kept a spot open for him for a really long time before we filled it permanently with Elvin the Blood Mage. Elvin had been playing with us for several levels already by the time we out leveled Kez and he is a really good bloke. He lives down in Melbourne with the rest of the group, I am the only Sydney based member of the regular team. Originally Elvin was a member of a guild called The Burning Legion. Nice people apparently, but all in American time zones, so we persuaded Elvin to apply to join us and we got him accepted so he is now a full fledged member of SA!.

While we were looking for places to go after we had out leveled TK, we were told about a place to the North called Dargun's Tomb. The shot below is taken from up on the hill as you approach the Tomb. Like many of the premium dungeons of VG, this place is massive and very imposing. The doorway you can see below is about 60 feet tall when you are standing in front of it.

Darguns Tomb is full of dog like humanoids who appear to have taken over the place. Lower down you also find a lot of Ogres. The models for both Dogs and Oggies are fantastic. I don't have any screenies of the Oggies, so heres a doggie, isn't he cute!. The first time we entered DT we were there at the same time as another regular SA group, Red and Nyms group. They are a bit further ahead in levels than us and they were just there to clear to some named's to finish some quests. Unfortunately we managed to pull most of the entrance mobs onto them just as they were buffing and thoroughly wiped them out. Sorry guys. It was a hell of a train tho!.

We were really in DT several levels too early however and the first time we tried it we struggled with some of the deeper Mobs. The content throughout VG I have found to be extremely well balanced and you can tell pretty quickly ether you have attempted a mob a level or two out of your range. Sure there is the odd glitch in tuning here and there, but for the sheer volume of content I think its been well done. We were only 2-3 levels outside of the range for DT and we could do it, but it was a lot harder than it possibly should have been. We went back a few levels later and found it much more agreeable.

The great thing about VG is that if DungeonA is to hard, go to DungeonB, or C or D. There is no shortage of content for low to mid upper levels. Below is a screen shot of me on my quest Doggie in the harbour at Khal. The quest is a painful grind when done solo but well worth the effort!. The feelthy pallies I group with did the Unicorn quest together, to me that just proves the old adage about Pallies and their need to hang out with other (male) Pallies. /nod

As you fly around Vanguard on your way to various places you will come across architecture such as you can see in the image below. I have no idea what this is or what it does. Its a beautiful building in the middle of a mountain valley surrounded by idyllic gardens. Is it live and usable?, is it something placed there for use later?, is it reachable by land or only by air?. I have no idea, I just think its cool that there are places like this in game, even if they are for use later.

The Wardship. This is a series of quests and dungeons that you begin in your mid 30's. The rewards are awesome but they are essentially based around one thing, faction. Now I have been told that the upper levels of Vanguard are all about the faction grind and that this, in comparison is easy. However as an evil race I had to start at a very substantial -9000 faction to the Wardship. In order to get the serious rewards you have to grind to positive 2000, 5000 and then 11000. The Good races start at neutral or Zero faction and so they get there a lot quicker. Each faction level is a tier and you receive substantial rewards at each level.

What we as a group found, was that by the time the goods in our group had reached 5000+ we had out leveled the entire area. Only one of the evils had even reached +2000 faction and that was me, only because I did a ridiculous amount of faction grinding against grey Mobs (no XP) in order to build my faction up. This seriously sucks, the evils should be equal with the goods or only slightly less, otherwise this is a a perfectly good dungeon set wasted. This is one of the few places I have found so far where the game play pacing could do with a bit of tweaking.

The Dungeons surrounding the Wardship, however are extremely visually impressive. There are 3 of them all tied together with Lore about the destruction of the Elven Kingdom many thousands of years ago. There is the Temple of Vol Tuniel, Vi'Rak and Thesaleen. The two main Dungeons are the Temple and Thesaleen. The Vi'Rak lair is the lower part of the Temple and is reached by a portal in an area called the scar. Vi'Rak is populated with fantastic looking Salamanders. By the time you get to the bottom of the Dungeon they are getting quite tough. Its an awesome dungeon and a really fun quest series. I think it needs a loot pass though as no matter how far into the Dungeons you go, there isn't a lot of loot. Maybe its because they are providing such fantastic quest items once you complete the series.

The lower parts of Vi'Rak are superb, the architecture is absolutely fantastic. When you enter the huge throne room with its flowing water, sweeping staircases and patrolling Salamanders its really impressive. Its worth the fight down just to see the rooms. I tried to get screen shots several times, but they just didn't do the place justice, you will just have to go and see for yourself.

Greystone. A massive finger of Granite reaching up into the sky. Surrounded by undead and with an aura of menace as you delve deeper and deeper into it. What a place. This is one of my favorite dungeons in VG so far. The quests are interesting and fun and they all tie together into one huge over all quest which delivers some really cool rewards. Initially the architecture looks confusing and you feel like you are going to be lost forever, but slowly you get used to it and begin to learn your way around.

The undead theme is carried through really well with the mobs getting both more powerful and the models more interesting the further in you go. There are several named's and one Uber named scattered throughout the Dungeon. The Lord of the Castle seems to be a rare por, we only saw him once in the whole 2-3 weeks we were in Greystone and I think he could be tuned to be tougher. Apart from that the whole place is well balanced and a lot of fun. I can highly recommend it in your early 40s.

The High Guardian Auroc'Yor (Isnt an Auroch a bull in Spanish?) guards the entrance to the Lords throne room.

The Greystone Throne definitely looks like the seat of a nasty undead Knight.

The major quest line for Greystone involves picking up Bloody Insignias as random drops. Once you have enough of them you hand them in to summon a series of Mobs. Each Mob requires X number of Insignias and you need about 130 to complete the series. Hint: don't start the summoning till you have the major quest line in your book or you are wasting a LOT of insignias you will have to grind out again. In the end we bought about 23 insignias cause the dungeon is greying out for us and the grind is beginning to be boring. The major quest line that you really want to finish is the Purification of Greystone. I don't have screenies of all of the summoned named but here is a few. The final rewards are WELL worth the effort.

Epo'Wroj the Depraved

Sir Patro the Loyal
Unknown but cool looking named. I think this is Phorean the Fallen.

Although the group is only 2 insignias short and still in Greystone, I have been looking for new and interesting places to quest and solo. After much dieing and trying to kill mobs I didn't have a hope in hell against, I found the Deadbog and the nearby town of Elani.

The Deadbog

Every now and again in MMO's you run into a truly unpleasant person. It doesn't happen a lot thankfully but when you do they can significantly impact your enjoyment of the game. One such person is Grendul Wildfire, the Guild Leader of Silent Redemption. Now I don't know the rest of the guild, but the actions of the GL certainly reflect very badly upon them. In order to explain this I am going to have to explain a little bit about Swamp Armour.

For the high level raid game there is basically two ways to gear up. One is to have a high level armor crafter make Tier 5 amour, this is time consuming and expensive. The other is to choose one of 3 factions and then kill your way through 3 different cities associated with that faction. Once you have enough parts dropped you can create some seriously Uber Armour for all classes. So I choose my faction and form up a group of Guildies and we head into Flordiel. Now this amour chasing is not easy, its going to take days of grinding in Flordiel to get the amour I will need to raid.

We are happily killing our way through the township when we run into Grendul. We are in the process of killing a named Tree when he rocks up and says "Ive been here for hours and now you guys think you are going to take all my Mobs?". Huh? His mobs?, when did this become a single player game?. We were all a bit stunned so we didn't say anything, killed our tree and just kept going. An hour or so later we have found the named ring (remember this is our first time here) and we are preparing to pull one of the named amour droppers when he turns up again. This time the comment is "Do you guys think you are going to be able to race me?". Again we are all a bit stunned at this comment, to be a smartarse I said something like "No speek da englis" but in the end we basically said 'No we aren't racing you we are just playing the game'.

He stayed around watching us and trying to interfere with our pulls until we left. Ok so hes an idiot and an asshole but we ignored him.

The reason he and his guild are on my shit list, he is also a cheat. The named Tree Lord who drops the BP's multi hits for 2.5K, there is no way he is solo able if you are playing the game fair and square. Grendul pulled the Tree Lord out from under us last night. We were almost GTG waiting on the Cleric to arrive, who was literally 50 meters away, and he pulled the Lord. Now I don't have an issue with him getting the pull. He got ready first and got the pull fair and square. What I do have an issue with is he used a positioning exploit to be able to solo the Lord. I have now seen Grendul and his guildies soloing the named Tree Lord, The Grove Queen and the named Human Lord. A few days after this incident there was a thread that popped up on the Official Vanguard forums about exactly this issue.

I don't know that SR is all like him, but as he is the Guild Leader I have to make the assumption that if he cheats, he condones his Guild members cheating. So, Silent Redemption, welcome to my shit list. I look forward to beating you assholes to a LOT of spawns.

My favorite quote from that Thread is from the chief cheat himself.
"Also, he only hits me for ~740 fully self-buffed. See, there is a stat called Mitigation, which is a component of our defense, it allows all us tanks to take less damage than other classes when it is maxed out. Now hush, your stupid is showing."

Yes dick brain I know what mitigation is. The next time that I see you soloing the Tree Lord, I expect that you will be doing it on his spawn spot instead of pulling him to the rocks behind the throne circle which is a known point of exploit.
Now hush, your lieing and cheating is showing.

I went to the SA AGM this year and had a blast. It was really good to put a lot of old names to new faces. Even Caniella flew in from SA which was just awesome. We drank a lot and had some really good food thanks to the organizational skills and drive of the mighty Redwynne. We are bloody lucky to have her in the guild. To be honest I was hoping for a big announcement from Kez that he would be returning to the game and leading us into the future of raiding. Unfortunately it was not to be. Kezlar is really really busy with his job and 2 kids and just doesn't have time to game. I understand and respect that, but I do miss him. Ahh well.

So while we were on downtime (Trikkie and Keepr went to the beach for a week) I tried to organize a few runs into the swamp for amour farming. There are several people in the guild who have maxed everything and have all the toys, but there are a large number who haven't. When we reach APW and start true raiding, everything I have read says that having a few people in high end gear will not be good enough to beat the events. You will need a well geared guild with everyone in the best amour and resist gear you can provide. As an example, I currently have a mitigation of 36%. In full Tier 2 insect swamp amour at level 50 I would expect to have a mitigation of 80% plus and double my current HP's.

Its my understanding that the events have been tuned with the expectation that tanks will have that sort of mitigation. As a Guild we have a LOT of gearing up to do to be able to successfully raid APW. Its a bit like farming Time to be able to survive in Gates Of Discord. The only other way to get the kind of gear the Tanks would need would be to have it made. Thats not only very expensive, but our only Tier5 armorer with the rare recipes we need to be able to make the amour doesn't play anymore.

So I did a few runs into Icky and got a couple of drops for myself and for a number of people who signed up for the runs. I now know that zone and where to look. The problem is the rarity of some of the drops means repeated farming runs into all of the zones. As a tank you cant just get what you need in one Zone. Pieces drop in one of 4 different locations and some of them are insanely rare. Ive been told of one piece needed for the BP which is a 1 in 1000 drop, off a named who spawns every 4 hours and is locked down by every Guild who knows how. Having said that, its possible that with the introducttion of overland raid Bosses coming in game update 2 and taking the Trikkie group into Rahz Inkur for some questing and named killing, we may be able to gear up enough to be able to survive. One thing that I think has been done relatively well in VG is that there is no 'One' path you must take in order to get to the higher level gear. You can quest for it in RI, farm for it in Swamps or get a crafter to make it. There is almost always an alternative. Tho the AOE aggro hat in RI seems like it will be a must have for every tank.

We also did a run into Gorgalok. AOEing, its a blast in VG! You can see 20 mobs coming at you behind the puller, they get snared and BOOM the Sorcerer and Bloodmage let loose. Half of them die in the first round. XP and faction is scrolling up my screen faster than I can read. While we were there we headed up to see if the Gorgalok Bloodpriest was up. You have to go round and round, higher and higher up a huge stone spire (the views are incredible) until you reach his inner chamber. Unfortunately the event that you need to trigger him was bugged, so we could see him but we couldn't see the third one of his guards that we needed to kill to be able to release him. So I took some screen shots instead. The screens are not very good as the lighting in the temple is terrible.

The first raid. Finally!. I am including this here because until the raid interface goes in and we start to hit the over land raid mobs, its not raiding its just extended grouping. Xardan organized a run against the temple complexes on Monday night. These are fun events and can be done with a single group, but we took 3. The point was not to get loot and stuff, tho we did get a bit of that and some people got some upgrades I think, the point was to get us all working together again and see how the game went with 18-20 people in on the screen.

I took the screen below and deliberately included the FPS meter. This is a pic of one of the platforms in the center of the temple. The entire raid force of about 21 people is in front of me as well as a full room of Mobs and I still have 14-20 FPS. Now at 14fps I noticed no discernible change in the quality of the game, no hitching or glitching. I had the graphics set at medium balanced and all names turned off. Raidng is going to be a blast if this is the quality we can expect.

Once we cleared the room of mobs we activated the big glowing orb in the middle of the room and approached Commander Abtu who provided us with a quest. Basically once you accept the quest the entire Pyramid respawns but everything is now friendly to you.

You have to run outside and protect the Pyramid against waves of attacking Mobs. Below is the last named Mob in the last wave. Once you have this guy dead you can do the hand in for the quest which nets you 7 medallions. With 25 medallions you can hand them in to get rewards of pieces of Lucent Jewelery. This jewelery is the best in the game and is another thing required for survival in APW. The fun part is that only one group gets the quest completion, so only one group gets the 7 medallions. You need 6 pieces of jewelery x25 medallions. Thats a LOT of farming. It was a hell of a lot of fun tho and really good to be in an SA raid again. I think I am going to really enjoy playing an SA raid tank and I am really looking forward to tanking against the Overland raid mobs when they are first released in game update 3.2

The first raid post should be up in a week or two hopefully. Whenever it is that GU 3.2 is released.

Vanguard Month 6

2007-05-30T12:48:00.001+10:00

28.06.07 Vanguard Month 6

Well its been a hell of a ride for the last 6 months. The game we had all been eagerly anticipating, Vanguard:Saga of Heroes was released. Unfortunately even by its own developers admission it was released 3-4 months too early. The developers, Sigil, had run out of money and they needed the cash to flow. It all went swimmingly to start with, then the numbers started to drop and people began to realize that they were going to need a seriously high end PC to be able to play VG at even mid range settings. The game world felt empty, bugs were abundant, quests couldn't be completed and crashes were a constant feature of game life.

Something had gone seriously wrong.

Then came the big news, Sigil was effectively folding.

The old enemy, SOE would be buying the game and half the staff were going to get fired. After 5 years of development the whole damn thing imploded with a welter of words from Brad which were largely self serving. I spent 5 years following the development of the game. I poured hundreds of hours into supporting web sites, creating communities, monitoring message boards, working with Sigil staff behind the scenes and encouraging friends to give the game a go. I logged a butt load of bug reports, wrote up ideas when asked for them and participated in in-game feed back sessions.

Suddenly it was all gone. The game was still there but all the work was toast. I tried very hard to be angry, back in the old days of EQ I would have been, I would have poured forth invective like a waterfall. I would have dragged into my anger even people who didn't know what a computer was, let alone a virtual world.

However, I guess I'm older, uglier and at the end of the day I got what I wanted. Vanguard is fun. Its a lot more challenging than most of the games out there, its prettier than almost anything else on the market and if SOE think they can make money out of it, then it has a hell of a lot of long term potential.

Southern Armada left WoW to move to Vanguard, so I have all my old raiding mates to play with again, in other words to a large extent I have found a Home, a World we can spend years exploring.

When you have cities like New Taraganor to explore what more could you want?

So I created my Dread Knight, logged in and started killing. I had been playing a Dread since the class was introduced in Beta2, nearly 2 years. To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure (even after becoming an Elder) if I was going to continue to enjoy playing the class long term, I needn't have worried. A Shadow Knight was my first class in Everquest and so far I'm still loving the Vanguard version of the class.

I did have a log of where I was when all of these screens were taken but somewhere along the line they got misplaced. The Mutated Rekk is from quite early on in my leveling career, I think I was based around Renton Keep and spending a lot of time dying while trying to complete quests which were meant to be completed by groups. Even this early in the game groups were very hard to find and the LFG tool was composed pretty much of running around zones spamming "12 Dread LFG".

This shot of the named turtle Gordaukar is also from around the same time. I was completing a quest line and he was the final Mob. This fight is held entirely underwater and to be honest he was incredibly underpowered. I think he took me about 45 seconds to kill, loot and run back to the quest giver. An impressive model tho considering this is the sort of thing that you see at the very early levels of the game. To me this sort of thing is what makes VG feel empty. Its not empty plains that don't have a mob every 3 feet (Drive across the center of Aussie, you wont see anything for 1000 miles.) its mobs with no loot table.

It makes the world feel incomplete somehow, like they haven't quite gotten around to finishing it.

Another MOB from around Renton Keep. This is a Stonemaster Ettercap. There are a whole range of different types of Ettercap. This is where I began to feel the difference of Vanguard as a world from any of the previous games I had played. Each different type of Ettercap is a different class and unlike most games where that doesn't mean a lot, in Vanguard this means different tactics to fight and beat each type. Ettercaps don't just stand there and hit you, they will cast class based spells and attempt different ways to beat you, a lot like a player would.

At the end of the first 20 levels, this is Ulaa Elfbrother of Southern Armada. He is wearing amour almost entirely from the Universal Races of Thestra quests. These are quests which can be entirely soloed and I was really enjoying doing them. The rewards are great and the XP is well worth it. They were great right up until I ran into a bug which made then impossible to complete. Sigh, another bug report submitted.

At this point something happened that completely changed my game play. I got a regular group!. I was soloing in and around Renton Keep doing various quests when I teamed up with a Pally called Rocks. We hung out a bit and chatted and after a while he told me he was part of a regular Wednesday group and would I like to join them. I went into the usual, "you realize I am in Aussie", time zones speech and it turns out that half the Wednesday group were other members of SA and Rocks is applied to join, he was Cuddles the Mage when SA were playing WoW!.

At the time I joined the group we were all in the 15-20 range and thus we christened ourselves "The Teens". Initially the group was Pally, Dread, Druid, Cleric, Cleric, so we had tons of Healing but our DPS was not fantastic. Apart from off-tanking we had no CC.

The group was formed with the idea of meeting up regularly on Wednesday nights so we could run through all the quests everyone had and do some of the premiere dungeons. We started off doing Hillsbury Manor in Thestra. I thought the map of the dungeon area was really cool (although I would see it repeated later in other dungeons) . We ran through HM several times and completed every quest that wasn't broken by bugs.

Once we were finished there we moved on to the nearby Crystal Caverns, killing our way down to the lower ant caves trying to get to the Queen. We never had a problem killing anything in that area but for various reasons (namely repeated server crashes) we never did quite make it to the Queen. The Crystalline servitors and the Crystal Warders did manage to make our lives a bit difficult at times. Having 2-3 of the Servitors pop on you at the same time can make it tough with out any CC.

In between Wednesday nights I'm still doing a bit of soloing. I quite like the game balance in the late teens early 20's, with Solo quests and small group or duet quests both giving solid xp. In the downtime you can still get stuff done without having to get a full group up and running. About 40 of the Vultrix Stalkers shown below had to die in order to make the quest gods happy.

Once we began to out level the Ant Caves, we decided to hit The Tomb of Lord Tsang. Its a hell of a run from Hillsbury Manor, being that its on Kojan, but its the perfect level and we had heard there were some nice weapons to be had. The design of the place was awesome with elevators going up and down, areas where you had to jump on and off and a really well done Asian theme throughout. It feels like you might be walking through the Kyoto palace in Japan with sliding screens and beautifully painted wall hangings. Kudos to whoever designed the place.

The Mobs were pretty cool with an undead theme all the way through. I think its really at this point that we started to get our groove on as a group. The second of third run through and we are starting to figure out how each of us works and the strengths and abilities of each class. It is also at this point that Rocks (our resident Pally) also decided to swap and become Lulla, our new resident Psionicist. This was a great move as it gave us lull and CC type abilities as well as adding to our DPS considerably.

A Roaming Phantasm

At sometime during the nights of smashing our way through the undead hordes, Lulla mentioned to me that he had started the Hunters League quests north of the Gnome city of Mekalia. So, in between group nights I ran myself across to Khal and started to do the early quest lines. Initially the quests are an easy solo quest. Then you run into the undead flesh quest and that's where it all starts to get a lot harder.

At this point I suggested to the whole group that we head over to the Upside garrison region and start to do the quests. they were into it as we didn't really have any thing else on the cards and needed to level up a bit before tackling Trengal Keep. So we farmed our way through the early quests and killed lots and lots of Gauthek on the way through.

The final parts of the quests are fantastic. This whole series not only delivers some awesome gear and a fantastic weapon, its also a hell of a lot of fun. Fighting up into the Bird skull cave, killing off the council members and then pulling the named, is going to go down as one of my most fun moments in gaming. Again Kudos to whoever designed both the quest series and the Skawlra Rock chunk.

A birdie dies on the way to the Skull cave.

Once we were through the quests I took Screenies to show all the guys fully kitted out in Hunters League class amour.

Naoru Shii Cleric

Benzine Cleric

Lulla Psionicist

Zeckl Druid

Once we completed the Hunters league quests we headed up to The ruins of Trengal Keep. Its interesting how acronyms evolve. There seems to be a split between people who use TK as the short version and some who use RoTK. I seem to use both depending on how I'm feeling at the time.

Trengal Keep is a huge quest hub to the north of Renton Keep. If you are a tight group in your mid to late 20s, or in an early 30's group, I can highly recommend it. The zone itself is really fun with lots of fallen ruins, undead Orcs and huge Drakes flying all over the place. The quests lead you deeper and deeper into the Keep with really cool rambles through underground caverns and dungeons. There are several named's on the way through, from whom we have managed to get some nice upgrades and at least one awesome set of Panties for Lulla.

Named Fatboy in the courtyard

Watching the Pally pull, and Die!

Oddly enough writing all of the above has been really hard for some reason, it hasnt flowed. I guess a whole lot has gone on in my life during this period, moving countries, quitting a very long term job and then finding a new one, renting my house out and then trying to find a new place to rent myself. Its been a hell of a year so far.

I've had a number of interesting conversations with various people about VG and where it will go. One that seems to have stuck in my head was a conversation with a chap who was helping to run Ausguard.com when I was involved with that project.

We were talking about raiding and he was boasting about his Guilds uberness and how they were going to be the best Aussie raiders on his server. This was a newly formed Guild mind you, with leaders with no experience of either leading a guild or raiding. So I said the three best Aussie raid guilds that I knew about were Southern Armada, Cold Fury and Aurora Noctum. I was also thinking of including Guilds with large Aussie populations like The Hand and some of the sub guilds that have spawned from the bigger guilds into new games, like Veni Vedi Vici, but I thought that would only confuse the issue so I left it out.

Anyway, this young chap went off, he started going on about how his guild had done more content, they were further along in high level dungeons, there were more of them, they were more dedicated and played more hours yada yada yada.

I tried to point out several issues to him.
Raiding is different. Working with, behaving in, and turning up to raids week after week is simply a different proposition to logging on to play in a group. Managing and running multi group raids is completely different to being in a single group and progressing through high level content. The Guilds I had named all had history. They had all been around since early EQ and had evolved into tight, efficient, well led, dedicated raiding crews, over years of banging against high level raid encounters.

Just killing stuff in groups for the first few months simply didn't get you into the "uber guild" rating in my books.

He couldn't see it and went off again. Oddly enough not only does his guild no longer exist in Vanguard, they disbanded about 3 weeks after this conversation and he no longer plays. A classic example of uber guild burn out I guess.

I have a confession.
I have been playing with the teens group for about 8 weeks or so, we have been happily making our way through the middle level dungeon progressions and I have been having a blast!. However shortly after I started with the teens I also hooked up for a couple of dungeon runs with some very old Guildies.

Keepr, Trikkie, Sanfy and Phaithful are also playing regularly 2 nights a week, Monday and Thursday. After a couple of runs I was asked if I wanted to join them regularly. Now I don't think I have ever made any secret of the fact that I wanted to get to raid level (Raiding is coming yay!) and I wanted to be able to play a whole lot more than I have been able to up to now. Having a group is pretty much a must have for play as a tank, Soloing is possible but not a whole lot of fun.

I am now at the point in game play that I have pretty much out -levelled the teens group and Trikkies group is beginning to delve into some parts of the game that are going to require some serious dedication. (Vol Tuniel and the Swamp Quests) I really don't think I am going to be able to play with the Teens group anymore.

I don't have an alt at the right level to continue to play with them and I have been their primary tank, so I'm feeling pretty crap about it. I am trying to level a Sorceror to be able to join them but it means Lulla the Psi will have to go back to being Rocks the Pally.

Its possible the Teens may just break up, I don't know. The feeling within the group is it was always a casual group to begin with. A couple of the lads within it arent really interested in VG and would rather be playing something else (see rose colored glasses comments later) whereas the Trikkie group is a little more dedicated and I can get to raid level a lot faster.

Where will SA go at the moment? that too is a good question. A lot of people have strayed off to other games like Lord of the Rings Online. Whether they are gone permanently or they will come back once raids go live is an unknown. Unfortunately I don't think that raiding as we have known it will ever exist in a game again.

Even a lot of the old SA people have the "this game must be perfect at launch and if its not I will go elsewhere" mentality which is a real pity. I think a lot of people look back with deeply rose coloured glasses at past games and hold them up as examples of shining perfection. I have seen people comparing VG with EQ as to how "finished" they are. Ignoring the fact that EQ was 6 years old when we left, when that game came out it was horribly bugged, the servers wouldn't stay up and huge parts of the game didn't evolve till years later. World of Warcraft was the same.

I think the closest example to what could potentially happen with Vanguard is EQ2. When that game was launched it was a POS. Major surgery occurred over the next two years and by everyone's accounts it is now a very good game. In the process of managing that game to the state it is in today, SOE has evolved a series of standards and methods for the management of an MMO and for communication with their fan base. If those same standards and methods can now be applied to VG then there is an excellent chance the game will evolve into something very powerful. Will SA stay that long?. I really do not know. I certainly hope they will, everything else that's coming out in the next 12 months or so is just a WoW clone from what I have been able to ascertain.

I actually have another update ready to go as I have been playing a whole lot more recently and have a whole lot more to write about so once this goes live the next one shouldn't take much longer and I will talk about some Guild stuff then.

I will also be making the screenies a lot bigger and I'm going to stop screwing with them to reduce file sizes. If you don't have broadband by now, go and bloody get it. So hopefull the pics will be a lot clearer. Vanguard is a beautiful game and some of the Mobs and Dungeons are fantastic, I would really like to show that off.

Say Goodbye to New Zealand (Part 2)

2007-01-30T12:20:00.001+11:00

Well its almost over.
We are only 6 days from flying out. As of 4Pm AEST I will officially be a Sydney resident. To be quite honest getting to Sydney has been the hard part, actually being in Sydney and having to find a place to live/work etc is going to be the easy bit. We have both been working enormously hard to get ready to move. If all we had to do was move our stuff to Sydney we would have been easily done in a week or so. However because we own our own house and we are planning on renting it out we have to finish the 2 major projects we started on the house before Jicki was offered the job in Sydney.

Suddenly instead of having 6 months to finish these projects we have only had 6 weeks. On top of both of those we discovered the fence was rotten down one side and large sections had to be replaced. So over the last few weeks we have:

Lifted 2000 bricks from the walkway at the back of our house. Leveled off the walkway so that it makes 3 steps down, dug-in and edged with railway sleepers, dug out several cubic meters of clay. Laid Scoria and sand to provide a bedding, relaid all the bricks.

Dug out 5 fence posts which were rotten, replaced the posts with new uprights, concreted them all in, replaced 10 meters of fence boards which were rotten. Relaid all the earth and planted new flowers.

Completely stripped the all the paint from the wood in the front entrance way. This is 100 years of multiple layers of mostly lead based paint on 4 door frames, kick plates and front door. If you are ever looking to restore wood in a home I can heartily recommend Coopers Wood Restoration System. Well worth the phone call and our entrance looks absolutely fantastic. Its still hard work to do the stripping but you will come up with a finish that will blow you away and best of all, no sanding.

Cleaned all the walls, repainted, removed the doors and had them dipped, we were going to hand strip them as well but we simply ran out of time. To do a decent job is about 6-8 hours per side and we just didn't have the spare time unfortunately. Its taken me about another 2 hours to do a really bad job fixing all the damage to the doors from the strippers. I have to oil and hang the doors and replace the locks that were removed tonight.

Cleaned, de-moulded and painted the front steps.

Organized to actually have our stuff shipped to Sydney. Gave away LOTS of stuff to friends, family and in some cases passing strangers. Sold my Motorcycle (Sob) and did lots of research on living in NSW, figured out how to pay our mortgage from another country (sort of), organized a rental agent to manage and rent our place, quit my job and after nearly 8 years that was a very hard thing to do, made sure I have some form of contact number or email address for all my friends and family, tidied all the gardens, fixed and sold my PC, went on a 4 day holiday, spent a weekend in Sydney on a research trip, thanks to Kez for driving us around all day!, researched the next bike I will buy in Sydney, unless I can get a full license, if so I will buy this beast, oh and we are both still working full time.

So its been a hell of a couple of weeks I can tell you.

What I am looking forward to is being in the same time zone as the rest of Southern Armada. Being able to log on and join up into groups, being able to go along to SA drinks in Sydney. I'm looking forward to a new Job, new things to learn. I really wanted to try and stay within APN as I have very much enjoyed my time here but APN don't have any technical services in Sydney, they are all based north of Brisbane. I interviewed for a job yesterday that I really really want. Its interesting and would give me a very good foothold into a section of the IT industry that I have long held an interest in.

Ah well, the night we get to Sydney we are going to go out to Dinner and get very drunk!.

So farewell to New Zealand for the next couple of years and Hello to Sydney!

Southern Armada Vanguard Week One

2007-01-30T12:16:00.000+11:00

I just re read the previous post and it probably came off a little more harsh than intended. In fact it came off way more harsh than intended. The important point was that I trust the leadership of SA to do the right thing. I have been following you guys for the last 5 years. I'm not going to stop now.

*note*
I just had a chat in game with Kez and I had to explain that last post. Halfway through the conversation my PC rebooted (of course, my 5 minutes online was up). Now I have a policy, I dont re write stuff once its live. I do spend a lot of time re thinking what I am about to post and often I will put something into draft and look at it again a few days later. But once I have put it live it doesn't change. There are a lot of reasons for this, but for me it comes down to you have to stand by what you say and going back and editing something constantly just feels wishy washy to me.

However, that last post does leave me feeling like it needs a re-write. I'm not going to but I am going to add a caveat. My intention with that post was simply to make the point that there are potential issues with the new system as it stands. I stand by the examples that I wrote, I can see them being possibly divisive and possibly causing issues for some players. What I didn't emphasis strongly enough is that the Guild leadership are a great bunch of guys. they have been doing this for a long time, and in the case of Kez since pretty much day one.

I have worked my ass off to help get Ausguard.com off the ground and a large part of that was because I wanted this guild, its officers and leadership to play VG with me. I wanted you guys back in a game that I knew you would enjoy and would challenge you. I wanted to help create a community where SA could both be a part of the community and stand out from it as an example of what an Aussie guild can do, what we can achieve without having to turn into 7 day a week hard core assholes. I didn't do all that work over 18 months to turn around and screw with the leadership before the game goes live.

I have said this before but I believe that its worth saying again. The leadership in SA is easily the best of any guild I have ever heard of, worked with, been a member of or even heard rumors of. They are guys and girls who put aside their own precious free time in order to do work for the greater good of the guild as a whole. I absolutely trust the guild leadership to do the right thing. They didn't create this system to make it work just for them. Much like the Sigil decision to do away with the Official forums, I may not agree with every point they put forward for doing so, BUT I am willing to step back and give the new system support and give it a try.

I trust that if there are some things in the new Guild system that don't work, they will be looked at, examined for the best thing for the Guild over all, and if they don't work, they will be modified or done away with.

So, thats been said.

The first week of Vanguard and goddamn it I am cursed. The gaming gods appear to look down on me and whenever a new MMO is released they reach down and put the whammy on my PC. This happened last time with WoW. I moved house about 3 days after WoW was released and then had to wait for about 3 weeks before Telecom (may a curse be on them forever) could supply me with a DSL connection. Its possible that may have contributed to my feeling of disconnection from WoW in general.

This time, even tho I have been playing this game for the last year in Beta, I have developed a severe problem with reboots. I have had this random reboot problem for about 2 years. Some days its really bad and I boot every 30 minutes. Some weeks it doesn't happen at all. However with the release of VanGuard to live I have started to lock up and then reboot roughly every 7-9 minutes. I am currently spending more time waiting for my PC to finish the boot, and then logging into VanGuard than I am actually playing the game. On top of that about roughly 1 in 2 reboots results in a death for me.

60 divided by 9 = 6.6 boots an hour
4 hours of play time 26.6 boots a night
26.6 divided by 2 = 13 deaths a night, no wonder I have no cash

I am at the point where I need to start grouping to progress and with my machine in this state I simply cant. It would not be fair to a group to have me disappear every 7 minutes and then take 3 minutes to get back into the game. I have replaced every bit of hardware on my PC with the exception of the disks (I've never come across a disk failure that will cause a full hard reboot), the mother board and the CPU. I am replacing the motherboard this week and I am desperately hoping that this will cause the whole reboot problem to go away. If it doesn't I'm stuffed until I reach Sydney. I cant afford to replace the CPU as well, so I will just have to live with it. Its also possible that the fan that was supplied with the CPU is horribly underpowered and I may have a heat issue. Again cant afford a custom heat solution to experiment with to try and fix the problem.

However, having said all that this is the box I have sitting next to me desk. All in pieces all still in original packing. I am shipping this to Sydney and this will be my new PC:
Intel E6600 Dual Core 2.4GhZ (I'm going to Overclock this to at least 3GhZ, more if I can)
Zalman 9500 Custom Fan
8800GTX 720
Gigabyte DS3 Mobo
2 Gigs PC 6400 RAM
2x 200GB SATA 2
1x 160GB SATA 1
Creative Wireless keyboard and mouse.

With a few other bits and pieces that is going to be my new PC. Unfortunately I will have to wait for that to get shipped, then wait to find a new apartment, then build it, then wait to get broadband connected then patch before I can play again so I will be off-line for, at a conservative estimate, at least a month. I haven't been disconnected from the web for that long in about a decade.

Now there really isn't a lot of new stuff here. I'm only level 10. I haven't managed to get to any dungeons or really get deeply into the game yet. I would be playing a lot more if it wasn't for the reboots. As I cant really do a lot in the way of XP'ing I'm working on crafting as much as I can. Apart from losing the credit for the work order you are doing when you crash, at least I'm not affecting anyone else.

I wandered though the first 10 levels and ran into the Giant Gargoyles again. For the life of me I cant remember what these guys are called. They are funky looking beats when you are fighting them tho, they way they fly up into the sky and pounce on you from the air!.

I have probably died more at the hands of the Forest Stalkers than any other MOB due to the huge amount of reboots I have had in this zone. Not the zones fault. My POS computers fault. Where oh where is that damn motherboard.

Spiders, really really big spiders, they freak the GF out. I keep telling her that there are bigger spiders than that in Sydney, she hits me a lot :)

Finally after about 100+ deaths this is Ulaa just after he dinged level 10. Its early days for the game and for me but this is the beginning!.

Southern Armada Vanguard Week One Minus 16hours

2007-01-26T11:19:00.000+11:00

Well its not long now. Vanguard will be released to the early purchaser crowd (of whom I am one) at 7am New Zealand time Saturday January 27th.

Southern Armada will be forming up on the Thunder Axe server not on the unofficial Oceanic server which has been organized by the affiliate site www.ausguard.com. There are many reasons for this but the primary one is contention. We don't want to be on a server with multiple other Aussie raiding Guilds, although it does make it easier to recruit it may very well make raiding a lot harder as we will be racing for raid targets against other Aussie guilds. Its a lot easier to raid if your competition is in bed. Of course this can work against us in a lot of ways as well. If the hard core US guilds have completely cleared the server ( and this did happen to us in EQ) we can end up on a raid night with no targets up to hit. Now obviously its all a bit speculative at the moment as we have little or no idea about the raid game in VG. Lots of people have thrown around a number of 24 raiders and this number has become accepted as fact. I have yet to see a post from anyone official which has said anything beyond vague references about a raid total "less than EQ" , the only rough number I have seen is 24-36. I guess we will see.

SA had an online meeting in Team Speak and Kez outlined the Officers new view for SA going into VG. It sounds to me like there is some serious discontent about the behavior of some of the membership from the WoW era. SA will now have two ranks within the membership.

Elders are those who have shown commitment to the Guild and to helping others within the Guild. These are people who show up to raid, who help out in gathering stuff for guild made components etc. They will get precedence in Raid slots and for gear.

Members are the more casual player members who don't want to or cant commit to time online and cant raid as often.

The other change is that we are having our classes picked for us. In the past the Guild has required an even spread of classes in order to progress. Often this even spread of people aren't there and you get raids with 12 tanks and 3 healers. Kez wants to sort this out to start with, so everyone has had to apply for their SA VG membership, state their 2 favored classes and the type of member they want to be (elder or member) The officers will decide who gets to be what.
Now I have been playing a Dread Knight since the class was released into the game last year. I am sure that there is a strong possibility I wont get this class as I'm sure there is at least one officer who will want to play a Dread. My secondary class choice is Monk and to be quite honest i would be quite happy with that. I played a Goblin Monk in Beta till about 15 and really enjoyed the experience. I would honestly be happy to play either class.

To be honest in my head this whole class choice and splitting of the membership feels a little premature. I can understand the officers wanting to get this sort of stuff sorted early on in the piece but I also think we really don't know enough about the game, especially the game at later levels, to even begin to make this sort of division clear and concise. I have a point to make here. Lets say that I don't get chosen to be an Elder, disappointing but fair enough, there are too many people and not enough slots. Now this means that I am free to choose my class. In that case I will more than likely choose a Dread or a Monk anyway. So I create my Dread, I level up, I join in with mini raids, I help with farming, I build myself up as a Weapon crafter, I join in the life of the guild as I would normally. I write this blog, I keep doing SA PR in and out of game etc

We get to raid level. No one has stepped down from the Elder role and I am still not an Elder despite all the effort I have put in. This means that I pretty much wont get to raid. Now raiding is why I play these games. Its what makes these games fun for me. If I am not an Elder ( and I am using the royal 'I' here, this can apply to anyone in the members position ) and I don't get raiding slots. I have one choice if I want to raid and that is to leave SA. THAT is what I don't like about this system. I don't think we will end up with a have/have not problem between Elders and Members, I do think we will end up with a potential of a lot of resentment from established long term members.

Second issue.
I have chosen my Dread, leveled him up etc and an Elder steps down. I get picked to join the ranks of the Elders ( again royal "I" ) but there is already a Dread in the Elders and it was a Cleric that stepped down. Do I HAVE to start and PL a Cleric in order to join the Elders?. I hate playing bloody Clerics, after WoW I said never again. If I can join as a Dread doesn't that blow the whole carefully laid class balance sheet out the window? and given that I can join as a Dread couldn't everybody just have chosen their classes to begin with?

Third issue.
A Cleric steps down, I have worked really hard to join the Elders but I am playing a Dread. The Guild needs a Cleric and goes outside the Guild for recruitment. Someone comes in and steps right over me from the outside, despite all my hard work. Instant resentment and I'm back to only having the choice to leave.

There was a list of Classes people were wanting to play as their Choice posted to the SA Forum and it was pretty evenly split with about 6-8 people choosing classes within each archetype. I thought it was a pretty good spread and I think that trying to come up with the 'perfect' class spread just isn't going to work.

I was talking with Anobis today and one of the things we both fondly remember from EQ and from Prexus was the SA ability of getting things done despite having completely the wrong class mix. I got asked once how many Wizzies for fast DPS we had when we beat Coirnav for the first time. The answer was only one, but we had 11 Necros. I really do understand that Kez and the Officers had a really bad experience with many of the WoW membership. But sitting at my desk listening to the TS chat the other day, I was reading the names of the people logged in and it struck me: This was the core of the old EQ raiding crew. These were the people who turned up to every raid and who worked with each other to help make the guild the best it could be for all its members. This wasn't a bunch of 14 year old wankers only out for themselves.

I'm guessing that the system will stay flexible and the officers will do their best for the whole of the Guild. I have faith in the guys leading SA and I know if a system doesn't work they will be flexible enough to rethink it.

I guess we will see what VG brings us.

Now normally I would have pictures to post but as there isn't any game to take screen shots of I will have to leave you with a picture of a Pohutakawa, the NZ Xmas tree instead.

New Zealand Christmas Tree

Week One Minus 8 hours
I'm a Dread!