This weekend I was at PAX 2008 meeting Jeff Hickman, Paul Barnett, Josh Drescher, and James Nichols from Mythic Entertainment. I got my picture with Paul and Jeff (while wearing Paul’s signature shades), signatures from Paul, Jeff, & Josh, and an “Elder Beta Tester” T-Shirt from James. I was spending so much time at the Warhammer booth showing off the game to other people at the convention that Jeff even joked “Give this guy a job”. Some of the other people who were paid to be there to demo the game were learning things from me. When Warhammer had it’s official presentation at the event, it was SOOOOO packed and overflowing that they had to cut the presentation in half and do it twice back to back “in fear of a riot” if they didn’t.
Back in June, I blogged about seeing a preview on Paul’s video blog showing the new Lord of Change model. When I met Jeff and Paul this weekend, I asked them directly about the new model. Jeff assured me that while there are still several different Lords of Change in the game there is one which is the “impressive looking one” which I believed he said was in the Lost Veil. I was rather pleased to hear about this and went on my merry way. Later on in the day I was showing some people the Inevitable City. Well upon zoning into the Inevitable City, I ran into none other than the Lord of Change. This was expected, but unexpectidly, he looked truly amazing. Just like I would expect with huge wings, 3 stories high, white robes, golden staff, and all the little details. Later on in the day I told Jeff that I saw him and was impressed. He was glad to hear that.
Speaking of glad to hear about it, I showed Paul where he could put in another “plunger of the world”, a location near the chaos starting area that he didn’t know about. He was rather pleased that I found it and said he’d get one put in.
Overall it was a fantastic event. It was kinda “meh” for me though because I was so excited about WAR and talking with people about WAR that nothing other than the concerts were really all that interesting. Spore was pretty amazing though as well as the One Ups, Johnathan Coulton, and Will Weaton. The World of Warcraft and other Blizzard BOOTHS (yes plural) made me giggle. Tabula Rasa and Guild Wars booths also had a brief visit by me.
There will be WAR starting September 14th. Oh yes and HILYMI will reign again!
Although this is a bit late it’s still important and worth mentioning. On June 15th, Hit it like you mean it, my guild and band of brothers hit their 2 year anniversary mark. I made another slide show style video showing off all the great times that have happened in the last year. Almost every single one of us now has the Collector’s Edition of Warhammer and we’re eagerly awaiting Open Beta and launch of the game.
I’ve started an interesting side project recently which is why I haven’t blogged in a couple of days. It really has been bugging me about what I’ve been wanting to do with my blog. I don’t want my blog to loose too much focus on ME as a person because again as I’ve stated before, my blog is mostly for me and my internal thought processing. So the tone of this site will stay what it is, but I’ve been wanting to do something more… something… bigger. In all the years I’ve been making websites, running websites, and building things professionally in my career, I’ve never taken the time to start a personal project of major worth for myself.
So an idea hit me and I went with it. The website is still top secret as I continue work on putting it all together and getting starting content in there, but so far here is what people are saying. Who knows if you comment on this thread, maybe I just might give you a sneak peak. Here is what people are saying so far:
A very ambitious project, for which I will be the first to pledge my support! To my knowledge, this has never been done before, and innovation is something to be commended.
Wow! That’s an excellent idea for a website. I dont think anybody has ever done anything like that before.
Who deletes an account off of a website without telling the person why?
Particularly who deletes a friend off of your website without telling them why?
A day ago after watching more and more videos about Age of Conan, I was thinking about playing Age of Conan for a little bit. Particularly a Priest of Mitra. Why? Well because from a single player, story driven RPG standpoint, it seemed like that alone was worth playing. So I made an account on TheConclave.Org and posted on their boards letting them know I was thinking about playing. A lot of the Browncoats/HILYMI members are hanging out there until Warhammer launches and a lot of the other cool people I knew from Tabula Rasa. I said I had my doubts because I wasn’t sure if the healing was “up to snuff” for my taste, but there wasn’t anything horribly negative. Again, I am still at this moment downloading the client. /shrug
Well apparently somebody (I don’t know who… yet) thought it was a good idea to not only delete my post, but delete my whole damn forum account. Now I can’t even PM anyone asking why. I’ve had to go to PlanetTR and PM the moderators of TheConclave.Org, asking them why my account was deleted. Maybe it was a misunderstanding and someone who didn’t know me from TR nuked my account unknowingly (like a conclave member who didn’t play TR). Still though, it says a lot about their moderation policies if a potential friend of the guild can just up and get deleted out of the blue like that.
On April 15th I asked the Browncoats and HILYMI for donations for our vent server. Pretty simple, I wanted to pay for a whole year of one of the best vent providers with best codec around for a 32-man server. Donations at first came in rather slowly, then I put up one of those donation Thermometers/Bats and an amazing thing happened.
As of today, April 25th, thanks to the donations from the Browncoats and Hit it like you mean it, we hit our goal. I’m so proud of everyone coming together to pay for a resource that’s outside my normal scope of things I pay for myself (the guild website I offer for free because it’s all lumped into my Dreamhost account).
Oh and we actually went a little above goal, but that’s ok. I’ll keep those funds in the account until we need them again.
I am am officially hanging up my Injection Gun. I am a 1 character MMO player. 5 1/2 years 1 character in EQ, 2 yeas in WoW, and 6 months here in TR and I had competed everything there was to complete in 4 slow drawn out months. Unfortunately the Alpha program experience assisted in the ending of my Tabula Rasa career.
I will be hanging out in DAoC with Zald until I get into the Warhammer closed (or eventually open) beta from my Collectors Edition pre-order. Warhammer’s Realm vs Realm was based on DAoC. We’re not going to play it seriously, just for fun and something new and different to do till Warhammer comes out. For me Warhammer has been an obsession of mine for 13+ years now. The new information released about the game recently got me super excited and the re-forming of my old guild has gotten me motivated to move into that universe.
I still will have by account active for another month (my account renewed today). Who knows maybe patches will come out that will keep me active in Tabula Rasa, but I highly doubt it. For the record: yes those assholes who complain that a game that’s a challenge is stupid and hate raiding… those people ruined the game.
So today I decided to resurrect HILYMI as a Warhammer: Age of Reckoning guild. I assure you, this is NOT an April Fools joke. Don’t ask me why this came to me on a day like this but continuing frustrations about TR and seeing posts on the HILYMI forums motivated me to do it today… /shrug.
I will continue to hate Warcraft, but I miss the guild. I don’t like what Blizzard has done to the game. It is not the game for me anymore. I’m not interested in going back to Warcraft, but I’m not happy in Tabula Rasa. It’s a great game, but it’s not the kind of game I want it to be and will never be. Warhammer, now with the big budget of EA, is shaping up to be an excellent game.
25 years of Games Workshop universe complexity.
Financial backing of Electronic Arts.
Realm vs Realm game play from Dark Age of Camelot.
Instanced PVP and PVE concepts from Warcraft.
Instanced raiding. World event raids.
Truly the next generation MMO.
I pre-ordered my limited collector’s edition copy on Sunday.
I was talking with Krommy in AIM chat and he mentioned “Isn’t Warhammer still in Beta?”. Yes, Warhammer is due in the fall. Yes it’s quite early to be discussing the guild’s future in Warhammer, but these things take time.
Discussions take time.
Revamping the website will take time.
Finding lost brothers will take time.
Gathering our forces will take time.
Re-forming the officership will take time.
Re-writing policy will take time.These things will take time.
I want all of it worked out BEFORE the game starts. That way we have time to enjoy the game and have a strong clean head start in the universe. We have a lot of lost time to make up. We can start that journey now.
Today I was fired from Tabula Rasa Vault as assistant site manager and as ”Medic Alpha Wolf”. I was fired rather forcefully from the Vault network and for reasons that were down right silly. The current site manager, Ocura is an unprofessional harlot who really doesn’t understand what it’s like to lead people or manage a program like the Alpha Wolves. I pointed out failings in her leadership ability and I got the shaft as a result. I know I haven’t posted about being an Alpha here in my blog, but it was practically a full time job over at PlanetTR and TRVault. This is the beginning of the end for me with Tabula Rasa I can feel it. Mark my word, it’s the beginning of the end of the Alpha program and Tabula Rasa in general.
Sori had a good idea for once. I decided to pick up where he left off and tonight not only was the team holding Retread CP, but the Bane control point in the South East. We had two squads of about 3-4 people and at times we moved people back and forth according to where the Bane where attacking. At times they lauched full assaults at both locations and we lost the SE base a couple of times, but we held the Retread base the entire time. Unlike Sori, I’m actually fully trained at keeping my squad alive and I even tried out some new healing techniques. Granting a Grenadier physical immunity can make a huge impact. Many times over our comm channel I’d yell “Yald, you’re immune, give them HELL!” or “BgFoot, you’re immune, go crazy!!!”. We had a fun time, I’m sure we’ll do more of this in the future.
I’ve found a new source of amusement, the Retread Control Point in the Pools. For the last several nights, various combinaions of members of the Browncoats have come together to entertain ourselves in this chaotic mess fighting off waves of Bane which at times total in the hundreds at once. Shots flying, repair tools pulsing, and most of all death happening. I especially like the Bane’s reponse to our recent mainfame update. It seems they have adapted well and seem a bit more toughened by our new technologies. I’m not disappointed by this, a hard fought enemy is more rewarding when they’re skull gets crushed under my boot. Excuse me while I get back to the killing.
