Category: Gaming

Humpday AddOn – Altoholic

The collection of addons I use is growing, and some of them are quite amazing so I thought once a week I’d take an in-depth look at one that I use, explaining how it works and what it’s used for. AddOns are not essential to any game, but they do help quality of life a huge amount, and I think there are so many options available out there it’s nice to get a cohesive list.

The first addon I’m going to talk about is one called altoholic. If you’re not familiar with how to install addons in World of Warcraft, well there’s really no excuse these days it’s pretty hands off. You simple download the twitch desktop client (previously known as the curse client) swap the screen over to mods (top left side), find WoW (make sure it’s pointing at the correct directory) and you’ll see two columns. One is ‘my addons’ and the other is ‘get more addons’. Pretty simple stuff. Then you just do a search.

Anyway. Altoholic keeps track of pretty much everything for all of your characters, and it’s lovely. It will keep track of order hall resources (and pretty much any currency you want), how many order hall followers you have, what ilevel they’re sitting at, what your artifact weapons are at as far as levels, what professions each character has and what level they’re at, bag space, and even what inventory they each have. I’ve been using this addon to monitor old WoD garrison resources so I can trade them in for craft materials to continue to level up a few characters that are below 700 in their respective craft.

It will tell you if missions are completed, how long it has been since you logged them in, how many auctions they currently have on the go, how much mail they have, how many AH bids they have, and even things like achievements.

It’s basically a one stop shop to see everything about everyone you play, and if you happen to be a collector of alts (like some of us are) it’s an addon that I really can’t recommend enough.

What I like most of all about this addon is that besides logging your characters in there’s almost no customization required. The default display is everything I need though you can customize some features and even enable account sharing if you happen to be multiboxing.

The addon is also pretty small as far as memory usage, clocking in at around 3.8mb for me personally. So far I haven’t come across a downside, but if you spot one please do share!

Next week we’ll be taking a look at GSE: Gnome Sequencer Enhanced, an advanced macro addon.

Noblegarden and Other Happenings

There’s a lot going on in World of Warcraft this week, and I love it. Yesterday marked the beginning of Noblegarden, an event where you can harvest some awesome eggs for a pet and mount (I know there are other things but these were the ones that interested me the most) and of course there’s temporary appearance gear like the cute bunny ears I am wearing on my Draenei monk above.

There was an invasion in the broken shore yesterday, so with some help from my husband we took my monk through them all and she reached just shy of level 105. Afterward we decided to duo one of the 98-110 instances just because, and she reached 105. I have leveled through the broken shore so many times (I have 5 level 110 characters so far) that I love finding new and interesting ways to push my characters along. Invasions are a great way to get a level and a bit, pet battles still reward a fair amount when I’m in the mood, and duoing dungeons meant for groups is always a sure winner.

I’ve also been working on my professions, but I’m not sure where I want to go with the monk. Right now she has inscription (and is my only scribe) and herbalism. I’m thinking of dropping herbalism (I have two others) and picking up engineering so she can use some of the fun toys which would come in handy for farming (like the loot a rang. There’s a draenor version that anyone can use and then there’s an engineer version that can be used anywhere). For now I’m undecided.

I REALLY enjoy the monk. I have been learning how to optimize my windwalker spec, and I want to pick up the other two artifacts and complete those so I have them on hand and so I can get down to learning brewmaster (tank) and windwalker (healer). I don’t expect it will take me too long to reach level 110 and then I can start running WQ (world quests) for gear, order resources, and all that fun stuff. It’s also my first time playing a draenei and I am LOVING the look. I may race change to a lightforged one if I can ever manage to unlock them. For now I still require a fair amount of faction. Ugh. Faction.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Economy Update

When I formatted my computer 10 days ago I lost all of my sales data, so I’ve started over and this information is from the past 10 days or so. In order to purchase 1 token a month to cover a subscription a player (on the North American servers) has to profit around 6k a day, anything else goes to generic purchases (repairs, etc). As you can see from the chart, I’m bringing in around 28k the past 7 days, 27k after expenses like repairs and any flips I buy. That’s a pretty nice chunk of change. I’m in game quite a bit but I tend to be AFK and I play sporadically, you can usually find me playing during my son’s afternoon nap, and the 2h period I have when he goes to bed at night. Otherwise I tend to be in front of the AH looking for things to snipe. I spent money on ghost iron ore because I turn that into living steel so long as the price still gives me a profit. My order hall nets me a huge chunk of change, and now that I have 5 level 110 characters I can start doing Argus with them and the order hall can technically pay for my token easily even if I were to do nothing else.

My latest project is a baby monk I’ve been leveling up for farming. Right now I have her at level 103. I’ve picked up some macros for her windwalker and brewmaster spec that make farming a lot easier (ie: one button commands). I’ve decided to go engineer so she has access to the loot-a-rang, and I can macro that as well.

My low population RP realm has an odd market. I’ve sold a mog or two for 10k+ but battle pets have so far been a slog to move. As is food. The funny thing is I’ve been selling darkmoon fair recipes for about 6-7k each and they only cost 25 fish.. which are around 7g right now. Patience as always is the name of the game.

I haven’t been flipping or reselling at all. Nothing has come up that was worth trying to flip, but I keep hoping to catch something big. Learning the market has been fun and interesting and I’m having fun sticking to one server instead of 4 and just learning the particulars of this one. I may not pull in hundreds of thousands of gold daily, but I do well enough for my satisfaction.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Movies and Games: Perfect Match

Unlike their comic book cousins, blockbuster movies based on video games often seem to struggle, not only with the critics and fans, but also with that most important measure of all—the box office take. Despite having what one would think is a ready-made audience, game-inspired titles simply don’t seem to have the same impact or appeal. So, what is the problem with game-based films, and are they always destined to fail?

The $240m made by last year’s Assassins’ Creed was a fair return on its $125m budget, but it still pales in comparison to the $853m made by Thor: Ragnarok or the $863m made by Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Meanwhile, Marvel’s Black Panther is still beating the new Tomb Raider movie to the number one slot at the U.S. box office five weeks after its release, passing the $1bn mark along the way.

BBC Radio Five’s Mark Kermode thinks that the problem is a fundamental one. “Games are designed to be played; they are designed to be interactive,” he explains. “You are not a viewer; you are a participant. Take that on to the big screen, and you are just watching someone else playing a video game.”

And therein lies the problem. The appeal of most video games is the chance to be the hero yourself and directly influence the action. Often games will echo the kind of scenes you are familiar with from a typical action film, sci-fi space adventure or war movie, but they allow you to play the lead role. When you transfer that game back to the cinema, you lose that critical first-person connection. It becomes a case of cinema imitating games that imitate cinema.

Lara Croft may have become ubiquitous, appearing on everything from backpacks and t-shirts to her own slot machine game. But that doesn’t make her any more real, and she is still just ‘us’ when we play the game. But in the film, she becomes someone else.

To be fair, the new Tomb Raider film does try its best to bridge the gap. Alicia Vikander’s version of our titular heroine, Lara Croft, is a long way from the fantasy figure that Angelina Jolie offered us. She is less invincible and more vulnerable, gets properly hurt (and even dirty), and cannot take on seventy men at a time and come out without a scratch.

Vikander’s Lara draws on her tenacity, street smarts, determination and drive, rather than impossible CGI stunts and superhuman powers. More notably, in a world stuffed with shoot-em-ups, she is moved by having to kill someone in her first fight. It’s all a far cry from the ‘wham, bam, thank you, Ma’am’ of the earlier outings, but, nonetheless, it is still a game-based film.

For all its politically-correct costumes and appropriate emotional responses, the disconnect remains, and it becomes more and more frustrating as the film goes on. Once we finally reach the tomb referenced in the movie title, the action quickly degenerates into ‘Tomb Raiders of the Lost Ark’, and you find your thumbs searching the cinema armrest for the ‘jump’ button in an effort to help Lara Croft avoid the spikey, swinging logs and spring-loaded spears.

Perhaps video games are just not meant to make the transition from the small monitor to the big screen. Perhaps even the best actors cannot make us feel as involved as we do when we take the controls ourselves. But with new Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog films on their way this year, a second Angry Birds movie due in 2019, and Tomb Raider all set for an eventual sequel, it certainly won’t be ‘game over’ for the genre any time soon.

PC Woes

I’ve been saying I’ll get back into streaming for a while now. Set up at our new place, our schedule is a bit flexible since my husband does shift work, but I wanted to eek out some time here and there to get a stream in. Unfortunately, the issues I had with my PC kept expanding and it seemed like no matter what I would do, I couldn’t fix them or narrow down the problem.

It started out simple enough. I had the movers take my computer tower, but they didn’t insulate it or even wrap it up. They just tossed it into a box along with a bunch of my son’s toys. The travel was in -40C weather for two weeks, and I completely forgot that this could have an adverse effect on my water cooling system.

When I started up my computer after the move I was experiencing some serious lag. I would lag while gaming, I would lag while typing. I ran memory tests and disk drive tests but everything came back normal. This marked the beginning. I upgraded the CPU, the motherboard, and the RAM. I reinstalled windows. My lag was cured and I could game again but then other oddities started to happen.

Once every two days or so I would have a BSOD, and a dump file would fail to be created to give me more details. I’d have random video game crashes that referenced memory, and a few other variety of crashes. I was getting a message about my CPU fan and PC temperatures but I didn’t understand why because what I could physically see was all fans working. I installed a program to monitor the temperature and found that all 6 cores would boot up at 85C and then if I did anything at all, they’d jump to 100C and stay there. Well, that wasn’t good.

I was also experiencing an odd bug of white noise when my mic was on mute. I had no idea where it was coming from.

So I got a new fan and heat sink, then my husband bought me a new fan for my case with fancy LED lights. All of that was installed and the temperature warnings stopped – but the BSOD did not. The white noise when my mic was muted also went away.

When I opened the case to install the case fan, I was unable to get windows running. It kept telling me that a component couldn’t be reached and that I should hit escape or F8. Neither of those did anything. I popped in my USB stick that has a media file of windows 10 and tried to repair, that wouldn’t work.

I decided that my SSD was probably the culprit, and I removed the SSD. I tried to install Windows to one of my two remaining drives, but the USB version of windows was also corrupted (even though it was brand new and I had just used it the previous week) – so I had to make a new media file. THEN I installed windows.

That was two days ago, and so far I have had zero issues. Of course right now I’m keeping things incredibly bare bones, I have discord, WoW, and that’s about it. I wanted to make sure the computer ran well for a few days before I started installing other things like xsplit.

This whole ordeal has taught me a few things, like next time we move I’ll be taking my computer with me. Thankfully our items are covered by our movers and I can get reimbursed, but spending a month trying to troubleshoot these issues has been a real pain. I’ve had multiple good friends helping me out, offering advice, providing tech support and showing me what tests to run – for that I am grateful. I’m not a very tech savvy person but I’m a quick learner and I like to think I can at least handle the basics of my own PC.

Now that it appears things are finally solved – lets get to streaming!