Fake guitars are not for me, but continued drumming

Just to make sure that everything works I take a short break from drumming in Guitar Hero: World Tour to try out the guitar parts, although I am still yet to give singing a bash to test the microphone. I get the guitar controller connected and working without issue and play through a couple of gigs, both on easy difficulty mode, one for lead guitar and one for bass guitar. I probably won't play too much more on the guitar controller than that, though, because I find it quite unfulfilling.

My earlier suspicion about feeling like I am only playing a game with the guitar controller is confirmed, instead of the sensation of actually playing an instrument when on the drums. But I wondered before why this should be a problem, as I play many games using skills only relevant to that game, and I realise now that it is because of the disconnect between the music and the actions. When playing the drums I am hitting pads that are quite credibly an electronic drum kit in time with actual corresponding notes, where the drums pads are in time with the snare or toms and the cymbals or hi-hat in the song require the cymbal pads to be hit. But playing the guitar is much more abstract when compared to the original instrument.

Whilst there is obviously a strong element of digital coordination required to master the guitar controller the game simply doesn't compare to the accomplishment I feel when I play along with a song on a real guitar, an activity I dabble in from time to time. My concern is not so much that I find it more gratifying to play along with a song on a real guitar but more that I feel a disconnect between the music played along with in Guitar Hero and my actions. It is more difficult for me to become involved in the game on the guitar, perhaps because of my experience with real guitar playing, especially compared to the direct connection that exists and I feel with the drums.

That's not to say I think the guitar controller is silly, just that it isn't for me. I have a lot of respect for machines like Zoso who can play the guitar parts on expert difficulty, because I know it takes a lot of skill. I certainly couldn't do it. And just as I prefer the drums and eschew the guitar so the reverse is likely true for others, which works well in a game that encourages play with simultaneous multiple instruments. I can be Meg to Zoso's Jack White. But a talented Meg, please.

As for my drumming, I think it is coming along quite well. Progress will be slow, as I feel I am effectively learning an instrument, even if at a relatively basic level. The key will be to practice consistently, which is what I am striving to maintain at the moment. I breezed through the easy difficulty gigs and moved on to the medium difficulty level, where I am lingering for the moment. I still haven't worked through all of the gigs on medium difficulty, instead going back to gigs and songs that I enjoy playing in order to build up my confidence and skills to a higher proficiency. After all, competently playing an instrument doesn't hinge on sight-reading and familiarity with a song is helping me focus on technique instead of the game.

Out of interest, I enter the practice mode to attempt a couple of the more engaging songs on the difficult difficulty setting to see what later challenges will hold. Playing in practice mode means that missing beats won't end the song early, which will allow me to play through to the end even if I miss plenty of notes. I find that I have a lot of practice ahead of me as it really is quite difficult. That's fine, I am really enjoying playing along even at the lower difficulty settings, getting thrills out of learning the trickier sections of songs and being able to monitor my progress. It also shows that I am being prudent in continuing to practice on medium level, to improve on my skills before attempting something more advanced.

One feature I notice when going in to practice is that there exists the ability to slow down the song during playback, so that needing to play at speed becomes less of an issue, and the notes required to be played and the intervals between them can be practiced instead. This feature, along with the gradual introduction of more complicated rhythms, patterns and multiple-pad hits looks to make Guitar Hero: World Tour an excellent introductory tool to learning to play drums.

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Tags: console, drumming, guitar hero, xbox 360

Overwhelming tedium in the Oculus

Having the Baconeers turn up in Northrend allows me to take a break from trying to find Sapphire, my warrior, emissaries of the Argent Crusade in an effort to raise her reputation with them. I have effectively completed the Argent Tournament, becoming an exalted champion for each of the five Alliance cities, and was looking forwards to my new title without realising that I also need to attain exlated reputation with the Argent Crusade themselves. I suppose it is a typical attitude of the host nation, really. But with the rest of the guild around we can find adventure as a group in one of the 80th level dungeons.

A fairly quick run through the Culling of Stratholme in the Caverns of Time becomes an enjoyable romp after my death knight takes over from the enthusiastic but inexperienced tank, even if I have to brush up on my death knight tanking rotation after so much PvP in Wintergrasp. I end up using icy touch, plague strike, pestilence, and death and decay, getting the death knight's diseases on all the mobs and generating high amounts of threat with death and decay. Whether death and decay is cast first or last is a matter of experience based on how mobile the mobs are likely to be. A static group can be caught in death and decay first, but a potentially mobile group is better pulled with frost strike and death and decay used to lock them in to place next to the death knight.

Apart from the initial spells I then concentrate mostly on keeping diseases up, dumping runic power with frost strikes, and using howling blast in place of obliterate, to damage multiple mobs instead of one, all of which holds aggro well enough for me in the guild group as well as producing a handy amount of DPS. Once we pass the main streets of ever-spawning weakling zombies we romp through the instance and clear quite easily. With our priest now almost reached 80th level a second instance run is suggested, to push her to the level cap. I would be content with just the one successful run, so I can get some more drumming practice, but am happy to continue. Finding out that the suggested instance is the Oculus really ought to have changed my mind.

I have only been to the Oculus once, with Sapphire tanking, and, upon my word, it was boring. I don't relish returning to it, the only lure being to cross it off my death knight's Northrend dungeoneer achievement list. Revisiting the instance it is a shame that I have the impression of it as being remarkably dull, because on reflection there is plenty that is interesting and challenging. The trash mobs fought conventionally are engaging enough and the two bosses fought on the ground are, to be fair, excellent encounters. The first needs good situational awareness of the entire disc in which the battle takes place, having to avoid changing electrical arcs that take time to charge, the second requiring constant movement around a ring and occasional retreats to avoid a huge blast. Both battles involve high mobility and are suitably different from other stationary fights to be worthwhile repeating for the challenge.

The fun and challenging boss fights might raise the question of how I found the instance to be boring initially, and it is a good question. The problem arises when travelling between boss or minion fights, having to take flight on the back of a dragon. Or, rather, when having to fight whilst on the back of that dragon. There are more trash mobs flying between the aerial platforms and these need to be defeated with the dragons in mounted combat. This is where my experience of tanking—and presumably the same applies to DPS and healers—the many levels I have gained in learning to use two dozen or so abilities, the synergies I can exploit and the nuances involved in mitigating damage against me and maximising it towards my foes whilst maintaining a relevant amount of threat, is all bundled up and thrown out of the window in favour of repeatedly pressing one attack button until the mob falls. It's absurdly simplistic.

I understand that it is not feasible to manufacture a complex mounted combat class with even a dozen abilities that can be mastered within a couple of minutes, and is part of the reason why death knights still journey through several hours of combat to learn their basic spells and mechanics to a minimal level, but surely it must be possible to create a more dynamic fight than 'press this button'. Even when the penultimate Oculus boss is defeated and the dragons gain their 'full' powers it is only one more ability for the tank to use, and one that is a taunt of ten second duration with a ten second cool-down. It hardly takes a genius to work out the obvious—and only—tactic for the final fight, particularly as the tooltip for the taunt strongly suggests mitigating the damage with the evasion ability. You don't say.

The final fight is as anticlimactic as World of Warcraft can get. Press the attack button repeatedly, use taunt at every cool-down and keep evasion up. There is no subtlety, no strategy, there is not even any movement required. Just mash the keyboard until the big dragon falls from the sky in front of you, which can take a couple of minutes of drudgery. It is staggeringly monotonous and a genuine shame for the final fight to be this way, because it is an appallingly dull climax to a chain of otherwise interesting conventional battles. It is also likely to be the memory that will linger with a player longest after leaving the Oculus, but it needn't be. Playing through the instance with a more critical eye the second time, expecting a fair bit of tedium from my first visit, I have to admit that I would really enjoy returning to fight everything in there except for all of the flying sections. I might even endure the clearing of the flying trash mobs to fight the intermediate bosses before skipping out without encountering the final boss to actually come away from the Oculus with a positive experience.

It is good that Blizzard have taken new approaches to combat to try to keep the excitement fresh, but it doesn't work in this case. The sad part is that it solely is owing to the dearth of options available whilst engaged in mounted combat. Giving players such limited options is a terrible mistake, particularly when, even with two dozen abilities and powers and combined interactions to use, viable strategies can be determined within a couple of combats and optimal ones with only a little more practice.

At least it looks like Blizzard has improved with the Argent Tournament, offering more options—only just, but still more—for combat and defence and guiding the player through what each ability does and how it is effectively used. Positioning and movement is also important when jousting, with a melee and ranged abilities. It makes me wonder why the mounted combat sections of the Oculus were not designed in a similar manner. Start the first mounted battle in the instance with the core abilities, enough to survive but not too many to be overwhelmed, and have the dragon give guidance through the first wave of flying mobs. Defeat the first boss and gain a couple of new abilities, helpful against the next wave of trash mobs, repeating until the final boss is reached with at least a handful of abilities that require more than a leper gnome's intelligence to use.

As it stands, the climactic battle in the Oculus is less an epic confrontation between a mighty dragon and heroes controlling flying drakes than a dreary waste of time. For an instance that involves highly mobile combat where situational awareness and coordination become vital to survival the tedium of the woefully static flying sections becomes heightened. My suggestion is to defeat the last boss once for the achievement and ignore him afterwards, unless you are desperate for the loot. The Oculus will become far more entertaining as a result.

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Tags: gnomesblight, mmorpg, northrend, oculus, sapphire, world of warcraft

Ice mine

'Get me some ice, would you Penny?', asks my Core Complexion, Inc. agent. Uh, will do, guvnor. I'm not sure why his secretary can't handle such a request until I find out he wants more than a couple of cubes for his daiquiri, ten thousand cubic metres of ice in fact. 'And be quick about it.' Maybe he's throwing a party. Either way, he tells me that there is some floating about the system so I hop in to my trusty Osprey and warp to the deadspace pocket. It is at this point where I jointly remember and learn that ice mining is a different breed to rock mining.

It should be obvious, really, that shooting a laser at ice is not an effective way to collect it, but I honestly didn't expect to get a mission from my agent that held no additional instructions or warnings for someone who had not mined ice before. After all, I continue to get reminder warnings when accepting courier missions if my current ship's cargo hold is not big enough for the package, which I dismiss prior to switching to a bigger ship, so it is interesting that I can accept a mission without any warning dialogue where I don't even have the requisite skills to achieve the primary objective.

I understand that it may not always be feasible to determine whether a capsuleer can achieve a mission or not based on skills. Even with the certificate system in place it could be tortuous to recommend a certain skill-set for encounter missions beyond suggesting core competencies and, even then, there are active and passive defence competencies, as well as missile, energy and projectile weapon systems to take in to account. Never the less, when a mission is presented to mine ice and the capsuleer doesn't have the ice harvesting skill trained it might be prudent to mention that. Either way, it would certainly be better to be consistent. I would rather the capsuleer need to check the details of each mission carefully than get a warning about a lack of cargo space but nothing about lacking necessary skills.

Getting back to the station I check to see what I need to do before I can harvest ice. First, I need an ice harvester module, which will let me mine the ice. Of course, it is rarely that simple and the massive CPU drain of the module makes it unsuitable for any ship other than a mining barge, and only then because of the CPU-need reduction bonus that mining barges get. This means I also need a mining barge to attach to my ice harvester, which is somewhat putting the cart before the horse. A quick look on the market shows that both module and ship are relatively inexpensive, and so feasible purchases for the sake of the mission even if not exactly cost-effective.

Both ice harvesting modules and mining barges need specific skill training, with the good news being that I at least have the prerequisites for each skill already learnt, saving time and frustration. A quick trip to the nearest academy equips me with both skill books and I inject them to begin training immediately, temporarily interrupting working on increasing my production output. With the prerequisite skills trained, ice harvesting being a level one skill, and only needing one level of mining barges to pilot the basic model my training queue shows that I can be mining ice within thirty minutes or so.

However, that thirty minutes of training will only get me in to a Procurer, the simplest of mining barges manufactured by ORE. With one high slot, one thousand cubic metres of cargo space and a puny drone bay only able to hold a single light drone the Procurer sounds like it will be puffing black smoke out of its engines as the steam generators struggle to keep up with energy demands of keeping the map-reading light on. In comparison, another half-day's training in mining barges will get me in to a Retriever with its two high slots, doubled cargo hold, and more generous twenty five cubic metre drone bay, making it a much more attractive option over the disposable Procurer. Whilst the extra training means I will miss out on the mission bonus reward for early completion, if I am going to mine ice I will do it properly.

But it's never that simple. I may have the prequisite skills already trained to learn ice harvesting and how to pilot mining barges, but the Retriever also requires competency in astrogeology IV. Astrogeology may be a skill I trained only to make the occasional mining mission less tedious but at least I have it trained, and to astrogeology III as well. Even so, training the skill to IV will add another couple of days to my plan. So be it! I won't subject myself to piloting sub-standard ships when there is a superior option readily available and within my capabilities, even if it is dedicated to mining. My agent is just going to have to wait for his ice.

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Tags: agents, eve online, mining, mmorpg, osprey, penny ibramovic, procurer, retriever

Kidnap kitty's continuing escapades

My neighbour's cat moved in with me and the neighbour was concerned about the kitty being a nuisance. A couple of short discussions helped convince my neighbour that, actually, I really like cats and I'm fine with her treating my flat like a hotel, as that's what cats do. I get to take care of Panda cat whilst the neighbour goes on holiday, all from the comfort of my own home.

Since then the neighbour has returned from holiday and, despite a brief overnight disappearance of Panda at the same time, kidnap kitty has remained quite firmly ensconced within my abode. The situation remains pretty much as it was before, where Kenickie and Panda get on together surprisingly well, with only the occasional scrap that they get out of their system, and both of them enjoying their own preferred relaxation spots without having to avoid each other. It's quite a happy little home.

Even though I know Panda thinks she is at home with me I still have moments of bewilderment about how comfortable she is. There was that time when I came home late from a day out to find Panda waiting to be fed, instead of heading back to her owner; she will jump on to the bed some mornings to say hello; and will spend days inside even when she isn't expecting me to be home from work. It still strikes me as a little odd on occasion, however much I like her company too.

I got another sign the other night. Panda returns from her outdoor adventures with a mouse she has caught, a gift for me, I suppose. I'm impressed, but also a little worried that the little fellow is still alive and scurrying around. However, Panda keeps a good eye on her prey and doesn't let it elude her, unlike Kenickie. Don't get me wrong, Kenickie is the best cat, it's just that he can be easily distracted. I have seen a mouse or two make good their escape when something shiny catches his eye. However much I guide or carry Kenickie to the new hiding place of the mouse he will insist that it must be where he personally last saw the rodent, before spending the rest of the evening hunting and scratching around that empty spot in vain.

In contrast, Panda almost cradles the mouse in her front paws, never losing sight or sense of it. This is good, as it allows me to get my surprisingly adaptable Blessed Cup of Spider Catching and a bit of stiff paper and still know where the mouse is. I manage to trap the mouse safely and escort it outside, where it probably isn't all that safe still but at least my cables and cords are safer. I'm not sure Panda is too impressed by this act of compassion as I find a dead mouse near my computer desk a couple of days later, although I can't make a positive I.D. on the victim. There is one conclusion I can draw, though, and that is I now have two active hunter kitties living with me.

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Tags: kenickie, kitty, panda

Guitar Hero: World Tour

I have had a few brief flirtations with the Guitar Hero style of game, picking up a Fisher Price guitar and single-string strumming in time with downwards-scrolling notes, but as my initial forays in to the genre were with a group my self-consciousness kicked in to overdrive and I became awfully aware of my mistakes rather than my successes. However, a curious thing happened when Guitar Hero: World Tour was released and the opportunity to play lead guitar, bass guitar, drums or sing was introduced. At the next gaming day we have some multiplayer fun with Guitar Hero: World Tour and after a few goes with the various options I settle in to playing the fake plastic drums.

I discovered two points that day. The first that the drums don't have to be hit anywhere near as hard than I first expected to produce a response, the second that I enjoy the drumming a huge amount, much more than the guitar equivalent. I think part of this is the verisimilitude between fake plastic drumming and real drumming, in contrast to the stringed instruments, such that I feel I am playing or at least learning to play the drums and not simply learning how to play a game. I don't know why this should bother me, as I don't particularly care that in playing Burnout, for example, I am only learning how to play Burnout better. Maybe it's because I already try to play the guitar, maybe I know that drummers are the butt of many jokes*. Probably it's simply because I actually enjoy playing the drums and this seems a pretty good way to learn at least the basics at home.

Whatever the reason for my enjoyment I come away thinking about getting the game for myself so that I can enjoy it more regularly. After some investigation I find that the fake plastic instruments for competing game Rock Band are not compatible with those for Guitar Hero on the Wii. Whilst the fake plastic drums for Guitar Hero look much more interesting to play than the Rock Band equivalents—two fake plastic cymbals as well as three drum pads and a foot pedal for Guitar Hero compared with the four drum pads and foot pedal of Rock Band—the music included with Rock Band looks to be more my style. Although the fake plastic instruments are not compatible across games on the Wii they certainly are on the Xbox 360. If I am to get the better instruments and more suitable songs it looks like the Wii is not platform I should be using.

Luckily, the Xbox 360 is relatively cheap nowadays, I find a bundle that includes the latest installment of the Burnout racing series, and work gave me a small bonus again this year. It is almost cost effective to get the console for the game rather than limit myself by sticking with the Wii, so I take the plunge and order an Apple Xbox 360 on-line along with the complete Guitar Hero: World Tour package. Big thanks go to both Melmoth and Zoso of Killed in a Smiling Accident for their help in getting me hooked up with a console and the game, particularly for Zoso's inexhaustible knowledge about fake plastic instruments.

It doesn't take long to get the Xbox 360 set-up—after winching the monstrosity in to place and taping over the bat-signal of a power light on the external supply—and soon I have Guitar Hero: World Tour installed on the internal hard drive. The instruments require a little assembly too, but nothing complicated, and I get myself in the game creating my drummer rock star. It is not long before my band, Moos, is booked to play its first gig. I start on the 'easy' setting, eschewing beginner mode, and start rapping away on the pads.

The easy level pretty much ensures you have a sense of rhythm without being too tricky, with only a few occurrences of two notes needing to be hit at once and the occasional use of the bass pedal. The only problem with the scarcity of some notes is that if you happen to miss then the associated drum sound is excluded from the song until the next note of that type is struck properly. If you miss a bass note the accompanying music track can seem a little empty for the next while until you get another chance to play a bass note. It all adds to the illusion of actually playing the drums, though.

With the exception of one gig, which I bizarrely don't have enough cash to pay for, I blast my way through all of the gigs on the easy difficulty setting, getting good scores in each. The free-form drum fills are still an amusing exercise in trying to hit everything as rapidly as possible and occasionally see a drum stick fly from my hand. They really should have wrist straps attached for the safety of surrounding objects and televisions. Did Activision not learn from the Wii-mote debacle?

Even being able to keep a firm grip on only one stick hasn't hampered my progress, my skills surpassing Meg White levels already. Now I am moving to the medium difficulty setting, which has a lot more notes and isn't shying away from simultaneous notes, but still keeps the drumming relatively simple. I like the way the game slowly builds up competency whilst still throwing in the occasional tricky section to keep me on my toes. I am also having a whole load of fun! Did I mention I bought a drummer's stool?

*How do you know when a drummer is at your front door? He doesn't know when to come in.
Return to post.

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Tags: console, drumming, guitar hero, xbox 360

Places I've been

The Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah presents a map of the systems Kirith Kodachi has been, colour-coded with stronger colours representing systems visited the most, and compels me to do the same:

It shouldn't be much of a surprise that I have stayed mostly within Caldari space, and almost exclusively in high-sec. My excursions across the galaxy have been owing to joining a corporation for some brief attempts at PvP and now being in a second corporation with a POS in Minmatar space. I'm not overly concerned that I haven't ventured far, as even my own small corner of the galaxy still feels vast to me.

Having written that, I think I'll invest some time in taking the occasional holiday jaunt through different systems, maybe even through low- or null-sec space once I get a jump clone, if only to light up the map for future updates. A kind of home-made achievement system, if you like.

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Tags: eve online, maps, meme, mmorpg, penny ibramovic

Need to expand

Waiting for the scrapmetal processing skill and its prerequisites to train saw my stock run quite low and once I could refine my mission loot I set to replenish my stocks to healthy levels. In picking out the BPOs for the modules I was confident would sell I install some jobs before I hit a wall. It's almost surprising to find I am still limited in the number of jobs I can run.

Even though I have trained in mass production I still cannot run a large number of jobs at once and the only way to have the capability to run more simultaneous jobs is to buy the advanced mass production skill book and train in that, which costs a cool twenty million ISK. I have been able to work around this limit so far mostly because the manufacturing runs for modules take less than a day and I can easily delay a run or two until tomorrow. However, with a healthy wallet it may be time to consider purchasing the skill book and expand my capabilities.

I have a handful of module BPOs that I can manufacture and sell for a decent profit but there are many more BPOs available to buy, and it has been quite a while since I have researched anything. I know that I am working towards Tech II manufacture but this shouldn't stop me from exploring more conventional options at the same time. Considering that even basic skill training has enabled me to have a few dozen open orders, compared to only a few laboratory jobs, that I only use half of them at most tells me that I am probably doing something wrong.

My trading error could be in not selling to enough markets or not taking advantage of buy orders to snap up bargains, but it could just as well be that I am simply not making enough unique modules. Even with only three or four stations to sell to, splitting ten modules amongst them would make much better use of my order limit than the five or six I currently manufacture. I will take a look at the market and see what I might be able to make. Maybe I could even start to look at producing some of the smaller ships, shuttles or frigates.

Buying the advanced mass production skill book is another effectively unrecoverable cost, but also one that will streamline my business by removing a bottleneck in research and manufacture. When I am sitting on two hundred million ISK I won't miss that twenty million investment, and there is no better way to progress than to use my assets to expand my current little empire.

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Tags: eve online, industry, mmorpg, penny ibramovic

Almost hitting the wall

I had previously considered that reaching 80th level is not the end of the game and that I would continue doing exactly what I had been doing before just without gaining XP, but I turned out to be wrong. I find myself logging in to Azeroth and wondering what to do. The quests are unappealing for their useless rewards, apart from offering fodder to be disenchanted, and the value of gold is neither here nor there when I have my swift flying mount and cold weather flying. And as much as I try I find it difficult to care about the quest text, if only because I know that despite repeated assertions by the NPCS of my single-handed heroism I know I am barely a cog in a machine in a mostly static world, although the phasing generously employed in some areas at least adds some semblance of effecting change.

I think I am getting to the end of World of Warcraft. Even the Argent Tournament is reaching its conclusion. After striving previously to reach exalted status with all the home factions for the Ambassador achievement and working out a winning strategy for jousting it was only a short journey to become an exalted champion for each Alliance race. I even manage to get Sapphire fifty pets so that I get the gift of Stinky the skunk, a pet I have desired since seeing skunks roam Terrokar Forest, long before the achievement system was even in place. I am not sure what else is left to do.

I am not going to raid again. I truly enjoyed all the forty-man raids I participated in, from Molten Core and Blackwing Lair to Ahn'Qiraj and some of the original Naxxramas, and even if I don't have the impression that the new raid content isn't quite as challenging I am simply content to have more flexibility in my personal schedule than working my life around a raiding group. I could work to increase my reputation with some more Northrend factions but the rewards from the quartermasters are unlikely to be worth the effort involved, particularly if I am not going to advance to raid instances, which reduces the effort to repeating the same daily quests and making it too much like 'work'.

Running the occasional instance would probably increase my interest sufficiently to remain entertained, letting me practice proper DPS with my deathknight or actual tanking with my warrior, but I have had some poor PuGs recently that have rather discouraged me from looking for groups. Whether it is the hunter who openly mocked me for suggesting a tactic to make my tank's life easier or the shaman who didn't think until after we wiped on a tricky boss to mention that it was the first time she'd been there, after a succession of previous wipes in the instance, I would rather work with people, not be suspicious of when or how I will suffer a preventable wipe. Mistakes are forgivable, but stupidity doesn't learn.

Luckily, just as I am wondering whether to renew my game time, the rest of the guild turns up and resumes the weekend instance runs. Instead of my normal routine of picking up a bunch of daily quests for the Argent Tournament, completing them within an hour and wondering when the next Wintergrasp battle will start there are plans being made to delve in to a dungeon. With one man down we take on the Halls of Stone as a four-man group before the straggler appears and we move on to Halls of Lightning for the daily dungeon quest. The next week we take on Utgarde Pinnacle as somewhere unvisited by the guild in general, but not for all individuals, and The Baconeers romp through to defeat the King.

It is surprising how these relatively simple runs inject a new spark of interest in to the game for me. Being in a group and taking on more difficult challenges with friends is a far more rewarding experience than running through familiar solo content, even if the group content is also familiar. The friendly atmosphere and general competence of the group is comforting, the banter is witty and more provocative for knowing each other, and there is little pressure to be perfect. It is fun!

The renewal of guild instance runs comes at a good time too. I may be an Exalted Champion of the Alliance from the Argent Tournament but I also need to be exalted with the Argent Crusade to get the associated title. I wasn't sure if I could face the reputation grind involved but the instance runs with friends let me view my solo time as a relaxing hobby and not a time-sink. I am now running around Icecrown and will pop over to Zul'Drak to seek out Argent Crusade NPCs for reputation-gaining quests. Now maybe I need to convince someone else to tank so that I can take my death knight somewhere other than Wintergasp.

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Tags: gnomesblight, mmorpg, sapphire, world of warcraft

Becoming a daytrader

My latest production run of modules comes off the manufacturing line and I ship them to the handful of markets I have found to be lucrative, finding again that one station with a level three mission agent has no heavy missiles and so is ripe to be exploited. Some modules start to sell better than I have expected and I go back a few days later to start a second manufacturing run to take advantage of the quick turnover.

As I am making the jumps to my manufacturing base I check the status of all of my orders and find that someone has dared to undercut my ammunition price. With good sales figures and all of it profit, because of refining the minerals from scrap metal, I see that I can buy the daytrading skill book whilst maintaining my newly acquired wallet balance of one hundred million ISK. Of course, there is little point in having ISK for the sake of it and I really ought to invest it, but there is nothing wrong with basking in the obvious fruits of my progress occasionally.

Popping in to a state academy to pick up the daytrading skill book is is only a single jump out of my way, after which I inject and start to learn the skill as I head for my destination. With the training time only having a multiplier of one I get a couple of levels under my belt within minutes, happy to relax in dock waiting for the training to complete, because once that is done it only takes a few commands to modify my ammunition sell order to undercut the competition and be the more attractive price again. And it is all done without having to make the three jump journey to the station holding the sell order.

Although the skill book won't make me any money directly it will save me significant amounts of time that I would otherwise spend travelling or waiting for orders to sell passively rather than stimulating sales. Instead, I can put my time to more profitable use, so the skill is definitely a good investment. Of course, I forgot that I have new modules coming off the manufacturing line with some of them earmarked to go to the station where I just modified the order, but the principle holds and I am pleased with the proof-of-concept demonstration.

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Tags: eve online, industry, mmorpg, penny ibramovic

Hat news today

Browsing around at LOLCATS I notice an advert for Shana Logic, an on-line company whose adverts I have seen here before as they often show off attractive and stylish wares at the side of the photos of cats with wacky captions. This time something catches my attention enough to click-through the advert and visit the on-line shop, where I start browsing hats and scarves.

The scarves are pretty cool, but the hats are just the ticket! I have been after a neat little hat like the ones here for a while. Most of the knitted hats I have seen in the shops are too big and are still baggy on the top of my head even when pulled down over my ears, which looks awkward and simply won't do, so having one that fits snug is just what I have been looking for to keep my bonce stylishly warm. On top of that, the furry in me is naturally drawn to the excellent crocheted hats as they come complete with animal ears. I am in hat-buying nirvana.

Whilst some might think the kitty hat is the obvious choice for me there is one that is far more suitable. It isn't the neat panda hat, because although it is distinctive the white base probably wouldn't work with my pale skin. Instead, the perfect hat for me is the raccoon hat. I may have a tiger tail and ears but if I were to make a second costume, which is possible, it would be of a raccoon. They are fabulous little critters and really cute, with the face mask that identifies them as nature's bandits.

There is nothing for it, the raccoon hat must be ordered forthwith! The colours are great, the ears are brilliant and the fit is perfect. This is one of the coolest pieces of clothing I have seen in a long time.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments »
Tags: furry, hat, raccoon