Blue Kae

Dear, Ubisoft, I heard your DRM servers are causing people a few issues.

Apparently people haven’t been able to play for most/all of Sunday. Of course the thread is only 7 pages long with a few hundred posts, so either not a lot of people are having problems or not a lot of people bought the PC version of your game.

I think this marks my last Ubisoft DRM post. At this point all of the bad things I assumed would happen have and I’m getting tired of feeling negative. I may change my mind if they do something monumentally stupid, but I’m not sure how they could top themselves.

Picked up on this via Stropp (who got it from Engadget). If you are using the latest Nvidia drivers, 196.75, you’ll want to roll them back. Apparently there’s a problem related to the fan controllers which can cause the card to overheat and possibly kill your GPU.

I looked at Nvidia’s support site, and you can’t even download the 75’s now. The current driver release for the 200 series cards for Windows 7 64-bit is 196.21, which is what I’ve been using since the end of January with no problems.

In what was surely only to Ubisoft, their shiny new DRM scheme has been cracked within 24 hours of the release of Silent Hunter V. There’s more details and links at Info Addict, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Destructoid if you’re interested. Ubisoft claims that it really isn’t cracked, but what else are they going to say.

I would say I predicted this, but really who couldn’t have. Regardless of the crack, I’m still not planning to buy any of their games PC or 360. Too bad, I hear Assassin’s Creed 2 is pretty good, but then again I have a literal pile of 360 and PC games I haven’t finished yet.

I mentioned yesterday that there was a new Ask Cryptic column where they started the process of fixing the mess caused by the Vibora Bay announcement. Well today Cryptic release a new State of the Game from Chronomancer as well as small news post from Rekhan with a bullet points summary of the coming expansion and two screen shots.

Here’s the highlights from the SotG message.

Kitchen Sink Patch

Roper starts off with a mea culpa regarding the all of the problems cause by the Kitchen Sink patch. Basically Cryptic admits to not having done sufficient testing, and has attempted to correct this by increasing the size of their QA team and instituting better internal controls to keep changes from STO and other projects from providing nasty surprises.

Communication Improvements

He also expands on what they stated in the previous day’s Ask Cryptic about how they’re intending to improve communication:

• bi-weekly columns for Ask Cryptic and State of the Game
• GM blog for a community channel to the support staff
• monthly chat via IRC with the devs
• an “all-company supergroup” to provide a more visible company presence in the game and additional PvP events
• website overhaul and additional web content: monthly fiction releases, screenshots, fan art, wallpaper, and developer special features (intended to provide the dev’s point of view on the game)

There is a lot of good stuff here. Most of this is specific enough that the community will be able to easily grade Cryptic’s follow through in the coming months, and I can guarantee that there are some heavy forum users keeping a keen eye on how well Cryptic does fulfilling these promises.

Vibora Bay Revelation Expansion

They’ve changed the name of the upcoming expansion from Vibora Bay to Revelation, supposedly this reflects the change from working name to release name. There’s a short mention of a new arch-villain Therakiel (half-angel/demon) who is the focus of the expansion. Then Chronomancer gets into the part most of the Champions player community was waiting for: the expansion will be free. There’s not much additional details beyond general promises of new powers, new play areas, etc. He repeated that the content is designed for the 37-40 range with a new level 40 repeatable lair. Roper was also very careful to emphasize that the change from paid to free doesn’t reflect the quality or size of the expansion in anyway, and closes out the post by promising additional details “very soon.”

Rekhan’s News

Most of the information here is a summary of what Bill already posted in the SotG message, with one new and important detail. Champions Online – Revelation will be released in mid-March of 2010.

Forum Followup

There’s a Chronomancer followup post in the SotG forum thread where he addresses a couple of additional player concerns.

First, they are looking at some technical issues to tie the PTS and Live server accounts together to provide testers with in-game rewards for helping out.

Second, he provides a clarification of his mention about the quality level of the expansion having nothing to do with the pricing change:

What I am saying is that we didn’t consider the expansion to be sub-par and so we’re just giving it to you, or that in some way you’re getting less than we always intended because we’re not charging for it. I am ecstatic that we can provide this level of content to you for the low, low price of nothing! We’re having an internal play test right now and it’s been great to see people that haven’t been through the zone before be blown away at how it looks and plays.

Third, Roper tries to address the whole “STO stole our developers” idea that a lot of players have used as a reason why the game are languished the last few months in regards to patches and communication, saying they’ve been focused solely on the upcoming Revelation expansion and not losing resources to STO.

For me, the best part is the last sentence of his post:

We don’t expect one post to fix everything, but it’s our first step of many in the right direction!

I’m happy to see that they’ve reconsidered the idea of a paid expansion six months after launch, and I like what they’re promising regarding increased communication with the community from all levels of the Cryptic Champions team. Two days of announcements are a good start, but they are only a start.

So like I said yesterday, now we just need to see if  the Cryptic Champions team can deliver on their promises.

There was a new Ask Cryptic yesterday. I couldn’t find a link, but I think this is the first one since before the game launched. Cryptic picked seven questions out of a 32 page, 320 post forum thread, and while that seems like a very small percentage I do think they picked all of the questions that the general community was most interested in finding out answers to.

Because of the recent uproar regarding the last State of the Game message, a lot of the questions were regarding future plans for the game both in terms of design and communication:

Jackalope: …you can expect to see new adventures every other month (roughly). The content will be far more story based and focused on the background of the game.

Chronomancer: …we’re going to be focusing more on creating content to provide multiple paths of advancement within Champions Online. The plan is to create more of what you want in smaller bites so we can do them on shorter timelines.

Arkayne: …We’re stepping up the communication. We’re going to do more Ask Cryptics, more Dev Chats, we’re going to be in-game, playing with you more, Our GMs are going to start letting you know the status on the current bugs, and the entire development team is going to start being more active on the forums.

As someone who enjoys theme based characters, I was especially happy to see this:

IchbinVol: Will there be any reason to have a theme based character in the future? Perhaps a synergy bonus for having a certain set of skills?

BigOtter: That’s actually one of the goals of our Tier 4 powers being introduced in our upcoming expansion – to provide high-end thematic meta-powers for each of the power groups.

Cryptic does seem to be making a start on their forum promises from last week about more and better communication. They also seem to have a proper sense of urgency:

Arkayne: …Oh, and that “soon” we’re talking about up there, that’s not a “soon(tm)” that’s a soon, as in as soon as humanly possible soon.

I do want to say, that I’m still enjoying the game. I’ve not yet reached the level cap and I’ve been leveling slowly enough that all of the content holes in the late game seem to be getting filled before I get there. My main hero, Silver Hunter, is level 35 and still has a full mission log. I’d not really been concerned about direction and communication issues, except peripherally, until the SotG announcement of Vibora Bay. While it is too soon to say for sure, it does seem that Cryptic is now genuinely aware of their PR issues and is starting to address them.

So now we just need to see if  Cryptic’s Champions team can follow through.

I had no idea it was Professor Tolkien’s birthday today (thanks Goldenstar), but I’m definitely going to offer a couple of toasts in his honor. If you want a bit more biographical information on the Professor, go see Once Upon a Hobbit.

Tolkien has been the largest influence on my reading habits every since I was 8 years old. I bought the Hobbit when I was in elementary school via a class book fair. The teacher passed out a small pamphlet that had all of the books being offered with a small summary and a picture of the cover. I don’t remember why I picked that one, but I can remember counting out dimes and quarters to pay for it and I’m sure the librarian was thrilled when I came in with my bag of coins. I still have the book and the slip which I used as a bookmark.

If I remember right, it was that summer that I checked out the Lord of the Rings trilogy from the public library. It took me the entire school break to finish them and I don’t know how much I really understood (certainly not as much as when I read them now), but from then on fantasy was about the only genre I would read (until I found Heinlein and got into sci-fi).

Since then, I’ve reread the books multiple times (including the Silmarillion), enjoyed Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation, and now I spend a little bit of time almost daily in Turbine’s interpretation.

Happy birthday, Professor!

Today marks the one year anniversary of the site.  It all started with rants about DRM and the RIAA.  Even though I’m not in Syp’s league for productivity, I have been happy that I’ve stayed with the site.  I’m at 50 articles published (including this one) and yes I did have to scramble a bit this week to hit that number.

When I started out last October I had 24 hits for the month.  January saw my first real jump with 62 hits and the blog stayed in that neighborhood until April when it jumped to 92.  Traffic jumped again in May to 132 and peaked in August at 142 with September on track for the 140+ range as well.  So right now I’m averaging 4-5 hits per day.  Not hugely popular, but not bad considering my sporadic posting rate.

So huge thanks to those of you who stop by regularly to see if I’ve gotten off my lazy butt and written anything new, and an extra huge thanks to those who’ve left comments.  While I don’t write here for anyone but myself, it’s always nice to get feedback and encouragement.

My goals for the blog for the next year are to post more regularly and more often.  This anniversary kind of snuck up on me and I did have to push a bit to hit the 50 post number.  So for this next blog year, I’m planning to double my output and hit the 150 post mark by this time next year.  So now that its on the internet, maybe I’ll have more motivation to make it happen.

Ars has an interesting article about some coming updates to Xbox Live.  Most of the items I’m pretty lukewarm about: games on demand (basically downloads of full-sized games like what you’d get through Steam) and easier ways to find/buy content (more UI changes).  The big news that I’m exciting about is that they are going to start listing prices in actual dollars (or whatever your local currency is) and allowing purchases using credit cards.  You’ll still be able to use points and buy point cards, but it won’t be forced on you.  Using the marketplace always felt like being at a fair or carnival where everything required even numbers of tickets that you could only by in odd numbered batches.

I really never thought Microsoft would drop using points for their marketplace, and was one of the few features I envied PS3 owners.

There’s a new blog up dedicated to fantasy literature:

The brain child of Regis from the Wizards & Wenches Warhammer blog:

Quilldragon is to be a fantasy blog that focus extensively on fantasy literature. By that we mean that Star Trek is not fantasy literature, and neither is World of Warcraft or Xena the Warrior Princess. Instead we will focus on our genre and deliver news of books, authors and happenings; reviews of old and new books; insightful and interesting articles about the genre; and everything else we can come up with.

If you love fantasy this is the place for you.

Head on over and check it out.