The Dark Knights

There have been a lot of diablo clones since the original game came out. Some of them have been good, some of them not so good… rarely we get a gem. Im now really looking forward to this title, and you gotta dig their sarcastic humor!

Well most folks in TDK know Im a rather hardcore Sci Fi fan. If its space, has aliens, and some form of lasers then I simply cant get enough.

Due to this I just happen to be a rather big Star Trek fan. I havent up till now purchased the game as my time in beta was rather unimpressive…but…as a trekkie its rather hard to resist the urge of Leonard Nemoy calling to me at night.

Thankfully my problem was solved when a buddy and guildmate (Seires) decided to hook me up with a copy. Man o Man was I excited. Downloaded the game fast as possible from Direct2drive at a blazing 2.2megs a second and in no time was patched and ready to go.

Right as I go to log in, bam server crash. I go to the forums and a Cryptic employee posts about an unexpected downtime…however he copy and pastes an OLD post about a scheduled maintenance…wtf… ok typos happen but usually you fix them when you notice, well not this guy. Its 2 hours later and he still has the wrong notification up.

Oh well no worries servers down for 20 minutes and they patch…wait… how do you have an unscheduled downtime / crash and then follow it with a patch. Come again? Oh well… no worries shit happens.

I create my toon get into game and start the rather lengthy (1 hour plus) tutorial. Its been about 40 minutes since the server crashed and Im almost done with the ground phase of the tutorial when my toon starts rubber banding like mad. Sure enough server goes down. I head to the forums again, still have the same broken announcement about the previous downtime unfixed…and no new announcement. Hopefully someone there knows there was a crash.

After talking to a few of the other rather angry forum denizens it turns out this is the 5th “Unscheduled emergency downtime” for the day. Folks are now calling it Star Trek Offline and apparently Cryptic is trying to get in touch with Guinness Books so they can nock off Funcom with Anarchy Online as the most unstable launch of all time.

Well grats Cryptic, you definitely made one hell of a first impression on me. Something tells me many refunds and charge backs will be springing up over the weekend.

So its no secret that I like shooters and most of TDK does too, but its been a while since a good one came out. Modern Warfare 2 was a joke with their non-dedicated server fiasco, however things are turning around.

For those of you who have been around for a while may remember a much loved game from the 90’s called Starsiege Tribes and no… I dont mean the second one, that one was garbage. Well this week in my usual browsing of mmorpg.com I happened to find a post about Global Agenda and decided to read it and was rather shocked.

Take a look at this.

Now that game play looks creepily like a moderned up Tribes and that alone would probably make the game worth picking up, but check this out.

So I think a few of us are going to give this game a shot, and Ill let you know what we think.

Well last night we gave our first go at ICC and we had mixed expectations. We figured progress would be slow, but we’d down a few bosses.

However by the end of the night we had downed 3 bosses and almost gotten Saurfang down. Sadly we didnt have enough ranged DPS to deal with the nasty beasts so we ended up calling it.

Not to bad for a guild that just hit 80 about 2 weeks ago.

Here is the loot we got.

1. Linebackher = Muradin’s Spyglass
2. Rickytick = Bracers of Dark Blessings

Sadly everything else was mail or guildbanked, hopefully we get some better drops tonight.

Well last night was our second week of raiding. We nocked out the weekly raid early in the day, and then managed to pound out VoA 10, Ony 10, and ToC 10.

The only fight that gave us any trouble was the Champions fight, but we think that was mainly due to one of our pug dps’ers dropping the ball on CC.

Over all it was a great night and looking forward to starting ICC 10 man this week. I added last nights EPGP stats to the site, so simply click the link to the right to find out where you stand.

After a rather rough start on our first night only getting ony down, we did manage to rally on Friday night and one shot ToC. We are going to be progressing into ToGC and then start ICC next week.

EPGP seems to be working perfectly for us. If you want to see where you stand then simply download the addon and you can check in game, or you can check it here. The only issue with the web page is the log doesnt always match the stats if there is a change. I.E. if you notice it shows that Aessedai got an item, and her GP is increased, however, if you check the stats, it shows shes at the base 100. The reason for that is she decided to give her item to Linebackher instead, and the GP was transfered. Other than that the numbers are fine.

I will try and remember to update that page as often as possible.

Here are the items that dropped this week. GB = Guild bank.

1. GB = Spaulders of the Snow Bandit
2. GB = Gloves of Looming Shadow
3. GB = Boots of Tortured Space
4. GB = Girdle of the Farseer
5. GB = Dragonstalker’s Helmet
6. GB = Valorous Darkruned Gauntlets
7. Phaine = Sabatons of the Lingering Vortex
8. Linebackher = Talisman of Volatile Power
9. Billybo = Shoulderplates of Frozen Blood
10. Billybo = Furious Gladiator’s Dreadplate Legguards

Nothing will scare the hell out of guild leaders and recruits more than tweaking a guilds loot system. Usually TDK goes by officer allocation for our games, but WoW is a bit different of a community and there are a lot of folks who have been burned before by bad guilds so we wanted to make sure that our loot system was fair, balanced, and 100% transparent.

After doing some research we have decided to go with EPGP. You can find out about the addon here. The system is kind of a combination of DKP with a ladder system. It keeps thing fair for the most part and is very customizable. There is no 100% fair system, and no mater what you pick you can always find away to work it even if its just a small benefit.

If you arent a rocket scientist or simply like me and your brain hurts when you think about charts, coefficients, and graphs check this article out. We will be using a very similar system.

Here is our modified version.

• Be on time and have signed up – 500 EP
• Every 15 minutes while on raid or sitting – 250 EP
• Boss kill – 1000 EP
• Progression Boss Kill – 2000 EP
• Full clear – 2500 EP
• 10% weekly EP decay
• 25% EP penalty if you No show on signup

One thing about the last line, we arent monsters here… if some kind of emergency happens, power outage, hospital, abducted by crazy liberal democrats… we will work with you. Its mainly to keep people from signing up and then deciding to go have a beer with friends instead of logging in.

I understand that RL is more important than the game, however, everyone also needs to realize that when you say you are going to be somewhere… you need to be there.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please let an officer know. This is a new system for all of us, and it might be slightly modified over the next few weeks as we all learn about it and as problems if any arise.

So TDK has used Ventrilo as our voice program of choice for the past 5 or 6 years. We originally moved from teamspeak to Vent for the better voice quality, but the price had always been an annoyance. Nothing feels worse than having to go to your guild mates with a hat begging for money.

Well this year our vent contract came up and instead of paying another 120 bucks for a year we decided to check out the new teamspeak 3 beta. Now for the past few years Teamspeak has pretty much been the bastard step child of voice servers. I.E. you only use it if you have to cause the quality is crap….well not anymore.

Teamspeak just released their latest version Teamspeak 3 which has very competitive voice quality with Ventrilo. That… and you can run up to 512 people on your own private server for free as a non-profit.

So for the time being TDK will be swapping over to Teamspeak 3 from ventrilo. You can download the app here, then just contact Phaine in game or on the forums for server info.

So after enjoying 1000 – 1500 pings regularly on Blackrock, we decided it was time for a change. Cant really raid effectively with 6 second delays. You can find us now on Garona Alliance side. Its a Central time zone server, so nice and central for everyone.

Hopefully Garona will be a better experience

Well its been a few weeks since we have come back to WoW and we’ve been grinding away. Festus, Waddy, and I all poped 80 in the last 24 hours and have started gearing up. Was a rather interesting transition from normal dungeons to heroics, but so far Im tanking em fairly well and with quick gear upgrades from badges like this we should be good to start raiding this week or next.

Nothing like getting a piece of raid gear after less than 10 heroics.

We are still looking for more players, so if you are 80+ and want to get in with a good coordinated group thats just starting out contact Wadzia in game.