myrddin.org: weblog

After many months of not being able to progress very far with my Karazhan attunement and always finding it difficult to find groups with the respective key classes I decided to change from the Suramar (US) realm to the Nagrand (Oceanic) realm so I could play with people in my own timezone.

The transfer process which I was expecting to take several days took a whole 4 minutes! The only problem however was that blizzard did some ‘changes’ and broke the authentication for what appeared to be all people who had transferred or topped up their accounts on that day so I couldn’t log in until the next evening.

I did a bit of research and found a guild that was progressing into Karazhan and put in an application. I was lucky enough for them to accept me and put into their 3rd Karazhan group that they are getting established which is great news. I’ve been itching to see and play this content of the game. Better yet, I decided to LFG for a bit and see if I could complete my attunement and get the Karazhan key and what do ya know, there were plenty of groups and I managed to get my key with almost no fuss at all!

I then went on my merry little way trying to gain reputation with various factions to obtain the Heroics keys for some dungeons so I can start getting drops needed for some tailored items and so on when I got my first invite to Karazhan! I’m certainly very pleased with this as this is what I’ve been trying hard for months to be able to do. I took some screenshots along the way.

Someone in the guild also made a really cool video which I (Adramune) can be seen briefly.

Filed under: World Of Warcraft

I bought an Apple Macbook Pro a little while ago! Now this is very significant coming from someone who has been a linux zealot for such a long time! Plain and simply though, I got tired of the instability of Transgaming’s Cedega product, which really is a modified version of wine to run your popular windows games on linux.

I have been using cedega for quite some time, and up until recently have been very *very* happy with it. As a heavy World of Warcraft user, I need to periodically use a voice communication software like Ventrillo or Teamspeak. While Teamspeak does work under linux, it is a complete pain in the ass to use while World of Warcraft under Cedega is running. Ventrillo is almost fsck’ing useless , no wait.. it IS fsck’ing useless.. *sigh*

I also started experiencing random crashes , more and more often, when playing WoW under Cedega and I could only attribute this to using it under Cedega so I finally got the shits with it to a point where I went out and bought a new 17″ Macbook Pro, one of the new ones with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU’s in it. I must say, its a freakin impressive looking machine. While it has taken a while to get used to the interface after using Fluxbox for so long, it really is quite a nice interface. There are still things that really annoy me but thats what I get for leaving a perfect (!) linux desktop (yes, if only games manufacturers would make them for linux as well as windows/mac…

So the difference in gaming persormance I bet you are asking.. well.. at first it was pretty shit.. I was really *really* disappointed considering I had spent so much on a new laptop to replace my main desktop for the sole purpose of gaming. It turns out that there was a minor World of Warcraft tweak which completely turned those performance issues around. I now get more than 100ms network latency and around 30-50 frames per second improvement over running on linux. The Macbook pro has 2 x fans which dynamically change their speeds based on how hot the CPU or GPU are and when I am in certain graphically intense locations like Netherstorm, the fans kick in to their higher speeds and its rather audiable, but when I’m in these areas I tend to have the sound/music up and don’t really notice it too much at all. When I’m not gaming, the laptop is so quiet I really can’t hear a thing at all.

I also had to pick up another new pair of Sennheiser headphones that used USB as the mac requires an amplified microphone which most microphones aren’t. So When I tried plugging in my previous sennheisers with the separate jacks it wouldn’t use the mic, and I was forced to use the one built into the laptop. While this laptop mic is quite good it caused problems when i was sitting back away from the laptop or leaning over looking at another screen/pc.

After a great deal of issues trying to get a Sennheiser PC165 from any Australian store, I ended up getting a brand new pair of Sennheiser PC166’s from amazon.com which arrived within 3 working days and saved me over $100 from buying it locally which I also was rather impressed with. The PC166’s also perform really really well and I would have to say are my current favourite set.

Filed under: m.o