#GAMERGATE Leave Black People Out of It You Don't Speak FOR Us

#GAMERGATE Leave Black People Out of It You Don't Speak FOR Us

It is highly offensive to me when white people, with an axe to grind and an ulterior motive of their own, dare to speak FOR Black people. We are not children. We are not goats. We are not slaves. It is not your place to speak for us, nor even to reference us in your little agenda. Oh, sorry, giant agenda, to destroy men, families, heterosexuality.

Leave Black People Out of #gamergate

 In the end, the evidence comes out that these white people are frauds, thieves, and thugs themselves.
Leave Black people out of your mouth. We are not only capable, but reserve the right to bar your from speaking "for" us. It is insulting, offensive, and disgusting that these people think it's their place to do so.

The New World of Warcraft Patch Before Cataclysm 4.0.1

The Patch Before Cat

New Player Race in Cataclysm Worgen

Unless you've been under a rock, yet playing world of warcraft, you should know that the big news is that the new expansion Cataclysm is coming up.  This is going to change the entire game for everyone.  The world ... of warcraft, as we know it, is going to be completely redone and changed.  An apocalypse is going to happen the likes of which is going to edit the entire map of Azeroth.  Volcanic eruptions and oceanic erosion is going to both destroy and age the entire world .... of warcraft, to such a degree that whole cities are going to be destroyed and famous dungeons are going to be wiped and / or completely changed.

But before this occurs, welcome to patch 4.0, the patch before the expansion.  In this patch the completely new system is being introduced for how the classes are going to operate.  Understand that this is an operational feat, and not, a free patch for all of the new content to come.  This means, all the classes are going to change, but not the actual world.  I assume for those who *gasp* might not buy cataclysm, or not buy it right away, *gasp* would be on the same system as those who stand in line at midnight to buy it. [insert eye roll here]

For those wondering why it skipped from patch 3.3.3 to 4.0.1, I don't know, I guess 4.0 doesn't sound as cool, or maybe they have to have a 3 digit patch number at all times.

World of Warcraft PTR Patch 4.0.1

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

General

    * Cataclysm Launcher Update
          o The new Cataclysm Launcher allows you to stream game data while you play. This will reduce the time you spend downloading, installing, and patching World of Warcraft. We'd like to get your feedback on the toolset and gameplay experience. Please head to the forums here for additional information.
    * Reforging
          o Players can now visit special Reforging NPCs in capital cities located near Enchanting trainers. 40% of any one secondary stat on an item can be can be allocated to add a new secondary stat to the item. The stat being added cannot already exist on the item. An item cannot have more than one reforged stat at a time, though the Reforging of an item can be undone and changed.
    * Copied Test Realm characters are not copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

Dungeons & Raids

    * Flexible Raid Lock System
          o All Wrath of the Lich King raids now use the new Flexible Raid Lock system. This system provides the opportunity for a character to defeat each raid zone's encounters once a week. A character may now complete the encounters during the week with different raids of either 10 or 25 players.
    * Icecrown Citadel
          o The Chill of the Throne effect has been removed.
    * Trial of the Crusader now uses the Dynamic Difficulty system found in Icecrown Citadel and The Ruby Sanctum.

Currency

    * PvE Currency Changes
          o All Emblems of Frost and Emblems of Triumph have been converted to new Justice Points.
          o Any dungeon or raid which awarded these emblems will reward Justice Points instead. Anything below Emblems of Triumph, including badges from The Burning Crusade dungeon and raid content, have been converted into gold and sent to players via the in-game mail system.
          o Any bosses players defeat that are level-appropriate to them award Justice Points.
          o All items that previously cost emblems or badges of any type now cost Justice Points.
          o Higher-tier Valor Points will be awarded to players who kill dungeon and raid bosses in the latest tier of PvE content after the launch of Cataclysm.
    * PvP Currency Changes
          o All Arena Points, Honor Points, Battleground Marks of Honor, Stone Keeper's Shards, Venture Coins, and Spirit Shards have been converted into new Honor Points.
          o Honor Points will be awarded instead of these currencies, with the exception of Arena Points.
          o Higher-tier Conquest Points will be awarded to players competing in each of the latest Arena or Rated Battleground seasons after the launch of Cataclysm.
    * For more information on the changes to the currencies and conversion rates for each type, please visit our Cataclysm forum.

Classes: General

    * Many class talents, spells, and abilities have been overhauled, added, or removed.
    * All spell and ability tooltips will now display damage averages rather than minimum and maximum damage potential. This feature is on by default but can be changed via the Display settings under User Interface options.
    * Ammo has been removed from the game.
    * The character levels at which classes gain new spells and abilities have changed.
    * Many item and class stats have been changed or removed.
    * Mastery rating has been added as a new stat which provides unique benefits for characters based on class and talent specialization. Mastery rating does not currently exist on items in the game, however, Reforging can be used to add Mastery rating as a secondary stat to existing items.
    * Rage has been normalized.
    * Spells and abilities no longer have multiple ranks and now scale with character level.
    * Talent trees have been altered. All player talent specializations have been reset, allowing for free re-specialization.
          o Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.
          o Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend.
          o Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.
          o Once a talent specialization has been chosen, players may only place points in the primary tree until at least 31 points have been spent there.
          o The initial announcement regarding these talent tree changes can be found on our Cataclysm forum.

Death Knights

New Player Race in Cataclysm Goblin

    * A dedicated tanking tree (Blood) has been implemented.
    * The effects of Blood Presence and Frost Presence have been exchanged.
    * The way in which runes recharge has changed.

Druids

    * A new Eclipse mechanic has been added for druids.






Hunters

    * Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.
    * Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.
    * Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.
    * The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

Mages

    * There is now a new spell fly-out UI feature for mage portals. Clicking on the Teleport or Portal buttons will expand the list of choices available.

Paladins

    * Paladins now have a new resource bar.

Warlocks

    * There is now a new spell fly-out UI feature for warlock pets. Clicking on this single button will open up the list of available pets to summon.
    * Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.

Items

    * Resilience no longer reduces the chance a player will be critically hit by an opponent.
    * Durability: cloth, leather, and mail now have as many points of durability as plate, making the repair cost on death much closer to equal for all classes.

Professions

    * The glyph system has been updated to now feature three different types of glyphs. Many class glyphs have been added, altered, or moved to different glyph types.


User Interface

    * Spell Alerts have been added to notify players when procs on select spells and abilities occur. A visual notification will display around the character and the activated ability will be highlighted on the action bar.
    * The Arena Teams pane has been improved.
    * The Character pane has been redesigned. Character stats can now be shown or hidden via the Show All Details/Hide All Details button on the bottom left. When shown, all character stats will be visible in a window to the right of the pane. Stat sections can be reorganized by clicking and dragging them up or down the pane.
    * The Professions panes now have more filtering and search functionality, as well as buttons to easily link recipes in the chat frame.
    * A Professions screen has been added to the Spellbook to better display the details of a character's primary and secondary professions.
    * Many of the yellow System Messages that would display in the chat frame when leveling up have been removed.
    * New text animations now alert players as they level up, also providing information on when new talents, spells and abilities are available.
    * Professions and Class Trainers windows have been altered to more clearly display available and upcoming purchases.
    * New Raid frames are now. They can also be used in place of the standard 5-player party interface via the User Interface options.
    * The Spellbook interface has been improved for greater ease-of-use and visual appeal.
    * For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.

Graphics

    * Improved water and lava rendering system (Video Options - Liquid Detail on the Graphics Panel)
    * Dynamic Sunshafts effect (Video Options - Sunshafts on the Graphics Panel)
    * Multi-monitor support (Video Options - Monitor on the Graphics Panel)
    * OpenGL Hardware Cursor support for Windows (Video Options - Hardware Cursor on the Advanced Panel)
    * Experimental support for DX11 (enabled by passing '-d3d11' on the command line or adding SET gxApi "d3d11" to the Config.WTF file)

Game Review: Champions Online - Another City of Heroes?

Champions Online Game Review

If you missed it, this past weekend there was an open beta for the soon to be released game Champions Online. Yes, if you recognize the name it is based off of the old table top, pen and paper game of the same name. Cryptic Studios bought the licensing rights and made an MMO [massive multi-player online] out of it. So at its core is it a super-heor online game.

I got a chance to take a peak at it and played it for the entire weekend. I first didn't remember the game, but seeing a couple of videos about it, I do recall it at E3. Low and behold it was the same game. I recall at E3 I wasn't that impressed by it, but it was still developing at that stage.

On to the review. Since this is my first review on my blog, unlike my YouTube reviews at Shakaama Live, I'll make this as factual as possible and list the criteria for the review.

Graphics
- Overall style (4 out of 10): The overall style of the look of the game is very unpolished. In city of heroes, your heroes were very larger than life and you really got the sense that you were playing a super-hero. Although the graphics were in fact realistic and the cityscape was modern, it just did not give you a sense of anything unique and exciting. It was not impressive

- landscape (3 out of 10): The environment was well executed, but everything was just so tiny and the levels were so compact that you never got the sense you were in an actual city, an actual forest, an actual tundra. The zones made it clear that you were playing a game with snow, dirt, trees and not that you were in some actual area.

- character (4 out of 10): The graphics of the NPC's and the PC's were not impressive at all. Again they were not polished. The animation of the characters were all stiff as well. There was no sense of fluid real life motions, nor super-hero life motions as well.

- hardware capability (6 out of 10): This category is for if the game really tests your hardware. As you can see by the previous graphics categories, it isn't a graphically impressive game. As such, I found no problem installing it and getting it to play smoothly. So for smoothness of playability graphic wise it gets a complete pass, but the lack of challenging hardware with impressive graphics it fails.


Gameplay
- chargen (2 our of 10): Character generation was a sticking point in City of Heroes. They constantly redeveloped the chargen. Champions Online completely just copied them. Chargen involves nothing more than making the rudimentary powers of your hero and overabundance of looks for your character. I say overabundance, because unless you are playing zoomed all the way into your character you will never see all the minor things you or anyone else did to their character. In the end chargen boils down to basic heights, colors and costuming. The hundreds of facial expressions you can put on your character or whether he has a cleft chin is unnecessary. Chargen therefore was not innovative at all. I've yet to see a super-hero chargen where you can plan out or plot out the path of powers he's to go on or even remove the powers altogether and do an actual back story in game of developing the powers. Both City of Heroes and Champions missed the point of this. They both just lazily put a text editor on your character and let you write some mumbo jumbo about the origins of the hero. The fact that Champions chargen is exactly the same as City of Heroes smacks of plagiarism.

- controls (2 out of 10): the controls were clunky as hell. I heard that you could attach an xbox controller to your computer and have massive fun, unfortunately I don't have one and didn't think about it. I suffered through, what has to be the worst physics known to man. It's as if my hero was 4 tons and didn't have control of his own muscles. While the developer at E3 called the gameplay heroic, it is anything but. The worst thing were the travel powers. I tested them all. unless you chose superspeed and flight, you had zero precision of how your character moved. None of this stop on a dime. I also was disappointed with the flying disks that they put in: ice, electric etc... those travel powers used a disk, and when you stopped moving you floated to the ground. I just don't get the point of that. Do you lose control of your disk in relation to gravity? I'm sure it's to prevent some exploit, but for game play it sucks. Speaking of ice, I thought it was going to be like iceman. You know he cools the air under his feet and creates a path of ice. No, it's a floating icy disk. How lazy are you that you can't program an icy path that fades in 2 seconds behind him after 10 yards. Yet in the videos and the splash screens he has an icy path. Mind you it wasn't even my power of choice, but I found it disappointing.

- ui (0 out of 10): User Interface! What can I say about their user interface. Oh one word comes to mind: HORRIBLE!!!! This was a pain in the butt. Man it was god awful. I just cannot say enough about it. There were these ... and then these ... also these... ugggg it was ridonkulous. Who thought it up? And, lastly, it wasn't even something new, it was just a bad copy of other UI's. uggggg!!

Story
- rpg ( 3 out of 10): Is there a story you can follow? Yes, and they do convey it. Yes you get a feel for what is going on in the game and it's not just something boring. Ok, for there being a story Champions gets a pass. As for the actual merits of the story? Fail. They had the most unimaginative staff come up with the worst scenarios possible. I've seen more imagination in table top games from complete social rejects, than what i saw in this game. The story for a super hero... yes a SUPER HERO, should be epic. Literally the challenges in this game, a swat team could handle and be home by dinner. It was just so bleh.

- lore (6 out of 10): Was there background to the story and the world and the game? Yes, they have cut scenes and npcs that talked to you. The voice acting was well executed and gave you a sense of the character speaking. Not bad build up to it.

Advancement
- rpg (1 out of 10): Does your advancement in the game have a story like quality to it? No.

- hack n slash (1 out of 10): Is the game advanced by hack n slash? Yes

Overall
- Immersion: Did you feel immersed in this online game. No

- Must have: Is this a must have game for video game nerds. No. This is not going to be a classic and a "if you're a nerd you must have this in your library". This doesn't advance any game style. In fact it doesn't even advance the Champions franchise. I'm sorry to say that. I played champions only once, hell i spent a month making the character. This game is not impressive in the least bit.

I predict a lackluster launch and a lackluster following. This game just does not capture the imagination.

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