Warlords of Draenor: Day 1

Warlords of Draenor marks the first expansion pack in which I did not order the physical copy of the Collector’s Edition to add to our shelf. Part of me feels mildly sad that we won’t be adding to the Blizzard shelf, but the majority of me knows that it’s probably not worth paying $20 more for a couple of toys that I will likely never use. I purchased WoD and logged in yesterday morning. Everything was awesome and near empty until I had caught up with virtually everyone else on the server (after completing the introductory quest line and hopping on the boat), at which point the game started to go slow as balls.

Proudmoore definitely wasn’t empty last night, to say the least. I happened to get home from work and also happened to sign on just as the server was starting back up from a crash so, no queue time for me! My husband on the other hand literally had to wait almost the entire evening to sign on. I don’t recall the previous two WoW expansion pack launches having a queue over several thousand (or much of a queue at all) and I don’t recall having that much of a lag problem. Several people have suspected that not having a secondary starting zone or a new race/class to split the player base may be part of the issue. Then again, I don’t recall the previous two expansion packs being DDOS’d on launch either.

Aide from queueing and server issues: Ding, level 91. Enjoying the garrison thing so far even though it’s obviously the WoW version of one of those mobile apps.

Odds and Ends: November 12th 2014

I’m not going to promise that I am going to regularly update my journey to level 100 because I am generally horrible about updating this thing, but I will make a valiant effort.

My initial fixation with World of Warcraft has obviously passed, seeing as how I have not logged onto the game in about two weeks or so. There really though, is not a whole lot to do in WoW at the moment other than to level my alts and raid on my paladin, which I’m not in the mood to do at the moment. In theory I should clean up the mess that is my bank. I guess much like virtually everyone else, I am just biding time until the expansion pack releases in a couple of days.

I admittedly haven’t been playing much of anything other that The Sims 4. Partially due to being real-life busy, partially due to spending time with other hobbies, and partially due to obsessively playing and documenting my Legacy Challenge Family. I am actually pretty close to completing the challenge. Generation 8 just reached adulthood, so generation 10 isn’t all that far away. I haven’t decided if I am going to start a new challenge afterwards or if I will put this game down for a bit to play other things.

Watching:

  • We just started watching The Legend of Korra Book 3. Still greatly enjoying even even though Korra is kind of a turd at times..
  • Sword Art Online II: I will admit that, despite the show being mediocre, it is nice that the series has returned to Aincrad.
  • Parasyte: This show is new this season and is based off of a manga series that I read and enjoyed quite a bit about a decade ago. Just think of it as a more violent and more fucked up version of Midori no Hibi. Migi is by far the most interesting character in the show so far; Everyone else is pretty mediocre.

The Naruto manga has come to an end after 15 years. I started watching/reading it shortly after the anime series was released in Japan, so it’s a series that I have been following for quite some time. I’m not sure how I feel about some of the romantic pairings. It’s almost as if Kishimoto started coupling the leftovers (Choji, Karui, etc). Also, apparently everyone had sex and spawned at literally the exact same time, given that their kids are presumably all around the same age. Regardless, I am pretty satisfied with the ending.

Blizzard Fortress 2

Well, I can’t say that I was expecting Overwatch or even a game like Overwatch to be announced at BlizzCon this year, but I was really hoping that new intellectual property would be announced and that is exactly what I received I guess. I am pretty sure that the last new piece of IP released by Blizzard was Starcraft and that was released what, 16 years ago and change? So even if it is obviously a Blizzardified Team Fortress 2,  having someone break out of the sequelitis plague makes me happy. I am also pretty curious as to how much of Overwatch was originally the now defunct Titan if any.

I like the basic premise and the art style, particularly the character designs. However, I don’t think that they did too good of a job making characters with a visually distinct silhouettes based off of the short preview clips that were shown. If I recall correctly, Valve specifically designed the Team Fortress 2 characters with very distinct profiles that could be seen easily from a distance, while moving at a high speed, and so forth. I guess we will eventually see how that impacts gameplay.

There is a suspicious Overwatch sized hole in my gaming schedule for a casual FPS and I haven’t yet played a Blizzard game that I did not enjoy, so bottom line: Will I be playing Overwatch? Sure.

“The Sims 4 Has Stopped Working” Crash Fix

When I had attempted to load my legacy save this morning, I was unable to do so because it would crash to the desktop after spitting out the error pictured above. I was able to fix that corrupted save, but my crash symptoms were very specific so the fix provided in the steps listed below many not apply to other saved game crashes:

  • I was able to successfully load The Sims 4 without any issues.
  • I was also able to load all other saved games as well as a new game without any issues. Whatever caused my crashed seemed to be isolated to a specific household at a certain point.
  • I was able to even successfully load the corrupted save without any issues, but upon loading the save in question, it would load into the Manage Worlds screen.
  • The game would crash after attempting to resume play on my legacy house. It would load for a few seconds and then sit out the error pictured above.

I had tried moving my “The Sims 4” out of C:\Users\<username>\My Documents\Electronic Arts and only the desktop, loading the game to create a freshly generated “The Sims 4” folder and then manually copying over the corrupted save, but that also resulted in the same crash. Repairing The Sims 4 from origin did not help. The crash would by the way, literally only happen to that specific family so I suspect that the corruption was either with a specific sim, an item on that lot, or with the family itself. This is what I had to do:

  1. Load the corrupted save to the Manage Worlds screen. As mentioned above, you should be able to do this when loading the save. If your saved game won’t even load to this point or if the game won’t even load, then your issue is different than my issue.
  2. Instead of loading the corrupted family, load any other house in that world (I am pretty sure that the corruption in my game was with a specific sim in that family).
  3. You should be able to successfully load that family.
  4. Go to the menu and click “Save As..” just to make sure we save a new copy of the game instead of writing over the old one.
  5. Go to Manage Worlds.
  6. Load the previously corrupted family.
  7. As a precaution, I saved a NEW game at this point.

The odd thing is that after performing the fix, I had tried loading the corrupted save again for the sake of taking a screenshot for this article but was actually unable to get the game to crash again. The only way I was able to recreate the crash was to use the old “The Sims 4” folder that I had backed up to the desktop before attempting to fix the corruption.

Pre-WoD Gearing

wowscrnshot_102214_234320Thanks to circling the Timeless Isle hunting out treasure chests and what not as well as the fact that the Valor Quartermaster goodies are now available for purchase with gold, my gear is officially out of the green shit-tier status. I even managed to replace my blue 450 weapon with that one polearm available for 20k tokens from the Timeless Isle loot vendor. I still need to gem and enchant everything and in theory, I should probably also work on my tanking set, but since my gear is out of the red zone, if I really wanted I could probably join some of the lower tier MoP raids in LFR.

This activity of gearing my character up is probably pretty moot given that the expansion pack is being released pretty soon and given that it’s not like I am planning on doing any serious raiding other than occasionally hopping on LFR, but whatever. One interesting thing is that, despite not having played for almost two years (I think?) I still remember exactly where all of my retribution combat abilities are on my hotkey bar as well as what my old rotation was purely by muscle memory from hitting the same buttons repeatedly for years. A couple of things obviously were missing from the recent patch, but I am not entirely sure if I miss them?

Look What I Finally Did

wowscrnshot_101914_231625

More than a couple of people that I know in-game and in real-life, aside from my husband, are playing World of Warcraft again or at least constantly talking about it. So after about a year and a half to two years of not playing, I actually resubscribed to WoW. Ugh though, it’s frustrating going from knowing virtually everything about the game to not knowing jack shit because it’s either something that’s new or something that I had forgotten.

My UI was surprisingly intact. Because of some of the new interface changes, I was able to drop quite a few things such has ArkInventory (BAG SORTING FINALLY) and my map mod. I haven’t really bothered respeccing my paladin or looking into what the new optimal rotation is for my gear level. Surprisingly enough, I was able to remember virtually all combat abilities based purely off of muscle memory from hitting the same key over and over for keys on my gamepad. I did end up forgetting a couple of important things like say, Redemption and a couple of other utility spells.

For what it’s worth, my character now looks really weird and vastly different from pre-patch 6.0.2 Keiya with the new models. Also, WoW looks pretty and smooth on ultra with my new video card.

Ring Bonus 7: The Legend of Korra Book 1

ringbonusalbum_0Tonight on Ring Bonus, we discuss The Legend of Korra: Book 1, which we greatly enjoyed watching this past week. If you haven’t watched it yet, we do discuss spoilers on the show, but an audible warning is given before hand. We also discuss house hunting, a recent movie shoot that we were a part of as well as all of the airsoft antics that we have been up to lately.

As always, thank you for listening and please feel free to subscribe to the Ring Bonus via the RSS feed as well as via iTunes. We also have a forum and would love to hear topic suggestions and what not.

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My Pending WoW Return and What Not

Just a quick post since since I have not done one in a while. The one and only game, other than anything that I play on my phone has been The Sims 4. I think I had originally stated that I would do a follow up, state-of-the-game review post of The Sims 4 about a month or so after it had been released. The answer to that, given that this game is all that I have felt compelled to play for a while is: Yeah, it’s pretty fun. It’s also pretty spiffy that ghosts, pools, etc are being added in at no additional cost. So, good on you EA.

The Sims 4 will likely take a back seat pretty soon though, possibly this weekend. Word on the street is that the new WoW patch is out and that I should resubscribe because enough people that we know on the server are playing now to group together and instance. Neat. I wonder how broken my user interface is going to be? Also, I’ve heard that Blizzard has finally added in bag sorting among other things into the game. I can probably just dump half of the addons in my user interface folder.

Other things: We have been super lazy about the podcast lately but will be recording an episode and releasing it this weekend. We haven’t been home on the weekends lately, which is our preferred recording time. Legend of Korra is pretty good. Dave and I just finished book one. In all honestly, I had forgotten that Korra was on my to watch list until the Book 4 previews were linked on Reddit. We’ll probably end up discussing it on the show. Better late than never, right?

Ring Bonus 6: Gaming and Tech News

ringbonusalbum_0We were busy last weekend and lazy last week so we skipped recording an episode last week. Tonight on Ring Bonus we cop out and discuss gaming and tech news for lack of a better topic. We also discuss a variety of other things like the freak ass monsoon from the other week and a truck flying off of the 805.

As always, thank you for listening and please feel free to subscribe to the Ring Bonus via the RSS feed as well as via iTunes. We also have a forum and would love to hear topic suggestions and what not.

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Odds and Ends: September 30th 2014

I am still playing The Sims 4, but mostly in an on-and-off function. Also still working on my legacy challenge and have posted a couple of chapters here. I am getting kind of tired of playing the same family, so I think that after I catch the blog up to where I am in the game, I will take a small break from the challenge to play another household or work on some other “sim project”.

I have noticed that the load times have gotten a bit longer. Instead of taking about 5 seconds to load a lot, it probably takes around 10 to 15, which is annoying but tolerable so long as it does not increase significantly past that point. I will have to say though, that after almost a month of solid play, the game hasn’t crashed, locked up, or presented any serious issues that have caused me to reload the game or a save (unlike its predecessor). So in that respect I am impressed. I guess.

  • Dave has subscribed to WoW again as we have mentioned in nearly every recent podcast episode. I have holding off for the time being; My slated return to the game will probably either be for the upcoming expansion pack or a little before, perhaps mid October? Not sure. I am pretty tempted to resubscribe earlier than that though though so that I can gear up and do some of the content that I have missed out on (Timeless Isle, Siege Orgrimmar), but we will see.
  • Absolutely everyone is playing Destiny, except for me. By the time I end up purchasing a PS4, I am sure that the fad will have long passed.
  • I want Shadows of Mordor but I also want Smash Brothers 3Ds. I probably shouldn’t buy both. Will have to choose one.
  • I have caught up on the Naruto anime and Manga in lieu of it possibly ending soon or from what I have heard, possibly time skipping into a new series/arc soon? Talk about dragging out a fight, geeze…
  • Word on the street is that we need to watch Legend of Korra. For some reason I stopped watching it half way through the first book.

I have also setup a forum that no one will likely visit.