Why do I keep going back to old MMO's?

I've been finding myself doing a lot of this lately. I tend to find myself wondering how old MMO's i've played in the past are doing now.. and entirely forget why I quit them in the first place.. but then shortly remember afterwards.

I have tried going back to DAoC.. went back and leveled a Friar to 50 with 2 friends, we made it the entire way with only 3 people. Pretty quickly too, like less than a week.. but we get to 50 and try to do RvR and find it extremely boring.. how dissapointing that was.. I mean I liked the classes and skills and some of the things they added, but I found the lack of people in the frontiers disturbing and how little action there was reminded me of how much fun I had in WoW battlegrounds.

Then I tried going back to EverQuest 1.. I even *gulp* bought platinum. I mean 1,000,000 plat for 20 bucks was hard to resist. Thats all that game was to me anyway was a way for me to get high enough level to farm plat and twink out a character I've always wanted. I went back and tried the new newbie zone.. made some sick twinks.. but in the end it was still just single button press combat with long down time and lots and lots of grinding.

So I tried going back to WoW, this is the one that held me the longest. I went back to WoW several times and had a blast each time. I quit the first time for several months just before Dire Maul came out.. I had a level 60 warlock and was one of the top 5 Warlocks to hit level 60 on Argent Dawn. Anyways I quit because .. well my friends quit and I didnt want to play by myself. We came back after a bunch of changes had gone through, mainly battlegrounds and such, and we made a Druid and Warrior combo. We got to level 60 pretty quickly and quickly became one of the best 2 player combos on the server for our gear bracket. We played maybe 3 or 4 hours a day on the weekdays and sometimes 6-10 hours a day on the weekends. This was a short amount of time considering the last games I've played.


But we got bored of the same boring content.. and.. quit.. again.. and went on to try EverQuest 1 again.. with the same result.. ended up quitting again after buying plat and reaching about level 30..

A couple more months went by and we went back to WoW, this time 2 months before Burning Crusade came out.. got involved more into the raiding scene but casually, trying to gear up for BC. BC came out, we quickly got to level 70 and created our own guild to start raiding. We did good.. but started to feel burned out (being guild leaders is tedious)

We ended up quitting after beating Karazhan and not having much time for Arenas and BG's.
Our true love still resides in PvP/RvR.

So why do we keep going back to MMO's? I have no desire to go back to any of them before but I do have a desire to try games like EverQuest 2 and some other older MMO's I never did, while waiting for the next best thing, Warhammer Online or Age of Conan.

How often do you go back to old MMO's?

Activision and Vivendi merge in $18 billion deal

Activision, the publishing powerhouse behind the Call of Duty and Tony Hawk series; and Vivendi Games, owner of Blizzard Entertainment, are coming together to form "the world's most profitable games business," cleverly named Activision Blizzard.

May the many Tony Hawk and Call of Duty MMORPG rumors arise, and the many Starcraft 2 on console rumors be made.

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Paintball Loader: The Torque..

Introducing the new Hard Corps Torque loader. It IS a true force fed hopper. It's super super quiet (I can barely hear it when its on). You can use 1 9V, 2 9V's, or attach a 6 AA Harness and use those. It is true that the loader has no board, the only board to speak of is the little PCB that the buttons are attached to. The loader does 42 BPS in a drop test, and at least 30 on guns. IT GETS MORE THAN 2-3 CASES FOR BATTERIES. If you were to leave the hopper on the entire time to run out the batteries, you would be able to shoot 8-9 cases is what I believe he said.

The Torque at first glance appears to be the baby of a Halo and a Vlocity according to most people. It does look like that to me as well. Thats where the similarities end. First of all the loader has no eyes and no sound activated system. Then what you ask? It uses a slip drive system. Now I'm not 100% sure the hell that means, but what I do know is this. When the tension on the balls reaches a certain point, it stops forcing them. This allows the loader to " ramp " up to speed according to how fast your gun shoots (at least thats how I "think" it works) until the loader maxes itself out.

Maintenance appears to be VERY easy. Inside the loader there are 2 spring loaded nub things. When you depress one of the spring loaded nubs, you pull toward you and away from the other half of the shell. Thats it, its done. You can remove the other side after that by just depressing the other spring loaded nub. The plastic feels very very strong, and after letting people at cup and friends open and close it all night long, I'm very confident in its ability to withstand standard paintball abuse. That includes diving and the sort.

The buttons are super simple and fairly nice. It's a simple toggle switch on off, no holding the button in for 5 seconds to turn it off. You push it in, its on, you push it again and it depresses outward, and its off. That simple. A green LED says whether its on or off. The other button is a unjamming button. You simply push the button and the loader rotates reverse and it unjamms.

The paddle wheel it's also pretty neat. It has little paddles on the inside that of course force the balls down the feed tube ala the Halo (I guess the similarities didn't stop earlier, but thats it pretty much for now). On the TOP of the paddle wheel there is a freely rotating disc called a Load Wheel. What this disc does is allows the paintballs ONTOP of the paintballs that are being fed to not have any tension on them. The loader has less mass to move.

Example.

In the halo, when you turn it on, it rotates pretty much the entire mass (looks like flushing a toilet) of the paintballs, this can cause breaks or jams or just use more battery life (stressing the motor).

In the Torque, when you turn it on, only the balls that are in the tray to be fed move, anything above them only moves when they are falling down into the tray to be fed. So its noticeably more quiet than others.

The gun comes with a pretty good 30 day warranty. If ANYTHING should happen to the loader within 30 days of purchasing it, you can send it back to them and they'll fix it free of charge.

After 30 days if anything happens to the loader, you can send it back to them with $3.00 and they'll fix anything wrong with it.

Me shooting the Torque



Me and a friend stripping down the torque



Torque drop test



The hopper can be had for $99 dollars. I would suggest purchasing it from SobePaintball.

Overall I'd say it's definitely a great buy and the experienced paintball player would be pleased.

Hydrogen Car from Honda.. Finally

Maybe honda won't magically dissapear like anyone else who has dealt with hydrogen powered anything.

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It's the President standing next to an evil blood sucking, life stealing monster

Yup.. thats pretty much a good description.

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Get your addons working with Firefox 3 beta

In my search to get Google Tool bar working with Firefox 3 I stumbled across this utility called Nightly Tester Tools. It allows you to run out of date extensions/add ons with current versions of Firefox even if its not officially supported. To get this working just do the following.

• Goto here and click Install (v1.3b3)
• Make sure firefox has permission to install and do so.
  
• Restart Firefox
• Go to Tools > Add ons

• Click on the add on you want to get working
• Click " Make all compatible ".

Voila. You're set. Now since you're forcing the add on to work that doesn't mean it's gonna be fully functional. Google Tool bar doesn't work all the way. It doesn't recognize that you're logged in even if you are so thus it won't load your bookmarks.

My computer is going through a Crysis

Ahh.. Crysis, the time finally arrived. Here's the lowdown on Crysis. Basically you're this marine with a killer nanosuit. The suit allows you to modify you to pool your suits energy into one of four different abilities.

• Super Strength
• Super Speed
• Cloaking
• Increased Armor

Now the hype behind this game is the freedom you'll have within the missions, the size of the game space, the great physics and realism, and the beautiful graphics.

First off let me say, the game looks absolutely amazing.. too bad you can't play it like that.

My computer isn't the latest or the greatest, but it plays most of the games out there including call of duty 4 fairly well.

AMD X2 3800+ Overclocked to 2.5GHZ
2GB PC3200 Ram
nVidia 7800 GT CO Also overclocked.

I cannot play this game on medium settings over 1024x768 without it being totally unplayable (under 10FPS) On the upside I can play it at 1680x1050 at low settings and it still looks pretty good (not as good as call of duty 4).

The size of the levels are ridiculous and you can pretty much approach each mission any way you want. The problem with games like this is they are never truly open ended as you can only advance after you've completed dedicated missions in each level. There are side intelligence missions that make your primary mission easier, and they usually involve finding some computer and downloading some data. Level design I have to say is pretty good. There was only 1 time that I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be doing but I kinda figured it out.

The enemy AI is kind of smart, and kind of stupid, if that makes any sense. The Korean soldiers are often easily tricked, as you can run straight at them, hit cloak and they'll pretty much forget that you were directly in front of them and wander off in the bushes to find you. The Aliens were much more aggressive and seemed a bit more intelligent.

Weapon selection was pretty nice and the whole customize your weapon thing was pretty neat, but I didn't find myself using it for anything other than the silencer and scope, and sometimes the occasional flashlight.

In the end, the game was pretty fun to play and had some amazing moments that made me go " Wow.. I can't believe that just happened! " It was longer than Call of Duty 4 but I don't feel right now that the multi player is as good as Call of Duty 4.

Pro's:

• Beautiful Graphics
• Excellent Level Design
• Great Weapon Selection
• Abundance of Vehicles
• Good AI

Con's:

• Super High System Hog
• Multi player isn't very satisfying