Fist de Yuma - August 26, 2003

Korr walkover Maddie as Maddie's Revenge wanted to get his mage armor upgraded. I was about to head to the north skill temple with Jr and another guy so I asked him to wait. He would also try to recruit others for it. When I got back there were still only Maddie and I. I got a RR Cestus since my last trip so I felt this one would not be as hard. Without having to do the weapon part it would also be a lot shorter. Additionally I now had a weapon that worked on the Golems as well as the Olthoi. Maddie had a tie to Stonehold. She also gave me a MMD note for the gems. We cashed the notes at Stonehold and got to M's for the gems. We used the gems, solved the puzzles, buffed up and were ready to go. As per last time I got us lost in the first part. I know my error now and will stop repeating it. At one part there are three rooms. You have to enter from the left or right edge room to the center room and double back to a hallway. I would always pass through the middle room and double back to the wrong hall. Now that I understand where I was going wrong this part should be easy. The biggest frustration with being lost there of course was the Golems. Even with a fair amount of magic defense taking on more than one could get iffy. As there are a lot of places with four or more and you really have to be on your toes. A few chain casts by multiple monsters and you could be starting over. Maddie got her key and we raced off to the next section. My RR weapon was working great. Even when Maddie could not land Imperil the Olthoi did not last long. We quickly followed the catwalk to the end and got the helm. We headed to get the gems. It turned out that Maddie only wanted the Helm. I can understand that because, other than looks, I prefer using tinked armor. Those that use the mage armor must be very fast on their feet. A quick backtrack to the next portal has us in the gem section. We quickly marched ourselves to one of the gem doors. I pulled my wand and started tossing Imperil V on them while Maddie did the same, only with VII's spells. There are hordes of Olthoi in the rooms so I wanted any advantage I could get. With them all set up we charged in and quickly cleared. I was surprised to find myself at the Red room. I had heard it was harder to get to. I know better now. It is amazing the amount of bad information out there. After getting the red gem we backtracked to the start and took the portal to the main room. We headed to the last and hardest part, The Forge. The Forge is nasty with fast spawning Olthoi that can eat a mage up in a hurry. Not much danger to me if I keep my stamina up. We Imperiled them and I started to clear. It did not take us long. Maddie rushed in and forged his helm. We had re-spawns by then. I asked Maddie to make a portal so I could escape without pulling a wand out. I battled the Olthoi until Maddie was out and then hit the portal. To my surprise I still had 30 minutes on my buffs when we were done. Two people doing this quest in 30 minutes is amazing. The RR weapons are sure strong. Bad week It is easy to make an enemy on the boards. There are immature people in this world that take any disagreement as a personal affront. Even pointing out something, while not disagreeing with their point, can gain their antagonism. A long time back someone made a post about the Monarch Break command. He wanted a timer on it so breaking a lot of people would take a lot of time. The reason for this is that some people have broke from an allegiance and then dismantled the links to everyone below them. I made a post saying that Turbine would likely not take the time to incorporate that change because it only helps chains. As chains are something Turbine would like to eliminate there was little chance of that happening. It would take a major change in policy. My reasoning is simple. Normal alliances gain their vassals because of leadership and friendship. This is something gained over years of play. Gaining good vassals will in turn gain good sub vassals. It is a long process made harder by the drain on the system chains create. Chains leach players from normal allegiances with a promise of gaining high level far faster than normal play will get them. Bad players seldom get vassals. Those they do get are mostly not worth having. People can see through those who are only after xp and have no desire to lead or be friends. Chains don't have this problem. A good chain vassal is one that makes a lot of xp, regardless of how they treat others. The patron and vassals are assigned. A bad vassal is one that fails to meet a quota. Chains regularly put a large section of the allegiance under unknown players. Talk about an unsafe practice! The higher in level they get the more of the chain they get under them. Many times a mule rank chain is also placed at the bottom of a chain so everyone can have high rank. Ever so often someone who can on longer meet quota or for some other disagreement decides to leave. They break from the allegiance and then use the monarch command to break everyone below them from their patron. This vindictive action has no adverse effect on the player as everyone below him would be breaking to go back to the chain anyway. This can greatly disrupt players. Many people have in-between players that are patrons to players of much higher level. Fist's Armorer is 102 and has four players of lower level above him. Restructuring that would be impossible. What about when players of a normal allegiance leave the game? Isn't there a chance they will dismantle their members? Yes, there is a chance of that happening but it is very minuscule. The reason is a player like that would not have many vassals to begin with. The vassals they have are vassals they have earned. When most players change allegiances they take their vassals with them. The bond between the player and his/her vassals is mostly stronger then the bond between the players and the allegiance. Even if an account is given away there is little risk. Most of them will inform their vassals when they leave. If transferring the player to someone they will try to find a worthy individual. Even selling on E-bay is not a problem. Who is going to spend money on a player and then dismantle one of the key ingredients of the purchase? Lastly is history. There is no recorded event of a dismantling that was not the result of a chain. I'm not saying it has not happened but I have not heard about it. A lot of chains have been dismantled. No, both logic and history has taught us that there is only one group vulnerable to this type of grief. When you place a large number of an allegiance under unknown people it is only a matter of time before one of them becomes disgruntled and dismantles the chain. So it is understandable why a chain would want this command restricted but it is of little concerned to a normal allegiance. In fact the inability to remove all five of a griefers players from an allegiance quickly would make the change detrimental. The only way this change would be made is if Turbine decided to support chains. I did not go into details in that post. I only said that Turbine would not make the change because it would only help chains. Well somehow he took that as an attack on him. As a monarch chain manager he took it personal. He let it burn in his heart waiting a time he could gain revenge. My last column I had a part joke part reminder about my PayPal link at the bottom of my columns. I'll admit that the goal was to remind people that I do this for free and my only reward is donations. While I don't make very much I can point out to Rosa that I'm a paid writer. That is important to me. Other events this week have made me hard press for cash so it is important to me right now. The guy felt my comment and link at the bottom of the column made my column a "For Profit" work and therefore against the VN rules. First he posted a nasty remark. Then he contacted a MOD who directed him higher up. The higher up decided to make a very tight ruling on what a "For Profit" work is and ruled that my column fits. That ruling is, "If you ask for money it is For Profit." A PayPal link on a button is ok. Of course those that know this board know I cannot have a PayPal button link. The tech is not there. I found this ruling strange as they have interpreted macro posts in as wide a range as possible. Unless you directly advocate unattended macro use, and at times even then, nothing will be done to the post. So advocating a cheat is given wide leeway but a free column with a donation link is given a narrow one. He proceeded to delete my posts discussing the column. Further discussion with them said that the ruling will stand and my posts will be deleted in the future. I have a letter to the managers explaining my position and I hope to get that changed. So far my request for another ruling has been ignored. Meanwhile I'll not be posting on the VN boards about my column. I was told that they would still post it on the main page, just not the boards. What that means for my relationship with VN over my column there I'm still debating. I feel betrayed and it is hard to work in that atmosphere. Nevertheless my column and relationship is mostly with Paraduck and he had nothing to do with this. While trying to figure out what was going on with my posts I came across some information on the immature hatemonger who started this. He posted a gloating bit of junk about how he had his revenge over my blasting him on the developers board. While a few felt he might be right on my column very few felt his gloating was in very good taste. Until he made that post I had no idea why this had happened. I was very angry at the time and was ready to name him but decided to just write about what happened and let it go at that. I still have hopes that this will be reversed or they can give me some guidelines that lets me use text, as I cannot place a button. One of the results from this is I have not played much this week. It really upset me and I'm better off not playing when angry. I finished up David Weber's book and started back on the second Reality Dysfunction book. I'm starting to feel like playing again and hope to have more adventure to write about. Of course here it is Friday and I'm writing instead of playing, but we will see. Video Card I guess I was lucky to get one good day out of my computer before it started going completely bad. Wednesday I could not be in the game more than a few minutes before I could crash to the desktop. Several times I had a device failure and the screen would go into 16-bit mode. I was sure it was the video card and worried it might also be related to the motherboard. For this reason I decided to buy a video card locally. This would make it easy to return if it did not fix the problem. Of course that restricted my choice of cards a lot and made me pay full price. At first I was afraid that there was nothing available. The first two stores I hit only had PCI video boards. Then Staples found a board in the back room that would do the job. It was a hundred bucks. While it was cheap for a video board it was hard on my poor pocket. I told you I lived in the sticks of the sticks. Without the Internet getting top gear is impossible for me. I was fortunate in that the card is a GeForce. (FX 5200 with 128m memory) That meant I should not have too much trouble with drivers. Sure enough I only needed to boot and let the CD do the work. If I had gotten a different video series I would have gone into safe mode and removed the old drivers before starting. After two days of trying to stress the computer I have had nothing strange happen. As lockups have been rare lately it will be month or more before I'm over that worry. I'll know for sure when I have time to test it. There are places where I have always locked up after a short time. I'll go hunt in one and see what happens. I have a feeling that the 4 in 1 driver update I did a while back fixed the motherboard video incompatible I was worried about. As I have not read much about the problem of late it could be I was worried for nothing. Virus One of the irritations for this week has been a virus. It forced me to change the way Norton worked or not get any mail. The first mail with the virus I recognized as an infection attempt. I was surprised that Norton did not hit on it. I updated my virus database and that fixed the problem. Of course it then added a rather large problem. When Norton finds a virus it stops and tells me. If I immediately say delete it, it moves on to the next e-mail. If I wait for a while before telling it the e-mail attempt aborts and starts over. Norton also takes in inordinate amount of time deciding if the mail contains a virus or not. To get mail I had to be there when it downloads, wait for Norton to finish and then tell it to delete and go on to the next mail. When I got maybe 1 or 2 attempts a week this was tolerable. Now I'm getting literally hundreds of attempts a day! Mail download was taking hour and I had to be there to hit the delete button at each infection attempt. I had to change Norton to delete any virus found and not tell me about it. That will work for now but I'll change it back when this attack of over. I have hopes that the writer of this junk is found in some Banana Republic, put up against a wall and shot. Patch good or bad Someone made a post saying this patch was not very good. They had worse language but I try to keep this column clean. (Very hard at times.) Even in that I have not played I know this is a great patch. For one all my melee players can stop looking like fumbling fools in battle. When I miss more than I hit something is wrong. As I'm only seven points below the maximum UA skill there was little I could do about it. Buffed with moderates, minors, majors and level VII spells, plus large bonuses on my weapons, missing as much as I did was a major bug. My buffed skills are at 498 and I have a 28% weapon bonus. That means an effective 637. I would still go miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss. So if that was the only change I would he happy with the patch. The poster also said that the new quest only gives one point to a skill, big deal. Well many of us are at 100 to 200 million a point on skills. Rather than one point to a skill would you accept 100 million XP? To some of us that is far more than a big deal. Looking at it that way this is one over-rewarded quest if there ever was one. I have not seen the Olthoi Armor yet but with my tinked armor it likely will not effect me much. The upgraded Virindi Amulet is going to be useful. As I still need to use the Major Magic D necklace item I cannot use it on my mages, unless I fight Olthoi, Tuskers or some other non-magic using monsters. My melee's have the Major Magic defense boots so they will use the Virindi Amulet, at least for buffing. Checking the mules I found I have two Virindi Amulets. I'll have to make a few family runs and get more. There are more Olthoi of course and we all love Olthoi now. Even my mages like them, now that I have fixed my buffing problem. I expect to see the Queen emerge soon. It is possible that it will be this patch. That will be an immense lag fest of death and destruction. Time to add a few points to missile defense. There are more and more I could go into but the bottom line is this is a great patch. I can bet that we have just started to touch on it all. The last three patches combined are more than worthy of a full-fledged expansion with another game. Turbine is to be applauded. Scams The message when you log into my allegiance is a warning about scammers. I spend a large part of my day doing tinker work for members of my allegiance. I would rather that than the stress of watching thieves take advantage of my members. I was told my message is boring and needs updating. The problem is tinker scammers are still making a good profit in the marketplace. Even well known thieves are catching people. If you are not totally sure if a tinker is on the level, ask around. Most of the thieves are caught fast and get a name. Don't be reassured if you see them tinker someone's stuff, especially if you don't see any text about a successful tinker. Many of the thieves have partners who help them with the scams. Lastly, if you just have to use an unknown tinker, hit the VN boards and ask about them. Chances are the VN people will know if they are legit or not. Really bad week After finally getting confident that my computer problems were over I got a kick in the stomach. The computer was working fine. The only worry I had was the CPU fan was varying in pitch a lot. As it sounds like a jet plane a varying pitch is very notable. I figured it was just trying to conserve power at times so I did not worry too much. Everything seemed working fine. I had a nice adventure with Maddie that I'll write about next. I had just finished rearranging some stuff on my mules when I got a tell from Bal's Bowman. While talking to him I locked up. Darn, just when I figured my problems were over. I rebooted and tried to get back. The computer locked up as it tried to load the MS Zone Friends. I rebooted again and got back so I could do some tinker work for Bal. After getting the work done it locked up again. This time I turned the computer off. I had decided to make a change in the BIOS and see if that improved things. I turned on the computer, got into the BIOS and made the change. While booting it locked up. It shut down and now the computer will not even turn on. I have a hope it is the power supply but have no way to check. The light on the motherboard lights. When I turn it on the fans do about half a turn and everything shuts off. To me that means a bad short somewhere. The most likely problem is a burnt up CPU chip. Being in the sticks of the sticks finding a good repairman is going to be troublesome. Most of the people working on computers seem to know less than I do. Being I'm a software specialist and not a hardware one, I find that puzzling. As I have had a lot of problems with this system it might be best to just get a new bare bones system and put the parts from this one into it. The problem there is of course money. Rosa is home tomorrow. I'll talk it over with her and see what I'm allowed to do. Meanwhile next weeks column might be a touch short. It will depend on how much I can stand playing on my slow computer and how fast my other one can be repaired/replaced. Matron with Maddie I was at the mansion and talking with Maddie's revenge. I noted she was 80lv and could get the new underwear. That is a really nice item, almost a must have. When I brought it up she was unsure if she had the ability to go there. I can solo it and, other than M's, did not find it that dangerous. I felt we could do it with ease. I quickly swapped accounts and headed to Baishi. We buffed up when I noted I did not have my underwear set. A bit later I noted I did not have my shield. While I could do without the underwear there was no way I was going in there without my shield. While NB did its thing I loaded the Death Mute account. After the buffing was over I ported back to the mansion to pick up the shield and strength underwear from Death Mute. I went in first to clear the landing. Most of them were already dead so I told Maddie to come on in. We advanced to the acid pits and crossed them. We only had to kill a few things on the way. I noted right way that I was hitting a lot better than before. Only the M's were giving me trouble. Even them I could hit 60 to 70 percent of the time. I noted I was being hit more as well. I expected that, which was why I had to get my shield before heading in. We got to the bottom and advanced on the Matron. We got engaged with the mob of Olthoi. There were several Swarm Olthois between the Matron and us. The M's were ripping Maddie and me up so they were our main concern. Then an archer came running up and started shooting at the Matron. As she was to far away for me to hit there was nothing we could do but watch the moron steal our kill. It is sad but 4 out of 5 morons I meet are bow or crossbow users. Saying anything I know would be a waste of time so we ignored him as he looted the Matron and left. After we cleared and the moron left we settled down to wait for the re-spawn. I was not sure if I could get another one so in hindsight I should have tried to pick it up first. That way if I could not pick it up we could pass on waiting for another respawn. Being polite (or brain dead) I told Maddie to get the Carp. While waiting was a full re-spawn of the guards. It was a hot battle as both of us were out of position. I had not expected the re-spawn to happen until a bit later. I targeted the M's as they are the real danger. The rest could not hit or damage me too much. M's are deadly. We finally cleared them and waited for the Matron to arrive. After killing her I found I needed 5 more days before I could repeat the quest. I had Maddie try to pick it up so we could get an idea on the timer. It is 21 days. From there we hunted. We backtracked and killed several mobs. I'm getting hit enough that I have to heal a lot but the battles are over much quicker now. If Maddie could land an imperil it was over very fast. The only real danger we had was when I lagged a touch while moving to draw some from around a corner. I ended up drawing them all and Maddie followed, not knowing I was lagging. We finished them off but it was a tight thing. I was under 100 hp twice. The last battle had a touch of danger. Maddie said her banes were dropping. I know I would be ok so I told here to port out, few seconds later she escaped. I cleared the rest and ported to the mansion. Utter Shock I picked Rosa up at the airport Saturday. I had already researched a new computer on the Internet. I felt my main problem with the old system stemmed from heat. We have air-conditioning but because of a payment plan we have we keep it set rather high until 9pm. We have it set lower than normal but in years past we have had 85 degrees or higher in the house. This year we have set it to a max of 83 degrees but that is still hot for a computer system. My old system is still going strong but it is an older cooler technology. Well-built Dells seem to last forever. I have two that are over 5 years old and going strong. Unfortunately one is totally obsolete and the other is almost there. So it seemed to me that getting a system that runs cool is a priority. I also wanted one that was silent given how I suffered with the old jet plane system. My ears still ring a bit from that one. After a lot of research I decided a water-cooled system was what I needed. Not only will a water-cooled system run far cooler than any other system it is also sealed. There is a lot of dust in Yuma. I also have two longhaired cats. Between the two keeping a computer clean is a problem. So a water-cooled sealed system will solve two problems that effect longevity. I searched the Internet and found some nice systems for a good price. Only one seemed to have the balance between performance and price I was looking for. So the only question was how would Rosa take the news? Well she really shocked me. Not only did she give me permission to get the new system she told me not to skimp on it. She understood that if I went low end I would be asking for a new one sooner. (grin) Smart lady. I hit Direction.com and placed my order. It is a stock system and so the only change I made was to upgrade the memory. They called me today and said it would be shipped Tuesday or Wednesday. With luck I'll have it ready to go before next weekend. It will all depend on shipping. If you're curious about my new system here is a link to it. http://store.yahoo.com/directron/watercoolsys.html It will drain my PalPal account of all I have collected in the last two years, $250. Not much but a start on paying Rosa back. Batten the Hatches The below is a reprint off of the Fred Langa newsletter. This is free and highly recommended. subscribe-langalist@lyris.dundee.net With all the trouble I have had this week I have hopes that this will cut down on vulnerable systems. The spate of recent worms makes it clear that way too many people aren't keeping their PCs secure. For example, the "Blaster" worm (the first of the recent bunch) spread itself by email or by direct infection via unguarded network ports. But any good AV tool, and some high-quality desktop firewalls like ZoneAlarm, defang hostile inbound mail attachments: This would have closed off email as an infection vector for this kind of worm attack. Any decent firewall--- even the simplest--- can block the port probes that worms like this use to seek new local victims, totally closing off that infection vector. And the better desktop firewalls also alert you to suspicious *outbound* activity from your PC, so even if your PC were somehow infected, you could still see what was going on, and prevent your machine from infecting others. And here's the part that makes me just scratch my head in wonder. The worm was designed to take advantage of a Windows security hole for which a patch had been released (via a "Critical Update") a month *before* the worm surfaced! This is a worm that should have gone nowhere. But clearly, huge numbers of systems were running unpatched, unprotected, and wide open; millions of PCs were thus needlessly compromised. Of course, the usual "it's Microsoft's fault!" cry went up. And while some problems *are* Microsoft's fault, I don't see how we can pin this one on them. People whose PCs were infected in this outbreak had ignored a "Critical Update" AND/OR were running unprotected by desktop firewalls AND/OR were running without up-to-date antivirus tools. Those are voluntary choices, and (as many found out) ones with bad consequences. Many readers of this newsletter are running very well-protected, so I don't want to bore you by "preaching to the choir." But if you have coworkers or friends who are leaving themselves open (especially if they were among the millions and millions who got bit by one or more of the worms)--- or if you're not well protected yourself--- this may help: First, stay patched. I know some users worry about applying Critical Updates, because they sometimes do cause new problems. Up to a point, that kind of caution is a good thing. Assuming you have a good antivirus tool and a good desktop firewall running to protect you from the most-frequent infection vectors, then it can make sense to wait a few days after a Critical Update appears to see if others have trouble with it. But it rarely makes sense to wait weeks or months before applying a Critical Update, and I can think of no reason just to ignore them: They're called "critical" for a reason. And please note that you can apply the Critical Updates as soon as they appear, if you have a good backup process. Then, if something doesn't work out, it's no big deal because you can undo the change in a matter of minutes. For that matter, you usually can apply Critical Update right away anyway: Although some Critical Updates have caused trouble, most of them work exactly as they should. Spy Ware While on the subject of computers it is good to check for adware/spyware ever so often. I found a good link to check if such as snuck into your computer system. This was also taken from the newsletter. http://doxdesk.com/parasite/ For a laugh This last bit from the newsletter. They have a Just for Grins section and this is funny for anyone who is a programmer and kind of funny for those who are not. http://www.newtechusa.com/PPI/main.asp Tribute Matt Jefferies died of a heart attack this month. For those who don't know or are not Star Trek fans "Jeffries Tubes" are named in his honor. Matt Jefferies was born in 1921. After a tour as a flight engineer in World War II, winning metals in combat, he became an Art Director in Hollywood. In the early 60's he was asked to create the model of the Enterprise. He did a lot more work for the show and helped create the franchise we have today.