GreySoul

I found some pretty stellar articles… on MTV.com no less… about Warhammer online and Mark Jacobs inputing his opinion and taking a few jabs at the industry. I found it to be a good read.

One of the best parts is covering the collapse of my beloved Flagship studios and Hellgate:London which was one of the best/cruddiest games I have played so far. It’s specifically interesting for me because I have a buddy who works as a producer at EA and had remarked to me that Bill Roper at one point ripper apart Warhammer Online, something which I was told was taken pretty personally by Mythic. Who would of thought this level of drama could persist in the gaming industry with middle aged men. Ego’s gotta love them.

Thus, read on players….

In other news I have been diligently jacking with the code on the site to present things in a cleaner fashion (They always look so much cleaner in photoshop). Anyway you might have noticed that now in these news posts we have breaks in the text. Had to do a little CSS manipulation but I came out on top in my battle against wordpress. Sorry for making this “news” worthy. As a graphic designer by trade this kind of stuff is a big deal for me.

So where have I been the last couple of days? Trolling the VN Boards against people who think I don’t know how to play a Zealot. And reading up on the Archmage whilst defending it from fanbois…. and for anyone new here, we have decided our first round of characters are going to be going ORDER. Balcloth put a bit of effort into convincing me that this was the best strategy for us. And I was hesitent I will admit. But after playing the CE preview weekend I understood. There are just WAY to many destruction and way to many passive-aggressive players that we just want to avoid.

It’s safe to say at this point that GreySoul is going to start out on the side of ORDER. I wasn’t on board at first but instant scenario queue and plethora of things to kill whilst adventuring in a less than crowded environment won me over this weekend. We will be heading to DESTRUCTION as planned, but this will be later on.

Or depending on the server load, at the same time as our ORDER characters. If there is one thing we have learned in our gaming years that it works best to go against the grain to get the best experience possible (quite literally in mmo’s). The initial server list was just announced at Warhammer vault, so expect a discussion and announcement from us as to where our ORDER home and future DESTRUCTION home will be.

With the beta servers down, it is going to give me some time to further customize the site to make it work for us at release time. I am just going to shoot things off the top of my head in no particular order.

Char names and Alts: I uploaded this cool mod for the forum that allows members to go into their profile and add their main toon name as well as up to 4 alt names. I think this will come in handy when people end up adopting a strong alt but are still posting under their main name on the forums.

Members access to post: I still need to get around to this. Balcloth has access to post but Ryjel and Bela still don’t. I’ll change that tonight. It’s basically just me on a soap box at the moment.

Members Only Discussion: I put together a discussion board only for GS members. However it’s not showing up so I need to look into this.

Adding a (X)comments posted: I really need to make it so we can see how many comments are posted to news posts. I didn’t realize this until we got going with GS but I think that will actually stimulate more discussion on this end (aside from the forums).

The PR machine: While we aren’t exactly in a member push, my efforts to get our name out there are working. Yesterday was our highest day per visits thus far. Don’t laugh but it’s at 40, not bad considering it’s now been doubled.

The PR machine x 2: My Zealot article I wrote for Warhammer Vault has garnered some mild success. I got my own section which was pretty cool.

The PR machine x 3: If you go to google and type in “greysoul” we are now the #3 placed site. Not bad considering when this started we were on page 5…

Possible ORDER guild restructure: After talking with Balcloth we may or may not go ORDER at release. The best thing we can do right now is be flexible as everyone and their mother is getting ready to play as DESTRUCTION. The underdog is always who we play for so read up on those classes. But we will of course come back toDESTRUCTION.

That’s really it for now.

A comprehensive Zealot guide that I wrote for Warhammer Vault is currently up on their site and now part of the side bar menu. Damn not to shabby. I went over a lot of the basic mechanics and left out a lot of names for the attacks. What can I say, I am bad with names. There is a shout out to GreySoul at the bottom, of course. As our PR machine slowly takes off…. which was the only requirement I made for writing said article in question. =D So go on over, check it out, let me know what you think.

Yup. Mark Jacobs just lifted the NDA. I am currently hanging out over at Warhammer Vault answering all the questions I currently can. This also means my article about the Zealot should be releasing soon as well.

So the plan goes as follows. Come opening day of Warhammer online, I am going to be over at Balcloth’s place. Money has been set aside for frozen pizza and I have the time off scheduled from work. Only one piece of the puzzle remained, the computer. Sure I could bring my “cube of death” over to Balc’s place, but I would have to bring the 24inch monitor, keyboards, etc etc. And the laptop I have is pretty awesome. Many of nights were spent playing World of Warcraft on it. However when I tried to run the WAR beta on my little HPzd8000… it ate it. I couldn’t even get animations for running the poor thing was bogged down so bad.

Now in it’s defense the little guy was top of the line for his day. ATI radeon mobility x300 …. 256mb dedicated graphic. 2.4ghz. The list goes on, plus it was a media center laptop so I had all the fixin’s and was one of the only kids on the block who had a remote control for his computer.

But yesterday, I stopped by Best Buy on a whim, and sure enough they had the laptop I had been eying. The Gateway P-7811FX. Aside from the amazing 4gb of DDR3 1066mhz ram, or the 7200rpm hard drive, the thing sports a NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS graphics with 512MB of sheer goodness. Did I mention the whole thing was $1445. Scary huh? I might also try this “Crysis” I had been hearing so much about.

Anyway, I am ready for WAAAAGH. This machine spits out warhammer without a problem. So if any of you are in the market for a new laptop, consider this one.

I finally got the SMF gallery installed for our site today. Now images of sweet pwns can be viewed by all. Once that nda is lifted expect a flurry of screenshots of my zealot. Until then and enjoy. If anyone wants to start a D2 or DAOC folder to upload some old time photos then feel free. The permissions should allow you to do so. Otherwise I’ll jump on my admin account and make that happen. PS. It might not be visible from the homepage until later on tonight. I need to edit the flash and it’s only on my home CPU.

Well grab your axes and get your disc polished. Mythic has announced that WAR will be rolling out on September 18th. Of course those that pre-ordered will be getting in a little earlier a-la the headstart program. I can’t wait.

Mmmhmmm very interesting. Seems that rumors have been circulating around the inter-webs about the release date of Warhammer Online. First it was October, now we pretty much know September is when this thing is getting shipped. Now, in the last few days we get word that the game is planning on launching the 23rd of September as per the EA.com website. This stirs up a few questions from me as to when I should plan my sick days for the headstart program. Plus we have a NDA that needs to be lifted, and not to mention open beta. Good luck Mythic, you got alot of loose ends to tie up…

In the meantime I am heading home this weekend and will dust off my old WAR3 disks and hopefully have a go with it before it’s time to focus on Waaaghammer.

Hey. If anyone has been looking around the site within the last week you’d see that I have been slowly finishing off my checklist for the site. I cleaned up our blog look; finalized it so people can make comments, finished up a wicked new login system, and best of all tied all of these systems together. Only thing that is truly broken would be the forum preview to the right on this post. So you log into one, you log into them all. Other than that I am just trying to get what “content” we have down on the page so we look like a legit guild. =P

I talked with Balcloth who is currently owning up in War3, going to join him soon so we can put a solid 3 man together with Bela. Warhammer online beta is going on, and Diablo 3 news is scarce. But considering it’s Blizzard, this is totally nothing new.

In preperation for all of this gaming coming down the pipeline, I picked up 4gb of ram from newegg at the low low price of $90 bucks. Not bad to say the least, my system is screaming at 6gb right now at dual channel 1066mhz, but since I have WindowsXP 32-bit, 3gb is going to total waste. So it’s time to upgrade that OS (If I happen to disappear for a few days, it’s because the process didn’t go smoothly).

Work is pretty brutal right now. Got a few campaigns in the works so I’ll try and be as active as I can this week.

EDIT: I guess Mythic is working on some kind of surprise reguarding… well I guess Warhammer. Some say it might be DAOC related. I think it might just more of what we are expecting…. open NDA open beta… etc…. sooner or later this stuff needs to come out anyway.