2010 January | Geek Tragedy Podnotes

Hailing frequencies open, preparing rant

January 31st, 2010 by Dave

Hey there, it’s Dave here, posting from inside Star Trek Online head start. Or rather, *trying* to post from inside Star Trek Online head start. You see, it seems that when tried to log in, I got a ‘server is full’ message and was placed in a queue to log into the game.

Let me say that again: I was put on hold while trying to log into a game that I have invested a not-inconsiderable amount of my finances into…2 days before the official release.

This is really not a good sign. Now more than likely, 90% of the people that were going to play this game already pre-ordered it, and there’s a lot of Star Trek fans world-wide that have been waiting for this. However, I don’t think the player base is going to be nearly the size of WoW (11 million +), and I’ve never had an issue logging into a WoW server whose status is ‘Full’.

Another little matter that I discovered Friday morning: all throughout Beta-testing, we were limited to only 2 character slots. I figured that this was only for the durration of the beta test so as not to overload the game. But lo and behold, I log in on Friday morning when the servers go live and for real for the head start…and I’m still only limited 2 character slots.

Seriously, what the Hell are they smoking over at Cryptic? They already have a char-gen issue by forcing players that only want to play Klingons to grind to level 6 before making a Klingon character; now they’re forcing those players to devote 50% of their character slots to a Federation character that they’ll NEVER PLAY AGAIN?

Of course, if you get the lifetime subscription of the locked in 1-year subscription (a program which ends the day before the official release date), you get a whopping *2* extra character slots. Fascinating.

Come on, Cryptic. Get your act together here. I’ve been defending you for a while now. Don’t let this turn into the ‘Kamp Krusty’ episode of ‘The Simpsons’ with me and quite a few others, curled up, rocking back and forth, and chanting ‘The fixes are coming…the fixes are coming…the fixes are coming…’

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Tags: Gaming, online, review, Star+Trek
Categories: Gaming

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Death Comes To Comicstown

January 27th, 2010 by Kyle

Kyle here;

So today Steve Jobs got on stage and read the obituary of print comics. A light, portable, color device with a big, bright OLED screen, a fantastic, easy-to-use interface, and universal connectivity to a huge, slick online store at an affordable price point – this addresses every single problem that was holding back e-comics. Marvel may be cautious, but so are all old media companies when faced with the future. Some purists will turn up their noses, but some music purists still haven’t given up vinyl records either. There’s no accounting for prickly purist cranks, but they don’t dominate the market.

Trees everywhere can rejoice – the dead tree model is, well, dead.

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Tags: Apple, comics, iPad
Categories: Tech

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