Humanoid

Revised: CPU: Intel i7-6700K CPU Cooler: Scythe Mugen 4 / Glide Stream 120 fan (1400rpm PWM) M/B: Asus Z170-AR RAM: 2x8GB G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3000 HDD: None SSD1: 500GB Samsung 850 EVO m.2 SSD2: 256GB Crucial m4 SSD3: 250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD4: 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus Video: Gigabyte R9 290X Windforce 3X OC Sound: Topping VX1 DAC + Stereo amplifier ODD: Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-ray combo Case: Fractal Design Define R5 PSU: EVGA Supernova G2 850W O/S: Windows 10 Home Mouse: Logitech M705 Marathon Mouse Keyboard: Das Keyboard Professional Silent (Cherry Brown) Display: 2x Dell U2711 27" IPS Speakers: Monitor Audio Bronze BR2 Headphones: Alessandro MS-1i Gaming Peripherals: - CH Products F-16 Fighterstick USB - Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar - XBox360 Wireless controller for PC Backup: 2TB External WD My Passport Router: TP-Link Archer D7

So sometime Saturday afternoon I wandered outside of the house to throw out some rubbish and found that $1500 worth of stuff had been left by a courier on my front doorstep god-knows-how-long-ago. Pretty disconcerting, but on the plus side it meant I could get my build done over the weekend. The physical build was easy enough, but by god, the process of clean installing Windows 10, starting with an old Win7 Family Pack licence, was an ordeal of nightmarish proportions. Intel i7-6700K Scythe Mugen 4 Asus Z170-AR 16GB G.Skill 3000MHz DDR4 500GB Samsung 850 EVO m.2 Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-ray Combo Fractal Design Define R4 EVGA Supernova G2 850W Plus carried over parts: Gigabyte Windforce R9 290X 256GB Crucial m4 250GB Samsung 840 EVO 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus Topping VX1 DAC/Amp (actually using the DAC portion now) Need to go back and do some overclocking of the CPU and some underclocking of the GPU. Really wish Arctic Cooling would do a deal with a graphics card vendor to get their coolers factory-installed on high-end cards.

The was probably a fair bit of churn at the end of WoTLK, but as the trend for the preceding years at that point shows, they were still signing up brand new customers at that point to offset subscriber losses. Initially I thought it might have been the impact of the Annual Pass, that promotion they had that if you committed to a one-year subscription to WoW, you'd get Diablo 3 for free, but that was apparently late 2011. There's also a big gap where subs were not reported between the end of 2009 and October 2010, so they may well have been a dip there that's effectively hidden by subs climbing back up on the crest of new expansion hype (see the September 2014 uptick).

Plenty of options with Intel Atom CPUs nowadays being really rather good. As usual, my go-to for recommendations is Notebookcheck, who happily enough have a handy Top 10 Windows Tablets section which is regularly updated, and most are easily in your price range.

Of all the big drugs scandals that have happened in recent years, they've almost all been instigated by a criminal investigation, so at least we know that part of of enforcement isn't totally broken. Remember that Armstrong was only toppled when Landis went nuclear and talked to the feds. Historically the major busts have been down to police raiding hotel rooms, or drug couriers being caught at border controls (as in the Festina affair). The respective sports' governing bodies most certainly did try to cover up any evidence, and calling them willfully ignorant is being charitable. At least the US it goes that far - in Spain, a major doping investigation - Operacion Puerto - that netted some cycling and track and field stars was shut down by the Spanish government as soon as word got out that some football stars playing for three of the country's largest clubs may be implicated, not to mention a certain tennis superstar. In the case of the major US sports like baseball, they're not even signatories to WADA, so they're a law unto themselves, with slap-on-the-wrist punishments for offenders - suspensions of not even one season, as opposed to base four-year bans. The sports are big enough that they can stand on their own commercially, a luxury smaller sports don't have. The Australian Rules football league for example has been engulfed in a team-wide doping scandal in recent times, and would dearly love to renounce membership of WADA so they can apply their own arbitrary (non-)punishment of the team involved, because effectively banning one of the largest teams in the sport for up to two years would be financially disastrous. But the federal government has made it clear in no uncertain terms that if the governing body were to do that, the sport would lose all government funding, an even more unpalatable option for them.

Hmm, that made me go check whether drivers were available for my Asus Essence ST. Answer is no. Then I checked for the Win8.1 driver. There's one download, a beta driver from April 2014. So Asus are just as bad, if not worse than Creative in that regard. That said, I don't even know if the Z170 board I'll eventually be going for will even have a PCI slot, so it might be a moot point. Every chance I'll just use the DAC in my Topping VX1 amp I think, though I haven't tested it yet.

A lot of the drugs used today are recovery drugs yes, it's easier to get away with them because they're taken out-of-competition. The thing is, over-training can be very much a result of using this type of drug - after all the idea is that you can now train harder and with less downtime than ever with them - so it's not as if they're unrelated problems. All that said, I think it's going to be difficult to ever wind back the scale of doping, ever. Implicitly I think governing bodies accept and even silently condone PED use provided the athletes don't go nuts on them. It's a thin line between producing a better spectacle (good for business) and risking a scandal (bad for business). The political aspect raised earlier is a very real thing of course, there are certain "talismanic" athletes which effectively have complete immunity for political and/or commercial reasons, and so we have the often unedifying spectacle of the small fry being made an example of to create an illusion that authorities are "serious about PEDs" while the big fish continue on their merry ways with no fear.

Yeah, it's easy to underestimate how much people think winning is worth. The is a famous study done of athletes done some time ago that found that a majority would knowingly accept drugs that would kill them in five years time, as long as it guaranteed them success in their field. This risk-taking behaviour might sound insane to the general populace, but it's not just based on a theoretical study. Around the early 90s where the drug EPO first found its way into sporting culture, pro cyclists were dying in their sleep. EPO is essentially a blood thickener, increasing the concentration of red blood cells in your bloodstream. This is great when you're working hard, a high heart rate pumping through all that extra oxygen through your body did wonders for performance. But at night, when asleep and your heart rate slows, having blood as thick as syrup... well, your heart basically wouldn't be able to handle it anymore and would just stop. It'd go down in the medical records as heart failure - EPO was undetectable for well over a decade - but that's hardly the complete answer. Did those early deaths scare other athletes off EPO? Not a chance. They developed some primitive "techniques" to try to get around the problem, they set their alarms to go off every few hours, and they'd wake up like that, in the middle of the night, to do some exercises to get the blood flowing again. There is some fascinating eyewitness testimony of athletes and support staff being amazed at finding a colleagues at 3am in the morning upside-down on a shower rail, maybe doing some crunches even - the upside-down thing being another theory of improving blood flow. Maybe it was a sound theory, but geez, it's still putting your life up based on cowboy medicine.

Meanwhile I tried the manual installer and got the memetic "Something Happened Something Happened" error message. But that finally led me down the right path, I had to change my language and locale from English (Australia) to English (United States). Just checked my main desktop and it's always been Australia and it has the upgrade tray icon though, so it's a weird peculiarity with my test machine.

Sweet, I enjoyed that game. Hot vampire Toreado women are always a good idea I had to abandon my Toreador playthrough in Hollywood because the armour you get there is a ridiculous feathered coat and I just couldn't take it seriously anymore. Not that the game is worth playing past Hollywood, mind you.

Well I reckon the underwear of a prince would be pretty valuable, so that's fully realistic really.

Eh, the only thing "wrong" with it in an absolute sense is that some retailers may opt not to carry the game as a result, thus reducing profits. Letting modders go wild with it on the other hand should increase profits, Bethesda really have the best of both worlds here. It's what makes EA's insistence on making their games as hard to mod as possible rather baffling, if they want a Skyrim killer (thinking DA3 here), then why omit Skyrim's one killer feature? However such an approach rather ensures sex is nothing but a novelty in the context of the game, completely inconsequential from a narrative perspective, and generally poorly integrated gameplay-wise. Of course, in a Bethesda game you'd barely be able to tell, but it's not a great result for the industry as a whole. The Witcher games get some (well-deserved) mockery for some of the sillier aspects of their approach, but it's still a reasonable benchmark in contextualising sex as something that naturally happens in a relationship, treading the happy medium between the Bioware approach of sex as an end goal (or Steam/Origin achievement), and the completely context-free sex such as you'd see in Skyrim mods. That said, it's a whole lot of effort for content that in a typical playthrough is mutually exclusive, so I can understand why some developers don't even bother trying, their resources could be spent more efficiently elsewhere. It doesn't address the persistent limitation of video games in that everything not about fighting is just a sideshow. Completely understandable because violence is cheap to make and easily stands up to repetition better than any other content. People will accept beating up 100 or 1000 mooks in the exact same way over the course of a game, but repeating even parts of the same dialogue tree a few times rapidly becomes unbearable. Now put that in the context of sex: how do you make it the core of a video game narrative for a reasonable cost without it being repetitive and boring? I certainly doubt any "Virtual Sex" type games that had their heyday in the 90s succeeded at that. A 3D model and a handful of customisable positions don't make for compelling gameplay for more than, oh, 10 minutes at a time, then what? I posit that even in a game where the central premise is sex, the gameplay logically is still largely going to be concentrated on context and not on the act of sex itself. Perhaps a framework like that use in Telltale's recent games or in Life is Strange might be the answer, but I haven't played any of them and can't say for sure. For what it's worth, I want Obsidian to make a Boogie Nights RPG. Golden Age of Porn stuff would be an interesting and untapped aesthetic for games. But I wouldn't even know how to approach it from a game design perspective. Are you a young up and coming actor? Or the hotshot director? The outraged moral campaigner?

Swearing Mudcrabs are where the adult mods cross the line. That's far too transgressive even for me.

Yeah, admittedly I have very little to say about the crafting system because I didn't really use it. The system has all the same problems that crafting has in any other game, and I don't consider it an interesting subsystem at all. Fortunately the game doesn't seem balanced around using crafted gear, so I just use whatever's on hand. I'd also note that the durability penalty is peanuts. Wielding a "completely broken" weapon is a 10% damage penalty on normal (+5% on each harder difficulty). That's completely inconsequential so I ended up using weapons with 0% durability until it came time to replace them. Technically these designs are flaws of course, but I live rather happily with the outcome of just being able to enjoy the game - generally speaking the talkie bits - while ignoring the mechanical aspect of most everything.

Yeah, that batch file linked has as the first option a check that all prerequisite updates are installed. There's another update required depending on whether you're running Win7 or Win8. IE11 is also required for whatever reason. Either way, I pass that requirement. Windows version is correct and eligible (and activated), Win7 Home Premium OEM, gives me the all clear. Fix #1 should work instantly if relevant, nothing happened. Fix #2 says to run it and give it 10 minutes, nothing happened. Fix #3 says it may take an hour, I left it overnight, nothing happened. Ah well, my only options now are either to wait until MS provide an installation option not tied to the GWX app, or to nuke the current Win7 install and start fresh (the parts in this PC including the OS install are from my old HTPC).

The XP bug in hindsight was a good one to have: with it fixed, there's way too much XP in the game that any semi-completionist run will greatly outlevel the intended levels for the game. The XP curve is messed up in general though, for example the breadcrumb quest that says "hey you should totally visit Skellige" is quite a few levels higher than some of the quests you can do once you actually get there. I can come up with a long, very long list of all my mechanical gripes with the game. But I'd also like to note that the game also takes proud place in my favourite games of all time, despite those shortcomings.

It's the micromanagement aspect I can't stand, I hate it so much despite it being easy money. Sure in previous expansions you've always had the daily cooldowns and such that gave moderate rewards to those hardcore enough to log in daily, but the garrison mission structure now rewards proportionally more for logging in three times a day on a schedule, if not more often. I've made more gold in WoD, in half a year, than I had in my previous 8 years of WoW combined so it may seem odd to complain, but it's also driving me to the edge of re-quitting. The problem is now going to be how they could possibly phase out the garrisons and the attendant income it provides in a graceful manner. If they do nothing, maintaining the old garrison will still be absolutely required if you don't want to be a hobo who can't afford to buy anything from the player economy. Will they dare to simply shut down the garrison missions completely as soon as the next expansion launches? Personally I'm hoping so. Anyway, it's always been a stated goal of the development team to release expansions on an approximately annual basis. Five times they've tried, five times they've failed. This might be the closest yet to doing that, assuming an early release next year would give about a 15 month turnaround. That's probably what the idea of "doubling the development team" strategy was about. From a user perspective though, it's just paying more and getting less. Ignore the furphy about increasing the box price, that's fair enough with inflation, but I suspect with WoD being 2/3rds the size of previous expansions, this will be an ongoing strategy.

That's only...sort of true. There's no way to do it via the actual control panel, but you can manually edit some text profile...uh, file somewhere or another in your appdata directory: I know this because I messed around with mine a while back trying to unlock lower clock speeds for my 3D clock speed settings, and found the 2D settings as well as the "half speed" settings...and it annoyed me that, for the 2D settings, the memory clock speed was set to 157MHz instead of just 150MHz (making my OCPD flare up a bit, ), so I changed that, too. I tried that but for whatever reason the numbers wouldn't stick. Either I'm doing it wrong (not unlikely) or for some cards the idle states might be locked in the BIOS or something. I know some people have flashed custom BIOSes with increased idle clocks. As for Win10, well, the upgrade icon isn't appearing on the one system I want to test it on. I have four other PCs running either Win7 or Win8.1 and they all have the option offered, but no such luck on the spare box. I've checked and double checked the prerequisites and fulfil them all, and have tried the workarounds to force the update (all three workarounds offered by the handy dandy batch file offered here), but no luck. I can't be bothered clean installing Win7 over again to see if that can force it to appear, since it's not a PC I'll be using for anything, so I'll wait until my build.

Ran into an old problem where in idle states (AMD Powerplay, the card clocks down to 300MHz on the core and 150MHz on the memory, down from 1000/1250MHz respectively), the VRAM will clock down too low and cause corruption (and possible black-screening) in 2D applications like an Internet browser. Fortunately I'm familiar with the problem and the solution - using a third party program like ASUS GPU Tweak or MSI Afterburner to raise the 2D clocks - but it's frustrating that there's no such inbuilt functionality in AMD's software. The problem apparently doesn't manifest on all systems even with the same card used - at least part of it is due to the arcane interactions with the motherboard as opposed to a specific fault with the card - so I'm hopeful that it's just a peculiarity with my 5-year old i5-750 platform and that it'll go away without having to use the workaround on my Skylake build. And now for something completely different: I've still got an old Sandy Bridge system gathering dust on my shelf. I'll go try out Windows 10 on it now that it's released and there are no major issues being reported.

There's probably a sizable subset of people who tried to launch Fallout 3 but failed because it continues to be encumbered with Games for Windows Live, so they give up and play New Vegas instead. EDIT: Have heard stories about it being even worse now, in that you can buy FO3 on Steam but will find it won't work unless you manually install some GFWL DLLs from Microsoft as a workaround.

Then I'd be the complete reverse, the mage is the one old class I've never raided with, though I did level one to max level at the time for the hell of it. (I've never used a monk either, but then they weren't available for 90% of my time with WoW)

Well if you rate the difficulty of healing from being in groups with dps who stand in fire, then yeah, it's tricky. Generally speaking though, it's actually less intense than the other roles for me, healers are the only role that has downtime instead of having to hit buttons from start to finish. I will concede it probably requires more preparation, in that UI setup is more involved, but that's largely a one-time thing. Over the time I've played WoW I think my time has been probably spent 50% healing, 45% dps, and 5% tanking. Obviously don't mind doing either of the former roles, I've always been the first to switch roles to whatever is required for balance. I'm less comfortable tanking since I don't really have the personality for it, but can do a reasonable job in a pinch.

I have no idea who Nathan Fillion is, so I thought it was a poorly rendered facsimile of Charlie Sheen.

It's an idealistic design that falls flat in practice. Not even the highest population MMO can sustain that kind of cooperation, because it doesn't match the reality of how people actually play games. For the vast majority of players, their pattern of play revolves around drop-in-drop-out multiplayer that they can fit around their own schedules, not something that requires levels of coordination approaching the lines of organised sports. Further, that sort of class/role-centric design effectively multiplies the amount of content the designers would have to create - exclusive content is a terribly inefficient way to spend development resources. The game is then also at the mercy of unpredictable factors like relative class populations: even games that have effectively simplified their role distribution to the ubiquitious tank-healer-dps trinity have struggled at lining up the relative popularity of each role with the numbers the design expects.

Yeah, part of Classic WOW & TBC's difficulty came from having to fight the game as well as the enemies, especially with regards to tanking and keeping aggro and having to have a certain setup to get through the fights, or fights being unreasonably hard with certain setups or specs being completely worthless. Maybe it was the sense of being new and all, but the WoW still was more "fun" back then - before I completely burned out on it during Firelands in Cataclysm where they gameplay was the reason for the game being hard, rather than the game & class mechanics. *shrug* I burned out in Dragon Soul, which was a shockingly bad raid, but I'd already been planning an exit strategy since the start of Cataclysm anyway, giving up any formal leadership roles and whatnot. Didn't mind Firelands, wasn't a terrible place in itself, but it really needed its companion raid not to be cancelled. (Abyssal Maw was supposed to be a concurrent raid, at only 7 bosses, Firelands wasn't enough to stand on itself) The guild had already downsized from a 25-person raiding guild to a 2x10s schedule, so we didn't see the really hard stuff, ended up 6/7 and 7/8 heroic in the last two raid dungeons. My subscription expired literally the day we got the Spine of Deathwing kill.