Attack of the Gamer

The Kurenai are an alliance only faction in the Outland. This guide will explain how to become exalted with the Kurenai faction. The main reasons someone would now want to become exalted with Kurenai would be for:

The achievements:

The Diplomat
Oh My, Kurenai

The talbuk mounts, and the tabard.

You will start out your journey as unfriendly and will begin your questing in Zangarmarsh.

• [62] Concerns About Tuurem
• [64] A Message to Telaar
• [64] Ango’rosh Encroachment
• [64] Overlord Gorefist
• [64] Daggerfen Deviance
• [64] Wanted: Chieftain Mummaki

To complete the following quests you will need at least neutral reputation.

• [64] Lines of Communication
• [64] Natural Armor
• [64] Maktu’s Revenge
• [64] Stinger Venom
• [64] The Terror of Marshlight Lake

Once you have completed Zangarmarsh, you will be moving onto Nagrand. At this point, you should have collected about 4500 rep. Once you are in Nagrand you will be completing the following quests:

• [65] Do My Eyes Deceive Me
• [65] Not On My Watch!
• [65] Mo’mor the Breaker
• [65] The Ruins of Burning Blade
• [66] The Twin Clefts of Nagrand
• [66] Diplomatic Measures
• [66] Ruthless Cunning
• [66] Body of Evidence
• [66] Message to Telaar
• [65] HELP!
• [66] Corki’s Gone Missing Again!
• [67] Corki’s Ransom (Group)
• [67] Cho’war the Pillager (Group)
• [66] The Throne of the Elements
• [67] Fierce Enemies
• [67] More Warbeads [Repeatable]
• [66] Wanted: Giselda the Crone
• [66] Wanted: Zorbo the Advisor
• [66] Wanted: Durn the Hungerer
• [67] The Ravaged Caravan
• [67] Solving the Problem
• [67] Stopping the Spread
• [67] The Totem of Kar’dash

Once you have completed all of these quests you should have picked up another 10570 rep, and you should probably be somewhere around Revered depending on how many ogre’s you had to kill to complete some of these quests.

Now comes the long part. You will have to do a repeatable quest [67] More Warbeads [Repeatable] over and over again. You get 500 rep per 10 beads that drop. You also get 10 rep per ogre you kill. It’s not that bad of a grind, I found the best place to grind for the Obsidian Warbeads was at the Burning Blade Ruins. What I did was I started at the bottom, cleared out all the ogres, looted and made my way to the top. Once I was at the top, I went in the cave, cleared it out, and then cleared my way back to the bottom. I did this over and over until I had enough beads.

A couple good things about this grind. First, the ogres drop Runecloth and Netherweave, which depending on your server can be worth a fair bit of gold. If you are a miner, lots of Fel Iron deposits, and Adamantite deposits are littered around the area. I got at least 2 veins each time I either ran from the top or from the bottom.

It shouldn’t take too long to get all the rep. I didn’t keep track of my grind, so I couldnt tell you how long it took, however, it took about 4 hours to go from 20% revered to exalted with just beads. Enjoy.

I haven’t been playing QuakeLive much, because honestly, it’s not as fun as I thought it was going to be. It seems the match-up system doesn’t really work all that well, usually I get stuck with 3 or 4 people who are just to good to be playing at a lower level.

I never really liked the weapons of Quake 3, and the dynamics behind the PvP. I don’t know it just didn’t feel like it was playing right. I guess I just liked Unreal Tournament a whole lot more. And I’m not talking 2k7, 2k4, 2k3, I’m talking the original version of Unreal Tournament.

There wasn’t a better game for fragging IMHO. It even had its own stats system, where you could see how well you were doing VS everyone on the internet.

The original Unreal Tournament has to be revived. If id software can do it, I’m sure Epic can pull it off. It wouldn’t even need any significant changes, I would rather no changes, but it would be cool to see a match-up system much like QuakeLive, and an achievement system, etc.

Maybe one day this will happen, until then I am going to have to keep hoping.

On a sidenote, while previewing this post, I noticed that google ads is spitting out links about terrorism. I wonder how the linked terrorism with Quake or Unreal. Does Jack Thompson have something to do with this? LOL.

I was going to write a review for QuakeLive, but it is still in a state where it cannot be reviewed. Reviewing the game at this point in time would be completely worthless because large chunks of the game still aren’t working, mainly because of the amount of people that id software was unprepared for.

When I initially created my account, I went into queue and there was about 20,000 people ahead of me, with 500 entering per minute, so it didn’t take long at all to actually download QuakeLive. However, my browser had to be restarted which put me back in a longer queue, then the server went down, and I had to re-queue, and the server went down, and I had to re-queue, then I get in, I get to a page asking for a verification code that was supposed to have been sent to me via email. It wasn’t there and it wasn’t inside of my spam folder. I had to send 3 requests before a code finally made it to me. The code when entered on their website, was invalid, but when I copy and pasted the link that was sent in my email, apparently my account was activated. The servers went down again.

Lovely, time to re-queue. I started at 30,000 got to about 9000 and then the queue reset and I was at 50,000 this time. After about 12 hours of waiting, I finally got to play against Crash, the bot that tests your skill. You do a couple simple tasks to determine which skill level you should be playing at, then you play the crash in a match to 15 frags.

Once you have defeated crash you can now search for games online. However 98% of the servers are full, or become full when you enter the game. All games are currently running unranked, so your scores are not kept as of right now. Which means the matchmaking system probably isn’t working properly either.

Now that we have the negatives out of the way, negatives that will hopefully be fixed very soon, on to some more positive stuff. QuakeLive is extremely fast paced. I was on a FFA server, with 17 other people, and there was no lag. That’s pretty impressive for a beta. However, some of the arena’s aren’t meant to handle that many players, and you may end up running around like an idiot with just the machine gun.

The graphics are good so far, especially for a game loaded from your webbrowser. It can be played in fullscreen mode, and it can be played in ultra high resolutions, aswell as widescreen resolutions. I haven’t tried this on a slower computer to see how it run’s maybe I will check it out on my laptop later.

All in all, I can’t wait for QuakeLive to officially launch with all of the bugs worked out. It’s going to be a great game.

I’ve been checking my email daily, to check for my quakelive beta invite (been checking for a couple of months now). Now I see that it has gone live, as posted on slashdot earlier today.

Right now I am sitting at work on my laptop, so I have atleast joined queue. Maybe I’ll get some quake matches in during my lunch. I started in queue posistion 22,000+ and the queue seems to move about 500 spots or so every couple minutes. So I’m probably going to be queued up for a couple hours.

Will write a full review once I get on!

Here are some car backgrounds for your PSP. Enjoy

[View with PicLens]

Open Arena is an amazing Open Source arena based first person shooter. It is based on the quake 3 engine, and has a lot of fast gameplay.

You are going to need your own server running linux. A shell account will not do, the admin will probably disable your account, and most likely you won’t have access to enough resources to run a dedicated game server. So I am going to assume you either have a computer sitting beside you running linux, or a virtual machine either on your pc, or hosted on a server somewhere. You will not be able to run the dedicated server on your own machine, without changing some of the server flags.

The first thing you will need to do is download the latest version of the OpenArena, which can be done here. Any download link will do, the windows and the linux binaries are both packaged together.

I recommend uploading the archive to your server, then uncompressing it, instead of uncompressing it on your computer then uploading it, just to save some time and bandwidth.

Once you have everything uploaded and uncompressed on your server, you will need to go into the baseoa directory and create a file called server.cfg

Your server.cfg file is going to look something similar to this:


sv_hostname "My OA server"
sv_maxclients 16
sv_master1 "dpmaster.deathmask.net"
sv_maxPing 150
sv_minPing 0
sv_pure 1
sv_maxRate 25000
sv_fps 20
sv_allowdownload 1

sv_privateClients "2" // slots substracted from sv_maxclients
sv_privatePassword " "

capturelimit 8
timelimit 15
fraglimit 35

set rconPassword "" // for remote ingame servercontrol

g_motd ""
g_quadfactor 4
g_inactivity 0
g_allowvote 1

//If you want to use unlagged functionality (since 0.7.6)
g_delagHitscan 1

//Special modes since 0.7.6:
//g_instantgib 1
//g_rockets 1
//g_vampire 0.25 //25%
//g_regen 5 //5 health per sec.

//Gametypes
// 0 = Free For All
// 1 = Tourney
// 3 = Team Deathmatch
// 4 = Capture The Flag
// 8 = Elimination
// 9 = CTF Elimination
// 10 = Last Man Standing
// 11 = Double Domination
// 12 = Domination
g_gametype 0

set d1 "map aggressor; set nextmap vstr d2"
set d2 "map oa_dm1; set nextmap vstr d3"
set d3 "map oa_dm2; set nextmap vstr d4"
set d4 "map oa_dm3; set nextmap vstr d5"
set d5 "map oa_dm4; set nextmap vstr d6"
set d6 "map kaos2; set nextmap vstr d7"
set d7 "map oa_dm5; set nextmap vstr d8"
set d8 "map oa_rpg3dm2;set nextmap vstr d9"
set d9 "map oa_shouse; set nextmap vstr d1"
wait
vstr d1 // start loop at d1


The main portions you are going to want to worry about are:

sv_hostname – Sets your viewable hostname in the serverlist
sv_maxclients – Sets the maximum ammount of clients allowed to connect to your server
sv_privateClients – Sets the ammount of slots held for private use (sv_maxclients – sv_privateClients = total clients)
sv_privatePassword – Sets the password for the private slots
capturelimit – Sets the capture limit in CTF
timelimit – Sets the time limit
fraglimit – Sets the frag limit
set rconPassword – Sets the rcon passsword for admin usage
g_motd – Sets the message of the day
g_gametype – Sets the gametype, the current option is 0, Free for All aka Deathmatch

The last portion is the confusing bit. This is where you setup the actual map rotation.


set d1 "map mapname1; set nextmap vstr d2"
set d2 "map mapname2; set nextmap vstr d3"
set d3 "map mapname3; set nextmap vstr d1"
wait
vstr d1 // start loop at d1


Basically what you are doing here is setting up a loop. d1 is set, with the next map being d2 and so on. You can do this with as many levels as you want, you just have to make sure to make the last map link to the first map, or the loop will not work.

Once you have your server.cfg file saved, go back into the root OpenArena directory and start up your server like this:

./oa_ded.i386 +set dedicated 2 +exec server.cfg


You may want to run this process inside of a screen session. There are alot more things you can do, this is just the basics for getting your own OpenArena dedicated server setup. Enjoy

Quite simply, this may be one of the most boring grinds to exalted you can do, other than say … Timbermaw Hold. However, you get a sweet ground mount [Reins of the Winterspring Frostsaber]. This is one cool looking mount, and not many people are going to be dedicated enough to do the grind.

You start out at Neutral with this faction, and you will only be able to complete one quest at 250 rep per turn-in. That is, until you are 1500/3000 Neutral at which point you will be granted another quest which is worth another 250 rep. The first quest available is called [60] Frostsaber Provisions and will have to be repeated 6 times to get 1500/3000 rep. Its not a bad quest, the NPC’s aren’t all that far away, but the drop rate can suck. The drop rate also varies, some nights it will be good and you will do the quest in 10 minutes, some nights it will be bad and the quest will take 45 minutes. It all depends.

Once you are at 1500/3000 rep you get a second quest available to you titled [58] Winterfall Activity which like I said before gives another 250 rep per turn-in. This quest will also help you out if you are working on the Timbermaw Hold rep because you have to kill Furlbogs, and they drop the [Winterfall Spirit Beads] aswell as Runecloth. Obviously you can sell the Runecloth or use it as donations to build up rep with your main factions. While collecting the [Winterfall Spirit Beads] it has been recommended to me to wait until you are revered with the Timbermaw Hold faction until you start handing these in.

These are the ONLY 2 quests that will be available until you are Honored with this faction. So doing the math … you will have to complete both quests 15 times until you are Honored. Once you are honored another quest becomes available titled [60] Rampaging Giants which provides 350 rep per turn-in. This quest requires you to drop 8 elites, so if you are low level you might want to skip this one and just do the other 2.

So again, lets do the math, if you are going to do these 3 quests from Honored you will have to repeat them 39 times to become exalted. Now if you just want to go all the way to Exalted doing just the first 2 quests you are looking at 66 turn-ins for both quests.

Like I said this isn’t going to be easy, but it can be profitable, especially if you are a leatherworker.

Becoming exalted with Sporeggar isn’t all that hard, or time consuming. Alot of the questing can be done as a group to speed the whole process up because the majority of the quests are based on killing mobs, rather than turning in a certain amount of loot.

There are a couple reasons you would want to be working towards exalted with Sporeggar:

1. You may want one of the pieces of gear (weapon or armor) that faction provides.
2. You may want the cool [Tiny Sporebat] pet for your pet achievement.
3. You may want the [Sporeggar Tabard] for your tabard achievement.
4. You are trying to become exalted with whoever you can

You start out with an Unfriendly reputation with Sporeggar but thats not a problem, you have 2 quests to help you get from Unfriendly to Neutral.

[63] The Sporelings’ Plight
[64] Natural Enemies

These quests have to be completed 4 times in total to get the a Neutral rating. You can complete these quests all the way up to Friendly however while you are doing these you should be collecting [Glowcap] for the quest [64] Glowcap Mushrooms. This is another repeatable quest and only has to be completed 4 times, meaning you will need to collect 40 mushrooms to get to Friendly once you have become Neutral.

Once you are friendly there are 2 ways you can go about this, if you run through The Underbog you can collect [Sanguine Hibiscus] and turn in 5 for the quest [65] Bring Me A Shrubbery!. This quest gives you 750 rep per turn-in so you can realistically do this quest 52 times (260 [Sanguine Hibiscus]) to become exalted. You can also buy these on the auction house because they are not Bind on Pickup

Or you can complete the quest [64] Now That We’re Friends… 52 times, which involves flying across the little lake (or walking around it) and killing 6x Bloodscale Enchantress and 12x Bloodscale Slavedriver.

This is the quickest way I have found to become exalted with Sporeggar, it only requires a couple hours of work, or some gold if you are purchasing items from the auction house. I hope this article was informative.

Until next time, keep fit and have fun!

Why waste your hard earned gold when you can create separate dummy “banking” characters that just hold bank accounts for you to store your stuff in.

Do you have a guild that has a cool name, but want to join another guild? Leave one of your dummy toons in that guild and you won’t lose it. You can even use your guild bank for storage (even though it is expensive to get one @ 100 gold for the first bank slot, 250 for the 2nd).

I have multiple characters that I use for banking. Saves me lots of time, and gold.

Wow, just to say, Red Octane did an amazing job with their 3rd release of the amazing Guitar Hero series! Guitar Hero 3 boasts a huge lineup of amazing songs, along with an assortment of new features and enhancements. Most notable enhancements to the game include, introduction of Slash and Tom Morello as players, battle mode, finally Xbox Live play, and enhanced hammer-ons and pull-offs. They work so much better in GH3 now.

Gameplay: The basic concept of the game is still unchanged from Guitar Hero 2, you still play a guitar, and you still hit notes as they scroll down your screen. There are still the standard modes of play aswell, as a new one, Battle Mode. Battle mode is competitive play between you and another player, or you and the computer. Instead of building up star power, you build up attacks that you use against your opponent to make them lose the battle. Power-ups like, Broken String, Difficulty Up, Amp Overload, Whammy Bar, Steal Power, Double Notes, etc.

There are also a bunch of new venues to play at. My personal favorite is Shanker’s Island, where you get to play in a jail for inmates.

Graphics: The graphics, have gone through some major upgrades. The characters are more crisp, the scenes have more going on in them. There isn’t much to say about the graphics, they aren’t really important, its the music that makes this game awesome.

Sound/Music: With Guitar Hero 3 you get over 71 tracks to play. 46 of those songs are part of the main set-list, and the other 25 are bonus tracks or unlockables. Some are alright, most are excellent. I would have chosen at least 5 different songs, but thats my opinion.

Pros: This game boasts an impressive soundtrack and will definitely provide hundreds of hours of entertainment for anyone who plays it. This is not a game you pick up, beat once, and never play again. I think this game lives up to all the hype it has received and I was not let down at all. There were more than enough copies at all of the stores I visited, unless you wanted a Gibson wireless controller. Good job Red Octane.

Cons: I have a couple problems with the game. I seem to have come across a slowdown, when you use the star power and there is a lot going on on stage, effects, etc, the game gets choppy depending on the amount of notes on the screen. The 360 is a powerhouse system, and this is unacceptable and I hope this gets fixed in a patch. Also, I noticed a couple of advertisements right in-game. Axe body spray has 2 different guitars. This was the only one I noticed, but I am sure there are more.

Conclusion: Overall this is an awesome game, and is suitable for anyone. Everyone in my house plays it, my 3 roommates which range in age, and my 6 year old son. This game is definitely recommended. If you already haven’t picked yourself up a copy, you can download the demo on XBox Live, or Decembers issue of OXM is loaded with the GH3 demo.

Score:

Gameplay: 9/10
Graphics: 9/10
Music: 10/10
Net Play: 10/10
Total: 9.5/10

The game would have been a perfect 10 except for the problem I mentioned with the star power. I am not sure if this happens on other systems, you may have to look around to see.