Attack of the Gamer

The Venomhide Ravasaur is the Horde equivalent to the Wintersaber mount the the Alliance faction gets. The main difference is its ease to get the mount. It only takes 20 days of doing 1 of 6 very simple dailies. If you read here you will see how much work it takes to become Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers to be able to purchase that mount. I think this is one of the more superior raptor mounts because it doesn’t have a little ball on its tusk.

The daily will provide you with a Venomhide Baby Tooth which you will need 20 of, aswell as 20 Runecloth, 20 Rugged Leather, and 80 Gold.

The first thing you are going to want to do is fly over to Marshall’s Refuge in Un’Goro Crater. Once you are here, run to the south of the crater, and look for Mor’Vek. He is going to give you the quest [53] Toxic Tolerance, which you will complete by being infected by Venomhide Ravasaur blood. The trick to this quest is to not kill the mob before it infects you, I just used auto-attack and a cheap melee weapon that does no damage. Once this quest has been completed turn it in and move onto [53] Venomhide Eggs, which are picked up right off the ground in the same area where you completed the previous quest. Once you have your eggs, go turn them in, and complete the first day of your 20 day journey.

This portion of the journey is broken into 4 different dailies:

[53 Daily] Gorishi Grub
In this quest you will have to collect 10 Silithid Meat and feed it to your Venomhide Hatchling. The mobs that drops the silithid meat is in Un’Goro Crater, right near the initial quest giver.

[53 Daily] Hungry, Hungry Hatchling
In this quest you will have to collect 15 Fresh Dinosaur Meat and feed it to your Venomhide Hatchling. The meat drops off the diemetradons, stegodons, and pterrordaxes in Un’Goro Crater, just south of Marshall’s Refuge.

[53 Daily] Poached, Scrambled, Or Raw?
In this quest you are going to have to collect 12 Silithid Eggs and feed them to your Venomhide Hatchling. These are in the eastern portion of Tanaris, and are orange eggs just laying on the ground. They are in the area with all of the bugs. You shouldn’t have to kill anything for this daily, just collect the eggs, and feed them to your Venomhide Hatchling.

[53 Daily] Searing Roc Feathers
In this daily, you will have to collect 5 Searing Roc Plumage. These mobs are also in Tanaris, right near where you collect the eggs. You won’t feed these to your Venomhide Hatchling, they are just a needed quest item.

After 20 days, go back to Mor’Vek turn everything in, and enjoy your new Venomhide Ravasaur Mount and Feat of Strength!

Recently Blizzard had announced the ability to change factions. So if you’re Alliance and you want to be Horde or Horde wanting to be Alliance, for $30.00 USD you can now change. The process is easy, sign into you’re battle.net account and there is a link to do a Faction Change right on the main page of your profile. Right now you can only pay by credit card, but it looks like you will be able to buy some kind of redemption code to complete the faction change. Currently paypal, and the other options are un-available. If you don’t have a credit card, you can always go and get a pre-paid one.

Blizzard says the process should take up to an hour, but makes mention of instances where it may take a couple of days. Personally, my account was active rather quickly. Thing’s to note before you make the change, you have to finish all of your auctions, and your mailbox has to be empty. Anything you have done with the Argent Tournament will be lost, unless you decide to change back, then you are back where you started. I don’t find this to be a problem, each daily is worth around 13g and there are 25 days worth of dailies I believe.

You do get to keep your Argent Tournament pets, they aren’t converted. The mount’s are converted but the pets are not. You also lose your Argent Tournament titles. Something you may want to do before going through with the faction change is completing as many raids as possible, and then doing the change. Raid lockouts (as of right now) are being reset.

Overall the process was simple, and I am very pleased to now be Horde. The $30.00 was a little steep and it only covers one toon, however I think the change was worth it.

Before you do your faction change you may want to read to see exactly what is going to happen to your toon.

The Sons of Hodir are an important faction to become exalted with for any level 80 toon. This faction sells the best shoulder enchants available once you become exalted with them. There are a couple of ways to become exalted, one involving buying Relic of Ulduar off of the auction house and turning them in. This is the lazy way and is going to cost thousands of gold to complete. The other is completing the daily quests, handing in Relic of Ulduar as you collect them, and Everfrost Chips if you can find them. This way will also make you gold during the whole ordeal. Either way, you are going to have to complete a long questline to actually start working on the Sons of Hodir rep.

The following quests will take you to friendly with the Sons of Hodir, and must be completed before moving on:

• They Took Our Men!
• Equipment Recovery
• The Crone’s Bargain
• Mildred The Cruel
• Discipline
• Examples to be Made
• A Certain Prisoner
• A Change of Scenery
• Is That Your Goblin?
• The Hyldsmeet
• Taking on All Challengers
• Defending Your Title
• You’ll Need a Bear
• Going Bearback
• Cold Hearted
• Deemed Worthy
• Making a Harness
• The Last of Her Kind
• The Slithering Darkness
• The Warm-Up
• Into the Pit
• Back to the Pit
• Prepare for Glory
• Lok’lira’s Parting Gift
• The Drakkensryd
• Sibling Rivalry
• Mending Fences
• The Refiner’s Fire
• A Spark of Hope
• Forging an Alliance
• You Can’t Miss Him
• Battling the Elements
• Hot and Cold
• A New Beginning
• Veranus
• Territorial Trespass
• Krolmir, Hammer of Storms
• Jormuttar is Soo Fat…
• In Memoriam
• A Monument to the Fallen
• Blowing Hodir’s Horn
• The Terrace of the Makers
• The Earthen Oath
• Loken’s Lackeys
• The Reckoning
• Whatever it Takes!
• Diametriacally Opposed

You will now be Friendly with the Sons of Hodir. At this point you will have 3 daily quests and it will take 8 days to reach honored if you dont hand in any Relic of Ulduar or Everfrost Chips.

The 3 daily quests are:

• Hot and Cold
• Blowing Hodir’s Horn
• Polishing the Helm

Once you reach Honored you will unlock 2 more daily quests, to make a total of 5 dailies, and it will take another 8 days to reach Revered just doing the daily quests. The 2 new dailies are titled:

• Spy Hunter
• Thrusting Hodir’s Spear

Once at Revered 1 more daily quest will be added into your quest line-up bringing the total amount of quests up to 6. It will take 11 days to go from Revered to Exalted. The final quest is titled:

• Feeding Arngrim

Grats! You are now exalted with the Sons of Hodir, go and visit Lillehoff and get your shoulder enchant! Also there are 2 Mammoth mounts available here: Reins of the Ice Mammoth and Reins of the Grand Ice Mammoth.

*EDIT* Recently blizzard made it possible to get 500 Sons of Hodir rep from the Daily Regular Dungeon turn-in. Hope this information helps!

Lastnight I finally hit exalted with 20 different factions on my mage. So I decided to start writing articles on how to become exalted with the different factions.

I am going to try and release something new every week. This first week I am going to link you to my Kurenai, Wintersaber Trainers, and Sporeggar tutorials.

These factions do require a considerable amount of grinding to become exalted, so you may want to work out a schedule and work on these over a couple of weeks, or a month.

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