The Battle for Arathi Basin! (Alliance, 25) is the first quest you have access to and is availble at the Neutral level. For this quest you will have to assault each of the Mine, Lumber Mill, Blacksmith and Stables. This quest will carry over to other Arathi Basin battles, so you don’t have to worry about assaulting all 4 bases in 1 battle.

The second quest available is Control Four Bases which you gain access to once you reach the Friendly level. For this quest, your team will have to assault and defend 4 bases until the end of the battle.

The third and final quest is titled Control Five Bases and becomes available at the Exalted level. If you guessed you have to assault and capture 5 bases to complete this quest, you are absolutely correct. Once this quest has been completed you will have access to the Arathor Battle Tabard.

Other than completing those 3 quests you get 10 reputation points per 200 resources collected, except on Arathi Basin weekends, when you get 10 reputation points per 150 resources collected. To win a battle your team needs to collect 1600 resources, which means you get 80 reputation per win on a regular day, and roughly 106 rep per win on an Arathi Basin weekend.

Some Math:

Assumptions: Only battling, not completing any quests. Only competing on regular days, not including Arathi Basin weekends. No loses only wins.

Neutral -> Friendly = 3000 Rep = 38 Wins
Friendly -> Honored = 6000 Rep = 75 Wins
Honored -> Revered = 12000 Rep = 150 Wins
Revered -> Exalted = 21000 Rep = 263 Wins

38 + 75 + 150 + 263 = 526 Winning Arathi Basin Battlegrounds to go from Neutral to Exalted.

You will earn the achievement:

Knight of Arathor

You will be on your way to earning the following achievements:

Master of Arathi Basin
The Justicar
Battlemaster
100000 Honorable Kills

The Battle for Arathi Basin! (Horde, 25) is the first quest you have access to and is availble at the Neutral level. For this quest you will have to assault each of the Mine, Lumber Mill, Blacksmith and Stables. This quest will carry over to other Arathi Basin battles, so you don’t have to worry about assaulting all 4 bases in 1 battle.

The second quest available is Take Four Bases which you gain access to once you reach the Friendly level. For this quest, your team will have to assault and defend 4 bases until the end of the battle.

The third and final quest is titled Take Five Bases and becomes available at the Exalted level. If you guessed you have to assault and capture 5 bases to complete this quest, you are absolutely correct. Once this quest has been completed you will have access to the Battle Tabard of the Defilers.

Other than completing those 3 quests you get 10 reputation points per 200 resources collected, except on Arathi Basin weekends, when you get 10 reputation points per 150 resources collected. To win a battle your team needs to collect 1600 resources, which means you get 80 reputation per win on a regular day, and roughly 106 rep per win on an Arathi Basin weekend.

Some Math:

Assumptions: Only battling, not completing any quests. Only competing on regular days, not including Arathi Basin weekends. No loses only wins.

Neutral -> Friendly = 3000 Rep = 38 Wins
Friendly -> Honored = 6000 Rep = 75 Wins
Honored -> Revered = 12000 Rep = 150 Wins
Revered -> Exalted = 21000 Rep = 263 Wins

38 + 75 + 150 + 263 = 526 Winning Arathi Basin Battlegrounds to go from Neutral to Exalted.

You will earn the achievement:

The Defiler

You will be on your way to earning the following achievements:

Master of Arathi Basin
The Conqueror
Battlemaster
100000 Honorable Kills

This upgrade will allow you to play homebrew software that requires the 6.xx Sony OFW.

Requirements:

Fat PSP (My PSP is version PSP-1001 Mobo TA-081)
Previous custom firmware, not sure if this works from the OFW (original firmware)
Battery charged above 80%, I kept mine plugged in aswell.

It clearly states when the upgrader loads up that you will need a Fat version PSP, if you do not have this type of PSP this firmware is not for you!

Step 1:

Download the firmware package here xgen-550gen-d3.zip.

Step 2:

Uncompress the .zip file you just downloaded.

Step 3:

Hook up your PSP via the USB cable, and copy all the files and the PSP directory to the root directory of your PSP’s memory stick. At this point the PSP folder you are copying will be merged with the current PSP folder on your memory stick.

Step 4:

Go to the games menu, select the upgrader and press x. Say “Enter” at the first screen that comes up.

Step 5:

Select “Flash Install CFW 5.50 GEN-D3″ and watch it. Once the upgrade is complete, you will be prompted to restart or turn off your PSP. I chose to restart mine.

Step 6:

Reconfigure your settings. The PSP will revert back to factory settings because the nvram gets wiped during the installation.

Step 7:

Enjoy

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!

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 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!

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 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 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.

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.