Irvine, CA – It was announced today that Origin Systems Inc. based in Austin, TX has recently acquired Blizzard Entertainment for an undisclosed amount. While representatives of Blizzard had no comment on this changing of the guard, Gordon Walton of Origin had this to say: “We are pleased to now have access to such great franchises as Warcraft and Diablo. There was a huge opportunity here with the pending release of Diablo 2 for us to disappoint millions of gamers worldwide just like we did with our Ultima series, and we have proudly seized that opportunity.”

“You see” says Gordon, “Originally Diablo 2 was perfect, but we just couldn’t have that. A game without any bugs or flaws would simply raise the customers expectations of our software too high, so we had to go to work implementing the same shoddy code that we have previously used in our Ultima Online product. Frankly, the battlenet servers now lag and drop games even more often than UO did back in beta and were quite proud of that. In the near future, expect dupers, exploters, h4xx0rs and l33t d3wds to make their presence known. That coupled with lag , an out of balance economy and generally shitty coding should ensure that we here at Origin will have gamers pulling their hair out in handfuls long into the 21st century.”

In reality, Diablo 2 is a good game. It is a natural evolution of the original Diablo, and any fans of the first game will definitely love the second. It unfortunately however has some major flaws, the biggest being battlenet. The lag is absolutely awful, and that’s even if you can actually get IN a game. The servers are as jam packed as a g-string in a fat girls ass. Blizzard says they stress tested their servers with 100,000 people prior to the games release. Problem is, they sold over 2 million copies of the game in the first week alone. What, nobody tell them that D2 was the most hotly anticipated software title ever, and that it would sell a shitload of copies?

The other flaws are minor in comparison to the multiplayer fiasco, with the possible exception of gold, as its basically worthless in the game. The economy is driven by trading of player items and to offer someone gold in exchange for an item is about as distasteful as offering them a used tampon. Gems are a hot trading item, problem is that gems suck. Even perfect gems offer such shitty magical properties that odds are good you can find better magical items on newbie levels.

When will software companies stop sacrificing game quality for the sake of a fast buck? Blizzard, normally known for producing high quality titles has fallen prey it seems to what I call “Ultima Ascension Syndrome”, and thats basically rushing what could be a good product to the market solely for the sake of getting paid, and damn the bugs and glitches... we will patch that later after our board of directors all get new Ferrari’s.

Just like anything else, they keep serving up steaming hot piles of shit long enough and the consumer will go somewhere else. If this trend of shoddy PC software continues as it has, I predict sales of console games will go through the roof. As a guy who would normally rather piss on an electric fence than play a Dreamcast title, sitting here looking at “cannot connect to server” for the 4578th time on battlenet is making the prospect of console gaming look even more appealing.

Oh well, in the meantime if they ever fix these sorry ass servers, you can find me on battlenet east playing as Greybeard (my barbarian) Evil_Pikachu (my amazon... sorry, the name Bearded Lady was already taken) or Undead_Bob (my necromancer) Maybe we can swap ears someday.
- Greybeard

7.8.00

Something dumb from Lum? You're kidding....

Well, there's a fine reason that the words Lum and dumb rhyme. He and his little crew always post tons of slanted and off base rants.

Well, this time myschyf has outdone herself. Posting that it was a good thing that a group of CoJ players got banned on Baja. Why'd they get banned? For luring stupid people through gates and killing them. I got bad news for ya, if you're dumb enough to fall for that trick (which has been being used since 1997), then you deserve to lose your items. But no, in classic UO form, the whinners prevail.

Now, who's all over this? I'll tell you who. My good friends over at LoD. I hit their site daily just to see what MP3 they have up with their funny as fuck posts and I stumbled across this bullshit. Take a look at Lum's for myschyf's insipid post and then hit LoD's site for an appropriate response.

BTW, the LoD site is the only UO site I even bother to read anymore, so don't send me your UO links thinking I care about that game.
- Nighthawk

7.6.00

Well, we're d00.

As you might or might know, I was born in St. Louis and lived there a good chunk of my life, so my padre raised me as a good old fashioned religious fanatic Cardinals' Fan. And I got to tell you, if it's any year, it's definitely going to be this year that St. Louis finally gets out there and does something (after a disappointing loss to motherfuckin gay-ass redneck non-baseball knowing fairweather fanning redneck ass Atlanta in the 96' playoffs after they were up 3-1 games [also lived in GA for a large chunk of my life where I hopelessly watched the disgusting transformation of redneck Braves' haters to redneck Braves loving redneck fans]). I of course have to give what is commonly referred to as a "phat shout-out" to our rookie catcher Keith McDonald, who becomes the first player in the NL to have 2 homeruns in his first 2 major league at-bats, and an RBI in his 3rd at-bat. Seems no matter who we pull to the plate we're scoring runs and knocking the ever-living llama shit out of the ball. It's about god damned time I have a power team behind me.

Unfortunately I haven't seen St. Louis do much since I was 4 years old when we won the Series in 82', then the losses in the 85' and 87' series, then the earlier mentioned loss to Atlanta in 96', and I have to say that if the Birds follow the St. Louis Rams' 2000 Superbowl win with a World Series win, I'll be one smilin' motherfucker.

It's my century god damnit. All mine. 2nd best record in baseball at the moment, I am hoping to see the White Sox and St. Louie duke it out at the end of the year. Surely wouldn't surprise me.

So if you're a fellow St. Louis fan, do me a large favor and smoke a bowl for me after you finish looting that body.

Last but not least, a few other notes :

If you see Ronald McDonald in AC, yes it's my character but it's the Crazy Spick, Joe, playing the account. The lame-ass went "neutral" for some reason and joined some other assrammers in "Black Rose" for some unknown reason. I think marriage has made him soft. Rest assured, he's been thoroughly smacked. Rich will assist with the follow up bodyslam and verbal scalding when we're in Atlanta at the end of the month.

So, as a favor, if you see him out there on Darktide, kill him, and take a picture of my items that you loot so I can show him while he's over drinking my beer.

On a final note, I cleaned my apartment about as well as St. Louis has been cleaning the bases, and I learned something quite fascinating - if you buy potatoes when you move into a joint, if you forget you bought them and shoved them in whichever cabinet 8 months ago, they will grow more potatoes and a rainforest / tropical jungle of "Eyes" throughtout your cabinet system. The extraordinary shit that was growing from them was some kind of really fucked up demonic plant that I thought would eat me.

Wish I had a digi-cam.

Then I might've shown you my small penis.

The Patriot (still) sucks. Bye. - Ron

7.5.00

Carebear Post

I was reading over my post about the carebears coming to Darktide from a couple of days ago and I noticed that I didn't mention specifically what I was trying to get at.

I didn't get the "they talk down about our server but then they come play it when theirs is down" point across. We talk down about the carebears, but when DT is down I don't see their numbers swell up a thousand or more. They call Darktide "dorktide" and other such names, yet when their server is down you see a flood of them on DT. If Darktide sucks so much, why not go play another carebear server when yours is down?

Anyhow, point made. I can rest easy.

And as I pointed out to Aurok in IRC, me posting twice in one day may very well be the seventh sign of the Apocalypse. So, keep your eyes open today. =)
- Nighthawk

Hey hey, we're the monkeys

Ok, I used to think that wand monkeying is cheesy. However, after working on my mage for a while, I've come to realize that anyone that doesn't want to fight you can easily run away from a mage. Sure, if you're way faster than them, you can peck away at their health with drain, drain, drain, harm - but if you're really fast enough to catch up to someone that many times, then they're probably a lot lower level than you which is again cheesy.

War magic is the easiest thing in the world to avoid and it's about the most horrible "finisher" of all time. I mean, when I killed Corim last night with a single vuln and war magic after he'd been saying that he'd own me, I laughed for a solid 2 minutes. Dying to war magic is embarassing. The big damager of mages is relatively useless since it's so easy to dodge and it's utterly useless against people on the run unless they're completely inept.

Introducing "Melee Be Gone". Hate to have those annoying meleers stuck on you like glue only to watch them scurry off the moment they see words of power? No more! Our two most popular flavors of "Melee Be Gone" are:

    

Wand monkeying can be cheesy still, but since I find myself in 1-on-many situations frequently, it's a great equalizer. Did I mention that you have to have some serious War Magic to use em? It's not like lowbies who haven't spent some time on their characters are using them... It can be countered with a simple spell and unless I want to drop it I have to carry some high quality death items, so I'd say it works out.

With the next patch (whenever that is), they're going to be nerfing wand monkeying. No one knows how yet, but that with the addition of the "un-baneable weapon type", it looks like meleers will again be the flavor of the month.

We'll see...

- Nighthawk

7.4.00

When servers go down in AC...

When Darktide goes down, I would be willing to bet that very few DT players log on the npk servers just because they want to play the game so bad that they play on their non-home server. Why go to an all white world to stand around and watch the spamming, fashion shows and other such carebear activities? How boring.

Yet, when the carebear servers go down, guess where they go. Right, Darktide. Naturally, their goal is to be lag and fight other lvl 1s. I've never been in a portal storm until today while I was trying to encourage these peons to get the fuck off our server. Its outright amazing how our server is so boring and whatnot to the carebears, but it's ok for them to go there while their server is down for them to continue having fun or spamming or being a pain or whatever they do.

Carebears are annoying. When their server is down, they're annoying AND lag causing.
- Nighthawk

7.1.00

You Recall - You Lose

I don't understand what's so hard to understand about this concept. If you recall from someone, you've lost the fight. In the past three days I've been getting rained on with /tells from people that have recalled to avoid death. All of them somehow come up with the concept that "u suck" or something similar is an accurate thing to say to me.

It's simple. If you have to leave the area for fear of dying, YOU LOST. No two ways about it. I'm not saying that recalling isn't a smart thing to do. When you're outnumbered, unbuffed, severely outleveled - you SHOULD recall, but you still lost.

People have then follow up recalling with trash talking and then subsequently declined a duel. This is reaffirming that they have been beaten and that they couldn't beat me 1 on 1.

I don't understand why this is so hard for some people. Take the loss. We all lose, but not all of us are whiney bitches about it.
- Nighthawk