Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Poking around DDO actually got me thinking about groups in MMOs and how they handle it. So a little comparison of those I'm familiar with: WoW : You can group up to five. Few world quests require it, but most at-level dungeons expect it - usually including one healer and one tank. Up to eight groups can be joined into a raid of 40 people. Raid instances used to be calibrated that high, but now expect 10- or 25-man raids. Being in a raid makes you unable to complete most normal quests - so people don't just steamroll everything. Five is a pretty good number, really, though there are naturally awkward times when you have three or eight friends around. GW : Guild Wars is a little psychotic. It's theoretically geared toward a full group of eight. One the up side, there are NPC heroes (from expansions, giving limited control) and henchmen (fully AI controlled) available to round out a party even for a solo player. But then, earlier zones inexplicably have group limits of fo...

... just have to be shared. Every now and then, you see fan-made trailers or short movies or music videos using game graphics. Some are good. Some are not so good. This Metal Gear Solid fan movie blows me away. I'm not sure I'd call the CGI "awesome," but it's better than a lot of SciFi (SyFy now) movies I've seen. It's live action, and the acting and voice acting is pretty good. The non-CGI props/scenes are amazing. Most of all, it has about the right feel or tone for MGS - even down to the exposition (thankfully more brief than the original) about genetics and growing up on the battlefield. If you're at all a fan of MGS, make the hour or so sometime and give it a watch. http://www.mgs-philanthropy.net/eng/

Hmm. Again, starting somewhere around an hour late. I wonder whether pushing the start time back an hour would work out better, of if we would just not have everyone until an hour later than THAT. So with Heigan down last week, we were on our way to smack down the last boss of the plague wing. Simple, right? Nope. The hallway after Heigan has a lot of respawning, slowing eyestalks and a ton of maggots. It must have taken four or five tries to get everyone through there. Even when only one person died, we had to go back because we couldn't rez them at the range and running through alone is even harder. Heh. I got through with just a priest on one attempt, then died because they were attacking the maggots instead of healing me through their attacks (mind you, I don't know if it actually would have made a difference and we probably would have had to go back anyway). We even had someone walk off a platform on the other side with no way back up. Not an auspicious beginning. Fin...

Over the weekend, I wrote an email expressing my concerns about our property manager to the other HOA board members. None of them have replied, but it appears my email got passed along to the company in some manner. Today, those on the board, myself included, received an email from the owner of the property management company that seems a direct response to mine. Names removed/replaced: --- Please forward this to all the parties who are concerned about property manager contact 's license. Her license was pulled for the reasons stated. At the time her license was pulled, I bought out her company. My company came in, audited all the books, and made sure that the amounts shown on the books were what was in the bank. The problems, by the way, were in her rental accounts, not the homeowner associations. The real estate commission did not find any problems with them nor did I. I am a licensed broker in good standing in Colorado. When I bought the business, I took property manager...

"You want X before tanking boss, you want Y before stepping into Naxx, you should be able to reach Z easy without gems..." There are guidelines like this all over for pretty much every class. The problem is, they're written by people who raid - usually with regularity and success. Sometimes, those numbers seem very, very far away. After a lucky drop (finally, Regal Aurous Shoulderplates!) and some emblems, my paladin's finally pushing a couple of numbers above the baseline. Of course, for non-druids, there's the threshold of 540 Defense. That is where you don't get critically hit by raid bosses. Technically, you only need 535 for bosses in heroic 5-man dungeons. I've been floating around here for a while, bouncing above and below 540 as gear has changed. For warriors and paladins, there's also the "block cap" (formerly uncrushable). This is where your total avoidance (base miss, dodge, parry - these all reduce a melee hit to nothing...

See, this is why righteous fury is usually not helpful. I could have torn into our property manager, but I didn't have any proof. I still don't. I emailed a request over the weekend, and this afternoon got cash flow reports for 2007-present, as well as an updated list of owners and what they owe outstanding. Of course, these papers don't have audit-level detail. The numbers could be fabricated. But my request didn't get blown off. That doesn't put my mind at ease, but nor does it reach a "three strikes, you're out" level with me. So where does that leave me? Suspicious, but still lacking in any evidence of wrongdoing. Worried about the 11 thousand dollars and change of unpaid assessments/dues - which I fully believe are really unpaid because it's plausible and easily verifiable with the owners rather than her. There's only so much we can do to collect that money. I think I may next try to get in contact with the guy in charge of the repa...

Back when we were doing Prophecies as a group, I was clearing Nightfall solo. Jerec, my paragon, tromped through missions and quests with naught but heroes and henchmen for support. I got to the last handful of missions off on other planes. So now that the guild has "officially" finished Prophecies and Factions, I'm returning to the campaign with a group of mostly real live people. And I'm not sure how I want to handle that. Last week was getting beginning characters up to speed. I, lacking any vision for a new character, pulled my ritualist over from the end of Factions. That bypassed several early quests, leaving me mostly waiting on people to finish with the 4-man-limited zones to get where we could all group up. This week, we actually did work on a primary quest line. It's not one I was on, though, and I'm not sure if that's because my character is a "foreigner" or because I missed doing some things in advance. Either way, Killian doesn...