Mercenary Party

Guild Wars recently added “Mercenaries” which are ways to add the other players in your account to your list of heroes – or players that you control as part of your team. Heroes were added with the “Nightfall” expansion and at that time were characters that you gained by progressing in the game. Nightfall had about a dozen heroes, and the “Eye of the North” expansion added many more heroes to this list, but still with the idea that you gained heroes by doing quests.

Mercenaries allows you to build your own heroes in two ways:

1. Use the other level 20 PVP or PVE characters in your account as heroes.
2. Create a PVP character in your account, use it as a hero, and then delete it.

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Cyber War

As I write this we are seeing daily reports of hacking and break-ins to commercial and defense enterprises world wide:

• Sony network down for over three weeks with customer passwords, emails and credit card information information stolen.
• Anti-bank Trojans stealing millions of dollars from customers’ bank accounts in Brazil.
• Oakridge National Laboratory was the target of a spear-phishing attack that only compromised a few megabytes of data before it was stopped.
• Millions of dollars being stolen from cell phone users in China by viruses infecting smart cell phones.
• The Stuxnet worm infects Iran’s nuclear program.

But it seems we are not doing a set of straight forward things that we can do to prepare for and mitigate the impact that cyber war is having on this country. We can start with some simple and comparatively inexpensive steps.

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What’s the big deal with apps over webpages?

Short History Lesson

In the day of the web, starting 20 years ago, say 1990, web pages were all the rage. By 2000 we had the (dot)com boom. Nobody was talking Apps then. We weren’t writing hundreds of thousands of apps for our PCs then. The concept of having a single program on the PC that could display hundreds of thousands of websites was the way things went. We could have had a PC app boom then. (more…)

VirtualBox

Installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu x64. At first there was a problem: starting Guest hung system. But this problem was eventually found as a BIOS setting. Avoid enabling Limit CPUID MaxVal in BIOS when using VMM. Now system is working fine. At first, VBox installed from Ubuntu PPA, but then removed that and installed as per this page. Either would probably work fine since problem was BIOS setting.

Now have Ubuntu x86 and x86 guests running on x64 system.

Clean systems are now available for testing programs in both x86 and x64.

- ww

VirtualBox

Virtual Machine systems have been popular for servers for a few years now. They save big time $$ when setting up server rooms since most of the server systems in an IT shop aren’t that busy. But recently VM has become popular for desktop users. Many of the reasons we used to use “Dual-Boot” systems are much better served using VM. There are several reasons why you might want to run VM on your system:

• You have a windows system and want to run Ubuntu.
• You have a Mac and want to run Windows occasionally.
• You have Windows, or a Mac, and want to have a system where you can surf safely, for example to do your online banking.
• You are doing development and want to have a “clean” system for testing.

One of the most functional, and easiest to deploy, VM systems is VirtualBox. Now inside Oracle, this system was originally developed at Sun and is Open Source, and free. Microsoft has Windows Virtual PC,  and you can run Windows XP or Ubuntu on your Vista or Windows 7 system. But of course, it has no support for Ubuntu or OS/X as a host, so why learn more than one system? I’m going to use Windows and Ubuntu systems as hosts, so I’ve chosen VirtualBox.

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AION Logo

I have been watching the AION game for some time, and since it was released in this country by NCSoft, I had hoped that they would use the same model as they do with Guild Wars, which is purchase followed by FTP [no subscription]. Well they apparently are greedy, and have gone with the WoW model, which is Pay for the game and then pay $15 / month. Sorry, but I’m not interested in this model.

However, I have found a FTP Private server. Oddly enough. GameZ AION is a private server with enhanced EXP, Currency and Drop rates.

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Elite Dekaron

I’ve recently discovered the culture of Private Game Servers for popular MMO and other games where the rules are broken to make the game experience different. Usually the EXP, loot and currency drop rates are multiplied by 200 – 1000x to make the game less of a “Grind”. Many Asian MMOs are one awful grind, meaning it takes hours or days to level up or collect the loot or currency you need by killing monsters. A couple of years ago I played 2Moons [Dekaron] for almost a year and never got above level 85.

On a private server for Dekaron I now have 7 characters above level 170.

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Dekaron at GameHi

Remember when 2Moons shutdown with no notice?

Well, it turns out that the accounts were saved. You can transfer the characters to new accounts at GameHi. So they apparently saved the database, and now Dekaron [and the other game] at GameHi, are Free to Play. Surprise Surprise. At the time that 2Moons was released, I understood that Dekaron – which was popular in Korea – was a subscription game, which is why Acclaim’s FTP version was IP checked for US only IP addresses.

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Nemesis

Dekaron Nemesis is another private server.

They have done an amazing amount of changes to the art work.

There are a number of interesting and odd features to their system.

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Elite Dekaron

Here’re a few things I’ve found out while playing Elite Dekaron.

The EXP factor varies from place to place. For example, in Frozen Forest lvl 40 it appears to be 60X, but in Heiharp lvl 25 it appears to be 40x. The DIL factor varies as well. To calculate the rate, watch the EXP and DIL drop for a monster and then do the math based on a Wiki like the 2Moons wiki which has a very nice Monster Detail section. Here’s the section for Heiharp.

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Dekaron Evolution

 

Elite Dekaron

Dekaron is Free to Play and it’s even more fun than it was with 2Moons.

Remember back when I was playing 2Moons? Seems like ages ago. (more…)

Heroes of Three Kingdoms

We like living in Heroes of Three Kingdoms, except for two big problems:

• There are two currencies. Money and Funds. And due to the second problem, this is just too much of a hassle to mess with.
• There is no good wiki. Oh they have a wiki. But it only has the bare minimum of content, and nothing to help you deal with the Two Currency problem.

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Mounted Combat

Mounted combat is available from level 30 in Heroes of Three Kingdoms. But the quest chain to achieve it is not well documented and is confusing. This is a guide to gaining Mounted Combat with a minimum of cost and headaches. I had to attempt it three times before I got it right and finally help from the forum got me across the last stumbling block. It cost me 3 Gold in Money to gain it rather than the usual 1 Gold, so I’m trying to save you the money.

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