User:GW-Blackdog

About me
I'm tired of seeing a link to edit, so a bit about me:

I've been playing since original beta.

In real life, I'm a programmer (since I was 11), system administrator, and DBA professionally for 20 years, so that dates me a bit.

I prefer PvE, only because I don't enjoy the general atmosphere in PvP (read that as too many obnoxious players). I have fought in the HoH, but I just don't do PvP anymore much.

I tend to solo. Mostly because finding a group always takes half as long as it does to do the mission.

Yes, I've been in several guilds and I'm not a guild jumper. But it always seems to be a lot of doing the same stuff over and over again to get people caught up, which isn't so much fun. No offense, but every single non-elite mission can be done easily enough with heroes and hench (and they could be done with just hench before there were heroes), and the ONLY mission I have not gotten bonus/masters on with H/H is that stupid forever trees mission in Factions (The Eternal Grove: mission easy- masters not so much), so if you're stuck, well, maybe you need to work on your game. Really, how else are you going to learn?

That isn't to say I won't help, but it gets old fast when you're repeating the same stuff again and again. I think I got burned out on repeating missions back in beta days when all there was was Ascalon, Kryta, and PvP, and everyone was new. These days I keep my own guild and help friends when they ask (unless I'm doing something).

I still pug at random. Keeps the monkeys sharp ;-)

Guild wars is a game. It's supposed to be fun. If it's not, don't play it.

Maybe read a book. There are tons of things to read. "Another Fine Myth" by Robert Asprin is a nice light read, maybe Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. There's always The Mallorean by David Eddings. Whoops, can't forget "The Dark Elf Trilogy" by R.A. Salvatore (the first 3 were so amazingly good).

Let me guess, you've read those? How about you take a peek at "Washington's Dirigible" by John Barnes? Kind of obscured. Fun, unless you are someone who nit-picks sci-fi. If you've read that too, please fill me in on books of similar interest on my talk page. I've read Anthony, Card, Hawke, Stephenson, Stroud, King, Rice, Barker (I enjoyed horror more when I was younger) lots of the classics and tons of odds and ends, but a good book is always a good thing.

About my characters
I actively play all 10 characters on 2 accounts (which makes for slow going.. but every character knows all their primary skills and has at least 2 full shrines in HoM). They've all finished prophacies, Nightfall, and EotN, but Factions I just don't enjoy enough to do on all 20 characters.. I'm sure I'll get to it.

I also have about 15 mules, which I don't care about and won't mention beyond they're all level 20...

My most uber characters are monks, but it's more a case of them being the first to be uber than anything, and EotN seems to have forced us to pick one. The recent changes are pretty much all good ones, and should help with that. To a point. It's certainly nice to let the rest of my characters open chests and identify things.

Things I like
I wholeheartedly recommend the DX-1 by ergodex as an input device, the things are great (but a bit pricey, and the ergodex itself is not vista ready.. but there are options from another company if you're a vista person). I don't use extended macros beyond /sit, /bow and "turn off the heads up display", but having a keyboard with the keys I want where I want them is awesome. Really, it's a board you stick keys on and assign to act as regular keys. Every button I really want right under my fingers in a comfortable position... it's just fantastic.

I also think very highly of the drobo/droboshare for mass storage needs. The damn thing just works. It's not as fast as other mass storage solutions, but it's elegant and simple. Check out the demo on their website. It really does do what they say it does. The speed issues are just with rebuilding large arrays, for instance when a disc fails (better slow but there than fast but gone), and bringing up a directory list on an idle share is slowish. The later they could certainly fix by adding more memory (hint hint guys), and is much less of a problem if you don't need it to be on a droboshare accessible from multiple computers on a network.

Additionally, I'll give a kudos to Alienware. I can and do build systems (I've done it for many years), but the systems they make are absolutely superb. If you know your stuff, and you have a chance, take a peek inside one if you get the chance. You'll be impressed. Don't be fooled by the fact that Dell bought them, be aware that Dell bought them and has done nothing to change what they were already doing. Dell knows better than to mess with them. Well, I used to think highly of alienware. I just purchased another, and they cut corners on the cooling (I'm not saying it won't work, but they had a much better system before), I believe they shipped without burning (started building at 10am, shipped at 4pm- you figure it out), I'm seeing occasional artifacts from this card (of 5 systems I've played GW on heavily, this is the first one to do that- I suspect drivers but dammit, that's their JOB), they dinked around for a full day before putting up the FedEx number on their status page, and, worst of all, they didn't hide the front wiring harness. With an illuminated system, leaving a harness visible through the front grill just plain sucks. It would have taken 3 minutes to tuck it away but they didn't bother. I will say this: the case, aside from looking nice, is an excellent design decision. It basically "forces" you to give the computer enough space on the sides for decent airflow, and places the airflow requirement on the front. See, the case is about 4" wider than a normal case, and the front has open grills which allows for the 2" on each side that's always recommended but usually neglected (things get moved around; we've all shoved our systems around). But, Alienware has lost my faith with this new system.

Things I don't like
Blizzard. And I will never give them another dime after the DMCA crap they pulled.

Things I won't do
Add links or make any efforts at formatting this page. I know HTML and wiki well enough, but I don't care. If you need a link to find something, you weren't interested anyway.