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About David

David Holloway has been involved with gaming since the early 1970′s and with virtual worlds since heavy use of a MOO in 1993 – he even admits to having owned a Vic 20 and used it heavily to play cassette-based roleplaying games. As far as Star Wars goes, he still owns his original set of Star Wars figures and can vouch for the fact that a 1978 Stormtrooper can be blown to bits by shooting it with a slug gun from a distance. He’s also played Star Wars games as far back as the Super Nintendo console and to this day is devastated by the accidental erasure of all his progress on Lego Star Wars on the Wii.

GW2 Servers Being Pounded

August 25, 2012 by

It’s less than 12 hours into the 3-day early access for those who pre-purchased Guild Wars 2, and it’s fair to say that if the amount of server downtime being experienced is an indication of game popularity, then this is going to be one popular game.

Since 2pm AEST when the servers came up, there have been intermittent issues with being able to log in, and these appear to have worsened this evening. Some are getting angry but it’s pretty par for the course for any MMO launch and things will pan out over coming hours.

And anyway: imagine what it’ll be like when the full launch occurs….

Over to you: how has your experience been with the game so far?

[Pic courtesy of businessinsider.com]

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Servers

Guild Wars 2: 3-Day Headstart Launches

August 25, 2012 by

For those who pre-purchased GW2, access to the game started at 2pm today AEST, a little ahead of the 5pm formal start as the servers opened up.

I jumped in pretty much from the start and as expected, was greeted with rather a large crowd of toons:

Lag has been minimal given the server loads, so kudos to ArenaNet there. There are some queues but that’s to be expected as well.

Other key bits of info for oceanic players to keep in mind:

Unofficial Oceanic Server: Sea of Sorrows
Unofficial secondary oceanic server: Gate of Madness
Guild Wars 2 Server List: here
Guild Wars 2 Guilds List: here
Guild Wars Oceanic Facebook Page: here

Over to you: tell those without the early access how you’re finding the game!

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

SWTOR Space Combat Popularity: Some Stats

August 24, 2012 by

For those who play space missions in SWTOR, there was an interesting snippet of information released by BioWare in the past day.

In response to a forum thread on how many people actually play space missions, Allison Berryman responded with this:

To address the question in the title of this thread, I talked to Jonathan Crow, a Gameplay Telemetry Analyst here. The data that we have shows that nearly half of all currently active players have played at least one Space Combat Mission in the past 30 days.

So there you go – I’d expected the numbers to be a little lower than that.

Over to you: did you realise so many people played space missions? Did you actually think the stats would be higher? Let us know.

Filed Under: General News, PvE, SWTOR Tagged With:

Oceanic Gamer Forums Get a Revamp

August 24, 2012 by

Ok, revamp is probably too strong a word, but we’ve updated the forums to match the wider focus of the site.

There are now sub-forums for Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World in addition to SWTOR. We haven’t created a WoW forum because of there being so many out there, though if you think it’s worth doing, we’re more than happy to do so.

So why would you use these forums?

– to advertise a guild event
– to let people know if your guild is recruiting
– start a discussion on something you love or hate about the game
– throw a brickbat or bouquet at us for a story we’ve run on the site
– just have a chat

Forums are pretty old-school but they still have their place, so do consider jumping in. Any forum relies on a critical mass of contributors – we’d love one of them to be you!

As always – let us know if you have any suggestions for the forums and if we can we’ll make the changes.

Filed Under: General News, TOG News Tagged With:

Oceanic Soap Box: Guild Wars 2 Eve

August 24, 2012 by

This week it’s a bit hard to ignore the huge MMO launch on our doorstep. Guild Wars 2 launches for some tomorrow afternoon, and for the rest three days after that. So let’s make that the topic for debate this week.

Will you be jumping into GW2 at launch? Will you be playing it at all and if not, why not?

For mine, I’ll be there Saturday afternoon to check things out and to start levelling but for me GW2 is going to be a casual thing. Something I jump in and enjoy once a week or so.

What about you?

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Suggestion Box Tagged With:

One Quest for Guild Wars 2 Glory

August 23, 2012 by

It’s only three days until those with 3-day headstart access will start playing GW2, and I know a bunch of people are getting pretty excited.

One in particular is Victoria-based Hayden, who has set up Condescend Gaming. He’ll be doing some serious streaming of his early days and weeks in GW2. If like me you won’t have 14+ hours a day to level up, you may be interested in seeing someone else having a go.

I threw some questions at Hayden to get an idea of what he has planned:

Tell us a little about how you got into streaming your play time

Got into streaming about 2-3 months ago while playing SWTOR. A friend on my server was a streamer and I had never heard of such a thing. Once I found out what it was, it instantly became something I was interested in and wanted to be a part of.

How long have you been playing MMOs?

WoW was the first MMO I ever played back in 04/05. I instantly fell in love with MMOs from the first time I logged on. Although I did quit and come back a lot over the following years, I still kept a high standard of competitiveness – landing Gladiator in Season 4 and Alliance first ICC 10man Heroic kill on our server (server 2nd) to name a couple.

After deciding to quit WoW for good a few weeks after Cataclysm was released, I have been searching for a new MMO ever since. Have tried Rift and TERA for a short time but it didn’t cut it for me. SWTOR was a game I thought had a lot of potential, but was rushed in it release and collapsed on itself soon after. I think GW2 is finally the MMO I am looking for to play long term.

Why are you excited about GW2 in particular?

The main fact that it is a brand new MMO. I have been searching and waiting for an MMO to grab me and keep me interested. I thought SWTOR was that game but I was highly mistaken. Guild Wars 2 seems to have so many new and appealing features that I can’t wait to play through.

You’re intending to go flat out to level up in GW2 – what’s your strategy and how long do you think it’ll take you?

I have 5-6 days off where I will be playing a minimum of 14+ hour days. Oceanic 1st 80 is something that I have in mind and will definitely be pushing to achieve this. I have read that someone in BETA did it in ~88 hours, so I think I would be able to achieve this in a similar time. Just have to stay focused and not get distracted. Remember the goals that have been set in place and strive to achieve them.

Plug time: where can people follow your stream?

I currently stream from twitch, a link can be found here twitch.tv/condescendgaming

Also be sure to follow me on Twitter and YouTube for the latest updates:

twitter.com/condescendau

youtube.com/CondescendGaming

I want to thank everyone at The Oceanic Gamer for this opportunity and the hard work that has been put into their website. There are constant news updates and articles which makes a good read and easy to keep up to scratch with all that is going on.

And here’s a quick promo vid that our esteemed oceanic colleague has created to showcase his intentions:

Over to you: how full-on will you be levelling in GW2?

Filed Under: Events, General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With: ,

SWTOR 1.3.6 Patch Notes

August 22, 2012 by

After last night’s maintenance we have a new patch: 1.3.6. There quite a bundle of fixes in this one, which you can check out in full below. And in case you didn’t realise, the Chevin world event is now over.

Enjoy the patch notes:

1.3.6 Patch Notes

8/21/2012

General

  • After a player uses the “Reset Local Phases” option, they now must wait 30 minutes to use it again, increased from the prior wait time of 2 minutes.

Companion Characters

Xalek

    • Many of Xalek’s personal conversations can now be had in Cantinas as intended.

Flashpoints and Operations

General

    • Using combat revive abilities now consistently returns the revived player to combat if an encounter is still active.
    • Non-boss enemies no longer occasionally respawn after an Operation group has been defeated and re-enters the Operation.

Group Finder

  • Pre-made groups of four players that queue for Group Finder now correctly receive daily mission credit.
  • The “Travel Now” dialog no longer fires more frequently than intended.
  • Players now receive an error when attempting to manually add a new group member while queued in Group Finder.

Items (Items and Economy)

  • Several Imperial head slot items that were not displayed correctly on female with body type 3 have been corrected.
  • Several head slot items now have text that correctly displays in Aurebesh.
  • Many hoods that previously stretched or clipped have been corrected.
  • Players can no longer modify an item while they are looting the contents of a reverse engineered item.

Missions and NPCs

Missions

Balmorra
        • Trash to Treasure: Multiple OT-15 Prototypes no longer spawn at once.
Quesh
        • Quesh Showdown: Master Berin Fraal can no longer be knocked into the acid pits.

Class Missions

Jedi Knight
        • Anarachy: Colonel Hareth no longer respawns after being defeated.
        • Doomsday: The map for this mission’s area no longer reverts to being unexplored as the player leaves the area.
Jedi Consular
        • Pilgrims: Master Yuon Par no longer disappears after speaking with the player’s character.
Imperial Agent
        • Darth Zhorrid Arrives: The conversation with Darth Zhorrid no longer triggers again automatically if the player uses Esc to cancel the dialogue.
        • The Master Stratagem: The conversation with Keeper no longer triggers again automatically if the player uses Esc to cancel the dialogue.
Trooper
        • Climbing the Ladder: Jonas now correctly responds to player choices.
Bounty Hunter
      • Garoya be Haran: the conversation with Torian Cadera can no longer be repeated.
      • Target Rich Environment: Redivivus now correctly draws his shotgun.

PvP

General

    • Corrected an issue that prevented players from receiving the correct rewards when a Warzone match was completed very quickly.
    • Warzone Information is once again displayed in the Warzone interface.

Miscellaneous Bug Fixes

  • Female Sith Purebloods’ fourth jewelry option now displays correctly in-game.
  • Female Sith Purebloods’ fourth hairstyle no longer clips with the character model.
  • Combat Training Targets MK-2, 3, and 4 now appear correctly on Dromund Kaas and Coruscant.
Filed Under: General News, Patch Notes, SWTOR Tagged With:

SWTOR Server Downtime: August 21st 2012

August 21, 2012 by

A standard four hour maintenance downtime for SWTOR tonight. If you want something SWTOR-related to do while you’re waiting, don’t forget to check out the latest episode of our podcast!

The time conversions:

AEST: 5pm-9pm

AWST: 3pm-7pm

NZST: 7pm-11pm

Bioware’s blurb:

 

Hello everyone, we wanted to let you know that we will be performing scheduled maintenance for four hours on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 from 2AM CDT (12AM PDT/3AM EDT/8AM BST/9AM CEST/5PM AEST) until 6AM CDT (4AM PDT/7AM EDT/12PM BST/1PM CEST/9PM AEST). All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours, but could be extended.

This maintenance is done in order to make general improvements and to check performance of the game so that we can continue to provide a consistent, quality experience. Quite often (but not always) after a maintenance period there will be a patch to download. After the maintenance, please login via the launcher to download the latest patch. If your launcher was open during the maintenance, you must close and reopen it for a fresh login.

Scheduled Maintenance

Date: Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

Time: 2AM CDT (12AM PDT/3AM EDT/8AM BST/9AM CEST/5PM AEST) until 6AM CDT (4AM PDT/7AM EDT/12PM BST/1PM CEST/9PM AEST)

All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than four hours.

Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.

Filed Under: General News, Servers, SWTOR Tagged With:

GW2 Oceanic Guild Spotlight: Brigade Of Light And Dark

August 20, 2012 by

If you’d like your guild spotlighted, just use our contact form to let us know. Or if you like, respond to the questions shown below and send them in – we love to profile guilds and the work they’re doing. The only requirement is that you’re an active oceanic guild. Please be patient if you don’t hear back from us immediately – we will only be spotlighting a guild every week or so.

Name of guild

Brigade of Light and Dark (BOLD)

Guild website

http://brigade-of-light-and-dark.shivtr.com/
– our old GW1 website…a new one may be on the horizon…..

History of your guild’s name?

Brigade of Light and Dark (BOLD) was originally formed by our guild leader Ptolia Arter in GW1. The name inspired by “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

What sort of guild are you?

This is a very relaxed guild who maintains “fun” as a priority – winning is, of course, fun.  Many members are returning Guild Wars players and have already pre-purchased GW2, looking to give us that head-start access.  We are looking to dominate Yak’s Bend, but members will in no way be limited to that one server. Could make for some fun in WvW though.

Some may say “international” is a fairly broad term and can complicate guild events. However,  our time-zone differences (ranging anywhere from the Americas, Europe and Oceania) are too weak of a barrier to keep us from hosting constant guild events!   Not only that, we also feel that through an international guild comes international friendships, cultures, constant members online, and success.

Most importantly, our guild focuses on learning; always trying new things, excelling, and then teaching others.  Knowledge is only real if shared (the saying was something like that). Try visiting our website:  “BOLD is not a guild that objects to answering questions – no matter how “silly” or “noobish” you might think they are.”  – Ptolia Arter (Guild Leader)

Have key guild members been involved in other games / MMOs?

Mostly GW1 but also LOTRO, Rappelz, and other MMOs

How many guild members do you have at the moment?

25 – 30 coming in at release or very soon after

What days/times do you see the guild being most active?

With being an international Guild we envisage having members online for most of the day/night

What are the achievements that your guild is most proud of?

Several members including our GL have attained 50/50 pts in Hall of Monuments and also GWAMM (God Walking Among Mere Mortals – the highest title in GW1)

You have one minute to convince someone they should be in your guild – what would you say to them?

We are a guild that has always enjoyed “Going Hard Out” in-game then kicking back with a party and some fun guild events, either in the Guild Hall or the world of Tyria

What are your predictions for the next 6 months for the guild?

We are all looking to get into GW2 and level our main characters asap while reuniting with old friends and making many more. We are looking to quickly grow BOLD into a 50 – 100 member friendly, family orientated guild for all ages and experiences.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Guilds Tagged With: ,

The Secret World 1.1.2 Patch Notes

August 20, 2012 by

Here they are in full:

 

Update 1.1.2 – August 15th

General

  • Removed the need to chew tacos – they can now be consumed in under a second. Note: We cannot be held responsible for choking or other health risks related to rapid food consumption
  • Improved the cast and cooldown times on the Faction Mark items (please note: the cooldown of Mark of the Illuminati will also be changed accordingly in the next update)
  • Using Faction Marks will not put players in combat anymore
  • Fixed an error when trying to connect to Facebook
  • Fixed an issue where some characters could not authenticate with the chat server
  • The target decal option setting will now be saved properly
  • Fixed an issue where flying NPCs would slide across the ground
  • The ingame browser will no longer crash when a download link is opened (it will rather just be ignored)

Dungeons

  • Polaris: The Ur-Draug will now do a line of sight check after agroing a character to make sure he can actually see that character. If not, he’ll resume patrolling
  • The Ankh: Reduced the health of Melothat by 20%
  • Hell Fallen – Nightmare: Reduced the health of the Endjineers
  • Hell Fallen – Nightmare: The Arch-Myrmidon’s Phalanx can no longer be purged, and is only removed when his soldiers are killed
  • Hell Fallen: Ascendant ninjas have gone back to ninja school and learned how to not run away
  • A new, more attractive and less cluttered buff marker for Nightmare dungeon timers has been added. This is purely visual, and doesn’t change how the system works at all
  • The Facility: Soviet laser targeting systems have been upgraded. Lasers will no longer follow you back to the Anima Well

Missions

London – Amity House

  • Virgula Divina: Fixed an issue which caused some players to be unable to move after watching a cinematic in the mission

Kingsmouth

  • The Pick-Up: One of the 3 doors will always allow the player to pass through to the other side

Blue Mountain

  • Detritus Prime: Fixed an issue that prevented players from completing the mission

The Savage Coast

  • Ami Legend: The Tenebrous Brood Ravager should now always spawn during tier 2

The Shadowy Forest

  • Last Dance of the Padurii – Tier 3: Capturing Music Essence from spirits must now be done individually if players are to receive the Humming Box correctly. As such, team credit for these goals are now disabled

City of the Sun God

  • Halls of Lost Records: Resolved an issue preventing players from interacting with the nodes
Filed Under: Patch Notes, The Secret World Tagged With:

Flash Point 39: The Stench of Desperation

August 19, 2012 by

A real mixed bag of a show this week. We talk a little on some adjustments to the show format, talk lots of SWTOR and a healthy slice of GW2, WoW and TSW at the end.

Points of discussion:
– Podcast feedback and slight change of format
– Chevin world event
– BioWare at Gamescom
– Thousand Papercuts thread on the SWTOR forums
– Guild Wars 2 launch (and Aussie/NZ launch time conversions)
– New content in The Secret World
– WoW cinematic for Mists of Pandaria
– Shout outs for our forums, Facebook page and Twitter account

One minor technical note: we’ve had feedback on the naming convention of the podcast so we’ve changed the file names to be more descriptive for those not using a service like iTunes. Hope it helps a little bit!

Please review or rate the podcast on iTunes if you can – it makes a huge difference!

Listen via iTunes or right here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Filed Under: General News, Podcast Tagged With:

Guild Wars 2 Facebook Group for Oceanic Players

August 19, 2012 by

Just a quick reminder for those Facebookers counting down the days until next weekend’s launch of GW2.

There’s a Facebook Group for Australian and New Zealand players right here – it’s a friendly group so jump
in!

And don’t forget that if you’re part of a GW2 guild and would like to be profiled, drop us a line!

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With: ,
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