All this, and Frostfell starts tomorrow too. Wheeeee. I’ve already dug out my bag of Frostfell hats and cloaks.
Maltheas is looking forward to popping over to Freeport to point and laugh at the Overlord’s ex-flying fortress. He only ever visited it once, in an ill-fated attempt to assassinate The Overlord (the original Freeport to Qeynos betrayal quest). It is a fine thing that such a symbol of Lucan’s oppressive dominion over Freeport has been laid low.
The most relevant fix in this mighty bugsquashing patch for our Extreeeme Questing Ratonga is:
* Many collections from Sinking Sands that were originally on the Kunark Burynai and then later removed have been added back to the tables in this zone.
That’ll help me catch up with folks who’d gotten them done via Burynai. I never had a Burynai :( there’s obviously a lot of fixes for quests I’ve not gotten to yet, as well.
I’m hoping that the drop rates for some quest starters might have been sneaked up. I was also sure I saw a fix for Et’sipe Ymeresh’s failure to spawn somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to be in the notes. I’ll check in on him anyway, as I’ve had the quest “Where will this lead me?” for far too long.
It’s also great to see “The Path of the Sun Wolf” making a return to the Peat Bog. Maltheas did it years ago before it vanished, but it’s an interesting little quest that I’m sure a lot of newer players will enjoy.
Everquest 2 : Will of a Tyrant patch notes follow, after the leap.
Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, was not dead in April when last the rumour went around, and she is not dead now either. Seriously, internets, stop saying people are dead when they’re not.
The only reason I care about this is that I have a number of friends who ill-advisedly buy into the whole Twilight thing, and every time she dies they get terribly upset, and insist on telling me about it. Though it does kind of make me look pretty amazing every time I prove to them that she is, in fact, still amongst the living, as if I’d personally whipped out a scroll of “raise dead” and revivified her.
Hey everybody. I just received a call from Stephenie and she wanted me to let everyone know that, contrary to some rumors that have recently started circulating, she is alive and well.
Have a great day.
So that’s that.
I am, of course, glad to hear that she is doing well. I’d be gladder if she promised to stop writing far-right religious allegories dressed up as teen-fiction, but I suspect I will remain disappointed in that regard. Apparently abstinence-only sells every bit as well as sex these days.
I found this remarkable. The chap in this video is Dr. John Mertens, and he really is the Chairman of the Connecticut for Lieberman party, the party Joe set up when he got beaten by Ned Lamont in the 2006 Democratic primary race, in order for him to contest (and sadly win) the election as an independent with heavy Republican support.
At some point they really need to change the name of their party. Also, they should probably apologise to Ned Lamont, though he may well consider their work to get Joe to act in the interests of his constituents to be apology enough.
This one is rather more fulsome than the previous efforts. It supersedes the test mod that many of us have been using that fixed the archery and dagger issues. You can grab the patch at the official 1.02 Dragon Age Patch page.
Dragon Age: Origins 1.02:
You do not need to download patches prior to Patch 1.02. Downloading Patch 1.02 contains all previous patches. Downloading Patch 1.02 will provide you with all patch data available.
Balance
* Daggers now apply 0.5 points of damage per additional point in dexterity and 0.5 points of damage per additional point in strength, as originally intended. This increases dagger damage for high-dexterity characters.
* During combat, mana or stamina reserves now correctly regenerate more quickly when reserves are low. This allows players to occasionally use an talent or spell in the later stages of lengthy fights.
* When exploring, mana and stamina now regenerate more quickly at higher character levels. This reduces downtime between fights.
* The spells Force Field, Crushing Prison, Cone of Cold, and Blizzard now have shorter durations and/or longer cooldowns. This ensures that combatants can no longer stun-lock each other by repeatedly casting the same spell.
* The cooldowns for several low-level sustained abilities are now shorter. This ensures that players are not penalized for accidentally deactivating them.
* Certain battles were not scaling properly, resulting in excessively difficult fights. They now scale as intended.
* Enemy corpses now drop health poultices and money more appropriately, resulting in less clutter in the player’s inventory.
Gameplay
* In rare cases, enemy corpses were selectable when they contained no loot. This no longer occurs.
* Party members whose combat tactics were set to defensive behavior no longer stop attacking after using a spell or talent.
* In rare cases, combat tactics conditions could fail to determine whether a character had enough mana or stamina to use an ability. This no longer occurs.
* The Rally talent no longer repeats its audio effect if it is active during certain conversations.
* The Rally talent no longer deactivates upon area transitions or conversations.
* The Shimmering Shield spell now deactivates when the character is out of mana.
PC Specific
* Controlling a summoned creature (like a ranger’s pets) during certain special area transitions no longer results in odd behavior.
* Creating a character in a custom module did not create a folder for saves. This could result in corruption of main campaign saves. This no longer occurs.
* In some cases, the class icon was set incorrectly for characters imported from the downloadable Character Creator. This no longer occurs.
* The options menu now includes a setting to automatically download previously purchased content that is not currently installed.
* After installing new downloadable content, the game now always reminds the user to restart the game.
* The icons for some promotional downloadable content items were missing. They now appear correctly.
* The screenshot upload GUI would stop working from time to time on the client. There was a memory override that was fixed. It is a client fix. It doesn’t affect the other problems we have seen on the server.
Plot *Spoiler Warning*
* Promotional downloadable content items now remain in the player’s inventory when standard items are removed at the end of the dwarf noble origin.
* Repeatedly talking to Duncan after gathering the vials in the Korcari Wilds but not the treaties no longer provides duplicate experience.
* Leliana’s personal plot can now be completed if the player substantially increased her approval (through gifts) before talking to her.
* During the siege of Redcliffe, enemies are no longer able to spawn in locations that would break the plot.
* Bann Teagan no longer disappears when he is supposed to be accessible during Urn of Sacred Ashes.
The Alexa Ranking theoretically determines how popular your website is, out of all the websites in the world. It does this by extrapolating from the behaviour of users who have the Alexa plug-in installed to their browsers. For instance, this humble stop along the internet superhighway is currently the 520,865th most popular by Alexa’s rating, though it fluctuates fairly wildly. That sounds pretty awful, but there are a heck of a lot of websites out there, so it actually ain’t bad. Because I am something of a numbers geek, I watch it leap about, seemingly independent of how many visitors I actually get, and have watched the ranking of some other sites I frequent, and I’ve reached a startling conclusion. Well, not literally startling. I just said that to make this sound more interesting. Alexa ratings aren’t exactly the sort of things that startle anyone, unless perhaps you are the sort of person that is shocked when a rather large yet unimportant number gets a little larger or smaller. I am not such a person, and I’ll wager neither are you.
It turns out that the best way to raise your Alexa ranking is simply to make a post telling people how to raise their Alexa ranking, and then thousands of people come in from the search engines to find out how. Because they all have the Alexa widget installed to raise their own page ranking, it also raises yours. (If you really want to go for broke, make a website all about SEO, Alexa, and Adsense. You’ll be in the top 10,000 before teatime.)
Now, some might suggest that this is a fatal flaw in how Alexa rankings are worked out. It means that the websites frequented most by people who care about such silly things as Alexa rating have inflated figures, rendering the ranking system mostly meaningless. In particular, websites dedicated to Search Engine Optimisation and such things frequently have ridiculously high rankings.
Some might even say that anyone who used such a method to raise their Alexa rank would be a terrible person. Or a very silly one, considering how little meaning the Alexa Rank actually has to 99.9% of web users. Possibly even both terrible AND silly. Some might also declare that it is good that I have warned of this danger, so that we might all be alert for such outrageous scampery.
Myself, I choose to break into a chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “A Paradox”!
Let’s sing along! There are pirates in it too! Pirates make everything better.
Alright, it’s not really a paradox. It’s more an out of control positive feedback loop, but I don’t know any songs about that.
I’ve noticed a lot of folks in my logs that look like they’re trying to track down some of my mods. With my mind once again turned towards modding, this post is here to help. These are all the ones I can still find available on the net. Some of my Oblivion mods, and all of my Morrowind ones (which were rather better) seem to have vanished without a trace, and I’m a couple of hard-drive crashes along since then. I no longer have Oblivion, so can’t offer much in the way of support for any of them.
These were all made in the first few weeks of Oblivion being out (I lost interest rather quickly. Oblivion was not half as fun to mod for as Morrowind), so are a bit primitive compared with what’s available now, but still, people still seem to be searching for them, so here you go. You can find full readme files on the hosting site and in the zip package.
I like to name my mods like old school D&D spell names :)
Ark’s Tutorial Terminator Plugin for Oblivion
My most popular work, and was a lot more complicated than it sounds, involving a lot of gentle pruning of dialogue trees and scripts if I remember rightly. This one is included in a lot of larger mods now, including the Tamriel Immersion Experience.
It removes all those annoying tutorial pop-ups. Don’t use this unless they have nothing more to teach you.
Ark’s Multiple Multiplier Mod
Apparently there were about a million mods that set multipliers to 5, but none for lower numbers. Five minutes later:
Simply sets your stat multiplier to a flat rate of two, three, or four, depending on which esp you use.
Ark’s Problematic Potions Plugin for Oblivion
Warning: This mod makes Oblivion more difficult.
Makes it so that the number of potions effects you can be under at once depends upon your ranking in Alchemy.
Without this mod, anyone can be under the effects of 4 potions at once. This mod changes things, so that Novices can only be under one effect at once, Apprentices 2, Journeymen and Experts 3, and Masters 4.
Ark’s Little Guys
This mod adds Gnomes, Dremi, Khajii, Argoni, and Dwarves (and as a bonus, Dremora) as playable races. Needless to say, this isn’t very canon, but some folks love playing those little guys. Don’t blame me if you have trouble reaching the cookie jar! There’s reports that the Dremora can make you crash so stick to the little guys! (It was a pre-existing NPC race I enabled for players. Unwisely as it turned out.)
This was one of the earliest mods to try to create a new race. Once I got the hang of shrinking and stretching them, I made a few, all with their own racial abilities. The most popular were the little cat guys, the Khajii.
Gnomes in Oblivion! Ark's Little Guys in action.
Ark’s Toasty Torch
A little test mod I didn’t release to the public at the time. Adds a flaming torch to your starting cell. Unlike ordinary flaming torches in Oblivion, it can be used as a weapon. Unfortunately in gaining that feature, it stopped creating a light radius, and I never got around to figuring out how to fix that. Still, it was quite a fun bit of kit to play with.
Ark’s Tribute to Leeroy Jenkins Plugin for Oblivion
In a moment of madness, I created this horror. Complete with sound files sampled from the original Leeroy, I still wake up at night cursing myself for unleashing it upon the world. For some reason, some people actually like it.
It adds a wonderfully magical spell, Summon Leeroy, to Trayvond in Cheydinhal’s Mages guild, and Edgar, of Edgar’s Discount Spells.
I have tried to contain Leeroy’s greatness as best I can, and yet I still could not call this mod well balanced. But then neither is Leeroy, so it is fitting. Pick either the balancedish Leeroy or Uber-Leeroy esp. Don’t use both. That would be too much Leeroy for anyone to handle.
