The only problem I have is this:

The USB 3.0 controller on my Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 is apparently an Etron EJ168, which is apparently crap. I could deal with crap, except that the controller will not recognize my AFT PRO-57U card reader. The PRO-57U’s passthrough appears to work, however, the reader itself is not detected at all by Windows 7. It does work in a USB 2.0 slot, which proves the reader isn’t DOA, and the problem lies elsewhere.

My solution is going to involve purchasing a PCIe adapter card and just replacing the whole damned USB 3.0 bus, but I would’ve rather have not had to spend extra money on doing this.

You may want to steer clear of anything bearing Etron’s controller. I’d say do research – some issues (certain external WD drives, for example) have been resolved by driver upgrades – but my own research revealed nothing with regard to the PRO-57U. I suspect there are a great many USB 3.0 devices that will have problems with the EJ168.

Thankfully, the Internets are here to help. A knowledgeable bloke going by Jalada knows his business. He knows what o’clock it is, I dare say.

The short of it is, Lion comes with some gimcrack modern rubbish known as LLVM, whereas you need the right honorable Admiral Lord GCC. If your MBP or MBA was made after the dinosaurs went extinct, you probably don’t have pure, undiluted GCC. As per the previous link’s comments, simply go here, snag the ‘OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: GCC-10.6.pkg’ package, install it, and Bob’s yer uncle Dick. That is to say, you’ll have proper GCC slumming about at /usr/bin/gcc-4.2.

After that, simply append ‘CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2′ before your RVM installations. (EG, ‘CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 rvm install 1.8.7′)

…This sort of nonsense, though, is why I despise the idea of local development; indeed, I avoid it whenever possible. But as the current fancy du jour involves building standardized virtualized machines for developers (thus avoiding this sort of issue, and more importantly, ‘hurr, works on my machine!!!!1111eleven’ syndrome), well, my hand is forced. Yo dawg, I herd u like virtualization, but we can’t put a virtual box in your virtual box. Really.

…Therefore your argument is invalid.

Spreadsheets, err, EVE Online has little appeal to me these days – the PvP aspect would be nice, if not for the impossibility of forcing a fight. PSO2 isn’t out and will disappoint me but I’ll play it anyway because damn you Sega and your sexy Numans but it’s not out. WH40K: Dark Millenium, not out. EQ2 has gone free to play, and really – Skyrim’s fixed me for PvE. World of Snorecraft is finally in the die back stage. It’ll take a few years for that abomination to finally bleed out, but the entire MMO industry should celebrate when it does. Star Wars? Is it out? Do I care? Absolutely not.

Well, damn. What else is there? Oh, it’s Dark Age of Camelot’s ten year anniversary this year? And – wait, what? It isn’t dead yet?

EA hasn’t shut off the servers?

What do you mean, population increasing over the course of 2011?

…

EA Nonsense

Account systems for DAOC have apparently come and gone, and after signing back up I had to go through some hellish rigamarole to end up with my DAOC account moved to a Mythic Master Account which ended up being folded into an EA account. Annoying, but not that difficult. The real issue is – game accounts are separate from master accounts. That makes sense, and honestly, I give props to EA for this – individual accounts should have separate credentials. Security for the win. Yet there remains such a thing as too much security. To change a game account password, you need to know the old password.

The old password that you probably haven’t used since 2003.

There is no password retrieval function; only the change password form within the EA account page. There’s talk of a secret word, but even that doesn’t exist on the change password form. To change your game password, you need to unfortunately call EA’s support line, wade through menus to get to DAOC, sit on hold for forty five minutes (even if you call right at the start of the business day the day after Christmas!) and explain your situation. Infuriating, but to ElectronicBioMythicArts’ credit – their support guy was pro. He had me up and rolling with a temporary old password in about five minutes, after checking some info to verify I was who I said I was.

The Glory of Thidranki and Low Levels

You can’t think of DAOC without Thidranki Faste springing to mind. Thidranki is more active than I remember it being several years ago (the game was all but dead in the wake of clustering); to be sure, there are slow periods, but there’s seemingly always something going on – and this is without the /level command. Yes, that’s right – on Ywain, the new server/cluster, /level has been disabled. It’s annoying to not be able to quickly raise Thid alts – but at the same time, /level was one of the nails in the coffin of DAOC. Now that /level is gone, and seemingly perhaps with the 10th anniversary – you can actually find low level characters. Grouping is actually happening! With no shortage of lowbies, I expect there shouldn’t be an impending decrease in Thidranki activity.

In terms of levelling, taskmasters exist – from Catacombs, I believe? – and it’s now relatively easy to burn through levels. Get task, take short walk to dungeon, kill. Rinse and repeat. It is kind of sad that this leaves the heart and soul of Camelot’s lands abandoned – but let’s face it – PvE (while damned good for its day) was never the heart and soul of DAOC itself. Anything that gets people into RvR faster is a good thing. At the end of the day, rolling Hibs is the point of the game.

Clinical Trials of Atlantis Failed, Causing Heart Attack and Erectile Dysfunction in 100% of Subjects

…Seriously, even female players were suffering from ED.

I haven’t looked into it much yet, but from what I hear, ToA is entirely optional at this point. Purportedly, you can spend bounty points to get master levels and artifacts. I want to give BioMythArtstronics mad props for this, but I’m still bitter over the debacle that was ToA. ToA ended DAOC, folks. Oh, I know some like to quibble over numbers. The fact of the matter is, a few months after ToA was released, I was a top level guild officer in my guild because nobody else was left. My alliance was, in a word, gone. Veterans fled the game with increasing speed. At that point, Camelot still had an influx of new players – but that was already dwindling thanks to /level. By the time I left, it was rare to encounter a true, new low level player out and about in the starter zones. Population went into decline and never recovered.

I’m not going to rehash the reasons why ToA was such a damnably bad idea for DAOC. The point is, it’s fixed by virtue of being able to ignore it entirely. Would I sound entirely hypocritical, though, if I have the slightest bit of sadness over that? ToA was, after all, a masterpiece of MMOG design. For a PvE game. DAOC was not a PvE game. It had PvE, to be sure, but the endgame – the entire point of the game – was realm vs. realm conflict. While I am thrilled it’s optional – it’s not in the way of RvR… There is some tiny piece of me that is going to miss never again running Sobekite Eternal.

Welcome to the Suck!

Haven’t done much in terms of true RvR yet – I’m having far too much fun in Thidranki. Still, judging by DF changing hands, relics being moved and constant alerts about watchtowers, outposts and keeps – the frontiers are quite active. A cursory glance around community sites that remain shows 8-mantrain bitches whining about the zerg. Thank the gods – RvR means Realm vs. Realm, not butthurt sporting match. Right, my personal feelings about the tactical wisdom of numerical superiority aside – zerg. There are enough players active to zerg, my friends.

The better news is there are now buffing NPCs. Slip them some coin and you’ve got buffs. I still see buffbots; I’m sure buffbots are more effective – but this at least closes the gap. If you don’t want to/can’t dual box, you’re no longer at an extreme disadvantage.

Come Back, Damn You

DAOC isn’t exactly a healthy game. Ywain’s active population is comparable to any individual server back in the golden, post-SI days of the game. But that’s pretty much it – overall population is terribly low. The Herald is completely broken. Patches aren’t quite exactly regular. Graphics and the interface are pretty damned dated (though SI reflective water is still beautiful, and damn – can you believe we had that way back when?!)

Still, the most glaring flaws of the game have been fixed – and RvR at all levels is extremely active.

At ten years old, DAOC is ailing, but it’s in a stable condition. She’s not dead yet, folks. And for all the flaws remaining; despite the old school graphics and interface and mechanics… No other game has ever surpassed, compared or come anywhere close to DAOC’s RvR. This is fact. I know it. You know it. Everyone knows it. Even those who haven’t played DAOC know it, because the moment you drop the acronym, ‘DAOC’ on any other MMO’s community, there’s nothing but a cacophonous, soul-rending mourning over the pinnacle that has never been matched.

Chances are you have fourteen free days attached to your account. If you enjoyed DAOC in its prime, you owe it to yourself to use them. Draw once more your sword in defense of keep, guild and realm. And roll over those damnable Hibbies.

As root:

yum --exclude=*.i?86 install -y gcc-c++ patch readline readline-devel zlib zlib-devel libyaml-devel libffi-devel openssl-devel make bzip2 autoconf automake libtool bison curl

As your Ruby-happy user:

echo insecure >> ~/.curlrc
bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)
echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM function' >> ~/.bash_profile
source .bash_profile
rvm install 1.9.2
rvm use 1.9.2
rvm use 1.9.2 --default
rvm gemset create rails3
rvm gemset use rails3
gem install rails

Note: Curl on RHEL5 is braindead when it comes to SSL – thus, you need to basically force Curl to not authenticate certificates by way of the insecure method.

Can it be that simple?

# ruby --version
ruby 1.9.2p290 (2011-07-09 revision 32553) [x86_64-linux]
# rails --version
Rails 3.1.3

I’m not going to stop cringing at the idea of taking software version control out of the hands of your distribution’s package management system. It’s the wrong thing to do. It’s always the wrong thing to do, even when it’s the right thing to do (hi, content management systems living in a docroot).

Still, props to RVM. It’s been blissfully easy to work with, and at least has clear upgrade paths/capabilities, even if they do reside outside of the rest of the system.

At any rate, congratulations on running the unarguably superior Linux distribution. Here’s some things you should know.

RHEL Version and Alternatives

RHEL5 vs RHEL6

There’s only one viable reason to go with RHEL5 at this point: You’re deploying a new server to an existing cluster of RHEL5 servers.

Other than that, you should now be using RHEL6. It’s past the initial release phase; it’s been out long enough to have proven itself stable; and by virtue of being a later version, it’ll be supported longer than RHEL5.

Distribution Alternatives

My advice? Don’t. But if you have to?

For many years, CentOS has been the “free” compatible alternative of choice for RHEL. There’s been concern over update frequency/lag time behind RHEL of late. Some have been looking at Scientific Linux as a result, but you can expect a visit from John Titor if you go down that route.

Where My Packages At?

Third party repositories are a necessity with RHEL. The fact is, developers are all whiny about new features and sharp pointy things they can injure themselves and your infrastructure with. Best to just give them what they want – and with RHEL, you can, while maintaining your sanity.

MySQL

If you’re running MySQL, you have no excuse whatsoever to not be running Percona. Percona is the Bugatti Veyron of MySQL, whereas every distributions’ default MySQL packages are nothing more than a bunch of Honda Accords. Percona Server is a drop-in replacement; your data is unaffected and you can revert to conventional MySQL at any time with no risk. Percona offers consulting and on-demand support; they’ve got enterprise paranoia, err, needs, covered. Percona currently offers 5.1 and 5.5 variants; there’s little reason not to go with 5.5 these days. I think they have Ubuntu packages now too, for you crazy kids who are into kinky stuff.

PHP

If you’re running PHP, Zend CE is the answer. Ever wonder how to get PHP 5.2 on a RHEL5 system without using packages that haven’t been maintained in a year? Or perhaps you just want PHP to actually be, you know, fast. Install Zend CE and you’ll have a well-documented, well-supported, optimized-to-hell-and-back PHP stack, from Zend. From freaking Zend, people. Zend CE currently offers PHP 5.2 and 5.3 flavors.

Ruby

Ruby’s the new Perl (and then some); and like the good old days of Perl, there’s an overinflated version hell problem. Unlike Perl, Ruby isn’t old enough to have stabilized to the point where you can run what your distribution provides and be happy. rbel.frameos.org may be the answer here – if and only if you’re working with Ruby 1.8. If you are, you can look forward to a repository filled with 1.8 goodness as well as things like Chef and Node.

If you want to run with 1.9? Good luck with that. The only viable option I’ve found so far is RVM, which lends itself to operational nightmares. (“Let’s make thirty two copies of this out of date gem with a security vulnerability! That’s easy to update, right?”)

I’m starting to suspect Ruby is nothing more than an insidious exit plan for exhausted sysadmins. Learn Rails, become overpaid; welpguesssomeoneelseneedstoberesponsibleforuptimeImtoobusydeveloping. Genius.

Everything Else

EPEL is your answer for all those miscellaneous packages, such as git and whatnot.

The bag has two main compartments – the rear for clothing/miscellany, the front reserved for a laptop and accessories. The front compartment came with a fairly large, fairly nice padded sleeve to slip a laptop into for protection purposes. It also sports a large frontal pouch, with two seperate pockets, a key holder and a decent amount of utility room. I’ve hit the limitations of it, however. First, there’s no viable way to properly and safely store a DSLR in the bag. The impending arrival of my shiny new Rebel T2i means that were I to continue using this, I’d have to deal with lugging two bags to conferences/wherever instead of one. Second, as I became painfully aware of while walking around Berkeley during BADcamp – it’s a shoulder carried bag, and large amounts of storage is a negative feature for shoulder bags.

Technically, it does have a slide-out handle and wheels, but… Look, I tend not to follow flights of fashion or image, but even I have to draw the line somewhere. You simply cannot slide out the handle and wheel this little bag around, without accepting the fact that you are a giant tool. Therefore, the handle and wheels are nothing more than dead, useless weight – and as I was a backpacker in a former life, I’m well aware of the horror of useless weight. (Every ounce counts!)

Taking into consideration my upward mobility into the DSLR-owning class, and the fact that I’m old enough to actually feel shoulder/back pain the next day, I fired up my Internets and went shopping.

Enter: The Lowepro Fastpack 250

I’m not a photography nut, and yet even I have heard of Lowepro. While I did do some brief comparative research, I pretty much went to Lowepro straight away and remained there. My requirements were simple: whatever I bought, it needed to be a backpack, and it needed to handle a laptop, a DSLR, and some spare clothing. My choices were quickly reduced between two lines – the Fastpack line, and the DSLR Video Fastpack line. I’ve got to admit – I went with the normal Fastpack line only because of the color choices. Not that I’m a huge fan of red – but I’m a huge despiser of single-color, black luggage. (I’ve had to go around the handles of my normal luggage with white duct tape, simply to make it more distinguishable on the baggage claim conveyors.) The DSLR line has one huge advantage – external tripod mount – but for me, that wasn’t a deal breaker. I’m rather fond of the idea of a nice, compact monopod. I decided to go with the 250 – the 350′s ever so slightly larger, and necessary for a 17″ laptop – but I’ve no desire to ever again own a 17″ laptop. The 250 is pretty much the perfect size for my needs.

The laptop slot is near the back of the bag, and has very decent padding on either side. As you can see from the photo, I can fit a 13″ current-gen Macbook Air in there, along with a decently thick notebook, and still have some room to spare. I could’ve easily swapped out the notebook for a spare pair of pants, for example, which is an important thing for lengthier trips.

The top rear of the bag has a thin little pocket, which I figure will be quite suitable for travel documentation – ticket storage, car rental agreements, et cetera.

The top itself opens up, providing a decent amount of miscellaneous storage and utility – two decent sized pockets, pockets for pens, a mesh pocket, a holder for keys. I crammed a bag of full-sized toiletries in here, along with a pair of underwear, two pairs of socks, and two long-sleeved shirts – no problems.

The bottom pocket is more of a psuedo-pouch; there’s not much room, but it’s perfectly usable for small cable accessories/et cetera.

The real beauty of this bag is the camera compartment. It zips open from the side, so you have easy access to your camera, even without removing the pack. More importantly, it’s a well-padded area, complete with padded, customizable slots to provide solid storage for lenses, cables and accessories. Ultimately, the slotting can be removed entirely (if for some reason you’re not lugging around a DSLR and kit). The slots aren’t fully customizable, mind you – but there’s enough velcro scattered about that you have some options in how you set things up. Finally, there’s two small pockets on the edge of the ‘door’, perfect for holding memory cards – SD or CF – again, easily accessible without even removing the pack.

There’s a mesh pocket on the side of the Fastpack 250, perfect for holding a water bottle. There’s also a shoulder-strap mounted pocket for an MP3 player (or some other small item) – it won’t, alas, fit my third-gen iPod Nano, but it does fit my newer iPod nano quite nicely. Finally, in addition to well-padded, comfortable shoulder straps, it comes with a hip belt. That’s not exactly useful for conference crawling, but I expect I’ll get a great deal of use out of that when I go mad and run off into the wilderness.

By way of comparison, I gathered together everything (or an equivalent) that I took with me to BADcamp in October. This stuff fit into my Delsey bag with no problem and plenty of room. I got everything into my Fastpack 250 as well, but it was a much tighter fit. While the top compartment is fairly large, it’s limited by the fact that the camera compartment is damned large. Still, I managed to fit everything in without needing to throw socks next to my camera, and this’ll motivate me to actually, y’know, get travel-sized toiletries. (Re: Every ounce counts!) I weighed the two bags after packing each, and the results were pleasant. The Delsey weighed in at a little over 19 pounds. The Fastpack 250 came in at 17.

A difference of two pounds is pretty awesome, but more importantly – the Fastpack spreads the weight by virtue of being a backpack, rather than making one of your shoulders, ahem, shoulder the load. Goodbye, conference-induced pain.

Why’d I go to the trouble of all this, instead of just using random WordPress plugins? A couple of reasons:

• WordPress plugins tend to do real-time pulls
• WordPress plugins are exceedingly limited when it comes to customizing how data is displayed
• WordPress plugins are, well, WordPress plugins

WordPress Plugins and Real-Time Pulls

The activity stream plugins I’ve found for WordPress generally had one thing in common. Well, they had a lot of things in common, but the first tour-de-farce is this: They tend to rely on real-time access to a third-party service. That is, when a browser hits a page with a Twitter stream, a request is sent to Twitter. Makes sense, no? It provides up-to-the-minute accuracy, right? What could be wrong with that?

So, what happens when, say, Twitter is down? The better plugins allowed for a timeout and a failure message. I actually hesitate to say better – better than what?

Here’s what’ll happen. A browser will hit your site; the page will begin loading, and the user will be treated to a spinning circle of death, or a rotating beach ball of death, or some similar irritant. For how long? That depends. What’s your timeout value? For the pull request? For PHP’s execution? Whatever it is, chances are, it’s too long. We live in a world of instant gratification, and the easiest way to lose visitors is by having slow or partially loading pages. I don’t partificularly care about browsers and page views and traffic on this site, but if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right.

Even assuming your real-time pull fails gracefully, what then? Do you display your own fail whale? Someone with a clue will say, “Oh, Twitter’s down.” The vast majority of people out there don’t have a clue. A computer is a magic box; the Internets are dark sorceries understood only by the Pope and/or Stephen Hawking. Display an error message, and your browsers will believe it is your site that is broken.

Finally, there’s traffic. What happens when you’re suddenly slammed with over 9000 hits per second? Are your pulls asynchronous, or is Apache going to be left holding connections to individual browsers for no good reason, consuming increasingly massive amounts of RAM and spiking load until a small puddle of molten steel drips from your rack? And are you going to have your API account taken out for abuse?

Direct pulls are stupid.

Granted, your average website about cats isn’t likely to have any of these problems. But they’re so easily avoided in the first place.

WordPress Plugins and Data Customization

The single most important thing to me, and the reason pretty much every WordPress plugin failed, was customization of how data is presented. The average plugin presented data in a fixed manner; if you wanted to change how it was displayed, you’d have to modify the plugin itself. You can go that route, sure – but good luck keeping up with plugin updates after that. And I’d rather maintain my own code than someone else’s.

Of course, this is sometimes a limitation of the third-party service – my Github stream, for example, is fairly h4x, because the atom feed spews broken links and a bunch of crufty markup.

WordPress Plugins and WordPress

Finally, WordPress plugins are designed to work with WordPress. What a shocking revelation, I know. That’s fine for now, really. WordPress presently suits my needs. What if it doesn’t, in the future? The obvious answer is to switch to whatever activity stream capabilities any new platform might have. There’s no guarantee that any given platform has the capabilities I need, however – and I’d have to deal with the first two items on this list all over again.

This certainly wasn’t a determining factor – but since I wasn’t happy with real-time data pulling, or the lack of customized presentation, this issue was solved as a bonus.

Right, then…

So, taking these problems into consideration, and espousing the Unix Way(tm), I wrote a series of small scripts to handle the matter entirely. The scripts are invoked via cron, and can thus provide anything from occasional to near real-time data. The scripts parse data returned via API or feed (in the case of Github), and insert any records not previously seen into a MySQL database table. That – the involvement of SQL – eliminates problems. Which problems? All of the problems.

Since a page load now references the local MySQL database, there’s no risk of users sitting around waiting for the page to load while Last.fm, Github and Twitter are contacted. Those services have already been contacted. There’s no issues of connection failure between the site and third-party services – if a data pull fails, users will merely see out of date information. There’s no risk of API abuse, no matter how much traffic is involved – because the traffic hitting my webserver is not resulting in additional API requests.

In terms of presentation of data, I can do whatever the hell I want. I can select precisely the data I need, and plug it into the markup I desire. There is an exception – as noted, Github and its Atom feed – but even that’s now easier to customize.

Finally, since the data’s pulled into MySQL, it’s available to anything. In my case, I am using my WordPress database for storage, but I can easily have other software reference the database and tables. Or export and import the data into a different database. The data pull will function regardless of what CMS (or lack thereof) I use for the site; the historic data can be transferred to any other software. Hell, with a quick bit of scripting, I could have the entirety of my activity stream scroll by on a USB LED message board…

…You know, I might actually do that. ;)

At any rate, data customization really was my primary drive here – but the other benefits are icing on the cake. Suet in the pudding. Rum in the coke. Bacon in the omelette.

…I had a sudden burst of 7.62mm inspiration.

As per usual, there’s still broken cruft floating about, which will be fixed in time. The main broken feature is the activity feed cluster toward the bottom of the page. There’s a nice little module called Activity Stream for Drupal which does what I wanted to do years ago but never got around to doing – collating crap from other sites on the Internets into a central place. Was happy to discover that WordPress has plugins to do it now as well. The problem is, they all seem to suck. Seriously. I’ve spent the better part of an hour digging through modules – I can’t find any that allow proper customized presentation and theming without h4x. So I’m going to roll my own. Torn as to how to do it – it won’t be the official WordPress way(tm) with plugins and widgets and other such nonsense. To be frank, I’ve no interest in learning to do things the ‘proper’ way in WordPress. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll have external scripts invoked on cron ping various services’ APIs and pull down data every so often, dumping it into MySQL. It can then be selected in appropriate pieces and mashed together in the format I like. It also prevents issues of connectivity from wonking things out – most of the plugins I found depended on real-time requests, with no measure for failure other than, ‘LOL IT BROKE’.

Update: The last.fm pull is coming along nicely; I’ve now got it pulling data and dropping into MySQL. Unfortunately, for development ‘speed’, I opted to go with Perl. Which would’ve been no big deal, except… the DBD-MySQL package on RHEL5/CentOS5 doesn’t properly support UTF8. Wasted time trying to figure out what was going on before h4x1ng up a workaround. I’ve got to say, I’m rather shocked at the poor state of UTF8, not only in Linux, but open source software in general. I mean, I’ve been talking to suspicious foreign sorts since 1994. It’s 2011. Why the hell do things still default to lolmurrican?

Fast forward past a play through of End of the Millenium, and I found myself un-custom-firmware-ing my PSP.

I’m amused – Sonic Team isn’t even mentioned in the title spam now. This could get interesting…

The Music

PSU always had strong music, and continues to do so – because most of PSP2′s music is PSU’s music. The notable exception is the opening song. I’ve never heard something more hideous. I thought ‘Save This World’ was bad – oh, wow, was I wrong. Looks guys, unless your game involves the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, your theme song should never self-reference the game’s title. End of story. Period. Fin.

I’ll tell you what it is, though, I’ve missed the open fields of Parum; I’ve missed the psuedo-western, “Where the hell’s my beef, because it’s what’s for dinner, bitch!” of Moatoob. Hell, I even missed some of the Neudaiz music.

Types, What Types?

Types are gone. Well, they’re still there, along with a kooky ‘Vanguard’ type. No more acro-whatsits, though. No more forte-thingamabobbers. No more mastern00bs laying dead on the floor at the mere sight of a Delp Slami.

Alfa’s done something half-assed, but with potential. You have four basic archetypes; and then… Then, you customize. Where this really shines is weapon selection – yes, you choose your own weapons. Finally, I can do true justice to my Numan heritage, and wield claws. Twin Claws; Single Claws; all S rank, all the time. BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD.

…Where it falls apart is class definition. I was expecting some sort of awesomeness whereby I could adjust attributes’n such; y’know, ensure my Numan was a true Numan. No such luck. Just a goofy, “Here’s a bunch of random passive skills you can select, in a very limited fashion.”

Well, it’s a start. Weapon selection alone is more than enough to make up for any other disappointment with the new class system.

I Shit on PSO: Photon Arts and Techs

…Are now lame. One of the more entertaining parts of PSU was the fact that you had to level Photon Arts and techs for them to be useful. In the short term, this prevented omni-characters. In the long term – look, it’s an online PS game. It’s a Diablo clone with fancy graphics. YOU ARE NOT GETTING AWAY FROM ‘GRIND’ HERE, SON. The PSU PA/tech system allowed for another level of character advancement – was it grindy? Sure. But it was the right kind of grind – quick, obvious benefits each time you leveled a PA or Tech.

PSP2 threw that away in favor of what I can only assume is an attempt to appease dimwitted retards who haven’t even played PSO since ’99 and thus can’t understand how lame and dated it really is. Both Photon Arts and techs are now drops. Need Renzan at 30? Good luck with that random number generator, hey?

To top it all, PP is no longer weapon-bound; it’s character bound. Lame.

So, About That RNG…

Synthesis is still completely missing. I didn’t really expect it back, after all, it was cut from PSP. But sorry to the bitch ass whiners – synthesis was one of the more brilliant features of PSU. Imbalanced? Oh, to all hell, what with gunners and techers only needing to succeed at synth period, unlike the rest of us and our horrible elemental percentages.

But the fact that you could get quality gear without being at the mercy of loldroprates… Huge.

It better be back in PSO2, or I swear, a black energy wave will be heading toward SOJ’s HQ.

But it gets better!

Grinding is now cash-for-goodness, rather than, “LOL YOUR WEAPON THAT HAD A 99% CHANCE OF SUCCESS FAILED, YOU LOSE. AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA. LOOK AT ME, I R SONIC TEAM! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

…Uh. Yeah. Well, do like. Let’s hope PSO2 keeps the idea, and more importantly, learns how the hell to write remotely secure code. *coughh4xs3ta*

GO KILL STUFF K THX

Ah, the cafe. Alluded to by a horrible French … I refuse to call that thing a Numan. A place of… Well, shit, people just stand around doing nothing. But now you can get fun happy side-jobs, to go with your normal spamming of missions. A nice addition, and had it been on PSU proper, probably would’ve got people running the more obscure stuff. Liek.

WHITE BEAST

…I just ran White Beast. BECAUSE I COULD. Oh yeah.

Lol Character Imports

…Imported my PSP character. I’m a ‘former guardian’. Bitches don’t realize my PSP character was my PSU character, because I always feared SoJ/SoA were going to double team us with double penetration action and kill our servers for no good reason.

This is hardly the fault of PSP2, since – obviously, PSP != PSU in terms of story. BUT I WANT TO GAG LUMIA AND THROW HER INTO A PIT OF KAKWANE.

…It’s my guilt, really. To think my PSU character mentored an annoying little girl who turned into an annoying big girl. Gah. Well, in fairness, I was at the same time, you know, SAVING THE ENTIRE GODDAMNED SOLAR SYSTEM. But still.

…So what’s with the school uniform getup? I remember when Guardians were cool, man. Except for Lumia, who was like, way too young for the hooker-wear she got from Maya. But other than that, there was flavor, damn it. Now? Sheesh, no wonder why even a mercenary company named ‘Little Wing’ can get off by insulting the Guardians. O HAI, UR LATE 4 CLASS, SCURRY OFF WHILE I SAVE THE GODDAMNED SOLAR SYSTEM AGAIN.

Woot.

PSP2 used the word ‘woot’ in a grammatically sound fashion. This is good.

The fact that I was able to respond to someone with, “That’s how I roll.” is even better.

I do enjoy dialogue that isn’t complete crap, which I’m happy to say, PSP2 is following in PSU’s footsteps.

Racism and Clothing

…So apparently there’s now racial-based clothing (apart from clothes for meatbags and parts for the walking calculators).

I AM DISAPPOINT. Mostly because the most badass looking of the new threads is restricted to humans. Pah. Stupid humans.

End Rambling Rant

I’ve heard rumors that Sonic Team is nowhere to be found with regard to PSO2.

That alone has forced a revision in my, “How dare you ruin Algo?”, “Not now, not ever again!” take on another PS* game.

With any luck, Sega will be shoving PSO2 into the hands of Alfa. They could do far, far worse – indeed, such a move might be the smartest thing Sega’s done since putting out Skies of Arcadia.

Further Lameness/Awesomesauce

Two more things I’ve noticed. No, three things. Three things. Wait, four.

First, level-locked gear. Lame. Even PSO didn’t do that. Well, the original PSO didn’t do it. PSU didn’t do it either. I think. Oh hell, I can’t even remember now. But, look, level-limited gear is stupid, even when simply compared to stat-limited gear. With the latter, you can come up with some pretty interesting/bad builds if you absolutely, positively have to wield $FancyWeapon.

Second, empty boss boxes are back! …And it’s the lamest thing Sonic Team ever came up with. Pity Alfa didn’t fix it. Look, I know, getting a bunch of monomates after an epic, thirty minute boss fight (is this still even possible?) is… Kind of meh. But it’s still better than breaking open a bunch of boxes and finding squat.

Lightning Beasts. It’s been neutered. I don’t know what to say. I mean, I felt kind of strange dragging Lumia through LB. In PSU, I dragged her through LB a few hundred thousand times, so I’m figuring she was wondering what the hell was going on. But man, it’s gutted. Really gutted. The music is still there; the abandoned/overrun city feel is… There, I guess. But somehow the heart and soul of the mission have gone. Sad.

Armor switching: Did I mention how bad ass it is to have palettized and thus easily swappable armor? Beats hitting the menu/inventory/armor/load up all your units again/baaaah. A true win, this one.