Guild Wars 2

The Guild Wars 2 Beta weekend was a blast. My wife and I enjoyed trying out the new MMO from Arena Net.

Some thoughts:
- Totally enjoyed the game. If this is merely the Beta, the real game should be amazing.
- The graphics were cartoony even on the highest level, but keep in mind that your CPU was rendering most of the graphics, My graphics card sat at idle most of the game (570GTX).
- The pay for teleport needs to go.
- The lowering your level for an area is a great idea, but they went too low. When you are an ‘acting’ level 4 going against two level 3s and get killed, it is too low. I think the level should be set where you can fight a group of three enemies to a standstill. In other words, three level 3s vs. your level 5.
- The healing skills are a bit too weak, a small buff would help them here –> faster recharge?
- The spawning and re-spawning was too fast. The spawns need to spawn at a slower rate. Several times I would be rezzing someone and two enemies would spawn right on me that we had just killed…yeah, I died. Also, have the spawns come from somewhere…i.e. the wolves spawn out of a cave and run out, etc.
- Just read that the Golem Banker guy that comes in the Deluxe Digital and the CE version of the game is temporary (5 days then gone). I would suggest that it would be better if he was a permanent item (permanent summoning stone) available through /bonus BUT only in the large cities. Letting him be used in the world once every 24 hours would be a nice bonus too.
- Give us a way to earn gems through quests.
- Have crafting contribute a small amount of XP to main character XP.
- Give us a select key please (‘C’ in GW1).
- Allow us to change worlds once for free in the first 30 days of the game, then charge for a world change. When my wife came on, my world was full. We wanted to play the game together.
- Give us an ‘aggro’ circle in the radar and mark the enemies on the radar ala GW1. I would suggest 1000 as the measurement.

Thank you ArenaNet for this great game, and GW1 too. Several of my chars celebrated the six year mark recently.

Update:
"Give us a select key please (‘C’ in GW1)."
Just learned that there was a key binding for this (Thanks, Grey Freeman).

Spearhead's Back!

I was suffering some withdrawals there.

Link

Very Cool Musical Instruments

These are really cool musical instruments.

Sweet Home Alabama

House of the Rising Sun

Dueling Banjos

In the Hall of the Mountain King

And some other guys:

The Masters of Lightning Play Toccata & Fugue in D Minor with Zeusaphones

It is not often you see Tesla coils making music. He is using over 24kw to do this!
Totally awesome!

From the description below the first video:

These are two gigantic solid state musical Tesla Coils. A Tesla Coil is a special type of transformer invented by Nikola Tesla that is able to generating extremely large voltages using a phenomenon known as electrical resonance. Each coil in this video is capable of generating a 13 foot spark. This equates to about 500,000 volts of electricity.

The primary drive system for the coils consists of high power semiconductors arranged into an H-Bridge switching configuration. During a spark event, the coil is pulsed on for a few hundred millionths of a second. During this short time, thousands of amps circulate within the primary tank circuit and the energy is coupled into the secondary resonator through magnetism.

So what appears to be a continuous burst of sparks is actually a specific number of sparks generated per second. By modulating the number of sparks that emit from the coil each second, different tones can be produced by the coils.

These coils were constructed by Eric Goodchild and Steven Caton.

Eric Goodchild is currently an EE student at ASU Polytechnic.
His personal website is: http://www.goodchildengineering.net/

Steven Caton is currently an EE student at UCLA
His personal website is: http://stevencaton.com/

Happy Easter!

Please remember the reason for this day is not bunnies, eggs, and jelly beans.

He is Risen! He is Risen indeed!

Happy National Athiest's Day!

"Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools." Romans 1:22 NIV