Gaming Days

The transition to Out of the Park Baseball 2006 has entered the painful phase.  The computer AI just does odd things with players.  Some get released when traded, others are listed as being parts of teams but don’t show up on rosters, all sorts of nonsense.  The good people at Sports Interactive must be on vacation or doing something OTHER than fixing the bugs that were claimed fixed, but in fact were not.  A brief glance at the technical support section of the OOTP 2006 forum shows at least full page of unanswered problems.  Own a Mac and want to FTP your team exports?  Too bad, because SI doesn’t seem to have a clue about Mac FTP issues.

So I am not talking about anymore SI games until OOTP 2006 is finally patched up and doesn’t feel like an unstable mess.  If you’re an online league, please take my advice and wait a while before suffering through the transition pain.  There are some brilliant additions and we will work through them to enjoy the game, but a lot of commissioner’s blood will be shed to get there.

In other news, World of Warcraft continues to shine.  Lots of nice looking games get released and fall by the wayside because I am playing WoW whenever I am not dealing with OOTP 2006 issues.  I am finally at the point where I can do the end game raiding content whenever I want.  Getting together with 20 or 40 people to take on a dungeon is a pretty exciting experience when things work.  When they don’t, it can be very frustrating and expensive.

There is just so much to do in WoW that it’s hard to describe.  Many people approach the game thinking it’s all about getting to the highest level (60) and enjoying the end game content.  It’s so much more than that.  First, you must determine how exactly you want your 60 level character to participate in raiding instance dungeons.  Is you priest going to focus on shadow damage or become a healbot?  Is your warrior going to abosorb a lot of damage or deal a lot of pain?  The answer to each of these questions leads to long and winding paths to various armor sets, trinkets, rings, weapons, etc.

So there is a lot of research involved.  Various web sites contain a lot of information about the best strategies for different portions of the post-60 world.  Need a pre-Molten Core priest build?  Look it up.  Want to know how to spec for Zul’Grub?  Look it up.  This is the sort of gaming complexity that keeps me coming back for more in the same sad, sadistic way I keep trying to solve OOTP 2006.

I’ll write more about WoW since I’m done with SI games for a while, even with NHL Eastside Hockey Manager on the horizon.  Let’s see if we can get Jonathan to join us on Bronzebeard server!    

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6 thoughts on “Gaming Days”

  1. Chris

    Do you have some save games with examples of these problems. We will be more than happy to look into them for you.

  2. Chris, I have said it before and I will say it again, I think I would *love* WoW. My problem is that I do not want to pay $9.99/month (or whatever it cost) as a subscription to play the game.

  3. Chris, I told a guy at work that I think I would do some sort of pay as you go thing … maybe $0.50/hr, but as far as I know, there is not such an offering. I have the $ … so that is not the issue, but I do have problems with paying $225 for a game (game + year subscription). Hard for me to justify.

    Cannot wait to read why I (and others) should take the WoW wild ride.

  4. Marc, I’ve posted in both the OOTP 2006 general forum and in the tech support forum the problems we are having, plus others (the Mac issue)posted about problmes they are having in another league that I am in. My league file is avialable for download on my site.

  5. Pain in the ass? I am not going to post this over on the IOSBL board, but it looks like you are having to spend a ton of time baby sitting us with 2006. I am going to take time to read the manual this weekend. Seriously.

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