[WoW] Gear, and Other Carrots

Does your gear matter? Kurn’s post Tech and the Devaluation of Gear shows how really, gear is effectively an illusion, a trick, a carrot to get you to keep playing even though the upgrades are effectively meaningless, becoming obsolete every time a new tier/expansion is released. It’s really with the introduction of Challenge Modes, and now Proving Grounds and Flex Raiding, that this has become too obvious to ignore: when the numbers on your gear and the enemies can be adjusted so readily, it leads to a questioning of why we bother to strive for improved gear at all.

Talk about a can of worms! This question can be split into two answers: levelling and endgame.

As the popularity of heirlooms has shown, players are fine with something that makes gear irrelevant whilst levelling – even the pieces that don’t provide an experience boost are used, and gear drops are mostly only used as a source of disenchanting materials. That the heirloom gear is generally equivalent to rare quality, thus is quite powerful, is an added bonus.

Levelling, though, is but a small part in the life of most characters: it’s often been said that endgame is where the ‘real’ WoW begins. Once you hit maximum level, whatever that might be at the time, you then need to start preparing your character for the Good Stuff: raiding (or battlegrounds or arenas; the goal is mostly the same). This, of course, means gearing up.

Grind My Gear

Prior to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, getting a newly-max-level character up to raiding standard was a tedious process if it started any significant time after most others had done it, both for the player of that character, and for any guildmates that had to go back and re-do content with the newbie, content they’d already cleared when it was current, and possibly never wanted to see ever again.

Thus did Blizzard introduce the concept of ‘tokens’, a currency that could be earned from doing dungeons and daily quests, and that could be used to buy previous-tier gear. This plus the introduction of automatic group-matching via the Dungeon Finder tool meant gearing up a new character to current-tier standards was a much quicker, if more mechanical, process, one that could be accomplished effectively ‘solo’, since the random, blitz-like nature of the Dungeon Finder groups made it easy to view the other people in your party as NPCs.

The ‘gear resets’ upon the release of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were the first clues that the numbers on gear are mostly arbitrary. The tokens were the second: no longer was gear something magical that you looted from a boss after a hard-won victory. Instead, it became something you could buy – not a reward but a return on time invested.

Perhaps coincidentally, this was around the same time addons like Recount and Gearscore really came to prominence, further clarifying the feeling that WoW is about numbers above all, a pretty facade in front of a spreadsheet.

Zahlen Über Alles

The fact that WoW is so numerically transparent has led to some fascinating things. Simulationcraft, for example, can predict, to a high degree of accuracy, how your character will perform in a given situation. Sites like Ask Mr. Robot will look at your character, crunch the numbers, then tell you what gear to acquire, and how to gem and reforge it, in order to maximise your potential.

At risk of invoking the slippery slope fallacy, it’s getting easier to see how this focus on and automation of numbers is making those numbers irrelevant. It takes very little skill to become ‘raid-ready’, just time. And, for those of us with full-time jobs and families to look after, time is often at a premium ¹, meaning we can feel somewhat obligated to optimise our gaming, sometimes to the detriment of fun.

So what happens when acquisition of gear is no longer necessary?

For Great Justice!

I play Guild Wars 2 as well as WoW. If you’re not familiar with GW2, it has almost no gear progression: you get to max level (80), and any gear with the stats you need is available via several means, including the Trading Post (equivalent to WoW’s Auction House, more or less). In other words, you can directly buy pretty much the best stats in the game (not getting into the debate about Ascended gear, which is slightly more powerful but harder/more time consuming to acquire, and only available for trinket slots at present).

Guild Wars 2 also has dynamic stat scaling too: go into a low-level zone on your level 80 character and your effective level gets lowered to the maximum for that zone; enter World vs. World on any character below maximum level and you get up-levelled to 80. Structured PvP is interesting, too: not only are you boosted to maximum level, you are given a set of armour with no stats, plus a single trinket that gives you a completely standardised set of stats. You don’t have to spend any time or currency on this, resulting in a completely level playing field (class balance aside).

So what do Guild Wars 2 players strive for? The short answer: appearance, fun and victory. Like WoW, GW2 lets players alter the appearance of their armour and weapons by using other items as a source; hence, players run dungeons in order to acquire items they think look nice. Additionally, they do things because they are fun – the endgame is not like WoW’s at all, with no raids, no tiers and (for now) no expansions, so players are free to set more of their own goals.

Then of course there’s WvW/sPvP, where the goal is quite simple: to win. In both cases, gear plays no part in one’s chances of success, and is not a factor in the rewards.

Dark Simulacrum

I bring up Guild Wars 2 not as an example of what Blizzard should copy, but to show that it can be possible to have a successful game in which gear progression is not a factor. Of course, GW2 differs in many other significant ways, many of which are primarily there as an alternative to gearing up – most obviously, ArenaNet have committed to releasing new content every month, for free, and often for a limited time.

That’s not to say Blizzard shouldn’t copy anything from ArenaNet – if it’ll work in the context of WoW, it absolutely should be implemented; good ideas are good ideas, regardless of who comes up with them.

Vestments of Prophecy

So what rewards would be acceptable for killing an Instance boss, if not statistically superior gear?

Already, we have one answer: items for use in transmogrification. Some folks may see this as the domain of ‘socials’, but each to their own – having your character look the way you want is a perfectly valid goal in my book.

Then there’s Challenge Modes, which already do not provide any kind of numerical upgrade, instead awarding ‘prestige’ things like mounts, pets, titles and so forth. Furthermore, there are realm-wide leaderboards, giving really good teams bragging rights.

Both of these things are relatively small-scale, however, and may not work so well for raid-sized content. What to do there? There’s a complicating issue here: how will new tiers scale? Will they be at the same level, numerically, as current tiers? If that’s the case, it’d go a long way towards reducing the way tiers become obsolete as new ones are introduced, and I personally would love it if all raids of a given expansion could remain relevant throughout.

While adopting Challenge Mode’s stat-normalisation could work for raids, I don’t think the timed aspect would. In fact, it’s hard to think of something that would effectively offer the equivalent to the dungeons’ Gold, Silver and Bronze ‘medals’. There could be a ‘difficulty’ setting, but the problem there is having to complete the raid several times at ever harder difficulties, which may get tedious very quickly, although this could perhaps be alleviated if the difficulty was adjustable on a per-boss basis.

So far, so traditional, but what about something… more? To bring up Guild Wars 2 again, I think WoW could benefit from taking transmog even further with armour dyes and craftable ‘skins’, i.e. armour made purely for use in transmog.

I say that entirely with the realisation that such a thing would require extremely large-scale changes to the game. Obviously there’s no way to apply custom colours to armour in WoW at present, and implementing one would mean a lot of work to make it backwards-compatible with existing armour models. Perhaps at first, only new armour would be alterable, with older gear updated over time.

Expanding on the dye idea further, the colours could, like in GW2, be craftable, perhaps by scribes or alchemists, and recipes would be one of the new kinds of drops from instance bosses, with the colour’s rarity and difficulty of acquisition being based on its value to players (black = most valuable, guaranteed; it’s one of the most expensive on GW2’s Trading Post).

Naturally, tailors, leatherworkers and blacksmiths would craft the appropriate class of armour, and engineers and enchanters could even get in on the act by providing cool animations and glow effects and so forth.

Solar/Lunar

Blizzard maintains a very careful balance in WoW to ensure as many types of players enjoy the game as possible. They know better than any of us what motivates players, and they’ve had eight years to fine-tune things in a way that no other MMORPG can match, so obviously, removing a fundamental aspect of the game is not going to go down well with the type of player who likes downing raid bosses just for the sake of acquiring new gear and seeing bigger numbers.

Furthermore, although there’s plenty of complaining from a subset of players that dungeons are too easy and that everything’s a faceroll and boring, when the instances are actually challenging, another, larger subset of players complains that things are now too hard (or, in the case of a recent GW2 dungeon, they just don’t run it). The outcry over the initial difficulty of the Cataclysm expansion’s dungeons is evidence of this, although in that particular instance there were other important factors to consider, not least of which was that by the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the playerbase had become used to blitzing through even heroic, current-tier 5-player dungeons, area-of-effect spells out in full force, no brainpower required. Cataclysm‘s dungeons were like a bucket of icy water to the face, and only those bracing themselves for it could cope.

The issue if compounded by the greatly varying levels of skill within the playerbase – the main reason the Raid Finder tool, with its lower difficulty and simplified encounters, was introduced was so more people could experience the boss fights that Blizzard spent a lot of effort creating (alas it turned out to be a not so great solution, as anyone who’s used it can attest).

Designing encounters with varying levels of difficulty may mitigate the problem of a less-than-ideal number of people being skilled enough to experience the content, but it does little to entice players who are not solely motivated by overcoming the types of challenges that raids provide. Hence, carrots, especially ones designed to appeal to stereotypical ‘casual’ raiders: pets, mounts, armour dyes/recipes and other ‘collectible’ things.

Winter of This Content

I’m on the fence really as to whether I believe Blizzard could or would implement something like stat irrelevancy or armour dyes. WoW is growing old, and it won’t be long before its retirement comes, so expending significant resources to change the very core of the game after almost nine years seems unlikely; I suspect rather that we’ll see something like this in the fabled Titan project, whenever it makes an official appearance.

Still, it’s nice to dream, and perhaps might yet see some of these ideas in the World of Warcraft, albeit in watered-down form. Roll on 6.0!

1: As gainfully employed adults, many of us now have something else instead of time: money. What’s that, Blizzard are going to be selling a thing that lets players achieve something in less time? Well, fancy that. ↑

Fuji X-E1 vs. X100: further observations

These are just a few things I’ve noticed now that I’ve spent more time with the X-E1. See also my first impressions.

New firmware, and handling

First of all, not long after I got the camera Fuji released firmware version 1.06 for it, which adds the ability to use the Down button on the four-way controller as a programmable function button. Furthermore, ‘Select AF Point’ is now one of the functions that can be assigned to such buttons. For those of us who regularly change focus points, this is a huge improvement, as it makes changing AF points with the camera up to your eye significantly easier, especially with a relatively heavy and ‘hands-on’ lens like the 18–55mm.

Another aspect of handling that is not immediately obvious when comparing the X-E1 and X100 is the shape of the body on the right hand side. They appear fairly similar, but in fact the X100 is much more rounded (X100 on the left):

It seems a minor difference, but it’s surprising how much more comfortable the X100 is when pressed into the palm of your hand, although with a lighter lens than the 18–55mm it might not be as much of an issue. I presume the X-E1’s shape is due to its thicker battery leaving less room for nice body contouring.

Raw versus JPEG

Almost always with the X100, I found the JPEGs the camera produced to be better than anything I could get out of Lightroom, Aperture or Capture One. For certain looks, I could get the included SilkyPix to give nicer results (it’s particularly good at highlight recovery and lush landscape colours), but on the whole the JPEGs were just plain nicer-looking, at least to me – I realise this is obviously a subjective thing. For reference, I shot Astia film simulation in Auto WB, with no WB adjustment, and with +2 colour, +1 highlights, and shadows at 0, in sRGB.

For some reason I’ve not quite pinned down yet, I can get much better results out of the X-E1’s raw files than I ever could out of the X100’s, especially in Aperture and Capture One, sometimes even better than the camera’s JPEGs. This was entirely unexpected, and it’s not because the X-E1’s JPEGs are worse either; it’s just that the raw files are… better, somehow. It seems to be because they have less baked-in contrast, and so are more pliable, easier to mould into what I want from them. Aperture, in particular, also does a really good job of the demosaicing – better, in fact, than the camera in some instances. Here’s a picture of my back garden:

And here’s a comparison of 100% crops from the X-E1 out-of-camera JPEG on the left, and Aperture on the right:

Slight colour differences, aside, the Aperture version is a little sharper and, at least on the red flower, more detailed. It’s also a little noisier, but I had noise reduction set as low as possible.

I’m still going to keep shooting raw + JPEG, as the camera does do some colours better than Aperture (orange and blue look nicer, I think), but it’s nice to know I have an additional very good option for processing my photos now.

White balance

The X-E1 seems to prefer a cooler white balance than the X100, so I’ve given mine a +1 nudge in the yellow and red directions.

This white balance tweaking is improved over the X100 in that you can set separate adjustments for each white balance setting, so for instance I’ve got Auto WB to be a bit warmer, and the Shade setting to be a little cooler (I actually rarely use the other settings, come to think of it).

This is especially handy as I’ve set up a couple of Custom Settings, with Astia/AutoWB on C1, and Velvia/Shade on C2, for easy switching depending on circumstance – C1 for most everyday shooting, C2 for landscapes. Being able to change the Custom Setting via the Q menu is also really handy.

Speaking of which, it’d be even nicer if the Color Space option was included there – changing it to Adobe RGB results in significantly more saturated images, even though it really shouldn’t make that much difference. I suspect it’s actually just tagging the photos differently, rather than converting the raw data into the specified colour space. Personally I don’t mind this – I see it as another parameter I can use when tailoring the look my photos.

Fujifilm X-E1: Initial thoughts

These are some really early thoughts on the X-E1, gathered during the short time between opening the box and the battery running out of its initial small amount of charge. There’s no real order to this – just things listed as they occurred to me. I’ve had a Fuji X100 for almost exactly a year now (I wrote about my first impressions of it, too), and thoroughly enjoyed shooting with it in that time, despite its idiosyncrasies. These thoughts, then, are frequently written with comparisons to X100 in mind.

First off, the 18–55mm kit lens is a lot smaller than I thought it’d be. The only other similar lens I’ve handled is the Pentax equivalent, and that’s physically a little fatter and quite a bit longer. The Fuji lens feels much denser though, very solid. The zoom ring is stiffer than expected, kind of like it’s attached to a powered-off electric motor (turning it makes a noise like that’s the case, too).

I know several people have made a big deal about how loose the aperture ring feels, but honestly I quite like it. It makes a similar ‘snick’ noise to the X100’s aperture ring, only it moves more easily and of course simulates ⅓-stop detents. I have read a few mentions of how lens rings are all a bit close together; I imagined these complaints were a little overblown, but now that I’ve handled the lens I can see the problem. I don’t think it’s so much that the rings are close together – that’s no problem even for my pretty large hands – but more that the aperture and zoom rings feel fairly similar in texture. Having said that, I’m sure it’s something I’ll get used to pretty quickly.

The rubber grip on the front of the camera is much better than the slippery plastic front of the X100 – on the latter I actually resorted to glueing some grip tape to it to improve the handling:

My X100 with grip tape, a modification that’s thankfully not necessary on the X-E1.

Similarly, the raised ridge that holds the AE-L and Q buttons provides good purchase for my thumb, so all in all I feel quite secure holding the X-E1 with one hand, despite the additional weight with the 18–55mm lens mounted.

The EV compensation dial has had a bit of praise in comparison to the X100’s, because it’s recessed into the body more, so it’s less prone to accidental turning. Personally, though, I never found that to be an issue with my X100, and, at least for now, I find the X-E1’s dial to be a bit less convenient, with a slightly less grippy texture to it.

The four-way buttons on the X-E1 are a big improvement over the X100, almost entirely because they lack the annoying spinning dial around them. Even after a year that dial still annoys me a bit every now and then on the X100, and while it’s sometimes useful for quickly spinning through menus, that’s a small silver lining on a big dark cloud. I know it can be used to nudge manually-set shutter speeds, but I almost always shoot with the shutter dial set to A, so that’s not been relevant to me.

The top rear dial is also a nice improvement over the X100’s, in that it’s an actual dial now, not just a rocker switch. It pushes in with a more satisfying click, too – the X100’s felt a little mushy. In fact all of the buttons on the right hand side of the camera’s rear feel more clicky and less mushy.

The screen is… well, it’s pretty much the same as the X100’s as far as I can tell, except perhaps a bit more neutral in its colour rendering. Since I’ve never experienced the supposed glory that is the X-Pro 1’s screen I can’t really comment on how they compare. The EVF is quite obviously better than the X100’s, though – much better detail, and a generally more ‘solid’ look with no faint visible gaps between pixels. It’s also a bit bluer than the rear LCD. The refresh rate doesn’t bother me in the slightest – I use the X100 almost exclusively in EVF mode, and it never bothers me on that camera, either. The X-E1’s EVF is marginally smaller than the X100’s, but not enough that it really matters. I’ll see if I can get a comparison picture once the battery’s charged.

The EV +/− display is a little less obvious than the X100’s, due to the lack of a blue bar extending from 0 to the current setting. It’s already tripped me up once so far, but hopefully I’ll get used to it.

The menus look nicer than the X100, and they’re organised a bit better, too, with tabs down the left side so you can quickly jump to the required section rather than having to scroll through each page.

The Q menus is, as others have said, very handy. It remembers the last setting you were on, so you can spin through adjustments very quickly, and of course since the camera uses an EVF you can do this with it up to your eye.

One thing I like about the X100 is its in-camera raw conversion feature. It’s not particularly good in terms of user interface, but since the camera can very often produce better JPEGs than I can get out of Aperture or Lightroom*, I’ve found I use it quite a bit. The X-E1 has the same feature, although it’s slightly less convenient to use since there’s no handy ‘RAW’ button to bring up the converter. Not sure why the Q button couldn’t be used for that purpose, since it doesn’t otherwise seem to do anything in playback mode.

Finally, the battery/card door is not as good as the X100’s, because the way it hinges up makes getting the SD card out much more difficult, especially if you have fat fingers like me:

On the left, the X100’s battery/card compartment, and on the right the X-E1’s. Being so close to the compartment door, it’s difficult to get a good grip on the card.

So that’s it for now – just my initial impressions on how the X-E1 compares to the X100.

* I recently got Capture One Express when it was on sale for €35, and initial impressions with X100 raw files are very good – sometimes I even like the C1 conversions more than the camera’s!

Lion's Arch Asura Gate Guide

Because I got tired of waiting for the gate racial guards load to every time I went near the Asura gates in Lion's Arch, so I could tell which gate went where, I made a simple visual reference:

Learning to use keybinds

How do you control your character in World of Warcraft (or any other similar MMO for that matter)? There are two main ways: with keybinds and mouse turning, and with clicking and keyboard turning.

Bait

The latter is not efficient. It’s easier to start playing with, and people can become quite proficient with it, but it has two major drawbacks:

• Attention – every time you need to click an ability, you’re diverting attention away from what’s going on around you and focusing on your UI.

• Speed – it takes time to move your mouse and aim it correctly at a button, and turning with the keyboard also takes a lot longer than with the mouse.

Many ‘clickers’ know this, but after up to eight years doing things the same way, it can of course be very hard and uncomfortable to change.

By using keybinds and mouse turning, you can avoid both of these major issues. With the right UI setup, you can even hide your main actionbars completely and track cooldowns via other means. You can also react to things much more quickly and calmly, and you can cast your spells in the correct with barely any thought; it becomes an automatic response, something you can do with your eyes closed.

Switch

It’ll be hard at first, and your performace will be terrible while you get used to it, but the benefits are worth it.

The first suggestion I have regarding specific bindings is to try to limit the keys to those which are easily reachable, i.e. `, 1, 2, 3, 4, Q, E, F and Tab. Those, combined with Shift, Ctrl and/or Alt, should give you more than enough to control all important abilities.

Ideally, to practice you’d start a new character and start from the beginning with keybinds, but obviously that’s not always practical. Instead, I’d suggest clearing your bars of all your main abilities, and building things up gradually. Start with your main ‘filler’ ability, and bind it to something like 1. Practice pressing it and moving around, switching targets, and most importantly, not looking at your keyboard or actionbars. This is important. The whole point of using keybinds is so you can keep your attention on important things like where mobs are, whether you’re standing in fire, etc.

Finally, since you’ll be using the mouse to turn, re-bind A and D to strafe left and right. It’s a quicker way to move out of bad stuff, and you can also cast spells at mobs whilst strafing away from them, if you turn in a very slight circle.

Dummy

Training dummies are invaluable when learning keybinds. I used them all the time, even though I only play with keybindings, because the practice is so valuable. It’s useful to use Recount to measure your performance on them, although obviously the numbers you generate are only meaningful to you personally, as a way of measuring your progress.

See

I mentioned ‘the right UI setup’ earlier – this is another factor that’ll help you stay on top of what’s happening. Addons like Fortexorcist, PowerAuras, NeedToKnow and TellMeWhen are really good for letting you keep track of important things like cooldowns, DoTs and so forth in an easily monitored way.

The general idea is to put the most important things near the middle, then less important things further out. As an example, if you’re a shadow priest you’ll want to keep track of Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain, and the cooldown on Mind Blast, so you’d put those near the middle. Something like Shadow Fiend, on the other hand, has quite a long cooldown so you could relegate it to a lower level of attention.

Go

As I said, I know it’ll feel horrible and slow and uncomfortable, especially at first, if you’ve never played this way before. I truly do believe, though, that it’s a better way to play, and the only way to reach optimal performance.

Guild Wars 2, from a WoW player

I bought Mists of Pandaria. Pre-ordered, in fact, and yet since it was released, I’ve played WoW exactly no times. Moreover, I stopped playing WoW a couple of weeks before MoP came out, and it’s all because of Guild Wars 2.

It seems I’m missing out on quite a fun time in Pandaria, too, since by all accounts this expansion is so far really good; Zoe is certainly enjoying it. Thing is, I’d been looking forward to GW2 for a long time, and conversely, getting less and less enjoyment out of the tail end of Cataclysm, to the extent that I only really logged in to level my mage a bit, and occasionally and begrudgingly help guildenfolk get their Iron-Bound/Rusted Proto-Drake from Ulduar.

Guild Wars, though. I like it a lot. It’s very pretty, but in a more realistic way than WoW, although this does mean places that look somewhat less diverse than Azeroth – one grassy hill looks much like any other. Still, natural-looking pretty is still pretty, and there’s enough variation in both scenery and architecture to keep it interesting.

Fight!

I find combat much more interesting and exciting in GW2, with lots more movement and reactive use of abilities. You really have to pay attention to the mobs you’re fighting, and what they’re doing; there are no enemy castbars or DBM-style timers or anything like that, so you need to respond appropriately based on their actions. One particularly memorable example is a boss in Ascalon Catacombs explorer mode (which is a bit like WoW’s heroic mode). He has an ability where he raises his sword to charge up a spell that pulls everyone in line of sight to his feet, then he does a lethal whirling attack that will almost certainly kill you. Generally you have two ways of avoiding this: use your dodge skill right at the critical moment before he pulls you in, or get out of LoS. As a mesmer I had a third option: my Feedback ability, which reflects ranged attacks back on the caster. Turns out the boss’s AoE pull counted, so I pop that on him just before he does it, and he knocks himself over instead :D

Combat in dungeons also differs from WoW in that there’s no specific ‘tank’ or ‘healer’ role – mobs will attack whoever they feel like, and everyone has a decent self-heal and other survival-oriented abilities they need to make use of. Certainly you can orient your traits (sort of like WoW’s talent points) and skill points (also sort of like WoW’s talent points) towards survival or crowd-control, or towards group-focused abilities like buffing and healing, but everyone is expected to do damage. If someone gets downed*, anyone can revive them; if a mob’s attacking you, don’t expect a tank to taunt it off you.

These differences mean fights feel a lot more frantic and desperate, and playing well is much more about utility and awareness compared to playing WoW’s more narrowly-focused specialisations. It means that even on my level 52 mesmer, I could still be useful when grouping with three level 80 characters, although clearly GW2’s level scaling† meant they were much less overpowered than otherwise.

* ‘downed’ means you’ve lost all your normal health and are sitting on the floor with a ‘reserve’ health bar that slowly drains. You have a few basic abilities, including a weak channelled self-heal, and if you’re lucky you can fill your reserve health bar and rally, i.e. get back up and join the fight again. Other players can help to revive you, too.

† your level is scaled to be appropriate for the zone you’re in, so in the starting areas you’ll be down to level 3 or so, and in dungeons you’ll be at the minimum level required for them, e.g. 40 in Ascalon Catacombs. However, you still keep all your weapons, armour and abilities, albeit also scaled down, so you will likely still be more powerful than someone at-level.

Mine!

Another significant difference in GW2, that I noticed most when watching Zoe quest in Pandaria, is that there is no mob tagging. Instead, if you make a significant contribution to the damage on a mob (the wiki says between 5 and 10 percent), you get loot from it, and credit for killing it if an event or quest asks for that. Likewise, there is no competition among players for gatherables (ore, herbs and trees), since collecting from one does not deprive others from it. All of this, plus the way you can partake in quests just by being in the right area, mean there is a very strong feeling of cooperation, with everything designed to encourage it naturally.

Of course, since everyone is on the same side, there’s no Horde-vs-Alliance–style world PvP – you’re never in danger of accidentally attacking someone who’s flagged, and getting trounced by them as a result. Player vs player in GW2 is an entirely separate thing, so it can’t interfere with the cooperation aspect.

Wrap!

So, those are my impressions after playing Guild Wars 2 for a couple of weeks, from the perspective of someone who has played World of Warcraft since just before Wrath of the Lich King was released. I still haven’t hit 80 on my highest character, and even when I do, I want to level a few others just to see how they play. Maybe by the time I’ve done that, an expansion will be nearing. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you want to drop by I'm on Blacktide (EU) server and my display name is Caer.1605, and I’ll probably be on either my mesmer, Yalaera, or my guardian, Aerlocke.

K10 again

I’ve not used my K10D in quite a long time, as I couldn’t trust it to focus accurately. I’d tried adjusting it using the debug menu tricks, but couldn’t ever get it to work satisfactorily, and to even adjust it meant faffing around with downgrading firmware temporarily.

Recently though, for reasons I can’t recall, I decided to see if I could improve it, and found some useful information about how to enable the debug menu (to adjust AF) even with firmware 1.3 on the camera. After much faffing, and the eventual discovery that the magic text file you put on the memory card needs to have CR + LF line endings (i.e. need to be in Windows format, not Unix or Mac), I got it working, and now my camera focuses properly most of the time with the F 50mm f/1.4 lens shown in the picture. It still struggles with backlit things, but I think that’s more an issue with the lens – it flares pretty badly when there’s light shining into it, so the AF sensors probably have a hard time seeing what to focus on.

So anyway, turns out, the K10D can still produce some nice images! In good light it’s quick to focus and with the 50 the pictures are plenty sharp (I’ve yet to try it again with my 35 and 50–135). In low light it’s not so good – noise at ISO 1000 is about the level of my X100 at 3200, and there’s a noticeably weaker response in the blue channel compared to the X100. Still, if I stick with good light, the camera can produce some very nice images, especially with the 50–135 lens.

All of this means I now feel like I have more options, photographically: although the X100 will remain my primary camera, I can now also trust the K10D when I want to use a longer lens. I don’t anticipate needing to do this a lot, at least not in the near future, but perhaps something will come up. Either way, it feels good to shoot again with a camera I’ve grown so familiar with over the years.