Neverwinter - Ebon Darkness Dye Pack

I've been spending a lot of time playing Neverwinter lately. I planned on creating a beginners guide, if nothing else to cover the currency which can be one of the most confusing aspects of the game as a newcomer. But, I digress....

In the meantime, I'm offering up a few screenshots of the Ebon Darkness Dye Pack. At this point there is no preview system in the game to see what something looks like on your character before purchasing it, so you're taking a really big gamble on dye packs.

I searched for a few screenshots before making my purchase, and surprisingly there are very few available.

Ebon Darkness is a tier 1 dye pack and can be purchased for 175 Zen. The dye pack is a combination of Black, Silver, and Gold.

Below is my Guardian Fighter in T1 gear with the Ebon Darkness Dye pack.

Stalwart Bulwark in Ebon Darkness Dye Pack

Stalwart Bulwark in Ebon Darkness Dye Pack

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Firefall Beta Invites

I have access to Firefall Beta keys for anyone who is interested. First come, first served. All I need is your email address to send the beta invite. You can either post it below (not recommended) or use the "contact me" link. (recommended)

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Supcom 2 - Patch Notes

Hell hath indeed frozen over! GasPowered Games has released a patch for Supreme Commander 2. GPG was recently acquired by Wargaming.net after a failed Kickstarter attempt for Wildman. This begs the question, why now? Why release a patch after nearly two years and four months of abandonment? Steve Bauman of GPG claims no significance to the timing of the patch release. No matter the reason, Supcom 2 players every where can rejoice. Feast your eyes on the changes below:

Supcom 2 Patch Notes

Fixes and Improvements:
- Mass Extractor Veterancy – Securing and protecting mass deposits is now vital to mid-term and long-term gameplay. Base unit cost and base Mass output has been reduced to half of the previous values. Mass Extractors will slowly increase in effectiveness as they accumulate veterancy until at 18 minutes they double their effectiveness.
- All units built at Land Factories have had their visual scale reduced by 25%.
- Players are now able to see the health value of enemy units.
- Fix for veterancy bar not displaying properly.
- Fix for Illuminate teleport ability overwriting the transport ability.
- Fix for Air units not receiving their LOS buff after being built.
- Fix for Pullinsmash ability remaining active when placed in a transport.
- Fix for some abilities to be activated more than once if activated very quickly.
- Fix for redirector not redirecting nukes if the launcher was previously destroyed.

AI:
- Updated the way the neural networks train. Integrated new neural network dataset.
- Improved AI’s use of transports 
- Fix for AI bases not realizing their extractor spots were full.
- AI is now able to build on floating islands and mesas again.
- Fix for AI trying to expand to areas it cannot reach.
- Fix for scouting positions that were under water.
- Scouts will try to avoid defenses more.
- Fix for AI engineers trying to reclaim something it cannot path to.
- Fixes for AI microing.
- Fix for AI determining a platoon's min firing range.
- Neural platoon code cleanup.
- Fix for AI not building Aegis.
- Fix for AI not scouting with land when it has an air factory, but no air units.
- Changed the way the AI counts the number of air attack units it has.
- Adjusted when the AI will build a radar in an expansion.
- Changed the rate at which threat from mobile enemies decays.
- AI platoons will now take threat into account again.
- Added ability to adjust AI aggressiveness.

Networking Improvements:
- If a player in the lobby does not have a connection to you a red ! will appear as their ping.
- Adjusted max packet size to use Steam's max packet size.
- Removed redundant pending connection cleanup.
- If Steam reports any connection error, other than timeout, we will close the connection and log it. If the reported error is a timeout we log it and ignore it. Networking will handle the timeout at this point.
- Fix to the connection adaptor when it transitions to a resting state.
- Ranked matches that desync will now immediately end and be counted as a disconnect.
- It will now cause the game to desync if a player modifies memory to give them free research items.
- Army research data is now part of the sim checksum.

Balance Improvements:
- Factory experience value increased from 1000 to 1250.
- Gantry experience value increased from 1250 to 1750.
- Factory TML upgrade now prioritizes structures over mobile units.

Cybran
- Executioner Class movement speed reduced from 5 to 4. Minimum range of 20 added.
- Magnetron cooldowns increased from 30 to 45 seconds.
- C-Rex health increased from 51300 to 60000.
- Intellitron health increased from 1500 to 2000. Cost decreased from 90m/300e to 80m/275e.
- Loyalist speed increased from 4 to 4.2. Weapon range increased from 17 to 18.
- Executioner Class RP cost increased from 6 to 7.
- Kraken RP cost decreased from 12 to 10.
- Sea Operations cost decreased from 8 to 7.
- Naval Vision boost increased from 75% to 100%.
- Structure Sonar RP cost increased from 1 to 2.
- Intellitron RP cost reduced from 5 to 4.
- Cobra RP cost reduced from 2 to 1.
- Power Detonate RP cost increased from 4 to 5.
- Land Regeneration effectiveness increased from 100% to 125%.
- Land Health effectiveness increased from 20% to 25%.
- Overcharge RP cost increased from 9 to 10.
- Core Dump RP cost decreased from 4 to 2.

Illuminate
- Buhbledow build time decreased from 145 to 130. Cost reduced from 800m/2800e to 600m/2100e.
- Harvog speed increased from 4 to 4.4. Weapon range decreased from 17 to 16. Cost reduced from 44m to 40m.
- Wilfindja sonar increased from 60 to 150. Vision increased from 28 to 75. Health increased from 8000 to 10000.
- Sooprizer now has radar stealth.
- Quantum Floating RP cost reduced from 9 to 8.
- Electroshock RP cost increased from 6 to 7.
- Land Damage II RP cost decreased from 7 to 6.
- Harvog cost decreased from 3 to 2.
- Wilfindja RP cost decreased from 7 to 6.
- ACU Range RP cost increased from 3 to 4.
- Angler Torpedo RP cost increased from 3 to 5.
- Core Dump RP cost decreased from 5 to 2.
- Harvog AA upgrade damage increased from 8 to 10.
- Weedoboth Scorch Bomb damage decreased from 25 to 20. Damage radius decreased from 3.5 to 3.0.

UEF
- Jackhammer health reduced from 40000 to 30000.
- Poseidon movement speed reduced from 5 to 4. Minimum range of 20 added.
- Mega Fortress cost increased from 1000m/3700e to 1100m/4000e.
- C-230 Star King Extreme health increased from 10000 to 12500.
- AC-1000 build time increased from 110 to 130.
- UEF Land Factory Shield health increased from 6000 to 10000.
- UEF and Illuminate Mobile AA health increased from 750 to 875.
- Titan speed increased from 4 to 4.4. Weapon range decreased from 17 to 16. Cost reduced from 42m to 38m.
- Transport Capacity increased from 10 to 15.
- Land Build Time reduction increased from -10% to -15%.
- Bomb Camera Duration RP cost reduced from 2 to 1.
- Air Heavy Shield RP cost increased from 6 to 7.
- Land Damage RP cost decreased from 5 to 4.
- Sharp Shooter RP cost reduction from 3 to 2.
- Jackhammer RP cost increased from 8 to 10.
- Combat Engineer RP cost reduced from 3 to 2.
- King Kriptor RP cost reduced from 11 to 10.
- Poseidon RP cost increased from 5 to 7.
- ACU Health RP cost decreased from 3 to 2.
- ACU Damage RP cost decreased from 4 to 3.

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• Wargaming.net acquire Gas Powered Games

Dish - Coupon Code

I recently switched from Cox Cable to Dish Network for TV services and find myself wondering why I waited so long to take the plunge.

The compressed Cox Cable signal doesn't hold a candle to the clarity I now enjoy from a direct satellite feed. My monthly bill has been reduced by 1/3 for the first year, and should still be 1/2 the cost of cable once the promotions and bonuses expire.

Which brings me to the point: Coupon Codes. A friend was nice enough to offer a coupon code which saved me $50 for the first month and will also knock $5 off his bill for 10 months for referring me.

Now that I am a Dish subscriber I have access to the same referral program.

If you're interested, send me a message and I'll email a $50 Coupon Code your way.

OK, I can see several people are visiting the page but no one is taking the time to submit a request, so I took the liberty of generating some coupon codes.

All I ask is that you provide a comment and with which number you grabbed as a common courtesy for others.

1.) Referral Gift Certificate Number: VCD0008866035
     Referral Offer Code: 01DIRWEBCD

2.) Referral Gift Certificate Number: VCD0008866010
     Referral Offer Code: 01DIRWEBCD

3.) Referral Gift Certificate Number: VCD0008866002
     Referral Offer Code: 01DIRWEBCD

4.) Referral Gift Certificate Number: VCD0008866028
     Referral Offer Code: 01DIRWEBCD

5.) Referral Gift Certificate Number: VCD0008866043
     Referral Offer Code: 01DIRWEBCD

BF3 - Buttons Unclickable

I ran into a peculiar problem this week with Battlefield 3 while attempting to join multiplayer games in Battlelog; none of the buttons were "clickable".

Oh sure, I could click them...but nothing would happen. Below are things I verified/attempted to no avail:

• Reinstall/validate extension
• Tried multiple browsers - Firefox, Chrome, IE...all kaput.
• Rebooted
• Disabled pop up blocker

I chalked it up to a java problem due to all the patches recently and went on my merry way playing SMITE.

A day or two later was our weekly game night and guess what everyone wanted to play? You guessed it Battlefield 3 - so I took another stab at troubleshooting. Clearly the problem was not browser specific as all 3 browsers no longer worked. I then recalled that the only recent change I made to my system was updating my hosts file with the latest version from MVPS. I renamed my hosts file to hosts.tmp to rule it out and sure enough that was the problem. There must have been an entry in the hosts file that was conflicting with a connection required by BF3.

I plan on investigating with Fiddler to determine which entry in particular is causing the problem.

UPDATE: I've tracked the offending entry to "s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com". Comment out this section from the MVPS hosts file and you'll be good to go!

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Support Wildman - Save GPG

GasPowered Games needs our help. Without support from us, the loyal fans, GPG will most likely cease to exist; and in that scenario no one wins.

GasPowered Games is the development studio that has brought us games like:

• Dungeon Siege
• Dungeon Siege II
• Supreme Commander
• Supreme Commander II
• Space Siege
• Demigod

And now they want to bring us Wildman, but they can't without your generous help. You can contribute as little as $5 or as much as $10,000 or more. Pledging at least $20 will secure your copy of the game upon release. Every pledge brings us that much closer to experiencing a ground breaking combination of action RPG and RTS gameplay. 

How can you help Wildman be successful?

Transformers - Fall of Cybertron Tweaks

If you're a lefty, or even a righty who doesn't use the default keyboard mappings then keep reading.

Unfortunately you cannot remap your controls in Transformers: FoC. My guess is because the devs chose to encrypt the ini files, so instead we can only choose from a hand full of preconfigured key mappings.

This is where Razer Configurator comes in to play. If you're using a Razer keyboard you can literally remap any keys you choose at the driver level.

This is the default key mapping for Fall of Cybertron. Refer to it when remapping your keys.

Lastly, you will want to download Flawless Widescreen to fix the FOV.

And if you're curious, Fall of Cybertron is NOT locked at 30fps.

Now get back in game and make scrap metal of those Decepticons!

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Rumor: Valve to unveil Steam Box this year, will use Linux

Valve's rumored "Steam Box," a compact PC designed to easily connect to televisions and leverage Steam's Big Picture Mode, will debut this year according to a report from German site Golem.de. Furthermore, the Steam Box will supposedly run on Linux. That wouldn't be too surprising given Valve head Gabe Newell's distaste for Windows 8 and the company's recent Linux push. The 2013 release also gels with Newell's recent comments predicting a spate of TV- and Steam-friendly hardware launching in 2013 from various companies, including Valve.

The news was supposedly confirmed by Valve electrical engineer Ben Krasnow during the EHSM conference in Berlin last month. Krasnow, incidentally, was there to show off his homemade X-ray scanner. Given that his personal projects also include, among other things, a DIY rocket engine, we'd say he's probably qualified to help build a little computer.

Valve has plenty of opportunities to announce the hardware this year, including GDC in March, E3 in June, Gamescom in August, or even CES, which takes place this week. For what it's worth, Valve chose to announce Big Picture Mode at GDC 2011. Of course, given this is Valve we're talking about, the company could just hold an event of its own.

Rumor: Valve to unveil Steam Box this year, will use Linux originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 07 Jan 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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