So it looks like Sony has had to pull certain AC Adapters which shipped with their slimline PS2 units. Seems some of them had become hot, a couple people reported minor burns and property damage. If you own a PS2 slimline you really need to check out the forums for more information on what to do about it, and if yours is actually affected.
Today they released a giant update for FFXI. For those interested, the details of this update are posted after the 'read more' link. Alternatively, you can click here to read the news directly from Playonline.com.
Black Avatar has been a long standing supporter of the gamers against terrorism movement that started shortly following the brutal attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Today's act of violence in London is yet another example of the cowardice of terrorist attacks. This is a little late in terms of posting however we have been taking the time insure that all members of Black Avatar and our affiliates were ok before we started to post any sort of comment. Our thoughts are with the victims and the families of victims during this trying time.
Blizzard made some promises at E3 2002 in regards to the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft, one of which was a rich player versus player combat system that allowed players to compete and gain ground in the real world. This concept has since been rethought as world of warcraft was never intended to be a "winnable" game and having to reset the pvp every week/month would lose it's incentive quickly. So back to the drawing board they went and early on in closed beta they announced the solution, player vs. player battlegrounds combined with an honor point system to flesh out the PvP aspets of the game. While the system was well thought out the execution was lacking. Blizzard, likely pushed by their publishing company Vivendi Universal as well as their investors, was forced to release the game in an unfinished state. While the game was playable and immersive they were still plagued with server problems, errors in queuing, and most importantly a lack of a real PvP system that was to set the game far apart from the others out there already. Other games have made similarly critical errors, namely Star Wars Galaxies who released the game before character driven flight was possible even though it was the biggest feature of the game.
That bit of history brings us to now. One week after the patch was released that introduced player vs. player battlegrounds; one of the key distinguishing points of the game. In terms of battlegrounds overall I think that blizzard has done an excellent job create the foundation for them but there is still a great deal of work left to do. The system has a number of high and low points and I will address them individually as I take a look at the major battleground of Alterac Valley.
Black Avatar is leading an alliance of guilds in a series of runs to Upper Blackrock Spire in an effort to solidify our alliance ties and get us used to running instances together.
The runs will start at approximately 13:00h EST (1pm) on Sunday May 8th, and we will be running UBRS 3-4 times. Primarily this is for members of the guild alliance however any are welcome. Please see the sign up below.
Well it's taken far too much time but everything appears to be displaying properly in Mozilla based browsers. Please post comments to let me know if there are any problems with specific browsers. All of our testing was done in the latest version of FireFox and the latest version of Internet Explorer.
This is a work in progress and I will try to refine the overall look and feel of the site over the coming days in order provide a polished look to the site. Around noon tomorrow we will be adding a suggestions forum in order to take your feedback. Specifically in regards to feedback we have received several requests to re-enable the rotating image pattern in the top right corner of the site. Rest assured that will return along with some new features available through the new version of gallery which will hopefully be installed tomorrow.
We are aware that the new theme is not displaying correctly in Netscape based browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc.). We are currently working to correct the issues and hopefully will have a fix by some time tomorrow. Until then please continue to bear with us as we resolve these issues.
The new theme is in place now. There is still some work to be done in order to refine it a little further however it is 100% functional. Some parts of the site may not be as refined as they were but it should improve load times.
Once again, thank you for you patience during this transition.
