I play a lot of Day of Defeat. Sunday night is my clan's practice night. We only just started putting a competitive team together so our practices were still a little raw. After going through one of the popular maps tonight and trying out all kinds of new tactics, we decided to help drum up some interest in our clan, but for members and to find other clans to play against, but going into another clan's public server.
Nice idea in theory, but it made me want to stick a fork in my ear. Bad enough when a PLAYER is spamming with with audio (hitting the character voice actions, or just using their mic too much), but when the SERVER is doing it? If I wanted to hear all ubber-base "Double kill!" and "ultra kill!", I'd play Quake. One of the things I like about Day of Defeat is that it has a certain degree of realism.
I will kill our team leader if he suggests that again.

Current Mood: cranky

Last night I’m on my DoD clan’s Ventrillo server just before a scrimmage and yakking with teammates waiting for the game to begin.
I apologized for getting home and logging on only minutes before the game is due to start as I had to work late and only just got home.
One of them asks what I do for a living, I explain that I work for CI Host, one of the larger Internet server hosting companies and he asks if that means I know about networking. I explain that I’m more of a Unix guy than a Network guy, but that does come with having to know a little about networking. He mentions that since the clan switched servers, he and his wife (who also plays) have noticed quite an increase in his ping time. He did a trace to the server and saw the route go from Houston (where they live) out to California, bounce around a while, then back to Dallas (where the server is located).
I tell him to send me a copy of his traceroute and I’ll take a look.
I logged onto the clam forum site and see he sent me a private message.
Did he cut and paste the traceroute into the message?
Nope. He made a screenshot of the DOS window and attached the .bmp file.

Dunno what to say about a guy who knows how to do a traceroute, but not a cut’n'paste.

Not making the assumption that my gentle readers know what the hell I’m talking about…
Day of Defeat, a WWII simulation in the First Person Shooter genre.
A VoIP application popular amongst gamers, that creates something akin to a conference call.
A game that is more than a standard public “for fun” free for all but not as formal a league “match” that counts towards a team/clan’s standing in a game season.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

Late night downloads of the 400Mb+ patch to WoW, going at a snails pace, because you don’t have access to open the ports the downloader uses for it’s bittorrent client.

Quick swap of the Linksys router with the crappy AirLink+ router I have sitting around, adjust the firewall properties and I’ve gone from “you appear to be behind a firewall” to “Estimated time left: about 10 minutes”

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.