T w e n t y S i d e d

Over the past week, I uninstalled World of Warcraft from my laptop, as I had proven everything I needed to regarding running WoW on Linux. I then spent the entire rest of the week trying to get Star Wars: The Old Republic running without ever achieving final success. SWTOR seems to be one of those things that either works immediately without problems or with very minor launch instruction additions…or it doesn’t work at all. I have increasingly run into things that “just work fine” on Linux until I try them, when I discover that the truth is “just works fine” comes with a ****load of caveats and assumptions. And Linux community-sourced support can literally tell you ANYTHING you would ever want to know about every possible problem you might ever have; at the expense of not ever being able to address the literal question you asked in a way that frames a useful experience going forward. I liken it to asking “how do I make a souffle?” and everyone answering “well, first I need you to go learn French or you won’t actually understand what’s going on or the instructions I would give you” or, unfortunately, the standard “why would you want to do THAT?”. Also, every discussion of a support issue WILL DEVOLVE into two separate arguments between two people trying to “help” about whether either is making the correct assumptions before attempting to provide and answer. Regardless, I erased my Windows installation and installed Linux on my main computer, this computer, last night.

Oh, and World of Warcraft released the newest expansion and broke some major game mechanics for two days.

I won’t be posting any *current* images from any games; I’m still working through managing my external hard drives, as you can see here:

That’s actually from a couple of hours ago. It *may* finish copying my downloads folder to a different drive by the time I finish writing this. At that point, all files from that particular drive will be backed up and I will erase it then format it in ext4. I believe I have an understanding of how to mount my external drives. I did remember from the last time I tried Linux that mounting partitions effectively makes them part of a single unified file system, from the user’s point of view. And honestly, I’m not sure I really need to install anything on an external drive…my 500GB system SSD still has over 400GB free after installing Linux and every necessary app I’ve thought of so far.

Hardware has remained the most questionable factor. Upon installation, I noticed the number-pad on my keyboard, a Razer Blackwidow Ultimate 2012, wasn’t working. Hitting the Numlock key didn’t seem to do anything, although this was later called into question. This keyboard is explicitly listed as supported by Openrazer, so that was one of the first things I did. I subsequently ran into all sorts of problems getting Openrazer running along with a managing GUI, Razergenie. This was mostly because I remembered the major steps but forgot some of the little things that the installation doesn’t do, that I had run across organically on my laptop. That took a few hours to sort out. Once I was able to successfully launch Razergenie, I was disappointed. Sure, the Blackwidow Ultimate 2012 was *supported*. But only the ability to change the intensity of the illumination, and put the illumination in “pulse” mode.

This seems to be pretty common, I am finding. While I was initially quite pleased that Openrazer meant I could use Razer products, it seems like most of them can’t actually be programmed or adjusted using features included in the hardware, but you can always find a way to adjust the RGB LEDs. Still, the process of getting Openrazer and Razergenie installed and running makes sure the Razer hardware is recognizable by programs such as Inputremapper, which is what I used to test the Razer Nostromo on my laptop. And while I’m on the subject, I did try to get the Logitech G13 driver working again on the new installation and ran into the same errors.

The second bit of hardware that surprisingly didn’t work, at least not consistently, is my 15-port USB 3.0 powered hub. I honestly can’t remember the brand; the case is unmarked. It’s an odd one, with a metal case, a 25 watt power supply (IIRC) and a THICC cable. I have always suspected it’s not 100% in compliance, as I have had the occasional problem with it just shutting down and not functioning for a day or two. It also worked when I tested all the external hard drive with my laptop. It did show up on my main computer in lsusb the first time I plugged it in, but after trying and failing to connect the second hard drive, it never would show up again when I plugged it in. The hard drives all worked plugged directly into the computer.

As for the keyboard, all the “check this, that, and the other” I did kept indicating there was nothing wrong. I did just today notice that the Numlock indicator is both *not* where I thought it was, and is also fairly dim. But it was working, and experiments since then have proven everything that you would normally expect on a keyboard works fine. The mistakes were likely all on my part. There are 5 macro keys available that I haven’t tried programming through Inputremapper, but honestly I never used them anyway. I have, for years now, relegated “gaming functions” to my mouse with  12-key keypad (works fine, the number keys just replicate the keyboard’s 10 number keys plus the “-” and “=” keys) and a game-board like the Logitech G13.

The new World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within, has been getting a lot of attention for three main things. First, they changed the character select screen from the design used since the retail launch. Here’s the old screen:

That’s a pretty-low res and old-technology image, but it present the essentials. Each character will have a different background that is connected to their race, so each character will technically have a different background. The changes over the years have to do with button look and location, and the addition of buttons for new features. Now, here’s the new screen:

It is certainly more visually interesting, but I prefer the old screen. Each of my characters have their own story (even if they are connected in my head), so I don’t really like the shared screen. They did this because of the second new feature that is getting a lot of attention: Warbands.

Warbands is a “concept” that actually just describes a sweeping change in several mechanics to make them more suitable and useful for “alt-play.”  Unlock a flight path (you have to physically visit most anchor points of the fast-transit taxi system to make it available to use; i.e you have to *run* to point A from point B in order to unlock the taxi route between point A and point B)? It automatically gets unlocked for *all* active characters on your account (and in your geographic region, such as “America” or “Europe”.) If you collect some armor that can be used in the transmog (visual appearance of your armor) system for a different armor class than what your character wears, but you have a character that *can* wear that armor, the appearance will now unlock for you anyway. This drove me crazy until I looked it up today; I hadn’t actually researched Warbands before now. I use an Addon called “AllTheThings” to keep track of rare drops and easy-to-forget-about optional quests and achievements necessary for completion status. AllTheThings plays little tunes whenever you obtain something on their massive list…IF it’s something you can use. Well, *now*, technically I can use almost everything. So I started getting unlock songs played *a lot* more than I had been.

The third feature that has caused a ruckus is how Blizzard broke flying mounts in the new expansion. It’s been fixed, but there is a certain amount of doubt and consternation over what caused the problem in the first place.

The ability to use a mount to fly, instead of just riding along the surface of Azeroth (or wherever) was introduced in the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. *However*, flying was only available in the new “world” added to the game, Outland. Despite the two new races also added, Draenei and Blood Elves, starting in the normal world of Azeroth, their home areas didn’t have flying enabled. Additionally, flying wasn’t obtainable until you were at or very near the end of the expansion; you didn’t gain the ability from the start. In the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, flying was again restricted until the end of the expansion when you could earn a *new* flying skill for the new “world” of Northrend: Cold Weather Flying. All flying was still restricted to the expansion worlds. If I remember correctly, the new Death Knight starting area, which is technically located in an “old” area (but only in an instance not available to anyone else) had flying enabled. Death Knights can actually visit this area later in the game after earning flying. I could be wrong though…I just remember that being able to fly in this instance actually causes some problems, at least during the starting story. Of course, the reason you couldn’t fly anywhere but the new areas is that Azeroth had been built without flying under real consideration. If you were able to fly in these old areas, you would see, well, what you normally see if you ever glitch outside of a 3D environment.

So, when the third expansion, Cataclysm, was released, a major component of “redesigning Azeroth” was actually rebuilding the ENTIRE world to allow flying all over Azeroth. In subsequent expansions, however, Blizzard went back to requiring the completion of quest lines or accomplishing an achievement to earn the flying ability for that expansion. It should be noted, however, that these requirements were typically abandoned as soon as a new expansion was released. This model stayed in place for the next several expansions, until Dragonflight, the expansion before the newest. Blizzard added a new type of flying in Dragonflight that turned flying into something of a mini-game. Or a challenge, if you want to look at it that way. Also, a needless waste of time, as most of us use flying as the fastest and easiest way to get from point A to point B. There are indeed some people who *liked* Dragonriding, as it was called. The majority either didn’t care as long as it could be turned off, didn’t like it much, or absolutely HATED it. There are a minority of players who actually experience motion sickness while using Dragonriding, and Blizzard has been trying to introduce “motion sickness” options to stop this from happening with, as far as I can gather, very little success.

Blizzard is so proud of Dragonriding, however; that in The War Within, they have expanded it to be usable with almost all flying mounts. In fact, it is set as the default flying method, although you can return to “normal” flight through a button in the Mount Collections interface. There *is* a problem with that on the face of it: while the previous expansion, Dragonflight, is now available with the basic game (if I understand correctly), Dragonriding, now called “Skyriding” must still be earned through a quest chain in that expansion. That is, if you have not previously earned Dragonriding, you can no longer fly. Because it’s the default method, yet you don’t have the skill for it. And you can’t switch back to normal flight, because you have to earn the Dragonriding skill in order to *later* learn the skill that allows you to switch back. While Blizzard would subsequently claim this was inadvertent, I strongly suspect it was intentional. Because the ability to revert the new version of Dragonriding, Skyriding, to normal flying was to be earned *at the end of the new expansion*. That, to me, sounds an awful lot like a plan to make people buy the new expansion in order to turn *off* a feature a lot of people may not want to deal with.

As I said, once the complaints started mounting Blizzard said this was all an accident, they don’t know how this happened, people weren’t *ever* supposed to lose the ability to fly normally anywhere but the new expansion, and they were working on a fix. And within two days flying was restored. Quietly, with no announcement. I don’t even think there was an actual client update. There was an update the previous morning that didn’t fix it.

Well. So as a coincidence, the file copy I’ve been waiting on just now finished and looks good. But first I’ll probably work on getting some games installed, even if I don’t have an optimal gameboard. Hopefully by next week, I’ll be able to post screenshots from games instead of just system software. And hopefully I won’t break my external hard drive. I started saving a link to every solution I found, because as I’ve learned you never use it just once.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Paige Francis He/him