A brief side note about World of Tanks.

I broke down the other day and bought "Gold," the in-game currency of World of Tanks- exactly $6.95 worth. They recently went through a number of updates, and I'm actually finding that they fixed some of the gripes I had with the original, fresh out of Beta release. Yes, mid-tier tanks are still largely useless in a number of situations, but I get the feeling that things are at least moving in the right direction. American Tank Destroyers have been added, and while I can't comment as to how useful they are just yet, they've certainly managed to shake things up enough to make the game feel fresh again, enough for me to spend a pittance to transfer some EXP and whatnot to get myself into a T-34, up from the doldrums of frustration that is using the A-20. It still puzzles me that the "scout" tank has a view range of ~270 meters, while the "medium tank," the much slower T-34, has a range of ~400m with the upgraded turret.

I've not yet committed to getting back into the game full-time, but we'll see how things pan out. I'm also plodding down the German heavy tank line and the American TD line, but I doubt I'll get into the higher tiers any time soon.

Also, for what it is worth, they've hinted at "shared progress" through their upcoming games involving World War 2 Battleships and Planes, something that piques my interest quite well.

World of Tanks

I was introduced to this MMO a few months ago, circa November. World of Tanks, now in open beta, is a really addicting WWII tank sim that is 15 vs 15 battles on various maps which can be urban or rural. The controls are fairly simple, just WASD to move and mouse to aim and shoot, essentially. The really cool thing about it, though, is the fact that despite being rather simple to pick up, it is actually quite deep and has fairly realistic armor bounce/penetration simulation. Once you get a handle on tank tactics and start to work together with your team, it becomes incredibly fun. Though it is not unheard of to get griefers, teamkillers, and people who generally suck and can't seem to grasp simple tactics into matches with you, the fact that you can platoon with other players on your friends list makes a big difference. Well-coordinated players can really clean up in matches.

The biggest downside, in its current state at least, is that the mid tier tanks are a crucible of grinding and being essentially useless in matches- while the occasional bounced shell is not unheard of once you have better guns, a number of tanks will be invincible against you, for all intents and purposes. It's sort of balanced out by the fact that HE shells can be loaded, but even then, you'll run into tanks that you can only scratch a few percent off of their total health. This wouldn't be a problem if you could escape and let your more powerful allies step in, but often times you'll be in a situation where the enemy tank can not only see farther than you, but is also faster and more maneuverable, negating any chance of escape. Once you grind your way up to the higher tanks, though, it gets much more enjoyable. However, the downside for a losing match becomes much higher, as you can end up losing money.

I had originally planned to write a much larger article, but I'm holding off until the retail release, since a number of things (like artillery) have changed & there is a lot of discussion about gameplay mechanics going on, as well as planned expansions like French Tanks, et cetera...

Also a hard wipe is coming soon, which means I will lose all my glorious tanks:

I think I'll withhold my judgment until retail is out.

System build 2010, post-action report

Now that I've lived with my first self-built computer for a number of months now, I think I've gotten a good feel for what I've done right, and where I could improve on future builds.

I think the combined SSD boot disk and traditional HDD storage drive is the optimal solution- Small, fast SSD's are getting cheaper and more mainstream, and the performance benefits they confer to startup speed and loading times is nothing short of awesome. For everything else, a large traditional HDD is great, since the speed differential for accessing something like a picture or a music file is negligible, and huge capacity hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper- a 1TB drive is probably more storage than I'll ever even need, and those are going for sub $100 prices.

Regarding gaming, the single video card more than holds its own against everything I've thrown at it so far, save for an odd texture bug with foliage in a game that brought it down to about 7 FPS... Since tweaking the texture settings in the game popped it back up to an average of about 40 FPS with no apparent degradation in visual quality, I'm going to rule that one to be a software issue. Of course, the siren song of dual cards is always strong, so I don't think I'll rule it out entirely as an option on future builds- obviously this will be determined by budget.

The only real area I believe I made a bit of a misstep in would be the case. I was very concerned about getting a small case, and I think that may have been a less than optimal choice in my situation. Make no mistake, the case I have is great, but the small size of it meant a whole lot of hassle and a few concessions made to get everything packed inside. Upon further consideration, I don't really move my PC around a lot, so the size of it really is not an issue- once it gets put somewhere it tends to stay there for a given period of time and not move until the desk moves, or I move out of said living arrangements. Since a larger case opens up more cooling options and makes wire management a bit easier, I see no reason not to go ahead and get a larger case next time around.

All in all, I'd say this was a pretty successful build.