Beta Testers, the Bane of Gamers.

So this weekend I got to spend some time on the Star Wars Old Republic beta. Obviously, it's still under NDA, so I'm going to stick with discussing things that are officially released common knowledge, plus the testers themselves.

Fact: a lot of people testing for Bioware don't have a clue how this works. The game releases in what, a month and change? So why would you suggest changes to the underlying structure of major systems, like space combat? I'm pretty sure there might have been a design meeting at some point where they discussed the merits of rail shooter vs open space combat. Do I wish it was more like Tie Fighter and X-Wing? Yes, of course, I loved those games. Do I think it's going to look like that in 40 days when it's nothing like that now? No, I don't know where to find that good of drugs. Stick to useful feedback.

Second: I don't care that you liked KOTOR. SW:TOR is not KOTOR. Doesn't matter that it's Bioware with a lot of similarities. If it was KOTOR 3, they probably would have named it KOTOR 3. It's not a single player game. It won't be a single player game. And come on people, grow a damn brain stem already. MMO does NOT mean WoW clone. Get a damn clue. It's a type of multiplayer experience. Nobody asking for them not to fuck it up by turning it into a single player game where we have to pay the upkeep of the DRM servers, which is what the KOTOR fanboys are asking for wants this game to be WoW. We just want the MMO to have the MM in it. It's easier to ignore other people in an MMO setting than it is to get an MMO experience in a single player game.

Third: Running from point A to point B won't kill you. You don't need to start off with a speeder bike. Hell, try doing some of the quests, you might even like the game if you do the content that isn't the storyline. Oh, but wait, this is a single player game with inconvenient other people in it.

And here's a big one, folks. Quit trying to give technical feedback if your PC makes the original Game Boy look hot. I literally saw one idiot talking about the "amazing" graphics. After he upgraded to a graphics card that let him play in native resolution. That's right, folks. He's used to ever game looking like Wolfenstein 3D, so he must know what good graphics are when he sees them! The graphics, as is, are objectively crap, and the performance was pretty bad on those graphics. Yes, I've seen worse, and it didn't detract too much from the gameplay, but that doesn't mean it performed well or looked all that pretty. Don't give feedback above your level of ignorance. You say opinion, I say you're too stupid to recognize an objective fact if it bit you on the ass.

If this is the sort of feedback designers get from their betas, and the sort of people they inevitably listen to, it's hard to blame the devs for the plethora of mediocre games lately. Let's blame the twelve year old kids who haven't played anything besides WoW, on their dad's old graphing calculators. They're destroying games for the rest of us. Don't stand for it. Sign up for betas, give good feedback, make your voices heard.

And devs, please, please, please start instituting some form of testing for potential beta testers. Pick a demographic, get some baseline knowledge levels on certain subjects for that demographic, and quiz people. It won't work completely, but it should weed out the worst batch of idiots, they can't use Google.

Keyboards, Had Enough, Popped my Cherry.

If that title doesn't sound like a delicious pun to you, and instead sounds dirty, A: get your mind out of the gutter, freak, and B: you clearly don't keep up with computer stuff in the neurotic way I do.

Here's some simple backstory. About 6-8 months ago, my old cheapo $20 Microsoft rubber dome keyboard died. I decided I wanted something all pretty and backlit, so I bought the Razer Lycosa Mirror. Now theoretically, all their issues (supposedly hardware issues from a bad production run) had been fixed and recalled, so the one I bought should have been fine.

So, within a couple of days, my fancy keyboard is spastically attacking me by loading a new instance of Windows Media Player roughly every 7 seconds, relegating whatever window I happened to be looking at to the background, and generally being a pain in the ass until I hard rebooted or unplugged the keyboard. Funny thing, my media player set up via the Razer software was iTunes.

I contacted Razer support. They told me "Oh, that's a hardware issue, initiate RMA." Well, it didn't seem much like a hardware issue to me, because it was easily fixed by forcing the drivers to reload, and would randomly occur at another time, whether 5 seconds or 2 days. So, I contacted them again, and told them it felt like software. After quite a bit of insanity, I managed to convince them their Lycosa software was broken, as evidenced by the fact that uninstalling it and running off of generic drivers fixed 100% of my hardware problems.

So, as the weeks go on, they keep contacting me, asking me for more information, since I'm clearly more competent than their QA/QC group, and eventually the software is actually reasonably safe to use. Of course, by this time, my audio and USB passthroughs in the keyboard had died, but hey, I'm a real geek, those are gimmicks I don't need or care about much, I get better signal quality when I'm plugged straight in anyway.

So, last night rolls around. My not so cheap keyboard, theoretically good for half a quadrillion keystrokes or some such, decides that it's time to go on strike. Specifically, my spacebar. Since I do occasionally type more than URLs, this seemed rather inconvenient. A look at the key showed me that the rather cheaply designed (read: piece of shit) spring wasn't going to function again. The little retaining clips that made the stupid thing stay attached were made out of the same plastic as those little green army men I used to play with, except less of it.

Well, that was the final straw. Something about owning an $80 "gaming" keyboard for less than a year and having more headaches than the morning after an Alcoholics Anonymous class reunion with an open bar just kind of pissed me off. So, when I drove down to my friendly neighborhood Fry's, I wasn't looking at anything Razer, and avoided all the rubber domes. I'm now fighting to get my hands retrained to work with my SteelSeries 6GV2, which uses nice mechanical Cherry Black switches.

I already love it, the return to an old-school feeling keyboard is like a slice of nostalgia that doesn't come with drawbacks like 8 bit sound and 640x480 max resolution. Granted, I'm having a few more typos than usual, but that will change soon enough.

Of course, you can't expect Razer to make a keyboard this solid. If they did, they'd be putting a perfect blunt object into the hands of the people with the most cause to want them dead: their customers. So, Razer, go soak your heads until you figure out that quality control means more than keeping half your stock in a warehouse to be able to handle the flood of RMA requests.

Sunbeam Rheobus Extreme Fan Controller, Half a Review.

So, the Sunbeam Rheobus. Great little toy. I've been using it on my rig for a while. Each channel can handle up to 30w, with 6 channels, letting it handle pretty much any fans you want to throw at it. It retails below $30 usually, making it extremely affordable.

Now on the looks, there's a couple of things that are a bit hit or miss. The LED's in the knobs run off the same variable resistor as the fans... now this is amazing for telling where your fans are at a glance, but they're so damn bright. It's only a minor issue unless you sleep in the same room as your PC and don't shut down at night, though.

Also, the front is glossy, instead of some fancy little LCD touch panel that was built for about three cents, so while the front panel is less of an issue if it breaks, it also looks really inconsistent in most black cases, since these tend to be matte. Except for maybe a few really shitty things made out of plastic, that would be vastly improved if they included duct tape and baling wire in the design.

That being said, it's nice. It's a little tight when you're fitting it into the 5.25" bay, but it fits without a hammer, and the screw holes line up, so really, it's all good for installation. That being said, that's physical installation of the panel itself. I haven't said anything about fan control wires. The connectors are placed kind of awkward if you've got, say, an optical drive or the top of your case above it. But this should only matter once.

Speaking of wires, it comes with a lot more than most controllers, but still not enough. It comes with two each 3 pin extensions, 3 pin to molex, and 3 pin to 3 pin with mobo signal. It also comes with it's own power cable, but that's neither here nor there. It pulls off the 12v rail via molex, so it's got what you need to tickle bigger fans, although you do have to kind of turn them up higher than you want them to get them going from a stop.

Overall, I really like this thing, although I haven't used a whole lot of  controller panels so you might take that with a grain of salt. Photos shamelessly stolen from the manufacturer's website. But judging by the manual, they probably can't read this blog to complain.

Overall, this product rates an official JingleHellTech 

Non-Turd Award!

Defending AMD FX: A Losing Battle.

So, since yesterday's release of AMD FX CPUs, including the FX-8150 Octo-core, there's been many discussions online, referencing benchmarks, value, quality, and performance. As can be expected, there are actually still some fanboys dumb enough to think they have a chance of defending these piles of shit. So, in interest of... fairness, I've decided to discuss some of the... reasoning.

Excuse 1: It's not technically an 8 core CPU blah de blah.
As much as I normally love being technically accurate, there is such a thing as having shit for brains, and this excuse shows us the people who do. AMD advertised FX-8150 as an 8 core CPU, why shouldn't I judge threaded performance by the standard of 8 cores? Are you accusing the company you love of fraudulent advertising?

Excuse 2: It's really only intended to be a server architecture though!
Sorry, comes down to the same damn thing. AMD spent a fortune sponsoring IGN Proleague and shoving their AMD FX ads down our throats, trying to convince people that an 8 core CPU was good for gaming. You market it for gaming, you get benched in gaming performance. Not our fault it fell completely flat on it's face. Most people using Intel would prefer if AMD could compete, it would be awesome for CPU prices.

Excuse 3: Well, it's worse clock for clock, but it overclocks way higher!
Sadly, this means nothing to the vast majority of users. Why? Because, during testing, Anandtech found that the FX-8150 can only hit the same clocks on air as a 2500k or 2600k. It goes a bit higher on water, but quickly ends up needing extreme cooling. And sorry, the clock you could hit if you kept liquid nitrogen hanging around doesn't mean a whole lot if you don't.

Excuse 4: It isn't working well with Windows yet!
Yes, we know, you've burned that one into the ground. Unfortunately, the tasks it does the worst on are less threaded tasks, like gaming, where it has to try and compete with Phenom 2, the utterly obsolete predecessor. 

Excuse 5: But it does compete with Sandy Bridge on multi-threaded tasks!
And it wants a cookie, I assume? For the vast majority of consumers this means... oh yeah, nothing. AMD FX is replacing Phenom 2 in bad product placement, as the poorly priced, late to the game CPU that you might get if you really need physical cores and don't want to pay for better hardware that costs from slightly less to slightly more.

Excuse 6: All those benchmarks are biased, and not representative of anything.
On the second one, welcome to benchmarks, jackass. Find a good analog for performance that gets benched frequently, or bench things yourself. As for bias, I really doubt all the reviewers were so biased that they had a damn conference at some executive resort in the Swiss Alps just to plan out how BD would do on each test.

So, AMD Fanboys, for your tenacity in the face of logic, for your stubborn pride and arrogance in the face of benchmarks, and for your inability to listen to reason, I salute you. Someone has to keep AMD in business so Intel can't really monopolize the market.

How Not to Suggest PC Components.

So it strikes me, there are a lot of people who manage to do bad jobs of suggesting components, from "reviewers" to forumgoers, and everywhere in between. The reasons are usually obvious if you already know the product is bad or inappropriate for you, or if you can read between the lines well, but what if you can't? You might end up wasting money, without even knowing it.

So what are the reasons for bad suggestions? I generally list ignorance, fanboyism, fantasy building, malice, and feeling honor bound to suggest certain components. Ignorance is fairly obvious. Sometimes people just don't know what they're talking about, whether it's outdated information, or something anecdotal they took on faith. Not much needs to be said about this, beyond two major factors: be willing to admit you were wrong, and try not to be ignorant.

Fanboyism, however, due to its close similarity to brand loyalty, deserves some discussion and definition. What is fanboyism? Fanboyism is when brand loyalty gets taken to an extreme, beyond reason, causing prejudice and inaccurate suggestions and belief in the face of evidence. Brand loyalty, however, is preferential treatment for a brand based on personal reasons, and usually doesn't come out in suggestions as a strong biased arguing point. Example being: I've got brand loyalty to EVGA. Awesome customer support, excellent warranty, and most of their products are well thought out, and designed in a way that's beneficial to my use. I'm not going to suggest them to someone that doesn't need those things, though, and, since their new motherboard team isn't quite up to my standard for EVGA, I wouldn't suggest their motherboards right now.

Fantasy building is what I call it when people try to get someone else to build the PC they wish they could build. This will come out in suggestions of multi-GPU, flagship motherboards, and top-end CPUs for people who would be perfectly happy with less, and not even use it in a way to see a difference. This is bad, because you waste people's money doing it, and that's kind of a dick move. This almost pisses me off more than ignorance, just because ignorance will generally get worse performance for a price point, but fantasy builds will convince someone to drastically overspend.

Malice. How can you give someone malicious advice on building a PC? Basically, by doing the opposite of fantasy building. You don't want that guy to have better than you, you don't want to suggest the stuff you wish you had, so you suggest worse. Congratulations, if you do this, you're in the running for asshat of the year. Die in a fire. Don't screw someone else over out of jealousy.

Finally, there's the honor bound people. This most frequently will apply to reviewers, bloggers, and fans of certain things being supported by a brand. A good example. Some of the bigger sponsors for competitive SC2 are AMD, Kingston HyperX, and ibuypower. But over at teamliquid.net, the best community site for competitive Starcraft, on the Tech Boards, we refuse to suggest stuff made by these and other big sponsors if they're bad, not cost efficient, or any other reason. Reviewers and bloggers will frequently rave about the quality of a product, and look for ways to make it look good, in hopes of getting more stuff to review.

Guess what. PC components are almost always objective. Preference on certain factors will be subjective, but performance, quality, warranty, and support are just plain facts. Misrepresenting them for any reason, particularly to kiss ass, is just stupid. If you misrepresent them too badly, you'll leave people with a sour taste. If you show the actual quality, and then leave the value of the support of x organization up to the prospective buyer, everybody ends up happy.

Peripheral Vision: Gaming Keyboard and Mouse

This is a topic that comes up a lot in discussion, especially in the various competitive PC gaming communities. People will see Razer, TTEsports, or SteelSeries sponsoring players, and they'll look into buying the high end, fancy, and oh yeah, kind of pricey peripherals. Of course, as soon as someone asks, the guy who thinks that his budget should determine every other person's spending habits shows up. (An idiotic asshat on the internet? No!)

So, here come the arguments: Overpriced, gimmicky, doesn't matter at all, don't need extra buttons, better stuff won't make you play like a pro! Well no shit, Sherlock, you figured that out all by yourself, did you? I thought that since Nike shoes let me get up from making a Krispy Kreme shut down early for the day and run a marathon, that a Razer Abyssus would make me the best pro gamer ever!

Obviously, no, you don't need to pay more for flashy LED's, teflon mouse feet, 5600 DPI mice, and a Windows button you can turn off. But you know what else I didn't need to pay for? My whole damn PC. I could buy a netbook for browsing the internet. Hell, these days you can use your phone. So my gaming rig is a luxury purchase. And like every other luxury purchase, there's nothing wrong with spending a little bit more for features that help just a little, or look sexy.

Now, obviously, the question becomes one of value. Well, last time I checked, value is relatively subjective, particularly in the leisure time/luxury purchase department. I can't benchmark how comfortable my mouse is, and if I did, it wouldn't mean a damn thing for someone else. But if it makes my hobby a little easier, or a little more comfortable, then it's cool. If I decide I like the flashy LED's? That's my decision, and you and your notion of what I should do with my money can go to hell.

Then you hear: Higher mouse sensitivity doesn't matter. Well, yeah, it does. If you take one of those old fashioned mice with the ball underneath, and used nothing but software mouse acceleration to change how fast it moves, and give it to the best pro gamer out there, he's going to do worse. It's like handing a chainsaw to a surgeon.

So, all in all, what do I think about fancy gaming peripherals? If you can afford them, and your rig doesn't need the money dropped in more, go for it. If it makes your hobby easier or more enjoyable, that's awesome. This may seem a bit strange after the way I ripped into Water-Cooled RAM kits, but as long as you know what you're getting, who really cares what you get? You should, and nobody else.