Loading... Season 4 Arrives

Welcome to the 855th Edition of Loading...

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Daily Column

Loading... Girls gone wild, except 80% of them are men.

First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we also show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

Age of Conan - 200 BPM World of Warcraft - 168 BPM Lord of the Rings Online - 139 BPM EverQuest II - 49 BPM Warhammer Online - 39 BPM EVE Online - 30 BPM Guild Wars - 25 BPM Lineage 2 - 23 BPM Dungeon Runners - 21 BPM Warrior Epic - 20 BPM

Lord of the Rings Online is making a run at the top two Pulse spots with a leap in traffic to 139 BPM. Congratulations to Warrior Epic for its first ever Top 10 showing and congratulations to Dungeon Runners for remaining in the very competitive Top 10.

In February of this year NVIDIA made a purchase that gave them what is perhaps an insurmountable edge in the gaming graphics card market. They purchased AGEIA, the company behind the PhysX products that offloading physics processing from your CPU.

The same day that they purchased AGEIA I wrote that it couldn't be long before the GEFORCE series of cards were married to the Physx technology. I'm not sure how I missed the announcement, but it has been done. I give you the NVIDIA GTX 200 GPUs.

"With more gaming horsepower than ever before and 1GB of memory, the GeForce GTX 280 GPU’s 240 processing cores make games such as Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and Bionic Commando® feel like the real thing. Its powerful NVIDIA PhysX™ technology creates rich, immersive physical effects with stunningly accurate realism. Experience absolute immersion and a 50% pure performance boost than prior generation GPUs with the GeForce GTX 280 GPU." - NVIDIA

At $650 a pop these aren't an inexpensive option, but imagine what they will cost by Christmas this year. This is good stuff folks!

World of Warcraft players also have some good stuff to look forward to today. Season 4 PvP starts once the patch is done and server maintenance is complete. Assuming it hits the live servers you will also be able to purchase a 22-slot "Gigantique" Bag from Haris Pilton, for a paltry 1,200 gold. That's only 4,800 gold ( or almost an epic flyer) to have 88 bag slots. Is it worth it? I guess that depends how much money you have. With the daily quests forcing money into the game faster than Kirstie Alley can force a donut into her mouth we are desperately in need of money sinks. Thanks Haris Pilton. Do I get a tiny hairless dog with my Gigantique Bag?

The new Season 4 armour is a lot like Cate Blanchett. You know that it is supposedly attractive, but you can't for the life of you figure out why. Everything seems to look the same. I won't be able to tell a paladin from a warrior, or a mage from a shaman. OK, I will, but if you read the message forums you would think that it would take the discerning eye of a trained detective to actually tell one class from another in this gear.

I'll be grinding out honor to get S2 pieces. As a non-guild type it's my only shot at purples. The arena gear will have rating requirements as follows, so you'd best get a good team together and play to win. Just playing won't get you much.

"While Season 3 is still going strong, we wanted to announce ahead of time the rating requirements that will be present for arena items once Season 4 begins. We also wanted to give everyone a heads up to some changes that will be in an upcoming patch, altering how points are gained and players are matched in the arena system. The patch with these changes is scheduled to release before the start of Season 4.

First though, the rating requirement changes:

When Season 4 begins, Season 3 items will be reduced in personal and team arena rating requirement to:

Shoulders: 1950
Weapon: 1800

The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:

Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none

In addition, some of the Season 4 quality items that will be purchasable with honor will also carry a personal and team arena rating requirement:

Boots: 1700
Ring: 1650
Bracers: 1575
Belt: none
Necklace: none
Trinket: none

The Season 2 items, which will move to the honor system when Season 4 begins, will continue to have no rating requirement." - Drysc in the Official Forums.

How do you feel about Season 4? Is it enough to keep you playing until Wrath of the Lich King arrives?

Do tell. The Loading Forums await you. Do you feel the need to contact me personally with naughty pictures or derogatory comments? Here's my E-mail.

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[A big thanks to Phil Comeau for putting together the links, headlines and taglines today. ]

17 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 238 in June! 1534 in 2008!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

Premium Content

Stargate Worlds: VIP Access Mythos Closed Beta Giveaway Age of Conan: Map of Tortage Age of Conan: Map of Old Tarantia Age of Conan: Map of Conarch Village

Images/Video

Rohan: Exclusive Crystal Quarry Video Voyage Century Online: New Version Images

Interviews

Vivox: Monty Sharma on Voice in Games

Contests

Warrior Epic: Closed Beta Key Giveaway

Comics

Age of Conan: Lost in Hyboria - The Collection

Op/Eds

World of Warcraft: Should mounts be available earlier?

Guides

World of Warcraft: Warsong Gulch Tactics Age of Conan: Conarch Village City Guide Vanguard: Dread Knight Spell List Update - Lvl 1-25 Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Class Portal Warhammer Online: the High Elf Archmage Tabula Rasa: Logos Library

Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to

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Thanks as always for visiting TenTonHammer.com.

- John "Boomjack" Hoskin and the Ten Ton Hammer Team