Sunday, October 26, 2014

Balmorra World Boss Destroys My Hard Drive

My brother bought me Star Wars: The Old Republic (obligatory referral link if you're interested, or if you're already a subscriber and you've never designated anyone as a referral) when it came out a couple years ago, and I finally redeemed the code a week ago. It gave me a free month and some other bonuses, so I've been playing it on the regular. It's been pretty good so far; the storyline and quest interaction is miles better than other MMOs I've played, and it's Star Wars, so there's a lot of familiarity between the aliens, the music, the planets, etc. Plus, the space missions have been a lot of fun, and a great change of pace from the rest of the game.

But that's not what this post is about.

So, each world has a "World Boss" roaming somewhere in it. These World Bosses are gigantic creatures (at least they have been in my limited experience). They appear to be engorged versions of creatures that exist on the planet. Well, the other night, I saw in General chat that someone wanted to get a big group together and try to take down that world's boss. I was, of course, totally in on it. I found out later that the group had level 55 guys while I was level 25, so I probably didn't have too much of an impact on the battle, but it was a fun little experience all the same.

Anyways, I knew I had FRAPS running on my computer, and I said to myself, "This might be a fun thing to record." So I hit my little hotkey to start recording just before the battle, and away we went. For posterity, the video of the battle is below:



(Side note: holy crap, my microphone is loud as a mother. Do you guys have to deal with that when I'm streaming? This explains why everyone seemed to leave my streams after five minutes of watching.)

Not crazy exciting, but getting that little achievement pop-up is always a nice feeling. I went back to my side missions to wrap up the planet, and at the end of the night, hit the hay and shut down.

The next afternoon, I logged in to do a little resource gathering, but my machine was running noticeably slower than usual. I had a few Firefox windows open, so I assumed that was the trouble, but it continued to be jittery even after I closed them down. I sent my crew members on long missions and exited the game, then went to take a shower. When I got back into my room, I saw a little notification bubble on the screen. It said, "Low disk space." I checked and sure enough, I was down to a measly 33 MB of free space on my main hard drive. I thought that was odd, but I had recently installed a few games to get their card drops, and hadn't yet uninstalled them, so I assumed that was the trouble. I uninstalled a couple of other games I never play (Planetside 2 and Warframe), and had plenty of hard drive space.
 
Then I remembered the FRAPS video I'd made the night before, and I realized why I had so little disk space. I had never shut off the video recording after the battle. So, FRAPS just kept FRAPSing, recording as much content as it could until it ran out of room on my hard drive. I checked my videos directory, and sure enough, there were 76 gigs of videos there from the night before.

I'll go through them soon enough to check out what might be waiting for me. I assume it's more loud keyboards and boring gameplay, but you never know.

1 comment:

Joey said...

Bravo Joe, 76 gigs of video.

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