WoW Journal - 27-April-2005

Yesterday I did another expedition to the Scarlet Monastery. Not for myself, but for two of my D&D group friends, and we also took one of my guild mates. We got their quests done, and collected some goodies. Of course at level 52 I didn't get any experience points, but that was not the point, it was fun anyway. And of course Irony with a capital "I" struck, and the Aegis of the Scarlet Commander which I had five times unsuccessfully tried to get dropped. Irony, because I have a better shield now from a random drop. So I left the Aegis to my warrior buddy, who with the Aegis and the Sword of Omen quest reward will now be nicely equipped.

Then I switched to Kyroc, my undead priest, and leveled him up to level 10. At level 10 you can move from apprentice to journeyman in your tradeskills, and thus the cap moves from 75 to 150. As I still had hamstered away lots of wool, I quickly increased my tailoring skill. And I made lots of green, magic vestments. Which I then disenchanted into strange dust, which I subsequently used to enchant my bracers over and over. That way I got both my tailoring and my enchanting skills up.

All this is made possible basically by twinking. About 3 gold for learning all those recipes, and the huge stacks of wool cloth I gathered with Raslebol. The only stupid thing is that for enchanting soulbound items you need to open a trade window between the owner of the item and the enchanter. Which means I can't use Kyroc to enchant Raslebols items, or the items of any other of my characters I have on that account. I can enchant the items of my wife, she has a second account, and of course Kyroc's own items, and those of friends and guildmates. So it isn't a total waste of time.

Over the next 10 days this blog/journal will probably be relatively quiet. From tomorrow evening on I'll be on holiday to visit my parents. I'll take the laptop, on which WoW is installed, but my parents have no ADSL, and no WiFi, so the best I can hope for is to get it to run on a 56k modem connection. I'll test if WoW is playable like that, but I severely doubt that I will be able to do much more than check my mail and the auction house during that time. You don't want to perform major heroics on a 56k connection.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:37 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Noticed any changes?

Inevitably, as I tried to fiddle with the new comment system layout, I managed to break the whole site template. The template had grown large and unwieldy, and since it was some years old, it contained a bunch of old tags. So instead of trying to fix it, I simply deleted the template and started over. I took the new version of the same style sheet that I had before, and added the tags that I wanted to recreate the old look with a shorter template.

I think the page is now looking more or less than it looked before. But I might have forgotten tags for some essential feature which you liked. So please, use the new comment system to tell me what I should change about the template!
- posted by Tobold @ 10:49 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
New Comments

My old comment service operator, CommentThis!, continues to be dead. So I changed the template of the blog to enable the Blogger comments instead. Sorry for losing all your previous valuable contributions to this site. I'm always delighted to get some feedback, so feel free to write a lot of comments on the new system.

The good news is that the comments you write will now appear directly on the "permanent link" page of the post in question. And thus they will be archived and not get lost again like the previous system.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:22 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Making a Fair MMORPG

The MMORPG world is still buzzing with the aftershocks from SOE's announcement to create Exchange-enable servers, on which trading virtual items for real world money would be allowed. There is a significant lack of outright enthusiasm for the plan. Pragmatists (like me) are on a "yeah, why not?" line. And lots of people see it as the event that will destroy MMORPG, this camp including some famous developers like Mark Jacobs, CEO of Mythic, makers of DAoC, who calls it "one of the worst decisions in the history of the MMORPG industry". Well, he should know, he has personally taken some of those worst decision, like launching the Trial of Atlantis expansion, which turned DAoC in a mega-grind.

Most of the arguments against the Exchange-enabled servers revolve around notions of fairness and integrity, or what Mark Jacobs calls the "spirit of entertainment". Unfortunately for SOE to be able to destroy the fairness of the MMORPG genre, that genre would have to be fair in the first place. And it is not. So I wonder if one of the game developer critics of SOE would step forward and change *his* game to be more fair.

Mark actually did a tiny step in that direction, by asking DAoC players whether they would be interested in a server with one of a list of different rule-sets. For example a server on which Trials of Atlantis was disabled. Lol, at least he recognizes the thing was a mistake. But he also proposed a server in which there would be a cap on how many xp you could earn per character per day. That would be "more fair", because it would prevent people from using a out-of-game resource they happen to have plenty of, time, to outlevel the competition.

But to make MMORPG really fair, you would have to disable trade. For example a real world friend of mine from my D&D group just reached level 40 and is 20 gold short of the cash needed to buy a horse. I'd sure be willing to give him 20 gold (he isn't sure yet whether he wants them). But would me giving him 20 gold be fair? I also just twinked my low-level undead priest with money and equipment gathered by my high-level warrior. Is that fair?

In the strictest sense, both are cheating. One character, who did not "earn" a reward, receives the reward nevertheless, from another character. What the out-of-game relationship between the two characters is doesn't matter. They could be the same person playing both characters, or the two players could be friends, or the two players could have exchanged money in the real world. The effect in game is the same.

And developers as "gods" of the virtual worlds have jurisdiction only inside the game. They have no way of knowing whether I send 20 gold to my friend because I like him, or because he paid me a beer, or because he paid me $5. Saying that sending the 20 gold for a friendly word is okay, staying silent about the beer, and threatening us two with banning if there was money involved is highly hypocritical.

To make it fair, it would be easy enough to design a game (or even change an existing game), so that there is no possibility of one character to transfer money or items directly to another character. You would need to set up the auction house differently, I've used the way it works now in WoW to transfer money between Horde and Alliance, by buying worthless items at a high buyout. GuildWars has interesting NPC traders, where players sell their loot to the NPC trader, who resells it to other players. The buying and selling price depends solely on how much of the goods in question the NPC vendor has in stock. So you still have a system in which players end up buying items from other players, but they can't sell something overpriced to another character to transfer money.

If any game company decided to do this, there would be a HUGE outcry, probably a lot louder than the excitement over SOE's decision. People value the ability to twink alts, and to give stuff to friends and guild mates. Fairness be damned. I wouldn't be too hot on a no-trade game either, I like twinking and helping guild mates. But I do realize that this is cheating. Just like buying 100 gold from IGE is cheating. I'm honest enough to not condemn people who basically do the same thing as I do. And I challenge people like Mark Jacobs to either make their games fair, or to stop preaching their double standards. SOE's decision of "if we can't beat them, join them" is far from being ideal, but at least it sounds more honest to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:40 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
McAfee Internet Security Suite

My ISP provides me with a free copy of the Norton Internet Security Suite. I used that for a while, and found it didn't work well. Often I would find the Norton firewall blocking my access to online games. Unblocking that and setting up exceptions was often a hassle. And after every patch of a MMORPG the same problems reappeared. The program was also visibly slowing my computer down. Finally I had enough, I uninstalled the programm, and relied on the hardware firewall in my router, and the Windows XP built-in software firewall.

But the new laptop came with firewall and anti-virus from McAfee pre-installed, as trial version. And while I was looking for information about graphics cards, the McAfee programs managed to catch a Trojan who wanted to install itself on my PC. And the McAfee firewall didn't seem to be bothered by me playing WoW at all. So I decided the "trial" to have been successful, and went to buy the programs.

I ended up buying the McAfee Internet Security Suite from the US site of the company for $69.99. US and Canada residents get a $20 mail-in rebate. I hope this mail-in rebate mania doesn't reach Europe, I find them highly annoying. Either you find out you don't qualify, or getting you rebate is such a hassle that it's not worth the bother. I buy a software online, for download, pay online, but for the mail-in rebate I would have needed to print out a form, fill it out, and mail the form by snail mail.

Anyway $69.99 was still a lot cheaper than the €74.95 the same download costs in Euro land, or the £49.98 it costs in the UK. Taking advantage of the cheap dollar here, for a downloaded software it doesn't make a difference. Just had to uncheck the additional $6.99 for the extended download period of 1 year. My ADSL isn't that slow, I can live with a download period of 30 days, thank you. And burning the file on a CD is cheaper than $6.99.

I took the suite because it was cheaper than taking the firewall plus the anti-virus. So I got the privacy protection and anti-spam for free. Download and installation was easy. Running the update took a while, because it doesn't automatically update all 4 programs, you have to repeatedly restart the manual update until you are told that now everything is up to date. The privacy protection program was annoying me by asking for a password every time I rebooted, but I managed to find the option to switch that off.

As far as I understood the suite comes with 1 year worth of virus DAT files updates, after which you need to pay $34.99 for another year of protection. A bit like a MMORPG subscription, and probably justified in view of the everchanging viruses.

Thinking about security, I also turned on the Windows XP password login on the laptop. My two desktops are not password protected, as for somebody to access them, he would first need to break into my house. In which case I'd be more worried about him taking the whole computer than accessing it unauthorized. I guess most passwords on home computers are used to prevent your children from watching porn, or to prevent your spouse from finding out that *you* have been watching porn. Neither of which will work: Your children are expert hackers anyway, and have no problems bypassing imperfect nanny filters. And your wife will *always* find out what you did sooner or later. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 2:28 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Comment problems

CommentThis, the free blog comment service I'm using to enable my readers to express their opinions, is currently down. This might lead to some lag when loading the page, and of course you can now neither read comments nor write them. If this situation continues, I would have to switch to Blogger's own comment system (which was introduced after I installed CommentThis). But as that would mean losing all old comments, I'm reluctant to do so.

So let's be patient and hope the problem gets fixed. Not that I'm complaining too loudly, it's hard to complain about the quality of a service which is free.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:21 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 25-April-2005

After some server troubles caused by excessive PvP on Friday, the servers were holding up reasonably well over the weekend, with just the occasional lag spike. So on Sunday evening I downloaded and installed CensusPlus, the utility I had previously used when I still had Cosmos installed to count how many players are online. Sunday evening at 9 pm there were 616 Horde players online, of which 69 (11%) were level 60. At the same time on the Alliance side there were 1308 players online, of which 89 (6%) were level 60. So the numbers have gone up by about 25% since my last census, but the same trends still apply: Alliance outnumbers Horde 2:1, but Horde has the higher percentage of high-level players. Or in other words, the hardcore players are more or less evenly distributed over the sides, while the casual players prefer Alliance.

Raslebol is still level 52. I did a guild group to Uldaman with him on Sunday, but as the first half of that instance was grey to him, he didn't gain all that many xp. But it was fun, and the second half was hard enough, me being the highest level in the group. We got wiped out three times, but fortunately we had a shaman with self-resurrect with us, and only needed to run to our corpses once, when the self-rez was still on cooldown. The final fight of Uldaman is always interesting, you wake up a gigantic stone statue, which you have to fight. And the stone giant awakens other, smaller statues. Then you have to decide whether you fight the small ones, or whether you concentrate on the giant. Last time I did it, we had two high-level rogues, and taking out the giant quickly was the better tactics. This time we had two warriors and three healers, shaman, druid, and priest, in which case you need to go for the slower variant, and kill the small statues first. We learned that by trial and error, that was one of the wipeouts. :)

At level 52, and in view of the speed that I'm still leveling, I'm slowly asking myself the question of what to do when I reach level 60. Well, this weekend showed that I didn't like raids, so the classical level 60 career as repeated raider doesn't appeal to me. Which leaves starting a new character as the alternative. I already have a level 11 undead warlock alt, which was foreseen for that role. But recently I have run repeatedly into situations where a guild group wasn't forming, because we couldn't find a healer. And nobody ever said "We can't start this group, we don't have a warlock." Plus, I'm not really a big fan of combat pets, and the soulstone management with the warlock seems to be a pain.

So I decided that my next major character would be a healer. Druid is out, because I already played one to level 41 on the US servers, and rather try something new. Shaman would be a possibility, but after talking with guild mates it seems that shamans are weak healers, but good melee fighters. Which leaves the healer class that the least people play, but the most people would like to have in their group, the priest. Few people play it, because the priest has only cloth armor, and not the best damage spells, which makes him hard to solo. But I was told that if I put all talent points into Shadow, the priest becomes soloable enough. And as that will be the second character, he will be twinked to the max, which should further increase his soloability.

Thus was born Kyroc, the undead priest, and I leveled him to level 8. The idea is to bring him up to the low teens, because of the rest bonus. Having 1.5 levels rest bonus on a level 1 character is not really all that great, below 10 the levels just fly by anyway. Better to level fast until the pace slows down a bit, and then have the rest bonus at those levels. Kyroc is going to be tailor / enchanter in his crafting career. Again a choice which is made easier by him being the second character. I did a short trip, half an hour, through Ragefire Chasm with Raslebol, ignoring the worms and elementals, and just killing the humanoids. That netted me 159 linen cloth and several green items to disenchant for Kyroc, as well as some stuff to twink him with.

I hope this works out well, I'm still a bit sceptic about the priest class. I'm used to play pure tanks, pure healers, and tank/healer hybrids. The WoW priest could theoretically be specced as pure healer, but then he would be a pain to solo. So he will be a shadow priest, with the option of respeccing at higher level for guild groups. But that means he is a healer / damage dealer hybrid, and I need to get used to that. Totally different tactics than my warrior. Which is good, the idea is to play something new. And as undead I'll level him in zones where I haven't done quests before, like Silverpine Forest. Who said the game would be over at 60?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 24-April-2005

I did my first raid in World of Warcraft. Well, not counting a chaotic low-level affair in EQ2, I did my first raid *ever*, as I never got to "raid-level" in other games. But frankly, if raiding is what level 60 characters do, I'd rather stick to my original plan and just start the next character, than to raid all day, once I reach level 60.

Our raid group of 10 people descended on Blackrock Depths. Not knowing much about raids, I had foolishly spent some time gathering quests for that dungeon before we started. Turns out that if you are in a raid group, you don't get any quest kill credits, and quest items don't drop. You do get to perform the same actions as you'd do for the quest, but they don't count, it's more like a rehearsal. That is a major disadvantage from my point of view, World of Warcraft is all about quests, and turning them off eliminates a major part of the fun.

The other problem is experience points. Okay, the level 60 characters don't care, but I'm still level 52 and would like to gain some xp. As far as I understood the way WoW calculates experience points, it works like this: Imagine some tough elite monster, which would give 1,000 xp if you soloed it (but it unfortunately too tough to kill solo). If you kill it in a group of five, you get one fifth of that, plus about 20% group bonus, for a total of 240 xp, which is still nice. If you kill it in a raid group of ten, you get one tenth of that, and all raid xp are halved, for a total of 50 xp.

In other words: I have Telo's InfoBar running, which counts the xp per hour I'm gaining. Soloing I easily make 10,000 xp per hour without even trying. In a typical five-man group in an instance I make more than that, plus getting quest xp at the end. But during this raid I only made about 6,000 xp per hour.

So the whole purpose of a raid is to gain items. And even that was a bit disappointing. I got some plate leggings which were slightly better than my previous ones. The problem is similar to that of xp, the loot is divided between ten people instead of five. And while there is no raid malus, that still ends you up with not very much.

After four hours of raid we had done the larger half of the dungeon, and had returned to the entrance, because we were missing a 12th key. So I politely bowed out of the raid and let another guild member take my place. Raids are not my cup of tea.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:39 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Guide to Blackrock Depths

I got an invite to a guild raid to Blackrock Depths later today. So I looked what quests I needed to get, and stumbled upon this excellent Guide to Blackrock Depths. Worth blogging to archive the link.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:32 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
First day of PvP in WoW (Europe)

In spite of not being a big fan of PvP, of course I had to give it a try on the first day of the honor system. I racked up 15 honorable kills in a huge battle which was raging for hours between Tarren Mill and Southshore. Some observations:

- Remember Blizzard forbidding people to gather together at one place to start a protest, because the servers can't handle large gatherings? With the PvP honor system they have caused lots of these large gatherings, so of course the servers went down. While I was able to play for a while before that happened, lag was pretty bad.

- In the real world, from the ancient Greece to the first world war, the defending side was holding a position in a typical war between two armies, and the attacking side tried to storm this position. Combat occurred where the both sides met, because if you line up several armed men side by side, the attacker cannot simply break through. When two lines of men with swords fight each other, you effectively have a lot on one-on-one fights, because there simply isn't room for several attackers to fight one defender.

In World of Warcraft a battle looks very different. It basically becomes a lot of five-on-one combats, because people are in groups of five, and can easily use assist to all attack the same target. And there is no collision control, so there is no physical problem of five people attacking one. There is no influence of the terrain, no defensive bonus for holding a position. The side that *locally* has superior numbers and levels wins. That makes WoW PvP a horribly fluctuating affair. You spend a lot of time running all over the place in WoW PvP, because every side is trying to outnumber the other side locally.

I never got into a single one-on-one fight. If I attacked somebody, whether I was alone or in a group, other Horde players would attack the same target as me. And then sometimes I was the target of a combined Alliance attack, where I was rooted in place by a spell, and killed by several players at the same time in less than 10 seconds. I don't know what type of combat you like, but I prefer fighting monsters, where the fight is slower and has tactical options.

- The PvP honor system works reasonably well on the PvE servers. Okay, if you come across a battle you will be severely lagged, and if the server crashes you are out of luck. But other than that you mostly still have the option to ignore PvP and play however you want. On the PvP servers there is a huge amount of complaints on the WoW PvP forums: Quest NPC and windrider masters are constantly being killed. All zones over level 20 are "contested", and above level 20 you can't do anything without getting killed every 5 minutes. Lots of people wished they could switch servers to PvE right now, but of course they can't, unless they restart from scratch.

- PvP honor kills (HK) are pooled, and at the end of the week you get a share of the PvP points of your side. So if I have 15 honor kills and the Horde racks up 15,000 kills this week, I get 1/1000th of the reward. If they do 15 million kills, I only get one millionth of the reward. So especially this week, where everybody is doing PvP, the rewards for HK will be tiny.

We can only hope that the first excitement over the new system will cool down, and at least on the PvE servers the situation will get back to normal. I'm afraid that the players on the PvP servers will suffer a lot longer.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:35 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Patch day

Today is WoW patch day in Europe, a 35 MB patch that adds the PvP honor point system and lots of other stuff. Patchnotes here.

I downloaded the patch not with the Blizzard Bittorrent downloader, but from Fileplanet. Might as well use my subscription with them for something, and that method is a lot faster. They have the UK English patch 1.4 available. If you need the French or German patch, you will need to search for it. The French one I've seen at WoWBelgium.

If you download the patch from somewhere, you just need to copy the downloaded file (wow-1.3.1.4297-to-1.4.0-engb-patch.exe for the UK version) into your WoW directory and start World of Warcraft to automatically install the patch.

I'd tell you to go and enjoy, but statistics tell me that you are most likely to be playing on a PvP player, and I have serious doubts that these will be enjoyable in the forseeable future. Some people will "grind" PvP honor points, which means killing other players, and that will get annoying pretty fast.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:32 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 22-April-2005

I don't know what it is that makes some instances more fun than others. Just excellent design, or does a good group play its part too? Anyway, last night I had loads of fun in Zul'Farrak, the instance in the Tanaris desert. The place looks cool, and it has several very good scripted events. Defending the top of an Inca pyramid against an on-rushing army was certainly one of the highlights of my career.

There are seven quests for Zul'Farrak, and I didn't finish all of them. I still have to collect more Troll Tempers, because the trolls simply don't drop enough of that for a whole group. And I couldn't summon Gahz'rilla, because for that I first need to kill a level 52 elite in the Hinterlands. Why a level 50 quest in a level 43-50 instance has a hard level 52 prerequisite is a mystery to me.

Oh, and speaking of 52, that's the level I dinged in Zul'Farrak. Funny, I hadn't even noticed my xp bar was approaching the next level, and suddenly I ding.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:53 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Time is Money

Predictably the latest SOE announcement that they would allow and even facilitate the trade of virtual items for real world cash has caused a huge outcry in places like Terranova. Many people seem to believe that MMORPG are fair as they are, and bringing money into the equation would make them unfair.

Now as I said before, I consider buying virtual items for real world money a form of cheating, but a harmless one. And I don't believe in the argument that MMORPG right now are fair. Even before anyone sells a single gold piece, MMORPG as they are now are rather unfair, that is two equally skilled players will not perform equally well.

One reason of unfairness is that skill plays a relatively small role in your progress, compared to time spent. Somebody who is half as skilled as you, and plays twice as much, will probably outlevel you. It makes no difference whether you are able to progress using your large amount of disposable income, or your large amount of disposable time. Time is money, we usually don't have enough of either, and people blessed with one of them in abundance in the real world can use that to their advantage in the game.

Another existing unfairness is that it is perfectly legal to make one-sided trades. You are allowed to pass on virtual money or equipment to your friends, guildmates, or your alt characters. In each of these cases a character who did not earn a certain reward himself is cheating by receiving this reward from another character. Again, this is a harmless form of cheating, but this is the same argument used against money trades. The only difference between giving a friend 100 gold pieces so he can buy a mount, or selling the same 100 gold pieces to a stranger for $50, is the real world part of the transaction. In game the two cases are identical: One character earned 100 gold, and gives them to another character who didn't deserve them.

It is this double standard, of making transfers to friends legal, but declaring them illegal if there is a real world money transfer in the other direction, that makes it so difficult for game companies. It is very easy to make a game in which items simply cannot be traded or transfered to another character at all. Such a game would have no trouble at all with EBay or IGE. But if you allow people to acquire in-game virtual items by spending social capital with others, you cannot prevent others to use money instead of social capital. How would you want to control that no money changed hands?

I think SOE did the right thing by realizing that they couldn't defend their previous position on one-sided trades. Better to take control, earn the money that otherwise would have been earned by IGE, and prevent players from being scammed at the same time.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:28 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 21-April-2005

This has been a crazy week, both from work and with all the excitement about the new laptop, so both my WoW playing and my blogging about it have lagged a bit. Nevertheless, here are this weeks highlights:

I hate having the same old quests in my quest journal for a long time. So while I didn't particularly enjoy the very drawn out first part of Maraudon some time ago, I jumped on the chance to do the second part with nearly the same guild mates. Just to get the quest finished and the dungeon over. In the end the expedition was anti-climatic. From the point where you teleport in with the staff you can gain in the first part, to killing the princess at the end, it only took us 45 minutes. And we did kill a named rock elemental and a named crocodile as well.

I managed to win not a single roll, and left the dungeon with just some junk loot. But finishing the quest gave me the Thrash Blade as reward, which is better than the self-smithed Phantom Blade I was still using. At first I was a bit disappointed by the looks, the Thrash Blade looks rather boring in comparison to the semi-transparent Phantom Blade. But after paying somebody an outrageous amount of money, 17 gold, for casting a +4 damage enchantment on the new blade, it looked cool enough, with a blue glow effect. Guess my next character will do tailoring / enchanting, there is a definitive shortage of enchanters, which drives the prices up.

Other than that, I didn't do much dungeoneering this week. I helped a guild mate to kill the last NPC he needed in Scarlet Monastery, but that was a relatively quick affair. I managed to get another elite quest done, The Mind's Eye, last of a long series of Stranglethorn Vale quests. The final mob there was 47 elite, but I needed the help of a guild mate of my level to do this, as these ogres were rather tough, and numerous. Now the only "last elite step of long quest series" I have open is the level 56 elite from the Legend of Zelda series.

On two days of this week I was playing in the mornings, instead of the evenings, due to a crazy work schedule, and the half day I had to take as holiday to wait for the arrival of the laptop. On these mornings I didn't gain much in xp, because I used the time with low population to gather herbs. It is *much* easier to gather herbs when nobody else is playing. I gathered a stack of Gromsblood in Desolace, and nearly as much Plaguebloom in Fellwood, and both of these are hard to find at all in the evenings, when there are several herbalists around looking for them.

Last WoW news is that I installed WoW on the laptop, and it is running quite well. The only remaining problem is that I can only play WoW on the move if I happen to stay somewhere where there is a WiFi hotspot or other possibility to access the internet.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:16 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
DELL Inspiron 6000 Review

I posted a review of my new laptop on a guild mates website: Laptop Showcase - DELL Inspiron 6000 Review

For archiving purposes, here is a copy of the review:

Specifications

Processor: Intel Pentium M730 1.6GHz, ATI Radeon Mobility X300 128MB, 15,4" wide screen XGA, 512 MB 333MHz DDR2 RAM, 40 GB Ultra ATA hard disk 5400 rpm, 24x CD-RW / 8x DVD combo drive, Intel ProWireless 2200 802.11 b/g WiFi

Review

The Dell Inspiron 6000 is a very nice compromise between the different extremes of the laptop market. Weighing over 3 kg it is not an ultra-light machine, but it isn't a huge desktop replacement PC either. Instead it offers a bit of both, decent performance even with games, while still portable.

Thanks to its ATI Radeon Mobility X300 128 MB graphics card, which is an optional upgrade, the Dell Inspiron 6000 in this configuration scores a nice 3DMark03 benchmark of 2536, which is pretty much identical to an older desktop I have with a Radeon 9600 Pro. That means you can get all games to at least run on this laptop, even if the framerates in Doom 3 won't be nothing to write home about. It is also more than sufficient to watch DVDs on, although the DVD / CDRW drive is a bit on the noisy side.

The Dell Inspiron 6000 comes normally with a 6-cell battery. So I ordered a second battery, a 9-cell one, and for some reason unknown to me Dell decided to make both batteries 9-cell, instead of giving me a small and a big one. Nice, two of these 80 Wh batteries will last a complete transatlantic flight, each one giving up to 5 hours of power.

The laptop comes with a modem, ethernet card, and WiFi, of which I am using the latter. That was very easy to set up, I just needed to type in the WEP-key which I use to prevent others from surfing on my connection, and I was ready to go. You can also get Bluetooth, but I didn't take this optional extra.

The Dell Inspiron 6000 does not have a "stick" for mouse control, only a touchpad. A Kensington Pocket Mouse is a recommended extra. Having only used desktop keyboards before, a laptop keyboard takes time getting used to, but the keys are big enough and have enough "depths" to give a real typing feeling.

Up to now I only used the laptop at home, where he does everything I wanted him to do. The real test will come once I travel with it, because I mainly bought it for being able to work, play games, and surf the net, while on the move.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:15 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
First mobile post

I'm typing this on my very own laptop, without being connected to any sort of cable. Yeah, my Dell Inspiron 6000 arrived, it's obviously working, and setting up the WiFi connection was easy enough. I'm happy, even if I still need some time to get used to this keyboard, and I haven't connected the mouse yet. Not a big fan of the touchpad, but it works. The laptop is bigger than I had imagined, but the wide screen looks good. More later, I need to go to work now.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:32 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EQ2 to facilitate buying virtual items for real world cash

In a surprising announcement John Smedley, president of SOE, announced a 180 degree turn on their policy of letting people buy or sell virtual items for real world money. Previously that was forbidden, and could get you banned. In the future SOE will implement "Exchange enabled" servers for EQ2, on which this transfer is not only completely legal, SOE will actually help in handling the transaction. This solves one of the big problems of selling virtual items for real world money, the fact that previously EBay or PayPal had no way of knowing if the virtual part of the transaction took place or not, which enabled a lot of scamming.

John Smedley justifies this change with 3 arguments: First, people were doing this trade anyway, he estimates the volume to be about $200 million per year. Second, players getting scammed in this sort of transaction often took up valuable customer service time, up to 40% of the total. And third, he sees it as an interesting test of future MMORPG business models. SOE is not yet selling virtual items themselves, but that could be the future of a new game.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:39 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Why PvP won't make WoW a better game

Blizzard's "under development" page for World of Warcraft is pretty clear about where the game is heading: World of Warcraft is going PvP. While many people are expecting PvP to solve WoW's perceived problems with longevity, I do not believe that more player vs. player combat will make WoW a better game. Here's why:

PvP is most fun when it is most fair. The winner is happy that he beat an opponent of equal strength, and the loser at least doesn't feel cheated. As soon as you move to any form of PvP combat where the result is a foregone conclusion, where the attacker nearly always wins, the whole thing becomes a lot less amusing. The winner doesn't feel he achieved something, and the loser is grumbling how unfair the whole thing was.

Unfortunately MMORPG combat is inherently unfair. And players have been trained to be unfair by PvE combat. Of 100 fair fights, you would expect to win 50 and lose 50. Of 100 MMORPG PvE fights, you win 99 and lose one, and then still think you died a lot that day. For PvE this is okay. The monsters never complain that they have been sneakily separated from their group and then overwhelmed five against one. But all this learned unfairness continues into PvP, and there it causes problems.

The first problem any level-based MMORPG has with PvP is that levels play a strong role in your chance to win a one-on-one PvP combat. Blizzard hopes to fix that with the concept of "honorable kills". If you kill somebody of around your level or above, you receive honor points, which you can spend for nice items. If you kill somebody lower level, you don't get any points. Problem solved, isn't it?

No, because MMORPG players have the same problem in PvE, where overly low-level monsters don't give much or any xp, and they have learned to work around it. One tactic is numerical superiority; if five people of one level attack one person of the same level, that person is obviously doomed. Another tactic is preparation; the attacker is usually much better prepared than the defender. A stealthed rogue can backstab a mage, stun him, and often kill him before the mage gets any chance to cast. If the same mage had been the attacker, meeting the same unsuspecting rogue, the mage would have rooted the rogue and blasted him with spells, and it would have been the rogue who wouldn't be able to do much.

Rewarding people for killing other players will bring out the worst in many of them. An honor system can never reflect whether a fight was really fair. On PvP servers, people will be attacked while they are fighting a monster (or just after finishing a fight), when they are low in hitpoints and mana. There will be lots of ambushes and unfair tactics of all sorts, and few really equal fights.

Blizzard's solution to this are the battlegrounds, about which they just revealed more details. That should provide for fights that are as fair a possible, by having both level restrictions and caps on the number of players on both sides. Quote: So we do have a cap on the number of people on each side that can enter a Battleground. Rest assured we want the two sides to be fairly matched. Instead of single players being ganked, there will be fights of two armies of equal strength.

Much better, but still problematic in the specific World of Warcraft context. How do you organize an equal fight between two unequal teams? Quote: However, if you have to wait for your turn to enter the Battleground, you can still adventure in the rest of the game world before you are summoned to fight. Yes, the beloved waiting queues are back, and for players of the Alliance they could be long.

While Blizzard refuses to discuss the numbers, beyond saying that the numbers on WoW census sites are not totally accurate, everybody agrees that there are much more Alliance players than Horde players. The ratio as determined by several census sites and samples taken by myself is about 2:1, although there are variations from server to server, ranging from a 3:2 to a 3:1 ratio. This means that any Horde player who wishes to enter a battleground will immediately find a place in one, while Alliance players will find themselves in a long waiting queue.

Now I'm far from doomcasting WoW; it will remain a very good PvE game, especially on the PvE servers. But I expect that both the introduction of PvP honor points and battlegrounds will lead to massive complaints, after the first excitement has dissipated. People on PvP servers will get ambushed and killed in unfair PvP fights a lot more often than before, because the attacker is now gaining points towards cool equipment for that. And Alliance players will loudly complain about battleground waiting queues. PvP will be popular with some players, but it will not catapult World of Warcraft to an even higher level of success. A real expansion set with a new continent would do more for the longevity of WoW than PvP ever will.

This article has been posted at Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 6:36 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 17-April-2005

World of Warcraft is currently down, at least for me. There were some "database issues", which forced Blizzard to restart the servers. And then every single player in Europe tried to log back into the game at the same time, which the login server can't handle. So right now I can't reconnect, although the servers are supposedly back up. Well, that gives me time to blog.

So what did I do this weekend? Lots of things, but mostly solo questing. That made me ding twice this weekend, up to level 51 now. I would have liked to do a dungeon, but somehow couldn't find a guild group, and wasn't feeling like joining a pickup group. But I did lots of quests, explored lots of new regions, and gathered lots of exotic herbs.

I started finishing lots of quests in Stranglethorn Vale. Mostly involving killing trolls, or pirates. The quests were all green to me, so easy enough to solo. But one quest series leads to a final step which is level 46 elite, and I tried but couldn't solo that. Then I did a few quests in Tanaris, but there are still a lot of quests there which I haven't even spoken to the quest givers to.

Following the recommendation of Alan, one of the regulars here, I then took a quest in Un'goro crater, which starts when you find a crashed boat in one of the ponds. Following some clues leads you to the gnome Linken, who has lost his memory. Getting his memory back, and organizing a sword for him, is a long series of quests, which lead me to several zones I hadn't visited yet. Good! And at some point I finally realized that Linken was "Link" from the Legend of Zelda series of games, making a cameo appearance in WoW. Very funny. Unfortunately I'm still stuck at the last part of the quest, because I need to kill a level 56 elite there, while the remainder of the quest was soloable at level 50. Why do all these long quest series have to end in elite quests?

The part of the quest that took the most time was getting to Winterspring. This zone is only reachable by a long tunnel from Felwood which is full of level 53+ timbermaw furbolgs. To get through, I first needed to get faction with them up from hostile to unfriendly, so they wouldn't attack me when passing. There is only one (repeatable) quest to get faction up, which involves killing deadwood furbolgs. But every kill also give a slight faction increase. Nevertheless it took me at least 3 hours before I finally got my faction up. In Winterspring I just visited the quest NPC, and then went to the neutral city of Everlook there, to tag the flight path.

Felwood was good because most of the monsters there were around my level, and mass killing the deadwood furbolgs resulted in lots of xp. Then I got lucky and found a blue level 44 two-handed sword on one of the deadwoods, which I put on the auction house for 20 gold. It was also good because for the first time I found Arthas Tear and Plaguebloom herbs, enabling me to make some potions for which I had the recipe. Herbalism on the weekend is not really good, because in many places there are far too many players around, often competing for herbs. In the Un'goro crater I couldn't find a single herb of *anything*, because other players had picked them all. And I checked several times, as the Linken quest made me traverse the zone often enough.

On Sunday I spent some time exploring The Hinterlands. I liked the zone, there were not all that many players around, the monsters were in the mid-40's and thus easy for me, and there were lots of herbs growing there. The only disadvantage was that there is no city or village of the Horde, and thus no quest-giver NPCs, and no flight path. I ended up looking up the quests on Thottbot, and taking the Hinterlands quests from other locations all around the world.

In spite of all the quests I did, I didn't gain any nice new items. Many of the quests of the higher levels now only give money. And the green quests that gave items didn't result in anything I could use, being a bit too low for that. So I bought armor in the auction house instead. I really need to group more, even if that means pickup groups. It's too easy to get stuck with quests that are elite or dungeon, and require a group.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:56 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Going mobile

Hello, my name is Tobold, and I am an internet addict. I was feeling a bit like that last month when I was on a business trip: staying nearly a week in a hotel room which had free WiFi internet access, which was of no use whatsoever to me, because I didn't have a laptop. So naturally my thoughts turned to acquiring one.

First idea was to let my company buy me one. That idea quickly went out of the window. Not only is it rather difficult to get the company to spend the money, but if they do they insist of buying you one which can only be used for "productive" things. With Windows 2000, and you not having system administrator privileges, so you can't even install software on it.

Next thought was buying a laptop with a fast processor and good graphics card, which would enable me to play all sorts of games anywhere. That plan failed for two reasons: a) those machines are hellishly expensive, and b) you can only get those powerful machines with huge 17"+ screens and huge cases, weighing a ton.

So I reconsidered what I really needed, and decided that I wanted a machine which had enough horsepower to play games up to the level of World of Warcraft, but not necessarily Everquest 2. It should be small and light enough to be transportable. It should have WiFi, so I could use it to surf the internet in an airport lounge. It should have a battery life of several hours. And it should be affordable.

Mixing all these requirements, I ended up ordering a Dell Inspiron 6000. With a 1.6 GHz Pentium M, an 128 MB ATI Mobility Radeon X300 graphics card, a 15.4" WXGA screen, 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB 5,400 rpm hard drive, 8x DVD / 24x CDRW optical drive, two 9-cell 80 Watt-hour batteries, and a 802.11 b/g WiFi card. With all the extras (especially the Radeon graphics card), the thing ended up costing just below Euro 1,500.

I went for a Dell for two reasons. One is the price. The other is that getting a laptop with a US-keyboard layout and English version of Windows XP is not a trivial task here in Belgium. For somebody who knows at least a little bit about computers, Dell's system of chosing options on their website is optimal. For example, instead of one 6-cell battery, I got two 9-cell ones, and each 9-cell battery is said to last over 5 hours in the different reviews. And I was able to save 300 Euro by taking just a 1-year garanty, instead of a 3-year full service one.

The laptop comes with a bunch of free extras. Free transport is nice. So is getting 512 MB for the price of 256, the second stick coming free as well. I'm less enthusiastic about the free inkjet printer, because I dislike inkjet printers. I rather use my black and white laserjet, where the cost per page is a lot lower. I think the "give the printer away for free and overcharge for the ink" business model is a scam.

So now I sit here, hoping for several things. One is hoping for the laptop to arrive before I go on a one-week holiday end of this month. The other is hoping that the thing actually does what I want it to do, allow me to access the internet in a mobile way. With two batteries and a charger the weight will approach 4 kg, I hope that isn't too heavy. And having never used WiFi before, I have no idea how easy it actually is to get connected while on the move, and whether it is really free. For testing WiFi I also bought a WiFi ADSL modem, to replace my current wired one. I plan to still connect my two desktop computers with cables, but have the WiFi station to communicate with the laptop. I'll see how all this works out.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:47 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 14-April-2005

This week I'm not playing at full speed. Monday I was playing D&D v3.5, my character being Murtog the Magnificent, the worlds greatest mage, at least that is what he thinks. As he is currently only level 4, he sometimes has problems of persuading others of his magnificence. :)

Tuesday and Wednesday I was playing WoW in the evening, but just for relaxation, without trying to be terribly efficient. I mainly did quests of level 40 to 45, which were effectively a bit too low for my level 48 warrior. But I did them for the fun, and for the faction, as it was all quests that gave positive faction with Booty Bay. Part of the quests was in a little cove in Arathi Highlands, where a Booty Bay pirate ship had stranded. The other quests were in Stranglethorn Vale.

The only difficult quest was one to kill a level 47 elite giant, for which I joined a pickup group. We were only 4, the others in the group were about 5 levels lower than me, and we didn't have a healer, but we won that fight anyway. But as is typical of the WoW pickup groups, you do the one difficult fight together, and then split up. A bit later I grouped for a while with a level 42 druid, helping him to kill trolls which I also needed for a quest. But the rest of the time I soloed.

Playing like this, soloing most of the time, doing quests and killing monsters that are relatively low level, would not get you anywhere at level 48 in another game. In World of Warcraft I still gained about half a level in two evenings, and I dinged level 49. I never had a character higher than level 42 in any other game, because everywhere else leveling slows to a crawl at a certain point, and you simply don't advance any more. But in World of Warcraft I haven't noticed a big slowdown. You level very quickly to level 10, quickly to level 20, and from there to level 49 was pretty steady. And for all that I hear, that pace continues up to level 60. And that is fine with me.

There are some people who believe that letting people reach level 60 in a reasonable time is bad, because the players at level 60 would then get bored and quit. I don't think that is true. People quit at all levels, because they are not having fun any more, and not just at level 60 because they reached a virtual "game over" screen. There is still lots of things to do at level 60, dungeons, raids, and, if you absolutely want, PvP. And if you don't like to continue at level 60, you just start over with the next character. I would guess that games like Everquest lost more people because these players felt they would never reach level 60 than they lost people who actually got there.

I have no idea at what point I will get bored with World of Warcraft. I first played it in the September beta, 7 months ago. Since December I'm playing WoW full time, first on the US servers, then on the European ones. And that is already a good bit longer than most MMORPG I played, with the exception of the first Everquest. Up to now I'm still happy.

Yes, I consume content in this game faster than new content is added. But in comparison with all the other games I played, WoW isn't adding new content any slower. There are new dungeons and things added in the major patches, and sooner or later Blizzard will announce the first expansion set. I happened to see a world map of Azeroth from Warcraft 3, and it had a third continent, Nortwond, which would make a rather obvious expansion set.

I'm also obviously unhappy whenever I crash, or the servers are down for maintenance. But that happens a lot less often than in other games, especially since I'm on the European servers. Finally I'm on a server where regular maintenance happens on a weekday, during the day, which means that most of the time I'm at work while the servers are down. Regular maintenance is 4 hours once per week, which is less than what I'm used to from other games. And WoW is more stable than previous games. Not quite ideal yet, and people who never experienced the disaster of games releases like Anarchy Online or Star Wars Galaxies are complaining loudly.

So right now I'm not looking for a new game, although I pre-ordered Guild Wars to have a look at it. But I'm not yet convinced that Guild Wars will be the next big thing, World of Warcraft is a hard benchmark to challenge.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Another 250,000 boxes of WoW for Europe

After not seeing WoW on the shelves in the games stores I visited on Saturday, I received news from one of the guys of my D&D group who wants to buy WoW, but couldn't get hold of it. There has been an announcement by Blizzard, Europe, about the situation. They have sold 620,000 boxes (!!!!!), and are currently sold out. The next shipment will be another 250,000 boxes, to be released this Friday. As a good part of these boxes are already pre-ordered, sales will probably pass 800,000 by the end of the month.

The new 250,000 boxes will contain an additional "bonus" of viral marketing, a buddy key for 10 days of free WoW play. Before only the collectors edition had this buddy key, the regular box came without one.

Number of people in my D&D group: 7
Of these, having ever played a MMORPG before WoW: 1 (me)
Now playing WoW: 4
Will be playing WoW by the end of the month: 5

News of WoW's death have been greatly exaggerated.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:51 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 11-April-2005

A very strange weekend, full of ups and downs, and sometimes I had problems telling the ups from the downs. So maybe it is just me being a bit confused for the moment. But the main series of events went like this:

On guild chat some people are looking for help to do the Scarlet Monastery. I'm *still* looking for that Aegis of the Scarlet Commander shield, and so I join that group. To get all the quests for the others done, we do all three parts of SM. And in the end I come up empty again, the stupid shield just doesn't want to drop.

Instead I group with two other guild members to finish my quests in Dustwallow Marsh. I only need to get stuff from the fireman elite dragonkin cave, but the other two also need to kill the much easier dragon whelps. No problem, I can always use the small flame sacs, and I'm happy to help. We kill, and kill, and kill dragon whelps, because the quest needs quite a lot of hearts and tongues, and a full supply for two people takes a lot of time. And then suddenly *bling* one of the dragon whelps drops the Blackskull Shield, and I win the roll for it.

Wow, the first purple drop I see, and I win it. Allakhazam says that this shield can drop from many different level 40+ mobs, but with something like a 0.01% chance, one drop every 10,000 kills. Allakhazam also reports an average price of this shield on the auction house of 70 gold. Not that I plan to sell it, I'm using it. In fact it is doubtful I will find a better shield before I reach the mid-50 levels. This is like winning the lottery.

And I hate lotteries.

I mean, I go *four* times through the Scarlet Monastery and fail to get a decent shield, and then a much better shield just drops on my feet from a random mob, which isn't even elite? My whole concept of a MMORPG being a series of goals and accomplishments is being overturned here. Dumb luck rewards me richer than any intelligent planning. So I don't really know if I'm happy or sad about this purple drop. I feel more comfortable when the rewards come from me actually having done something dangerous, fought elite mobs, or entered a dungeon.

Besides this, I don't do very much this weekend. I finish the Morrowgrain quest and ding 48. I make a guided tour with my wife's level 24 druid through the Wailing Caverns, which means that I practically solo the place. Things like that make one realize how much more powerful one's character has become. Our only problem there is not having enough inventory space for all the loot. :)

I also do some grey and green quests in Desolace, killing demons there. Mainly because that is the only place I know which grows Gromsblood, which is used for the Mighty Rage potion. I'm still not a big fan of rage potions for warriors, because they are on the same timer as the healing potions. That makes them hard to use in solo combat, if the rage boost doesn't win you the combat, you die because you can't heal yourself.

Another event where potions failed to save me happens while I am standing on top of the zeppelin tower in front of Ogrimmar, waiting for a ride. A level 53 shaman wants to duel me, and I accept. It turns out that shamans have a spells named Frostshock, which both damages and stuns me, and is on a very short cooldown timer. So I never get out of the stunned state, the shaman just runs around the outer ring of the landing platform, and I can never hit him, because I'm running at half speed. I drink a free action potion, but it doesn't seem to help, and then I can't drink a frost protection potion, because of the 2-minutes cooldown. I might be able to win a duel against a shaman who is not 5 levels higher than me, if I drink the frost protection potion well in advance, and we fight on flat ground instead of a circle with a hole in the middle. Or if the rumors come true that frostshock will be nerfed. But as it is, that PvP combat was utterly pointless, because I never had a chance. PvP in WoW is not well balanced, if you can permanently stun, root, slow, fear, kite your opponent, so he can never hit you. Where is the fun in a combat which is totally one-sided?

I do some quests on the coast of the Swamp of Sorrows, killing crawlers and murloc. But somehow I have problems finding more than 2 or 3 quests in the same zone that are for my level and soloable. There are over 4,000 quests in the game, but I have the impression that the supply is getting thinner in the higher levels. Lots of quests for dungeons or elite, but finding a good quest for solo play needs more running around than before.

The last quest of the weekend starts with me finding a quest item on a vendor in Undercity, a field testing kit. After buying that kit, I can accept a quest from some alchemist in the apothecarium, to collect samples in Tanaris. I first need to kill some bandits in the desert to persuade a goblin in Gadgetzan to make the field testing kit work. Then I have 2 hours to collect 8 good samples each of hyena, scorpions, and basiliks. Of course less than half of the samples I find are good, and so I need over 1 hour of the 2 hours given to me to finish the quest, although the monsters I need to kill are green to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:34 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Finding quests for your level in WoW

Old news, but as I had problems finding the page back, I'm blogging a link to it:World of Warcraft Community Site -> Info -> Basics -> Quests Per Level is a page that gives a list in which zones you can expect to find quests for which level. Useful if you happen to have emptied your quest journal and ask yourself where to go next.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:14 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 8-April-2005

For a change of pace from tradeskills, I started the evening by looking through my quest journal, for doing some quests and gaining some xp. I still got one Maraudon and two Dustwallow Marsh quests, but all of these are elite, and I felt more like soloing. But there was one intrigueing quest in my journal, in which the archdruid of Thunder Bluff was requesting that I visit him. Okay, the quest was marked level 50, and I'm still level 47. But the visit to Thunder Bluff is obviously the easy part, the level 50 part will be where the archdruid sends me. So lets hear him out.

I fly to Thunder Bluff, and easily find the archdruid. And as expected he wants to send me somewhere: Find 20 samples of soil in the Un'goro crater. Hmmm, interesting, I've never been there. And the quest says I can pick the soil from ground spawns, and don't necessarily have to fight level 50 mobs. So I fly to Gadgetzan, and ride southwest through the desert, to reach the entrance of the Un'goro crater.

The crater is a nice place. It has a Lost World jungle theme, with dinosaurs, huge insects, and other monsters. And it is a veritable paradise of ground spawns. There are dirt piles for finding the soil, power crystals that are used for a quest there and for smithing, plants for a repeatable quest to feed a kodo, and herbs for alchemy.

To my delight I find Golden Sansam and Mountain Silversage in the Un'goro crater. Which are the two ingredients needed to make Major Healing potions. These restore 1050 to 1750 health, which is nearly twice as much as the Superior Healing potion I used before. Now the alchemy study is paying off, instead of buying overpriced Superior Healing potions in the auction house, I'll make much better potions for free for myself. Even with my large amount of hitpoints, one of these new potions heals about half of my life, which is a huge boon in combat.

I also do all the other ground-spawn pickup quests, and explore the whole crater, killing only very few mobs. Most monsters I see are above level 50, which is still a bit to difficult for me. In fact one of the regions in the crater is called "Terror Run", and I joke that this is exactly what I'm doing here. Wait until no monster is standing on the ground spawn, rush in, take it, get aggroed, and run away in terror.

I find 19 of the 20 soil samples I need, then find a stack of 4 in one ground spawn, which brings me to 23. I destroy the excess 3, and go back to Thunder Bluff to hand them in. There it turns out that the 20 samples are just the first part of the quest. I'm given 20 seeds and a pouch, and told that I need to gather more soil. Damn, I shouldn't have destroyed the excess 3 soil samples. Well, it doesn't matter, I will need much more than that. By clicking on the pouch, one seed and two soil samples are consumed, to give one evergreen shell. You open that shell and get a random herb. You can repeat that every 10 minutes. The goal of the quest is to get 10 morrowgrain, but up to now I tried it 3 times and found 3 different other herbs. Well, as the other herbs you find are used in alchemy, I'm not really complaining. I got 20 seeds for free, and I can buy more seeds for 9 silver each, I just need to gather lots of soil.

All in all I was having a lot of fun in the crater. And I was thinking again how good the World of Warcraft quests are. For one thing, the quest sent me into a new area to explore, which is always good. And then the goal of the quest is not just to kill X monsters of one type. Gathering soil and hoping for the right herb to grow from it is something different, and variety in quest goals is a very good thing.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:02 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 7-April-2005

I spent a mainly peaceful evening on a tour of the world of Azeroth, picking herbs. Not a single quest, and no dungeon, so I made only a handful of xp from monsters standing too close to a herb. But I got herbalism up to 290, and alchemy to 275. That means I can now transform arcanite, but that has a very long cooldown of several days. Still, for the guild it might be useful.

My main problem as alchemist are fish, which are used in several recipes. I would really need some Stonescale Eel, but can never find any on the auction house. Fishing is one of the few less well done parts of this game. It started out as being boring, but profitable. That resulted in people using fishing "bots", automated macros that fish unattended. Blizzard banned a couple of people, but was unable to prevent fishing being macroed. So instead they made it unprofitable. Of course now that fishing is both boring and unprofitable, nobody is doing it any more. And thus there are no fish to be bought for alchemy.

I refuse to do fishing without some sort of UI mod making it less annoying. But I certainly don't want to do anything illegal that could get me banned. So now I'm unsure what sort of fishing macros are legal and which aren't. Cosmos had some fishing macro stuff, that saved a few clicks, but I'm not running Cosmos any more since the last patch.

What Blizzard *should* do, is to make fishing a lot more interesting, some sort of more interactive mini-game. As a game, it could not be macroed any more. And when it isn't bot-able, it could be a bit more profitable again.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 6-April-2005

I start the evening with five completed quests in my quest log, which I have still to turn in. Two from the swamp, and three from Maraudon. The bad news is that from all the quest rewards, I can only use the Mark of the Chosen, the other four rewards go straight to the NPC vendor. The good news is that the Mark is very good, giving a 2% chance every time I get hit to give me a one-minute buff which increases all of my stats by 25. And as tank I get hit a lot. The other good news is that all the xp rewards from the five quests make me ding 47.

After that, I make a tour through Feralas, gathering Sungrass for alchemy. That enables me to make Superior Healing Potions, and gets my alchemy skill up to 250. Which then enables me to learn the recipe for the Limited Invulnerability Potion, and after gathering some Blindweed in the Swamp of Sorrows I can make some of those, and send them to the guy who donated the recipe to me.

By then my real life friends from the D&D group log on. They are level 32 and 34 now. They have a bunch of quests for Blackfathom Deep, but as they don't group with strangers, they have problems doing these quests. So I group with them, and we waltz through BFD, completing all their quests there. My wife, who still needs the staff from Lord Kelris, isn't with us. So of course the staff drops, Murphy's Law. We kill the bonus boss mob, Akumai the hydra, and use the teleport behind her to leave. The teleport ends you up high in the air above the entrance of BFD, from which you fall a long way, but end up safely in the pool. But something goes wrong and one of my friends breaks his neck by the fall, which makes that sequence a lot less funny.

Meanwhile my guild is looking for somebody to help them kill Princess Myzrael. As I reported in a previous journal entry, there is a long series of 9 quests around level 40, and the 9th step is to kill this princess of the giants, who is level 50 elite. I previously complained that the gap between the 8th quest and the last quest is too wide. So this time we are prepared, having a full group of level 47 to 50 to kill the princess. Ha ha. Turns out that Blizzard also noticed this design flaw, and they reduced the level of the princess from 50 elite to 44 elite in the last patch. That makes much more sense in general, but our group is complete overkill for her.

After the princess, four out of five group members, including me, head over to the Scarlet Monastery, to do just the cathedral part and get me the shield from the scarlet commander. That goes quickly enough, we know all the shortcuts by now, and we are nearly too strong for there. But no luck, again the shield does not drop. I'll have to try again, there isn't any other blue shield around for my level.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
The Matrix Online

What if somebody launched a new MMORPG and nobody noticed? That seems to be what happened to The Matrix Online, which launched two weeks ago, with a distinctive lack of fanfare.

I know very little about this game, but I haven't really searched much for information. I read occasional blurbs saying that the game is buggy, bland, and lacking features. A typical example that "brand" alone does not make a success. Although the brand "Matrix" has probably been ruined already by the second and third movie. From what I hear they launched the game with 20 servers, and ended up needing only 6 of them. And while I know that it is completely unfair to judge a game I never played, and only know rumors about, I still think this one has "flop" written all over it, and will probably not survive long.

And I *do* hope some game company executives noticed this. Because while it is good that World of Warcraft sent them the message that a MMORPG can earn millions and millions of dollars, it would be even better if they realized that this success doesn't come easy. You do have to make a good game to be profitable. Just taking a movie licence and slapping on a mediocre game doesn't cut it. Especially not in the MMORPG genre, where people are more reluctant to spontaneously buy a game, due to being scared off by the monthly fee. We really don't want a wave of bad WoW clones coming out in 2 to 3 years, and it is likely that many of them would do as badly as the bad EQ clones.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:29 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Who reads this?

A blog is a curious thing, half private diary, half publication. I'm writing for myself first, and for the people who like to read what I write second. But occasionally I wonder just how many readers I have, and click on the Sitemeter button on the bottom of this page. Doing this today, I first thought that my WoW journal must be a smash hit: There is a visible upwards trend in visits and page views, and the March numbers are the second highest after my 15 minutes of fame last October, when I was slashdotted.

But then I started to have doubts about this apparent success, and I checked the referrals. Very different picture there. 9 out of 10 visitors come to my site having searched for some MMORPG related terms on Google. Writing a WoW journal just results in my site being on the first page when you google for things like "iron deposits wow".

I'd like to think that the guy searching for those iron deposits found some helpful information in my journal, but chances are he didn't bother to read much of it. And I probably disappointed the people googling for cheats, bots, or macros for different games, because I might talk about those, without ever offering any for download. Still, there is a small chance of people coming here by accident and finding they like what they see, thus staying on as readers. But looking at the search terms, I had to conclude that that chance is indeed very small.

That still left me wondering how many people are actually reading this. So I turned to another report from Sitemeter, giving some details of the last 100 visits, including how long they spent reading my blog. From the last 100 visitors, only 4 spent more than 5 minutes on my site (with the record being 17 minutes). I'll count those 4 as "readers". Another 8 spent more than a second, but less than 5 minutes (average around 1 minute) on my site, lets call these "browsers". And the remaining 88 percent spent less than a second on my blog, having seen with one look that they were on the wrong site.

Extrapolated to the about 2500 visits (3000 page views) from the last month that would mean about 100 of these hits were readers, and 200 browsers, with the remaining 2200 being in the "lost" category. That goes some way to answer my question about the number of people actually reading this. But it also makes me wonder if the huge amount of lost people are just a sign of the times being fleeting, or whether I somehow managed to create an especially non-retaining click-through site. As far as people are able to judge the quality of my site in less than a second. Scared of too many words?
- posted by Tobold @ 1:12 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - 5-April-2005

I start the evening by hunting in Tanaris, killing hyena for mystery meat, and rocs for giant eggs. I make a stack of Dragonbreath Chilli with the mystery meat, and Monster Omelette with the eggs. Then I go and test the chilli in Ragefire Chasm. There is definitely some sort of bug: When you click on a stack of them, they all disappear, and you only get one breath of fire per item on the stack. But if you first shift-click on the stack to split off a single chilli, and then click on that, it works well. You get 10 minutes of effect, with several fire breaths per combat, and the other stack doesn't disappear.

So I run around in Ragefire Chasm, collecting large trains of low level mobs, then turning around and breathing fire on them. Okay, not highly effective, the chilli only does 60 to 70 points of damage per breath. But fun nonetheless. That way I "farm" the whole dungeon, netting me no xp, a couple of silver, and a few low level green items.

Then somebody from my guild sends me a tell, and wants to do the Maraudon instance dungeon with me and some other guildies. My first instinct is that I'm too low with level 46, but he says the monsters are level 46 max also. Which turns out to be not totally true, the quest to kill the final boss is level 51 elite. But the monsters in the first half of the dungeon are low 40's.

What I should have asked him instead is "how long will that take?". Because it turns out that Maraudon is huge, much bigger than any other dungeon I did up to now. After 4 hours we reach a point in the dungeon where you get a staff, with which you can teleport back to that mid-point of the dungeon. And because it is late and there are at least 2 more hours of dungeon ahead, we postpone that to another day. Dungeon with a save point, now that is something new for a MMORPG. But necessary for instances which otherwise take 6 hours or more complete.

The expedition sure was profitable. I finished four quests there, which I still have to cash in. I won the roll for a blue trinket which cures poison, and for some green stuff for selling. I even manage to persuade the group member who won the roll for the recipe for the limited invulnerability potion to give the plans to me, and promise him to send him a stack of those as soon as I can. 6 more points of alchemy skill to gain until then, should be doable.

But I can't say I especially enjoyed that Maraudon trip. The guy who invited me was level 48 priest, and the rest of the group even higher, up to a level 60 rogue. Now for a priest it is okay to be a bit lower in level than the others, but as level 46 warrior I felt I was the least useful member of the group, and I hate that. I don't want to be powerleveled by others. I'd rather group with people closer to my level, where everybody has an equally important role to play in the group. I'm kind of committed to do the second half with the same group this evening. But as the second half starts with level 48 elite mobs, which I can hardly hit, I wouldn't mind if that group fails to reassemble. Guess I'm not much of an "achiever", speaking in Bartly type terminology, I don't care much about the phat l00t and xp I can gain when grouping with high-level guildmates.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:26 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 4-April-2005

Another WoW weekend, having a lot of fun. But somehow the theme of this weekend turned out to be "how to have fun without gaining xp", and so I just dinged once, to level 46. So what did I do that didn't gain me xp?

One thing was playing tour-guide through low-level dungeons. Once for my wife, in Blackfathom Depths, and once for my two D&D friends, in Razorfen Kraul. It is sometimes surprising how differently new players play WoW. My wife simply never groups, except with me. My D&D friends either solo, or group with each other. And I guess they are not the only ones, you see a lot of unguilded people in World of Warcraft. While veterans instinctively go for guilds and groups, to maximize benefit, the new players don't feel the need to group. There are disadvantages to grouping, it's often a hassle to set up, and then you can't easily leave or go afk. And as WoW allows you to level without grouping, many players simply don't. And then they do the instances dungeon quests either not at all, or in a small group with real life friends, when the quests are already green or even grey. Or, in this case, grouped with a level 46 warrior they happen to know in real life. Okay, obviously I did nearly all of the work, and got no xp. And I even passed on nearly all the loot rolls, so I didn't get much treasure either. But it was fun anyway, especially for dungeon which I haven't visited for a while. If you remember how difficult a dungeon was when you first did it, you feel all powerful when you can practically solo it.

The other thing I did without gaining xp, was raising my herbalism and alchemy skills. With good success, both are now above 240. The downside of that was that all that training costs a lot of money. 9 gold alone for getting the two skills past the 225 barrier, plus all the cost of the alchemy recipes from the trainer, some vendors, and some from the auction house. I tried to offset the costs by selling potions on the auction house. But although I had started alchemy with low expectations on profitability, even those were disappointed. I had put different sorts of potions on the AH, but I didn't sell a single one. Not even after lowering the prices to something less than the cost of the ingredients. I ended up giving the potions away for free to my guild, or using them myself. I wonder if that is because I'm playing on the Horde side, which is less populated, or whether it is due to the server being younger. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a market for potions.

A part of my weekend was spent hunting for small flame sacs. These are used for fire protection potions, which are immensely useful, as they offer a random amount between 900 and 1600 points of *complete* protection against fire damage. Rather useful against some spellcasters, and against some kinds of dragons and dragonkin. Small flame sacs are also used for a cooking recipe, Dragonbreath Chilli. You eat the chilli, and for the next 10 minutes, in every combat you breath fire several times, dealing more than 60 points of damage to everybody in front of you. Looks funny, and is useful against hordes of lower level enemies (like when touring low level dungeons). I have to experiment a bit more with the chilli, I think there is a bug where you click on a stack of them to eat one, but the whole stack disappears instead of just one of them. I had the same bug with my druid on one potion, the Gift of Athas.

But of course I also gained some xp, from quests. I managed to do all but one quest in my quest journal, with the one remaining quest being for Tanaris. But before starting questing in earnest there, I wanted to visit one of the forgotten corners of the World of Warcraft: The Dustwallow Marsh. This is a level 35 to 45 zone, with an Alliance city on one side, and a Horde village on the other. And somehow I had never quested there, except for one quest from the Badlands, where I had to summon a sea giant on one of the islands along the coast of that zone.

One quite interesting detective quest has to do with a burned down inn, at the border between the swamp and the Barrens. There are three "clues" hidden in the inn, a shield, a tiny badge, and some hoofprints. I had found the shield, but the other clues I only found after reading about them on Thottbot. Each clue leads to a quest, leading to the perpetrators of that crime. Unfortunately the series ends with a dud. After you did everything, you are told to bring the black shield to somebody in Thunders Bluff, for the final revelation of the mystery. And there you hand in the shield, get a tiny xp reward, and the quest abruptly ends without explanation. Seems a bit unfinished. Maybe you would get more information if you did the Alliance side quests from the same three clues, but my druid only found the black shield at the time, and now his account has expired.

Maybe the reason why the Dustwallow Marsh are a bit underpopulated is that this is not the only bad quest in there. There is a guy in a hut in the swamp, "Swamp Eye" Jarl, who gives three quests which don't make much sense. First he wants three soothing spices, which you have to buy from a vendor, and the reward is only some food without stats. Then he wants 40 spider eyes, but he is talking crazy, and you don't really know what for. And then he wants an expensive smithed sword for the third quest. I declined that third quest, because I knew how valuable the sword was, and the reward he offered was worth a lot less. But I checked on Thottbot if there was another quest behind that, which would explain and reward a bit more, but there apparently isn't. Simply a badly written series of quests. It actually speaks for the otherwise high quality of the World of Warcraft quests if the bad ones are jarring so much.

But then I struck gold in the Dustwallow Marsh, by taking three quests for the southern part of the swamp, which were interesting, fun, and profitable. The ogres in the Horde village in the north of the marsh are refugees, which have been driven out by dragonkin of their old home in the south. They send you there to kill dragonkin, dragon whelps, and to find some lost items. The area is well done, with the wooden ogre fort being in smoking ruins, and dragonkin roaming them, with the whelps flying around in a wider area. The dragon whelps are easy enough to kill, being around level 41. And as they drop small flame sacs, I was happy enough to kill them, even if collecting 15 each of their tongues and hearts took some time. I like fighting dragon whelps, because their breath weapon is technically a "spell", thus can be interrupted with my shield bash. And a fire protection potion absorbs the few breath attacks they manage to get past my shield bash.

The dragonkin are a lot tougher, being level 41 to 44 elite. And they have some nasty area of effect fire spell, with a very short casting time, which can rarely be interrupted. With the help of fire protection potions I could barely solo the level 43, and my potion supply was running low. But then somebody from my guild turned up in the swamp, and we grouped and did the dragonkin together, which went a lot better. That got us two out of three quests done, with one quest item found for the third quest. But another player told us that the other quest items for the third quest are in a cave full of elite dragonkin, and I guess I have to go back there with some reinforcements, and a freshly brewed stack of potions.

The dragonkin dropped up to 10 pieces of silver each, so they were profitable enough. But besides money they practically never dropped anything. It seems their loot table is rather empty, with no common drops. Another sign that this zone has been done in a bit of a hurry, and maybe isn't as finished as it could be. But I liked the dragonkin area anyway, it was dangerous, exciting, and fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:43 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 1-April-2004

No April fools joke, my World of Warcraft week was relatively quiet, so there isn't much to report. I finished only a few quests, and I did one expedition with a guild group into Scarlet Monastery. That made me ding 45, but unfortunately the shield I had hoped for didn't drop.

The major activity this week was peaceful: picking flowers. Or rather herbs, to increase my herbalism and alchemy skills. Herbalism is up to 150, alchemy to 165. A lot of that progress was achieved by me swimming up and down the Wetlands coast and collecting stranglekelp. There being no water breathing potions on the auction house, I thought I could make a profit by selling them. So I put them up with a minimum price covering what I paid for the oily blackmouth fish component, buyout at twice that. No luck, I didn't even get the minimum bid. Part of the problem is certainly that on the Horde side undead is the most popular race, and undead have a racial skill which allows them to hold their breath much longer. Well, it doesn't matter, I took alchemy more for my own consumption than for profit.

What I noticed was that progress in herbalism and alchemy was both rather fast. Not because these tradeskills are inherently faster, but because I'm already level 45. On the US servers I dived for stranglekelp at some point with a naked dwarf of below level 20. Naked because he kept getting killed and I didn't want to pay too much for the repair bill. But while under level 20 the murlocs had a huge aggro range on me, and gathering the kelp was time-consuming and difficult, at level 45 it is fast and easy. I need to actually collide with a murloc before he considers attacking me, and if he does I whack him in a few seconds. And the same is true for other herbs, the herbs that advance my skill are still to be found in zones where the monsters leave me alone or pose no challenge. So I should quickly rise to a point where my tradeskills are appropriate to my level. Oh, and having leveled herbalism/alchemy with my US server druid already certainly helps, I still remember in which zones to find which herbs.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:32 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments