WoW Journal - Day 18

Just a short entry today, I'm going to play pen and paper D&D again this evening. So I just log on 10 minutes in the morning to check the AH. The green iron hauberk didn't sell yet, damn. It might be too early in the servers life for that, not many people have level 31+ warriors with cash to spare.

I buy a couple of gems for further smithing. Strange, one guy is selling tons of gems, at reasonable prices. He has about a dozen of each kind, and is selling them in groups of 2. Where did he get all those? I buyout his complete stock of really cheap Moss Agates, and bid on some of his reasonably priced Citrines and Jades.

Problem in this sort of games is, that if you see something strange, you can't really ask what is going on. If I would ask the guy where he got all this gems, he is going to tell me he gathered them over time. If he has a secret source of them, he isn't going to tell me. I just hope the gems aren't duped or otherwise gained illegally. It's not like buying a Rolex from the trunk of a car, where you have a clear idea that something isn't right.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:26 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 17

Day 17, Saturday morning. As usual I get up early, not because of the game, but because I simply can't sleep that long any more. Quick census for the fun of it, at 7 am there are only 39 people on. Now what can you do best when there is nobody else there? Ah yes, buy the rare things some vendors have in limited supply. So I head over to Hillsbrad, where hidden in a corner is the vendor for the pattern of Green Leather Armor. I buy one then, and later in the day I buy another pattern. Both go to guild leatherworkers. I also supply them with the heavy leather, so they can make this Green Leather Armor for me. With this done, I can now smith the Green Iron Hauberk. Perfect, it's minimum level 31, which is just the level I am now.

But smithing the hauberk needs 20 iron. So I spend a good part of the day gathering metals. A guild mate recommends an additional UI addon, Gatherer. Nice, it keeps track of all the spots where you found metal in the past. I just hope the date don't get erased by the next patch. I gather metals in Thousand Needles, where there is few iron, but lots of tin. And in Desolace, which has more iron, but higher level monsters. I then spot some iron bars in the auction house, stack of 20 for a bid of 1 gold, buyout 2 gold. The buyout is too rich for me, but I put in a bid for three stacks, and win that bid on two stacks.

All in all I make 4 green iron hauberks this day. I wear one, send one to a guild mate (for free, but he promised to send me iron later), put one on the auction house, and keep the 4th for selling later. Then I get smithing quests from an orc next to the Ogrimmar forge, who wants me to smith bronze stuff for him in exchange for patterns. I do two of these quests, using up over 100 bronze. The next quest in the series would require me to hand in iron armor pieces, and I just don't have the materials right now, so I leave it for another day.

After lunch some guild mates want to tackle Dun Gorak, a dwarven stronghold in Hillsbrad, full of elite dwarves. They share one quest with me, but for another quest I first need to do a series of quests as prerequisite, which takes some time. Then we storm the dwarven keep, which turns out to be empty, because another group just cleared it. We head for the part where the boss mob should spawn, and wait for him to reappear. Strategic mistake. He reappears, we fight him, but during the fight a lot of other dwarves respawn as well, and we get wiped out. Fortunately we get credit for the kill of the boss, so we don't have to do it again. I resurrect at the graveyard, but some group members want to walk to their corpses and rez there, which gives less damage to items, and no resurrection sickness. I can't help them, as I'm stuck outside with 10 minutes rez sickness. And they die again on the way out. Well, in the end we all get all our quests done, and I ding 32, so all is well.

I do some more quests to keep the number of quests in my quest journal below 20. I have one quest for which I need to storm another dwarven stronghold, but this one is in the Barrens, and the dwarves are not elite. On the way there I get a message on the local defense channel that "southern Barrens is under attack", and I see the quest giver NPC dead on the road. Well, I'm not going to hunt Alliance players, am I? I start killing the first dwarf outside the dwarven stronghold, when I notice a level 29 night elf NPC in stealth mode sneaking up on me, with PvP flag on, undoubtedly the guy who killed the quest NPC. What an idiot! I don't have PvP flag on, so even if I hadn't noticed him, he couldn't backstab me. So I turn around and whack him. He is fighting badly, and not using the best of his abilities to stun me. I use a special ability (which I can only use once every 30 minutes) which automatically counterattacks after each time I get hit for a couple of seconds. That is bad news for a rogue which relies on a flurry of fast dagger attacks, and I quickly take him down.

Then I notice that he isn't alone. He brought a level 29 druid, and level 26 hunter as reinforcements. They just were too slow to react to help the rogue much, I didn't notice him getting a heal from the druid. I attack the druid next, always take the healer out first. The druid transforms into bear form, but that's okay with me, that way he can't cast any nasty spells. He doesn't even think of putting faerie fire on me. Finally I go after the hunter. Who like all hunters tries to run away. But this time I'm prepared. I got some Really Sticky Glue from some quest, which immobilizes him for a few seconds. Enough to hamstring him, after which I'm faster than he is, and he goes down quickly.

I still don't see the point of this sort of PvP, even if that encounter was fun. Why did the rogue sneak up on me stealthed? Okay, if they had played better (and I worse) the three of them could probably have taken me out. I didn't gain anything from the fight, they didn't lose anything. And now I have to wait 5 minutes for the PvP flag to go away, because they are still around, but don't dare to attack me any more. I hope the battlegrounds add some purpose to PvP.

In the evening we hold a guild meeting in the arena of Ogrimmar. Wow, 39 guild members online, impressive. We discuss recruitment, and how to help each other out with crafting and resources. We pose for screenshots and somebody even tries to capture a movie with the whole guild dancing. Fun time. As it is getting late, I go to bed, but most of the guild is doing a raid on Ashenvale. Thanks guys, but not for me, I had enough of PvP for today.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 16

Day 16 starts with a plan: I finally want to do the warrior-specific Brutal Armor quest. For some strange reason this is a long level 30 quest which you get at level 20. I'm not really happy with that design. Because if you do it at level 30, the armor isn't better than the green iron armor you can smith (or get from a smith) at that point. If you do the quest at level 20, you practically need one or several high-level guildies run you through the quest, with you not contributing much.

I already did the third and the fourth part of that quest in that expedition to Razorfen Kraul, iron bars and a drop from a boss mob. The first part is very easy, killing level 21 kobolds in Stonetalon Mountains. Remains just the second part, killing miners in Hillsbrad. I start doing that, and soon ding 30. How appropriate on the level 30 warrior quest.

But then I meet a level 26 shaman who needs help killing two boss mobs in the same mines. No problem, I think. Thought wrong. This is the first time I experience a strange effect, that grouping with somebody ends me up worse off than solo. And it's not the poor guys fault, but due to a quirk in the design of the mine. In World of Warcraft the aggro range depends on the level difference between you and the mob, but can also be variable with the kind of mob. And it increases if you fight, or do other activities like opening a chest. The level 27 mobs in this mine have a huge aggro range, even on me at level 30. But on the level 26 shaman that range in a fight becomes ridiculous. He basically pulls half the mine every time we fight. We die three times from attacks by six or more level 27, until we give up. Sorry, man.

I hand in the stuff for the Brutal Armor quest, and get four more quests, three for different armor pieces, and one for a weapon. Weapon sounds interesting, but it leads to a level 40 quest, which obviously has the same problem as stated above. Besides, my guild doesn't even have level 40 players that could get me through this yet, the highest online is 35, and the highest I've seen yet in the guild is 39. I look up the quest on Thottbot, and it turns out that while you get the choice between three weapons at the end, all three of these are two-handed weapons. Damn, I'm only using one-handed weapons and shield, as every tank should. I'll do that quest at my ease at level 40 or so.

In the evening I do a census on the Alliance and Horde side. Alliance has 968 players online, highest level 50. Horde has 482 players online, highest level 60. I'm really sceptical how this will work out in the battlegrounds. Either you allow each side to bring as many people as they want, in which case the Alliance will simply outnumber the Horde 2:1. Or you limit the fight to equal numbers, in which case the Alliance players will have to wait in a queue to do the battlegrounds. Both aren't really satisfying.

I train up my level 30 warrior skills. I get a new talent, which is great: By having put all my talent points into the "Arms" branch, I now get Sweeping Strikes, an ability that makes my next five attacks hit two opponents instead of just one. Very useful when fighting against several enemies. My warrior trainer also sends me on another warrior specific quest, to visit Klannoc Macleod , pun intended. My guild mates tell me horror stories about the pit fight I have to do there to get the Berzerker Stance. But while the fight is hard, I get through this all alone and on the first try, with the help of bandages and potions.

Now having a third stance, my button bars are becoming a mess. I'm using Cosmos' "second bar" feature. But now I also turn on the "pop bar" from Cosmos for a third button bar, and start sorting my buttons out. Ouch, I notice that I was stupid. I had the Battle Shout on my Battle Stance hotbar, so whenever I was in Defensive Stance and wanted to use Battle Shout, I had to switch stances, often losing a lot of rage in the process. But Battle Shout *can* be used in Defensive Stance as well, I just had to move the button to another bar.

Meanwhile on the World of Warcraft Under Development page, Blizzard announces that the number of hotkey buttons on the standard interface will be improved from 12 to 48. And a quest tracker added. Clever bastards: They let other people offer lots of different UI mods, find out which are used most often, and then implement them themselves. Well, they also promise some improvements that aren't UI related, like Warrior generating rage when the enemy blocks, dodges, or parries. Good news for me.

I continue playing at an easier pace. I mass slaughter crabs at the Zoram strand, because they drop both clams and crab meat. With all that meat I increase my cooking skill to 150. Then I do an expedition into Desolace, where the book to train cooking beyond 150 can be found for the Horde. I also do a big tour once around Desolace to mine iron, and increase my smithing to 180. Guildmates who had smiths on the US servers tell me how great the Green Iron Hauberk is. True, but to smith it I would need a Green Leather Armor from an expert leatherworker, and nobody in the guild is that far, or has the recipe.

I continue with the other brutal armor parts, and finish two more. Both are worse than what I'm already wearing in self-made armor, but at least I get the xp for it and ding 31. I end the day doing some old quests in Stonetalon Mountains.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 15

Day 15 starts with me searching for iron. Somebody told me Thousand Needles would be a good place for that, so I search there, and pick up a lot of quests there as well. But I only find one single iron spot, and lots and lots of tin. Also useful.

Then the talk in guild chat turns to Razorfen Kraul. I have a suspicion that the place is a bit too hard for me, but I got a level 30 warrior quest there, so I join. The start is easy enough. The trench in the middle is for a fun quest from Ratchet, searching for hidden plants with the help of a gopher pet. The tunnel to the left is leading to the warrior quest boss, so I get that done. But the tunnel to the right is leading to the main boss. I ding 29 on the way, but the level 32 bats that silence us are hard, and the priest has to leave.

We head out again, train, sell loot, another group member leaves, another guildie joins, and we are still short one player. Nobody else from the guild is interested, so we end up inviting a level 29 priest from outside the guild. We are lucky, he is playing well. He is lucky too, because being the only cloth wearer in the group, we leave him lots of useful items, and he wins some rolls on blue stuff too. Besides loot, I find that the dungeon has several iron veins, so I end up with over 20 iron from the double expedition.

I get my first helmet in Razorfen Kraul, but it looks rather stupid on me. After the dungeon I start smithing will all that tin and iron I collected earlier, to increase my skill. I make a green iron helm, which has the same form, but in green looks slightly better. Still debating whether I should turn the helmet graphics off. I already turned the cloak off, because it was hiding my guild tabard. No use paying 1 gold for a guild tabard when nobody can see it.

At the end of the day I'm level 29, with 174 smithing skill. The highest level person on the server is level 59, so we will get our first level 60 this weekend, after a bit over 2 weeks. I can't help but think that by rushing so fast the guy missed a lot of the fun. Although "I was the first level 60 on this server" has a lot of bragging value, it wouldn't be worth it to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 14

Day 14 begins with me having no plans whatsoever. But that is the beauty of WoW, you just open your quest journal and you'll find something to do. Using Cosmos I not only get a color code for each quest, but the exact difficulty level. So I start with the lowest level quest in my quest log, to get it done before it turns grey and too easy.

There are two quests there for the southern part of the Barrens, killing razormane quillboars. One to collect three weapons of them, the other to kill their three leaders. I head over to there and kill a lot of them, but I can't find the third leader. I ask for advice in guild chat, and look up the info on the web, but still no luck. Either the guy spawns very slowly, or he gets killed very quickly, being the one closest to the road. But I keep killing the boarmen, until finally I find the third leader. All that killing made me ding 28.

After training I still have some money left. And my first aid skill is at 150 of 150. I know that to enable the secondary skills to pass 150, I need to buy a book somewhere. Turns out this somewhere isn't all that far, Brackenwell Village in the Dustwallow Marsh, close to the southern Barrens. I also learn how to do silk bandages from the first aid trainer in Ogrimmar, but I haven't got all that many silk yet. And guild mates could probably make me silk bags out of it, with 10 slots, so I don't cut it into bandages.

Another quest sends me to Ashenvale. Great, I hope to find some iron there. Well, I find exactly one vein of iron. Plus lots of tin, some silver, and even a gold vein, for which I'm still missing 5 mining skill. The quest is about killing dryads. It takes me some time to realize that in WoW a "dryad" is a female centaur, and not some butterfly type of faerie. Another quest done, and time to go to bed.

At this point I have /played 95 hours. Damn, 50 hours this week, even more than last week. I'm turning into a catass. :) The funny thing is that the census at 8 pm shows that the highest level player online is already level 57. And of the 20 people online from my guild, I'm definitely above average level, but barely into the top quarter. Doesn't really worry me, I don't even want to be the highest level, as then I couldn't group. It just shows how I (job, no children) spend more time playing than the average casual player (job, children), and less time than the really, really serious power gamer (no job, no children).
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 13

Playing a MMORPG is not always about achieving experience points or phat loot. Day 13 I had fun, but made practically no xp at all, and gained only some minor loot.

I started the evening with an expedition into Desolace. I mined some iron there, but in general the place was too hard for me. As warrior I don't have stealth, so the stealth harvesting techniques of my druid don't work. And at level 27 the Desolace monsters of level 32+ already have a rather large aggro radius on you. Then my ISP disconnected me for a minute, and when I logged back on I was dead. I also saw my first mithril vein, but didn't have the mining skill to mine it yet.

Then a guild mate which whom I had explored Shadowfang Keep earlier this week sent me a tell to ask me if we could do another dungeon. Sure, but I had already done all the Horde dungeons I could enter several times. So I proposed a crazy expedition: Visit the Deadmines, an Alliance dungeon. We ended up going there in a group of three, me as warrior, a priest, and a mage. I had looked on the map, and it seemed that Westfall wasn't all that far away from the Horde zeppelin station in the Stranglethorn jungle. I was a bit afraid that we might get attacked by high level murlocs on the way, but the voyage was short and uneventful.

The Deamines are interesting enough as scenery, although not so consistent as other dungeons. I mean, why is there a huge pirate ship in an underground lake at the bottom of a mine, with absolutely no connection to the ocean? We fought our way through the mines easy enough. In the goblin foundry we got swarmed by too many engineer with their robot pets and died, but managed to do it on the second try. We then reached the pirate ship, and cleared it. Finally we faced Van Cleef, and killed him, although the thieves he summons then wiped us out.

Interesting enough as a sightseeing tour. But Van Cleef was the only mob in that dungeon that still gave me xp at level 27, so I didn't level this day. I gated back to Ogrimmar, and smithed my first iron armor piece, then logged off.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 12

Day 12 I explore Ashenvale, from east to west. Especially the eastern part is nasty, having invisible spiders up to level 29. Arriving at the western end, Zoram Strand, I do a quest where I have to summon a hydra Vorsha the Slasher, from the ocean and slay it. That and my other Ashenvale quests make me ding 27.

At 8 pm I do a census of both Horde and Alliance. Horde has 541 players online, highest level 53, and 19 players of level 40 to 60. Alliance has 1010 players online, highest level 44, and only 6 players level 40 to 60. Seems that the Alliance has more players, while the Horde has more power gamers.

On a second run to Ashenvale from the Barrens, I meet a big group of about 20 Alliance players, some with PvP flag on, which are just crossing the border into the Barrens. Not much I can do, but they can't attack me, and so I just give a warning on the Barrens local defence chat channel. A good bit further into Ashenvale I meet a night elf hunter of my level, who also has the PvP flag on. Well, if he wants ... I whack him. But he just turns his speed buff on and runs away. Nothing I can do, except kill his pet. He comes back with 3 friends and they kill me. Did I mention how pointless PvP in MMORPG often is? This is a typical example. Most people only attack if they have superior numbers or levels.

Back in the Barrens the Alliance invasion has reached the Crossroads. Which is a strategic blunder, because that is the central airport of the Horde side on this continent. Everybody calls in his guild mates, the Horde soon outnumbers (and outlevels, see above) the Alliance forces, and they all go down. I participate, but the main difficulty again is getting an enemy into the range of my sword. I manage to hamstring one, but he is only level 17, and the fight is pretty pointless again.

Time to do something fun instead. A guild group gathers to do Blackfathom Deeps. Having done that instanced dungeon six times with my night elf druid on the US servers, I know it well. But it is interesting that for a Horde group it plays slightly different, because the quests are different. The group is level 25 to 27, me as tank, a priest, a shaman, a rogue, and a mage. Nice setup. And all good players. We kill the turtle and I finally get the Tortoise Shell armor, but end up not using it. Sure, it has 100 more armor than my Shining Silver Breastplate, but it has absolutely no stats boni.

Short time later the mage goes linkdead. We continue while waiting for him to come back, but he never comes back. Surprisingly we still manage to finish the whole dungeon with just 4 people, doing all quests, and killing the optional big hydra mob at the end. The hydra drops a very powerful blue 2-handed sword. I lose the roll against the rogue (who later finds out that rogues can't use 2-handed weapons), but I don't mind. I prefer 1-handed weapon plus shield anyway, my role is to tank, not to deal big damage.

But I don't end up empty-handed. Because one of the quests in BFD is to dive for a stone in the temple pool, which then summons a huge water elemental. Who then drops a glowing stone, which starts another quest. You just need to hand in the stone and get the Outlaw Sabre, a blue 1-handed sword that is better than the Wingblade I had up to now. On that happy note I end day 12.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 11

Day 11, Monday evening at 6 pm, I do my usual census, with the usual result of slightly below 500 players. Turns out I'm taking this census at off-peak time. In the UK it is only 5 pm, not everybody is home from work/study yet, or people are still busy with family and other things. A second census at 9 pm shows 604 people online on the Horde side, the highest level being 50.

I want to explore Ashenvale today, but I don't really get far. Some guildies want to do Shadowfang Keep and could use a tank. So I head over to Silverpine and join them, in spite of having done all the quests already. And I end up doing nothing but Shadowfang Keep all evening long.

The first run is kind of a draw. One of the group members is only level 19, which makes the things a bit more difficult. Aggro radius in WoW depends strongly on the level difference, and a level 19 in Shadowfang Keep is working like a mob magnet. Still we manage to get to the final boss, Arugal. He kills three of us, including me, before the last two kill him. Unfortunately the other two dead are the rezzers, and by the time we release and run back, the corpse of Arugal has gone, and they can't loot his head for the quest.

One of the two healers who didn't get the head wants to do it again, the other is fed up. Especially since if Shadowfang has one fault, it is a too big level difference. At my level 26 I'm a good match for Arugal, but the mobs at the start of the dungeon are grey and don't give any xp, while the main part mobs are low green and give very little xp. But I agree to help the other healer to do it again. Reshuffling of the group occurs, with people who got the head leaving and others joining. That takes some time.

Finally we start the second run. Our rogue isn't home, and is playing on a laptop with a flaky internet connection. He keeps getting disconnects, which doesn't help. Our average level is lower than on the first run, which doesn't help either. At the start of the hard part of the dungeon, where the level 24 elite mobs are, we get swarmed twice and wiped out twice. And the rogue has so much lag that he decides to give up. No chance to make it to the end, we give up.

While the end was a bit disappointing, and I only made half a level of xp in the two runs, the evening was not a total loss. Because I get a very nice blue shield, a nice blue ring, and some minor green loot. Still level 26. I hope I can do Blackfathom Deeps tomorrow, I think I've done everything in Shadowfang.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 10

Day 10, a Sunday, I'm playing all day, but I'm doing the census at 4 pm, where I think most people will be on. 599 players on Horde side, highest level 48. I've been asked how I do the census. I'm using the Cosmos UI mod, and that has a census module. It is basically a script that runs a series of /who commands and tallies the result. As I always do a purge of the data before the census, the result is an instant picture of the population at the moment the census is taken. If I wouldn't do the purge, I would get a cummulative result, which is the sort of thing reported on WoWCensus. The cummulative census is counting every secondary character and mule, so it risks to distort the result over time. The instant census at least counts every player only once.

And whatever Blizzard is saying about census numbers being wrong, by having a look at the series of instant pictures, without the distortion by cummulation, you get some indisputable facts. For example that priest is the least popular class, or that significantly more people play Alliance than Horde. It also tells you that in spite of all the warrior protests, warrior is a popular class. One of the most popular classes on the Horde side, together with hunter. And only slightly inferior in numbers to paladin on the Alliance side. They can't be that bad. I quite enjoy playing my troll warrior Raslebol on Runetotem.

Anyway, what did I do all Sunday long? Glad you asked. I started the day with a quest that led me to Tarren Mill in the Hillsbrad Foothills. I had to kill Syndicate shadow mages in a keep there. While doing so, I see an orc prisoner I can't interact with. I conclude that he is a quest target, look up the quest on Thottbot, and get "The Rescue" quest from Tarren Mill. Turns out that it is more difficult than I thought. My second raid on the keep is a lot less smooth than the first one, and I die three times before finishing the quest. Getting rooted by an archer character with a web is bad news for a warrior. Good that the penalty for dying in WoW is so minimal. At least I ding 24 on the occasion.

Having had enough of Hillsbrad, I move to Stonetalon and do some quests there. I remember a fun quest in Windshear Crag, where you get to play James Bond, distracting the enemy with a huge explosion, then grabbing his secret plans. I was under the impression that it was a neutral quest from Ratchet, but unfortunately it turns out that quest is for Alliance only, and I can't get it. So I have lunch instead.

In the afternoon someone on guild chat is looking for people to do Wailing Caverns. I have finished all the quests there, but I still think I missed something: The disciple of Nevrax, who stands right at the entrance, and tells you to talk to him once you have killed all the fanglords. So I join the guild group, we kill everything in the caverns, and then I talk to the disciple. That starts a special event. Not really a quest, the guy doesn't have an exclamation mark over his head. But when you talk to him, he tells you that he needs to awaken the sleeping Nevrax, whose bad dreams are causing all the monsters in these caves. So you need to escort him to the sleeper, defending him from all the monsters on the way. Then while he does the ritual to awaken the sleeper, you get attacked by several waves of monsters from all sides. And finally the awakening causes a huge murloc to rise from the waters. We kill the murloc, and I get a lucky roll and win a very nice blue ring. Plus everybody gets the glowing shard, which trapped the bad dreams of Nevrax, which starts another quest. Easy quest, just visit three people in Ratchet, the Barrens, and Thunders Bluff, to get over 5k xp and a quest reward I can't use. Fun event, well worth doing, and I ding 25.

I really like the WoW instanced dungeons. Remembering the Blackfathom Deep instance my Alliance druid had so much trouble getting his staff from, I head over there to see what Horde quests are available for there. I take the back exit from Ogrimmar, which leads directly into the Barrens, but then turn right and walk upriver into Ashenvale. While that is certainly the quickest way to reach Ashenvale, it ends me up at exactly the opposite end from BFD. And with my level 25 in a corner which is inhabited by level 28 to 30 mobs, not safe. But a warlock is shouting that he is looking for more group members, I get an invite, and warlocks can summon a party member to them, so I don't have to walk all the way through the zone. I get summoned to the Zoram Strand, where there is a flight path I can tag, so next time I can fly there from Crossroads. Great.

Unfortunately the group I'm in is not so great. Group leader wants to set loot to "need before greed", which would prevent people to roll on loot items they can't use. Somebody protests, and we have to use the normal group loot, where everybody can roll on all green and blue items. We agree to pass on stuff we can't use. Ha ha! The first blue drop we get is the Tortoise Armor from the big named turtle, mail armor with an extremely high armor class. I roll higher than the other warrior in the group and think I'll get it. Then the druid rolls on it too and wins the mail armor he can't wear. And he can't even sell it to other players, because it is "binds when picked up". Worth only 16 silver to a NPC vendor, while it would have been a good armor for me. Damn. What an idiot.

Next thing that happens is that we get swarmed by too many monsters, and the druid dies. He is the only healer, only one with rez. And the warlock, who can protect somebody with a soulstone, which would allow a dead person to resurrect himself, had put that soulstone on himself, instead of on the rezzer. The druid is angry and logs off. God, sometimes I hate pickup groups. You meet far too many idiots. Fighting our way out to get another healer, we get hit by a strange lag spike in the middle of a fight, and we all die. The group splits up, and I'm not unhappy to be rid of them.

To make up for the bad group, I join another guild group. Much better. We are heading for Shadowfang Keep in Silverpine Forest. Never been there. This turns out to be a very stylish haunted castle. Lots of atmosphere, great fun. And good loot and great xp for my level, so I ding 26 there. The keep is densely populated, but we are doing well by me pulling with my bow and avoiding to get swarmed. Until I try to pull the wolfmaster, and he decides to bring his 6 wolves with him. Ouch! We get wiped, and try again, this time first pulling the wolves. Much better.

Finally we arrive at the chambers of the evil archmage Arugal, whose head we are supposed to collect. The tricky bastard has spells to transform group members into monsters, which makes them attack their friends. Then he teleports into different corners of the room, and pelts us with shadow magic bolts doing lots of damage. We get wiped out twice before we learn how to handle him. Very exciting, but finally we manage to kill him. I pass on the blue loot he drops, as it is cloth armor. Loot distribution is a lot more hassle free in a guild group.

The end of the day finds me happy, having dinged three times today, from 23 to 26. So I end the day by deliberately doing something very stupid. I have already won the auction for one iridescent pearl during the day, not cheap at over 1 gold. There is a second one in the AH, but somebody keeps outbidding me. So I take the buyout option and pay 3 gold for the pearl, which is *far* too much. But it allows me to finally smith that blue Shining Silver Breastplate. Less armor class than the Tortoise Armor I missed, but a +14 bonus on strength and +6 on stamina more than make up for that. I think that stat boni are more important than pure armor class anyway. I'm broke now, having trouble paying for the level 26 warrior skills, but being able to do irresponsible stupid things is one of the advantages of a game over real life.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 9

Day 9 is a Saturday, and I play most of the day. That gives me the opportunity to do the census at different times. At 8 am the server is rather empty, with 62 Horde players online. At 10:30 am this has gone up to 220 Horde players. In the afternoon at 4 pm there are 538 Horde and 914 Alliance players. And that doesn't diminish much in the evening, where at 10 pm there are still 503 Horde online. Seems that Runetotem like the US servers has an Alliance to Horde ratio of nearly 2 to 1. Not well balanced. On the other side a closer look at the census reveals that the Horde has more higher level players, 22 of level 35+, with the Alliance only having 7. On both sides the highest level player is level 46 now.

The census in the morning reveals one principal weakness of localized servers. You need to build them big enough to withstand the big population peak at prime time, but if people from only one time zone play, you get times where your server is hardly used at all. Okay, you can patch at those times, but it is still rather inefficient, and a waste of hardware.

With all that playing today, I don't really level much, ending up at level 23. But I get my cooking skill up to over 50, so I can now make food which gives +4 to stamina and spirit. First Aid goes over 100, to wool bandages. And smithing to 150, where I can make my first blue piece of armor, the Shining Silver Breastplate. That is I could make it if I had any idea how to get Iridescent Pearls. But there aren't any on the auction house, and I haven't come across any from mobs yet.

So I spent much of the day running around on different Barrens quests, or to mine copper and tin there. I then do quests in Stonetalon Mountains, because I have a Ratchet quest leading me there. With all the Ratchet quests I've done by the end of the day, I'm now considered as "friendly" there. Nice, I like positive faction.

A good hour or so is wasted looking for a quest giver named Ebru. Yesterdays Wailing Caverns expedition had me get a quest shared by another player, and I need to return to the quest giver I never met to hand it in. Problem is I just can't find him. He is marked as a yellow dot on my map, but I don't see him on top of the Wailing Caverns cave entrance, nor inside. I fight my way down, but can't get below the initial point either. After an inquiry in guild chat it turns out Ebru is in a mini-cave between the cavern roof and the cave itself. The cave mouth is formed like a head with a mouth and eyes, and the quest giver is in the right eye. Bloody hard to find, no wonder I didn't have the quest on my first Wailing Cavern trip.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 8

On day 8 I do the census a bit later, at 8 pm, to see if that changes anything. It doesn't. 461 characters online on the Horde side, highest level now 41.

I do some smithing and auction house transactions, then head over to Thunder's Bluff to hand in the main Wailing Cavern quest. I receive a very nice blue sword, the Wingblade. So now I'm armed with a bow and a sword, instead of a gun and an axe, and I have zero skill in my new weapons. So I start whacking low level mobs in Mulgore and Durotar. At the southern tip of Durotar there are some low level centaurs, half of which are armed with bows. Ideal for practicing a ranged weapon, as they don't run up to you.

Then I head for the Crossroads. Two quests from the Wailing Caverns not finished, one for collecting Serpentblooms, the other to kill a mob in the non-instanced part of the caves. Hey, maybe I can solo these, let's try that. The plan fails insofar as I get invited to a pickup group standing in front of the Wailing Caverns. They do have some quests I didn't even know about, and share those with me. Now I'm up to 4 unsolved quest, and enter the Wailing Caverns with them to do these.

After killing the first Fanglord, the other warrior in the group suddenly has to leave. We continue with 4 people, but still manage to kill all three remaining Fanglords. Then we fail twice to kill Verdan the Everliving. Afterwards I would like to do the escort quest to wake up the sleeper of the Wailing Caverns, which you can only do if you killed the four Fanglords. But after two wipeouts two of the four group members are fed up. The remaining guy starts the quest before we can discuss that further, and we get wiped out again, to a "told you so" comment of the not present healer. The group splits up. Now you know why I prefer guild groups to pickup groups.

Anyway, I got some more loot, and I am level 21 at the end of day 8.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Auto Assault Beta

GuildWars isn't the only NCSoft game in development, they are also working on Auto Assault, a strange MMORPG in which players battle each other with armed cars. Now there is a message on the Auto Assault homepage that you can sign up for beta. Only you can't. If you follow the link, you end up on a login screen from NCSoft, then you log in, and you reach your account management screen. And no Auto Assault beta signup anywhere.

I don't know if I just missed something, or if some strange settings of my browser end up in getting me nowhere, or if the beta signup is really borked. In any case, I tried for a quarter of an hour to sign up, and failed. I'm more of a sword and sorcery guy anyway.

[Edit: On a second try the reason why I couldn't sign up became clear. The beta signup page now says that the beta is restricted to US citizens.]
- posted by Tobold @ 9:45 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Cheating in MMORPG

Mentioning IGE predictably started a debate on cheating, and whose fault that is. Here is my position: IGE isn't cheating, because they aren't even playing. They might have some mule characters in the game, but those are just to hold their stock. The farmers aren't cheating either, as long as they aren't using bots to farm. They are playing the game in a particular way, but inside the rules of the game. They don't comply with the social rules of the game, they aren't playing nice, which makes them a nuisance. But they aren't breaking any game rules, unless they are really harrassing other players. In cases where selling virtual items is against the EULA, they are in infringement of the EULA, and thus "illegal", and could rightfully get banned. But that is a breach of contract between them and Blizzard, not an issue of "cheating" in the game and ethics.

Buyers of virtual items and currency from IGE, or EBay, or whereever, are cheating. As Zonk said, it is like using a Gameshark to cheat in a console game. Or a cheat code. Now I don't own a Gameshark, but I have used cheat codes in single player console games, or single player PC games. And there is nothing wrong with that, because whether I cheat in GTA:Vice City or not isn't hurting anybody. If a mission in the game is too hard for me, I have the choice of either being stuck, or cheating to make it easier. I prefer cheating.

Now comes the tricky part: If you were playing a two-player game on the console against an opponent, using a cheat would obviously be unethical, unless your opponent agreed to that handicap. So is cheating in a MMORPG unethical? Is it unethical to buy gold from IGE because I get an unfair advantage over an opponent? Or is buying gold just like cheating in a single-player game a decent alternative to getting stuck and quitting?

In spite of WoW having PvP, I tend to consider it as a single-player game. Especially when you are playing on a PvE server like me. A MMORPG is not a race, where who advances fastest is the winner. The "race for level 60" is inherently unfair, as it mainly depends on how many hours per week you are able to play. People are often complaining that buying virtual goods with real world money is "bringing real world, out-of-game advantages into the game". But being able to play 100 hours per week is also a real world, out-of-game advantage, which gets you even further in the game than 100 gold from IGE.

So in the end the trade in virtual property is kind of balancing out inherent unfairness in the game, selling time for money. The people that are buying from IGE are cheating to compensate for their lack of playing time. Blizzard does have the right to ban the buyers, as well as the sellers, as both aren't complying with the EULA. But first they would need to be able to catch them, which is pretty much impossible. IGE claims that none of their clients has ever been banned. And that might well be the truth. Because sending a friend, or your spouse, or a guild mate 100 gold by mail is obviously legal in the game. So as long as you can't control whether a sum of real world money changed hands in the other direction, how are you determining whether the gold transfer was legal or illegal? IGE isn't going to tell Blizzard.

If Blizzard would want to stop IGE, they would need to sue them. And I don't think they are going to do that. The experts aren't really sure who would win such a case. There has been a widely published case in China where a player successfully won against a game company in a virtual property case. But in the US all game companies still claim that all the virtual items in the game belong to them, not the players, thus IGE can't sell what they don't own. But if IGE is "taking a fee" for facilitating the transfer of gold from one player to another, and that transfer would be legal if there was no money involved, the legal issue starts getting complicated. Armchair lawyers can argue the case on message boards for days, but nobody really knows how it would work out in a real court. Plus it would be bad marketing to insist on the message that all the items in the game belong to Blizzard, not the players, because the players have a strong attachment to these items, and a strong belief in them owning these items.

So in summary: Farmers not playing nice are bad, but legal. Farmers selling gold are against the EULA in many games, thus could be banned, but they aren't easy to catch. Buyers are cheating, and could be banned as well, but cheating isn't necessarily unethical, because you can't win a MMORPG. IGE is on shifty legal ground. But ethically they are just the middleman between the buyer and the seller. You can't blame them for the existance of farmers and buyers, just as you can't blame EBay for matching sellers and buyers. The only way to stop the trade in virtual property is to make the transfer of virtual property in game impossible, which would be hugely unpopular. The best approach is thus making the acquiring of virtual property so much fun, that nobody would want to "outsource" that activity. And World of Warcraft is at least half way there.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:48 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 7

Day 7 I log on in the evening, as usual, and first do a census. 479 players on the Horde side, with the highest level being 39. With me and my level 19 being somewhere in the middle of the distribution.

I travel from Ogrimmar to Thunder's Bluff to hand in the Lost Satchel. There I pick up a quest to sends me to the Sepulcher in Silverpine forest. No problem, as I wanted to pass Undercity anyway to learn how to wield swords. I travel from Undercity to Silverpine and further to Tarren Mill to tag the flight paths in that region. The exploration xp make me ding 20. I love it when I level without having done anything special for it.

Back from the undead lands I head for the Crossroads in the Barrens and hand in another quest. Ouch! Turns out this is part of a series, and for the next part I have to visit ... Thunder's Bluff and the Sepulcher in Silverpine. Grrrr! I end up doing the same voyage again, only slightly easier by the fact that I can now ride a bat from Undercity to Silverpine. But it's worth it, as the Thunder's Bluff part of the quest gives me a very well rewarded quest for the Wailing Caverns, where I wanted to go anyway.

So, next stop Wailing Caverns, after having found 4 more guild mates for a group. This is exactly what I am playing on the Euro servers for: The ability to group with guild mates. And WoW is quite open to that, our group ranges from level 19 to 25, without we being punished with low xp. Wailing caverns are huge, it takes us something like 3 hours to clear it out. But the xp are good, and I come out literally loaded with "phat lewt", including my first blue drop, a bow. Sigh, I was using gun up to now, I'll have to change. And the blue quest reward for killing the four Lords of the Fang is a blue sword, so I'll have to change from axe to sword as well. Well, probably a good idea to stay flexible.

The end of the day finds me well advanced in level 20. As I have now played one week, I'm doing a /played command to see how many hours I played: 1 day 21 hours, that is 45 hours in my first Euro WoW week. That's a lot, even for me, I tend to play between 30 and 40 hours per week. I wonder how people got to level 39 in the same week. Several players taking turns in playing one character? Or somebody on holiday, or unemployed, doing nothing but playing all day? Are they leveling just for the fun of it, the l33t status, or are they planning to be the first to farm gold at level 60 to sell it on IGE while the dollar value is still high? I don't know.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW User Interface Mods

Grog asked me to write something about World of Warcraft interface mods. I must confess I'm not very qualified to do so. But here is the little I know: World of Warcrafts interface is XML-based and can be modified without calling the wrath of Blizzard upon you. Thus hundreds of user interface mods have sprung up.

There are even websites just about WoW UI mods, you might want to have a look at .

But frankly, for many of us this is scary stuff. You should know that for using a "bot", for example for fishing, you can be banned, your account closed, and you losing your virtual existance. And some of these UI mods are walking a thin line between making the UI more friendly and cheating. Furthermore the first Trojan programs have turned up, disguising as WoW UI mods. And finally the installation of these mods is not always trivial. With every patch you risk the mod becoming incompatible with the new version of WoW.

The easiest solution is to use Cosmos, which is a collection of many different UI mods, and covers all the essentials. Like adding an extra hotkey bar, making fishing faster without using a bot, adding notes to the map, or giving you a better view of the health and mana status of your group. By running Cosmos.exe you also automatically update your UI mods. You can also upload your data collected with Cosmos to Thottbot, the most complete database site.

Of course there is a hidden downside. It turns out that Cosmos / Thottbot is owned by OGaming, which in turn is owned by IGE, the leading company in the secondary market of virtual worlds. That has caused some outcry, as IGE is considered by many to be the driving force behind the infamous "chinese adena farmer" type of player. By using the Cosmos / Thottbot link you are providing game data to a company that might potentially use these data to make a profit. As profit is a dirty word on the internet, some people shrink back in horror from the prospect. Me, I realize that nothing in life is really free. And I was aware that I was sending these game data to somebody, and that these data have some value. But I considered that as fair payment for the use of the otherwise free Cosmos and Thottbot.

And the fact that IGE is behind those is not changing my attitude. Because I do not think that it is IGE's fault if there are farmers in MMORPG. It is the fault of the game developers if there is an activity in the game which is so necessary and so unfun that you prefer to pay real world money to somebody to do this activity for you. IGE is just the middle man in this trade, not the driving force. But I haven't bought anything from them yet. And in WoW I really don't see the need, earning enough gold in WoW to pay for your training and gear is fun enough. And that is the correct solution of the problem, make achieving virtual currency and gear so much fun, that nobody would be willing to pay real money for it. No buyers, no farmers.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 6

I log on at 6 pm with some apprehension, but it turns out to be unfounded. Somebody at Blizzard's found the spot where to kick the server, and the game is running perfectly, with neither lag nor crashes. 445 Horde players online, very broad distribution, with the highest level now 37.

After some smithing and AH transactions I move into the Barrens, where there seems to be a neverending supply of quests. Plus there is copper, tin, and silver, everything an aspiring smith needs. Although I'm slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that all profits from tradeskills are immediately eaten up by the cost of training and buying the recipes. The white items you can make with easy to find materials don't sell, and for the items that do sell you need hard to find gems, which you mostly need to get from other players.

I reach level 19 in the Barrens. Then two level 18 guild mates want to do Ragefire Chasm. So I join them, as I now got the one quest that was missing last time. Nobody else joins us, but with me as level 19 tank, and a level 18 priest and shaman we have no problems finishing the instance. No deaths, obviously fewer xp than my first run, but more loot. Harmonious loot distribution between one mail wearer, one leather wearer, and one cloth wearer.

The group is working so well that we decide to go to the Barrens afterwards. We are doing the series of centaur quests, culminating with one of the best quests in the game: Counterattack. In that quest an army of centaurs is attacking a horde outpost, and you are right in the middle, between battling centaurs and horde NPC. You need to battle your way through to the centaur warchief, kill him, and bring a piece of his banner back. Much fun, we end up doing the battle twice. No items as reward for the last step, but the previous step earned me my first ring. And the last step has a huge reputation point award, making me "honored" in Ogrimmar, which reduces the cost of things bought there by 10%. Useful for smithing components, the strong flux now costs 18 silver instead of 20.

I end the day still at level 19, but not far from level 20. Which is good, because I also reach 125 blacksmithing skill, and I need level 20 to become expert blacksmith, which will allow me to progress beyond skill 150.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 5

One day missed and I'm falling behind. During weekdays I can only play about 4 hours in the evening. I log on, and there are 405 Horde players online, the highest 3 being all level 34. And the level with the most players is level 20, while I'm still 18. Sadly that isn't going to change tonight.

But some good news first: As expected the big bronze knifes are selling well. I buy some bronze in the AH, and make some more of them. I also gain enough skill to make bronze shoulderpads. I make one for me, and one for the AH, which sells 5 minutes later. Another money maker, it seems.

Unfortunately lag is making all this rather difficult, every AH and mailbox transaction takes minutes, and sometimes all NPC disappear. I know what is coming all too well, from Icecrown. And yes, the server crashes, and doesn't come back up for one hour. Not really surprising, after Blizzard's announcement that the European version of WoW sold 280,000 copies on the first day (more than the US version, which had 240,000), and another 100,000 over the weekend.

Afterwards the lag is better, but I get frequent disconnects, and the login is difficult. I manage to hand in the quest items from Ragfire Chasm in Thunder Bluff and Undercity. Then make it to the Barrens for a quest or two. But then I get disconnected again and can't get back in. Day 5 over, and I'm not really happy.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:55 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Guild Wars - Release Date

In a press release NCSoft and ArenaNet announced that their latest MMORPG GuildWars will be released on 28th April 2005 in both North America and Europe. They expect the game to be a huge success, as they are trying a business model without monthly fees, in which volume of sales and the income from expansion sets make up for the missing monthly fees.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:55 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 3 (and 4)

Sunday I log on at 8 am. Most people are still in bed, only 41 Horde players on, highest is level 26. Only 30 ms of latency. The day starts well, I find the pattern for Gemmed Copper Gauntlets in my mail, from a guild mate. I make three pairs, wear one, and put the other two up on auction. Then I decide to head for the Barrens and do quests.

One quest has me collecting 15 centaur bracers, which means killing a lot more than 15 centaurs. And I remember something from beta: There is a Kolkar Booty Chest in a centaur village northwest of the crossroads. The chest respawns quickly, always has good loot for the level, but it is locked. And by killing centaurs there, one can find the key. This way I loot that quest four or five times. Only thing I can use is an 8-slot bag, I only have 6-slot bags up to now. The other green loot items I send to guildies.

In between Barrens quests, I always head back to Ogrimmar, selling loot, doing a bit of smithing, and putting smithed goods up on auction. My copper armor rarely sells. But I can make a magical copper axe with decent stats, and the thing sells like hotcakes. While I'm there, I also check what other people are selling. Surprise, surprise, the first blue item is in the AH, and it is a good 1h axe that would be just right for me. Bid at 75 silver, buyout at 1 gold 50. I just have 1 gold, but the timer is down to medium, so I place a 75 silver bid. Bingo! Two hours later I win the auction. The axe is called Serpent's Kiss, some people must be high enough for Wailing Caverns now, where it drops. While my smithed axes (I was using one) do 8.6 damage per second, the Serpent's Kiss does 13.4 dps, plus a proc that deals additional poison damage. A steal at that price.

More and more guild members come online, over 20 are online in the afternoon. I do one guild group for the quest to storm Northwatch Hold. First time my warrior is in a full group. It's working well. I'm using defensive stance all the time, so I can taunt. As reward I get a gun, so I spend 10 sp in Thunders Bluff to learn gun. Trolls normally have a racial bonus to thrown weapons, but the gun deals twice the damage than the best throwing axe I can buy. Forget about trollish tradition, I like shooting guns, even if I'm not a dwarf.

In the afternoon a census counts 498 Horde players, the highest being level 27. I'm doing more Barrens quests. The undead apothecary gives a series of two quests which are very easy, and the reward is a very nice staff. Good to know, but my blue axe is better. Anyway, I'm sticking to 1h weapon and shield. That is not only the best "tank" setup, it also allows me to use shield bash, a move that interrupts enemy spellcasting. Very useful. With all these quests I'm doing, I'm already level 17.

Late afternoon and more level 16 to 18 guild mates are online. Time for the first instanced dungeon: Ragefire Chasm. I show the others how to get the quest for the end bosses from Thrall in Ogrimmar. Name sounds familiar? That's the main character of the orc campaign in Warcraft 3, now a NPC chieftain of Ogrimmar. The others have quests for Ragefire that I don't have, we share, and end up with 4 quests to do.

In Ragefire I improve my strategy a bit, and sometimes chance between stances, so I can use the battle shout buff. The other group members are a warlock, two rogues, and a shaman, so funnily my battle shout is the only buff, not counting the totems. Having read up on warriors I knew that Tactical Mastery is the most important talent, and I already got 3 ranks in there, allowing me to keep 15 rage when changing from one stance to the other.

I die once in a tough combat against Taragaman the Hungerer, but the shaman rezzes me. We manage to kill one of the two end bosses, and do all the other quests, but can't find the other end boss. Looking around we notice that many mobs have already respawned. Then the shaman has to go afk because of Real Life calling him, and without a healer we promptly get wiped out. While waiting for him to come back, I find a map of Ragefire Chasm here. The second boss is behind a very dark, hard to see passage. When we are ready again, we fight our way there and kill him easy enough. Dungeon finished, except for the Lost Satchel quest, which we didn't get for some reason. Need to remember to get that one in Thunders Bluff. Good that there is a flight path there, otherwise it's a rather long trek.

After Ragefire I'm level 18. And I'm outleveling my armor, still wearing lots of copper stuff. I found tin in the Barrens, even some silver, but my blacksmithing skill isn't high enough, I can only make the very first bronze item, the boots. So I go to the AH and blow my money on copper bars and rough stones, the reasonably priced ones. That gets my blacksmithing skill up to 105. I can make the Big Bronze Knife now, should be another sales hit. I make one, put it in the AH and stop playing for the day. Watching TV with my wife is good too.

Day 4 of the journal will be skipped. This monday evening I'm going to play in my new D&D v3.5 campaign. Good old pen & paper role-playing.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:00 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
World of Warcraft Tradeskills

The design of combat systems in most MMORPGs has converged to an auto-attack system combined with pressing special action keys. To find innovation in MMORPGs, one has to look to crafting systems, which show a much wider range of variation. Tradeskills in World of Warcraft are innovative, but they are both a step forward, and a step back in development. This guide describes the WoW crafting system, what is new and what is old, and why there have to be some restrictions.

The MMORPGs of the last years have shown a remarkable variety of different crafting and tradeskill systems. There have been games where resources come from monster loot drops, other games where you extract resources from nodes, and even one game where you can extract resources with a harvester anywhere, but need prospect the area first for the highest concentration. In some games, your execution of crafting steps (or combines) can end with either success or failure, while in others a mix of random chance, skill and quality of ingredients determines the quality of the crafted item. In most games, you craft by a simple click, but in other games, where you need to make several choices in the process, or even play a mini-game to craft. In several games it is possible to follow a pure crafting career, without having to go adventuring and kill monsters. But in all of these games, mastering a tradeskill took many, many hours of often highly repetitive grind.

What is new in World of Warcraft is that crafting is extraordinarily hassle-free, and does not have any grind. The highest possible skill level is 300, and every attempt to make an item not only succeeds, but also has up to 100% chance to gain you one skill point, depending on the color code of the recipe. Furthermore you can make several items, and gain several skill points, with one single click, provided you have all the materials. It is thus theoretically possible to master a tradeskill with less than 300 clicks. And if you just count the time needed to click on the craft button and wait for the timer, you can master the skill in less than one hour, provided you have all the resources at hand.

Where World of Warcraft takes a step back to a previous era of MMORPGs is that your crafting skill is linked to your adventuring level. You can't even start most tradeskills until you have level five, and every further step of 75 skill points requires you to have an appropriate minimum level. You need a minimum level to master a tradeskill, which is between level 35 and 45, depending on the skill. Besides this direct level requirement, there are indirect ones: resources either drop from monsters, or are guarded by them, and the higher level the resource, the stronger the monster you need to overcome. Training crafting skills, learning new recipes, or buying resources from other players costs money, and that is another indirect link to your adventuring level, as higher level characters are generally richer. So making a "pure" craftsman character in World of Warcraft is impossible.

The reason for this step back is something I already mentioned in the EQ2 tradeskills review: Creation of items by tradeskills competes with looting items from monsters. Thus a crafting system needs to pose challenges, so that crafting an item is as difficult as gaining it in combat. World of Warcraft went for gathering resources as main challenge for the average crafter, with the added difficulty of paying for training and recipes. High-level characters with lots of money can buy all resources from other players and master a tradeskill in a very short time, but there is a limit of two primary tradeskills that a character can learn. And the level limit to skill advancement stops the high-level character from doing the other tradeskills with a secondary low-level alt.

There are twelve tradeskills in World of Warcraft. Three of these are labeled as secondary skills: Cooking, Fishing, and First Aid. Any character can have any number of these secondary tradeskills. Of the other nine tradeskills, the primary ones, you can only choose two. Lets discuss the secondary tradeskills first:

Cooking is the art of turning the meat of slain beasts into food, with the help of vendor bought spices. You need a cooking fire to do so, but if there is none available, you can make a campfire with flint and tinder, and some vendor bought wood. Eating food regenerates your hitpoints a lot faster than normal. In addition to that, some food also gives a temporary buff to your stamina and spirit, thus increasing you maximum hitpoints, and making hitpoint and mana regeneration faster.

First aid is somewhat similar to cooking. Humanoid enemies often drop raw textile materials, like linen, wool, or silk. With the first aid skill you can turn these textiles into bandages, which then can be used to heal yourself or others. Unfortunately this requires some concentration, so using bandages to heal yourself in combat can be interrupted. Bandages regenerate your hitpoints faster than food, but don't give a bonus to stamina or spirit.

Fishing is mainly used to catch fish, which can be used for cooking, for some alchemy recipes, and for feeding some hunter pets. You also have a tiny chance to fish an item out of the water. The more dangerous the place is you fish, the better are the fish and items found. Unfortunately fishing is the most boring of all twelve tradeskills, as it doesn't require you to move. You can stand at one place and repeatedly fish. That led quickly to players using third-party software to macro ("bot") fishing, which then caused Blizzard not only to ban using such sort of software, but also to significantly reduce both the amount of money vendors pay for fish you catch and don't need and the chance to find items. Fishing is not really profitable any more, thus mainly used by hunters with cat pets.

Let us now turn to the primary tradeskills. I'll discuss tradeskills of the same category together, pointing out differences when there are any:

The first category is tradeskills is resource gathering: herbalism, mining and skinning. Herbalism and mining give you a special "find resources" skill, which makes resources of the relevant type appear as a golden dot on your mini-map. You can only have one "find" type of skill active at any time, which includes tracking and the dwarves’ "find treasure" skill. Each golden dot represents a resource node, an herb or a mining spot. You right-click on them, and after a short gathering/mining animation a loot window opens, from which you can take your herb or ore. Skinning works differently. After you have looted a slain beast, you can right-click it again, and get a loot window with leather. There is no find skill for skinning, but you can skin beasts killed by other players. All the gathering tradeskills are pure moneymakers. Resources are valuable to other players, and can easily be sold in the auction house. People that aren't interested in crafting can nevertheless take two gathering skills for added income.

Tailoring, blacksmithing, and leatherworking are the basic crafting skills to produce equipment. All three produce armor. But each of them produces also additional useful items, for example armor kits from leatherworking, bags from tailoring, or keys from blacksmithing. There is an obvious advantage in taking the crafting skill that corresponds to the type of armor your character can wear. As long as you keep your crafting skill up, you can then always supply yourself with useful armor. At higher levels you can even produce "magic" armor with stats boosts. But as I mentioned earlier, crafted items are in competition with looted or quest items, and crafted armor is not always the best available armor for a level.

Alchemy is my personal favorite tradeskill, because potions are always useful, and there is very little competition from potions found as loot or quest rewards. The downside is that alchemy requires the most work and materials, as the effect of potions lasts never more than one hour, so they are consumables. You will use a lot more potions per level than you need to create armor pieces. There are basically two types of potions: One type buffs you for 30 or 60 minutes, increasing your stats, your hitpoints, your armor, or giving you other beneficial effects. You can drink several different buff potions and run around with several quite useful buffs. The second type is immediate effect or short duration potions. They heal your hitpoints, refill your mana, increase your rage, enable you to run very quickly for a short time, or even make you invincible for a few seconds. Unfortunately all of the second type of potion share the same two-minute timer. If you drink one of them, you can't use the same or any other short duration potion for the next two minutes.

Engineering is a special tradeskill that produces a wide range of useful, often funny items. Engineers make guns, scopes to improve guns, and ammunition. They can create bombs to throw at their enemies, or blow them up with explosive sheep. They can distract them with a target dummy, or shrink them with a shrinking ray. There are far too many items to list here, but most of them are quite useful in combat. But most of the things that an engineer can produce need engineering skill to use as well. As only the producers of these items can use them, there is practically no market to sell them to other players. This tradeskill is very much a money sink. There is a certain trend that engineering becomes the tradeskill of choice for high-level characters wishing to participate in PvP, as it certainly gives an added advantage there. The more powerful items have a chance to backfire, but most of the times engineering items can give you the edge in PvP, as they significantly increase the options you have.

The last tradeskill is Enchanting, the odd man out, which works differently than all other tradeskills. As enchanter you have a skill named "disenchant", which destroys a magical item and transforms it into ingredients. These ingredients can then be used by the enchanter to add magical bonuses to other items. There is a market for enchantments, but you can't sell them in the auction house. The enchanter has to shout out his offers in a busy city's trade channel, and meet his customers directly. There is a special place in the trade window where the owner of the item can place it, allowing the enchanter to enchant it without the item being actually traded. Not an easy business to be in, as finding items to disenchant and finding customers are both difficult.

To sum up this review, I would like to briefly discuss combinations of tradeskills. You can only have two primary tradeskills, so they had better work together well. Some combinations are obvious: mining with blacksmithing or engineering, herbalism with alchemy, and skinning with leatherworking. Less obvious is the combination that makes you the most money: skinning with either herbalism or mining. This combination maximizes income with one gathering skill that doesn't use a find ability and one that does. If you want to learn enchanting, a good combination is with tailoring, as the latter does not require a gathering skill. This combo allows you to tailor magical garments, and then disenchant them for enchanting materials.

In summary the tradeskill system of World of Warcraft is very playable. It innovates in eliminating the grind from crafting. But it is balanced by adding several restrictions, in the number of tradeskills you can learn, and in level limits. This necessary balance unfortunately means that you cannot play a pure crafter in WoW, which some players will consider as a step back in development.

This article has been published on Grimwell.com.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:49 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 2

Day 2 finds me getting up far too early for a Saturday. Basically played most of the day, but concentrating not on leveling, but on crafting. I knew playing a warrior on a new server would be hard, due to the warrior being strongly dependant on gear, and gear being hard to get on a new server. So I made an alt, Tobold the undead warlock, level him up to 5, and start skinning and leatherworking to make light leather for Raslebol's smithing, and light armor kits to improve his armor. By the time he is finished with that, he is level 6.

Raslebol starts the day by doing his level 10 warrior quest, which gives him a second stance, and a better weapon. Unfortunately the latter is hard, as the quest item to get is guarded by level 12 hunters with pets. An underequipped level 10 warrior is having difficulties, and I die several times before I make it. Time to improve the equipment. I get cracking on blacksmithing, and get this up to 85 over the day. Blacksmithing is hard work, because at the end I need 10 copper each point of increase, and thus I spent most of the day mining, mixed with questing.

At level 12 I'm able to make myself a nice magic axe. Time to see the world. I leave Durotar and head over into the Barrens. First stop: Ratchet, where there are some quests to kill pirates on the shore. Although two of the quests are level 16, I manage all of them. One with luckily not running into the level 16 mob, the other by grouping with a rogue. I then move to Crossroads, and take quests there. The quest journal is filling up quickly. I also do some more quests in Durotar, to get access to one of the quests that leads into the first instanced dungeon, Ragefire Chasm. But I won't enter that before level 16, if not 18, the elite mobs there are hard.

I spend more time for crafting, increasing my first aid to make heavy bandages, and start to learn cooking. If my guildmates don't help me out with some fish, I might be force to learn fishing just to increase cooking. I make a trip to Mulgore to kill swoops, to collect small eggs, which can be cooked into the first stat increasing food. But progress in cooking skill is slow.

Didn't have a single crash all day. But once I had the infamous "stuck in looting position" bug from mining, and quit the game and rebooted to fix it. Most of the day the latency was below 100 ms. But at one point I get hit with a lag spike and latency goes over 1000 ms. Up to now can't complain about server stability.

The day ends with me being level 14. The Cosmos census says that in the evening 473 players are online on the Horde side, with most of them being level 9 to 10. Logical, I'm one day ahead of the curve as I managed to create the account on Friday already. The three highest level players are level 21, 22, and 23. I get a chuckle out of the level 23 looking for a group to do Wailing Caverns. You can't be both faster than everybody, and always have people of your level to group with at the same time. I make another alt to do a census on the Alliance side. 659 players there, average level 8 to 9. Only one player higher than level 20, but he is already level 26.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 1

The release day of the European version of World of Warcraft finds me strangely excited. I can't wait to get playing there. Utterly silly, because this is the same game I'm playing for months now. But a new server, and playing with a guild in my own time zone, are things I'm looking forward to.

I take the afternoon off as holiday from work, and drive directly from work to the shop. Great timing, in the shop the guy is just ripping open the cartons in which the game was just delivered. And they even got the English language version. I take the collectors edition, a huge heavy box.

At home the installation seems to take forever. Not quite as huge as EQ2, but still several Gigabyte on one DVD, or 4 CDs. Then I try to create an account, and get only a web page with error messages. I surf to the European official WoW site instead, and after several tries finally manage to create an account. Try to log into the game, and first have to endure another waiting period, downloading 40 MB of patch. The first 99% take 10 minutes to download, then I need another 5 minutes for the last 1%. Annoying.

Finally I'm able to launch the game. Meanwhile I checked my guild website, we are playing on the Runetotem server, PvE, English language, Horde side. I create a troll warrior named Raslebol, and get playing. The huge troll looks quite funny with his cute panda cub pet (added bonus from buying the collectors edition) following him around. I reach level 2 in no time, then the game crashes. Fortunately the only crash for the day.

Back online I continue to level quickly. The guild mates are there, and we already have our own chat channel. Private chat channels are a nice feature of WoW. A bit later we get the 10 people together needed to form the guild, The Order of the Rose Croix. Great.

The game feels strangely deserted. I get Cosmos running, downloading a tool from Curse Gaming to set the version to the right number. That allows me to run a census, which shows practically nobody from level 1 to 4, with the most players only already level 8 to 10. Less than 200 players on the horde side. A guild mate whose girlfriend is trying to create an account confirms the bad news for Blizzard: They had to take the account creation page down because it became overloaded and crashed. For hours nobody is able to create an account. They fix it only late at night.

Meanwhile I picked mining and blacksmithing as my tradeskills. I believe alchemy to be more useful, but thats what I took in the US version, and I want to try something new. Plus I'm the only blacksmith, and the only chain wearer, in the guild right now. I get lucky and find a recipe for making a Copper Chain Vest, manage to find a the Malachite needed for that, and thus arrive at my first "green" magic item, self-made. The end of the day finds me at level 10, with the highest level player on the server being an undead warrior of level 17.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
How Amazon lost a customer

I ordered the European version ofWorld of Warcraft at Amazon.co.uk. This morning I obviously wonder when they will send it, as I had hoped to get the game in time for tomorrows release. So I look on their site and find the following cryptic message:

Please Note: this game may be in short supply for launch, while Blizzard increase their game server capacity. Please be aware that we may not be able to fulfill orders placed before February 8 until a few weeks after release. [Emphasis mine]

Either that is the worst typo ever, or they have installed a new customer-unfriendly "First come, last served" policy. So I went to Play.com and ordered a copy this morning. And this evening it is already listed as "posted". But as I still won't get the game in time for the weekend, and I need two copies anyway to get my wife playing with me, I went and reserved myself a collectors edition in a local store. Will be in French, but who cares. Once I get the English client I can probably install that one on both computers. The important thing is to get an account. And I kind of liked the cute panda cub you get when you take the collectors edition. I'll cancel my order with Amazon.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:51 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EverQuest II Trial of the Isle on FilePlanet!

If you are a paying subscriber to FilePlanet, you now participate in the EverQuest II Trial of the Isle, that is download and play EQ2 for free for one week. You will be limited to playing on the Isle of Refuge, where you can't go beyond level 6, but you can make up to four characters, trying out the four different character archetypes.

Even as a writer of reviews I believe that trying out a game for yourself is *much* better than just reading a review. So check Everquest II out for yourself, and form your own opinion.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:01 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Technical Support

Something scary just happened to me. I posted this question on the WoW Technical Support forums. And got an answer from a "blue name" Blizzard representative in less than 1 minute. I'm seriously impressed.

I was asking whether I could install the US client and the Euro client on the same computer. Answer is probably no, they didn't try, but it would probably not work due to registry issues. Good that I have two computers, otherwise I would be in a serious pinch.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:59 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Class Balance

Since a few weeks the issue of class balance in World of Warcraft is making headlines. Especially warriors are unhappy, they even staged a protest march on one server. Which then promptly caused the server to crash, causing Blizzard to threaten all future protesters with account bannings. So what is the problem?

Direct comparison with paladins is the problem. Paladins wear the same armor, and wield the same weapons (except ranged weapons) as warriors. But pallys have the better abilities. They can make themselves invulnerable for some time, and heal themselves, making them nearly impossible to kill. Warriors have abilities too, but while paladins enter combat with a full mana bar, warriors have an empty rage bar instead, and complain that it is filling far too slowly, making them unable to use abilities as often as other classes in combat. In a direct PvP duell a warrior doesn't stand a chance against a palladin of the same level, equally prepared.

That has further implications, because only the Alliance has paladins. Not only is the Horde outnumbered in general, they can also field less tanks, and those are inferior to the tanks the Alliance brings to the battle field.

Blizzard developers responded to the protests by claiming that warriors aren't that bad. Because they have the much better taunts, being able much better to hold aggro when fighting monsters in a group. That is certainly true. Unfortunately that doesn't help warriors much. The paladins abilities are useful in all situations, solo and group, PvE and PvP. The warriors taunt only works in group PvE. In all sorts of PvP combat taunt does exactly nothing. And in solo combat neither.

So what am I going to do? Play a Horde warrior on the Euro servers of course. :) And that is not a masochistic love of playing the underdog. I'm relying on the self-balancing forces every game has. Being the only metal armor wearer the Horde has, warriors are the least redundant. Groups will always be happy to take them. Furthermore there is far less competition for metal armor and heavy weaponry on the Horde side. As long as you are the only warrior in a group, it should be easy enough to be allowed to loot this stuff, which is worthless to the other group members, especially if it is "binds when picked up". The lack of demand could also lead to more reasonable auction house prices for warrior gear. And finally there is always hope that the thought "warriors are underpowered" is lodged in the developers heads, leading to them being improved instead of nerfed.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
World of Warcraft European Release

Blizzard finally announced the European release date for WoW. It will be 11 February 2005. Hey, thats next Friday. They sure don't believe in advance warning.

They report that the Korean release had 100,000 players online simultaneously one day after release. In Europe they had 400,000 players registering for the beta (no wonder I never got in), and already 110,000 copies of the game pre-ordered. So lets hope they put up enough servers in Europe to handle this demand.

What makes the European release a bit more complicated is languages. In Europe WoW will not only be offered in English, but also in German and French. The Italians and Spanish only get the manual in their language. As far as I understood it, there are three different clients, English, French, and German. But you can use for example the English client to play on the French server. In which case you will *not* be able to listen to the main French chat channels, but you will be able to hear /say, /tell, and guild chat.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:50 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
PCZone UK

Picked up another PC games magazine, the March 2005 issue of PCZone UK. Not only because it has another rave review of World of Warcraft, rating it with 95%. But mainly because to my surprise they now have an "Online Zone" part of the magazine, with over 20 pages. A news section reporting on EQ2 adventure packs, WoW battlegrounds, and the European release of City of Heroes. A preview of The Matrix Online. And lots of reviews.

For comparison of the World of Warcraft 95% score, Lineage II got 61%, and EVE Online 91%. They even wrote a whole page on A Tale in the Desert 2, but wisely refrained from giving it a review rating.

I'm afraid mainstream has caught up to me. The magazine even *start* with a huge double-paged ad for World of Warcraft, making fun of the competition, saying "No. I'd rather kill rats." The time where MMORPG were reserved for us geeks are over. Is that good news? Good and bad both, more likely.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:36 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Trackback

Site Meter reports that this blog had it's 10,000th visitor yesterday. Woot! After a short celebration lasting all of 3 seconds, I began asking myself where all of these people are coming from. Fortunately Sitemeter had an answer to that as well. They show the last 100 referrals to my site, that is the URLs of the sites where somebody clicked on a link which directed him to here. Many of these referrals are shown as "unknown". These are either coming from sites which for some reason don't give out the referral information, or from people that visit my site using a link in their favorites, or typing in my URL.

Unsurprisingly the main source of visitors are search engines. One the one hand that is good news, I seem to rank reasonably good on these. Google says I have a page rank of 4 out of 10, whatever that means. On the other hand the links show what search terms were used to find me, and I can't help but thinking that many of these people didn't really want to come here. For example I've seen at least two visits from people that were looking for "free MMORPGs", and just arrived here because I used both the words "free" and "MMORPGs" somewhere.

The other big source of referrals is links from other blogs. Special mention goes to Broken Toys, not only because that is the top blog referrer, but also because it is a honor to be linked from there. Broken Toys is the blog of Scott Jennings, formerly known as Lum the Mad. "The Rantings of Lum the Mad" was probably the first MMORPG "blog" ever, years before the word "blog" had even been invented. The site became reasonably famous in the still young world of MMORPGs, and Scott got a job as developer for Mythic Entertainment, makers of Dark Age of Camelot. He is now not so mad any more, and instead of rantings is now running a well-read blog on MMOs and life in general.

Now I'm probably breaking some unwritten bloggers code of honor by not having a sidebar linking back to all the blogs that link to me. Sorry if that offends anybody. But I am not actually trying to become part of some network and pushing up the number of visits to this site. Oh yes, and that means you can stop sending me spam on how to increase my Google ranking and whatever. And I'm certainly not interested in "getting rich through advertising". Being an old cynic, I never believed in the internet economy trying to make money out of "eyeballs" *yuck*. Look at it this way: If I had put up banner ads to make money from my writings, what would that have earned me? 10,000 visits with a click-through rate of about 1% makes 100 clicks on the ads. Then each click is worth maybe 1 cent, and I would have made the whopping fortune of $1. No thanks. If you ever see banner ads on this site, they would be from Blogspot, who are hosting this blog for free.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:56 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Loyalties and Practicalities

World of Warcraft still doesn't have a certain release date for Europe, but is widely expected to be released end of February, or March at the latest. And then I'll be in trouble: Do I stay on the American servers, or do I switch to the Euro servers?

From a pure technical point of view, there isn't much reason to change. From Europe you can play on the US servers just fine, with not much noticeable lag. A Euro server *could* be more stable than the overcrowded US server Icecrown I'm on now, but I could as well end up on an overcrowded Euro server with the same problems. Playing on a US server 9 time zones away has the advantage that I never got into the prime time queues, but the disadvantage that the weekly maintenance prevents me from playing on Tuesday evening. Not sure yet what is worse.

So while technical reasons don't push me one way or the other, the deciding factor will be my guilds. Since years I'm in The Echelon, in different games, and it is with them that I'm playing on Icecrown. Great guys, we are having a lot of fun when playing together, and we help each other out by sending stuff via mail all of the time. Trouble is the same as in all these years: We are playing together not very often, due to the difference in time zones. During the week, when I play in the evenings, I meet the few guild members that are playing during the day. During the weekends, around the middle of my day, I'm often the only guild member online, because it is the middle of the night where they are. And then they organize a guild event in their evening, and I can't attend because it is 4 am in the morning here.

For this reason I decided to switch guilds for Everquest 2, which I played with The Order of the Rose-Croix, a European guild with mainly UK members. And of course they will be playing World of Warcraft as well, which would give me the opportunity to play with a guild playing just 1 time zone away. I kind of botched playing with them in EQ2, because I was too concentrated on crafting to group much, my mistake. But I would expect that if I play WoW with them on the Euro server, I'd have a lot more opportunities for guild groups and guild events.

I really like the fact that you can solo World of Warcraft when you want. But that doesn't mean that I don't want to group. And guild groups are so much better than pickup groups, where you sometimes are plagued with the most incredible idiots. If I wanted to play solo, I wouldn't need to pay a monthly fee for a massively multiplayer online game, there are a lot of quite good single-player games out there. And as I mentioned in my WoW tips, playing in a group means you can get quest rewards and loot which you would be unable to solo. Furthermore I could play a character class which is strong in groups while being less optimal solo, for example a warrior. Playing on a Euro server would mean playing on "prime time" most of the time, so finding a group at most times, guild or pickup, should not be a problem.

Right now I'm undecided. I'd hate to leave my old guild. I'd hate to abandon my druid, who is level 37 now, and restart from level 1. And I'm not sure the European launch will not have the same server problems as the US version, and wouldn't want to stand in a waiting queue every evening. But I would like to group more than I'm doing now. And the Euro guild would be playing Horde, enabling me to see more of the other half of the game. Decisions, decisions.

Well, anyway, the US version is pre-paid until end of March. Assuming the Euro version comes out before that, I can try it out and see how good or bad it is in comparison. I'm already thinking about what I would play as Horde: Troll Warrior as main, and Undead Warlock as alt? Whereever I go, and whatever I play, seems I'm stuck with WoW for quite some time to come.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:58 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments