Not The Sort of WoW Travel Poster I Had in Mind October 19, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Humor, World of Warcraft.Tags: Royal Caribbean
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Some email subject lines do not communicate their content as well as others.
So when I see something like, “2-Day WOW Sale ends TODAY!” in a subject, my mind is not conditioned to expect this:
WOW, it is a cruise ship!
On the other hand, it is something of a travel poster. I don’t think Royal Caribbean (who hosted us on the Freedom of the Seas a few years back) is going home with a sparkle pony based on this, but it was amusing to get in a serendipitous sort of way.
But YOU could win a Sparkle Pony, just go read up on the contest!
Still, after posting the first travel poster contest entry from Jazzy, four more entries have shown up in my inbox… not including this one. The contest is on!
The First Entry in the WoW Travel Poster Contest… For Real This Time! October 19, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: azeroth, contest, Kaanapali, Travel Posters
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My nag on Monday got at least one person going, as we now have an official entry in the WoW Travel Poster Contest.
Yesterday afternoon, Jazzy sent me this (click to biggify):
Blue water, white beaches... goblins carefully out of sight
This pretty much what I gave as an example, a beach in Tanaris.
I might have chosen a spot that pulled the palm tress in closer. And, given the tropic topic, I might have gone with “Visit Sunny” or the ever popular “Visit Exotic.” Also, I would have turned off names… you can see them above the crabs when you zoom in close.
On the flip side, the fonts are clear, and I very much like the way Tanaris was written out. The subject is a nice beach. I feel like it might be some place like this:
I put this picture on my credit card
And there is a very nice soft focus effect. It isn’t cranked up to the “Kirk leers at Yeoman Rand” level (you need special lighting for that), but it is noticeable and it works.
All in all, a very solid entry.
And, more importantly, Jazzy has a sparkle pony headed her (his?) way unless you can do better.
I would like to thank Jazzy for the entry and apologize for holding that entry up for public scrutiny. My hope is that this will get a few more people going on entries. And, if nothing else, Jazzy will get a couple extra points toward getting at least one of the companion pet codes for being first.
18th EverQuest Expansion, Veil of Alaris, Available for Pre-Order October 18, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest.Tags: Veil of Alaris
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Just because I have been on an EverQuest coverage binge with the Fippy Darkpaw progression server, I thought I would mention that SOE has announced that the 18th EverQuest expansion, the Veil of Alaris, is available for pre-order from now through November 14th.
The Veil... On Sale!
The expansion is $39.99 as a pre-order through November 14th… and $39.99 if you order on November 15th or after. So the only question there is, “40 bucks for an expansion? Do you think you’re WoW or something?”
There is also Digital Collector’s Edition because, God help us, there always is one of those these days.
The pre-order version is $59.99 through November 14th and, I kid you not, $89.99 if you order on November 15th or after. 90 bucks, so if you have to have it, get it now I guess.
There are two items, according to the list, that you only get in the November 14th or before pre-order with either the standard or collector’s edition.
- Resplendent Sword Ornamentation
- Painting: Original EverQuest Box Art
The painting actually sounds pretty good. I’d like that in EQII, where I can actually afford the upkeep on a house.
The expansion itself adds the following to the game, copied directly from their site, so the prose is all official SOE and not my own:
- Go from 90 to 95 – Achieve a New Max Level of 95 and set a new standard of gameplay
- Improved Hotbars! – Have better control of your characters experience with a revamp of the Hotbar system including the ability to display more hotbars with more buttons; assign icons to individual buttons; link and click on items from your hotbar instead of hot-swappping; and cool-down timers!
- Parcel & Coin Delivery system – Mail items and coin to your friends while they are offline; share profits from your adventures with your friends and receive items from them easier than ever before!
- New Guild Halls – Take Guild Halls to new heights with an integration of Tools and Functionality derived from EverQuest’s robust Housing System. Customize and place your guild hall in one of our housing zones including multiple exterior and interiors.
- New Guild Rank-Based permission system – Personalize your Guilds with namable ranks and customizable permissions
- New Guild Trophies with varying bonuses!
- More than 800 AAs – Elevate your power and abilities beyond the norm
- 13 Raids – Collect valuable rewards from all new adventures
- 12 Zones – Be the first to discover untouched lands of Norrath
- 500+ Spells – Exponentially add to your spell arsenal
- 20 Missions – Experience intriguing lore and immersive Missions
- 110+ Quests – Challenge your skills and gather useful loot
- Legends of Norrath™ – 5 Digital Booster Packs
I have to imagine that the whole improved hotbar system is most likely the only feature I will notice, given that I am in the low 20s on Fippy Darkpaw and somewhere in my 40s on Luclin. And I am going to guess I will get that for free no matter what I do. So I will likely pass on this expansion.
I suppose it says something that SOE at least thinks it can sell a 90 dollar box… a 90 dollar virtual box… for the 18th expansion of a 12 year old game.
I mean, the 90 dollar WoW collector’s editions take up a crap load of space on your book shelf, but at least you get a physical art book and the music from the expansion on a CD.
I guess they know who they have over a barrel… those people who need to have it all, even if “all” is all virtual these days.
How about you? Who out there is eager to hit level 95?
Or who is at least happy to see an update to the EQ hot bars?
EA Unifying Online Currencies for Play4Free Titles October 18, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Need for Speed World, Star Wars: The Old Republic.Tags: Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free, BattleForge, EA, Lord of Ultima, Play4Free, Play4Free Funds
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Over at the Need for Speed World home page, there was a little news item I hadn’t seen any place else so far.
Electronic Arts is going to unify the currencies used for… most of their Play4Free titles.
Play4Free has six titles under its banner:
- Battlefield Heroes
- Battlefield Play4Free
- BattleForge
- Dragon Age Legends
- Lord of Ultima
- Need for Speed World
Of those titles, the following four are going to be merged into a single currency that will be shared across games using the same account. Since EA has been on the great account merger hunt, which came as a bit of a shock when they merged my Star Wars: The Old Republic account into another account, all the EA games I play, plus Origin, EA’s new digital distribution platform, are now on a single login.
I am not sure I like that. I certainly want an authenticator for my EA account, since getting into one gets you into them all, so I have to worry about their low rent web games paying as much attention to security as their triple-A MMO. I am sure that seemed like a good idea to somebody.
Gimme that thing there!
Anyway, the following four currencies will be going away.
- Lord of Ultima currency: diamonds
- Need for Speed World currency: speedboost
- Battlefield Heroes currency: battlefunds
- Battlefield Play4Free currency: battlefunds
Those four will be replaced by a new currency which will be called… and this is really a sign of creativity at EA… Play4Free Funds.
Yeah, somebody in marketing got a bonus for that I’m sure.
As for the other two… well, Dragon Age Legends is on Facebook, so if it uses any currency, it is probably Facebook Credits. And BattleForge… I don’t know why that isn’t on the list. But I have never tried it, so no matter.
In a way, this might be a good thing for me. I have some diamonds in Lord or Ultima, which I stopped playing since updates killed the game for me (I was going to write about that, wasn’t I?) which I might now prefer to use in Need for Speed World.
There is no word on the exchange rate… how much I will get in Play4Free Funds from my diamonds and speedboost… nor has there been any hint on what the new pricing schemes will look like both in and out of game. But EA had better have that all lined up because this whole consolidation is supposed to go live on November 16, 2011.
drag pcorpse enter moonwell October 18, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment, MUDs, TorilMUD.Tags: Faerie Forest, ZMud
3 comments
Probably the hardest thing about going back to visit TorilMUD is remembering the odd syntax that used to be second nature to me at one time.
The first two items on the list are:
- Do not hit return to bring up the cursor in the typing buffer… it is already there waiting for me. And it remembers my last command, so hitting return will just do that again.
- Do not put a forward slash in front of every command. This is the habit ingrained by a dozen years of 3D MMORPGs. I need to type “say” and not “/say.”
Those two I picked up pretty quickly. After that, it started to become a challenge.
The weekend kicked off with Gaff’s conjurer Nerral dying.
Yes, I got him killed by the Tako Demon, but that was later, after we sort of got ourselves back into the groove of the game. That was preceded by some “getting back on the bicycle” antics.
It started with an IM from him tell me he had died in the Faerie Forest and asking if I could help him get his corpse.
I had to chuckle because Nerral is a level 50 conjurer and the Faerie Forest is… a bit tame. Oh, there are things in the Faerie Forest that can kill any player going at them solo and unprepared, but I didn’t think he was going after Finn or his ilk, which pretty much left Lubberkins and Flower Fairies.
Welcome to the Faerie Forest
I logged on with my druid and caught up with him at the Leuthilspar gate, which was closed and locked. He was waiting for it to open. I had to remind him that you can just say the magic word (“peace”) and it unlocks.
That was once we learned how to speak again (see above bit about forward slash) and not incessantly repeat the last thing we said/did (and the bit about not hitting return). Once we got past that, he explained that he had summoned an elemental, the conjurer’s stock in trade, and it had turned aggro on him. These things happen, one of the perils of the profession, and which is something a conjurer can usually deal.
Unless, of course, the conjurer doesn’t remember any of his combat spell, in which case an angry elemental is likely to beat him into the ground, which is exactly what happened.
So he wanted to know if I could run and get his corpse, in case the elemental was still lurking.
And then we stood there for a minute while I tried to remember how to form a group. Finally I said, “consent me,” which he did, and then I could type in, “group Nerral” which formed the group. Having him “follow” me would have also allowed me to form a group, but I also needed consent just in case I needed to move his corpse.
That accomplished, I left him there while I ran off to the Faerie Forest. It was dark and he didn’t have a light source, so he was kind of stuck there. Thanks to innate infravision, he could see the room exits, but he couldn’t see anything in the room.
I started looking around for his corpse, which he helpfully described as “near a lubberkin.” That is like saying something is “near a parking meter” in your average downtown setting. Still, there aren’t that many rooms in the Faerie Forest. I just had to run through about two thirds of them before I found his corpse.
At his corpse, I immediately cast my spell “moonwell,” which opens a portal between two people on the prime material plane, so long as they are in rooms that all teleportation. The devs love to limit your options by flagging rooms !teleport. Leuthilspar, for example, has only one room within it where I can cast moonwell as I recall.
This is why I left him out on the road outside of Leuthilspar, so I could open a moonwell to him. My expectation was that he could then hop through the moonwell and grab deal with his corpse.
Unfortunately, it was night time, he was in a room without a light, so he couldn’t see the moonwell and thus could not enter it. I had to bring the corpse to him. This meant a bit of thinking to come up with the right syntax.
A player corpse can be dragged to move it from room to room, and can be indicated by the player name or the generic name “pcorpse.” The syntax for that, which I recalled pretty quickly, is “drag pcorpse west” to move the corpse out of the west exit. But into a moonwell, that took a bit more digging in the unused spaces in my memory before I came up with the right set of commands.
They are the title of this post. Drag pcorpse enter moonwell.
That finally remembered, I was able to open another moonwell to him and drag his corpse through.
After that, we decided to warm up in Kobold Village. That seemed like a good place to warm up. And we know how that turned out.
Still, that forced us to remember the rudiments of the game.
Now I have to remember what all the scripts, triggers, and short cuts I programmed into ZMud over the years actually do.
The First Entry in the WoW Travel Poster Contest… October 17, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, World of Warcraft.Tags: azeroth, contest, Travel Posters
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Has yet to make an appearance.
It has been a week since the contest was announced and I have nothing in my in-box.
Really? Does everybody already have a sparkle pony?
Nobody wants me...
I know the reach of my blog is pretty small, but for the EVE Online screen shot contest I ended up with over 100 entries and gave out prizes to many winners. And the Travel Poster contest even got a mention in Tipa’s Daily Blog Roll… which might be a commentary on the reach of both of our blogs.
Anyway, the field is still wide open and I am going to give this horse away even if I only get a single entry.
Go read the rules and create your entry. Time will run out eventually.
Could WoW Support Something Like PLEX? October 17, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, EVE Online, World of Warcraft.Tags: PLEX, RMT
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And would they want to?
When Blizzard announce their Guardian Cub plans for the Blizzard store, the immediate comparison that came to mind was PLEX.
And while, as Massively notes, there are items in other games that have some of the qualities of PLEX, nothing quite matches it. CCP has something quite interesting on their hands.
PLEX is an in-game item you can buy in EVE Online for cash from their web site. PLEX stands for Pilot License EXtension, and it is essentially a consumable in-game item that extends your subscription by 30 days. You buy it and collect pick it up with your character in game.
Your character can then either use it to extend their account (which would be silly, since at a cost of two PLEX for $35, it is more expensive than a month-to-month subscription in most cases) or they can put it up for sale in the in-game marketplace and sell it to other people for in-game currency. The going rate currently is about 400 million ISK, the in-game currency.
This effectively gave players a legal way to “buy gold” as well as rewarding hard core players by allowing them to essentially play for free as long as they were able to part with 400 million ISK or so every month.
It didn’t seem to break the economy and has provided only a mild amount of spectator drama in the two years since it was introduced. There is a lot of PLEX for sale on the market in EVE and price has slowly risen over time, proving there is demand for it.
So could Blizzard pull off something similar in World of Warcraft?
My gut response is “no.”
I wouldn’t say it was impossible, but I cannot come up with a good answer on how or why Blizzard would go for it.
The 20,000 foot view seems to reveal this as an opportunity for Blizzard. WoW has something like ten times as many players outside of Asia as EVE Online. And they have a problem with gold sellers. A big market and a problem to solve!
But EVE is special. EVE may only have a tenth of the subscribers, but they all play on the same server and use the same market and contract system.
WoW players, on the other hand, are scattered over more than 400 servers in the Europe and North America. And there are two separate factions on each server, each with its own auction house. So there are at least twice as many economies in action as there are servers. (There is also the neutral auction house, which is active on some servers, but really isn’t anything like a full economy.)
So while it has 10 times the players, WoW is divided up into economies that are, on average, about one tenth the number of potential users as the EVE Online economy.
And potential users is another key. In EVE Online, the economy is the life blood of the game. You pretty much HAVE to use the marketplace. Everybody participates. When the Goons start doing things to impact the economy, everybody feels the ripples.
In WoW though, the auction house is a bit of a sideline. You do not have to participate. You can gear yourself up with quest rewards and instance drops for the leveling game, and if you move on to raiding, you aren’t going to find any of the tier rated gear you want for sale there. And while it is the place to go to make gold (Darraxus just finished a good series on the subject, though he needs to discover tags to I can link to the whole thing. The first post in the series is here.), I know people who hate the auction house and refuse to buy or sell on it.
And those people can not participate and get along just fine.
And so my first concern is if there is even enough economic activity on the dominant faction on a high population server that has a high percentage of auction house use to support something like PLEX being introduced into the economy.
Even in that optimum scenario, would there be enough players with enough gold to absorb all the… let’s call it WoWPLEX… that would enter the market so that it maintained a stable and viable price?
I cannot actually answer that question.
This is where my gut says “no,” but I cannot prove or disprove that feeling.
And “that” feeling is that the price of WoWPLEX would bottom out at a level too low to make it an attractive illicit gold sellers or that, at best, the price would fluctuate wildly.
And that is on the optimum server environment. The price would almost assuredly bottom out too low or be radically unstable on the short faction side of a low population server.
To which I can hear some of you replying, “So what?” Low priced WoWPLEX might be good for you, if not the seller.
And this is the second part of the problem, which is creating a set of circumstances under which Blizzard would see it to their advantage to adopt such a scheme.
Given that customer service is likely one of their larger expenses when it comes to the operation of the game, adding in anything that will generate phone calls that they might have to actually address is not going to fly at Blizzard. The thought of people upset about WoWPLEX, likely because the selling price on their server is too low for their tastes, flooding the forums or calling up customer service looking for a refund is probably enough for Blizzard to steer clear of the idea, all the more so when they start seeing what happens when the Guardian Cub market starts to fall flat.
I can think of a few things that Blizzard might do to mitigate the market problem.
- They could break down the wall between horde and alliance and create a unified auction house per server
- They could a special cross-server auction house for WoWPLEX alone
- They could put a floor on the price of WoWPLEX
- They could make the actual real world price attractive enough that people would not mind if they could not sell it immediately
But those all require some changes on the Blizzard end
What do you think? Could Blizzard be successful with their own version of PLEX? What changes to the game do you think they would have to make?
And, probably most important, do you think Blizzard should pursue this sort of idea for WoW?
A Visit with the Tako Demon October 15, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, MUDs, TorilMUD.Tags: Kobold Village, Leuthilspar Tales, Tako Demon
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Leuthilspar Tales – Part V
About two years back I was working on a series of posts tagged as Leuthilspar Tales. The idea was to recount what life was like, back in the day… or even today… for a player on TorilMUD who chose to roll an elf. I had about a dozen topics to cover… and I managed to write about three and a half of them. The I got distracted and went on to something else.
Recently, with the updates to TorilMUD, there has been something of a resurgence of interest in the game by myself and a few friends. And so last night found Gaff and I roaming about Leuthilspar and the island of Evermeet looking for nostalgia.
We went to visit Kobold Village, which due to changes in the geography outside of Leuthilspar, is even more difficult to find and enter. It isn’t just .10w4n from the gates any more.
Outside Leuthilspar
Once there, we wandered around slaying things. There was not a lot of challenge. Gaff was on as his level 50 conjurer, Nerral, and I was on as a level 47 druid. (Used to be level 50, then I started a strange game… to be covered at a later date.)
We went and kill various key mobs on the surface.
Kobold Village - Surface
Then we headed down into the mines where, for no real reason, I lead us into the Kobold Temple of the Unholy.
There are not many rooms down there. And most of them are occupied by mobs that were not going to be a problem for us.
So, of course, I lead us into one of the problem room, that of the high priest down there, who is really a mob a full group should be taking on.
He wailed on me, I had wimpy set, which caused me to flee when my hit points dropped below a certain threshold.
And then the real fun began.
You flee westward!
The Sacrificial Pit
Exits: -U< 160h/835H 165v/165V >
< > You try to leave but are grappled backwards by a snaky tentacle!< 160h/835H 165v/165V >
< > You try to leave but are grappled backwards by a snaky tentacle!< 160h/835H 165v/165V >
< >
A summoned tako demon misses you with his pummel.< 160h/835H 165v/165V >
< T: Zouve TC: pretty hurt E: tako EC: excellent >
You miss a summoned tako demon with your slash.
YIKES! Another hit like that, and you’ve had it!!
You try to leave but are grappled backwards by a snaky tentacle!
PANIC! You couldn’t escape!A summoned tako demon misses you with his pummel.
You try to leave but are grappled backwards by a snaky tentacle!
PANIC! You couldn’t escape!A summoned tako demon barely wounds you with his weak pummel.
You try to leave but are grappled backwards by a snaky tentacle!
PANIC! You couldn’t escape!< 75h/835H 165v/165V >
< T: Zouve TC: awful E: tako EC: excellent >You start chanting…
< 75h/835H 165v/165V >
< T: Zouve TC: awful E: tako EC: excellent >You complete your spell…
Temple of Rillifane Rallathil
Exits: -N# -E
A young elven druid is standing here, getting in tune with nature.
A young elven druid is standing here, getting in tune with nature.
Fortunately, druids have the spell “Word of Recall” which return the caster to his guild hall. It does not work in all rooms in the world, but it is apparently an escape from the Tako Demon.
I rejoiced in my escape!
You group-say ‘hah, was in with Tako demon!’
And then I got another, less joyful message.
Nerral stops following you.
Nerral has left the group.
You disband the group.
Nerral has quit the game, consent lost.
Oops. Dead. Never good, not in with the Tako Demon.
And, in TorilMUD, on which EverQuest was primarily based, when you die, you are faced with the naked run back to your corpse. And the lair of the Tako Demon is not a place you want to go naked by yourself.
And I could not help out. The Tako Demon is a world tracker, which means as soon as I step out of town, he gets up out of his lair and starts looking for me. So I start seeing this.
A black rift in space opens next to you, and a summoned tako demon steps out of it grinning.
Yeah, that is bad. Fortunately there is a couple second delay after somebody steps out of a dimension door like that before they can attack you. Enough for me to scurry back to town.
Fortunately, there were quite a few people in the game, including Lilithelle, a player who has played on TorilMUD so much that she once gained so much experience, it broke the game. In TorilMUD you apparently do not stop gaining experience when you hit the level cap of 50. Lilithelle kept on to the point when her exp hit the most significant bit of the number, which was signed, which meant that her experience went negative and the whole MUD went down. They had to fix the game just for her.
Anyway, she is the master of such rescues and had the time to help us, so Nerral’s corpse was recovered and restored to him.
But that is a lesson from the age of MUDs. The deadly Tako Demon basically lives beneath what is mostly a level 5-20 zone.
Fun!
SOE Wakes Up, Bans Some Fippy Darkpaw Hackers, Promises to Fix Raiding Conflicts… October 15, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest.Tags: Fippy Darkpaw, Progression Server
2 comments
There have been some… issues… on the Fippy Darkpaw progression server.
After Ten Ton Hammer rang the bell about hackers, SOE pretty much said they were too busy working on the next expansion to do anything about it.
Apparently somebody found a little free time to work on the issue over at Sony, as this message popped up tonight in the Progression Server forum:
Greetings progression players!
I just wanted to keep the community in the loop on our on-going efforts to increase your enjoyment while playing EverQuest. Without further adieu here are two updats for you.
We have made recent advances in our fight against the evil MQ users. Our first test run of some new information we have has resulted in the permanent banning of 17 accounts and extremely long suspensions for 31 accounts. We know this is just the frosting on the cake, but sometimes that frosting is delicious. This was just our first run, and only on two servers, we promise to keep `hacking` away at these people. For any of the non progression players who may be reading this, don’t worry. Hackers on your servers will start vanishing too, this is not something just for the progression servers. J
As our second update we wanted to let the community know that we have contacted all the leaders of raid guilds on Fippy. We are pushing to work on a more permanent fix to the current difficulties that we are seeing between raid guilds. So, if you are a leader of a raid guild, check your email! Also, if you are a guild leader of a raid guild on Fippy (who is raiding current content) who did not receive an email about this please PM HeadGM Kaeldread.
I guess that was the exciting news that Kaeldread was referring to earlier in the week.
Civ II – Found the Disc, Can’t Use the Disc October 14, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games, polls.Tags: Civilization II, Civilization Series
26 comments
After some searching tonight I found at least one of my copies of Civilization II. It was hiding in a generic white disc sleeve on a shelf with some music CDs.
Civilization - 16-bit Era Disc
Unfortunately, this disk is from the stone age. Look at it. “IBM/Compatibles” is printed on it. How long has it been since it was IBM and Compatibles?
Sure, Windows 95 was out when this game launched… barely… so this disc had to install on Windows 3.1.
All of the executables on it are 16-bit.
And, as I found out after an hour or so of screwing around and trying to fool it into believing it was installed, the 64-bit version of Windows 7 is not at all down with 16-bit. I couldn’t find anything official on the Microsoft support site that definitively said, “No 16-bit,” but I found plenty of unofficial things that said it wasn’t going to happen.
Not that I am totally surprised. I was doing WinLogo certification for the company I was working for in 1997, and even then you had to get a special exemption to have 16-bit executables… including the installer… on your disc. That was a long time ago.
Anyway, no Civ II for me right now. I’ll have to go find a more recently rolled version of it.
In the mean time, since there was some discussion over the best version of Civilization, I will put up a poll.
Justify your pick in the comments, if you feel the need.
