The Age of the Discriminating Vendor January 23, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment, Rift, TorilMUD.Tags: Leuthilspar Tales, MMO Economy, Vendor Trash
14 comments
Another one of those posts that starts with “back in the day…” and which recounts how things used to be during the stone age of online gaming. Writing about it is not necessarily advocating for its return, but it certainly made things different. Anyway, on to it…
Back in the day, back in TorilMUD, there were things that were very different than we see them now in modern MMORPGs, and there were things that were very much the same.
It was all text, all the time back then
One thing that was the same was money.
Everybody needed it, the economy needed it, but nobody started out with any and the only real way to get any was to kill NPCs that spawned in the world for their loot.
There were also quests. But quests were not very common, annoying to find, and could be frustratingly difficult to complete. I have gone into the way questing used to be back in the day. There was nobody standing around waiting to tell you to kill ten rats. And the end result was more often an item than any money.
So that left murdering the residents of the world and looting their still warm corpses as the only real money making enterprise.
Wholesale slaughter would get you some coins. But for the most part that was a pretty slow way to earn money, at least at lower levels. Later, in a leveling group in place like the pirate ship, a good group could end up with a nice pile of cash.
But you, new adventurer, won’t be doing that or zones or anything of the sort for a long while.
And that went double for elves and half elves who started on the Island of Evermeet, in the elvish city of Leuthilspar and were stuck there for the first 20 levels of their career. I will focus on the plight of the elves, since that is what I am most familiar with.
So to supplement the tiny trickle of coins, you would have to also grab whatever else your victims were carrying. Swords, bits and pieces or armor and clothing, random items of junk, whatever you could pry from their cold, dead fingers. You would collect all of this to sell to one of the many vendors in Abeir-Toril.
As a young citizen of Leuthilspar, you would head out to Kobold Village or the Faerie Forest in search of adventure, experience, and loot. At least, once you figured out how to get there. Eventually, if you were successful… by which I generally mean that you did not die and have to go find your corpse in the dark… you would have a pile of coins and some items to vendor.
In Kobold Village there was a couple of vendors, but as your became more seasoned you began to notice that those vendors paid very little for your items. That was the way of the world. The buy and sell prices from vendors were influence by your race, your class, your charisma stat, and the general level of wickedness of the person who created the zone.
The young elvish adventurer could make much more money, multiples of what the stingy vendors out in the world were offering, if said adventurer just dragged all of that loot back to a vendor in Leuthilspar.
The key was, which vendor.
Leuthilspar Locations (click to embiggen)
The good part was that all the vendors were pretty close to the square at city center and near to the bank.
The down side was that the vendors were all pretty picky about what they would buy. Your options were:
1 – Talidnal’s Goods and Supply Shop – Sold random supplies like rations and small bags, would buy miscellaneous items of the same sort. You had to sell the red feather from the traveling faerie here.
2 – The Weapon Shop of Leuthilspar – Bought and sold weapons and only weapons. Notable for being one of the vendors with special responses. Would point out in all caps that this was weapon shop if you tried to sell something else and would claim that they could buy items flagged “no value” because they just bought a Doombringer earlier.
3 – The Scribe Shop of Leuthilspar – Sold scroll, including the scroll of identify. These cost 2 platinum coins, which was more than any new player could afford, but which was the only way to see the full stats and information on any given item. Except, of course, if the item was flagged as “no identify,” in which case you just wasted 2 plat.
4 – Silyonlanster’s Fine Gems and Jewels – Sold some gems that had no purpose I ever found, and would buy any gems you happened to have.
5 – Norlan’s Pet Shop – Bought nothing as far as I could tell, but would sell you a very expensive pet that would fight for you and which would be gone forever if it died… or if you logged off. A lot of us bought one of these exactly once.
6 – The Armorer of Leuthilspar – Sold some very heavy bronze armor and would buy anything flagged as armor, which did not include leather armor from Kobold Village or the Cloak of Forest Shadows.
7 – The Leviathan Shipwright – Sold rafts and canoes for crossing water. You just had to have one in your inventory (but not in a container) for them to work. Would buy them back at a deep discount.
8 – The Green Griffon Pub – Sold alcoholic beverages. Never bought anything I had to sell.
9 – Tilanthra’s Shop of Alchemy – Bought and sold potions.
10 – The Magic Shop of Leuthilspar – Sold a number of scrolls and wands, despite there already being a scroll shop. Would only buy wands and the like. This is where you would sell that Wand of Thunderous Rage that was in the garbage heap and which never worked for me over the last 15 years.
11 – Morlanthrtilan’s Fine Clothier – Had nothing for sale as I recall, but would buy that leather armor from Kobold Village that the armor shop turned its nose up at.
12 – The Blue Dragon Inn and Restaurant – Sold oddly specific and very expensive food at various times and would buy, for reasons I could never determine, arrows and quarrels.
13 – Qulazoral’s Barrels and More – Sold you a skin or a barrel of water after your first issued water skin evaporated after you emptied it (I think they finally fixed that) but before you finally got a flagon from Bandor. Would buy liquid containers, if you ever found one.
There were some other vendors in town. Each guild had a vendor that might give you a few more coins for specific items. But in general, it was vendor row on main street that handled your needs. You just needed to run around a lot until you figured out who bought what. It helped that what vendors purchased ended up in their inventory for sale again, a feature I miss, and which was last seen in EverQuest as I recall.
And even then you would end up with a few items that no vendor would purchase, but which were not flagged “no value.” There were a few items I would have to travel to Mithril Hall, way up in the north beyond Neverwinter, in order to vendor. I think the dead rat was on that list.
Still, in some ways, the elves did not have it so bad. The vendors gave decent prices and were all centrally located. This was not necessarily the case in Waterdeep or Baldurs gate, and good luck selling things way down in Calimport.
And vendors in Leuthilspar never closed. Elves don’t need sleep. In other towns vendors would often close for some or all of the night cycle of a given day. The time translation was one real world minute for one game hour, so you might end up sitting in a shop for 6 or 8 or 12 minutes waiting for the vendor to open up again.
And with all of that, you still ran the risk of selling something of value to other players… something you could sell or trade… to a vendor without knowing. As I mentioned above, you needed a scroll of identify to see what an item did. There were no stats on demand and equipment was not color coded by the now standard formula (gray, white, green, blue, purple) to indicate relative worth. Of course, once you sold the item to a vendor, it cost you a lot more to buy it back. It seemed that vendors were in the business of making money… or at least acting like they were there to make money as opposed to just being a place to dump your crap.
Today though, we can see it all. Stats show up when we hover the cursor over and item, and it will even show what we have equipped in the relevant slot so we can instantly compare. Items names are color coded, as noted above. And not only will vendors buy just about anything you have (and sell it back to you at the same price if sold something by mistake) but we are at the point in games like Rift where there is a button that will automatically sell all of your “trash” grade loot to the vendor with a single press.
As I said at the top, I am not exactly hankering to go back to the way vendors used to be. But it is interesting to see how much has changed, and one wonders if it was all for the better.
Wielding The Dead Rat January 8, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment, EverQuest, TorilMUD, World of Warcraft.Tags: Dead Rat, Equipment, Faerie Forest
12 comments
Way back in the TorilMUD days… and back before then I am sure… I began to subscribe to the “no empty slots” theory of equipment.
Basically, in your typical RPG/MUD/MMO, your character has a set number of equipment slots. They vary from game to game, but generally correspond to the basics of an armor set. And since anything equipped in one of those slots is likely to add something to your character… a little more armor, or maybe a stat bonus…. there is no reason to leave a slot empty.
In TorilMUD, and especially in equipment impoverished Leuthilspar, where elves and half-elves started, when you were starting out, you would wear anything. For example, there was one good ring you could acquire as a young elf… the pearl ring… which actually boosted your armor by 4. That wasn’t much on the 100 to -100 scale that was used back in the day (100 was a completely unarmored, inert character, while -100 was the best you could get, and they related to the % dice rolled for a hit) but it was something.
However, the pearl ring was coveted because of this, and it only showed up once per boot, so if you didn’t get to the mob carrying it (an elf in town, who would be assisted by guards if they were around, so you had to take care) you were out of luck.
So a lot of us wandered around with another item on in the ring slot, a piece of string. It came from the Goblin’s trash pile in the Faerie Forest.
The Goblin is down south
All the piece of string did was help your save versus paralysis. But that was better than nothing, right? Who knows when you might need that boost to your save! (Realistically, by the time you needed it, you had ditched the string for something else. But you didn’t know that at the time, and had probably forgotten all about that string when you were standing, paralyzed by those vines south of Waterdeep, slowly waiting to die.)
Because that is the way it went… and the way it goes today. First you get some piece of equipment to fill a slot, because something is better than nothing. Then when you find another item for a given slot, it becomes a comparison; is this new thing better? Early on those decisions are usually pretty easy.
Have shovel, want mallet!
Eventually you wind up at higher levels and having to compare the relative merits of one set of stats versus another. In TorilMUD with the melee classes it was always the trade off of +hit versus +damage, or strength versus dexterity versus agility, or armor class versus stats.
In the early days, in TorilMUD or EverQuest or even early World of Warcraft, getting equipment was haphazard early on. Since then the process has been bound to quests. Following the quest chain keeps your armor at an appropriate level and likely even offers up armor that is specifically for your vocation.
But things have essentially remained the same. You get your first piece of equipment for a given slot, then spend your career upgrading it.
What seems to have gone missing somewhere is the equipment with bad stats that off-set some great boost for your class.
From TorilMUD I recall the Polished Bone equipment that had good armor and a boost to strength, but penalized dexterity, which in turn could impact your hit roll. Or the Dolomite armor set that had great armor, but which was very heavy. If you were not maximum strength and playing a strong race (ogres, trolls, or barbarians), the weight of the set would not only eat up your movement points, but could impact your agility to the point that it would start reducing your armor class.
There was a green gemstone earring that was -4 strength, but which granted protection from fire. If you were going to the Plane of Fire or the City of Brass, you often needed to take the strength hit to go to those places.
There were equipment items that covered other slots. There were “whole head” helms that prevented you from wearing something in the face slot, and “whole body” armor pieces that took up the chest, leg, and arm slots and which favored one stat, usually armor class, over all others.
And then there was the dead rat.
Actually, I think it was actually called “a very dead rat.”
This was another item from the Goblin’s trash pile. It was wieldable as a 1h blunt weapon, but had a very low damage roll and had an -10 to hit modifier. So it was a really bad weapon, and heavy to boot a I recall, but a lot of tanks kept one stashed away in his bag for specific situations.
If you were facing a mob that was unbashable and had a damage shield up, that dead rat might save the day. Generally, with a damage shield mob, you waited for the shield to go down and when the mob began casting the spell for the shield, you would knock it down with a bash and keep it down so the shield was not a problem.
But if you could not bash the mob, then there was trouble. Every hit by a melee class on that shield causes damage to the attacker. I have seen hasted rangers kill themselves in a couple of rounds attacking a shielded mob. So you either had to have a magical solution that would protect melee classes from the shield, or you had to kill the mob with ranged attacks only.
However, you still needed a tank. If the tank wielded that dead rat, and maybe shed a bit of hit enhancing gear, you might get by with the tank missing enough that your healer could keep up with the damage.
Not an ideal solution, but the dead rat gave the possibility of an alternative solution.
Do we still have that in MMORPGs today? The item with a bad stat that is useful in certain specific situations?
I realize that with dungeons and raiding that players may favor a given stat or protection, but that is a trade off of one bonus against another. I am looking more for taking a serious hit in order to meet a goal.
Is there a dead rat left to wield in games today?
Nineteen Years without Raising the Level Cap November 7, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, MMO Design, TorilMUD.Tags: Dark Age of Camelot, Level Cap
3 comments
When I started playing TorilMUD… or Sojourn MUD as it was known back then… just after their go-live pwipe, the level cap was 50.
Today, a little more than nineteen years later, the cap for players remains at level 50.
A lot of things have changed. The D&D rule set being modeled has moved from 2.0 (THAC0) to 4.0 (D20 simplification). Races have been added. Classes have been reworked and, in some cases, removed. (A moment to remember lost monks, mercenaries, and berserkers.) Zones have been added at a steady rate over time causing the room count to swell over time.
But in all that time they have never added a single level. Level 50 remains the pinnacle.
Which is odd, when you consider that TorilMUD was such a big influence on EverQuest, which must hold some sort of record for the total number of different expansions they have sold (soon to be 19, plus half a dozen different expansion “roll up” packages), many of which included boosts to the level cap (which started at 50 and will soon reside at 100) or added in alternative level progression mechanics (primarily alternate advancement).
And EverQuest itself is the template on which your typical PvE fantasy MMORPG is based. So clearly EverQuest got its expansion mojo from some other source… like a desire for more box sales.
But how has TorilMUD managed this over the last 19 years?
Awkwardly would be my reaction.
TorilMUD was not one of those MUDs where you got special powers or access upon hitting level 50. You were still a just a player and your only real game option was to conquer content and acquire loot. So the staff had to come up with methods to keep people engaged and playing.
Some of that was done in ways you will recognize, in ways that MMOs with many expansions use when they want to do another expansion but not raise the level cap. They have, as noted above, added new races and reworked classes to make them more viable. (Though nothing has ever made rangers really useful for long.) And they have trimmed back some of the less useful classes. (Mercenaries really were just half-assed warriors with a backstab skill.) They have also added new low level areas to make bringing up an alt a different experience.
But primary way of keeping people playing without raising the level cap has been the carrot and stick approach, which was used quite liberally with players sitting at level 50.
The carrot comes in the form of new content. New zones to run, with new monsters, new themes, new gimmicks (including nakedness), and, of course, shiny new loot. Lots and lots of new loot. Getting that one item with the perfect stats for your character and class was something of an obsession in the game.
There was the stick as well. And it wasn’t so much a stick as the infamous Nerf bat and it was wielded with almost gay abandon, much to the dismay of the players.
In order to keep gear inflation in check, equipment with great stats would almost inevitably be downgraded as new gear came in with new zones. One of the problems with taking a break from the game was coming back and finding some of your best items had been beaten into submission by the Nerf bat.
Sometimes particular enchants or stats would come in for special attention. I remember the war on haste. Items began to creep into the game that with that attribute. Haste is a spell mages could cast on melee classes that would give them extra attacks in combat. But it was a very short duration spell. You had to cast it right before a fight and, of course, you had to have a mage with the spell on hand. But if a melee class had an item that gave him haste all the time, well who needs a mage! So haste items like the emerald longsword and the gray suede boots became a requirement for melee classes.
And then out came the Nerf bat and haste was removed and people were left with items that otherwise were generally fair at best. (I remember trading a pair of gray suede boots for a pile of equipment just about a week before the change went in. I got lucky.)
To this day I remember far more old stats for items that have been hit with the Nerf bat than current stats.
All in all it could be a brutal process, like having a semi-continuous gear reset going on around you. Gear advancement became something of a treadmill. If you stopped moving, you would eventually fall off the back.
So I guess I can see why EverQuest, and World of Warcraft in its turn, went with the “increase the level cap” option. Gear resets still happen. All that great gear you got is still trivialized in one fell swoop. But at least you are getting newer and better stuff as opposed to seeing your old stuff literally turned to junk.
Avoiding level cap increases has only been attempted by a couple of otherwise level-based MMORPGs, like Dark Age of Camelot. And while some have praised them for holding the line, it is tough to tell how successful that approach is commercially with a limited sample set.
Games like Vanguard and Warhammer Online haven’t boosted their level caps, but neither of them were apparently successful enough to warrant any sort of expansion, much less one that included new levels.
Guild Wars also stuck with a level cap of 20, but the business model was clearly one of selling boxes since they also went without a subscription. Guild Wars 2 has the same business model, though one of the lessons they seemed to draw from the original was that they needed more levels. I suppose we will see what that really means for expansions when they get their first follow-on box ready for sale.
Meanwhile, DAoC is pretty quiet these days as I understand it, though I am not sure if 8 years of a static level cap is a big factor in that.
And TorilMUD is still going, but my gear is totally out of date.
Summer Reruns – TorilMUD June 28, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, MUDs, TorilMUD.4 comments
Life has conspired to make this a quiet week for blogging. I’ll get to why that is later in the week.
In the mean time, rather than just let days go by with nothing, I am going to fall back on the grand television tradition of summer reruns. I am going to go back to a classic theme, TorilMUD, and call out some of my favorite posts.
Of course, the real problem is that I like all of my TorilMUD posts. They are filled with nostalgia leavened with just the right amount MMO history. Still, I think I can narrow it down to ten… links. One points to five posts. So sue me.
- On Greater Challenges – How TorilMUD had a “hard mode.” Why can’t we have this in modern MMOs?
- Echoes of a Crashing MUD – How we ended up sitting for hours camping rare mobs. It was all a misunderstanding.
- The Way Questing Used to Be – There were no yellow exclamation marks in my day.
- Leuthilspar Tales – A few posts about the starter zones exclusive to grey elves. I should write more in this series.
- drag pcorpse enter moonwell – Trying to remember command syntax after getting Gaff killed.
- Of Rooms and Rooms and Rooms – 19,584 rooms, each of which I visited and mapped. And that was only about a third of the total rooms at the time!
- The Salesman of Waterdeep – Why don’t we have NPCs like this any more?
- How Information Access has Changed – Sharing quest information used to be a sin!
- Dartan’s Portable Hole – Screw you Blizzard, this is how much stuff a Portable Hole should hold!
- 15 Years of TorilMUD – Memories of my favorite MUD, which I started playing in 1993
Echoes of a Crashing MUD May 29, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment, EverQuest, MMO Design, MUDs, TorilMUD.Tags: Camping
5 comments
Last week’s crash bug fixing bonanza has resulted in a near-record uptime of 150 hours and still going.
They have been working hard on crash related bugs at TorilMUD.
TorilMUD has been around, in one form or another, for nearly 20 years now. Next year I will get to write my “20 years of TorilMUD” post, a follow up to my 15 year post, as I will have played it off and on for that long.
In all that time, running without a crash for less than seven days is a record.
I guess there is a reason that uptime was displayed only as hours, minutes, and seconds. There was no need for days to be displayed.
So this is a big success, this huge increase in reliability, right?
If you had asked me that when I was playing the game actively, back when there were 50-100 people on all the time, I would have told you that seven days of uptime was a disaster!
The thing is, crashes were points of opportunity to be valued, not disasters to be avoided.
Yes, sure, if you were doing a zone and had finally gotten through to a big fight and the game crashed, that was bad. And you didn’t want to the game going down every ten minutes… unless you wanted to farm Bandor’s flagon or some other easily obtained item. But no crashes for days could mean no loot for days in a very loot oriented game.
The thing is, most monsters in the game that carried anything worth having only carried that item at boot. Once you slew the monster and took its item, it would respawn, but would come back empty handed. You might get some coins from it and some experience, but the special item was only there once per boot.
In addition, there were a lot of rare mobs that had a chance to spawn at reboot, often mobs related to key quests in the game.
So a crash and a reboot was a time of renewal in the game. You would spam your way out to pick off an easy item or two, help friends scour known locations for special spawns, and then start forming groups to tackle the zone content, which was the MUD equivalent of raiding.
We all loved a well timed crash, and there were few things as depressing as logging in at prime time on a weekend and seeing the uptime sitting at 18 hours. All the easy drops would be gone by then, all the good zones done, and the world mobs likely spotted already.
Players would begin whining about the uptime and how all the good stuff have been done. And often an administrator would take pity on us… they were all long time players and knew the importance of a timely reboot… and announce a reboot.
So key aspects of the game… loot and raiding… were predicated on the system crashing at fairly regular intervals. How crazy was that?
And this, of course, had influence that was felt long after so many of us moved to 3D graphical MMORPGs.
TorilMUD was the Diku template on which EverQuest was based. Brad McQuaid, Aradune, and other EQ devs were long time players of TorilMUD, and if you played them both you could see the many things that were influenced by… or copied wholesale from… TorilMUD. Races, classes, equipment stats, racial home towns, the layout of Freeport, and much more came from EQ’s text-based predecessor.
But not everything could be copied directly. What works in text does not always translate well to a 3D virtual world. You never dropped your weapon in Norrath for example, which was something of a relief. They actually turned off the fumble mechanism in TorilMUD in the last couple of years, so you need not worry about losing your weapon forever in a shallow stream or a duck pond.
And the concept of aggro management started to take shape, as there was no such thing in TorilMUD. Monsters switched to attack casters all the time and the tanks job was to use the “rescue” command, which would switch the monster back to focus on the tank.
And one of the things that the EQ team no doubt felt they could not depend on was the crash/reboot mechanism to repopulate drops and spawn rare mobs. Depending on crashes is fine in a free game, but can you imagine a commercial MMO where a crash or a reboot a couple of times a day would be seen as a good thing?
So they had to come up with another solution to meter out rare mobs to simulate the whole crash/reboot cycle. The decision was to put such mobs on extremely long respawn timers.
And thus the insane camp was born.
I suspect, though have no confirmation, that the EQ devs never expected players to actually sit on a rare mob spawn point for extremely long stretches of time waiting for it to appear. I have to imagine that they thought that players would treat that sort of thing the way we did in TorilMUD, which was to run by and check the spot at intervals. In the TorilMUD, that interval was at every reboot. But with no such similar timer in EQ, people just sat down in a group and waited.
And waited, and waited, some times for days at a stretch, for a specific mob to appear.
Eventually, other mechanisms were created to replace the long spawn, though not all were necessarily more successful. How many hours have I spent killing the placeholder mob over and over again in hopes of spawning that one special mob I needed?
In the end, certainly with the advent of WoW, I think most such mobs were stuck in instanced environments and metered based on difficulty rather than the amount of time you and your group could sit in one place and wait. The age of the long camp was over, though I am sure somebody will tell you they miss it.
But for a while at least, our behavior in MMOs was influenced by the fact that they simply could not be allowed to crash a couple of times a day.
TorilMUD Adds The Tower of Kenjin May 15, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, MUDs, TorilMUD.add a comment
Some games just keep on going.
Originally live six years before EverQuest, TorilMUD just added another zone.
Somewhere in the southern Calimshan desert a mystery unfolds. Rumors spread like wildfires about an enormous ebon crystal tower (which not a soul can remember ever seeing, or hearing about for that matter) rising high into the skies, yet casting no shadow. Foreigners have been seen exploring the desert, all seeking to discover the mystery of The Tower of Kenjin.
In addition, some crash bugs that have been been keeping the game down lately have been addressed.
TorilMUD Adds Nine New Zones December 7, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment, MUDs, TorilMUD.Tags: Homeland MUD
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Just because an online game was already about six years old when EverQuest, which drew much of its inspiration from this game, hit the store shelves doesn’t mean that it is winding down. It may not be in danger of exceeding its maximum connection limit any more, but TorilMUD is still alive and evolving.
The new login art
A little over 18 years since I started playing, they are still adding new zones. From the TorilMUD dev blog:
Nine new zones from the former Homeland MUD have been converted and added to the mud. Look for them in the credits, and here’s a taste of what’s in store:
- King Horgar Steelshadow the Fourth has closed the city of Gracklstugh to outsiders, but has finally, after being pressured by merchant guilds for the better part of a year, agreed to allow passage around the city walls to the wild tunnels of the Underdark that lie due west of the city gates. With the trade routes open, the fiendish minotaurs that roam the Labyrinth once again have a steady supply of food.
- Denizens of the Underdark have reported many sightings of extra-planar beings, native to the Plane of Fire deep underground.
- Rumors spread throughout the Northdark about a temple dedicated to the Elder Eye, and the riches contained within, unfortunately for adventurers, those rumors usually finish with ‘… and they were never heard from again.’, but there is always an exception, isn’t there?
- Patrolmen from Phlan have reported increased activity ranging from ogres to dragons, all hailing from the mountains to the north.
- Strange travelers have been seen in the astral plane, whether they mean good or bad tidings for the casual travelers remains to be seen.
And while these are not new zones, made exclusively for TorilMUD, they do represent a further expansion of the already enormous world of the game.
My traditional method for finding new places, because the devs never tell you exactly where they are, is to wander around watching my map and looking for new room exits. Maybe some day, if I have time, I’ll add some of these new places to my already large map database.
October in Review October 31, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment, EverQuest, Facebook, Month in Review, Need for Speed World, Rift, TorilMUD, World of Warcraft.Tags: Defense Grid: The Awakening, WordPress.com
4 comments
The Site
I think the biggest internal site news was when WordPress.com made some change and messed up my stats for a few days.
Well, I hear they messed up a lot of people’s stats.
For the last five years page views have been counted in pretty much the same way. I’ve kept them all in a spread sheet, every single day, since I started the blog. The consistency is verifiable via third party page view counters I have used off and on.
Then, on the 18th, something new crept into the mix.
Basically, page views have been counted and displayed on the stats panel in a way such that the total page views for a given day were displayed in two places. One is the big chart at the top of the statistics page (a section of which is shown above) and the other is in a table that breaks out which posts were viewed how many times, including the main page.
These two charts always added up, until October 18, when suddenly people started asking why they were getting so many page referrals from WordPress.com and why those referrals seemed to be added into the total on the big chart, but were clearly absent from the Posts and Pages table. (The sum worked out to exactly WordPress.com referrals + Posts and Pages total = Big chart value.)
So the Posts and Pages table, for the three days indicated with arrows in the picture above, showed the same number of page views (well, not exactly, the tallest column is actually over 100 views less), while the main page views chart showed very different results.
This became a burning question on the help forums where the main volunteer who handles the forum, in a demonstration of getting exactly what you pay for, was less helpful and more clueless than usual.
Eventually one of the paid staff (Macmanx the Hapless Engineer) came along and said that they had started including pages viewed via email subscriptions RSS in the mix, and this was where the boost in page views came from. Since RSS tops site visits by 4 or 5 to 1, that seemed possible. He said that views not getting matched to actual posts would be fixed soon, and off he went.
Then, a couple of days later, the founder of WordPress.com showed up and said, no, this wasn’t just RSS views.
Hey guys — founder of WordPress.com here.
Good news: We’ve historically been vastly undercounting your stats, and we’re starting to fix this.
Bad news: There are some bugs with how things add up, meaning that they don’t. I apologize for undue excitement this may have caused.
More good news: Although support is closed, we’re working on this. We’ll fix it ASAP.
When asked why the sudden boost in views did not match what third party counters were reporting (like my flag viewer on the side bar, which lined up almost exactly with the Pages & Posts report of page views for the 21st), he blustered about such page view counters being inaccurate and eventually said that all page view counts were just approximations and no two would ever match.
Tell that to the people who get paid for page views and the like. I am sure that would make them very happy to use WordPress.com stats.
And then the next day wordpress.com referrals in the stats started to fade away, so by the 26th things were pretty much back to normal and the great mid-October page view spike was over. (Other people posted pictures with similar spikes.)
In my WordPress.com stats, October 21, 2011 is now listed as my best day ever. However, I am pretty sure that June 29, 2011 is still the actual champion, which happened at the peak of the great Incarna bitch-fest.
And life goes on.
One Year Ago
I had some hopes and expectations for BlizzCon. There were pretty much unmet. But Blizzard had already announced the Cataclysm ship date, so what else did I expect?
I asked if people ever look at the items in the blog side-bar. People mostly do not.
I finished building my new computer. It has been live a year and Windows 7 hasn’t completely degraded into a pile of blue-screening ooze the way XP used to when not constantly attended to.
The EVE Online screen shot contest wrapped up, winners were declared and prizes were sent out.
The instance group was playing in LOTRO, which had been live as a Free to Play game for one month. In-game, we were subjected to the disturbing habits of some of the residents of the Lone Lands, while I indulged in one of my own habits, the mid-game character swap. And then I made one post completely unreadable by making anagrams out of all the proper nouns. I had to repost a corrected version.
I bought Civilization V, which like every Civilization launch, had issues with my current computer. The unwritten rule of Civilization is that you need to upgrade your machine in order to play.
And my daughter and I were drinking new and interesting sodas.
Five Years Ago
Five years ago our Saturday night WoW group completed our first full instance run, The Deadmines, on our third try at it, and got in a whack at The Wailing Caverns.
I decided in EVE Online that covert ops would be a good career choice. It certainly sounds cool. However, the effort was cut short when I got to some of the pricier skills.
I felt that fall urge to run around in EverQuest, plus I wanted to take some pictures of Faydwer in order to compare them to the upcoming EverQuest II expansion, Echoes of Faydwer.
I also jumped into EverQuest II and got all confused (nothing new there) about the trade skill changes that occurred during the 10 months I was away.
I was defending instancing and game company forums as well as moaning about the fact that I couldn’t find a decent video card for my AGP motherboard.
There was some talk about which pen and paper RPGs would make good MMOs.
And I spent some time carping about MMO pricing plans. I still feel about the same on the subject five years later.
New Linking Sites
I would like to thank the following site for linking here.
Please take a moment to visit them in return.
Most Viewed Posts in October
- Beastlord to be the New Class in the Next EQ2 Expansion
- How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark
- Blizzard Endorses the Transfer of Capital to the Proletariat
- Play On: Guild Name Generator
- Tobold Prediction – CCP Bankrupt in 2012
- Panda Reactions at Our House…
- And Then I Told My Daughter About Pet Battles…
- Post BlizzCon Thoughts on Pandaria
- Despite Rampant Hacking and GM Shennanigans, Fippy Darkpaw Server is Still Stuck on Velious
- Azeroth Travel Poster Contest – Win a Sparkle Pony!
- Civ II – Found the Disc, Can’t Use the Disc
- The Most Wiley WoW Phishing Attempt Yet…
Spam Comments of the Month
I’m just done looking at your posting and I fairly enjoyed it….
[A long comment from somebody linking back to "Write Comments, Get Paid." I wonder if he got paid.]
i cant believe you are coming to Burlington, VT !!! andddd Albany, NY. im totally going to see you twice!
[Not if I see you first.]
Search Terms of the Month
3d gay porn
[Sorry, I don't cover Second Life here.]
lou attack report
[Who did Lou attack?]
EverQuest
I have written enough about EverQuest this month that you might think I am actually playing it. But I am not. I am, however, keeping as close an eye on the Progression Servers as I can manage and reporting on forum fun. I hope, in the end, to have a decent sketch of what happened on the Progression Servers based on that. You can keep an eye on the Fippy Darkpaw tag for the story as it unfolds.
Need for Speed World
As I mentioned in a previous post, I am starting to play this less and less. Not a bad game, and it really can be free to play, but there just isn’t much to do once you’ve sort of hit the walls that surround the world.
Rift
The instance group is slowly coming online with Rift. The general reaction from the group has been positive. Primarily that has been about the look and feel, which stands up to WoW level of polish, unlike EverQuest II and Lord of the Rings Online which, for all their merits, are still rough around the action bar.
TorilMUD
There was some excitement generated by big changes at TorilMUD. A bunch of people surged back on, dug out old characters or rolled up new ones, and then said, “I seem to remember this being a lot more fun.”
Well, that is what I said in any case. There is still a lot to love about MUDs, but it was a time of very raw fun and few online multiplayer fantasy roleplaying options.
As a sign of how things have changed, TorilMUD had a double experience event this past weekend.
World of Warcraft
All this talk of pandas, pets, and BlizzCon got my daughter and I to resubscribe. She really wanted to play, and when she plays I play. We ended up doing a bit of the Hallow’s End stuff because she wanted the creepy crate pet.
Other Games
Facebook games in general, and Zynga games in particular, are really fading with me. I used to try every Zynga game, then every other, then every third or so.
I end up playing them all about the same amount of time, but they seem to be cranking them out faster and faster. I think this might be hurting them.
Two years, Zynga meant FarmVille and Mafia Wars. They had a strong identity. Today Zynga is a new game a month and I couldn’t tell you what the stand-out game for them really is.
I am sure there is a lesson in that.
Anyway, my Empires & Allies neighbors will have to understand. I left everything harvestable, so they can reap (literally) the benefits of visiting, but I am done.
I have been playing some Civilization II, now that I have it working on Windows 7 64-bit. I miss some of the enhancements that came with the later games… and unit pathing just sucks… I have to find the patch that fixed some of that… but it is light and clean and still a damn good game.
And, finally, I have been meaning to write about Defense Grid: The Awakening, a $10 tower defense game on Steam. But every time I go to write about it, I launch it and just end up playing. I have thought about picking up Dungeon Defenders, because I like the tower defense genre, but I doubt I would play it any time soon because I am not done with Defense Grid yet.
Coming Up
Well, the instance group will actually have to do something together in Rift.
There is a screen shot contest to judged! You still have until November 6th to get your Azeroth travel poster submitted!
I am sure there will be something to note on Fippy Darkpaw. Right now the forums are just boiling about the whole rotation thing, but there might even be a vote on the next expansion, the Shadows of Luclin. If waking the sleeper was the gating item to trigger the vote. If it was “finish all tasks listed on the chart,” then… well… all those tasks are not done yet, and we’re still stuck on Velious.
And we’re getting to the end of the year wrap-up season. All those predictions… erm demands… will be coming home to roost. For some of them, the companies were listening, while on others I apparently did not make myself clear.
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.
A Visit with the Tako Demon October 15, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, MUDs, TorilMUD.Tags: Kobold Village, Leuthilspar Tales, Tako Demon
5 comments
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!
