Darren has gone back to give Runes of Magic another try and seems to be more disposed to like it than he was the first time around.

But then he hit a snag.  He started looking at the Real Money Transaction, or RMT, aspect of the game and did not like what he saw.

Specifically, he saw that a permanent horse in the game was going for about $10 after translation from cash to virtual currency to actual Equus ferus magicus.

His response was rage and shock.  And I have to admit, my initial gut reaction was right there with him.

$10 for a virtual horse?   You must be mad!

And from both of our perspectives as people who have not made any real commitment to the game, it is a pretty reasonably point of view.  Plonking down $10 for a game I might stop playing tomorrow seems like a bad investment.

Then I thought back to the pre-expansion days of World of Warcraft and the pain of scraping together the gold for an epic mount and the riding skill.  If, back then, there had been a $10 package from Blizzard to get the riding skill and your mount, I would have gotten in line like a lot of other people and snapped that puppy up.

A lot of people spent more than $10 buying gold from illicit gold sellers to buy that mount.  If there had been a legitimate method I am sure they would have taken it.

But then, when were talking about people in WoW buying their epic mount, we are talking about people who have made a real commitment to the game.  $10 in the scope of that commitment is not such a big deal.  Many of those who would have thrown in the $10 without thinking twice at level 60 might not have been so eager on their first day to part with cash for a virtual horse.

This is something we will have to come to grips with as RMT financing of MMOs becomes more common.  The value of virtual items is all a matter of perspective.  To a player committed to a game, who has invested time and effort, something like $10 for a permanent horse might seem trivial, and all the more so in a game that is otherwise free to play.  But to somebody there on day one, week one, or even month one, $10 for a horse may seem like an excess, a squandering of cash on a trivial item.

I am sure we will see this play out again and again.

We saw it when SOE started offering RMT in EQ and EQ2 via their Station Cash program.  I personally found some of the items they were offering for $10 to be over-priced fluff being just appearance items.  Darren thought they lacked substance, but wasn’t as up in arms as he has been about the ROM horse, but I suspect that is because he actually wants the horse.  But some people bought them I am sure.

And I am sure we will see if for the next big title that finances itself either partially or wholly through RMT.

Has anybody analyzed the RMT offerings of Battelfield Heroes or Dungeons and Dragons Online yet?

Saturday night and we were all in Dalaran making our way to Violet Hold.

Actually, only four of us were in Dalaran.  I was waiting somewhere else.  WoW still crashes on my machine when ever I get too close to Dalaran despite having installed a variety of drivers, swapped video cards, shut down every extraneous system process I could find, updated the BIOS on the motherboard, tinkered with the clock settings on the video card (turning them down seemed to give me an extra minute or two at one point, but it may have just been situational), and installed WoW again fresh.  And the more people in Dalaran, the quicker the crash happens, so prime time on a Saturday night is Dalaran crash central time for me.

So the other four went into Dalaran, got the quest for the Violet Hold key, picked up the key, and then got an instance for us.  I had already gotten the key and the quest lined up on our iMac earlier in the day.  Once they were in the instance and set I used my hearthstone to recall to A Hero’s Welcome, one of the Inns, and attempted the run  roughly a quarter of the way across the city to the instance.

And I crashed in about 30 steps.  Bugger.

And when my system crashes in Dalaran I have to reboot.  Something… the video card, the drivers, the OS… something in the system needs to be refreshed after one of my Dalaran crashes.

After the reboot I managed to make it the rest of the way and into the instance.  I asked to be added to the Skype conference call (no point in asking before I got safely into the instance) and we got ourselves ready.  Our group was:

75 Warrior – Earlthecat
76 Priest – Skronk
76 Warlock – Bungholio
77 Mage – Ula
77 Paladin – Vikund

As is usual, and despite some warnings in past comments, we went into Violet Hold without any research into the instance.  All I really knew was what what people mentioned in comments along with the warnings to read up on the instance in advance.

We were there, and it seemed a bit busy even as we arrived.  There was a bit of an NPC battle going on right there on the steps in front of us.

We join the action in progress...

A Lieutenant Sinclari was standing there facing us.  Ula went to talk to her.  She went a little too far in the dialog and suddenly the good Lieutenant (not Harvey Keitel) was announcing in a yell that her team was pulling out.  I read her yell aloud over Skype, “We’re pulling out….”

Ula Heard me and thought we were leaving the room so trotted along after Sinclari and her team just in time to be on the other side of the doors when they closed and sealed.  A familiar counter popped up on the screen.

Yes, just like last week in Black Morass.

A portal opened up with a portal guardian standing at it.  Mobs began showing up from the portal to attack us at the top of the stairs before the door.  We killed them while trying to figure out what to do about Ula.  Bung tried to summon her to us which took him off of offense.  Meanwhile another portal opened.  Then another.  Soon we were swamped and slain.  Oops.

Round 1 to the bad guys.

Fortunately, running through Dalaran as a ghost does not seem to bother my video card.  We ran back to the instance, got to the locked door at just about the time the bad guys broke through.  Seeing a mass of them running straight at us I thought we were in for another wipe.  As they hit Vikund let off a consecrate hoping to take some down, but they just ran past us.

The encounter reset.  Lieutenant Sinclari was waiting for us again. We decided to read up a little about the encounter.

Slightly more informed, though we had already guessed a good portion of the basics of the event, we spoke to Lieutenant Sinclari, this time with everybody on the correct side of the door.  When her team pulled out, we moved to the middle of the main floor and waited for a portal to open.  One did to the immediate right of the stairs, behind us as we stood.

We turned to face it and when the portal guardian showed up, Earl hit him with such a mighty charge that he disappeared.  I thought perhaps Earl had knocked him back into the portal.

Instead the guardian actually fell through the floor.  We were able to coax him up a bit so that he was visible, but he was bugged at that point.

Invincible Portal Guardian

We could hit him once in a while, but then he would start evading and reset.  Meanwhile his portal kept spewing mobs and other portals opened while we tried to get him unstuck.  Again we fell under a sea of hostile forces.

Dead All Over

Round 2 to the bad guys.

Back again in time to wave at the ravening pack as they broke down the door and ran past us and into nothing.  We joined Lieutenant Sinclari at the top of the steps yet again.

This time around we started the event and were a bit careful about pulling portal guardians.  No more charges.  Call it paranoia.

And, paranoid or not, we went through the first five portal groups just fine and hit the sixth, which meant the first boss fight.

We drew Xevozz.

Xevozz Cometh

We fought him like we would fight any boss the first time around, straight up tank and spank and don’t spare the DPS.  He ate us alive.

Round 3 to the bad guys.

Back again with the ever patient Lieutenant Sinclari, we read up a bit on Xevozz, just in case we drew him again, then started the encounter up for another run.

Again, we got through the first five portals just fine and when the sixth came up it was Xevozz!  The recommend tactic with him was to kite him around to keep him away from his ethereal spheres.  If he stays by them they rev up his damage and a wipe ensures.  We managed to keep him in motion, though line of sight issues plagued Skronk as he tried to keep everybody alive.  Still we managed.  One boss down and a short break.

Xevozz was good enough to drop the Riot Shield which turned out to be a big upgrade for Earl, so we all passed and he strapped on that barn door.

Second verse, same as the first; we tore through the next five portals and got to the next boss, Lavanthor, and enormous core hound.

Lavanthor must mean "big" in some language

Vikund put up the his fire resist aura and we went after him, bringing him down without much drama.  Lavanthor left us the Prison Warden’s Shotgun as a drop, another upgrade for Earl, being the only gun user in the group, and making a nice companion for the Riot Shield.

Which left just five more portals and then the main event, Cyanigosa!

Cyanigosa appeared to be a pretty standard dragon fight with the expected breath and tail sweep action.  We lost Bung part way into the fight on a random shot, which caused a bit of anxiety, but we managed to power through and bring her down.

She ended up dying in a rather awkward position, head buried in the allegedly solid floor.

Cyanigosa face plant!

And, as a drop, we got the Plate Claws of the Dragon which went to Earl, giving him a trifecta.  But in a group like this, when the tank wins, we all win.

As we left, Lieutenant Sinclari gave us a pat on the head and told us her team would be able to take over.

Wow, thanks!  Don’t get your uniform dirty or anything!

And so we finished up in Violet Hold.  We didn’t get any of the additional achievements, but the run is short enough that we might go back for another try.  There are other bosses to play with.

Maybe next time Moragg...

The run was short enough, in fact, that we decided to run out and give the Amphitheater of Anguish a try. (I think I saw The Ramones play there back in ‘84.)

Running around Dalaran to the flight point caused my video to lock up again, but only after I got on the bird out to Zul’Drak.  The funny thing is, the game is quite clearly still going.  I could hear the wings of the bird flapping and the sound of coins when we passed flight points, but to see anything I had to reboot.

Once back, we found the Amphitheater, stopping along the way to hit the Midsummer quest points for alliance and horde.

There was a horde group already doing the Amphitheater when we arrived, so we got to watch a couple of the battles.  We couldn’t communicate with them, but when they had a wipe (druid tank, not much healing) we jumped in to try it out, then alternated with them.  Or tried to, in any case.  They tagged one of our bosses before we did at one point, but I couldn’t tell if they were trying to help, trying to hurry us along, or just trying to be annoying.

We got through the six battles, though not without a caster casualty now and again.  We lost Ula and Bung on one fight.  But in the end we got to collect on each victory, which amounted to a decent pile of experience, 19-20 gold, and, for the last fight, a nice weapon.  Vikund picked up the De-Raged Waraxe as his new main weapon.

After that I called it a night, thinking that my wife would be in bed.  The rest of the group went off looking for some more experience while I logged off.  Then I found that scrapbook and martini night was still going on with my wife and a couple of her friends sitting out in our back yard still chatting.  A late night for that group, but it was still hot out and we had no plans for Sunday.

The next instance on the list is Gundrak, but this coming Saturday is Independence Day, so I am not sure if we will have a full group, or any group for that matter.  We shall see.

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

-Some U.S. Senator

Last week I decided I the Mountain Mtn Dew Game Fuel promotion was not really worth any more of my time.

I had my Battlebot, another companion pet in furtherance of my WoW achievement goals.

I had collected a pile of fuel for said Battlebot, but it was largely going unused.  Blizzard might have a nice gallery of pictures, but I’ve only ever seen three Battlebots out at a time, and only once were all three actually fueled up.

The fuel is part of the problem.  I have been asked a number of times in-game where to get the fuel.  You have to go back to the Game Fuel site the day after you get the Battlebot and click on the button for some fuel.

You only get five units of fuel per daily visit to the site.  Five is not much, especially when you lose it if your Battlebot goes away for any reason, so I am sure people don’t want to waste it on the off chance of a battle.

And then, just to make things a bit more annoying, the fuel only stacks in units of 20, so if you start hoarding the stuff, it starts taking up valuable inventory slots.  Why Blizzard, why?

Bot fuel in my bag

I had been stockpiling fuel, but I gave it up last week.

But while I was doing my daily fuel run, I also took a minute to accumulate some prize tokens, which you can enter in the many daily drawings.  You get 25 for each daily visit and you can earn more through various other actions.  The easiest is to watch videos.  You get 25 tokens each time you watch a video, though you get the tokens about 2 seconds into the video and sticking around seems purely optional, and there are 15 videos up currently, so you can get 400 tokens a day.

The first couple of days I threw my tokens after any prize that looked like it was lightly camped.  You can see how many tokens have been spent against any given drawing.  Then I saw there was a trip to BlizzCon as one of the prizes, so I saved up my tokens and put them all on that.

I heard nothing.  Tokens into the wind.

That was amusing for a couple more days after which I couldn’t be bothered.  I collected some more tokens, put them up against some prizes and then stopped showing up.

But on Monday there was a package in the mail for me.  In it there was a note.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have been drawn as a winner in the Mountain Dew Game Fuel “Choose Your Side” World of Warcraft Promotion.

Your prize is enclosed.

On behalf of the Pepsi-Cola Company, we thank you for your participation in this sweepstakes.

Young America Corporation

They don’t notify you if you win a small prize, they just send it to you.

Or they tell Young America Corperation to send it to you, since they appear to be the prize clearing house that Pepsi is using.

Oh, and also enclosed was a Mtn Dew Game Fuel T-shirt.

I went back and checked through the winners list and found that I was a winner the day after my original post on the subject.

I'm on that list

The shirt itself is… well… it is okay I guess.  I tend towards white T-shirts when I have a choice. The graphic on it is good enough I suppose, in a cheap concert-shirt sort of way.  I’ll wear it around the house on the weekends I’m sure.

Rock on Alliance! Rock on Horde!

The graphic itself is awkwardly placed on the lower right side of the shirt, wrapping around from front to back, as if placed to protect the stomach under my sword arm.  Since I tend to tuck in my shirt, you lose a good third of the graphic.  The shirt does have a nice Blizzard logo on the back of the collar.

So I am a winner!

And, while checking out the winners on the site, I noticed that the BlizzCon trip is still listed as “pending verification.”  They might be trying to get in touch!  Any messages for me?

Well, I can dream.

Anyway, this all inspiried me to go back to the site and watch some more videos.  I think I’ll save up my tokens are try for a pair of the Razer Carcharias headsets that they are giving away.

The Site

Is it the end of June already?  I know that time flying is a cliche and all, but this month only seemed like it had about 12 days in it.

The only thing I really did to the site was ad something to the right side bar (way down at the bottom) the shows the national flags of the visitors to the site.  It is silly, but it intrigues me to know that somebody from the Faroe Islands visited my blog. (Hey, can you get me Sunleif Rasmussen’s autograph?)

You even get little “dings” for a new visitor or, even better, a new flag!

Hello Bangladesh!

Yes, I am easily amused.  But I play MMOs, so that was probably apparent to some already.

The title on this side bar addition, “Release Flags of All Nations!” is something that Potshot says once in a while when we’re doing something memorable in the instance group, like unloading on some boss with every possible attack at our disposal.  Now who gets the reference?

Other than that, I ended up getting a pile of page views from a pair of sites called Condron and Alphainventions.  I cannot tell if they just offer a gimmick to drive up page views or if there is something worthwhile about the sites.  You can just go to either site and watch blog posts flick by every few seconds.  Relaxing in a way, I suppose.

One Year Ago

The big news a year back was Blizzard announcing Diablo III.  Of course, the really big news will come when they announce a ship date.  Still, we were all primed for the announcement, there having been a surge in Diablo II nostalgia at the time.

The Empyrean Age was upon us in EVE Online, if you could stay logged in.  CCP went looking for a fix and found one eventually.  When I could get a break on connectivity I went out to try a factional warfare mission.  It did not go well.  After that I moved back to Amarr space again and started in on level 4 missions.  And while that was going on, the skill point meter rolled over to 20 million.

Meanwhile, around the house, Summer began and it found us playing with LEGO and Pokemons.

Norrath was calling as SOE launched their huge Living Legacy marketing campaign.  I picked up some nifty stuff in EverQuest, but never really got rolling with EverQuest II during the promotion.  Of course, not everybody was happy about the campaign.  The phrase “a slap in the face” was used by some. I never got around to a post about that involving the prodigal son (I still have the notes) though I did wonder what sparked this campaign.

And in Azeroth the instance group struggled through the Mana Tombs and started in on the Auchenai Crypts.  We were struggling, this being long before the great re-spec of 2009.

New Linking Sites

A veritable land rush of new linking sites appeared this month.  Well, compared to last month.  I am going to save a few for next month, since I have noticed that the more I list in a post like this the less the sites in question get visited.

• A High Latency Life
• Facepalm’s Blog
• Pearls of Unwisdom
• Random Mileages
• Tales of Wasted Time

Thank you!  I encourage people to go take a look at these sites.

Most Viewed Posts in June

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
2. Rotom Secret Key Event
3. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
4. Regigigas Event at Toys R Us
5. Shaymin Event at Toys R Us
6. Which Game Was I Playing?
7. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access
8. Five LEGO Video Game Titles I Want
9. 2009 MMORPG Progdictionations
10. Mount Up Sooner, Race Through the Outlands
11. The Reluctant R&D Agent
12. What Would You Do for a Pet in WoW?

Search Term of the Month

ancient sewer
[You have been here before I see.]

Spam Comments of the Month

/yawn
[Nearly fooled me into approving since most comments with spam links are very positive in tone.]

Tired of a competitor’s site? Hinder the enemy? Fed pioneers or copywriters?
Kill their sites! How? We will help you in this!
Obstructions of any site, portal, shop!
[Denial of service attacks, only $70 per 24 hours.  You can buy anything on the internet!]

EVE Online

It has been something of a slow month for me in EVE Online.  Training goes on as well as lining up the capital for the w-space venture.  Fortunately I spent a chunk of time in May stocking up my inventory for sale, so there has been a reasonable amount of cash coming while I’ve been idle.

On the other hand, Gaff has had some tales to tell about 0.0 space, a couple of which he has actually posted, so I have kept my hand in somewhat vicariously.

World of Warcraft

WoW was the only game I spent much time with over the last month.  The instance group kept up weekly appearances in Azeroth.  And though we have been down a person lately, we still find ways to get in trouble as a foursome.

As for my other regular group, my mother and daughter, we have… erm… breadth and depth I suppose.  My mom has one character almost to 50 and another holding around the 40 mark waiting for my daughter to catch up.  My daughter though… she won’t focus on one character.  She keeps making alts.  She runs off to other servers.  It all sounds vaguely familiar.  It all sounds like the way I used to play.  Now is it nature or nurture that is causing that?

Nintendo DS

Our daughter was banned from TV and the computer for a week after going Veruca Salt on my wife.  After most of a day went by she realized that the DS had not been put in time out as well, so out came the Pokemon.  Pokemon Ranger, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and Pokemon Diamond seemed to be the three favorites for the week, though I heard the bark of Nintendogs and the whir of the blender in Cooking Mama as well.  I had to get out my own DS to do some battles with her.  Oddly enough, Pokemon Platinum was low on the list.  In the MMO spirit, she is more invested in Diamond so isn’t so keen to move on.

Coming Up

I suspect that July will be a light month for me when it comes to posts.  We have a vacation planned plus work is very busy.  There is a correlation between my planning vacation time and work suddenly getting hectic.  It is somehow related to the rule that says I should always plan my vacations on the first product ship date we target, since history shows we will never ship on that date.

Anyway, I will keep the weekly instance group posts going.  The log of our weekly exploits and foibles is one of the cornerstones of the site.

New details were released about StarCraft II and Ars Technica has a round up.

The good stuff sounds… good.  Epic single player battles sound great.  And some of the negatives, like no port to consoles don’t really bother me.  I cannot picture myself playing an RTS in front of the TV.  But there there was this bit about support for LAN play in SC2:

Rob Pardo is the VP of Game Design, and he had strong words for LAN play when he spoke with IncGamers. “We don’t have any plans to support LAN,” he told the site, also saying, “We will not support it.”

Um… but Rob… LAN play at the office, where access to Battle.net was iffy at best, represents probably 80% of my multi-player time with the original StarCraft.

Okay, let me breath into a brown paper bag and calm down.

The game hasn’t shipped yet.  Things could change.  I remember back when Diablo II was announced Blizzard said they were only going to support advanced graphics via the 3dfx video cards, then changed their mind.

But then 3dfx tanked right about that time as well.

Meanwhile they are also talking about monetizing Battle.net with microtransactions, so who knows what we’ll end up with, though if I am going to pay anything for Battle.net it better include reduced lag.  That was the main reason we stuck to the LAN.

“Shut Up We’re Talking,” one of the podcasts in the VirginWorlds Podcast Collective, celebrates its 50th show this week!

Regular hosts Darren from The Common Sense Gamer and Karen from Journey’s with Jaye were joined by Brent, the reclusive Howard Hughes father figure of the VirginWorlds Podcast Collective, Michael Zenke, formerly of Massively and who is now working on fun stuff as part of the SOE team in Austin, Jonathan from the “Through the Aftermath” podcast, and myself.

Topics:

• Introductions – Includes a poem from Karen to celebrate the 50th show/second year of SUWT
  
• Listener Mail – From SmakenDahed and DestroyerDestroyer
• What We’re Playing
• Changing of the Guard at Mythic – We talk about the departure of Mark Jacobs from Mythic and EA as well as the return of Brad McQuaid to the spotlight.  Jonathan has a cathartic rant about the latter while I generalize about the former, referencing an excellent Scott Jennings post.
• RMT Again – We then go on, again, about RMT and alternative subscription models in light of the major changes with Dungeons & Dragons Online and the release of Free Realms.  We’re mostly excited about the DDO changes, but that is coming from people who see buying D&D modules as a natural part of life.
• Blog of the week – Of Teeth and Claws, go give it a visit.
• Show Close
• Out Takes – Michael runs amok
  

You can get the show via iTunes of download it directly here!

Congratulations to the SUWT team for 50 great shows!

Another foursie group on Saturday night sent us back to the Outlands for a bit more instance backfilling while Earl got some rest.  It is tough to blame him for missing once in a while since we start playing at midnight his time every Saturday.  He’s the young guy in the group, but nobody stays young forever.

So that left the Left Coast Quartet to carry on:

76 Priest – Skronk
76 Warlock – Bungholio
77 Mage – Ula
77 Paladin – Vikund

A check of the Instances by Level list showed that Shattered Halls was the next instance in our queue.  But it also requires a key which has a quest chain behind it which we have not yet run down.  Wanting to get straight to the action, we moved on to the next instance, The Caverns of Time: Opening the Dark Portal, also know by its location, the Black Morass.

I suppose this wasn’t exactly going back to the Outlands since the Caverns of Time are in Tanaris.  But it is Burning Crusade content.

We had been to the Caverns of Time on more than a couple of occasions, so we knew how to get there.  We did not, however, do any reading up front so were not sure how things were going to play out.

We grabbed a quest for the instance on the way in, found the right instance swirl, and then spent 10 minutes trying to get in.  We were back to the old “Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later” routine, only it seemed to be worse than usual.  A busy night for instances I guess. Eventually though Blizzard relented and let us in.

Once in, we spoke to the quest mob at the door… he must have been the butler… and then headed towards a likely looking portal thing we could see in the middle distance.

There we spoke to a guy named Medivh who said something that essentially seemed to mean, “Cover me!”  We stood around for a minute or so, waiting for something to happen. Then some dragonkin began wandering in from one of the flanks.  We killed them while looking for the source.  There was a swirl in the air and a mob called a “Rift Keeper” standing next to it, so we figured that must be the target.

Upon killing him, a counter at the top of our screens incremented.  It seemed that we would be doing this at least 17 more times since we had just advanced to 2 of 18.

It turned out that at every sixth rift came with a boss.  We did well enough against the first one but had a rough go with the second, with Bung and Vikund getting killed.  Fortunately there is a fairly long delay after each of the bosses, so Skronk was able to bring us back before the next rift came along.

Rift Count and Shield Status

Back up we got through the next six battles including the last boss and… well… we were done.  Achievement.

There we were, standing before the portal.  A host of orcs came wandering through, but they turned around and left.  I would have too, the place was a dump.  But when we tried to follow them, we just ended up at the backside of the portal.

Defective Portal

Out of that the only look worth mentioning is the Mask of Inner Fire, which dropped off of the first boss.  And the only reason it is worth a mention is because it just looks cool.  Vikund won the roll for it and I am keeping it as part of his ever growing hat collection.

The Mask of Inner Fire!

That done, it was still early for us, so we decided to go for two.  Ula opened a portal to Shattrath for us, and while we were there, it was decided that those who did not have the Going Down? achievement should pick it up.

I showed everybody where I had done it, jumping of the Scryers area and landing on an awning below.  It turned out though that only Ula was missing that achievement, so it was gnome free fall time.  Unfortunately she missed the awning.  Twice.

Ballistic Gnome

And then when she did hit the awning, she didn’t get the achievement.  So, once we stopped laughing (you should have seen her bounce off of that structure in the picture above) we decided to shelve that achievement for the time being and move on to the Botanica wing of Tempest Keep.

The Botanica did not turn out to be that hard for our group of four.  We hand’t picked up any of the quests for the instance, so we just burned our way through to Warp Splinter, the final boss, without slowing down.  There were four bosses in before him, but none were that tough.  We’ll have to go back and do this one in Heroic mode at some point.

Warp Splint and his minions in the last fight faded before our damage and soon another achievement was ours.

The loot, just for Coppertopper, was:

And that brought us to the end of the evening.  We just had to take our traditional victory shot.

Warp Splinter Down

This coming weekend, if we’re all available, it will be time for Violet Hold.

The latest attempt to milk the World of Warcraft license comes from Figure Prints, which is now has 3D models of three of the in-game companion pets up for sale.

Pets for a Price

I can appreciate their offer to sell you a 3D sculpture of your WoW character.   Although I am not keen enough on them to put down the $130 to have any of my characters immortalized in resin, I can see the appeal. (At least you don’t have to enter the lottery I mentioned back in November to get one made these days.)

But to drop another $25 to have a companion pet in tow on your bookshelf or desk, I just can’t get there.

And this is just Series 1 and is available only through July 31st, at which point I am going to guess we’ll see Series 2.  Bets on which three companion pets that will contain?  I am going to guess it will be Mr. Wiggles, Pengu, and the Worg Pup.

In Azeroth (and the Outlands) the Midsummer Fire Festival is upon us.  You would think a company in Irvine would be a little skittish about summer fires, much of our state being a constant blaze during the dry season, but maybe that is the source of the inspiration.  A little bit of black humor perhaps?

The telltale signs of the Midsummer Fire Festival

Anyway, the event is akin in some ways to the Lunar Festival.  Rather than running around and honoring the scattered elders for event currency, you run around and honor… well… fires… which are located near, but not in, various settlements.  You ride up, talk to the guy with the exclamation point over his or her head (the local Flamewarden), collect your experience, your cash, a few burning blossoms (the currency… talk about money burning a hole in your pocket… I can’t believe I made that joke, I swore I wouldn’t…), and off you go.

The Alliance flamewarden and bonfire in the Dustwallow Marsh

There are a few other things you can do.  You can juggle fire.  You can throw fire.  You can dance around the fire pole.

And you can go desecrate the opposing faction’s bonfires.

That last bit is actually the fun part.

Since the bonfires are often located close to horde camps (as the alliance ones are often close to alliance outposts) there is a certain amount of risk involved since the moment you’re done with the desecration, you are flagged PvP and it is open season in you for five minutes.

Sunday morning when the whole thing started this was no big deal.  The only ones running after flames and bonfires were the hard core achievers, so there was some waving to the opposing faction but almost no conflict.  Then as the day wore on, the killers got involved.  There was fresh, flagged meat to be had.

By that time I had stopped running Vikund through the festival fun, fearing that the experience gains would level him up ahead of the instance group.  Instead I decided it might be a good time for alts.

I ended up getting out a couple of me “stuck in the 40s” alts, a 41 druid and a 42 rogue.

I made a point of picking up all of the alliance flamewarden updates with them that I could.  In the Eastern Kingdoms it was possible with a character in the low 40s to pick them all up for the achievement and maximum experience.  On Kalimdor though, Silithus and Winterspring are a bit tough for a character of that level to approach.

And then there were the horde bonfires.  The ones that were in close proximity with their alliance counterpart, like the ones near Booty Bay or Gadgetzen, were generally unguarded.  But the ones that stood alone or that were sites of traditional struggles, they ended up being a challenge at time.

Both of my characters had to dodge and run from higher level players at the Tauren Mill.  Both got away from the scene, though my druid got popped making his way up the canyon to the Hinterlands.

My druid got caught again on the road through Feralas by a group of horde players.  I managed to dodge them for over a minute before a consecrating Blood Elf Paladin got me cornered and finished me off.

In Trisfal Glades my rogue got into a long chase with a Blood Elf hunter that he only lost because I decided to stop and desecrate the Silverpine bonfire while I was passing by, enough of a delay to get me killed.

And at the Crossroads in The Barrens my rogue ended up playing hide and seek with another Blood Elf hunter (what is it with the Blood Elves?  Is being too pretty making them over compensate?) both getting to the bonfire and then getting away.  I was surprised to actually make it out of that one alive.

I even ended up deciding on a couple of survival tactics, the prime one being to avoid any road that runs directly between any horde and alliance camps.  They tend to be traveled by players already flagged PvP, 90% of whom are much higher level than me.

The other tactic involves a quick escape.  When you bring up the quest page to desecrate a bonfire, you get dismounted.  However, you can resummon your mount before you complete the quest, so you can be riding away just as you get flagged PvP.  Not a sure fire tactic, since every single player who has been after me has been on an epic mount (when are we getting th0se level 40 epic mounts?), but it gives me a bit of a chance to get out of site, stealth, and lose them.

After running through Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, my rogue was level 44 and my druid level 43.

Then today I read that they reset all the flags for the various camps to fix an issue with people who ran the quests last year, so I will be able to get out there with my rogue and do it all again.

And I am even relearning a bit about playing a rogue.  It has been nearly two years since I had him out in the field.

So not a bad deal for a silly WoW holiday.

It ought to come as no surprise if you have read this blog for a while that I am fond of the achievement system in World of Warcraft.

Despite the fact that I rank higher as an “explorer” in the Bartle Test, achievements do tend to drive my actions.  Of course, I tend to view exploring different places, having seen the world as it were, as an achievement, so it is no doubt more a matter of  how I interpret the questions that is mucking up my results.

My Bartle Test results - Explorer!

And it is not just in WoW that I like achievements.  In EverQuest II I had a reasonable pile of server first and three game-wide first achievements.  They were almost all related to trade skills where the different tiers of quality (all of this was pre-Live Update 24 which started the big move towards trade skill sanity) allowed for many ways to grab a server first.  My initial game-wide first involved my Woodworker taking a rare (and expensive) component and making the medium quality version of an trade skill item that had just been introduced to the game.

So, yes, I like achievements and will squander valuable resources both in-game (gold or rare harvests) and out (time) to get them.

And yet I have problems with most achievement systems.

In Lord of the Rings Online the achievements are a bit grindy.  (Not that some of the WoW achievements are not grindy.)  Plus you tend to zoom past some of them as you level up, so to go back and get them you have to slaughter mass quantities of no experience mobs.  I tend to find that a bit tough since gaining experience and levels counts as an achievement in my book as well, though one I am not so good at sticking to, so I tend to prefer achievements that give me experience AND something shiny.

Warhammer Online went the hidden achievement route (as did LOTRO for their emote based titles), which seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.  The achiever in me likes to have a nice laundry list of potential tasks.  That is the enticement, the fact that I know I’ll get a shiny if only I can find some way to fall 65 yards and live. (And maybe get a two-fer if I bandage myself quick while my health is under 5%!)  The object of these achievements is to say, “Here are 101 crazy things to do when you’re bored and we’ll acknowledge when you’ve done them.”  The Tome of (Hidden) Knowledge doesn’t give you that list until after the fact.  Some people like that, I don’t.

The vast majority of EverQuest II achievements are of the server first variety, which is great and satisfying if you’re the person who gets it.  But once it has been taken it is gone, never to be seen again.  EQ2 also has a series of achievement-like things that award titles and the like.  But titles, while a nice and obvious sign of achievement, get out of control fast pretty fast in EQ2.  I have characters with piles of titles.  And, of course, you can only display one title at a time. (Two at a time, I suppose, if you get a prefix and suffix title.)

EVE has an achievement-like in its certificates, though since they are relegated to the largely off-line training mechanism of EVE, I have not found certificate chasing a very compelling hobby.

And then there is WoW, with its bright and shiny achievement system that puts up awards for things you were going to do anyway (made level 10!  trained for a mount!), to things you might not do without the shiny dangling before you (yesterday’s explorer title or the loremaster title), to some things that only the most dedicated player might go after (killing all the rare spawn mobs in the Outlands or Northrend for example), with some goofiness mixed in for fun.

Yet as enamored as I am with the WoW achievements, I can still find problems.

Currently in Azeroth the Midsummer holiday event is running, though they must use a different calendar in Azeroth since according to my calendar summer just started.  Anyway, with this event there is the usual set of achievements offered to players related to things you can do in celebration of Midsummer.  These events are actually pretty sweet, offering cash and experience as a reward for a range of simple to mildly dangerous activities.  For pissing on a horde bonfire, which does flag you PvP, my level 76 dwarf hunter gets 20K experience and 6 gold while honoring an alliance fire gets him 10K and 3 gold.

Level 76 Quest Rewards

Hot stuff, so to speak.  Back of the napkin I would estimate that there is a good 2 levels of experience to be had running around honoring your own sides fires while desecrating the opposing faction’s bonfires.

What is not to like?

Well, the problem is that my main achievement collecting character is also my instance group character.  If I were to run out and scoop up all of the achievements for Midsummer with Vikund, he would end up pretty close to level 80, if not there.  But our instance group tries to stick together when it comes to levels and I am already pushing the limit at 77.  Going to 80, or close to 80, would be seriously breaking faith with the group.

I can still run through the event and get some of the achievements with my other characters.  But their achievements are separate from the achievement’s of my main character.

So I am going to add yet another wish to my long MMO wishlist.

I would like something along the lines of an account-wide tally board for achievements.

I want to see the sum of the achievements for all of my characters.

I do not want this to replace the individual character achievement listings, but I would like some way to see the cumulative achievements across the game.

In addition to my problems with levels on my main, there are other achievement areas this would open up.

For example, I never do battlegrounds with Vikund.  I understand paladins can be reasonably effective in PvP, but when I want to do that I get out my hunter.  So my hunter has a reasonable pile of PvP achievements that I will never bother to try and pick up with my pally.

This universal achievement board could also open up achievements exclusive to the other faction.  You could see the total of both horde and alliance achievements, for those of us who play both sides of the game.  Blizzard could even add achievements for doing something on either faction or for doing something with more than one character or on more than one server.

Meta achievements.

So that is the long-winded path to my wish of the day.

Are you an achiever too?  Which MMO achievement system do you like?

Our run at Drak’Tharon Keep tipped both Vikund, my paladin, and Ula over the mark and into level 77.

Of course level 77 is a special level.  It is the level at which you can train cold weather flying, the skill that lets you use you flying mount in Northrend.  A fine moment indeed, especially if you got your flying mount at 70 then moved on to Northrend only to find you had to wait another seven levels before you could use it again.

The skill costs 1,000 gold and there is no faction discount.  Not yet, anyway.  And while Vikund spent nearly all his gold recently getting his epic flying mount, I have since been on a harvesting binge with him.  And so he blew yet another thousand gold for this skill.

Of course, once you have the skill, you want to do something with it and I had just the thing in mind.

Previously I had wrapped up all the exploration achievements for old Azeroth and the Outlands.  The biggest pain of that was actually Kalimdor.  I had fully explored surprisingly few zones on that landmass.  The Eastern Kingdoms were a better covered because they had been the focus of much of my quest activity, though there were still a few sticky spots I had to pick up, like the Blood Elf lands.

The Outlands, on the other hand, were very easy.  Exploration is easy when you have a flying mount.  And since I could fly in Northrend, it was time to wrap up another set of achievements.

And, as we had been hitting Northrend as a group, I had been finishing off the exploration of those zones through which we worked.  That left me just four zones to finish off, Sholazar Basin, Ice Crown, Zul’Drak, and Storm Peaks.

So I ended up on Saturday morning flying over the last of those, taking in the scenery.

One Big Statue in Storm Peaks

A circuit around the zone hit most of the key points, though I always seem to miss at least one little spot, so a second, shorter round got me to the magic point.

Technically there should have been three achievements, the two above plus the one for Storm Peaks, but I guess achievement notifications cap out at two.

In addition to the achievements, you also get the title “The Explorer” and a special tabard.  The title shows up immediately, but the tabard comes through the mail.  I’m not sure who put Brann Bronzebeard in charge of this achievement, but you get the tabard from him along with a short note.

The tabard, which features a globe, was immediately dubbed the tabard of world domination or the tabard of the tri-continental commission.

Vikund and his new tabard

That deserved a big cheer.

Go pointless achievements!

Vikund now has 67 out of 70 possible exploration achievements.  The remaining three are a bit problematic.  Two of them are in the Outlands and involve first killing one very rare NPC, then all of the rare Outlands NPCs.  I might, perhaps, get one of the rares.  I did so in Northrend when I stumbled upon King Ping on evening.  But to get all of them, that would require an EverQuest level of commitment to camping a couple of dozen NPCs.

And the final exploration achievement left is killing all of the rare Northrend NPCs.  Again, beyond my level of commitment to the game.

But that is okay.  There are plenty of other achievements towards which to work.

Pokemon.com reports that you can again obtain the secret key that allows the Pokemon Rotom to change forms between now and July 19th.

This is not an in-store event.  You have to have your DS configured to connet to Nintendo Wi-Fi.  But if you have that option, the Pokemon Platinum site has full instructions for obtaining the Rotom secret key.

At the other end of the game control spectrum from Wii bowling balls, Scott Adams expressed his excitement in a post today about NeuroSky’s MindSet, a “brain-computer interface” that lets you control things on screen with just your mind.

One of the first apps, developed by Uncle Milton of Ant Farm fame, is Star Wars/Jedi related.  Use the force to… um… lift a ping pong ball!

Uncle Milton Force Trainer!

Okay, maybe that isn’t so impressive.

Still, that seems a lot cooler than jumping around playing pit crew with the whole Microsoft Project Natal thing.

Anything that keeps our collective asses planted firmly on the couch has got to be a winner.

How long before I can cast a fireball in World of Warcraft with my mind?

Brought to my attention via The Register, it seems that CTA Digital, taking the pursuit of Wii Sports realism a bit too far, has created a Wii remote attachment available in the form of a bowling ball.

Bowling for... what exactly?

You put your Wii remote in the ball and… well, I’ll use their description:

Once the remote is set inside, plug the three holes with your fingers, as you would a bowling ball. Lastly, make sure to wear the wrist strap securely around your wrist, this will prevent the ball from accidently flying out of your hand, and you are ready to bowl virtual strikes like a Pro!

How you actually use the controls through the three holes is a bit difficult for me to visualize.

What is not difficult to visualize however is that Wii remote bowling ball flying across the room and striking your TV, Wii, or anything else down range.  There is no doubt that CTA Digital has had that same mental image given some of the wording in their product description.

CTA Digital, Inc. will NOT be liable for any damage to your TV, home appliances, and/or accidents caused by these accessories.

USE EXTREME CAUTION WHEN USING THIS PRODUCT. CTA DIGITAL, INC IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RESULTING FROM THE BOWLING BALL ATTACHMENT

Still, you have to hand it to the team at CTA Digital for trying to bring back some of the early thrill of Wii gaming by coming up with a device that is bound to go flying across the room!

Now about that Wii Fit skateboard attachment….

After another side trip to the Outlands last week, we were ready again to assail another instance in Northrend.  Our target for the night was Drak’Tharon Keep, and out line up was:

75 Warrior – Earlthecat
76 Priest – Skronk
76 Warlock – Bungholio
76 Mage – Ula
76 Paladin – Vikund

Drak’Tharon was a troll keep at one time, but now the scourge appear to have taken it over.  Reminiscent of Gnomeregan, as you approach the instance, an endless stream of Drakkari trolls can be seen fleeing the area.  They materialize just shy of the summoning stone outside of the instance and run down the steps and into the woods, where they disappear.  While their names are in red, they do not appear to be aggro and will just run past alliance players.

We spent a little bit of time with the now familiar “too many instances” issue, but were able to get our own version of the keep after about a minute of jumping in and out of the entrance swirl.  Once in we got our first look at the decor.

Vikund has been eating those pirate treats again

There being undead and the like running around meant that Skronk and Vikund were on crowd control patrol for some parts of the instance.

We did not have to go far to get to the first boss, Trollgore.  He appears to be locked in his own little battle when you show up.  But you don’t have to wait, you can step to the front of the line.  The fight with him was not very dramatic.  In fact, it was rather straight forward, barring the other NPCs running around during the fight, and we did him in pretty quickly.

Trollgore down

He dropped a very nice weapon for Vikund, the Troll Butcherer, a 2 handed sword that was considerably better than the mace Vik was carrying.  Vikund’s 2 handed sword skill was only about 100, so he had some work to do before he could use if effectively, but that would come in time.

From Trollgore we moved into an area of spiders.  They were easy enough.  We decided to go after the struggling forms bound in spider webs in the room and were rewarded with a quest update.  Some of us had done a few of the lead-in quests for the instance, but had not really been paying attention.  Our usual formula of leaving no potential witnesses stood us in good stead.  The quest update sent us off to kill the next boss, Novos the Sommoner, who was conveniently just in the next room.

Novos, not yet summoning

We suspected that, with the suffix, Novos might have some special tricks up his sleeve.  But we’re always game to just go after a boss on the first run just to see what he does.  What Novos does is put up a shield that makes him immune to damage and call in the cavalry.  Before we could adjust, we were down.

Novos, shielded, summoning, and kililng us dead

We had seen a similar routine with Elder Nadox back in Ahn’kahet, so we figured it was time to concentrate on the adds and see what developed.  Sure enough, once in a while an add would come along that would, upon dying, turn off one of the four crystals around Novos.  These seemed to be the power behind his shield.  Soon enough Novos was without his shield and we stepped in and finished him off.

That let us move along and outside to possibly the largest raptor model I have ever seen in the game, a brute by the name of King Dred.  KD has his own herd of smaller, but still elite, raptors hanging around.  A raptor posse, if you will.  We cleared out some of the nearer small raptors then took on KD.  And at that point we found out that he calls on his little friends during the fight, which tipped things in his favor.

We came back after the wipe and finished clearing things out and went after him again.  Things went much more smoothly without additional raptors howing up mid-fight.

King Dred now King Dead

King Dred dropped another good item for the group, the Stable Master’s Breeches, a caster item coveted by all of our cloth wearers.  A roll off sent this new piece Skronk’s way.

After King Dred we were climbing stairs, headed towards the top of the instance where the last boss lives.  After clearing out the way, we ended up withing reach of The Prophet Tharon’ja, the last fight in the instance.

Up the stairs awaits The Prophet

We got ourselves squared away and Skronk did a ready check to see if we were a go.

The ready check generally startles Ula and puts her in a fighting mood.  We all said yes, so in we went.

The fight was fun, maybe one of the most enjoyable fights we’ve had in a while.  Every so often during the fight, Tharon’ja calls out and turns the whole party into undead.  Everybody so affected gets a new, limited set of attacks on their quick bar while the effect lasts.

This did not seem to degrade our ability to fight by much, nor did it make us much more vulnerable, so we just ran with it and chased him around looking like a bunch of skeletons.

We're undead while Tharon'ja is mortal

Fun is fun, but eventually the fight came to a close with all of us standing and Tharon’ja down.  And when the main boss goes down, the achievement comes up.

So there we stood again at the end of another instance with main boss down and some loot nobody really wanted.  Muradin’s Lost Greaves were not bad, but neither were they an upgrade for Earl or Vik.

The Prophet Defeated

And so we wrapped it up.  The way out of the instance was around the back of Tharon’ja’s high seat, the now somewhat common jump down in to a conveniently placed body of water.  Not a bad night all told.  There were a couple of decent equipment drops for once, plus Ula and Vikund hit level 77 along the way.  Vik just has to get out and practice with that new blade.

The next instance on the list is Violet Hold in Dalaran.  We’ll see if my “crash in Dalaran” issue will allow us to actually get into the instance.

Over at Wired Lore Sjöberg’s latest Alt Text column has a modest proposal for defining who is really a hard-core gamer.

It is a bit different from Darren’s version.

I have broken with the long standing American tradition of closing the barn door only after the horse has bolted.

Previously, when I was signing up with Battle.net I noticed that my account was also good for the Blizzard Store.  How convenient, I guess.  So I went leafing through the store and ended up on the page for the Blizzard Authenticator.  It was only $6.50 and I have read enough tales of people, even quite bright people, getting their account hacked one way or another, so I decided to buck the trend and get the authenticator BEFORE something like that happened to me.

Weird, I know.  But now I have one.

Blizzard Authenticator

The unit has an overlay on it with what appears to be a Terran Marine, the Lich King, and something that might be Diablo related, but which looks more like a rather ugly minotaur to me.  Not that minotaurs and Diablo are mutually exclusive, but they certainly don’t leap to mind when I think of the Diablo games.  Or it could be something else.  In any case, I take this as an indication that I will be able to use this unit with upcoming Blizzard games.  Well, that and the fact that I need the authenticator to access my Battle.net account as well as WoW.

As the blurb on the Blizzard site says, it is pretty durable.  I have had it on my key chain and in my pocket for a few weeks now and it hasn’t been damaged yet.

Initially it came with a piece of adhesive plastic over the front, the way that so many electronic devices do these days.  This particular piece was stuck on so well that at first I thought it was part of the actual unit.  So when my keys dug a groove in the cover on the first day, straight through where the numbers show up making it tough to read, I was a little annoyed.  Eventually though I was able to separate the temporary protective cover from the actual authenticator.  The picture above is sans cover.

Size wise, it fits in well enough with the other items on my key chain.  It is a bit smaller than the remote entry fob for my Toyota and the who key mechanism for the wife’s Honda.

On the key chain

Using it is simple enough.  It is from Vasco, who makes a lot of such units.  It looks and operates very much like units we have at the office from time to time when we have to do work on secure customer networks.

With WoW, you log in as usual, then are asked for an authentication code in a separate window.  I tend to not stray too far from my key chain, or my key chain tends to not stray far from my computer in any case, so it hasn’t been much of a bother.  The only issue I ever have is that I tend to play in the dark and the unit is not lit in any way, so I end up having to read it off of the light from the monitor.

Once in a rare moment I log in right on the time boundary when the code changes and have to enter a fresh code.  But I am much more likely to make a typo entering the code than to hit that moment just right.

Having adjusted quickly to the extra security when logging into WoW, I wouldn’t mind having a similar device for other games, especially EVE Online.

Actually, what I would really like is a universal device that could be used with other games.  That seems unlikely to happen, at least in the near future.

Of course now I worry about losing the damn thing.

Not that this is the top worry in my mind, what with the economy and being a parent and so forth.  But it is a worry, about on the level of worrying about dropping something in the toilet if the lid has been left up.  Around our house we’re more likely to have a cat fall in the toilet if the lid is left up (one kitten dunked so far, and Oscar has fallen in a couple times over the years), but it has happened on occasion.  And I do tend to take care of things that have value.  I used to get a new watch about once a year because I would either break or lose the old one.  Then I bought an expensive watch and have been wearing it for the last 23 years.

I’ll probably end up dropping my keychain in the toilet now that I have written this.  Or my watch.  Or both.

I wonder if the authenticator is water resistant?  I know the watch is.

And how long will the battery last on the unit?  And will I end up playing WoW long enough to care?

Last week I mentioned that one of the R&D agents which which I work in EVE Online had become oddly reluctant to speak to me.

Everything looked okay.  I had been using her as an R&D agent for some time.  My standing with her corporation, Viziam, was good.  When I checked the corporation agent list, she was flagged as available.  But when I flew out to her station, I was greeted with this:

In resonse to my post I was given some tips to check if I had done anything to hurt my standings.  Reatu Krentor suggested going to my standings page on my character sheet, right clicking on Viziam, and selecting “show transactions” to see if there was anything recent that would have negatively affected my standings.  There wasn’t anything.

Then Gunner came up with a web site about R&D agent standings that had an ominous quote from Apocrypha 1.2 patch notes.

Standings will now be calculated and displayed correctly when Connections and Diplomacy are applied to any character.

So there apparently was some change recently.

I went through the page which had a number of ways to check if your agent relationship was affected by this change.  But none of them seemed to apply.  Things just were not adding up.

So over the weekend I went back to the station where Eveh Pomar was based and saw this:

She was available to me again at the station.  I bought my datacores.  Did my little daily mission with her.  And then went on my way.

Database anomaly?  Station fever?  Space madness?  Feminine issues?  I have no idea why she stopped talking to me and I have no idea why she started back up again.

Mysteries of New Eden I guess.

You’re not leveling fast enough.

Okay, maybe you are, but it appears that some of us are not.

That seems to be a plausible explanation for some of Blizzard’s plans for the upcoming 3.2 patch.

Specifically, I mean the changes to mounts and travel reported over at WoW.com and discussed on various blogs.

Mount availability:

• 60% land mount at level 20, 4 gold to train, 1 gold for the mount
• 100% land mount at level 40, 50 gold to train, 10 gold for the mount
• 150% flying mount (boosted from 60%) at level 60, 600 gold to train, 50 gold for the mount
• 280% flying mount at level 70, 5000 gold to train, 100 gold for the mount

And, with the 3.2 patch, faction discounts will apply to all purchases.  Previously flying mounts and the skills for them had no faction discount option.

In addition, other travel related skills, like druid travel forms, will be aligned with the above changes.  I haven’t seen what they are going to do about Pally and Warlock mounts, which are only available via quests that take a couple of trips to Scholomance, plus some other running about, to accomplish.  But I imagine those mounts will move to the NPC dispenser model.  It would be nice if you could tell the difference, if you could see who got their mount the old fashioned way and who used the newer model, but I doubt we’ll get that.

And finally, according to WoW.com, on the list of travel bennies planned for the 3.2 patch, they are going to put a portal in Stormwind and Orgrimmar to haul your epic mounted backsides straight to the Stair of Destiny in the Outlands, thus removing your need to travel to the Blasted Lands and walk through the portal the old fashioned way.

From the stairs you will be able to fly directly to either Honor Hold or Thrallmar then train for and purchase your level 60 flying mount.

All of this seems to be generally aimed at getting people around faster to get them leveled up and into the current content, and specifically to get people through the Outlands as fast as possible.

Seriously, short of lowering the experience curve again, what is going to move you along quicker than being able to fly directly to your quest objective, avoiding the yard trash, and then straight back to the quest giver?

On the other hand, I don’t see anything drastically wrong with these changes.  Certainly my daughter was cheering at the idea of getting a faster mount at level 40.  And I have my own pile of level 40-ish characters who will probably get the speed boost.

And, for a first mount, level 20 isn’t a bad plan.  It would certainly make that haul from Auberdine to Desolace, or even that first run across the Wetlands for the flight point, much more bearable.

As for flying, despite the fact that this will take the challenge out of a lot of quests, it will close a huge and annoying gap in flying progressions.  Currently, you work you way to level 70, get your flying mount, then move on to Northrend where you have to wait another 7 levels before you can use it.  At least now you’ll get to experience flying, one of the more liberating methods of travel an MMO can offer, for 10 full levels.  And if you’re like me, you won’t accumulate enough cash to buy that epic flying mount until you’re almost able to use it in Northrend.

I will be interested to see what this change really does to the Outlands.  On my server, the Burning Crusades zones are pretty sparsely populated, at least for WoW.  Will this change encourage more alts?  Will the Outlands get busier for a time?

I won’t, for example, buy the collectors edition of the game just to get a pet.  I also won’t buy a bunch of collectible trading cards in the hopes of getting a pet… or even one such card off of eBay as a sure thing.  Or is it just mounts you can get from those cards?

Apparently though, I will give PepsiCo my real name, address (postal and email), and date  of birth for a pet in WoW.

You see, PepsiCo, specifically its Mountain Dew… erm… Mtn Dew brand… and Blizzard have a cross-promotion going this summer.

It is a contest.  You can win prizes, anything from a T-shirt to a gaming laptop.  You can earn tokens which will, in turn, increase you chance of winning prizes.

I could even download a banner to put here that, when you clicked on it, would award me even more tokens.  But I won’t.

Blizzard has a FAQ up about it, though it doesn’t answer the magic question of who is paying whom for this promotion.

And because Mtn Dew is involved, you can drink some truly awful soda.

Neither health nor mana here

At least that is my opinion of the Mtn Dew Game Fuel flavors they have come up with for this promotion.

They are red and blue to look like health and mana potions.  Or maybe to represent Horde and Alliance.  I guess those are red and blue too, though when I see red liquid in a bottle, I think “health potion” not “for the horde!”

I had hoped against hope that PepsiCo would just use their Code Red formula for their red drink.  I like Code Red.  It is like a caffeinated Shirley Temple, which is about my speed.  Put it in a dirty barkeep!

Alas, it was not to be and they produced something that tastes like they dumped some canned orange juice into some perfectly good Code Red and ruined it.

As for the blue flavor… well… I have never had a really good experience with a soda of that color.  Snow Cones, Otter Pops, and, once, even an interesting blue gellato have been fine.  But sodas?  I once nursed a 16 oz. bottle of blue cream soda for three weeks, drinking it one sip at a time, because one sip was all I could take.  It was a good sip, but I was done after one.  I think I threw almost half the bottle out after the three weeks.  And that was my best blue soda experience ever.  So I’m not keen give the mana potion… erm… alliance potion a try.

But to get the pet you don’t even have to drink the soda.

All you have to do is register for the whole promotion at the Mtn Dew Game Fuel promotion site and click on a little button to claim claim your Battle-bot pet.  That is what I did.  Once you follow the steps, they mail the bot to all of the characters on your account.

Pets by Mail

Of course, then you have to go back to the site every day and click on the button to get fuel for you battle bot.  You can choose either red or blue fuel.  When you pick a fuel and fill up your Battle-bot, it will automatically fight and Battle-bots that show up with the other fuel color, much the way the Clockwork Rocket Bot will engage any other such bot that shows up.

Red fueled bots waiting for a blue fueled victim

And, like the Clockwork Rocket Bot, the fights are over pretty quick.

But the Clockwork Rocket Bot works over and over, while the Battle-bot needs to be refueled after it dies or is dismissed, and you can only pick up five units of fuel a day.  And, Battle-bot fuel will only be available until the promotion ends, which it is scheduled to do on August 20th of this year.

Still, it is another pet towards that 50 pet achievement.  18 more to go with plenty to look into.

[Addendum: Since I wrote this up I have seen some one on one Battle-bot fights go on for quite a while, so they aren't all quite as instant as the Clockwork Rocket Bot fights are.]

We were short a Bung last Saturday night, a phrase that works on so many levels, so we had to postpone our planned outing to Drak’Tharon Keep.  So those of us remaining were looking for something to do.  Our foursome was:

75 Warrior – Earlthecat
75 Priest – Skronk
76 Mage – Ula
76 Paladin – Vikund

We didn’t know in advance that Bung was not going to make it, so we initially met up at the Drak’Tharon Keep stone.

Earl and Vikund at the stone

Earl finally found a helm to replace his Tankatronic goggles, the Greathelm of the Unyielding Bull.

We hung around for a bit, waiting to see if Bung would show.  Eventually we all ended up as bunnies.

Finally we decided to move on to other fun.

We thought we would look into the Outlands heroic instance scene again to see if we could pick up another achievement while doing something that would provide some challenge, but not too much, for a group of four.  We decided that since we had done Hellfire Ramparts as heroic last time, we should just move on to the next instance in line, which is The Blood Furnace.

Now, we’ve been there before.  We went there first over a year ago, back in the pre-achievement days of WoW.  Then we went for another visit a few weeks back to pick up the achievement, which was missing from our list, as part of another evenings “we’re short a player” fun runs.

The three of us having been through the instance so recently made it interesting to compare how the fights went.

We were a little more prepared for how tough the yard trash would be this time around.  Plus with Earl out front, a real tank who is spec’d and geared to tank, we were in a better position than last time when the retribution pally had to be the front man.

Thus showing due caution, we were able to make our way to the first boss, The Maker, and frankly through him, without much drama.  We thought perhaps as part of the heroic version of the battle, the guys in cells along The Maker’s room might come out and join the fight, but they seemed content watching from the sidelines.

That was it? That's all you've got?

We moved along the corridors to the next boss, tackling groups of three or four as we went, along with the occasional stealthed rogue, until we got to Broggok’s room.

This will be the third time we’ve done Broggok, and yet we always forget what happens when you pull the big lever at the end of the room.  The event starts and one by one those cells along the sides of the room open and the groups inside come out to attack you.  Only, in the heroic version, they are all level 70 elites.  Once again, this surprised us.

It surprised us enough that Ula, standing in the back, the direction from which the groups approach, got smoked by the first group out of the doors.  Yet we managed to hang on with the classic holy trinity of tank/healer/dps and made it through to Broggok and took him down.

Don't step in the glowing green stuff

That just left us Keli’dan the Breaker to deal with.

Getting to him wasn’t an issue, but the fight itself proved to be a bit tough for us.

We managed to deal with his five helpers easily enough, but Keli’dan himself had a few new tricks up his sleeve.  That area attack he has, which was annoying in the normal version, turned deadly in the heroic version.  He emotes before he starts his wind up, but it also seems to pull the outlying players right to him.  The casters.  The people who that attack will one-shot.

The first fight was a disaster.  The second time around were doing okay, but got caught wrong by the AOE again and the party was over.  Finally, on the third fight we managed to hold it together and finish Keli’dan off, though I think we lost Ula during the fight to the same attack.  a 10K hit can be brutal.  But that was enough for the achievement.

As a side note, Earl did not have the regular Blood Furnace achievement, but you appear to get that as well when you get the heroic achievement.

Double Achievement

And, for the loot oriented, the haul from the final boss.

Not all mail and leather this time!

Some stuff that would have been very nice pre-Lich King.  Well, the Primal Nether has its uses.

Which just leave the final victory shot.

Victory over the Keli'dan girl... or boy

And so wrapped up another instance night.  We will give Drak’Tharon Keep a try again next week if we have the full team.  If not, perhaps another heroic.

But if we’re going to do any more heroic instances, we might to need to do something about reputation.  We were lucky to all be honored with Honor Hold, so the flamwroght key was available.  And I know that at least Vikund is honored with the Cenarion Expidition, so the reservoir key is a possibility.  The other faction requirements we’ll have to look into.

EVE Online has been having some database troubles of late, which has caused some off errors including, I hope, this one.

There is an R&D agent that I have been using for ages.  I went out to visit her the other day to collect datacores and found that she would no longer talk to me.

Now, you might ask if I had done something to mess up my standings with said agent, which is why I took this screen shot.

You can see that Evah Pomar is flagged as not available, but a higher quality agent from the same corporation is available.  Generally speaking, if my standing is high enough to talk to a level 3 quality 19 agent, then I should also be able to access another level 3 agent with a quality of -18.

Furthermore, she shows as available when I look at the Viziam Corporation agent listing.

So I was stuck.  My only option when speaking to her was to cancel my research.  But Evah appeared to be still accumulating research points for me, not to mention all the points I had banked away with her, so cancelling seemed like a bad idea.

What to do?  I let her be and I’ll check in on her next time I’m in the area and hope that CCP has fixed the issue.

Friday’s post got more of a response than I expected.  It was just something I wrote on a whim.

I am declaring this the stopping point for the poll.  I won’t delete the poll itself, but I am doing my count now.

The results as of this post are:

There were varied attempts at logic in answering this question.  One of my favorites was the claim that if my response from the company arrived in “many hours” it couldn’t have been EQII as that would have required several days.

Somebody else decided that, since I was currently only playing EVE and WoW, it had to be one of those games.  But I did not say the event happened recently.  In fact, it happened a while back.  Still, with that logic did their answer did end up in the “right action/wrong reason” quadrant of the decision matrix.

But most people took the bait and chose EVE Online.  It is, after all, that bad game where your ship can get blown up and you can get scammed by other players.

Which, as some people rightly suspected, was probably related to some point I was trying to make.

The correct answer, which came in second place, was World of Warcraft.  In fact, the event in question was something I mentioned in a post a few months back. (Minor congrats to Spinks for mentioning the right zone!)

The summary is that while doing the Defias Traitor escort quest in Westfall a group of high level horde players were standing along the route, just meters before the end point, and killing the traitor before the quest could be completed.   Once the traitor is killed, the quest cannot be completed and must be abandoned.

Annoyed by this, I submitted a ticket.  The response came back that the Defias Traitor is flagged PvP so the horde players can kill him all they want, thank you for playing WoW, please let me know if there is anything else with which they can assist.

In a way this amuses me.

People complain about the harsh reality of EVE, but I face player griefing a lot more frequently in WoW, especially in low level zones.  There are reasons for this, of course.

First, the way the Azeroth is laid out relative to the population, you spend a lot more time in close proximity to other players.  It is a rare location in WoW where you don’t have somebody else close by. (The exception being the Outlands, which are rather dead of late.  All the better for my harvesting activities though!)

While in EVE, out where I am generally based, I might only see one or two other players over a couple hours of time.  And even when in a trading hub, only a dozen or so might be visible, in their ships.  And even then, ships passing are like… well… ships passing.  You tend not to wave or make small talk unless you see somebody you know.

Second, my tolerance for being griefed, and even my definition of what constitutes being griefed, is wildly different in the two games.

WoW is a shiny, happy, amusement park and when a bunch of surly teens start wrecking the fun for other people, it gets on my nerves pretty quickly.  I expect Blizzard to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.  But this happy, amusement park-like feeling also seems to let some people’s sense of responsibility off the hook.  They can bounce off the walls, get in your face, and generally make things unpleasant and there isn’t much you can do about it without going to Blizzard.

EVE is a rather more harsh virtual reality, being a PvP based game.  So somebody coming into a mission I am running in a low sec system and blowing up my ship… or somebody just blowing me up on general principles in a low sec system… is just part of the game.  CCP isn’t there to shepherd your enjoyment or make sure nobody takes advantage of you.  Ignorance gets punished pretty harshly, so you ignore the tutorials for things like contracts at your peril.

Does that mean I am happy when I lose a ship, get a jet can flipped, or have somebody try to con me? (And I am told you aren’t anybody until you’ve been hit up for the Goonswarm initiation fee scam.)  No, I am not happy.  But I can accept that this is part of the game.  Doing something wrong just has a more tangible price in EVE.

So what is the point of all of this?

Well, really, there was none.  I just wanted to see how many people would vote for EVE.

But, since I have gotten this far, I feel compelled to get this all summed up in a handy package you can take home with you.  And what more could be more appropriate way to do that than another poll?

Call it “Choose your own moral to the story!”

Tell me how it turns out or add your own summary to the comments.

Unlike EVE Online, where I keep a close eye on finances, I tend to not think too much about currency in World of Warcraft.

Every so often I go on an auction house binge.  I get Auctioneer installed and running, then go looking for stuff to sell.  But that does not happen very often.

So I was a bit surprised to notice my gold count running past 3,000 pieces a couple of weeks back.  It turns out that running all those daily quests for the Kalu’ak, as well as the Dalaran and Shattrath cooking and fishing daily quests, started adding up.

And then the Dalaran fishing daily paid off big with a gem that sold at the auction house for 800 gold.  (I considered keeping it, but I have no socketed gear at all right now.)

That put me within striking distance of something I never thought I would have: The epic flying mount.  It was time for another auction house binge.

Vikund, my main, is an engineer, which is not a particularly lucrative profession. (You can make a bunch of stuff other people have problems using.  How like real life!)  But he does have the mining skill to go along with it, so I started going out of my way to mine.  Outland ore, fel iron and adamantite, were especially good to me.  Nagrand has ended up being the best zone for me to mine in, being rather sparsely populated most of the time.

Last week I got close enough that I sent a couple hundred gold from another character and took the plunge.

That is the achievement you get for spending 5,000 gold on the artisan riding skill.  Then just another 200 gold for the actual epic flying mount and I was… broke.

It has been a long time since I had only that much gold.  In fact, I had to dig some soulbound stuff out of the bank to sell to a vendor to be able to finance ongoing auction house work.  But it was worth it.

The epic flying mounts boost your ground speed by 100%, the same as the level 60 epic riding mounts, and in the air it acceleates you by 280%.  Add in the extra 20% speed boost Vikund gets from his paladin Crusader Aura and you have a pretty fast ride indeed.

I suppose, being an engineer, I should have gone for the Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, but I was selling all my raws to pay for the artisan riding skill.  So, instead, I went for the Swift Blue Gryphon.

High Speed Paladin

If the flying mount gave a feeling of freedom in the game, then the epic version multiplies it.  The gryphon seems to be about as fast as the ones used to go between the various flight points in the game.  I have not tried racing one from point to point, but I have followed a couple of people in flight and have been able to keep them in sight.

Now I have to carry on with my auction house binge though.  Vikund is closing in on level 77 at which point he will be able to get the Cold Weather Flying skill which will allow him to fly around Northrend.

Fortunately, the boosted flying speed makes harvesting ore in the Outlands just that much quicker.

Monday morning I went out to get the newspaper off the driveway to find that it consisted of exactly 8 pieces of paper.

There was a light breeze blowing and I am surprised it did not pick the paper up and blow it away.

The doubled up rubber band was in danger of damaging this frail publication.

The whole package consisted of 7 full sheets that add up to 4 pages when folded and one half sheet that was just 2 pages.

So the San Jose Mercury News, the self-proclaimed paper of Silicon Valley, which bears the name of the 10th largest city in the United States, managed to fill out all of 30 pages with the news it considered essential to print.

Well, not 30 pages of news.

I estimate that 10 pages of the paper was ads, which is a somewhat low percentage for a newspaper.  They make most of their money off of ads rather than the $230 a year I pay to have it delivered daily to my house.

But this is the trend these days for general news publications.  Time and Newsweek, which both get delivered to our home are also thin shells of their former selves.  They should merge.  Editorially they ceased to be distinct at least a few years back.  And visually, until a few weeks ago, they were almost indistinguishable past the cover page.  Somebody at Newsweek must have noticed this because they redid the layout to emphasize opinion pieces and remove actual news reporting.  It has become Opinionweek.

Of course, the dependence on reporting actual news damns them all, the paper, the magazine, and any other print media outlet that takes a generalist line, because I’ve already read about almost any key story on the web before a periodical can reach me.  The front page of the paper is often a checklist of things I saw on the web yesterday.

And even general media in specific areas has faded.  Remember Byte Magazine?  A general magazine to cover all computing!  It was great in its day.  But is there room for a general computing magazine any more?  And general magazines in even smaller domains still have faded, like Games for Windows Magazine.  They couldn’t keep that going with Microsoft behind them.

So what is the future of print media?  How do you keep going when the web is reporting stories first and stealing all your ad revenue?  Do you have to go completely niche to survive?

AviationWeek, another magazine that comes to our home seems to be doing okay.  It serves a very specific audience and delivers news that almost never makes it to any general web media outlet.  You won’t find anything about the ongoing delays in the Airbus A400M program on the front page of Yahoo.

Air & Space and National Geographic seem to be chugging on, the same as always.  I hear that Oprah’s magazine isn’t having any problems.  On the other hand I just got the most pathetic plea from Smithsonian Magazine asking me to resubscribe.  I’m not even sure how they found me, since it has been at least 10 years since I was a subscriber.

So what is all of this going to look like in 10 years?  Will the paper go the way of the horse and carriage?  Or will the Mercury News find a niche (like, say, local news) that will keep it going?  Will Time and Newsweek be able to soldier on, or will they give up and go the way of US News & World Report and begin the slow fade to obscurity?

Something to think about on a Saturday morning when looking at the biggest edition of the paper this week, which totals out to a bit over 20 pieces of paper, plus the Sunday ad supplement, which hasn’t shown up on a Sunday in the last 20 years to my recollection, so I should probably stop calling it that.