Make Sure You Preorder Warhammer Online

That is, if you want to play in the opening days of the game.

I headed out on Monday to my local EB Games and put down my preorder payment for Warhammer Online. I did ask about the Collectors Edition — I’m addicted to the art books they contain — but unfortunately, they had sold out of those.

While I was there, I had a chat with the sales dude. He’s been at the store for a couple of years now and I take the opportunity to chat whenever I’m in there. Since the Warhammer Online CE had sold out, I asked him how quickly he thought the standard edition would sell out.

He told me that Age of Conan SE sold out, in that store, very quickly — within the first day or two. That wouldn’t have been a problem normally, however it then took another couple of weeks to get new stocks in. A little surprising considering AoC was supposed to be a bit hit — you’d think there’d be plenty of copies available for restocking.

Anyway, it occurred to me that Warhammer Online could suffer the same fate. The buzz around this game is building up very quickly, and I suspect it will be much bigger than Age of Conan. AoC after all really pushed the mature aspects of the game, something that would have reduced the number of potential players. Warhammer is targeting a much wider audience.

Warhammer Online selling out in the first couple of days is a real possibility.

So. If you are planning on getting the game from a bricks and mortar store and want to play on release day, I highly recommend that you head out and preorder. It would be a shame if you have to wait a few weeks to play.

Popularity: 6%

MMORPG Search Trends

I was looking at my blog stats this morning. When I came to the search terms that people use to find my blog, it occurred to me to have a look at the search trends for the big three games of this year.

Google provides a handy little tool called Google Trends that uses their historical search data to produce a series of graphs showing where different search terms stand in relation to each other. BTW, a search term is the text that you type into Google when doing a search. That’s all there is to it.

Anyhoo. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the numbers and scales of people performing searches for the big three games of 2008: World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online.

The Google Trends tool allows you to select a time frame for the graphs. I picked on three: All Time, 2008, and the last 30 days.

On all three graphs, The blue line is Warhammer Online, the orange line is Age of Conan, and the red line is, of course, World of Warcraft.

Trends for All Time (since 2004)

Trends for 2008

Trends for the Last 30 Days

As you can see, World of Warcraft remains the eight thousand pound gorilla for searches. In terms of search volume, there’s only one time when they weren’t the most searched for in the MMORPG world, and that was when Age of Conan was released.

Unfortunately for Age of Conan, the spike in search terms appears to resemble the stats that XFire put out for their members who were playing the game. Shortly after launch, when everybody was keen and interested in the game, searches for info on the game skyrocketed. But when players started leaving, interest waned and  the search volume plummeted. It’s now almost to the point where it was before the game was released. Not good.

You can see a similar pattern starting to happen with Warhammer Online in the 2008 trends graph. With the announcement of a release date interest in the game is starting to rise. I expect a rise similar to Age of Conan around the time when the game is released. I reckon it will then settle down at about 50 percent of the peak search volume… more or less. Providing the game is in a good release state.

One interesting thing, if you like graphs and statistics I suppose, is that the search volume for each game is remarkably consistent and low level until the game is released. There is a small amount of increase in the last year, but then at release, boom, everybody’s searching. It seems to be true for all three games charted here.

The final trend I’ll comment on is that it appears that the search volume for World of Warcraft is waning somewhat. This could be due to a number of factors.

• WoW Players are getting bored with the game and leaving. I don’t think this is the case. It doesn’t gel with the fact that World of Warcraft has 10 - 11 million players.
• WoW Players no longer need to search for information. This is more likely. After four years and few expansions, most players know a lot about the game, and have their sources like Wowhead, Wowwiki, and various other sites and blogs bookmarked. No need to search.

If the trend of players searching on release continues, I expect we’ll see a rise in World of Warcraft searches at that time.

What does the data tell you?

Popularity: 16%

Become a Casualty

Yep. That’s right. Casualties of War is recruiting. We are looking for all comers, both Order and Destruction, Blogger and Non-Blogger. We need folks from all walks of life. We’re not an exclusive club.

Despite the fact that Casualties of War will be set up on two of the US servers (one for Order and one for Destruction) we are also looking for players from non US time zones. So if you live, work and play in the Asian or Oceanic time zones we are quite happy to have you. We’re also happy to have folks from the EU, but we’re currently not sure if that can happen. Perhaps an EU chapter of CoW is in order?

So head on over, pledge your life to serve WAR, and apply to Casualties of WAR now. Your Emperor needs you!

Popularity: 4%

Casualties of War - Epic Shenanigans Pending

What do you get when a bunch of MMORPG bloggers who are eagerly anticipating a major new MMORPG release get together and decide to form a guild?

Casualties of War, that’s what.

The brainchild of JoBildo, Heartless_, Hudson, and Rick, CoW (yes, the moo jokes have already started on the forum) is already attracting a wide range of applicants, many of them bloggers. It’s a veritable who’s who of the MMOG blogger community.

BTW, don’t let that stop you from heading over and signing up. Casualties of War is not a bloggers only guild. It’s simply a group of folks who want to have fun in the game and enjoy each others company.

Although, as one post on the forums has already indicated, with this many bloggers in one place, there’s sure to be much epic shenanigans.

With the release of Warhammer Online still over a month away, I’m now finding myself looking forward to it more than ever.

Popularity: 5%

I Am Not That Stupid

I really hate being treated like I’m an idiot. I really do.

I received a comment on one of my Age of Conan posts yesterday where the commenter effectively stated that he liked AoC and it was great to be able to knock other players off bridges with mounts. Well… okay… It’s not really on topic since I posted about Age of Conan succeeded in the long term. But, when I get a comment on one of my posts that’s only a little off topic, I really don’t mind.

I have this blog set to do follow. I use a plugin that is set to revert all comment links from no follow to do follow after two days. This allows me time to check if a comment is spam before passing link juice on to the spammer. Since I want to encourage commenting from other folks, I think it’s only right to pass on that do follow love.

But here’s the rub. When I get deliberate no value comment spamming, I’ll mark the post as spam in Akismet. This has two effects. First, it removes the comment from my blog and sends it to the trash. No big deal for the commenter really since all they’ve wasted is their time commenting — which if the comment I received yesterday is any indication, it took all of three and a half seconds.

Secondly, and this hurts, the commenters comment, IP address, email address, blog URL, and other relevant data gets added to the Akismet spam database. That means that, if enough of these messages get marked as spam, the offending blogger gets their blog marked as spam. In the future any comments from the offending commenter are blacklisted by Akismet and any blog using that system filters them out.

So back to the story. Yesterdays commenter left a comment that was a little off topic. No big deal. I’m not an ogre when it comes to blog comment relevance — I’ve never played one either– as long as the comment is close. But I don’t like being treated like a fool.

So when the commenter in question comes back three whole minutes later with a new comment agreeing with his previous comment — also slightly off topic by the way — with a different name but using the same identifying information, I can’t help feeling like I’m being treated like an idiot. Surely I’m not smart enough to recognize this attempt at spamming, am I?

Ironically, the blog he was promoting wasn’t all that bad either. If he had left a value comment, he wouldn’t have shot himself in the foot.

Age of Conan commenter, meet Akismet. I’m sure you will have a long and fruitless relationship together.

Popularity: 6%

Make Sure You Harvest in Everquest 2

That should probably be rule numero uno in the Everquest 2 guide for noobs.

And there’s a pretty darn good reason for it too. That is, spending five plus hours harvesting in order to raise your harvesting skills is about as boring as watching chili seeds grow*.

That’s about the time it took me last night to bring all of my harvest skills to the point where I can harvest tier 4 resources. Unfortunately, when I started, my fishing and trapping skills were low at 22 and 63, while my mining, gathering and foresting were in the respectable 130s.

However, even my mining, gathering and lumberjacking skills needed some love. Ssirius the Sarnak Shadowknight has just reached 31 by doing quests in Nektulos Forest. While Nek is a treasure trove of quests and XP, it’s a dismal dreary place, especially when it’s raining. And it seems to rain all the time.

In search of nicer weather, I did some traveling to both the Enchanted Lands and Zek, both level 30 plus zones. At both locales I ran around loading up on quests — I’m almost out of space in the quest log now — and just looking around the early parts of the zone. However, when I tried to do some harvesting I was soundly rebuked.

So. I needed to improve my harvesting skills.

I’ve thrown together this little table to give you an idea of what the skills are for each tier. The Final Skill Gain column is where the tier x nodes stop giving me skillups. I’m not sure what these values are after Tier 3 at this stage. I also pulled some of this data from the EQ2i wiki which states that the Tier 7 minimum requirements vary.

The EL and Zek are both Tier 4 zones, so I needed to get my minimum skill to 140. Unfortunately, my fishing was still in Tier 1, and my Trapping at Tier 2. So back to the newbie zones I went.

Fishing was relatively easy, if time consuming. I basically swam around the coast of Mok Rent looking for fish. At one and a half laps, I hit 95. At that point I dried off and went looking for nests to practice trapping. These were like looking for hens teeth. After just over an hour, the server came down with still 10 points to get. This was around 11:30pm. When it came back up, there were more nests than before and I quickly finished off.

Now it was off to Butcherblock. This was easier, but I needed to be more careful. In the newbie zone everything was gray to me. I could walk around raptors and man eating plants unhindered. In BB, it was mostly green. In any case, I ran around gathering from nodes like a madman until all of my skills were 140+. I finished of at 3:30am.

So take my caution. It’s easier to harvest as you go along. If you craft you’ll need the resources to make gear. If you don’t craft, you’ll need the rares to make cash. I ended up harvesting about ten rares in my session last night. I’m not sure if I’ll sell them on the broker or use them to make some goodies. In both cases, having your harvest skill as high as possible will help you out later. Not to mention that some quests require certain high harvesting skills.

* Watching chili seed germinate is not all that interesting until they actually appear. I recently purchased some Dorset Naga seeds from the UK, and they are beginning to grow now. They are supposedly the hottest chili in the world with a SKU rating of approximately 1,000,000. In comparison the humble Habenero is around 100,000 - 200,000 SKU. Woo Hoo!

Popularity: 9%

They Told Picasso He Had It Wrong Too

Yep. That’s right. The fans didn’t like the cubic shapes he gave the women in his pictures. Women should be rounded they said, and look soft.

It’s a little known fact, but Leonardo Da Vinci came under fire from the fans for his painting, the Mona Lisa. If she’s smiling, we ought to see teeth, they said. Oh, and more boob too.

Okay. I’m making that up. As far as I am aware, the fans of both Leonardo and Pablo never demanded that they change their paintings to be how the fans thought they should be. It’s possible of course that the fans, or critics, did do that, but if they did I’m sure both great painters would have, politely, raised their middle fingers in reply.

If you study the old masters, you’ll know that they change their styles from time to time. That doesn’t only happen in the world of painting either. Musicians evolve their styles over time, so do writers, and any other kind of artist. In fact, for the greats, it’s almost mandatory to change.

So here we are. It’s 2008 and we are seeing a maelstrom of criticism over Blizzards changing art style for Diablo 3. Once again we have the fans, and critics, demanding that the artists do things the way they ’should’ be done.

Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Blizzard collectively extend their second digit in response.

Diablo III will stand on its own merits. I expect it will be a graphically stunning game, even if it uses a different color palette. Frankly, I’m looking forward to it.

Popularity: 5%

Update Complete - Now To Collapse

Phew!

The update of Wordpress to 2.6 is complete. Finally. What should have been simple ended up being something of a nightmare.

After I completed the upgrade, which by using a plugin called Wordpress Automatic Upgrade, I loaded up the blog only to find some errors. Okay. I expected that. Dan over at the GamesLaw blog told me that he had problems with the popularity plugin. So I did my homework and found out how to fix it after the install.

Only it wasn’t the popularity plugin that failed. That worked perfectly. It was the actual Wordpress installer that royally screwed things up. Some of the errors disappeared after I updated all the plugins, 2.6 handles that from the blog… mucho coolio. But the categories at the bottom of the page were giving errors.

After doing a bit of checking, and it turns out that I wasn’t the only upgrader to experience this, I found out that WP 2.6 has a new database table structure. Where my categories were once stored in a single categories table, now they were spread out over at least two new tables. And the upgrade didn’t properly copy the categories.

The table had been populated with the categories, but all the names, descriptions and post slugs were missing. This in turn screwed up the functions getting data out of the DB to the blog, causing the error.

In this case there are three choices.

1. Restore the whole blog from a backup and attempt the upgrade again (or leave it as it was.)
2. Delete all my categories (they still showed up in the manage tab) and re-add them. I would then have to edit over 350 posts to re-categorize.
3. Manually go into the database and fix things up.

I chose option three. I had performed a backup before starting — you must always do this — so I had the data from the old category table. I then copied it to a text editor and massaged the data into a SQL update statement. I created one for each category like so: (there were 39 categories in my db)

UPDATE `wp_terms` SET name = ‘General’, slug = ‘general’ where term_id = 1 ;

UPDATE `wp_terms` SET name = ‘Humour’, slug = ‘humour’ where term_id = 2 ;

UPDATE `wp_terms` SET name = ‘Vanguard: Saga of Heroes’, slug = ‘vanguard-saga-of-heroes’ where term_id = 13 ;

…

I then opened up the database administration tool that was provided by my web host, located the Wordpress database, opened the SQL tab and copied in the SQL statements above. At that point I held my breath, crossed my fingers, and executed the statements.

As I said there were two tables to update, wp_terms and wp_term_taxonomy. Both required slightly different update statements, so I made changes for the second table and repeated the process.

So far everything seems to be fine. I’ve got my categories back to the state they were before the upgrade, and I think they are all set against the correct posts.

I’ll tell ya. It was a tense couple of hours. I was a bit scared that I’d mess up the database. Even though I’ve done DB work before, it’s not my forte, I’m a C/C++/C#/Python sort of guy and more comfortable deep in that sort of code.

Now I sort of suspect that part of the reason for this is that I was upgrading from an older older version. I was using WP 2.1 and I think a few of the other folks having problems with this were doing the same. Still, it’s unacceptable. If I wasn’t technical, I’d have been lost big time. The only option would have been to spend hours and hours deleting and recreating everything. Or going back to an old install and never upgrading again.

And on that note, if you’ve attempted the upgrade and are having this problem. Shoot me an email and I’ll see if I can give you a hand working it out.

Man. This post ended up being longer than I intended. It’s time to collapse into a heap. My brain hurts.

Popularity: 6%