These update automatically every 24 hours.

- Windy

As a Warlock, my armor is cloth, so it is natural for me to have the tailoring skill. One of the exclusive benefits for Tailors is the ability to build a Flying Carpet. I have increased my Tailoring skill to 300+ and have been able to tailor a Flying Carpet mount. I had quite a bit of help from my Death Knight brother who helped with farming the cloth, and buying the other materials from the auction house. The Arcane Dust required is readily available, but the Golden Draenite is rare and quite expensive. Four Golden Draenite items are needed for the glowing globes at each corner of the carpet.

You may have noticed that my Alliance brother has also made his Flying Carpet. Another benefit to the tailoring profession is the ability to make bags for storage or the bank. At Tailoring 300, the Netherweave 16 slot bags can be made. These can be sold, or shared with Alts [other characters on your account] or friends.

As a warlock with minions for tanking or damage, I’m making good progress and have reached level 66. The pictures of the carpet were taken in Shattrath City in Outland.

- Stormvein
Level 66, Blood Elf Warlock

Level 23 Priest

The Problem
Wow classes are not balanced for PVE soloing. I’m not suggesting that they aren’t balanced for other efforts or that they should be changed, but as we all know, some classes have a real problem soloing in PVE.

Some Background
I’m not a whiner, and I’ve been playing MMOs for over 5 years, so I have some experience beyond Wow. Here in Wow, in the past few months, I have played all the classes and studied the wiki guides.
Let’s look at the biggest example you are all familiar with: The Priest. The priest is the squishiest of the classes. I’m sure it’s possible to solo the priest in PVE. I’ve gotten a priest up to level 20, but it’s no fun. It’s a lot of work to solo a priest. The mental and input “load” is very high. Many different skills are required and everything needs to go just right to take down mobs, even if you are a few levels higher than they are. And if two mobs run you at the same time, forget it. You are in for a long walk from the graveyard.
Class Solo Ability
I’ve played all the classes in PVE, and some in dungeons. Some up to level 60 [ I know. I’m no expert until I’ve Raided at level 85 with every class. But bear with me for a while here. ]
The following ranking is based on how much work it is to take down foes and stay alive, and how many times you die while soloing in pve. Work is measured by how much attention you have to pay to what is going on and how many different skills you have to use per minute to get the job done. The more different skills you use and the more attention you to pay, then the higher the number in the ranking, that is the harder it is to play this class in solo pve.

It seems that the solo ability of the classes can be ranked like this:

1. Hunter – a great solo class. Comes with this own tank, which is a big deal, esp when working two or three mobs at a time. No problem soloing at level. Basically, pick a target, hammer the bow skills, pretty much at random, and your tank will watch your back.
2. Warlock – a good second solo class. Also has it’s own tank, some minor healing and good DPS, but long casting times and lower armor rank the warlock second. You need to pay attention to which skills you are using because they have long casting times, and you need to watch your health and use your minor health slurping skill. Sure there are subtleties beyond that, but they are most useful in parties, not in pve.
3. Paladin – Great armor and good healing put this class next, IMHO. My experience is that a paladin can level effectively solo, but it’s not where as easy as Hunters and Warlocks to do so. You need to watch your skill bar since some skills have long cool downs and you need to heal yourself. But the heals are good when you do them, and you can do them during combat. No ranged weapon. Bummer. But did I hear that this was being fixed in the next update? Can’t pull with no ranged weapon.
4. Warrior – Great armor and good damage, but poor healing. I’ve played the warrior less in pve than the other classes since they seemed less interesting. Maybe they rank here or below the Rouge and Druid.
5. Rogue and Druid – Stealth and good Melee skills rank these two classes about the same. I’m sure there are subtleties that folks might argue separate them, but basically they are about the same experience to solo. It seems that to solo effectively, you want to be a few levels above your mob foes. Druids drop back to casting from melee when you heal, which is a bummer. Rogues have a ranged weapon which is useful.
6. Mage / Shaman – I’ve grouped these together. If we are talking about solo pve up to level 20, these classes are about the same amount of work. Long casting times might actually rank Mage worse than the Shaman.
7. Priest. – We all need priests for healing in dungeons and raids, but they are not effective at PVE solo, so we don’t grow enough of them in the wild, right?

Compare with Other Games
Let’s look at some other games I’ve played. When I play an MMO, I always play all the classes. I guess I bore easily so I want to experience all the variety in the game. Let’s look at some of the games I’ve played:

• Guild Wars – Classes are well balanced. They all solo well through lower levels. At higher levels – at level 20 in high level areas of all continents – all the classes solo well with heroes. And now with mercenaries [you play with other characters from your account or other chars you create for this purpose.] Soloing the high level content on all continents is possible with all classes. I’ve done it.
• Dekaron – all classes are designed and balanced for soloing PVE content to the highest levels. I’ve worked to high levels with all classes. A real manual grinder in the Asian tradition. Private servers abound.
• Ether Saga – again all classes are well balanced for soloing. All classes can have pets. This is a grinder game which becomes tedious after about level 40. When you find yourself putting a game on automatic for a day at a time, then it’s time to move on.
• Jade Dynasty – all classes are well balanced for soloing. Another grinder at the higher levels.  I found a private server that levels more quickly. But it’s still a grinder at higher levels.
• Heroes of the Three Kingdoms – All classes are well balanced. But some are easier than others to level to level 40, but differences are minor. This game seems to have disappeared from the Perfect World site. Not sure what happened. Two currencies and lots of confusion about what you have to buy with which currency make this one a non-starter. Not a grinder tho. The quest system is very nice and complete.
• Aion – Played this on a private server – Gamez AION.  Classes seem well balanced and on the private server, they level quickly. But there is so much running around – some areas you are grounded – I got bored and moved on.

Friends and Guilds
So the first point that will probably arise when you say you can’t level a priest is: “Go find a friend or a guild”. And that’s a good point. I’m very social in games, when I get the opportunity. I’ve partied when ever I can and done a fair number of dungeons. I have no problem with doing those things, but it’s not easy to find friends or a guild that is useful.
I play during the day, when other folks are working. Friends I’ve met are only showing up on weekends or I never see them again online. Guilds often to be more about signing up members than signing up members that play. Although one guild had a 15 day kick rule. You don’t sign on for 15 days and they kick you. Since guilds are by character and not by account, I guess I’m kicked. Not been back to that alt for a while. The guild was no help for leveling anyway. They were too high a level to be interested in helping me get to level 20, or 40 or whatever.
Dungeon wait times [as Blizzard knows] are long even during busy times. The problem appears to be that there aren’t enough people playing priests? I wonder why?

History of Guild Wars
Let’s look at an example of what Wow might do based on the ideas from Guild Wars. First a little history.
Guild Wars started with a single continent and then added three more. From the beginning the game had Parties and NPCs called Henchmen, that you could add to your party to solo in PVE. These henchmen were adequate to the task at lower levels, but at higher levels they did not allow solo of the content. In the third expansion they added Heroes, which are NPCs that you gain as quest rewards and fight along with you. As you play the game you build your stable of heroes and customize them so they quickly become stronger than any henchmen.
As recently as May 2011, Guild Wars added Mercenary Heroes. http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Merc_Hero This allows other characters in your account, or PVP characters created for this purpose, to be customized for use in PVE. I guess Mercs were added by popular demand. I never saw the forum posts, but over a year before it appeared, I privately wondered why I couldn’t play my other account characters as Heroes. Well now you can. When this happened, I was quickly able to build a merc team to solo the hardest content in the game – the end quests of the Prophecies campaign – with any class. So it made it possible, and the whole game more fun.
In GW, a Merc is a clone of a character from the account. You get a COPY of the character at the time of the clone with:

• The armor look, but standard stats like Hero armor.
• No weapon.
• No Skills
• One fixed base class of the character.
• The secondary class can be changed at any time.

This scheme is based on the way heroes work in GW already. Basically, you clone a hero that looks like another character in your account. From then on, you armor buff them, weaponize, and skill buff them as you see fit. Those changes have no effect on the character that was cloned. In fact the original character can be deleted. This means that you can make temporary characters, clone them, and then delete them.
The whole Hero thing would be a very large change to make to Wow. But there is a limited way to enhance Wow with these ideas to add a significant way to party, to level the playing field for all classes in PVE and to grow more priests in the game.

Mercenaries in Wow
I propose that in Wow, Mercs are a clone of another character from the account on the same realm and of course, faction. They appear as a party member next to the player in the state they were left in when the character was last used. There is no way to change them once they appear. They can’t be re-dressed, re-weaponed, and no access is given to their inventory from the current character. I’m not suggesting that Wow adopt the Merc idea from GW so you get a clone of the characters and customize them from the start. But only that you get a clone of the character as it was when it was last used. For example, skills, talents, and the hunter pet, or warlock minion, are all set up by logging into that character and changing it, then going back and adding it as a merc you get the updated state of the character.
Mercs work as follows:

1. Allow clones of other characters on the current account, from the current Realm and Faction to be added to your “party” as Mercenaries. Adding a merc to your party must be done “out of combat” and has no cooldown. Removing the merc is easy, just Kick her. No voting. Again, adding back has no cooldown. This allows for simpler travel, if you like. See later travel issues.
2. You can only add mercs from alts on your realm that are at your level or above. If the alt is below your level, then it does not appear as a choice to add. This is because the system does not buff a merc to work at your level.
3. Each Merc you add gets a simple interface with three buttons: Fight, Defend, Passive. That’s all. The spell effects are not available, but are automatic, and intelligent of course. The spell bar is the same as the last one the merc had when you played him. There’s a quick way to set Fight, Defend, Passive for all Mercs that you control. Do we need Go?
4. Mercs fan out to the left and behind in an intelligent way like pets and minions do. They don’t jump all over you and so close that you can’t select foes,  NPCs and other players.
5. The number of mercenaries is limited by level of the character adding them. Level 1-10 – none. Level 10-20 – one. Level 20-40 – 2, Level 40-Max – 3. If there are more than one player, then each may add mercs based on their level. Currently high level players are not de-buffed or limited  from power leveling low level characters, so we don’t add de-buffing rules for players now.
6. However, mercenaries are de-buffed to not more than Character Level + 5 and their spells, armor and weapons are reduced to appropriate levels, or damage, based on that de-buffing. Mercs are not a path to Power Leveling. They are a means to make parties when other players are not available or to balance your party for PVE.
7. Mercs level with you as long as you are partied with them. But they drop out of your party if you level beyond their true level. Any leveling that occurs is not transferred back to the original alt, but is transitory with the merc.
8. De-buffing? What if you have Slam, a level 85 warrior with a ton of powerful skills and  you merc him with Splat, a level 10 character. How do you de-buff Slam to work with Splat? I don’t know, but I’m sure that there are intelligent ways to do it that are simple. Not trivial, but simple. Slam doesn’t have to be insanely great, to help out at level 10. But if you merc him with Punch, a level 60 character, you expect that he will be more help and not make stupid decisions.
9. If you have a resurrect skill of some kind, you can use it on a dead merc. If the merc dies, and you can’t res him, then you dump him from the party and add him again to get him back. If the hunter pet dies [or warlock minion dies], she will rez him intelligently when she can. Shaman merc with self resurrect will attempt to do so.
10. If a merc has a resurrect skill, she will res you at first reasonable opportunity to avoid you walking the long way from the graveyard. If more then one party member dies, then members are prioritized by class. Priests / Shaman / Paladin with resurrect skills are rezzed before others that don’t have those skills so the party can be returned as intelligently as possible.
11. Above level 20, Mercs use their mount to follow you when you use your mount. Assuming they have a mount. If they don’t yet have a mount, then they are going to be left behind. Which mount to use when there are several is a minor issue. Maybe a simple dialog in the character itself to set the “default” mount. This use of mounts includes using flying mounts.
12. Travel with Mercs. When you fly with a flight master, your Merc is de-rezzed like a pet / minion, and re-rezzed at the destination. When you take a boat or dirigible, then the merc stays rezzed and accompanies you, just like another party member or pet / minion  would do. Yep, boats might get more crowded. But you can kick and re-add a merc with no cooldown.
13. Mercs are not available in dungeons. Or are they? This might solve some of the current dissatisfaction with dungeons.
14. Mercs are not available in Raids. Or are they?
15. Got a problem with copyright? Call them Sidekicks or something else.
16. Mercs are not available in PVP. Or are they? I’m not suggesting that I have an idea how to make this fair.

De-buffing powerful characters to work pretty well at intermediate levels is probably the most challenging part of designing mercs. When you debuff an 85 to work at level 10 or 20, it’s ok to be suboptimal. But when you expect an 85 to work at level 60, then you expect more out of the merc. To get the best “performance” from your merc, require as little debuffing as possible. For example, if you really need a 60 Priest, or Mage with specific skills, then don’t take an 85 and expect it to just happen. Maybe building the 85 with skills/ talents available at 60 would be best. You don’t’ need to manually de-buff weapons or armor. That is done automatically. De-buffing weapons and armor is the easy part. Rebuilding a skill bar that would be empty if all high level skills are removed is harder. Maybe the automatic skill / talent de-buff is done by down grading each skill / talent rather then removing the ones not available at the lower levels. The de-buff is designed to be “fair”, not to be perfect in some way.
The design presented here probably has some holes left in it, but basically I think it’s sound and reasonable to implement. The AI behind NPCs and Mobs should be adequate to drive a merc, so it’s not that Wow would need to design a whole new subsystem to play them. I’ve tried to limit the impact on the interface, database and basic concepts to make Mercs a reasonable enhancement that we might actually see in a reasonable timeframe.

Example Scenarios
Let’s look at some examples of how Mercs would work.

• To build characters in a realm, start with a hunter and work the hunter up to level 20, for example.
• Then add another class, and at level 10, party up with the merc hunter to level 20.
• Then level the hunter up to level 30 or 40 or whatever, and come back to your alt and use the hunter to level them up.
• For instance, you have Spike, a level 20 hunter with his pet. And you have Squash, a level 10 priest that needs some help. You play Squash and add Spike as a party member. Now you do your PVE quests and Spike and his pet do damage and tank for you for mobs that attack you or that you attack.
• As you level up, Spike and his pet level up too. They don’t add new skills or talents, but they become stronger, less de-buffed [re-buffed], as you level up.
• When you reach level 21, Spike stops leveling up, but stays with you and fights. It would be a bad idea for Spike to leave you suddenly without aid in a fight. But you can no longer add Spike to your party.
• To level up further with Spike’s help, just go back and play Spike and level him up.
• Notice that you can use Squash as a healer with Spike if you add him at the same level. So when Squash and Spike are both at level 20, Squash can be the healer for Spike for some harder PVE quests, or maybe in dungeons.
• Say that you and your friend want to do an instance dungeon, but you are both warriors. No healing. Well you can add a priest from your account as a merc, or a priest and a hunter, and then  you can party the instance dungeon yourselves.

Summary
Some classes are not well balanced in Wow for PVE. Some classes like the Priest, Warrior, and to a lesser extent, Rouge, Druid, and Shaman, need help to form a balanced party for PVE. This fact is recognized in the formation of dungeon parties, but is not addressed for PVE. While guilds and friends are a solution, it is not always possible to take advantage of friends and guild members.
Mercs are a solution to this problem. By allowing the account to serve as a source of party members, Mercenaries would allow all the classes to be played with their strengths in PVE. This will mean that more folks play the roles of priests, mages, shaman, rogues, druids and maybe someday, Monks.

- windy

Closeup While Flying

I just made my flying carpet. It takes a lot of work to achieve Tailoring (300). The best way to do that is to use a plan from one of the many websites, such as Wow-Professions. My Death Knight brother helped a lot to get me the materials, and I followed the guide for farming as well as the tailoring.

Getting the Materials

Once you level up the tailoring skills to 300, you can purchase the pattern for the flying carpet. The materials are pretty easy to get and reasonably cheap, except for Golden Draenite.

My brother has good mining skills and while working in Hellfire Peninsula mined all the deposits but got no GD.

About a week ago I checked the Auction House and there were some GD items going for about 40G, which is pretty high. I bid 38G on 4 of them and was able to get one that way, but lost the other bids. Yesterday when I checked, there were some going for 10G each, so I bought them immediately, and was able to make the carpet.

It took a week or so of working, as my brother Death Knight leveled up, to get the materials to level my tailoring skill and funds to get the carpet. But it’s worth it to show that I’ve worked to achieve something interesting.

- wg

Balloons Enhanced

This is an enhanced version of a tutorial game provided with Stencylworks. The enhancements are to add a scene with more balloons and to add a 5 second frame rate measurement.

The desktop shows 60 fps. I see my Android Asus Transformer getting 30 FPS, which is apparently the setting for Flash on this platform. Go Nvidia Tegra 2 ! Looks like Stencylworks is just fine to make games for Android.. What are we waiting for?

-windy

Death Knight Night Elf at 61

Once you level at least one character in your account to level 55, you can create Death Knight class characters of any Race on any Realm. Death Knights start at level 55, so all the drudgery of getting to level 55 is eliminated, but there are other problems to deal with. There are many notable experiences and problems for a Death Knight:

• While you start at level 55, you have only 20 silver in your bank.
• The starting quest chain is a tight story line, which is exciting and engaging. While it is not as rich with cinematics and dialog as the Undead quest chain in the Silverpine forest, it leads you through a story that places you in the world and fills in your back story.
• You will find yourself at level 58 with an updated weapon and some new armor pieces when the quest chain ends.
• The story ends differently for Horde and Alliance based on your race. But I’ll not spoil your experience by telling you the end.
• Your only starting profession is First Aid and it is leveled for you to about level 200, so you can built quite nice bandages should you need them.

The Coming of Transmogrification

You will want to carefully save your great looking armor which is updated with some nice pieces in the starting quest chain. In an upcoming update, you will be able to change the look of armor to look like armor you already have, so you will be able to take dungeon pieces that you get and keep your consistent Death Knight armor look.

Solo Leveling Experience

While I’m no expert here, having only played for a couple of months, I find that the Death Knight is a very powerful class to solo with. Working in the Blasted lands at my level of 58 – 60, I found that the quests were easy to accomplish and self healing was not a problem. Quite powerful mobs could be taken down quickly with only a few strokes of my powerful weapon and spells. I’m using the X-elerated guide and talent suggestions. The talents were set for PVE DPS [Player vs Environment, High Damage per Second ] and this achieves a character that levels as if it is a couple of levels above the mobs. In my limited experience, only a hunter has a similar experience when working at level.

Your Funds are Limited

Again, I’m no expert in Wow, so your mileage may vary. And you may know better.

In no time I was level 60 and could purchase a flying mount, but with a very limited lifetime, I didn’t have nearly enough gold to pay for the skills. As you end the starter quest chain, you have a mount and are a Journeyman Rider, so you can move at 200% walking ground speed. But of course, we all want to fly as well as ride. Flying is very expensive. Apparently, one has to buy Expert Riding and a Flight Master License, which are 225G each. In Orgrimmar I found the Flight Trainer and a Wind Rider NPC. The basic Wind Rider – in your choice of 3 colors – is only 45G. The skills however are very expensive. I started out with only about 40G after leveling to 60 doing quests.

To build up my funds, I’m taking two approaches:

• Gathering professions. I’m a skinner and a miner. I plan to mine and skin for loot to sell at Auction. My dwarf hunter working from level 40 – 55 has had quite good luck with auctions of loot from skinning and gathering. The various cloth items are in large supply and fetch reliable income in the auction house.
• Dungeons. Doing a series of dungeons I find that I’m quite effective and this gives funds and loot to sell at auction. The DK is very powerful. While Frost is not the right talent set for tanking, it is quite effective at Damage.

You need to get your mining up to level 200 or more to mine the minerals found in areas at level 60, so be prepared to work long hours in lower areas. Also skinning needs to be 300 or so to skin mobs in dungeons or while leveling, so again there is much work to do in lower level areas,.

Reputation from Dungeons

I want to upgrade my reputation to Revered with as many Cities as possible. This has the advantage of allowing me to purchase large bags with 16 slots for about 1G. Apparently you may purchase one bag from each city at this price once the Rep is Revered. Perhaps more bags at Exhalted, but I’ve not tested that. My Dwarf Hunter wore a tabard for Darnassas to get a Saber mount and was able to purchase large bags from both Darnassas and Ironforge while working dungeons to level to 55 to allow us to create a Death Knight.

However, watch out beyond level 55. The Random Dungeon option in the finder begins sending you into Burning Crusade dungeons where the cities are not available and regardless of your tabard, you will be gaining only Thrallmar, or another rep. This won’t help with your city rep. You need to choose “classic dungeons” from the finder rather than  Random.

Quite Impressive

I have been quite impressed by the Death Knight class. My experience with Warriors below level 20 indicates that they solo poorly, but the DK is an excellent solo leveler and is quite effective in Dungeon play. I look forward to many hours as I gather funds for my flying mount.

- Windy

Chair Open

How great is this? Whatever computing you want to do, you can do it from the comfort of the recliner.

Notable Features

Among the notable features are:

• The 7Flex arm makes this all possible. It has a 24″ reach, which is just enough to put the monitor directly in front of the recliner with enough room to reach the handle to open the leg rest. It goes together easily and is high quality and sturdy. And affordable at $250.
• The computer is the recent Gaming Desktop from Cyberpower. The case is admittedly larger than required for this application. My Bad. A mid-tower would have done nicely to hold the Core-i7 950 with the single Nvidia 470 graphics card. This graphics card is plenty to run Wow in style. No need for SLI for Wow.
• A 20″ Acer LED back-lit monitor is very slim [ 3/4" ] and light. Although the arm is happy with as much as 12 lbs, this monitor is only 6.2 lbs. At $100 on sale at Newegg, the monitor is great, and cheap. 1600×900 resolution is plenty for gaming.
• The Logitech K800 Wireless Lighted Keyboard. So you can work / battle with the lights down and still see the keyboard. The keyboard is so smart that it lights up when you move your hand over the keys and dims to save batteries when you move your hand away. It’s just great.
• The house is now wired with two additional Ethernet cables and this one is a Gigi-bit connection back to the router. Not all the connections in the house are Gigi-bit but the two desktop machines are connected at GB speeds.
• A 2+1 Sound system with the speakers strapped to the TV Rear speaker stands behind the chair and the sub-woofer in the cabinet above the UPS. UPS is required in my area due to frequent power glitches that would cause reboots.
• A Cyber Snipa gaming keypad – wired – under my left hand for hours of World of Warcraft fun.
• I made the cabinet from 3/4″ plywood – 1/2 sheet is required – with 1/2″ for the baffles / stiffeners front and back. Luan plywood gives the cabinet a mahogany look. The edges are finished with iron-on tape, and the cabinet is finished with several coats of marine grade poly urethane varnish.

The battle chair is everything that I hoped. I no longer have to overheat my laptop playing games. I may not buy another laptop ever. My next portable purchase may be a tablet.

More Photos

Here’s an example:

Front View

When used for gaming, laptops tend to over heat, and eventually they destroy their video cards. My Alienware m15x laptop, while it seems to have good cooling, has had 4 new video cards in the last 3 years. I have wanted to use a desktop for gaming, but prefer to do most of my playing from the comfort of my recliner. Here is the start of an idea to accomplish that. Missing from the renderings are the arm that holds the monitor from the case to the right of the recliner to the monitor in front of me. As  you can see the computer case is very large. I’ve provided for a UPS in the cabinet since in my area all my computers require a UPS due to frequent power glitches that would cause an unprotected computer to reboot. Click on pictures for larger views.

The arm will be mounted at the front left corner of the side cabinet. Notice that the cabinet projects forward of the side of the chair to allow the arm to reach to the side. The side reach must be about 22-24 inches. The base of the monitor will be slightly above the level of the side cabinet. The cabinet has a platform for the computer, which is raised above the floor by 3 inches to minimize dust intake. The cabinet design does not surround the computer case to allow for adequate cooling. The computer is built with a HAF-X, which is larger than would be ideal in this application. The computer is liquid cooled with fans that blow straight out the top. This makes placing the case inside a cabinet less desirable. Despite the size of the case and the number of fans, the computer is quiet, so I do not expect problems viewing TV this close to the computer. In fact it may be quieter then my current setup, since the laptop lap table has a fan which is quite loud. The HAF-X case may actually be quieter.

Here’s a view from the rear. The keyboard, mouse and gaming keypad will be held on a light wood table on the lap. Only the keyboard is shown in this rendering. The monitor I have chosen is a 20 inch Acer model with a VESA mount at the back, a DVI connection and a resolution of 1600×900. The Alienware m15x has a resolution of 1920×1200, but that resolution is not required for a great gaming experience. The larger screen will make seeing the interface details much easier. Sometimes I have to actually use a magnifier to see details on the laptop which has a 15 inch screen.

Rear View

Notice the rear of the cabinet has openings at the top and bottom to allow adequate circulation for the UPS. Also the cabinet will have a shelf for the sub-woofer for the 3 channel sound system. I want the gaming sound separate from the TV, and 2 channels and a sub-woofer will be plenty of fidelity. More to come as I choose an arm and finalize the design.

Here is an arm I’m considering by Innovative at lcdarms.com.

7Flex Arm by LcdArms

Update:

Here’s a render with the arm in place:

Arm in Place

- windy

World of Warcraft

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. While the game has much to recommend it, especially since they have a trial or starter edition that is free-to-play [up to level 20], it has a serious problem with its design of “realms” or “shards” as some games call it.

“Shards” or “Realms” of course is the name used  for the “instances” of the server that are required to support very large numbers of players. These games are MMO – Massively Multi-Player – and “Persistent” which means that they do not place players in private “instances” of the game as they play. But it is not possible to have hundreds of thousands of players all playing in the same server at the time. How is the game going to solve the problem when thousands of players show up in the same town at the same time for a party or just to hang out on a Saturday night?

Well the point is that World of Warcraft solves this problem very badly. There are better solutions out there. Let’s look at the Wow solution and then look at some other games and see much better solutions.Where Are Your Characters?

To examine the problem more closely we need to understand where the characters are that you play.

They are in a database. All the information about the characters for an account are stored in a database.

So what are the performance issues? There are two issues:

• Access to the database to retrieve and save character information as each change occurs to the character. This does not include each damage hit you take, but each change to your inventory, and each change to experience you achieve, such as each quest you complete, each monster you kill or each activity such as crafting or trading that changes your character in such a way that you would not want to lose the change if you logged out at that instant.
• And the surrounding game state, that is the nearby players, and monsters and other state of the environment that affects your character. This is separate from the database.

Let’s Have a Party

So let’s see what happens when a game has a party and everybody decides to show up in the same town at the same time. Guild Wars does this all the time. About six times a year they have week-long festivals that severely tax their servers. I’m not familiar enough with Wow to know if they have parties too, but I’m sure they have the “Saturday Night” effect, I’ve experienced it, and it is a real mess. I have been playing some human characters that start out in Elwynn Forest. At about level 6 you are sent on a quest to the nearby large city of Stormwind. Well don’t go to Stormwind on a Saturday night. The place is mobbed by high level characters with their huge pets, and mounts, jockeying up and down the narrow streets showing off and visiting with their friends. I could not walk down the street, and for some reason it picked me to bump off the server repeatedly. It took several tries before I was able to “Transport” home and get out of that place. It was so bad that I moved to another Realm, but the problem is that with Wow, your characters don’t exist on that other realm.

Guild Wars parties are never a mess on festival days. Let’s see why.

Guild Wars Districts

Guild Wars Districts

There is a universal Guild Wars database, so all your characters and all your friends characters are in one place. Then if you want to party, the system automatically puts you in a “District”, which is the game server “instance’. If you and your friends end up in different Districts, that is no problem, you can still Whisper to each other and agree on a District where you can meet. Then you pull down the menu at the top left of your screen and it moves you to the District that you choose. Of course when you are Questing, your party is given its own instance of a server so you are alone, but this design works perfectly well for “Persistent” MMOs too. During festivals I have seen this list grow to a hundred or more districts of one town. If you move to another town where there is no party, then there are only one or two Districts.

One might argue that Guild Wars is not as popular as Wow and so it has no database problem, and this is true, but there is a design that solves the Database Scaling problem: Multiple Servers. In this case we just add more servers when we have so many users that the database can no longer handle the load.

Jade Dynasty

Jade Dynasty is a “Persistent” MMO run by many folks in Asia, and by Perfect Worlds in the US.

Jade Dynasty Server List

In this case there are only two, but there could be several. Each server has a unique set of characters and you can’t “Visit” or “Party” with  your friends on other servers. But if they are on the same server, then you have “Realms” which are like Districts. Once you log in to the server with your username and password, you are presented with an initial Realm, and it remembers the last one where you visited. There are special Realms for Trading to keep other realms free of all the traffic of trading.

Jade Dynasty Realms

To find what Realm you are in, just click on an icon next to the compass.

Jade Dynasty Realm at Compass

So if you and your friends meet in Jade Dynasty, then you have to go back to the Login Screen and switch Realms.

Realm Selector

Of course it takes a little longer to logout – which takes you back to the Character Selection screen – and then change the realm, which takes you back through the big list above.

 Heros of Three Kingdoms

Heroes of Three Kingdoms

HoTK is another game from Asia that Perfect Worlds provides. HoTK fixes this problem in the way that Guild Wars does, with a pull down to choose the Realm right in game.

As you can see they have a large number of Realms. The drop down from the Compass let’s you switch Realms instantly to join your friends or participate in “instance” dungeons that are only supported in certain Realms. For example, to do quests for “Mounted Combat” you need to switch to the “Events” which are only given in Realm 11.

Wow Design

The Wow design has no realms really, but only “servers” so each time you switch to another one, you have none of your characters. Of course as you play, you probably won’t meet other folks from other servers. But if you run into Saturday Night as I did, you are faced with the problem of building characters on other servers. Fenris is apparently completely loaded. And Galkrond and Nazgrel are billed as being for “New Players” but I created some characters on Galkrond and then tried to start them off, and ran into a mob in the starting area. It was so bad that I started the same character again on Nazgrel. So I have three instances of the same character on three different servers. What a mess is that?

It’s not possible to combine the Servers at this point since all these games depend on character names being unique, so if they mashed them together they will have to somehow allow you to rename the characters to make them unique. I remember that 2Moons once did this. After they combined the servers, when you logged in, your characters were forced to unique names and then you were given a chance to rename the characters to unique names of your choice.

World of Warcraft needs Realms.

But when they do this, they will end up with too many servers. If they actually implemented Realms, they probably will find that they don’t need all of those servers. If  you notice the list, there are a large number of PVP servers. This is probably due to high load on those servers. Well that load is due to “Game State” load, not database load, and since Wow only has one way to “shard” its world – Servers – the design has only one way to deal with Game State load, and that is to make more servers.

What a mess.

Allow Players to Move

With their server-only design, they could allow users to Manually load level their servers. They could provide a free means to move a character or a whole group of characters between servers. It should be free and completely automatic – no person required to do it. It could work like this.

In the Character Selection Screen, there is a new button called Move to New Server. This presents a wizard that has two steps:  You choose the server and a new name for your character.

1. The server choice is simple. You know where your friends are, or, you are given some indication about the loading in terms of total recently active character population on that server. Say an average of character hours over the last week or month – which ever would give a smooth estimate. This would allow folks to make intelligent choices about moving to less populated servers.
2. The next step of the wizard checks to see if the character name is unique. If the current character name collides on the new server, then, you can choose a name that will not collide, and of course it’s checked immediately before you go on, and you get to see if it’s unique right away and don’t have to commit until you get to try several options. This is unlike the character creation screen that only tells you after  you commit.

They could limit character moves to once a week for each character if there is some reason. But you should be able to move your whole stable around once a week if you like. Also it should be free to move since the idea is to level the load on areas that are over crowded. Don’t charge for something that benefits everyone.

IMHO,

- ww

• No Trading. They are preventing trial accounts from being used as farmers apparently.
• Can’t invite players to Groups [Parties].
• Can’t whisper unless they are a friend.
• Can’t use mailbox. Again the farming problem.
• Not all races are available.
• Characters are capped at level 20 out of 85.

But you can have up to 10 characters per account so you can explore a lot of the world and figure out how things work.

Add Ons EcoSystem

World of Warcraft has a huge ecosystem of AddOns that add and change functions of the program. I needed a way to see my coordinates on the map to match up with quest descriptions. There are a ton of map addons so I chose a simple one. You can find TomTom here and comment on it here.

Compass without TomTom

Compass with TomTom

Here’s the compass of Wow without TomTom – Where Am I? With TomTom no problem I get the coords at the bottom.

But there’s a minor problem in the Small Map.

Mercenary Party

Guild Wars recently added “Mercenaries” which are ways to add the other players in your account to your list of heroes – or players that you control as part of your team. Heroes were added with the “Nightfall” expansion and at that time were characters that you gained by progressing in the game. Nightfall had about a dozen heroes, and the “Eye of the North” expansion added many more heroes to this list, but still with the idea that you gained heroes by doing quests.

Mercenaries allows you to build your own heroes in two ways:

1. Use the other level 20 PVP or PVE characters in your account as heroes.
2. Create a PVP character in your account, use it as a hero, and then delete it.

The second method allows you to quickly build a whole team of the professions that you need since every PVP character starts out at level 20, it’s available immediately for use as a hero. This is especially powerful since you can build a whole team with a specific use in mind.

A Team of Necros for Super Discording

For example, there are many hero builds, but one particularly powerful team is built around the necromancer skill called Discord. Discord is a powerful Elite health stealing skill that ignores armor and has a short recharge time. Before mercenaries were introduced, there was a limit of up to 3 heroes at a time in a party. This limited the complexity of team builds. Here is a three hero team built around the Discord skill.

Discord Team Skill Bars

The Discord team is balanced with lots of healing and lots of damage that works under lots of conditions. The only drawback might be that against foes with condition removal, the team may have difficulty keeping the necessary conditions on the foes so that Discord can do damage.

Before Mercs were introduced, if a player wanted to “solo” a mission, the party had to be completed with various Henchmen which were generally weaker than heroes could be. Also there was the difficulty of getting the necessary heroes. There are only three Necro heroes in Guild Wars, Master of Whispers, Olias, and Livia. Master and Olias require Nightfall and Livia is gained in Eye of the North, so one had to be a quite experienced player before they could assemble a Discord team.

Player Mercenary

Once Mercs were introduced, one could build a party with seven necro heroes immediately. All one needs to do is upgrade your account for the maximum mercenaries, which costs $44.99. Then one uses the trick of employing PVP heroes.

Recruiting PVP Heroes

To recruit PVP a hero, just build a PVP only character, using whatever campaign, face, hair, and armor color you like since you won’t be able to change any of these later. PVP only characters are immediately a level 20 so they can be immediately recruited as mercenaries. To Recruit the character to use as heroes for other characters on your account, just play that character, and visit the Mercenary Recruiter in Balthazar Isles and sign up to be a mercenary. At this point, you can delete the character from your account and create another one. To build a Super Discord Mercenary Team, you will want to build seven such characters. You may have other characters in your account already that are Necros, you can use them if you like as heroes, just sign them up at any convenient Mercenary Recruiter. They won’t be able to play as heroes helping themselves, of course. Make sure you have their armor on and in the colors you like before you sign up, because they are fixed at that point, unless you delete them. Be sure and read all the wiki pages for Mercenaries and ask any questions you have in GW Forums if things are unclear.

Building Your Heroes

Once you have your seven necros, and have recruited them, you can equip them with weapons and buff their armor. They come with no skills, no weapons and their armor is like other heroes, with no buffs. Any buffs they had when recruited are not copied, only the look and color is copied.

Thankfully, you get a “Bonus” to equip your heroes with weapons. Just type /bonus into the chat window and you will be given powerful weapons of every class.

Pvp Merc with Bonus Weapon

You can buff the weapon and the armor, as soon as you can afford to make your hero more powerful. Remember that if you want to delete the hero, to recover all buffs from all instances of that hero from all the characters on your account before you delete it, or you will lose all those expensive runes and weapons.

Leveling Quickly using Mercenaries

You can level a Nightfall character very quickly using Mercenaries since you can begin using Mercenaries immediately after visiting the Recruiter in Kamadan. So as soon as you reach Kamadan, after your tutorial quest, you can begin using level 20 Mercenaries to help you level. Prophecies and Factions characters must wait longer since the recruiters are in Lion’s Arch and Kaineng City.

Building Your Skills

You will need to collect the elite Discord and other skills in the normal way that you collect skills for heroes. Check the Guild Wars wiki to find out where to get these skills, and apply them to your heroes. Of course, once one character has made the skills available to heroes, then they are available for all the Mercenaries too, even to level 1 characters who are starting out to use Mercenaries. This means that a Discord team is available to your low level character in Nightfall.

Modified Discord Teams

Since there are more heroes available with the Mercenaries update – 7 instead of the old limit of 3 – the teams can be more powerful. Here is an example of a team that I am using for most of my builds now:

Notice the Necro / Mesmer Reaper Boneclaw, which employs interrupts, echo and skill thief skills which are particularly powerful against bosses. If you steal a bosses elite skill, then they are much easier to knock down. Heroes can use echo quite effectively on their own, and they seem to know how to use Signet of Sorrows, which recharges instantly if the foe is next to a dead ally or pet.

Of course, if the mission is less challenging, and involves long distances, adding Koss, or another Warrior with “Charge” or a Paragon with “Fall Back” can greatly speed your progress through the mission.

Prophecies Can Now Be Beaten

Prophecies last three quests are among the hardest in the game to solo with H and H [Heroes and Henchmen], but with a modified Discord team of 7 Mercs, I’ve beaten it with 6 out of my 10 characters already and I’m sure I can do it with the rest. The Necro / Mesmer is especially effective for the last quest – Hell’s Precipice. The Signet of Sorrows is very effective against the Ether Seals.

I’m going to start working on the Nightfall end quests next.

Suggested Progress through Guild Wars

Eye of the North is much easier by comparison with the end game of the campaigns. My path for a character is usually as follows:

• Start a character in your campaign of choice and do missions to get to level 20.
• Use Mercs as soon as you can in your campaign of choice. Starting in Nightfall is easiest.
• Buff your armor and weapons using funds from other characters in your account, as soon as possible.
• As soon as you get to level 20, go to Eye of the North and finish it to get a powerful weapon and skills. The weapons of most importance are: Kerresh’s Staff  with a +60 HP bonus, which will probably be your primary weapon if you are a spell caster, and the EotN bonus weapon if you are a melee character.
• The hard quests are the Asuran quests, especially GOLEM which you can do solo with a back route approach, and the last one, which I usually just purchase a runner since a specific build takes the monster right down. I usually party up for Destruction’s Depths, although with a Merc Team it may be possible to Solo this mission. A Discord team will even get you through the Shards of Orr if you also take a running skill for the end dash. An extended Discord team makes it much easier. Of course you have to get through the Shards of Orr to complete Kerresh’s quest chain.
• Most powerful and useful skills from EotN are Pain Inverter, which is near the end of the chain to get Kerresh’s staff any way, and the Bear, Wolf or Raven skills which used alone polish off the solo Augury Rock mission in seconds.
• Now go back to your chosen campaign and finish it since you have a very powerful weapon, great armor due to buffs you can add from funds from EotN, and buffed Mercs too.
• Your Mercs and EotN skills are going to come in handy if you want to solo the Crystal Desert. Before I had these, the Hydra and other monsters there wiped out all those level 17 henchmen and it was nerve wracking to even think about the desert. Now with a discord team, I walk the desert calmly, and solo all the quests there.
• The only NightFall mission that seems impossible to solo is Dzagonur Bastion. Not even an extended Discord team is enough to beat this one easily. I have not yet completed the last few missions solo, but killing Varesh in the Ruins of Morah is not such a big deal with a normal Discord team, and I’m sure it’s going to be easier with the extended team.
  
• Factions is pretty easy by comparison to Prophecies and Nightfall. Use the Luxon side to avoid the I usually finish Factions with a run for the last mission just to get the weapon, but it’s usually less useful since it’s often life-draining and there are no staffs, only wands and foci. The Raisu Palace mission is easy to solo with an extended solo team. Just be patient and use Pain Inverter on those elemental bosses. Being a mesmer or secondary mesmer so you can echo Pain Inverter helps with this any the Hell’s Precipice mission of Prophecies.
  

Getting a Handle on Guild Wars

I’m sure there are experts, or groups of players that scoff at my difficulty with these missions, but after playing for many months and reading the wiki for many hours, the end game of Prophecies and even Eye of the North missions were very frustrating. They no longer are that difficult. I sometimes wipe and some professions are more challenging than others, but I feel like I have an handle on some of the most difficult parts of GW.

- ww

AION Logo

I have been watching the AION game for some time, and since it was released in this country by NCSoft, I had hoped that they would use the same model as they do with Guild Wars, which is purchase followed by FTP [no subscription]. Well they apparently are greedy, and have gone with the WoW model, which is Pay for the game and then pay $15 / month. Sorry, but I’m not interested in this model.

However, I have found a FTP Private server. Oddly enough. GameZ AION is a private server with enhanced EXP, Currency and Drop rates.

Problems with the Game

I won’t be doing a full review here, I’m sure you can find lots of those on the web. I’ll just be relating some of my own issues and observations after playing the game for a few hours.

Installation

It takes a very long time to install the game. The install procedure at GameZ involves downloading and installing the NCSoft installer which will install the client. However, it doesn’t download it quickly, but runs it into your computer over about an hours time. This is because it’s a very large client. 18 GB on your hard drive. Yes, that’s Eighteen Gigabytes. Most MMO clients are between 1 and 2 GB. This is a whopping 18GB. Once you install the game using the NCSoft installer, you install and start another small program which directs the program to GameZ. Don’t start the program normally since it will point to the NCSoft servers.

Character Creation

Once you start the game you can create a character of either race.  There is something funny going on at NCSoft regarding races. Apparently they did allow two races, and then they didn’t for a while, and now they do, but they soon will only allow one race per account per server. What a mess. Well GameZ confirms that  you can have accounts with both races, so don’t worry about any pop-ups from the game that indicate that your characters will have to be moved.

There are a bewildering number of character options, mostly in body shape. Have fun, or not.

The name format restrictions are lame. A single word with a leading capital letter, and no spaces. But at least you can check to see if your name is available.

Character Selection

Graphics

The graphics are awesome. Over the top. Although all the environments I’ve seen are muddy and dark. The problem is that you better have a high end, very high end, system to run this game on. As you can guess from the client download size, this will push modern systems to the brink. I have a high end laptop [Alienware m15x] that is 4 years old and it is tapped out running this game. I suggest you have more than 4GB of memory. The client is over 1GB of memory, so less than 4GB does not cut it. My laptop is 4GB, but I don’t get to use it all due to 32bit Vista memory usage, and it’s barely enough memory with the OS and Firefox to read the wiki. There is a very nice wiki however. Check it out. I found the quests I needed when I got stuck.

Also you need a very high end graphics card with more than 512MB of graphics memory.

Desktop machines will fair better with this game.

The performance on my laptop was herky jerky especially in town. Pandemonium is a huge city. I’m not sure whether this is the server or my laptop, but I suspect that it is my laptop. I don’t have the patience to install the game on my high end desktop to determine which it is.

Gameplay

Game play is of course colored by the private server high exp/drop rates. You are quickly at level 9 and asked to ascend before you really get started, but there are several issues that show up immediately.

Picking up loot is a chore.

Picking up Loot

Every kill requires opening a dialog and scrolling down to pickup what you want from the kill. And each time you right click to select an item you are tossed back to he beginning of the list and have to scroll down again. Bad design. What were they thinking. One of the problems is that the inventory is so small that you have to be careful or you will instantly fill it.

Inventory is Small

Only 27 slots in your inventory. Apparently they want you to spend real money in the store to expand your bag. Notice the high currency after only a little while playing the game. That’s a good thing.

Navigation is the Real Problem

But the show stopper for me is the navigation. As I have mentioned with other games that I’ve reviewed here, navigation can make or break a game play experience. And it breaks this one.

Quest Log

The quest log is designed by someone who has not played the game. You have to open too many windows to get from the quest log to a marker on the map. You open the quest log, then you click on the quest, and as you can see there are a pile of them. Mostly because NPCs tend to dump groups of quests into your quest log when you complete one quest. Then when the panel on the right is open, you click on a blue name – the target or the NPC for the quest, and up pops another dialog with a Locate button in it. All I wanted was a marker on the map, and I had to type a key and click three times? Showstopper.

The quest tracker shows the quests that you have checked in the log.

Quest Tracker

But none of the items in the quest tracker are click-able. So no help there.

Once you do get a marker, you can get a transparent overlay map like this to navigate with.

Map Navigator

This is a reasonable and innovative idea. N toggles this display so it’s easy to bring up or dismiss as you fly along. You will be doing quite a bit of flying as it turns out. Wings are available for both races from the start.

Not only is navigation a problem, but quests lead you all over the place, when you cannot fly, or run more than a few seconds. So it takes freaking forever. Here’s an example:

Quest Map

I just finished one part of the quest called “Fear This” in the Mumu Village on the left part of the map, the next part of the quest is to talk to the NPC at the cross on the right part of the map. I can’t fly in this area. I have to walk. There is a “charge” skill that allows you to run for about 10 sec every 4 minutes. Big deal. Ok, I get that they want me to open up more of the map. Notice that the NPC is in an area where I have not yet been. But I can’t TP, I have to walk. So to walk, since there is no Auto-Route. I have to hold down the W key and steer for about 10 minutes to get there. That’s just plain bad design. A waste of time.

Bottom Line

This is too much game for my laptop. Maybe someday. The herky jerky lag, probably due to my laptop, makes the game no fun to play.

Update: I installed this on the Core I-7 quad processor, 6GB machine and it’s not herky-jerky at all. It took over an hour to install and the program file folder is over 21GB.

The quest navigation is too much of a pain. If the performance was good, I might put up with that for a while. The long runs to complete quests are just plain torture, there’s no getting around it. While the landscape is beautiful – if it wasn’t so dark and colorless in most places – does not make up for the fact that it takes so long to get around between places to complete simple quests.

Maybe later on some new laptop in a year or two. Interesting to try, but not a keeper now.

- Windy

Elite Dekaron

I’ve recently discovered the culture of Private Game Servers for popular MMO and other games where the rules are broken to make the game experience different. Usually the EXP, loot and currency drop rates are multiplied by 200 – 1000x to make the game less of a “Grind”. Many Asian MMOs are one awful grind, meaning it takes hours or days to level up or collect the loot or currency you need by killing monsters. A couple of years ago I played 2Moons [Dekaron] for almost a year and never got above level 85.

On a private server for Dekaron I now have 7 characters above level 170.

Where do you find Private Servers?

Now that you know what they are called, you can google for “Your favorite game private server” and find a list of servers. Here are a couple of lists I found:

http://www.xtremetop100.com/

http://www.gtop100.com/

All of the sites have some sort of voting, which moves them up in the rankikngs. You should expect to receive a reward of some kind as you vote. Usually it’s currency for the game shop. You can vote every 12 hours so over time you can make a modest amount of shop cash to expand your storage or purchase other game items.

Not Always Working

You will have to try a few of these before you find one you like. So don’t necessarily jump right in and invest a lot of time on the first server at the top of the list. Some of the common problems are:

• The game servers lag. I found Dekaron Evolution servers lag quite a bit, so I dumped them for a better performing server. Dekaron Nemesis servers are great. Elite Dekaron servers are fine, but they have other problems.
• The servers break game features. Elite Dekaron broke the quest log. Apparently you could still take quests, and complete them, but you could never see your progress. Not sure why they did that. And it’s not clear that quests are important when the EXP rates are very high, but occasionally quests are interesting, and it’s annoying to try to do quests with no log or tracking.
• The folks are no fun. Griefing is a problem with the design of Dekaron. You may not like the level of nonsense from other players. Xtreme Jade Dynasty on the other hand has no griefing since they separate the PVP from PVE on different realms and have a zero tolerance policy for griefing. I have found Xtreme Jade Dynasty to be a very friendly and social place to play.
• The installers don’t work, or you can’t download them. Some of the servers use “free” hosting services for the files, which is a pain since they make you wait and reduce your download rate unless you pay. What nonsense! Some of the installers are just broken on some systems. In order to install Elite Cabal Reloaded, I had to watch the installer, and when it tossed an error, I had to find and copy the installer at that point and run that part by itself. Not for the faint of heart. The installer worked fine on a Windows 7 x64 system, but failed on Vista x86 unless you grabbed the installer files and installed those manually. Sometimes the support staff for the servers aren’t the sharpest folks around.

I’ll do other posts for each game and suggest which private server I found as the best.

Gear Fortified +2

Real World Economics of Private Servers

I cannot confirm this easily, but apparently, private servers license the game software for “non-commercial” use, which means that the companies apparently need to be non-profit. So while they are Free To Play, they accept Donations, and typically give you game rewards for these donations. In the case of Dekaron Nemesis, you will find that a few real dollars will get you some pretty sweet unique game content. Unique costumes and one items – a ring – which gives you killer buffs and you can wear up to 4 of them. They can be traded among your characters so you can buff the ones you want to level up without spending a bunch on rings for everyone.

How the Gameplay Changes

You might think that 500x EXP would be a great thing, but changes like this can have some unusual side effects. In Elite Dekaron it is no problem to get a character started. You are born with the same situation of the standard Dekaron, and you go out to kill a spider or a bug, which you do and you level up with a few whacks to level 15 and away you go. You are born with 500K DIL, which is great so you can buy armor and weapons.

Unique Artwork in Nemesis

But with Dekaron Nemesis, it’s not so simple. You are born with level 15 armor and weapons, but with level 1, and no stats. Which should be invalid, but isn’t. But if you try to kill a spider, he kills you. You are given a few stat points that are unassigned, and if you assign them reasonably, and use some of your 500K to buy a few pots, you still can’t kill a spider easily. I whacked on a spider for like 10 minutes before I brought him down, and then I was suddenly at level 16. Strange.

To solve this problem, I created a second account and lead that character, called BootStrapKnight, in a party to kill a few bugs to get him started, then he could lead characters in the other account to get them started. After I was shown this trick with my first character by a friendly passer by, all was well. But clearly the Nemesis folks didn’t completely debug the character startup process.

The high currency drop rates can toss the character trading markets out of whack too. But usually the drops in some area are high enough to get what you need, in Dekaron Nemesis anyway. More later on that specific blog post.

Bottom Line

So the bottom line is that if you don’t like the grinding of some Asian MMOs, you may find private servers a lot more fun.

I have found Dekaron, Jade Dynasty and Cabal servers that are much more reasonable to play than their standard counterparts. I’ll provide specific recommendations for servers and game play in future posts.

Enjoy,

windy

Dekaron at GameHi

Remember when 2Moons shutdown with no notice?

Well, it turns out that the accounts were saved. You can transfer the characters to new accounts at GameHi. So they apparently saved the database, and now Dekaron [and the other game] at GameHi, are Free to Play. Surprise Surprise. At the time that 2Moons was released, I understood that Dekaron – which was popular in Korea – was a subscription game, which is why Acclaim’s FTP version was IP checked for US only IP addresses.

Looks like the GameHi folks are on the FTP bandwagon, and I’ve transferred my accounts and hope to find out in a few minutes whether all the characters were saved.

I don’t think this is going to be a place I spend a lot of time, since the private servers allow leveling much faster. Also there was a lot of griefing [bullying in game] in 2Moons, and it may be the same in GameHi’s version. We’ll check it out tho.

My only question is going to be what if the character names for my characters are not unique? Will a popup when I log in allow me to change them, or will they just modify them to make them unique in some way? We’ll see.

Update: All character names are unchanged. So it looks like they transferred the Acclaim database to GameHI and started from there, and left the characters saved and dormant awaiting our return. The servers have the same name I notice: Siz and Helion.

Enjoy,

- windy

Nemesis

Dekaron Nemesis is another private server.

They have done an amazing amount of changes to the art work.

There are a number of interesting and odd features to their system.

Starting a Character

Each character starts out at lvl 1, but with a full set of level 18 armor and a level 18 weapon. Also there are several skills that are class specific. The armor and weapons are of course illegal since all the Stats are zero and there are no skill points. Also since the level is 1, the level 18 armor is invalid as well. Not sure how they faked that.

But the problem is that the way that characters are set up, they cannot get started by themselves. If you try to go outside of Braiken or Loa and kill something, you die immediately. The only way to get a character that I know of is to party with a higher level player and have the leader kill something. The lowest level foes have such a large EXP factor that a single hit takes the level 1 character to level 31. After a few kills done by the party leader, including Akris or any other foes, the new character can easily be at level 60.

Once my first character was started, by a passer by in the game, I made a second account and created a character called BootStrapKnight. This character was started by the character that was going by using two instances of the program and doing a party with the new character. Then the other characters on the first account were “bootstrapped” by the BootStrapKnight.

Artwork Changes

There are several changes to the artwork in Nemesis. Notable among these is a complete re-texturing of Parca Temple.

Nemesis Parca Temple

Armor and Weapons

Each of the NPCs have a level 130 weapon of each type and level 130 armor, in addition to the normal items that are for sale. It seems that one can level to 130 in only a couple of hours. I have a knight at level 105 after about three hours working in Draco to get Eternity [level 80] armor and then in Requies Beach Upper to farm Quesa [level 92] armor. Farming weapons are just as much of a problem as with Elite Dekaron, but the NPC selling level 130 weapons and armor certainly mitigates the issue to a large extent.

Quest Log Works

Unlike Elite Dekaron, the quest log works fine. So far I’ve not needed any quests, but it’s good to know that I can do them if I like.

Stat Points- 2X

I wondered what was up with my Stat points. It seemed that the numbers looked much larger than I had remembered. Well they are. Each level gets you 10 points, not the usual 5. If you put these toward HP, then you will pump up an amazing HP in no time. Of course it’s more prudent to up your weapon attributes as well as your HP, and also boost your SPI [MP] even if you are a knight. The end result is that you will be more powerful for PVP or for farming.

Mavrics to Fortify Your Gear

In most servers, the Akris – the glowing unicorn like horses – give high EXP, HP and MP pots, and large DIL drops. In Nemesis, they give large numbers of Copper, Silver and Gold Mavrics, which are used to enhance gear. The gear becomes stronger as you fortify it. Armor has higher defense and weapons do more damage. It looks like Nemesis has decided that a major benefit for their server is that Mavric enhancements are widely available.

To enhance gear using Mavrics, visit a blacksmith and call up the Fortify dialog.

Blacksmith Fortify Dialog

Each time you fortify the gear, it costs more, and at some point you need to start using Silver and Gold Mavrics. I seem to recall that the success rate goes down too, but perhaps they have eliminated that from Nemesis.

Here is a picture of my Quesa Armor and axes fortified to a +2 level. There is an animated glow that becomes stronger as the level gets higher. Fortifying to +6 requires 3 Copper and 3 Silver, and is relatively inexpensive. It looks like the cost is going to be high, but apparently the cost charged is not the cost reported. But you must have the larger amount to start. The cost for each level is relatively minor until you get to +7. +7 costs 7M DIL, which is obviously very expensive. So fortifying all your armor and a weapon or two to +6 is affordable, and well worth the effort for your level 94 armor which you will need a while until you can purchase your 130 armor from the NCP. Remember to check your class NPC merchants for your 130 level gear when you get there. It is surprisingly affordable.

Gear Fortified +2

No Aloken

Apparently the Nemesis folks have used a release of Dekaron that predates the Aloken spear class. I’m not sure if they plan to upgrade, but I can see that with all the changes, it will be a lot more work

Nudity

If you undress the female character classes, you will find them topless. Since the game is adult anyway, this is hardly a shocking feature, but it’s an interesting side note.

Wings

Modified versions of wings are purchased from an NPC for 50M DIL. That’s twice what other servers sell them for, but the modifications are interesting. They give a buff for Shield [2x] and a  more standard buff for speed, HP and MP of 10%. I presume the shield buff is to allow you to be stronger in PVP which is what shield is for.

There is also a Dragon wing set for 100M which gives no shield buff, but with other buffs a bit larger.

What Now?

At this point I’ll probably get my level 130 gear for one character and then go back to Elite Dekaron. I’ll be watching to see if they are going to upgrade. Update: I’m have a great time on Nemesis. It’s actually more fun and more social than Elite. So I’m working on all my characters there. Currently I recommend Nemesis.

I’m finding that Elite tends to take many of their servers down at odd times and the servers that they leave up, have been neutered – no monsters at all. I’ve never seen this done before. Odd.

More as I learn more about the server.

- Windy

Updated: Wings, Stats and Mavric Prices 23 April.

Elite Dekaron

Here’re a few things I’ve found out while playing Elite Dekaron.

The EXP factor varies from place to place. For example, in Frozen Forest lvl 40 it appears to be 60X, but in Heiharp lvl 25 it appears to be 40x. The DIL factor varies as well. To calculate the rate, watch the EXP and DIL drop for a monster and then do the math based on a Wiki like the 2Moons wiki which has a very nice Monster Detail section. Here’s the section for Heiharp.

Armor Farming

Once you reach level 70 and can’t buy armor any more

Farm in Draco Desert for lvl 80 armor [Helm is lvl 80]. For level 92 armor, farm in Requies Beach Upper, which is easily reachable from Draco Desert using the Teleporter that you come in on.  I’ll update this with new spots as I find them. I’ve heard that Avalon and Aquarius are the next spots.

Weapon Farming

Draco Desert has pretty reasonable rates of weapon drops and with patience you can get 72 and 78 weapons of almost all types. But Requies Beach has very low weapon drop rates for some reason. In a few hours of farming there I only got a couple of wands, and saw a lot of two handed axes or swords that were of no use. I’ll have to watch for another place to get one-hand axes and gauntlets. In your travels especially in coming and going through Parca or your visits to your Stash, keep your eyes open for discarded items. I got a level 105 Gauntlet that way, as well as a few other things.

Running Multiple Characters

I like to have a brace of characters of all classes since I get bored with the same old thing all the time. So I like to have one character pass items of real interest to other characters. And of course as one character makes it to the next farming area, the loot needs to be passed on to the other characters. This is of no interest below level 80 since the DIL rate is so high that it’s less work to just buy armor and weapons from the NPCs in town.

But once you reach level 80 you may want to pass farmed items along. My Knight and my Bagi farmed all the armor for my other characters since they reached level 100+ first. It was no more trouble when farming in Requies Beach for EXP and DIL to pick up the level 92 armor that drops for other classes. The drop rates for all armor is very high except for Helmets, which for some reason are harder to find. Farm helmets in the North East section of the map as you might expect.

You will need two accounts to pass your items on since Mail is disabled. I didn’t see any rule against multiple accounts and since the “Shop” ties up your character, they expect you to have multiple accounts anyway. At first I was moving the laptop next to the Desktop to Trade between the accounts, but this was a pain. An old laptop, which was very fast at the time [about eight years ago] was a herky-jerky experience these days, but it works.

But the best solution is to use my desktop with two big monitors. It turns out that two copies of Dekaron will run on the same machine at the same time. I’m surprised by this since I figured that GameGuard [an anti-hack software package] would get really upset, but all is well.

One copy on each monitor and away we go. The 6 year old Alienware Area 51 with Quad processors, and an Nvidia GTX 260 [896MB] has no problem with two copies of Dekaron, so on with trading that loot and saving a lot of time farming with each character separately.

So Far So Good

The performance of the server continues to be very good. Griefing is minimal and I’ve even talked with a player or two, but no lasting friendships or parties yet.

I’m a little annoyed by the lack of a quest log. There are a few quests that I might like to do, but with the log disabled, it’s just not practical.

I’ll be playing more on this server, and also trying another one.

Update:  23 April -I’ve got my wings for my Knight and am close for my Summy. But I’m finding that they take there servers down at odd times, like the middle of the night, and that all the servers on line [MarketPlace, Castle Siege, Events] are neutered [no monsters at all]. Actually I can understand the neutering the market place. That makes a lot of sense so that folks won’t load the server by playing on it. But that’s no fun if it’s the only server up and are having a sleepless night. Oh well. I’m back to Nemesis, which at the moment is my favorite.

- windy

Dekaron Evolution

Elite Dekaron

Dekaron is Free to Play and it’s even more fun than it was with 2Moons.

Remember back when I was playing 2Moons? Seems like ages ago.

Let’s Review:

Acclaim, a computer game company of some note, purchased the rights to a Korean game called Dekaron, reworked it, and set up a FTP [Free to Play] US only server – they checked your IP address. Apparently they needed to check because the Koreans were charging to play Dekaron at the time.

Well Acclaim didn’t make it and they were bought out by Playdom, the makers of those browser games in FaceBook, like FarmVille. Well as you can understand might happen, Playdom didn’t have any interest in 2Moons, or any other non-browser, MMO’s, so they shut them all down and all I was left with was some pictures.

Well with the frustration over the games over at Perfect World.

Ether Saga, and Jade Dynasty require 2 much grinding, even if it is automatic.

Heroes of Three Kingdoms is frustrating with two currencies and no good wiki.

I remembered 2Moons / Dekaron and did a search.

Dekaron Private Servers

It turns out that there are enough Dekaron private servers to have a Top 100 List. And they are FTP of course. Because who is going to pay to play a 2 year old Korean Grinder, right?

Well one of the things that Acclaim didn’t change was the GRIND GRIND GRIND nature of Dekaron.

But these private servers change that First. These servers do 60X EXP and 60X Currency drops, and something like 5X loot drops. So you level up in no time. Seriously, level 100 in like 3 days or less. You get level 80 in an afternoon.

But here’s the rub. After level 68 or so, you can’t purchase armor or weapons from NPCs, you have to loot them. So there are lots of folks running around at level 100+ with level 80 armor, which is easy to loot in Draco.

But I got my Wings!!! Wings are speed, Health and Energy boosts, and a mark of “having arrived”. They cost 25M DIL and require level 102. Even with the 60X it takes a bit of work after level 80 to get them.

Bagi Warrior Wings

Azure Knight Wings

Note we are still wearing our level 80 armor even tho we are level 102 or so, and using level 78 weapons. Next we are off to Avalon and Aquarius to farm for better armor and weapons.

Select a Good Server

At first I signed up on Dekaron Evolution since they were the top on the list. Turns out that they encourage you to vote, so they get high marks on voting, and have a nice website, but only one server and it’s not very quick. So it’s jerky and bogged down to play there. They are running a more recent version “Action 9″, but the server lag makes it harder to play. They only have one Realm, or sub-server, so they don’t have enough hardware for the number of users.

Next I tried Elite Dekaron and I’ve been pretty happy there. They have several sub-servers and performance is very good.

Also you can switch realms to find the glowing deer – Akris – to level up more quickly.

Elite Dekaron is running Action 7, which is apparently 2 releases ago, but they are talking about upgrading so that’s a good thing.

But they disable the Quest Log and Mail.I’m not sure why the Quest Log is disabled. Quests aren’t all that useful since the EXP and DIL rates are so high. But some quests reward interesting loot like GEMS, so it is useful to do them.

So you have to do the trick of having a “trading” account to pass items between two characters, which you will want to do since a high level character can easily farm armor and weapons for lower level characters of other classes. I’ll probably get my database sites going again to keep track of farmed loot.

The Agency is in the software, but disabled as far as I can tell. This is a pain since the Agency allows you to go one place and purchase from any player with a store open. Great way to compare going rates if you are going to sell something too.

There are some old Wiki’s out there, so keeping track of what armor, or weapons or armor is still documented.

Currency and Trading Market

The high DIL [currency] drop rates and high EXP rates cause a few other odd things:

Trading prices for items are very high. 10,000,000 [10M] and up for anything.

Gems are apparently hard to get. Even a single gem costs 10M and up. Gems are not all that hard to get, although the drop rates seem a little low. You just need to remember what low level areas to farm. Maybe high level areas have higher drop rates.

Griefing and Scamming

So far the griefing is at a reasonable level – same fools outside of Parca and in Draco Desert, but let them kill you a few times and they leave you alone. Griefing is a high level player killing a low level player just to be annoying. The key strategy is to not fight back at all. If you don’t hit them and they kill you, then they get points that eventually keeps them from using TP and they can go to JAIL which is very costly to get out. If you don’t fight back they leave you alone after a kill or two.

Watch for the scammers that dress in low level armor and use a small weapon and invite you to a duel. Of course they are level 100+ characters and kill  you right away. This is no big deal and once you are a high level they leave you alone anyway.

Dekaron is back and a lot of fun.

- windy

Update: 23 April – Check out my article on Dekaron Nemesis. Currently my Favorite.

Heroes of Three Kingdoms

We like living in Heroes of Three Kingdoms, except for two big problems:

• There are two currencies. Money and Funds. And due to the second problem, this is just too much of a hassle to mess with.
• There is no good wiki. Oh they have a wiki. But it only has the bare minimum of content, and nothing to help you deal with the Two Currency problem.

Here’s an example of how exasperating the two currency problem can be:

Currency

Currency is of two kinds: Money and Funds.

Money is obtained from a few quests – good luck figuring out which ones since the quest details don’t clearly tell you which type of Currency you get. They are very sloppy about this documentation, even in the game. Also Money is what you get from selling loot items that you pickup while farming or questing. Money can be exchanged with other characters.

Funds are obtained only from quests and “Roll Call” and cannot be traded with other players.

Apparently Funds were invented when folks noted a problem with the “Roll Call” system that gives you EXP, and Money just for showing up. You check in each day and collect the rewards. Well, folks created some characters that did no thing but show up for roll call and then passed the money to their main character. So Funds were invented to prevent this kind of exploit.

So, some things can be bought with Funds first, and then Money, and some with Money only [ like tickets to campaigns], and who knows what else, since it’s not documented and impossible to tell often in the games.

Just to make it totally confusing, rewards from quests are usually Funds, but not always. A quest for the Red Moists for example gives 2 Gold, and this turns out to be Money, not Funds. But it doesn’t say so.

And since there is no complete wiki, you can’t look up which quests give you money, and which funds, so if you are short on Money to get your Mounted Combat skill upgrades, there is no way to find out which quests you should do.

For example.

This is the point at which I decided to take a break from Ho3K and come back when they fix the Funds / Money thing or fill out their Wiki. I don’t need this frustration in a game, that is otherwise a lot of fun to play.

Mounted Combat Campaign Ticket

This picture illustrates the problem:

The ticket can only be purchased for Money not Funds. Note two currency lines on Bag to the right of picture.

It doesn’t say that in the NPC window. Some NPC windows say that Funds are consumed First. In this case, only Money would do. So why is it immoral to purchase a ticket to the campaign with Funds, which you earned by doing quests? Is there some feeling that quest currency is not good enough to purchase campaign tickets?

The Mounted Combat system is totally punitive and difficult due to the funds problem.

The Guard system, which was added later and which gives you a Human Pet to fight along side you, is totally well documented and does not require any funds or money to participate in.

I wonder why the choice to penalize players for Mounted Combat and then make Guards easy to get?

Oh well. Taking a Break like I said.

- Windy