Gold sellers move in to Warhammer

As Stylish Corpse reports, gold sellers have hit Warhammer Online.

I got a tell from two of them last night, from different web sites. This early on, they have legit-sounding names. And they aren’t spamming in general chat yet. They’re offering to sell you gold or to power-level your character.

In case you are wondering how to deal with this, I opened a CSR ticket under the topic “Harassment” and left the spammer’s name, the fact that they were selling gold, and the URL of the site they were advertising. Not very long after, CSR Rep Cielua contacted me in game to ask what s/he could do for me. I noted that I was just reporting a gold seller and asked if that was the proper way to report such things, and was told “Yes, absolutely.”

In case you want to report them after the fact, don’t forget you have a chat log! Look in:
\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\logs\communication\{server name}\{character name}^M

And you’ll have a file for everyone who sent you a tell, and what they sent you. Mine looked like this:

[08/09/20][01:54:30] [SELLER NAME DELETED]: < <[URL DELETED] >> Have good day. Warhammer Online Gold Price (10G==13 USD) ,Fast Power-Leveling 1-40 sale $239. And World Of Warcraft Gold sale (1000G==$24) . ~~Welcome to ( [URL DELETED] )

As a side note, I was very impressed by how quickly CS responded to my ticket on a busy Friday night.

Warhammer client. What directory holds what?

The point of this post is to help you with debugging or moving preferences from one install/computer to another. I’ve determined what I’m writing just from poking around and you’ll probably want to confirm this data with someone smarter than me.

Logs
Let’s start with the Logs directory. Inside it is a Communications directory. A level deeper is a directory for each server you have characters on, and then inside that a directory for each character. So for my character Meglivorn I’m looking in:

\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\logs\communication\Averheim\Meglivorn

Averheim being the name of the server. Anyway inside here are 4 log files. chat.log, combat.log, guildnews.log and system.log. These are all text files and contain a *ton* of information if you feel like writing a parser for them. Here’s a snippet of the system log:

[08/09/14][12:55:57]You receive Druchii War Pendant.
[08/09/14][12:58:02]You sold Worked Highstaff to Galmaer Silvermoon for 1 silver and 20 brass coins.
[08/09/14][12:58:06]You sold Druchii War Pendant x2 to Galmaer Silvermoon for 24 brass coins.
[08/09/14][12:58:28]You have purchased a new ability.
[08/09/14][13:00:51]Jobildo has invited you to join the Casualties of WAR guild.

and the combat log:

[08/09/14][12:26:45]You have learned about Eltharin, Language of the High Elves
[08/09/14][12:26:45]You gain 104 experience.
[08/09/14][12:27:40]You gain 700 experience.
[08/09/14][12:28:19]You gain 700 experience.
[08/09/14][12:29:02]Your Eagle Eye hits Dark Sprite for 52 damage. (21 mitigated)
[08/09/14][12:29:02]Dark Sprite’s attack hits you for 9 damage.
[08/09/14][12:29:03]Your Grim Slash hits Dark Sprite for 28 damage. (11 mitigated)
[08/09/14][12:29:04]Dark Sprite’s attack critically hits you for 13 damage.

And so on. The only odd thing I’ve found is that /tells *seem* to go into a separate directory, named your character name + ^M. So for Meglivorn, his private chats are in \logs\communication\Averheim\Meglivorn^M Inside that directory is a file for each person you exchanged /tells with.

Check out the logs though. There’s a lot of data to play with in there.

Notes
The notes directory holds the current patch notes from the launcher, in case you don’t feel like logging in to read them

Interface
Next is the interface directory. You might not have one of these yet, but if you’re going to install modes they go in interface\addons\{nameOfMod}. e.g.:

\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\interface\addons\CurseProfiler\

These are the ‘static’ files for addons.

User
Now let’s look at the user directory. Inside it is your UserSetttings.xml file. This contains screen resolution, key mapping, and a lot of other stuff controlled by the User Settings GUI in-game. There’s an audio_log_settings.xml file too, which I assume holds audio settings. Rocket science this ain’t.

But when moving clients, you probably really want to bring over
\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\user\UserSettings.xml

Inside the user directory is a nested interface directory, and inside that an AllCharacters directory. And inside that, a huge list of subdirectories, including ones matching the names of your addons. This is where all the settings for addons and various chunks of the UI are held.

I think a lot of this gets auto-loaded from the server. For instance inside EA_ActionBars is a SavedVariables.lua file (standard name for UI setting files) with the hotbars slots indicated, but there’s no character name attached to them. It possibly contains hot bar settings for all characters, but still, I quickly logged into my freshly installed client and although the UI was in its default layout, the hotbars were correct for that character, so that data must’ve been loaded from the server. On the other hand, the physical layout of the windows themselves didn’t. The EA_BackpackWindow has a SavedVariables.lua that contains the items in each characters backpack, and we *know* that info is held on the server, so this must be some kind of caching mechanism.

An important file is the settings file in EASystem_ActionBarClusterManager. This file contains all your UI layout settings, so you’ll probably want to bring that over.

Also, if you’ve ever tried to scale ActionBars using the mouse you probably found it to be tedious to get them all the same size. It looks to me like you could edit this by hand:

EA_ActionBar1 =
{
buttonCount = 12,
columns = 12,
buttonXSpacing = 0,
barId = 1,
modificationSettings =
{
true,
true,
},
buttonXPadding = 6,
buttonYSpacing = 0,
show = true,
buttonYPadding = 5,
showEmptySlots = 46,
caps = true,
buttonFactory = "ActionButton",
background = true,
scale = 0.93,
selector = 43,
}

Change the scale factor to be the same for each action bar, and voila. I’m intrigued by the other options here, too. If you made the bar 10 columns and 20 buttons, would it have 2 rows of 10, or just have half the bars hidden? Some experimentation is in order.

By the way, this is all in an AllCharacters directory. It appears that you can make custom settings for your characters by putting them in interface\{server_name}\{character_name} if you like. You’d have to do this by hand; as far as I know there’s no way to do it using the GUI.

A peek into the Warhammer client directories

As mentioned in my last post, I installed a new “fresh” copy of the Warhammer client off the retail disks. Before nuking the old one I took a quick glance at the two side by side, and here’s some of what I found. This isn’t a complete list; I did drill into every directory to compare things.

New directories in the retail client are GDF and Support. GDF looks to have something to do with patching, and Support contains a bunch of Help HTML files. Worth looking at if you’re having trouble.

The old Beta server has one directory and a few files that retail doesn’t. *Presumably* these are no longer needed, but of course I take no responsibility if you delete them and it totally fubars your install. The directory is audio and holds, unsurprisingly, a bunch of mp3 files with names like Music-Test_Fanfare_Chaos08.mp3. I’ll be holding on to these!

Now we get to the file level and again I’m not going to list everything. 3 directxfiles, d3dx9_30.dll, d3dx9_34.dll and d3dx9d_34.dll are in the beta client but not retail. These aren’t very big though. dev_zones.myp is huge, though, a bit over 3 gigs. .myp seems to be the basic data file ‘bundle’ extension for Warhammer Online. There are also some Player_Guide files that you d/led for beta.

On the retail side, there’s a world.myp which presumably takes the place of dev_zones.myp, though its a bit smaller, about 2.8 gigs. And there’s the opening video (I assume) video.myp, which is a 1.5 gigs or so. I wonder if we could nuke that to save space once we’ve watched it?

In my next post I’m going to talk about what some of the other directories are far.

Warhammer fiddling

I didn’t play much Warhammer last night, but instead was fiddling around with addons and such. I wound up installing the Curse Client, which is supposed to gather data to populate the online-database.

I couldn’t get the addons to work at first using the Client’s automatic installation system, and my google-fu was weak and I couldn’t find out where to put stuff to install manually. Finally I stopped acting like a dweeb and just started looking at directory structures. Long story short: as a former beta tester I had 2 Warhammer Clients installed (one for beta, one for test) and the Curse Client was installing addons to the Test Client.

Inside the beta client was a likely looking directory that was completely wrong…maybe a remnant from earlier days? It has interface by server and then by character, including an “all characters” directory and that seemed like a likely spot, and I was manually installing the addons to there. Bzzzt! The correct place is … heck, I’m 99% sure but don’t want to post the info until I’m home and can check to be sure \Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\interface\addons assuming you’ve installed the client in the default location.

Anyway, I finally got “Clock” working. Yeah, the first addon I installed was one to put the time of day on-screen; something I really need with Warhammer because otherwise I totally lose track of what time it is.

This morning I re-installed the client from the disks. I wanted a ‘clean’ install, and wanted to let the patcher run while I was at work. I left the old clients installed and will compare directory structures to see how much cruft is in the beta that is no longer needed. Will post that info here.

Finally I rolled a Chaos Marauder for the Destruction side of CoW, got him to level 4 or so and into the guild. Now Genda says they’re ok and don’t really need us, so I dunno if I’ll play him or not. But damn, those guys are EVIL… burning and pillaging, even killing “our own.” I do actually “role-play” these games and I’m not sure I want to be that vile full time. But OTOH I want to see everything the game has to offer.

4 day weekend begins at 5 pm today. WAAAGGHHH!!!

Quick review of Warhammer CE

So I just tore open my Warhammer Collector’s Edition. I was fairly pleased. The own bummer for me is the figure that comes with it: it needs to be assembled and painted, which I’m not the least bit interested in doing.

Beyond that, both the art book and the graphic novel are hard bound and printed on what appears to be good quality, clay-surfaced paper. There’s a code for the game, of course, and a code for an extra map for C&C Red Alert… uh, which is weird but I understand C&C Red Alert is going to come with a code for a Warhammer helm or something.

No trial or buddy codes, and of course we haven’t seen all the in-game stuff yet. What’s there seems to be pretty high quality, and of course we got an extra 2 days of Headstart, so overall I’m pretty satisfied.

Warhammer for nerds

Last night I started messing around with the Apothecary skill in Warhammer Online. I had a backpack full of ingredients I’d grown, and not a clue as to what to do with them all. I just knew my packs were full of smelly herbs and slimy fungi and I had to use ’em or sell ’em.

Even for a nub like me it was easy to figure out I’d need vials, so I bought some of those. I got the cheapest ones possible because I had this vision of flinging them at monsters and I wanted them to break easily (ok ok, I just assumed low skill level = cheap ingredients).

OK vial. Check. Now I needed a main ingredient. I had half a dozen or so of those so I added one. “This potion will surely fail.” says my Home Apothecary Kit. Try another. Same result. Another. Same. Slowly it sunk in; I needed something other than a main ingredient.

Applying my keen logic skills, I thought “Well maybe I need a liquid to make a potion.” so I bought some cloudy water. Bought it. After traipsing through bogs and ponds and rivers, now I’m buying rank water from some vendor. But oh well, when in Rome, or High Elf Land, or wherever you are…

So vial. Check again. Main ingredient. Check. Cloudy water… “This potion will be volatile at best.” Well, volatile sounds good to me. I want to see fireworks, baby! So I make it and get a weak-sauce potion of something-I-now-forget. Try again using 2 cloudy waters, and now I get a slightly better potion. I’ll try 3 cloudy waters! And I get the same as when I used 2. Damn.

“Well,” I think to myself, “I have these other non-main ingredients. I probably need to add a cloudy water or two, and one of these other ingredients. Heck, how am I going to keep track of this stuff?”

And then my inner nerd woke up and shot to my frontal lobe.

SPREADSHEET!!!!

I then spent the next hour carefully experimenting with ingredients and making note of all my results in a spreadsheet. While my inner nerd (which, lets face it, isn’t very “inner” on my least-nerdy days) gleefully listed ingredients, my rational self was yelling “This is a waste of time; some even bigger nerd has already compiled these lists and put them online somewhere!” But I didn’t care… using one of those lists was like reading a nerd spoiler. I wanted to figure out the logic behind this process.

All night I made maybe half a level. I did take part in a couple of RvR Scenarios with the CoWs and proved once and for all that nerds suck at RvR, but the bulk of my time was spent mixing ingredients and filling out a spreadsheet. And I had a great time doing it!!

Plus I now have potions that let me breathe fire, which is fun for effect if not all that deadly.

Warhammer server distribution puzzler

I’m glad I’m not responsible for the Warhammer servers, because there are forces in play that defy explanation, at least to me.

This morning SE Headstart began. I logged in just to look at the server list. Virtually all the NA Core servers are at Low/Low population this morning…except one (Badlands, iirc…should’ve written this down) which was Full/Full, and one other that was High/High.

What draws so many people to a particular server? Mythic has RP servers and Oceanic servers and other ‘flavors’ of server (I say this because in other games one server will be, for instance, the “Unofficial Roleplay” server and that’ll make it stand out and attract more players). The only thing I can guess is that Badlands is an “Unofficial North American European Server” for players in Europe who don’t want to play on GOA’s (?) servers?

Anyway, my greatest fear is that I’ll come home tonight to find the server my guild is on has become super-populated with long queue times. I have an even greater fear of that happening on the 18th. Nothing to do but wait and see, I guess.

Hammer of War Online

So there’s this new site called Hammer of War Online, which bills itself as “The Unofficial Source for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.” Some people I know are writing for this site. I truly hope they’re getting paid, since it is an ad-supported site.

I’m not going to talk about the content of the site because people I know write for it. But let’s talk business practices. As I said, it’s an ad-supported site. And what are the ads for? “Gold Farming Secrets.”

Talk about poisoning your own well. Granted, it isn’t quite a “Buy War Gold” ad, but it’s as close as exists right now. Apparently a guide to help you become one of the people selling the War gold.

I urge you to write to the site owners and tell them how you feel, if you think selling gold farming tools on an enthusiast site is wrong. This isn’t a call to boycott the site or anything like that. I just hope that they can find better advertisers who send a more positive message.

UPDATE: I contacted Hammer of War Online with my concerns and very quickly got this response:

Pete,

Actually, they are offering secrets on how to make money for your character, not advocating the buying and selling of gold for real money. They just use the term “gold farming” to catch your eye. Hammer of War Online does not nor will it ever support any company that advocates the buying or selling of gold or in-game items with real money.

Hope that answers your questions, and thank you for reading Hammer of War Online!

I’d still personally advise the advertiser that using “gold farming” to catch an MMO gamer’s eye is something akin to using “How to be a Pedophile” to grab attention, but I’m heartened by the broader message that Hammer of War Online has a firm policy against hosting ads that advocate buying or selling gold.

Kudos to them!!

Warhammer pre-orders through the roof

FAIRFAX, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Mythic Entertainment, an Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) studio, today announced that the highly-anticipated MMORPG, Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning™ (WAR), will ship tomorrow to retail stores across North America, Europe, and Oceania in preparation for launch on September 18th. WAR set a company record for the most retail pre-orders placed by consumers for a PC title in EA’s 26 year history. Overall, the company has sold 1.5 million units of WAR to retailers.

[source & complete press release]

Read it carefully, it doesn’t say 1.5 million pre-orders, it says “most pre-orders place by consumers” and then it says “sold 1.5 million units of WAR to retailers.” A bit of marketing number twisting, granted, but still its safe to say that a helluvalotta copies of WAR are going to be going home with angry Destructionites and pompous Orderers this week.

Waaaghhh!!

Warhammer Day 1 a day late

So after my ennui of yesterday morning, I did log into the Headstart shortly after noon yesterday. First things first, I have to eat my words; the servers came up at noon, an hour before previously scheduled, and as far as I know they stayed up all day.

I rolled a Shadow Warrior and was puttering around doing quests when I saw Esri run past with a CoW tag, so I shot a /tell to JoBildo and bam, I was in the guild. I never did get around to starting Vent though, so my session in the early afternoon was pretty quiet. I think most folks were focused on tweaking their UI and learning their skills and stuff; I know I was. I did max out my Influence in the Chap 1 Public Quest and won 1st place once and 3rd place twice. I did the RvR scenario early on and we got trounced; I decided then I needed better armor and more skills before I tried any more RvR (melee characters were 2 shotting me in my ‘born-in’ armor).

After lunch, there was football to be watched. I made it to half-time in the living room then had to get back to War. I rolled a second character — a Witch Hunter — on an RP server. I was half-playing, half-watching the game, so figured it was a good time to solo. The vibe on the RP server was a lot nicer than on the ‘Core’ server that CoW is on (setting aside guild chat, I mean) and I played a lot more slowly, reading through all the Tome unlocks and really drinking in the atmosphere and the lore. On the CoW server I’d felt a need (totally self-imposed) to level as fast as I could, but on the RP server it was just the opposite.

After dinner I went back to CoW, taking my new “relaxed” play style with me. Did a bunch more PvE quests. CoW was doing RvR and asked for volunteers, and I offered my services, but it never panned out. My comment was probably just missed, and I didn’t repeat it since it was pretty late already. Honestly its a little embarrassing how clueless I am about some parts of the game considering I was in the beta as long as I was. But most of my beta time we were plunked down in an area and told “Fight this battle”. So I had no idea how to get to the RvR area!! *blush*

First day recap. Game ran pretty well. One CTD. Some pathing issues with the mobs still. But lots of fun. The Shadow Warrior isn’t as interesting as the Witch Hunter at early levels and solo. My SW has only 1 melee skill that isn’t positional, so fights are a couple of arrow shots then spam my melee skill until the dude is dead. The Witch Hunter is lower level and already has 3 Stances with a variety of skills and techniques. But I’m not judging either class yet, since I’m something like level 6 and level 5. And, in theory at least, I’ll be rolling with CoW most of the time with the SW and those backstabby skills will be a lot more useful. 🙂

I have to say the ennui has been swept aside, though. I’m looking forward to playing some more tonight. I hope the servers are as stable this weekend (I’m taking a 4-day weekend). Waaagghhh!