Hmmm.

From the Herald article, Reporting Spammers 101:

Place the text the player sent you in the second window, which asks for details about what was sent. Also note if this solicitation came in the form of in-game chat (any channel), or through the mail system.

Here is a typical gold selling spam. This is what Mythic wants you to key in every time you want to report a gold seller.

Skdjfhoiertr: Hello, www.asdfasd.ca, is selling warhammer gold, 10g for $3.75, 50g for $ 18.77. Delivery in less 3 hours. Get the gold now and be ahead of others

and another:

Banded: < < www.ignsux.com >> Cheapest Warhammer Online Gold, Price (100G==28 USD) , Order < 20 Mins Deliver. Fast Power-Leveling 1-40 sale $259. ~~Welcome to ( www.ignsux.com )

(I’ve changed the urls a bit for obvious reasons.)

In the first case, just typing in the name of the seller is a chore. And while these aren’t super lengthy passages to type, I just feel like Mythic is punishing ME, the paying customer, here. At least that’s how it felt after submitting a dozen or so of these things, many of them complete duplicates of others. Why do I have to type all this crap out? Either allow us to cut and paste the tells, or do the work yourselves and check the log files. I’m happy to type the name of the person and the site they’re advertising, but why is my typing out the cost of the gold they’re selling relevant?

Then once you do report them, does Mythic respond quickly?

[08/10/05][11:08:51]Joined Channel: [1. - Ekrund - Mordrin's Watch]
(Me logging in. So it took 18 minutes for this spammer to find me.)
[08/10/05][11:26:22] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][11:35:56] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][11:47:17] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][11:57:56] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:10:31] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:21:53] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:34:43] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][12:46:53] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][13:29:25] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][13:43:19] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][13:59:02] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][14:13:22] Grotidkya:
[08/10/05][16:09:18] Grotidkya:
And I logged out at 16:21, 6 minutes late for the start of the football game. No idea how much longer Grotidkya was spamming people.
[08/10/05][16:21:35]You will finish logging out in 10 seconds.
[08/10/05][16:21:40]You will finish logging out in 5 seconds.
[08/10/05][16:21:45]You are no longer logging out.

How long does it take to swing the ban-hammer? Either a lot longer than it would seem, or Mythic is seriously deluged with reports. But how many accounts can there be? And if that number is huge…say 1000 gold seller accounts. That’s $50,000 in retail sales for EA/Mythic in gold seller revenue! Or is Mythic banning Characters rather than accounts? That seems to be a losing battle.

I’m just going to start ignoring these guys. They were pretty easy to ignore before I started being a good citizen and following Mythic’s reporting rules. But now that I’ve been trying to report each seller, I suddenly feel like a data entry clerk, not a gamer. I’ll install SpamMeNot and let the gold sellers be someone else’s problem.

Side note: A few of these jerkwads spam you for more than one website. Not sure if the sites are all owned by the same place, or if “gold seller spammer” is a new contractual position in the world of bottom feeders.

I mean, I did plenty of it in beta testing, but when you get handed a level 30 or 40 character and go bash other people who are all level 30 or 40, it just isn’t the same as going out there with the character that you grew from level 1, and who is going to be encountering opponents both higher and lower than he is.

It really brought back memories of pre-Battlegrounds WoW PvP, and I mean that as a compliment. I wasn’t even grouped, just moving *with* a group, and trying to do some quests while dodging baddies, or ambushing them, depending on circumstances. This was in Tier 1, mind you. It was so great to see stuff happening in T1 RvR! Early on I did a bunch of quests in the High Elf T1 RvR areas, and never even saw another player.

I was also playing as a Witch Hunter, a class that has always called to me and that I have, for mostly silly reasons, resisted until now. I’ve actually rolled a WH on not one but two different RP servers, because I really wanted to “RP” a Witch Hunter. But I keep playing on Averheim, so I was ’saving’ the Witch Hunter until such time as I moved to an RP server. But CoW is turning out to be such a good guild that I’ve abandoned all other servers..well anyway, no matter.

Point I’m trying to get at is that the Witch Hunter is incredibly fun. His basic pistol shot has a snare effect when it hits someone in the back, and he can shoot while running, so he’s pretty useful in RvR even when outmatched, since he can snare fleeing bad guys. (My Shadow Warrior has a snare shot as well, but he has to stand still to fire it off.)

And when it comes in to close up fighting, the WH has a nice variety of melee and close range pistol shots. Just great fun all around.

My only fear now is the scenarios are going to feel dull after tonight!

Wallpaper Set

And a ‘cropped’ set of generic Warhammer shots.

So I was playing Warhammer last night, running a baby dwarf through the first PQs. If you’ve done the dwarf PQs you’ll know that the boss of the first one is pretty tough. There was a White Lion running around doing the quest with us. His name was Jyrk.

Now to me, that’s an odd choice for a name. And the player was berating an Iron Breaker (who was I think level 4) for not tanking the boss. Now yeah, an IB lives to tank, but this little guy was getting slaughtered by the boss when he tried to tank him. He died over and over again, and Jyrk was calling him stupid, or an idiot, or something along those lines. Jyrk seemed to be paired with a Rune Priest named Jynx, but she had to drop heals on the IB so fast that invariably she’d get aggro and when the IB went down, and then she’d be next to die.

Basically it was a difficult situation because we just didn’t have the ranks to cleanly take down that boss. But we were also low enough level that we’d just respawn with no ill-effects and run back into the battle (the spawn point is seconds from the PQ). So there was really NO reason to get upset, and certainly no reason for Jyrk to be berating this dude who was still figuring out how to play his class.

So maybe the name fit. Maybe Jyrk’s player really is a jerk. My experience would suggest he is. But maybe he’d had a really crappy day at work, or he has a sick family member, or he was heavily invested in the stock market. Maybe he was acting abnormally for whatever reason. He might normally be a very nice guy.

But his character’s name was Jyrk, so I can only assume that, yeah, the dude that plays this character is an ass, and I’ll make a point of avoiding him if we ever cross paths again.

So I’m going to be the 8 billion and oneth blogger to urge you to think about your character’s name, and what the name says to other people. For most players you’ll encounter, your name is the first bit of data they’re going to use when they start to form an opinion of you. Neutral names are fine, but if you’re going to use a descriptive name, assume people are going to believe it.

This stuff has apparently been scientifically formulated to provide the perfect balance of vitamins and nutrients that your body needs to perform “such as visual input, cognitive processing, signal transmission and muscle reflexes” during marathon gaming.

Who’s gonna pwn n00bs now, huh?

Action Pizza for me, Strategy Chocolate for the woman.

No more supermarket runs from here on out….

Don’t misread me, I’m not condemning CoW or any guild for using the term. Heck, I talk about being an “alt-aholic” which infers that I have Alts. And having Alts in turn infers that I have a Main. So I use the term too. But what does it mean?

Is your Main your highest level character?
Is your Main your character with the largest /played value?
Is your Main the character that you find the most fun to play?
Is your Main the character you can most naturally role-play as?
Is your Main the first character that you roll on a server?

And from an external point of view, what significance is it that Char A is my Main and Char B is my Alt?

The only theory I have is that your Main is the character that you personally identify as Most Important, and since its Most Important, the Guild is going to give priority to helping you equip/level that character over the Alts of other players. So if a nice juicy loot drop for a Priest appears, and Player A is playing a Priest that is his “Main” and Player B is playing a Priest that is his “Alt” then Player A gets the item (all other things being equal).

In the same way, if there’s one slot open in a guild event, and the group needs DPS, and two DPS characters want to come, the Main gets preference over the Alt.

So assuming all this is true, I can see why a guild as an entity would want you to declare a Main. But why do individuals do it? You see it in chat all the time: “My main is a {insert level cap} wizard!” In this case is it just bravado? A way to prove that you aren’t a noob to be pwned just because you’re a low level character?

I need to pick a “Main” in Warhammer, and suddenly it is becoming a dilemma. My highest level is a Shadow Warrior but I haven’t touched him since Sunday since I’m having so much fun playing various Alts. I guess I need to do some navel gazing and decide what class I find to be the Most Fun, which will make that character the Most Important to me. This is going to be tough since I enjoy them all so much.

And oy! I hope the Alts don’t resent my Main and start accusing me of playing favorites.

* Pet dragons now move at the proper speed
* Score modifiers for the difficulty setting have been rebalanced
* When playing on easy, the maximum difficulty level of an encounter has been lowered
* When playing on difficult or hardcore, enemies will work together more frequently when they fight you
* Fixed several issues relating to random chests, the way they were distributed in the world, and King’s requests for items in chests
* Audio loading moved from pre-game to scenario creation (may fix some audio driver conflicts, improves game start time)
* Fixed an issue with some versions of direct 9.0c in particular installations of Vista and DirectX 10 that would cause crashes on start-up or when loading
* Switched to starting in windowed mode by default (may fix some crashes on start-up)
* Fixed minimap corruption at higher resolutions
* Fixed a rare infinite loop in scenario creation that caused a lock-up on starting a new character
* Fixed an issue with the game resizing fonts more than necessary (may fix some crashes, particularly upon changing to full-screen mode)

Update #2: I finished my first game tonight. So that’s what? Three evenings of playing probably 60-90 minutes to finish a game on Easy (I think I chose Easy…maybe it was Normal).

Overall I’d give the game an 8 out of 10. A replay might change that score: it’d be interesting to see how the experience differs with bigger or hard games. Most of my gripes ended up being user error, and I thank the folks who commented here and set me straight on those.

My remaining gripes have to do with the end game. There were times when I just had to let the game run to generate gold. There were almost no enemies left on the map (so no raiders) but the ones that were left were too tough for me to kill, so I need to do some upgrading, which meant I needed gold, which meant just twiddling my thumbs waiting for my coffers to fill. By the end of the game I had two rows of Craftsman at various levels of upgrade just generating gold.

It’d be nice if I could sell excess food, or just turn a farm or herder over to generating coin; that’d just make for some variety. You can order Craftsmen to do Research, but I never found a way to see what they’d discovered, other than switching them back to creating items and seeing what popped out. And if there’s a way to “level up” your townspeople, I didn’t find it. Maybe they level up by adventuring with you, but I left that until late in the game, so I was level 6 or so, the things I was fighting were 6 or 7, and my townsfolk were 3. In those circumstances, 3 is very squishy!

My town had a dragonmaster by the endgame, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to take the dragon out adventuring without also taking the dragon herder, who was a very low level person, so I just left ‘em both back in town. So that’s another puzzle.

But these are all pretty minor concerns/questions and overall, I’m quite pleased. It’s worth keeping in mind the game was $20, and I already feel like I got my money’s worth. It’s one of these games that gives you a score when you’re done, and I’m looking forward to going back and trying to beat that score next time.

It’s an interesting combination. I’ll be crossing my fingers for expansions or a Hinterland 2, because they could really expand the game in many interesting ways.

1) I always miss /tells because nothing draws my attention to them
2) Gold sellers keep sending me /tells and its seriously impacting my enjoyment of the game

Does this seem odd to anyone else?

If the chat system is so bad that you don’t notice tells, then how can the gold seller spam be so annoying!!?

I’m just askin…

And, like Ysharros, I’m sorta tired of the WAR bashing. If you don’t like the game, that’s fine. We get it. No game is right for everyone. But why put so much energy into a string of anti-Warhammer posts? It seems to me like it takes one, maybe two, posts to say “I don’t like Warhammer because of X, Y, & Z. If these are big issues for you too, you might want to hold off on buying the game.”

Then move on and share your *enthusiasm* for games you like. Because enthusiasm is infectious and fun to read. Whining, not so much.

And yeah, I realize the irony of me whining about whining.

I’m sure at this point in the day, this is No Longer News to anyone reading this blog. But in case you just woke up or something, I am now blogging that Wired’s Chris Kohler live-blogged the live-blogging of the press conference. You can read his live-blog of the live-blogging here. It feels very satisfying for me to blog about this.

For a more bullet-pointy rundown, check out DS Fanboy.

One VGA camera in the hinge facing you for video chat (?), one facing the world. The latter takes 640×480 shots. SD slot on the right.

Also comes in matte-black.

This product is potentially interesting to me, but I don’t see myself running out to buy one on launch day. Bigger screen is nice, thinner is nice. Lack of GBA slot not so nice: I do still have some GBA games on my “To play” list (though I can’t fault Nintendo for finally leaving that format behind).

I can’t find a reason to care about the cameras, or the web browser (I don’t use the browser on my PSP…I can’t imagine I’ll use on on a DS with a still-smaller screen), and I have an iPod for listening to music. Stick a 30 gig drive in the new DSi and we can talk.

The big wild card is the downloadable programs. So far WiiWare has been pretty lackluster in terms of software. DSWare is going to have to be much more compelling to get me to upgrade my DS to take advantage of it.

When my current DS breaks, I can see spending a bit more to replace it with a DSi, but unless DSWare has some real killer apps, I don’t think I’ll be tossing aside a perfectly good DS to upgrade.

Highlights from the Herald:

* Players no longer need to scroll down through the EUALA when logging into the game. The window now defaults to the bottom, and players need only check the Agreement box and click accept.

* The war against the gold sellers continues! We have made improvements to the Appeal system to allow players to report spam messages from gold sellers more quickly.

* TAB-targeting should now more consistently select the nearest enemy in the player’s field of view.

* Corrected an issue that was preventing players from adding new friends to their friend list even while the number of existing friends was below the list’s size limit.

* Fixed the issue that was causing players to sometimes get stuck in a particular animation state.

* Monsters which change velocity while moving in combat should no longer return “Target is Out of Range” sometimes when attacked by players.

* The /ignore command will now work more consistently.

* In response to player feedback, we have made improvements to player pet movement and behaviors.

* The Pet window should no longer disappear when its master is zoning or entering the game.

* We made many UI fixes including a new “autoloot” feature requested by many players.

* Guild cloaks will now display their heraldry properly.

* We have made several improvements to the chat window, and it should now be more intuitive to use and set up. A number of chat window issues were resolved in the process. We are continuing to work on your requests about chat, with more improvements to come in the future.

Not bad at all. Seems like they’re working on the hottest issues, to me.

Good show, Mythic!