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Gold Capped: Cataclysm glyph addons
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The glyph market has spawned quite a few of the important modern auction house addons. It's a uniquely challenging market, as there are hundreds of different products, each with their own balance of suppliers, buyers, and materials. The challenges faced by early glyph producers were met by a hodgepodge of fairly complex addons and macros, and only recently have unified solutions began to appear. I remember that at one point, I had addons to: Keep track of how many glyphs I had on the AH, in various characters' banks and in their inventories. Allow me to queue a list of glyphs and build a materials list (that allowed me to buy the vendor mats with one click). Automatically queue enough glyphs in the second addon to assure that I kept stock levels at my desired level. Automatically post every glyph I made onto the AH. The tasks needed for this market are not unique, and so the most important tool that can trace its origin to the glyph market is certainly TradeSkillMaster. TSM is an addon that I've covered before, and it's built from the ground up to be perfect for glyphs. It's also perfect for a lot of other markets, but mostly those you can treat like glyphs.
Gmail accidentally resetting accounts, years of correspondence vanish into the cloud? (update)
If you've got a working Gmail account, you might want to back it up every so often -- as many as 500,000 Gmail users lost access to their inboxes this morn, and some of them are reporting (via Twitter and support forums) that years worth of messages, attachments and Google Chat logs had vanished by the time they were finally able to log on. While we haven't experienced the issue personally, we're hearing that the bug effectively reset some accounts, treating their owners as new users complete with welcome messages. For its part, Google says that the issue "affects less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase," engineers are working to fix the issue right now, and that missing messages will be restored as soon as possible. We'll soon see if this is a momentary setback... or a lengthy wakeup call. Update: No fix yet, but Google's revised its estimate as to how many users might have been affected by the issue -- "less than 0.08%" -- which means we're probably looking at closer to 150,000 individuals, rather than 500,000. We're assuming that the revised estimate means that the initial count wasn't precise, and not that customers are ditching Gmail in droves. Update 2: Google's provided promising but terribly vague guidance on when the situation will be resolved: "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change." Update 3: One-third of users have now had their account access restored, according to Google. Read all about it here. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Sega resets Sonic 4's leaderboards due to cheating
Look, Sonic the Hedgehog is fast. He can run faster than the speed of sound, but even if he ran full speed through Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1's shortest level, it would still take him longer than 0'00"00 to do it. That's just physically impossible, even for an improbably proportioned and colored hedgehog. And since some hackers have posted those times and impossible scores on the game's Xbox 360 leaderboards, Sega has decided to go through and reset the whole thing. That means you might have to go back and try to re-earn that record time you picked up on Lost Labyrinth Act 2 (no easy feat). But you might not want to grab that controller right yet -- Sega hasn't actually announced a fix, just reset the leaderboards. So there's a good chance the hackers will still hack, and there will be another reset to come. Thanks for nothing, cheaters. Can't we all just let the hedgehog run? (Also, cheating at Sonic? Where did our innocence go?)
DirecTV software update locks up HD DVRs nationwide -- Update: Fixed
It looks like one of DirecTV's astronauts had more trouble flipping switches than their DISH counterparts, after a software or guide data update last night knocked out HD DVRs all over -- and not for the first time. Currently the only advice needed to get back in working order is to reset the box twice (there's a red button on the front, underneath the flap) within a thirty minute period (the official website indicates you can wait as little as 15 seconds between resets) and all should be well, but good luck getting through to customer service to get that message right now. Countdown to an apology starts... now. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Update: According to DirecTV's website, a "transmission glitch" was to blame and it has automatically reset affected receivers from its end, so no further red button pushing should be necessary. [Thanks, Blake!]
WoW Rookie: The inner workings of instances
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.Maraudon or Blackrock Depths, anybody? Instances are your opportunity to meet and work as a team with other players in the World of Warcraft. You'll combat pack after pack of minions and defeat unique, memorable bosses on your way to some of the most enjoyable play in the game. Instances, also often known as dungeons, offer your group (and later, your raid) your own personal copy of a dungeon. No players other than your own group members are able to enter an instance with you. Instances provide some of the most rewarding and well designed content, challenges and loot possible for your character. The teamwork and cooperative effort required to down the elite mobs and tricky bosses within an instance require a new level of teamwork from your rookie character. We've touched on the basics of finding your niche within a group. Today, let's cover the mechanics of managing instances – becoming "saved" to an instance, resetting them, understanding respawn and more. (One note: this week, we'll discuss five-man instances designed for single groups along the path to level 80, not raid instances requiring 10 or more players to complete. We'll introduce raid instance concepts for fresh level 80 players next week.)
Officers' Quarters: Managing your lockouts
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.Last week, our very own Michael Sacco broke the news that raid lockouts will be extendable after Patch 3.2. Reading through forum comments about this exciting new feature, I found the varied reactions quite amusing. Hardcore raiders seem to think that Blizzard is catering to casuals with this change. They think you should have to earn your kills by reclearing bosses if you can't make it all the way through a raid zone in one week. On the other hand, casual players seem to think that Blizzard is catering to the hardcore, since it's so much easier now to work on hard modes and other achievements without the threat of a looming reset. Casuals need as much loot as possible, they say, so why would they ever want to extend a lockout?Despite the hardcore/casual debate reaching a new all-time low, the good news is that, in a sense, they're both right. Blizzard is catering to all of us. Regardless of playstyle or progression, all guilds will benefit from having this option. However, there are decisions and tradeoffs to be made. Let's examine this new feature in more detail.
PSA: Club Nintendo status reset coming June 30
Attention Club Nintendo members: on June 30 your membership status will be reset. According to an email being distributed by Nintendo, via Aeropause, users attempting to claw their way to Gold elite and Platinum member status for Nintendo's buyer program will have their efforts reset at the end of next month.Here's the skinny: Coins (points obtained by registering games/hardware, taking surveys and buying WiiWare and DSiWare titles) are only valid toward a user's Club Nintendo status within the year they are purchased. The Club Nintendo year runs from July 1 until June 30. Users will not lose any coins they've collected (although they can expire), but will have their membership status reset when the year is over.In order to achieve Gold or Platinum status again, users must collect the necessary amount of coins within the year. Gold membership status begins at 300 coins, Platinum begins at 600 -- as a reference point, the DSi nets users 150 coins. Club Nintendo Gold and Platinum members are awarded special bonuses by Nintendo, in the form of a unique gift at the end of the calendar year. Like Aeropause, we recommend you hold off on any activity that may net you coins ... for the sake of your Club Nintendo street cred.
Sprint's Palm Treo 755p phone reset patch released
Is your Palm 755p mysteriously resetting? Palm and Sprint should sort that with this update that'll bring your device up to a better, more stable, and newer v1.08. We saw a similar patch addressing a "reset issue that occurs under certain specific and rare conditions" for the Palm 755p on Altel way back in June of 2008. This may be the same bug and this may well be the same fix. So if you're running v1.04 or v1.07, hit the read link and get it sorted with fixes on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms. Oh, and as per usual while updating: yada, yada, yada save. Yada, yada, yada be careful.[Via Mobileburn]
iPhone 101: Reboot your iPhone for better gaming
One of the biggest comments on the recent SimCity announcement for the iPhone, other than being able to locate the SimCity International (link goes to the U.K. iTunes store) version of the game, was complaints that the game was crashing for some people. This is not a new issue for graphically intense games for the iPhone and one of the solutions for solving this is very easy: Before playing your new game, reboot the iPhone. Here's how to do it. Update: As has been pointed out in the comments, a normal shutdown/startup process, or "soft reboot," should work fine: simply hold the power button down for 3 seconds and slide to power down. The "hard reboot" described here should only be used if your iPhone isn't responding to touches or the Home button -- it is not intended as regular maintenance. Thanks to all for the feedback. [If your phone ever becomes completely unresponsive, you may need to do the 'hard reboot process described next -- but remember this is the equivalent of pulling out the power cord on your computer.] Hold down the Home and the Sleep/Wake buttons until your screen goes black, as shown at right. After a few seconds, you should see a sliding bar for powering off the phone. Ignore it and keep pressing those buttons. After about 20 seconds or so, the screen will go completely black and the silver Apple logo appears. Once your phone goes through the rebooting process, launch your game. You shouldn't have any further problems with it. One word of warning: Rebooting the iPhone does drain your battery somewhat, so if you're pretty low on power you may find yourself unable to use the phone until after you're recharged it. Why reboot your phone? The iPhone, like a regular computer, uses memory and system resources every time you launch a program. The typical iPhone user utilizes several applications at a time, often hopping back and forth between them. When a program that is heavy on system resources is launched, such as SimCity, if you haven't rebooted in awhile to refresh your iPhone's memory and resources, it could cause the program to crash. I saw this tip posted on the App Store when I was purchasing Scrabble at the end of November and followed the advice and didn't have a single problem with Scrabble on my 1st generation iPhone. I repeated it with SimCity and, again, I'm not having any issues playing the game. If that doesn't solve your issues, check out this list of iPhone troubleshooting tips.
PTR 3.0.3 Patch Notes
Looking for the Patch Notes that are being pushed to the live servers? We've got that, too.Blizzard has released the notes for the Patch 3.0.3 on PTR (Public Test Realm). With the PTRs going to patch 3.0.3, I wouldn't be surprised to see 3.0.3 hit the live servers next week. Also, please note that these patch notes appear to be in flux and are being updated. We'll keep you posted with any changes.While patch 3.0.2 has a lot of great new content, there have been a fair share of bugs in the game. This patch will fix some of those, and change around a few other things. Remember, there will be an ongoing series of changes – the game itself won't seem normal until Wrath of the Lich King.Some highlights of this patch include: Druid talent points are refunded (only Druids) Hunter aspects are off the global cooldown Vampiric Touch has had its spell power coefficient doubled Warlocks can now use an Infernal indoors Bloodthirst cooldown is now 5 seconds No more level requirement to train gathering skills Read on after the break for the full PTR patch notes.
Breakfast Topic: How are you spending PvP points?
While we know that Honor is not going to be reset as we once thought it would be, we do know that all your Arena points will be reset once you reach 71. But for now, both Arena and Honor points are still available to us if we put in some effort, and some rewards are still purchasable with them. The question is, how much time should we invest in them now, and are these rewards worth the time? You can save Honor points, of course, until you reach level 80, even though everything at that stage will be much more expensive, and you won't be able to buy as much with what you earn today. Is this inflation enough to make you just wait till later to PvP in battlegrounds? Or do you want to hit 80 with us many points stored up as possible? Do any of the current PvP rewards look attractive enough for you to purchase them now instead of waiting?The Arena is a somewhat simpler proposition. Any points you have will be gone as you start leveling up again, so you have to spend them now. Are they still worth earning? If so, will you spend them on gear? Or will you buy the special PvP gems in order to put them in gear you get later on?
Blizzard retracts honor point changes: honor points will not be reset
Bornakk has announced on the forums tonight that the honor points wipe they were going to do before Wrath of the Lich King will not be happening after all.Once again for clarity: honor points and PvP tokens will not be reset when WotLK is released. According to a post by Zarhym today, Arena points and teams will still be wiped immediately prior to Wrath's release.This is a very interesting change of policy. Blizzard announced last week that all honor points and tokens would be reset. Since that announcement, there has been significant outrage by many players that have saved up large amounts of honor and tokens. With this change players will be able to stockpile points and purchase level 80 PvP gear. However this gear will be "significantly more expensive" than current level 70 gear.We'll bring you any updates that develop on this breaking news.
Gear transition between BC and WoTLK should be smoother, says Bornakk
We've known for a while that we've been getting a gear reset in WoTLK, and just this morning, we've discussed and speculated on how it will affect people as they transition into the 70-80 game, especially alt-o-holics. Here's some news that should strike a lot of people as good: Bornakk confirmed in a thread yesterday that we really won't be seeing quite as large a gear gap in the jump from Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King as we did in the past: No more doubling of stamina values this time, guys. This should be good news for raiders who feel like their epics don't mean that much anymore (although to be honest, I was using a few of my BWL and AQ40 drops well into my late 60s, so I don't think the gear reset was that bad after all). If the gear jump isn't that bad, your shiny new epics should still work pretty well. Heck, same goes for badge runners. I've suspected for a while that the new Badge of Justice gear was meant to be a partial preliminary gear rest ahead of time, and I'd bet this more or less confirms it: If there's not going to be as much as a jump, these Tameless Breeches might last my druid longer than one might think. I think it's definitely a good middle road to take. We'll get a gear reset so alt-o-holics and casuals can jump right into the Howling Fjord, but the gap won't be quite as great, meaning that raiders and badge gear savers won't need to feel like they're watching months of work go down the drain when that first level 71 green drops.
Raid reset timers are wrong
You might be noticing some strange things in your "Raid Information" window. For many players it is showing that the timers are twice as long as they actually are. Ie: Kara is showing it resets in 13 days 8 hours, ZA is showing it resets in 5 days 10 hours, etc... You can access your raid info windows by going into the raid tab and clicking on the "Raid Info" button in the upper right hand corner of the window. The raid tab is part of the social windows, which you can access by pressing the "O" key (that's oh, not zero).This is a known error. Drysc has posted as much in the forums. Since they know about the bug, we can assume that it's going to be fixed. Further, this is just a display issue, which means it is not actually going to affect the timers. It doesn't appear to be showing up for every player though. In fact, I'm not seeing it on my two toons I raided with last night. However several of my friends are not as lucky. Once this bug is fixed we'll let you know.
Using permadeath as a character reset
Damion over at Zen of Design combined (or saw his readers combine) two things that are rarely done in MMOs, and draw a lot of attention when they are done. Recently, permadeath has been brought up a few times (and implemented a few as well), and other games (most notably Shadowbane) have reset all character information in the game. And Damion asked if the two ideas complemented each other-- could permadeath make sure that, as with a character reset, everyone who gets too powerful is brought back to zero?It would only work, however, if lower characters could somehow stop someone who was too powerful, and as Damion notes, permadeath usually lets people accumulate power, not lose it. If one character is able to gain enough power to break the game and you combine that with a permadeath system, then any deaths he or she causes bring everybody else back to zero. And the balance to keep the lower characters powerful enough to stop the higher character and yet not overpowered is so precarious that, as Damion says, it usually ruins the game.But we are falling yet again into Damion's stages-- permadeath, it seems, just doesn't work unless you build your game around it, and then it can't necessarily be called permadeath anymore. The very fact of gaming means that, in a social game, to build a character worth playing, death, it seems, cannot stand in your way.
Shadowbane resets with Patch 22, on test servers today
I'm not sure if anyone's still playing Shadowbane since its release five years ago, but its developers are about to do the most radical thing you can do to a virtual world: they're hitting the reset switch.As of Patch 22, showing up soon on the test server for the game, the team has decided that "it would be best for the longetivity of the game" to completely reset all server and character data. They also say that there are certain items in game that make it unbalanceable, and so they're just starting over from scratch. There are a few other big fixes coming in the patch, but as they say, this will definitely be the "most talked about" change.And players are taking it surprisingly well. Over on the forums, most players seem happy that developers are taking major steps to fix the game. The servers will apparently use the Vorringia mapset, and lots of players are happy about that, as it's a popular choice. A few players are unhappy that they're losing everything, but the general consensus seems to be that making the game balanced is more important than keeping individual player data.Interesting. It's hard to imagine a more major game flipping a reset switch like this and surviving, but maybe Shadowbane will prove it's possible to reboot and keep a core audience that loves the game more than their own assets.[Via Wired]
Bornakk confirms WotLK gear reset
We've suspected this all along, but now Bornakk has confirmed that yes, when the next expansion comes out, we'll all be turning in our epics for green gear once more. (And via MMO Champion, here's a comic that explains just what you're feeling right now). As he says, the whole point of a subscription MMO is that you need to keep playing to be awesome, and so new, more powerful gear is exactly where Blizzard wants to go.On the one hand, this is actually a great thing. I just finally brought my Hunter alt through Hellfire Peninsula, and it was terrific to run a few quests and all of a sudden have what used to be raid level gear. And as Bornakk says, another reset in Wrath of the Lich King will accomplish the same thing for new players then (including Death Knights, ahem, so if you're reading between the lines as much as I am, that means that Death Knights will probably start before level 70, because they too apparently will be coming through the 70-71 gear transition). It is great to do the starter quests in a new expansion, and quickly get brought up to speed with some of the best gear in the game.However, now that this is known, does it mean the gear you earn now is worthless? I don't think so-- while the old endgame was almost all about gear, there are so many epics now and so many ways to get them that the game is much more about how you play rather than the gear you're playing for. Sure, we'll all end up stashing our epics away for a green quest reward from the Borean Tundra, but we'll always have Karazhan and Gruul's, right?
Sidekick Slides losing power, respect when they slide
We're no QA experts here, but if your product is called the "Slide," isn't the slide mechanism the one thing you'd test the dickens out of? Alas, folks are discovering that Motorola's Sidekick Slide for T-Mobile has shipped with a devil of a flaw: actuating the display's slide periodically causes the phone to spontaneously reboot or to simply turn off and stay off. We've tested the claim on our own Slide, and yeah, it happens. Granted, it only happened twice out of thirty or so slides of the screen, but by standards of modern electronics engineering, we're pretty sure that's two times too many. As Boy Genius Report points out, to make matters even worse the power cycle is a hard reset, meaning your data's kaput unless you're within range of a T-Mobile signal to download everything from Danger's servers again. An ever-so-slightly loose battery seems to be the culprit here, but seriously, Moto, how did this defect ever leave a factory floor en masse?
TUAW Tip: Safari's reset button
Brandon sent us a great tip that I should have known was in Safari, but that I hadn't found yet. For you paranoids out there, the Safari 3 beta offers an easy way to clean up every single thing you've ever done, including the history, passwords, cookies, and even favicons and Autofill text. Under the Edit menu, there's a "Reset Safari" option which reveals a checklist that lets you hit the reset button on your browser. Firefox users like myself will notice that this was "gently lifted" from the Clear Private Data function under FF's Tools menu.And it's not just for paranoid browsers out there-- the blogging engine here at TUAW, Blogsmith, is a great program but sometimes hiccups when the cache gets overwritten or pushed out of sync. When it does, the Reset options let me flush the cache in just a few clicks without losing any of my browser windows. If you ever run across a browser-based application that's not doing what you want, this is definitely an alternative to try before actually restarting the browser.
iPhone Troubleshooting: How to Restart, quit frozen apps and Reset iPhone
I'm starting to think there is some sort of bad luck attached to my iTunes Store account, as tonight I experienced the third iTunes Store song that completely locked up an iPod - only this time it was my iPhone. While listening to 'Again with the Subtleties' from the Yppah album You Are Beautiful At All Times (US iTunes link) in my iPhone's iPod app, the phone completely locked up at the end of the track with an almost-faded out display. What was worse, the iPhone became completely unresponsive - the display wouldn't accept any of my taps, and even the external buttons were ignored. Momentarily wishing I could simply yank the battery to cut the power and reset the phone, I realized Apple must have some sort of a contingency in place for lock-ups like these.Fortunately, I was right: The iPhone troubleshooting section of Apple's main iPhone support site contains a walkthrough for situations like this, complete with instructions on how to restart the phone, force quit a frozen app or reset the phone in cases like mine where it has completely locked up. Here are these steps in a nutshell: Restart your iPhone: Most people probably already know how to do this, but just in case, you can simply hold the sleep/wake button on the top for a few seconds to bring up a red slider at the top of the display which allows you to power off the phone. Quit a frozen iPhone app: I know it's a crazy thought, but it is entirely possible that Apple's wondrous iPhone apps can lock up from time to time. In this case, simply hold the Home button when in the app for about 6 seconds to kill the app. You should be able to jump back into the app without restarting the phone itself. Reset your iPhone: Note that this is not Restoring your iPhone; that's the button in iTunes that wipes the iPhone and all your information on it. Resetting an iPhone is nothing more than a hard reset or a forced reboot - you're simply cutting the power and making it reboot. To do this, hold the sleep/wake button and Home buttons simultaneously for a few seconds; the display will quickly wipe itself and you should see the black background and white Apple logo, signifying a reset well done. Fortunately, that reset fixed my problem and I'm jamming again with my iPhone as I write this. Still, you can be sure that I'll ping iTunes support to find out what's going on with these files, as this is the third one I've downloaded from the iTS that's caused an iPod to stop dead in its tracks. Anyone else experience something like this? You know where to sound off.
