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The Daily Grind: Is magic too common?
Maybe I think about these things too much and should just give in to the tropes, but it often bothers me how prevalent and common magic is in MMOs. I grew up reading loads of fantasy books where magic was a difficult talent to cultivate and amazing when it was performed. But that's not how it is in MMOs, is it? Our magically apt characters already start out with a full array of spells and are granted new ones with nary a training sequence. And even if you aren't a mage, the fantasy worlds themselves are so littered with magic that navigating them becomes an exercise in not going blind from all the particle effects. It's kind of like cell phones: When you think about them, they're amazing, but they're also so common that they don't impress anyone any more. Is magic too common in MMOs? Would you be open to a game that treated the occurrence and acquisition of magic as a rare and life-changing event instead of a never-ending laser light show? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Are common quality items rare to find?
Common may not be quite so common anymore. While working on an article about a legendary quest chain, I recalled the days of class quests -- specifically, the days of Molten Core and The Eye of Divinity, along with the Ancient Petrified Leaf that started the class quests for epic weapons. Epic anything was rare to see in the early days of vanilla, and even when Molten Core first came out, it was rare to see people decked out in purple gear. But these days, it seems everyone is wearing epics, as it's dropping from dungeons with alarming frequency. When you look at gear labels, each color of gear is assigned a different label. Common quality items are white, uncommon are green, rare are blue, and purple of course are epic. But as the game has evolved over time, each expansion offered more raids and more epic gear, which led me to the question -- just how common is common gear? How rare is rare? Is uncommon gear really that uncommon? I hit Wowhead just for a quick look at these items to compare numbers, and the results were actually pretty surprising.
Mobile Miscellany: week of September 12, 2011
This week was packed with news on the mobile front, so it was easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here's some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of September 12, 2011: Vodacom South Africa has joined the data throttling club, though this carrier is taking a slightly different spin: BlackBerry users consuming more than 100MB of data each month will find their download speeds downgraded to GPRS or EDGE. The company claims this will only affect less than five percent of its BlackBerry customers. [via N4BB] Bada fans: the Samsung Wave 578 is featured on Orange's site as "coming soon." [via The Inquirer] Motorola announced the availability of the Fire and Fire XT in India this week. [via Motorola] The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is now being sold at Vodafone UK. [via Vodafone] Parrot announced the most recent addition to its lineup of Bluetooth products, called the Minikit+, a refresh of its popular hands-free speakerphone. The new model offers simultaneous pairing and voice commands. [via Parrot] Research in Motion is hoping to put the NFC functionality in OS 7 to good use, as it announced that the BlackBerry Bold 9900 / 9330 as well as the Curve 9350 / 9360 will support HID's iCLASS digital keys, which means corporate folks will able to use their smartphone as an access card. [via PhoneScoop] While digging through the Droid Bionic's webtop app, the names of two unknown Motorola phones were discovered: the Edison and the Common. Little is known about the Common, but a recent FCC filing mentioned the Edison and is speculated to be the follow-up to the Atrix, albeit sans LTE as originally hoped. [via Droid-Life] The manager of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Matt Bencke, wrote a post pleading developers to submit their Mango-compatible apps as soon as possible, as the new update is coming to existing phones soon and it's obviously very important to have Windows Phone 7.5 run as smooth as possible. [via WMPowerUser] A leaked Radio Shack roadmap indicates the HTC Vigor should be available in stores by October 20th, and the QWERTY-packing Samsung Stratosphere will be up for online ordering as early as October 6th. As this is a third-party retailer, we can't say with surety that these dates reflect the carrier's official release. [via Droid-Life]
New Fallen Earth dev blog talks fixing the economy
What does the Fallen Earth dev team mean when it says "fixing the economy?" The latest dev blog has your answer, and there's nary a tax cut, stimulus plan, or partisan political argument in sight. Instead, producer Marie Croall waxes on about what's wrong with wasteland supply and demand, with a specific focus on crafting component drops and rarity. The end goal is to "give value to basic, improved, and advanced recipes," and Croall hopes this will happen as a result of the team's manipulation of the market. "We had to, in some cases, actually create rarity where there was none or -- in the case of cooking components -- create common items where there were only rare and uncommon," she explains. Fallen Earth's cooking mechanic is also receiving special attention, due in part to the large number of required components and the lack of rare ingredients in the current game build. The dev team is also taking a hard look at consumable buffs, and Croall states that more details on the upcoming fixes will be available as the patch nears release.
European Union's 'One charger for all' starts sampling, coming this year
It was way back in summer of 2009 that Nokia, Apple, RIM, and the rest of the mobile world agreed to make micro-USB the connector around which all future European chargers would be built. Since then, most of those companies have transitioned their hardware to micro-USB without further prompting, but the European Union is still pushing ahead with a universally compatible charger standard to make sure everything is nice and harmonized. The details of what's expected of these chargers were published in December and now the first samples of the new hardware have been produced. The EU expects all manufacturers to have chargers adhering to the new guidelines by the end of 2011 -- and if you're wondering about how Apple, one of the signatories to this agreement, will handle it, there's a note to say that adapters will be allowed on phones without a micro-USB port. Full press release after the break.
Patch 4.0.6 PTR: Sell prices for common archaeology artifacts changed (again)
After the hoopla that went on over a 1,000g sell price on the Word of Empress Zoe, Blizzard has changed the sell values on all of the common archaeology artifacts again on the PTR. Word of Empress Zoe's sell price to vendors has gone down significantly, but to compensate, many other commons have had their prices increased to even out the spread of money-makers in the profession. Thanks to Wowhead for the comprehensive list. You can check out the full table of common sell prices after the jump.
WoW Rookie: Save everything, sell everything
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.It's clean-up time around here. Now that the WoW Rookie Guide is up and running to shuttle you to precisely the information you've been wondering about, we're poking through our older pieces to bring them up to date. (If there are any WoW Rookies whose datedness you find especially galling, shoot me a link at lisa [at] wow [dot] com and I'll prioritize it for updating.) Sometimes during the updating process, I uncover little gems, like this excerpt from Elizabeth Harper's 2007 piece Money-making 101. Be sure to visit the entire article, by the way; it's an outstanding resource to make sure you arrive at your character's more costly milestones with gold in your pockets.In the meantime, let's talk about what's worth selling and what's not. First of all: keep everything. Make buying or making big bags a priority; after all, you can't make money if you can't bring home loot to sell. If your bags get full, sure, go ahead and destroy grey items (items with their names listed in grey letters). (To destroy an item, left-click it, drag it to an open spot on your screen, and left-click again to drop it; reply "Yes" to the dialog box that pops up.)
Movie stars contribute voice work to Wanted: Weapons of Fate
Wanted is a pretty sweet comic. It's also kind of a lousy movie. You'd think the same pejorative would apply to the upcoming video game, but we're actually looking forward to that. Go figure! Less surprising is the news that some of the film's actors will reprise their roles for the game, with additional Hollywood talent coming on board to fill out new roles made specifically for the GRIN-developed title. Among those from the film are Common (he played the Gunsmith in the film, but will voice Brummel, a new character for the game), Thomas Kretschmann (Cross), and Terence Stamp (Pekwarsky). Joining them will be Paz Vega, who will play "a seductive Spanish assassin known as Araña," and Peter Stormare, who will play The Immortal, leader of the French Fraternity. Just so you know, he'll "stop at nothing to follow the film's notable Code of Weavers." Wanted: Weapons of Fate will be available in March for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. Head past the break for an interview with Common about his role in the game.%Gallery-38585%
Microsoft to push cool factor with retro-inspired clothing line
It's actually kind of amazing how much dough Microsoft has spent over the past little while in an attempt to polish its image in the minds of the general populace, and as if those "I'm proud to be a PC" and completely incomprehensible Gates / Seinfeld spots weren't enough, the Redmond-based outfit is about to roll out its own clothing line (dubbed "Softwear") this month. And no, we're not kidding. Not even a little. Microsoft has purchased the assistance of Crispin Porter & Bogusky in order to ensure the results are actually desirable, and it has also hired rapper Common as a spokesman. We can't definitively say the shirt you see above is as fly as Pharrell's Gizmondo Enzo tee, but we'd rock it. We'd rock it hard.[Via Boy Genius Report]
The secret society of WoW players
Rufus on WoW LJ had something happen last weekend that I'd be happens to a lot of us players: He was introduced to someone who he had nothing in common with... except that they played World of Warcraft. It happens a few different ways -- sometimes, it's like what happened to Rufus, in that you share a mutual friend who knows you both play WoW. Sometimes, it's just someone (or you) overhearing something about WoW and realizing that you've found a fellow player. And sometimes it's just your guildies -- out of game, you have almost nothing at all in common, but the game has brought you together.In my experience, it's usually just as awkward as Rufus makes it out to be -- especially when you're brought together by someone else, they have no idea that there are different factions and realms and that there are probably a good nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand people you haven't ever met in game. There are some things that we have in common, obviously -- everyone has died to the Defias pillagers at some point, and almost everyone knows how tough it was getting past Moroes that first time. Sometimes, people can actually come together on these things -- I had a good old friend whose husband and I bonded a little for no other reason than that we both played Shamans.But usually, especially if introductions are made by a third party, it's just awkward. Have you been in this situation? Did you come away as awkwardly as Rufus did or did you make a new friend thanks to your time in Azeroth?
EQ2 Rise of Kunark tradeskilling: armor
We have one last link to share with you from EQ2 Traders Corner tonight. Previously, in their blitz on EQ2 Rise of Kunark tradeskill coverage, we featured their new harvested resources and furniture showcase pages. This final page has to do with pimping out your character's appearance (and undoubtedly stats, though we don't see that just yet) in the expansion, with a large gallery of the different kinds of crafted armor.This gallery has front and back shots of males and females wearing what looks like every kind of new armor. As with the furniture catalogue, it contains items of both the common and rare variety. There is one set of chain armor that has been updated in-game and not yet on their page, but apart from that, you should be able to determine what your avatar will look like once you've been kitted out by your local crafter after RoK hits.Have a browse of the armor shots, and stay tuned to Massively for more Rise of Kunark coverage both leading up to and after the anticipated release.
EQ2 Rise of Kunark tradeskilling: furniture
Earlier today we linked to EQ2 Traders Corner's article on harvested resources found in EverQuest II's upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion. This wasn't the only hard work that they did to document their creative journeys in Kunark, as we now bring you their tier 8 furniture showcase.There are nearly 60 screenshots in this gallery of brand new crafted furniture, from the expected lighting, bed, table and bookshelf items, to other more unique things such as weighing scales and hourglasses. Some of the paintings that can be made look particularly nice, and will surely be a popular choice for those wanting to shake up the aesthetics of their housing.If you're less concerned with what these items look like, and more with what they can actually do for you, the page also tells us that the common items will reduce rent status by 125, and the rare items by 1100. Have a window shop for things you'd like to buy in the expansion via the related story link, and there is more still to come from EQ2 Traders Corner later on.
