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Groqit barcode scanner has your hippocampus' back
C'mon, we've all done it. Standing vigilantly in front of the DVD section, our mind races to remember whether or not we already own Land Before Time 11: Invasion of the Tinysauruses, and in a fit of frustration, we make the purchase anyway only to come home and find it sitting peacefully in one of the thirteen movie racks. If that hits home, you should definitely take a peek at Groqit -- a handheld barcode scanner that prefers to be called a "personal inventory management system." Owners simply scan in every book, CD and DVD they own, take it along for any future shopping sprees and use it to tell whether or not they've already purchased a given title. It should be noted, however, that it doesn't play nice with jewel cases, but apparently, the manufacturer thinks the $95 price tag more than compensates. Honestly, is the return process that much of a hassle?
The Traveling Avatar's useful tips for SL inventory management
Your inventory. It's something that's extremely easy to ignore, because Linden Lab doesn't force you to acknowledge how much stuff you're carrying. What this means, however, is that you're likely to accumulate quite a lot of junk during the course of your stay in Second Life. Oh, sure, most of that junk started out as interesting, useful, fun stuff, but after wearing a dancing cow animator a few times, you'll tuck it away and move on to the next fun toy. In the meantime, that cow's still in there, taking up space, adding to the total number of objects -- a number that will likely give you a heart attack when you take the time to look at it.So what's to do? Well, there's no way around it: you'll have to do some weeding. And while there's no tool to magically get rid of the things you know you don't need anymore, The Traveling Avatar has come up with an article full of great management tips. Some of these tips may seem like no-brainers to some of you, but that doesn't mean that you exercise them, Ms. 20,000 Inventory Items Girl. I'm looking at you, Moo! GO check out the article and make 2008 the year you conquer the Inventory Beast!
MMOGology: Fat sacks 'o crap!
There's nothing like Christmas to remind a MMOGer that much of our game time is centered around bagging gobs of loot as fast as we can. There's all that scurrying and hurrying to find the perfect gift that shows our loved ones exactly how special they are to us. At least, as special you can get when shopping at 9:00 PM in a Walgreens on December 24th. Sure, Great Grandpa Bob really wants that Celine Dion Holiday Special CD, who wouldn't? And we all know Aunt Petunia loves her Pringles. Hey they're even in a red can! No need to wrap 'em up, just slap on a bow!In times of frantic loot grabbing like these I often think about how much crap we haul around with us in our virtual worlds. Almost all MMOGs I've played involve dragging around five or six Santa sized sacks of garbage; half of which contain stuff I absolutely must have at all times; although I often can't remember why. I don't know how many hours I've spent staring at stuff in my inventory going, "OK, what was this again? Was it a quest item? Do I still need this scroll or potion? Yeah, I better save that for later when I know I'll need it." Ten levels later I'll look at my Insignificantly Minor Potion of Liquid Mana Love and wonder why I didn't just use it already.Inventory management can be even more of a hassle in a game like Dungeon Runners where all your junk is combined in one grid-based space. You've got your backup crossbow that takes up six slots next to your mana potions that take up one slot, next to that rusty shield you plan to sell that takes up four slots in a square formation. And oops, you just picked up a sword that takes up four vertical slots. Now you have to re-arrange your entire inventory like some type of Tetris mini-game. If I'd wanted to play Tetris I would've fired up my old GameBoy! (Can you hear the Tetris theme song in the back of your head yet? You're welcome.) So why is managing our inventories such a gigantic hassle, and what are some possible alternatives to current inventory design?
Breakfast topic: What do you pack for a raid?
You wouldn't go to Cancun, Rome or New Zealand without packing items appropriate for the trip -- so why should you go to the Black Temple or Karazhan any less prepared? Levenah of the World of Warcraft Livejournal community asked players, "What do you carry for a raid?" She personally slings an impressive number of potions, a good amount of weapon oil and holy candles, and what appears to be one banana. Most of the respondents seem to carry multiple stacks of every potion and food available, which makes me feel slack -- back when I was raiding, I came with about 10 healing pots, a stack of plus agi food, and then five to ten or so of my choice offensive and defensive elixirs. Oh, and 20 of each poison and Flash Powder, and usually a small amount of the Blinding Powder that no one ever asks me to use. I know that tanking and healing classes tend to have to bring more items than DPS -- and this isn't even counting all the various sets a druid has to carry! What's on your packing list for a raid?
Second Life transaction notification problems
We have some reports (and I've also experienced it myself in the last couple of hours) of L$ payments not showing up immediately for Second Life users this-evening. The money is there, but account balances in the top corner of the screen are not updating until you've paid someone at least one L$. More confusingly, L$ transactions of L$1 and higher dated 4 November SLT (US Pacific) tonight are not necessarily showing in the transaction history unless you include at least November 2 (or earlier) in the search range. Some users say that the transactions show up after an hour or so, some have to increase the search range several days in order to see L$ transactions that took place this-evening. [Update: 11:30PM SLT (US Pacific) - We are starting to receive reports of problems with inventory transfers as well. No word from Linden Lab at present]
Bigger backpacks (and more) coming soon
Gaslaw asks on the forums whether backpacks will be bigger in Wrath of the Lich King, and (kind of surprisingly) Drysc says it's not beyond the realm of possibility.I guess it's not that surprising-- it does seem like we are carrying more stuff around lately, in terms of quest and rep items, if not just plain old extra gear sets. We've already had lots of ideas on how to fix things, from creating more keychain setups, to just plain coming up with more bag space. But fortunately, Drysc doesn't seem to have just bigger bags in mind-- he seems to have "better stuff in the works."What that could be, we have no idea. Pack mules? Dimensional suitcases (made, naturally, of sapient pearwood)? Finally, player housing? Drysc says we'll find out soon.
Addon Spotlight: Possessions
I should warn you in advance before we get too far into this review that Possessions has been known to be very addictive, meaning that once you use it, you may not be able to play the game without it. One particular hunter who is very near and dear to me started acting like a drug addict who had just gotten her fix when I showed her this add-on. For people who have multiple characters on the same server and especially characters devoted exclusively to storage, this add-on may send tingles of pleasure through your body that you have not previously experienced in an online game. Once you install Possessions the first time, you should immediately login to each of your characters and open all your bags in your inventory and in your bank. Once Possessions has scanned all the information into it's database initially, all updating is then done on-the-fly. This is where the sheer beauty of Possessions begins to shine. Let's suppose you're playing on your warlock who is an engineer, and someone in your guild is looking for silk cloth which would be stored in the bank of your tailor. You can either type "/poss" by itself to bring up a dialog box (and type "silk cloth" in the search field) or type "/poss silk cloth" right in the chat window. Possessions will give you a search engine style report of all the items you have that have "silk cloth" in the name. You can even "link" these results back into chat by shift-clicking the item icons in the search results. Mousing over these icons will give you the usual in-game description of the item, but at the bottom of the tooltip it will also tell you how many you have, and where the items are located on what character. There are other options in the search dialog you can explore that accomplish a variety of other filtering tasks and that allow you to search a specific character or a specific location, but that's for you to play with later. Packrats of Azeroth, download Possessions today! I should note that I've hot-linked a much larger screenshot of the Professions search window to the tooltip thumbnail above. Click it to behold the true beauty of Possessions!
Baggy McBaggerbag would be fine, too
Hot on the heels of that trinket chain suggestion from the other day, I've got another easily-implementable suggestion for inventory management: I want to name my bags.Not necessarily "Jonah" or "Sally" or "Tricia," although those are all very acceptable names for bags. No, I want to be able to label the bag that I keep all of my healing gear in my "Healing Gear Bag." And I want to label the bag that I keep all my quest items in "Quest Item Bag." Clear labels that help me organize exactly how things get laid out in my inventory.Now, there's already a little bit of that going on-- "special" bags like Enchanting or Soul bags are already labeled, not to mention that you can't put anything in them that doesn't belong there. And obviously the same thing applies to quivers (Related: where on your bag bar do your hunters put your quivers? I always put mine just to the left of my backpack, but I just realized it didn't have to go there all the time).But I want to put custom labels on all of my bags, so that if I happen to take a vacation (either out of town or to an alt), I can come back and know exactly what's where. There are lots of bag-related addons out there, and for all I know, one of them lets me do exactly this. But I'd like to see a nice and easy implementation in the normal interface.
Get trinkets out of inventory-- and on a chain
I can conquer dragons, I can crush Centaur, and I can even take candle (I've been waiting for days to get a chance to post that hilarious thread), but if one monster in the World of Warcraft has cost me more than anything, it's a full inventory. On my hunter, I've got a bag full of food, and on my shaman, I have to carry around four totems all the time. Crafting items take up another bag or two (my disenchanting rogue has a bag full of enchanting mats and a bag full of poisons). Quest items, potions, food, reputation tokens, noncombat pets and mounts, and that hearthstone-- there's just not enough room for everything!So here's one idea, shared with me by Braila of Thunderhorn (our guild's tree-mendous healing druid) during last weekend's Karazhan run: How about a trinket chain?It makes a lot of sense. Blizzard implemented a keychain to get keys out of our inventories, and considering that we're all hauling around tons of trinkets lately (I had seven on me, and one of our warriors had eight with him), this seems like the first place Blizzard should go to thin out the inventory. It's not like trinkets are huge items-- why should they take up 1/16 of Netherweave Bags when you can fit 200 arrows in the same place? Spare trinkets should have their own tab to sit in, something that grows the more you get, just like the keychain.Of course the obvious solution would be to just not carry so many trinkets around. But there's so many of them for every situation-- healing, solo grinding, raid healing, DPS, PvP-- that it's no wonder everyone at 70 has such a collection. Blizz should give us a chain to put them on.
AddOn Spotlight: TBag
When I compared EngBags and Advanced Bags Plus a while back, a commenter named Purity commended TBag to me in the comments. Well, Purity, I'm glad you did, because ever since I installed TBag, I haven't looked back. It's now one of my all-time favorite WoW mods, right next to ClearFont and TheoryCraft. Its features include: Customizable sorted inventory frame Customizable sorted bank frame Text-based searching of all your characters' banks and inventories Includes the bag bar in the inventory window, so you can easily swap bags without having to figure out how to restore the default bag bar that you nuked weeks ago because it takes up way too much space and you hardly ever use it Really, what more could you want in an inventory mod? It's compact, it sorts very well, it seems stable. Go get it!Download TBag at CursePreviously on the SpotlightDon't know how to use AddOns? Fear not!
"I can't carry any more"
When I first looked at this thread in the forums, my reaction was "QQ." But the more I think about it, the more reasonable it seems. The poster asks for an upgradable backpack, since bags larger than 14 slots are becoming the norm. I've definitely had trouble selling Netherweave Bags, since almost everybody seems to already have 16-slotters. In a world like that, the backpack becomes your smallest bag, and that doesn't make a lot of sense. Furthermore, anything that increases the amount I can carry, without me having to spend 90g each on Imbued Netherweave Bags, would certainly be welcome. Between a full set of extra gear (for healing), various consumables, quest items, rep pickups, herbs, etc., I don't usually have very much free space -- and that's even with having an AH alt that I mail everything off to once it's ready to be sold. Vendors have been pretty easy to come by, but still, I'd really appreciate an extra 4 slots, like the poster proposes.
The Burning Crusade: Preparing for the Expansion
With exactly two weeks to go, I'm left feeling a little blah about what to do in the World of Warcraft. Not quite enough time to get another character to 60 (well, maybe my shammy), not really in the mood for raiding when my gear is soon to be replaced anyway, and the PvP grind is wearing me out a bit. Fortunately for me (and for you!), I came across a posting on TenTonHammer from about a month ago. So while it may be "old news" to you, I think that it's well worth the read, given that we're so close to launch. The article covers the following topics with some good hints and tips:
