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What Rase Kenzo means for virtual property
Our own Tateru Nino has been covering the Second Life case of Rase Kenzo very closely, but with the settlement yesterday, it seems the ruling might have effects on the concepts of virtual worlds at large. At issue is whether or not an avatar named Rase Kenzo could use an exploit to duplicate items created by Second Lifers-- does copyright and intellectual property matter when the items you're talking about are virtual? As Tateru herself noted, yes-- virtual theft matters.And Raph Koster agrees. He points to the Rase Kenzo settlement as all the precendent any court would need to consider virtual goods "merchandise" in every sense of the word, with all the normal protections and inherent properties included.Now, the Second Life items had some properties that most other virtual world items do not-- they were actually coded and created by the creators, and while you do hit a button to create, say, an Epic in WoW or a ship in EVE, the item you create wasn't actually created by you. So the intellectual property laws probably won't cross over-- whether you virtually "crafted" an item or not, you don't have a lot of claim on it when the design didn't come out of your head.But we are another step closer to putting a real (and real-world) value on virtual items. This case took place in Second Life, but like many things in the Lindens' world, odds are it will have repercussions in lots of different virtual worlds.
Wowhead adds new item links
My favorite database site has recently added a new feature to their item listings. When you look an item up on Wowhead.com, you'll notice a new link to the right of the item's name which says "Get in-game item link". When you click on it, a new window will pop open with some highlighted text. Simply copy the text into your in-game chat window and hit enter. You'll be given an in-game item link for the equipment you looked up on Wowhead, so you can check yourself out in the dressing room or pass the info on to another player.This is certainly a cool feature and one I'll probably play around with quite a bit. This may allow me to do away with some of the item database addons I currently use in-game. I'm already alt-tabbing out to read Wowhead all the time, so it won't be much hassle at all to copy their links into the game when necessary.Will you be using this feature at all? What do you think about it?
Remember your gems
Once again, it's the first of the month, and that means it's your gem payday from the Consortium! Get your butt out to Aeris Landing and click on Gezhe for your Membership Benefits, which means a package of free gems to help you pimp your new season 3 gear or Zul'Aman epics. Depending on your Consortium reputation level, you get one of the following: Friendly: Gem Stuffed Envelope Honored: Unmarked Bag of Gems Revered: Bulging Sack of Gems Exalted: Bag of Premium Gems I meant to get my rogue up at least to Revered since last month, but alas, real life stepped in, so it's another Unmarked Bag for me. What's your haul for December?
The itemization bug bites Tabula Rasa
As you should already well know, Destination Games is hard at work on patching up some common complaints in their new sci-fi epic Tabula Rasa. Though the most significant part of the patch for most players was Rage getting whacked with the nerf bat and the promise of a free respec, that wasn't all that Paul Sage and crew had in mind. An easily overlooked part of the patch notes says, and here I quote, "We have also fixed another problem where item rarity was not affecting damage bonuses on the items. Now green weapons will do more damage than their white counterparts of the same level. Blues will do more than greens." Itemization is getting tweaked, and it's going to have huge ramifications.As things of this nature usually do, the change has spawned a heated discussion within the TR community, with some feeling that the difference in itemization (which, if you'll note, is called a "fix" not a "change") is going to have profound implications for the way players approach equipment and the game in general. As the game exists now, damage is entirely independent of item quality, and the only advantages conferred by rare items (which follows the popular rarity scheme of white < green < blue < purple) are that they have their mod slots filled. In most cases an item bought at a vendor is basically equal to a purple of the same level that you can get either as a rare drop or as a quest reward. Why is that a problem?
To shop with honor
Although Patch 2.3 arrived two weeks ago, it isn't until today that Arena Season 3 will make its official debut. Just like in fashion, the styles of the previous Seasons will go on sale for low, low prices. In fact, in true Filene's Basement style, the items from Season 1 will become purchasable with Honor and Marks of Honor. The once-shiny gear from Season 2 are being taken off the racks to make way for the latest Vengeful Gladiator's fashions, complemented by Vindicator's accessories. Some players looking ahead have already saved up on the maximum Honor of 75,000 and maximum Arena Points of 5,000 in preparation for the new Season. I think I have an idea of how my wife feels when Mango goes on sale and a new line comes in. It's kind of like the World of Warcraft equivalent of Black Friday.How about you? What's on your Honor shopping list? Will you be buying Season 1 gear or spend it on the new Vindicator items? Will you be buying armor or weapons? Are you trooping over to the Hall of Legends or the Champion's Hall before you head over to Area 52 (with branches now open in Nagrand and Blade's Edge!)? Choices, choices.
Season 1 Prices revisited as items go on sale tomorrow
We heard a long time ago that Arena 1 sets would be purchaseable with battleground honor and marks, and it looks like tomorrow's the day-- all those marks and honor you've been saving up will be able to get you some Arena PvP gear.We posted prices a while back as well, but just in case you missed them, here they are again, at Curse's website. The full list of prices is after the jump-- lots of people will probably be headed for the weapons, but make sure to bring lots of honor and marks. While the offhand weapons are the least pricey (at 9k honor), the marks are probably what will break people-- you need 20 Eye of the Storm marks for all the one-hand weapons, and 40 AB marks for the two handers. Librams, relics and totems are the cheapest-- only 8k honor and 10 EotS marks.The full list is printed for your convenience after the break. Got honor? If you want to grab some of that season 1 gear tomorrow, you're gonna need it.
WoW Insider: Now with Wowhead tooltips
The more observant among you may have noticed something neat happen to the site over the past few days: all item links that point to Wowhead now have tooltips! In case you hadn't noticed, here are a few examples: Primal Mooncloth Arcanite Steam Pistol That should save some people a click or two, and more importantly, it looks cool (in my opinion, anyway). And the most exciting part is that this is really easy to get going on your own site. All you have to do is include this one line anywhere in the page:<script src="http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>That's it! Now all Wowhead item links have tooltips.If you want to jazz the links up a little by making them show up in the appropriate color, you can put "class=q#" in the <a> tag, where # is the number of the quality level of the item: 5 for legendary, 4 for epic, and so on down the scale. As an example, the code for the Arcanite Steam Pistol link above looks like this:<a class="q4" href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29949">Arcanite Steam Pistol</a>But your tooltips will still work if you don't want to bother with the class attribute; the links will just all be the same color. Now you too can be powered by Wowhead!
The coming of mudflation
Keen (of Keen and Graev) has a great post up about what he calls "mudflation" (a combination of the words MUD and inflation). If you've been playing any MMO through the introduction of an expansion, you'll know exactly what he's talking about. That shiny bit of loot you worked for weeks to obtain doesn't look quite so hot when players are grabbing an even better piece from a quick five-minute quest.Truth be told, "mudflation" isn't actually a bad thing. Change is inherent to MMOs, and it's unavoidable that just as the bar will raise (there will be new heights for players to climb to), so will the minimum rise as well. Mudflation is actually a good thing for the majority of players by definition-- if you consider players as a normal distribution, with a small number of players at the top of the endgame, and a small number of players just entering the endgame, "mudflation" is actually that swell of players in the middle getting their hands on some really new items.There is a problem, however, with mudflation that I haven't really seen an MMO skillfully deal with yet-- what happens to the content made obsolete? Whenever an expansion comes through town, the old worlds and content get more or less abandoned. While the newest players may still find a little bit of joy in discovering "the old world," they too eventually learn to abandon it for the greener pastures brought with the new content. Mudflation is all well and good for the folks picking up the new shiny items, but it's too bad that MMO makers haven't come up with a better plan for making old content relevant to new players.
BoE Epic throwing weapon pickpocketed
Pickpocketing is one of my favorite things about the Rogue class. It adds some nice texture and a bit of extra cash to my grinding routine, keeps me stocked in Super Healing Potions and Flash Powder, and best of all, I can easily macro it along with my opening attack (usually Cheap Shot), so it doesn't even require an additional keystroke:/cast Pick Pocket/cast Cheap ShotNow, according to a few different reports around the official forums, there's a new reason to pick those pockets: epics.The BoE epic throwing weapon Spinesever was, allegedly, found in a lockbox picked from a random mob in Shadowmoon Valley. There seems to be some debate over whether it's real or not, but it is on Thottbot, and it looks believable enough. Edit: it's real. It does have rather high stats, and is probably the best throwing weapon in the game. I wonder what the skin looks like. What do you think? Is there a better throwing weapon out there? And how much do you think this is worth? People are suggesting that this is considerably over-budget; I don't know the item level formulas well enough to verify that claim -- can any of you?[Thanks, Gonçalo]
Preparing for 2.3: Pre-patch farming, part 1
Although your time to farm before the release of the patch is quickly dwindling, hopefully everyone will be able to spend some quality time over the weekend preparing for next Tuesday. It's always difficult to accurately predict what will be big sellers, especially since the economy on one server may be radically different than another. With this in mind, I've decided to simply provide a list of all the items that will be used in new trade recipes or for obtaining the new reputation rewards.
Breakfast topic: Your server's [item]
At least once a day, the trade chat of my home server, Magtheridon, is filled with people linking [Skullflame Shield] for some reason. For a while, I thought it was caused by some sort of sociological mass brain spasm unique to Mag, kind of like Chuck Norris jokes or being an Ohio State fan (/duck). But Phyllixia of Proudmoore has broken my theory. It seems like every server has its own item to link in trade. Notable "server items" include:
