Thoughts On Crafting In WoW and WAR

I've been thinking a lot about crafting lately, as Wormson chases down the last few non-bind-on-pickup tailoring recipes and has finally made his awesome frost-and-shadow robe. I'm also looking for jewelcrafting recipes for him, and seeing the number of items appearing in the auction house search for "usable items" decreasing is a great pleasure. It's becoming apparent that crafting skills have to be chosen carefully, and I'm keeping a close eye on the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning news to see what way things will play out there.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on April 28, 2008 at 12:55 | Comments (0)

WoW: Am I still casual?

I'm starting to wonder if I can call myself a casual player in World of Warcraft any more. After all, Wormson traded in his last green item on Saturday evening for an epic belt, and is now clad entirely in rare and epic items. Indeed, out of seventeen slots for items that have bonuses, his PvE outfit has epic items in thirteen. PvP drops to only eleven, as I replace epics with higher-resilience "welfare" rare items.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on April 28, 2008 at 12:44 | Comments (1)

Multiple Group Membership in MMOs

The World of Warcraft guild I'm in is part of a larger group of three guilds, the Hillsbrad Pact, in-character, and ARCORB, out of character. Between us, we can muster a decent raiding group, a good chat channel, and a fair chance that you can find someone to help you with group quests. This isn't something any of the guilds could manage on its own. The trouble is that there is no mechanical way in WoW to support this concept.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on April 25, 2008 at 12:44 | Comments (0)

State of the Games

I'm currently playing two MMOs, and running two tabletop games. I'm soon (all going to plan) going to be playing in another tabletop.

World of Warcraft: The Shattered Sun dailies are still entertaining, and I fully expect Argent Dawn to go to Phase 3 tonight, if it hasn't already. Wormson is levelling fishing (now at 295, and with the Master level book bought and used), and I'm enjoying it greatly. The raid group that my guild belongs to has Karazhan on farm, has had an attempt at Magtheridon, and is going hunting in the Serpentshrine Caverns this week. I have 11 epics, and am starting to work on getting hold of enchantments, good gems, and possibly even dedicated sets of PvP and raiding gear. My bank is pretty nearly full, due in large part to my obstinate tendency to hang onto RP-oriented clothing.

EVE Online: I'm training long skills in EVE, and logging in occasionally to do some trading or manufacturing. The weird bug that makes the game freeze on me for 30-90 seconds every time I go near a jump gate makes it essentially impossible to run missions - a mission that happens two systems away will involve between four and fifteen minutes of looking at a frozen screen, and that's just for the mission-running battleship. By the time I get the salvage destroyer out and back, it's a complete waste of time. Missioning will have to wait until I have a new machine (or a new videocard, or some other upgrade or update), or until a fix appears in the game itself. This is annoying, but the pleasure I'm getting from WoW makes up for it.

Tabletop: My two tabletop games are going well. I can't really say much more without giving away details that I don't want the players to see, but all of them seem to be enjoying themselves, and that's really the main aim of the games.

I'm doing a good bit of world-building (a lot of it purely in my head) at the moment, and narrowing down possibilities for future events and games. There are, I think, too many possibilities for one world, especially since about six of the ideas I have would amount to full setting reboots, or singularities. There's an inherent problem in being a simulationist who likes huge, epic narratives - they leave the world in tatters, and two or more in a row would get very, very messy.

I'm looking forward to the release of D&D's 4th Edition, even if I won't be playing it for some time, and am also following with interest the appearance of the Pathfinder game from Paizo, commonly known as 3.75. This is a splintering in D&D that might actually amount to something on both sides.

Posted by Drew Shiel on April 7, 2008 at 14:25 | Comments (1)

Doctor Who: Partners In Crime

I've had some time to mull over the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who, Partners in Crime, and I've come to the careful and considered conclusion that my initial impression was entirely correct: it was crap.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on April 7, 2008 at 14:00 | Comments (0)

WoW: Sunwell Isle and the Power to Change

The new Sunwell Isle daily quests have a compelling aspect like none I've seen in an MMO before. I'm usually ambivalent about dailies in World of Warcraft. On the one hand, they allow me to do something productive in a short amount of time, which is useful when I have a limited period online. On the other, they're the ultimate in repetitive tasks, which I abhor. But the Shattered Sun Offensive quests are making me consider putting dailies on my calendar.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on April 3, 2008 at 09:44 | Comments (1)

First Time in Karazhan

I've never done much raiding before - a few times into Zul'Gurub, back in the pre-TBC days. Saturday evening last, though, the raid group my guild works with were arranging runs into the new, no-attunement Karazhan. We had enough people to run three simultaneous raids, each with ten people. For me, at least, it was a momentous success.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on March 31, 2008 at 09:31 | Comments (0)

WoW Patch 2.4

Patch 2.4 hit the European servers of World of Warcraft on Wednesday, and was the smoothest patch yet - things were up and running well by the time people were coming home from work. It chewed up a lot of addons, mainly due to the changes in the combat log, but that's to be expected, and there wasn't a lot Blizzard could do about it anyway.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on March 28, 2008 at 11:39 | Comments (0)

Doctor Who Series 4

There's an interview in SFX this month with Russell T Davies. Front and centre of the article are the words "We have a twenty year plan..." That's pretty ambitious in television, but starting in to the article, I really hope we can take it at face value. This is the kind of concept you just might be able to pull off with Doctor Who that you really couldn't with any other TV series.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on March 20, 2008 at 12:06 | Comments (0)

Orbital Preview

This year's Eastercon is Orbital, to be held in the Radisson Edwardian in Heathrow. It's been a long time since I went to an Eastercon, being as they're across the water and over the one guaranteed four-day weekend of the year, but this one has both China MiƩville and Neil Gaiman, as well as Charlie Stross and Tanith Lee. So Nina and I are off on Friday afternoon to London, and as soon as we're in the door, we'll be putting our names down for the coffee sessions with the authors.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on March 20, 2008 at 12:05 | Comments (0)

WoW: Old Hillsbrad FTW

On Saturday last, Nina and I sat down and did 12 straight hours of World of Warcraft, playing through the entire attunement process for Karazhan. I didn't actually attune, since I've no interest in the raid, but the quests and storylines though Old Hillsbrad were so good that I'll be happy to do the instance again.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on February 19, 2008 at 11:50 | Comments (2)

Honor Harrington MMO

Apparently - and despite my interest in both David Weber's Honor Harrington series, and MMOs, this managed to sneak past me until now - there's going to be an game called something like Honorverse: an Honor Harrington MMO.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on February 13, 2008 at 09:19 | Comments (1)

Star Trek XI Trailer

I don't think I've ever posted a trailer on The Wizard of Duke Street before, and I never expected the first one to be for a Star Trek movie. But this is one of the simplest, best trailers I've ever seen, and if the moive is anything like as restrained and precisely evocative as this, I may actually have to go see it in the cinema.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on February 11, 2008 at 12:46 | Comments (4)

Torchwood Series 2: The verdict so far...

This is a guest column by Katherine F

Three episodes in, and the fans are delighted: the second series of Torchwood has everything they loved about the first, and has solved a great number of the problems that plagued it, to boot. The writing is sharper and less sloppy; the characters are more competent (they haven't accidentally killed a single person yet!); Tosh and Ianto get more lines; the relationship between Jack and Ianto has been clarified; and, perhaps the best development of all, the series has stopped giving the impression of being too far up its own arse to see daylight.

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Posted by Drew Shiel on February 6, 2008 at 14:05 | Comments (1)