House of Jorob

New blog: World of Warcraft gnome ftw!

I'm goofing around in World of Warcraft a bit these days.

Joined a guild called the Knights of Ehre.

Good bunch of gamers.

Guild has plenty of tolerance for gamers like me--who don't have gobs of hours to spend.

Guild also has a blogging tool.

Oh boy!

So I started one.

From the viewpoint of Deldodin, my main.

A gnome.

Blog is here.

Can't quite figure out how to dump the posts onto my blogging pages.

Yet.

Nor my Facebook account, either.

Working on that.

Dungeon Tiles: Collector's item. Who knew?

The guys who make Dungeons and Dragons (TSR, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro) have had hits and misses over the years.
Like version 3.0.
Miss.
Oh dear god, what a miss.
And like Dungeon Tiles.
The exact opposite.
Serious hit.
So much so, that you can't even find the first two kits in the series any more.
Released in August 2006, the things retailed for less than ten bucks.
And they were an instant hit among the graph paper set.

When my pen and paper game went to version 4.0 six months ago, one of the things I wanted to do, in keeping with the spirit of the new rules, was to speed up the battle-preps.

Which meant moving away from hastily scrawled graph paper battle maps.

Dungeon Tiles looked like the answer. Sturdy cardboard cutouts, gridded, and printed with different images on either side, they provided fast builds of complex rooms for combat.

The Wizards D&D site still lists the first group of tiles as if they were still available in stores.

Wrong.

Thirty bucks on Amazon.

$32 on Ebay.

None of the bookstore sites carry them, and good luck finding them on the shelves.

Burned about 40 miles bouncing between 9 different bookstores.

There are maybe seven or eight volumes in the series now. Most of them are still around, retailing for $9.95.

I've put together enough tiles to work for me using several of the later sets.

But those first two?

Ghosts.

World of Warcraft: Powerlevelling your cooking and fishing skills to 150 on the Cheap!

And you don't have to be all that far along in class level, either. I did this when my gnome rogue was just level 19, which was perfectly high enough to slaughter any aberrant wolves or things that attacked me while running between trainer and city and lake.

It won't cost you much to get this far: The coin for two recipies and the fishing pole, and time is all.

No other materials costs involved.

Too bad I can't say the same for later levels of cooking, but at least you can catch a break where it counts: at the beginning, when you may not exactly be rolling in silver, let alone gold.

Couple of assumptions:

• You are Alliance.
• You are hanging around in IronForge.
• You have 9 or 10 open slots in your inventory.

Names and locations to know:

There's a fishing trainer and a cooking trainer in the area. The cooking trainer is named Daryl Riknussun and he is located in Ironforge, at the Great Forge. There's a cooking vendor named Gretta Gantner in the small village near IceFlow Lake. She sells a recipe you will need, along with fishing poles, but she can't train you. The fishing trainer is hanging on the shores of Iceflow lake, which is where you are going to be doing your fishing. His name is Paxton Ganter.

You'll need all of these guys to reach 150.

Make sure your bought a fishing rod.

If you want to buy it before heading out to the lake, general goods vendors have them in Ironforge.

First order of business:

Go fish.

Hike on over to Iceflow Lake.

Invoke your fishing skill. When the bobber bobs, right-click it. You will land a fish if you've clicked within two or three seconds of that bobbing motion.

You will pull two kinds of fish out of Iceflow: Raw Brilliant Smallfish and Raw Longjaw Mud Snappers. These things stack to 20. Fish until you have 9 stacks of fish, total. You will probably split your catches pretty evenly, with Brilliant Smallfish having a slight lead. The first 75 fish you catch, you will gain one point on your fishing skill. After that, it's roughly one point for every two fish landed. 

When you hit 75 fishing, run over to Paxton Ganter, and train. Your cap will go to 150. Return to the lake, and fish until you hit that number.

That's it for the fishing.

Second order of business:

Jog across the lake to find Gretta Ganter. She sells the cooking recipe for making Brilliant Smallfish. Buy it, and head back to IronForge.

Learn your recipe, find a cookfire, and cook every single Raw Brilliant Smallfish up to level 75.

Don't cook the Raw Longjaw Mud Snappers yet.

Once you hit 75, run over to the Great Forge and find Daryl Riknussun. Purchase the recipe for cooking Longjaw Mud Snappers.

Don't cook the Raw Longjaw Mud Snappers yet.

Go find a cookfire, and finish cooking ever single remaining Raw Brilliant Smallfish.

You should gain a couple more cooking points.

NOW cook all of your Raw Longjaw Mud Snappers.

These things cook at a higher level than the Brilliant Smallfish, and so will level your cooking skill from 75 to 150, where the Smallfish results will tail off.

Once you are done, you will have levelled both skills to 150.

Now you need to complete quests in order to advance into Expert.

But that's where this little guide ends.

Meteor 4: The World of Warcraft Expansion

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 ftw!

Jill got Wow's Wrath of the Lich King for Hanukkah.

Time to install it.

But first, relocate the entire WoW installation to the 1 TB Barracuda SATA drive I installed in there during the late October hard drive disaster.

Oops.

When I set up the big drive, it was as a destination for backup and recovery services during the reconstruction of the existing--but crashed--hard drive.

I never reconfigured the drive to behave as a normal storage device.

Hell, at the time I was just happy to have a recovered PC installation with all applications running correctly.

Okaaaaay.

Pulled out Acronis.

Brought up the partitioning tools.

Advanced, Manual Mode.

Located about 700 free Gigs and created a new partition out of it.

Moved and deleted a couple extra backups from the Time of Troubles.

Closed Acronis and restarted the PC.

All drives checked in.

With the correct drive letters.

Total time to repartition and clean up the files: 8 minutes.

I am never going to use Partition Magic again.

Evar.

Next: moved and upgraded Wow:

• Located the installed files under Program Files.
• Copied to their new drive space.
• Renamed the old folder.
• Repointed the desktop icon for WoW's launcher to the new folder space.
• Booted up Wow and tested the new location.
• Testing: mailed stuff between characters, deleted a character, created a new character, doublechecked maps and character locations on the maps, etc.
• Rebooted.
• Fired up the upgrade DVD
• Grinned as the autoloader found the new location for the files and installed Lich King to the right place.
• Updated the account with Blizzard during the installation.
• Fired up Wrath of the Lich King.
• Tested by playing the damn thing long enough to level a 1st level Blood Elf priest to sixth.

Total time for the entire migration and upgrade, including updating the account with Blizzard and the subsequent patching (which kicked off automatically upon the installation completion) to the Lich King files:

45 minutes.

As in, less than an hour.

Man.

I hope this is an omen for the rest of 2009.

Little Big Planet: My Contribution to the User Guides

Wheeeee!

I got LittleBigPlanet for Christmas!

So, after playing the thing until my eyes bled for the past couple days, I tried to distill everything I learned about the start of the game into one pithy, helpful sentence.

It is this:

The Star Sticker that you need on level two, "Get A Grip," is found at the end of level three,"Skate to Victory;" you're going to have to go through "Get A Grip" a second time--after you finish "Skate to Victory"--in order to attain 100% completeness.

Okay, what the hell does that mean?

If you're new to playing the game, those words mean the difference between a smooth tutorial experience and repeating the second level ad infinitum.

LittleBigPlanet is a platformer.

Like any good game, there is a tutorial built in to the front end.

In LBP, this is The Gardens, a LBP tutorial that takes up the first three complete levels of the game.

It's a very good tutorial: plenty of intuitive situations allowing you to figure out what works, what doesn't, and gives the player beaucoup rewards along the way.

There are tons of voiceover and video helps built in, too.

There are even total-tallies for each level, so you can see if you've uncovered all the hidden and not-so-hidden items for a level. "21/53 Items Found, 44%" and such.

So, after you complete a level, if that stat isn't 100%, you know you've got to rerun the level and search harder.

In LBP, there are trigger stickers which, when you paste them onto their blanks, will cause item bubbles to drop nearby. All kinds of fun things are in those bubbles. The more you find, the closer you get to 100% completion.

And the trigger stickers are not always found on the same level as where you need to paste them.

The earliest example of this is in The Gardens.

Almost half the of the goodies on level two, "Get A Grip,"are unlocked with the Star Sticker.

The Star Sticker that is found at the end of level three, "Skate to Victory."

StV doesn't open up until you complete GaG, so while you're running through it the first time, staring at all these blank star-shaped forms just screaming for a star-shaped sticker, you have no idea you will never, ever, find it on the level you are currently in.

There is nothing in the tutorial to tell the beginner that. Nothing in the instruction guidelet, nothing in the voice-overs, nothing in the vids.

I'm all for letting the player learn the ins and outs of the game mechanics by trial and error. But if your mind isn't open enough to consider the possibility of the keys you might need to one level are hidden on another, you are very likely to be rerunning the second level for a very, very long time before you give up and go on to the third...and feeling a bit discouraged for screwing up so early in the tutorial.

Imho it would not have hurt the experience to drop a little hint at the end of "Get a Grip."

Domino Toppling

No, not her.

The world record for domino-toppling was set last month in the Netherlands.

Students used 4,079,381 tiles.

The effort took two months to set up.

The event--Domino Day--was televised on BBC.

Head over to the Domino Day fansite.

One caveat: the site's in Dutch.

As an alternative, an English-speaking site, Domino Games.com, is loaded with tons of domino-ey stuff--but as of Dec 21 the site needed to be updated to reflect the new record.

Step Ball

MLB has a great commercial about playing baseball with anything you can get your hands on for gear: folding chairs, milk crates, phone poles for bases, a stick and a ball for the essentials.

But that has nothing on Step Ball.

For one thing, you need at least six people to play streetball--teams of three: Pitcher, fielder, and someone to catch--or else you'll be chasing that ball a long way every time someone whiffs.

Where I grew up, we had a shortage of little kids our age. By the time I was eight, it was clear we existed in the neighborhood as tweeners, as in, "tween the last crop of kids and the next one." There were a bunch of big kids--16, 17, 19 year olds--and a pile of infants--3 months, 1 year, like that--on our block.

And then there was us.

Me, my brother, and Chuck and Jeff.

Four, maybe five years separated us in total. So it was natural we hung around together a lot, like it or not. Once we were allowed outside.

Summertime on a block of row homes, when you can't cross the street, can be brutal.

It was brutal when you could cross the street, for that matter. We couldn't ride our bikes too far away, and the neighbors really threw a fit when you played football across their lawns.

So some time back in the mists of the early 1970's, we invented Step Ball.

You could play it with just two people. Four worked, too.

All you needed was an open space in front of our front steps, and a cooperative neighbor to not park their car directly across the street from those same steps.

That, and a tennis ball.

An older one, preferably. New ones, fresh out of the can, had too much fuzz on them.

What you did was stand on the sidewalk, in front of the steps.

And threw that ball as hard as you could.

Our steps were perfect for this. Four concrete slabs, eight-inch risers, 12-inch treads. And a rounded corner where the tread met the riser.

We didn't know any of those words, of course.

All we knew was that rounded edge was the sweet spot, and if you hit it, that ball was going to soar clear across the street onto the neighbor's front porch.

That being a home run, naturally.

A single was anywhere across the front half of the street. Doubles, the back half. Triples, up on the opposite sidewalk.

Fielder had free run of the entire area--including the home run area, if he could get up the neighbor's lawnslope  to the front of the porch area before the ball came back down.

Which was never.

Foul balls skipped off the front curb of the sidewalk, where you stood to throw in the first place.

The sweet spot had an evil twin, right next to it. Because if you missed that sweet spot, the ball would carom forward, up the steps and into your own lawns, bushes and--god help you if you did this--the roof of the front porch.

The annual rite of Retrieval of Roofed Tennis Balls occurred in September, when Dad would climb onto the porch roof from out the bedroom window and toss them all down.

I remember one particularly rough season when between three of us we managed to roof seven tennis balls.

Before July 4th.

Dad proved himself to be very cool that year.

Two RoRTB's.

One in July, and one in September.

The September one brought back eight tennis balls.

Just could not find that sweet spot.

The Journey of The Demo Disc

Playstation Store launched their video magazine a month ago.

It's called Qore. It's a download, roughly 1.5 Gb.

It's basically the Official Playstation Magazine's demo disc. with two less playable demos, three fewer video trailers, and a bridge named Veronica Belmont acting as host.

I'm still waiting for her personality to show up.

There's a neat easter egg in the two episodes I've seen. Fiddle with your L2 and R2 simultaneously and you bring up a old-fashioned arcade game.

OPM is gone now. Folded up seemingly overnight by their publisher with a shocking "Final Issue" notice parked on the January 2007 cover (issue112) .
The key to that magazine was their demo disc. Video trailers, playable demos, interviews, the works. All included free inside the magazine. But PSM was a Playstation2 magazine, and Sony was pushing PSP and the upcoming PS3, and you couldn't fit a DVD inside a PSP nor could you put blu-ray gaming demos on a regular DVD and so one day it was just....over.

Or Sony pulled the license. Or publisher Ziff-Davis didn't want to keep the magazine going. Or whatever. The editors weren't forthcoming, considering they had already put 98% of the issue to bed when they were told there would be no Issue 113.

Whatever.

An interesting thing happened ten months later, though. In October, 2007.

The other magazine I subscribed to, PSM, a magazine that prided itself on being "The Number One Independent Playstation Magazine," changed its name.

And its entire focus.

The new name?

Playstation: The Official Magazine.

So much for independence.

First thing I did was look inside for the demo disc.

There wasn't one.

Come last month, I'm reading Issue 010 of POTM and the back page has an alpha-numeric code printed on the final page. A page I thought was an ad about Qore.

It was better.

The code got me a free download of the first episode of the video magazine.

Sure, I'm two months behind the release, but the price is right.

And so the Playstation demo has come full circle, once again being provided as a freebie inside a magazine.

If you want the current edition of Qore, the Playstation Store wants $2.99 for it. Or a subscription of $24.99.

Not worth it. At all. From what I've seen, I'd pay .99 for an episode. Maybe subscribe for $11.

The magazine's a better buy at $20 a year, with a ton more content and at least for now, a free demo disk.

Sort of.

Chocobo joke!

So coupla chocos walk inna barrr anna firrst one say, "Phweet."
Barrrtenderrr look atta second choco anna go, "What he say?"
Second choco say, "I dunno. He not frrrom arround herrre."

---Corbi Denergal, 75 THF/37 NIN
Mithra, Diabolos server, FFXI

Dungeon Masters: Protect your ideas--Don't post original material on Wizards of the Coast

There was a time, back in the dark ages of electric typewriters and 2400 baud modems, when the true mark of an unschooled amatuer novelist was the "You're gonna steal my idea and so I've got to slap 'Copyright <myname> on every page" approach to manuscript submissions.
It only took a couple of hours research in a library before the author learned the copyright was already in place, as soon as taking pen to paper. Oh sure, you could mail it to yourself, or even register it with the copyright office. But you didn't have to.

I feel sorry for the writers starting out today. To keep this topic manageable, and because I am by no means an established and published author, I'll work with what I really know: Dungeons and Dragons.
Beginning Dungeon Masters will eventually grow into DMs who want to work up their own ideas. From there its a natural progression to publishing your own stuff.

The web makes it easy to publish. There are sites where DMs give their stuff away, and sites where you are asked to kick in a few bucks, and other places where you can invite contributions after folks take a look at your stuff..

On all of these sites, one thing is clear--or at least if not clear, then easily found: original authors of material retain their original copyrights.

Not so Wizards of the Coast. And, by extension, Gleemax.com.

First, we have the "We don't want your stuff" statement.

Gonna quote Wizards.com here in entirety. The caps are not mine:

8. Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy

NEITHER WIZARDS NOR ANY OF ITS EMPLOYEES ACCEPTS OR CONSIDERS UNSOLICITED MATERIALS PROVIDED TO WIZARDS REGARDING THE SITE, THE SITE CONTENT, WIZARDS, OR THE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES OF WIZARDS, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, SUGGESTIONS, IDEAS, PLANS, NOTES, DRAWINGS OR OTHER ARTWORK, DEMOS, PROTOTYPES, SAMPLES, ORIGINAL OR CREATIVE MATERIALS, OR SIMILAR INFORMATION (COLLECTIVELY, "SUBMISSIONS"). SOME EXAMPLES INCLUDE IDEAS FOR NEW ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS, NEW PROMOTIONS, NEW PRODUCTS OR TECHNOLOGIES, PROCESSES, MATERIALS, MARKETING PLANS OR NEW PRODUCT NAMES. PLEASE DO NOT SEND ANY SUBMISSIONS TO WIZARDS OR ANYONE AT WIZARDS. IF, DESPITE OUR REQUEST THAT YOU NOT SEND US YOUR SUBMISSIONS, YOU STILL SEND THEM, WIZARDS MAY NOT TREAT YOUR SUBMISSIONS AS CONFIDENTIAL OR PROPRIETARY AND MAY DISCLOSE YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO ANY OTHER PERSON OR ENTITY, WHETHER PUBLICLY OR PRIVATELY. WITH RESPECT TO ANY SUCH SUBMISSIONS YOU PROVIDE THAT WIZARDS ACCEPTS INADVERTENTLY OR OTHERWISE CONTRARY TO THE ABOVE POLICY, YOU HEREBY GRANT AN IRREVOCABLE, NONEXCLUSIVE, PERPETUAL, WORLDWIDE, ROYALTY-FREE AND FULLY SUBLICENSABLE LICENSE TO USE, PRACTICE, MAKE, HAVE MADE, REPRODUCE, MODIFY, ADAPT, PUBLISH, TRANSLATE, CREATE DERIVATIVE WORKS FROM, DISTRIBUTE, PERFORM, AND DISPLAY YOUR SUBMISSIONS AND THE INVENTIONS EMBODIED THEREIN FOR ANY COMMERCIAL OR OTHER PURPOSE, WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDGMENT OR COMPENSATION TO YOU.

That's pretty clear. Don't send us anything. Because if you do, and we like it, thanks so much for the donation.

But then there's this stuff, laying in wait on the Wizards resources site, the place where DMs will go for content, and the place that hosts the forums

1. User Content

By posting or submitting any text, images, designs, video, sound, code, data, lists, or other materials or information (such User-submitted content, collectively, "User Content") to or through a Site, including without limitation on any User profile page, you hereby irrevocably grant to Wizards, its affiliates and sublicensees, a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable license, to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such User Content (in whole or in part) in any media and to incorporate the User Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. The foregoing grants shall include the right to exploit any proprietary rights in such User Content, including but not limited to rights under copyright, trademark, service mark or patent laws under any relevant jurisdiction.

Here's the problem--in order to get to the reference material that a good DM needs, the DM is forced to sign this. It's the only way, for instance, to get at Dragon magazine while online.

So, while the amateur author of modules is bound to heap their opening efforts with cliches by the handful, once in a while something bright, shiny and good drops out of the pile.

And if its been posted on the so-called "community" forums, with honest critique invited from honest gamers all over the planet, guess who just got screwed?

Not because any of the "community" is going to steal the thing.

Because the friggin host is.

But you agreed to their terms, so I can't call it stealing.

But that's what it is. Baiting the trap. Setting the table. And waiting for others to serve good food on it.

I've been blessed to hit one or two really good ideas in my gaming life. Good ones, ideas that were so memorable people still talk about them today, even though they may have encountered them over a dozen years ago. I didn't make any money with them; at the time I didn't know how. That doesn't matter. What matters is that even though I didn't cash in, I still owned the copyrights to the story narrative.

That won't happen on the Wizards.com site.

Next comes the really insidious part:

The terms found on the Wizards site are invalid. The really nasty ones are here, from the Gleemax site. Which you can't get to from the Wizards unless you're applying for a Wizards.com login.

You can find it here, on the Gleemax site:

2.                   User Content; Intellectual Property Ownership; Rights Granted to You

a. User Content

Except with respect to User Content (defined below) relating to those non-Wizards games that have an official Gleemax.com webpage as set forth under Exception C under Section 3(b) of these Member Terms, if applicable, by posting or submitting any text, images, designs, video, sound, code, data, lists, or other materials or information (such User-submitted content, collectively, "User Content") to or through the Site, including without limitation on any User profile page, you hereby irrevocably grant to Wizards, its affiliates and sublicensees, a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable license, to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such User Content (in whole or in part) in any media and to incorporate the User Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. The foregoing grants shall include the right to exploit any proprietary rights in such User Content, including but not limited to rights under copyright, trademark, service mark or patent laws under any relevant jurisdiction. It is not the intention of Wizards to commercially exploit User Content through the foregoing license grants. Rather, our lawyers tell us that this license is necessary to protect Wizards in those rare circumstances where Wizards has ideas or business plans similar to User Content.

With respect to non-Wizards games that have an official Gleemax.com webpage as set forth under Exception C under Section 3(b) of these Member Terms, by posting any User Content relating to such games on or through the Service, you hereby grant to Wizards a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such User Content solely on and through the Service.

You represent and warrant that: (i) you own or control all of the rights to the User Content that you post or you otherwise have the right to post such User Content to the Site, (ii) the User Content is accurate and not misleading, and (iii) use and posting of the User Content you supply does not violate these Member Terms and will not violate any rights of or cause injury to any person or entity, including without limitation the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights or any other rights of any person. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owing any person by reason of any User Content posted by you to or through the Site.

For audacity, I like this part. It's at the end of the first paragraph, if you want the context:

"It is not the intention of Wizards to commercially exploit User Content through the foregoing license grants. Rather, our lawyers tell us that this license is necessary to protect Wizards in those rare circumstances where Wizards has ideas or business plans similar to User Content."

That's good.

Someone just put a label on a red box.

The label says "White box."

Does that make the box white?