Project Lore

A guild castle from Runes of Magic.

This week we look back at the recurring idea of guild housing, and Upper Deck Entertainment's thoughts on the WoW TCG issue.

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There's many ways to teach a dog, or even a child new tricks.  Most of the psychology behind teaching relies on positive reinforcement.  The idea is simple, whenever the subject does something correctly it is rewarded for its action.  Food, love or a pat on the head, the reward can be almost anything likeable.  It has also been shown that if the positive reinforcement comes somewhat randomly, rather than every time, the subject is more likely to seek perfection later on. 

Positive reinforcement has worked wonders on me.  My parents promoted good grades by granting me fancy dinners for each A.  My teacher gave out Jolly Ranchers for fixing a grammatical error in a paragraph (it's vs. its ftw).  Sports accomplishments lead to WWF/WCW (now WWE) pay-per-view events - I even like cheesy stories!  In college I rewarded my own achievements with video games or a night on the town.  It's a tactic I use on my pets, and will likely repeat when I have my own koopalings.

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Overlooked captures smaller news stories that didn't have the legs to stand on their own, or have just fallen through the cracks of the blogosphere.

Hey, we can't be everywhere all the time.

Incentives To Draw Players To Wear Maximum Gear Class

This inaugural post of Overlooked kicks off with something that has plagued the lesser gear wearers since the dawn of gear classes.  If you are sick of plate and mail wearers stealing your gear due to bad itemization, be rest assured that Blizzard is finally going to do something about it.  Come Cataclysm.

Bornakk states that Cataclysm (including its pre-launch patch) will offer incentives to players that stick with their correct gear class.  Unfortunately, the blue doesn't go into any detail, or even give an example of an incentive.  The information follows his previous warning that Cataclysm's stat overhaul will ruin those classes that have been picking up +Agility leather gear, such as DPS warriors, paladins and DKs.

Ghostcrawler follows up, adding "In most cases, a good piece will still be good for you. In the dps warrior, paladin and DK case, the now +Agility leather and mail you might be wearing will be bad for you. [But] if you plan to keep raiding after the conversion, that might be a problem."

Bottomline: Stop taking my gear!

Warcraft Movie Not Raimi's Next Flick

Apparently, I am the only one here at Project Lore that thinks the Warcraft movie has a shot at being good.  Not just "good for a video game movie," like Mortal Kombat or Resident Evil, but good in general.  Neither you readers, nor my fellow bloggers seem to hold much hope.

When Spider-man 4 melted down, resulting in a reboot of the franchise and dismissal of the entire cast, many people expected Raimi to get to work on the Warcraft project.  That won't be happening thanks to a movie called The Shadow, based on the old, 1930's old, radio show, stepping in the way.

Fear not, the Warcraft movie will be out "soon."

BlizzCon 2010 Returning To Anaheim In October?

WoW.com got tipped off that the Anaheim Convention Center, where most of the BlizzCons have been held so far, had added BlizzCon 2010 to its calender for October.  The convention was scheduled to happen from October 22-23, the normal Friday and Saturday routine.  'Was' being the keyword.

Since breaking the story the listing has come down, but the convention center assured WoW.com that the deal was "99.9% confirmed."  We've heard that one before.

First Nevada in July, now California in October.  Can we settle on Philadelphia in early September?  No?  I'll bring cake for everyone.

Wishful Thinking is a column for the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft.  No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff.

World of Warcraft has been available for more than five years now.  That amount of time has enabled me, someone who's never been into alts, to not only roll one, but two alternative characters to level 80.  Add my mule and then the Auction House character and I have a grand total of five characters with over 30 days played each (mostly idle time on the bank and AH toons).  My point is this, I log in and out of my characters a lot.  I am talking about five to ten times a day.  That's why I wish Blizzard would implement a /relog characterName command.

It's an incredibly simple request that would do nothing fancy.  You'd simply type /relog Goggins, or any other toon's name, and the game would log you out of your current avatar and into the requested one in a seamless step.  No need to hit the selection screen and double-click.  You'd go from logging out to logging in.  We'd still have the option to hit the character selection screen through the old /logout, or the initial login, but how often do we really need it?

I figure that every relog wastes anywhere between a few seconds to thirty seconds, depending which computer I am playing on.  Compile five to ten relogs at ten seconds a piece over the course of five years and there's a lot of lost time there.  It's a simple request that would save me, and likely many players, a large chunk of time in the log run.

Frankly, I can't see any downside or possible abuse to it.  Can you?

It's with an unusually heavy heart that I report that earlier this week Sega announced the company's intentions to shutdown the PS2 and PC servers for Phantasy Star Universe.  PSU is being shuttered on March 31, after just over three years of being the second MMOG to come from the Phantasy Star world.

Ironically, the sequel to the first wildly successful console MMOG will continue to live on Xbox 360, including additional content past tomorrow's update.

Tomorrow, January 29, will be the last day that gamers can create a new account on the dieing platforms, and it will coincide with the launch of the "long awaited" MAG+ event.  From that day on, the game will be free-to-play.  Unfortunately, it appears that Sega is not opening the game to new users.  So we won't be able to see what we missed, be a part of closing events, or possible get sucked into the 360 version.

I really enjoyed that last few hours of Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault, two titles that I played during their respective launches.  Although I never played Phantasy Star Universe, I do wish I could be a part of its sign-off.  That's because I did play its predecessor, Phantasy Star Online.  In fact, PSO is the MMOG that I cut my teeth on back in the Dreamcast days.  I even carried over that casual addiction to the Gamecube version ($$$), going so far as to purchase the system's super-rare broadband adapter.

For those unfamilar with Phantasy Star Universe, it's a third-person hack-n-slash game set in a science fiction universe.  It's not like WoW at all, being far closer to a Diablo meets Mass Effect title, with MMOG aspects.  The irony here is that the game is fully playable in "network" mode or as a single-player experience.  I may pick it up to rekindle the desire to slaughter rappies since the price of the PC version is almost at rock bottom ($13.53).

Phantasy Star Universe had one expansion, Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus.

According to Sega, the affected server platforms aren't being shutdown due to production costs of new content, or lack of subscribers, at least not directly.  The main culprit is the spread of the population, which is mostly on 360 now.  Sega should attempt to merge the game's databases and offer a move to the 360 version if at all possible.  I'd bite if I had a soon-to-be-dead character.

Phantasy Star Universe GM Edward@Sega told Escapist, "If you've played on PC/PS2 recently, you also likely know why we are shutting these servers down," he wrote. "The population is simply too low for us to be able to continue to support this platform."  He went on to say that the 360 version's content should now catch up with the Japanese edition of the game, thanks to the singular focus.

Did anyone else try either incarnation of Phantasy Star MMOG?

I managed to quarantine Heartbourne somewhere between brewing his latest sugary beverage to be featured on Protip (available in stores soon!) and geeking out on lore. I refused to let him leave until he answered the tough questions that needed to be asked. It's why hit Protip videos were late last week, honest. ProjectLore: We know where your name came from, but why did you start playing WoW in the first place? Heartbourne: I've been obsessed with Warcraft since I was in middle school, around the time WC2 Battle.net Edition came out. I was an avid Warcraft 3 player and was ranked on several ladders. Being a total lore nerd since the WC2 days, when the lore was much more obscure, the RPG incarnation of WoW sucked me in. I skipped high school the day it came out and ninja'd a Collectors Edition from Best Buy (as in I ran in and grabbed it; I still paid for it!).

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It seems like a most appropriate time to reveal to all my first experience with quality guild drama.  You see the guild I've been running with since Warriors of Faith went in to administration mode died over the weekend.  It wasn't until yesterday that I managed to get one side of the story.  According to my informant, the former GM was fed up with the guild, snagged all sorts of materials and gold and gquit.  Your basic ninja scenario. Instead of flocking to some random guild I've decided to split my chances between my characters.  Solidsamm will be joining the guild that a large portion of Smooth Criminal's officers and members have moved to.  Solidsagart has already moved to a guild run by a friend from the "good ole days" of WoW.  She'll reside there for the foreseeable future, gearing up and possibly even raiding with them. Hot on the heels of the collapse of Smooth Criminals, I bring to you a tale of woe, back room deals and intrigue. Since the abandonment of 40-man content I've always felt that guilds have become a far more fleeting endeavor.  The social aspects haven't changed, but the difficulty of finding 40 competent people, and the more challenging raid content in general, lead to guilds and members remaining together longer.  Knowing those facts, you can imagine my old guild's shock and dismay when word came out that a few core members were thinking about forming their own crew.  A rumor of that caliber, which happened to involve three officers and the main tank, crushes moral, to say the least.  An even worse case, it could easily fracture a guild. Not the stuff of legends; a simple exodus of the executives you say?  Here's the kicker, the rumor started during the second All That Remains party.  As it spread like wildfire through the 30 or so people roaming my apartment the situation went completely nuts.  It became an elaborate game of telephone mixed with the too many cooks in the kitchen issue.  Everyone heard different things, tried to interject their opinions and create a plan of attack.  Personal feelings were used as facts, and players with conflicts of interest started writing guild policy.  It was a mess. Oh, the second kicker (would that be the placement kicker?), this all went down while the people in question were in transit to their domiciles from the party.  A party where they spent a weekend hanging out and having fun like everyone else.  Didn't matter, they were unceremoniously kicked before being confronted.  I bet they were surprised when they logged in! In the end the guild lost a few members, but ATR remained as the premiere guild on Matheridon-US.  The members were kicked, their new guild dreams died shortly after, and they joined another guild.  With the help of our ousted members the other guild became the #2 guild on the server, even grabbing server first kills for a good stretch of time. Friendships were tested, the guild hit a wall in raiding as it recovered, but worst of all feelings were hurt.  All because of a stupid rumor's ability to take on a life of its own, and cause once level-headed people to act on impulse instead of logic.  It pains me to even discuss the stupidity at how the whole debacle was handled.  At least everyone lived... What's the craziest bit of guild drama you've ever been tied up in?

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Wishful Thinking is a column for the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft.  No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff. Is Violet Hold The Bastion Of Wrath's 5-Man Content? I love WoW's PvE content, but there's no denying that it can get boring.  Doing the same runs over and over for weeks on end do nothing but show us how repetitive things can become.   After the first few virgin runs we fight through the monotony mainly for a chance at some glorious rewards.  Thanks to hard and heroic modes, and quick content patches, raiding has become less repetitive, but our heroic dungeon farming is no less mind numbing than ever.  Considering how much time we now spend in heroics, thanks to the vastly improved badge system, don't you think party-based PvE deserves content diversification?  What to do... We already have heroic and non-heroic versions, so that's out of the picture.  Hard modes could be done, but would be placed on farm by anyone who raids in a matter of weeks.  Not the best return on one's development investment there.  That's out.  What else can be done to make five man dungeons a little less stale, a little more enjoyable? Ignoring our insatiable desire for loot and badges, one way to keep an instance fresh is already implemented by Blizzard in Violet Hold (and later ToC).  Boss mob rotation.  In VH the party is given a random chance to encounter three of six possible bosses before they tackle Cyanigosa.  It's a small change, but the randomness forces players to stay on their toes even after they start to outgear the dungeon.  Extend this idea further, apply it to multiple dungeons, and it'd give us a little boost in content. For the lore and item junkies out there, new bosses can offer both.  Many instances can simply have lieutenants written in as taking over a former leaders' position, or perhaps the vacuum left by a leader's demise allows a new faction, race or species to subjugate the rest of the instance's denizens to their will.  It's true that in the long run the change would be like Diablo II's "dynamic" map system, where you could easily remember all the map layouts, but the longer we can extend that notion the better. I've mulled over the problem of the lack of 5-man heterogeneity for ages, with multiple audiences, and outside of making entirely new dungeons more frequently, a dynamic encounter assignment has been the best thing I've come up with.  Does anyone have any other bright ideas to make five man content less repetitive likes their big brothers? Do you agree that that VH offers a bit more play before it becomes repetitive?  Everyone likes new encounters right?

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Slowly, but surely, Solidsagart has been progressing along the levels on her way to level 80.  With her XP busting in to the level 76 range I decided to take her to the one zone that Solidsamm skipped, Sholazar Basin.  The last bastion of (almost) untouched life by the Scourge was a wild ride of old quest design, new ideas, stellar writing and world traveling. I'm sure most players know of Sholazar as the new home to the greatest hunter of them all, Hemet Nesingwary.  That, and the presence of the Ghostfish, are about the only things I really knew about the basin before I decided to tackle its content.  Yea, you read that right, I wasn't aware that both the Frenzyheart Tribe and the Oracles made their homes in the Un'Goro Crater-esque zone.  I did figure that out soon enough. Sholazar starts off innocent, offering a cavalcade of quests that hearken back to the days of Stranglethorn Vale.  I was tasked with killing ten of these, eight of that, and then going for the leader of said species.  It's not until I begin tackling the big game that Nesingwary becomes interested in me, and my various feats.  Once I begin to gain a following in the zone, Nesingwary actually joined me in the hunt as I went for the really big game.  The interaction with such a well known NPC made me feel as if I was having some impact on the world; a great use of subtle phasing. Juxtaposing Nesingwary's incessant need for bigger, badder and more dangerous game is a Avatar of Freya.  The demigod is struggling to comprehend, and hold back, the Scourge that are pouring in from Icecrown.  She asks any who will listen to investigate their coming, and help in their destruction.  She becomes so desperate that she allowed me, a mere mortal, to travel to Un'Goro Crater to unlock a Titan weapon for use against the Scourge. I was told that if I managed to succeed she'd overlook the death I caused in her lands.  My spine tingled when I realized that she witnessed me laying waste to the wildlife, for fun and gold.  The antonymous and interweaving stories between the two hubs end up delivering a perfect opportunity for a moral question or mechanic.  Unfortunately, there was nothing along those lines.  A missed opportunity in my book. The most memorable part of the zone for me wasn't hunting game, or demolishing the Scourge.  It wasn't even the fun quests presented by the Oracles or Frenzyheart factions.  What stuck out in Sholazar Basin for me was the writing for the quests, and the story arcs.  As noted, the Freya/Nesingwary tandem made for some good, if one-sided, moral discussion, but the wolvars and gorlocs each had an entire language of their own.  And the language was used, with one quest giver as an exception, for each and every quest presented by the factions.  I actually enjoyed reading the quest text just for the nuances in the language.  The entertaining gameplay mechanics and actual story arcs presented by the faction dispute was simply a bonus. I can't say any other zone's quest dialogue can compare to Sholazar Basin's.  There are areas of the game that offer more jaw dropping revelations and unexpected twists of allegiance, but the basin had it all in one nice little package.  Hell, I even found the hatch from Lost while running around the lush lands. I highly suggest cleaning up any remaining quests you have in Sholazar.  If you haven't been there, you are missing one of the most integrated and self aware zones in the game.  Be sure to run the Frenzyheart/Oracle line to the end.  You'll know the end when you get there...

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Mo' Money, Mo' Problems features tips and tricks to striking it rich in World of Warcraft.  If you need some extra gold to cover those costly repair bills, are working on an epic flyer for your umpteenth alt, or are attempting to hit the gold cap, Mo' Money, Mo' Problems is for you.  Have ideas or tips you'd like to submit?  Then @iTZKooPA or leave a detailed comment. Ahh, gold, I collect it even though I have little use for it these days.  Due to that fact I am willing to share my gold making ways with you, free of charge!  No longer will you have to drop real money on some random gold making guide seen on Google Ads panes.  You can just come to your friendly ProjectLore were we, and the community, will collect, refine and categorize ways to turn a buck in our favorite MMORPG.  We've already given out a few basic tips in the past, but now I will pull out all the stops, and go so far as to tell you my biggest money makers. On this second edition of Mo' Money, Mo' Problems we will cover ways to turn Brewfest into a beer drinking and money making seasonal event.  Okay, ways may be stretching it, as I have only found one surefire scheme to turn a tidy profit from the seasonal event.  The quests generally reward nothing but steins and tokens, and the loot from Coren Direbrew is unvendorable and not disenchantable.  All of it except the Tankard O' Terror.  The gnome-sized tankard is truly a money maker. For starters, the tankard is the only BoE weapon above ilvl 200.  That makes it worth at least 1000 gold right there.  The mug isn't exactly rare, I've already seen a few, but it's highly limited availability, only drops during Brewfest of course, will also impact the price.  The non-unique status means that a moneymaker like yourself can have on in the AH, and continue to farm for another.  Oh, and people may want to dual wield them, driving up the demand, thus the price, further.  A perfect storm of potential profit in my mind. That's all pretty basic stuff, but here's the real tip, hold out on putting your tankard on the AH.  As mentioned, the supply is limited by the presence of Brewfest.  If you don't need the money right now, then you'll be able to raise your profit to stupid levels if you can hold out until a few weeks after Brewfest is complete.  Just be sure to play the AH before Blizzard decides to release another high ilvl weapon for the next seasonal event! Tankard O' Terror is running around 1500 gold on my server at the moment.  What it's priced at on yours?  Have you already cashed in?

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