The Wizard of Duke Street Details

Thoughts On Crafting In WoW and WAR
2008-04-28 14:55:57
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.In WoW, you can take up any two "professions" - main line crafting skills. These are divided into gathering and crafting skills, which do pretty much what they say. However, there are other, less evident divisions within the crafting skills. Some of them are useful to every class, and some are only useful to particular ones. For instance, blacksmithing is simply not useful for a caster class. Leatherworking is useless for cloth-wearers, and tailoring is e ...

WoW: Am I still casual?
2008-04-28 14:44:04
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.And yet, I don't think of myself as being any more than a casual player. I'm certainly enjoying the endgame at the 70 cap a lot more than I did at the 60 cap, but I've been on about ten raids, and they're not a priority for me. I spend more time wandering around Silvermoon and poking at the auction house than anything else. I haven't a chance of getting anywhere near the epic flying mount, unless I stop spending money on pleasing shiny jewlecrafting recipes, and with the new vendor opening up in the harbour soon, I can expect to hand her about 1700 gold over several weeks. ...

Multiple Group Membership in MMOs
2008-04-25 14:44:26
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.The way to handle it under the mechanics is to have everyone join one guild. Where the group overflows into other games, this tends to happen - the Fellowship I joined in my brief foray into LotRO was composed of people from the Pact. But in WoW, everyone is fond of their own guilds, and each guild has its own slightly different culture, origins, and traditions. The guildmaster position in my own guild, The Red Branch, is periodically decided by voting, whereas the Oathforged have their Founders and that's that. I'm not sure how the Ashen Rose Conspiracy decide wh ...

State of the Games
2008-04-07 16:25:00
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 ...

Doctor Who: Partners In Crime
2008-04-07 16:00:33
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.Contrary to my fears, Catherine Tate was fine. She and David Tennant did very well with what was, I think, the worst script I have ever seen. RTD has some issues he needs to work out, but the main one is the notion that some juvenile jokes, some "cute" monsters, and some references to previous episodes constitute a plot, and that dialogue hacked together in the back seat of a taxi on the way to the shoot can make it hang together. I know it's a series which is for kids, but that doesn't mean it's ok to have it be bad And then, hey, we'll include Billie Piper for a gratuitous shot at the end. I have a lot of respect for RTD for being at the helm of the new Doctor Who, but for gods sakes, take his crayons away and let some of the far better writers - Moffat and Cornell be ...

WoW: Sunwell Isle and the Power to Change
2008-04-03 11:44:32
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.The Quel'Danas ones, though, have another aspect - you feel that you're changing the game world. It's not true, strictly speaking - the new phases of the reclamation of the island will proceed automatically after a while, even if nobody does the quests. And your individual contribution is tiny - there are hundreds of turn-ins required for each percentage change. But there's a feeling of progress in seeing that percentage rise, and a feeling of real victory as the next phase starts. And the change will not go backwards - or if Blizzard d ...

First Time in Karazhan
2008-03-31 11:31:45
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.There were some post-patch oddities with the Omen addon. The Prince fight had apparently been made a lot harder, and we made it through anyway. None of the rest seemed terribly difficult, and I think we hit a total of about seven of the bosses. At the end of it it all, Wormson had got: an Adornment of Stolen Souls, a pair of Voidheart Gloves, a Tirisfal Wand of Ascendancy, a Talisman of Nightbane, and a Nathrezim Mindblade - all fairly massive upgrades. I'm in massive DKP debt, of course. It was also a lot of fun. Our raid leader really knew his stuff, never seemed to even get flustered, let alone panic, and kept us thoroughly amused throughout the four ...

WoW Patch 2.4
2008-03-28 12:39:30
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.Quel'Danas Quel'Danas is the new island, aka Sunwell Isle off to the north of Silvermoon. The Shattered Sun offensive (a combination of the Scryers and Aldor) are mounting an offensive to take back the island from Kael'thas. This offensive will happen in multiple stages, with each one granting access to new areas of the island. Stage 1 is already over on the European Argent Dawn - it lasted, I think, about 32 hours in total. The stage one dailies were fun, as long as they lasted, even if my rewards were all greens rather than the Badges of Justice other folk were getting. I've done one run through the Stage 2 ones, including the incredibly awesome b ...

Doctor Who Series 4
2008-03-20 13:06:41
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.The Sontarans (classic Who monsters) are back. There's a visit to Pompeii - although given the howls that Gladiator provoked from those friends who know about such things, I may need to watch that one on my own. UNIT is back - although we knew that from Martha's appearance in Torchwood. Mind you, I still get a bit of a headache trying to work out the continuity gaps between the original aim of Torchwood - protect England and Earth from aliens in general, and the Doctor in particular - and the Doctor working for UNIT in Classic Who. Maybe we'll see some nods toward solving that. With the rumours of Rose's re ...

Orbital Preview
2008-03-20 13:05:12
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 Miéville 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. The way these things work is that there will be a small room, the authors will be in there with some coffee, and so will a limited nhumber of fans. You book in adance and if (if!) there're more people than spaces, it goes to a lottery. I would imagine that places for the Neil Gaiman session will have a resale value equialent to chunks of the London property market. But if I get a place, I will not be selling. To be honest, though, if I had to choose, I'd go for China. Much as I love Neil's work, there's not ...

WoW: Old Hillsbrad FTW
2008-02-19 12:50:51
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.Black Morass, admittedly, was a lot more work for me, as Wormson the Warlock, than I've been accustomed to - the most efficient way to keep the various portal-spawned mobs away from Medivh was for me to drop Seed of Corruption on each of them, and occasional other DoTs. So I had to think a lot more than my usual wall of DoTs and DPS approach. It's very unusual for me to get to the end of an instance, and be happy to do it again. The other ones in the attunement - Steam Vaults, Shadow Labs and Arcatraz - were ordinary, and while I'd run them again if people need to, I wouldn't want to go back. But I definitely want to run Old Hillsbrad again. Possibly even go in and poke aro ...

Honor Harrington MMO
2008-02-13 10:19:27
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.The website, unfortunately, does not fill me with hope. Of the logos at the bottom, Baen, Weber's publisher, is the only one I recognise. The site itself looks like it was built with care and attention, in 1998. And then there's the direction the game is taking - instead of playing a starship captain or crew member, you play the leader of a Star Nation. I've a number of issues with that approach. First and foremost, the books focus on starships and tactics, and that's what people's interest in the setting is focussed on. A game wherein you found a star nation is an odd diversion from that. Second, part of the appeal of the books is getting to know the geography and history of a broad, deep setting, and having your part of the action explicitly take place outside tha ...
Honor

Star Trek XI Trailer
2008-02-11 13:46:00
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. ...
Star Trailer

Torchwood Series 2: The verdict so far...
2008-02-06 15:05:56
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.There's a light-heartedness to the new series that's deeply refreshing after the previous series spent thirteen episodes wallowing in existential angst -- in the first five minutes of the first episode, we get an alien blowfish driving a sports car (it's a stolen car, but he still stops at the red light -- hey, wouldn't want to get a ticket), a little old lady staring after the team's gigantic SUV and mutte ...
Series

Idiot Quotient in WoW
2008-02-04 08:46:13
So WoW is going well, I'm acquiring the PvP epics, doing the daily quests for cash, it's not a must-log-in, but a decent pastime, and I like having a lot of other people I know around. However, there's a much higher incidence of, well, stupidity.In EVE, there are, as in any game, a few idiots moving around. But generally, they're few, far between, and easily and quickly shot down. In WoW, they're spamming the Trade channel, jumping around the cities, and yelling, all the time - or they're in the battlegrounds. Argent Dawn seems to be better than other servers, generally, because it's in the cross-server battlegrounds that I find the finest examples of stupid. Here's an exchange I, as Wormson the warlock, had with one such specimen - this is after a bit of back and forth in the /bg channel. It's notable for an evident ability to spell. Dktjalex [Burning Legion]: what are you talking about? Wormson: That's the third time in as many battlegrounds I've seen you in that you've responded t ...
Idiot Wow

More Lich King Beta Phishing
2008-01-25 09:19:44
Some time ago, I published an article here about a World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Beta phishing scam. Yesterday, a comment came in on that article which read: The REAL beta of Wrath of the Lich King is acctualy now out! Visit [URL REMOVED] and sign up!!! (you need a real WoW account to sign up) It's supercool and very fun!!!... and a link to a very convincing looking Beta signup page, asking for your WoW username and password. I deleted the comment before it ever hit the page, but I was curious enough to investigate. If you fill in something (I filled in nonsense), you come to a second page that says: Blizzard Entertainment is seeking for experienced and highly motivated players to participate in the beta of the upcoming expansion , please fill out the application below to win a chance to get in the beta testing. Please enter your legal name, current mailing address, email address, and a phone number where you can be reached. Please ensure that the name entered is an ex ...
Beta Phishing

WAR Refinements
2008-01-22 13:30:16
EA Mythic are releasing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning later this year (hopefully). I've been looking at a few of the features they intend to have in - specifically, what kind of quest systems and what kind of endgame options there are.The quests look interesting. Alongside the more ordinary kill, escort, and courier ones, there's also the concept of a Public Quest. TenTonHammer says: Public Quests are area based quests that you trigger by crossing over into an area where a Public Quest is taking place. Basically, once you're in the area, you can help with the quest. They're things that no solo player could achieve, but that a mass of people can, without the organisation necessary for raid-type content. It looks to me to be a bit like the War Effort way back when in World of Warcraft - you get rewards for participating, the more you do, the more you get, and you can drop in an out as you want, rather than having to be there all the time. Then there's the Tome of Knowledge, which ...
War

World of Warcraft: Second First Impressions
2008-01-21 13:26:22
I'm back in WoW, for a short while, mainly because a good few of my guildmates there are trying this PvP thing, and I like PvP. My first two impressions were, "Woah, smooth!", and "Woah, lag!"Having been controlling ships in EVE for a while, I'm used to a slight delay in response. The battleship I've been piloting for a while now turns like an arthritic whale. The responses in WoW are instantaneous, and it lends a definite feeling of smoothness to the whole experience. On the other hand, there was ferocious lag across the entire battlegroup last night, and it made things... interesting. I could be into the third or fourth spell, from a buttons on the keyboard point of view, and not know if the opponent was still there or not. Once, I ran over a cliff, and was watching the pretty falling motion, and then was suddenly back on top as though I hadn't fallen at all. And then the whole battlegroup crashed. PvP in WoW is easy and risk-free. You don't even have to pay repair costs when you ge ...
First Impressions Impressions Warcraft

Torchwood Series 2: Preview
2008-01-14 13:25:07
Torchwood returns to BBC on Wednesday 16th January, at 21:00 on BBC2. It'll be showing in the US on HDNet from Monday, February 11th. This article contains speculation, spoilers, and rumours!So, there've been a few preview spots on BBC, one of which features John Barrowman as Jack alternately snogging and fighting with a new character, played by James Marsters. This is, of course, pretty nearly the ultimate in slash fiction wish fulfillment - although possibly without the fighting. I do know of one regular slash reader who's a little disappointed with it, though; she says there's no speculation left in it when it's so direct. We also know that Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman, is going to make an appearance in Torchwood during this season. Martha was last seen leaving the Doctor at the end of series three of Doctor Who. There are various other rumours floating around as to who else is going to appear in the series, but few enough are confirmed. The Telegraph reports that there ...
Preview Series

WoW: 10 Days of PvP
2008-01-11 10:31:38
So there's this Scroll of Resurrection deal for WoW, whereby someone can give you 10 free days on your existing lapsed account. Coincidentally, this is exactly the gap in time between the date when my EVE account renews and the date I want it to renew for convenience. And further, the end-game bit I really like in WoW, the PvP, has just become a lot more popular among my guildmates. So for a while at the end of this month, assuming my guildmates haven't got bored of PvP, I'm going to set a long skill training on EVE, and go play WoW for ten days. I'll let you know how it goes. ...
Wow

EVE: Armor Tanking Dominix
2008-01-07 18:47:47
So I got the Dominix built, and was slowly working up to large guns - or rather, working up to Gunnery V, which is a pre-requisite, when my Myrmidon got blown out from under me again. This time, it wasn't necessarily my own fault - I'm suffering from occasional freezes in the game, and I'm not sure if it's the connection, the PC, the mouse software, or something in the game itself. Anyway, I was lined up on a warp-out station, and I was right-clicking to get a menu, and nothing was happening. When the screen moved again, I was in a pod.So (after some swearing, and a consolatory bottle of beer) I sat back to consider whether I could run medium rails on a battleship. It sounds daft, but my damage is more from my drones than my guns. Poking around the EVE forums led me to consider a fairly solid armor tank, and when I found I could run a Capacitor Recharger II without further training, that decided it. Six medium rails up front, five CRIIs in the mid slots. In the lows, I have two large ...
Armor

Ten Books io9 Can't Wait to Read in 2008
2008-01-07 17:16:18
io9.com is a new scifi blog that I'm really enjoying. It covers new and literary scifi, rather than the Star Trek type stuff. This is a listing of ten books they're looking forward to in 2008, for instance, and I can't bring myself to disagree with any of them.read more | digg story ...
Books

Future Expansions of LotRO
2007-12-10 13:56:30
Hayoo over on Visions of the Ring has created a dynamic map of likely expansions to LotRO up to 2015. It's all speculative, of course, but based on the known story and the existing maps. An eight-year plan for an MMO would be very ambitious, but I wouldn't think it's impossible, either. ...
Future Lotro

EVE: Punching Thieves
2007-12-10 13:22:20
So I was poking around a few belts in a 0.5 sec system in EVE last night, killing off NPC pirates (rats), and salvaging and looting as I went. And this guy showed up, fairly legitimately salvaging wrecks that other people had left lying around, and then going after my wrecks. Now, him salvaging my wrecks is annoying, but allowed - salvage, it's felt, is not loot. It was when he started lifting my loot as well that I got annoyed.There's an automatic aggression flag that goes on when you steal loot from someone else (or anything at all from a can they've jettisoned). So having checked with some more knowledgeable players that Concord would not come and beat on me, I locked my sights on him as a warning. He popped another wreck. He was flying what looked like a Vexor, a good cruiser-class drone ship. However, I'm aware that the T2 Ishtar-class looks very much the same, so I took a good look at the information before going any further. But no, he was definitely there, in a T1 cruiser, popp ...
Thieves

Pirates of the Burning Sea Beta Review
2007-12-08 20:55:39
Well, I've played some of Pirates of the Burning Sea. Leonardo Mendoza is now a level 6 Freetrader. It probably will not be to everyone's tastes, but for my money, it's absolutely brilliant. It has the potential to be a very deep, interesting game, and I've not yet got to grips with any part of it in depth. But here are some of the things I like about it, so far.The ship handling is utterly fantastic. I was a bit iffy about this in advance; I dislike fiddly or complicated areas of any interface, and I didn't see how it would be possible to do realistic ship handling without that. In fact, the interface is beautifully simple. The up and down arrows - or W and S, if you prefer, raise and lower the sails, and the left and right arrows (or A and D) turn the ship. Depending on your ship and sails, you'll be able to sail at different speeds with, against, or at an angle to the wind. Some cannons can fire at wider arcs than others, so that to fire at your full capacity, you need to be broadsi ...
Beta Pirates Review Sea

Review: Stephen Hunt's The Court of The Air
2007-12-05 16:17:37
In many ways, I am not a terribly discerning reader. I'll chew my way through books that are badly written to get at the ideas, and deal with prosaic, unoriginal ideas if the writing is good. However, Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air has the most bizarre mix of superb ideas and bad writing I've seen in a long, long time.The setting is a steampunkish, magic-using, New-Weird-ish one, obviously owing a good deal to both China Miéville and Philip Pullman. The lead characters are not one, but two orphans with unknown inherent powers. There are voodoo-using, Loa-worshipping robots, floatquakes which can throw segments of land into the sky, and restraining orders for those suspected of having wild magical powers. It's jammed with excellent combinations of ideas, some really good, evocative descriptions, and some of the worst dialogue I have ever had to read. The thing that jarred most was the search-and-replace nature of the nouns. It's as though the book had been written with words like ...
Court Review Stephen

Pirates of the Burning Sea Beta
2007-12-05 09:01:00
So the Pirates of the Burning Sea NDA has been dropped, and I can reveal that I was not in the closed beta. I have, however, got an email telling me I can participate in the open beta, so my PC is currently crunching through the necessary downloads. Obviously, there's not much to tell you about yet, but you can expect a fully detailed account of how things go in the next few days. My current intention is to play a Spanish Freetrader. I don't want to play a pirate, because I suspect that the pirates will be much the same as the Alliance was in WoW, overly popular, and therefore with more idiots than the other factions. Being Irish, I can't possibly take the British side, it wouldn't be croquet. So it's the French or the Spanish. And really, musketeers and all aside, when you think of swashbuckling, you think of Zorro and Inigo Montoya. So Spanish it will be. The class option is much simpler - since I normally end up dabbling in the economic aspects of a game far more than anything else ...
Beta Pirates Sea

EVE: Rags to Riches, Videoblogging
2007-12-03 13:51:01
Wiseones is off to a running start in the Rags to Riches competition, with a videoblog of the first day. For those of you asking about the wallet format, go to the EVE Online site, and choose the "My Character" option from the sidebar. You can then click through to the character, and download the "Wallet Journal" and mail it to me. ...
Rags Riches

EVE Online: Rags to Riches Competitors
2007-12-02 00:34:34
The competitors for the EVE Online: Rags to Riches competition are: Crazykinux, Bellacrow and Wiseones. You may open your trial accounts tomorrow, December 2nd, and I'll expect to see wallet transactions in my email (gothwalk@gmail.com) each day for fourteen days. Post accounts of what you're doing as often as you like, but at least twice over the fourteen days. If you don't have a blog of your own, email your account to me and I'll post it here. ...
Rags Riches

Rags to Riches Reminder
2007-11-29 12:53:57
This is to remind you that the EVE Rags to Riches Competition closes for entry tomorrow. Get your entry in! And if you're not entering, but know someone who might like to, be sure to point them at it. ...
Rags Reminder Riches

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