This isn’t the first time that I played D3, I did get beta access about a month and a half ago.  But I really only jumped into the beta to see what the fuss was all about.  Personally, I did not think it possible to administer crack via the interwebs, but somehow Blizzard found a way.  I swear, even in the closed beta they had the iCrack delivery system well established.

While I’ve never played any of the Diablo’s in the past, I am familiar with the “dungeon crawler” type of game.  Some of the games range from the text only Zork, to the early Wizardry and Might and Magic series of games.  I’ve also pretty much mastered the Eye of Beholder series and it’s pseudo-random little brother Dungeon Hack.  One should note the relative age of these games.  I haven’t really played a true dungeon crawler since around 2000 or so.  Until D3, of course.

The first character I rolled was a Barbarian.  He is currently only level 17, but he’s also a pure joy to play.  It’s all “Hulk SMASH” all the time.

The controls are incredibly simple, the rewards almost literally explode from enemies, and with the variety of destructible environmental items it’s easy to see why D2 has been so popular for so long.  I have no idea of how the story telling went in D2, but I can say that in D3 I an entirely engrossed in it.

WoW’s MoP expansion is basically just around the corner and I’m very much looking forward to it, but I also have to admit, to myself at least, that D3 now has a permanent place in my game rotation.

-b1urry

So, as any WoW player could tell you, the beta for the Mists of Pandaria expansion is in full swing.  It has actually been available for better than a month now, but it has only been since this past week that Blizzard announced that all Annual Pass holders are finally able to enter it.  As for myself, I’ve been in since the third round of invites and I have been having a ball with it.

I’ve spent most of my time re-acclimating myself to the default UI and running through the quests that are currently available.  Endir is currently 88 and is thumping heads in mountain steppes of Kun-li, and Unguis is applying the pew pew in the Krasarang Wilds.

With this post I’m not going to do any particular analysis of anything in particular.  What I do intend is to simply put down my impressions of the world itself and the quests that we will be immersed in.  For the full set of screenshots, check out the full MoP Landscape gallery.  At the time of this writing we are currently in build 15677, so some things may change once the expansion goes live.

The Jade Forest

The Jade Forest is simply amazing with it’s rich forests and towering green spires.  The flora is extremely varied, going from a dense bamboo filled valley, to rich stands of old growth woods, and even a boggy marshland that is home to some rather large crocilisks.

One thing that struck me as being quite visually remarkable are the various bridges that can be found in this zone. These bridges are sharply arched and ornamented in a very East Asian style.  They span everything from streams and rivers to spanning the peak of one spire to the next.  One large bridge in particular is rather spectacular.   It spans from a hilltop just north from the central village of Windblossom, over a bamboo filled valley, and terminating at the trail into the foothills leading to the Chun Tian monastery.  This impressive bridge also houses a massive bell, known as the Bell of Hope, and is tended to by a Pandarian who occasionally laments that he cannot take the time to visit the bountiful bamboo forest below.

As a general rule, the art in WoW tends to be rather abstract, most definitely not photo-realistic.  Because of this most zones can look impressive, they don’t have that feel of a living world.  Only a few zones even came close, such as Nagrand in Outland and Howling Fjord in Northrend.  The Jade Forest is perhaps the first zone that really has that living world feeling to me.  I think it has less to do with the level of detail of individual items and more to do with those details that are most easily overlooked.  One example would be the presence of weeping willows and lily pads along the shores of many of the small bodies of water.  Another would be the pure abundance of critters, and critters with baby critters in tow.  That’s right, not only are there worg pups, tiger kits, or bear cubs running around, but actual baby critters.  Baby turtles, otters, rabbits, you name it.  If there is an adult critter in the world, there is also a baby version of it running around as well.  I have to admit, after killing all those rabits (misspelling intentional) in Stonetalon Mountains waaaaay back in the day, I did wonder at times where they all came from.  Now I know.

Valley of the Four Winds

At the moment, this zone reminds me very much of Nagrand in the Outlands, although with fewer floating rocks and just as many large, angry four-legged beasties.  The valley is a pastoral zone, with rolling hills, farmland and a number of wetland type water features.  It is home to the Tillers, a farming faction, and the tremendous Stormstout Brewery.

The brewery is the ancestral home of Chen Stormstout, who you help several times during your time in the valley.  It is also haunted by a bad mojo and some very angry drunk monkeys.  The brewery itself dominates it’s part of the zone and it’s mysteries are the focus of the five man dungeon found there.

The Tillers can be found at the town of Half Hill, smack in the center of the zone.  This area is considered rich farmland judging by the size and complexity of the Tiller farms found north of Half Hill. These farms are essentially large plots of land devoted to growing over-sized vegetables and grains.  It is rumored that after gaining enough reputation with the Tillers will gain you a farm of your very own to tend to.  This farm will apparently allow you to grow your own herb nodes and several cooking mats.  Speaking of cooking, it also seems that there are a couple of specialty cooking trainers located at Half Hill, teaching either Oven or Grill specializations.  I’m not entirely sure what the advantages would be for either, but it would seem that the Valley of Four Winds is going to be an important zone for folk that level those professions.

I’ll continue with the Kasarang Wilds and Kun-Lia Summit in a follow-on post in a bit.  Of course I’ll follow with Townlong Steppes and the Dread Wastes, and finally the central domain of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms later on.

-b1urry

I am involved with a couple of online employment sites that offer freelance work, and I regularly scan available jobs in both web development and copy-writing.  This is a wonderful way to get a foothold in the industry, but in the area of copy-writing I see a trend in some SEO requests that I’m not really okay with.  Fortunately for my sensibilities, Google is taking steps to make sure that much of what I’m going to discuss will actually punish a site for using these tactics.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is very important for any company with an online presence.  Who wouldn’t want to have their site at the top of any search involving their area of business?  As long as there are search engines SEO will always be a factor and those who are masters at it will always be a valuable resource , but like anything that can be gamed there is a dark side to it.  I’ll discuss in more detail my opinions about good SEO in a later post, but here I’ll be touching on keyword cramming, link farming, and spinning; three of the most often used of the more underhanded tactics out there.

Let us start with keyword cramming.  This is as obvious a tactic as it sounds.  An article or post is written to include as many keywords as possible that were provided by the business requesting the work.  In the past this was an almost accepted technique to improve your chances of topping the search charts, however search algorithms are far more complicated now and relevance is key.  Stuffing a 500 word article with dozens of keywords can quickly lose relevance with relation to what the article is supposed to be about.  Readability and comprehensiveness often suffer from this treatment.

Link farming works on the principle of generating outside relationships linking back to a particular website.  One thing that many search engines look for while calculating a site’s search rank is how many other sites link back to it.  A number of freelance requests for blog or forum posts attempt to do this, as well as some article work.  Sometimes the work is turned in to the hiring party and then they in turn inject links to point to their customer sites.  A funny thing that happens when this is done, as it’s done on a large scale, is that the links have absolutely no relationship to what is written.  These articles are also posted on blogs and forums far and wide.  In a fashion, this is very much related to comment spam that bloggers and forum administrators struggle to keep out of their sites.

When a human reader parses an article of this type, it can seem almost nonsensical.  However, these aren’t intended for a human audience, they are meant to be parsed by search engine web crawlers.  In the past these crawlers would send back data that basically said, “hey, there are a lot of articles written that link back to here, so here must be important somehow.”  A number of years ago, in the infancy of search engines, link farms were just exactly that, websites that contained nothing but links to other websites.  These sites were built specifically for search engines to crawl.  Fortunately modern search engines ignore these legacy sites for what they are.

Spinning.  This tactic is so utterly brilliant, yet so devious in it’s implementation.  The written language is really nothing more than patterns that follow rules.  Some very bright people have created programs that have the ability to analyze an article and create hundreds of alternate versions of it, all more or less grammatically correct and more or less legible, through the simple method of word replacement.  It is, to me, astounding and inevitable at the same time.

A well constructed spinner can create versions of the original text that use alternate characters to replace standard ones.  The result here being a visually identical copy of the text, but when parsed through an automated check for plagiarism they come out as being unique due to the replaced characters in the text.  It is entirely possible for a well tuned spinner to crank out thousands of, seemingly, different versions of a single article.  It is also possible to retain specific keywords and links so as to have the results point in the correct direction for the search crawlers.

Unfortunately for the folks that use these tactics, Google has tweaked their algorithm once again to basically find and appropriately punish those that attempt to abuse the system.  Google has said repeatedly that well written, relevant content will always be king with regards to site rankings.  In the very near future Google will be be flipping the switch on this new algorithm and I think they said that as much as 3% of the sites ranked by Google may be affected by this change.  That may seem to be a small percentage, but that number can represent tens of thousands of websites.

To me, a website’s landing page, or home page, is the single most important part of any business’s web presence.  It has to present to the visitor a concise and focused view of what that business has to offer.  It also must present the same information to search engines, but search engines aren’t visual and that makes your written content even more important.  There are many methods to position a website, but that discussion is for another post.

~b1urry

edit – I’ll be updating this post later to add links to examples and such

Azgalor, however, was a rich diamond mine ready to drop gold into my pocket.  I say “was” because Azgalor’s glyph market now more closely resembles an asylum filled with people that are more than willing to list at a loss, while at the same time trying to gouge buyers where it thinks it can get away with it.

Over the last three weeks or so, maybe longer, competition has become insane.  There are now at least four different posters that will, for one reason or another, post their entire stock for less than 30 gold each.

I can understand that with a new expansion coming out that there will be a number of fire sales to get rid of stock that will quickly become useless, but it’s still very early days for that and there are still players willing to pay upwards of 200g glyphs.

I can also understand that it is occasionally necessary to “reset” a market by posting a large amount of stock at low prices, with the intention of forcing competitors to price lower than you so you can buy them out, or forcing them to not post for the duration.  Either method forcing a lot of competing stock out of the market long enough to be able to repost at a much higher rate.

What I don’t understand is why so many individual posters would undercut a relatively small number of items by over 100g or more and end up with a price that is barely a gold or so above margin.  It is just odd to me, people not wanting to actually make a profit.

Is it that there are too many very active participants in the glyph market currently?  Is it that it’s just that current content no longer matters and people are just going a bit screwy while waiting for the new to come?  Perhaps it’s a case of some people with way too much time on their hands and they need some way to grief others.

I have no clue.

I would love to be able to talk to a couple of these guys, but I get the feeling that I’d be seen as just one more asshole complaining about what they are doing.  And to be honest, I wouldn’t blame them.  Some marketeers receive what amount to death threats over their manipulations of a fantasy economy.

Ah well, I suppose I could just pull completely out of the market for a couple of weeks, but it’s a tad hard to do once you’ve been bitten by that gold bug.

Not too shabby for a casual raiding guild.

Our resident raiding rogue, Teenytiny, completed her quest for the legendary dagger set last April 4th, and has been giggling manically on and off since.  Only she got to see the final cut scene for when she received her daggers, which is kinda bogus on Blizz’s part.  They could have done something where we could have watched it with her, or at least arrange a “public” acknowledgement of the achievement.  But then, it is a rogue weapon, I suppose you have to expect the end to just trail off into the shadows.

Just yesterday our moar dots slinging pint sized warlock, Darktyme, finally completed that long assed quest line for the legendary staff Teragosa’s Rest.  The final investment of this weapon is a very public display in both Stormwind for the Alliance and Orgrimmar for the Horde players.  It’s actually quite an amazing display, even after having seen dozens since the Firelands raid opened.  It’s also surprising just how many well wishers there are during that presentation.  Of course it’s not at all surprising how many jackholes still ask in trade channel what all the dragons are for.

So a great big grats to my guildies, Teenytiny and Darktyme, and may SiB find many more legendary times in the future.

-b1urry