Malchome's Mind on Gaming

First I want to apologize to those of you that have occasionally come back to my blog.  I had a lot of ideas percolating and then got swamped in IRL work related stuff.  Such that when I did have time to blog I chose to play a variety of games instead to relax.   Anyway I need to stop doing coming soon threads as I am not very good at actually writing the ideas up in a timely manner.

So what have I been up too in the mean time.  In no particular order.

• Playing Star Craft 2, Beta – hopefully more on this soon or later.
• Playing EVE Online again, the lure of planetary exploration/exploitation in the next expansion was enough to get me back in until the expansion.  How the systems actually work will determine whether I stick around.
• Leveling more Alts, yes this time they are Horde though.  I want to get through the starting areas of each race which I essentially have now and get through Outlands and Northrend quests/lore before Cataclysm.  There is the 45-60 part of the horde questing I have not done yet either and will need to get at least 1 character through that section.
• Got a new computer so can run dual monitors and 2 WoW clients at 30FPS+ in Dalaran with graphics setting at max.  It looks like a new game.  Like I went from Warcraft to Warcraft 2 or 2->3.  But with this beast I also will be able to run one client and have a development studio open while restarting a second client without wanting to stab my eyes out at the lag.  So I may slowly get into mod development or at least making patches to my own mods when they generate errors.  If something interesting develops out of this, here is where I would post initial information.

Well that brings us to the present.  I hope to have a few short posts “soon” lol.

Well looking at my google analytics my 3 main sources of traffic are Warrior Macros, Restokin and Feed readers.  So my next few posts will have something to do with Macros, Druids and most likely the Auction House again.  I also want to discuss how I really think Cataclysm will be the best version of this game yet given several of the things mentioned about gear/stats and tanking/healing changes.

Anyway this was just a quick FYI post.

Ok I was checking out the TwistedNether site and the Blog Azeroth question of the week is a powderkeg waiting to explode.

They are asking for opinions about using the 5M+ US WoW players as a voting block to influence politics.  Now I must admit I have discussed similar thoughts with friends in the past.  But when it comes down to it, if you think herding raiders, like cats is a fun or an easy thing, then think about trying to organize 5 million into a somewhat cohesive unit.

On a slightly different note, it would be amusing and actually might be an improvement to our current political discourse in this country if shouting from both sides of the spectrum were to be like the WoW general forums.  This of course would then degenerate into Barrens Chat but even then I still think Chuck Norris jokes and stuff about someone’s mother may be preferable to the insipidness of what is going on inside the belt way.

As for a more informative and constructive post I may add to this at a later point however for now I think this may be a little too charged of a subject to really get into.  The generalizations that need to be made to just initially classify the dynamics would be enough to set people off.  Besides, I argue politics with another blogger enough at home that I don’t need to get into it here.

I have 2 topics on my mind a lot recently and I have been working, albeit slowly on composing a few posts about these subjects for this blog.  The larger post composition wise will be a review and or summary of the current crafting systems in general.  Included in this multi post review will be some comparisons of crafting systems across several games.  Some I am have used directly, others just in passing, and for the last group going by what others have said about those systems with which I have had no direct interaction.

The other post I have been working on and off for over a week now deals with travel time.  I was brought to the subject by reading thoughts on the subject on the blog, Player Versus Developer.  Specifically the June 24th post about Teleporting to Quest Hubs.  What has taken so much time was that I have been working on creating a directed graph of travel in World of Warcraft.  I know that even when finished I will be missing some of the edges that exsist.  I am very familiar with all of the alliance travel and most of the Horde pre-BC.  I have been using www.mapwow.com however some of the labels and flight paths are out of date.  It is wierd because they have Northrend from WotLK but they don’t have Mudsprocket from one of the content patches in tBC.  Anyway I hope to have the initial overview of crafting systems up some time in the next day or so and have the travel post for the weekend.

I have been meaning to start writing for this blog but things have either kept distracting me or required my attention until now.

The first few topics I plan on posting about over the next few weeks are the following.  

Raid ID and Instances (Mostly WoW)

AH and Market Systems 

The point of a Crafting System

Time and Rewards

Raids Guilds and Alliances

Some of these may evolve into a mix of the different topics and become multi-part posts just due to the scope of the subject matter.