Andrew Busey: My Musings

Check out the first ever Duels comic:

It’s really cool and gives a great overview of the backstory behidn Phyrra, the world of Duels.

Speaking of WoW (as in World of Warcraft), I’ve quit playing.  I’m having more fun playing (and working on Duels) and I just haven’t had time for WoW.  I was getting tired of it even before Duels fully consumed me.

Here are my issues:

1. Takes too long to do anything.  2-6 hours to do any dungeon?  And for anything good, it was closer to the high end.
2. To get any good gear takes 10 people and that’s Karazhan.  Got everything from there.  Which leads to:
3. Nothing to do.  I’m in a top guild, but I’m a social member.  So I don’t get to raid much.  I don’t want to join another guild or raid every night, so there is pretty much nothing left to do.  Except:
4. PVP…  I’m a hunter.  No one likes hunters in Arena.  It’s hard to find a good team as a hunter.  And I’m sure not starting over.

Many of the reasons I started Duels are encapsulated in that list.  I love Duels because:

1. I can jump in and out.
2. Play when I want across whatever time increment I want.
3. I can keep it open in the background while I’m working (which in my case is on Duels, but still - there is a lot of work to do.)

Duels is still growing like crazy. In two weeks we’ve already crossed 13,000 registered users. Today we’re bringing up some new database hardware - should kill the last of our performance issues - and making some cool changes:

• New Set - Duels Core Set II. We’ve gone through 250,000 packs in the last two weeks so we’re putting the next set up today. We will also be introducing a new expansion set soon as well.
• New UI improvements:
• An inventory management page which will make it easier for you to buy/sell items and manage the items you have.
• A new challenge management page that should make it easier for you to keep track of manage your duels and skirmishes.
• A myriad of smaller tweaks.

This should be a nice step forward on serveral fronts.

First on Techcrunch: Ready To Kill Some Time (And Some Enemies)? Try Duels.com

- This resulted in a ton of traffic. It brought the servers to their knees.

Second, the article shows up on Digg: Duels.com - New Free Online WOW-like Game and Social Network Launches

- It became popular on Digg, eventually making the homepage. It currently has 500 diggs. This finished the servers off.

We doubled our server capacity.

- There was still tons of traffic coming in. We had to tune MySQL.

Meanwhile it also made the home page of del.icio.us (on the hotlist) and got picked up on a myriad of other blogs.

Next I’ll post some graphs.

You can read the article:  Ready To Kill Some Time (And Some Enemies)? Try Duels.com

This has resulted in a huge influx of traffic that has caused some server hiccups for us.  I think we’ve managed to tweak things enough that they running smoothly (although more slowly than we would like).  I’m hopeful we can get some additional servers up today, but that is not entirely within our control.

The corporate site for my new company, Oxygen Games, is live.  Check it out and find out what we’re planning to do!  Our first game, Duels , is also going live today. Stay tuned for more information! (Oh who am I kidding, like there is anyone reading my blog that is going to actually stay tuned! So if you wander through the great interwebs, fall through the “tubes”, or whatever - check out the game!

I think there are some pros and cons to each.  I know a ton of people that just stay logged into ventrilo (a common voice server) all day.   I’m not that enamored with the voice chat, but it is definitely useful in World of Warcraft.  Certainly for action and socialization, voice chat is pretty cool.  Text chat is kind of a nice way to retain anonymity and casualness.  Anyway, this article from wired.com is pretty interesting:

Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW

It looks like this patch is coming Tuesday (May 15) and that it is big.  Lot’s of changes here, especially in itemization.  It looks like virtually every level 70 epic (purple!) item is getting a significant buff in stats.  Especially items from Karazhan and the later instances (Serpentshrine Caverns, etc.).   Tier 4 and better armor is also getting bumped up.  Weapons are also getting a huge buff. 

For example, Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix, shown here in it’s post 2.1 stat (83.3 DPS +19 Agility +34 Attack Power) is currently 77.4 DPS, +16 Agility, +30 Attack Power.  This is a pretty big bump.  As a hunter I really appreciate it! 

I’ve been looking at posts on MMO Champion because they’ve been keeping a pretty good running update on what is happening on the PTR (Public Test Realm) with changes in 2.1.   Many of the updates are on WoWHead and Thottbot now too.  So if you want to see a specific change they might be better.  But MMO Champion is the easiest way to see what the latest news is.

They have also substantially reduced the honor costs of many PVP rewards items.  The epic PVP gems have been reduced in cost by 50% or more.   So if you’ve got some honor saved up, don’t spend it until 2.1!

The remaining question I have:  When is Arena Season 1 over?  I can’t seem to find this anywhere.  I can find references in blue posts (Blizzard / WoW employees on the official forums) that say Arena Season 2 is coming and will have new rewards.  They also say you can carry 5,000 Arena points forward into the new season.  So I’m curious to see how the rewards change.  (And hey, I currently have well over 2,000 points to spend and I don’t want anything that’s available right now.)  

So my guess is Arena Season 2 starts with Patch 2.1, but I can’t find anything definitive.  Anyone know?

 

You know a game is crazy when bots login every few minutes and spam everyone with messages like:

1000g for only $99.  We powerlevel 1-60, $200. 

Etc.  They have URLs, but no need to help them out by posting them here.  It’s annoying. 

I guess it’s a sign of success that so many people want to buy gold and power-leveling services.  But the spam is really starting to get overwhelming.  I’m curious to see how Blizzard handles this. 

I’m actually in the camp that says buying gold and in-game stuff is ok.  I know a lot of people disagree, but I’m sure we all agree that in game spam sucks. 

 

 WARNING:  If you receive a letter from the Argent Dawn telling you thanks for all your service to them and saying they’ve attached the present as a reward or a token of their gratitude.  This reward appears as a gift-wrapped item (commonly available in many places in WoW, probably the easiest is the reward for cleaning a grime encrusted object in Gnomeragon).   Anyway, it turns out this is a high price COD (100-300g typically) so do not accept it.  Hit return and send it back.

 So this Argent Dawn scam is not the first scam of this type, but appears to be the most prolific.  I’ve received multiple of these letters (on my main and one of my alts).  I know lots of people that have.  I assume it is hitting other servers as well.  If you’ve been hit by this scam, please post a comment preferably with what server you are on.  I’d like to try to get a feel for how wide spread this is.

I’ve seen another scam, this one got me a long time ago, popping up a lot recently.  I call it the Auction House Gotcha.  It’s simple and it also falls in more of a gray area.  It’s probably not a technical rules violation but it is evil.  Basically, there are many trade items (ores, bars, leathers, herbs, cloth, etc.) that have tons of the same item listed.  Because of market efficiencies these tend to fall roughly around the same price point.  Often you will need many of these items, especially if you are leveling up a tradeskill, and you will just click to buy them.  Click, click, click.  The auction house pops-up a buyout notice with the price, but if you’re buying more than 4 or 5 you start to ignore this.  And then boom, you hit the one from the jackass who put it in at ten or hundred times the normal price and you just bought a stack of something for 100g.   Anyway, watchout for that one when you are buying a lot of stuff in the AH.