Massively

The building of a character in World of Warcraft can be just as painful as balancing a budget by hand without a spreadsheet. The number-crunching side of the game where you have to figure out hit ratings and mana regeneration rates and dodge percentages is something that few people can say they really enjoy. This is especially true when you are nearing the end-game in WoW and you can't just count on your fingers anymore. What if there was a tool that let you play "what if" games with your character (or your planned character) to see how different combinations of gear, talent points, gems, enchants, and even buffs would affect your character? Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that day is here.

Chardev.org is not only a fantastic web application, it also has a gorgeous user interface that is simple to use. You can either build a character from scratch or import your existing character from the Armory. Once you've made it that far, it's as simple as pointing-and-clicking to swap out gear, switch gems, redistribute talent points and add or remove buff effects. The display of thirty-five essential statistics remains fixed on the left side of your screen during most phases of editing process. At the present time, it only supports gear from level thirty and up but that's no real drawback. There are way too many customization options on this site to describe every one. You really need to experience it for yourself.

The Chardev site is a dream-come-true for people who enjoy playing with numbers, but hate doing the math. Check it out!

Whether you play EverQuest or World of Warcraft or City of Heroes or Lord of the Rings Online, or any other MMOG, one of the most highly anticipated times of the year is the holiday season. Why? Because every year the people we love to hate through the other eleven months of the year (i.e. the developers) bring us holiday events that bring a festive flavor to the virtual worlds that we spend so much time in.

Being predominantly a World of Warcraft player, I got a fair bit of enjoyment out of this year's holiday offerings. Admittedly I didn't do the quests (I did most of them last year), but I did do my fair amount of kissing in the inns to get my holiday goodies which ranged from snowballs I could whip at gold spammers, to holly that would transform my dwarf's ram (or his gryphon) into a reindeer. I also really enjoyed the festive recipes that came in our mailboxes at the beginning of this year's event and made a lot of Hot Apple Cider that I shared with guildmates.

Sometimes though, the holiday spirit hits you between the eyes from an angle you don't expect it. Sometimes in the midst of chaos, bad manners and spam you find a single person or a group of people who are doing their best to exude a real spirit of generosity and kindness to those around them in-game.

Over in Bree (in LoTRO) a guild by the name of The Order Of The Silver Hand had their own Santa event, and handed out gifts to players who stood in a single-file line on their server for over four hours! Everybody got at least three gifts according to Hjalmar who acted as Santa for the event.

Closer to home I was walking through Ironforge a couple of days before Christmas on the Gnomeregan server (in World of Warcraft) when I heard a familiar voice. It was the voice of one of my guildmates, Nellisia. She was calling out to anyone and everyone within the sound of her voice to come to the steps behind the Christmas tree in Ironforge and pick up gift-wrapped presents from her and her sister! Folks, this wasn't a guild event. I didn't even know it was going on. This was just a few girls who went out and farmed/bought tons of stuff, and handed out gifts to everybody who asked. I'm even told there was some gold handed out too! I don't know about the rest of my guild, but I'm mighty proud to have this young lady in our guild family who put such a positive face on our guild on her own time, on her own dime, with no need for recognition. Way to go, Nellisia!

To The Order Of The Silver Hand, and to Nelissia and her sister... I salute you! What other selfless demonstrations of the holiday spirit did you see in your game this season?

Every year I am faced with a dilemma. I am faced with the question of which calendar I am going to buy to hang on "the hook" that is attached to my wall beside my computer with 3M command adhesive. The last couple of years I've lucked out with some exotic car calendars from a car dealer I do business with, and this year I picked up a "motivational" calendar from my mother as a Christmas gift that sports such motivating one-liners as "Perseverance is a sign of someone who is too stupid to know when to quit."

The Jesters of Middle Earth guild clearly decided to take matters into their own hands though. They created a 2008 wall calendar (in printable PDF format) of the female avatars in the guild in a variety of poses. Sorry guys, there are no (overly) naughty elves in this publication, but I think this is a really incredibly creative idea from Jesters.

With the right software it would be a simple thing to make such a calendar for any guild, perhaps with a raiding schedule or guild meetings pre-marked on it. The Jesters calendar is freely downloadable here. You can either print it yourself or take the PDF to your local Staples-kind-of-place and get them to print it on nice heavy stock and bind it for you.

Hat's off to the Jesters of Middle Earth (and the talented Rowanath) for a wonderful idea, and a great contribution to the LoTRO community! September will never be the same.

The holidays are coming, and what more lovable folks exist on your gift list than the hardcore PvP players in your life? You know the people I'm talking about, everybody has one. (In my case, I have about fifteen of them in my guild.) They're the ones who blow three, four, six, eight or more hours sitting in PvP arenas and battlegrounds. They're the ones who overdose on Red Bull and sit in their dimly lit computer rooms screaming into their headsets, and white-knuckling their mice.

So what do you buy as a stocking stuffer for your favourite PvP enthusiast. They do, as a whole, tend to go through input devices (mice and keyboards) particularly fast. There are lots of good gamer keyboards out there, but what about mice?

PvP purists will tell you that wireless is not an option. Anything that requires batteries for power is a weakness that cannot be allowed, so wired is preferred by most. For $22 USD, Brando is offering just such a unit with an innovative twist that is clearly aimed at the hardcore gamer segment. The 800 dpi USB Optiwind mouse has a cooling fan built into it that will keep your hand cool and prevent it from getting sweaty, thus interfering with your "PvP productivity."

Bring some tidings of comfort and joy into the world of the PvP gamer in your life.

For you World of Warcraft players who are dealing with patch-related downtime and for others who find themselves with nothing to do, let me remind you of something. If you use Ventrilo for in-game voice chat for whatever game you play, and your Ventrilo host has made the upgrade to version 3.0 today, you'd better get into upgrading mode.

Although information seems to be sparse on the actual Ventrilo site (other than this changelog), I found a fair amount of information on the site of the Ventrilo provider that my guild uses.

From my understanding of the semi-cryptic explanation offered, version 2.3 clients will not communicate properly with version 3.0 servers, and version 3.0 clients will not communicate properly with version 2.3 servers. It would therefore be in your best interest to find out which version your host is running and act accordingly!

You can find the updated Windows client here, and the updated Mac client here.

One of the things I love the most about writing for Massively and WoW Insider is that I get incredible exposure to what is going on in the MMO world and the ideas that come from the brilliance of the people who make these games we love so much. Some ideas are "me too" ideas that hopscotch from one game to another to another. I think it's safe to say that player housing is one of those. Lots of games have had it, Lord of the Rings recently introduced it, and I think there's a chance World of Warcraft may follow suit in the not-so-distant future to some extent. The problem with player housing -- from my experience -- is that you never have enough "stuff" to fill your home. I remember a few Everquest 2 homes I toured that were 98% candles, and others that resembled rat mazes of bookshelves simply because there was nothing more interesting to do with the virtual real estate.

Turbine sure came up with a winner of an idea though... a taxidermist! Lotrolife.com has published a great article about the taxidermy vendor in Bree near the Vault-Keeper. The premise is simple. Animals now have a chance of dropping a rare undamaged hide when you kill them. If you get one of these hides, you can take it to the taxidermy vendor and get it stuffed into an item you can display in your home! In my opinion, this idea has limitless potential for future development. The undamaged skins are rare drops now, but what about rare creatures? Will they (or should they) always drop a skin? Wouldn't it be cool to have a trophy in your virtual living room of an especially difficult or rare encounter? In my opinion this is a brilliant way to allow players to decorate their homes without needing to pick up a tradeskill or spend a ton of money on player-crafted items.

Everquest will always hold a place in my heart. One of these days I will go back. As strange as it may seem, there is a part of my soul that I left in Greater Faydark, high atop the tree city of Kelethin. I think it's the MMORPG place that always felt the most like home to me. Even in my later years and levels I went back to that city every night before I logged off. I wish somebody could identify and duplicate that "feeling" and put it in another game. Until such time, Everquest retains it's crown despite it's dwindling numbers.

To some this may seem like The Ballad Of The Sugar Plum Noob, but the good folks at SOE have kindly published some tips on their site on how to survive this coming Tuesday's patch with a minimum of anxiety or discomfort. To a certain extent, this information is good information for all of us who live in virtual worlds, not just the world of Norrath.

1. Don't let the door kick your butt on the way out. In other words, get off the server before the engineers pull the plug. There's always a possibility of a game transaction being lost if your timing is off. I've also seen cases where a rollback has had to be performed and people who tried to further their characters in the eleventh hour got burned.
2. Physician heal thyself, or at least get a necromancer to help. Sony suggests that even though the servers will attempt to clear corpses during maintenance it's always best to do it yourself.
   
3. Be a shutterbug. The best way to protect yourself from maintenance-induced psychosis when your custom user interface becomes borked is to take a screenshot of it in all of it's pristine (functional) glory before the mayhem begins on Tuesday. A screenshot can be a useful tool for remembering what you had, and what you need to replace.

A definite hat tip is in order to the folks at SOE for their thoughtfulness in publishing these helpful reminders!

The folks over at West Karana sure have an interesting concept. It seems the author of this afternoon's post was in the market for an Xbox 360 and was a little shell-shocked when the salesperson tried to sell them a copy of Pacman.

This got the creative juices flowing and our friend reasoned that if games like Pacman, Asteroids and Tetris can have such ridiculously long shelf lives, there's no reason this concept couldn't be applied to MMORPGs.

I'm with him one hundred percent. I cut my teeth on the original Everquest, which just happens to be the game she is talking about. The question is posed in the article: With all the graphic assets and geography assets already "in the can", how much work would it take to make single-player versions of some of these cherished old games? I would love to go back to the Maiden's Fancy in Neriak Commons and sit in the peeler bar where I spent so much money (on booze of course) and where I often sat sharing a drink with friends. And that's only one of many places that come to mind.

Would you pay for single-player versions of old MMORPGs? Which ones would you like to see make the transition? Could the henchmen concept from Guild Wars possibly be married to this idea with interesting results? What do you think?