Game videos so good while game is not

Posted on by
Reply

What does a pre-rendered video have to do with a game that is not pre-rendered? The artistic value of those videos is not to be questioned. Some of my favorites include Warhammer’s trailer 2, SWTOR Hope, SC2 The Betrayal and Deus Ex trailer; and that is just off the top of my head.

These videos are amazing and have often provokes comments of why are these people not making a feature length film, they are just that good and I have also wished for these artists to go and make a film.

However, these films have nothing to do with the games other than being set in the same game universe. For instance, all the videos of SWTOR show lightsaber combat as we see it in the movies; it’s a dance of hit attempts and defensive moves because a lightsaber strike is almost always lethal. SWTOR actual combat though is nothing like it. A lightsaber hit is just a hit that removes hitpoints from a total pool. A grenade in the videos kills 5 or 10 enemies. In the game is only takes away a portion of their health pool (because it would otherwise be unbalanced). In Warhammer’s trailer, the Marauder never hits the Shadow Warrior when they fight close up. In game, this does not happen, as the player with the Marauder would be pissed off. And when did a Ghost ever have that high of a rate of fire?

So, if the videos have nothing in common with the games but are only a nice piece of art, why are they being made? Do they help with PR that much (and ultimately sales?) that the cost is justified by the company? Some of these videos are so unbelievably beautiful (art direction, complexity of scene, detail, music, voice over, render quality, etc.) and so high-end that I would expect them to cost quite a bit of money, even going so far to compare them to Hollywood special effects cost. Are they really affecting players that much to justify it?

Of course, you may ignore the above if you think these are made to satisfy artistic expression and are targeted to the viewing pleasure of the audience for the sake of art and not promotion…

How to copy formulas without changing reference cells

Posted on by
Reply

I am in love with Excel and I’m not ashamed to say it. That may prove that I’m a geek, but I just love collecting and analysing data. So when in a latest project I had to copy many formulas just as they were to a different part of the sheet, I know it would be a problem. Excel tries to be smart and change the reference cells in the formulas you copy, and 99% of the time it is exactly what you need. But not this time.

It is not a new problem. I’ve had to face it many times before, but it was on a smaller scale. This time what I needed spanned formulas over 5 worksheets and about a quarter of them were the same formula used over and over. This meant that about 500 cells needed to be copied from one worksheet to the other 4 and they were not in the same place. This was going to be a nightmare.

Now, Paste special… option is all very nice and good, and I’m using it many times and it helps greately, but it does not have that specific method to allow me to copy the formula just as it is. I’m sure many people would need that method of copy/paste but it’s not in there. Searching for an answer I found a trick that works best. Just turn the formulas into a text format. Then copy over the exact formula text and presto! You are done!

If you are using an Excel version that can select multiple non-adjoining cells, then you can select the original cells and the ones you pasted and use Replace on both to revert them to working formulas again.

Symbolic and hard links for dummies

Posted on by
Reply

Let me start by saying that this will be mostly for users of Vista and Windows 7 (as those are the ones I’ve tested and understood). Apologies to users of WinXP and MacOS, what I cannot test I cannot comment on.

First of all, I wanted to write this as it became apparent that there is no one place out there to offer solid and valid information about the topic subject. Once I understood what each term is, it became so clear to understand what the general misconceptions and misunderstandings are.

Most of it comes from using the wrong terms. For instance, many sites describe the mklink /j (path) (path) command as creating a hard link to a directory. The mistake is that windows does not allow hard links to directories, it uses junctions (hence the /j switch of the command which stands for junction). Another mistake is that they provide the same explanation of hard links and junctions when they are two different things.

***WARNING***
none of the links here are applicable for network connections outside of your own local network, so no connections to FTP servers or cloud backups etc.

Let’s start with the simplest:

Shortcut

has no correlation to symbolic links, hard links or junctions. For normal home use it is best to be thought of as being only able to be acted upon by the user. This is the only way to access the file or directory that the shortcut points to. No program (other than Windows Explorer) can understand it.

Note to purists; yes, I have heard of programs that can work with shortcuts and mimic the way symbolic links work, but that is pertinent to the program used and not the whole system. It might be time to change those shortcuts with symbolic links so that every program you use can potentially use the data you point to without worrying about compatibility.

Some general rules to remember from now on.

All of the links are transparent to all the applications you will use. No program has any kind of way to understand it (except maybe some backup programs that try to be smart, but that is very specific and you should read the manual for explanations or contact their support to find out how they use links). The effect is that you can point ANY program you like ANYWHERE on your system. Examples include moving Google Chrome cache, Steam games and iTunes library. The reason you might want to move something does not matter, you simply can. What matters is choosing the right type of link for the job at hand, and even that is so simple that you will almost always use a symbolic link over all others. This is why I will describe the links from the most restrictive to the least one, so you can choose the right one.

Hard link

this is all about files and only files. You cannot use hard links with folders (remember we are talking about Windows here), you cannot use it across volumes (so no hard link on C: pointing to any other volume other than C:), and you cannot use it across the local network.

So what is it? To understand that you must understand what a file is. For the purposes of this discussion, a file is the filename and the data it contains. So you have this database file (maybe your expense-income file?) that is 10MB and has a filename house.db and it is inside the folder Peter (I’m keeping it simple, don’t rip my head off). For whatever reason you see fit, you decide to make a hard link to that file in your temp folder so you use mklink /h c:temphouse1.db c:Peterhouse.db

Let’s break that down a bit. All the links we talk about here are made with the mklink command. The switch /h denotes you want to make a hard link. Then comes the full path of the link you are creating along with its name, and then the original filename with its full path. The name of the link can be anything you want, including the same as the original file, except in the case where you are creating the link in the same folder as the original file, in which case it must be different.

mklink /h c:temphouse.db c:Peterhouse.db (correct)
mklink /h c:temphouse1.txt c:Peterhouse.db (Correct – you can do that, but programs will get confused about the txt extension just as if you had renamed the original file)
mklink /h c:testhouse.db c:Peterhouse.db (correct)
mklink /h c:Peterhouse1.db c:Peterhouse.db (correct)
mklink /h c:Peterhouse.db c:Peterhouse.db (INCORRECT)

What you are doing here is creating a new FILENAME for the same DATA on your disk. Remember that a file is not just the data or the filename, but the combination of the two. This means that now the DATA on your disk has two filenames. Opening either one will access the same data, so if you open house.db, make changes, save and then open house1.db, the changes you made are there.

Furthermore, because all you do is create a different filename for the same data, you don’t use any extra hard disk space, no matter how many hard links you make for the same file. You can have 5 hard links of the same 50MB file and the space occupied on your system is still 50MB. Hard links are just pointers with different filenames to the same data. This is important to understand as deleting ANY hard link does NOT delete the data on your disk, as long as there is still at least one hard link available. Only when all hard links are deleted will the data get deleted.

If you don’t understand that, it might because you don’t see the point. Why would one need something like that, especially considering that hard links cannot cross volumes or network. Apparently, hard links are advanced stuff and thus only address advanced needs not usually needed by everyday users.

One common use is renaming. You don’t actually see that, but when the OS renames a file it is actually first creating a hard link with the name you want, and then deleting the old one. All this is transparent to you, but that is also one of the best uses of hard links in programming, since a programmer can use each step instead of calling a rename which allows him to avoid various problems. Why this is, how did systems rename before hard links and other such questions are outside the scope of this text, so I will stop it here.

Another use for hard links is to make the same file available to multiple programs (or users) without having multiple copies on your system that would consume space. If 10 programs want to access a file that is 100MB but they all want it on different folders, you would need 10 x 100MB = 1,0000 MB. Hard linking will, in this case, save you 900MB.

All in all, hard links are extremely specific in their uses and cover a very small percentage of what a normal user might want to do. Here is one danger. Remember Peter’s file house.db and the hard link he made. If Peter opens house.db and starts working on it, then Marry opens up house1.db and start working on it, each user will most probably make different changes. The data are being accessed by both users without a problem, but if Peter saves his changes, Marry doesn’t know about it. After a while, she saves her changes and in effect the data now show only changes made by Marry. Peter’s changes are gone forever. However, if you know a file is accessed by multiple users (or programs) that do not (or cannot) change anything, hard links are a good way to save hard disk space.

As a recap:
• Used only for files
• Used only on the same drive letter (volume)
• Cannot be used on the same physical hard drive if the target and source are on different volumes
• Definitions must be absolute paths (the whole path starting with the drive letter and ending with the filename)
• They do not consume extra hard disk space
• For the data to be deleted from your disk and the space reclaimed, you need to delete ALL the hard links pointing to it
• Beware of syncing problems

Junction

this has given me the most trouble when first trying to figure it out. Most suggest that this is a hard link for directories. However it has nothing in common with the way hard links work.

A junction will not provide an alternate entry to the same directory if the original directory is deleted (unlike hard links which wait for all to be deleted before deleting the data). Deleting the original data will indeed delete them, as in remove the data from the hard drive and releasing the space back to you. The junction will still exist but point to nothing, which makes it an “orphan”. Trying to access it will produce a system error message informing you that the target is not there. You can make a new folder and give it the same name as the one you deleted (and it must be in the same place as the old folder) and then the junction will work again as if nothing happened. Of course, all the data the old folder contained will still be gone.

A junction can cross volumes so you can create a junction folder in C: and point it to D: so your data are in D: but programs can access them from C: without issue.

The only similarities to hard links are that junctions cannot point to network locations, and they both require absolute paths in their definitions.

The command is in this form:

mklink /j c:Peter d:HomePeter

This will create a junction folder Peter in your C: drive root that points to data in your D: drive that are contained in the folder HomePeter

If you are in WindowsXP or Windows2000 then junctions are all you have available for folder links. If you are using Vista or Win7, then there is really no point in using junctions, use symbolic links instead, as they work in exactly the same way, and can work over your local network. Junctions are available in Vista and Win7 for reasons of backwards compatibility. I suggest you learn to use symlinks from now on.

As a recap:
• Used only for folders
• Can be used over all available local disk volumes
• Definitions must be absolute paths (the whole path starting with the drive letter and ending with the filename)
• They do not consume extra hard disk space
• Deleting the junction will not delete the original data (Win2000 users can delete all containing files when deleting a junction from within Explorer. I have tested it on Vista and Win7; every time I did just that, using delete command, delete key, clearing recycle bin and even shift+delete key, and every time the original folder remained intact)
• Deleting the original folder will “orphan” the junction. If you try to access the junction, a system error will be produced that it cannot find the folder it was expecting.
• Recreating a folder of the same name and path as the old folder will make the junction work again.

Symbolic link

used for both files and directories, can be used to point to different volumes (that means between different drive letters as C: and D:) and can also be used across a local network. Furthermore, they can be used across platforms if the target system supports the correct commands, so a Vista machine can have a symlink to a Win7 or a Linux or any other number of POSIX-compliant OS. There are some restrictions to note for cross platform links, such as Linux allowing special characters in filenames that Windows cannot read, or that Windows only allowing 31 links where other systems allow more. Again, those are too advanced topics for this text, so I’ll move on.

Symlinks also allow relative paths in their definitions. Relative paths are in the form of:

Samplefile.txt
..temp
Utils

All these are relative paths and the definitions can get complicated if you don’t know what you are doing, however they are not that hard and they could prove to provide much needed functionality. To explain the above examples, lets assume a path c:UtilstestSample

• To use Samplefile.txt you must be in c:Utilstemp and you are telling the mklink to look for (or create) a file (or a file symlink) called file.txt inside the folder Sample
• To use ..temp you cannot be in the root folder but at least one folder inside, as you are telling the mklink command to look for (or make) a folder (or a folder symlink) with the name temp by going one folder back and looking in there. If you are in C: there is no “back” to go to.
• To use Utils it doesn’t matter where you are, as you are telling mklink to just look at the root of the volume you are in now.

Symlinks act the same way for both file and folder symlinks. What is true for one is true for the other. What makes them different is what you define at the start. If you want to point to a file you make a file symlink with the command

mklink c:UtilsJohn.pst "g:My DocumentsOutlookpersonal.pst"

There is no switch here. Also note that the source file path is enclosed in “” because the path contains a significant character, the space between My and Documents. This is relevant to all mklink commands, regardless the switch you use. If your path contains space characters, then you need to enclose it in “” no matter the link you are making.

If you are making a folder symlink then the command is

mklink /d "Marry HousekeepingHome Theatre" d:manualshdtvcombo

which is telling it to make a folder symlink inside the Marry Housekeeping folder called Home Theatre. If there is no folder Marry Housekeeping in the root folder (in other words, if the path :Marry Housekeeping does not exist) it will not work, the command would have to make a folder Marry Housekeeping and then make the folder symlink in there. This is something that mklink does not do.

Finally, if you have a machine in your network that you want to point on your system someplace, then you have to map the network drive it is on and then use that path as the source drive. Let’s say that your whole music collection is not available locally to you. You map the network drive that the music is in and you give it a volume letter (and for some reason you choose K). Now you can see all the music on K:FamilyMusic but that is not where you want it on your machine, but in c:My DocumentsFamily Music

For one, you must not have a folder Family Music inside the My Documents folder. Then you just type:

mklink /d "c:My DocumentsFamily Music" k:FamilyMusic

and that is all.

As a recap:
• Used for folders and files
• Can be used over all available local disk volumes
• Can be used over local network with any platform using POSIX commands and SMB network protocol
• Definitions can be absolute paths or relative paths
• They do not consume extra hard disk space
• Deleting the symlink will not delete the original data
• Deleting the original folder or file will “orphan” the symlink. If you try to access the symlink, a system error will be produced that it cannot find the folder or file it was expecting.
• Recreating a folder or file of the same name and path as the old one will make the symlink work again.

Vader Replacement

Posted on by
Reply

I recently bought a BluRay version of the Star Wars episodes 4, 5 and 6. After watching them I have this to say; I don’t appreciate rewriting film history.

I’m referring to the final scene in episode 6 where the force-ghosts of Yoda, Obi-wan and Anakin are appearing to Luke in the celebration on Endor. Yoda is Yoda, Obi-wan is Sir Alec Guinness and Anakin is … Hayden Christensen?!? What happened to Sebastian Shaw? Who is he? The actual actor you see in the same movie when Luke removed the helmet of Vader and was originally the force-ghost of Anakin Skywalker.

I don’t know why they did that, although George Lucas did offer an explanation (from this link)

In the DVD commentary Lucas elaborates somewhat, “as [Anakin] joins The Force, he is able to retain his original identity,” Lucas said, “it’s because of Obi-Wan and Yoda, who learn how to do that — how to join The Force at will and then retain your identity.”

Lucas closes on the subject stating: “That was his identity as he was as he died.”

I’m not buying it, plain and simple. Vader was redeemed and thus should have kept the form in which he died at that time, as did Yoda and Obi-wan. Why did they not change Sir Alec Guinness with Ewan McGregor? Identities do not age, the force-ghost is not the matter they were but the essence of their being given form, if anything Yoda has said so himself, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter”. So either keep them all young as this reasoning going, replacing Sir Alec Guinness with Ewan McGregor or keep them all as they were when they died bringing back Sebastian Shaw.

Context Menu Platinum Popup

Posted on by
16

I met this little “gem” today and I was very surprised. It has been a long time since something snuck up on me like that. My detection tools are always updated and I’m very careful about handling downloads and attachments.

The problem is that once infected (and yes, it is an infection) one can no longer use the start menu shortcuts of apps mostly used. One can still launch them from any shortcut on the desktop or from their proper group in start menu, however most of us just press Start and click on our favorite app. With this infection though a popup appears that requests a registration of the Context Menu Platinum program (that I never installed, nor read in any setup dialogue steps which, yes, I do read). The close window button does not work, the Register program closes the popup without launching the app but takes you to a web page that requests anywhere from $400 to $250. All of that of course is moot, because no one requested this program in the first place.

Upon looking on the net, there are three most probable culprits; CompMgmtLauncher.exe, FILEminimizer and EmailOpenView. None of these were the cause in my system. Spent two hours trying to identify the problem using all kinds of tools and monitors etc.

Finally I just did a simple sorting and eyball-1 (look for it with my eyes) on the directories inside Program Files. It turns out that of the four directories modified in the last two days, one was the freeware Movie Subtitle Searcher from opensubtitles.org. Inside that was a directory Application Data and inside that another called Opensubtitles-1.0_1_0_0_0

Inside that was a program ShellMenu.exe with the same icon as the popup. It was of course being used by the system and could not be deleted, so reboot to command prompt, delete the file and all was well and good. After that I uninstalled the Movie Subtitles Searcher, just for the hell of it.

Cataclysmic Progression

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a little over a week now since Cataclysm launched. My paladin tank is lvl85 and has finished most of the new areas. Mount Hyjal was not that great, just a lot of the same old. Twilight Highlands I have yet to visit, since I like to do all the quests in a zone and then move to another. But the other two…

Vashj’ir was just breathtaking. I could not imagine a more beautiful setting. The bright colourful palette of the environment that could have so easily been an attack on the senses was calming and mesmerising. The emptiness of the usual maps were contrasted in the full of life landscapes of every conceivable aquatic creature, shimmering about their every day chores, a ballet of shimmering masses and constant movement that provided such a lived in experience. This was a world that I was intruding upon and yet felt a deep connection to. I’ve always loved the sea and this setting gave me many pauses that I would just admire the surroundings and try to find a piece that just seemed to belong to the previous feeling I had of a WoW map. I could not find it, and how joyous it was that I felt like this was a different game altogether. I could stay there for many more hours, and I truly wish there were many dailies to be done there so that, when I do go there and just swim about, I did not feel like there was something else waiting for me on another map.

Uldum, the vast emptiness of the desert with the lush banks of a river. Egypt renewed and Gods resurrected in a new race of WoW. Magnificent ancient tombs, wonderful architecture that simply feels like transporting through time. Had there been no Vashj’ir, this would have been my favourite thing about Cataclysm.

With all the new quests and the distracting beauty of Vashj’ir, I did not have the time or resources to level up my two professions; jewelcrafting and enchanting. This has happened of late, although I did rush to 475 in both to be able to do the daily JC quests and DE the new greens I was getting. Now it’s been about 3 days that I have really started levelling up my tradeskills, being largely helped by the fact that I switched many a product in AH (meaning buying them low and selling them high) and I levelled my mining/herbalism DK to 525 in both (but only 82 in level). Jewelcrafting is a slow tradeskill to reach an equilibrium because we cannot get more than one pattern every three days. So while there will be rare cut gems on the AH, their prices will be largely inflated by their scarcity considering that most jewelcrafters will not want to learn a new pattern that already exists in the AH. I fully expect a month before we see rare cut gems drop in price.

Enchanting is not hampered by this and everyone who flushes gold down the drain will learn it all very quick. This has led to enchants that are the most powerful in their field to be so mass produced that they are ridiculously cheap. Consider a scroll that needs 8 dusts (10g each now) and 3 greater essences (60g each now) being sold for 2-3g on the AH. This is just madness and I am purchasing all I can find and send them to my bank alt. When the equilibrium comes they will most definitely be worth much more than that.

My guild is currently at level 2 and a half. We are a very small guild, people that know each other in real life, and we don’t mind the slow progression. We have already done half the guild dungeon runs and have accepted that we will never see certain achievement rewards (like “Classy”). It is a good system, none the less, and we will eventually climb the levels and most of the achievements since at least three of us are achievement junkies. We already have UN, we just need the guild reputation to unlock it.

Reforging code

Posted on by
Reply

Christmas is approaching fast. I need to take some time off coding, thus I have decided to spend my precious vacations on… coding.

Hey, no surprises there. So this is me starting a new project. When I first started thinking about it, I saw Java code. After talking to a few friends, one of them suggested Python. This caught me off guard because I’ve always wanted to get my hands on Python but never got around to it. Everywhere I turn I hear the name Python. I am certain I will spend 500% more time than just doing it on Java, but what if I like it?

This enterprise makes it all the more crazy when one considers all the requirements. What I’m planning on coding is a tool to help WoW players manage their reforging needs. If you don’t know what that is, reforging means taking an item in the game and converting 40% of one of its stats to something else the item doesn’t already have. This is made complicated when considering there are desirable limits to how much of one stat one needs (anything above is essentially wasted) and the conflicts that arise when players start high level min-maxing. Their items will already have ONLY stats that interest them, at that time reforging takes on nightmarish proportions. To my knowledge there is no such tool available, only guidelines as to how to proceed or already set final tables of gear and their reforging. The former is just advise, the later offers no input on what to do when one does not have the complete item list in his possession.

I have run on this problem myself, the famous need that proceeded the solution, and after running many scenarios and wasting many in-game currency to the task, I stumbled upon an “algorithm” of sorts that proved effective on the next few gear I acquired. It is still in its infancy though, but I am convinced that a computer program can exist that produces good results without resulting in brute force. A brute force approach might be simple for a computer programmer, but this is a hobby of mine (yes, I’m weird) and I don’t care for brute force solutions when it comes to my hobby.

Furthermore, there still is a nagging feeling that trying to program a reforging assistant will ultimately prove that there is either more than one or no solution to the reforging “problem”, which is why there is no such program yet. We will just have to see. Wish me luck.

Shaman healer

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a few busy days now. On one hand work is keeping me quite busy and I don’t have the time I would like for WoW. On the other, Cataclysm is nearly upon us and having seen the new green quality items available simply put me off trying to attain better gear for my paladin.

So I level up a Shaman. Never played a healer before so I cannot say what changes have come with 4.0.1 shamans, but I have rarely been stressed to heal a group. Of course, all my leveling past lvl15 is done with the LFD tool, with the occasional shared quests delivered.

I have been really surprised at how easy it is to do my job. Especially when others know their job, as in when DPS knows how not to pull aggro even if they can. I have had very nice experiences with some tanks that were capable and enjoyed their role and communicated with me to find an equilibrium between maximum mobs pulled and survivability. Communication in a team effort of any sort is key.

However, there are the cases when the tank is incapable of holding aggro due to his fault, or when the tank is lazy and/or inefficient and DPS gets impatient and pulls mobs. Then the shaman healer (of low level – sub 60) is slightly more tested and engaged. Still, it was easy. Having an Earth Shield on the tank means almost never having to heal him directly and I find that incredibly powerful and lazy. I shall wait to see in further levels if there is any difference.

Jewel crafting has been a daily effort. With the changes in the gems my prior almost full complement of gems recipes has been reduced and I have been working to relearn them all. I still don’t understand why jewel crafters are the only people that have to work for four days to learn a new recipe. Even Inscriptors can buy books from the AH at a price no more than 50g at my server. Titanium ore goes for 9 to 10g each and titanium powder for 30g. That is 30 x 10 x 4 for one jewel crafting recipe if you buy it from AH. Furthermore, we still lack a 32slot bag even though our product does not stack… Maybe we will see some improvement in Cataclysm… but I don’t hold my breath!

Cold cap and you

Posted on by
1

There are many sites and blogs about that talk about making money in WoW. There are even some that sell you the “secrets” for doing that. Most, if not all, talk about reaching gold cap, somewhere around 214.000 gold pieces. That is an insane amount of money for WoW. Does anyone actually need that?

Quick answer is no. WoW has no big costs. A full raid where you die twice will result in a repair bill of about 30 to 50 gold. Daily wear will MAYBE cost you 5 to 10 gold in repair. Flasks, potions, food, maybe 200g for a raid lockout period, and that is if you buy most of it and are not simply making them yourself or having a friend craft them from mats you gather. I’ll even add a staple few gems and enchants needed for new gear you got from raiding, say 500 to 1.000 gold. That is a total cost of 765 to 1.320g per week for an active diligent raider.

Say that is even doubled and go for 3.000 gold, that means that a player must make 429g per day to break even. That is a totally achievable figure by anyone, since most of that will come from the dailies. Doing 20 of them will get you about 300-350 gold and the rest comes almost on its own by various daily activities; heroics, reputation farming, auctioning stuff you find while doing the previous. Most of my friends make a minimum of 1.000 gold per day and none of them has any problem making money, slowly but steadily. It all depends on goals.

Some want to make money to buy the big mounts like traveler’s mammoth or the mekgineer’s chopper. Most just want to get by, have a safe cushion for when they need gems, enchants and repairs. Some, admittedly few, never have enough gold, their gear is almost always missing some gems and/or enchants and they keep on whining about the high cost of repairs. All of them talk about the cold cap, all of them are in awe of people who reached it, but none of them are actively trying to boost their income by using the many information readily available. In the end, all of them have a good time playing and complaining about their gold is only a passing thought, a momentary hiccup in their enjoyment. None of them actually need the gold cap.

The gold cap is just a self imposed achievement, in that WoW doesn’t give you something for reaching it. It is just an ego booster, a goal one sets for himself, an announcement that you are good at your craft. I’m making about 15k a week, nowhere near the figure of a good auctioneer or harvester (or even a skinning bot), but I have reached all my goals, bought all the stuff I wanted and the gold just keeps climbing. Eventually I will reach the gold cap, simply because my income exceeds my expenses. Is that something worthy of admiration? Or is reaching the gold cap only admired when you actively pursuit it and reach it quick enough? What is the allure of the gold cap? Capitalism?

The wind of soul change

Posted on by
Reply

Something interesting came up. Everyone knows that warlocks use soulstones, although most people don’t know how little they need. Used right a warlock will not need more than 5 or 10, ever. So the soulbags were always a curious thing for me. Why have a bag devoted to souldbags with room for 32 of them?

Well that issue now is moot. Soulstones are three, max, and they are not items, they are a resource visible in the screen and nowhere else, like the DK runes. But then what about the soulbags? This is the interesting thing! They are now plain bags.

The Knights of the Ebon Blade sell such a recipe for Abyssal bag, a previously soulstone bag that now is a 22 slot plain bag. Instead of the 4 moonshrouds and 4 ebonweave that the Glacial bag needs, this one needs 4 ebonweave and 2 spellweave cloth. Now I know what you think, spellweave is much more expensive. Yes, but that is not why I’m writing this.

I’m writing this because Abyssal bags do not have a crafting cool down and they too are 22 slot. Enjoy!