Gold Farmers & Sellers

I haven’t bothered to express my opinion on this since I believe that just about every single gamer out there is against it. I’m strongly against it. Since the first person sold their EQ account on Ebay, I’ve been against it.

Of course in EQ when someone was dumb enough to buy and account you could spot the ebayed account right away. They would usually be someone of a high level that had no idea of how to play their class. It was sad since they would usually get their group wiped out somewhere. Then they were just plain blacklisted so it ended up being a waste of money for the person. Later on people would simply buy a higher level character of the same class they were playing.

In WoW it’s so common placed that players are buying gold just to buy better gear, that it’s just about unstoppable. I do appreciate Blizzards strong stance against gold selling and all the efforts they are going through to stop it. I had a guildie that admitted to buying gold for better gear the year before Burning Crusade came out. Then that expansion came out and all the gear he bought was obsolete. Rather funny really. But sad for the people that actually raided for the gear.

Ok back to the point, gold sellers. I had a random, out the blue gold seller message me on one of my IM programs I use. It was very strange and disturbing. I asked how he got my name. He claimed to have found it on a game forum. I only had it up on one game forum, a forum that I created for a guild I was in. Plus it was a game that you can not easily sell gold on. So I tell this guy that I don’t buy gold and no longer played the game. He asked me to basically spam my friends with his website. Needless to say I just blocked him at that point.

So it’s not bad enough that gold farmers ruin the games we play by hording all the monsters or camping spawns. Now we have to get spammed on our IM programs we used! I mean it was bad enough to have the constant spamming of gold sellers in WoW but this?

And here is why I finally wrote my opinion on gold sellers. I recently did a Google search of my alias name on Second Life and for this blog and found something that’s just very irritating. Some gold seller has posted my entire review for LoTRO, everything including all the comments for it! Didn’t bother to do a simple link back to the blog, but they did credit me for writing it. Which makes it look like I wrote the review for this asshat! View it here in all it’s glory.

Yeah, I’m surprised and shocked, but mainly I’m very very disgusted. It’s a straight rip off. I don’t even understand the continued popularity of that review since it’s a year old and was from closed beta. What I really don’t understand is why this person didn’t just do a link instead of making it look like I wrote this for them.

You need to “register” to post a comment on their gold selling blog. I rather not hang out my IP address for this jerk. I’m just pissed.

*Special Note* - I want to make a special distinction between gold sellers/farmer and RMT (Real Money Trading). When a game like Entropia Universe or Second Life has RMT built into the economy then any game money that’s being sold is not against their rules. Nor is it ruining the game for other people. Sony did give up the fight against gold sellers and put in a RMT system for EQ 1, which basically blows away outside gold sellers since a player can sell directly to another player with their system. I am not against RMT that a game has in place. Actually with Second Life people are able to pay their monthly subscription off by selling their game money.

Improv Everywhere

Let me first say, yes it’s been a long time since I posted anything. I just haven’t felt like writing much of late. Plus I was trying to refrain from joining in all the rants against Linden Lab over the past few months. That’s sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, when it comes to having ready made topic to write about. Which is why I’ve tried not to. I do have a few other topics floating in my head finally to post about.

First is about Improv Everywhere. I’ve been following their blog of late after first hearing about them from Geek Gestalt. Very creative group of people! There are more groups around the world now. I believe it all started in New York City. The New York group has some great videos on YouTube. My favorite from NYC group is this one:

It’s just so harmless and fun! I did have to wonder why the DC group had problems with their Ipod “silent” dance. They weren’t silent, from the horrible video they had they were noisy. Still I wouldn’t think that would be a cause to be arrested. Although there is a difference between the DC group and NYC group. The NYC group did state plainly that if you are asked to leave to just leave. Don’t fight it just go. The DC group made it into some weird political statement instead. Hey I agree with them, but it wrecks the process of the improv.

Although I love seeing the videos of the various groups, I have to say some of the taping is so bad that you can’t hear or see what is going on. Yet most of the taping in NYC was pretty good. I wonder how they did their taping without looking obvious about it.

Enjoy their work or join or start a group. They have more information on that on their website.

Understanding Art For Geeks

Akela Talamasca, from Massively, posted about this Flickr artist, paulthewineguy. He has a Flickr set called Understanding art for geeks. Some very geeky, but cleverly done references made on classic paintings.This painting is by Andy Warhol, called One blue pussy. The geek reference is to lolcats blog, I Can Has Cheezburger.

Edit Note: I’m afraid his art work is no longer available on flickr or his blog. Here is his post on his reason for removing it. Update 2/28/08 - He has a new Flickr set called IT everywhere. Still funny and very witty.

Understanding art for geeks #12

Originally uploaded by Paul The Wine Guy.

Comedy Photoshop Tutorials

I found this very funny photoshop tutorial series on photography blog, Photojojo. Photojojo is something to check out in itself for photography and photoshop tips. This photoshop tutorial series comes from a comedy internet tv site called, My Damn Channel. If you’re getting bored with regular tv since the writer’s strike started, check out this site for some comic relief. Some very funny stuff in there but there is also a lot of just plain silly stuff too.

What made this particular episode of You Suck at Photoshop really funny was that his eBay post was really on eBay for one day. The auction started off with a starting bid of $0.99 and went up to $750 by the time it was canceled. To see some of the Q&A comments from eBay you’ll have to go to the Digg story at the bottom. Those were equally entertaining as the video was! I’m not sure if there will be more episodes in this series, but I am hoping for more!

Oh yeah, as for the actual “photoshop tutorial” part of the videos, you can actually learn something from them if you already have some familiarity with photoshop. Right before episode 4 came out I had just started getting my feet wet with the pen tool and paths. Masks I haven’t tried yet. He did give some small tips on how to edit your pen paths.

This episode brought to you again by Donnie, is about paths and masks. Have fun and learn a thing or two.

digg story

Second Life Age Verification: in beta now

I wrote a couple of posts about this when it first came out in May, that Linden Labs was going to put in age verification. I wasn’t happy with the way they were going to implement or the fact they needed to clean up their own mess with the whole, no credit card needed thing. (That just opened the door for anyone to go on the Main Grid were it was adult only. Yet on the Teen Grid you still need credit card info. *boogle*)
Ok, /rant off.

Last week it was announced that Linden Labs has put age verification into beta testing. There are some glitches in the system though. Massively has been publishing some very good articles on the subject, this one has some very good info in it. I would have to say after reading that article, Linden Labs should scrap this age verification system and go back to the drawing board. Maybe put back the old credit card verification system they once had and charge the one time fee of $9.95 again. Basically, if an under age person really wants to get on the Main Grid in SL, all they ever have to do is pose as one of their parents. So no system will ever be full proof.

Edit: 12/9/07 - Linden Labs has their latest blog post to answer resident questions. They are answering most of the questions we all had back in May but were not answered at the time. Probably because they didn’t know the answer then. Massive has another insightful post today. It’s a rather funny post on how many people are using dead celebrities and even live ones to verify with.

Elder Scrolls MMORPG is official!

I was very excited a month ago when I saw this post on Voodoo Extreme. But I was cautiously happy, since there was nothing official on it yet from Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls site. Well I just found this post on QJ.Net. (I’m a month late seeing that post though.)

I’ve seen many blogs buzzing about this since Voodoo Extreme first posted. Still there was nothing concrete yet. QJ.Net is the closest thing to concrete so far. Massively had several articles with different speculations on it.

I’m still worried that Elder Scrolls Online will be yet another WoW knockoff. I would like to see something new or improved in the way of MMORPGS. There are several things about the Elder Scrolls series that I really like. One main thing that I noticed right off with Oblivion, was the quests. They are not straight forward, some are even hidden quests. Even the Thieves and Assassin Guilds were hidden. The second thing was all the mods available to tweak the game itself. Plus you can even make you’re own mods for the game.

First Meta

I’m finally getting a bit more into SL again. I guess I just needed the SL vacation time. Plus I was having some creative blockage. Anyway, JEVN recently had an update for their vendor system. In the release notes she mentioned that the vendors are now First Meta compatible. Since I love to tinker with gadgets and learn about different ways JEVN can be used, I needed to look into this First Meta thing.

First Meta is a credit card for Second Life. They also offer a saving account. The credit card idea sparked my interest. I have no need of using one but enabling my vendors to accept a credit card is a great idea! Their current merchant list is not fly by night merchants either. So I do have faith in this company. It will be interesting to see how many people use their credit cards.

New Way of Picking a Candidate

I just saw this on my local CBS station which showed a great way to choose one of the millions of Presidential candidates. Instead of watching one of many debates, which we’re going to be drowning in for next year, Glassbooth.org helps you see where candidates stand on issues that are personally important to you.

I encourage anyone in the USA to check this out. Since we are having to wade through so many candidates with a list that grows and shrinks monthly. It takes 10 min. to take the quiz which is rating system of which topic is most important to you.

I ended up with Dennis Kucinich, which surprised me. I mean the only thing I ever heard about him was that he had a “hot” wife. The media rarely talked about what issues he stood for. Basically the media only focuses on the top 3 candidates from the Democrats and the Republicans. They don’t even pay attention to the other parties. Hmm…I’m not even sure this site pays attention to the other parties but at least it does show the candidates in the parties.

Travian - Curiously addicting

Travian is a free browser game that’s heavily advertised on different game sites. The first thing that comes to my mind for a browser game is either something very good like Runescape or something very very bad. (No example of bad since I run away screaming from them.) Travian is a RTS game, Real Time Strategy, similar to the Warcraft series.

I wondered how a RTS game would work in a browser. It’s actually much easier to do than what the RPG game Runescape did. The funny thing about Travian is that it becomes addicting. You want to build up your village and go off to conquer or pillage someone. Like all RTS there is a bit of a flow chart in the order of things you can build. I enjoy this game because I can do other things and let this sit on the browser while I’m at another site. If you try it out and need more information on the game, there is a FAQ page and a Wiki. Also look through their official forum.

Update note 10/14/07 - There is a Beginner’s Guide on the Travian forums.  Also the 3x Speed server is exactly what the name implies. Everything is three times faster on that server versus the four other servers currently online. Which means they are seriously slow to build on.

Phil Hansen’s Art

Just in case you haven’t seen this guy’s art yet, here it is.

It was hard to pick only one of his pieces. He’s extremely unique not in the end product so much as how it’s made or what it’s made from. I should add that he’s very very talented. Here is his personal site and his Youtube site. He takes the meaning of multi-media art to a whole new level!