From what I understand the reason that WoW doesn’t have any kind of housing is that they are worried about the server space issues that changing the map issues that could occur if they did something like that. I have an idea that I think would allow it without causing problems for blizzard.

You can see from previous posts I don’t like the banking system in WoW. I think that this could replace that, make more sense, be fun for everyone, and not bog down anything for the servers. It would actually make Blizzard some money as well if they did this.

Basically everyone can go to a city and get a house. There could be a few apartment complexes or entrances to nicer housing in various places around the city. It could be just a few different standard houses that everyone enters. In this house you would be able to decorate it however you want to. You can also leave your things there. It would function as your bank instead of having a “bank” that stores 20 fish in a “slot” you could dump it in your house in a barrel or something. You leave and don’t have the fish anymore.

Server side this should function just like using a bank does. It adds or subtracts items from your banking file and your character sheet. The player experience would be much improved though without burdening the server.

You could add shops and gear that would be related to making your house nicer. Achievements could be created left and right, etc. etc. You could win restricted rugs or something. You could have your companions that you don’t have out welcome you at the door really excited. You could download themes for your house. Make your house another place you can hearthstone to instead of just Inns.  Have a function to be able to add rooms and expand the amount of things that you can store with gold or achievements.

Maybe you could have gear that can be used in your house, say your trade skills. Have the sewing gear already there. You don’t have to carry around with you. You just go home and sew for a while. Maybe have gear that let you store cloth in a house. Etc.

Make it so that characters can meet there and chat. From the server side it would be no different from two or three people standing in a town hall or a building and only having their says go a certain distance. It would just create a channel per house with more then one person and leaving would be built into walking out of the house.

This way you never have an issue that someone has total control over their character sheet and can cheat because they are not actually leaving the server. They are just not rendering for passing people.

Blizzard could have different levels so that starting out you have a small apartment. For $10 you can get the expansion that gives you the graphics and such for the nicer house. Maybe for $15 you could have a guild expansion that gives you a guild hall that you can design. It could include a version of ventrilo built in and a larger set of storage space.  People could meet up and have meetings and such.

Now I can imagine that people will say that there is a disconnect that is going to occur if you can go into your house from any city. That would mess with their suspension of disbelief as much if not more then having a bank with your fish in it elsewhere. I think that you should only have your house in one place. You could move it but if you want to go home then you should actually have to travel back to your house. You can actually tell people, “I live in Darnassis but I travel alot!”.

I think that this would work well with the concept of Inn Based Banking I mentioned before. You have a house somewhere with most of your stuff but you go and rent some space in an Inn where you can leave some things while you are in the area. Say you pay the rent for a week, then you would be able to go back and leave some things in your room. If you forget and leave your things in there past the week you paid for then they are taken by the Inn.

Then you could have some sort of mule rental to help you carry things from one house to another if you move or from an Inn to your house. It could follow you around for a limited amount of time and give you the carrying capacity to move but not be around all the time.

I think that this would be useful and fun for the players, it would increase immersion in the setting, not be a burden for the servers.

Right now we have skinning which gives you scraps or a piece of leather. Other times we kill an animal and get “loot” of a pelt and some meat. Why not make these make more sense? Make the skinning skill into a dressing a kill skill, maybe call it skinning to keep it simple but expand it’s function.

Have skinning function based on what other skills you have. If you have cooking then everything you kill should provide meat. If you have alchemy then when you skin you could get reagents as well.

Also you could have different animals have different amounts of meats and leather based on size. A small animal would be worth 1 so it would provide 1 meat and 1 pelt. A medium could be 2 or 3, larger could be 4 or 5. Your skill level could determine how much of those you got in good shape. If your skill was low, or you didn’t have the “recipe” for killing birds, or reptiles, or something like that then you would possible ruin some of it and get less then the full amount. So someone with more skill would be able to get more out of the same carcass then someone else.

I think that all the Gathering skills in WoW should be secondary skills. There are several secondary skills, such as First Aid, that do alot more then any of the Gathering skills. Why not just make them all secondary skills.  That way anyone could make use of them.

Then take the primary skills and only allow one of them for characters up to 20th level or so. That way they can focus on making one type of thing for a while.

I have gotten sucked into World of Warcraft and I enjoy it but my builder nature have made me notice some things that could be improved in the game. One of these is Banking.

I think that there should be a bank account per account, per server, per side. So you would have one on each server for any Alliance characters and one for Horde characters. All of your Alliance characters on that server could access that bank account but not the Horde ones and vice versa.

The reason I think that this would be a good idea is that currently there is a lot of time spent mailing things back and forth between your Alts (assuming that you use a lot of Alts – if not then this will make no difference to you).  You have a few herbal gathering characters that gather as they explore, then you mail that stuff to another alt to make healing potions to mail back to the others. There is a lot of this going on and I consider it a fun part of the game. The problem is that you have to spend time and money mailing all the time in order to make a lot of things.

I have seen several people making what I call Alt Guilds. You get some people to sign a charter and then kick them out. Now you have to buy that first tab and you leave one other person in to add your alts. Then you can pass things back and forth between your Alts.

What I am suggesting is making that a normal part of the game. It’s something that people want to do and they are having to do an end run around the system to do it. Just make it a normal option.

Maybe each time you add an Alt your number of slots increases or you get a new tab or something like that. If you are worried about soulbound items being abused then leave them soulbound to a certain character. They show up in the bank but are only accessible by one character.

Either way it wouldn’t be that hard to implement. It would simplify things for everyone. It would allow people to save things that they like for their lower level alts and it keep people from occupying the guild system for themselves.

I have most of my nexus game rules up on a wiki now!

www.wiki.garrowolf.net

Check it out and tell me what you think!

I saw the new Star Trek movie last night. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun.

But …

I have been a Trekkie for my whole life, like alot of people out there.  There are all kinds of spin offs, cannon and non-cannon material out there. Some is pretty good but some of it just keeps missing the mark.

One of the things that always bothered me about the novels was this idea that the original Enterprise crew was not representative of the rest of Starfleet but somehow better then everyone else. I mean I understand that they were the focus of the show but it’s like having a modern military show where everyone in all the other ships are the under achievers.  I didn’t get that impression from the TV show but every novel I read had them commonly showing up everyone else in starfleet. At least it wasn’t a part of the actual cannon show.

Then with the Next Generation we were given more of a sense of the rest of starfleet and that it was full of people with drive and intelligence. It was a sense that the future was bright for everyone again. With the other series we got a variety of versions of this but it was there.

We were also developing as a audience. We were more technically sophisticated so there were more important details scattered in the background to reward those who really paid attention.

So I went into the new Star Trek movie with that sense of wonder and paid attention to the details.

but… they weren’t there!

We have cell phones so I expected some sort of update to the communicator. I was even thinking it would be neat if they combined the communicator with the tricorder. Nope. They look mostly the same. My wife’s phone does more then their communicator. The tricorder was about the same as the old series and was used to record Kirk complaining. Couldn’t the communicator even communicate with a nearby starfleet base?

Okay, I’ll give you that the Bridge looked cool and updated. But Engineering was crap! It looked like they had an old power plant for the weekend! It was a bunch of pipes and tanks and looked stupid. There was even a part where Uhura was on station beside what looked like a bunch of milk tanks!I couldn’t really tell the difference between the set for the Vulcan moon base that Scotty was on (which didn’t make much sense either) and the engineering of a Enterprise. I didn’t even get the feeling that it was in a ship. It just looked like another building.

The shuttle craft bay is good but there is this non-sense plastic sheet hanging between the sections for no reason. They sure had a lot of shuttles though!

The space combat was nice and I’m glad that they got it right that there is no sound in space but apparently there are no force fields anymore either. They talked about shields but they didn’t show them even flickering.

Now the plot had some problems for me. One of which is why did they go from what was basically an emergency cadet cruise to suddenly have their own ship and skip every rank from cadet to whatever they settled at. That’s a pretty bizarre jump. Basically the movie was saying that they had killed off everyone else or that everyone else was busy and only the cadets could do it!

That’s lazy writing. That’s all that is. You don’t have to make your crew great at their jobs and come up with a logical progression of other ships and situations. You jump to the finished version all at once. I thought that these people were good because they were seasoned and experienced crew of a large organization devoted to the highest ideals of humanity. Nope – they were just the people that showed up to the shuttle for starfleet academy that day. I can’t wait to see what the next year’s class does!

So overall I loved it as a movie. However it didn’t seem to have anyone on the set who actually knew the science fiction aspect of it. Maybe by creating a new continuity they can leave  a lot of these questions behind but it seems that while the new movie will undoubtedly be able to entertain it is missing something that made Star Trek something more – Intelligent Science Fiction that can Inspire!

I’m am starting to think that maybe McCain has PTSD. He talks about his time as a POW any time people want to talk about things he doesn’t want to discuss. He says it like he is confused by the question! He wants to start new wars to the point that he wants a new draft. He won’t talk to other world leaders that he might be in conflict with. I am guessing that he has gotten over the fear of loud noises by now.

Okay I am not a scientist. I don’t focus on science. I understand the basics and I understand the scientific method.

I have no problem with a personal relationship with the Divine. I am a polytheist myself. I believe that there is a spark of the Divine in all things. I’m not sure if that Divine is a guiding force or a just a part of the universe.

I believe strongly in the principles that this country was founded on. We have a country that is based on several freedoms and I think that alone makes this country one of the best in the world. The more we dedicate this country to those principles instead of push them aside when they become inconvenient the stronger and better this country will be.

I have no problem with people saying what they believe. I think that everyone should have the right to any opinion that they want. They can have some facts wrong and some people confuse the right to your own opinion to the right to say anything and claim it as a fact. Your beliefs about the Divine are your opinions because we have no way of proving anything about them. Your favorite color is an opinion. Basic facts about the world are not opinions.

Now people come up with various theories about the mechanisms that the world functions under. One person may have one idea and another has a different theory.

Now we get into a problem when laymen confuse this with the idea that these are different opinions in the favorite color sense. I think that the fault is just a simple confusion in communication. We have words that mean different things in different contexts and it is easy to get confused and think one thing is being said when something else is.

So anyway we have Scientists who’s job is to study and figure out things from the Natural World. They are supposed to follow the scientific method.

Physics is basically math in a bunch of word problems. It’s the idea that if we can figure out how to put things into these word problems then we can get a useful answer. Unlike High School math you don’t always know the formulas ahead of time. Sometimes you have inputs and outputs and you are trying to figure out what formula would make that work. Different people have different ideas for what formula would fit there.

Then somebody comes along and starts writing “god” as the formula.

How is that useful to anybody?

Then other people come into the room, that they were not invited into in the first place and start praising this. Great! they say, this solves it all. The scientists point out that this makes no sense and doesn’t help. The people say that the scientist are persecuting them for their beliefs and they take their hero of the day on their shoulders and say that they are going to found their own labs to study this new theory.

Ok, what ever, the scientists say to get them to go away and erase the “god” formula. They get back to work. They can write formulas that allow for all the technology and medicine that we have today, trillions of provable results are generated. All of western civilization is based on this.

Then those people come back in and say that their “scientist” deserves equal time. They say that their opinions are just as valid. They say that they have the religious right to dictate to them.

The scientists try and explain that opinion and theory are not the same thing. A theory has to accept a lot of givens and be able to predict something in the world.  Their scientist is ignoring all the givens and not predicting anything. Therefore no science is occuring.

They say that both of these have to given equal weight in schools.

Why? the scientists say, isn’t there History, Philosophy, and Sociology classes. Can’t you teach a Religion class and leave it out of Science where it doesn’t belong?

No, the people say. The polls say you have to teach by mass agreement.

So you have people that learn some science. They pretend to understand the scientific method. Then they come along and say that they believe in Science AND in God!

OK I say, so you believe that science is true but God is the prime mover?

Yes they say. God controlled the situation through science.

OK, I have no problem with that.

Then they say that God has been steering things in many ways.

Ok but at what point did God stir?

If you believe in science and that God set it in motion then we need to figure out at what point did God change the laws of Physics to cause certain things that wouldn’t have occured to actually occur. Then we can give up on figuring out anything before that. Since the universe became untrackable at that point we need to know it.

I’ll give you another example that is simpler. Say you are doing a mathematical proof and someone came along and changed the equation in mid solution. What happens?

We have a way of modeling Astrophysics and we are learning enormous amounts. IF it behaves in a logical manner then we HAVE to assume that it occured out of rational events. So did God stir before that?

I’ve heard that a GaTech teacher was actually teaching that Evolution was impossible because of the Law of Entropy. That is interesting when Evolution is an example of Entropy, two different actions of it in fact!

Entropy causes disorder in a system. This is reflected by the amount of mutations that occur in the biological systems. Diversity is an example of entropy.

The problem is that the universe is not a nice place. Most things are not successful and die out. IN fact 99.9% of all life dies out. It’s an extremely rare thing that can be in the right place with the right traits to survive. The entropy of the system destroys most of the system.

These two examples of entropy mean that only the most perfectly narrow chance exists for anything. It’s really hard out there.

So Entropy is the driving force behind Evolution. The system has no plans ahead of time. It’s a shotgun approach. SOMETHING is got to catch!

So when someone comes up to a scientist and tries to put an opinion in the middle of formulas, I give that scientist permission to laugh at him and call him names. When that scientist beats that person down for irritating him I will call it aggravated assault. However until all the scientists of the country get together and work on killing people with the stupid gene then I will not believe them when they scream that they are being oppressed for their beliefs.

And maybe, just maybe I will have a harsh word with those scientists.

Anyone who looks at my blog can tell that I’m for Obama. I think that he is one of the best candidates we have had in a long time. I really hope that he gets it.

One of the questions that they have been asking him over and over is who is your running mate. He hasn’t answered and I think this is a good thing. It is not really the time to deal with that part of the game. He needs to get Clinton off his back and get the Democrat Nomination first before he does that. That is a part of the Presidential race and it will involve picking a running mate that will cover his bases with voter groups.

I was stumbling across the internet and I came across this video. It discusses the idea of using Goggle Trends as a way of figuring out interest in a subject graphed over time. You can even graph it against media attention on that subject as well to compare them and see if the media is reporting based on what people are actually interested in. It helps to tell if a story is being hyped or buried.

The gist of the video is that the Media apparently has decided to ignore Ron Paul as a candidate in this election. The internet activity suggests that there is a lot of interest in him, maybe even support.

Well I decided to look up this guy, check out his main page here and a wiki article on him here.

Ok so we have a Republican that is nearly a Libertarian that did place in the 1988 election though not by much. He is a principled man of his standards that focuses on the Constitution above all. He is well respected and articulate.
So what would happen if Barack Obama chose him for his running mate!

It would show that he really is about change and listening to the Republican side of things. It would be an amazing signal to many out there. They are both principled idealists. I’m sure that they would clash over some things but I think that it would make for an incredible ticket! Most of the time the VP is some guy I never heard of and is there to get some money for the campaign (that’s the only explanation I can think of for Quayle). He would get more Republicans as well as Independants behind him. It would also add an interesting voice to his cabinet.

What if?

I was just thinking about this new Web OS stuff. I like the idea but I keep running into worries about it. I outlined them already earlier.

Anyway it gave me an idea that maybe have a remote home folder for live CDs. Basically a live CD gives your the OS and some common apps. How about have it so that you can get online, once you are up and running, and have the home folder on server somewhere. That way you have access to your stuff anywhere but you don’t have to wait for everything to load remotely back and forth. You can still access what you want, use nearly any existing distro and even package it the way you want it instead of having to accept someone else’s apps and such.

You wouldn’t have to carry around those thumbdrives, just the live CD.