Happy New Year
to all of You and Yours

Regardless of race or faction affiliation or the quality of your gear!

Ok, this issue came up due to a comment I received (see below.) Here I assumed that the Guide Seller Nyhm was who I thought he claimed to be: the Video Maker Nyhm. So if it’s not the case then there’s the Nyhm who sells a set of WoW guides and there’s the Nyhm who has put together a set of cool videos, some of which I’ve posted on this blog.

I’ve sent emails to both, asking “What’s up with this?” and I’ll try again later if I don’t get a response. I’ll update this post with any replies I get. Feel free to add your comments, as well.

Nyhm of the Vids sent this comment, to this post, this morning:

B***S***!!  This is not me, i never did an interview with anyone, this is some fool still trying to sell his garbage. Im getting damn sick of this shit and im going to have to make a video putting this site and any gold selling site out of buisness once and for all.

Im done with this b***s***!

By the way, I saved the email interview. So it looks like there are the two Nyhms (and I’ve been told that this might be the case.)

Until then I’ll go through all my Nyhm posts and delete the guide references that looks like they confuse the two Nyhms and make sure that Nyhm of the Vids gets appropriate credits.

By the way…

1. Nyhm of the Vids page is here
2. Nyhm of the Guide’s page is here (and it isn’t working as I write this. edit: it works now. )

Anyone care to add anything to this?

Update: Nyhm of the Videos sent an email stating that he is not the same guy as Nyhm of the guides. So I have deleted all of the guide links, since those links were on pages with videos by Nyhm of the Videos. My bad.

Update 2: Nyhm of the Guides sent an email the stated that they are different Nyhm’s, but that they have very similar characters. WoWarmory lists nearly 100 Nyhm’s as I write this, so there seem to be a few that can lay claim to the name.

updated: edited 12/31 for grammer, etc.

By the way #1: Nyhm of the Videos has graciously agreed to an interview and I’m coming up with questions to ask, which hopefully won’t be too brain-dead. Any suggestions?

12/31: No questions have come up so you’ll have to live with mine. Ha.

By the way #2: Nyhm is not to be confused with MGM’s NIMH.

Ok, now I’m going to go play WoW for a few…

A few days back my web host punted me, suggesting that I find a new host. This was due to something crashing their servers, but as far as I can find out it wasn’t my fault and wasn’t theirs. Obviously it was the Gnomes.

So I received a backup of all my data from them and moved everything to the new host, where it actually seems to be running ok.

Umm… so where’s “The Cookbook is Back #1?”

Well, in a massive display of epic falm palming fail, I deleted the database for the blog. It was actually supposed to be the OTHER (expletives deleted) database, but there you go.

Fortunately, I was able to extract the database from the aforementioned backup file and restore everything, except “The Cookbook is Back (#1)”

So just the one post and the one comment (Sorry, Zug) is gone.

And now it’s time to get back to work. Or gaming. Or something. Maybe I’ll just watch some more 24 (via Netflix.)

As you probably have noticed the 3.0+ patches to WoW have crushed the guts out of many of our addons. Curse Gaming has a list of addons updated for the 3.0+ patches and, presumably, Wrath Ready.

Go here to browse.

edit: Some additional info on use and installing addons can be found here: WoW addons

Ever had a hard disk die? How about the one with you WoW (and/or any other MMO) data on it. How long would it take you, and how much would it cost, to get it all back?

How long would it take to download all those patches, updates, addons, reconfigure your hotkeys and other characters setups?

DominateYourServer has a detailed guide to backing up your WoW installation. Basically you copy/backup the entire WoW folder set over to your backup system and you’re good.

There are a number of choices for backing up, but none are foolproof. Do two or more if you’re really concerned (or paranoid.)

1. Install an internal hard drive and use it for backups. Just copy data from whichever drive you have your copy of WoW on over to the other drive. This is great if your main drives dies, not so good if your computer is fried (eg: by a lightning strike,) but it’s lots faster than the other methods.
2. Use an external drive. These connect with a USB cable and usually come with backup software. A bit slow, but since you can disconnect the drive after backing your system and then store it in a safe place, you’re pretty well protected.
3. DVDs (and BlueRays) are  cool, get yourself the appropriate software and burn some disks. Then store then in a safe place. DVD burners are pretty cheap, Bluray not so cheap (yet.)
4. Online backup. We use Mozy, but there are a bunch of other services available. You pick the files/folders that need to be backed up and it does it all in the background, making incremental backups on a regular basis. The first backup will take a long time since it will back up everything that you tell it to. Once that’s done then the following backups take a lot less time.
5. Go Raid. A RAID is a set of dard disks which work together. We’re interested in the mirroring function here. You set up to drives to mirror each other and then every bit of data that gets written to drive 1 also gets written to drive 2. So if one or the other fails you have a backup. I’ve seen these fail, so I suggest another backup method as well as this one. Also, this won’t backup your existing data, it’s best done with a new install.

Blizzard, as you may know, has a widget called the Authenticator. This is a hardware device that makes it very difficult to have you account hacked.

ExNovis has a write-up about it and answers the “Yes, but is it really secure?” question:

So the Blizzard Authenticator is back on sale, even after a day of being sold out. This time, it’s available in more countries and it looks like Blizzard understood there would be a huge demand for them. I bought one for myself, and for my partner, Cantara. Sometimes, I get teased from people about ‘wasting money on a device that doesn’t provide total security.’ Well folks, Blizzard has stepped into the fray of the debate and confirmed, yes, the authenticator is secure!

Here’s the rest: For The Last Time, YES, It IS Secure

Check out Quassia. They have an interesting system to get links back to your site and I’ll be fussing around with them later this week. It’s all free as of this writing.

Basically you write or submit intell (articles) on the subject of your choice and get links back to your site. Since the links aren’t buried in some directory someplace they might actually get clicked.

Links in the articles are nofollow, links outside the articles aren’t. Right now the site looks to be mostly marketing related, since those are the most popular tags, but that’s ok, and they really do have a lot of other articles. You just have to dig through the tags a bit.

All the navigation is done by tags. So if you want to find the stuff on WoW then you go to the alphabetical list, click “W,” and you’ll get the “W” tags. There are several that are WoW related.

So check ‘em out, see if it looks good to you, maybe write some intell,  and maybe we can get some traffic from it.

Here’s my, somewhat barren, profile page. You can browse the site from there, just like Facebook and the others.

Lolwut?

Having nothing whatsoever to do with the World of Warcraft, or anything else game related, comes this post which I thought was just plain funny.

Standing apart from the bog standard Vauxhall and Peugeot drivers of this world, there exists a special breed, a group who nary flinches when the word ‘insurance’ is mentioned. Such people insure tanks for the daily shopping run. Inspired by this, I decided to take on the ultimate car insurance challenge. I was going to quote me happy for the Batmobile.

I took as my example the Batmobile from The Dark Knight, or, as it’s officially known in movie lore, the ‘Tumbler’. A brief look over the specification reveals myriad possibilities for 3rd party fire and theft, including a jet burner in the rear, landing hooks for when the Batmobile jumps over rooftops, front-mounted machine guns…

It’s a fun read. So take a break from WoW and check it out, here:

Insuring the Batmobile

Tobold’s MMORPG Blog has an interesting post today. WAR kills AoC, not WoW

First, a bit of background.

• Here’s the link to WAR: Warhammer Online
  
• Here’s AoC: Age of Conan

Will anything kill WoW? Nope. Nothing will even come close. The only thing that will kill WoW will be brain-dead management, and that doesn’t seem to be happening right now.

So here’s my 2 cents worth.

I really wanted to play Age of Conan. I’ve been reading the Conan books and comics since I was a little kid, so I was pretty jazzed when I heard that the MMO version was coming out. Then I heard it was Funcom . . .

I played Funcom’s Anarchy Online for quite some time. Got up to level 185 with one character (Opi Martial Artist.) Lots of potential, little of it realized, and not a lot of quality bug testing happening. The Heckler AI was . . . interesting. Remember those lumpy rock piles?

AoC has its own issues, with servers and a few other things, though the game at launch was FAR more playable that AO (which apparently wasn’t playable at launch.)

Personally, I think AoC going as high end on the graphics and such was a mistake. For example, the only part of the game that my computer will run is the character generation. Past that, everything looks like water. Some form of scalable graphics system would have opened the game a lot. But . . . maybe it’s only buggy drivers.

Now, all MMOs have their issues at startup. All of them that last any length of time clean up many of those issues and constantly improve the game. AoC posted some pretty good start numbers, as I understand, and that will put a lot of stress on their servers, as it did with WoW, but how many of these people are sticking?

So, I think AoC is out of the running as anything that WoW will much notice.

Now how about WAR?

Warhammer has a good sized real world following. Lots of people play the miniatures wars on a regular basis. Drop into a hobby or game store and you’ll see a large section devoted to the game, and also to Warhammer 40k. Check out Amazon and you’ll see a nice pile of Warhammer books, figs, and stuff.

So there’s a pretty good existing fan base. The online game will draw from these guys (mostly guys, of course) and from those of us who’d like to see something compete with WoW. Combine an interesting, playable, world with good gameplay and a system that will attract all types of players and you’ll have a winner.

If WAR is playable at launch, (and I’m reading good things from the people plaing the beta,) then it’ll get a pile of subscribers. I think we’ll see the number of WoW accounts drop very little, but I think there will be a dip in active players for awhile. If WAR can do the magic that’s required to make people stick with it for months, then maybe WoW will notice.

Blizzard has an awesome track record for making sticky games and it’s definitely the 900 pound gorilla in the playground. If WAR can mount a good launch with a highly playable and fun game, a game that’s playable and fun for a lot of people, then the competition will have a good effect on WoW by forcing Blizzard to improve WoW even more.

WoW is fun for those who like PvP and those who don’t; those who like raids, and those who don’t; those who like role playing, amd those who don’t; those who like . . . well, you get the idea. If WAR can match that, then it’s competition. If it can’t, then it’s just a niche game.

So what’s your take on this?

edit: Some other posts on the topic:

• Visin at AzerothNow: Age of Conan Vs. World of Warcraft
• Massively asks, Should there be a WoW Killer?