qbradq

That's what I found in the database. I need to look at the code more carefully. I did create a Cartographer file with ain t ll the herb spawns in Tanaris and found that only a percentage are up at any given time. I don't know what the percentage is. However, when you pick a firebloom, five minutes later another firebloom spawns somewhere in that zone.

I just like the math. It gave me an excuse to understand the gameobject spawner table in the database. The GET OUT AND FARM bit was facetious.

Yesterday I was waxing philosophic - or something like that - to my guildmates about how every time I play Vanilla WoW it makes me want to play Everquest, and how I'd like to be playing Everquest, and about how I would be playing Everquest if the penalties for death were not so unforgiving. So today I thinks to myself, "Self, why don't you play Everquest anymore?" Then I watched this, and I remembered.

Challenge accepted. Elysium has yet to release their static database files, but if we assume they use the ManGOS Zero database at least for Firebloom there are 198 spawners total each on a 5 minute respawn delay. If 1/4 (about 50) of those spawns were farmed as efficiently as possible and turned in it would take 708 hours, or just over four weeks (ending April 9, 2017). SO GET OUT AND FARM

After looking into the total materials required and the reasoning for it, I do not think I agree with the reasoning. Requiring 70% of the active player base's resource holdings to be handed over for raid content that most of the server's active population is not going to be involved with does not seem to make a lot of sense. Especially when there is no incentive for the average player to hand in most of these goods.

The Princess quest chain in Arathi really stands out to me. The one where you have to kill the demigod at the end. It gives you your first taste of the ancient lore of the game and was the first long quest chain I ran into as an Orc in Vanilla. Other than that I actually like how Westfall is setup. Most of the "unrelated" quests are there to set the mood of poverty and hopelessness brought on by the Defias Brotherhood. The zone culminates in a dungeon instance of the same theme where you get to kill the big baddie of the organization you've learned to hate over the past ten or so levels.

The difference between being dry-looted in UO and being unable to get your corpse back in EQ is that in UO your equipment was very replaceable. The best you might go out with was player-made platemail, and you'd have several suits stockpiled in the bank. In EQ - as in WoW - your equipment makes your character. Imagine dying in WoW and having to get back to your corpse, but alive and naked. Of course you could beg / pay a necromancer to summon your corpse in EQ, but that could be a huge pain in the ass unless you were in a large guild. Death in EQ could take days to recover from if you weren't well connected. In UO it could take at most an hour or two unless you did something foolish like walk out of town carrying all of your possessions.

Yea, I think we're saying the same thing just using different words :) I tend to have that problem a lot. I'm saying that folks tend to remember "retail vanilla" as "just before TBC", not what we have now. It's comparing apples to other, more different apples.

Thank you so much! I've been looking for resources like this and was unable to find them. My Google-Fu is weak :(

I agree that inflation is typically a bad thing. However I think this is one reason for the perception that money is harder to come by on Elysium than it was in retail vanilla. Retail was more inflated. I remember as a miner I would make circuits of starting zones mining copper because it sold on the AH for 1g per ore at one point just before TBC launched. It was certainly a lot easier to get 90g together for a mount at that time.

The big difference between Elysium and retail Vanilla is the economy. Back in retail most folks were not running gathering skills. You could easily sell minerals, herbs, and skins for a very good profit on the AH and there was very little competition - at least at the lower levels. On Elysium the markets are flooded. The only thing that keeps minerals and herbs above the vendor price on the AH is their spawn frequency. Most materials from Skinning auction for barely above their vendor sell price. Another factor is that the economies here have not had enough time to inflate. As you get more level 60's pulling more gold into the economy through coin and grey drops there is more money for them to spend on things like copper ingots to train engineering. Then it gets easier for you to afford your training and mount.

I agree! Every time I've had to file a ticket it's been addressed very quickly, and accurately. Great job folks!

HANDLE IT

I had to learn the hard way. Lucky for me it was an online retail site that had an expired card saved. Taught me a valuable lesson though.

I'm guessing this was intended to be humorous? In case anyone was confused by this, the SHA1 bruteforce attack for a known hash and a password length of 8 costs about ten US cents on average if you rent time on Amazon's EC2/P2 GPU computing instances. No collision attack necessary. This cost can be drastically lowered by using your own hardware or subletting idle cycles. This is why most major companies have switched to using SHA2 since last July.

Fair enough.

Font size is not why I don't like EQ :) It's not a graphics thing. I had forgotten that the entire game is unforgiving, not just death penalties. Boats take 30 minutes to run and take you through a whole freaking zone where you can get agro and die. Most classes need a group just to level or farm. The few that can solo can't solo much. Getting a group can be quite tedious. Mobs are on very long respawn timers, even for level 1 junk it's like five minutes. You can't run away from anything. A skunk will chase you to the end of the zone for your delicious blood. And binding a new spawn location requires you to beg for sometimes hours to find a priest. And that's not to say anything about late-game issues. WoW is basically EQ done right.

The "weak security system" is the same as most WoW private servers. SHA1 is the hash algorithm built into the ManGOS server. If there was some conspiracy to compromise accounts to sell their stuff someone with direct access to the database wouldn't bother spending hundreds of dollars on compute time to brute force the password hashes. They would just reset the account password to a known hash and log in. You are noticing a lot more compromised accounts since February because there are a lot more accounts since February. And it's only been since then that this place is worth an attacker's time. With great population comes a black market. Retail games have the same issues, as do sites like Etc. Your account is your responsibility. No one else can make sure you have a good password that isn't used at 100 other sites. No one can force you to use 2FA. Final note: The "weak security system" was the industry standard when the ManGOS project started. It just needs an update.

Terrible idea. If people were that desperate for server-first progression as to bail on their server for a new server then they would have stuck it out with the PvP. And if those players really did leave because of the PvP they wouldn't come back if it were changed to PvE because, hey, no more server first chance.

Ya'll do realize AQ did open on all retail realms, right? And none of those realms had 5K online.

Where is Elysium Headquarters? I want a tour! Do you even understand what is contained in the ManGOS database? It's the spawn points, loot tables, etc. that make the game work. 99% of this information is already available at the ManGOS Zero project and on sites like http://db.vanillagaming.org . The only sensitive information in any database are the hashed passwords of the game accounts. Looking at the ManGOS realmd sources they are hashed using SHA1. This is an issue as it would cost only a few hundred dollars to brute force every account password in the database using modern distributed GPU processing. Something you should be excited about is software engineering professionals like @HudsonHawk and myself who understand this stuff and want to patch it for the team.

If I'm a hacker and I brute-force shlepy157 's game account password, but it's got 2FA, there's a decent chance that game account is tied to a Google Authenticator at [email protected] . If that email account uses the same password and the email account doesn't have 2FA it's game over.

Where is the algorithm published?

Could probably do that with a server-side patch to just not send the shoulder item when sending other people's character data, but we'd still have to send the shoulder item to your client otherwise the client would think you didn't have anything equipped and wouldn't let you remove them / try to equip another shoulder slot item.

This is a terrible suggestion. If someone wants to horde Purple Lotus and doesn't want to contribute it to the War Effort that's their prerogative. It will not block the war effort. It may slow things down if someone wants to farm all the Copper they possibly can and trash it. On most servers you can just corpse camp them and problem solved. On Darrowshire we don't have enough A-holes to completely block the war effort.