Virtual Crossroads

Copying the last rows from a large remote table into the local database

2013-04-22T08:29:00.000-04:00

I recently ran into a problem where I needed to copy a subset of the rows in a huge remote table to the local database. This is the kind of thing best suited for mysqldump paired with mysql, but there's no parameter that lets you export only the last n rows of the table. There is however a WHERE parameter (--where, -w) and apparently mysqldump does not protect against SQL injection. So the solution looks like this:

Warning! This will drop and re-create your local table, so if you have data in it you need to keep then you need to look into the flags to skip the drop and create statements.

mysqldump -u REMOTE_USER -pREMOTE_PW -h REMOTE_HOST --compress --where "true ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 0, N" REMOTE_DB REMOTE_TABLE | mysql -u LOCAL_USER -pLOCAL_PW -h LOCAL_HOST LOCAL_DB

Make sure you replace the values in yellow with those appropriate for your situation.
Notes:

N should be the numeric number of rows you want to copy (ex. 100000)
There is no space between the -p and the password, but there is a space between most other options and their values
If your password contains special characters, make sure to escape them
If your local host is actually the same machine you are running the command on, you can skip -h LOCAL_HOST. In my case it wasn't because my host operates separate MySQL and web servers (I was SSHed into the web server)
You can skip the ORDER BY id DESC (or replace the sorting order with whatever fits you) as needed

Why does this work? We're basically doing SQL injection by causing mysqldump to create select statements like:

SELECT ...
FROM ...
WHERE true
ORDER BY id DESC
LIMIT 0, 100000

The whole value of the yellow text is coming from our --where value.

Getting the most bang for your buck in Planetside 2

2012-11-26T19:50:00.000-05:00

Here is a quick guide to XP/certs, weapons, and getting the most out of your dollars in the action-packed futuristic warfront of Planetside 2. If you know anything about the game or about SoE's F2P business model some of these may be obvious tips, but some may not be so obvious even for veterans.

TLDR:

XP = Certification points. 250 XP = 1 cert. Read the XP section below.
Subscribe. 50% XP bonus and free SC pays itself off. (Priority queue is nice too)
Buy SC when they are on 2x/3x sale and take advantage of retailed promotions (WalMart, GameStop, etc)
Follow ALL SOE games, they all use SC and may let you know about sales
Use the 1wk 50% XP boost, do not use the 1hr boost

XP (= Certs):

Be in a base when it caps/gets defended
Always spot enemies. Even if you don't kill them, you'll get XP if someone else does it. (To spot press Q when your aiming reticle is close to or over an enemy)
Damage targets even if you know you won't get the kill. For example use your HA GtA launcher to hit airplanes / sunderers / tanks. Mostly, you won't kill them solo, but if someone else finishes them off you'll get XP.
Be in a squad that works together (bonus XP for anything you do that helps your squad: spot, assist, heal, etc). Also, you'll be more sucessful = more kills, more caps, less time respawning
Complement your fellow soldiers. Provide what is missing in the current situation:

Is there a big armor standoff where lots of tanks are getting damaged? Repair them.
Is it a big foot zerg with lots of deaths? Revive them.
Lots of friendly infantry/MAXes firing a lot? Drop ammo packs for them. (10xp/reload from your pack)
Lots of enemy ground but not much enemy air? Gun someone's Liberator. You can get massive amounts of kills by bombing tanks/AMSs/large infantry zergs.
Cert into Sunderer AMS (50 certs) and reload AMS and park one near fights. Each respawn gives you 2 XP. (Not much but it adds up fast. Parked in the right spot I've had my AMS spam me continously with XP messages for 20min+)
Overload / stabilize / repair generators. (You do this by walking up to one and holding E till the bar fills up, don'tshoot them it does nothing) Sometimes there's a whole back and forth cycle of (de)stabilizing generators as the teams struggle over them. Be in the right place at the right time and each one will get you 100xp. In a protracted fight this can net you more than the base itself.

Don't die. Recognize situations where you're spending a lot of time respawning without getting much/any xp and move off, find a more advantageous situation.
Carry grenades and use them to clear rooms / clumps of enemies behind cover (watch for friendlies tho! and don't run into other's grenades!). A grenade can often get you 3-5 kills.
Join squads that have the squad XP boost running. It stacks with your other boosts.

Weapons:

You do NOT need most weapons. Most of them are slight variations that fit the same role. Find 1-2 good weapons and maybe an utility one if your classes has one.
Use trial mode to try weapons out.
Read the forums and ask around to get an idea of what are good choices too.
While I won't go into the details of each weapon for each class, consider picking up certain utility weapons:

Any: Healing kits (not a weapon but it often lets you survive for a second encounter)
Any: Nanoweave armor (again, not a weapon, but 10+% extra HP is nothing to laugh at)
Heavy Assault: lock-on Ground to Air launcher
ESF: Rocket pods. These things are devastating to anything on the ground and even Liberator/Galaxy aircraft
Liberator: Dalton anti-tank gun
MBT: anti-tank and/or anti-infantry secondary weapon
MAX: Left AA arm

As a new player without many fancy weapons take advantage of strong weapons you can get into around you:

Base turrets can be your friend. Get into an engineer, repair a turret and use it to great effect. Get out of the turret when it gets focus-fired and go do something else for a few minutes till it gets destroyed and forgotten, then come back and rack up more kills.
Man turrets on others' vehicles. Not everyone wants a non-squaddie in their vehicle, but you can find lots of MBTs (main battle tanks) in need of a turret gunner. Keep an eye for the upgraded ones particularly as they can be devastatingly effective.

Station Cash:

SOE runs SC sales that give you 2x or even 3x the amount of SC per $. Stock up when they run one, don't buy at the regular price if you can help it (we had a 2x sale in PS2 this last Friday). 3x sales are rarer, but they've done them a few times when I played EQ2. Keep your eyes peeled (and have some spending money) around xmas, new years, `sale` holidays (black friday, boxing day, etc), easter, etc. A 2x sale makes your $7 weapon cost $3.50, a 3x sale makes it effectively cost $2.33
Read the launcher, follow twitter / facebook to make sure you don't miss out on sales
SC is common to ALL SOE games so follow the twitter/facebook for EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Free Realms, etc to hear about more sales. If some other game gives you bonus SC if you buy a SC card at a certain retailer, you can do that then spend your SC in PS2
Not sure if they are doing / will do this in PS2, but in other games they've run item sales. Stuff like a 700 SC item only costing 400 SC. If they do that in PS2 then try to pick up items you may want some day when they go on sale.
Combine promotions. $15 is approximately 2 weapons, right? Wrong. With the right promo that $15 could be as much as 15 weapons. For example, there used to be (maybe still is) a $15 for 1,500 SC on WalMart cards where you got 500 SC bonus. Redeem that on 3x SC sale day and you got 6,000 SC instead. Spend those SCs when your item is 50% (assuming they do item sales in PS2) off and you're effectively spending the equivalent of 12,000 SC. Your $15 just became 15 weapons.

Certs and Station Cash:

TLDR: Subscribe. Use the 1wk boost if you get at least 1500 certs/week. Never use the 1hr boost.
If you subscribe ($15/mo) you get 500SC each month and an increasing XP% buff that ramps up to 50% after 6mo (hint: if you pay for a 6mo subscription you get +50% imediately) This bonus stacks with xp boosters. 50% XP is 50% more certs. Let's consider 1000 certs = $7 = 700 SC

The monthly bonus 500 SC are worth $5 out of your subscription
If you get 3000 certs in a month, the 50% XP bonus gives you an extra 1500 which is worth the remaining $10. At a dismal cert rate of 50/hr, you only need to play 60 hours a month (2h/day) to break even.

50% XP boosts (which stack additively with your subscription) cost 125 SC / 1 hr, 250 SC / 1 day, 500 SC / 1 weeks.

The 1 hr boost is not worth it. You would need to get 375 certs/hr for it to pay off
The 1 day boost may be worth it if you get >750 certs in that day (play >7.5h at 100cert/hr, >15h at 50cert/hr)
The 1 week boost is worth it if you get > 1500 certs during the week (play 15h/wk at 100cert/hr, 30h/wk at 50cert/hr)

Milestone: 200,000 gold in World of Warcraft

2012-11-20T07:02:00.001-05:00

If you're one of the folks on my BattleTag or in my guild, then you probably know that lately I've been spending quite a bit of my playtime in the pursuit of the almighty gold coin. A couple days ago I passed my latest milestone: 200,000g.

So how did I come to reach this milestone? Read on to find out...

Gold making is an interest I developed back in the days of WotLK as a result of being too broke to buy anything (particularly the hilt I wanted!). Unfortunately real life pulled me away from WoW for quite a while at that time. I returned for Cataclysm and got back to pursuing gold making, starting with a scribe and a measly 5000g. By the time I burned out on WoW again, I had reached 60,000 gold on hand plus massive stockpiles of materials/items (not to mention buying flight skills on a lot of alts).

When MoP came out, I wasn't planning to return to WoW, having a blast in GW2 at the time. However my wife's excitement for MoP finally got to me and I returned a couple weeks after the expansion had come out. I focused on levelling at first, until I saw the price tag of the yak. I decided it had to be mine so I got back into gold making. This time around I had a lot more crafting toons and a lot more gold to start with so things went a lot smoother. Hitting 100k took a few weeks. Another 100,000 to hit the 200k mark only took two weeks after that.

Enough about that though, let's get to the part I know you're most interested in: "How did you get all that gold?" That is a topic worth many blog posts in itself, but here are some of the key ideas I've reached on the way to this milestone:

Diversify

Just because you can produce 1,000 glyphs a day doesn't mean you'll sell 1,000 glyphs a day. There simply is a limit to the demand for any given item because there's only so many players logging into your server to buy that item. Unless you sell so cheap that other AH goblins are buying your items to resell (and that's just wasting money you could be making) there's only so much of any item you can sell in a day. It effectively limits how much gold you can make with a single product. So instead of selling 100 different items, you sell 1,000! Instead of doing one craft, you do two or more, or all of 'em.

Optimize

Each item you stock takes time to craft, list, retrieve from the mailbox, relist, etc. It also takes inventory space. And while you can use the mail system as an infinite buffer for your stuff, it's not really efficient. As you diversify into new crafts and item types you also want to optimize your choices of items to keep their volume to a manageable size.
For example there are a whole pile of glyphs that are learned from the trainer and that everyone crafts when they level up inscription. Most of the time there is a flood of them on the AH for a fraction of the material cost. Sure, every now and then the stars may align and the supply may dry up for half a day and you sell one for 200g, but for the most part that inventory slot is much better used to stock up something that is consistently generating profits. So as you diversify also look at your items and see which ones are under-performers. Liquidate them and don't restock them.

Network

Get to know players who farm raw materials. Doing face-to-face or CoD transactions for bulk mats benefits both you and the seller. Listing 300 stacks of tea on the AH is not a guaranteed sale. You might sell all of it, or some other farmer might come by in 5 minutes, drop his 200 stacks for 1c less than yours and you end up selling nothing until you check the AH.

A lot of farmers love not having to deal with that and rather get instant gold plus a guaranteed sale of their whole stock even if it means a lower price. And since AH fees are 5% they can pass on at least that much of a saving to you. Often though you will find suppliers willing to sell at 10-25% off the AH price (and occasionally you may get lucky with deeper discounts than that).

So get to know other players. Keep in touch. Make friends. And be professional in your dealings with them. Your suppliers may occassionally forget to set CoD on a mail. Those 240 free herbs may be tempting, but a good reputation is worth far more. Mail out that gold manually!

Automate

No, I'm not talking about using illegal bots. Take advantage of some very helpful addons that will let you manage thousands of items and auctions with ease. Use legal addons that make you life significantly easier!

Tradeskill Master - This one's the most important. It does almost everything you need, including restocking, posting, undercutting, mailing items to the right mule and a lot more. Make sure you get all the modules for it!
Altoholic - Keeps track of everything about your alts (and lets you access it from any toon), but more importantly it can provide stock levels to TSM and it allows you to sync inventory data between different accounts. Since I use a second account to do most of my auctioning (while using my main account to stock up) this one is indispensable.
Auctionator - Hasn't been updated in a while, but it still works (except for minipet auctions - altough this might provide a fix) and is very convenient for manual buying and listing. I use it when I do manual listings and to do custom purchases.
Auctioneer - The grandaddy of AH addons. I don't use it much anymore, but keep it around (despite its hefty size) for Enchantrix which is the best DE/mill/prospect addon I've come across.

Study

Study the particulars of your server's economy! Start out conservatively and get a feel for your server's demand, supply and daily/weekly fluctuations. Don't invest into huge stockpiles of items and don't jump on items that seem like a great deal until you know your server's economy enough to know they're a great deal. Learn the ebb and flow of prices and stock up on materials when they're cheap, then focus your selling at times of peak demand and price. While there's a good degree of similarity in these aspects, your server can be skewed by low population, large oceanic presence or even just a few high-volume farmers that play and sell their wares at atypical hours.

And don't forget to study your competition! Find out who the major AH goblins are and get a feel for their market areas, undercutting behavior, hours of activity - everything you can find out! Figure out what items they don't sell. Figure out what items they will undercut into the ground.

Conclusion

Unfortunately this single post barely scratches the surface of everything that could be written on this topic. If I find the inspiration for it I may follow it up at some point with other advice as I continue to work towards the gold cap. In the meantime, I hope these few pointers help you out if you decide to pursue a well-padded bank account or even if you're just trying to scrounge some gold for mounts or gear. Oh, and if you're wondering what happened to the yak? I decided to hold off on buying it for now. Maybe until I have enough that 120k won't deplete more than half my gold, or maybe until I get to 1,120,000 gold... We'll see!

Guild Wars 2 first beta weekend impressions/feedback

2012-04-30T06:41:00.000-04:00

*GENERAL*
* *Positive*
** *THE GAME IS CHALLENGING, AND FUN, DON'T DUMB IT DOWN*
** Art / graphics are excellent
** The music is GREAT
** Very good performance even with 50+ people doing the same DE, or in WvW (even with custom-high settings I switched to)
** Save account AND password information is awesome to have!
** Game is fun and stable
** Charr are a very cool race concept

* *Negative*
** *Overflow is horrible. You need to identify each overflow (ie. I am in Overflow #3) and add the possibility to switch to your friend's / group members' / guildmates' overflow to play together. Being unable to play in the same version of the zones as the people I want to play with is a dealbreaker*
** XP gain is too fast
** Better / more in-depth tutorials are needed. Particularly on dodging, crafting, WvWvW
** Add a button to go to WvWvW directly without having to go through the PvP lobby
** Annoying to have to log out and back in to switch characters. Add a "Go to Character Select" option
** No 1-st person view
** Camera max distance is far too low
** Cannot bind multi-key actions (Ctrl + 1, Shift + PgUp, etc)
** Cannot bind additional mouse buttons
** Transferring worlds failed with cryptic or no error. Randomly worked and randomly didn't with no indication as to why.
** 5 character slots on a single server is unplesantly limiting. Consider allowing 2-3 servers we can have 5 characters on each. At LEAST allow 1 Euro and 1 America server per account.
** No /follow
** Windows need to remember the last position / panel they were opened to when reopening
** No Oceanic servers, no South-America servers

*PvE CONTENT*
* *Positive*
** Co-op play with everyone participating in an event is very fun. No kill stealing is nice.
** Heart tasks are awesome and I particularly liked the mix of combat and fluff (clean graffity, hit kids with snowballs, feed cows, etc)
** Dynamic Events are a lot of fun
** Death / revive system is awesome
** Weapons of opportunity are great

* *Negative*
** Hearts are too easily filled. Make them require 25-50% more contribution
** NPC dialogue doesn't always show in chat when NPC dialogue is checked, very easy to miss instructions or story
** Selecting the right target to Revive / Search / Gather / whatever is very hard to do when you have a bunch of them stacked.
** Combat is very adversely affected by the slightest lag
** Obstruction on abilities can be very wonky in a lot of cases where it blocks an ability that did have line of sight and allows others that didn't. Sometimes without moving (or the target moving) some abilities will pass and others fail
** Dynamic Event scaling needs to better adapt to massive numbers of players without becoming an exercise in frustration as mobs 1-shot dozens of players (only increase damage so far, if more scaling is needed spawn some sidekicks to keep everyone engaged)
** DE bosses easily get lost in the swarm of players / particles when there's 30+ fighting them. Make them scale in size.
** Dynamic Event chains should be longer with more steps and less repetitive. Fork DE outcomes more into different events
** Melee combat is far more risky than ranged without being more rewarding
** Camera is too close-in when 'dead' making it impossible to use certain abilities well (ex. Teleport to target area)
** Events in a zone should be announced / marked at a greater distance not only when you're right on top of them
** Personal story has too few variables and will get old fast
** Pets need some improvements to AI or mechanics as they do not dodge and get splattered. Every. Single. Fight.
** Spawn rate is too quick when solo, too slow when in a 30+ player blob
** Difficulty is all over the place. Some mobs and PQs are trivial and others are almost impossible.

*PVP CONTENT*
* *Positive*
** Loved the WvWvW!!
** Good architecture on the keeps / towers

* *Negative*
** Add 'hotspots' on the map based on where a large number of players are engaged in fighting each other
** WvWvW needs a lot more tutorials (for ex. building siege machines, supply carry limit, co-op nature of supply, how to capture supply)
** Battlegrounds are boring and very much been there, done that
** WvWvW is very much lacking in personal rewards
** No dueling
** WvWvW groups need a squad system with multiple levels of command (take a look at EVE's fleet system)
** No option to leave battleground at the end of a fight, leads to a lot of players dropping after the next game starts
** Trebuchet produces too much smoke

*CLASSES / SKILLS*
* *Positive*
** I like not being swamped with a million abilities on my hotkeys
** Underwater combat with its own weapons and abilities
** Skillchains

* *Negative*
** A lot of buffs should last longer (paired with longer cooldown on their casting) to add more strategy to casting / dispelling / stealing them
** A class's weapon options and the skills they provide should be shown on the info screen at class selection
** Weapons change gameplay significantly - give the player a choice in their starting weapon
** Low camera max distance makes it hard to effectively use the range of many ground target abilities
** The ground target preview shape does not appear always when preparing to place an ability (the ability places OK when clicked, but you can't preview where it'll be)
** AoE ground targets can be very hard to see in a variety of environments
** Mesmer illusions and engineer turrets do not attack keep doors. Particularly mesmer illusions get summoned by the abilities used then stand there being completely useless.
** No skill reset
** All skills disabled when swimming on the surface of water. Make either ground or underwater skills active don't disable everything as soon as we touch the surface

*ITEMS*
* *Positive*
** Starting with a set of armor dyes (and customizing color of starter armor) is great
** Unlimited use armor dyes
** I like salvage kits and being able to break items into all kind of mats
** Skimpy female outfits

* *Negative*
** Armor and weapon appearance needs more variety in shape
** Offer a choice of starting armor appearance. Even with the custom color schemes it looked like the zones were full of a million clones running around since everyone looked the same from 1-10.
** Many of the dye shades are almost indistinguishably close. Feels like a gimmick to sell more dye packs on the market

*CRAFTING*
* *Positive*
** Discovery is FUN!
** I like salvage kits and being able to break items into all kind of mats
** Being limited to two crafting skills is frustrating but good
** Liked being able to harvest everything without needing to learn gathering skills

* *Negative*
** Blood needed for the basic sub-10 craftable armor is too rare. In the time I got 3-4 blood I not only levelled to 10+ but also discovered and crafted more than a full set of level 10 armor.

*UI*
* *Positive*
** Intuitive and clutter-free

* *Negative*
** Chat system is not up to snuff for a 2012 MMO - Need /say, need overhead chat bubbles for nearby speakers, need more categories of chat when controlling on/off (ex combat should be split into far more detail)
** The auction house is VERY slow and buggy (a lot of times it stalls into infinite loading, other times it fails with no error message given)
** No minimap filter
** No face-to-face trading
** Player name font too small (allow to select font size)
** UI size other than default causes ugly pixellation and unreadable fonts
** UI size scaling should have a broader range and more steps in between
** UI elements should be movable and resizable at least
** No guild recruitment window

MySQL dump to .gz file in 1 line

2012-04-17T00:04:00.001-04:00

Came across this neat little 1-line linux script to dump a mysql database to an zipped sql file. Auto-named based on current date/time too!

mysqldump -u <username> -p<password> <database> | gzip -c > <database>_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).sql.gz

I love snippets that speed up things I do dozens of times a day sometimes!

Slow response from mysql server

2012-04-11T22:59:00.000-04:00

I've been working with one of our older applications the last couple days and for some reason my test server database was very slow to respond to each operation. Pages would take upwards of 6 seconds to generate even though the actual queries ran for less than 0.05 seconds.

I also noticed that the slow-down only happened if the application ran on a different machine than the sql server. For example I was browsing from my machine ( 192.168.0 .10) to the Apache server on the same machine (localhost) which in turn connected to a MySQL database on another machine in the same LAN (192.168.0.99). When I connected to Apache on 192.168.0 .99 and it used localhost to connect to mysql everything was smooth.

The solution - as I found out after several hours of Google-ing - is a little configuration option in mysql's my.cnf (or my.ini as your case may be):

skip-name-resolve

This should go in your [mysqld] section, so I just added mine at the bottom. Here's the what the whole section looks like:

[mysqld]
user = mysql
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
port = 3306
basedir = /usr
datadir = /var/lib/mysql
tmpdir = /tmp
skip-external-locking
skip-name-resolve

While I am not exactly clear on what is causing the slowdown, I believe it is due to the MySQL server attempting to resolve a host name for the server connecting to it if the connection comes through the network and not a local socket. As such it wastes some time attempting to resolve 192.168.0.10 which would fail.

Five Things EverQuest 2 Gets Right

2012-02-22T23:58:00.002-05:00

Us MMO gamers tend to be a fickle and malcontent bunch, always complaining about this and that and how X game or Y new feature sucks. You can hardly view any MMORPG forum without finding threads complaining about it, or its competition, or the next expansion. I'm no exception either and many times in the past I've found myself often engaging in General Chat arguments over the failures of this or that game. What sparked the idea of this article was EverQuest II, a game I had played very little since its release in 2004 but one that sucked me in recently with its free-to-play move in December 2011.

In the time I spent in EQ2 these last few months I found myself genuinely surprised and delighted by the way it approaches certain features. It's nothing revolutionary, but after over 6 years spent mostly in World of Warcraft it can be easy to take WoW's ways as standard.

With these things in mind I decided that, for a change, I'm going to post about the positives of various MMOs I play or have played and focus on things they did right, things that added enjoyment (sometimes very subtly), instead of bashing what they did wrong. So to cut to the chase, here are 5 positive things I found in EQ2:

Mentoring
Depending on what MMO lands you've been traipsing through this feature might be something you're very familiar with or completely new to you. Mentoring, as implemented in EQ2, allows you to temporarily reduce your level to that of a groupmate. You keep all your abilities but they are scaled down in power and you incur a penalty to your XP gain (your mentored groupmate gets a bonus), but you can still earn XP based on how mobs con to you at your reduced level. For example if I want to play my lvl 60 conjurer and my wife wants to play her 25 inquisitor we can group, I can reduce my conjurer to level 25 and we can do level 25 mobs together.

Mentoring may not seem to be a big thing, but it's huge boon both to content and teamwork. On the content side it allows players to experience content they missed as they levelled or revisit content they enjoy in a way that retains some of its challenge.

The social aspect is of even bigger importance. Have you ever rolled a new level 1 toon you weren't too interested in just to help a friend / girlfriend / relative who was just starting the game? Have you ever hated playing catch-up because your jobless friends got 10 levels ahead of you? Did you ever get tired of slaughtering grey mobs 30 levels below you because your guildmate asked for help? Of course. With mentoring you can do all those things and still be playing the toon you love while getting some xp and challenge out of it.

And to make it all even better, there are chronomage NPCs that allow you to reduce your level without having someone to mentor. So you can even enjoy lower level content solo!

Mounts

One of those little things that just work and just subtly improve your enjoyment is the way EQ2 handles mount buffs. You get a mount. You equip your mount. You summon your mount. You ride your awesome new mount around. And then you zone into a dungeon. Your mount disappears. Not a big deal, it's standard fare of most MMOs for mounts to not be used indoors. The difference is in EQ2 the mount buff is simply suppressed not lost. When you get back into a rideable area you're immediately back on your mount and all its speed enhancing properties resume. It's a tiny thing, and one that I didn't even notice until I had been playing for a couple months. And then I noticed it and couldn't help but think "Holy shit, this is a great idea! This is so much more convenient than having to recast my mount each time I exit a house or fall in the water."

Appearance Slots
In addition to the standard inventory slots where you equip your rusty short sword or epic lootz (depending on how addicted to the game you are), EQ2 also gives you a set of appearance slots. These are only available for those slots visible on your 3D model (head, chest, main-hand, etc) and you can place any item you can equip in them. If you leave them empty your looks will be based on your stat item (so you could leave all of them empty and things would work as in any other game), but if you place something in the appearance slot its looks will be visible instead. Meanwhile you still get all the stats of your regular item.

Did you just loot a Super-Ultra-Mega-Epic Mace of the Apocalypse but realize its looks fall somewhere between a caveman's club and a turd-on-a-stick? No problem. Pop that sucker into your regular main-hand slot so you can visit doom and destructions on anything able to yeld more phat lewtz and put your Not-very-efficient Mace of Awesome Texturing in the appearance slot. You look like your're swinging the cool looking weapon but the mobs you fight are in for epic pain.

This is not a unique feature but EQ2 gets it right: The custom look isn't tied to a specific item so when you upgrade your stat items your appearance stays the same. It doesn't cost any gold or a trip to an NPC. The items do not have to match - for example my tank uses an axe and shield but her appearance slot is filled with a badass looking two-handed sword. And there's oodles of appearance-only items (which have no stats but look awesome) to be found / quested / bought / crafted. All in all an RPers dream.

The Marketplace
Definetely an odd one for me to place on this list because I'm not at all a fan of micro-transactions. I'd much rather shell out $60 for a boxed expansion and $15 a month and get everything there is to get through gameplay than spend on micro-transactions, but in EQ2 I ended up spending quite a bit on fluff and I didn't even need it for gameplay.

First off, nothing in EQ2's marketplace is required to be competitive. There are no epic loots, no buffs, no combat pets, no potions, no mercenaries. There are a few things in there have some effect on gameplay, but they're all minor. For example there are XP potions but they cap at 100% bonus for 4 hours for a whooping $18. Keeping in mind that everyone can get a 200% rested bonus and that levelling is very easy already, they aren't at all necessary. There's also a few stat items but they can all be bought with Station Cash OR Dungeon Marks (farmed in game). All in all I spent over $250 and I haven't felt driven to buy a single item that affects gameplay.

Secondly, the EQ2 Marketplace is packed with a huge variety of stuff. It doesn't matter what you like doing in the game, there's something cool you could buy. From appearance weapons and armor, to non-combat pets, to houses, to mounts, to dungeon layouts and spawners for creating your own dungeons (also buyable with dungeon marks).

Last but not least, you can use your Station Cash balance to pay for services such as server transfers (As an aside, EQ2 server transfers take less than 5 minutes to complete!!), character renames or even to add prepaid subscription time to your account.

Player and Guild Housing
This feature is awesome enough to deserve its own blog post (and maybe one day I will dedicate it one), but to make a long story short in EQ2 you can own houses. The downside is they are instanced. The upsides, however, are many! You can allow others to visit your house and you can even designate friends or alts who can make use of its amenities, place items inside it or redecorate. There's also a huge amount of items that can be placed in houses (in fact a whole tradeskill profession is dedicated to creating furniture and decorations). There's also a huge variety of house types and layouts. I've seen everything from a 2 room shack, to a mansion, to a firey draconic lair, to your own flying island. And just so you aren't too torn by the choices, each of your characters can own 10 of them.

And for a final treat here is a video tour of a player-owned house. The layout is premade, but all the furniture, paintings, statues and other decorations are placed by the owner. One of my characters owns one of these too, but I have to admit mine is not nearly as cool as this one. So for your enjoyment here's the video (made and posted by thesawolf):

cURL on Ubuntu 11.10

2012-02-21T19:45:00.000-05:00

One of the new features I'm working on for a client requires libcurl to connect to a remote server from PHP. I've dealt with enabling this on Windows installs of PHP before, but since I've lately had to use a linux (Ubuntu 11.10) server for testing I had no idea how to get it up and running (my forays into using a linux-based server are still new). After some searching and trial and error it turned out there's a very simple and elegant solution:

sudo apt-get install php5-curl

Nifty bit of sofware: Oracle VirtualBox

2012-01-10T00:46:00.001-05:00

Upgrading my computer at the end of December was a perfect time to start fresh with all my installs. The first couple days were the usual whirlwind of installs for all the most used pieces of software (OS obviously, browsers, IDE, Skype, and so on). Unfortunately I'm far from the most organized guy around so a lot of the things I used to have, but didn't immediately need, slipped my mind. A couple days ago though I ran into the need for a virtual machine and realized I hadn't re-installed Windows Virtual PC yet.

In 2011 I used Virtual PC on and off as a platform for testing projects in a few browser/OS configurations that are common to our clients but that I don't personally use at home. It's worked well, but as impatient as I am I always found it taking too long to start up and shut down VMs (not the guest OS itself, but rather the loading time before the guest started 'booting'). Since I was faced with a fresh installed anyway I looked around for some alternatives. One of the first things that popped up on my Google search was Oracle's VirtualBox software. Between it free price tag, the well-known Oracle as its developer and the fact that it's open source software I decided it's worth a shot.

Installation (I use Win 7 x64 as the host) went smoothly. Configuration was also very straightforward and covered all the usual things I've come to expect from a desktop VM solution. The list of supported guest OSs (as far as I can see from the options when setting up a VM) is quite extensive. The Windows selection covers everything from 3.1 to 8. The Linux list covers big names like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian and several others. The other lists are more limited, but some names stand out: DOS, Max OS X (and its Server pair), Solaris 10, Free BSD (and a handful of other flavors), several OS/2 versions and more. Each list also tends to have an Other option which may let you install even things unlisted. Also, most OSs are accompanied by their 64-bit counterpart as well.

My first attempt was to import my Windows XP virtual disk I had from my previous Virtual PC install and basically re-build my WinXP VM. This didn't pan-out as neither the built-in Virtual Media Manager nor several command line tricks I found on Google were able to turn this virtual disk into something usable. This wasn't a huge issue as I had pretty much expected to start fresh when I chose to try different VM software.

Windows 7 and Ubuntu VMs in Oracle Virtual Box

Starting from scratch I created two VMs, one with Ubuntu 11.10 and one with Windows 7, both in 64 bit version. Both of them installed very smoothly. Absolutely no problems with Windows 7, and while Ubuntu threw a couple error lines due to some feature the virtual bios didn't support it installed and runs perfectly.

One thing I really liked is that once the guest OSes were up and running everything else was also working without any additional drivers or tweaking. Both VMs' sound system played properly through the host's speakers, both of them were connected to the internet and picked up the USB devices I enabled on them. A very quick "Install Guest Additions..." on each VM also provided them with video drivers (after a reboot of the guest OS) that allowed them to go beyond 1024x768.

What I really like (beyond the painless setup of the VMs) is that start-up / shutdown or save / restore of the VM state is very very quick compared to Virtual PC. No, I didn't run benchmarks on all that, but it definitely satisfies my impatience.

All-in-all Oracle's VirtualBox addresses my VM needs so I can see myself using it long term. If you're looking for a VM solution then this one is definitely worth a look-see.

SoE will unlock all pre-existing characters the morning of 12/09

2011-12-09T03:51:00.001-05:00

Sonly Online Entertainment is listening to the issue experienced by veteran players who tried to return to EQ2 in the new free-2-play model only to find themselves unable to roll a new character on top of having all their characters locked. Earlier this evening, EQ2 Executive Producer `SmokeJumper` posted that characters which existed before the F2P switch will be unlocked. This change ~~should happen sometime~~ is happening during downtime on Friday, Dec 9th at 7:00 AM PST (patch notes here). You can find his original post here, but you can read below for the highlights.

All characters created before Dec 6th will be unlocked for former EQ2 Live accounts
All race/class unlocks purchased by former subscribers to EQ2 Live between 12/06/2011 at 12:01 am and 12/08/2011 at 4:30pm will be refunded (I am assuming those are PST times)
Characters will still be subject to number of character slots limit, and once in game will be subject to the standard silver-tier limitations
This will unlock your specific, existing characters not their whole race/class (ie. if you want to make new characters of those races or classes you need to subscribe or buy an unlock

I have to say I'm happy with this compromise. It makes it possible to get back into our old characters (up to 4 of them) completely free and it gives us a chance to see how we feel about the game. Sure, it doesn't unlock everything but to be honest anyone who's enjoying the game enough to need more than 4 of their toons definitely should go for the gold subscription ($15/mo) at that point as it removes the various in game limitations of the free silver plan. (see here for a breakdown of the 3 plans offered - returning veterans are automatically silver-tier accounts)

I'm also quite happy with the quick action that SOE took in response to the complaints about this issue and that they're going to have the unlock down in less than 24h from when they posted about it. Sure, they're a business and as any business it's in their own self interest to please customers, but this is quite different from the way they handled a lot of issues and complaints back when I used to play EQ2 (or in the EQ days). Perhaps their decline has taught them some humility? I've also noticed these past few days that they have a few devs that are fairly active on their forums and seem to read a variety of threads. Another pleasant departure from SOE of old.

If you're interested in the game I definitely recommend giving it a shot once the unlock goes through (or if you've never played it, just make a new account). From what I remember you can expect a much better game than the average F2P and unlike some of the other big North American F2Ps (DDO, LotRO) you won't be nickel-and-dimed for every other quest or dungeon. (Also, not pay-2-win is a big plus to me - I hear all the in-game buyable items are flavor and looks without any stat gear!)

EQ2 Free-2-Play or "We REALLY don't want you to come back to our game"

2011-12-08T17:57:00.000-05:00

Update: Looks like SOE listened to this issue and is speedily moving to address it. See my update for details.

A short while ago I got interested in giving EverQuest 2 another shot. My wife was eagerly on board with this as we've both had an on-again-off-again love for this game. We also heard that SOE, the company who owns EQ2, was making it free-2-play so what better time to give this MMO another shot?

"It's free-2-play so we'll at least get to see how we feel about it before we pull out the credit card", we excitedly told ourselves as we downloaded the installer. Of course, being avid MMO players with more than a few F2P ones on our resumes we knew there would be limitations and we full expected to be dropping a few hundreds on all kinds of perks and fluff items once we got sucked in. Re-launch day rolled up and servers finally came up. Eagerly we logged in, already thinking of what feature we'd like to check out first. And then we saw this:

Sony Online Entertainment's idea of welcoming returning players to the game. Note all the locked characters and disabled Create Character button.

"Wait a second ... all our characters are locked... Is this a bug?", we thought to ourselves and tried to figure out how to remedy the problem. But no, nothing as understandable as that. The issue is that most classes and races are locked out - not unexpected for F2P, right? What is unexpected however is that they are locked out even for past paid members who not only cannot create new characters of any race they previously could, but can't even log into their existing characters!

Apparently Sony decided that just because I paid $60 to purchase access to those 20+ classes and 12+ races they were listing on the back of the box 7 years ago it's completely OK to charge me again to unlock the exact same classes and races. Only in the MMO gaming industry something like that would fly even for a second. Think about that for a moment, will you? Let's say you bought a car 7 years ago. You paid for it, and you also understood it would be useless if you didn't pay for gas to keep it usable every month. Now, 7 years later, your car's manufacturer has decided to give away free gas to all owners of their cars. But they also lock out existing owners out of their cars until they re-buy the car at the current price. Somebody would get sued! Or lynched!

The thing is we wouldn't have even asked they let us use those classes and races without limits (say to create more alts). We didn't even expect to get access to all of our toons without paying. What is ridiculous is that a company who invited me back to "EverQuest II Free to Play. Your Way!™" decides to make it impossible for me to even log in a single, existing character until I pay. In a free-2-play game! I think someone somewhere in SOE's marketing department must have decided free-2-watch-the-character-select was too long to fit in their promo email.

End result? My wife logged off, uninstalled and hopped back on WoW. I logged off and went back to my EVE account along with a few good old games I recently picked up from gog.com. Two players who would have almost surely subscribed (getting rid of bag/item/spell restrictions is something I consider essential and worth $15/mo if I am having any fun in the game) and bought additional content ($20 for the vampire race plus $10 for a new alt slot for my wife, plus the dungeon-creation expansion for $40 for myself would have been almost immediate purchases) instead went back to other MMOs. In fact, in my case, this leaves a bitter enough taste about Sony that will have me thinking long and hard before even considering any of their future products. Someone give those marketing guys another raise!