Hidden Warcraft

What Is Server Maturity?

Renei — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:20:12 +0000

World of Warcraft has been online now for over four years. After a couple of initial hiccups, it began running smoothly and has ever since. If you can remember that far back, you’ll recall that the previous level cap – pre Burning Crusade-was level 60. After the introduction of the Burning Crusade expansion set, the level cap was raised to 70.

You are allowed a maximum of 10 characters per server. As time goes by, the number of players that are entirely new to the game naturally diminishes, and those few that join are automatically directed towards the newer, emptier Realms.

What does it mean for established servers? Basically, and over the months, the number of low level players gradually diminishes, since a lot of players butt against the 10-toon limit. This has numerous, severe consequences on Realm economies. Let’s assume the following:

Most players have one or more level 70 characters.
They do one or more daily Quest each day.
They have one or more lower level alts that they feed with cash.

Understanding that most people dislike farming, all those rich low level alts will be buying the raw materials they need to level their skill on the auction house, concentrating the limited time they have in Azeroth to leveling their ‘toons’.

This leads to a supply and demand problem. It is well and good to buy your supplies on the AH, but someone HAS to be selling. Since a lot of players will be making their WOW living from daily Quests, the incentive to gather materials for the purpose of resell will be decreased because of the easy availability of gold. Prices will therefore rise until the prices become so high that it becomes worth it to deal with the drudgery of farming, because the rewards are so great.

Whichever way you look at it, the WoW economy is inflationary. The Central Bank - Blizzard - keeps pumping cash into the economy through quests, vendored items and mob drops. As time goes by, and especially on mature servers, it is inevitable that the prices for the most annoying items to gather will rise first, followed by everything else, as everyone has fatter and fatter bank balances, and just like in the real world, people are short on time.

Darnassian Bleu - make your own cheese?

Renei — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:57:05 +0000

Recently I have been leveling up a new character - a night elf druid. The other day, as I dealt with the Defias Brotherhood in Westfall collecting red bandanas, one of the Defias dropped some Darnassian Bleu.

Now, while Darnassian Bleu doesn’t have much in the way of benefits for a druid, as a Tauren Chef it made me think. Hmmm, wouldn’t it be great to know how to make your own cheese? Especially in the event of a life-as-we-know-it-is-ending apocalypse (such as the destruction of the Sunwell) that sort of knowledge would be nice to have.

During my research at the grocery store and on the internet I came across a site that gives easy to understand instructions for how to make your own cheese at home.

The recipes were written by David B. Fankhauser, Ph.D. who is Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College in Batavia, Ohio. He also has a very informative site on homemade cheese (and so much more) titled Fankhauser’s Cheese Page.

He has cheese recipes, cheese videos, recipes for home made root beer, ginger ale, limoncello (an Italian aperitif liqueur,) and other items of interest too numerous to list. And yes, he does have a recipe for Blue cheese, though I don’t believe it is Darnassian Bleu.

His cheese recipes use rennet tablets from the Junket Company???????? ????? ????????, which sounds like a good idea. They are very inexpensive and apparently quite reliable. I bought some today, but I haven’t tried them out in any recipes yet.

Of course, if you are a purist, you can always do it the old-fashioned way and use a small piece of salted and dried abomasum. (According to Dr. Fankhauser, an abomasum is the last of the four chambers of the stomach of a ruminant animal. The abomasum from a suckling kid or calf was apparently very good for making cheese.)

Or, you can always buy cheese at the store . . .

Update - What’s Coming up at HiddenWarcraft.com

Renei — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:49:05 +0000

I’ve not been writing too much recently. In fact, I’ve just realized that it already has been a full month since I posted anything, and for that I apologize.

I wish I could say that I have a real good excuse. I don’t. I started a new job, and it does take much of my time during the day, but I could still write at night, much as I’m doing now. So that’s no excuse. I can’t even claim that I’m not playing as much as I used to, because while the total hours played have dropped, I’m still playing pretty much every day, and quite intensely on weekends. (more…)