Mania’s Arcania

I have jury duty tomorrow. Because I chose to delay my service for several months, I can no longer just call in the night before to see if they need me. Instead, I have to drive up there tomorrow and sit in the courthouse all day. (But hopefully just for one day!) I need to be there at 7:45 am, so I probably need to get up around 6:30 am. Now, I’ve been working more or less second shift hours for the past two months, so my normal wake-up time has been around noon. (For the record, I sometimes cheat on this blog — I often post before I go to bed early in the morning, or schedule posts to go up while I’m asleep).

So I plan on being very unhappy for most of tomorrow. But at least I have Thursday to recover before BlizzCon starts! (Not that I’m going, but I plan on being glued to the monitor waiting for snippets of news.) Anyway, I’ll schedule one of the Kaet posts for after midnight, but I probably won’t be around much tomorrow.

If you get the chance, make sure you check out the in-game concert by the band Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain. They play every hour on the hour at a stage just south of Shattrath City, along the road. I saw Drysc talking about the concert on the WoW General forum, so I swung by — and it was really good! The pyrotechnics were especially cool. They only played one song (even though I called for an encore), but it was worth the trip.

I spent a big chunk of today getting myself set up to test taming ‘pet’ creatures on the PTR. I reactivated my husband’s account, installed the PTR on his laptop, copied a pre-made level 70 mage (that I have no idea how to play), read for an hour while both this character and my copied main waited in the PTR queue, ducked the hundreds of requests for teleports that came in as soon as I got on, and headed out across the world to try taming some of the controlled beasts that people have mentioned.

I had absolutely no luck.

(more…)

(You can read all of Kaet’s adventures, starting with why I’m doing things this way, by checking out the series Table of Contents at the end of this post. Alternatively, if you are here primarily for juicy pet-related news, feel free to skip these bits — they’re optional.)

And so, at level 10, the hunter trainer in the Dwarven District of Stormwind, the eloquent Thorfin Stoneshield, sent me off to Kharanos for my level 10 hunter quests. For some reason, you must do your level 10 quests in your race’s homeland, even if you have been leveling up elsewhere. But just to be polite the hunter trainers in other towns will often give you a minor quest to go home, worth some 85 experience.

(more…)

I spent some more time yesterday and today tweaking Petopia in response to feedback. Let me say it again — thank you to everyone who has sent me their impressions of the changes. It really helps me figure out where I went wrong and what needs to be dealt with first. *grin* But here’s a quick rundown of the work from yesterday and today.

• I added another shortcut to the front page to search for pets that know a particular skill. Like the shortcuts for searching by level and zone, this shortcut feeds into the main database so you can refine your search from there as you like.

(more…)

(You can read all of Kaet’s adventures, starting with why I’m doing things this way, by checking out the series Table of Contents at the end of this post. Alternatively, if you are here primarily for juicy pet-related news, feel free to skip these bits — they’re optional.)

Last I left off I had just reached level 6 and trained my level 2-6 skills after finishing up all the quests in the Northshire area. Next up, of course, was Goldshire.

(more…)

I spent most of the day fixing minimum width issues under IE6 (*sigh*) but I did find time to get some new/old info back up. It’s really late and I’m incredibly tired so I’ll just list a couple of useful things.

• There are shortcuts to simple level and zone searches on the front page now, so it’s easier to find those functions. They feed right into the main database so you can start with a level or zone search and then refine by diet or skill or what have you from there. It wasn’t always obvious before that the database had replaced the old Pets by Level and Pets by Zone pages, but hopefully this will help.
• The “Show me the pets!” shortcut on the front page now opens up options for seeing all the pet appearances or just a specific type of pets (damage, armor, etc.).
• I completely revamped the old family stat page (which was just the table of all the stat modifiers) into a more broad family comparison page. It has color-coded tables for comparing diet, skills, and stat modifiers across families. There’s a good bit more to be said about most of these things, and more work to make that information accessible, but these charts will do for now. Tomorrow I hope to get them hooked up to the family, mob, and skin pages.

I got through all of the feedback e-mail from yesterday this morning but I haven’t really looked at it since, so I’ll get through all of today’s feedback tomorrow morning. If I haven’t answered you yet, please be patient – I have a lot to dig through, and I’m making tweaks  to the site as I go. :>

First, Big Red Kitty has a great article on WoWInsdier this week, What Kind of Hunter Are You?, in which he talks about all the newb mistakes that lay in wait to trap an unsuspecting young (or not so young) hunter. Now I admit, reading BRK sometimes (often!) leaves me feeling bad about my own abilities as a hunter, but this column made me feel better. :>

(As an aside, I think one of the bigger mistakes Blizzard made with the hunter class conceptually was to leave so much very important information outside the game. Sure, the advanced details and mathematical analysis of pets and skills belongs on external websites, but it would be nice if basic info about how important pets are and how to go about training a pet was being transmitted in-game where it belongs. *shrug* Personal rant.)

(more…)

I’ve just uploaded a whole bunch of changes to the Petopia website. Most of these are fairly subtle changes meant to make things easier for me, but some of them are also meant to make things easier for you. :>

Now I should start by saying that, just like a live MMO game, a web site like Petopia is a living, growing thing. And it’s going to go on growing — there’s a lot of work left to do, a lot of small tweaks I want to make, major features I want to add, interesting research I want to host, all sorts of things –  but since there’s just me whacking away at it right now, it won’t all get done overnight. So expect ongoing changes as I continue to polish things up. :>

The flip side of that is that I have a lot of opportunity to evaluate feedback as I go. It doesn’t matter if I am excited about a change if it makes it harder to use the site. So I’m going to be watching all the feedback I get about changes to Petopia very carefully. If you have a comment or a suggestion, please drop me an e-mail! I prefer e-mail for this kind of feedback — I find it easier to sort and track that way.

(more…)

So Comic-Con was a bust. I somehow thought that since we’d bought tickets ahead of time, we’d be able to, you know, get in. But there was a two hour line when we got there, and after we wandered around downtime for a bit and had some lunch, it had gotten longer. *sigh*

We weren’t going to wait that long in the sun. My husband’s bald head just got over being badly sunburned and I have a bad tendency of passing out when I overheat.

So we came home instead. But I used the rest of my day wisely – getting a big update for Petopia ready to go live. So that was something. :>