Prsm for GM!

I've known Prsm now for about 6 months. He's up for election as a GM on the main server. I think he's an excellent candidate, always helpful, never selfish. If you know Prsm, please vote him in on the forums.

Getting Ubuntu to recognize current manaplus

There are several The Mana World clients floating around. The Mana World web site links to a really old client in the downloads section. Many people switched to the 4144 client which until recently was located at http://tmw.cetki.com/mana/. Recently it's been updated and switched to http://mana.cetki.com/.

Linux users if you installed the old client 1.1.2.20 and go to install the new client you'll find both your Gnome menus and the command line link to the old manaplus client. But if we find the paths we get:

$ whereis manaplus
/usr/games/manaplus /usr/local/bin/manaplus


Both the command line and menus recognize the old manaplus because the /usr/local/bin/manaplus is part of the PATH statement:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games


The simplest way to change our Gnome menu is to click system then preferences then main menu and select the games tree then click on the manaplus icon and click the properties button. Chance the command from just manaplus to /usr/games/manaplus.

But this doesn't solve the real problem, which is the path for manaplus is looking to /usr/local/bin first. And why does it do this? Because it's before /usr/games in the $PATH list. In Ubuntu we can change this by editing the /etc/environment file at the PATH section:

sudo vi /etc/environment
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/games:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"


All we had to do is shift /usr/games from the end of the file to near the beginning. As long as it's before /usr/local/bin the newer version of manaplus will take. Note that if you do this you do not need to change your Gnome menu as per above.

The PATH doesn't take immediately. You need to log out of your xsession (but not reboot) and log back in for the PATH change to activate.

Manaplus 1.1.2.20

Recently I compiled the 4144 Manaplus 1.1.2.20 as per these instructions: http://tmw.cetki.com/4144/ubuntu/. One of the things I noticed that was slightly different was when someone killed a monster any drops I tried to pick up too early were labelled as not mine. I like this slight change. Of course all drops if ong enough can be picked up by anyone.

 

How many spikey mushrooms does it take to get 30 iron potions?

Iron potions are the staple of a good warrior, they allow warriors to do additional damage on all creatures, but come particularly handy fighting yetis, skeletons, and jack-o. They can be bought in the snow town Nivalis for 500 GP each. If your character is rich this is a decent price. I've bought quite a few in the past. But I recently spent most of my gold and found myself wondering just how long it took to get 30 potions (actually I was thinking more like 100, but also figured I didn't have the patience).

The answer is: it takes a fair amount of time. I had to split my session into 2 sessions. In the first session I gathered 25 iron potions (which are sometimes dropped when you kill Spikey Mushrooms). The second session I finished off with 5 iron potions. It took approximately 453 Spikey Mushroom kills to accumulate 30 iron potions. I say approximately because other monsters got in the way sometimes: mooboo's, plants, etc. This is a terrible drop rate 0.06%, nowhere near the 1.2% rate that is suppose to happen. Of course just because it's a 1.2% chance of dropping doesn't mean it will drop for me/you, it's 1.2% overall.

Buy or hunt for Iron Potions, whatever your decision the price is still kind of high.

Bone quest

Players wandering below the graveyard

One of the graveyard quests is to collect 50 Bones. With a few friends I imaging raiding the graveyard for bones would be easy, and I think this is the approach a lot of people are taking. I still like a slower game and it seems a few other players seem to as well. While wandering below the graveyard I spotted a few people doing solo and small group raids on monsters.

Group attacks on the graveyard do seem to result in rapid advancement, well relatively rapidly. I've gone from 73 to 75 in a few days (not playing all day of course, just a couple of hours). It's nice to advance, but I really wasn't seeing a lot of bones since players who hit harder get the drops first. In some cases a drop was mine and if I'd already grabbed a few bones and there was a player who didn't hit as hard I'd let them squat on a bone until it became available. It isn't about rushing it but enjoying it.

Lately I've been wandering below just soloing skeletons and I've noticed that all but one skeleton didn't critically hit me - 61 Luck, not at the magic 66 yet, but close - a couple of levels. I picked up 2 or 3 bones this way. It seems you have to kill quite a few skeletons to get bones. I had gem drops, skull drops and lots of no drops, but only a few bones. Still, it's nice not being hit hard by skeletons anymore, it's an encouraging sign that I could probably get all the rest of the bones by myself.

Karma

Despite my last rant about botting I find that usually Karma happens! I try to help new players that try to help themselves. If I see a player struggling with something (mogguns for example) I might offer to help. Recently I spent about an hour hunting mogguns with Kotex (upping his coal collection from 17 to 40 and getting him his first diamond). The only thing I grabbed was a few white fur and a second diamond that showed up. Last night I spent a bit more time helping Kotex in the graveyard (imaging going from mogguns to the graveyard - a pretty big step) along with MoonWolf (a mage who also seems particularly helpful).

I also gave away my (rare) staff to a player who had helped me out a bunch of times before and who I've mentioned in this blog a couple of times before. At some point I might do the mage thing, but for now I still prefer the warrior route. As a rule I don't give away rares, or items of particular value, and I especially don't give items to people begging for it (it just encourages more begging). Earn it! The player I gave the staff to was a mage and he certainly earned it with all his help.

As I started to mention karma seems to come back... Sugar, Prsm and I went Jacko hunting and they allowed me to pick all the drops. I had previously fought jacko 4 times, all of which only resulted in a soul drop, and were difficult because I had to consume a lot of healing. Rikle joined us for a bit and provided healing.

Sugar previously helped me with an Infantry Helment when I needed one for the steel shield quest. I returned it in the form of an extra crusader helmet I had. But Sugar has helped me a few times before, including when I first started blogging about TMW (a previous Tarq character before the wipe).

Prsm helped me brew monster oil for my setzer and with coal. I was really impressed when I was hunting mogguns one time and he came in and killed one in a group I was working on and took the coal, then apologized profusely. Just the apology was nice, especially since I could barely kill mogguns at the time.  But he also gave me 10 coal that allowed me to finally get my warlord plate. It's players like Prsm and Sugar that inspire me to help players like Kotex. But they too deserve a big thanks... so Prsm and Sugar, thank you... your karma kick is coming.

Stop the bots!

Originally I had a different idea for this post, I wanted to talk about a few great players in the game (and I still will) that helped me with Jack'o. Instead it's a rant about the rampant botting that's going on. Currently botting seems to be allowed as long as the player can respond using all characters in the bot train. It shouldn't be... here's why:

* It slows down the server and creates lag. Sometimes it's not noticeable, but I've noticed it quite a bit when botters bot around where I'm training.
* It creates an unfair advantage for botters. Botters with a big train can kill much faster than single players, meaning all the drops end up going to botters.
* It creates an economy where botters have more than non-botters. Whether it's something as simple as oranges, or special event prizes (lots of botting during the Halloween event).
* It creates more of those annoying shops that pm regular players. These occur anyway, but seem to be more prevalent now that botting is allowed.
* It creates a lot more bots.

I've been to the beach a few times (including at 6:50am) the past week and each time someone has been botting there with between 1 to 3 extra bot players in tow. I think players are farming for pearls, which means they'll get devalued. Unfortunately it's also one of the best places for healing drops. Sea slimes drop oranges and red apples at 8% each, 16% chance of getting a healing drop, the highest for any creature. Sea slimes also drop concentration potions. Normally it takes time to farm Sea slimes, but with bots in tow it's easy for them to rack up a good amount of oranges, apples, concentration potions and pearls. I set a goal about a month back to kill 1,000 sea slimes. That goal would have never happened if I needed to fight against botters.