I’m currently at level 31 there and one quarter away from the second highest faction rank just from questing and killing orcs, wights, goblins and other creeps that the Eglain find objectionable.

Speaking of which, crafting will be one of the elements covered in Altitis’ next “From Azeroth to Middle-Earth” post. Stay tuned…

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO faction reputation: The KhazadGuard’s comprehensive review of crafting for Eglain

Cataclysm has come, and my inability to give a damn about it has persisted. Oh, I still read some Azerothian bloggers from time to time, but in reality, I only care about the meta posts, the ones focusing on the social aspects of the game.

Closure is due, and in that spirit, I decided it is high time to do some pre-Spring cleaning, dust off the cobwebs, and see whether I still have any live audience at all, or whether the 142 feedburner subscribers are nothing but spambots waiting for a new post to open.

Cleanup also brought me to my blogroll, and it’s at that stage that I took stock of just how many warcraft bloggers have stopped writing. When I last updated it, in Summer 2008 (in other words a couple of decades in ‘Net time), every one on there was active.

Today, I pruned 71 Wow-related blogs from the roll. All of those had no post more recent than last Fall. And while the Blog Azeroth community still gets many new blogs introducing themselves every week, it seems only the most dedicated are still around from the founding days.

I also cleaned up my links page, and found out in the process that my item tooltip provider had ceased their service. So if for whatever reason you were reading old warcraft related posts of mine and get error messages while hovering over an item link, my apologies. I’ll probably need to find a suitable replacement for all wow posts. Eventually.

And this cleanup marks the final closure on the World of Warcraft as far as yours truly is concerned. Since I last posted, I spent many bucks on Steam games, catching up on some great titles both single and multiplayer that I had missed while focused on WoW. Well, catching up is an overstatement, at the time of this writing, I probably have another 20 games or so that I have yet to play from the previous sales. I take great comfort in the fact that others are afflicted by similar troubles, most notably another former WoW blogger who expanded his focus to other (and wider) horizons a long time ago, Andrew of Systemic Babble.

It has been much quieter on the MMO front: while I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying out other things, nothing really had any lasting impact. I have tried out several of those fancy new Free to play + microtransaction MMOs over the past year and a half, in no particular order:

• Wizard 101, cute, interesting combat based on building card decks, but became quite repetitive and grinding before reaching level 10 to me
• Free Realms, another entry on the cute factor, too much limitations on F2P even early after their launch, even more, I understand, nowadays
• Dungeon & Dragons Online – a trip down memory lane for sure. Quite nice for casual players actually, since you can play most if not all instances in solo mode. I again eventually found it a bit grindy for my taste. DDO is also a world built on loosely connected instanced areas with relatively long loading times in-between, and for some reason that eventually turned me off, perhaps more than other elements of the game. I found that in MMOs, I apparently need to keep a certain sense of seamless connection between areas in order to feel immersed. Lacking that, I’d rather play Neverwinter Nights offline.
• Final Fantasy XI, take 2: Wow, talk about radical changes. FFXI was my first MMO, long before WoW. In the 5 years since stopping it, the game has undergone several important changes making it more casual friendly. Most amazing was to find out that several of the people from my old linkshell still played the game, and catching up and saying hello was definitely a plus. On the other hand, at this time I found out that experience hits upon death are no longer suitable to my playing time, habits and expectations. Good to revisit an old and previously beloved place, but at the same time, it felt a bit like visiting your childhood bedroom 20 years later.
• Battle Forge: I quite like playing RTSes, I quite like the notion of building and playing decks of cards, so an MMORTS that uses trading decks as a way to build your army sounds great. Played for a while, then had a total hard drive crash, and never reinstalled. The reality is, I probably don’t really like the Real Time in Real Time Strategy. I’m not that good at twitch and fast paced reactions, and it turns out that what I really like are PE-RTS – Pause-Enabled RTS.

Mind you, none of the above are bad games, and if you’re looking at a change of pace, I would recommend you give any of them a try if it sounds fancy to you.

And so I was eventually bound to end up in Middle Earth.

Lord of the Rings Online is made by Turbine, the same developers who worked on Asheron’s Call 1 & 2 and DDO before that. And while many companies who have published and operated more than one MMO out there seem unable to really capitalize on their previous experiences, Turbine, according to those who have tried out all of their games, definitely seem to be learning and producing games that are more polished and offer more robust gameplay every time. A game perfect for casual players: Free to play with microtransactions means I can unlock content at my own pace. Loose and informal grouping. Able to provide ok challenge without at the same time having punishing penalties for failure (like others before, you get a hit to your equipment durability rather than experience points, there’s no corpse walking). At the stage I’m at, it’s definitely not a game designed for the hardcore players, and I have to confess that I haven’t yet spent any time looking at the raiding scene at all. I doubt there’s any bosses that take over 18 hours to defeat though (and here’s my parting shot to the WoW hardcore crowd: compared to FFXI’s endgame, you’re just scrubs anyway, regardless of how dumbed down both games have become recently). A good social climate, at least on my server (playing on Imladris-US). And many, many features that make the game interesting so far.

Speaking of the social climate, the only really annoying discussions on public chat channels seem to involve WoW (as in “-WoW is so much better than this! -Oh really? Why are you here then?”). And while my current Kinship (that’s Guilds in LotRO) isn’t necessarily the most chatty one, I got invited to a friendly and helpful bunch.

The opening of the LOTRO chapter on this blog definitely deserves its own posts, but in the meantime, there are two resources needed for players who want to give it a go:

• MMORSEL for Lords of the Rings Online is a well organized and comprehensive information resource on the game.  Not sure what account model is right for you? How core game mechanics work? Whether a quest pack is worth purchasing? Mmorsel has the answer.
• A Casual Stroll to Mordor is a multi-author blog and podcast that has a ton of information, guides, updates, and other useful resources.

Last but not least, a word of caution. The main LotRO servers are run by Turbine in the US, but in Europe, the game is operated by Codemasters. Depending on the ping you have, it may not be a good idea to play overseas. I found out when I already had a toon in my 20ies, a house and enough cash to pay for a mount or three that I was playing on the “wrong” servers.

And that’s enough for now. Need some screenies to illustrate the next post. Soon. I swear.

This was a post from Altitis.

Closing the Warcraft Book, Opening Lord of the Rings Online

For those unwilling to read up the entire background, in January, after a long edit war on the Wikipedia entry for Threshold, one of the more well-known MUDs ever produced, the article was proposed for deletion for lack of notability. Followed two bitter weeks of fighting and concerned / angry / outraged posting throughout the online gaming blogosphere, including reactions from people like Richard Bartle, Raph Koster or Scott Jennings.

Many posts painted a picture of a Wikipedia subjected to the whims and tantrums of the so-called Deletionists, a dark troop of book-burners intent on building reputation by deleting thousands of articles on the flimsiest grounds, about to doom the free encyclopedia with their antics.

I was largely under that same impression – for instance I commented on Wolfshead’s initial post with “The problem I have with the whole matter, like Wolf(shead) pointed out, is that based on the Threshold (and other similar matters, eg the webcomics purge of 2007), I have a hard time conceiving the displayed behaviour as an exception rather than the norm.”

I believe this isn’t too different from what most of the gamers reading about this at the time were thinking.

It’s also pretty much entirely wrong.

In the 10 months since, the English Wikipedia has passed 3 million articles. The Threshold article has remained entirely untouched by anyone since March, and is since then getting between 200 and 300 clicks per month.

And from a critic, I actually turned into an editor myself. See, after the Threshold fiasco passed and my temper cooled off, I read a gaming article, found something that was not correct, created an account, and fixed it. 5’000 edits later, and I’ve found that I was wrong back then.

Deletionists, and their counterparts inclusionists, may make for good headlines because their clashes are always loud, spectacular and sensational, but they are a tiny, tiny minority among regular contributors. There are far more people called deletionists in anger (it’s Wikipedia’s equivalent of Godwin’s Law) than true deletionists among regular editors.

The claim that deletionists build their cred with the internal Wikipedia cabal by getting stuff deleted is patently false. Since I started editing, about 150 editors submitted themselves to the community’s appraisal through a “Request for adminship”, to become administrators with the tools to, among others, delete articles. Among these 150ish editors, how many true deletionists  have been promoted to administrators?

Zero.

Yes, not a single of those decried book burners has been successful in getting access to the tools that would allow them to delete more content. In fact, during all these months, the two most important criteria the Wikipedia community has looked at before voting whether a candidate should get access to administration tools (beyond deletion, they also include the ability to block users and protect pages from editing) were their interactions with other users, in particular in conflictual situations, and the amount AND quality of their content contributions. Or, in other terms, what they have done to build the encyclopedia rather than destroy it.

In 10 months of contributions, I haven’t run into any of the Threshold antagonists, I could probably count the interactions I had with true hardcore deletionists on one hand, and I’ve had exactly two articles I contributed to deleted, on what I found to be valid grounds in both cases.

What is true is that the inclusion standards are strict and become stricter as time passes, and these rely on the four core content policies: that an article be written in a neutral tone, its content verifiable through independent, third party reliable sources and that they contain no original research. The oft-decried notability criteria isn’t even a policy (and is unlikely to become one for quite some time), and in general, pure rationales of “it’s just not notable” aren’t considered in a deletion discussion at all.

Notability itself is a bit of a misnomer anyway. What the notability guideline tries to do is to specify some (relatively) objective criteria a topic must adhere to in order to be written about, most importantly, that the subject has been noticed and commented about by these famous reliable sources in a sufficiently non-trivial fashion that a neutral article can be written on it. If nobody ever heard about a topic before, Wikipedia cannot, and should not, be the first place to talk about it.

Threshold was a typical example of the kind of train wreck that happens when the need for reliable independent third party coverage clashes with a topic that is extremely familiar to a (all things considered) small group of people, where most coverage is available only on specialized, user-generated sites. Many MUDers of old and most people who dabbled in MUD content design or coding are intimately familiar with TopMudSites or TMC, probably used its forums, and have a relatively decent notion of what MUDs were / are imp0rtant to the genre. The older among us will also remember using Usenet rec.games.mudding.* discussions and will definitely be familiar, for instance, with Michael Hartman and Threshold from these days. We probably all remember the MUD Commandos and the design discussions we held there, and from that, we have a good feeling of what is / was key to our hobby and what isn’t.

The problem is, none of the above fit Wikipedia’s criteria for Reliable Sources. And that’s where culture clashes happen, and Threshold is a perfect example of that. The thing is, when trying to build an online, entirely volunteer-based encyclopedia, you need to draw a line somewhere on what kind of information you base your articles. Stupid marketing slogans put aside (If you’re really trying to find “The sum of all human knowledge”, Google + archive.org are probably the closest you will get), should Wikipedia have an article on my pet cat or the great maths teacher I had in 3rd grade (OK, I lied, he was anything but great but you catch my drift)? Should this blog have an entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. My own personal delusions of grandeur put aside, nothing I did so far has been noticed and commented upon sufficiently to warrant an article in Wikipedia, and that’s probably unlikely to change for that matter.

But back to the original topic, or rather, this new round of “look at the disaster that is Wikipedia, people are leaving in droves”. Well, first of all, this statement is pretty much similar to all the doomsday prediction we get when WoW’s overall activity level decreases. Yes, people stop contributing, and yes, you could very easily measure the decay then make a projection on when Wikipedia will die off if you speculate that the curve is entirely linear, and like WoW keeps proving, those predictions would probably end up quite wrong.

That being said, the learning curve for a newbie is steep, in particular since while Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, creating a new article for the first time is usually a quite unpleasant experience.

What typically happens to an article created by a new contributor is:

• It gets first checked by a bot against obviously copy / pasted material, if the bot comes up with a positive result, the article will probably be deleted very swiftly. Wikipedia does its best to weed out copyright issues as soon as it is made aware of it, and many people simply do not understand that just because a text has no copyright notice that doesn’t mean it is free for taking. On average, between 30 and 80 copyright issues are identified and manually verified every day, of which about 50 concern new articles exclusively. This is a first deterrent to new contributors, but one that is difficult for Wikipedia to bypass, because of the legal ramifications.

• Next, it will be visited by the so-called New Page Patrol, and this is where the user experience can become negative pretty fast. The average new user will start an article and write a couple of sentences, then save it, and continue working on it, in a quite natural editing process. Between the first and the second save, though, chances are that a patroller will have visited the article, and, in the best case, placed a series of maintenance templates highlighting its most glaring defects (it’s a draft after all), or nominated the article for speedy deletion. When that happens, the article is often gone before the new user has finished reading through the warnings (provided he got some). This is definitely where the process can be improved, and a discussion is currently underway to seek venues to improve that. Wikipedia has also recently created an Article Wizard which guides new users through a series of key questions to cover in order to build an article that has staying power.

One other reason for the drop in active contributors is that with over 3 million articles, topics with abundant third party coverage become more rare. Also, undeniably, when I talk about a steep learning curve, the trend is definitely worsening as the years pass – at the same time, we’re now in an age where less and less people bother to RTFM before they do anything (I still remember the old Netiquette recommendation that people lurk for a while before posting on a new forum, it seems outlandish nowadays).

Wikipedia has its problems, and among them, the biggest is that when you purport to be the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, anyone does, and that includes teenage pranksters who believe it’s great to insert swearwords into articles or make up stuff in biographies of personalities. It also includes politically motivated people who will try to influence the perception of the side their backing or of their opponents, it includes PR representatives from small or new companies who want to use Wikipedia as an extension of their advertising campaign, and many people editing sensitive stuff in which they are way too emotionally involved, like national topics or, let’s say, their own MUD’s entry. But protecting biographies of living people is currently the biggest issue, and it’s one of the core reason why the New Pages and Recent Changes Patrols exist.

Because of the fallout generated by vandalism, regardless of pranks or pure malice, many well-meaning contributors get turned away at the door as well. As indicated above, in order to ease the learning curve a bit for new contributors, there’s the article wizard (Wikipedia’s newbie zone if you will), there is also a feature called Articles for Creation where people can start on their drafts and get reviews before their article goes live. In a Blizzardish “soon” way another feature is due to be piloted called Flagged Revisions, which will hide from public view any changes to an article as long as they have not been reviewed by a human – to ensure some of the most well-known fiascos and defamation scandals that have happened in the past will no longer be repeated, and to provide a better layer of protection when events like Thierry Henry’s infamous hand action in a highly disputed qualification match for the 2010 FIFA soccer world cup happens.

The other reality is that in the grand scheme of things, you cannot rely on Wikipedia alone for information. Some articles are excellent, some are abysmally poor. In any case, you should stay well clear of re-using it in a school work for instance. Two things are valuable in any case, though: the footnotes on a well-referenced article will allow you to cut short a bit on bibliographic research and provide you with a good starting point on any topic. And on most articles’ talk page, you will find a quality assessment of the article that should help you decide whether you’re dealing with something Wikipedia’s community has self-identified as decent work or not. Articles are classified on a scale which starts as a Stub (a couple of lines, barely more than a draft), then from Start class to C, B, A, then Great Article and Featured Article. The last three quality classes are subject to multiple reviews and more stringent criteria, and while far from perfect, will give at least some measure of the article’s content quality.

To conclude this overly verbose post, let’s go back to what Wolfshead had written in the immediate aftermath of the Threshold trainwreck:

“The other problem is that the fastest way to earn points is to delete articles, which has the deleterious effect of removing information from Wikipedia instead of adding to it. It is far easier to destroy then it is to create. A project like Wikipedia that deems to hold the public interest with regard to being a virtual library of the “people” like Wikipedia should be held to a higher standard then it currently is.  Their current admin policy which incentivizes and rewards destruction and penalizes creation is woefully flawed and should be overhauled immediately.”

In over 10 months of contributing, I’ve found this assessment wholly without merit. Despite my own initial impressions, generated in the same context, and pretty much in line with Wolfshead’s sentiment at that time, the Threshold case, from what I’ve since experienced, is a rare exception rather than the norm, and the current community’s overall sentiment is, on the contrary, very unforgiving of the few people who try to earn points through deletion of information. Once a contributor is identified as a true deletionist, he has less than a snowball’s chance in hell to get the community’s trust for any additional responsibilities.

The reality is that the majority of the regular contributors are reunited around a single goal, to build the online encyclopedia along the above mentioned content criteria, to remove the “suck” still remaining in way too many insufficiently referenced pages, to weed out plagiarism, copyright violations, vandalism and libel wherever they find it.

They strive relentlessly to produce and improve content, driven with one unified passion, to share knowledge. And they all could do without the drama of these rare, but visible, exceptions like the Threshold affair.

This was a post from Altitis.

The Threshold / Wikipedia story, 10 months later

So, what happened to Altitis?

Real life, that’s what happened. While I don’t want to dwell on things too much (or turn this into a “fishing for sympathy” post), I went through a situation not unlike what Big Red Kitty went through. Oh, the circumstances were different, and WoW was a mere symptom of what had gone wrong in my life, but the background is similar.

Except in my case, I went a bridge too far, and almost failed to mend and amend what I once thought would be lasting for the rest of my life. My family was on the brink of dissolution, and I moved out for about six months, convinced it was the end. And while I used to qualify blogging as cathartic, I never found the strength to blog about that at all. That explains the long hiatus.

In the middle of it, I thought I would be able to resume blogging, but for some reason, I never managed to do so since that cryptic one-worder a few months back.

Against my pessimistic outlook six months ago, though, events took a turn for the better, and we finally worked things out.

This isn’t however a sob-story serving as the testimonial on how MMORPGs have ruined (or almost ruined) the life of yet another family. As I said, it was a mere symptom of things gone wrong – spending too long in the game, investing too much into the completely wrong thing. And it wasn’t just gaming either, my job had taken an overblown importance too. What happened is probably just one in a million similar stories, where the people change, the context changes, and the symptoms change, but to keep this short, where we went wrong was that my significant other and myself started to take each other for granted and stopped communicating on tiny issues at first, and then on bigger and bigger issues, and this almost brought our couple down.

So the only advice I can give to any gamer out there, in particular if you’re in a stable, long term relationship, and more so if you have kids: you may want, periodically, to examine your gaming habits and ask yourself if they are an innocuous hobby or have become escapism for you. If it’s the latter, it may be worth taking a honest look at your life,  figure out what you’re fleeing, and address the issue, because trust me, leaving your home while your 4-year old daughter starts asking “why is daddy taking his pillow with him?” is not an experience you will enjoy.

But that’s enough background already. This was then, and as I said, we finally worked it out a couple of weeks ago.

What is going to happen to Altitis?

Frankly, I don’t know really. When crap hit the fan, I jokingly remarked to my friend Adventsparky that at least I’d be able to play during raiding peak times. In reality, that never happened.

I continued playing WoW pretty casually for a while, first on my mage, and then I picked up my shammie and eventually reached level 80 with her.

At the same time, for the first time since joining in May 2005, I actually let my subscription run out, and didn’t notice for several weeks. And it happened a second time more recently – a few weeks ago, before moving back, I wanted to check out something in the game and found, again, that I could no longer do so.

I haven’t resubscribed since.

Interestingly enough, Adventsparky once asked me whether I was still playing the game, explaining that some evening this Spring he just logged out after a raid, and never logged back in. The heart isn’t in it anymore.

Oh, I read the cataclysm announcements, but they failed to raise any kind of enthusiasm. I think the only thought that entertained me was when reading about the split of the Barrens zone, I started wondering whether this would be the end of the Mankirk’s Wife jokes.

In reality, like many other commentators on the blogosphere, I now find myself playing various different games extremely casually, either purely single-player games, or trying out one of the several viable Free2Play MMOs out there: From Wizard101 to FreeRealms, over Jade Dynasty, World of Kung Fu and Runes of Magic. I’m currently exploring Dungeons and Dragons Online (which recently went Free2Play) a bit, when I have time. I’m not really far in the game.

World of Warcraft? A while ago, I pondered resubbing for the anniversary pet and the headless horseman event. I probably won’t do that any more. In reality, the Free2Play games out there, and their microtransaction schemes allowing you to buy and consume content at your leisure, represent simply much more entertainment value for my money than shelling out 15€ / month for WoW when I might play it for little more than a couple of hours at best, if at all.

And while I could definitely afford it, I also find that the subscription fee actually participates in generating a compulsion to play in me, at the exclusion of other games, becoming enough a narrow focus that it might again draw me in and provoke another spiral that may, next time around, no longer come with a happy ending.

So the future of Altitis is similar to what a few other former WoW bloggers have done – altitis no longer confined to one game, but offering, perhaps, comments, reviews but also broader thoughts on several games.

Or maybe not. Time will tell.

In the meantime, the tagline of the blog has changed (I actually changed it when I posted the “Soon” message already), it has now become “Seeking Better Worlds”.

It is a combination of Dr. Richard Bartle‘s continuous action to try and push developers and players alike to create and demand better, richer virtual worlds. At the same time, it is also a play on the fictional Weyland-Yutani (of the Alien movie series) corporate slogan, “Building better worlds”, as a reminder that the quest for better virtual worlds in itself may very well become perverted if it turns, again, into a threat to my real life.

This was a post from Altitis.

Phoenix Reborn?

I will therefore thank all my readers, commenters, respondents, and the fellow bloggers in the WoW gaming community for your participation, interaction and readership over the roughly 18 months during which Altitis has remained active.

Of course, since an inactive blog doesn’t actually take too much space in your feed readers, you can always keep it in in case I get back to blogging about WoW in the future. If not, thank you for the shared journey, and the best to all of you.

This was a post from Altitis.

Altitis Goes on Indefinite Blogging Hiatus

This post will be focused on self-hosted WordPress blogs, but some elements may be applicable to other platforms as well.

First, what is SEO, and why would your WoW blog want it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a field of activity which covers an innumerable amount of methods to promote a website. These methods are in general roughly divided into so called white hat activities, considered fully legit by search engines, and black hat, which if caught will get your site blacklisted. While most search engines have different rules of what is black hat and what not, as a very rough rule of fist, anything which is devised to deceive a search engine or artificially inflate your search results is to be considered off-limits.

The purpose of starting to apply some SEO techniques is to boost your search engine traffic and ensure all the wonderful, smart, funny, witty, insightful posts you write are positioned properly.

A word of warning before we begin, though. No search engine has published how their indexing mechanisms work exactly, nor how they rate content internally.  As a consequence, the field of SEO theory has always been full of exploratory techniques which would turn out, later on, to be totally worthless. Fortunately, we’re going to focus on the basics and these are quite straightforward.

As to the question of whether it’s worth it, well, in the grand scheme of things Altitis is a very small blog. Before Wrath (and due to a low posting volume), my readership was in average below 150 visits a day. If you were to Google last Friday (when I started writing this post) and type “death knight macros” as the search term, though, I was sitting in 4th position with my post about the ghoul leap suppression. Ahead of scores of sites focused on macros, ahead of wowwiki, dedicated DK sites, and even the o-bards.

Since Wrath was released, my readership sits between 400 and 600 visits a day, without ever getting linked by the big names (EJ or WoWInsider). All of the additional visits come from search engines, mostly Google.

Worth it? Well, I don’t have advertisements on the site, but I still like the fact that my posts are being read, so I’d say yes, it’s definitely worth it for me.

Setting Up

First thing first. Before anything else, make sure your blog is actually allowing search engines. On WordPress, it’s under Settings -> Privacy. Blogger definitely has that setting as well, under Settings->Basic->Let Search Engines find your blog. Others? You tell me

Second, make sure your blog is known and recognized by Google. Blogger users have a slight advantage over others here as they will be included in some capacity even if they do nothing beyond changing the privacy settings. Nonetheless, start by visiting Google Webmaster Central and follow the Submit your content to Google procedure. Next, sign in to webmaster tools, and authenticate your site. Webmaster tools aren’t really good for a lot of things as much of the information is stale, inaccurate or way too plentiful to be of any practical use, but the diagnostics page can point out a couple of interesting elements to check and fix. Among these, keywords and meta descriptions.

For WordPress users, a good way to improve drastically the context of your posts – that is, providing some additional information to search engines to help them catalog your posts, or in other words, to give them some clues what your post is about, is to grab the plug-in All-in-One-SEO Pack.

The reason you want to use and configure this plugin is simple, it gives you a simple and handy way to edit meta keywords and descriptions for all your posts, which will appear as an additional set of fields in your edit post page. The settings are pretty self-explanatory, but basically you will want to fill in some generic recurring elements (like “world of warcraft” for the home keywords”) in there at the very least, for the general context of what you’re writing about.

In the post editor page, under the All in One SEO Pack menu you will have an opportunity to enter some specific keywords and a short description of what the page is about. Note that while not all search engines will use these, they are better filled in than left out. Descriptions should ideally have between 80 and 160 characters (more might get ignored, less are flagged as “short descs” by Google) and should be unique for each post.

Next, a very important element, the post slug, or permalinks – in short the url under which an individual post can be reached. Blogger users have little in terms of options here but in your Settings->Archive Settings make sure you have Enable Post Pages active. This is important so that the search engines index each post individually instead of just an ever-changing front-page where whatever search results fall off every 10 posts or so.

For WordPress users, you have many different choices in how to configure permalinks, under Settings->Permalinks. There are many schools of thought about permalinks, but one of the most basic one is to make sure these actually add to search visibility. That is, your permalink should be explicit and probably reflect your post title. The default setting in WordPress (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com) is to a simple numerical value. This is bad, as the numbers not only aren’t telling any story at all, but if for whatever reason you migrate your database the posts may get re-numbered, and all search results pointing to any specific posts will end up in a wrong place. You could further improve visibility by making the permalink text a rephrased version of your post title. For the rest, there are divergent opinions of what else should be part of the permalinks – just the post’s name, or the full date, just the month or just the year. The majority opinion seems to be the shorter the better (so no dates at all or just the year), but full dates are quite popular on some SEO trendsetters’ own blogs as well. As long as the permalinks are explicit, you’d probably have to work at Google to know which of the other options are best.

Last but not least, to improve the search engine’s knowledge of your blog’s content, you will want to generate a sitemap. The best way to do that is to use the Google XML Sitemap plugin. Once you create your sitemap, make sure to go back to Webmaster Central and link to the sitemap from here. As you will see in the plugin’s settings, you would be well advised at that stage to also follow through with the other search engines, use their own webmaster tools and make sure the sitemaps are registered there as well.

Duplicate Content? We don’t need no duplicate content!

In general and due to years of abuse by spammers and black hat SEOs, search engines will penalize duplicated content. The problem here is that WordPress in particular is very generous in the way people can access an individual post: by its permalink, by its category (../category/MyCategoryname/permalink)  and by its tags (../tag/MyTagName/permalink). A post in two categories will therefore appear in Google’s index at least thrice: by it’s own normal permalink, Category 1 and Category 2. This is bad because Google is said to penalize all results on the theory that it may actually be spam posted all over the web. If you use tags, you can add one additional individual result per tag, which will rapidly dilute the value of your post the more tags you’re using. Last but not least, WordPress 2.7 has added comment pagination, which means you may end up with your normal post’s permalink duplicated with permalink/comment-page-#/ by search engines. Not good.

The best way to fix that is twofold: For most search engines, noindex directives to categories and tag archives will be honoured. The simplest way to implement that is to use a plugin called Robots Meta, it’s configuration is still pretty straightforward. Google is however pretty bad at honouring noindex and nofollow directives, so for these guys, you’ll want to make sure the following is set in your robots.txt file (create this one at the root of your blog’s path, eg altitis.treehuggers.info):

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /comment-page

This will simply prevent Googlebot, the automated scanning engine, to access all links containing these three elements, and sort the issue.

We’re doing it with Style!

Last but not least, remember the good old html heading tags, <h1> to <h5>? Since the advent of CSS, they have often become underused, but in terms of search visibility, that’s probably a mistake. Headings are important as they give additional context, so do use them properly to provide a clear hierarchy to your content. Again, there are a couple of options available to you, but roughly, you should decide how you will build up your blog’s brand. Is each individual post the key element you want to promote? Make sure your post title is styled with <h1> tags. Is your blog’s name the brand you want to promote? Make your blog name a <h1> tag and your individual posts <h2> tags. Everything else should have a lower heading that these, your posts however should probably not be lower than <h2>.

Content is King

Beyond the above basic technical measures, there are almost as many tricks and methods as there are SEO specialists. Whether to investigate the field further for a hobby WoW blog is worth the time or not is up to each individual blogger, but you can easily get lost in the wealth of additional stuff to do (popular things include link-building and the realtively new but still not proven pagerank sculpting, for instance). That being said, the best way to have a good search visibility remains to simply write quality content matching the purpose of your blog. The better your posts, the more people will read it, comment on it or comment about it. In the end, a trackback from your blogging peers will remain a high-value testimonial to the quality, relevance, importance or wittiness of your writings, and no amount of additional SEO techniques can replace that.

This was a post from Altitis.

SEO Basics for the WoW Blogger

“A couple more points about Naxx: many of the guilds who cleared it quickly already knew the encounters from 40-player days, AND were allowed to practice extensively on beta. By contrast we gave players very little exposure to Kil’jaeden on the PTR.

But really, trying to slow down worldwide progression by making encounters insanely difficult is a losing proposition. We’re in the world now of professional guilds with corporate sponsors and players willing to put in enormous numbers of hours and attempts. We can certainly (and will) make very challenging encounters for which guilds can take pride in server firsts. However, I would not expect to see encounters that are so difficult that the entire WoW community wipes on them for months before achieving success. I just don’t know if that game exists anymore.”

That pretty much sums up everything there is to say. As much as Nihilum Curse SK Gaming 25th November Ensidia Whatever-They’re-Called-This-Week and the other handful of überguilds hate it, the C’Thun days appear to be gone for good.

There’s another piece of wisdom hidden in that statement. When the world’s biggest überguild has fully beta access, sees the content, remains absolutely silent about the difficulty then race through the content on release in order to bitch about the lack of challenge, it isn’t just faux outrage and manufactured controvery. It isn’t just a clear demonstration that whatever firsts they achieve in the future is no longer properly legit and completely meaningless (as opposed to the merits of every single guild who was NOT in beta, clears the content and remains out of the limelights monopolized by what has in the meantime devolved into WoW’s biggest collection of attention whores and drama queens). It also shows that they are a total failure as beta testers and haven’t understood the purpose of all these shiny passes they have recieved.

The game too easy for you? Sod off. You should have said so in beta. Now get off the headlines.

This was a post from Altitis.

Ghostcrawler on Current Raid Difficulty

I got some playtime on my paladin (now Ret with the blue honour PvP set), and did some Shattered Sun dailies. And currently, despite the nerfs already live (and before the rest to come), from a pure solo PvP standpoint, the changes definitely feel good. Stuff dies a lot faster than before 3.0.2.

PvP? Haven’t had a chance to do more than one single AV, and I don’t think there’s any justification for me to start playing pretend DPS. Healing remains an extremely rare commodity in BGs, my PvP healing set is half season 1 and half season 2 kit from back in the day, I’ve only started to use some of the Ret healing toys a bit in the mix. In other words, I haven’t had a chance to experience that so badly decried uberness which has led to this uncessant string of nerfs.

That being said, what this past month has, again, amply demonstrated, is that Blizzard still has no clue about the paladin class. The sequence of “Ret is fine, stop QQing” leading to “it’s a bit too high, we’ll tweak a bit” followed by the implementation of “To the Ground, Baby”, a modification to the TTGB nerf, and now the backtracking on Avenging Wrath / Bubble / Forebearance, combined with the dramatic side effects on prot threat generation and holy solo-ability, shows a team of class designers in total disarray.

There is no plan, there is no coherent vision, there is also no consistent message and there is ample evidence of QA (including player testing on the beta and the test realms) being a shameful mess.

Ghostcrawler, initially applauded for a new approach to dev / player communication, is seeing his credibility dropping week after week.

An example, when he answers the forum question “How do you come about your decisions and numbers to boost or nerf paladin class related abilities?” with the following gem, illustrates that we’ve moved from open communication to defensive PR bullshit:

“We do very extensive testing on all aspects of combat balance. Remember, as a large company we have access to testing capabilities far beyond that of the average player. As developers of the game, we also have access to a large number of tools that we don’t make public.”

Sorry, Ghostcrawler. When 3.0.2 went live, you first told us Ret was fine, then perhaps slightly too strong in PvP, then massively too strong in PvP and PvE and again still too strong in both aspects (oh and we don’t know how to handle burst damage sorry but in another couple of months we’ll revert a lot of the nerfs because contrary to what we’re saying now Ret won’t be scaling well at level 80 beyond Naxx). I’m not questioning the reality of the class’ balance state, I’m simply unable to reconcile the evolution of your claims with the notion that you do extensive testing.

Or perhaps you’re simply unable to interpret the results.

The final nail on the Paladin class designers’ coffin is this gem hidden in the announcement of the next nerf (they said to the ground, after all):

“Yet bubble+wings currently is used a lot in BGs and Arenas and helps contribute to the feeling of being destroyed by a Retribution paladin while you are unable to respond.”

Hello, Blizzard, ever heard of stunlocking? For four years, you have nerfed every other class who had the capability to kill another player while they were unable to respond. Never has stunlocking been touched. If rogues are to be the exception, fine, but you could start being open about it, and cut the crap like shown in the post above. As a former warlock main who’s had chain fear nerfed time and time again, I’m getting really tired of this.

That being said, since Blizzard has no clue, there are extremely smart bloggers out here who’ve come up with many suggestions to diminish the frontloaded burst potential of a Retadin in PvP without affecting PvE damage on longer fights nor holy / protadins.

The first, repeated often, is to stop seals proccing on special attacks (and adjust damage accordingly to make up for it). Almost every Retribution paladin who has given some thoughts to the matter recommends the same thing.

Blessing of Kings’ Rohan, perhaps the smartest of us all, has an extremely well thought out post with a whole set of measures to fix the issues. While I encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself, here’s the TL;DR version:

“Have Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, and Consecration share a 3 second cooldown (in addition to their normal individual cooldown).

1. 1. Change Judgement as follows:
      1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
      2. Increase damage by 20%.
      3. Change Improved Judgements to increase damage by 10/20%.
      4. Increase the duration of the debuff to 30s.
   2. Change Divine Storm as follows:
      1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
      2. Make it do Holy damage once again.
   3. Remove Seal procs from specials, and tune abilities upwards as appropriate.“

If the burst frontloading is the issue, address the frontloading. What Blizzard is currently doing is lessening the value of every talent point invested in Ret more and more. They should make up their mind. If they want a holy-based burst class in the game, they should fix the frontloading. If  not, they’ll have to rethink the holy-based burst aspect from scratch. Either way, this is the fourth time they’re messing up the class in the same amount of years. Whatever they’re doing, it’s not working.

This was a post from Altitis.

The Mandatory Paladin QQ Post

When he finally recieved his order, the packaging explained much. In this day and age, over-packaging should become as unfashionable as smoking. Chain Trap’s contribution, in form of a mail to Blizzard, is something you should absolutely read.

Call me a treehugger if you want to, but we’re way past the stage where we can continue to blissfully ignore the impact we’re having on the environment. While I’m not advocating going back to living in trees, it is nonetheless high time we start changing some of our habits, and asking of corporations that they do their part in this.

Reducing excessive packaging is but a small step, but it is also an easy one, which further should allow both corporations and customers to save money in the short or longer run. I’m with Chain Trap in this, and if you’re at all concerned by the matter, I encourage you to join the movement and drop off your own e-mail to raise the point with Blizzard.

This was a post from Altitis.

ChainTrap Takes on Blizzard Packaging Madness

Only avoid reading it in case you don’t want to be Wrath-spoiled, of course.

This was a post from Altitis.

BBB on Ferals in Wrath