Well, he’s a POTTER, and he’s HAIRY, so he’s a HAIRY POTTER, right?

I was a level and a half from level 20 tonight, I wasn’t sure I’d make it to 20 — the starting level for the Grizzleheim quests — but I finished the quest chain in the pyramid and dinged 20 on the final quest. It was clearly meant to be :)

I have barely looked at Grizzleheim since there was really no reason to do it with my Grandmaster. But now that Marissa, my 20 Myth wizard, and Allison, my 30 Balance wizard, are both ready… I’ll be writing quite a bit about their paths through the expansion.

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With the Grizzleheim expansion, KingsIsle also brought crafting to the world of Wizard 101. The crafting system chosen is the most … um … unique(?) … that I’ve seen in any MMO.

Crafting in the real world was once the domain of skilled artisans who devoted years to learning their craft, and then spent the rest of their careers making items of art and utility for their customers. A good craftsman’s name was known far and wide, but every village had a smith, and larger towns and cities would have entire quarters set aside for the crafting trades.

By and large, MMOs have used the idea of a skilled artisan earning a living by selling the items they make as the basis for their crafting systems. Becoming a skilled crafter was so expensive and time-consuming in EverQuest that those who chose to take on a trade or two were highly prized by their guilds. WoW simplified crafting, as it did so much else, so that everyone had a trade, but getting the best and rarest recipes required significant effort so that once again, the best crafters were a rare commodity. EverQuest 2 started out considering crafters a separate but equal career path to adventuring.

What binds them all is the notion of a crafter who, with great effort, is able to use their artisan skills for the benefit of their friends and guild, or just to hawk as a service to others or a means of income. In most MMOs, after spending time and money learning their craft, an artisan can earn a good return on that later.

Wizard 101 looks at things differently.

Harvesting

Most WoW-like MMOs require crafters to harvest raw materials from the world, and here, Wizard 101 is no exception. Harvesting nodes spawn here and there throughout the world. W101 crafting requires so MANY resources, though, that a given zone doesn’t have enough active harvesting nodes to support even one crafter. Instead, the most efficient means of harvesting resources is to find an area with several node spawns, then flip between the different servers harvesting where you can. This might seem like a hack, but it’s impossible to gather the necessary items for free otherwise.

While the first crafting “badge” isn’t too onerous, all later ones require hours spent flipping realms and running a route. I spent the better part of a day running the same circle in Moo Shu for enough items to complete the first of the Moo Shu crafting quests.

I don’t feel this is appropriate for a kid’s game, but it’s not out of line with the effort required for other games, since there are no skill-ups for W101 crafting, just earning badges (analagous to levels).

But here’s where W101 takes an exciting turn toward the bizarre.

Crafting Slots

In order to prevent crafters from being overly productive, every crafted item uses up a crafter’s ability to make another item for anywhere from 15 minutes to 60 HOURS or more. Earning new crafting badges earns you more crafting slots; working on the second half of my initiate crafter badge, I have three slots available, all of which are working off twelve hour cool-downs.

Cool-downs punish crafters by making it impossible for a crafter to make things to order. But that was already never going to happen because …

You can’t trade money or items to other people

People love the new mannequins, which let you show off your best outfits in your home. Any Apprentice Crafter or above can make these, but they take vast amounts of very, very rare harvests, so it’s unlikely to be something I make casually, especially if someone doesn’t have the materials. But even if someone DOES have the materials, they can’t give them to me (and I couldn’t give them the mannequin) because there is no item trading in the game — just Treasure Cards — special, single-use cards.

The only possible way to get an item from one player to another is via the Bazaar.

The Bizarre Bazaar.

The Bazaar also came along with Grizzleheim. It’s not really a bazaar in any traditional sense; it’s more or less an NPC store where the stock is sold to it by players for a fixed amount, and bought for a fixed amount.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Bazaar is that it is filled to the very top with trash items. From Wizard City through to Dragonspyre, most items awarded from battles are trash, never used, only sold for their cash value. (And helpfully, the vast majority of the equipment you can make by crafting also falls into this category, making it likely most recipes in the game will never be made by anyone, ever).

So for me to make your mannequin for you, you would have to sell your rare components to the Bazaar, I would have to buy them back (at a higher price) to make the mannequin, then put the mannequin on the Bazaar and hope you bought it before someone else did. All very risky, and with a significant chance of loss. (And a certain chance of being out lots and lots of gold for the privilege of making an item for someone else.)

The 5000 gold recipe for a mannequin, by the way, can only be used seven times.

Crafting in Wizard 101 is not any fun at all. Zero. Neither harvesting or the crafting experience itself provides the slightest bit of enjoyment, not even the satisfaction of making something useful for a friend, since even that is impossible. Having to buy three crafting stations (you get a fourth for making the very basic items for free) to make items is pointless, since you are only at them for an instant, unlike EQ2, where crafting stations have their own animations and the crafter is actively using them during the entire process of crafting (which ranges from a few seconds to a couple of minutes for hard to craft items).

Fixing crafting

Here’s my suggestions for fixing Wizard 101′s crafting.

1. Get rid of crafting slots. Instead, make crafting take a set amount of time spent at the crafting station, like WoW, EQ2, LotRO, DAoC, Aion, etc etc etc. Having crafting cooldowns of 59+ hours for some items is just … weird.
2. Let people trade items between each other, or at least implement something like EQ2′s “commission” system, where two people can join the crafting process. One provides the skill, and the other the materials (and gets the item).
3. Remove trash crafted gear. The selling point of having equipment strong in two schools loses its lustre when the items so made would seriously gimp the wearer. Case in point: Flaming Cloak of the Tomb, recipe sold by a Death school recipe vendor in The Necropolis. +1% Death accuracy, +10% Death damage, +6% Fire damage, no health, no mana, no card, nothing — a robe no death wizard in Dragonspyre would EVER wear, for any reason, having gotten superior robes probably in Wizard City.
4. Remove trash loot from the Bazaar so it is possible to find worthwhile items.
5. Remove trash loot from the game. It just overflows backpack space and gets into the bank and overflows that as well, causing people to miss out on items of actual value because trash loot choked up all available space. Just give the gold instead.
6. Allow players to sell their crafted items for prices they set. Make it worthwhile to be a crafter.
7. Add appearance slots, so crafters can make equipment of unique appearance for wizards to wear over their battle gear.

Crafting, currently, is a money and time sink. Its only real use, thus far, is to make unique housing items (which I have done), but those taking amazing amounts of resources and aren’t likely to keep up interest in crafting as a past-time. It needs a huge overhaul to be at all useful, and in its current form, I very much doubt many people will take up crafting to make items at considerable expense for no reason.

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I probably shouldn’t have titled this post “First Night in Grizzleheim”, because I hardly went there after doing the quests to open it. At 50, Tara doesn’t get any experience rewards from defeating monsters or completing quests, nor are any of the gear rewards any upgrade, so she has no reason to go. Allison, my Balance wizard on my second account, just hit 30 and is a perfect level for Grizzleheim — but she’s been partnering with my level 13 Myth alt, Marissa. And level 13 is too low for Grizzleheim — she can’t get any of the quests yet.

So, I explored all the OTHER things that came new with the expansion, instead.

First, top of the page, the sprawling neighborhood of the Marleybone Royal Estate. The new Bazaar makes it easy to overindulge on house items, and combined with the loot she was siphoning from Marissa’s completed quests and monster drops, and her own equipment, she’d outgrown the modest Marleybone mansion where once she dwelt.

Next down, Tara proudly bears her “Apprentice Crafter” badge. This took awhile, not because harvesting takes too long (more on that later), but because the cooldowns on the crafting slots is so onerous. Thankfully, they want fewer items made for the first tier than they did on the test realm. But it’s still pretty bad. I’m working on the Marleybone crafting quests now — five rings and five athames for the FIRST quest, and each takes an astonishing number of harvests.

EVERYTHING takes an astonishing amount of harvests. Crafting would be utterly impossible if there weren’t a trick to harvesting, and here it is. Enjoy it before KingsIsle nerfs it :)

First, find a place AWAY FROM OTHER PEOPLE where a harvest spawns. I like the room outside King Djesserit’s Chamber in the Djesserit Tomb in the Temple of Storms in Krokotopia for Stone Blocks and Parchment. There are two Stone Block spawns and two Parchment spawns in that room, and there is a third Parchment spawn in his chamber, along with a possibility of two Wooden Chests, one in each room.

Start in the Ambrose realm. Check out the room, harvest anything you find, then switch realms to the next one down — Bartleby, or whatever. Continue this until you have enough. You can speed this up with a partner checking realms, too, since you can port to someone in a different realm even if your realm change cooldown timer is still running.

I got all the Cattails and Ore I would need in the Cave of Sorrow in Moo Shu, and Newgate Prison gave me enough Deep Mushrooms to fry a hundred steaks.

I haven’t found a good place for Mist Wood yet. I got the bare minimum from just running through Moo Shu’s wooded areas (Grizzleheim may come to the rescue, here). And Marleybone crafting needs metric tonnes of scrap iron. I haven’t found any of that yet.

The key here is to hang out in an isolated area. Other wizards will harvest whatever they come across. The guides on Wizard 101 Central point people to highly populated areas to harvest. That leads only to frustration. Harvesting is a solitary activity.

While waiting on crafting cooldowns, I took Allison and Marissa back to Wizard City to finish some quests. Since Allison has been Tara’s constant companion through Moo Shu and Dragonspyre, she has leveled to 30 mostly by doing high level quests and instances and actually never — tis sad but true — even finished Wizard City. And Marissa needs everything, so last night, both wizards received the Three Streets Savior badge for brave deeds in Wizard City, finished their quest robes (pictured), and are poised on the edge of Colossus Blvd and the Sunken City before moving on to Krokotopia.

When Marissa turns 15 in two levels, I’ll see if Grizzleheim has opened up for her. If so, I’ll start mixing in those quests along with Krokotopia.

I spent some time in the Bazaar looking for fire resist gear. If I could get fire resistance up past 100%, Malistaire’s devastating attacks couldn’t touch me. Sadly, I was only able to get unbuffed FR up to about 45% — far short of what I’d need. I haven’t yet found anything that will ameliorate his meteor storm, but I’m working on crafting precisely because I think there is something that a master craftsman can make that will help. The forge RIGHT OUTSIDE Malistaire’s instance is an obvious clue.

The sad thing about crafting, and what I hope most they will change, is that crafters cannot be fairly compensated for the things they make. Either they use their crafted items for themselves or their alts, or sell them for a fixed price on the Bazaar. And I assure you, the vast material requirements for the highest level crafted gear far outstrip the meager price you can get for them in the Bazaar.

The Bazaar is a good first attempt. But it is not a rewarding experience, and by a rewarding experience, I mean one that results in gold. In a non-managed Bazaar, wizards who harvest what they come across could then sell these items in the Bazaar at a price they set, and the prices for these resources would quickly reach a natural level, quite higher than what they are today. Crafters would buy these resources at inflated prices so they wouldn’t have to go out and harvest on their own. The harvesting wizards would make good amounts of money, and the high cost of materials would tend to keep dabblers out of crafting and more inclined to sell their harvests.

Crafters could then make items and sell them for their natural price, which would likely be below the cost of materials in most cases. People looking for unique gear or home furnishings would have the chance to buy items they normally could never see, as currently, there is absolutely zero incentive for a crafter to make something for anyone’s use but their own.

A managed market is never a good thing. An open market could spark a thriving community of artisans. It’s just that simple.

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Wizard101 will undergo an extended maintenance window on 01 July 2009 from 3am to approximately 5am Central US time. This downtime may extend beyond two hours and we will message accordingly.

Wizard101 is going offline to add Grizzleheim, Crafting, Bazaar and Enhanced Chat features to the game. For more information on what is being added to Wizard101 at this time, please see our Update Notes.

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Though I was away this weekend, I still managed to squeeze some hours into Wizard 101′s Test server to check out the latest changes. And there’s a LOT of them. This next update does not just introduce the world of Grizzleheim into the game, but a whole laundry list of things players have been begging for (aside from appearance slots, which haven’t made an, um, appearance).

Grizzleheim opens, a new world of Viking Bears, Ravens and Wolves.

Ah yes, Grizzleheim. The whole new world that pretty much has nothing for max level characters. You can do the next Zeke collection quest, which continues its classic rock theme this time with The Yardbirds, rather huge, wooden birds that look suspiciously like Mr. Lincoln’s less mobile cousins. But no new levels and gear that is no upgrade make this an excuse to haul out the lower level alts rather than to progress your main.

Grizzleheim works alongside your normal leveling path. The parts I saw were crowded with Rank 3-4 critters, which would place it next to Krokotopia in difficulty. And by the parts I saw, I mean with my level 30 Balance wizard, Allison Goldtalon, as I found certain quests were not offered to my level 50 Life wizard, Tara Mythcrafter. There were parts of Grizzleheim that only Allison could get to, though I could teleport Tara to her. This is the first time Wizard 101 has made content that can be out-leveled, and I have no idea why. Perhaps to give high level wizards a reason to befriend lower level wizards?

In the picture above, Tara stands before a Teleport Stone. You’ll find these throughout Grizzleheim; once discovered, you can teleport instantly between the stone and the main teleport hub in your region. Very handy, and I hope to see this brought to the other worlds of the Spiral.

We’re introducing a Bazaar that lets players buy and sell items they’ve earned or found in the game.

Yes, you can finally sell stuff to other people through the Bazaar. You can find an outpost of the Bazaar in at least Wizard City (in Olde Town) and Krokotopia (on the mysterious fifth island, before this unused, and no, I don’t know how to get to it, but it’s on the map, and before you say anything, it’s not the hourglass secret island).

The Bazaar is not an Auction House, like WoW, or a broker, like in EverQuest II. You don’t get to choose a price for your item. To find a similar scheme, you have to go all the way back to the original EverQuest, where people would sell things to NPC merchants, which other players could then examine and buy from the merchant’s inventory. You sell an item and get the cash, and your part in this is done. Your item appears immediately in the Bazaar and can be bought at that fixed price like anything else.

Can you buy something at an NPC store and then place it in the Bazaar? Sure, all but one of the pets for sale in the Bazaar when I looked could be bought in shops. Buyer beware.

Those hoping to avoid camping bosses for the best dropped gear will be disappointed — the very best gear cannot be sold in the Bazaar, thanks to the new “No Auction” tag. However, the Bazaar is an excellent place for finding crafting reagents.

Crafting lets players create their own equipment and Treasure Cards.

MMOs tend to go one of two ways when they add crafting. Either the crafted gear is superior to that found in boss drops, or it isn’t. Wizard 101 has gone this second way.

Crafted items require recipes (bought from various vendors throughout the world, including in dungeons (there is a Myth robe pattern vendor in Krokosphinx’ Hall of Champions, for instance)), reagents (some bought, most harvested in various places throughout the game), a crafting station and a crafting time slot.

Eudora Tangletree in Olde Town will have your very first crafting station for you once you bring her three Mistwoods, a fairly rare harvest. Find a place for the crafting station in your home, then return to Eudora for her very first crafting assignment: Five athames. This will require an astonishing amount of harvesting both the mist woods and cattails (found near water), and for all that work, the athames you make are nearly useless. In fact, as you look through her recipe book in despair, will it be worth the grind to become a master craftsman for *this*?

Well, hold on, Bucky. After you get your novice crafters badge (and here I was helped by a GM who was dumping crafting reagents on the Bazaar), you’re sent to Krokotopia for whole new quest, where you make five really disappointing rings, which for some reason, take large quantities of parchment and stone blocks. Parchment seemed fairly common in the dungeons, but stone blocks — seen only as a blue sparkle — were somewhat more rare. Crafters had cleared out all the GM-given items from the Bazaar, and an hour or so doing quests in the Krokosphinx only yielded enough blocks to make two of the five rings.

Why level? Well, crafted items are made instantly — click and done. To slow you down, your crafting station has a small number of “crafting time slots”. Your first athame takes up a slot for an entire minute. You earn additional time slots as you finish each tier of crafting — the Krokotopia ring takes up a slot for seven minutes. So mostly, while crafting, you’ll be waiting for a time slot to open. You can see your time slots via a new tab in your character window.

Eventually, you’ll be able to craft furniture and other house items, and I’m hoping that will make the grind worthwhile. I’m hoping, in fact, that top crafters will be able to make Grizzleheim homes, since Grizzleheim doesn’t appear to have a builder turtle of its own.

We’ve added Grouping that allows players to team up with friends.

Grouping is pretty clever. You get a group-only chat channel and a group list, and that’s handy stuff just by itself. But you also get a reserved spot in a dueling circle. You can make out a red sparkly person next to the wizard in the dueling ring above — nobody but a group member can take that spot. If you have a group of four wizards and one of them starts an encounter, no wizard not in your group will be able to join.

This is a godsend for people with full friend lists — people popping in all the time could ruin encounters. Now they can only take up spots on the duel circle that are left over after your group gets theirs.

And last but not least the introduction of Chat Channels and Open Chat.

Along with the group chat comes the dread General Chat (“All”), where wizards anywhere in the game can chat with each other. Since this chat channel follows the same rules as the existing Dictionary Chat, you can’t be too explicit, and the chat was fairly helpful — but we’ll see how it is in the live game. There’s a limit to how many people can be in a chat channel at the same time, and the chat system will start new general chat channels as needed.

I don’t know if the chat channels are cross realms yet.

If you have a wizard leveling through the Spiral, you are going to want to be spending a lot of time in Grizzleheim. If you are a max level wizard, now’s the time to start an alt — the Bazaar makes alts easy to gear up, and Grizzleheim is full of things you’ve never seen before. Grouping is a huge win, and chat channels should build the elusive Wizard 101 community we’ve been wanting.

Crafting, as far as I have seen it, is somewhat of a disappointment. Huge costs in time and gold to make garbage items, and the Bazaar, which doesn’t take scarcity into account when setting prices, won’t let reagent prices rise to a level where they would be attractive for wizards to harvest for sale at premium rates to crafters. I have no idea at this time if crafting will ever be worth it, but I’ll give it a shot when the game goes live.

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Grizzleheim and many other Features are now available to preview on the Test Realm.

To find out what features are being added to the Test Realm, please consult our Update Notes Page.

To participate in the Test Realm, please visit our Sneak Peek page.

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IGN has the scoop on Wizard 101′s next expansion, Grizzleheim. The article goes into a little detail about the three main clans of Grizzleheim, the war-like Bears, the cunning Wolves and the mystical Ravens. And as a tidbit, at the very end, it looks like Thomas was right on the money, as the article mentions that Grizzleheim goes live on Test today.

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Wizard 101′s sixth world, Grizzleheim, has been announced, and it already looks like it will be a real departure from the other worlds of the Spiral.

Quantize believes, from the announcement, that Grizzleheim is explored parallel to the other worlds as you play through the game.

The announcement seems to (aheam) BEAR that out:

Players will first encounter the Viking Bears of Grizzleheim, great traders with the ability to travel the worlds of the Spiral, in the free-to-play areas of Wizard City.

As student wizards adventure through subsequent worlds, Grizzleheim will offer new quests, new locations to explore, new opponents and new Viking-themed decorative housing items interspersed throughout the mid and higher levels of the game.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be material for high level players, but it probably does mean that to experience all of Grizzleheim, you’ll likely want to be leveling up a new wizard from scratch. Which is a good reason; until now, Wizard 101 has been so linear that there hasn’t been much reason to play through the game more than once.

Nonetheless, I expect an additional five levels in the game to give those who choose not to restart something to look forward to. Though the previous level cap was 50, until Dragonspyre, it was VERY difficult to advance much past level 45 in Moo Shu unless you had done so early enough to exploit higher level instances for quick, combat-free, mega-experience, before they nerfed repeat instance experience.

Dragonspyre, then, was the first post-nerf expansion that raised the effective level cap from 45 to 50; and Grizzleheim will likely do something similar, allowing wizards to progress to level 55, and perhaps earn an additional skill point, though likely no additional spells for their main school.

Grizzleheim’s “parallel path” will likely delay, for awhile, W101′s problems with fight duration. Dragonspyre yard trash was often more difficult than most Moo Shu bosses, and any fight could be expected to take a significant amount of time, and yet give only a small amount of experience and gold. Compared to the previous four worlds, Dragonspyre was often a relentless grind.

Now, they can add easier, more casual encounters tuned for lower level wizards.

These are things we can guess from what we see in the screenshots and read from the announcement. But every MMO expansion has something special in it, something that will give people who have left the game something to pull them back.

Here are my not-so-humble suggestions:

• Appearance slots: I’ve been wanting these since forever. KingsIsle used to offer statless costumes on holidays for Crowns, but without special slots where you could wear this clothing without sacrificing the stats of the clothing you need for adventuring, it was near useless. KingsIsle hasn’t offered statless holiday clothing since their winter celebration. This would be a boon for the game, the players and KingsIsle itself (as it could once again sell holiday outfits), that I would be shocked if appearance slots were not a feature of the Grizzleheim expansion.
• House pets: Unlike appearance slots, I’ve seen nothing from KingsIsle that would lead me to believe that Wizard 101 is about to get house pets. Anyone who has played the game for any length of time has gotten several pets; I’ve got at least a dozen. Some I’ve sold, some I’ve passed to alts, but most of them I have kept. I have a room in my bank that REALLY needs a good cleaning. I should be able to free my pets from the vault and let them roam (or even just stand) in my home. I have a bunch of dark nooks that would be perfect for a bat or spider. Krokotilians who could walk slowly up and down my street. Let me put my pets in my home, and I’ll definitely be more interested in playing more to get more pets. As it stands now, my level 48 life pet is too useful for battle to not equip all the time.
• Auction House: The Grizzleheim bears are traders? And they may appear in every world? Would it be wrong to think that these Viking bears might sell items on your behalf through consignment? Wizard 101 has thus far lacked an economy, though you can see crowds of people trading Treasure Cards, the one item in the game you can barter, in the Shopping District. Wizards playing through the game are drowned in cool gear they cannot wear or give away, and can only sell. Why not put it on the market? Someone gets something they really want, you get cash you can use to improve your house (or buy something YOU really want). Wizard 101′s rare item grind becomes optional. Another total win.

What sort of things do you think Grizzleheim will bring?

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We’ve heard rumors of Grizzleheim, a Nordic world along the spiral filled with Bears, Wolves, and Ravens. They are rumors no more. Next month, we’ll be able to journey to Wizard 101′s newest world and befriend the various tribes we find there. New house items, new quests, new places to explore… new levels? I don’t know. I’d expect new levels, at least five of them.

We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on that. (Thanks to GameMom for the tip!)

Headmaster Ambrose has been telling us a series of riddles on Twitter. The answer is shrouded in mystery, but clues can be found in game and on the Wizard101 web site. It’s been a long road, but Merle will reveal the final question at 8AM CDT today, at which time the Wizard101 website will allow Ravenwood students to guess at the answer to the mystery. The first hundred to do so will receive a unique pet!

The first ten of the eleven questions are below. The first letter of each answer is a letter in the riddle’s answer. Now, get solving! You haven’t much time! And be careful — some of the answers could be a little tricky!

1. MooShu is the Kingdom of “___________, Honor, and Family.”
2. Where is the first place you arrive in Krokosphinx?
3. What treasure card gives -75% to next storm and fire spells?
4. What is the Ravenwood school’s motto (hint – it’s in Latin)?
5. What prison will you find in Marleybone?
6. Cards that can be attached to any regular card to improve the stats. — What are they called?
7. What is the first creature you duel in Unicorn Way?
8. What is Zeke’s occupation?
9. What new feature launched in April that allows you to hear the story come to life?
10. What creatures do you duel in Colossus that remind you of Frosty?
11. ?

See you in the spiral!

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