Sage made writing books

kyrrah wrote:

It was a bug/error that happened when the notebooks first came out as I had the same problem. It is all fixed now so typing in 'notebook' will work

Pusska@Permafrost wrote:

Yes, by the time you posted it had been fixed. Thank goodness.

Antu@Antonia Bayle wrote:

The stacking should be working. I'm looking on Unrest right now and lots of people have stacks of the same books. When determining if a book stacks with another, the title and text must match exactly. If you even have extra spaces in your book text, it won't match 100% and won't stack.
However, I'm seeing lots of people who are not stacking their books, but I'm not sure if this is on purpose so their books take up more space or what.
I'm still considering what it would take to allow you to preview the first page of someone's book. It might be enough to discourage people from listing books with no content, but someone who really wants to get away with it would just need to write 1 page of good text and the rest be garbage. There's really no good solution to this unfortunately.

prize.
Cataclyx wrote:

I actually wrote my first book, nothing real special. I took some random fun interesting useless facts from a site on the internet and put those in there with my own personal comments to those facts, I also wrote about a few of my friends in game, how we met, how long we have been friends. I plan to later make a book about each of my closest friends telling about them and things we have done together. Kinda a spotlight on them basically.

I also plan to write a full Norrath for Nooblets: A guide to survival in Norrath this will inclued commonly asked questions along with the answers as well as little tips and hints to making it in norrath as a new player. These I will hand out to new guildies that are new to the game as well as those I run across in my travels that are nooblets. (I really like the term nooblet.)

Those are my current ideas.

Rothgar wrote:

This would be nice if you could do this since someone on my server did sell a book on the broker titled How to make plat off of player written books. The only thing in the book was
OMG! I can't believe you fell for that <3.

I did not buy the book I saw screenshots of it, this person said it did sell for the 1p she listed it for but then she did return the money the person lost by buying the book, so really no harm there. Though not everyone is as nice as the author of that book and there are a ton of people as gallable as the person that bought it. Just would be nice to know that what we are getting is worth ever 5g on the broker.

I know this would be really tough to keep from happening as I am sure this same thing has happened on every server, or someone on each server has considered doing something like this. (I myself thought about it to, but I am to nice to actually do something like this.)

Rothgar:
Semi-simple solution (in theory, don't know how practical this would be):

1) Player "examine" window. Have a brief blurb as to what that book is to be about, written by the author. Sorta lke the back/inside cover of a novel.
2) Categories. Much like an ebay search, compile a list (I'm sure the people here would be happy to help) of topics that people are using these books for. Everything from player guides to raid strats to EQ/EQ2 fiction to lore to non-EQ fiction, ect, ect, ect. That way you could do a glance at the book and see "Hrm, player guide, necromancer," or "Lore, EQ1, Fiction," or "Fiction, non-EQ, sci-fi" and so on.

Just a thought.

Akaran2 wrote:

Good idea. How about having the Examine window show the first few lines of text so that potential buyers can see that there is actually something written in the book.

Rothgar wrote:

I am having stack issues too. Some of the books I have made stack jsut fine while others do not. They are an exact copy with the notebook matching completly, same type and same maker (me).

Rothgar wrote:

It could still be an option Rothgar, I feel that something needs to be done. It would be nice to preview the books and find out what they are about as well as give an indication if they are a scammer.
However, there aren't many people out there who are despicable enough to do this kind of thing ... can you not just make it a reportable offense? It is obtaining money under false pretences and that has to be against the EULA somehow right?
I think anyone who does it should be warned once, and then suspended. It would be nice if they have any money made from it removed from them as well but that is probably a real pain to sort out. Suspended would be nice.

Rothgar wrote:

Player reputation is enough to deal with this 'issue'.
It may take a while to kick in, but when it does, players will know not to spend large amounts on books from authors they are unaware of, new authors will charge low amounts for books as a result, and authors with a number of good books will be able to charge more as a result.

Great job on these new books, Rothgar! I did recently hit a small problem with the edit feature though. I went linkdead while making some changes and hadn't hit save for a few paragraphs (yeah, I know ...).
When I logged back in and opened up the edit again I was pleasantly surprised to get a popup telling me there was an autosave file and would I like to use it to recover the saved version it contained. I hit the yes option and it recovered most of what I thought I'd lost since my last manual save - fantastic feature!
However, once that auto save file existed I found that I was now being prompted to use it every single time I hit the edit button on a book - any book. This started to be a major pain as if you aren't being careful to hit the no option you can overwrite the text in your current book with the text from the last one you amended. I played about with it a bit and found that it was being constantly updated as I moved around doing edits to different books. I found the file, eq2_book_auto_save.txt, but I couldn't delete it while the game was running as it seems to be holding it open even when there are no edits being made. Once I closed the game down I was free to rename or delete as needed and once it was gone so were the prompts and the constant updating. As I haven't gone linkdead during an edit since then it hasn't reappeared and I can edit as normal.
Any chance you could get the code to cleanup the file after the saved text in it has been used and the recovered book manually saved? Or maybe give us an option on the popup to delete the file or something?

Rothgar wrote:

I had stacking issues.
I made three copies of a book, put two on the broker. They stacked.
One of these books sold almost immediately (thanks, patron). So I made 18 more and copied from the third book I still had in my inventory.
I dragged these 18 to the box icon on my broker window, some stacked with themselves, some didn't, and none stacked with the single book that was actually priced up.
I took them all out of the broker window, except the single book that was priced to sell, and tried dropping the books onto the single one. None of them would stack.
I then dropped all the books, one on top of the other, into the broker window, so that at least all 18 books stacked, unpriced. I then removed the single book and dropped it onto the stack of 18 and it stacked!
Then I priced to sell.
So, something's not working properly. That they all did eventually stack proves they're identical, but why wouldn't they stack in the first instance?

Silken@Butcherblock wrote:

If you're going to do this, then you need a "dust-jacket" which can be edited by the author which can be used to convey the contents.
'Cos on the first page of my book, I just wrote the title, what edition it was and a faux-copyright blurb.
The second page has only a quote from some poetry.
And the action doesn't start until page three, and goes on until page 11 or so. Perhaps a page count would be neat too?!?
Changes to the book system now, is going to affect my first editions adversely.

MrWolfie wrote:

Or it affects books that are written after the change? If you choose to edit after the change it asks if you want to convert to the new format. Rather easy if you ask me.

We need Amazon/ebay style reviews of the book, or at least ratings of the author's total body of works, posted by buyers of their books.

Akaran2 wrote:

The "book scammers" would just get elaborate with the examine window info (since it would be author written) and still only have some insult inside. It only shifts the problem a little.
Reportable offense, as someone else suggested:

• If it's offensive (i.e. profanity or inappropriate... umm... subject matter), /petition
• If it's abusive, you could /petition on the concept of harrassment, but it's not a targetted or specific harassment

Frankly, I agree that it should be dealt with on "reputation" much like books are in the real world. Books are new right now so there hasn't been enough time for reputations to grow. But, they will (just as there are reputations surrounding various crafters and decorators). Those who write the 'scam' books will get eshewed.
The examples cited, though, had such scam-worthy titles I am amazed anyone would buy them or fall for them. If an offer looks too good to be true, it most likely is. Sheesh.

Rothgar wrote:

I don't know if this is the cause of them not stacking or not, but if you drop things onto the container they stack *usually*, if you drop them into the broker inventory area they don't, they will make a new space instead of stacking.

Rothgar wrote:

What if it displayed one page every one fifth of the book starting at a random point somewhere in the middle of the book.
If the book had five or less pages it would show the first and last page.

It wouldn't even have to show the whole page either.
What if it showed the top half of the certain random pages?

Just a quick note on stacking problems : I had none so far. I wrote 8 tradeskill guides in french (beginners TS guide 1/2, metal armor, cloth & leather armor, melee weapons, ranged weapons and 2 books on T8 ornaments). I wrote one book for myself in a mastercrafted book and made copies in common books. I then put the copies up on the broker and sold at least 2 of each. I then did copies from copies, removing previous books from the broker to make them and I never had any stacking problems. We were 3 authors last time I looked on Storms (only TS guides) and all were stacked. Books stacked after removing the only one listed but also while adding other books to a previous pile of books. I dropped them on the "drop here" part on top of broker window and not directly in the container. I don't know if anything is relevant, but I wanted to post an "all is well" comment just for feedback after the previous ones. I don't know if I made anything different that those who had a problem but for me it worked so far. On the part of showing part of the books... except the random system suggested by Josgar, I fear there will be no easy answer. Those that want to write gibberish will find ways to sell if the text shown is the beginning of the book (if there's one) or a player-made text. Perhaps taking the top of the middle page of the book ? But don't forget that, if you put a blank page in the middle to separate your book in 2 parts, for example, you'll show a blank to the other players, even if the book is well written. Randomness seams the only solution there, if randomness varies from one time to the next.

Bratface wrote:

If you'd read my post, you'd have seen that dropping onto the container was NOT stacking books, and dropping directly onto the first item in the inventory area did stack *sometimes*.
Normally, if you drop into the inventory area, but NOT on an identical item, you can create two (or more) stacks. If you drop it onto an already existing item, it's supposed to stack (and usually does).
I'm up to volume IV of my books now and while I have I & II stacked in my Veteran's Cabinet, I cannot get either of the next two volumes to stack on top of themselves. In any container. Tried stacking them every which way, but each book wanted it's own stack. 10-15 minutes of mucking around until I gave up!