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The best gifts for the PC gamer in your life
Of the more than two dozen sections in our massive holiday gift guide, the PC gaming is one of the largest. That's because there are so many directions you can go in here: You can splurge on a laptop (we recommend three here) or pick up any number of accessories like headphones, a mouse, keyboard, mic or webcam. Or, you know, you can pick up some actual games. Find all that in our guide at the link below, and while you're there, check out the 100-plus other items in there.
The best PC-gaming gear for students
While many of you will likely make your school computer some sort of all-purpose laptop, a few of you need something that can also withstand extensive gameplay sessions. For that reason, we've included in our back-to-school guide a handful of gaming-specific notebooks along with three GPUs, should your existing rig be due for an upgrade. Already have a system you're happy with? Treat yourself to a mouse, keyboard, or a game or three.
Battlefields open in Sevencore's first expansion
Sevencore may have just enjoyed its global launch at the beginning of this month, but there's already an expansion just around the corner. On December 2nd, Webzen will release Occupation War for the English server Balmung. This expansion includes the battlefields Tillau and Crimson Plateau, where players can earn victory points (VP) to spend on weapons, armor, random boxes, and even mounts from the PvP vendors. Each Saturday at 4:00 p.m. EST, one guild will compete against the others for control a certain area. Winners of this contest will be able to collect taxes and manage prices in regional goods as well as access the Presidential election for Inadar. [Source: Webzen press release]
Warlords of Draenor: Call to Arms removed
Way back in 2005, patch 1.7.0 brought with it Battleground Holidays, intended to offer additional rewards to players who participated in particular battlegrounds over a designated weekend -- later renamed the Call to Arms in Wrath of the Lich King. Since then, the familiar sight of representatives from various battlegrounds has been a staple of the Warcraft experience. As new expansions were introduced, new battlegrounds came with them, and were subsequently added to the Call to Arms rotation. While the thought of getting bonus honor might have been pretty good incentive when the feature was first introduced, as the years have gone on, the Call to Arms weekends have been doing exactly the opposite of what they'd been introduced to accomplish. Unfortunately, some battlegrounds are still perceived as favoring one faction over another -- which means that on Call to Arms weekends, queue times can skyrocket as one side piles on to queue for the additional bonuses, and the other simply avoids the battleground altogether. So what's the solution? Removing the Call to Arms weekends altogether.
Heroes of the Storm launches interactive battleground page
Looking forward to exploring the maps in Heroes of the Storm? The good news is that you can do so right now, even if you aren't currently in the test pool. The game's interactive battleground maps are now available, showing off the fields of battle and allowing you to zoom in or out, highlight important points, and scroll around to see all of the neat stuff that's there to be seen. Each of the maps has numerous different mechanics as well as additional routes for players to take, including aboveground and underground routes or enemies that spawn during the night. The page outlines how all five maps will work and should help players start plotting strategies even without getting your hands on the game. If you feel like a bit of surveying, go check out the maps now.
World of Warcraft's 10th anniversary preview
Ten years is a long time. Ten years ago, in 2004, I was 20 years old and entering my third semester of college--also entangled in endless piles of paperwork while I prepared to spend a year studying at the University of New South Wales in Sydney for the calender year 2005. Ten years ago, in November 2004, World of Warcraft officially launched. The mark that WoW has left on the gaming industry is indisputable--but we're not here for musing retrospectives. At least, not yet. We're here because there's going to be a whole bunch of fun in-game events to celebrate WoW's first decade of existence, and Blizzard has given us a lovely preview of what at least a few of them are.
Censer of Eternal Agony and Bloody Coin hotfix and changes
A very brief list of hotfixes for patch 5.4.8 were introduced on Friday, brief enough that they likely escaped the attention of most players. However, if you are one of the players currently farming Bloody Coins on the Timeless Isle via the Censer of Eternal Agony, you may have noticed a few changes in the way the Censer works, and in the manner that Bloody Coins are farmed. The cooldown for the Censer of Eternal Agony has been increased from ten minutes to one hour. In addition, Fire-Watcher's Oath now has a cooldown of ten minutes, down from the one hour mark it was set at previously. Its cost is now 100 Timeless Coins, rather than 50 Bloody Coins, and the transformation now allows both mount usage and druid shape-shifting. In addition to that, the internal cooldown on earning Bloody Coins has been significantly reduced. Community Manager Lore hopped on the official forums to discuss the changes in detail.
Hotfix to address issues with flag carriers in rated battlegrounds
It's tough carrying the flag in Warsong Gulch or Twin Peaks, primarily due to the Focused Assault debuff which increases the damage you take when you pick up the flag -- but it's about to get a little tougher for tanks playing these rated battlegrounds. According to CM Lore, in rated battlegrounds tanks who carry the flag should be getting a bigger debuff -- 50% additional damage compared to the 20% others get. However, a bug is currently treating tanks just like everyone else, so expect a hotfix soon (no restarts required). In addition to fixing debuff damage, there are plans to add the same kind of debuff system to orb carriers in rated Temple of Kotmogu and cart carriers in rated Deepwind Gorge. These changes will take effect next maintenance cycle. All of these changes are for rated battlegrounds only, where they should make it a bit easier to take out enemy flag carriers -- and tougher to keep your own alive.
Battlegrounds, arenas, and warplots: How PvP works in WildStar
PvE is a staple of MMORPG gameplay, but if you prefer the challenge and adrenaline rush of fighting against another human being while bashing on a keyboard and circle-strafing to dizzying effect, then you, my friend, are a PvPer. And if you've PvPed in other games, you'll be familiar with WildStar's battlegrounds and arenas. But warplots? What's a warplot? That's just one of the PvP-related questions I asked at a press event last week at Carbine Studios with the WildStar team. Battlegrounds Designer Kevin Lee and Lead PvP Designer Jen Gordy explained to me that PvP is one of the key focuses of the game; all PvP content in WildStar will be on a cross-realm queue. Your level and gear stats will be normalized to provide an equal playing field. WildStar's telegraph system ensures that PvP is extremely reactive, which is typical, but what's not typical is being able to see where your enemy is aiming that AoE or conal attack.
Honor changes not active until next week [Updated x2]
Last week we learned that honor changes were coming to battlegrounds across WoW. Too little honor was being earned in the multitude of BGs available, and in turn Blizzard decided to significantly adjust the rate at which bonus honor was awarded. For example, where previously you earned bonus honor every 260 points in Eye of the Storm, you'll now receive it every 130 points. At a small level this won't have a major effect, but when you add up running a few dozens BGs while honor farming, it's going to stack up pretty quickly. This change also seems to be a good way to allow players to catch up and enjoy the expansion's PvP offerings near the end of its run. However ... not quite yet. PvP Designer Holinka tweeted that the changes will be coming next week. We'll just have to wait for "moar honor." Update Part Deux: According to a source of Lore, this actually is happening next week.
Changes to Honor earned in certain Battlegrounds
Blizzard Community Manager Lore has posted today in the official forums about some changes to honor earned in several different battlegrounds. His full post is, as ever after the break. The devs have concluded that players are earning too little honor in various different battlegrounds, specifically Arathi Basin, Battle for Gilneas, Eye of the Storm, Silvershard Mines, Warsong Gulch, Twin Peaks, and Strand of the Ancients. All other battlegrounds remain unchanged. While these aren't huge changes, which is to be expected given that they're arriving via Hotfix, every little helps. The jist of the changes is that the periodic honor earned in points-based BGs in the list above will be earned faster, so you'll get bonus honor every 130 points as opposed to 260. This is altered for Silvershard, where it's every 200, as opposed to 265. The flag capture battlegrounds will see the Focused Assault debuff applied faster in an effort to make them shorter, and there's a bonus for capture prevention. Strand will give a bonus for destroying gates, or preventing their destruction. Whether this will be enough to replace the most efficient methods of farming honor -- Krasarang rares, Isle of Thunder PvP dailies, Grizzly Hills quest and JP conversion -- remains to be seen. I suspect not, but it's at least a step in the right direction. Hit the break for Lore's full post.
WoW Archivist: The evolution of Alterac Valley
This edition of WoW Archivist was originally published July 13, 2012. Given the Alterac Valley terrain changes introduced in patch 5.4.2, we felt this piece of Warcraft history is worth another look. WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? The battle was nearly won. Back and forth, a 16-hour war between the Frostwolf Clan and the Stormpike Expedition had ravaged this once-remote valley. Towers and strongholds had been put to the torch. Countless heroes on both sides had fallen to blade and blast. A rampaging troll king had been defeated. Air strikes had rained fire from the sky. Elementals had been summoned and vanquished. At last, but not without heavy losses, the Frostwolf orcs and their allies had fought their way across the narrow bridge to assault the final bastion of the dwarves. All had sworn to see Vanndar Stormpike dead that day and the valley seized. They would kill him or die in the attempt. The AV "zone" The original version of Alterac Valley went live with patch 1.5. Along with Warsong Gulch, these two Battlegrounds were the very first ever added to WoW. Warsong Gulch was designed to be a more traditional PvP experience that anyone who had played Unreal Tournament or Halo could recognize. Some matches could last for a while, but the experience was meant to be a short-term PvP engagement. Alterac Valley, in its first incarnation, was absolutely nothing like that. AV was not, in any modern sense of the word, a Battleground. AV was a zone.
Do Battlegrounds need tutorials?
When I first starting doing Battlegrounds way back in vanilla, it was pretty easy to learn exactly what the rules were. Not because I went and researched the individual Battlegrounds, but because I had a team of guildmates that were happily running the new feature over and over for a fun break from raiding. In later years, I joined a guild that was by and large devoted to PvP content over PvE. With the original honor grind being as ruthlessly difficult as it was, I was happy to help heal those in the guild working on that arduous trek to High Warlord -- and I never had to ask what to do in a Battleground. I was well informed from the get-go. But at some point after Burning Crusade, I simply lost interest in PvP. I think it was after the introduction of arenas. Most of my PvP-oriented friends became absolutely enthralled with the idea of doing arenas, gaining ranks, and more importantly earning those hard-won season's end mount rewards. It wasn't that I didn't have an interest in the mounts, or that I didn't like PvP anymore. It was more that I knew, logistically speaking, that I wasn't particularly good at PvP. It didn't matter so much when the games were just a matter of win or lose, but when it came to arenas, I really didn't want to ruin the carefully-earned rankings my friends had obtained. I came from an era of the original honor grind. Rankings were sacred back then. Consequentially, I don't really do PvP anymore. Not because I don't enjoy a good Battleground, but because at this stage in the game, I haven't the faintest idea what to do in any of them.
Warlords of Draenor: Low level PvP balance to be reviewed
PvPers rejoice! Blizzard Community Manager Bashiok has made a post today that is music to our ears. As ever, the whole lengthy ramble is after the break, but let's cherry-pick here for a second. What Bashiok is replying to is a perfectly reasonable post about PvP balance. He starts off with the same thing we're used to hearing, that WoW is a big game, and the devs have to focus their efforts on where the majority of players hang out, which, for PvP, is max level. But then it gets interesting. He confirms that "some" low-level PvP balance will be addressed in Warlords. Some? What does he mean? Well, he continues on to explain that as a part of the ability removal that's going on, the devs are going to be looking at the ability acquisition pacing -- when you get stuff as you level up. At the same time as doing this, and the stat squish, they are going to be doing a pass on low-level balance, looking to ensure that ability damage is more even than it is now. He does add that the lower brackets are inherently somewhat imbalanced, but that the devs' goal is to improve that as they work through the abilities. He also notes that they will be fixing "obvious tuning problems", and doing as much fine-tuning as possible. This is fantastic news for low-level PvPers everywhere! Hit the break for Bashiok's full post.
Warlords of Draenor: Base resilience and Battle Fatigue potentially eliminated
Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka has been tweeting up a storm today on the topic of PvP design plans for Season 15 and Warlords of Draenor, the most interesting of which is the following: @Linklmm We dislike how large base resil and battle fatigue numbers have gotten too. Out goal is to reduce or eliminate both in Warlords. - Holinka (@holinka) January 9, 2014 I think this is an admirable goal, base resilience and battle fatigue are confusing to some, and annoying to others, but I'd be really interested to see how they do it. Resilience, although not Battle Fatigue, has been part of the game almost since PvP first got instanced, and it's a valuable option for the devs to tune incoming PvP damage so that it can cope with the ever-inflating stat levels in PvE. Yes, there'll be a squish, but then PvE will still almost certainly scale up. So I'm pleased they aren't planning on taking the rather bold step of completely removing it, to leave themselves without the option to reintroduce it easily would seem a little foolhardy, and not something they'd be likely to do. I'd imagine that if it were to go, there'd have to be some method to increase player health, or at least effective health, in instanced PvP, and there'd have to be some formula changes to healing, too. I'm looking forward to beta!
EVE Evolved: Designing EVE Onland, part 1
When I'm not playing or writing about EVE Online, I can usually be found huddled over my computer typing lines of code into a compiler and chipping away at bugs that make varying degrees of sense. Designing my own hardcore space game is a really fun challenge and very fulfilling work, but I have a dirty little game dev secret: I've actually always wanted to make a fantasy game. While the budget and personnel required to take on a project the scale of an MMO remain quite far outside my grasp for the moment, it's still fun to think about how I might design such a game if the opportunity arose. The MMO genre seems to be heading for a sandbox revolution this year, and there's no bigger sandbox than EVE Online, but could all of EVE's gameplay translate to a fantasy game? EVE is probably the most atypical MMO out there, maintaining a subscription-based single-shard PvP sandbox in a genre that's typically headed in the exact opposite direction. There are several new sci-fi sandboxes on the way that may or may not qualify as massively multiplayer titles, but the vast majority of MMO gamers still prefer to keep their feet on the ground in fantasy lands. I often find myself wondering how much of EVE Online's core gameplay is possible only because of its setting -- and how much could actually be applied to a fantasy MMO. Not only should it be possible to adapt most of what makes EVE great to a modern land-based game, but many of the mechanics sandbox gamers now attribute almost solely to EVE actually started life in classic fantasy MMOs like Ultima Online. In this week's unusual EVE Evolved, I'd like to start a game design thought experiment as I delve into the hypothetical world of EVE Onland.
MMO Mechanics: MOBAs vs. MMO battlegrounds
It may feel as if MMOs have always existed as a core part of our gaming repertoire, but the genre made its indelible mark on the industry just over a decade ago. MMO titans like World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and City of Heroes shaped the mechanics we now use as markers and basic standards for the quickly growing genre, and those mechanics have been reiterated and reforged by the countless additions to the MMO clan that we know and love today. This new MMO Mechanics column aims to navigate the mechanical minefield that is the modern MMO through in-depth opinion pieces, comparative analysis, and a little bit of Irish wit, starting with a peek at what distinguishes MMO PvP battlegrounds from Massively Online Battle Arenas. If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, MMOs and MOBAs must be from different galaxies altogether. Despite the similarities between MMO PvP arenas and MOBA matches, the two take very different approaches to progression, persistence, and matchmaking. This leads to two very separate yet equally engaging ways to test the mettle of your character against the might of a human opponent.
Blizzard schedules PvPTR arena testing events
The PTR servers for patch 5.4 are crawling with testers for raids and PvE content, but PvP areas need testing too! To help facilitate the process, Blizzard will be holding two special PvPTR testing events. These events are set at certain dates and times in order to hopefully get quicker queues, more matches, better competition, and better feedback on PvP issues and changes. Part one of the event takes place Wednesday, July 10 from 4pm-8pm PDT. Part two will take place on Saturday, July 30 from 8am-1pm PDT. Along with the fun of PvP combat, Arena Junkies will be hosting some giveaways, and several of their streamers will be participating in the events and streaming them live for people to watch. As always, if you're participating in these events, leaving your feedback in the PTR Discussion Forum afterwards is highly recommended -- it's why the events are being held, after all! If you're a PvP fanatic looking to test the new content, the events should offer you more than enough challenge, fun, and play testing time. For more information on the event, the streams, and the giveaways, take a look at the official site. Good luck to all who participate!
How long are you willing to wait for a group to form?
In the leveling homestretch, I tend to follow a pattern. My main goal is to boost my ilevel as soon as I hit 90 to get in on Raid Finder. Although, once I get there, I end up feeling bitter because waiting in a Raid Finder queue isn't fun. Even if you're not into Raid Finder, WoW presents players with plenty of opportunity to wait around at some point -- battleground and dungeon queues, or even sticking around for a PUG to come together. As a tank on my main, I groan when thinking of entering Raid Finder, mainly because of the wait. There are only two tank roles, after all. With the new loot specialization coming to 5.3, players looking to win tank gear have hope of a less painful wait in a DPS role, at least. Even if you're used to the long wait, everyone has a limit. I remember waiting as a tank in a Raid Finder queue for an hour and forty minutes. I'm not usually willing to wait that long. I'm relatively comfortable with waiting about thirty to forty minutes before moving on. When it comes to PUGs, I'm quite patient, usually waiting longer than I probably should. In a PUG, I tend to have a personal connection to at least one of the other players in the group, so I'm not quick to leave. How long are you willing to wait, whether it be for a dungeon, Raid Finder, battleground, or a PUG? While in queue, how do you pass the time? I usually find myself completing dailies or battling pets. But at what point do you throw up your hands and leave?
Should WoW add a Deathmatch Battleground?
I was reading twitter as I often do... no, really, it's for work, I'm not just wasting time posting jokes about wearing a crown roast as a helmet... when I saw Nethaera post this tweet, which led me to this forum thread. While perusing the thread I eventually found Neth's response to it, and that got me thinking about the concept. Nethaera - Could we get a PvP battleground? Battle grounds have always been missing an important part of world pvp.... PvP. Make it like a big arena but not so big that people can't hide. 10 to 15 players forced into all out pvp. First to so many kills or 10 minutes, whichever comes first, wins the round. No need to even create an area for it. Just make a copy of Blackrock mountain in an instance. That is PvP I would actually like... its the reason I liked AV so much back before it was turned into race where pvp sometimes breaks out. What you're asking for is a straight Death Match type of Battleground. I'm not sure it would be compelling as you think. I'm a big fan of DM as well, at least in FPS', but for an MMO like World of Warcraft, I question how enjoyable it would be in the long run for people. I think for players who feel very comfortable with their abilities, straight head on PvP like that would be fun for them, but for others, I'm not sure it would have the same appeal. That said, I'm not killing the discussion. I'm just interested in how you feel this would work or appeal to a wide enough audience for it to be worth creating. source I have in the past advocated a deathmatch style BG because I do understand the original poster's point. But let's really take a look at what a deathmatch BG would have to entail.
