anecdotal
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A new blogger survey, this time for DPS
Last weekend we spotlighted the big healer survey that went around the blogosphere a little while back -- it was chock full of information straight from healers about their classes and abilities and what they thought of them. Now, Death Goddess is aiming to do the same thing for DPS classes. She's only got a few blogs who've answered so far, but they run a good range, from hunter to warlock to mage, and maybe getting the word out like this will encourage a few more DPS-style bloggers to put their answers in the pot. As long as we're going to keep encouraging this meme (or non-meme, as they may be saying), I'd love to see some of this stuff quantified a little bit more. It'd be interesting to put into numbers which kinds of classes like their roles best, or which situations each role likes to play more (do healers prefer raiding over 5-mans, or do DPS prefer to play solo rather than PvP?). The healer survey was a treasure trove of raw anecdotal information, but it'd be good to see this put into a spreadsheet or graph, and maybe give us a more quantified look at what people think of their class. We'll keep an eye on the DPS data and maybe try hashing it out once the list of those surveyed becomes pretty substantial.
Possible hidden mechanics behind Lock and Load
The Hunter's Mark's Atkallen takes a good look at one of my new favorite Hunter abilities: Lock and Load. I'm pretty late to the party on this one (BigRedKitty showed us all how awesome it was a while back), but ever since I went dual spec and started raiding Survivalist, most of my time is just spent waiting for a Lock and Load proc. And oh boy, when it hits twice in a row and I can throw off Explosive Shots for free on just a global cooldown, look out.But Atkallen's post suggests something a little sneakier about the buff, which procs off of any trap snares or damage, or, more commonly, off of Black Arrow, another Survivalist talent. It used to proc off of Serpent Sting, from 3 to 10 percent of the time according to how many points you put into the talent, and when it was changed to the current form and lowered to 2, 4, and 6 percent, most Hunters worried that they wouldn't see it pop up as much. But here's the thing, and I can attest: it still shows up all the time.
BlizzCon tickets: how it went, and what's next
Yes, if you were around on Saturday, you know that the first round of BlizzCon tickets sold out, and sold out fast. Tickets went on sale right around 10am PST (which was 1pm EST), and sold out just about 28 minutes later. If the queue numbers are trustworthy, over 21,000 people (we've heard as high as 25,000 at a time) logged in to buy tickets that day, and from unconfirmed reports around the web, it seems like about 5,000 to 8,000 tickets were sold: most people who got in line around number 5,000 were able to pick a ticket up, and that was a few minutes in already. Some of those people are already selling tickets on eBay as well.We believe (though aren't sure) that they'll be selling more than 15,000 tickets this year, since that's what they sold last year and they're using even more of the convention space. If that's true, then Blizzard probably went through only about half of the tickets, and will sell the rest during the second session on the 30th. But that's probably not much of a consolation -- given the frenzy around this last Saturday, there'll probably be more people trying for tickets, and given the prices on eBay, possibly more scalpers clogging up the queue. We'll see.Update: Lots of people point out, rightly so, that I missed something in my guesstimates of how many tickets were sold: you could purchase up to five. My personal guess is that the majority of people bought only one or two, but even if you go with three as the average, 5,000-8,000 people in the queue is actually 15,000-24,000 tickets. Blizzard probably did sell the majority of tickets on Saturday then, not just half. So the process on May 30th will presumably go even faster.BlizzCon 2009 is coming up on August 21st and 22nd! We've got all the latest news and information. At BlizzCon you can play the latest games, meet your guildmates, and ask the developers your questions. Plus, there's some great looking costumes.
Owner of seven failed Xbox 360s speaks out
Our thoughts that anecdotal evidence would pile up publicly about the failure rate of the Xbox 360 took less time than we imagined. Dean Takahashi of the Mercury News wrote a piece this morning about a loyal Xbox 360 fanboy who has given up on the system after seven units "croaked" on him. Rob Cassima, 42, who attended the Zero Hour Xbox 360 launch event in the Mojave Desert said, "All of the four that we got at Zero Hour croaked on us.''Takahashi met Cassima and his wife at the event a year and a half ago. After Cassima contacted Takahashi about his plight, the journalist got him in contact directly with Peter Moore ... that must be nice. An Xbox 360 representative has since contacted Cassima to offer him a brand new unit. Cassima says, "A new 360 was all I really wanted in the first place, but after two failed attempts dealing with Microsoft's overseas call centers, I am very annoyed that it took an e-mail directly to P. Moore to get results ... I am just so gun-shy about the reliability issue ... I still feel like a chump."Tina Conley, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, told Takahashi the failure rates are "within the consumer electronics industry average." Microsoft refused to give exact failure rates. Yeah, that's not going to cut it much longer if these stories of failure continue with less than two degrees of separation between people. Purchasing extended warranties should not be the answer to defective production.See also: Ring of Death: An Xbox 360 story -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 BBC show tackles 'clapped-out old banger' Xbox 360
