curse-gaming
Latest
AionSource shutting down
It's been a good eight-year run for one of Aion's longest fan sites, but that run is over now. AionSource, a fansite operated by Curse, is shutting down over the next few weeks, first going into read-only mode before being shut down altogether. The site's current administrator has set up a new site for the community members who would like to migrate. No reason has been stated for the shutdown; the site is not the only fan site that Curse has shut down in recent years, most likely due to a lack of cash flow. Users are encouraged to back up forum posts and the like before the shut down, while site administrators attempt to copy over some of the most useful community guides. Our best wishes to the community organizers attempting to keep the group together through the move. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
The Summoner's Guidebook: Will Korea dominate League of Legends, too?
When I first started following the League of Legends pro scene, I was introduced to top teams like Team Solo Mid and SK Gaming. As I watched matches and player interviews, the first thing that came to my mind was this: If Korea fielded a LoL pro team, it would be incredibly scary. When Riot Games added support for Korean League of Legends and OnGameNet began running regular tournaments, I had to check it out. Sure enough, big pro-gaming teams like StarTale and MiG started fielding pro League teams, and most of the things I suspected were true. Korean teams have amazing coordination and incredible mechanics compared to their western counterparts. This was put to the test last weekend during Major League Gaming's LoL Summer Arena, where Korean qualifying team Azubu Blaze utterly destroyed the other teams, losing only once to Curse Gaming. Most of the matches weren't even close. What's the secret to Azubu Blaze's dominance? Can it be reproduced in the West, or is League of Legends going to end up like StarCraft -- dominated by the Korean scene?
The Summoner's Guidebook: Get back, get back!
Last week, I said I would avoid doing articles on the situational "soft skills" in League of Legends. Well, this week kind of ruins that already. Today we're going to talk about lane positioning, zoning, and harassment. These things are not something I can just give you blanket tips on. There are a lot of nuances involved in good positioning, and every single matchup is completely different. You do not stand in the same places laning against Cassiopeia as you do against Kennen, and those positions change depending on which character you're playing, too. Even though there is a lot of matchup-specific knowledge involved in lane positioning, there are some general tips I can provide. This week I'm going to only teach you about the basics of lane safety but give you some dirty mindgame tricks that will absolutely ruin your opponents. Interested? Read on!
The Summoner's Guidebook: I suck at last-hitting
Given all of the fansites dedicated to League of Legends, you might wonder what kind of content I have planned for The Summoner's Guidebook to set it apart. Fortunately, there are quite a few little niches to cover. Our focus with the column will be on the beginner to intermediate players and improving key elements of lower-level play. While I do recognize and admire the pro League scene, websites like SoloMid.net and Curse Gaming's new LoLPro.com have tons of advice to push your gameplay from the expert levels of play to the master and professional levels. This week, we're going to start with the basics of laning well. While there are dozens of guides on how to do this, I want to cover them in the Guidebook because their importance can't be stressed enough. Laning fundamentals are something you should practice in every game, even as you learn new strategies or tactics. If you can commit yourself to constantly improving in this area, you'll see dramatic leaps in your ability to play. These tricks are the hardest skills in the game to improve on, so getting better at them gives you a significant edge over most opponents. If you want to take the first steps to improve your LoL game, you'll have to read on.
World of Raids going offline in favor of MMO-Champion
It was announced in July that MMO-Champion had been acquired by Curse, which also owns World of Raids. It was unclear at the time what would eventually happen to World of Raids, given the obvious close proximity of content between WoR and Curse. While there were no details to be had, it seemed clear that something had to happen between MMO-C and WoR. Now, Kody, a World of Raids administrator, has announced that World of Raids will be going offline and that most of the page views will automatically forward over to MMO-Champion. At the same time, MMO-Champion will receive a facelift by the same designer who created the Wowstead design. According to Kody, the new design will not repeat any of the "mistakes" in the WoR design, although Kody didn't specify what those mistakes may have been. World of Raids will still be providing basic coverage until the final forwards are completed and the lights are turned out.
Curse acquires MMO-Champion
Yesterday, Curse.com announced the acquisition of MMO-Champion from its owners, Major League Gaming. Boubouille, the big dog over at MMO-Champion, is heading to the Curse team as well. This is some pretty exciting news for the Curse network! Curse, which already has one of the largest repositories of WoW addons and mods for download, as well as the venerable World of Raids outlet, adds on significant prowess in the WoW information community. With content from all three channeled into each other, you can expect big things from all involved. Read the official press release over at Curse or MMO-Champion. Some of the questions that I personally had about the acquisition were, happily and thankfully, answered by both World of Raids and Boubouille himself. Curse currently has a premium subscription-based service, and I wanted to know if we could expect something similar from MMO-Champion in the future. Boubouille answered on his website: I'm not going to bullshit you, premium might happen but it's really not a top priority for the moment. I would hardly call it premium, more like "Donator/Sponsor" for people who would like to help, I would also like to explore new features through that like user generated blogs or user groups on forums, etc ... But really, I don't see it happening in 2010. If I ever add a Premium feature to the site, it will be because it can bring something more without penalizing people who don't want to pay, it won't be just because I'm jealous of Ghostcrawler and want to buy a bigger yacht than his. If something is free today, it will stay free. It's that simple. Doesn't sound attractive or well-thought? Good, that's because we have no immediate plan to do that. Exactly my point. Secondly, what happens to World of Raids, now that two similarly positioned outlets are housed under the same roof? From World of Raids: What this means for World of Raids, and when it will happen, is still being worked out. I'll make sure to announce any plans well in advance though. We talked with Boubouille back in 2009, and the interview is definitely worth a read. Good luck to Boubouille at his new home and big grats to Curse for picking up a hot property.
Cory Stockton breaks down the process of making an instance
Blizzard has done a lot of press regarding the fifth anniversary of the game (and there's probably more to come), but Curse has done one of the more interesting pieces so far. Instead of just chatting with Cory Stockton about his experiences, they had him sit down and explain just how Blizzard puts an instance together. They specifically talked about Ulduar, but the process Stockton reveals works for all of the instances Blizzard has created for the game. A few interesting things -- they "block out" the instances first, create lower-res versions of them to play around in and create the mechanics for the fights. They also do some boss testing outside of the environments -- Razorscale, specifically, says Stockton, was actually tested down in the Stranglethorn Arena. Finally, once the encounter team works out the basics of the encounters, the art and item teams move in, and create art and loot, sometimes with the two of them collaborating (the art team will make a cool item for a boss, and then the item team, with the help of Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, will give the item stats and balance). Interesting just how collaborative the whole process is -- even the Ironbound Proto-drake mount came from the team seeing Razorscale and wanting to put him in mount form. It's nice and all hearing Blizzard remember the Fry's launch, but it's nicer getting an inside look at their process.
Curse Client v4 now in open beta
Curse has recently released version 4 of their addon client to open beta. This is a major overhaul from their current client both in looks and functionality. It adds features such as change logs, settings backup, addon package creation, and a healthy dose of added security. While it still does have some features only available to premium users, it is much less nagging about the process than their v3 client is known to be. Adamar (PC version) and Kaelten (Mac version as well as the addon OneBag) are the developers behind this new version and have been working with ckknight to help integrate some of its features into WoWAce.com and CurseForge addon development sites (both of which are owned by Curse Gaming). This allows players to report bugs via the new client and have them show up as support tickets in the addon sites for the developers to track and work with. We've put together a couple quick galleries of what both the Mac (thanks Mike!) and PC versions of the new client look like as well as delving into some of the cool new features that are available with premium membership. %Gallery-77063% %Gallery-77062%
15 Minutes of Fame: Teza of wowraid.com
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.Some of the most fascinating and insightful interesting profiles here on 15 Minutes of Fame have been about players you've never heard of before: an anthropologist whose field research is inside the raiding World of Warcraft, or the couple who assembled a scale model of Booty Bay entirely out of Legos. But we suspect that most regular WI readers will have heard at least in passing of Teza, the bleeding-edge guilds he has played with and the widely read WoW resource sites he's helped create. Teza's latest success: wowraid.com, launched in March to offer up-to-the-minute news and PvE raiding resources. Teza's WoW pedigree is a long one. The old-school raider was a founder of Curse guild, which has split, merged and morphed its way through incarnations including SK-Gaming and now Ensidia. Today, Teza plays with still another well known raiding guild, Apex. Teza created Curse's add-ons section as a guild resource, guiding its explosive evolution into a widely used public add-ons resource. He also built WorldofRaids.com to offer hardcore raiding news and what become a leading PvE progression tracker. After helping WorldofRaids' transition to become a Curse site in 2007, Teza has created a new WoW news site, wowraid.com. In a strange melange of English, French and Franglais/raidspeak, we visited with Teza about raiding in today's World of Warcraft, keeping up with WoW news, raiding progression and more.
WOWDB introduces Simplified Chinese language option, promises more upgrades
In more international WoW news, Curse's foray into the realm of WoW database sites, WOWDB, is now available in Simplified Chinese, joining Allakhazam among the major database sites that offer the language. In addition, Curse's announcement post also hints at additional features coming to WOWDB "soon," which seems like it may be a direct answer to Wowhead's recent extensive features upgrade. WOWDB has already been accused of copying Wowhead in the past (and, to be fair, opposite accusations have been made). Of course, Wowhead doesn't yet have a Simplified Chinese language option, so in this case, it seems WoWDB has come out ahead. We'll be eager to see if these new options coming to WOWDB make it stand out from the pack.
Two Blizzard inverviews from Leipzig now on video
Yesterday, new Wrath of the Lich King information began trickling out of the Leipzig Game Convention in Germany. Journalists are lining up to talk to Blizzard and two of the interviews with Warcraft Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan can be viewed as video. First, we reported on German game site Buffed's interview with Jeff Kaplan that revealed more details of the new COT: Stratholme instance and an explanation of the Death Knight rune system. If you go to their page, scroll down past all that German and you'll find a video of the interview (in English!)Later in the day, we covered Curse Gaming's own interview with Kaplan that announced Utgarde Pinnacle, gave more detail on the new Inscription profession, revealed the plan behind the increased pre-60 leveling curve and explored the dev's thoughts about giving the Hunter class some PvP love. Now Curse has put up a video of the interview.Leipzig isn't over yet. Hopefully we'll have more revelations before the weekend is over.
More Wrath info from Leipzig
It seems that WoW Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan has a new bit of expansion information for every journalist he talks to at this week's European Game Conference in Leipzig, Germany. This batch of news comes from Curse gaming, who has sent a couple of journalists over to get the scoop. We already know about the L70 instance called Utgarde Keep in the Howling Fjord zone. Now we learn that there will be a second wing of the instance for L80 players called Utgarde Pinnacle. Both dungeons will have Normal and Heroic modes. Yay for key grinding! Anybody? The new Inscription profession will do more than increases effectiveness of spells and abilities. Devs are playing with the concept of using Inscription to improve other elements like range, duration, etc. The "increased leveling curve" of levels 20-60 is going to be accomplished two ways: reduction of the amount of experience required per level and increasing the amount of experience a quest grants by 30%. To address Hunter concerns, Blizzard is considering a Woodworking profession as well as a Mortal Strike kind of ability that reduces healing effectiveness on the target in PvP. These are just ideas they are currently considering and have not been confirmed as going live. The full interview can be read on Curse's front page. Curse promises a video of the interview later tonight. I'll update this post with the link when it goes live.As for the pre-60 leveling increase, I've been toying with leveling an enhancement shaman, but have been weary about the grind. This may be the incentive to get me to accomplish that goal. Is this enough for you? Will you level an alt before the expansion?
AddOn Spotlight: WoW UI Updater
Here's something I've been looking for for a long time! It's not an addon itself, but it does make the management and upkeep of your addons a lot simpler. Cairnehoof of Dethecus (US) sent this in to Mike, who kindly sent it my way: I read your article on wowinsider (big fan btw) about the addon issue in the upcoming patch. I have come across an great application for windows that updates your addons from all the popular sites. Maybe you could share it on the site. I know many people would love it. It's alot better than the one offered on ui.worldofwar.net because it not just download from one site. It is maintained on sourceforge.net and does not contain any malicious code. (I scanned with 3 different anti-virus programs and a anti-spyware one) heres the link if you want to take a look: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wuu So, armed with that information, I set off to explore WUU.
Curse Gaming site revamp
The new patch is coming this Tuesday to a realm near you, and when you run off to find updated versions of your latest addons, you may be in for a surprise -- because favorite addon site Curse Gaming has undergone a complete redesign. (If you're trying to find the addon section of the site from the main page, it's a big purple button on the right.) Their addons section looks quite a bit different and no longer sorts addons by familiar categories -- instead, there appears to be one giant list of addons, which is searchable by labels attached to the addon. For better or for worse, the new layout is going to take some getting used to -- and I can only again encourage everyone to go and download addon updates in advance of Tuesday's patch!
