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The Classifieds: Back for more
The Classifieds brings you weekly news from around the WoW community, including your shout-outs to perpetrators of Random Acts of Uberness. They came, they went ... And now <There and Back Again> is -- well, back again. This Thorium Brotherhood (US-A) guild, formed specifically to quest its way through a farewell tour of vanilla WoW Alliance content from start to finish, has hit the level cap, marked its territory and is preparing to launch a similar effort Horde-side. "After starting with over 100 members who joined us (in most part due to your article!), we ended up with around 35 who stuck through to the very end," reports GM Mistigris. "Lots of adventures along the way! Foot races through Stranglethorn, marches through Dalaran, cooking contests, random dungeon madness, tons of visits to the NPC that turns off XP ... We did ZG and Karazhan at very close to level cap, and there is a robust kernel of folks who are gearing up for 80th heroics and raiding." Time now for the flip side of the coin. "We're going to nest within <Imminent Rueage> on Thorium Brotherhood (US-H)," Mistigris continues. "Our starting date is Saturday the 24th of July -- starting zones and guild invites galore! Level cap for the day is 12th; we'll be gathering the following week at Crossroads for our first 'official' event." If you've been looking for just the right way to wrap up the pre-Cataclysm era, look up <Imminent Ruage> and give all things Horde-side one more for the road. We've got plenty of other news from around the WoW community this week, as well ... So let's crack open The Classifieds.
Creators of Epic Advice working on Epic Plan encounter planner
Now this is interesting. Our old friend Jesta, who made the EpicAdvice.com site not so long ago, is working on a new project at EpicPlan.com, and while it's still hidden away in pre-alpha, you can see what they're up to in this thread on EA. It's a slideshow/diagramming web app, basically -- you can take maps of the game's instances, lay out icons and symbols on them as you wish, and then animate and caption boss fights and encounters. The end result is a very clear way to show off different raid strategies, and we're told the slideshows are embeddable on other sites as well (you may even see some here eventually on WoW.com). Unfortunately, they're only taking signups for the beta of the service right now, and while you can watch a show in action on the technology demo, you can't make your own quite yet. But it seems like a very impressive tool for raidleaders, both to share plans with the public and players seeking help, as well as your own raid members. It'll be great to be able to make a quick and easy visual display of where to stand and what to do during boss fights and instance encounters.
The ins and outs of chatlinks
I know -- most of you will hear the word "chatlinks" and think of horrible times in Trade channel where people are spamming the names of abilities and items in different ways, from nonsense to offensive. But chatlinking is a skill that isn't talked about much, and there definitely are place where it's useful (telling guild members about an item that might help them, or linking an enchant to show what mats it needs). So, encouraged by this thread over on Epic Advice, let's run through a few of the ways you can put links to items in the chat channel.
EpicAdvice.com lets you ask and answer Warcraft questions
Reader Jesta sent us a note about his new website. He's a big fan of Stack Overflow, which is a big Q&A/advice site for programmers -- you show up, ask your question, and then other folks who might or might not be working on the same problem post their answers, in moderated and organized threads for everyone to read. Jesta decided this same type of thing could work for our little game, so he put together EpicAdvice.com -- the idea is that you go there, leave a question about anything in the game, and then wait for your answer from other people browsing the site.Stack Overflow actually has a little "badge" system where answerers can earn reputation points for answering questions correctly, and Jesta says that they're working on doing something similar for Epic Advice (though they'll probably have Achievements, as that's more Warcraft-y). But as of this writing, the site definitely needs more questions and answers, so if there's something bugging you about WoW (that our own Queue hasn't answered yet), or you consider yourself an expert and want to clear some things up, head over and give the site a look.
