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Officers' Quarters: Unchart(er)ed territory
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.It's no secret that the game we all know and love is in a period of transition. Many basic assumptions of Warcraft are changing, from the way loot is itemized, to the way buffs work, to the very nature of raiding. Amidst all this change, I decided to update the document my guild wrote to define our basic principles and guidelines. Written in 2005, it was astonishingly outdated. I guess I shouldn't have been all that surprised. Someone who stopped playing back when Blackwing Lair was the endgame would barely recognize WoW if they rolled a premade 80 on the beta servers today.We call this document our guild's philosophy. Many guilds call it their charter. However you label it, right now is a great time to reevaluate exactly what your guild is all about and what your basic rules and beliefs will be going into the next expansion.
MobileMe browser requirements page found
Joining in on the conversation about tonight's .Mac outage, reader Chad sent us a link to a page he discovered on .Mac. He said that while trying to access his .Mac service on his iPhone, he was redirected to a MobileMe browser requirements page. One of the suspicious things on the page is the fact that "calendar" is spelled wrong (i.e. "calender"). You can see a screen grab of the page after the break. The page in question shows Safari as the top browser to use, followed by Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. On last night's talkcast (MP3 Link) Michael Rose, Robert Palmer, and I talked about the possibility of Apple marketing the Safari browser for Windows users through the MobileMe service. It looks as if that guess is true.Thanks, Chad!Update: Apple has updated the page (see new screenshot after the break).
Testing Age of Conan: Gamespot's hardware roundup + performance guide
You got bills to pay, no computer upgrades in a year, heck maybe it's been two or three, and here comes along Age of Conan with eye-dazzling effects that you must play. It also comes with launch bugs that don't ease the stress on your computer or your nerves for that matter. Crash after crash will leave you infuriated, the problem could be drivers, maybe the PSU can't handle the load, or it's poor optimization code -- whatever it is let the debugging process begin. PC Gaming really does need some better standards, especially MMOs, but let's get back the basic computer hardware needed to run Age of Conan. What hardware will make it run like a champ, and what hardware will even run the game at all in case Grandma wants to chop some heads off in Hyboria on the most sluggish computer. Everything you need to know is available in this in-depth, fantastic hardware performance guide by Gamespot.
On scalable instances and including everyone
Think it's "ridiculous" that you need exactly 10 or 25 (or 40-- or 3) people to raid? Beefpile does. He wants a World of Warcraft that conforms to his wishes-- if he's got seven players, they should have an instance to go without grabbing three more or leaving two behind.And there is such a game-- it's called Dungeon Runners, or Diablo II, or any other game that scales itself to match the players in it. But there are, of course, tradeoffs to such a system. If you have scalable instances (or a scalable overworld, or anything else that scales according to the people playing it), then you start to miss out on some of the development choices you can make. Many of the best bosses in the game don't work unless you have a certain number and a certain mix of characters involved, and any scalable instances would miss out on that design choice.It's the same reason we haven't seen single-player instances yet-- because making things scalable would mean that developers would have to make everything accessible for all classes, and therefore they would lose the design that made the game so popular in the first place. If you want to play a game that scales to as many players as you have, you're welcome to play something else. But if you want to experience the content designed by the WoW programmers the way they intended, you've got to log in with what each instance requires.
Arena rating requirement likely 1800 or 1900
The big news on the forums today is arena weapon ratings-- Blizzard announced last month at BlizzCon that they didn't want players just putting their time in every week to rack up enough arena points to grab the weapons, so they're putting a rating requirement on those next season. Drysc says the exact requirement hasn't been set yet, but it'll likely be around 1800 or 1900.The main problem with this, as many players say, is that it's not those folks who need the weapons. Why give the best weapons to the people who are already winning at PvP. That argument doesn't really hold water (because the whole point of the game is to reward the best players with the best stuff), and the fact is that this change won't really affect that many people anyway-- as of each new arena season, the last seasons' weapons will have the requirements removed and be available for arena points only. So if all you want to do is the minimum number of arena matches and save up your points, you can still do that-- you just can't get the latest and greatest.Blizzard's said before that they want arena PvP to be the peak of player-versus-player combat skill (or at least know-how), and a change like this makes it clear that they don't want to give out any free rides to the top.
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children reports from Hollywood
For the Final Fantasy fans lucky enough to be near Hollywood yesterday night -- and in line for free tickets during the middle of a regular workday -- there was much rejoicing to be had as Advent Children celebrated its U.S. theatrical premiere in style.Siliconera has a write-up on the event with quotes from most of the American voice actors in attendance, who, along with the audience at hand, watched the film in English for the very first time. Lip synching may have been off due to the low-resolution print the actors had to work with, but even Rachel Leigh Cook -- pictured here with her character Tifa Lockheart -- declared herself a new fan of Final Fantasy after the show.Helpful Joystiq Contributor epobirs also had something to report from the screening yesterday, where he gives us an Ain't-It-Cool style rundown of the event. If you want the rest of his reflections on the requirements of the Academy in Oscar nominations, as well as what it takes to "assert your hetero nature ... after watching a movie packed with metrosexual men," simply continue reading below for more. Siliconera's report can be found by clicking on the image of Ms. Cook above or the Read link below. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children will be out on DVD/UMD April 25th.[Thanks, epobirs; image of Tifa courtesy of Eyes on Final Fantasy]
