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Arcane Brilliance: The threat hotfix and you
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're applying a hotfix to Arcane Brilliance. Beginning now, any warlock who reads Arcane Brilliance will be overcome by intense feelings of self-loathing and an irresistible urge to reroll a mage. The column's actually been functioning this way for some time now, and we thought we ought to just make it official. I figure it's about time we discussed the threat hotfix, mages. And before we go any further, I should point out that from now on, the threat level is always midnight. The hotfix has been in the game for a few weeks now, and I would have brought it up long before now but I got kinda sidetracked daydreaming about the whole transmogrification thing. Now that I've spent a few weeks going through all of the pretty dresses in my wardrobe and deciding which one I want to wear on my next date with Ragnaros (he's a passable conversationalist, a snappy dresser, and the dates are so much more fun now that he's bipedal ... but he tends to shout a lot, and he's a lousy tipper), I'm ready to talk about what amounts to the complete removal of one of the most basic MMO battle mechanics from the game. Now, removal isn't the right word, I know. Threat is still technically in the game, but it no longer really matters much. It's been sort of difficult to wrap my mind around, to be honest. It's as if I woke up one morning and discovered that I no longer needed to wear pants. For so long, pants (or a reasonable pants equivalent) were pretty much a requirement when leaving the house, but now, pantslessness is considered the style. Do I still have pants in my closet? Sure, but I only keep them in there to hide my porn beneath. So how does this new status quo impact us as a class? And is the change good, bad, or does it lie somewhere along the spectrum between those two extremes?
GamersFirst kicks off APB's second open beta
In case you missed it, APB Reloaded's second beta phase kicked off yesterday. The version 1.5.2 update "contains the biggest changes to missions, matchmaking, skill rating, and district recommendation to date," according to the latest GamersFirst dev blog. Bjorn Book-Larsson has a few words of wisdom for residents of San Paro in terms of 15-minute patching-related disconnects. GamersFirst is working "round-the-clock" to isolate issues and come to terms with bugaboos that don't necessarily crop up prior to a large-scale player influx. The latest Reloaded dev diary also contains detailed info relative to all the matchmaking and threat level changes, as well as a bit about cheating statistics and upcoming Nvidia support. Finally, there's a blurb about future servers, and gamers in Russia, Hong Kong, and Australia can look forward to dedicated shards before long.
GamersFirst tweaking APB beta threat levels
The latest APB Reloaded blog entries reflect the ongoing adjustments being made to the resurrected free-to-play MMORPG as it rolls toward a summer re-release. It seems that threat level displays in the city of San Paro were in need of some tweaking, and today's update, scheduled for 5:30 p.m. EDT, looks to address the discrepancies as well as a recently identified problem with low-level matchmaking. GamersFirst's Bjorn Book-Larsson wrote extensively about the issues with threat level visuals in a post over the weekend, and he follows that up with a brief blurb that explains how the devs are tackling the problem. It's not a quick fix, though, and Book-Larsson cautions that GamersFirst is "likely to perform yet another update later this week as we continue tweaking the system."
