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Google's YouTube party app is available without an invitation
You no longer need an invitation to see whether or not Uptime, the YouTube social viewing app, lives up to the hype. Google incubator Area 120 has made the app accessible to anyone in the US with an iOS device -- sorry, there's still no Android version. The app has gone through a few upgrades since its debut, including a new home screen to help you discover videos, support for music videos and an option for finding friends through Facebook. Either way, the core concept remains the same: you can either watch videos 'live' with your friends or watch their reactions to a previous session.
Google's Uptime is all about snarky YouTube parties
Last year, Google created Area 120, an incubator where employees with (approved) ideas can spend their "20 percent time" on side projects. One of the groups has just released Uptime, an app that lets you meet friends, share YouTube videos and add stickers, "sparkles," hearts and snarky comments. You can search for video content within the app, which can also will help you find friends "based on common connections within Uptime," according to the FAQ. Ironically, it's only available on iOS and not Google's Android, at least for now.
Blood Pact: Buffs and debuffs for warlocks and logs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is almost free for summer. Almost. The last two weeks have been on simple topics like glancing at a raid parse on World of Logs (WoL) or looking at the various graphs WoL has. Before we dive into the actual combat log itself with the expression editor, I'm going to take a stop at what buffs and debuffs are going on in the fight. This information is still broad in scope and can apply to almost anyone, but it's still important foundation knowledge for warlocks and logs.
Encrypted Text: Why mobility doesn't matter
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. Brian Holinka, who is quickly becoming the most frequent tweeter on the dev team, recently talked about Shadowstep and rogue mobility in a series of tweets. Mobility is one of those things that gets trotted out every time a melee class starts talking about PvP balance. One melee class has a teleport, another has a snare break, yet another has a speed boost –- no two melee classes are equal. I'm sure we all remember ret paladins complaining about their lack of a "gap closer." The problem with mobility is that mobility doesn't matter. Well, not really. What really matters to a melee class is uptime. Our goal isn't to have 100% mobility, it's to have 100% uptime. We want to be attacking our target as often as possible, and that usually requires being in melee range. Looking at mobility in a vacuum is missing the forest for the trees. Mobility is just one of the tools that we use to achieve a high melee uptime. All of our other abilities, like CCs, stuns, and slows are critical components to maximizing our uptime. Shuriken Toss is the exact opposite of mobility, but its strength comes from increasing our uptime despite being out of melee range.
Encrypted Text: Troubleshooting rogue DPS
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or topic suggestions. Did you know that druids have four different, viable playstyles? They can heal, tank, and DPS in two different ways. While others might be impressed with their flexibility, we aren't. Rogues have learned that complete dedication is required to be the best. Do you know what else doesn't heal? A shark. Do you know what never tanks? A viper. Do you know what always attacks from melee range? A wolf. Rogues channel their predatory instincts while concentrating on a singular purpose. The only issue with being so focused on DPS is that we don't have any backup plans. What do rogues do when they can't kill things in melee range? If you're familiar with the Shazzrah encounter from the days of old, then you know that a rogue who can't attack is completely useless. My guild used to have all of us rogues light a few campfires in the back of Shazzrah's room and cook food for the rest of the guild while they downed the boss. After years of training to kill, I was stuck wearing an apron and making Savory Deviate Delights. Rogues need to do good DPS in order to validate our very existence.
WoW.com's top ten stories of 2009, part 2
In mid-August, Blizzard released patch 3.2.2, which re-introduced Onyxia, the game's first raid, as a special anniversary encounter. Blizzard told us all sorts of stories about how they did it, from the early trepidation (soothed by one of their bosses saying that they'd have "a million subscribers" someday), to the first launch night and the subsequent scrambling for more and more servers to keep players in the game.
More on Black Arrow and Lock and Load
The Hunter's Mark examined what's going on behind the Hunter talent Lock and Load a little while ago, and last week Atkallen did a follow up post getting down into the nitty gritty of the numbers a little further. Essentially, he charges that you're looking at an LnL proc for about 2-4% uptime during a four hour raid -- that is, for about 4% of the time, you've got Lock and Load giving you free Explosive Shots with no cooldown and no mana cost. And as he says, that's the "applied" time -- since LnL disappears as you use it, odds are that the real time you have it available will be much less.He also tracks that time from 3.1 to 3.1.2, and says he's found data that confirms his previous theory: that it was more than the tooltip that needed changing during the last patch. Before the patch, he was looking at 11% uptime during three Ulduar fights, and after the patch, that's dropped down to 6%. Blizzard said they were only changing the tooltip, but that doesn't seem to be the case.Finally, he stands by a notion that a lot of our commenters debated last time: that LnL is proccing more after 3.1, even though the mechanics claim that it shouldn't be. I haven't had a lot of personal playtime with it post-patch, but there are two different conclusions to take away here. First: LnL, in conjunction with Black Arrow and Resourcefulness, is a definite force for DPS in the Survival spec no matter how often it's proccing. And second: there still may be something else going on here behind the scenes -- the removal of the cooldown is almost definitely a factor, and Blizzard may be playing around with the RNG more than they're letting on.
Breakfast Topic: Uptime
What? No regular long downtime for this week? That kind of... ruins my plans. I mean, the weekly maintenance usually means going out for coffee or a movie. Now that servers are actually going to stay up, the option to stay at home and play becomes available. For a lot of people, I think, this probably isn't even an issue. They'll be at work or in school, so the rolling restarts don't get in the way of any plans. Or do they?While it's common for many players to do something outside of the game when it's server maintenance, I'm curious to know what happens when server maintenance doesn't happen or happens in the form of rolling restarts. Since Blizzard never announces too much in advance whether or not the maintenance will take a long time, some of us make plans for Tuesdays. What happens when servers don't go down? Do you take the unexpected uptime to catch up on some play time? Finish the Lunar Festival Achievements, maybe? Run a couple of heroics? Or hey, maybe it's business as usual.
Realm Status plugin for Firefox
The realms are back up now, but we've all been through that wait before -- you've got things to do in Azeroth, but Blizzard is doing their updating, so you're stuck browsing around WoW Insider in Firefox. And here's a handy little tool to help you get back in the game as soon as possible -- the Realm Status Tool Firefox plugin will let you see the status of all the realms from right in the browser's toolbar, or even monitor a realm for you, and drop a note when its status changes.Of course, if you just need to see what's up and down, the Realm Status page on Blizzard's site will do it for you, but the plugin will actually put up a popup when your selected realm is back up. So you can browse all you want, and know exactly the right time to log back into the game. It's been around for quite a while, though it's only at version .4, but I haven't had any problems with it yet. And it supports both US and EU realms, so no matter where you are, you can have it keep an eye on what your realm is up to.Thanks, Berg!
Palm ads take a shot at RIM's recent Blackberry outages
Nothing says Valentine's Day like trying to cash in on a vulnerable, insecure relationship -- and it looks like Palm's doing its best to, ahem, "be there" for Blackberry addicts left a little shaken by Monday's network outage. The company's taken out full page ads in several national papers and changed its homepage to read that Palm devices include a little something called "uptime" -- which is actually pretty funny since we've got a Treo 750 here that's been rendered all-but-useless by AT&T's various outages these past few weeks, but we'll still grant points for panache. Of course, that still doesn't change the fact that a recent survey ranked Palm dead last in customer satisfaction, but since when has being a homewrecker had anything to do with long-term happiness?[Via coolsmartphone]
The keepers of virtual worlds
We would probably faint at the sight of Blizzard's internet bill every month, but the folks at TeliaSonera are very familiar with how much bandwidth World of Warcraft uses-- they run the network for Blizzard over in Europe. Gamesindustry.biz has a short interview up with one of their reps, and it provides a pretty interesting look at the daunting task of keeping virtual worlds online 24/7.They don't get into specifics on any games (unfortunately, though I'm not surprised), but Vlad Ihora says that the best thing developers can do is keep their server plan flexible. TeliaSonera will actually rent out servers to up-and-coming MMOs with the option to later buy if their game does well, or release if they didn't need as much as they thought. Flexibility is a huge benefit at the server farms, too-- Ihora says they can switch on a few extra gigs of bandwidth in just a couple of hours if necessary.When you enter into a virtual world, with the snow on the mountains twinkling in the background and the vile monsters bearing down on you, you probably don't think often about the hundreds (if not thousands) of servers in place bringing the experience to you. But Ihora and his company sit in an interesting place-- in charge of keeping virtual worlds up and running for all of us to enjoy.[Via incgamers]
