C.K. Sample, III

Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

Poor leadership kills BattleGround teams

Oh, man. So last night, I got a chance to play a few rounds in Warsong Gulch. Usually, I have a good amount of fun doing so, following along with nicely placed orders and helping out while trying not to get slaughtered, lose my tank, or go through all my soul shards. I'm not going to name names here, but last night, I was in a group with a complete and total jerk who continually bossed everyone in the team around because he was a higher level, continually calling us all noobs and flipping out constantly about how we all couldn't do anything right.The thing is, we were winning until he started yelling repeatedly, "EVERYONE IN THE MIDDLE NOW!" And since the team was a little n00b heavy, most people listened to him. This left our flag unguarded by any but my lone self, who ignored him until I just gave up, and we quickly had our flag stolen and planted and he just kept shouting "WHAT? HOW!?"Because your strategy sucked. You need people to charge in the raid, and people to guard the flag. Put all your cards too heavily in one place or the other and you are screwed. Word to the wise: good leaders don't start yelling at you and calling you all noobs. If that happens to you in game, it is time to pick a new leader. What do you think? What's your best BattleGround strategy? Who has been your worst leader?ps—There's an update this morning, and I only need one more signature on the charter for Akama's Horde WoW Insider Guild.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

WoW Universal Binary for Mac is FAST

This is much better. After this morning's patch, the new, universal binary version of WoW running on my 17-inch iMac Core Duo is very speedy. I'm seeing between 50 and 60 frames per second consistently. That's on a 1.83Ghz Core Duo with 2GBs of RAM and 128MB of VRAM. Who says a Mac isn't a gaming machine? ps—I'm in the Royal Quarter of the UC on Akama if anyone wants to come sign the charter.

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News By C.K. Sample, III

We have 1.9.3.5059 update...

So, I grew tired of the maintenance message and decided, "What the heck?", so I tried logging in. To my joy, my screen immediately started downloading an update. I launched the updater and there it was: 1.9.3.5059, streaming down through the Internets to warm the dark rotting recesses of my Undead heart.Why am I so pleased to get an update and still be locked out of doing anything since the realms are still down, you ask? Easy: I have a new Intel-based iMac, and this patch seems to have finally made World of Warcraft run natively rather than via Rosetta, as the comment at the bottom of the login screen no longer mentions Rosetta, but only GCC Intel. Nice!For the HORDE!

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Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

All Realms down for maintenance until 11am PST

All realms are currently down for scheduled maintenance until 11am PST.Looks like I picked the wrong day to log in and sit in the UC all day waiting for people to come up and sign the WoW Insider guild charter on Akama. In any case, later on today, after things are up and running, I will be logged in on Akama, sitting in the Royal Quarter of the Underground City waiting for people to come by and sign our charter. I will simply have it running while I am busy doing other work on my computer, so if I'm AFK for a while, just be patient. I will return.For the HORDE! UPDATE: They are back up now, and I'm waiting in Akama for anyone who wants to sign our guild charter. My handle is Cks.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

WoW Patched and now I cannot get the wand I won

So, I eagerly loaded the new patch and logged in. I noticed that I had some new mail and low and behold I won the Shadow Wand I was trying to nab over at the Orgrimmar Auction house. Very nice. So I open the mail expecting to grab the attached wand only to find no attached wand!As I sat there cursing into the screen, I noticed the broadcast message: "We are aware of the current issues with the mail system. At this time we are working on a resolution and we ask that you please do not delete your in-game mail. We apologize for the inconvenience."Who else thinks I should get the wand for free for this inconvenience? ;-)

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News By C.K. Sample, III

Comments back up and running

Hello readers, Sorry for the technical difficulties over the long weekend; however, I'm happy to report that things should be performing more the way you'd expect them to now. Comments are back up and running. I just did a test one on another post. Thanks for bearing with us. More content to come soon...

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

New to WoW: A few basic tips

I'm still relatively new to World of Warcraft. I've been playing for about 3 months, but only on and off with a few days here and there of serious questing. The highest ranked character I have is a level 15 Tauren Warrior. In any case, I'm at that intermediate stage where I'm starting to learn a lot of things that the seasoned gamer takes for granted and that the complete newbie has no idea about, so I thought I'd share a few of these basics that I've noticed recently for those of you who are just getting started. These will most likely garner "Well, d'uh" from those of you who have played the game for any amount of time. In any case, here's three random bits:Yesterday, when I was riding over to Mulgore, someone else on the airship with me kept asking "Where is this going?" I then told him/her to hit M to pull up the Map. n00b: "Oooooh!"Also, while at the Crossroads when you see the little guy with the big guy as his bodyguard on the road selling weapons, if you think, "Wow, that seems a bit overpriced," that's because it is. Don't buy from him.You can kill as many Plainstriders as you want, but if they are not in the area that the quest you are on says they need to be when you kill them, then you're not going to make any progress on that quest.Any other tips that you'd like to share?

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News By C.K. Sample, III

Please not the fishies

Joystiq is reporting a bit from Gaming Steve with an image that seems to indicate that the new race everyone has been talking about may be the Murlocs. I hate the Murlocs. They have killed me multiple times when they all swarm together with that annoying gurgling battlecry of theirs. Please, say it ain't so, Blizzard.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

Word of Warcaft: Paladin

Have you ever noticed how, after playing WoW for hour after hour, you start greeting people on the street by saying things like, "Well met!" or you start making odd connections between your real life and your virtual World of Warcraft life?Well, I don't have a Paladin in Azeroth (yet), but I had that odd feeling that the Matrix and the real world were colliding somewhat when I launched Bloglines this morning and discovered that Dictionary.com's word of the day for today, December 14, 2005, is Paladin. Definition: "1. A knight-errant; a distinguished champion of a medieval king or prince; as, the paladins of Charlemagne. 2. A champion of a cause."

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

Bill Gates Plays WoW?

This is a totally fictitious article, but it's somewhat amusing and WoW related, so I thought I'd share: "While you can't turn a corner without seeing [Bill Gates] pimping the Xbox 360 these days, he actually prefers PC gaming. Most folks think he's dreaming up the next big thing for Windows when he's locked away in his office. Uh-uh. He's working to level up on the Mal'Ganis server in World of Warcraft." Take that XBox 360 Fanboy! I especially recommend that you read the comments on the Digg page where I found this. My favorite is by Toecutter who says: "He wouldnt level up anyways he would just pay someone." Ha ha. [via Digg]

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Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

In the game: solo vs. groups

Since it's a slow weekend, I thought I'd throw up a post about our gaming. Earlier today, Damien and I were questing through Azeroth together. We're building up our Undead Warlock characters and just bought a guild charter so that we can start a WOW Insider guild for everyone to join in on. Damien will post later with more details on that. In any case, this shot was taken while I was waiting for him and I decided to start dancing. I had just helped him get his VW, as the day before someone else had helped me get mine. I've been playing a lot on my own, and, so far, I haven't felt the group pull. It seems like every time we go to group quest, we're all at slightly different points in the game from our solo gaming. This means that some of us have to repeat quests we've already done and we have to ask help from others. In any case, thanks to Damien, I finally finished The Family Tomb, which is the quest that I currently hate the most. I died so many times. Anyway, do you prefer parties or solo? Let us know.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

NYT on WoW gold farming

Josh posted a bit about gold farming the other day, but now the New York Times is following suit with an article, aptly titled, Ogre to Slay? Outsource it to the Chinese by David Barboza. We just love seeing NYT headlines like this one. In any case, it's an interesting read, giving us the gold farming experience from the perspective of actual Chinese gold farmers. We already knew that Blizzard sees gold farming as being illegal, but it's interesting to see the people involved in it as a business talk about it as if it were akin to working on Wall Street. One 23-year-old gamer, named Wandering in Azeroth (so watch out for 'Wandering') notes: "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day." $250 a month for playing World of Warcraft? Perhaps we should look into launching a WOW Insider Chinese. If these gold farmers can write, they could probably make more money blogging the game than gaming the game and the gold farming industry would diminish (Yeah, right!).Thanks to WOW Insider Reader, Dr. Funbags, for sending this one in!

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

WOW Insider Flickr Group

Josh set up a WOW Insider Flickr group for us earlier today and membership is open to the public, so get in there, join up, and start sharing your favorite shots of Azeroth with us. Don't forget that Josh started another Flickr pool for your custom UI in WoW.Also, if you happen to have shots of your most embarrassing death, we'd really love to see those too.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

Has WoW ruined your life?

You've all heard the stories. People have died from exhaustion from playing video games too much. People have started affairs and ruined marriages in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft.If this sounds familiar: here's your chance to share. It's Jerry Springer on WOW Insider time: Has your devotion to the world of Azeroth ruined or negatively impacted your real-world life? Give us all the dirt.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

WoW Student Ethnographies

Is the general population of WoW sexist or gender-biased? Are there way more fanboys than fangirls playing the game? If your answer was: "Who cares?" Then you may want to skip this post. Otherwise, check out this group of student blogs from a class called "Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games." [Side note: why didn't they offer courses like this when I was going through?] The blogs don't just cover sexism, as each blog details a different student's progress in a research project and paper examining ethnographies in World of Warcraft. Pretty cool stuff. [via BoingBoing]

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Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

How much time do you spend designing your characters?

A comment (which hasn't been cleared yet, or I'd link to it[link]) on Damien's post about naming conventions in WoW got me thinking about how much time everyone spends designing their characters. I tend to hit randomize until I see something in the ballpark of what I'm looking for and then tweak the individual features from there until I have something I like. How many of you spend a lot of time customizing the looks of your characters? How many of you just hit randomize and jump on in and start killing things? Let us know.

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News By C.K. Sample, III

Well met: Roll call

No, this isn't a pimp-the-bloggers post. Although, we will most likely have such a post in the future. What we want to know is: do you like to play Horde or Alliance? How many different characters do you have in World of Warcraft? Which one is your highest ranked? What's your favorite Realm? How much do you play a week? Give us all the gritty details in the comments.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

WOW Insider Video Podcast: Halloween edition

I put together this video podcast for Joystiq back in October, but due to various issues, it never saw the light of day. I decided to go ahead and release it here for all of you as a sign of things to come from WOW Insider, as we've got some pretty good ideas for some video content bouncing around in the WOW Insider back offices. The entire video was captured from within Argent Dawn using Screen Capz Pro on OS X. There is one error in the film, as I n00bishly proclaim the little colorful bobbles dangling from the huts in the middle section Halloween decorations, but they are, in fact, part of the normal design of the huts. Here's a direct link to the file (right click and save) and you should also be able to subscribe to our podcasts using the following URL: http://wow.joystiq.com/category/podcasts/rss.xml The entire video lasts three minutes and is formatted for playback on the new video capable iPod, but will also play in QuickTime or iTunes 6. We'll try to offer future versions in both PSP and iPod compatible versions. If there are any particular flavors of video or special content or stories you'd like to see us cover in-world, then let us know in the comments to this post.

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PC Gaming By C.K. Sample, III

Is WoW overpopulation becoming an issue?

Forget what I said the other day about the more the merrier. Why the heck am I constantly having to queue up to log in to servers where I already have characters? Last night, I tried logging into 5 different Realms, before finally giving up and creating a new character in a new Realm. I, for one, would like to see Blizzard do something about this. Either make a population cap or let us migrate characters from other Realms or spider all the Realms together. Something. Sometimes I just want to log in and play for a little bit, and the queue destroys that. Do I really need to create a different character for every Realm and spend hours and hours trying to grow them all? What do you think?

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How to get unstuck

For some reason, I like to jump off of things and commit virtual suicide on a semi-regular basis while playing World of Warcraft. I don't know why. It makes me giggle like a young Tauren maid. In any case, as a result of this little hobby, I have—from time to time—found myself stuck and wedged in between two bits of some odd area of Azeroth where no character was ever supposed to tread. Of course, the first time I did this, I tried exiting the game and re-entering, only to find myself still entirely stuck and unable to move. I panicked. I shouted out into the virtual halls, "I'm stuck!!!" A fellow gamer came by and advised that I try backing out. I tried, but I was firmly planted between a wall and a bookshelf. The solution: I used my Hearthstone to teleport back to my home. So, remember kids, if you find yourself stuck somewhere in WoW, use your Hearthstone. *sigh* Home, sweet home.

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