Eliah Hecht

Gaming By Eliah Hecht

PvP with Blizzard QA tomorrow

Hey North American players, want to PvP with Blizzard's QA staff? They sure seem to have been doing a lot of these lately. Your next chance is tomorrow, Thursday the 11th, on the PTRs, so get your strategies ready. The details: Anasterian realm (but players on Broxigar can participate too by queueing for randoms) 3-11-2010, 4:00 PM PST Queue for a random battleground The Blizz staff will be in the guild 'Blizzard' Horde-side, and the guild 'Blizzard QA' Alliance-side. Who's going to try their hand against the boys in blue? Get your PTR transfers in now if you haven't already. And yes, I know our dear friend Mr. Street isn't in the QA department, but I just love these Ghostcrawler shops. He's poking Skeletor in the eye, and He-Man in the nostril! So hardcore.

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

BlizzCast Episode #13

Episode 13 of Blizzcast, Blizzard's occassional podcast, came out yesterday. The majority of it is devoted to a StarCraft II beta special, which is beyond the scope of this site, but they did do a WoW Q&A after that (and a Diablo 3 Q&A at the end), between WoW CM Zarhym and Diablo CM Bashiok. The WoW segment was mostly retrospective, discussing what the developers learned from Wrath, with a dash of looking forward to Cataclysm. Here's a quick summary (you can read the whole transcript, or listen to the podcast, at Blizzard's site): ICC is designed such that the final boss in each section is harder than the rest of the section (Putricide, Blood Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King). The ICC zone-wide buff "won't come in until at least a month after the Lich King has been released," which means we could see it soon, since the Lich King fight opened up February 2nd (although the devs mentioned in the Twitter chat that it's not quite time for the buff yet). It will improve "roughly once a month," and the buff will affect health, damage, and healing (much like the Luck of the Draw buff from random dungeon groups). They thought the Illidan encounter in Black Temple, back in BC, was a bit anti-climactic, so they wanted to make sure the end of the Lich King was "super special." In answer to "what next after I clear ICC:" ICC hard modes, and to a lesser extent the Ruby Sanctum, which is coming in a future patch. Ruby Sanctum will hold "roughly Lich King level gear," as has been mentioned elsewhere. That's about it for the WoW content, but if you're interested in SC2 or D3, you may well want to read or listen to the whole thing.

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Ensidia temporarily banned for exploits

It looks like Ensidia's 25-man world first on the Lich King will go down with an asterisk next to it, because they've all just received a three-day ban for "Abuse of in-game mechanics or glitches with intent to exploit or cheat in World of Warcraft." The Ensidia blog post reporting this is down as of this writing due to traffic, but you can still view the Google cache. The story is that Ensidia made use of Saronite Bombs to "bypass The Lich King fight mechanics" (Saronite Bombs and similar items were disabled in a hotfix last night). In addition to the temporary ban, all items and achievements they gained from downing Arthas have been revoked. Before the ban (but after the hotfix), Ensidia put up a post claiming that they didn't think the bombs were an exploit; Blizzard obviously isn't buying it. Meanwhile, Muqq, the Ensidia player who posted about the ban, has taken this as an opportunity to quit WoW (and rant a bit at Blizzard about "half-assed encounters"), saying "to ban people when they do not know what's causing the bugs is just a [expletive] joke." Update: It's worth a mention that the language Muqq used at the end of his post is identical (save places and names) to this post by Tigole (scroll to the bottom -- it's the last thing on the page), written of EverQuest in 2002. Be warned, neither of these are safe for work.

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Daelo and Ghostcrawler discuss the Lich King

The latest edition of Blizzard Insider, Blizzard's very sporadic email newsletter (and no relation to our old name, WoW Insider) has been released. Issue 32 features a note that the Starcraft II: WIngs of Liberty site has been revamped, blurbs about the mobile Authenticator and the Armory app, and some calls to buy their merchandise. More interesting for WoW fans, though, is an interview with Scott Mercer (Daelo), WoW's lead encounter designer, and Greg Street (Ghostcrawler), a crab who needs no introduction. They discussed the arc of Arthas and the Lich King from Warcraft II through World of Warcraft (congratulations again to Blood Legion on their 10-man world-first). Please note that here there be spoilers for some details about the Arthas fight, so stay away if you want it all to be a surprise.

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TV & Movies

TV & Movies By Eliah Hecht

Raimi tackling another movie before Warcraft

You remember the Warcraft movie, right? A couple weeks ago, we learned that Spiderman 4 had melted down, and director Sam Raimi, and the entire cast, are being swapped out while the Marvel Empire reboots the franchise. The link here is that Mr. Raimi is also the one who's directing the Warcraft film for Legendary Pictures. The Spiderman fiasco drew rumors that Warcraft was coming that much sooner, since Raimi was now free to work on it. However, news appeared yesterday that his next project is The Shadow, so it looks like we're going to have to be patient a little longer. But hey, we're Blizzard fans, right? We can be patient. And honestly, I'm still not convinced that a live-action Warcraft movie is a good idea. I mean, I like a lot of Raimi's work, and Legendary Pictures has made some great films, but... I dunno. We'll see.

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PC Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Icecrown Citadel raid weeklies activated

Icecrown Citadel is just full of news tonight. Hot on the heels of the Lich King's entire loot table being revealed, it appears that the Icecrown raid weeklies are now available. There seem to be five different raid weeklies (here's the list), existing in both 10- and 25-man versions, and they appear to be given by a different questgiver within Icecrown Citadel for each quest. Tonight Anne, our new lore columnist, did the 25-man version of Securing the Ramparts, and she reports back that the frost giant (a special mob that appears only for the quest) was "friggen HARD" and that although they got it in a couple of tries, a PuG might have trouble. There was an interesting fight mechanic in the form of a disease debuff that must be passed to another player within 30 seconds, or else it kills the target. The original target is now immune for 30 seconds (no tagbacks, I guess). The giant dropped no loot, but for completing the quest you get Sack of Frosty Treasures, which contains 5 Emblems of Frost, some gold, and a chance for epic gems. Has anyone else had a chance to try the new weeklies yet?

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Lich King's loot table revealed

This is surprising: the entire loot table for the Arthas fight, on both 10 and 25-man (normal and hard, judging by the item levels) has just been posted to the Armory. Edit: the loot is also on Wowhead now, complete with 3D models. As tipster Micah noted, if this is really the whole loot table, it consists entirely of armor tokens, weapons, and Invincible's Reins (which is listed as a guaranteed drop on 25-man heroic). The focus on weapons isn't exactly new for raid end bosses, but it's interesting nonetheless. I haven't had a chance to go through the whole list yet, but as far as I can tell, there aren't any of the nifty proc-based items we've been seeing elsewhere in Icecrown. It's pure stats on Arthas drops (though Alex points out that they all the 25-man heroic items have flavor text). Still, I wouldn't say no to a nice Tainted Twig of Nordrassil for my druid. Which one's your favorite?

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Have emblems ruined heroics? (Hint: no)

Ardol has made a compelling post at World of Warcraft Philosophized, a blog which I can't remember adding to my feed reader, but which I'm now glad I (evidently) did, arguing that the current emblem system has ruined heroic instances. You should go read the whole post if you can, because it's well written, but here's his argument in a nutshell, as I understand it: A player who mainly runs heroics will quickly amass many Emblems of Triumph, thereby becoming easily overgeared for all but the most challenging heroics (i.e. Halls of Reflection). This makes them much less fun. Raid-oriented players who are running heroics just for the two Emblems of Frost at the end are not very fun to run with. He also proposes a solution: five-man instances should be ordered into tiers, like raids, and should award emblems on the same schedule as raids do. The first part of this suggestion is already partially implemented: Trial of the Crusader already came with Trial of the Champion, and Icecrown Citadel with the Frozen Halls trio of instances. But Ulduar did not have any attendant five-mans, and the same quality of emblems drop in every heroic (although the loot quality is differentiated).

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Blizzard launches Facebook Armory app

Earlier this evening we received a tip (thanks, Taylor) that Blizzard has launched a WoW Armory Facebook application. It promises to publish data about your WoW characters to all your Facebook buddies in real time. I figured I'd give it a spin, not so much because I want to spam my friends with it as because I'm curious what they've come up with. You can see the results in the gallery below. Here are my brief impressions: It's a bit scary that it asks you to log in with your Battle.net account, but if you look at the URL of the popup window it is in fact from us.battle.net, one of the legitimate domains. Still, I'm not sure it's good training for users for Blizzard to ask us to log in within random popups. The login form does not ask for your authenticator. It doesn't tell you this in the brief description, but you choose up to five characters for the app to report to your followers. It doesn't just indiscriminately report the progress of your latest bank alt. By default, it publishes updates on your characters to your Facebook feed, but that box is easily unchecked (fortunately). It also by default posts to your feed that you've installed the app, which is something I can't forgive a Facebook (or Twitter) developer for. If I really want to tell all my friends I'm using your app, I'll tell them. Don't do it for me. At least this too is an option that can be unchecked. After choosing your characters and what you want to show, you may be worried that it's not working, but just give it a minute - it doesn't populate immediately. Mine started showing data in about ten minutes. Overall, assuming they manage to make it work, if you want your Facebook friends to know about your WoW characters, this is the app for you. If not, why are you still reading this post? Anyway, I'm glad to see Blizzard following through on some of the promise the Armory has always showed, even if I don't approve of all their methods. Innovation is always welcome. %Gallery-84420%

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Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity By Eliah Hecht

Blizzard shines the spotlight on account security

At least judging by the number of emails we've been getting about them, WoW scams have never been more popular than they are now. So I'm very happy to see that Blizzard has launched a new Account Security section on their Battle.net site, featuring tips on how to keep your Battle.net account safe. A lot of it is common sense - things like using an authenticator (which also gets you a nifty Corehound pet), not giving your account name/password to anyone (even if they say they're a Blizzard employee), and keeping up-to-date browser software and anti-virus on your computer. It never hurts to reiterate these things, though; many accounts get compromised every day through not observing these rules.

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Reviews

Reviews By Eliah Hecht

Curse Client for Mac v4 reviewed

Curse Client version 4 for Mac has been in open alpha for some time now, and I'm happy to report it's pretty good -- far better than version 3 ever was. I have no idea how the Windows version is, but the Mac one is probably better than WoWMatrix ever was, from a usability standpoint, without that nagging "steals bandwidth from hosting sites" issue. Things I like about it: It's pretty fast. It doesn't lock up for seconds at a time, and it doesn't max out my CPU. It works well with links on the Curse site to install addons; it also makes it pretty easy to get new addons from within the updater. It's easy to update all your addons; one click does it. The changelog for a new version is pretty easy to bring up, in case you're wondering whether to update.

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PC Gaming By Eliah Hecht

You are not invited to the Cataclysm alpha

In the wake of yesterday's rumor that the Cataclysm Friends and Family alpha will be starting this Tuesday, January 12, we should expect an increase in scammers trying to get your account details by offering phony alpha invites. We saw a lot of these for both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King as well, and some of them were very well crafted. At this phase of Cataclysm's development, though, it will be comparatively easy to keep yourself safe. Since this is a friends and family alpha, if you don't have friends or family that work at Blizzard, you will not get an invite. Therefore, anyone offering you one is trying to pull a scam. Basically, everyone who's going to be getting legitimate access to the alpha should know who they are already. Everyone else, sit tight and stay tuned to WoW.com for the latest on WoW's next chapter. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

The Dungeon Finder and gear disparity

There is some confusion as to whether/how the Dungeon Finder matches characters according to internal gear score. To the best of my knowledge, it actually attempt to create a discrepancy between characters' gear, so that you're likely to wind up with a few heavily geared members 'carrying' lesser-geared members. This is directly contrary to a claim I've seen circulating that the system attempts to match internal gear scores. If the system doesn't attempt to create disparate groups, it should, and if it does, I'm glad it does. It may be disheartening to see someone in your group in full blues or maybe even a couple greens, instead of the now-familiar suit o' purples, but as some commenters pointed out in my post on Dungeon Finder bingo, we all started out in blues and greens at 80 (with the possible exception of some crafted gear and BoEs), and heroics were designed to be run with that gear. Where are the epics supposed to come from, for a pre-raid character? Furthermore, a less-geared character might actually need some of the gear that drops in the ilvl 200 heroics (i.e. everything except CC, FoS, PoS, and HoR), which is a nice change of pace from the usual shardfest. It may take you a few extra minutes to farm your emblems, but PuGs are about more than just you: they're about a group of people coming together to help each other out, and enjoy a dungeon.

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PC Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Dungeon Finder bingo

Tinwhisker sent us this link to a set of entertaining PUG bingo cards on the official forums, made by Cruce of Scarlet Crusade. While I'm not sure I would actually have gotten bingo on any single run, some of the squares have certainly happened in many of my runs: A pure DPS class doing triple digit DPS (especially Death Knights; sorry to all the good DKs out there). RankWatch. Almost every run. Three or more members are "the Patient." I guess it's nice to show that they have some PuG experience, but that just makes egregious failures that much more disappointing. Someone starts on a mob the tank hasn't even hit yet. More often than not. Melee DPS attacking from the front. It's really not that hard, folks. One thing I'd add to the list is people protesting that they don't take the game that seriously when you give them advice, like that they might want to put up diseases before using other strikes on their DK. You don't have to break out the spreadsheets, but there's a certain minimum effort to not be letting everyone else in your group down. What do you guys think of this bingo set? Going to print out a few sheets to keep you entertained during those long, cold dungeon runs? Are there any squares you'd add?

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PC Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Completion tracker and more from Wowhead

Wowhead has given us a few new features for holiday presents. The navigation tabs have been tweaked to showcase some of the features and pages they've been adding recently. There's also a super-cute wallpaper by Noxychu, featuring cartoon avatars of various Wowhead employees. More interesting, however, is the Completion Tracker, which works with their profiler and client to track your characters' endless quest to 100%. Areas tracked include quests, mounts, pets, and recipes. It's still in beta, but it seems to be working fairly well. It also lets you exclude categories that you may not be working on. The other feature that Wowhead added is one that I'm honestly not a fan of - the little "share" button at the bottom of blog posts. I know we have it on Wow.com as well, but I still think it would be better not to have it; people are perfectly competent to submit links to Digg or Facebook or whatever without you encouraging them to do it. That's just a personal opinion, though.

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Science

Science By Eliah Hecht

Math problem: Average winning roll

Here's a question that occurred to me while I was walking home from the subway recently: What's the average winning roll in a five-man group, assuming everyone rolls? That is, if you randomly chose five numbers between one and 100, what is the expected value of the highest one? I know a bit of statistics, but I really don't know how to begin getting at that one. However, I do know how to write a script that will calculate the answer. (Yes, these numbers are only pseudorandom, but I did some limited testing with real random numbers (from random.org) and the results were the same. Besides, I'm pretty sure Ruby's Mersenne twister pseudorandom generator is good enough for testing distributions like this.) The average winning roll out of a group of five people is 82.8 83.8 83.3 (tested over many, many repetitions). Now can any mathemagicians tell me why? The graph above, in case it isn't clear, is average winning roll on the y-axis vs number of people rolling on the x-axis, tested over 100,000 trials for each group (the relatively small sample size is why the first point is not right at 50, and probably why the curve is a little wobbly).

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

More dungeon finder tips

Like many of you, I've been spending the last few days happily hitting up the new dungeon finder over and over again. The rewards are pretty amazing for the time involved, and the whole system is usually pretty painless. I've picked up a few tips and tricks along the way, on top of what was covered in Saturday's post by Mike Schramm, and here's what I have to share. If your dungeon pops and then gives you the dreaded "additional instances cannot be launched," you can try again by simply selecting "teleport to dungeon" from the DF menu on your minimap (the eye icon). If you have a full group (of guildies, say) and want to do a particular instance, you can use the DF to queue up for just that instance, and thereby gain the ability to teleport straight there. Sure beats flying.

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Reviews

Reviews By Eliah Hecht

Addon Spotlight: RankWatch

Author Gronzig emailed us a note about this new addon of his called RankWatch, which serves a simple purpose: it alerts you if anyone is using downranked spells. I'm sure we've all seen the player who forgets to train, put on their bars, or update their macros with new ranks of important spells. Heck, I was using rank two of Binding Heal well into Naxxramas, since I had it bound directly to a key with Dominos. If anyone in your party or raid uses a rank lower than the maximum for their level, RankWatch will tell then about it in a whisper. The only exception is for Life Tap, which warlocks will often use rank one of to proc effects without taking much of a health hit. Back in the day, healers would commonly downrank heals as a mana-saving measure (if I recall correctly, Heal rank four was a staple in classic raiding), but this strategy is long-gone (since patch 3.0.2), because downranked spells now cost the same amount mana as top-rank spells (or more). Configuration options include turing off the auto-whisper and ignoring certain players, which are both vital for a potentially-annoying mod like this. Overall RankWatch looks like a useful little tool, if only so I no longer have to worry about checking up on myself. Download RankWach at Curse

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Wowhead store now open for business

A tipster named James sent us a pointer to store.wowhead.com a little while ago, and as a few people have noticed since, the Wowhead store is now open for business! Here's what they're selling: Official Wowhead merchandise (a t-shirt, a hoodie, and a mousepad, so far - does anyone still use mousepads?) WoW paraphernalia, like those steins, and some LapWorks and Steelseries hardware products. Some random gaming hardware that seems to have nothing to do with WoW, like Guitar Hero for PS2, and Xbox 360 accessories. It is at a discount, though, so that's cool. The Burning Crusade collector's edition. I guess they had some extra copies [now seems to be sold out]. One interesting feature of the store is "reward points." Every item you can buy gets you a certain number of reward points; the amount loosely correlates with price, but I couldn't determine a direct correspondence from one to the other. Basically they idea is: buy stuff, earn points, spend points on rewards. So far the rewards consist of the original WoW and the various Wowhead merchandise, and the points add up fast - as the site points out, a $30 Xbox controller nets you enough points for a copy of WoW, and almost enough for a t-shirt. For the technically inclined, I inquired about the underlying technology of the shop. The front-end work is all in-house, and so should hold true to the beautiful Wowhead aesthetic, but the e-commerce engine is the popular open-source platform Magento.

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PC Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Breakfast Topic: How many of you play on a Mac?

This was a reader suggestion, and a good one: Zvonimir wants to know how many of us WoW players use a Mac to play the game. Blizzard has steadfastly put out Mac and Windows versions of all their games ever since the original Warcraft, but this is not at all the norm in the industry. There are only a few other major MMOs I can think of that even have official Mac versions (EVE, Warhammer, City of Heroes, um...anything else?). Sure, we can always run some sort of virtualization (like Crossover Games, which supports WoW on Linux) or Boot Camp, but that's just less awesome than running something in your regular OS. Anyway, here's the question for today: what platform do you usually use to play WoW? %Poll-37057% Please no flaming in the comments. This is not a "which is better, Mac or Windows" poll. Inappropriate comments will be gladly deleted.

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Wowhead's new item page now even newer

Wowhead has been a go-to site to track what's going on on the PTR for quite some time, and now there's even more reason to go there. Their improved new items in patch 3.3 page features the following improvements: Categorization by item level, with breakdowns for the five levels of items that are coming at us (219, 232, 251, 264, and 277). You can now filter the new items and search within them. Items are also sortable. And this isn't a new feature, but it bears mentioning, at least if you're a major news geek like me: you can get an RSS feed of the new items added to the Wowhead database. If you wanted to you could probably hook this up to Twitter, or put it on your blog, or whatever. Anyway, if you want to know what items are coming at us along with Icecrown Citadel, I think there's no better place to be. What items are you most excited about?

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Robotics

Robotics By Eliah Hecht

Ask Mr. Robot

Simulators for WoW are nothing new -- Rawr, for instance, has been around for years, and is steadily snowballing into a one-stop shop for simulating all classes (it's not there yet, but I still love it). In case you're scratching your head at this point, a simulator is like a spreadsheet, but much smarter -- instead of using some general approximations to calculate how your gear is going to change your DPS, it basically goes ahead and plays a model version of the game for you. Edit: apparently Rawr is not a simulator -- it uses formulas that come up with the same answer every time, much like spreadsheets. We still love it anyway. What is new about the simulator I want to talk about today, which seems to be entitled "Mr. Robot," is that it runs on the web, in Microsoft's Silverlight framework (Silverlight seems to have come about because someone at MS saw Flash and decided they wanted one too). This means it's cross-platform and there's nothing to install (well, except Silverlight, but you may have that already). They're only doing sims for Death Knights right now, but the team says more classes are coming (I hear Warlock is next, but don't quote me).

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PC Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Patch 3.3 PTR: New totems for trolls

Now this is neat: brand-new totem artwork has been spotted on the patch 3.3 PTR for troll shamans by extremely excited tipster Zjin. Previously, all Horde shamans shared a totem design, and draenei got their own space-themed totems when they were added. The new troll ones look appropriately voodoo, I think. There are now at least three designs for the four different horde races; I wouldn't be surprised if orcs turned out to have their own as well. The current Horde totems fit tauren best of all the races. Once we here at WoW.com start making our way onto the PTRs, we'll bring you any more information we can find on possible new totems for the various races. In the mean time, I'll be in my bunk, doing designs for dwarf totems in my head. Update: yep, there are new Dwarf and Orc totems too.

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Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Patch 3.3 PTR: Craftable nature resist gear

The patch 3.3 PTR is up (as you must have noticed if you're reading the same site I'm writing on), and among other things, it contains a battery of crafted gear that confers nature resistance for users of the various armor classes. There's leg and foot wear for all armor types, in various versions where appropriate (like DPS/tanking/spell for plate). This is a pretty good sign that we're going to want/need nature resist somewhere in Icecrown Citadel. The mats list is another hint in that direction, calling as it does for Icecrown Thing of Crafting Things [PH]. It's a good thing they put "PH" there, or I might not have known the name was a placeholder. But seriously folks, get ready to craft another set of resistance gear. I'm not particularly jazzed about this myself - I mostly raid as a druid these days, and we have little enough bag space as it is - but I guess it's one way to make sure players don't consume the content too quickly (if they have to stock up on Things of Crafting Things from earlier bosses first). Still seems like a silly hoop to make us jump through.

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PC Gaming By Eliah Hecht

Razer is giving away a sweet Asus rig

In case BlizzCon today isn't enough excitement for you, Razer, maker of fine gaming hardware of many kinds, is teaming up with Asus to give away a killer gaming computer. It's custom-painted with a ghost from Starcraft (anyone excited about SC2?), and it features some serious hardware. Intel i7 at 2.66 GHz, 9 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX260 with 896 MB RAM, a 1 TB hard drive - it should run pretty much everything you want to throw at it. And it's so pretty! Of course, it comes with some Razer peripherals too. All you need to do to win is leave a comment on their Facebook thread saying what your favorite Blizzard game is, and why. This means you will need a Facebook account, and you also need to become a "fan" of Razer first from their profile page. The winner will be randomly chosen on Monday, so you have until then to get in there.

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