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WildStar begins testing Drop 4 and 20-player Datascape raid
WildStar's upcoming Drop 4 is now on the public test realm, and despite Carbine's reluctance to post patch notes, the news on the street is that this content update will be a doozy. Among the changes and additions coming to next year's Drop 4 are new costumes for all of the races, more daily and weekly quests, an underground bunker housing option, the ability to see different armor models at character creation, a character customization vendor, loads of class changes, and a low-level shiphand mission called Fragment Zero. Datascape, the former 40-player raid that is now being retooled as a 20-player instance, is also on the test server for those with 19 good friends.
Swedish police raid The Pirate Bay and knock the site offline
Despite The Pirate Bay's efforts to escape an increasingly hostile environment in Sweden, the torrent site has been taken offline today. TorrentFreak and Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter report this is the result of a police raid as confirmed by Fredrick Ingblad, a special prosecutor for file sharing cases. The Rights Alliance is a local group backed by the music and film industries, and it took credit for the shutdown, claiming its criminal complaint lead to the action and called Pirate Bay an illegal commercial service. Only time will tell if this shutdown sticks, but TorrentFreak says it is affecting the site's forum Suprbay, as well as Bayimg.com and Pastebay.net. [Image credit: shutterstock]
World of Warcraft opens the doors of Highmaul
The raid cycle of World of Warcraft's endgame begins anew today with the advent of Highmaul. While this raid did not go live with Warlords of Draenor's release, Blizzard is now opening the doors a crack to let in players for their first taste of epic combat. Highmaul is a seven-boss raid, although only two of those bosses are mandatory for players to down (but c'mon, only cowards tiptoe by the big baddies). Even though the raid is open for business today, it will feature only normal and heroic difficulties and will not be listed on the raid finder. In the coming weeks, mythic difficulty and raid finder functionality will be added to the instance.
CalDigit T4 RAID: Big, fast storage in a compact enclosure
Speed and storage capacity are the qualities that creative professionals look for in a RAID array, and they're willing to pay a lot for the ability to store huge amounts of video or photographs on a fast and redundant unit. CalDigit is now shipping a very affordable 4-bay storage solution called the T4 RAID that comes in a variety of capacities: 4 TB (US$899), 8 TB ($1,199), 12 TB ($1,399), 16 TB ($1,699), 20 TB ($1,999) or 4 TB SSD ($3,299). I had a chance to put a T4 through our standard benchmarks and found it to be a speedy, quiet and sturdy high-capacity RAID array. Specifications Weight: 7.2 lb. (3.3 Kg) with 4 SSD installed, 12.5 lb. (5.65 Kg) with 4 HDD installed Dimensions: 5.8 x 5.3 x 9.5 inches (148 x 135 x 242 mm) Interface: Two Thunderbolt 2 ports with transfer rates up to 20 GB/s RAID: Supports RAID 0,1,5 and JBOD, auto disk failure detection, hot swappable disks Design The T4 is surprisingly small for a 4-disk RAID array. The entire case is machined out of aluminum, with an appearance similar to that of the T3 3-drive array that I reviewed earlier this year. As with the T3, the drives (either SSDs or HDDs) come in proprietary drive modules. Those drive modules come in a variety of sizes: hard disk drives in capacities of 1 TB ($129), 2 TB ($179), 3 TB ($229), 4 TB ($299), 5 TB ($399), and a 1 TB SSD ($799). These drive modules are also compatible with the CalDigit T3 and the AVPro. There are some tiny keys that are included to lock the drive modules into place for extra security, and there's a Kensington lock slot on the back of the case. Both are nice physical security features that aren't commonly found on other RAID arrays. The small size comes at the cost of a good-sized external power supply; usually, that's going to sit under your desk with all of the other power supplies. Although the T4 has a built-in fan to keep those drives cool, it's surprisingly quiet. During testing the drive was about two feet away from me at ear level and all I could hear was a faint white noise. This was an 12 TB HDD configuration that was tested, and there was absolutely no drive noise that I could discern. With a quiet drive like this, you'll want to have some indication that it's actually working and a set of tiny blue LEDs on the front of the array perform that task without being too bright or distracting. CalDigit includes a monitoring app that's also useful for setting up your array. That app includes some useful tools for benchmarking video throughput to the drive. Functionality/Benchmarks Like the T3, the CalDigit T4 is easy to set up. You simply plug a Thunderbolt cable into your Mac and into one of the two Thunderbolt 2 ports on the back of the T4. Plug in the AC adapter, then plug the cable from the power supply into the T4. Turn on the T4 with the front-mounted power button and it spins right up. The array can be set up as RAID 0 (stripe set), RAID 1 (mirror set), RAID 5 (block-level striping with distributed parity) or in a JBOD ("just a bunch of disk") array with no RAID functionality. Our benchmarking was done with the array set up in RAID 0 with a total volume size of 10.914 TB (four 3 TB drives installed). For the purposes of testing external drives and RAID arrays, we traditionally use the Intech SpeedTools QuickBench 4.0.6 app to run multiple cycles of read/write tests. The T4 was directly connected to a MacBook Pro with Retina display using an Apple Thunderbolt cable. This MacBook Pro was equipped with Thunderbolt 2 ports. To ensure accuracy in testing, I performed a 100-cycle complete test. This subjects the drive to sequential and random read and write tests with file sizes from 4K to 100 MB, then graphically or textually displays that information to show the "sweet spots" for a specific drive or array. For example, if your work involves shuffling around a lot of very large files, you'll probably want a drive that has peak read/write speeds for files around your average file size. Here are the test results for a RAID 0 stripe set, compared with the T3 using a Thunderbolt connection: Sequential Read: 324.063 MB/Sec (313.917 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Sequential Write: 303.615 MB/Sec (279.731 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Random Read: 92.613 MB/Sec (69.402 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Random Write: 74.876 MB/Sec (62.263 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Large Read: 906.819 MB/Sec (538.599 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Large Write: 1045.913 MB/Sec (763.516 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Extended Read: 739.724 MB/Sec (552.096 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Extended Write: 671.629 MB/Sec (553.392 MB/Sec for CalDigit T3 connected via Thunderbolt) Now the CalDigit T3 was our previous speed demon for RAID arrays tested by TUAW, and the T4 blows right past it. The first four results - done with extremely small files - show an improvement over the T3 of up to about 33 percent in the case of random file reads. But it's with the large (2 - 10 MB) and extended (20 - 100 MB) file sizes that we really see the T4 take off. The large read test was 68 percent faster than the T3, large writes were 36 percent faster. The average large write test result was 1045.913 MB/sec, the first time we've seen a RAID array result in this range. Extended file reads and writes were also improved over the T3, with a 34 percent improvement in read speeds and 21 percent faster writes. What does this mean? Well, the T4 is perfect in those situations where you're going to be reading and writing large files a lot; not so much with those smaller files. For professionals who do a lot of video or photographic work, connecting the CalDigit T4 up to a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 2 makes a lot of sense and can speed up almost any workflow. CalDigit is targeting the T4 for those who are working on 4K video production, and I can see where it would be perfect for those large files and big data streams. Conclusion CalDigit has outdone itself with the T4 RAID, creating a fast RAID array at a price point that isn't out of the realm of any creative professional who needs big storage. The addition of Thunderbolt 2 to the new array improves throughput for those who have Macs with the new interface built in. I was impressed by the CalDigit T3 earlier this year, but the T4 surpasses its smaller sibling in every way. Rating: 4 stars out of 4 stars possible
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 3
In parts one and two of this Soapbox miniseries, I tackled four of the reasons the MMO genre should abandon raiding as a central gameplay element, but one key argument has been left out until now: The social aspect of raiding. Whatever else is true of raiding, it is definitely social. Communities spring up and keep going largely based on that raiding community, to the point that it's easy to assume that everyone in a game's population raids. There are lengthy discussions about raiding, about how to raid, about tips and tricks for clearing raids. The social aspect of raids is what I think has kept them around so long; it's easy for a designer to look at that sort of engagement and see it as vital. Yet there's more to the story than might be available at a glance, and the social aspect is not without steep costs. Those social elements do not carry the weight of everything else... mostly because they aren't as strong as they appear.
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 2
In yesterday's Soapbox, I had some things to say about why it's time to dump raiding. I'm writing this before I've seen the comment responses, but I'm willing to bet that a fair amount of angry shouting was involved in the comments because that's what I usually expect. But I wasn't done, as suggested by the whole "part 1" thing in the title header. For those don't feel like reading the whole thing, the short version is that raiding is too expensive to develop for too small a portion of the players. This is a solid argument, but it's standard: You hear it every time this debate comes up. In some ways, it's the foundation of the argument against raiding beyond the reality that most people say they just don't like raiding. There's more to be said, though, and there are more serious issues up for discussion. Raiding isn't just expensive in terms of development. It's expensive in lots of ways.
Here are the tier 17 armor sets non-PUG WoW raiders can loot in Highmaul
With the first raid of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor right around the corner, Blizzard has released a preview of the Tier 17 armor sets in all their glory. There are three variants of each set: the Mythic version (which has a unique skin compared to the others), the Heroic version, and the Normal version. Raid Finder raids no longer drop tier sets, thus reducing the overall number of available sets by one from the end of Mists of Pandaria. Player opinion seems to be somewhat split on whether or not the sets are good matches for the aesthetic of the expansion and the individual classes, as well as the split between the Mythic versions and the other versions of each set. The raid that drops these pieces, Highmaul, will be available starting on December 2nd for Normal and Heroic, with Mythic launching a week later on December 9th.
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 1
Raiding is no longer doing MMOs any favors. I've compared raiding to open PvP in the past, and the comparison still holds up. It's something that a lot of games developed in response to a specific genre-defining game have featured. But it's not doing those games any favors, and it might be time to take a hard look at this gameplay element that games survive in spite of rather than because of. If we learn nothing else from WildStar's issues when it launched into what should have been an ideal environment, it's that raiding certainly isn't driving players into a game's waiting arms. But I don't want to just say that and let it roll around on the floor. Let's actually break the argument down across a couple of articles this week. Why does raiding need to shuffle off of the main stage, definitely as the default endgame model, perhaps altogether? I can give you six good reasons.
WoW Archivist: Epics
WoW Archivist is a biweekly column by WoW Insider's Scott Andrews, who explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? It first appeared on our sister site on November 21st and is included here by permission. Leveling through Draenor has been a blast, but as I am a player from classic WoW, a few things have struck me as incredibly strange. Triple-digit numbers in the guild panel. Sending NPCs to do quests on my behalf. And most of all, getting epic armor and weapons from solo leveling quests. Many players in classic WoW (and not just raiders) opposed making epics more available to players. They called Blizzard's evolving attitude a slippery slope. "What's next," they argued, "epics for doing solo quests?" They never actually imagined that would happen. In 2005 it would have been unthinkable. Eight years later, here we are. But it's all been by design -- an evolving design with many steps along the way. Let's look at how we got here, one random drop at a time.
WoW previews Highmaul raid, kicks off anniversary events today
Are you ready to start in on the raid cycle of Warlords of Draenor? Yes you are; that's what you do here. You can start by checking out the latest World of Warcraft development blog that shows off Highmaul in all its glory. The raid's release will be staggered into four parts, with Normal and Heroic releasing on December 2nd, Mythic and the first part of the Raid Finder difficulty releasing on December 9th, and the final two wings being added to the Raid Finder on December 16th and January 6th. Highmaul contains seven bosses, three of which are optional and two of which are mandatory. Players will take on Kargath Bladefist to kick off the raid experience, while the ultimate encounter leads players against Imperator Mar'gok, the pinnacle of ogre power in the region. You can also take the time to play around with the game's new Twitter hashtag campaign while you wait. That won't help you with the raid at all, really, but it will help pass the time. In other WoW news, Blizzard will be kicking off its previously announced anniversary events today. Both the 40-man, level 100 version of Molten Core and the Southshore vs. Tarren Mill battleground will become available to players through the raid finder and battlemaster queue, respectively. Everyone who logs in will receive a molten corgi pet as a happy birthday present from the team. The events end January 6th.
The Nexus Telegraph: Is WildStar's raid size change too late?
Very few people are going to contest that scaling WildStar's biggest raid down to 20 people is a good move. Some will, yes, but when 400 players are working on content five months after release, that's a good sign that it's not doing the most basic job of getting people to play it. Bringing Datascape's size down is an indisputable good thing. The question, of course, isn't about that. It's about whether it's too small a change too late in the game. Make no mistake, this is a change that is significant enough to merit an announcement, but it's one that just missed the big patch we finally received not too long ago. (My initial reaction to that is middling, for the record, neither bad nor really a break from form or something that justifies its long delay.) I would be surprised if we see this change actually live in the game before next year. And it's a change of more conceptual significance than anything else because unless someone very quietly managed to clear Datascape without telling anyone, the end of that raid has gone unseen.
WildStar is scaling Datascape down to 20 players
WildStar brought 40-player raids back to the forefront. The game is now pushing said raid size back away from the forefront, as the game's 40-person raid pinnacle is getting scaled down to 20 players. The official post on the subject notes that the number of people entering was far too low and the attrition rate far too high, so the raid is being rebalanced (but not nerfed) to account for having only half of its originally designed population inside. Several reasons are cited for the changed, such as the game's combat working best with a smaller number of people, the lowered demands on computers, and a consistent raid size for future raid content which will hopefully make guild management easier. While the topic stops shy of saying that the 40-player versions are never coming back, that is certainly the implication. So it'll at least be marginally easier to form a group for Datascape soon if you're able to get through the first raid successfully.
The Daily Grind: Should MMOs have a 'raid stat'?
Last week, WildStar dev J-Tal outright apologized for the game's poor solo progression, stating that Carbine is "well aware that solo progression in WildStar is pretty much non-existent" and is working on the problem. But as I was researching that quote, what caught my eye is the post right after J-Tal's mea culpa, a benign little question by a player named Nike Online: If progression is driven by need, why is there not a budget-hungry 'raid stat' that only provides benefit inside raid instances and keeps those drops more sedate when taken out into the open world? [...] PvP gear has its own stats to protect its environement from outside gear coming in and dominating. PvP power/defense also drain budget from those items so that it's not the optimal open-world gear. Lots of games have tried PvP stats (for example, World of Warcraft's now-defunct spell penetration and resillience), but I've never seen the equivalent for raid gear. It's definitely a band-aid on a game with innate design and balance issues, but it does seem to solve the problem of overgeared raiders trampling the open world. What do you think: Should MMOs have a "raid stat"? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Destiny's next patch to address Vault of Glass' buggy boss
If you've been running and re-running Destiny's Vault of Glass raid in hopes of obtaining exotic gear, you may have already learned about various tricks and exploits people are using to speed up their adventures. One of the most popular involves knocking the raid's final boss, Atheon, off a ledge, letting gravity do the dirty work of killing him. It's quick, efficient and relatively easy, but not exactly what Bungie had in mind for an epic final showdown. To that end, they're patching the Atheon battle so that he can't be knocked off, while simultaneously changing how he targets players. Currently, Atheon will send the three players furthest from him through space and time to an alternate battlefield, where they'll stay until their teammates open a portal for them so they can return. Once the fix goes live, he'll target three players at random. Enjoy knocking a titan of terror off into the dark depths of the Vault of Glass while you can, Guardians; Atheon's fixes go live next week. [Image: Activision]
The Daily Grind: Would you play an all-endgame MMO?
I'm hard on MMOs with endgames, especially endgames that focus on a single repetitive activity. The problem isn't so much what that activity is but that MMOs spend so much time making you do something else before you can get to that activity -- instead of just letting you just do that presumably ideal and fun activity from the start. That's prompted some clever players to wonder, why not just make an all-endgame -- an all-raiding -- MMO? To be clear, I'm not talking about sandboxes or persistent PvP games that can be perceived as entirely endgame. I'm talking about a classic themepark experience with the levels and questing ripped out -- just endgame dungeons and raids, pure PvE group challenge, from the moment you log in to the moment you log out. If raiding really is about the challenge and the thrill of big group PvE, such a game would be welcomed by hardcore raiders... right? And more importantly: Would you play it? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
World of Warcraft gives players a 100% chance to get heirlooms for Warlords of Draenor
The World of Warcraft faithful are busy devouring the recent Patch 6.0.2 in anticipation for the much larger expansion pack that's coming next month. To help players prepare for Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard is currently running a Smash 'n Grab event that will award players prized heirlooms. By running any difficulty level of Siege of Orgrimmar, players will get a 100% chance to obtain their first Garrosh weapon if they haven't already for that difficulty. The caveat is that players will have to run this without the assistance of the raid finder. The Smash 'n Grab event is currently running and will end on November 13th.
Carbine's Donatelli and Moore on WildStar's population and philosophy
Two weeks ago, Carbine Studios offered us the opportunity to interview product director Mike Donatelli and creative director Chad Moore regarding the state of WildStar and what future updates would bring to the game. We have their thorough answers in their entirety for you today; Carbine assures us that there was no animosity or conspiracy in the delay, and we thank the studio for that. So let's get to it: Read on as the duo discuss WildStar's current population, business model, development strategy, and plans for the near future.
Destiny knows you want a looking-for-raid tool
In Destiny's latest letter to the playerbase, Bungie Community Manager Deej says that a looking-for-raid tool might be on the table. "You've been heard," he tells a player asking for raid matchmaking. "We're having conversations about how Matchmaking might support the more challenging activities in Destiny." He suggests that PUGs for dungeons thought mostly un-PUGgable are already happening. You don't need to sell us too hard on the value of Matchmaking at Bungie. It's something we helped to pioneer. Yet, we understand its limitations. In the recipe of a Bungie game, Matchmaking has always contributed the ingredient of a team built to play one match of competitive multiplayer. As you've probably witnessed in recent weeks (or years), many of those fresh allies have failed to go the distance together. The Raid was designed for solid teams of killers who have made a commitment to solve a dense and explosive riddle. Most of the raiding parties who have emerged victorious from the Vault of Glass have sworn that one weak link would have doomed their chain. There have been other stories, of course. We've heard tell of Guardians who met each other just outside the door that leads into that vault. Strange tales have reached our ears - tales of total strangers who have banded together to see the Raid all the way through to a triumphant finale. After announcing that he wouldn't be fielding queries about rumors, Deej also addressed the companion app, factions, feedback, and class balance. "The next batch of enhancements, refinements, fixes, and tweaks," he says, will be released "very soon."
Age of Conan's Update 4.4 ushers in new raids, new tier sets
As summer fades into memory, Age of Conan players turn their gaze toward the Halloween event and the next major patch of the game. The latest game director's letter is about exactly those topics, as well, so that works out nicely. While update 4.4 will bring with it new Unchained raids, there are other improvements coming along as well, not the least of which are visual improvements to the Tier 5 sets that will be released along with the raids. The update also brings with it the PvP streak system and new area looting functionality; pressing Shift and V will automatically loot all eligible corpses in the immediate area. Players can also look forward to the upcoming gem system and Thirst of the Serpent God event at the end of the month. Check out the full letter for more details about what's coming next for the game over the next 31 days.
WildStar adopts quarterly update cadence: 'No more drops before their time'
WildStar Product Director Mike Donatelli has penned a new state of the game post to address concerns about the themepark in the wake of Jeremy Gaffney's resignation as Carbine President and the announcement of server merges in the form of megaservers. Donatelli says that WildStar will now function under a quarterly cadence for major updates. In August, he told players that the team was adopting a "when it's done" approach to drops instead of its originally planned monthly cadence. "If it's not ready, we'll hold it until it is," he reiterates today, citing quality as his motivator. "This doesn't mean we won't have other activities available to experience on a more regular basis; we're just taking the necessary time to get the major drops right." The next drop, scheduled for November, will include both solo and world story content. He also promises improved elder game itemization, disincentives for toxic PvP behavior, attunement adjustments, and a new training dungeon to prepare players for WildStar's controversial raid content. "I want to stress that we're not nerfing raids," he writes. "We're just giving you the tools to succeed when tackling them."
