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Breakfast Topic: Your alt woes
While some prefer focusing on one character at a time, others thrive on the variety of alts, which can make for a nice change of pace to grinding away for experience or gear on a main character. But some players have raised the playing of an alt to something of an art: altaholics who play for both the alliance and the horde and have characters of all races across all level ranges. But even if you love them, alts are not without their problems. My biggest hurdle is my strange inability to remember which character I've logged on to, and automatically using the hotkeys for my monk when I'm playing my hunter. (I try to arrange my hotkeys so they're not foreign to me whatever I'm playing, but I always stumble nevertheless.) But what about you, readers? Do you have any alt problems you're always running into? Or, better yet, alt solutions? Share!
Breakfast Topic: What do you do while you play?
A lot of us here at WoW Insider have been playing WoW for a long time -- and we suspect most of you have, too. A long enough time that parts of the game are, dare we say, boring. So while doing our dailies (again) or grinding an alt through a zone we've done half a dozen times before we admit, we're usually multitasking. Sometimes we'll have a movie or television show on, and others we might be reading email or catching up on RSS feeds in another window. It's not that we don't still love the game -- it's just how we stay sane while leveling our dozenth alt. So, fellow WoW players, we pose this question: what else are you doing while you play WoW? Do you have a favorite television show to put on? A much-loved playlist? Twitter or Facebook in another window?
Alt-week 4.20.13: NASA's Space Shop, nature's needles and 30 years of cellphone bills
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. The natural world offers up some ingenious biology that is only possible through many, many years of evolution. Other ideas, well, they come about through good old-fashioned brain power. We've got examples of both in this edition. Naturally. This is alt-week.
Alt-week 4.13.13: micro-LED mind control, clear brains and clairvoyant ants
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. Brains are complex things. Man's quest to understand this lump of gray mass has become something of an obsession. In this edition, we learn about two new studies that could help oil the wheels of this cerebral journey. That, and some clever ants. This is alt-week.
Breakfast Topic: How do you level?
Leveling in World of Warcraft is a rite of passage that we all must go through in order to reach max level where we can play with our friends. Though for alt-a-holics -- and I'm starting to think I may be one of them -- leveling is the whole point of the game. But whether you're leveling for the first time or the hundredth, whether you're speeding through or taking time to enjoy the scenery, chances are you have your own way of going about things. So when you're on the leveling treadmill, what's your choice? For my part, I tend to quest through zones -- especially if they're zones I haven't been through before. But if I'm stuck in zones that I've been through before, perhaps many times before, things get awfully tedious, thus ending my life potential alt-a-holism. But do you quest, dungeon, subsist on dailies and rested XP, or something else entirely? Let us know, so we may commiserate about the leveling treadmill together!
Ask Massively: Whitebackgroundgate, image captions, and sockpuppets
OK, AndyMonahan. You win. You broke me. This Ask Massively is for you. AndyMonahan asked (approximately eight million times): It doesn't matter what games you cover as I can't spend more than five minutes on the site before my eyes bleed. Any news on a choice of background colour? Do you really think you're going to like the only answer you know I can give?!
Alt-week 3.9.13: Sunstones, knotted vortices and a zero-g robot
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Technology is all relative. We imagine there was a time when even the wheel was the latest must-have gadget. This week we straddle the past and the future of exploration technology to illustrate this point wonderfully. Two very different objects, both a marvel of their time. There are also two hat tips to the every impressive power of mother nature, too. Where else but alt-week? Exactly.
Alt-week 3.2.13: A mission to Mars, robosparrow and facial recognition in fertility treatment
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Life -- as they say -- is short. So, you gotta cram in as much as you can while you're here. Right? How about a once in a lifetime trip around Mars? Well, if that's on your bucket list, then you might just be in luck. There's other news pertaining to one of life's biggest events over the fold, too, but we'll leave you to figure out which story that is. Hint: it's not the robotic bird. This is alt-week.
Alt-week 2.24.13: Mapping the brain, discovering dark matter and our inevitable, grizzly end
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. The discovery of what is hoped to be the Higgs boson was an exciting time for anyone with a curious mind. It turns out, that the price of knowledge is often a heavy one. Without putting too much of a negative spin on it... that teeny-weeny boson could predict bad news. On a lighter -- or is that darker -- note, other areas of science and technology bravely march ever-onward with the goal of a better understanding of life, the universe, and tattoos. This is alt-week.
The Daily Grind: Should alts get special bonuses?
I'm a big fan of the notion that when you hit the level cap in a game, the MMO should encourage you to roll alts by giving you bonus incentives. One of my favorite browser titles, Kingdom of Loathing, has a nifty ascension mechanic that bestows significant bonuses on subsequent characters if you decide to reroll. Since alts theoretically extend one's interest and time in a game, I think it's in the studio's best interest to make rolling them an attractive proposition. There are many ways that alts could receive special bonuses, such as faster leveling speeds, unique gear, legacy skills, and so on. The question is, should alts get these bonuses, and if so, what do you think they should be? 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!
Alt-week 2.16.13: robo-rats, a young black hole and a computer that cannot crash
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Seven days, 26,000 lightyears, 637 languages, two groups of terrorised rats and one computer that never, ever crashes. We're light on intro, heavy of the numbers. You know the drill by now, this is Alt-week.
Alt-week 2.9.13: Seismic invisibility, bacterial gold and really, really big prime numbers
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. The lure of gold, the unpredictable weather and the power of invisibility. What do these three things have in common? We'd argue their almost universal appeal to the human race. Science makes headway in all three of these areas in this edition. On top of that there's a really, incredibly, massive prime number. This is alt-week.
Alt-week 2.2.13: SpaceLiners, building a brain and the man made multiverse
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. What's black and white, and read all over? This week's dose of sci-tech news, silly. What is less black and white, however, IS where reality ends, and the stuff of science fiction begins. Europe to Australia in 90 minutes? Automatically-melting military technology? A material that hosts multiple universes? It's all here, it's all alt-week.
Royal Institution considers selling its historic London home
In the last few weeks, we've covered more than our fair share of real estate news. Of course, as money gets tight, selling your inner-city headquarters helps to keep the lights on, but it's not just tech companies who are feeling the pinch. The Royal Institution has announced it's considering selling its London headquarters, the place where 10 chemical elements were discovered and Michael Faraday first demonstrated electricity, in order to raise £60 million ($95 million) in cash. Maybe it's time someone gave Matthew Inman another call.
Alt-week 1.19.13: cloudy lasers, GPS drugs and proving George Lucas wrong
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories. It's 2013 and yet somehow we haven't ascended into a creature made of pure energy, so we'd better put some clothes on and get back to work. We've got lasers that are made from gas, a team of student physicists that are determined to prove George Lucas wrong, the world's oldest underground railway celebrating its sesquicentennial and we'll learn how the NYPD wants to track drug addicts with GPS. If that doesn't sound like the Alt-weekiest Alt-week you ever did see, then we can't be friends.
The Soapbox: The heartbreak of altitis
In the MMO culture, there are those who alt and those who don't. Sometimes there's a hilarious rift between the two factions, as one side can't understand why you wouldn't want to try out all of the game's classes and the other side can't understand why you wouldn't specialize and excel in a single character. I'm one of those who alt, which is a blessing as much as it is a curse. I blame City of Heroes for starting me out on the path to altoholism. C'mon, it was simply impossible to play that game and not be rolling a new superhero concept every other day. By the time I moved on to more "traditional" titles, I was hooked on the idea of alts. It's a curse as much as it is a blessing. I'll be the first to advocate that alting can give you a wider perspective in a game, offer you more play flexibility, and perhaps keep you in a title far longer than if you played a single character until you burned out. But there's a darker side to it, a path to heartbreak. For those of us who alt, this is the unspoken danger that lurks in every reroll.
Alt-week 12.22.12: strange skulls, solar portraits and 17-minute code cracking
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. Despite all the bad press, the 14th baktun is actually turning out pretty good so far. Okay, we're barely a day into it, but it's a promising start. To celebrate we've got a stunning postcard from the sun at the exact moment of solstice, some curious Mexican skulls and an amateur codebreaker who thinks he beat British intelligence agencies at their own game. This is definitely alt-week.
Alt-week 12.08.12: The oldest known dinosaur, lighting up a space station and the black marble
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. While some refer to it as a lonely planet, we prefer to think of it as unique. Where else can you find such diverse biology that dates back millions of years, that also has a space station hovering delicately above it. A planet where several millennia of human evolution gave birth to the comedy animated gif? Precisely. One of a kind. This is alt-week.
Alt-week 12.01.12: Bigfoot DNA, bombs on the moon and shapeshifting robots
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. Science. We like to think of it as a force for good. But, in the wrong hands, this isn't always the case. Something we're reminded of all too well this week. As a counter to that negative vibe, we are also reminded that for every Yin, there is a Yang, and this comes in the form of some developments in med-science that could mean new technology options for the blind. Then there's the Bigfoot DNA and shape-shifting robots, of course. This is alt-week.
Alt-week 11.10.12: the contagious smell of fear, finding Bigfoot, and the theory of everything
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. There are some questions that have puzzled the human race more or less since the dawn of time. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? You know the sort of thing. While we might not have the answers to these just yet, thanks to science, we're getting there. In this week's instalment we discover that you can, in fact, smell fear. Meanwhile, one scientist pledges to launch an ambitious hunt for Bigfoot, and we get an early hint at what could be the start of an explanation for life, the universe and everything. This is alt-week.
