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Ghostcrawler on why Bluetrackers suck
Ghostcrawler has finally said on the forums what I've been saying for a while here on WoW.com and elsewhere: using blue text on the forums as a way of disseminating information is "a strange way to communicate." He's been appending the words "[Not tracked]" to some of his posts so they don't end up on the official "bluetracker," because a lot of what he posts is just silly and fun and not to be pored over and examined (especially without the context of the other posts around it). But all of those posts are still picked up by the unofficial bluetrackers that many players follow, and he laments that it's annoying to have people jump in on threads without reading all the context: "you end up looking like a real jerk half the time."I would never call GC a jerk, but it's clear to see what he means -- sending out information via official posts on the forum is something Blizzard has done for a long time, and it's really a bad way to go about it. To their credit, they've been trying lots of new things lately, from official interviews to class Q&As and just plain releasing official information on the site. But I've always thought (and still think) that the company could use an official blog -- back when I was playing Dark Age of Camelot, I really enjoyed all of their work on the Camelot Herald, and I think Blizzard would benefit from something more like that. They do have a section for official news on the front page, but that's mostly licensed items and marketing information, not actual updates to the game.
Brad McQuaid returns to pimp Vanguard
Remember Brad McQuaid? As one of EverQuest's original creators and eventually the man behind Vanguard, Brad is a legend in the gaming industry. Sure, his reputation spiraled downward after his time with Sigil and Vanguard, but he has now come out of hiding to tell us all that we should play Vanguard!Wait, what? Is he now working for SOE again? Well, no one knows if that's the case or not, but the fact is, Brad seems quite keen on getting back into the industry. After taking a few years off to "ride street bikes and dirt bikes, as well as drive sports cars, as often as possible", Brad wants to start creating games again. So if you're a fan of Brad's work with EverQuest, Vanguard (or even WarWizard), head on over to his newly-revamped blog and show him some support. [EDIT: Some are speculating that this is an impostor. You be the judge.][Via Common Sense Gamer]
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.
Nourish, a WoW recipe blog
Blogger and WoW.com friend Pixelated Executioner has introduced a brand new blog project -- he's working with a few other folks in the community on a new blog called Nourish, dedicated to providing some fun and relatively easy WoW-related recipes for real food. It all originally started over on Twitter, where a few of them decided to come up with some WoW-themed dish names, but eventually it escalated into the idea of an actual set of recipes, with the added bonus of getting some WoW players some real homemade food to eat as well (you can only go so far on Doritos and Mountain Dew, after all).There's only two recipes so far (both submitted by another friend of ours, Cadistra of WoW, Eh?), but that spice bread does look pretty tasty. If you're a foodie or just have been looking for a way to use something other than the microwave in your kitchen, it seems like a great place to start. And if you need more than the few they've got up so far, don't forget our old Well Fed Buff column -- it's retired now, but we've still got plenty of great WoW-related recipes to try making there as well.
The curious case of Ferarro
We, along with many of you, have been monitoring the curious case surrounding one of the most prominent Paladin bloggers, Ferarro. We originally did a 15 Minutes of Fame with Ferarro on May 26th. The article was about her life as a blogger, a paladin, and a game tester for Blizzard.After the article was written, a few things happened.First, Jagoex posted a story on Ferarro's use of pictures from the website TechDarling. Ferarro was claiming she was the person pictured, when in fact she wasn't. Sarah Townsend, the author of TechDarling, has stated she doesn't know who Ferarro is.Secondly, Ferraro's blog, Paladin Schmaladin, suddenly switched over to privacy mode blocking anyone from reading it who didn't have an invitation directly from Ferraro. Her Twitter account had the message "Stalkers are cool," and was then locked until it was deleted completely a day later. Her WoW character disappeared via a likely server transfer, and her contributions at RetPaladin.com were removed completely. Update: After this article was posted, Ferarro has once again made her blog, and thus her statement, private. However you can view a google cache of the page.This began raising many eyebrows and brought on a lot of speculation. All of which ended today when she posted claiming herself as multiple persons, which after investigation is now brought into question as well.
Are MMOs truly as persistent as they claim?
The two biggest differences between single player RPGs and massively multiplayer online RPGs are the MMO and persistent components found in the latter. Player vs. Developer has a thought-provoking blog post up claiming that MMOs are not as persistent as they claim to be."Persistent" can be defined as "continuing without change in function or structure," which when you really think about it doesn't quite fit with how it is employed in most MMORPGs. Many MMOs claim to have a "persistent struggle," or "persistent world," which is only half true. Developers are constantly changing their MMOs and it impacts how we play.What happens at the end of an expansion cycle? Often, players stop trying to progress and wait for the new content that makes old content obsolete. What happens when classes undergo constant balance shifts? Players are forced to compete on uneven playing fields. What happens when some gamers benefit from bugs or exploits before they are fixed? It can hurt player morale.Many of these changes are for the best, but it does illustrate that MMOs are not truly as persistent as they claim.
Choose My Adventure: The birth of Turpen, Gnome Warlock
WoW.com readers, it's up to you to decide the fate of Turpen the Gnome Warlock with Choose My Adventure. Help test the site's new features by participating in this event, casting your vote toward the many aspects of Turpen and following his exploits on Alex Ziebart's WoW.com profile!The polls are closed and the votes have been tallied. The audience has decided that for this little experiment, I am going to play a Gnome Warlock while I track my misadventures on my profile. As mentioned in the original post, most of the decisions regarding this character's growth will be made by you, our readers. I'll give weekly updates on my progress via the blog here, but so much more will be happening over on my profile. I've already started a photo album which will contain screenshots of my little 'lock as he goes from level 1 to level 80.I've already rolled the character and I've named him Turpen, in homage to a certain Englishman on the WoW.com team. I've decided to play a male, because... well, I usually play female characters as you can see on my character list. Let's be different this time around! However, dear readers, there is still more for you to decide. There are three polls behind the cut below. Professions and my talent tree.
Studying WoWcology, where psychology and WoW meet
I've been meaning to write about this WoWcology blog for a few days now, but there's just so much there -- reader Skeuk is guilded up with a PhD in Psychology, who's writing not only about the guild's day to day battles, but also about how the deeper tenets of psychology can be seen in our Azerothian gameplay. This post about group dynamics is extremely interesting -- if you've ever suffered through some bad PuGs in your time, you can see the different stages of group development, and you can probably even figure out where your PuG fizzled out in the "storming" stage or made it all the way through to the "performing" part of the cycle. Fascinating stuff, for sure.Unfortunately, posts aren't coming too often, and it seems like Dr. Amalea -- who for some reason refers to himself in the third person at times -- understandably has other things to do besides keeping a blog about World of Warcraft and psychology. But maybe if we send them a little traffic, we can convince him to keep it up regularly, as what's there now makes for some really interesting reading. It's really interesting that a lot of the stuff we're dealing with the game now -- forming PuGs, guild drama, even loot distribution, has all been studied by psychologists for years and years before World of Warcraft ever existed.
Blizzard's success with equalizing content
Kinless Chronicles talks about something I think Blizzard has done exceptionally well with the latest expansion: "equalized content." Their story is about taking control of a Blightblood to finish off Drakuru, but there are countless examples of this in Northrend, from the last fight of Drak'theron to the encounter in Eye of Eternity with Malygos. World of Warcraft (and MMOs in general) has always been about levels and gear -- get better gear or level up, and you can cast more spells, swing an axe harder, and move on to more epic encounters. But Blizzard's "equalizing content" means that gear isn't always an issue -- by putting you in control of something else, whether that be a mind-controlled Troll or a siege vehicle, you can have extremely epic encounters without worrying about whether you're powerful enough for them or not. The limiter becomes not gear but skill (and/or the knowledge of how to use those skills).Obviously they can't do nothing but equalized content, otherwise we're all just playing the same game (and, under pressure from players, they've even moved on to a mix of both, where gear does affect how you play in a vehicle). But Blizzard has really hit on something brilliant with what we're calling "equalized content" here, and used in a balanced way, it can allow players of all kinds of different skill levels to do even more epic things than they'd normally be able to do.
WoW Insider Show live today at 3:30pm Eastern
Oh yes, the official podcast of WoW Insider is back on the air today at 3:30pm Eastern (which is April 4, 2009 3:30 PM EDT var date_span = document.getElementById("date"); var date = new Date(date_span.innerHTML); var monthname=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug", "Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"); var weekday=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday", "Friday","Saturday"); var year = date.getFullYear(); var day_of_month = date.getDate(); var month = monthname[date.getMonth()]; var day = weekday[date.getDay()]; var hour = date.getHours(); if (hour > 11) { if (hour > 12) {hour -= 12} am_pm = "PM"; } else { am_pm = "AM"; } var minute = date.getMinutes(); if (minute < 10) { minute = "0"+minute; } date_string = day + ", " + month + " " + day_of_month; date_string += " at " + hour + ":" + minute + " " + am_pm; offset = -date.getTimezoneOffset()/60; if (offset >= 0) { offset = "+"+offset; } date_string += " in your time zone (GMT"+offset+")"; date_span.innerHTML = (date_string); -- like what we did there?), and it's going to be a blast. Not only will Turpster be on with us, and I believe Michael "Belfaire" Sacco should also be in attendance, but we're welcoming one of the newest writers on WoW Insider, Mr. Nick Whelan. Nick originally wrote about Warlocks at his blog, Curse of Senility (and still does), but we've recently recruited him to start writing our Blood Pact column, and so today on the show we'll be talking Warlocks: where they are now, where they'll be in 3.1, and where they want to be in general. And we'll also talk about all the most popular posts for the past week, including the April Fools news, the latest on the next big content patch, and where 25-man gear should sit in relation to the 10-man loot.And of course we'll answer your emails, which you can still send to us at theshow@wow.com. Should be fun. Tune in over on the Ustream page (or just in the second half of this post -- you'll find an embed there) at the time listed above this afternoon, and sit back and let the soothing sounds of WoW Insider raid your ears like so many groups through Naxx. The only epic loot we drop... is knowledge.
BRK taking a break from World of Warcraft
Our good friend and colleague Daniel "BigRedKitty" Howell has announced on his blog that he is taking a break from World of Warcraft. He's taking time off of the game and his blog to, as he says, "rededicate myself to my family." He thanks readers for their attention and kind words, and hopes that everyone will understand his decision, as well as examine their own lives to make sure that they focus on what's most important to them.We of course wish him well -- BRK was an excellent contributor to our site and podcast, and we commend him on making the decision to do what's right for him and his family. We hope that everything turns out OK. And as many of his commenters have said, we wish him the best of luck in everything, WoW-related and otherwise.Phaelia of Resto4Life, you'll remember, also closed her blog down recently, also choosing to focus on her family (and the sapling about to grow into it). Trying to figure out a good balance between your free time and your work and family life is a tough thing -- our Azeroth Interrupted column has covered exactly that battle. And as even Blizzard says, if any other part of your life is suffering because you're choosing to play this game or be a part of this community, it's time to make a break. Raiding the wilds of Azeroth is a lot of fun, and it's possible to do it while leading a healthy life. But if that balance ever gets thrown off, it's time to take a step back and do what's right for you and those closest to you.
How to level up through the Argent Tournament
Banana Shoulders has a really excellent guide to just what the Argent Tournament is all about. I played it for the first time the other night (while we were streaming live from the PTR), and it's a strange little mix of minigame, questing, and rep grind. The Argent Tournament has set up north of Sindragosa's Fall, and there are three basic stages: first, we've got to help them build the place (which will send you to quest in other parts of the world), second, you'll be moving up the ranks from Aspirant in the tournament to Champion, and third, you'll be acting as an Argent Tournament Champion, and picking up Champion's Seals to spend on various rewards and items.The tournament itself involves a minigame of mounted combat -- you can ride around on a mount, lance equipped, that has a few different abilities. There's a ranged attack that will let you break down an opponent's shield, there's a Defend ability that will let you build up your own shield, and then there's a Thrust melee attack that just does damage, and a Charge attack that will do damage as well as break down your opponent's shield. And out of combat, you can fully heal your mount or challenge someone else to a duel. The Aspirant quests teach you all of this, and then the Valiant quests really put your knowledge to the test as you move up through the ranks, fighting NPC mobs as challengers to the title.The Argent Tournament definitely seems like a lot of fun -- as I said way back when, the whole event seems like a one-stop shop for picking up rep and items in Northrend, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if Blizzard plans to add more events and more daily quests on to what we're building up there. Banana Shoulders will be posting part three of their guide soon, and of course you can stay tuned to WoW Insider -- as we get closer to the patch 3.1 release on the live realms, we'll have everything you need to know about the Tournament and then some.
Quantifying Wrath's success
The Egotistical Priest has a good series of posts up attempting to somehow quantify whether Wrath has been an overall success or not. Of course, it's definitely a financial success, but has the game's second expansion delivered what both players and Blizzard expected it to? Vonya sets out to find out in what has turned into a three part post: you can find parts one and two on the site now, and part three is set to come out tomorrow.So far, the answer is yes: while the area of Tradeskills is noted as less than a success (it seems to me, too, that tradeskills had more variety and options in Burning Crusade than their current state in Wrath, though that might be because we're only partway through the expansion cycle), everything else is noted as a win for Blizzard: they've really beefed up questing, balance has been intriguing since Wrath (and even if one class has rubbed you wrong, consider how many players came running back with the expansion patch to re-try their class), and of course, Achievements have (predictably) brought the game to new levels of addiction and given players of all kinds new things to do.Vonya still plans to tackle instancing and raiding as the other two criteria for Wrath's success (and there are probably a few other ways you could test it -- lore? setting?), but by the reasoning so far, Wrath is a win no matter how you slice it. Blizzard has outdone themselves with the second expansion -- the only question is where they'll go from here.
Resto4Life is closing its doors
Sad news on the druid blogger front. Phaelia of Resto4Life fame will be closing her doors on March 19th. Resto4Life is, in many people's opinions, is one of the best Druid healing blogs out there. Phaelia is one helluva intelligent resto druid, and a funny blogger to boot. Phaelia posts that she's ending her bloging for a number of reasons, chiefly among them is that there is a new baby tree that her and Mr. Phae are expecting. So despite our sadness at seeing her go, there couldn't be a better reason!The community over at Resto4Life is really quite a good one, and as such Phaelia is going to make a final post in March comprised of all the reader submitted screenshots and artwork she gets. And to add to the coolness of it, she's randomly awarding a Belkin Nostromo Speedpad N52TE to someone who submits some artwork, purchased with the money she's made from the site.Class act all around, and a great site that will be missed.
Healers know you're dying. Don't yell.
Ambrosyne wrote an interesting post in her blog the other day, making a nice point about not yelling at healers. She addresses the point essentially to DPS classes who yell over vent that they need healing. She explains -- with the illustration above -- that she sees everyone's health bars and that "99% of the time, we know when you're dying." So don't yell. She's actually polite enough not to tell her fellow raid members not to ask for heals. And nice enough not to reveal that if you really put off a healer, you won't get healed at all. I remember back in the days of Molten Core where we had this inept Hunter who refused to Feign Death because it "dropped his DPS". That same Hunter always asked for heals even though he wasn't supposed to be taking much damage sitting in the back of the raid, firing from afar. It got to the point where, on the healers' chat channel, we all agreed not to heal him. Sure enough, in the next pull, he steals aggro, refused to Feign Death, and dies. With a little help -- or lack of it.That's the truth about healing, for the most part. Healers are already on their toes watching everybody's lives. That's their role. You don't often hear yelling at DPS to, well, DPS, do you? They're expected to DPS. Even when they fall below a certain DPS threshold, you won't hear the raid leader chew them out. Most of the time, at least. Ambrosyne points out that pretty much all she sees are feet. That's right, feet. Because healers play a little mini-game watching Grid and often miss out on the action. If you're dying, they know it. So as a public service announcement, we're reminding all of you not to yell at your healers. It just might mean you'll get healed.
Sony doth protest too much: don't call the VAIO P a netbook?
Our main man "Rick" over at the Sony Blog has penned another short-form stunner entitled "You Can't Tell a Netbook by its Cover," which aims to dispel the seemingly persistent myth that the VAIO P is... gasp, a netbook. We'd thought we'd break down the points (which Sony has helpfully broken down) and see if they hold water. Since the Sony Blog moves through these killers one-by-one, we're going to do the same -- read on for the hard facts.
The many uses of Shadowmeld
Phaelia's got a guest blogger over at Resto4Life who's extolling the many virtues of Shadowmeld, definitely one of the more OP of the racial bonuses after the big change with the Wrath release. Previously, the spell could only be used out of combat, which made it very useful for, umm... hiding while AFK? But with the change of letting you use it in combat as a temporary threat wipe, the skill really opened up to be extremely useful for all sorts of things. If you're a Night Elf and you don't have Shadowmeld on your action bars, it's time to put it back.Flipping on Shadowmeld has its disadvantages (almost any action takes you out of stealth and puts you back into combat), but if you need to duck out of combat for a quick drink or a quick change of gear, you can do it. And it can easily buy you some extra time to summon a mount or get away from trouble if you happen to be in PvP outside. And while it's not quite as powerful as Vanish, you can even use it in the Arenas to drop out of combat (hidden, as when you start drinking you'll lose your stealth), and grab a few seconds of drinking before you get brought back into the fight.None of these uses are exactly gamebreaking -- the Shadowmeld action is pretty fragile, so you're going to have to be fast if you want to put that second or half second of dropping out of combat to good use. But when time is short and you've got to use every little ability you have, it's important to have Shadowmeld around. Ducking out of combat for just a moment might be just the boost you need.
BioWare blog defines "stylized reality" in The Old Republic
Sure, the news of Star Wars: The Old Republic was kept a secret (kinda) for a few years, and during that time we really heard nothing of the game itself. Yet here we are now getting a steady stream of useful information on a game that is not even predicted to launch this year. This week we have two examples of this from the team at BioWare: a look at the art style of the game, and an entertaining blog entry from Principal Lead Animator Mark How.In the blog entry, How explains a bit about how enthusiastic the animation team is for getting every lightsaber battle exactly right. He reflects on how powerful the toys were to him as a child and how the work they will do with TOR can be 10,000 times better than anything we could imagine back then.%Gallery-35034%
Snowshaman!
This is brilliant -- after Anna jokingly asked for pictures of Snowshaman, she actually got one. Niyahti and her husband built this snowshaman, complete with two totems (though we're not sure which ones they are -- Wrath of Air and Frost Resist maybe?). Sure, it loses a little something in the translation from polygons to frozen water, but remember the medium. Considering it's handmade with snow, that's a pretty good snowshaman. The horns on the head must mean it's a Draenei, right? Though I have no idea what the sticks are coming out of the front.And hey, if you happen to get a nice bit of snowfall this month and feel like you can make a better one, feel free. We'd love to see it.
WoW Insider's top ten stories of all-time
Today, December 6, is the third anniversary of our little site. We actually started posting a few weeks beforehand, to get up and running, but the official launch was over on our parent Joystiq on December 6th, 2005. Since then, we've posted over 12,000 posts, commenters have commented over half a million times, and people have visited the site over two hundred million times (millions more if you count all the RSS readers out there). Oh, and we've covered nine classes, 27 builds, nine major content patches (and hundreds if not thousands of class and content changes), and absorbed the angry yells, QQ tears, cheerful applause and apathetic mehs of all of you hundred of thousands of readers. What a ride it's been.And so, to look back at our little piece of history today, we figured we'd check back over the records (all the records we have), and come up with a top ten list of our most popular stories of all time. Keep in mind that this is a list of our most popular stories -- while it does include our most popular posts of all time, we had to make a few tweaks and filters to make it all make sense (our most popular page of all time, other than the front page, surprise, is actually page 2). But this will offer you a good look at just what WoW Insider is all about -- from our great looks at some of the biggest stories in Warcraft, to an interesting view of just what you, our readers are really interested in.Thanks for the memories -- the site has only gotten bigger almost every single month during the past three years, and that's because readers like you come and visit to see what we're posting. Click the first link below to see story number 10, and follow the links all the way up to number one.Number 10: Blizzard takes a stand on erotic RP...
