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Gowalla announces shared trips
There's a growing battle lately on the App Store over "check-in" apps -- Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown have all seen big gains in users lately (and a few other contenders have been roaming the periphery), and it looks like we're starting to see some innovation in the mix. Gowalla recently updated their free app [iTunes link], and introduced a new feature called Shared Trips. These are more or less tours (or a line of check-ins at different places around a given city), but they can feature all kinds of things: a set of bars, interesting buildings to see, the old bookstore/coffeeshop run, or any other ideas Gowalla users have. Trips can be shared and rated, and you'll be able to browse through the most popular trips and even earn badges in the app for creating or going on a popular trip. The new version also adds bookmarks, which will let you remember your favorite check-in spot -- while you can't add them from the mobile app yet, you can browse them from there, and they're hoping to get the functionality in soon. Obviously, this might not appeal to everybody -- there are lots of iPhone users out there (including me) who aren't so keen yet on sharing their location with everyone they know every time they leave the house. But it is interesting to note that this is a burgeoning mini-industry, brought on almost completely by the ubiquity of the iPhone and its up-and-coming competitors. Any time you have more than a few apps vying for a growing audience, you're going to end up with some interesting innovation. It'll be fun to see what kinds of ideas Gowalla and its competitors can come up with.
Time Is Money: Putting your emblems to work
Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply). After all, Time Is Money. If you're like me, you have a lot of excess emblems sitting around. Maybe you never got around to spending them before the next tier came out, or maybe the badge gear just never quite compared to your raid drops. Whatever the case, there is no sense letting them go to waste when you could put them to work and earn some gold! First, here is a quick breakdown of the current badge system, from most recent and difficult to acquire on down: Emblem of Frost: These can be acquired primarily by raiding Icecrown, completing the Raid Boss Per Week "weekly," or by completing one WotLK heroic dungeon per day using the Random tool. Emblem of Triumph: Most raids now drop these badges, as well as heroics. You will also be awarded these for doing any number of WotLK heroic dungeons past your first one per day using the Random tool. You will also get some by completing your first normal WotLK dungeon per day using the Random tool, as well as completing the Raid Boss Per Week "weekly." Also of note: If you get Heroic Oculus using the random tool, don't drop group! Not only has it been nerfed like crazy, but when you defeat the end boss, every player will receive a loot bag that will contain these badges and more, plus a chance at getting the super rare Reigns of the Blue Drake, which used to be available only by killing Malygos, who now drops his 25-man version (Azure) in both 10 and 25-man. Emblem of Conquest: Originally, these were acquired by running 10-man Coliseum, or 25-man Ulduar. Emblem of Valor: Originally these dropped from Ulduar 10-man and Naxxramas 25-man. Emblem of Heroism: These were among the first WotLK badges, and dropped from Naxxramas 10-man and heroic dungeons.
Dungeon Finder reactions from players
The long-awaited Dungeon Finder is finally out on the servers, and people have had a few days with it now, so let's jump in and gauge some early reactions. Overall, it seems to be a big hit -- tanks and healers are jumping into groups right away, and while we've heard of longer waits for DPS, it doesn't seem bad at all. While of course the initial flood of people brought instance servers down (I'd expect to see the same thing happen during peak time this weekend), everything seems to be working well since then: disenchanters are correctly dropping items out, loot is getting distributed correctly, and groups are doing what they were always supposed to do: rake in the badges and rewards for players. Hots and Dots actually has a long take on the Dungeon Finder, including "15 Things You Should Know," like that tanks and healers are still as important as ever (if you sign up for DPS and another role, you likely won't be doing DPS), and that we're finding out very quickly just how skilled or knowledgeable people really are ("the Party Leader will be forced to confess midway [through] that they actually know nothing about the instance").
Officers' Quarters: Patch 3.3 -- An officer's perspective
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. Much as I've done with Patch 3.2 and other major patches in the past, I'd like to examine what 3.3 will mean for officers. All major patches require some forethought and adjustment, and this one just happens to be a doozy! Icecrown Citadel The ultimate raid of this expansion, Icecrown Citadel is poised to be one of the most exciting raids that Blizzard has ever released. As such, I can virtually guarantee you'll have long-lost players coming out of the woodwork to get back into the raiding scene for a chance to face off with the Lich King. Make sure you review your guild's policies for inviting players to raids to make sure that slots will be awarded in a way that's as fair as possible while still giving your raid a solid chance at success. One debate that's sure to rage among officers and raid leaders this time around is whether to extend lockouts until you beat the zone and unlock the hard mode toggle or to reset the instance each week to farm the early bosses. I'm still not sure how my guild is going to handle this. It will certainly depend on how quickly we can clear those first bosses and which bosses present more of a roadblock. If we're clearing quickly, we'll probably keep going until we hit a boss we can't beat. Then we'll reset and farm up more loot and Frost Badges.
Neolux badges bring e-ink technology to trade show vendors, sweaty rock dudes
Ah, the backstage pass -- as much a part of the rock'n'roll lifestyle as sleeping with a roadie to get to the lead singer. Now, thanks to Neolux (an e-ink developer best known in these parts for its rather bland e-reader) the things have gotten that much harder to counterfeit. What does an e-ink badge do, exactly? Well, it does what a regular badge does -- with the added expense of color e-ink technology. How's that for progress? See for yourself after the break. Update: ...and by "color e-ink" we meant "regular old e-ink with a red overlay." Oldest trick in the book, really. Thanks to those of you who pointed it out! [Via E-ink Info]
We Have a Tabard: It's not cheating if...
Looking for a guild? Well, you can join ours! We have a tabard and everything! Check back for Amanda Dean talking about guilds and guild leadership in We Have a Tabard.As I've mentioned before I'm not totally against PUGging raids. I find its actually an excellent way to get to know people on the server and sometimes a handy recruiting tool. Depending on your guild rules, there are some raids to PUG and some raids to save your lockout for your guild.I had a guildie today all distraught because he was saved to Naxx 10 helping a guildie out. He apologized profusely when someone was putting together a "Badge Run Blitz" but couldn't heal it. At this point Naxx 10 is like running an extended heroic with more gold and shards. We've progressed beyond it, so lockouts are fair game.I get a wee bit crabbier when folks get locked out of our current progression. We're actually still working on Ulduar 10, and need to draw upon any available resources to move forward. Guildies can feel free to run Naxx, Vault, and Obsidian Sanctum to their heart's content. Usually when someone asks for my blessing to run with another group, I give it if they have to miss guild times or we're unable to get into the group.
The next level of questing
Elnia at the Pink Pigtail Inn has some excellent and interesting advice for Blizzard's quest designers (or whoever they hire for the current position). As big a component as quests are in the game, they haven't been innovated on much since the game's release. Blizzard has played around a little bit with allowing us to repeat certain quests, and they've streamlined the group questing mechanic, but other than that, quests are pretty much the same: pick up a task, do it, and bring it back for a reward.So how can it be done differently? Elnia has some great ideas: she asks for quests that span a little farther, that push players through a storyline that might even follow them all the way up to 80 (of course, there are quests like that, though they're few and far between -- and not all players have the patience to finish them). Rewards could be mixed up, too -- instead of the old gold and XP, how about some profession skill, or a tradeoff of badges based on certain quests done. Finally, Elnia suggests that every quest in the game become repeatable. Questing is paced to keep us interested in from 1-60, but we all know how the game works now -- why not let us do some of our favorite quests over more than once?I'd suggest we go even farther -- Warhammer Online offers Public Quests that are an interesting twist on the usual "go kill boars" mechanic. I'd like to see branching quests with more than one outcome -- maybe a moral choice to make that affects the storyline of the quest you're doing. And talking real pie-in-the-sky here, I'd like to see questgivers treat you different based on the way you look or maybe what title you've got equipped. If you've got "Jenkins," they might not expect you to do much, but with "Champion of Ulduar" over your head, they should probably be groveling at your feet.
Patch 3.2 changes the tiered Emblem system
There are a lot of things in the patch 3.2 test realm notes that jumped out at me, but the changes to the Emblem system seem like an especially big deal. The developers made it quite clear that they wanted a tiered token system in Wrath of the Lich King, they didn't want players just farming Heroics all day and night to get the best possible gear. In patch 3.2, it looks like they're backing off on that pretty heavily, likely an attempt to reignite interest in running Heroics. If you haven't seen the patch notes, here are the points I'm referring to: Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism. Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders' Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph. The heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Triumph. The existing achievements to collect 1, 25, 50, etc. Emblems of Heroism, Valor, and Conquest have been converted to Feats of Strength since Heroism and Valor Emblems are no longer attainable.
The opposite of Heroics
Reader Malos on Nagrand sent me an interesting idea that I thought was worth some discussion. For a long time now, I've been a big fan of the idea of turning the old instances into Heroic versions -- I think it would be really fun to play Deadmines as a level 80, or roll through Scarlet Monastery for badges. But obviously the problem there is that Blizzard already has enough to do -- they're focused on creating new content, not revamping old instances that people have already played.So Malos has a solution: instead of tweaking the instances to us, how about tweaking us to the instances? He suggests a set of gear, much like the Heirloom gear, that matches your character to whatever instance you happen to step into -- if you enter Deadmines, it powers down your level 80 character to an appropriate power and level for the instance. That way, all Blizzard has to do is make one set of gear per class (that could even scale upwards, so they never have to make it again), and boom, every instance could be played at the standard difficulty by any character any time.Will it happen? Probably not. But I really like the idea of tweaking the players, not the instances, and I think there's a lot of possibility there for Blizzard. They've had such a tough time trying to balance out content for all kinds of players (including all of the hard modes and extra gameplay in Ulduar), that it might be interesting to try and measure the difficulty by going the other way -- balancing players out for all kinds of content.
Polling for Mr. Pinchy
Blizzard EU Community Blue Ancilorn has posted a poll over on the EU forums asking players about one of the more prickly pieces of loot in the game: Mr. Pinchy. Usually with loot, Blizzard has been pretty good lately: if there's a piece that you want, there are usually a few different ways to get it, one of which usually requires grinding (i.e. picking up tons of Badges) rather than just getting really, really lucky. But with vanity stuff, it seems like they feel free to just put us at the will of the dice roll, and almost no other pet is more random than Mr. Pinchy. Not only do you need to level fishing (which, admittedly, is much less random than it used to be), and not only do you need to fish up a random item, but then, you need to hit a random choice of five different options. It's a slim chance on a rare chance on a nearly impossible chance.Which explains why even those who have been trying for him for so long (ahem, me -- as you've probably heard on our podcast) haven't picked him up yet. The biggest percentage in the poll (about 26% of respondents, as of this writing) says they've been trying a lot and haven't gotten him. But strangely enough, the lowest percentage says "an absolutely enormous amount" of effort went into getting him. Which suggests that the people who are getting him are underestimating the amount of time they're putting in -- just how much fishing is "a moderate amount"?At any rate, it seems like Ancilorn is just asking to be asking. Mr. Pinchy is definitely as much of a vanity item as they come, and there should at least be some items in the game that are very, very rare. It does seem at times that every time I suggest Blizzard won't move on something, they do, but I'd say in this case Mr. Pinchy will stay as rare as he is.
Rampant farming forces Paragon Studios to remove City of Heroes badges
When City of Heroes brought us Issue 14, they also brought something rather unique to the MMO space with the Mission Architect -- the ability for players to create their own mission scenarios and share them with other players. Unfortunately, when many games offer achievements of some sort, there are people who figure out ways to cheat the system and farm them out... which, sadly, has proven to be the case with City of Heroes. Synapse (aka Phil Zeleski) from the City of Heroes development team addresses this in a recent blog post. He writes: "We really didn't want the Mission Architect to be an environment that encourages farming for XP, Rewards or Badges, and we thought long and hard about the current Architect badge situation. Ultimately we'd like it to be a place where you go to play great player created content." To keep the Mission Architect system in keeping with their initial goals, Paragon Studios is removing the badges commonly farmed from the game, 90 of them in all, which he lists in his post.
BlizzCon badges are back
Danielle "Shyka" Brown is back again, and making custom art badges of your character to put in your BlizzCon lanyard. We covered her last year before the convention, and so if you're headed to BlizzCon and want to put a little custom memento of what your character looks like, now's the time to order them. She's starting a little earlier, so they're a bit cheaper, only $30 per badge, but any orders after June 16th will go up to $40 because presumably she'll be in crunch time. The good news is that since the last set of BlizzCon ticket sales are on May 30th, you should know for sure by then whether you're going or not.And as you can see from the pictures at left, the quality of her work is pretty darn good -- there's a whole collection of her work from last year over on the blog, and it would be neat to have any of those hanging from your neck at BlizzCon.If past years are any indication, Blizzard will definitely put your character's name somewhere on your ID badge for the convention (and they've also asked for your faction affiliation and/or class in the past, so those may make an appearance as well). But this is something a little extra, especially if you're planning to meet up with in-game friends or guildies (or attend the sure-to-be-awesome WoW Insider bash, which we'll be having on Thursday night yet again), to identify yourself on the convention floor.
Matt "Positron" Miller prepares his radioactive banhammer against mission architect abusers
Mission architect -- an amazing system that allows a very creative player-base to finally take the reigns of creation and make amazing in-game arcs that feature personalized stories, personalized characters, farming, well made.... wait, what?Yes, you heard that right, people have already began to leverage City of Heroes's architect system into nothing more than powerleveling tool, and the community doesn't find that to be too enjoyable. Luckily, Matt "Positron" Miller, the lead designer, has already stepped up with a post to the community on the City of Heroes message board about how they plan on dealing with these problems.The team wishes to remove the rewards some characters may have gained through powerleveling, all the way up to removing access to characters that were solely leveled up via mission architect exploits. Past working on a player by player bases, some badges will be changed while others may be removed entirely due to the exploiting groups surrounding them. Lastly, but certainly not least, the team will be proactively banning missions that are created to exploit the system.For Matt's full plan, check out his post over on the City of Heroes message board.
The pros and cons of autolooting
Gnomeaggedon has a really insightful post about one of my favorite "hidden" features in patch 3.1. The first time I ran Naxx after the patch, I was a little worried on the first boss that I couldn't loot my badges or Stone Keeper's Shards. But of course, I'd missed it in the patch notes: all of that currency stuff now works like currency should. Whenever one person in the group or raid loots it, everyone gets their own as well. No more forgetting to loot your Badge, as it all goes automatically into the currency screen. Very nice change.But as Gnomeaggedon says, there are still a few kinks in the program (aren't there always?). Quest items still don't get auto-looted, and since Badges do, that's even less encouragement to go check the loot to see if there's anything you need. He'd also like it if items got autolinked while Master Looter is on -- right now, it's the responsibility of the Master Looter to link and give out items that get looted, and that doesn't always get done clearly. That second one is kind of a good point -- my raid looter does pretty well with showing off items, so I don't really have much of an issue with that, but it would be helpful to see for sure what's in there.But back to autolooting: the flip side of this is that if Blizzard uses autolooting too much, the game becomes that much more simple -- they already show you where the monster is and how to kill it, and now you want them to give you the loot automatically too? While it would be easier to have quest items sent to your backpack automatically, let's not forget that mobs with loot on them are shiney. It might make sense in raids to do autolooting (since everyone is grabbing for the same quest item), but autolooting while soloing might be a little too streamlined.
Badge purchases now refundable for two hours
A previously unannounced relatively un-promoted feature is apparently going live in patch 3.1 today: buyback for "alternate currency" items. "Alternate currency" means any currency except gold - Emblems of Heroism, Arena Points, etc. According to Vaneras, when the patch goes live, you'll have two hours after buying an item with an alternate currency to sell it back and get a refund. I've never accidentally bought something with badges, but I know people who have, and it sucks; this is a nice fix. A few caveats: Stackable items (such as Frozen Orbs) are non-refundable. Items that grant achievements are non-refundable. Augments will not be returned - if you buy an item, enchant it, and then sell it back for badges, you don't get your enchant mats back. This only works one step back: If you buy a tier token for emblems, then exchange that tier token for a tier piece, you can trade the tier piece back for the token if you want. You can not, however, trade that token back for emblems after doing that. Even with these limitations, it's still good protection against accidental purchases. Thanks, Blizz!
City of Heroes Issue 14 open beta has begun
City of Heroes has announced the open beta phase for Issue 14: Architect, which allows players to customize their own missions, at long last bringing player-created content to the superhero (and supervillain) MMO. The NCsoft announcement reads: "Now is your chance to play and give feedback on one of the most in-depth player created mission systems in an MMO to date! Your story/mission masterpieces will be available in-game for all your fellow gamers to play and rate - and the higher the rating, the more YOU benefit!" They also announced that they'll be handpicking the best player-created content as 'Developer's Choice' stories. Those missions will be identified by a unique icon and the creator will receive a Dev's Choice badge. The devs aren't the only ones who get to rate the best missions. There will be a Hall of Fame where the highest peer-rated stories can be recognized for being a cut above the rest. As with the Developer's Choice missions, these stories receive a Hall of Fame icon and badge, but these rankings established during open beta won't carry over once Issue 14 goes live.%Gallery-45908%
Why too many currencies actually helps progression
Badges of Justice, Battleground marks, Marks of Honor Hold and Thrallmar, Spirit Shards, Stone Keeper's Shards, Emblems of Valor, Emblems of Heroism, and now Emblems of Conquest: Ulduar will add yet another currency item into the game and Cypruss of Draka wonders, rightfully, if it's all just too much. The good news is that since the currency system was introduced, all of this stuff is out of our bags, but wouldn't it just be easier if instead of creating a whole new token system, Blizzard just charged a lot more for the gear?Bornakk says no -- he says that if they just kept the same tokens and charged more per item, people would end up doing Naxx, Ulduar, OS, and any other instances that dropped that token every single week rather than actually moving up through the content, which is what Blizzard wants us to do. He also says that the Emblem exchange mechanic is designed to help this -- you can do Ulduar and go backwards for the gear, but you can't do Naxx ten extra times to get Ulduar gear.Which, we have to give it to Blizzard, is actually pretty smart. Yes, it does keep players from farming up the tokens (Blizzard knows that if you could run all the instances per week just to get one kind of token, there'd be lots of players who would), but it also keeps people progressing to get gear they can upgrade to. As Bornakk says, they've been trying to improve the Badge system ever since it was introduced in BC, and this method of introducing new currency to send players up the ladder is a result of their work there.
Phat Loot Phriday: Pride
Fist weapon! And a pretty cool looking one, at that.Name: Pride (Wowhead, Thottbot, Wowdigger)Type: Epic Off-hand Fist WeaponDamage/Speed: 251-467 / 2.50 (143.6 DPS)%Gallery-33600%
Why you should be playing City of Heroes: Badges
"Why you should be playing ..." is a free form column from Massively.com intended to inform you about our favorite parts of our favorite games. We want you to know why we play what we do!Non-combat rewards aren't new to MMOs, but for a long time they were entirely player-driven. In EverQuest the success of running guild or friendships within an online community were the primary non-mechanical motivators. Since then, and especially with the advent of Xbox Live, in-game achievement tracking has become a major factor in persistent games. We as players love to be rewarded for success, and pinning gold stars to our sashes is a lot easier (from a game mechanic perspective) than actual monetary or xp doles. Warhammer Online may have perfected this schema with the Tome of Knowledge this year, but way back in 2004 City of Heroes really got the party started with their Badge system. Collecting badges is not only a fun and (often) relaxing alternative to leveling or instance-running, in recent years the NCsoft developers have made it worth your while as well. Supergroup badges, for example, stack up to allow your group the opportunity to teleport straight from your base into the field. There are a number of reasons to enjoy badge hunting, and the addition of this seemingly-simple gratification system is one of the reasons CoH as much fun as it is to play. Read on below the cut for more on how the City of Heroes developers give you more fun, with less grind.
Overheard at BlizzCon 2008: A real, live Blue
Scene: Just outside the BlizzCon badge pickup area, the Thursday before BlizzCon, 10 minutes before 4pm badge pickup.Crowd: (Mills around, is huge, waits patiently, talks occasionally about everything from the Protoss to the weather. Throws out a random "WoW Insider rocks!" yell as we pass by -- thanks for that!)BlizzCon Employee: (Steps out of Convention Center to address the crowd) Hi everyone! We're going to open up the doors here in just a minute, but we will not be giving out badges until 4pm. So when we open the doors, in about five minutes from now, come on in and line up, but we won't give out badges until four.Crowd: (Various murmurs of excitement, until, from in the back:) Why aren't you wearing a blue shirt?(Laughter from all sides.)Employee: Ha, that's funny. No, I'm wearing a black shirt today, not a blue shirt. Ok, so in five minutes we'll let you in, and then we'll give out badges at 4pm. (Turns and heads back inside.)Crowd: (Follows immediately, calmly flooding inside without waiting, while convention center employees stand and shake their heads.)
