marks
Latest
Final Fantasy XIV offers more details on the Hunt system
Are you looking forward to stalking and destroying the rarest beasts across the land of Eorzea? Then you'll want to read the latest Final Fantasy XIV letter from Producer Naoki Yoshida, who takes the time to talk in a little more depth about the Hunt system. The basics have already been established, but how will Elite Marks avoid horror stories of players camping spawns and only one person getting any reward for all of the effort? Yoshida explains that the Elite Marks are meant to offer rewards to everyone who takes part in killing them, meaning that multiple players or parties taking down the monster will just result in more people getting the rewards. Some of the Marks are even meant to provide a challenge for multiple parties, anot several do not respawn in the same places, providing more incentive to wander, search, and help out. Check out the full letter for more details, and get ready to experience the system yourself when patch 2.3 goes live tomorrow.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV's latest Live Letter
As of this writing, the Letter from the Producer LIVE took place yesterday, and that means we have a whole bunch of Final Fantasy XIV news to discuss! It's a happy time for people like me, because it's at least a couple weeks of very chewable information to discuss. And at just the right time, too, we were in the middle of a serious drought there. Not that all of the information is good, mind you. Every time I think about Atma my hands instinctively ball into fists. Still, there's stuff to chat about, there's good stuff in with the bad, and perhaps most importantly there's enough to fuel some speculation and some off-the-cuff reaction before we dive into the meat of E3 and we learn even more about the future of the game. So let's get right into it, starting with the bit of news that I already foreshadowed in the intro.
Captain's Log: Star Trek Online tweaks Season Seven
It's been just over two weeks since Season Seven went live in Star Trek Online, and a lot of tweaks to the new reputation systems have already been implemented. Because of what seems to be low turn-out on the Tribble test servers, the team placed its focus on major performance bug squashing and decided to wait to make changes to the system mechanics until after it could get more solid data from the players on the live (Holodeck) server. Once that information was received, the changes were fast and furious. Star Trek Online's Executive Producer, Daniel Stahl, released two blog posts over the course of the last week, outlining not only the alterations to the Season Seven material but also answers players questions in the November Ask Cryptic. Join me as I go over a few of the changes!
Addon Spotlight: Adding on to the Blizzard Raid Frames
Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. One of the great joys of writing Addon Spotlight is watching the evolution of addons and their relationship to World of Warcraft over time and how the effectiveness and usefulness of certain addons wanes and waxes like the phases of the moon. Blizzard's new raid frames have not replaced my own custom job, but they have been getting progressively closer to a complete package, as I discussed only a few weeks ago. But there are ways, friends, of adding on to even the Blizzard default raid frame setup to give them just a bit more substance. Today, I've got three little additions to the default Blizzard raid frames that can help you with targets, marks, and debuffs. If you like options, these addons will add a ton of them to the Blizzard standard setup, making the entire package look a little more like Grid. So sit back, relax, and check out these new additions to the Blizzard default raid frames.
Ask Massively: Can't talk, slaying darkspawn edition
If it wasn't obvious through previous posts, I'm rather keen on the whole Dragon Age franchise. Which means that yes, I've been playing the stupid Facebook game that has just gone into open beta. The next revolution in gaming it is not, but it's got just enough of the setting to tide me over for the moment. Plus, it has player housing, which is conspicuously absent from most of the more modern MMOs out there. Seriously, guys -- if it's able to fit into a Flash game on Facebook, you can fit it into your umpteen-millionth triple-A title. Get on that. But I'll put aside the slaying of darkspawn and associated questions about how they're this far north, because it's time for another edition of Ask Massively. This round, we're talking about reviewing new MMOs, the conceptual space of games, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. As always, you can feel free to leave your questions in the comment field or send them along to ask@massively.com.
Ask WoW Insider: Is PvP gear still worth it?
Here's a good question from our email (it's ask at wow.com, if you've got a question for Ask WoW Insider). It's about PvP gear, and what to do about it in the few weeks left until the Wrath launch. We know now that Honor and marks are not getting wiped for sure, so Treecow wants to know what to do:My question is this, now that Wrath will be out in 6 weeks or so, does it really pay to get the S2 gear? Is it worth getting, even if it's going to be replaced within the first couple levels in Northrend, just to make those couple of levels easier? Or should I keep running quests and dailies? Or is there something else I should be doing that I haven't even thought about?Thanks,Treecow70 Druid on ThrallIf you ask me, dailies are the way to go at this point (and if you haven't gotten your rep up in some factions, dailies should help there, too), simply because gear will get quickly replaced and gold will always be useful. Not to mention that there are battleground dailies to do every day if BGs are what you'd rather play.But on the other hand, I'm mostly a PvE-er, and who knows -- doing the PvP to buy PvP gear could be worth it in the long run. You might even get more gold out of selling items you'd normally be equipping in Wrath. Readers, what do you say to Treecow?Previously on Ask WoW Insider...
Breakfast Topic: Honorary wipe
Well so much for the honor wipe. As you can already see from the comments on that post, players have all kinds of opinions about this -- some believe that Blizzard should have gone through with the wipe, giving everyone a clean slate as the expansion started. Some players disagree, saying that honor is honor -- if you earned it, you should keep it. Some players are unhappy that the prices for level 80 items are going to be raised as part of the non-wipe, leaving new players in the dust. And even other players are just angry because they listened to Blizzard, and already spent the honor they thought they were losing anyway.So the question this morning isn't how you feel about the Honor non-wipe, since odds are you've already expressed that. But it is: where do we go from here? Are you going to step up Honor farming in the hopes of picking up new, expensive items right away at level 80? Or are you just done with the system completely, and planning to worry about what's available at level 80 when you get there?You should keep in mind that for all of the gnashing of teeth, we still don't know for sure how rewards will worth in Wrath -- Tigole has even said that tuning is still happening, and so any tweaks Blizzard may make might actually turn out to make the whole thing easier on everyone. But now that you know the Honor isn't going anywhere, what's your plan before the expansion?
New items for old Honor
Vaneras on the EU forums has posted those "special" items we heard about yesterday -- the bad news of the Honor wipe before the expansion is tempered by the fact that Blizzard is giving us some more ways to spend that honor before it all goes away.I've put all the items after the jump in case you can't reach the forums here during the day, but these items are about what you'd expect -- cloaks and trinkets, at or maybe slightly better than the gear you'll be picking up early on into Wrath of the Lich King. If you haven't ground out PvP gear yet (or grabbed some epics from the high-end raids), you may get a level or two out of these, but you'll definitely have replaced them by the time we all hit 80. There are no prices or timelines on when these items will be released, either -- we'd imagine that they'll come out with patch 3.0.2 (Vaneras says "the next content patch") and that the actual wipe will come with the Wrath release patch.Additionally, gems obtained through Honor will go BoE (or at least not BoP) and will no longer be "Unique-equipped" after the patch, so you can nab some gems as well before the wipe shows up for your alts or other guildies. Nice of Blizzard to give us a few more ways to get rid of the honor (and personally, I think there are good reasons for the wipe anyway), but those who are really steaming about losing the honor they built up probably won't be completely satisfied by these items.
Forum post of the day: Winning isn't everything
I love most of the battlegrounds. Oddly enough, even as Horde, Alterac Valley is my favorite. Warsong Gulch is the exception. Maybe because of it's small team size, it seems really difficult to get organized and the games drag out. Now I don't necessarily need honor from WSG, but I do need marks for some of my gear. Should I just go in with the intention of getting a single mark, offer no resistance to the opposing team, and collect my singular mark. That's not my style. I'm in it to win it like Yzerman. Aparently not every feels the same as I do. Pigskin of Medivh is unimpressed with mark farming. Even if it's a premade losing team, there are still often folks who get pugged into their groups who can't do much alone when they lack the support of their team. She's hoping for a response from Blizzard.
Season 1 Prices revisited as items go on sale tomorrow
We heard a long time ago that Arena 1 sets would be purchaseable with battleground honor and marks, and it looks like tomorrow's the day-- all those marks and honor you've been saving up will be able to get you some Arena PvP gear.We posted prices a while back as well, but just in case you missed them, here they are again, at Curse's website. The full list of prices is after the jump-- lots of people will probably be headed for the weapons, but make sure to bring lots of honor and marks. While the offhand weapons are the least pricey (at 9k honor), the marks are probably what will break people-- you need 20 Eye of the Storm marks for all the one-hand weapons, and 40 AB marks for the two handers. Librams, relics and totems are the cheapest-- only 8k honor and 10 EotS marks.The full list is printed for your convenience after the break. Got honor? If you want to grab some of that season 1 gear tomorrow, you're gonna need it.
Pukka updated to v1.2
Pukka, the versatile, multi-account and light-weight del.icio.us posting client, has been updated to version 1.2. New features and fixes include: Pukka now uses the new SSL del.icio.us API for increased security as well as a more reliable means of storing passwords in the keychain. The tags field now resizes in height as necessary to accommodate all of the tags that you type. There is a new option to disable warning messages when resetting, closing or quitting with unposted data. Bug fixes and tweaks: hiding behavior, more reliable determination of successful posting, success dialog "Visit del.icio.us" button, pasting into tags field, added tooltips, smaller font in Bonjour drawer, problem with semicolon in posting fields, only attempt to use Growl when it's running A demo of Pukka is available from Code Sorcery Workshop, and a license will cost a mere $5.
Delibar 0.8 update adds tag bundles, auto-reloading, more
Delibar, my favorite little missing link for social bookmarking, has received a great update to version 0.8. In case you aren't familiar, I'll summarize my previous post: Delibar turns your del.icio.us bookmarks into a bookmark menu that's accessible from your menubar. New features go a little something like this: Improved Interface Support for Bundles and recent Post Auto detection of system proxy Auto reload Bookmarks Tag sorting (alphabetically or by frequency) Tag scraping (show only tag with more than 1/2/5 post) New icon and overall better user interface Delibar is donationware and available for 10.4 (v 0.8) and 10.3 (v 0.5.1), though I believe the version for Tiger is the only one being updated from now on. You can pick up a copy of either from Matteo Rattotti's site.
