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Will Ulduar break your guild?
Dueg is the first blogger I've seen to suggest this, but I feel like it's an undercurrent that's been going around since the 3.1 release last week (and we'll probably find out more when Guildwatch comes out later tonight). He suggests that Ulduar might be, of all things, a guildbreaker. Now certainly it won't be nearly as much of a roadblock as Karazhan -- not only was that a tough instance, but it was also the first one we came across in Burning Crusade, and guilds who couldn't make it in Kara had no place to turn back to (at least guilds that can't make it in Ulduar can fall back on Naxx farming). But there's no question that Ulduar requires some excellent gear and some serious tactics, and if your guild has people raiding who are missing either one of those, you're going to be hitting your head on the wall quite a bit in there.That's not to say that it's super hard -- it's not, especially if you know not to stand in the fire and you've got the kind of gear on that lets you conquer the Heroic achievements. A lot of guilds have 25 of those people, and they're doing very well in Ulduar so far. But as Dueg says, Naxx is a casual instance, and Ulduar is not. In Naxx, you can get away with losing a few people, or having a few folks in greens along. In Ulduar, you can't.It's not the apocalypse for guilds -- most guilds will go back to Naxx if they have trouble in Ulduar, grab a few more epics and tier pieces, and try again later. And some probably won't bother with Ulduar at all -- my casual guild is having fun just taking our time finishing Naxx wing by wing. But Ulduar seems to be where the rubber meets the road with casual raiding. If there's a guild out there who has a few lesser raiders carried along by a few high-level veterans, Ulduar's likely to cause some friction.
QuickArmory offers localization, boss tallying
Our friends over at QuickArmory, which is a site with a whole slew of extras for parsing and checking out Armory information, have sent along a list of updates to what they've done lately. The site itself is still pretty barebones (it focuses on getting information together fast rather than flashy graphics or layouts), but they've added new details to what you can see on a character view. In addition to the usual achievements, you can mouse over the title of each instance, and it will tell you how many times the character has killed each boss that's tracked in the game.And they've also added localization support -- next to the box where you put the character's name in, you can choose to see the site in English, German, French, Spanish, or Russian. Some of the achievements, we're told, aren't fully translated, but that's quite a feature on an "Armory lite" site.QuickArmory isn't necessarily the most robust Armory site out there, but it's still really good at getting you lots of information on one character quickly. If you do a lot of Armory searching for PuGs or just like learning about the various characters on your server, it's definitely worth a bookmark.
The best of WoW Insider: March 24-31, 2009
Ravagers, boars, and tigers, oh my. Patch 3.1 is bringing all sorts of wild animals into the game (though there are definitely of plenty wild animals available already) and WoW Insider is your animal tamer. No matter what Blizzard is tossing in to the world's most popular MMO in the next content patch, we'll make sure you've got the knowhow to tame one for your own. News WoW Insider's Guide to Patch 3.1Our constantly updated guide to the new patch will you get you as ready as you can be. Orangemarmalade's 1 vs. 2 comeback explainedA play-by-play of how an Arena Mage was able to conquer two players in one match. Vaneras answers a whole lot of Mage questionsThe casters among you may want to read what Blizzard has to say about the Mage class. iPhone Authenticator now in App Store for freeBlizzard releases a free mobile authenticator program for your iPhone or iPod touch. 65% fewer Arena teams in Season 5Where exactly have all the Arena players gone? Features The Queue: Scantily clad editionThe Q&A column answers exactly why women in the game seem to have such skimpy gear. Scattered Shots: Finding a unique petNeed a singular pet for your Hunter? Let us help. Ready Check: Ulduar and burnoutRaiders aren't quite as happy as they could be with the raiding game. Spiritual Guidance: Sartharion with all drakesHow to help out a Sarth 3D run on your healing Priest. Time is Money: Low-level clothWhere to make the money with Wool, Mageweave and Runecloth.
Sleeper Cartel hosts Spring Break 2009 in Sholazar Basin on Saturday
Our good friends in Sleeper Cartel over on Perenolde are having yet another server party -- Spring Break 2009 is taking place not in Cabo, but Sholazar Basin! As with all of these player-run events, it certainly sounds like fun: they're planning to have free food and drinks, tournaments, and games and contests of all kinds (last time around, they had trivia contests and scavenger hunts). They're even setting up a "Gnomes Gone Wild" event -- level 1 gnomes are going to be trying to sneak into the party, and it'll be partygoers' responsibility to keep them out.The party starts this Saturday, March 21st, at 7pm server at the River's Heart in Sholazar Basin (you could probably make it there with a DK, or they'll have people summoning as necessary, as long as you send them an ingame mail first). As they say, Kel'Thuzad and Malygos will be there next week -- this Saturday, head over to Perenolde and celebrate Spring Break with the Sleepers.
YouPlayorWePay opens up a new month, plans to add EU realms soon
We haven't heard much from the folks at You Play or We Pay lately, but maybe that's a good thing for them -- after all the noise from their initial launch, it seems like things have calmed down over there. They're giving out "Compensation Credits," it looks like they've started running a few ads, and it seems like they've finally settled on a model that works for everyone -- both the founders of the site and the people who sign up for compensation. While we heard the first month of slots filled up pretty fast, the second month seems to be going a little slower -- they've still got about half the slots for March still available as of this writing. But as you can see from the picture, they're promising some real items in exchange for those Compensation Credits. With 150 slots in March and about 100 credits given out last month, you may be waiting over a year to save up the credits to buy a 30-day game card, but the site is working the way they planned: you can sign up for free and eventually get something back for your realm's downtime.And they're planning on expanding soon -- the site reports that by the 15th of March, English EU players will be able to sign up for compensation on their realms' downtime as well. This site caused a lot of controversy when it first opened up, but we have to give it to them: it looks like they've worked out a way to do what they want to do.
The state of twinking pre-3.1
Our friend Drayner has posted an open letter to Blizzard over at Twinkinfo.com in which he basically laments the breaking of WoW's twinking game. We've covered twinking quite a few times before here -- it's the game-within-a-game of beefing up lower-level characters to their maximum power using enchants, low-level items, or whatever else they can find. Officially, Blizzard hasn't endorsed or condoned twinking -- if you want to do it, you're free to, but you've got to live with the rules they set on items and enchants, and so forth.And that seems to be Drayner's main issue with Blizzard: they aren't consistent on twinking. They'll make changes that level the twink field, and then they'll ignore bugs that almost completely break it. They kept the latest enchants off of players below level 60, but then they grandfathered in players with the 450 profession buffs. He's got a whole list of changes they've made for and against twinking, and basically asks Blizzard to either support twinking, or (and obviously he's less happy with this decision) end it for good.Unfortunately for him, he probably won't get an answer. There are plenty of players twinking, but not nearly enough for Blizzard to consider making changes based on twinks alone (and while twinks are howling at some of the changes, the rest of the player population either dislikes the whole idea of twinking, or couldn't care either way). And considering that twinking does draw some players into the game, it's not likely Blizzard will ditch it anytime either. Twinks, they would likely say, are playing a meta game already based on made-up rules, so why should it matter that they've also got to abide by other inconsistent rules? Based on what we've heard from them in the past, it seems twinking is a player creation, not a Blizzard creation, so it's up to players to deal with the issues, not Blizzard.
Happy Valentine's Day from WoW Insider
Just in time for Valentine's Day, Ataraxaven and Alastriona of Azuremyst sent us this picture of their "soulbound" wedding rings -- just like the other wedding rings we've posted before, the couple says that "soulbound" works well for them. It has a nice gamer reference (they're both WoW players, obviously, and they've been playing together for two years now), and even people who've never picked up a BoP item at least get the meaning.Very cool. Being as it is Valentine's Day today, don't forget to check out our guide to the Love Fool achievements, and be sure to get your sweetie something nice, ingame and/or out. Happy Valentine's Day to Ataraxaven and Alastriona and all of the lovers out there this weekend, hope you have a good one. Love is in the Air and on WoW Insider. Check out our continuing coverage of the event and our guide to earning the achievement. And you better hurry; the holiday only lasts five days!
Tabula Rasa honors biggest fans by naming in-game items after them
As I mentioned in an earlier post regarding Tabula Rasa's Deployment 16 hitting the test servers, one interesting feature included with this patch was this tidbit: 40 unique weapons named after players. This might be something you glanced over as you searched for more info on the PAUs, but this simple addition has made so many people excited, including myself.The official list of immortalized players hasn't been released yet, but from the buzz at the PlanetTR forums, the ones who were honored are quite happy. I've skipped the plural narrative here to gush a bit about how much something like this means to me and presumably, the other 39 people honored as well.
Survey reveals what twinks are all about
This is interesting -- our friend Drayner over at Twinkinfo.com recently took a survey of his site's readers, and after picking up almost 1,000 replies, he's posted the results. They show a little bit of insight into the kind of person that plays a twink (a character maxed out at a certain level before 80, usually to run around in PvP battlegrounds). Specifically, they're male, under 21, play for 21-30 hours a week, think their gear rates a 5 out of 5, and are probably level 19 and in Warsong Gulch capturing flags. I'm not sure if that's suprising or not, but those are pretty safe majority votes, even given the smaller sample size of the poll.Twink players are also more likely to not have more than one account, which kind of makes sense -- they only need one account and just have lots of characters on them. 66% of twinks are actually in twink guilds, and most have at least more than one twink to play around with. Hunters and Rogues top the class choices (though not with a clear majority at all). And perhaps most interesting, over 50% of twinks say Blizzard is serving them just fine -- they're not ignoring them, and they're not giving them any more love than other players. Still, as Drayner pointed out to us, about 36% of twinks said they'd leave the game if Blizzard shut them down with an additional 30% saying Maybe, so Blizzard does have a little incentive there to keep twinking happening.Quite interesting -- twinks might be one of the only groups of players who are completely fine with how they're being handled in game. 2.3 obviously gave them lots of new items to play with, and while there is some frustration from other players, Blizzard has made it so easy to level that if you don't want to play with the twinks at 19, you can move on pretty quickly.
GamerDNA and Massively explore Death Knight demographics
Our friends at Massively and GamerDNA are at it again -- they're digging into their database of players, this time to determine some Death Knight demographics. They want to know what kinds of players are picking up the new Hero class. Unfortunately, their sample size is super small -- only 500, according to Sanya Weathers, which seems way too tiny to determine anything about the Death Knight class at large. But we'll go with it anyway, and see what we can get.As you can see above, Blood Elves and Humans dominate the race choice in our little group, which seems about right, considering that those are the two most popular races overall. Death Knight players in this study generally tend to have reported themselves as male in real life. And GamerDNA also lays their Death Knights up against the Bartle test and while WoW players trend pretty well to the norm, Death Knights go way more towards the "Killer" and to a lesser extent the "Explorer" end of the scales.So according to this little survey (and we'll remind you that this is 500 people, so there are plenty of exceptions out there), the average Death Knight is male, chooses whatever race is most familiar to them, and wants to go kill and do damage rather than worry about socializing or achieving. In other words, lots and lots of former Ret Paladins. It'll be interesting to see how this changes over time -- lots of these players are interested in the newest thing, obviously, since they've switched their mains to a new class at the first chance, but as things settle down and more people head back to get new alts, maybe we'll see a different crowd coming out of Acherus.
A walking tour around the Roleplaying realms
Someone named wowgossip on livejournal (though I think her character -- I'm assuming she's a woman, though that might be wrong -- is named Mary Sue, like the lead of so much bad fan fiction) is conducting a pretty exhaustive tour of roleplaying on the servers, both good and bad. As is clearly stated, this is not a review -- it's more of a "state of the game" of Warcraft roleplaying, so the good, the bad, and even the ugly are included. She's already stopped by Argent Dawn, Blackwater Raiders, Earthen Ring, and Moon Guard, and Sisters of Elune.The sights range from the disgusting (you get offered to cyber by just being a lowbie and hanging around Elwynn, apparently), to the boring (there is some really, really bad vampire RP), to the fascinating (some of the character descriptions are very well written, and use some commonplace ingame gear to portray a character's backstory very well). There's no judging involved -- it's basically a (pretty) objective survey of what RP players are doing on RP servers lately. Even if you're not an RPer, it's an interesting read (though some of the images and situations are NSFW, depending on where you work).There's more info in a Q&A on the journal, including a plan to possibly do some group RPing, but just the idea of surveying what's out there is cool. There is so much happening on the realms (in terms of RPing and grouping and PvPing), and even here at WoW insider we can only document so much of it. Definitely cool to get another look inside what players are coming up with (no matter how weird or boring or wild) on the realms.
Loot Council splits your loot up for you
Bonkers of Vek'nilash, creator of the very useful Gear Wishlist that we posted about a while back, has sent along a new site he's been working on called Loot Council. Basically, you throw the names of every character in your instance group into the system along with the name of the instance you're running, and you get a quick list of all the loot available from the instance and which character it's best for, according to class, need, and spec. You can use various rankings for the item, but eventually, all you have to do to determine who needs the item is look it up on the list and then see who has the biggest improvement from what they're wearing.Very useful, though this might not be quite as tough to figure out as getting gear for yourself: in most of my instance runs, it's usually pretty clear who gets/wants what. And if you do happen to be in a PuG where people don't understand why a certain stat is better for one class or spec than another, you're probably not going to get them to open up the webpage and follow what they see there.But for a quick no-brainer loot solution while instancing with a group of friends (especially in 25mans, where it's often tough to see who really needs an upgrade), it seems helpful and works well. Another great app from Bonkers.
Meeting the goal of 100,000 honorable kills
Tipster Tomek sent us a note about his friend Zbijmnie of EU Vek'nilash, to see if, at level 49, he might be one of the lowest level players to every hit the goal of 100,000 honorable kills for the achievement, but after looking around for a bit, I've found the achievement is pretty commonplace. Because the count actually started way back when HKs were first added to the game (and not when achievements were), lots of people have picked up the seemingly gigantic number already. In fact, here's a level 19 who did it right when he logged into the expansion for the first time (which means he had killed 100,000 people even before patch 3.0.2.Which is kind of a shame -- after Gears of War's "Seriously" achievement (to kill 10,000 enemies) was met, they added a "Seriously 2.0" to the sequel (to kill 100,000 enemies), and that one's been met as well.So in retrospect, getting 100,000 HKs isn't too hard -- even if you got one every second, it'd really only take you about a day of playtime, which is probably a lot less than a month of realtime, depending on how long you play for and how good a player you are. Maybe in the next achievement update we'll see a really impossible goal for players to work on: 10 million mobs killed? 10,000 instances run? A million players looted in the battlegrounds? There's got to be something in the game that seems impossible for someone crazy out there to work on.
Slow Fall castable on others in 3.0.8
Christian caught this one in his last Arcane Brilliance column, but I figured the rest of us non-Mages might like to know as well: Slow Fall will be castable on others in patch 3.0.8. Very exciting -- while there are a few other Slow Fall buffs in the game (and lots of parachutes, from all the vehicles in Northrend), now all you need to jump down from a high point in the game is a friendly Mage. We expect to see a nice jump up in the number of Slow Fall videos. Which, come to think of it, we haven't seen that many of lately. Guess the whole "flying mounts" thing has made Slow Falling for long distances not so interesting.And while we're at it, before you say that you need Slow Fall to get the Going Down? achievement, you don't. First of all, it won't work, and secondly, there's a better way to do it: as you've probably heard by now, you can do it just by jumping off of the platform on the Scryers Tier in Shattrath onto the little canopy hanging over from the Lower City below. Everybody has their own place for that, of course, but that's the easiest. Still, it'll be nice to have Slow Fall for everyone -- we can throw it on the list with Levitate as a class ability that's been spread around a bit. Is it still too limited to include in game mechanics? Could we maybe have an instance boss in the future that we fight with while falling down a long mineshaft, or on a falling platform?
Do WoW players make bad employees?
William Dobson over at our sister site Massively.com picked up this story earlier today. A poster on the f13 forums revealed that a corporate recruiter claimed they'd been given specific instructions to not consider World of Warcraft players for jobs. And we're not talking here about people actively playing WoW at work -- just whether the person plays the MMO at all. The theory behind using WoW play as a disqualifier is that WoW players are somehow unable to focus 100% on their day job. There's part of me here that wants to say "screenshots or it didn't happen," since I can't imagine many corporations spending time and effort weeding out WoW players. I could see one or two HR folks preaching "Addiction!" and otherwise chewing on bitter apples. But several companies independently telling that to their recruiting folks, of their own volition and without prompt? I'm not so sure. If this recruiter is being honest with the forum goer, then I'd guess the recruiter her/himself is responsible for the WoW player ban. Of course, that being said, I'll acknowledge this comes after the FCC commissioner claimed WoW can cause college drop outs. Maybe this recruiter happened to be talking to someone who had just heard her speech. But, still, I'm not convinced there's need to be worried about corporate conspiracies looking to pit WoW players into joblessness.
From Outland with gems
Dear players,Things are good back here in Nagrand -- though we don't see anyone but Death Knights coming through nowadays, I often think back to a few years ago when I saw so many of you come through leveling up, just as you are now in Northrend. You were so innocent and naive back then -- you really weren't prepared, at level 66 and 67, still not knowing what treachery Illidan might have planned or what treasure the walls of Tempest Keep might hold. Nowadays, the space inside those walls is empty except for the occasional Death Knight group -- my friend Ghabar up in Stormspire says they see even fewer players than we do here.Even the boys in Halaa say things are slow -- while I'm sure it's a relief not to be under attack every other hour, they come down here to Aeris Landing every once in a while just to pass the time and see what's up. I suppose when the Death Knights are gone, that'll be pretty much the end for us. Oh sure, we'll have the occasional newbie come through (I'll always need Crystal Fragments and Obsidian Warbeads, as long as there are suppliers to buy them -- and there are), but things won't be the same. Maybe I'll even get out of the trading business and take up a profession of my own. I hear Inscription can be fun.Oh, and by the way, it's the first of the month, so I've got your monthly gems sitting here. You may not need them up in Northrend, with your Lich King and your dragons and whatever else you've discovered up there (have you found any Ethereals yet?). But they're here, just like the rest of us, waiting for you. Sigh.Yours,Gezhe at Aeris Landing in Nagrand
Analyst: Wrath will sell five million copies
Here's our first analysis of Wrath sales (actually second, if you count Mike Morhaime's take on the subject): someone thinks it's going to sell big. Gamasutra reports that Mike Hickey of Janco Partners is predicting sales of five million copies for Wrath's first month in stores, which would basically make it the most popular expansion pack of all time. Burning Crusade, a pack that just barely beat out The Sims, sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours, and 3.5 million within the first month, and so Hickey is looking at a little less than double that for the Northrend expansion.Huge numbers indeed, and yet they don't seem that surprising -- WoW's population has grown since Burning Crusade was released for sure, and while pretty much everyone agrees that not all players will be buying the expansion right away (our own informal poll has about 13% of our readers waiting, not to mention all of the players in other markets around the world), but if even 1/4 of WoW's 11 million players decide to pick up the game on launch, we're still looking at 2.75 million copies, more than BC.No matter what, Blizzard will make a lot of money, and very likely break all records anyway next week. Wrath of the Lich King will be huge.[via BigDownload]
World of Warcraft hits 11 million subscribers worldwide
Even in the middle of zombies, nerfs, and Death Knights, World of Warcraft has continued to grow. Blizzard announced today that World of Warcraft has achieved 11 million subscribers. To help with perspective, that's as many people as had been employed by the construction industry last year, or just slightly under the population of Greece. When WoW hit 10 million back in January, Blizzard acknowledged how big the holiday season had been for them. Now consider that we're going into a new holiday season with a brand new expansion on the way. Even if other games are looking to get a piece of the action, we should expect Blizzard to keep steamrolling with their great success. Word of mouth from the recent zombie event might be exciting older players to return, and programs like Recruit-a-Friend will keep growing their active base. We should expect to see the 12 million landmark sometime in 2009. WoW had hit 9 million subscribers back in July of 2007. Like we said, 10 million subscribers was reached in January of 2008. It took a little longer to grow from 10 to 11 than it did to get from 9 to 10, but if they keep up this rate, we should see the 12 million announcement around February or March.
The scourge of the Scourge
Last Saturday on the WoW Insider Show (which you can hear right here, with an embedded mp3 post coming in just a bit), we voiced an opinion about the Scourge Invasion world event that's getting a little lost in the mix: not everyone is having lots of fun with zombies. While I personally love zombies in all their forms (and am thrilled by all the content the event is bringing us, even if it is moving really fast), lots of players out there are logging in to play World of Warcraft, and finding themselves in the middle of World War Z.As we said on the show, Blizzard is making sure that this is an event that everyone feels -- in the past, you could avoid most of the world events just by staying out of certain areas or certain zones. But at the same time, that made some players feel it wasn't immersive enough -- why have a world event if it doesn't affect the whole world? And so this one does -- no matter what level you are or where you play, whether you got eaten by a zombie or downed Tenris Mirkblood, you know that the Lich King is coming. And some folks, who play the game casually or at a low level, just don't care.Update: Well that's timely. In between the time this post was written and planned to go live, Blizzard has decided to cure the plague. Considering that things moved so fast this weekend, that seems premature, but we'll have to see how the event plays out -- Blizzard is of course saying that it's not because of the vocal minority speaking out against the zombie gameplay, but we'll have to see what happens next.
15 Minutes of Fame: Proudmoore guild plays out GLBT pride
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Proudmoore_guild_plays_out_GLBT_pride'; 15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.If you've made even the occasional pass through the Blizzard forums, you're likely to have run up on at least one of the periodic flamefests with players stomping their virtual feetsies and pointing in horror at the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender (GLBT) guilds clustered on the Proudmoore server. Never one to ignore the elephant in the room, we got curious about what these guilds are all about and how they ended up on Proudmoore.Our interview with Venfelder, a long-time member from the rank and file of Taint, paints a picture of a mature, friendly, open community of players making the most of WoW's many opportunities for raiding, PvPing and just plain hanging out together.
