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The Queue: Going to a party party
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Michael Sacco will be your host today. It's my little brother's birthday today -- fourteen years old, what the heck -- so today's Queue is quick and dirty so I can get the caking and presenting done. Lochlorien asked... Will we be able to wield Frostmourne after we defeat Arthas? Nope, the developers opted not to make Frostmourne an equippable weapon, replacing it as the Icecrown legendary weapon with Shadowmourne.
CCP Games alters plans for EVE's capital ships in Dominion expansion
The EVE Online developers have announced that some of their proposed changes to capital ships will not deploy with the Dominion expansion as originally planned. This may come as good news to some of EVE's supercarrier (formerly "mothership") pilots who've expressed no small amount of dissatisfaction at how their ships were slated to be changed. With the supercarrier changes not going through, this also means that the fighter bombers -- anti-capital ship drones intended to bathe EVE's largest ships in waves of torpedo explosions -- will not arrive on December 1 with Dominion. Changes to other capital ship weapons systems like XL Turrets, however, are another matter entirely. They're discussed at length in a dev blog from CCP Nozh titled "Capital Ships in Dominion" as are the new Citadel Cruise Missile Launchers intended to be a long range weapon system.
Major rebalance of capital ships coming to EVE Online in Dominion expansion
There are few things in EVE Online which provoke more outrage among the playerbase than capital ship nerfs. These multi-billion ISK behemoths aren't just an investment in terms of currency -- being able to pilot a capital ship effectively is a time investment as well, given EVE's real time skill training system. The writing's been on the wall for a long time though. Considering the sheer numbers of capital ships being fielded in the game, some changes might just be a good thing for EVE Online. EVE developer CCP Abathur's dev blog "Dominion - The Capital Battlefield" frames the current state of capital ship warfare with a look at how dreadnaughts and carriers entered the game, and how over time their significance was eclipsed by supercarriers like motherships and titans. The big announcements are the changes being made to the various classes of capital ships in EVE, and Abathur walks us through the boosts and nerfs that will soon affect the game's numerous capital ship pilots in the Dominion expansion.
Abyssal Maw Cataclysm zone preview posted to the official site
We've all been waiting with bated breath since BlizzCon in hopes of getting more solid news about the expansion, and today, it seems like we've started getting it. Blizzard has updated the official Cataclysm site with some screen shots and lore information of one of the new areas of the expansion, the Abyssal Maw.The Abyssal Maw is the elemental plane of water, one of the four such planes created by the Titans to contain the elemental servants of the Old Gods so that their own creations could thrive on Azeroth. Deathwing's prison break will break the walls between the elemental planes and Azeroth, with the Abyssal Maw being no exception.
EVE Online gets rework of 'Destiny' simulation engine
EVE Online is notable among the MMO titles on the market for having a game with a single shard setting. Whether you're an industrialist mass producing exhumers or fighting in fleet battles for a large 0.0 PvP alliance, you're active in the same setting rather than shards. Keeping as many as 50,000 concurrent users active in one vast galaxy has been a challenge for CCP Games, and of course there have been numerous growing pains along the way. Namely, something called "desync". Desync has been a catch-all term to describe the various things that can go wrong during gameplay, but in short it's been something that has plagued a number of EVE's subscribers. In the words of EVE Software Engineer CCP GingerDude, desync is "the situation where the server and client disagree on the position of an object in space at a given time." Although it's been an issue for years, the problem has just recently been solved, according to CCP GingerDude's dev blog "Facing Destiny".
Ask a Lore Nerd: Looking to the future
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.This week I have a special request: I want any questions you might have about potential future expansions. Any questions at all are welcome, but I'm on a speculation kick recently, so next week's column will probably focus on the future and then we'lll be back to our regular deal after that. So no matter whether you think the Maelstrom could be next or something else entirely, ask!Mark asked..."Any chance that the Vrykul will be a playable race in a future expansion?"
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Scribe
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-sixth in a series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay various aspects of the lore and gaming elements of WoW. What is inscription anyways? I mean, we all know that it's the newest profession, added in Wrath of the Lich King, and it lets you make these "glyphs" which allow you to modify or improve your various class abilities in interesting ways. In gaming terms all that makes perfect sense, but when it comes to telling a story with your character, there are a lot of details missing. Technically, a glyph is a character or symbol, like a heiroglyph or a pictograph, which we can see to a certain extent when we click on the glyph and put it into our in-game glyph interface -- it looks pretty cool with all those circles and lines and stuff. But what does it really mean? Are you pasting these symbols into a book of some sort? Are they getting magically tattooed onto your skin somewhere? And where did inscription come from to begin with? Has it been around in Azeroth all along somehow, or was it some sort of ancient knowledge only discovered recently, around the time in the Warcraft lore when the Wrath of the Lich King begins? If it was discovered, then who discovered it and how? How exactly does a scribe learn these glyphs? Does he or she pore over ancient tomes that haven't been read in thousands of years, trying to decipher ancient texts? Or is the art and magic of it more in the artistic calligraphy of it rather than any difficulty in discovering or interpreting the symbols themselves? There are far more questions than answers when it comes to roleplaying a scribe, and to a large extent each roleplayer is free to choose his or her own approach. What follows is the just one suggestion as to how you might work out a plausible solution -- please feel free to read it and improve upon it in whatever way you like.
Has EVE's most powerful alliance fallen?
Band of Brothers (renamed KenZoku) was once the most powerful alliance in EVE Online with a stated goal, even here at Massively, to control all of the game's New Eden galaxy. Now, KenZoku has reportedly left the contested, lawless frontier of 0.0 space after months of resisting the combined forces of rival alliances. One of EVE's in-game journalists, Interstellar Correspondent ISD Clarity Brown, reports from the site of KenZoku's last holdout: "GoonSwarm and their allies deployed a camp on KenZoku's sole remaining outpost last night. A joint force of pilots from Pandemic Legion, GoonSwarm, Morsus Mihi, Razor Alliance and KIA deployed 27 titans around the station in a show of force and gave a demonstration of the sheer power embodied in such a gang." Titans are the game's most expensive weapons of mass destruction, massive ships capable of unleashing 'Doomsday' area-of-effect attacks that melt fleets caught in the blast. To unleash 27 Doomsday blasts at once is... quite a sight, as the video footage demonstrates.
The Queue: All your fault
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.You know, I was getting bored of that whole musical intro thing, but having it around certainly made these preambles easier to write. What do you write here every day about a daily Q&A column? Guess what, guys! We're A'ing more Qs! Shock! Awe!So you've broken me. Congratulations. I am now a hollow husk of a man that can do nothing but uphold the status quo. I hope you're proud of yourselves. Here it goes again. WootZoot asked... "Any word on if Blizzard is working on a new novel or RPG book?"
The Daily Grind: Is lore important to you?
Lore is the keystone of every good MMO, it crafts the raid instances and pushes the game to new heights in the form of expansions and patches. For many it is the lure of the lore -- and by extension the playable races -- which pulls them into the game. When I was a little younger than I am now, I studied classics and religious studies and theology at a uni in London for almost four years. I dig religion, I adore translations of ancient texts and I really, really like mythology. As a result fantasy games are especially fascinating for me to me. When everyone else sees Titans, I see a mishmash of the actual Titans and the Olympians given new life, where you see Anubisath I see the ancient Egyptian protector of the dead. Where you see Val'kyr, I see Odin's barmaidens. So come on readers, how important is lore to you? Do you dig finding all the references in game? Does the lore make a game more rich and appealing? Does it make it feel more real? Do you not give a fig? Are you more interested in just killing things? Do you play titles like AoC or LotRO just because of the books they were inspired by?
The Lore of Ulduar
One of the things I really love about Ulduar is how interconnected it is to the lore of older Azerothian instances and new Wrath content like the Storm Peaks. (I have no idea who that mermaid is, though.) If you ran Uldaman back in the day, or even as you leveled characters more recently, you got to see a smashed, ruined installation of the Titans with lore characters like Ironaya and Archaedas (both of whom even have nice little shout outs in the Ulduar-10 loot table) and got a nice dose of the backstory for the creation of Azeroth. I think it was my lovely and talented wife who pointed out that Ulduar references lore from Ashenvale (the Master's Glaive), the Badlands (Uldaman itself), even Ahn'Qiraj and all of that lore is not just evident in the massive construction of Ulduar (you could even call it titanic, if you wanted a lot of people to groan at you) but in the sheer scale of bosses available. Only Naxxramas has more, and Ulduar has the edge in that several of its boss encounters have hard modes as well. Ulduar also does a really excellent job of making you part of the lore of the place. If you leveled through the Storm Peaks, you most likely took part in the extended and rewarding quest chains that allowed you to interact with the Sons of Hodir, took part in the Hyldsmeet, and eventually raided the Halls of Lightning themselves to slay the Prime Designate himself. I'm trying really hard not to spoil anything, so suffice it to say that if you played through all of that content, you are directly responsible not only for the presence of one of the watchers within Ulduar itself, but for the potential upcoming end of the world. I find that to be rather motivating for going into the place, and they did a really excellent job of tying it all together.
The Daily Quest: Of Titans and Moonkin
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Lorecrafted asks an important question: What came first, the Titans or the egg? Wait, I meant Old Gods. Titans or Old Gods. World of Matticus's Sydera takes a close look at healing through Freya in Ulduar. As always, a great resource for healers of all flavors. Sacred Duty is making the most out of Mining in Icecrown, and they're willing to show you how, too! The Druid Team goes where many have hoped someone would've gone before: Balance Druid spell rotations. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
Ulduar maps aplenty
Haven't loaded up the PTR and gone to check out Ulduar for yourself yet? The good news is you've got lots of ways to see it online -- in map form. Reader Evan B sent us the version in the picture to the right (click it for the full version, and it's big) -- he cut and pasted together the in-game map screenshots to make up a to-scale version of what the instance looks like. Our friend Stompalina also has a version, cut together from what looks like the minimap ingame, so you can get a little clearer idea of what the textures look like in each section of the instance.And StratFu sent us an interactive map of the Titan city, with hover-over tooltips on each boss and click-through information for what we'll face inside. Strategies are still being fleshed out completely (and remember, this is the PTR, so everything is subject to change). But if you're looking for as much info as possible on what's waiting for you inside the brand new raid of Ulduar in patch 3.1, there's lots of places for you to find it.
Ask a Lore Nerd: It's the end of the world as we know it
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.Good morning, everyone! My apologies for missing last week's Ask a Lore Nerd, I am apparently very, very bad at time management and I lost track of things while trying to finish furnishing my apartment. We're back in action this week though, so it's all good!Before we get started, I also wanted to remind people that Tokyopop is letting us read Warcraft: Legends for free until the 17th. I know Daniel mentioned it already this morning, but seeing as this is the lore column of the day, I just wanted to mention it again. Just imagine me as the hammer trying to drive this nail into your head. You can read it for free. And now we get the show on the road!naixdra asked...Why do the Orcs call Draenor, Draenor? Didn't the Draenei show up out of nowhere and call it that, so why would the native Orcs adopt the name given to it by outsiders (and still refer to it after their attempted annihilation of said outsiders)?
Ulduar on the Patch 3.1 PTR: The Flame Leviathan
The developers sent us for a bit of a loop today, putting an Ulduar boss up for testing with very little notice immediately after PTR maintenance. Matticus, ever reliable, threw together a quick 10-man raid and welcomed me along to try out the Flame Leviathan. Unfortunately, Michael Sacco (who walked you through Hodir and the Iron Council) wasn't able to go with us this time around. I think he did it on purpose so I couldn't make any jokes about his inability to perform, if you know what I mean.The Flame Leviathan is the boss (or one of the bosses) that uses siege vehicles in its encounter in the outdoors portion of Ulduar. For the safety of those that do not wish to be spoiled on anything Ulduar related, I'll put all information on the encounter beneath the cut below.Again, if you do not want to be spoiled, do not click the link below.
Sneak peek at World of Warcraft comic issue 16
The official WoW website has put up a preview for issue 16 of the World of Warcraft comic. I have to say, this one doesn't look nearly as facepalm inducing as the last few. In fact, aside from a few art oddities (did Valeera just trip up there?), it looks like a pretty good start for this arc.It looks like this arc is not only focused on Garona's half human, quarter orc, quarter draenei son, but a few other things, too. It looks like this arc will focus somewhat on Fandral Staghelm and the state of Teldrassil, what's happened to Ahn'qiraj since we were there last and potentially the relationship between King Varian and Valeera. To avoid spoilers, I'll stick a few more things behind the cut below.
CCP Games releases findings on EVE starbase exploit investigation
The EVE Online starbase exploit revealed in December has had a far-reaching impact on the game. Certain player-owned starbases in EVE were producing valuable, high-end materials that they shouldn't have been. Once a group of players picked up on this, they exploited the game on a massive scale, resulting in trillions of ISK (Interstellar Kredits, the game's virtual currency) that never should have existed being injected into the game. To date, this is the largest economic manipulation (via an exploit) ever revealed in EVE Online. The starbase exploit was the first of several player-triggered drama bombs that hit the game in recent weeks, and resulted in a substantial amount of (in-game) market turmoil and player outcry over the issue. The game's subscribers wanted openness on the matter from EVE's developer, CCP Games, and they've certainly got that as of today. CCP Games posted the results of the exploit investigation, and the caveat "be careful what you wish for" may apply here, given the depth and complexity of the findings conveyed to the playerbase in today's dev blog, "War Makes Thieves and Peace Hangs Them."
Ask a Lore Nerd: Demons rule, naga drool
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.Just as a warning, today's Ask a Lore Nerd has a couple of spoilers for Wrath content. At this point, I assume that light Northrend spoilers isn't going to scare people off, but I figure I should mention it anyway. It's nothing major, so you won't ruin your experience by reading it anyway. Let's dig in!Tarean asked...Blizzard's said that there's enough material for plenty of more expansions after Wrath of the Lich King, and there's plenty of possibilities, but what expansion should come next lore-wise?
Know Your Lore: The Sons of Hodir
Welcome to Know Your Lore, where each week Alex Ziebart brings you a tasty little morsel of lore to wrap your mind around. Sweet, sweet lore. Mmmm. Have suggestions for future KYL topics? Leave a comment below! This week, the role of Alex Ziebart will be played by Matthew Rossi.Hi. You may remember me from not finishing the KYL on Thrall. Well, since this week our Alex Ziebart has to take a small breather, I'm filling in for him as part of our "Hey, I finished that post you didn't so you owe me, and also the pictures are back from the developer and I'd hate to have to post them to the website" arrangement. Alex informed me as he handed over the package in that park, just before my trained snipers totally failed me, that this week would be discussing the Sons of Hodir from a lore perspective. Since until such time as Agent Deathwolf tracks him down and retrieves the microfilm I have no choice, that will be the topic of today's post.Since I happen to be exalted twice with these guys, it seems a fair enough question to ask who they are and where they come from. So far, we have fragments of the story, but not the whole picture as yet. If it even needs to be said at this late point, I will be dropping spoilers for Storm Peaks quests like they were remarkably heavy antiques that you asked me to help you move into your new apartment on the 17th floor and I wanted to make sure you never asked again.
Ask a Lore Nerd: All about dragons
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.The last Ask a Lore Nerd brought a whole load of Dragon-related questions, likely a result of the huge amounts of Dragon lore we've been given in Wrath of the Lich King. So today, we're going purely Dragon themed, and I'll be hitting a few of the bigger questions. Let's get started! Ves asked...Who are all these humanoids aiding the blue dragonflight? I did the quest where you find out one of them was a Troll forced to work for them under the threat of harm for his family, and I assume some of them are blue dragons taking human form becuase sometimes blowing up the world requires opposable thumbs, but surely they can't all be either dragons or slaves.
