World of Warcraft
Monumentally popular Fantasy MMORPG from Blizzard Entertainment
Old news now, of course, in this whirling helter-skelter of Information Superhighways and what not:
Slashdot: eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life
All quite complicated, and still on-going I think, but the basic gist of it is that the megalithic online car-boot sale that is eBay, has decided that it wants nothing more to do with the mind-wrenching conceptual hijinks that is Online Virtual Asset Ownership, and have decided to just pull the lot. Including imaginary stuff from Ultima Online, which is actually allowed to be traded in this manner, and yet not including imaginary stuff from Second Life...
Winnaaaah!
Pro G: French WoW Player Reaches Level 70 in 28 Hours (via MMOG Nation)
Good grief! Something of a study in obsession, Monsiuer Gullerbone there took the rest of his guild out to the Outlands, and in a feat of determination as much impressive as it is frightening, organised a 28 hour marathon, with rotas, a shift system and some highly dubious use of the Mage's AOE spells 'tagging' monsters around him that were then taken down by his guild chums, and has finished in just over a day, what Blizzard were probably hoping would take a month or two at...
Hot on the heels of their recent announcement of 7.5 million accounts, and just when I was starting to feel left out:
Dear Adventurer,
While u've been away, something monumental has been happening, yaddah yaddah, Burning Legion, yaddah yaddah, Outlands, yaddah yaddah, Hawt Horde ElfSecks, yaddah yaddah truly horrific attunement path, yaddah yaddah, Ponies, but Flying! yaddah yaddah, avoid crushing the servers by resubscribing today!, yaddah yaddah, jewelcrafting, yaddah yaddah, click here to automatically be billed!
Luv, Blizz!
=^.^=
Aww, I feel special now. My name is Van Hemlock, and I ... am actually quite indifferent about The Burning Crusade. Gosh, that feels so much...
Not something I do often, but...
Tobold's MMORPG Blog: Dear Mr. Aaron R. Conklin
I've always had a great deal of respect for Tobold, and indeed would probably have to cite his blog as the initial, and ongoing, inspiration for my own. His engaging style, wide ranging and varied focus, and incisive insight make for a regular and required addition to the old RSS reader, and indeed read like articles one would expect from someone whose job is to write about MMOs for a living. This Aaron Conklin chap on the other hand...
Leaving aside for the moment the inherent doom attendant...
Well, exhibiting typical self-control, I caved in like a badly timed soufflé and got myself the currently available Everquest II expansion meal-deal – the original game, Desert of Flames, Kingdom of Sky and the new fellah, Echoes of Faydwer, all in one handy box. (Thanks for the heads-up, Zygwen!). SOE have always been prolific with expansions, far more so than any other online gaming company, and while this can be a good thing overall, it does present a bit of a barrier to entry for new folks further down the line: at new player starting EQ1 now, is going to...
Since I’m in danger of falling below my Federally Mandated World of Warcraft Ramblings Quota, I grabbed this, via Virgin Worlds:
World of Warcraft: Game Statistics
Proving that the folks at Blizzard have much better things to do with their time than, say, make The Burning Crusade ready, playable and released, they bring us this invaluable reference page. I don't even play anymore, but I love stats – the numbers keep me warm on cold empty nights, so lets have a looksee:
Most Auctioned Item: Runecloth
No big surprise there then – it’s the top-end humanoid common-drop, and essential for tailors, bandages for everyone...
I find myself at something of a crossroads at the moment, regarding matters MMO. This current malaise seems to have been largely caused by me recently winning of World of Warcraft. An arbitrary thing, I know - just a number, but more importantly, I’m now at the point where most of the interesting and varied solo content options are running out, to be replaced by endless repeatable "Kill 100x [L58-60 TrashMob], Gain 10 Faction Points" type open-ended blue-question-mark types of work, and of course the nightmarish prospect of 5-Man L60 Instance Pick Up Grouping. (Which I'd have to massively, and...
I really don’t get Halloween. To me, in the UK, it’s always seemed a rather lacklustre and unremarkable affair, primarily manifested by the necessity to hide, in one’s own home, so that the roving gangs of 13-17 year old juvenile delinquent thugs think that you’re out, and move on to demand money with menaces…err…'Trick or Treat' elsewhere. At least at Christmas they have to sing a bit first. Humbug indeed!
In MMO-land however, it’s a much grander affair, and curiously, usually seems more meticulously and lavishly observed than anything Dec 25th has to offer. I can only imagine that this is...
I won!
The end, when it came, was a rather subtle and anticlimactic affair, which in itself was not altogether unexpected. A few days recent minor illness saw me at home, with time on my hands, time which I spent at least partly in World of Warcraft, making that last big push on Level 60. I was just handing in a quest to the night elf commander chap at Cenarion Hold in Silithus, when I dinged for the final time. Huzzah!
Of course many players would maintain that in World of Warcraft, life begins at 60, and now the game opens up...
A thoroughly enjoyable session in World of Warcraft last night, largely consisting of two halves.
First was a fling in Alterac Valley. I quite enjoy it actually, being something of an RPG Planetside map of sorts. Having been in there a few more times, I begin to see what Blizzard were trying to do there, which is basically create a game of Warcraft III, but with players as individual units. A fun idea, but of course, without a Big Hand In The Sky telling each of us what to do, where to go and what abilites to use, the thing can’t...
Those funny little orcs in the wolf-skull hats and white and blue outfits were loitering outside the bank in Orgrimmar again. You sort of take these NPCs for granted after a while, but I suddenly realised the other night that one of them had a yellow exclamation mark over her head. I’ve been L50 or above for quite some time, but never really thought about the Alterac Valley Battleground as something for me, being a 40v40 raid PvP battlezone. I’d always thought of it as a kind of Molten Core for the Bloodthirsty, and dismissed it out of hand.
Anyway, figuring...
And so I wandered the Wilderness, the blasted dry lands of My Own Hard Disk. Entering my second month without internet access, and well past the longest period I’ve gone without since sometime back in 1999, I looked for substitutes. Offline gaming is all very well, and a good way to pass the time, but there is something indefinable about the MMO that draws at me. So I started looking into emulators again.
Pretty much every MMO out there has at least one half-arsed emulator project on the go, unrealistically optimistic attempts to create an alternative server application to power the...
I accidentally fell out of World of Warcraft the other day. It was an unfortunate combination of apathy, fatigue, annoyance, and a bizarre billing muck-up that got me this time. In the UK, we have a payment system called ‘Switch’, which is basically like a credit card, but much less irresponsible, as it pays direct form your own bank account, rather than turning into the potential landmine of an high interest loan. I prefer it, but very few online games allow payments in this manner, being mostly US-run affairs.
World of Warcraft does offer it’s UK players this option, but...
You know it’s news when the BBC have it on the Real People News Website:
BBC News: Gay Rights Win in Warcraft World
This had been bubbling along on the more esoteric gaming sites for a while, the chiefest of which had culminated in an open letter to Blizzard at the Terranova site, but many community sources seem to have kicked up a fuss over it all. The basics seem to be that a member of a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual (GLBT) Friendly guild used the General Chat to air some recruiting spam, and then found herself being warned by GMs...
World of Warcraft news here:
Slashdot: New World of Warcraft Raid Dungeon
In short, a new really HUGE, really HARD 40-man mega-raid zone with AT LEAST 18 bosses, and MORE phat lootz. And my server hasn’t even finished scouring for Peaceblooms to get the previous one open yet!
The accompanying quotes do seem to suggest that Blizzard’s position on future content is clear; 40-up and Raid, or start a new character, which seems like a bit of a middle-finger to the great many players clamouring for something to do post-60 that doesn’t involve 39 other half-way competent idiots, and I do begin to...
Ha…that didn’t take nearly as long as the event designers planned, I bet. Never under-estimate the power of the catass!
AFK Gamer: Medivh Wins World of Warcraft!
Foton has the details, but basically, Medivh server has farmed its way to victory, completing the big server resource hunt event. Predictably enough, every one on the other servers all went to have a look, causing server overloading, and requiring GM intervention and a ban on new characters. And there wasn’t anything to see anyway – there’s a five day buffer on the thing actually happening – a thinly disguised attempt to let everyone else...
Big World of Warcraft weekend, what with the big new patch and all; The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj. Now I don’t know what it’s like over in the Colonies, but back in the Old World, the main feature this patch seems to have added is massive server overcrowding and hardware failures, with almost all of the established European English servers reporting ‘Full’, and as a result, the few newer servers suddenly gaining huge login queues, as we the addicted seek our fix as newbies on temporary servers.
I did the same, unable to get at my usual character (L49 Troll Warrior) on...
Well, with that many days off work, the psychotic episode was somewhat inevitable, thinking about it. A generally lazy demeanour, coupled with a lack of routine, conspired to turn me firstly nocturnal, and then make me sleep only one night in two, so to fill the time, I’ve been back to work in World of Warcraft mostly, and I’m really quite surprised how accessible the game still is.
Most MMOs seem to have two parts:
The Casual Newbie Friendly Start Game: This consists of character creation, the tutorial island/space station/holothingey/dungeon, the initial city and environs, the first dabbling recipes of tradeskill, and...
Am I the only one beginning to worry at this point?:
Gamasutra: Blizzard Announces 5 Million WoW Subscribers
Sort of reminds me of the plot for a bad ‘got nuthin’ week on a long-running sci-fi serial. Wedged in between a thinly masked tale about how exploiting indigenous people is Bad Thing, and an episode where an Main Character learns Something Important about Themselves, there will be a silly episode where one of the comedy side-characters finds, or makes, a really cool thing that grows really fast, and it isn’t until it’s almost too late that they realise it won’t stop growing. Hilarity...
Been a while since we’ve seen one of these:
Slashdot: Blizzard Sued for Death of Gamer
It seems a 13yr old Chinese kid jumped to his death re-enacting a scene from World of Warcraft. It’s amazing what they can determine with forensic pathology nowadays.
I think I actually did that quest once – a Spiritual Tauren Shaman chap in a cave in Thousand Needles, The Weathered Nook, who sets you a series of quests involving various aspects of spirituality; the test of strength, the test of endurance, etc. Quite a nicely storied mini adventure, and I quite liked it. Presumably, the Alliance...
Well, seems like the Warcraftosphere is alive with bits of expansion news, following the ‘Blizzcon’ event, the chiefest of which seems the confirmation of the ‘Blood Elves’ as new Horde race. General opinion seems to be that of disappointment as far as I can tell, a sentiment I share. I mean really – Caucasian-Textured Night Elves? That all ya got?
I always got the impression that on the whole, the Horde was the side to pick for players who don’t take themselves too seriously. “We come from the Orrrrrrrcs, we eat with spoons and forrrrrrrrks, we love to eat our...
I’m a Farmer! Gah, it sounds so sleazy when I write it down like this, but I can think of no other way to describe it. It’s a familiar tale, of course; the happy-go lucky Adventurer races through World of Warcraft, almost incidentally earning enough pretend money to cover the costs of skill training, maybe buy a few nice shineys to help with viability, and then level 40 turns up and bam! A bill for a horse and skill to ride it, totalling 90g.
Forewarned is forearmed though, and having seen so many blogs go on about it already, I know...
Ha! There ya go...
WoW Wiki: Instance Grouping Guide
Extremely detailed, and very comprehensive. There are no more excuses! Read! Learn! Improve!
Well, after yesterday’s concerto for the smallest violin in the world, a happy tale of things gone right. Scarlet Monastery again, which I’m learning actually consists of four separate sub-instances, each with a boss at the end. The line up: Me (Warrior), another Warrior, a Warlock, and…get this…TWO Priests! As you can imagine, I felt somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing as we sallied forth this time.
It went well – I was main tank, which is just as well. I have absolutely no experience as secondary tank, and haven’t a clue what is involved – keeping an eye on...
Ah, here we go:
Warcraft Realms: Server Stats, All Servers
Well that explains a lot, in particular why so many of my pickup instance groups have three Tanks, a Mage and a Hunter if I'm lucky, and NO HEALER! According to the charts for my server, there are only 49 Horde Priests, and 62 Horde Druids with five levels of me, and how many of those are actually online, available, have even heard of a Meeting Stone, and not busy being desparately twinked and powerlevelled by the other 60s in their guild, is anyone's guess. Meanwhile there are 123 Warriors, who all...
Well I’m sure you’re all dying to know how I’m getting on with this whole beating-other-people-to-death for points thing, and the first week’s results are in! I’m a Scout! I get a neat red tabard with a Horde symbol on it. I don’t wear it much, as I end up wearing my Amazing Technicolor Guildtabard mostly instead, but that isn’t really the point (and another story). I also get the word ‘Scout’ appended to the usual floatey name above my head that keeps following me about, so everyone can be impressed and intimidated in equal parts, by my presence. In...
Flush with not humiliating myself (or having it done for me) in Warsong Gulch, the next stop was The Crossroads in The Barrens. The Crossroads is a small walled village in the middle of the main Horde L10-20 development levelling zone, The Barrens. Most Horde players will spend a good week or so here in their early days, and The Crossroads is their main goods and services hub for the essentials, and loot selling. It also occupies a key point at the centre of the Wyvern air travel routes to the further away and higher level zones. This means that...
So, as promised, I spent a lot of the weekend throwing myself into the fray of World of Warcraft PvP, (and indeed, threw myself into the fray of Fray Island at one point, but that’s another story,) and you know what? It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. I guess a lot of my problem is with Rallos Zek induced psychological scarring. The kind of post-traumatic stress disorder you could pick up there doesn’t go away, instead colouring your perceptions of all online games, and the people who play them, hence my unrelentingly bitter style. On the whole, I’m...
Life continues to be interesting in World of Warcraft, and progress is steady. Most remarkable of all, my usual Level-Buddy is still actually my level, which is quite a departure from the norm in my experience. We’re approaching 30, which I realise is not an especially arduous feat, but the options for different sorts of evenings online are continuing to open up.
There is the bread and butter of course; the thousands of solo quests available, and one thing I’m having trouble coping with is that I don’t have to do them all. I’m usually quite obsessive about the Quest Journal,...
My latest World of Warcraft incarnation is as a Hordeling, mostly because I’ve done much of the lowbie Alliance questing twice before and fancied a change or scene and most importantly didn’t really want to do all the Westfall Defias stuff again; it probably loses its charm the third time in fairly quick succession.
I’m almost certain that the Horde wasn’t designed as the obviously ‘Evil’ team, but I suspect a great many players choose to see it that way, as on the whole, the Alliance towns and villages seem to be much busier than the Horde ones. Oggrimar, the Horde...
I probably owe Tanks an apology, particularly World of Warcraft ones. I’ve recently started another character, primarily for the reasons in the previous post, and this time it’s a Warrior, chosen partly because I wanted to put my feet up a bit, and partly because having been on the Healer end of the Tank-Healer relationship, I felt it would be helpful to understand exactly what Warriors can and can’t do.
I think that’s possibly the best way to become a good pick-up group member; proverbially walking a mile in another man’s shoes. Often that mile is enough to get a...
Regular readers will by now know that Van Hemlock is a very solo-friendly website, and whines about Enforced Grouping any chance it gets; mostly because of stuff like this:
Van Hemlock: Another Typical Day At The Office
So having heard how solo-friendly World of Warcraft also is, I was already looking forward to getting stuck in. I did my homework and decided, on the basis of previous experience, on a pet-class, to further remove any need for human interaction from my massively multiplayer online experience. Hunter or Warlock. I picked Warlock in the end, mostly because Gnomes are cool, but unable to...
To be honest, at this stage there doesn’t really seem a lot of point reviewing World of Warcraft. It’s all been said, by everyone and often. That just leaves me with self-indulgent subjective ramblings – my own personal World of Warcraft. Still, I’m fine with that if you are.
Having said that, I am actually quite glad to have been so late in getting on the Deeprun Tram of Popular Gaming for a change. Almost without exception, any MMO in which I’ve in the first landing craft onto the beach, has not been pretty, so turning up this late, I...
I’ve decided that there’s one thing I really can’t stand in an online game, more than PK Greifers, Exploiters, Trade Spammers, Ninja Looters and Random Drive-By Guild Recruiters, it’s Attention Whores, and boy did I hit the jackpot last night, in World of Warcraft.
Warcraft is quite fascinating for me right now. I’d thought that pretty much everyone else on the Interweb had comprehensively Been There and Done That with the game by now, and that turning up as unfashionably late as I have, there would be not a lot left for me – just a novel, but mostly empty world...
Interesting link, if you're into Virtual Economics:
Terra Nova: WoW Market Scoop
Terra Nova is a bloggey-type site with people who over-analyse MMORPG even more than me! I think if I spent less time writing about games, and more playing them, I might actually get somewhere in one.
For many online gamers though, the business of imaginary money can be brutally serious, and with the 'Bureau De Change' that is E-bay, the dividing line between pretend money and real money becomes clouded.
I could wax on at length about the perils of inflation, the dynamics of pretend trade skills and the laws of supply...