Posted on April 29th, 2009 by admin
Just a quick word of congrats tonight to our friends the moderators of the WoW Ladies Livejournal group — their community has been spotlighted over on the Livejournal front page. Definitely some well-deserved recognition for one of the best sub-communities in World of Warcraft.
The mods over there are ready to deal with the exposure, too — though you can see over in this thread that they’re a little “dazzled” by all of the new traffic, they’ve (as usual) got things well in wow goldhand. They’ve created a series of “Master Posts” to keep overflow on the channel to a minimum, and as you can see from their main page, they’re taking the growth right in stride, still showing all kinds of interesting viewpoints on the game from their various posters.
The WoW community is a gigantic one, but it’s all of the little interrelated communities within it (from us here at WoW Insider to the theorycrafters on Elitist Jerks to all of the hundreds of WoW player blogs, each with their own little voice and insight) that really make it such a
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Posted on April 28th, 2009 by admin
Last night I was flying down to Un’Goro to do the Hard Boiled Noblegarden achievement. Long flights get me thinking, at least they did until I installed the Bejeweled addon. World of Warcraft has changed so much since I started playing and 3.1 has brought some of the most interesting changes: dual specs, the hearthstone timer nerf.
Now as I was flying, my guild whispered me asking for my aid in Naxx 10. Fortunately they could summon me but it reminded me of one of the biggest problems with flying in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, you can’t get off a bird. Yes I know you can log out and then log back in to be deposited at the next flight point but it’s hardly ideal if you need to get off right now.
Since I first started playing, I’ve wondered why Blizzard don’t implement a handy eject button that you could use when on long flights. You could be thrown from the back of your gryphon or wind rider and gently parachute to the ground. Alternatively they could just allow you to hearthstone while flying. But I digress. Readers, I want to know if you could add one
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Posted on April 27th, 2009 by admin
I’ve been looking at the Noblegarden items for awhile now, since they first showed up on the PTR. For some reason, it never hit me until I saw it on live realms how cool one item in particular actually is. For five chocolates you can buy your own Noblegarden Egg, which allows you to lay a Brightly Colored Egg. Yes, that’s five eggs for one egg of your own, which is a pretty horrible exchange rate.
What’s so cool about it? They’re the exact same eggs you’ve been picking up that whole time, except that you can set them out. You can loot them right away for an added chance of whatever loot may be in them, but I’m not sure why you’d do that, except for possibly completing Dressed for the Occasion/Sunday’s Finest. What makes it better is that other people can loot them.
What makes that so great? If you can get an organized crew (and their alts) together, you can set up your own Noblegarden Hunt for your guild or your friends and family. Laying an egg has a 1 hour cooldown, so each of you will only be able to set out one egg each, but with a
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Posted on April 26th, 2009 by admin
Each week Arcane Brilliance sits around, thinking of things to put in this opening paragraph. Arcane Brilliance considers many things. Then Arcane Brilliance usually ends up going for the easy Warlock joke, because let’s face it, Warlocks are pretty low-hanging fruit, and Arcane Brilliance is lazy.
Of all the new stuff patch 3.1 brought us, perhaps this single most significant change was the addition of dual specs. Suddenly everybody and their second cousins wow goldcan tank (or think they can tank), and every Druid/Paladin/Shaman has a resto/holy spec waiting in the wings. Everybody rolls on everything in every dungeon because they’re “gearing up for their second spec”…or third spec…or whatever.
Mages don’t have multiple roles to fill. We can’t use our second talent spec slot for a tank or healer build. Our choices are and always have been DPS or DPS, just as God intended. And so, the advent of dual specs have instead opened up a different kind of door for a lot of Mages: PvP.
For the first time, we can keep our mana-efficient, DPS-maximized
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Posted on April 24th, 2009 by admin
I like Ulduar, I really do. I mean, the place is huge. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a raid so massive. While it has about the same number of bosses as Naxxramas or Karazhan, give or take a few, the scale of Ulduar really dwarfs me. The very first encounter is epic — it feels like some sort of Mad Max sequence, with throngs of enemies rushing at you. Despite my misgivings about vehicle fights, I thought the concourse to Flame Leviathan was a lot of fun. I think Blizzard outdid themselves with the scope of the zone. When they say that Titans built the place, you see and feel it.
Sometimes the game really makes me feel small. Flying over Storm Peaks gives me a rush and a feeling of grandeur — the mountains are so high! When I head over to Icecrown, the armies of undead can be truly intimidating, and it provides but a glimpse of the promise of Icecrown. When I first entered Hellfire Peninsula back when the Burning Crusade launched, it felt truly epic because I’d never seen anything so vast before. And who didn’t shudder at the first sight of a Fel Reaver?
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Posted on April 15th, 2009 by admin
In the second of our two exlusive interviews, we sat down with Dan Jolley, the writer behind TOKYOPOP’s latest Warcraft manga, Warcraft: Death Knight, which is due out later this year. You can also read our interview with TOKYOPOP Series Editor Troy Lewter here.
WoW Insider: How did you get involved with the Warcraft manga?
Dan Jolley: I’ve been writing for TOKYOPOP for a number of years now, and when I heard they were going to do Warcraft manga, I called them up and basically did the long-distance, over-the-phone equivalent of jumping up and down and holding my breath until they agreed to let me write some of them. (Tantrums aside, I think I’m also a bigger Warcraft geek than anybody else there, so that was another factor in my favor.)
Did you have particular plots in mind for ‘How to Win Friends’ and ‘Miles to Go’ when you were first approached?
I actually turned in quite a few story ideas – just one-paragraph pitches – for Blizzard to choose from. Lucky for me, they liked several, and ‘How to Win Friends,’ ‘Miles to
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Posted on April 14th, 2009 by admin
The past few weeks have seen a rise of in-game casinos on some servers. I haven’t noticed any on my home server of Shadow Council, but on Arygos, where I’ve been toying with a horde hunter (level 34 right now), I can’t walk two steps in Orgrimmar without seeing a /yell advertising a chance to win big.
As of April 20th, however, this will now be prohibited. In Blizzard’s words, after that date, “any advertising for a casino is not permitted,” and players are encouraged to report advertisers to the GMs. I have to say, I’m not sad to see the casinos go. It’s a clever way to make money, yes, but I don’t like seeing players advertise repetitively, and of course, the house always wins. It’s nice that Blizzard was so responsive about this issue.
While the new rule doesn’t prohibit casinos directly, I imagine it will put a stop to most of them, unless there is some secret network of private casinos out there, with transactions carried on in mysterious raid and party chats, or custom channels. If there is, carry on –
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Posted on April 13th, 2009 by admin
Selserene actually released In For A Penny: Part Two “The Thorne of Rose Streeet” this past Friday. Since Moviewatch runs only during the week, we were faced with a dilemma. Do we feature this work immediately, to get the good news out to everyone as soon as possible? Or, wait until Monday, when the most readers would be available to see Selserene’s movie? After enjoying the twenty minute installment, your intrepid Moviewatch team had their answer. We wanted to get it in front of as many people as possible. Everyone — and I mean everyone — should have the opportunity to see this series.
If you haven’t seen In For A Penny’s prologue or first chapter, you might want to take the time to do so. I’m not sure it’s necessary, since there’s enough thematic information in this episode that you get the gist of what’s happening. The beauty of Selserene’s noir piece is that the genre really informs the story. Selserene displays a love of the film noir genre, but not because of the black-and-white composition. A significant factor
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Posted on April 12th, 2009 by admin
Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Naxxramas-10 or Naxxramas-25, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. This week, we do some homework.
With Patch 3.1 and the release of Ulduar fast approaching, it’s time to sit down and prepare for the upcoming content. Now, you might be the sort of raider who loves a surprise or two, and as a result you haven’t looked at any of the preview coverage of Ulduar; if that sounds familiar, you probably don’t want to continue reading this article.
If, however, your guild is going to rush into Ulduar as soon as possible, aiming for server or even world firsts, you need to be prepared. Let’s take a look at the resources you can use to maximise your chances of success against the unknown.
The PTR
Obviously, nothing beats experience, especially if you’re the sort of raider who learns from doing. It’s too late to go back in time and fight the PTR bosses now, but you can make the most of your personal PTR experiences by reviewing the fights
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Posted on April 10th, 2009 by admin
A University of California Irvine anthropologist named Bonnie Nardi has been studying one of the strangest cultures known to man lately, and she’s going to be presenting her findings in a book called “My life as a Night Elf Priest” — that’s right, she’s been taking notes on the weird sociological experiment known as Azeroth. It sounds pretty interesting — she’s been examining the way Chinese and American players play the game (and of course the differences between them), and she’s also looking into how games like WoW can bring us closer together rather than isolating us socially.
It’s funny — as a genre and a technology, MMO games are actually in the absolute earliest phases of their history. Socoiologists and psychologists have been studying real humans for thousands of years, and yet it’s only in the past few decades that they’ve gotten access to MMO games, like little petri dishes of condensed human behavior. Nardi may be one of the first to try and scientifically examine how players use (and are affected by)
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