Archive for the ‘Blizzard News’ Category

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman Gamer scorned.

In 1697, when William Congrave wrote that memorable quote in his play, “The Mourning Bride”, he obviously didn’t include the part about gamers nor did he have us in mind. But the events of this week that began on Tuesday when community managers of the World of Warcraft forums announced in the forums that sometime shortly before Cataclysm (WoW’s 3rd expansion) goes live, a new forum system was going to be implemented in which people who choose to post on the forums will be required to do so using their Real ID which for most people is their real life first and last name. And while I’m sure that the brains that run Blizzard Entertainment expected some amount of blow back I don’t think they necessarily expected the hate bomb that exploded over what many saw as a huge violation of their privacy rights. Apparently Blizzard hadn’t been paying any attention to the rage that Facebook caused with it’s huge privacy violations.

In just over 3 days from the time of the announcement, the forum thread had reached nearly 50,000 posts, the vast majority of which were highly critical of the upcoming change.

Now, I understand what Blizzard was trying to do. The official World of Warcraft forums have earned a legitimate reputation for being an untamed wilderness of hate, flame wars, and trolling, as well has being highly unwelcoming to new players to the game.

How ever, there are very legitimate concerns about having your identity exposed to the cesspool of the internet, and doubly so when you tie it to game that can and has driven people to the emotional edge.

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Extended Maintenance today, does that mean patch 3.0.8 is on the way to live? Odds are uncertain and I’m not holding my breath on this one. I’m certainly looking forward to this patch, but mainly due to what I feel is a long overdue change to mounts. The removal of the racial limitations will make my dream of owning an Undead horse for Am a reality.

UPDATE: 11:40 am

Home for lunch and it appears the servers are up. No patch…

Ok… so MMO Champion and World of Raids have posted the latest changes that have come about in Beta patch 8982. There is some really cool information about the cut scene cinematic (which I think is far better than the Wrath Trailer) and links to Blizzplanet‘s full, Extremely Spoiler Heavy, review of the whole quest chain leading up to and including the Wrath Gate and Battle of the Undercity quests. I am sooo looking forward to doing those both in beta and in live. I’ll try to do some frapsing.

Beyond that however, lets take a look at what the Druids got in this build.

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Well I’ve been playing Beta quite a bit since I got my invite. Lots of lag and lots of crashes. Last weekend it was pretty much unplayable for long stretches of time. As of tonight right now Amradorn is level 72. I’ve done a ton of quests in both Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra and I have to say that I’m extremely ramped up about Wrath.

Release date and picture gallery after the break. Note that there are spoilers in the screenshots.

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The raiding beast sits dazed for a moment and confused. The rolled up newspaper that Blizzard smacked it on the nose with lays on the ground at its feet, shreaded and torn. Its emotions are mixxed and its anger is building. Will it pounce and destroy the hand that smacked it or will it take the scolding and learn to be tamed? Only the beast knows

Blizzard appears to be trying to stop raid stacking by making many buffs raid wide buffs but in exchange they are making a lot of them not stack based on an elaborare catagory system. I have to agree with Phea at resto4life when she says that she believes that the result will be opositie to what Blizzard is hoping to achieve.

The principle is right, but the method seems off to me. I guess we will have to wait until Naxx 2.0 to see how it plays out.

This appears to be the hot topic of the day.

WoW Insider

World of Raids

Last night I went back to Stratholme for more mount farming (no I haven’t gotten it yet) and this time I changed things up a bit. I decided that instead of just going for the Undead side bosses I would clear all the trash. I still died three times but it was actually a lot of fun, and seeing the Baron die again was very rewarding personally, even if he is being stingy about the mount.

MMO Champion has some interesting tidbits about the upcoming 3.02 patch and some speculation on when it will hit the PTR. Blue posts in the EU forums show that the PTR forums have been cleaned out which usually means the PTR is just around the corner. I could really see it hiting as early as Thursday (8/28) or Friday (8/29) so as to give everyone all of Labor day weekend to download and get into the PTR.

Since I have yet to get a beta key this time around I will definately be trying my best to get onto the PTR with Amradorn and check out what ever new features Blizzard sees fit to let us try out. I expect the PTR to be up for some time, with 3.02 going live in late September and Wrath finially going Live In early November.

As I was working on updating the Wailing Caverns Field Report, I ran across this articale over at WoW Insider in regards to a post by Eyonix in the offical forums that “in the coming weeks” we will see a content patch prior to the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

What will this patch entail?

Spoiler alert… more info after the break.

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Blizzard’s new recruit a friend program has been a boon to my multiple account WoW experience. With the triple XP and the granting of levels I couldn’t resist. So I opened a third account and linked it to my main account, that way Am can get the mount. I’m also powerleveling a hunter so that I can give levels to my alts that are not 60 yet. Since I’m on vacation this week it’s gone rather well and quickly. The toon I am powerleveling is a second hunter. I originally planed to not keep this toon after I leeched some levels off of it but right now I’m not so sure. Having 2 hunters, 1 on each of my main accounts (I’ll be dropping back to two accounts after Am gets the mount) is kind of temping.

Oh… one last thing, I moved a level 43 shaman to the linked account from one of my main accounts and leveled him to 45. I was able to use that toon to give a level to my mage, so I learned that the toon on the linked account doesn’t have to start out at level 1 in order to give levels, it just has to be on the account.