Filed under: Blizzard

There is a Battle.net preview up at the official StarCraft II site. While much of it talks of the integration of the StarCraft with the new Battle.net, including new mod functionality and better matchmaking, it also discusses something that affects WoW players: Real ID.

Blizzard mentioned this new cross-game social aspect of Bnet at last year's BlizzCon. Real ID is an optional system for chatting with and keeping track of "real life" friends in any Battle.net game. You invite friends with your Real ID. If they accept, you can find out what game they are playing and on what realm and character. You can also chat across realms or games. You won't have to remember the usernames of your Real ID friends and family, because you will see their real names on the interface. And you will also be able to broadcast messages to all on your Real ID friends list, rather than just chatting one at a time.

I cannot wait for this to be implemented for WoW accounts. I would love to be able to chat with my friends who are scattered across many realms and who defect to play StarCraft. I really think this is great for more hardcore players (I'll be on my Alliance alt until you Hordies can get your act together for the raid) or very casual, chatty altoholics.

Will you use the Real ID system?

It's fairly common knowledge that Blizzard has kept updating the Armory with new features and new apps. Now, Bornakk comes forth with news of an app that will be to the armory what a giant Steve Allen pog was to pogs: behold, the ultimate feature! In the glorious future, we'll be able to work our auctions from the Armory itself or apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. Yes, one more step closer to actually living full time in Azeroth. I have my eyes on a nice cottage outside of Elwynn, myself.

In all seriousness, I know a lot of people who would probably club me over the head and hand me over to a cabal of secretive necromancers for this feature. No news yet on exactly how it's going to work, and Bornakk does point out that with the amount of work it will be to develop, you're probably going to have to pay extra for it.

This is a fairly complex service to develop, due in large part to its unprecedented integration with the game, so we don't have an exact release date yet. It's important to note here that certain elements of the service will be premium-based, which we'll go into more detail on once the service functionality is finalized. As with all of the services we offer, we plan to integrate the Auction House and Armory in a way that won't disrupt the gameplay experience, and we won't release it until it meets the quality standards that we've set for our other features and services.

See the rest of the announcement after the break.

As many suspected might have been the case, the recent resilience change seems to have made healing a little too strong in PvP. To continue the efforts of slowing down the pace of PvP in the final arena season of Wrath of the Lich KIng, Zarhym has made the following announcement regarding healing Patch 3.3.2:

Patch 3.3.2 is bringing about a change to the way healing functions in Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Wintergrasp. We have applied a debuff to all players in these zones which will decrease the effectiveness of all forms of healing by 10%. This includes heals from items such as Healthstones and potions, however, it will not affect defensive shields or auras. This change is being made to balance the effectiveness of healing against the recent buff we made to the damage reduction component provided by resilience. Rest assured that we will be closely monitoring the effects both the healing and resilience changes have on Battleground, Wintergrasp, and Arena PvP game play to ensure that fights last a reasonable amount of time without overtly skewing the effectiveness of any class, role, or team combination.

Should we hear any further announcements today, we'll make sure to keep you posted.

Earlier this evening we received a tip (thanks, Taylor) that Blizzard has launched a WoW Armory Facebook application. It promises to publish data about your WoW characters to all your Facebook buddies in real time. I figured I'd give it a spin, not so much because I want to spam my friends with it as because I'm curious what they've come up with.

You can see the results in the gallery below. Here are my brief impressions:

• It's a bit scary that it asks you to log in with your Battle.net account, but if you look at the URL of the popup window it is in fact from us.battle.net, one of the legitimate domains. Still, I'm not sure it's good training for users for Blizzard to ask us to log in within random popups.
• The login form does not ask for your authenticator.
• It doesn't tell you this in the brief description, but you choose up to five characters for the app to report to your followers. It doesn't just indiscriminately report the progress of your latest bank alt.
• By default, it publishes updates on your characters to your Facebook feed, but that box is easily unchecked (fortunately).
• It also by default posts to your feed that you've installed the app, which is something I can't forgive a Facebook (or Twitter) developer for. If I really want to tell all my friends I'm using your app, I'll tell them. Don't do it for me. At least this too is an option that can be unchecked.

After choosing your characters and what you want to show, you may be worried that it's not working, but just give it a minute - it doesn't populate immediately. Mine started showing data in about ten minutes.

Overall, assuming they manage to make it work, if you want your Facebook friends to know about your WoW characters, this is the app for you. If not, why are you still reading this post? Anyway, I'm glad to see Blizzard following through on some of the promise the Armory has always showed, even if I don't approve of all their methods. Innovation is always welcome.

At least judging by the number of emails we've been getting about them, WoW scams have never been more popular than they are now. So I'm very happy to see that Blizzard has launched a new Account Security section on their Battle.net site, featuring tips on how to keep your Battle.net account safe.

A lot of it is common sense - things like using an authenticator (which also gets you a nifty Corehound pet), not giving your account name/password to anyone (even if they say they're a Blizzard employee), and keeping up-to-date browser software and anti-virus on your computer. It never hurts to reiterate these things, though; many accounts get compromised every day through not observing these rules.

No, it's not just a case of the obvious being stated. In a discussion of DK design in arenas, Dr. Street comments to clarify the intended role of death knights in arena and other factors. He also makes a good point about the forums in general that bears repeating for emphasis.

"We don't intend for these forums to be the primary way the team communicates our vision for the game and upcoming changes to the community. You'll get a little of that on a few select subjects through the forums and sadly that's all you're ever going to get. It's not that we don't care. It's that forums are not a great medium for that kind of mass communication. I wish sometimes you guys could be satisfied with the fact that we used to not communicate at all and now are able to communicate a little."

Moving on to the specific issue at hand in this thread, the discussion is the old shadow/frost spec that turned the death knight into a much more ranged caster, generating runic power quickly and then converting that runic power into Death Coils at range. It wasn't intended for the class. They have no problem with Death Coil itself being a popular attack, as long as the death knight has to put an effort into staying in melee with its attendant disadvantages to do so.

"The DK that runs around and does nothing but Icy Touch or Howling Blast or Death Coil feels like a rogue who forgoes combo points and openers and everything just to spam Fan of Knives and nothing else."

It's interesting to see players managing to find ways to bend the class out of the original design intent and how Blizzard responds to that: specs like shadow/frost or diseaseless blood DPS were adjusted quickly to put the class back to where Blizzard intended it.

Last night, Blizzard unveiled a new behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the Gunship Battle encounter in Icecrown Citadel. Although it's light on technical details, it's an interesting look at how they reasoned through both the mechanics and lore of the fight. They wanted something epic that allowed for some of the ship-to-ship combat that players have asked for, and it was a great opportunity to integrate the ICC raid with one of Icecrown's most important quest hubs.

I've gone on record before saying that this is one of Blizzard's best and most unique fights, and it's particularly fun if you're part of the "away team" making the jumps to and from the enemy ship. That really nails the "controlled chaos" angle they were aiming for. If you're part of the "home team" defending your own ship, I'll grant that the fight feels a little more by-the-numbers. Oddly enough, this is one of the few encounters where the achievement version (I'm On A Boat) actually makes it less engaging, as most raids assign static teams to the ships and either kite Saurfang/Bronzebeard or swap taunts. However, if you've already got the achievement or just aren't worrying about it for the moment, all the joys of a personal explosives pack are yours for the taking.

If you're not part of a raiding guild but get a shot at doing ICC, go for it; the first two bosses aren't too tough, and the gunship battle is an absolute hoot.

Another portion of the BattleCry mosaic was revealed on Friday, bringing the total completed to 50%. This time, instead of unlocking a piece of art, Blizzard gave us something a little more special -- a 3-minute piece of music titled "Invincible" recalling the leitmotif of the Wrath of the Lich King trailer. Blizzard rather cryptically describes it thusly:


Cryptic or not, this is a beautiful piece of music, and one we're hoping appears in-game soon. Staffers here have guessed that "Invincible" might play either during or after the much-anticipated fight with the Lich King himself, and we're quite likely to see one whopper of a lore moment and cutscene. Fingers crossed, but until then, I'm going to enjoy playing this in Icecrown, and I'd kill to hear a rendition with a full chorus and symphony, perhaps at some social convention said to take place yearly...but surely that's just crazy talk.

It looks like we have some quick play disruption coming our way this Saturday morning, as Blizzard has announced rolling restarts for all realms at 5 AM pacific, or Noon pacific for Oceanic Realms. Judging by Ghostcrawler's words in a recent thread, this is likely meant to jump start the resilience hotfix.

Either way, if you're one of those folks weird enough to get up early on a Saturday morning, you may as well grab another hour or sleep or so, since you may not be able to jump on WoW for a 15 minute window. There's still no word on Tuesday's downtime, so maybe we were spoiled by the past couple of weeks. Then again, maybe they're just seeing if they can get that minor patch ready for a release this week too. Either way, keep it here, and we'll keep you informed.

Even though Crimson Halls has been open for about half a week, a series of hot fixes have been applied today. Most of the fixes posted by Bornakk are applied to Blood Queen Lana'thel. I have to admit though, the bug where the Kinetic Bomb could trigger Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Prince Council encounter did make me chuckle. I'm glad that's been resolved as well.

• Blood Queen Lana'thel will only be available after the Blood Prince Council is defeated.
• Blood Queen Lana'thel's Essence has a longer duration.
• Kinetic Bombs no longer aggro Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Princes encounter.
• Blood Queen Lanathel should no longer cast Vampiric Bite on pets.

In addition, Daelo posted another set of fixes for the Blood Princes encounter:

• Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank.
  
• The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight.
  
• We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further.
  
• Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage.

Valnoth states that the Essence duration was lengthened because the developers didn't like the idea of sacrificing a player to get through an encounter. As a healer, I'm inclined to agree. I hate it when I have to stop all heals on a player in order to progress through a counter. It just goes contrary to everything my character stands for.

In a fascinating post over at Gamesindustry.biz, Blizzard COO Paul Sams takes great pains to emphasize that Blizzard will ship no game before its time (to rip off an old wine slogan): "We will not pull the rug out from under them and ship it before it's done, so people feel that when they out their heart and soul into a game, they'll be able to deliver the game they envisioned."

This is interesting to me on a couple of levels: the first is the long time between the original idea that World of Warcraft would get an expansion a year and the actual time (more than two) that it took for The Burning Crusade to ship. It seems that over time they must feel they've gotten more proficient at the development process since Wrath of the Lich King and now Cataclysm seem to be getting ready to ship even faster. You can read the excerpt from Sams at gamesindustry.biz (which requires creating a new account) as well as a full interview with Sams and executive producer Rob Pardo.

There are so many scams going around like the Catclysm Alpha invite and the WoW Armory phishing site, that people's accounts are getting stolen more than ever. With all of the work that Blizzard has to do to keep up with the problem, it's no wonder they are offering the fast solution of care packages. We've talked about how to avoid scams as well as how to protect yourself. Here is a guide as to what to do if your account gets stolen.

Important note: The following guide assumes that you have not put an Authenticator on your account. There are no confirmed cases of accounts being stolen if they are protected by an Authenticator.

We are getting numerous tips that servers are crashing. Blue poster Aredek says it is a realm connectivity problem and that their technicians are looking into it. Currently, there is no time for when they will have an update.

We will keep you posted as usual.

Update 6:45pm: The realms are expected to be back up by 7:30pm EST.

Update 6:27pm: The Realm Status forum has posted the realms affected, which we have listed after the break.

[Thanks to all who sent this in!]

Bornakk hit the forums this evening to announce the second Twitter Developer Chat. It will take place Friday, January 15th at 5:00 PM PST. Like last time, questions will be taken via Twitter and answered on the forums. Senior game producer J. Allen Brack and lead systems designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street will be the ones answering your questions. Instructions on how to submit questions and all of that sort of thing can be found over in the forum thread.

The focus of this Q&A will be patch 3.3, Fall of the Lich King, so don't expect to hear any grand Cataclysm news in this chat. I'm actually very curious if we'll learn anything at all, considering the focus on current content rather than future content. It might be a good chance to get some insight into the development process, rather than trying to squeeze strategy tips out of the devs.

Zarhym popped into one of the many official forum topics complaining about the seemingly inordinate amount of times Old Kingdom pops on the Dungeon Finder to offer some welcome news for exhausted dungeon runners: Old Kingdom and Nexus alike will be receiving some adjustments meant to bring the dungeons in line with other Wrath heroics.