Posts with tag forum

Last week Eyonix started a poll on the forums asking players what they do directly after logging in (all of the options are listed in the picture above). For me, it's no contest -- before I do anything else, I always pop the friends list up to see who's around. The only time this doesn't happen is if I'm logging on in a rush for the night's raid, but I try to limit the number of times that occurs. Reading this poll has made me realize the extent to which I depend on my bank alt for mail and AH-related business; my main very rarely needs to check her mail.

If you're interested in responding to the poll, it'll be running for another day or so, and you can find it here. Because it's on the official forums, you'll be prompted to log in to your forum account before replying.

This is one of the few forum threads of late that has given me hope in mankind rather than the other way around. Jastiri of Antonidas started a thread asking players what the last nice thing they did for another player was, and relates his/her own tale of running into a new level-15 player who had saved 20 silver and materials to pay a tailor to make 6-slot bags. This "just about broke my heart," Jastiri wrote, who then made the newbie five 16-slot bags and offered 10 gold. The player thanked him/her for the bags but didn't accept the gold, insisting that the bags were gift enough and that he/she intended to pay Jastiri back for them eventually as well. How can you not love that?

The whole thread's full of little gems like that that, and was lovely to read. Share the wealth, readers -- what have you done lately for other players?

Stuck in the Midwest and didn't have enough money to go see all the fun at BlizzCon 2009 this year? We've got a little (very little) bit of condolence for you: Richard Knaak, author of the Warcraft novels, is doing a signing tour this weekend around the Midwest in Missouri and Kansas. Blizzplanet has all of the dates and places -- he'll be in St. Joseph, MO on Friday (today), and then in Overland Park, KS and Lawrence, KS on Saturday and Sunday respectively. Not quite as fun as seeing Ozzy, but if you're out in the middle of the country, there's your chance at a little facetime with someone helping shape the WoW universe.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck in Chicago, and -- oh wait! I moved to Los Angeles last weekend, which means I'm actually going to get to go to this artists' forum down at UC Irvine in California. Where I am (it's still a little weird to say that). The Laguna Art Museum (which has an ongoing relationship with Blizzard) will be hosting some of Blizzard's and other artists on October 1st, and they'll be talking (we presume) about creating art and other media for games and digital entertainment. Usually this is the part of the post where I'll ask you to send us pictures if you go, but what the heck -- I'm in the neighborhood (not really, but closer than Chicago), so maybe I'll get a chance to go and check it out for myself. See you there?

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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In a recent set of posts on the subject of Prot Paladins wearing holy gear in PvP, Ghostcrawler mentioned that Prot Paladins are not intended to be able to out heal Holy Paladins in the same gear and that fixes are intended that will remove their ability to do this. I'd like to offer a suggestion: destroy all spell power plate. Destroy it! Destroy, destroy, destroy! Exterminate it! Extirpate it from the surface of Azeroth! Perhaps in a Cataclysm of some kind. (Except Judgement. That can stay.)

My reasoning isn't to nerf Holy Paladins as healers. I love all healers equally. Rather, my idea here is to incorporate a class design that's been picking up steam since the end of Burning Crusade. Back before patch 3.0 dropped, two Paladin specs wore spell plate, Holy and Protection. Since that was two specs out of a possible six plate wearing talent specializations (2/6 = 1/3 = roughly 33 percent, I'm not doing a repeating) that meant that there was a fairly sizable minority that wanted the stuff.

Flash forward to Wrath of the Lich King. There are now three plate wearing classes. Two of them (six total talent specs) have absolutely no use for spell plate. The one class that does use spell plate? Well, the Protection tree was revamped, so tanking Paladins don't wear it. Retribution has been giving spell plate the stink eye forever. So we now have 1 out of 9 possible specs wearing the stuff, and yet it drops everywhere. There's no reason spell plate needs to exist, much less be a protected species by Blizzard when they went out of their way to do away with tanking leather, for example.

Rayless on the General Forums asks a question that I've always wondered about but never poked into; how exactly does phasing work? If you've leveled through the Death Knight starting area, done the Wrath Gate questline, or quested in Icecrown (and you should really do all three), you've had the opportunity to see Blizzard's most intricate phasing in action. However, Zarhym and Crygil are pretty cryptic on how it's done, and it's up to players to fill in the details.

In a nutshell, phasing is all about the information that's sent (or not sent) to your computer by the game server; Blizzard can toy with anything that's not client-side, affecting which buildings and NPCs you can "see" but not affecting the game's basic geography. I was surprised to discover that phasing has technically been in the game since launch -- ghosts and stealth are a form of phasing, as are (I would assume) the ghosts of Caer Darrow -- but the hugely elaborate set pieces of Wrath are simply a more complicated evolution of the same mechanic.

Given the success of phasing, players have been kicking around suggestions for instances or zones that could do with a touch of it, and Gnomeregan seems to be a pretty consistent pick. I'd have to agree, but I'd also add the Echo Isles (the Gnomes and Trolls have overcome their low-level foes by now, surely?) and perhaps Duskwood for starters. Is there any other zone or instance that you think would benefit from a little reality-bending?

European Blue Ancilorn has updated the times for this week's extended maintenance which will affect a large percentage of realms. We mentioned the extended maintenance to you last week and that Ancilorn was keen to make sure players had an "opportunity to plan accordingly".

The selected realms will be offline from 1:00am to 3:00pm CEST, not 3:00am until 5:00pm CEST as we previously reported. The following servers are affected by the extended downtime:

Balnazzar, Bloodfeather, Darksorrow, Defias Brotherhood, Earthen Ring, Frostwhisper, Genjuros, Haomarush, Hellscream, Laughing Skull, Lightning's Blade, Magtheridon, Neptulon, Nordrassil, Quel'Thalas, Ragnaros, Ravencrest, Runetotem, Shadowmoon, Shadowsong, Shattered Hand, Silvermoon, Skullcrusher, Spinebreaker, Stormrage, Stormreaver, Stormscale, Sylvanas, Terenas, The Maelstrom, The Venture Co, Thunderhorn, Turalyon, Twisting Nether and Vashj.

Earlier this week we reported on Nethaera's stunning revelation that faction changes were in the works. Yeah, I was just as amazed. It might just be an idea at the moment, a work in progress which we might not get access to until a patch or even the next expansion. The logistics are mind-boggling. Would this be a literally blending of species into factions so Humans could join the Horde and Taurens the Alliance or would your character literally be transformed into another species? How exactly would the lore work around that? We've had character customisation for a while now and the ability to change gender but changing faction and possibly even species. That a whole new kettle of fish.

So, constant readers, in the wake of this bombshell I'm very eager to know what you think. Does the very idea of changing faction seem contrary to how the game works? Would you consider jumping factions? Would you rather see characters choose whether to become Horde or Alliance? Could you change your very species to join the opposing faction? From a lore perspective, how do you think would this work and, indeed, does it need to have a basis in lore? After all no one questioned the gender change. What do you think?

Now while the US forums have had this feature for a while, EU Blue Wryxian has posted that the EU forums have a little more order this afternoon. Rather than clumping the Horde and Alliance guild recruitment threads together, they now have separate areas to, as he puts it, 'increase the usefulness and accessibility of the Guild Recruitment forums'.

Despite his entreaties to the contrary, we're sure it's more to do with furthering the mutual dislike between factions. However that said, it will certainly save a lot of time and hassle.

So if you're Alliance and looking for a guild, take a look here while Hordies can go here.

Alan on LJ is having a problem I've been thinking a lot about lately -- like me, he wants to go back and finish the Loremaster achievement, which asks you to clean up all of the quests in the old continents. But like me, he's wondering just how he'll find all of those old quests -- unfortunately, there's no way to know which quests have and haven't been done, and while of course, there's a "low level quest" tracking option, that still requires you to run around to all of the different quest locations to find them.

A forum thread like this one is a huge help, but still, there's no way in the game to really go back and easily find which ones we've missed. Even with a list like that, you might spend twenty minutes trying for a drop before realizing you've already done that quest. Blizzard promised us a little while back that they'd be changing the "discovery" mechanic (so that we'd be able to see on the map which areas we hadn't discovered for the achivements yet), and an option like that might be helpful for cleaning up old quest -- say that low level quest tracking might work over the entire map, or there might be a magic box in Dalaran that would have whatever quest items we might need.

The good news here is that Blizzard has built a fair amount of leeway into the quest achievements -- you won't need every single one to get the points, so the more obscure drop-based quests can probably go undone without worry. But just like the World Exploration achievements, a little more help finding the quests we might have missed would go a long way.

Maybe PTR character copies being up today isn't a fluke after all ! The US PTR forums just came up as well, ready to become an unceasing wall of jungle animal noises. Head on over if you're so inclined.

With the character copy page being up too, signs are continuing to point to it being 3.1 PTR go time very soon. Be ready to download that client and, as always, keep an eye out here for when the PTR news trickle inevitably turns into a flood. We swear to shake it up if you swear to listen.

Adding your mom's worldly wisdom to any situation always makes it better, and clearly the EU forums agree with this sentiment! Elbonio of the European WoW forums wants you to ask your mum to draw the Lich King, even if she's never seen him before. If she asks what he looks like, just ask her to draw what she thinks he'd look like.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this meme before, on the SomethingAwful forums, replacing Arthas with Homer Simpson, but the results are still pretty hilarious. Elbonio's been kind enough to compile a gallery of the kid-tested, mother-approved images that resulted from the experiment.

If you get your mom or significant other to do it, but don't have an EU forum account, feel free to post it in the comments below and I'll assemble them for laughs at a later date.

What are you waiting for? Go ask! But be nice, because after all, she's your mum.

Taking a gander at the official forums tonight will reveal something magically spooky.

All the blue posters have been turned into glowing jack-o-lanterns, and all of us normal folks have turned into undead zombies.

The conspiracy theorist in me suggests that this is a clue to the next stage of the zombie invasion. Tomorrow we'll all log on and have a strange urge for brains and only brains. Lots and lots of juicy... yummy... braaains. Insert Homer Simpson drool here.

Of course this could just be another fancy bit for Halloween, but who knows....

There is no indication how long this will last, and also there's no word if there'll be new Wrath of the Lich King avatars after this is done as there were when the Burning Crusade was released.

Each week or so, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time.

This week, I answer some Reader Mail from Arjun.

Hi Robin,

The writing style of [WoW Insider] is always upbeat/positive, which is great. I thought I'd ask you your opinion of the official WoW forums, especially the realm forums. What do you think of them? Should casual or newer players try to avoid them at all costs? I've been playing casually for about a year, and have two 70s (Ally Mage and BE Tankadin). I posted to the forums that I'm looking for a new guild, casual in focus. It's amazing what happens, but not in a good way. [Here is the forum link.] What would you recommend to your readers about the official WoW forums?

Thanks,

Arjun

My answer is after the jump.