New Guild Finder Tool in 4.1

 Patch Notes  Comments Off
Apr 222011
 

This looks like a very cool idea. From the devs:

In patch 4.1 we’ll be introducing the Guild Finder, a new system designed to enable easier and faster guild recruitment. Guild leaders and players who are looking for a guild to call home will use the Guild Finder to meet one another and begin communications that can lead to a prosperous membership.

The Guild Finder is intended to act as an in-game bulletin board for guilds that are actively recruiting. Previously in World of Warcraft, your options were limited. You would have to publicly post on your realm forum message board, or speak to other players directly via private messages or the chat channels. That can be a time consuming process. Guild Finder will allow your “looking for new members” message to work 24 hours a day, accessible to all of the characters in your faction, from anywhere in the game.

Click here for the rest

This will reduce trade chat spam to some extent, depending on how widely known it becomes and if people decide that it’s a pretty cool tool. I think it looks great and will be a big help to getting people into the right guilds.

I didn’t see anything on that page about creating guilds, but that’s easy enough. Offer 10 or 20g to anyone who signs, become official, then fill out your info in the widget.

Will it do away with blind invites? I don’t think so, but I think they may become fewer.

Will it help or hurt smaller guilds? I have no idea, but I can think of arguments either way.

 Posted by at 10:33 am  Tagged with:

They Go Up and They Go Down and They Go…

 wow news  2 Responses »
Oct 142010
 

Rumor has it (Ok, it’s only a rumor with me) that the quakes you’ve been seeing in-game are the result of Mage crits with their spells. Another mountain being destroyed or crater being created. Probably the main reason for the upcoming Cataclysm is the damage the spell casters are causing.

You thought your warrior was tough? Here, eat this 100k crit.

From MMO-CHampion:

We made many changes yesterday. A lot of these were bug fixes, and many bug fixes will affect damage one way or the other. So just because you don’t see a specific change referenced below, doesn’t mean it didn’t change.

With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post:

1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn’t do as much to tanking abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities.

2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two.

3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn’t nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow’s biggest spell.

4) We returned Searing Pain’s damage to its 3.3.5 levels.

5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change.

We don’t have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic.

I heard rumors that long time players (one or two, anyway) were quitting over the 4.0 changes. I don’t get it. Those are the players, more than anyone, who should know what happens after patches.Yeah, I know that players leave for any numbers of reasons, including boredom, it just seems that giving a reason like “the patch broke my game!” is silly. But, what do I know?

Over 12 Million!

 wow news  Comments Off
Oct 082010
 

Really it’s only abut 2 mill, because everyone has 6 accounts, right? ;)

Bliz announced yesterday that WoW has over 12 million subs. Regardless of how snarky one wants to get with the numbers of real players that’s what… 5x the #2 game?

Blizzard Entertainment said Thursday that the number of players now subscribed to “World of Warcraft” and its expansions has reached 12 million.

The multiplayer online game topped 11 million subscribers in October 2008.

The rest is on PC World (and a few zillion other places)

I want Aion’s graphics, animations, and some of the mechanics combined with WoW’s depth and cool features. Ah well, WoW’s what’s taking my game time. Guess that says it all.

edit: Just a last minute thought – people play Aion and the other games for a couple of weeks or months, they play WoW for years. I think that says it all.

 Posted by at 9:04 am

Beyond Awful – Patch 3.3 Tier 10 Armor Sets

 Patch Notes  4 Responses »
Nov 232009
 

The new tier 10 armor sets. This might be enough to make me pass on any gear rolls in the new 3.3 raids (assuming I could actually get into them in the first place.)

The t10 rogue set, noooooo…..

  • Paladins now wear dresses.
  • The Tauren and the Humans have merged (hunter armor) or maybe those are gloves?
  • Warriors, DKs, Priests, and ‘Locks are Ok, at least by comparison to the others.

So here they are, in all their, ahem, glory.

I think Bliz needs to look into Aion’s armor remodeling system.

The 3.2 Patch Notes, as Viewed by the Orc…

 Patch Notes  Comments Off
Aug 042009
 

Say what?

A friend and I are putting together a new blog, Orc and Gnome, which we hope will have an interesting feel to it. Over there we’ve written up a couple of posts on the patch (see below.) I’m the Orc, he’s the Gnome.

The 3.2 patch is live (or will be in a couple of hours.)

Lots of little changes. While there’s a lot of stuff there it doesn’t look like you’re have to rebuild your talents, unless you’re a Death Knight. DKs received a small nerf (much needed and yes, I play one) and they’re had enough talents moved and tweaked that a respec is necessary.

WoW User Interface Updates

 wow news  3 Responses »
Mar 182009
 

Dual Speccing is on its way. Want one spec for raiding and another for PvP? Now you can have them both, for the low low price of 1k gold (pocket change, right?) By the way, your glyph set can change with the talents. One set of glyphs for raiding, another for PvP.

As of today…

  • You have to be level 40+. Originally you had to be 80.
  • You can switch talents anywhere, no Lexicon of Power is necessary.
  • 1,000 gold to set it up, payable to your trainer. Need more gold to pay for that? Go here.
  • It looks like the system is set up that you can use it during any period of downtime and never in the middle of a fight, battle, or raid. So you can duel someone, but cannot change spec mid-fight.
  • Your actionbars also switch with the specs. Have one setup for your raid, another for PvP.

Switch your gear, too

There’s also a very cool change to the Equipment Manager. You can now save up sets of gear and switch them with a hot-key. Finish that raid, then switch specs and gear with a couple of clicks and you’re good for the arena.

For the near future there will only be the two specs, but GC says that Bliz is considering …

We will be launching the feature with just two specs, but depending on how we feel it works out, we might consider additional specs in the future.

Here’s the Interview with GhostCrawler that originally lays it all out.  There have been some changes since the interview, mentioned in the UI Page.

More UI Stuff

There’ve been some changes to the Looking for Group chat interface. Think anyone will use it now or will we all continue to spam the trade channel?

Like the BGs, but hate to have to travel to the big city? You will be able to queue for the Battlegrounds from anywhere, as long as you aren’t in a fight. Take a momentary break from farming crystallized whatevers and jump in line for your BG. When you’re done you’ll be popped back to where you were, to continue… your….. farming……zzzzzzz

Patch 3.08 is Live

 wow news  Comments Off
Jan 202009
 

3.08 patch is live. Looks like there are a lot of buffs going around. Plus, the Warlock class wasn’t, in fact, deleted (see last post.)

Death Knights, as one might expect, got buffed, in addition to a bunch of tweaks.

Other classes got their tweaks, too, though not as many.

Lots of stuff in this patch, see WoWinsider for details and commentary about all aspects of the patch.

 Posted by at 10:46 am

Wrath, WAR, Blizzard, and Whatnot

 wow news  Comments Off
Aug 302008
 

Bits and pieces from other places.

From Tobald:

Blizzard just announced that parts of Wrath of the Lich King content will already be released “in the coming weeks”…

But many people interpret the patch announcement, and the new features that were announced for Wrath of the Lich King and which just happen to be similar to features that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has, to be a defensive move by Blizzard…

Here’s the rest: WoW is fighting back. There are a ton of comments on that post, so join the fun.

Blizzard does need some serious competion, but WAR doesn’t seem to be it, except maybe in the PvP area, though I think WAR will do well if it has a smooth launch. I think Bliz has the formula that most others are missing, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be on the lookout for nifty ideas that make their game more interesting for more poeple.

Spooncraft has a post on new voices in Wrath, and a video with the voices: Wrath of the Lich King Beta 8885 brings new Death Knight Voice Options

Spoon says:  Awesome changes, not exactly sinister but at least now Blood Elf Males actually sound like MEN. You have to go into the sound options menu (if you’re a Death Knight) and turn this feature on for it to work. I am very excited about this and hope that it stays in game permanently.

Go check it out. Now I’m going to go see what my DK troll has to say.

Here’s a bit on the new Level 75 ability for Rogues, “Tricks of the Trade,” from WoW Insider: Rogues in 8885: Tricks of the Trade

Ok, time for dinner.

Wow Talents – Now to Level 80!

 wow news  Comments Off
Jul 242008
 

Via MMORPG.com

Blizzard has posted a Wrath of the Lich King talent calculator, which helps players explore the talent changes that are coming to WoW with the next expansion.

Bliz has the preliminary level 80 talents up on their talent calculator. All of these are subject to change, and likely will be changed, as [tag-tec]Wrath of the Lich King[/tag-tec] moves through beta.

I suppose that since Bliz has posted these talents that they must be reasonably close to the final version, but we’ll see.

Still, they’re fun to explore now. Check out the new talents here.

World of Warcraft Achievements

 wow news  Comments Off
Jul 212008
 

From the offical World of Warcraft Site:

While Wrath of the Lich King will improve many of [tag-tec]World of Warcraft[/tag-tec]‘s existing features, it will also introduce plenty of brand-new ones to keep the game fresh and interesting. One of these new features is sure to suit a wide range of play styles: achievements. These self-contained goals will offer new challenges, satisfy goal-oriented players, allow others to see your accomplishments in World of Warcraft — and are just plain fun.

Achievements, of course, are a big thing on the Xbox system and they’ve been done in other MMOs, such as City of Heroes’ Badges.

Personally, I like the idea of adding achievements to WoW and I think it’ll spark some new interest in re-doing some old stuff, as well some other things that aren’t necessarily along the lines of leveling of making more gold. .

It looks like their Feats of Strength achievments will retroactively take care of some past glories, so older players won’t have to re-do everything again. Bliz even says that some of these will be impossible to achieve in Wrath of the Lich King.

For new glories there will be achievements for getting a shave (Ok, let’s load those Dwarves onto the cart!) and there’s even one for people prone to falling off of high towers.

Anything to further the WoW addiction, right? ;)

So what do you think should be some of the new [tag-tec]WoW achievements[/tag-tec]?

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