Insidious Guild – Ultimate Challenge (screenshot)

A little while ago the Insidious Guild on Nagrand got THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE (yes, has to be written in caps, its the ultimate). That means 250 Guild Challenges. Sheesh the boy and girls in Insidious are a busy bunch of achievement junkies players.

drool … Armored Bloodwing mount

What a nice evil looking Bat! The new store purchasable mount is god damned evil looking, and a pleasure to behold. Blizzard store link for those who can’t wait and have $25 they can spend without regard for charity or child support.

I want this mount.

Ref from MMO Champion: Armored Bloodwing – Items – World of Warcraft. Video after the break.

wow Loot Specialization Menu

MMO Champ reports a fine new feature for Patch 5.3 in WoW:

The new Loot Specialization menu is in, allowing you to choose what spec you want loot for when getting bonus rolls, Raid Finder gear, and Pandarian quest rewards

Yehaw. Darn good feature. Its very welcome. A good step toward getting a friendly loot system. It might be seen as a change which makes World of Warcraft more friendly to casuals, which is true and not a bad thing but it is also something that makes the loot system more friendly for hardcore players and those player who love Alts.

I cannot see a drawback which is not related to a whine about “back in my day…”

Related articles

• World of Warcraft Patch 5.3 PTR Patch Notes (wow.joystiq.com)
• The Azeroth Ethicist: Is it cheating to trick the LFR loot system? (wow.joystiq.com)

Playing wow for gold? Nope

There is a spot-on post by Tobold which questions those players who play to acquire in-game currency (Optional Economies). It’s not that playing to get large amounts of gold is not a valid goal – it is; but some players do not care at all for the economies. It resounds for me as I am one of those players. Gold is just another token to get to the other end-goal.

With so much concentration on efficient gold farming and selling around, its good to see a blogger outlining that non-gold approaches are not silly. Playing for gold to me seems silly; I’d be better off working another job if I wanted to acquire extra money in my spare time. I don’t – I want to relax.

Insidious wants you (recruitment post)

The mighty and awesome guild Insidious on Nagrand-US (of which I happen to be an officer) are looking for a few warm bodies with computers and wow accounts attached for progression raiding 3x nights a week.

The guild is 15/16 in the current content (it was 11/16, then 13/16 – BOOYA!), and typically aspires to get well into hard modes for each content release. With wow patch 5.2 now in the works, we’re darn keen to clean-up the Empress and get through Terrace in a hasty fashion.

What can we offer:

• Some of the most sane and kind hearted players in Oceanic realms,
• who love progression kills, achievements, titles, and are not afraid to keep at it until we seen the great stuff drop.
• a darn fair loot system (EPGP) which is supported by most of our players arguing for who else should get the gear instead of themselves. Rare stuff!
• A social collective of players who indulge overly in all aspects of the game.
• Players who are in the game for the long haul.

What we need:

• Great players who know their class/roles;
• Particularly a Mage, Hunter, or Elemental Shaman is highly desired, with a Holy Paladin or Rogue also being bloody useful.

You’ll need to be:

• An adult who wishes to enjoy your time online, and have a thick-ish skin and appreciation for off-colour Aussie humour,
• be happy with progression raiding, and all the corpse running that usually involves,
• able to raid (vent, addons, etc) 3x nights a week from 8:30 to 11:30 server time,
• be willing and able to bring your own mats,
• and generally a good sane person.

For those who are interested message Genowen, Mortigen, Kalsor, or Rhamiel in game, or visit the Insidious on Nagrand-US website for details. Apps through the website. Or ask me questions here too.

So come join us for some happy killing.

WoW players raise $2.3 mil for Sandy Relief

Warcraft players raised $2.3 Million for Sandy relief through puchased of entirely option in-game widgets and toys. At last a feelgood aspect of MMO games, instead of a typical angry rant. 2.3m for any charity effort is bloody nice work, and not bad considering we’re a bunch of no-life basement dwellers; with violent tendencies.

Kind of makes you feel good. See we do have souls. Kek.

World of Warcraft Players Raise $2.3 Million for Sandy | Geekosystem.

A Few Silly Things

As wow game time flies by, the odd silly thoughts appear…

• What is a Lightwell? – click to adjust the light in the area briefly for the perfect screenshot. Strange that it is a Priest power, but then they are of the light.
• As a Melee dps I think my role in the last two encounters of the Mogu’shan Vaults will be spear-carrier and pop-pop-waver. Encounters designed to make range dps easy and melee dps difficult is something well beyond a meme by now. The designers of those fights can get stuffed. I bet they play warlocks.
• After each patch spam a Pally for buffs stating that they have changed. Chances are that either (a) they have, or (b) the pally won’t know that they have not – given how much Paladins change each update. You can also still snigger when somebody asks for “Wisdom”.
• I don’t troll /Trade as a rule, but someday I’d like to ask, “since patch which spec is better for aoe grinding guardian or sentinel?”.
• Or offer a gold seller a great deal on a Spirit of Harmony, say 530g per, but only if they can supply 25 of them. Hopefully/maybe they don’t understand the BoP nature and go off farming.

Wired thinks WoW isn’t cool anymore. I think Geeks never cared

Wired has an article about wow’s decline in subscribers and the change from WoW being a hobbie that all geeks were playing, to now being something that is no longer chic or cool. Its like reading a hipster’s impression of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire; misguided and not really facing the reality of the geek community or the WoW community.

It was mainstream cool when the celebrities caught up, and now it’s on its way down.

Fundementally geeks tend not to care what others think, as the geeking out on a topic or activity is so much part of our mindset that at worst we might hide the hobby, but generally are always happy to talk about it. Wow or any other game’s “cool status” or its appeal as a “social activity benchmark” misses the point that most of the players are true geeks about it. And if not about World of Warcraft specifically, then it might be computer games in general.

The point made about wow being “Golf for Geeks” might be true for a smattering of people thinking it might make a difference to a job or a social niche, but any golf player can detect a newbie or a pretender, and so can a gamer. Did anyone actually stop or start playing computer games just because a celebrity did? Pretty shallow.

Many years ago we interviewed a Dev and she said WoW was one of her hobbies, and while we joked in the interview about her being Horde scum, it made no difference to the outcome.

Some celebrity or mid-weight personality playing WoW has no influence on my wow one way or the other. I guess the article might generate some hits for Wired though, as I geek out about a quasi-anti-wow story. Wink.

Related articles

• MMO Champ reference post

The Instance Interview with Cory Stockton

The Instance had the opportunity to interview Cory Stockton (episode 292), one of the key World of Warcraft “Lead Content Designer” at Blizzard. It adds an element of personality to the names that we read about on forums and blogs.

Overall listening to this helped me along the hype cycle, to look forward to Mists and also raise my expectations on the lore and content being offered in Mists to characters leveling through 85-90. End game options in particular get a good thrashing as a topic throughout the interview. Some notes:

• What characters Cory plays…loving the Monk class, and appears he’s a bit of an alt-a-holic. I respect that.
• Timed runs, and Scenarios – What were the challenges in getting the balance right? Goal: Competitive PvE and Leaderboards.
• A key challenge was explaining what Pandaria is, and why the factions are going there, and for what goals. A quick mention of Garrosh’s motivations and how they think about new lore.
• Corey stated that scenarios should have the players understanding the goal up front. The snarky part of my play experience thinks that he’ll want to review the Fall of Theramore then. That said, he has confidence that the other scenarios are interesting and engaging. He mentions a “siege of the Undercity” style scenario with Varian Wrynn as a 3 player mode. Interesting.
• Apparently folks do not read quest text! Wow, that makes for a challenge in terms of keeping context for a mission new without over simplification.
• Less cinematics in questing, which is probably good given some of the feedback from Uldum.

Its definitely worth a listen.

Cosmetic Glyphs are a great idea, more please.

Short comment today to note – I love the fact that we have cosmetic glyphs in the game. Ideally I would have said that we could have kept major & minor glyphs and trivial levels, but its a call that Blizzard made and its not worth crying about.

What I would like to suggest is that the options get expanded for all classes. Paladins for example have a number of cosmetic effects, while DKs have a few that affect out pets. I’m sure Shadow Priests have some (something about being less shadowy) just as examples. More please, perhaps even non-class specific effects too.

A side effect of adding so many new glyphs might be a massive effect on the market, but I think adding very rare glyphs from some other sources or drops is a good thing. In fact I’d like to see some of the rare or lost weapon and armour patterns added to the Blacksmith profession as well.

How about these glyphs:

• (all characters) Burning red flames, blue and white arcane glows and wisps, smoldering smoke, leaves dropping from them, and shadows writhing on the character – as aura effects. These would be translucent effects which surround the character in a subtle way when out of combat.
• (all) The Footsteps of Illidan card where you leave burning footprints effect as a permanent effect.
• (all) Ioun Stones (from dnd, similar to the Shaman watershield), Floating Orbs, etc as special rare find glyphs for Inscription only characters. ie. They get a rare pattern which creates a BoP Glyph. The pattern might be tradable (allowing a market effect) but the glyph is not.
• (all) switch your casting, special weapon swing, standard weapon swing to an alternate animation. Meaning that this will give a fixed alternative for each race, and adding the glyph might make that the default, or even let the toon choose randomly from the set of options.
• (all) Change of default voice, to a different sub-set.
• (all) different Death animation, as many raiders spend a lot of time on the floor. Perhaps the character even twitches a little.
• (all) race specific powers have a chosen colour tint. ie. Let the Draeneo healing effect be a purple aura on my DK, rather than normal.
• (Death Knights) Path of Frost animation whenever a Frost run is used.
• (Druids) As forms are a key part of the class, perhaps allow a greater degree of switching and swapping? Allow a horde model to be used by Alliance. Swim form as a shark, nessy, or Crocolisk.
• (Racial, e.g. Worgen) Make your Worgen form look like the very cool Northrend Worgen instead of your normal model. Likewise for the Dark Iron Dwarves for Dwarves, etc. The roleplaying potential is huge, mechanical effect nill.
• (Engineers) A transporter mistake offers a much wider range of changes, or always one, depending on the glyph used.

What else folks? What is your dream animation, change, or effect?

Related articles

• New and changing glyphs for patch 5.0.4 (wow.joystiq.com)
• Glyph of Disguise (bubblesofmischief.com)
• World Today: This Looks Safe (irez.me)