Archive for December, 2009
December 31st, 2009
Maybe it speaks to the nostalgic Horde members more than the rest of us, but I think the Interactive Horde Onyxia Attunement Chain is probably Wowcrendor’s best work yet. It has the same subtle sense of humor shown in his previous work, but then takes it up a notch by speaking to one of the single most prominent, painful moments in any Horde member’s life.
Like so much of Wowcrendor’s work, it’s not only the in-game references that make his work relay so much truth. It’s also the subtle nod to universal experiences. (For example, my favorite part is when you choose to not do the quest. If you go down that path, your guild leader yells at you to get your act together. C’mon, haven’t we all been there at one point or another?)
As a note, make sure you do not simply play this video. The experience is best if you visit Wowcrendor’s start page for this adventure.
Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an e-mail at machinima AT wow DOT com.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Moviewatch
WoW Moviewatch: Interactive Horde Onyxia Attunement Chain originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 31st, 2009
November saw the celebration of WoW’s fifth anniversary, the introduction of the pet store, and a steady avalanche of news from the patch 3.3 PTR.
Drama Mamas: When a partner wanders astray: The Drama Mamas answer one of their hardest and most unsettling questions.
Cataclysm: The exhaustive list of old-world changes (so far): Sacco goes over all the known information concerning upcoming zone and dungeon changes in Cataclysm with a fine-tooth comb.
Blizzard: Arenas were a mistake: Blizzard’s VP of game design says that arenas as they were implemented were probably not the best idea. Let a thousand comments bloom.
Blizzard launches real-money in-game pet store: The destination for data-mined pets we’d seen earlier that had never materialized in-game is finally revealed — Blizzard’s selling them. The march to micro-transactions continues apace, and not everyone is happy about it.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Get a pug when you PUG: The destination for the Perky Pug is also revealed, and players are somewhat happier about that, particularly after finding some of the pug’s more interesting animations.
Continue reading Best of WoW.com: November 2009
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Features
Best of WoW.com: November 2009 originally appeared on WoW.com on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 30th, 2009
In the transition to Cataclysm, an increasing amount of the game looks pretty dated, and we’ve already see Blizzard take a wrench to a number of models like druid forms and major lore figures. I’ve been hoping for a while that they’ll do the same with the game’s earliest and most dated models — the ones that haven’t changed a whit since the classic game hit beta — and particularly the following. All of them are a jarring difference from the graphical quality of Northrend creations, and only stand to get more so in Cataclysm:
1. The wyvern
The wyvern is the model from which Blizzard cribbed the horrifying older version of Tauren cat form, but it was already awful in its own right. Compared to gryphons, wyverns look…well…terrible. They have a host of much less impressive and realistic animations and just seem like they’re a lower-resolution model overall. The run animation on the player mount version makes it obvious that the thing was never meant to run, and the top of its head looks like somebody took an experimental swing at it with a frying pan. I have yet to see a Horde player fly one of these monstrosities longer than they absolutely have to.
Dear God, someone please put this affront to nature out of its misery.
Continue reading In-game models I would change if I could
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends
In-game models I would change if I could originally appeared on WoW.com on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 30th, 2009
October, as with August, was mostly a lot of news reporting. The patch 3.3 PTR dropped on October 1st and everyone went nuts for the last (we think) major content patch of Wrath of the Lich King. Next up? The content patch heralding the approach of Cataclysm, but with a lot of gated content between ourselves and that, we’ve got a ways to go.
Ask a Faction Leader: Cairne Bloodhoof: Among all the AAFL columns he’s done so far, Sacco’s personal favorite is Cairne.
Spiritual Guidance: Don’t be that priest: Matt Low not-so-gently lectures his fellow priests on the failings to which the class is prone while not paying attention or entering an encounter unprepared.
Searching for the most popular server: Schramm takes a look at some data and wonders — what’s the busiest and/or most crowded server out there?
Patch 3.3 PTR: New Tauren skins found: So what are those things anyway? A new set of NPCs for Icecrown? A new barbershop option? Tribal markings for the Grimtotem?
Chill of the Throne: Dodge nerfed 20% in Icecrown Citadel: The debuff is quickly termed “Icewell Radiance” by disgruntled tanks everywhere.
Continue reading The best of WoW.com: October 2009
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Features
The best of WoW.com: October 2009 originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 29th, 2009
Erunno’s Christmas Story won the WoW Model Viewer Christmas contest. It’s a comedy video about one elf’s brave struggle to find gifts for a Christmas story. His adventure takes him across the world of Azeroth, and features a dozen or so cameos of other, well-known machinimators.
Accord to Erunno over on his Myndflame post, he was experimenting with different techniques and styles from the anime industry. He wanted to take a look at how well those techniques would work out in machinima. I think Erunno nailed it pretty well, and I found the movie to be pretty fun and entertaining. Still, opinions will probably vary. I’m really curious to see how Erunno might use the styles in future videos, consider how well Erunno’s Christmas Story seems to have succeeded.
Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an e-mail at machinima AT wow DOT com.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Moviewatch
WoW Moviewatch: Erunno’s Christmas Story originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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December 29th, 2009
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. Winter Veil is winding down, and as we here at the WoW.com offices fight over the last carton of eggnog, we’ve been taking a lot of time to look over the past year and celebrate. Of course, here in the Tuesday Morning Post, we generally look at the past 7 days or so. So yeah, there’s plenty of the navel gazing stuff, but there’s a good smattering of news too. Nothing too major, I suppose. Even the dev team likes to see their family over the holidays, I guess. But it’s there. And in the meantime, a little bit of a navel gazing never hurt anyone. Our navels are pretty awesome anyway.
Join me for the last Tuesday morning of 2009 and catch up on your WoW reading. The usual list is after the break.
Continue reading Tuesday Morning Post: Same Old Auld Lang Syne edition
Filed under: Realm Status, Odds and ends, News items
Tuesday Morning Post: Same Old Auld Lang Syne edition originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 29th, 2009
Tinwhisker sent us this link to a set of entertaining PUG bingo cards on the official forums, made by Cruce of Scarlet Crusade. While I’m not sure I would actually have gotten bingo on any single run, some of the squares have certainly happened in many of my runs:
- A pure DPS class doing triple digit DPS (especially Death Knights; sorry to all the good DKs out there).
- RankWatch. Almost every run.
- Three or more members are “the Patient.” I guess it’s nice to show that they have some PuG experience, but that just makes egregious failures that much more disappointing.
- Someone starts on a mob the tank hasn’t even hit yet. More often than not.
- Melee DPS attacking from the front. It’s really not that hard, folks.
One thing I’d add to the list is people protesting that they don’t take the game that seriously when you give them advice, like that they might want to put up diseases before using other strikes on their DK. You don’t have to break out the spreadsheets, but there’s a certain minimum effort to not be letting everyone else in your group down.
What do you guys think of this bingo set? Going to print out a few sheets to keep you entertained during those long, cold dungeon runs? Are there any squares you’d add?
Filed under: Instances
Dungeon Finder bingo originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 28th, 2009
BlizzCon, BlizzCon, BlizzCon! That’s pretty much what August was all about — well, that and patch 3.2. Because this month was mostly crammed full of pure, unadulterated news about the upcoming convention and Cataclysm, there weren’t quite as many one-off features this time around.
All the World’s a Stage: Reflections on the passing of a roleplayer’s mom: This isn’t a very easy article to summarize. All I can say is — please read it. One of David Bowers‘ most elegant and introspective pieces: “WoW is not an escape from life, it is a reflection of it.”
WoW.com’s Patch 3.2 Guide and content for the day: Patch 3.2 went live on August 4th and was (oddly enough) one of the top stories for the year. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t that surprising — it had been a while since Ulduar had gone live, and the Argent Tournament patch heralded the introduction of a slew of new pets, mounts, titles, and new druid forms. Huzzah!
Playing WoW for charity: Interview with the WoWathon team: Three college students managed to raise $5,000 for Child’s Play with a marathon WoW session coupled with “dramatic readings of bad fanfiction.”
Researchers study WoW to see how gangs form and fade: A UC-Irvine team has been studying guild and group formation ingame for data on “group ecology.” As Schramm observed, “Listen, guys, all you have to do to break up gangs is ensure there’s not enough loot to go around.”
Continue reading The best of WoW.com: August 2009
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Features
The best of WoW.com: August 2009 originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 28th, 2009
Reader comments — ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.
The story’s not over ’til [1.Local] has picked it to bits and pieces … So what did the local denizens have to say about the world of WoW during the first half of the year? In fact, the [1.Local] scene itself became the news back in June, as [1.Local]: The epic rap battle comment war edition hit readers’ screens: “Players disagree over Blizzard’s upcoming badge changes. Rap battle ensues. Site is left terrified and confused.”
epsilon343: Ahh yes, the rap battle. Nothing like mad rhymes to cool off tempers.
Higher on Killchrono’s list of memories, though, was all the commotion about scamming: Aaah, I remember that run of articles about scamming. The best (and simultaneously worst) part about them were the numerous comments by phishers and scammers who tried to justify their actions by saying non-security savvy people deserved to get hacked and how they were ‘doing them a favour’ by showing them how stupid they were. A testament to how deplorable and vile malicious scammers truly are.
Continue reading [1.Local]: The best of 2009, January-June
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Features, [1.Local]
[1.Local]: The best of 2009, January-June originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 27th, 2009
July 2009 was defined by two dominant trends — waiting for patch 3.2 to hit, and an increasing amount of information starting to flow that would be confirmed one month later at BlizzCon.
Blizzard files trademark for Cataclysm: Gee, we wonder why?
Arcane Brilliance: Five things every mage should do before they ding 80: Archmage Pants guides you through some things that should be on every leveling mage’s checklist before the endgame.
Encrypted Text: Fan of Knives mechanics deep-dive: Chase Christian runs across a rogue on his server who’s able to kill people in an interesting manner, and goes on the theorycrafting warpath to figure out how he’s doing it.
Worgen Garwal hotfixed, now untameable: Worgen pets were, for a brief period, universally agreed to be the coolest thing in the game before being hotfixed into oblivion. Reason given? Something vague concerning why Blizzard doesn’t want hunters to have humanoid pets. Yes. Yes, that must be it.
Continue reading The best of WoW.com: July 2009
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Features
The best of WoW.com: July 2009 originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.