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Snowyfox of the US Vek’nilash server recently brought up a point on the forums which is near and dear to my heart: 5-mans really feel like they’ve lost their heart. In both Vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade, you could usually count on having the motivation and reward for running a 5 man no matter what your level. In Vanilla WoW, you might do a tribute run for potions and buffs or a Stratholme run for Abomination stitchings for an enchant. In BC, you’d run for badges. In Wrath of the Lich King… not so much. Badges don’t stretch so far since most of the good stuff requires badges only obtained in raid dungeons, and even the daily quests aren’t even close to as lucrative as just heading up to the Argent Tournament or over to the Sons of Hodir and doing some dailies.

Yet 5-mans, in many ways, are the heart of the game. They’re where you cut your teeth on group mechanics and really learning your class. While there are many PuG horror stories, they can also be a place to meet new friends and prospective guild members. They’re a nice way to get together and do something with friends in game that’s a little less intensive than raiding but can be done with everyone on the same page more easily than trying to synchronize quests. I know I have quite a few great memories of doing 5-man dungeons with friends, myself.

The nice thing is, Ghostcrawler chimed in to say that things may have not fallen completely on deaf ears. They did stuff like making end-game raiding more accessible and segregating badge rewards so that raiders wouldn’t feel like they were obligated to run 5-mans, he says, but in the process they may have made 5-mans too easy to graduate from, and thus they may want to strike a balance in the future.

I’d love to see 5-man progression more open-ended and rewarding in the future. Being able to work toward more badge gear and even cool cosmetic rewards like the Argent Tournament mounts and pets would be amazing, as would a wider variety of daily quests with interesting storylines (Something beyond kill me the boss and bring me this drop) and solid rewards that make them more enticing than the soloable dailies. Since it seems Blizzard has this idea in their heads, perhaps we’ll see the first fruits of it in patch 3.2. I’d love to see more interesting daily quests or rewards come out of the 5-man Argent Coliseum and even out of other older dungeons that would inspire me to log on and run them again.

Catherine World of Warcraft 5-man, ghostcrawler, snowyfox

The World of Warcraft Trading Card game has released its latest expansion, but it’s a little bit different than what’s come before. It’s called Arena Grand Melee, and it actually changes the gameplay of the TCG just a little bit, including some very different mechanics than those players have seen before. For instance, there’s a card called “For the Fallen” that will grant additional cards to players when they act out their melee strikes in real-life. Another card called “Steamwheedle Casino” has players playing a quick game of Blackjack with their WoW TCG cards to win an extra card. Arena Grand Melee sounds it puts a very strange twist on the current TCG game.

The WoW TCG site has been highlighting some of the new cards in the game — there’s a new ability called Preparation, which allows you to use a card twice in quick succession, and there are cards that boost your hand size and beef up your allies, as well as cards that offer up some other new heroes and abilities. It sounds like an interesting addition to the game, but on the other hand, this doesn’t seem like a pack for newbies — experienced players will get the best thrill from these twists. Pick up the eighty card sets in either of the Horde or Alliance versions at your local gaming store.

MMOvalue World of Warcraft Arena, talents, wow-tcg

We noted an error earlier this evening which was causing the Lake Wintergrasp PvP zone to be reset prematurely. Since ending epic battles early is a bad thing, Blizzard has gone ahead and “shut off Wintergrasp” completely for the time being.

This change is affecting all realms.

There is no word when a fix will come through, but we’re hopeful it will happen sometime soon. Disabling an entire part of the game is a big thing, and an error that usually is corrected quickly.

Some speculation points to the change in daily (now weekly) quests that just went in, however there is no evidence to support this.

MMOvalue World of Warcraft patch-3.1.2, wintergrasp

Last week’s maintenance saw a larger number of servers go down for an extended time in order to receive some hardware upgrades. This week it’s the same game with a new batch of servers.

For those realms who are not getting a hardware upgrade, maintenance will run from 3:00 a.m. PDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT. Just another week, nothing special to see here, move along.

For those realms who are getting the server upgrade, maintenance will run from 3:00 a.m. PDT until 1:00 p.m. PDT. Last week the maintenance ran over by a bit on the realms that were receiving hardware work, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that be the case again this week.

The list of realms undergoing these hardware upgrades after the break.

Area 52
Auchindoun
Azuremyst
Blade’s Edge
Blood Furnace
Coilfang
Dawnbringer
Exodar
Fizzcrank
Galakrond
Ghostlands
Grizzly Hills
Shattered Halls
Terokkar
The Scryers
The Underbog
Velen
Zangarmarsh

MMOvalue World of Warcraft maintenance

Yes, if you were around on Saturday, you know that the first round of BlizzCon tickets sold out, and sold out fast. Tickets went on sale right around 10am PST (which was 1pm EST), and sold out just about 28 minutes later. If the queue numbers are trustworthy, over 21,000 people (we’ve heard as high as 25,000 at a time) logged in to buy tickets that day, and from unconfirmed reports around the web, it seems like about 5,000 to 8,000 tickets were sold: most people who got in line around number 5,000 were able to pick a ticket up, and that was a few minutes in already. Some of those people are already selling tickets on eBay as well.

We believe (though aren’t sure) that they’ll be selling more than 15,000 tickets this year, since that’s what they sold last year and they’re using even more of the convention space. If that’s true, then Blizzard probably went through only about half of the tickets, and will sell the rest during the second session on the 30th. But that’s probably not much of a consolation — given the frenzy around this last Saturday, there’ll probably be more people trying for tickets, and given the prices on eBay, possibly more scalpers clogging up the queue. We’ll see.

Update: Lots of people point out, rightly so, that I missed something in my guesstimates of how many tickets were sold: you could purchase up to five. My personal guess is that the majority of people bought only one or two, but even if you go with three as the average, 5,000-8,000 people in the queue is actually 15,000-24,000 tickets. Blizzard probably did sell the majority of tickets on Saturday then, not just half. So the process on May 30th will presumably go even faster.

Mustapha World of Warcraft Blizzard, blizzcon

I’ll admit it: Armor Penetration has always confused me. I understand it moderately well – it makes your attacks act as if your opponent had less armor. The conversions from numbers to percentages, and the corresponding DPS increase, can be found at various places on the internet. But due to the fact that armor doesn’t scale linearly, neither does ArP: going from 50% to 51% ArP helps you much more than going from 10% to 11%. This makes it pretty hard for me to get a good feel for.

As a consequence of the non-linear nature of ArP, getting very high amounts of it can lead to insanely boosted damage – as an unattainable example, I’m told that 300% ArP would mean thousands of times more damage. To keep ArP from getting out of control, then, Ghostcrawler has announced that they plan on capping ArP at 100%, meaning armor could no longer go negative (which it can now).

This was made with an eye towards future tiers; at the moment, it’s impossible to get to 100% unless you have very specific gear and two trinkets proc at the same time. So this should have very little impact, if any, on current DPS. However, we may see a day in Icecrown when ArP, like Hit, is a completely worthless stat after you have enough of it. This strikes me as an awkward situation, but short of removing the stat entirely (which, sadly, I don’t think they’re going to do), I can’t see a much better solution.

Catalans World of Warcraft armor-penetration, arp

BlizzCon tickets go on sale in two days, this Saturday, May 16th. One question we at WoW Insider have received several times is: “when on Saturday do the tickets go on sale?” So far, Blizzard has been silent on this issue.

Turns out there’s a good reason for that – they don’t know themselves. Bornakk puts it as follows: “we don’t have an exact time on when they will be up but our web engineers will need to be here to properly start and monitor the system when it goes live so we don’t plan to be doing that in the middle of the night.”

In response to a poster’s conjecture that since the billing department is going to be open from 9 AM to 6 PM this Saturday (they’re not usually open on weekends), tickets will be sold during that time as well, Bornakk calls it a “solid line of thought.” So that’s the best information we have so far: not in the middle of the night, and probably sometime between 9 AM and 6 PM PDT. If we hear any more, we’ll keep you posted.

gmaxwell World of Warcraft

While writing the most recent Shifting Perspectives column and browsing old records on Druid population statistics, I started to wonder about the various factors that play a role in how popular a class becomes. While Blizzard and Blizzard alone has the exact numbers on who’s playing what, various fan sites have honed data collection strategies over the years and amassed a pretty impressive pile of numbers. This only got easier when the Armory launched in spring 2007, and by now I’d be surprised if players weren’t at least broadly accurate about overall trends. If we can trust what we see, how we do best explain fluctuations in class popularity? Has Arena success (or the lack thereof) been as influential as we think? Is class population an accurate, albeit crude, guide to the overall “quality” of a class at any given moment — or just a guide to the perceived “quality?” I’d be interested to hear what people think.

Having played a Druid since the beginning of Burning Crusade and observed it going from the second least-played class at 60 to the third or fourth most-played class at 80, I have my own theories about what’s influenced Druid population numbers particularly, but I need to do a little more digging before I can be sure. However, I don’t know whether any of it really applies to other classes, and the meteoric rise of the Death Knight is a thought-provoking (and somewhat troubling) trend.

Castro World of Warcraft trends, wow-armory

There’s new patch notes for patch 3.1.2 on the PTR out this evening. The patch notes are an update to the ones already released, however there are a few notable changes in them. Some of the major changes:

All Lake Wintergrasp daily quests have been changed to a weekly format. The honor and Stone Keeper’s Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate.
Juggernaut: Critical strike chance bonus reduced to 25%, down from 100%.
Jewel of the Sewers: You can now fish in all parts of the Dalaran sewers for this quest.
10-player bosses that drop Runed Orbs will also sometimes drop the recipes that use those orbs.
The full patch notes, along with a complete list of changes, after the break.

Read more…

MMOvalue World of Warcraft ptr, Update

For those of you worried about the return of Failoc, or just interested in how the BlizzCon ticket process is going to work this time around, Blizzard has posted a FAQ on buying tickets on their BlizzCon site.

Interesting information includes:

You should make a Battle.net account ahead of time, and make sure the payment information on it is up-to-date.
If there are enough people on the site trying to buy tickets (and trust me, there will be), there will be a queue to join.
Once in the queue, you’ll get an ETA for how long until you can get your tickets. Do not close or refresh the window. If tickets sell out before you get to the front of the line, they’ll let you know.
When you get to the front of the queue, you have 15 minutes to buy your tickets before you get booted and have to join the queue again.
You don’t need to give attendee information until after finishing the ticket purchase.
They also note that this queue system will remain in place for future Blizzard items “whenever a certain number of people are making purchases simultaneously,” so get used to it – you’ll almost certainly be seeing it when StarCraft II and Diablo III come out.

Catalans World of Warcraft blizzcon, Events

Blizzard just announced that tickets for BlizzCon 2009, the third fourth installment of their phenomenally successful Blizzard-themed convention, will go on sale on Saturday, May 16, for $125 each. That’s a week from this Saturday, friends. Additional tickets will be sold on Saturday, May 30. Edit: You’ll be able to buy tickets at blizzcon.com at the appointed times.

BlizzCon 2009 will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center on August 21 and 22. For those unable to make it, DirecTV is once again selling a pay-per-view package of the event for $40, which seems a bit steep for a two-day video feed, but will include exclusive video and this year’s in-game item. This will also be available as an internet stream, presumably for those not subscribed to DirecTV.

Last year’s BlizzCon ticket sales were marked by a figure affectionately known as the Failoc, which was displayed when Blizzard servers utterly failed to respond to crushing demand. This year, they think they’re prepared: “the company has made upgrades to the Blizzard Store, including a first-come, first-served queue system and a fixed time limit for completing purchases,” according to their press release.

MMOvalue World of Warcraft blizzcon, news

I’m sorry Blizzard, but I’m with the whiners on this one. The School of Hard Knocks is so badly designed that it’s ruining, instead of enhancing, the Battleground experience. Take, for example, the requirement to return a flag in Warsong Gulch. First of all, the requirement is that the player return the flag personally as opposed to being in the vicinity of a flag return. This means that all ten players on one side are angling to return the flag… which is great in theory but in practice encourages entire teams to wait inside the base hoping to get the Achievement. This results in extended stalemates that don’t actually encourage what needs to be done, which is to capture the flag.
Read more…

Castres World of Warcraft School-of-Hard-Knocks, Warsong-Gulch

X-Men Origins: Wolverine came out in theaters yesterday, to fairly dismal reviews, and like any good summer movie, it has a tie-in video game. Why are we talking about it here? Because the game contains a hidden nod to our own favorite digital pastime, WoW. I’ll put specifics (and a screenshot) behind the cut, in case you don’t want to be spoiled for the Wolverine game.

MMOvalue World of Warcraft easter-egg, references, x-men

We’ve received a lot of tips in the past few minutes, and now it’s official: the Shadowburn battlegroup is down for emergency maintenance. The realms are estimated to return in two hours, around 3:30 EST, but we’ll keep you posted if we hear anything new.

The affected realms are Agamaggan, Azshara, Baelgun, Dark Iron, Detheroc, Emerald Dream, Greymane, Kalecgos, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Moonrunner, Nazjatar, Sargeras, Staghelm, Twisting Nether, Ursin, and Wildhammer.

What are you guys going to do in the mean time? I hear there’s a good WoW blog around here somewhere that you might enjoy browsing through.

MMOvalue World of Warcraft Realm News