Newslist For MMOValue

The Guild’s Twitter account is tweeting up a storm from the panel about our favorite Internet series at Comic-Con, and there’s a whole downpour of news already. Probably biggest is the news that Dark Horse Comics will be publishing a comic book featuring characters from Felicia Day’s show, penned by none other than Ms. Day herself. Details are still hard to find (there’s no mention of the book yet on DHC’s site), but we presume it’ll be about the real-life personas of The Guild folks, rather than a story about their characters. That’ll be interesting to see.

Other news from the panel is that Season 3 is coming soon, and it’ll feature a special guest: Mr. Wil Wheaton, former Star Trek annoyance (sorry, I didn’t like him at all), and current geek icon. Apparently they showed a sneak peek at the panel and a Jed Whedon-directed music video (featuring Vork spanking Codex and Tink dancing?), so as soon as we see either of those, we’ll be posting them here.

And finally, apparently Jeff Lewis (a.k.a. Vork) has announced that he’ll be marrying his wife in the game, though we have no idea if that’s a joke or not. With these Guild guys, you can never tell. Lots more news about season 3 to come, we’re sure, and of course we’ll see all of these folks at BlizzCon — here’s the interview we did with them last year. We’ve got at least one contact on the ground at Comic-Con this week, so stay tuned for more news from San Diego, too.

Kanghi World of Warcraft comiccon, comiccon2009, dark-horse-comics, felicia-day, jeff-lewis, microsoft, sdcc-2009, sdcc2009, sneak-peek, star-trek, the-guild, the-guild-comic, the-guild-season-3, vork, wil-wheaton, wilw

Rage is a problematic mechanic, and has been since its implementation. It can be a lot of fun, but it can also be frustrating, and it contributes to Warriors’ gear dependance. Blizzard is probably working on a way to redo rage entirely, but in the mean time, I’d like to highlight this suggestion for a rage revamp from Alveredus, a commenter on a recent post of mine.

Here’s a quick rundown of Alveredus’s proposal:

Rage increases over time by itself.
The more rage you have, the lower your attack speed, but the higher your crit chance.
When your rage is at maximum, you start losing resilience.
Your abilities vent rage instead of costing rage – same thing really, but a different way of looking at it.
I’m not certain about the specifics of it, but I like the general idea of rage being something you want to get rid of instead of something you want to spend. It makes sense: being in combat makes you angry; when angry, you may be less accurate, more vulnerable, or generally imbalanced.

On the other hand, a system like this runs the risk of feeling like Rogue energy with a penalty. Rogues get their resource back at a constant rate and use it on abilities, but nothing bad happens to them when they cap their energy (aside from losing out on some potential DPS). The comparison could feel unfair for Warriors, who already have their share of penalties for core abilities. But rage definitely could use some work, and I’d like it to stay an interesting mechanic.

Castro World of Warcraft Druid, Warrior

Ghostcrawler has posted a little paragraph on the forums, reaffirming something we’ve already heard from Blizzard: that in the past, they’ve spent more time on Arenas to the detriment of battlegrounds, and that battlegrounds are going to be gaining a little more focus in the future. They’ve already started, actually, with the Isle of Conquest in 3.2, but GC says there’s even more on the table, and that future plans will be revealed at BlizzCon.

He also brings up another good point, however: in terms of class balance, Arenas are a much more striking example of imbalances than battlegrounds are. Battlegrounds have all sorts of things going on, and so you don’t get as good a picture of just how the different classes work with and against each other as you do in Arenas. And so, if you’re a dev trying to figure out class balances, of course you’ll spend more time looking at the Arena gameplay than the BGs. GC also says that the majority of issues in BGs tend to be map-based rather than class imbalances, which is really a whole other science. Not that BGs aren’t relevant to how the classes work, just that there are many more variables in there than the relative vacuum chamber of Arenas.

All good points. I’m a fan of battlegrounds much more than Arenas, but I don’t particularly feel that Blizzard has ignored them necessarily. The real problem, to my mind, with BGs is simply how faction imbalanced they are: it seems like on every realm in every given BG, one side always seems to have the upper hand, for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s a population problem, sometimes it’s a map issue. But GC is right: those problems are more pressing than class balance in the BGs.

Castille World of Warcraft Battlegrounds

It’s the middle of the week again and once more unto the breach, my friends. Yes, tomorrow is maintenance Wednesday for European players. Fortunately, we told you this morning how EU Blue Wryxian had spilled the beans on the reason for all the recent rolling restarts and weeks of extended maintenance for a few select realms. I always find it’s easier to exercise more patience once someone proffers a reason.

So, this week it’s time for some rolling restarts. These will take place on all realms between 5:00am and 7:00am CEST, with the usual fifteen minute warning. The following realms (the same will be undergoing an extended maintenance from 3:00am until 11:00 am CEST.

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

As usual, I intend to sleep right on through the rolling restarts. My cats probably have other ideas though. If you’re bored and looking for something to do, don’t forget to check out Daniel W’s helpful post collecting up all the important news from the last week.

Catherine World of Warcraft Blizzard, europe

Blizzard EU has released a long and detailed statement concerning the recent waves of extended maintenance and how it’s connected to the problems associated with launching instances. For several months players have been plagued with the message “Additional instances cannot be launched.” The message was being caused by overloaded instance servers, and for a long time there was seemingly nothing Blizzard could do about it.

Blizzard’s statement today clearly informs us that all the extended maintenance we’ve been seeing is directly due Blizzard implementing fixes for the problems server-side. While the statement comes from an EU source, once can assume rather easily that it applies to the US as well.

While no timeframe is given as to exactly when this will be done for all realms, it is very good to know that stuff is getting done behind the scenes. And this look at exactly what Blizzard is doing to their servers represents a rare glimpse into their inner workings. Usually Blizzard is pretty tight lipped about what exactly is happening with their hardware.

The full statement after the break.

The full post from Wryxian reads as follows:

Recently there has been a number of extended maintenance periods for certain realms. Some of these we informed you about in advance and some we were unable to until during the actual maintenance period. We want to take the time to explain the reasoning behind these extended maintenance periods, and also those that will need to occur in the future.

These extended maintenances are directly linked to the message we posted in early July (http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=9941934722) about our investigations in regard to instance capacity and our plans to implement hardware modifications to achieve positive change for your play experience. As we said we would do in that message, we are now informing and updating you of our progress.

These modifications are typically a two stage process, requiring two lots of extended maintenance for each group of realms being worked on. For the realms listed below, the first stage was completed successfully on Wednesday the 15th of July during a pre-announced extended maintenance period.

On Wednesday the 22nd of July we also began to complete the second and final stage of this process on the affected realms. However, we encountered unforeseen difficulties in implementing the modifications. We were left with two options; either to further extend the maintenance period well into the evening and thus the busiest playing hours, or to take just a couple of extra hours to roll back the changes so that the realms could be back up and playable quickly. Since we did not want to disrupt your ability to play the game during the prime time, we decided on the latter option.

Since the final stage of these modifications did not complete successfully, we will need to do a further extended maintenance for the realms listed below. This is currently planned for the next maintenance period on Wednesday 29th of July. Because of this, we wish to inform you in advance that the realms listed below will again experience extended maintenance as we implement changes that we believe will bring positive change for your play experience, especially in regards to the ability to enter dungeon and raid instances.

After these modifications are implemented successfully, we aim to post up a feedback thread so that you can share with us your thoughts on how they have affected your play experience. At that stage, we will greatly appreciate it if you are able to help us with your feedback.

Catelet World of Warcraft Blizzard, Realm Status

We saw it last night, and the problems have once again appeared this afternoon. Authentication isn’t working as intended for non-Battle.net accounts. This means if you haven’t transformed your WoW account into a Battle.net account, you’re probably not going to be able to get into the game easily.

The transformation process can be initiated at us.battle.net. It only takes a few minutes and is relatively painless. Converting your account to Battle.net is not required at this time, but I don’t think anyone should be surprised if it is soon.

Malkorix has said that there are problems, and they are aware of the problems, but don’t have any ETA on a fix at this time. He also makes a point to note that converting your account to Battle.net is only a reported and unconfirmed by Blizzard solution. However we can say that we haven’t seen any issues with Battle.net accounts.

We’ll update this post when we have more information.

Castres World of Warcraft News items, Realm Status

Blizzard announced the Warcraft movie in 2006, after a long and arduous search for a proper production outfit that shared their vision. This search ended with Legendary pictures getting the deal – and while the studio doesn’t have spotless track record (Lady in the Water, I’m looking at you…), I think they’ve hit more home runs than strike outs, particularly with properties that resonate strongly with us geeks and fanboys. Whether or not you agree with their vision, it’s safe to say the guys behind Legendary respect their source material a great deal – from the visually stunning 300, the somber and severe The Dark Knight, and the un-movie-able Watchmen. I even really liked Bryan Singer’s reverent and messianic take on big blue in Superman Returns.

Now, after a drought of news regarding the film, Harry Knowles broke the news about Spider-Man and Drag Me to Hell director Sam Raimi landing the job of helming the Warcraft flick. Variety soon reported that Charles Roven, who produced The Dark Knight, was also joining the mix. Although a lot of things can still change from now until we see Azeroth on the silver screen (directorial musical chairs isn’t uncommon in Hollywood), a lot of us at WoW.com were pretty stoked to hear Raimi being selected for the job. I mean, at least it’s not Uwe Boll.

Raimi is a fanboy’s director, and I’m sure we’re all fans of the cult classic Army of Darkness, as well as aware of his signature cameos of the Delta 88 and childhood friend Bruce Campbell and brother Ted. Blizzard and Legendary have both noted that they want a director capable of directing an epic not unlike the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and we think Raimi’s suitably up to task. He’s got a really good sense of humor, too, something I’m sure Blizzard liked on his resume when he expressed interest in the film back in 2008. The question is, what kind of Warcraft movie should we expect?

Considering his Army of Darkness roots, I’m sure we’ll see a lot of hilarious moments in a large-scale battle. He also directed Quick and the Dead, so we’re pretty sure there’ll be a lot of cool and stylish moments. He’s shown that he can play around with big budgets in the Spider-Man franchise so it’ll be interesting to see what he can do with upwards of $100 million. Will we see Campbell as Varian Wrynn? Ted Raimi as a Goblin trade prince? Dolly zooms! Montage sequences! The possibilities are endless.

Where will it be set? What period? Will we see Draenei or even the speculated new races? Who among the popular Warcraft lore characters will make an appearance? Will Griftah finish his tale? Do you agree with MTV’s assessment? The movie speculation is going to go even wilder once the Cataclysm hits Azeroth, too! Share your thoughts on a Sam Raimi-directed Warcraft movie with us.

Castille World of Warcraft sam-raimi, wow-movie

As part of the latest issue of WIRED magazine and to tie in with the release of war movie Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt has contributed his thoughts to a section in the magazine on how to deal with everything from Google-stalking to WoW.

The idea of this seems to be updating social rules for the twenty-first century (and not make you look like a jackass). He’s responsible for the ‘Ask a Bastard’ sections which feature fun photography and answers life’s insanely important questions, like what to do with your WoW wife if you suspect she is, in fact, a he.

Pitt suggests the following should you suspect your ‘wife’ (night elf, blood elf or even human, I doubt it matters on the specifics) is actually a guy. Yes, he’s playing the fidelity card: Should you confront the individual? “Absolutely not. If it’s good, don’t check under the hood. I say, love her with everything you’ve got. I mean, she’s your wife, man!”

What I want to know is, does Pitt play WoW and is his advice based on real experience? Somehow I see him as an Orc …

Kiuperli World of Warcraft News items, Odds and ends

Zoltan of Aegwynn is the guy who’s been sitting on top of the overall achievement point lists for a while, and he’s just recently cracked the incredible total of 10,000 points. At the time of this writing, he’s finished off a total of 908 out of 931 achievements currently in the game, giving him a total of 10,005 achievement points.

The Champion of Ulduar is the one that put him over the top according to his Armory profile, and strangely, he doesn’t appear to have any of the Feats of Strength (edit: never mind, I read it wrong — he’s got plenty). He is only missing the two World Event achievements left (Brewmaster and the meta-achievement, neither of which are yet possible), the Sea Turtle achievement, and then a few more Heroic Ulduar endgame points. Given that the 3.2 patch achievements will likely come out before Brewmaster, there’s no way yet to clear everything completely, but he’s as close as it gets.

Very impressive indeed. Zoltan has just one or two people on his heels, and then the numbers drop out to a few hundred below 10,000 (and strangely enough, the top five players are all EU folks). There’s no reward for all of those points (and Blizzard has no plans to offer any), but it’s quite, as you might say, an achievement.

dreadmage World of Warcraft achievements, Virtual selves

According to the in-game announcement there will be downtime for tomorrow, Tuesday July 21st. Tuesday also marks one month before BlizzCon 2009, where we’re expecting to hear lots of major announcements from Blizzard. Something cataclysmic, hopefully.

The downtime will be happening from 5:00 a.m. PDT / 8:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT. Unlike previous weeks, there are no additional “special” battlegroups that are being taken offline for an extended period.

If there are unexpected going ons with this maintenance, you’ll see additional information posted here. And for those of you wondering, we’re not expecting Patch 3.2 to drop just yet.

Pic for this article is unrelated, but I wanted an excuse all day to use it and now seemed like the right opportunity.

Castillans World of Warcraft News items, Realm Status

Just in case you aren’t satisfied with one chance at winning tickets to BlizzCon, those guys from SteelSeries have teamed up with J!NX, BradyGames, Upper Deck, and Swag Dog to bring you the BlizzCon Sweepstakes. That’s like an all-star crew of geek and gamer gear companies forming some sort of super team just for you. That’s right, these guys want you to go to BlizzCon, too, and all you have to do is hop on over to their sweepstakes site, fill up a form, and you’re in. It’s that easy. First prize is a flight for two to Anaheim, 2 nights at a hotel, 2 passes to BlizzCon, and yes, even $300 in pocket money (so you can buy more of swag, I’d imagine).

Here’s where the all-star crew comes in — if you don’t get to win the Grand Prize, five lucky chaps will go away with a SteelSeries World of Warcraft mouse, a $50 J!NX Gift Certificate, and the World of Warcraft Atlas from BradyGames. The rest of the lucky guys will get $25 Swag Dog Gift Certificates, Fields of Honor booster packs, World of Warcraft-themed mousepads, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Not a bad deal at all for just filling out a form. Of course, as usual, it’s only open to residents of the United States and Canada (excluding Alaska, Hawaii, and Quebec). The contest runs until July 31, so feel free to dilly-dally around WoW.com before you submit your entry

Kocherberg World of Warcraft

If you’re looking for a way to relax this weekend, why don’t you hie off to Houston and get tickets to the Gamer MusiCON ’09, an all-day event celebrating music from the video game industry. If you’re familiar with the Video Games Live, the whole event has expanded somewhat with the help of Blizzard Entertainment and will now have a full hour-and-a-half Blizzard Live! to go along with the traditional Video Games Live! concert.

Blizzard Live! will feature music, both old and some never performed ones, from Blizzard’s different game worlds – Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft – paired with exclusive game footage and synchronized lighting. The Video Games Live! segment features music from other popular games like Chrono Trigger or Mega Man.

Of course, just like any great geek and gamer event, Gamer MusiCON will feature a lot of fun in between, such as costume contests, Guitar Hero faceoffs, a Q&A with Blizzard’s composers, autograph signings, and lots of swag. The event, conducted by Jack Wall and hosted by Tommy Talarico, comes to life with the help of the Houston Symphony. It will be held at the Jones Hall in downtown Houston. You’d better get your tickets today! Oh, and don’t forget to bring a date.

Cephalonie World of Warcraft Blizzard, Events

This got somewhat lost in the news shuffle over the holiday weekend, but Blizzard has posted another issue of their extremely irregular Gadgetzan Times fan-fic-oriented newsletter, for the first time since May 2008. This time around it consists of two pieces of short-form fan fiction, an amusing “classifieds” section, and a slightly half-hearted crossword about the dungeons of WoW.

It’s an interesting thing for Blizzard themselves to come out with, as it has been from the start. I really like the idea — characters from Azeroth report on events in and around their world — but it could use a little more polish and effort, not to mention a more regular timetable. On the other hand, they’re still publishing more regularly than my Illusionary Tactics column. Maybe I should not call this particular kettle black.

Cephalonie World of Warcraft Blizzard, Virtual selves

Live PvP competition is old hat. 2009 appears to be the year of PvE (if you ask me, every year should be that year). At the Games Convention Online, in Leipzig over the weekend of July 31 – August 2, two of the strongest PvE guilds in the world, Ensidia and Method, are competing in a timed run of Ulduar.

It’s going to be on 10-man, which is kind of strange, given that most people (and especially hardcore raiders) seem to think of the 25-man version as the “real” version of the raid. Maybe they wanted it to be easier for spectators to follow the action.

Points will be awarded for killing end bosses of a “zone” faster than the other guild, with points increasing from zone to zone. I’m guessing that by “zone” the press release refers to the Siege, the Antechamber, the Keepers, and the Descent into Madness, but the translation is not perfect – I could be wrong.

The Ensidia/Method matchup is going to be on August 2nd; as a prelude, two German guilds (Irae AoD and For the Horde) are going to compete on the same event on August 1st. Apparently the raids will be streaming live on allvatar.com, although I can’t really get very far on that site – WTB English translation. Does anyone know if it will be free to watch or not?

Catalans World of Warcraft Events, Guilds

The Breaking News box has recently cropped up in-game, announcing tomorrow’s maintenance for North American realms. As you can see in the image to the right, servers will be down from 3:00 AM PDT until roughly 11:00 AM PDT, assuming all goes well. If you’re not sure what time this is in your timezone, use this timezone conversion tool.

You know the drill, guys. WoW.com will, as always, be here all throughout the maintenance to cure your boredom. For you European readers, remember that some of you will be hit with an extended maintenance later on, which we’ve posted about already.

Castille World of Warcraft Realm News, Realm Status