Author Archives: Sam

Warcraft and Questing

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Another post! Crazy right? It’s even a Warcraft one. Yesterday I had several ideas for posts so I’ll be working on those and posting them.The Grumpy Elf did his usual Monday Random Thoughts post and in it he mentioned the level 90 boost, and what that did to trivialise what they did in Cata to reform the levelling zones, and indeed the whole levelling experience.

I replied and from what I said he got “there is one like you that hates it”, in regards to how I feel about levelling. I replied to that comment as that’s not strictly true, and I explained why. I then thought that my response would make a decent blog entry, so here is my post on Warcraft and questing.

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Minipost – 5 reasons to love Marvel Heroes

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1) Christmas credits. When you killed enemies over christmas rather than piles of shiny coins, mountains of wrapped packages appeared. It was just a graphical change but a fun one.

2) Christmas gifts. I think the 12 hour rarity boost potion was to do with the patch rather than christmas. A Hulk costume with Hulk in Santa hat was given for free, not any use to people without Hulk but a nice gesture. The cool christmas gifts were the ones you logged in everyday for. This was a bit bugged in that you had to log in twice for them to appear in your inventory. Apart from that everyday you got 5 cube shards, 3 odin marks and 10 eternity splinters. As this went on for about 10 days this added up to a fair few. It’s all in game currency and it was a nice boost towards getting new things.

3) Speed of patches. The game has been out six months and it’s all but unrecognizable from launch. They have done an incredible amount of work to turn it round in a short space of time. It inspires faith in the dev team, that if something is wrong then they will fix it. I ran into a bugged legendary quest, googled on the forums, a purple had already commented that they’d fixed it internally and it would be applied on live as soon as possible. They have bugs and make mistakes, they acknowledge when it’s gone wrong, work hard to fix it and communicate while they are doing so.

4) Community communication. The purples, as they are in MH, are very active on the forums. They regularly write posts explaining what they are currently doing, what they are planning on doing, what they know isn’t working etc. They give estimated dates for patches and comment on their progress throughout. This is nice as we know the direction of the game, we have things to look forward to. They also actively ask for community input, they don’t always follow it but I get the feeling they listen.

5) The test center. This is obviously where they get people to test their patches, so that bugs are found and they don’t break the live servers. However, I’ve seen more than once one player advising another, to download the test center to ‘try before they buy’. As you can access heroes for free on the TC. I thought this would get stomped on but I saw one purple encouraging it. I suppose if people aren’t going to pay money unless they like it, trying it and liking it will part them from their money. I thought that was nice.

The Pursuit of Trivia

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I thought one more post before the end of the year would be nice, although perhaps I should do a special “Year’s end – The future” post. I haven’t decided and New Year’s isn’t for three days so I have some time. Anyway, for christmas I got Trivial Pursuit Warcraft style. Which seems a little odd I know as I don’t know anyone in real life who plays the game. This led me to playing against myself on boxing day and I thought that a review would make a nice post.

I also got Trivial Pursuit Star Wars style so I might do a little comparison of the two. Though they are different trivia games as the Star Wars one also utilizes DVD questions, whereas the Warcraft one is just on cards.

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Back to The Old Republic

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I got swtor pretty much when it was released. I played it for a few months and I really enjoyed it. However, when given the option I usually opted for playing Warcraft back then so I couldn’t justify two subscriptions. I wasn’t logging into swtor often enough for it to be good value for money.

Once it went free to play just over a year ago I tried it again briefly but I was busy in Warcraft at the time, trying and failing to set up a new raid team. I tried to play it again this past summer but whenever I booted the game my computer would crash. I think it was because it overheated. The game required more resources, resources my computer had but it made it run hotter, as it was already hot from the ambient room temperature it just couldn’t cope. Which brings me to the present day, playing again now it’s winter time.

Back to The Old Republic. So what’s new?

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After Warlords: Your Warcraft Expansion

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I liked this community blog topic – Pitch your Warcraft expansion – as it’s something I suppose we all think about. There’s things we like, things we don’t like, things we’d like to see. This is a chance to play dev for an hour or three and outline what we’d do if we were in the hot seat.

The post hasn’t been up that long but there’s already a few comments, just reading through the ones that are already there hammers home why the devs job is so difficult. People don’t just want different things, they want opposite things. This is why in my expansion I would try and emphasize choice. I went on about this a bit in my previous post because I think it’s incredibly important, especially for such a diverse playerbase as Warcraft has.

So after Warlords what’s next? I was stuck on a title, naming is hard and so for a working title I went with The Dark Below. I know it was a hoax which made it slightly amusing. However, I think I’ll call it World of Warcraft: Curse of the South Seas. It’s not great but it’s something.

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5 mans, LFR and Choice

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On WoWInsider they had a topic entitled – The return of hard heroic 5 mans. It referenced a blue post which said that 5 mans would be making a return in Warlords and that they would be harder than the Mists ones had been. I wrote a fairly long comment to the post, so it occurred to me that if I expanded on it a little it would make a good blog entry.

Let’s face it in Mists 5 man dungeons were sidelined. You could level in the normal mode ones, at the start of the expansion the 463 gear wasn’t bad and it filled in some holes. However, with LFR available and offering higher gear if you wanted to be optimal with your playtime, and were focusing on gearing, then 5 mans didn’t have a lot to offer. This only got worse as the expansion wore on and other options became available. True if you want to just play you can go run a 5 man, but if you want to play and achieve something at the same time than 5 mans don’t offer much.

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From Now Until Warlords

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The community blog topic at WoWInsider asked What are you doing from now until warlords? Now I haven’t been inspired by any of the previous blog topics but this one made me think, as actually it’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We don’t even have a date for the Warlords beta so we’re looking at several more months of Mists. How to fill that time?

At the end of every expansion there is always dead time and we’re approaching it now. Siege of Orgrimmar has been out three months. Based on the schedule Mists introduced us too we should have something new soon but there’s no 5.5, nothing until Warlords. It’s hard to put a life expectancy on a patch as people’s mileage will vary according to their goals. My personal experience is not the same as anyone else’s so it’s impossible to say. However, it’s my personal belief that if the beta isn’t announced soon, this month soon, then Warlords is going to come much too late. Beta lasts six months looking at history, so unless they break with tradition we’re looking at almost being in Dragon Soul territory already, only it’s worse as there’s a third lockout in flex every week.

At the end of Cata I wrote a bucket list, a list of things I wanted to do before Mists dropped. This isn’t the Mists version, I’m not too sure I’ll even write a Mists version, as I’ll explain below.

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November Retrospective

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I nearly entitled this post December Retrospective but then I thought that didn’t sound right. I’m looking back at November not December, I’m just writing it in December. Oh lets face it my brain is fried, I’m not even sure retrospective is the right word. Basically a post looking back at November and the madness that is NaNoWriMo.

I wrote a post about NaNo before November started stating my goals and what my thoughts were about the challenge this year. So it’s time to compare what I thought and hoped would happen with what actually did. What lessons did I learn this year? More importantly what am I going to do to carry it forward?

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Warlords of Draenor

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It’s Blizzcon time and they did announce the next expansion, well obviously they were going to. So I’m going to compare what I predicted and what they announced. I wish I could do a table but I don’t know how to do that. The website for Warlords of Draenor is up, as well as the feature trailer that they previewed at the opening ceremony.

I started writing this post right after the opening ceremony but realised that I couldn’t publish while new information was still coming out. I was writing something and then having to delete it as they explained the answer to my question. So I’ll probably be late to the blizzcon post party but hopefully what I write will make sense. Blizzcon isn’t over, they still have that big Q&A later but I reckon all the announcements are over now, so I’m going to post this. It’s already 5000 words, I know hardly anyone reads this blog but that’s still probably my longest post by a huge margin.

There’s some changes coming in Warlords and as usual some people like them, some people don’t. From my point of view there’s good and bad and I can’t wait for beta. I got into Mists beta thanks to the annual pass, and they’ve confirmed they aren’t doing another annual pass. I guess I can see why, I mean I got the annual pass and extra stuff to sub for a year, which I was going to do anyway, so they made a loss in that respect. So I might not be lucky enough to get a beta key whenever it does come out. It looked pretty far into development so I’m going to go out on a limb and say beta will be in out December/January. They need to get started on it really as otherwise the expansion won’t be released, and Siege of Orgrimmar will be out for too long, especially as they’ve said there isn’t going to be a patch 5.5. Anyway I hope it will be soon.

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Shift and Control

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I really did not know what to call this post but I wanted to write it anyway. November last year I wrote a review of my new mouse, the Razor Naga 2012. Well, I just took delivery of a new keyboard, a Steelseries Cataclysm bundle. It came with a standard keyset and the Cataclysm keyset specifically coded with Warcraft in mind.

I’d wanted a new keyboard for ages but I only have a small desk, most keyboards don’t fit on it very comfortably. In all honesty neither does this one, but it’s smaller than most of the others I looked at, so on balance it’s fine. Plus my previous keyboard was wireless, part of a keyboard/mouse set that came with the computer. It had an annoying habit of running out of battery during boss pulls, so it was time to upgrade.

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