Arcadio saves the day.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-general&ThreadID=6005986

“I see this as a problem similar to piracy. In their attempt to combat piracy, many companies have ruined the products ability to run for normal, paying customers. The pirates? They find a way around the protection within days.

Piracy problem solved? No.
Normal customers hurt? Yes.

It goes back to many problems we deal with in real life all the time. What is better, preventative health care programs or catastrophic coverages when the lack of preventative care bites you in the backside? Keep your car regularly maintained at a few hundred a year, or the once every three year two thousand dollar breakdown?

They’re not addressing the symptoms that make people farm for gear. Instead, they’re spending great amounts of money making it more and more difficult to obtain by anyone not involved with 39 other people, to the detriment of everyone who cannot come up with, or does not want to come up with a group of that size.

The game suffers, those farming, farm it anyway. Oh, gee, you stalled their farming behavior for… three weeks. /golfclap

They will reduce all the end game content to nothingness no matter what size raid dungeon you place the loot into. You might as well build raid dungeons that everyone can build a group of friends to enjoy.

You can see that the barrier between great gear and so-so gear is not skill, is not dedication to the game, but how many people you can organize to help you earn it.

That is a lousy barrier for a game to provide. Imagine that as you played forward in the NFL (for those of you that are US), you didn’t have to play better teams, you had to play bigger teams with your bigger teams, until at the Superbowl, there were 50 players running across the field on each side.

It would be comical, and people would wonder who in their right mind would think of such a system.

It applies to this too. You go from a game where challenges are presented in managable terms that require you to learn and do well at your role, only to stop challenging you to play well, but instead challenge you to gather up enough people.

You read the strategy online, and l-r-l-r-b-a-b-a-start your way to victory.

/yawn”

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=6002105&p=3

“Blizzard needs to acknowledge the hardcore players in small guilds by putting in extremely difficult 10 man instances that have lockout timers and aren’t some winged BS like Dire Maul.

They also need to reinvent some of their design practices and make said instances immune to being trivialized by excessive purples. A couple suggestions are percentage-based nukes and abilities from bosses, creep attacks that ignore defense/armor of the MT, challenges that are extremely time sensitive, etc.

Right now the hardcore players in small guilds are faced with a hopeless future. Through their design choices, itemization and dev comments Blizzard is shouting from the rooftops that 40 man instances are the “legitimate” content. When asked to make a very hard 10 man, a common reply is that such an instance would be too hard for people in blues, and too easy for the uberguilds, so it cannot contain special or elite loot. This is a design cop out, and Blizzard needs to creatively rise to this challenge.

It’s solo to 60, then join a 60 man guild or die. WoW need a paradigm shift, whereby difficult 10-20 man content becomes the standard “legitimate” content vehicle, and 40 is reserved for special instances like Onyxia, Illidan, etc.”

And something I liked from further on in the thread:
“Tigole said:
But it would simply be unfair to cut our current raid game short because people think it’s somehow hurting their play experience. It’s perfectly ok to NOT raid if that’s not your thing. But there are lots of WoW fans out there that thrive on getting together in large groups to conquer difficult content. And they want (and should be) to be rewarded for that effort.

Translation:

We will keep focusing on Raid content my buddies and I loved when raiding in EQ. We will use our limited resources for the playstyle I like. I choose to ignore threads which show the vast majority of our playerbase prefers 5-10 man content. To Hell will you guys.”

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-realm-test&t=97874&p=1&tmp=1#post97874

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-rogue&t=753207&p=1&tmp=1#post753207

Flurry fixed?

New ranks should be good stuff. The question is, are they 20 man or 40 man drops. If they are 20 man which I am guessing they are, AQ becomes a massive priority over ZG, and something I would be VERY serious about doing.

As usual, here are some of the “most important” changes:

- Greater Blessings will cast the associated blessing on all raid members that share the same class as the target. For example, if you cast Greater Blessing of Might on a warrior in your raid, all warriors in the raid party will receive Blessing of Might from you. Additionally, Greater Blessings have an increased duration of 15 minutes. Imba.

- The following weapons and shields have been updated with new art : Perdition’s Blade, Obsidian Edged Blade, Gutgore Ripper, Core Hound Tooth, Aurastone Hammer, Drillborer Disk, Staff of Dominance. I hope the new hammer graphic doesn’t suck.

- Drop rates of Darkmoon Cards 2-8 (Portals 2-8, etc..) have been reduced. Ace drop rates have been increased. More expensive 2-8s and dirt cheap aces? I hope they didn’t Pristine Black Diamond the drop rate.

- Winterfall Furbolgs will not drop Winterfall Firewater as often.Why?

- Transforming Thunderstrike and Shadowstrike will no longer consume additional copies of the item that might be in the inventory. I wonder how this bug was discovered, perhaps a guild bank tried using it on a whim and all 20 of his vendorstrikes were removed?

- Blue Dragon Card - This trinket will no longer proc from non-combat abilities. To be honest that is a load off because I got it right after I lost herbalism, however this trinket should be buffed now to compensate imo.

- An Alchemy recipe to Transmute Heart of Fire into three Elemental Fires has been added at the Friendly level of the Thorium Brotherhood. This is very nice, since the imps having it on their loot table as a .00000000001% drop did nothing to fix the problem of getting these.

- Epic items that are level 51 and above will now disenchant into a Nexus Crystal. Also items that normally disenchant into Large Brilliant Shards have a very small chance of disenchanting into a Nexus Crystal. New more powerful enchanting recipes that require these Crystals can be found in the new Ahn’Qiraj content. Incendius can perhaps give Nexus Crystals? I’m glad they listened to my emails because having them be purples only would be some assbeavis.

- Enchanters can now turn some of their dusts and shards into magical oils. These oils when applied to weapons add a temporary bonus to magical damage or mana regeneration that stacks with permanent enchantments. The lower levels of these recipes are found on normal enchanting vendors. The higher level versions are found on special vendors and are rewards for high Zandalar faction. Good.

- The cleansed plants of Felwood have been modified:
There is no longer a gossip option to interact with them; simply right click on the plant to receive your buff or fruits. The amount of items you get from plants has been adjusted. A corrupted whipper root plant was bugged to require one fewer plant salves than intended to be cleansed; it’s now fixed to require the salves just like the other whipper roots. O RLY? I guess people team farmed these and you could have like 5 people click the dialogue at the same time. Adjusted could mean more, and I am guessing it means more. It could of course mean less since they want to nerf them, but that would be some BS.

- Noxxion in Maraudon now has the correct immunities. Noxxion is now social and will bring friends if pulled past other creatures. A jab at farmers.

-A new option has been added to Interface options, “Sticky Targeting”. When this is turned on, you will not deselect your current target when you click on empty space. Interesting.

- Any time an item is distributed using the “Master Looter” system and the item is quality epic or above there will be a confirmation dialogue to confirm that the item is going to the correct person. Another addon snagged and put into the game, not that I mind though.

- Talent improvements to buffs will persist across instance boundaries and logging out. Now perhaps we can fix the hardcoded tooltips?

-Chests in Maraudon have been disabled for good. Star punch to the farmers.

- Tauren males now use their off-hand attacks animation. What’s this? Do I hear some book backhanding action?

- New flight paths added between Ironforge and Chillwind Point. Also, between Chillwind Point and Light’s Hope Chapel. Imba FP.

www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=10510

His crits are big, and all, but I was laughing 30 seconds into the video, due to the editing.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=5832290&p=1&tmp=1#post5832290

“# We’re also adding raid versions for five of the Paladin’s blessings. These new raid version blessings will last for fifteen minutes, and allow the Paladin the means to buff every player of a given class in the raid by selecting only one. These blessings will be available at your class trainer and the only prerequisite is the final rank (talent point where applicable) of the Blessing.

# Blessing of Sanctuary
# Blessing of Kings
# Blessing of Might
# Blessing of Wisdom
# Blessing of Salvation”

Fucking imbalanced.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=5811820&p=1&tmp=1#post5811820

“Video Games Big Business
From Xinhua

Shenzhen
November 15, 2005

An emerging high tech opportunity in today’s China is playing games. Not only are more and more Chinese flocking to video games for diversion, there is money to be made reselling material accumulated in so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMORPGs). MMORPGs are games where players interact with one another in real-time and, more importantly from an economic perspective, accumulate virtual wealth which can be resold at a profit to other players for real money. Many innovative companies based in China are exploiting this new source of revenue and business couldn’t be better.

Wang Weiping, president of Shenzhen-based company Quizhou, says that growth in the resale of in-game material is reaching all time records. “We have over two-hundred and fifty employees at our location alone, and we are not the only company doing this. We are attracting highly-educated, dedicated employees and our business is growing by leaps and bounds.”

With this growth has come both wage pressure and concerns that the labor pool to perform the work required to keep these businesses growing may be strained. To address this problem, the governement is considering implementation of an intensive program to train displaced workers from rural areas to play online games for profit.

“Up until now, most of our employees have been college graduates, people who innately understand computers and computer games, but we are exhausting that pool and wages are climbing. If we could tap into a large pool of cheaper workers, we could expand faster.” said Quizhou’s Wang.

This idea does not sit well with some current employees. Jia Youling, who works for an online resale company, expressed his concerns, “This is an excellent job right now, it pays much better than my chosen field of chemical engineering. However, if there are peasants trained to do my job more cheaply, I may have to look for work elsewhere.”

Quizhou’s Wang isn’t concerned, “There seems to be sufficient revenue in this field for everyone, I think we can keep everyone happy.” With several new games planned or announced and several expansions on the horizon, the future looks bright for Chinese businesses in this area.”

Poor guy was standing around waiting for it to spawn for like 10 minutes, killing only the creeps in reach. Right as it appeared he ran forward, but it was too late I had already harvested it. I did wait around and he was still there for the next one, so I pointed at it right before it spawned and let him have it.

www.boomtown.net/en_uk/articles/art.view.php?id=9804

AoC should be payin’ me, bitch. I get DPS like this all day, dime a dozen. Shiiiiit. Here’s two dollars. Go buy some better weapons and be ready for me.

I am officially baffled. I asked JLC to try to talk to him in Chinese, but he wanted no part in it.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-realm-gorgonnash&t=137186&s=new&tmp=1#new

“Djai hit level 60 2 weeks ago. Last week we booted him out of our guild for speed hacking. This week the “hacker” is still guildless. He is now wearing these items:

Greaves of the Ten Storms
Black Brood Pauldrons
Soul Corrupter’s Necklace
Zandalarian Hero Medallion”

Very fishy.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=5726230&p=1&tmp=1#post5726230

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=5740754&s=new&tmp=1#new

“Too bad about that Sony DRM rootkit that enables cheaters to hide those hacks from warden, huh.”

Also includes coy response from GM about DM exploit as well as macro’d assurance response.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-dungeons&T=225005&P=1

Guy made a thread advertising a 2-man BRD clear (WAR/PLD), and had a numbered list of particular feats. Reading the thread at first I was blown away at some of the stuff that was listed and couldn’t wait to see how they pulled it off. I downloaded and I watched, come to find out it was just a BWL gear romp with Thunderfury. Sure using spell power buffs and the proccing shield for super AE damage was clever, but in essence it still was a purples + Thunderfury video and should have been presented as such.

It was late and I was feeling frisky so I hit up his thread with a minor flame. I could tell he was bent because he didn’t address me directly, basically completely ignored what I said. Today I checked the thread again, and he drops this blast on page 2. “It’s just a showing of some top tier items having some fun. If that doesn’t interest you, don’t download it.”

Sorry but no, you aren’t qualified to make such a statement after setting up the thread in the manner you chose. With that much gear you should be trying to 2-man Scholomance or DM biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-hunter&t=811955&p=1&tmp=1#post811955

Apparently, he was hotfixed, not hotfixed, ninja changed, impossible to solo, and easy to solo, depending on which post you read.

forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-dungeons&t=218894&p=1&tmp=1#post218894

That Andore guy sure gets around.

www.thottbot.com/?sp=22570

Logged on this morning and as usual went right to Rare > Misc. in search of my elusive ace. It was there?! Oh snap. I saw the price, 500G. I don’t even remember what the bid was at, I think 400-something. I just gave it a second thought for like 2 seconds, and nabbed it. In order to appease Ebenezer I look at the gold loss in the following way:

500 - 300(Elem Ace) - 40(Smoking Heart recipe) - 50(Fiery recipe) - 20(Various mats sales) = 90G Ace of Beasts

The aquisition of the other cards has begun, including trips to the Alliance AH. Once I get it made I can finally start some hardcore testing with it.

www.curse-gaming.com/mod.php?addid=2151

I’m telling you this guy doesn’t fuck around. I sent him overly polite emails about features in Autobar that now seem to work poorly, he responds with very annoyed tiny responses. I could tell he was hating me through the cable line. Now I go to check out the listing on Cursed and there’s comments about how he is all bent at Cursed for something they did. Other people also comment on his crankiness.