Witness this in all it’s glory, as the Goon Squad of Mal’Ganis starts from scratch and within 62 seconds completely dominates Wintergrasp.

They’re billing it as the fastest Wintergrasp ever, and while I suppose that could be true, it’s definitely one of the most interesting I’ve ever seen. The trouble now is that everyone will wind up trying to duplicate this strategy, and while I applaud the Goon Squad for their epic conquest, they were also pretty lucky: I don’t see this happening terribly often.

Patch 3.1 goes live today, and with it comes the release of the Ulduar raid dungeon. My guild has been preparing for weeks to storm the instance, but an interesting thread (warning: heavily trolled) popped up on the Blackrock forums last week that has us somewhat undecided as to how we should approach the encounters.

In a nut shell, a few guilds are arguing over what criteria should be used to rank guilds in WOTLK. It used to be simple: you kill a boss, your guild moves up a rank. First guild to clear an instance “wins.” Now, however, with the advent of achievements, ranking a guild has become slightly more complicated. Encounters can be done several ways, and if you voluntarily choose to do an encounter the “hard” way you get an achievement. Clearing an instance without doing any of the optional achievements is easy by design. However, completing all of the individual raiding achievements is itself an achievement (known as a meta achievement), and guilds that do so are rewarded with a special prize. The guilds that are fighting want to have their idea of progression be the “official” method of ranking a guild. Not coincidentally, their idea of progression also happens to put them on top.

The guilds that cleared the instances on “easy” mode wants to be recognized for the simple act of defeating the dungeon first, which is how guild rankings used to work. The guild that managed to kill Sartharian the Onyx Guardian and all three of his lieutenants at the same time wants to be recognized as the top Alliance guild because they consider that to be the most difficult encounter in the game. Lastly the guild that completed the meta achievement first, which is all raiding achievements including the Sartharian achievement, wants to be considered the top guild.

On the surface, it seems to make sense that completing the meta achievement would be the logical way to rank a guild, as Blizzard itself rewards you with a special mount for completing it. However, the difficult part about completing the meta is an achievement called The Immortal. To get The Immortal, your guild must kill every boss in Naxxramas without a single person dying. It’s the rarest raiding achievement in the game, and guilds (usually the ones that can’t do it) are claiming that it’s not fair because sometimes people die to circumstances beyond their control. Now, I don’t agree with that assessment. My guild was the second guild to complete the meta achievement after Death and Taxes, and we never considered The Immortal to be out of our control. Then again, we’re not a guild based in Singapore that is plagued with random disconnects and international lag either, so you can probably see their point.

So now the debate rages on inside my guild. Do we go for the quick clear tonight, or do we work on hard modes from the get-go? We’re a leading edge content type of raiding guide; going straight into hard mode isn’t beyond our capability. But is it worth it to adjust our progression strategy just so we can juice up a forum thread? I’m really not so sure. There are already websites like wowprogress.com that do an amazing job of tracking guild progression, and they’re using much more advanced scoring techniques than any forum thread I’ve ever seen. They already rank us as the top alliance guild by achievement. My gut feeling tells me to just ignore what goes on in the forum thread, refer potential applicants to wowprogress.com and just do our own thing. At the same time, I also know that being recognized as a top raider means a lot to quite a few of my guildies. I hope we end up just doing a quick clear the first week, but we’ll see. Raid starts in 3 hours.

I mentioned this here, but just in case you were wondering if it works:

Be aware battlegrounders. There is a new bug in AV that allows flags to be capped through walls and from 10 to 40 yards away. Possibly even farther if you are a hunter and use Eagle Eye. No word on if the Spyglass affects this. This is primarily a problem in Alterac Valley, but also in Arathi Basin. At the Blacksmith location in Arathi people have been hiding in the building and capping from inside.

People are capping through hills and from behind trees. Hunters are reporting standing at the flag, with their pets on aggressive, and the pets do not aggro on the cappers. That’s how far away they are.

So widen your defensive patrols and watch for the golden swirlies to appear on your flag. Someone, somewhere is trying to cap it.

Update: Patch 2.0.4 fixed the bug.

AFKZero is a very simple application with only one purpose – to publicly shame those who enter Alterac Valley solely with the intent to leech honor while staying in the cave or elsewhere.

To this goal, AFKZero traverses the scoreboard and finds players who meet three criteria – more than 100 bonus honor, no damage done, no healing done. The list of such players can then be either just enumerated locally (on your screen) or sent to the Battleground.

This is a first, 20 minute code, start at something I was wanting to write since the new honor system was released – a meshed shaming and blacklisting application. Version 1.0 will not only list and print the offenders, it will also sync offender lists between players who have the AddOn installed, allowing those who are on the same realm as the offender to take appropriate action (imagine my surprise to be informed by a beta test version of 1.0, that one of my former guildies is a honor leech).

There will be some common criticisms of this. First, of course, the fact that anyone can evade the AddOn by simply killing a wolf/ram and add to the damage done listing. That is correct and something I might make configurable in the next version, maybe a threshold of 2x Ram/Wolf or so…

Secondly the reverse criticism. There’s the AFKers whiny response that, indeed, they are not “idle” but are “coordinating” assaults from the cave. It’s a hollow defense and anyone who’s been in an AV since the honor changes knows that. Secondly the “defender” defense. People will claim they are “on D” and not seeing any movement yet. After 100 honor, Horde is usually past Stonehearth (no idea about Alliance, I’d assume the same distance) and Alliance is on Galv. With Alliance on Galv any defender worth his or her salt will be there, stalling Alliance approaches by helping Galv. If that’s not the case it’s akin to AFKing, just outside the cave.

Under all circumstances, you do have the ability to simply show and verify AFK behavior. Print the offenders to the screen and verify they’re really AFK and not “defending the poison goods vendor” or something equally pathetic.

Usage:

Drag the AFKZero folder into your Interface/AddOns directory. In-game type /zero show (or /afkzero show) to locally display all offenders. If you are comfortable with the list, you may report it to /bg by typing /zero avreport.

That’s it so far. Enjoy. If you happen to hate AV AFKers as much as we do, would like to be in a guild with people who love to code, love to theorycraft, and love to progress (all the while not having a GM, long story), come to Kul’Tiras (US), Horde site and look us up. We’re always in the market for more cool people.

You can find AFKZero on Curse Gaming.

This is a repost of something I wrote on the Blizzard PvP Forums. I wrote it to maybe, elicit some kind of reaction, but … alas … “hord r ghey” is a more popular topic, lolz.

It’s my story…
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Just got this e-mail about what might be the biggest world PvP event ever, and if you aren’t on Dark Iron then you missed it.

I don’t know if you guys are hip to this yet, but last night the guilds that compromise the Penny Arcade Alliance on Dark Iron launched the largest offensive in World Of Warcraft history.
After several days of planning and reconnaissance the members of the Penny Arcade Alliance were told to meet up in Darnassus for a surprise.

At 7pm server time everyone was told that the Penny Arcade Alliance was launching a full scale attack on all three horde cities.

Everyone immediately began forming raids and awaited their assignments. Groups were sent out on diversionary raids against the Orgrimmar gates, Brill, Tarren Mill, and Crossroads, while the elite PVE raiders (who cancelled their AQ40 and BWL runs) were summoned into the capital cities for assaults on the racial leaders, as well as every single NPC we could find.

By 7:20 Cairne became the first racial leader to fall. Within minutes Thrall, Vol’jin, and Varimathras were joined him. Sylvanas herself was down to 50% when the stress of having over 300 people inside the Undercity brought the eastern kingdoms down completely.

But we weren’t done.

As soon as the eastern kingdoms were back up the group that had successfully razed all of Orgrimmar (and Razor Hill, and Sen’jin village, and pretty much everything else in Durotar/The Barrens) hopped on a zeppelin and redirected their attack towards the Undercity.

After a long battle to her throne room, we were ultimately felled by massive lag and another server wipe.

The PAA however, was comfortable with the fact that we’d just wiped out every single horde NPC, in every major horde city (and their outlying towns) in a surgical strike usually reserved for bombing civilians in Iraq.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. This is the face of world PVP now.

-Manif, representing Team Hurricane, and The Knights Of Arcadia.

Official forum threads with personal accounts and screenshots can be found here, here, and here.

I’m posting this on metblogs rather than the WoW forum because the crowd here seems pretty open-minded, and there’s something I’ve been planning to do for a while– take on the indefensible position of justifying Twinks.

I’d like to take this forum to clear up some common misconceptions about twinks, and maybe give y’all some insight into what makes us Twink. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a few of you to try your hand at it.
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I’ve recently discovered PvP. I’ve always refused duels, never rolled a character on a PvP server, and always sniffed at guild members who spent most of their non-raiding time in the battlegrounds. But then, during one of those periods where I couldn’t face grinding anymore and all of my quests were either too high-level or involved dungeons, I tried both WSG and AB. And you know what? I absolutely, totally love it.

In the beginning, of course, I was abysmal; I was everyone’s meat. But I got better, and am becoming addicted to the adrenalin rush. I can actually do some damage, my kill-to-death ratio is finally on the “good” side, and I’m learning a lot more about playing my class. I do, however, have a few questions…
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