The fine folks at Raid Ready (who we spoke to a while back) have taken a break from making hilarious internet videos and ar eback to working on the Raid Ready service. In the interim though, they need some new videos, preferably from folks like you and I for whom sometimes World of Warcraft can be a little close to reality for some people’s comfort.
So, they’re looking for your videos! That’s right, YOU.
The video above outlines what they’re looking for and what’s at stake, namely a bag of delicious delicious skittles. And 6 months of pre-paid WoW game time, a 2009 Blizzcon Authenticator, and a Starcraft II poker set! But seriously, skittles!
Head over to the Raid Ready: Do It Yourself page for the full contest details and to find out how to enter!
The beauty of all of the whole caramelldansen meme is that regardless of what you’re a fan of, there’s likely a video of it. This can’t possibly be the first one related to World of Warcraft – heck, it’s not even the first one I’ve seen, but it’s definitely one of the most adorable. Maybe it helps that I play a Paladin.
Okay, now I admit that I have just as many female characters as male characters, but the reason for that is because I just prefer some of their character models – not because I base my gender identity on the gender of the virtual character in a game I play. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? I mean really!
I’m not looking for loot, or looking for anyone to treat me differently because my character is female or anything….although I have noticed it a couple of times…but that’s not the point!
In this hilarious video, we have someone who just recently switched factions, and decided – what the hey, they may as well switch genders too while they’re at it. The results? Hilarious.
I have to admit, I kind of feel bad for the old guy, but you know what – ten bucks says that guy just whispered his hunter and rogue friend before pulling aggro on those griefers. Expect sniping and de-cloaking to commence in the moments after the end of this video.
Yeah, I like to make up my own endings for things.
This hilarious video (hit the link to see it in HD at YouTube) is one of three that have been unlocked over a Raid Ready, all designed to give you a little bit of a clue as to what Raid Ready will be when it’s released.
Okay, the videos themselves don’t say too much, and that’s okay because they’re all hilarious – the one above is the first to be unlocked, and since then there’s another great one that parodies an eHarmony ad, and yet another that makes me feel awful for that poor guy – he just wanted his morning cup of joe.
Anyway, between the site and the videos, I had to find out what this Raid Ready business was all about, so I dropped the team there a line to find out what they’re planning and what they could tell me about it now.
I noted the air of mystery around the videos, and I asked what exactly Raid Ready was going to be: a Web site? A service? An add-on? A utility? A subscription service? What was the deal? Here’s what Stubby, one of the folks behind the scenes working on Raid Ready, had to say:
Raid Ready is a new way to measure the readiness of players and entire raids for certain content. In the past 3-4 years several methods have been introduced that give players what I feel are rather ambiguous ways of measuring their readiness for certain content. What’s wound up happening with all these methods is that we have several sites, add ons and calculators which give you either a number or a graph that tells you what you’re ready for and how you rank against other players. The problem with these systems is that they tend to use things which don’t matter to measure the capability of players. I’ll be 100% honest. The only real thing that matters is a player’s ability, but there’s no true way to measure that outside of having that player in your raid and seeing how they perform.
Raid Ready doesn’t focus on iLevels or achievements to make it’s assessment of players or groups. Instead it takes the accumulated research on player stats and measures known good stats against the stats of players in your raid, allows for variance in stats to compensate for others and mathematically takes into account players who will make up for others in order to come up with an assessment that determines whether a raid can find success in the content they’re attempting. The idea is not to tell a raid leader that their raid will pull content off but to give them a better understanding of what they’re taking in so they can be better prepared and build strategies accordingly. This is really just a small part of what we intend to do but at it’s core this is what Raid Ready is.
So, I asked, it’s more about understanding the overall “talent” of a player, as opposed to his or her gearscore or total HP or DPS averages, right? Some way to determine how a player will likely perform overall, not just a stack of numbers that supposedly define them, right? Stubby replied:
Somewhat a look at talent. It does take some level of understanding of a class to be able to stat properly, but more to the point it’s about knowing whether the group as a whole based on the known required stats can pull off the task at hand. In that way, yes, our approach is much more holistic and takes the character into account over gear.
Very interesting – so we still don’t know how Raid Ready will do what they’re planning to do, but the concept is exciting regardless – imagine as a raid leader having the ability to understand the capabilities of your group and whether you have the right mix of talent, stats, and skills to get the job done, as opposed to just staring at some potentially non-representative piles of numbers that supposedly will help you make a judgement call on your own.
We’ll have to wait and see what the folks behind Raid Ready have up their sleeve, but the prospect is exciting, and the videos are more than entertaining!
The venerable TotalBiscuit, of The Cynical Brit, has an amazing tutorial on how to get a super-secret achievement in one of the more fun quests available in Mount Hyjal! In this quest, you’re supposed to climb trees, grab bears, and throw them down to a tampoline, but if you do something different you could earn something very unusual for yourself! Check out the video to find out how!
…and if you believe any of that, or that the video itself is real, I have a bridge in New York to sell you, nice and cheap. Enjoy!
Poor Gamon. He just can’t catch a break – or he couldn’t, until Cataclysm came out, and he got a pretty hefty buff to the tune of now being an 85 Elite mob waiting quietly in respite for anyone who would dare attack him. And trust me, when you attack him, he brings the pain.
But what’s this? Apparently 300 naked orcs are more than enough to take him on and take him down. Check out the video – which will likely go down in the halls of legend – above. it’s a long, hard pitched battle, but eventually he falls to the massive fury of 600 orcish fists.
This is hilarity. It’s a little cheesy, sure, but it’s also fantastic – especially for those of us who have seen the trailer a couple of times. I give you, the LITERAL Cataclysm trailer, complete with subtitles. Enjoy!
If you’re having a hard enough time getting used to all of the changes now that the shattering has taken place, and you’re looking out over a new Azeroth and wondering what the new zones have in store for you, this amazing annotated world map in YouTube form will help you explore the new world as it looks today.
The project is the baby of Jesse Cox and Pride, and together they walk you through the changed old world zones and show you how they look now, what you can expect to encounter when you head back to those zones, and what the leveling experience is like for you now.
To use it, just play the video above and click the continent you want to visit. Then click the annotation for the zone you can to see, and you’ll see a video walking you through that zone. It’s truly a master work, my hat is off to them. You can also head over to YouTube here to play the videos larger in their native habitat.
Look into its adorable, huge, loving eyes. It longs for you to cuddle it. And then it will cast Starfire on you and it’ll loot your body. Or it might love you forever and follow you around. You never know until you have one!
The Moonkin Hatchling above is the alliance version: the horde version predictably looks like a Tauren Druid, just shrunk down and made super-adorable. Lil’ Ragnaros is no slouch either, in all of his heated swirly glory. The images above and video below come to you courtesy of the folks at MMO Champion, who found all this good stuff lurking in the depths of the latest Cataclysm beta build.
Want to see the video? Click the jump below to see both Moonkin Hatchlings and Lil’ Ragnaros!
