It’s Children’s Week in Azeroth, and Horde and Alliance alike tend to their orphans. Mine is called Orgh, and he’s a true Horde. My first trip with him will be to the Mor’Shan Rampart, where “we push back those smelly Night Elves”. A little man after my taste. I might take him into EPL with me, and show him what we do with those smelly Night Elves when we’re not pushing them back at Mor’Shan.
Here’s to you, Orgh, zug zug.
Good luck trying to get through Camp Mojache right now as upper 50s elites are swarming through the place, making it impossible to get in or out of the area without getting seriously injured or killed.
Yikes.
The bodies of the many fighting the Ahn’Qiraji decorate the sandy floor of Gadgetzan today as the gates of Ahn’Qiraj were flung wide. Bugs were everywhere. 80 foot tall warriors and giant crystals have popped up all over the world today. Feralas is under Siege. Gadgetzan is under siege. Sithilid roam the Shimmering Flats.
Seen in Gadgetzan
I just posted some old screnshots on Flickr that I took during the Beta.
Click here to see two Guardians of Blizzard.
Fishing during the beta left many bobbers on the water. I think Blizzard was experimenting with how to combat fishing bots. This was near Southshore.
Blizzard Construction Co. This was in Deadwind Pass.
World Terrain Some interesting terrain I found during the beta. This was between Thelsamar and Dun Morogh.
Another World Terrain screenshot This was also in the same general area. It looks like someone took a huge eraser and erased some of the snow.
I had parked my self outside the instance last night for our ZG run tonight. I logged in this evening and notice there is about 15 to 20 Alliance in the immediate area. I sat down and I see one Alliance flagged. I decided to flag up as well and then see if they attack me. I thought maybe they would leave me alone as I presented no threat to them and was not attacking anybody.
One paladin got right in front of me and started dancing and then laughed. I grinned at him. Shorly after that I was stunned by a Paladin. I’m not sure who did it but I sat down again. Shortly after that a Rogue sneaks up behind me and ambushes me. I got one Intimidating Shout off before the FIVE alliance killed me.
Way to go. You can kill me five vs one. You guys ROCK!!!!
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I’ve blogged a little about playing World of Warcraft on a Mac, and how Blizzard plans to continue to make OSX native versions of WOW despite the introduction of Boot Camp, the beta application from Apple that allows the new Intel machines to boot Windows XP.
I’m quite happy they’re going to continue to support OSX, but in the short term it might be worth giving Boot Camp and WOW a spin if you do have one of the new Intel iMacs or Macbooks.
Gabe over at Penny Arcade tried it out and noticed a visible improvement in performance over running it in OSX [pa].
From a comment on an earlier entry by me:
“The thing that makes me doubt these stories the most is the sheer improbability of encountering anyone else on your server, let alone anyone you’ve fought before. However, it has been known to be a small world.”
Agreed. It’s near improbable in a completely random environment. However, there are limits to that randomness. First, Blizzard is known to suggest realms based on IP blocks and server availability. Today’s 60s joined the game before the big new server rollout, so two people living in close proximity (Foster City, for example) away from decent DSL, are very likely to be on the same Comcast netblock and likely to have been assigned to the same server.
Secondly, Stormrage (my server) was the first retail PvE server. Lots of Silicon Valley dwellers were early adopters of WoW, and would have, if they chose PvE, would up on one of four servers. Combined with above mentioned IP…
Thirdly, as Joi Ito shows, and as my guild, Pride, shows, in-game societies often are bled into by, and reflect up on a subset of Rl networks. I came into WoW trough a friend who was on Stormrage already, and has many RL friends on the Alliance side of the server. I swapped to Horde after leveling an Alliance, dragging more people I knew IRL into the game, some of which dragged others in, who then either rolled Alliance or joined us.
To underline this, of the nine officers in my guild, four live in Silicon Valley and I only knew one before WoW. Since then I’ve met the other two, but this was pure chance. If, and this isn’t so far fetched, we both had gone for coffee around 3pm, we would have likely wound up at the same coffee shop, as well, being Sunnyvale isn’t that huge. Not to mention, a psychiatric incident would deliver all four of us into the same psych ward :)
While the truth of this story can not be ascertained, it’s possible. The following is a link to YTMD, a fave spot to upload such whackyness recorded in the World of Warcraft. Listen to it, first, lest I might spoil some of the conclusions.
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For doubters: Here’s a video I made today. Blizzard hasn’t removed this trick yet.
