Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Take this with a gigantic shaker full of salt, but a sketchy guild site host named Ejeet Networks claims to have received screenshots of the downloader for the Wrath of the Lich King alpha (watch out for the automatic music player on their site, too). Again, this means almost nothing-- even if the downloader is really out there in the wild, it hardly means the game is anywhere near done, or that anyone but Blizzard employees are still playing it at this point. But Ejeet says the DNS server for the WotLK beta is online and answering DNS resolution, and they claim that a "Swedish contact" sent them screenshots of the alpha downloader.
Personally, I call shenanigans-- their first screenshot says version .1, and then the Properties screen they have says version 2.0.3.70, so which is it? They also claim that since the Properties screen says "{c} 2004-2008 Blizzard Entertainment," that's proof that we'll see Wrath in 2008, but that's hardly true as well. I have no doubt that we'll see the beta in 2008, but I'd bet money we won't see the expansion itself until January 2009. I'd love to be wrong, but them's the breaks.
But I leave it up to you-- as much as I disagree, these could be proof that Blizzard has an expansion alpha up and running. Anyone else spot any other weirdness that could rule these out as fakes?
Astela on Maelstrom sent us this shot of the floor in Morogrim Tidewalker's room in Serpentshrine Cavern. It took me a second to see it, but right there in the designs on the floor, you can see a Panda, calling card of one Samwise Didier, one of Blizzard's lead developers (and lead singer of L70ETC).
He's also the creators of the fan favorite Azerothian race we haven't seen in Azeroth yet, the Pandaren (I'm a little disappointed that they didn't show up during Brewfest, actually). Obviously, this is just a hidden Easter Egg done by one of the artists, right? Clearly, this isn't proof that the Pandaren helped build the Coilfang Reservoir or anything like that. Right?
Is that him in the WoW comic book, or is he going to be in Northrend?
The answer, according to Stormgaard of Se7en Samurai, may be 'both'. And to be honest, I agree with him. Not because of the strength of his evidence, good as it is, but because his argument makes sense. One of the things we've seen with World of Warcraft tie-in media like the manga series and novels is that they all flow back into the MMO, help develop and direct the lore forward. As much as players like to chant 'lorelol' it is clearly important to the folks at Blizzard, and Stormgaard's argument that the comics and movie may well be setting up a new age of hostility between the horde and the alliance centered around a new lore figure who is connected to, if not the 'star' of the Missing Diplomat quest makes a lot of sense to me.
Plus, having the comic star a human who washed up without his memory on the coasts of Durotar... well, if you look at the map you'll see why that could well lead to the exact scenario Stormgaard posits. It makes sense to me. What do you guys think?
I'm very interested in seeing the answer to this one-- I have always used a credit card to pay for my account, just because it's all automatically done between Blizzard and my bank, and I don't ever have to worry if my account is all paid up. But I'm sure there are tons of people out there, like popsixx, who play from game card to game card, buying them one after another, or hoarding them up (from gifts or elsewhere), and putting them in when necessary.
For the life of me, though, I can't guess which one would be more popular. There are definitely a lot of kids playing the game, and they'd use game cards for sure. But then again, most of the folks I play with are a little older and financially more stable, and more likely to use credit cards (or PayPal for that matter)
So which is it? Game cards or credit cards? And feel free to tell us in the comments why you do what you do-- maybe there's some huge benefit to using only game cards that I haven't noticed yet.
Last week I talked about mid-level content and as expected, many of you expressed an opinion. One comment in particular from autumnbear got me thinking. Autumnbear writes:
"How about updating the overall lore for the game, and allowing more class choices for the current playable races. Still waiting for the Night Elves to teach my Human how to be a Druid, especially since he's Exalted with both Darnassus AND the Cenarion Circle."
Now that's something I can chew on. What about quests that will allow you to make race/class combinations that are not otherwise available in the game? I think this is a tremendous idea if the process is sufficiently difficult to prevent everybody and their uncle's cat from doing it. The original Everquest had epic quests that took some players months to complete. Everquest 2 had the betrayal quests which allowed you to change factions which took a really long time to complete.
Why shouldn't a human, in Autumnbear's case, who has earned significant faction with Darnassus not be able to learn the finer points of being a druid? Gnomes have no healing classes. Why not create a very difficult quest line for those gnomes who are exalted with Stormwind that would allow them to become a paladin or priest?
I know I'm going to get a billion comments about game balance. Admittedly this would likely not count as "mid-level" either, but I think that if it was properly implemented it could be a valid source of that new content that everybody is craving.
I've never been in a guild where we've finished all the content in the game, but I've definitely seen a difference between raiding farmed content and raiding progression. When you're working on farmed content, things are very, very different from a progression raid-- the mood is lighter, things move more smoothly, more mistakes are made (and it matters less), and there's a little less leading and a little more joking. Not that farming content is more or less fun than raiding progression, but it's a very different feel-- last night I ran Karazhan with my guild for the first time (they're farming it now), and things were very, very different from those raiding days back when we were struggling through Moroes and scared that the Wizard of Oz event might come up in Opera because we didn't have the DPS we needed.
But what if you're recruiting for farmed content? Sara is facing exactly that situation, and she wonders if her guild will be able to find good people now that they're about to finish off all the content in the game. They're expecting loss and attrition (because some people only like to raid progress, and have no interest in farming content beyond their own needs), and trying to bring new people into a guild that's already done everything. Will they only be able to find folks in it for their own loot, or will they bring interested, knowledgeable raiders willing to do the work for the rewards?
Hopefully they'll be able to weed out the "omglootz" people from the casual raiders and the other folks interested in seeing the endgame content. There's no question that running farmed content is not nearly as demanding (and that's why some people don't like it as much) as progressing a raid, but that doesn't mean that anyone wants to take on a raid full of loot whores only bent on scoring their next Epic.
Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage fans will recognize my lame attempt to quote the line from The Rock (without digging out my copy.)
Gitr noted on his blog yesterday that after he killed Frostmaw recently, he noticed something strange. Much like the foot of the Marine in the aforementioned movie, it's hand was still moving -- clenching and unclenching his staff -- even though it was clearly dead. I don't know if this is something that can be duplicated every time, but it would sure freak me out.
About once or twice a month I get a somewhat more amusing graphical bug where the mob keeps "looking at me" even after it's dead, causing the body to spin on the ground if I run around it in circles.
While some bugs are annoying, some like these are amusing and even interesting. What silly in-game anomalies like this have you seen?
Who are these poor souls who lead our guilds, who gladly (in most cases) take on what is definitely a part time job (if not full time) in order to outfit 25 people with epic gear and provide an online social outlet? Who are these folks, that they bend over backwards to make everyone they've /ginvited happy and sometimes get so stressed that they, for lack of a better term, flip out and /gdisband? We don't know where you guildleaders get your drive from, but from signing the charter to /gkicking everyone and ninja-ing the guild bank, we salute you.
Time once again for Guildwatch, your weekly look at drama, downed, and recruiting news from around the realms. As always, your tips fuel this space-- send them (anonymous or otherwise) to wowguildwatch@gmail.com. Click the link below to see today's GW.
We have a couple cool mounts coming to us in the very near future, but as with many cool things in life, there's a catch.You can't have your cake and eat it too it seems, even in Azeroth.
As David mentioned a few days ago, we will get the chance to purchase an epic Hippogryph flying mount when Patch 2.3 err, lands.But Bornakk has let us know that this baby won't be as easy to get as the Skyguard nether ray mount for instance.When asked about the mounts that will be added into the game when Wrathlaunches, he had this to say:
We do plan to continue adding new mounts to the game, but we aren't ready to go into details on Wrath of the Lich King specific mounts yet. Keep in mind we are adding the Hippogryph mount as a Cenarion Expedition purchasable item in patch 2.3 along with the Engineering only flying mount...The Cenarion Expedition Hippogryph mount is a 280% epic flying mount that requires exalted status and will cost 2000 gold
My wife, as I've stated several times, is an excellent player, one of the best hunters I've ever run with and has created in me a healthy respect for women who game. When we were both raiding, the biggest problem we had was that if she ever spoke in a raid, there was always someone who would hit on her until it was explained that she was engaged to and then married to the tank, and he would have no compunction about letting the mob come over and eat said person until such time as the supposedly funny come-ons stopped.
Fast forward a year to this post on wow_ladies and poster amalana asks if the new voice chat feature is giving other women who play the same kinds of experiences she mentions: running a PuG and the other players hitting on her as soon as they realize she's a woman. To be honest, I expected this. In my experience, WoW has the same ratio of jerks to decent folks as regular life, but something like John Gabriel's Theory always seems to come into effect and there's always someone in a PuG who feels comfortable making racist jokes or blindly hitting on someone based just on ten seconds of voice chat.
Have your experiences with the new voice chat feature been positive, or are you being subjected to crude commentary and unwelcome advances?
Sometimes we, as players, do some incredibly silly things. Even after, say, 45-50 levels of dealing with the character, learning the tricks of the trade and the ways of your class, we can still make mistakes which may or may not lead to our certain doom. In the case of our poor Tauren friend in this week's comic, that certain doom is very, very certain and all together rather doomish. Clicking on the big florescent green "Click Here" symbol will reveal this doomed fate to you, but don't say I didn't warn you: There will be doom involved.
Speaking of doomed fate, somewhere just beyond this sentence there is likely a link that says (more...) and clicking on it will more then likely provide you this elusive "more" they keep promising all over the Internet. Go ahead, click it. You will see.
Tenehuini over on the EU forums has an excellent point: currently, higher level characters have no way at all of seeing which NPCs, at a glance, have lower-level quests for them. What we need is another set of exclamation points, a toggled way of showing which NPCs have quests for us, even if they're below our current level.
Aeus says it's a good idea that just hasn't been acted on yet, but I'll add my voice to the crowd asking for action. Before, when lower level quests didn't grant XP or rep, this wasn't that big a deal-- if you were going back to do a certain low level quest (for lore or completion purposes), you probably knew where it was anyway. But since reputation has been buffed on lowbie quests, there's value in knowing where quests are. And there's really no reason for Blizzard to hide that info, anyway-- the quests are viewable right after you talk to the questgiver, so why not throw a exclamation point up there?
The only question, then, is what color. Later in the thread, Readbeard comes up with a whole list of exclamation point colors-- green, yellow, orange and red for quest difficulty, and black and gray for pre- or post-level status. As good an idea as that sounds to us WoW veterans, my guess is that Blizzard won't vibe with it-- explaining all the different colored exclamation points to a new player might be a little tough. But still, a toggle-able lowbie quest exclamation should be easy to implement, and would help those folks headed back to the starter areas to pick up experience, rep, or whatever else they want.
There are a lot of good World of Warcraft podcasts out there, including our own. There are a few though that are really considered pioneers, and I think Taverncast is probably one of them. Despite their extremely erratic production schedule, they've been around longer than most and the quality of their production has always been top-shelf.
Yesterday, they released their final "exclusively" WoW-themed podcast. Eloy explains in his blog that several changes in the lives of the cast have brought about this change, most notably that only one of them still plays the game on a regular basis.
The podcast will continue though, it will just be less WoW-centric. As one of their long-time fans, I know they will continue to rock with whatever content they choose to focus on.
Finally, on a personal note to Infernal Bill, Cromley, Eloy, and Kirnkaterre... I hope you enjoyed the voicemail I left for you. It comes with love from one of your Canadian fans. (You'll have to listen to TC32 to understand the Canadian connection.)
We had two similiar comments drop in on the tipline in the past few days that both are pretty interesting ideas that WoW does all right with, but could probably do a lot better. Foxtir dropped us a note the other day voicing an opinion about the night and day cycle of World of Warcraft. As you may have noticed, WoW does have a night/day cycle already-- when it's midday, the light looks very different from the middle of the night (and my favorite zone in the whole world is Hinterlands in the evening). But Foxtir wants an even more obvious cycle-- during the day, Stormwind should be bustling, while at night, the weirdos could come out, and maybe even some Defias could be found in the city. It would be cool to see the day and night cycles have a gameplay effect as well-- in Warcraft III, they definitely did, but in WoW, I don't know that the day/night timing has any effect but the lighting.
And Jasperwind sent another note saying basically the same thing about the weather-- we've got the occasional rain and snow, but what if weather affected gameplay somehow? Or even more extreme forms of weather, he suggests-- what if earthquakes scared mobs away for a matter of time?
Let's give Blizzard credit where credit is due-- most games don't have a night/day cycle (much less a realtime cycle), and many games have no weather at all, or implement it badly (and anyone who's ever experienced a freak storm in Tirisfal will agree that Blizzard didn't do that). So WoW is already ahead of the curve in both cases. But in an MMORPG where we pay monthly, we can always expect more. And it would definitely be cool (and add a little more strategy to the game) to have these cosmetic changes affect the lives and actions of the characters we play.
Defeating the Horseman for this evil little gourd is no easy feat. It requires a full group of L70s, one of which needs a Daily Quest given out only during the Hallow's End event. Once the Horseman is defeated in the Scarlet Monastery graveyard instance, the new pet then only has a 25% or so chance of dropping.
For you pet completist out there, this is a must have. For everyone else, it definitely tops the cool list. Hallow's End is scheduled to begin October 18 and run daily through November 1.
Take this with a gigantic shaker full of salt, but a sketchy guild site host named Ejeet Networks claims to have received screenshots of the downloader for the Wrath of the Lich King alpha (watch out for the automatic music player on their site, too). Again, this means almost nothing-- even if the downloader is really out there in the wild, it hardly means the game is anywhere near done, or that anyone but Blizzard employees are still playing it at this point. But Ejeet says the DNS server for the WotLK beta is online and answering DNS resolution, and they claim that a "Swedish contact" sent them screenshots of the alpha downloader.
I'm very interested in seeing the answer to this one-- I have always 
Last week 
Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage fans will recognize my lame attempt to quote the line from The Rock (without digging out my copy.)
My wife, as I've stated several times, is an excellent player, one of the best hunters I've ever run with and has created in me a healthy respect for women who game. When we were both raiding, the biggest problem we had was that if she ever spoke in a raid, there was always someone who would hit on her until it was explained that she was engaged to and then married to the tank, and he would have no compunction about letting the mob come over and eat said person until such time as the supposedly funny come-ons stopped.
Tenehuini over on the EU forums has an excellent point: currently, higher level characters have no way at all of seeing which NPCs, at a glance, 
We had two similiar comments drop in on the tipline in the past few days that both are pretty interesting ideas that WoW does all right with, but could probably do a lot better. Foxtir dropped us a note the other day voicing an opinion about the night and day cycle of World of Warcraft. As you may have noticed, WoW does have a night/day cycle already-- when it's midday, the light looks very different from the middle of the night (and my favorite zone in the whole world is Hinterlands in the evening). But Foxtir wants an even more obvious cycle-- during the day, Stormwind should be bustling, while at night, the weirdos could come out, and maybe even some Defias could be found in the city. It would be cool to see the day and night cycles have a gameplay effect as well-- in 
