I Heart Yumfries

Time for another Machinima break. I could (and almost did) put the entire Yumfries catalogue on here because the "Nub Tales" series is so much fun. But, you guys can either follow the link here back to the rest of the Nub Tales collection or I'll save some to post for later. And you know part of what makes Yumfries as much fun as this? He's a shaman, baby!

It's the Little Things... (part 2)

Ooh! It's a red launcher!

Blizzard has unveiled a new system for delivering patches and updates. The launcher now tracks what kind of data is being updated into your WoW client and Blizz categorizes it as essential, secondary, and "less-important."  The trick is that once the "essential" files are downloaded and in place, you can turn the game on again and the secondary and "less important" files will fill in as time ticks by.  Inside the game, there is a new indicator near the mini-map that shows file traffic coming in.

It's the round red thing at the bottom.

General reports are that if you do start the game while the patch is still incoming, you can expect a wide range of um... experiences.  WoW might be playable, or you might be sorta stuck in a place like Dalaran that hasn't loaded in yet and so you're just going to lurk there in the sky until the scenery comes back. 

• I have realized that despite everything, Sylvanas cannot really be an evil mastermind. A real evil mastermind, when giving her lickspittle an assignment that goes horribly wrong, is supposed to torture said lickspittle horribly and then say "You have ONE MORE CHANCE to redeem yourself!"  In reality (as much as WoW is reality) Sylvanas just blames herself and then gives the lickspittle a pair of magical britches.

What about the Big Raid?

Actually, I really won't miss Sartharion 3D on 25 man

I just can't see how very many 25-man raiding guilds are going to survive after the Cataclysm. Everything I read fails to give 25-man guilds any real incentive to keep running 25-man raids.

• The loot tables are the same in 10 man and 25 man.
• The lockouts for 10 and 25 man instances will be the same. So there's no more way to run both.
• 25 man raids are awfully painful to organize. I would not lay blame on one single guild leader who decided it wasn't worth his trouble to keep doing it.

How is Blizzard Trying to Help Our Guilds?

I had never stopped to think about guild structures being messed up before, at least, not in any way that developers could do about it. But there are so many incoming changes for guilds right now, that I thought I needed to give it another look and see why these changes were really implemented.

I think, on the outset, people just see More Stuff To Do. And it is, of course. The main way to prolong the life of a game like this is give the players More Stuff To Do. But why this More Stuff To Do?

Think about the problems that guild leaders have: players trying to exploit the guild for materials, easy carries through dungeons, a place to stick your alt where they can tag along when the player feels like it, but doesn't really contribute.  Ragequitting. People on the gripe about loot rules.

I don't think there is much that Blizzard can do to overcome a lot of the gross human nature that causes some of this. But they have added one important aspect that should help:

Guild reputation

Developers Gone Wild!

This is just a tidbit, but check out this tooltip:

Glyph of the Monkey

At some point in the future, this dynamic link will get dynamically fixed. So for historical accuracy, at the time this was posted it said "Your Polymorph: Sheep spell polymorphs the target into a bear cub instead."

It gives me the idea that there's a bunch of developers sitting around a table somewhere calling out ideas that some peon is taking notes and they all get confused sometime.

To be honest, I have fought monkeys and I have fought bear cubs in world. I'm not sure that these are docile enough for polymorph.

Regardless, between my mage's Polymorph sheep, turtle, pig and cat, (penguin needs a glyph. Whatever) Need something to rotate around that bestiary a bit more frequently

Say hi to Naralie!

Hi, everybody!

Over in Betaland, there has been some shaking up going on.

A new build was released last week and it apparently became clear that something was wrong, because the presence of any goblin character in the realm caused the entire server to  crash.

As a result, all goblin characters have been "disabled."  There are some calling this The Great Goblin Wipe of Last Thursday, but since I can read and understand English, I know that "disabled" is not the same as "deleted." I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to this before I write Winklestien's obituary.

In the meantime, I decided to go visit the Eastern Kingdom a bit with Naralie the undead rogue here. I can say that Tirisfal Glades is not particularly special. There is a combination of some old quests with a few new ones, but it is sort of ambling. Silverpine Forest on the other hand... has gotten a complete and utter remake. The Banshee Queen Sylvanas is on the warpath against Gilneas and she is making face time with her loyal subjects.

Paradigm Shift

One thing never changes: Subtlety rogue dps is still lolz

I know I'm not the only one looking very hard at the new 31 point talent trees. Apart from Ghostcrawler, I don't think there is anyone very very happy with them. But I think that perhaps we need to look a little harder at the developer's intentions-- particularly at something that may not have been said (yet.)

I think the developers may be setting out to destroy min/maxing. This has not been a stated goal to the best of my knowledge, but most of the statements being made and then the structure of trees themselves seems to show this.