Zul’Gurub and Cataclysm

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If there is anyone out there who hasn’t finished Zul’Gurub yet for their achievements or posterity (or those stupid mounts that never ever ever drop), now is your last chance because when Cataclysm goes live, it will no longer exist as a raid instance and will instead be a quest hub in Northern Stranglethorn.

You know, I was a little disappointed that a troll raid instance wasn’t added into Wrath of the Lich King. Both Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman are two of my favorite instances in the game. It’s a vibrant zone with both challenging and interesting raid encounters. I remember it being so contrasting as a raid instance. It was colorful and open where Molten Core was constrictive and uniform. Back in the day, the loot and reputations rewards were pretty decent as well. It was one of those instances that I would continue to clear weekly without really getting that tired of.

It’s kind of a shame that it’s being dropped but I’m really looking forward to seeing what they did with it as a quest hub. I am sure that they will even drop a few nods to the “good old days” into that particular storyline. And hey, now that it’s more accessible, maybe everyone will once again have a chance to putz around Zul’Gurub meaningfully instead of just skipping over it to power level through the 60s. And who knows, maybe another Zul’X raid will be added in at some point.

…Then Along Came a Nuke

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I was linked a few YouTube videos of absolutely hilarious Cataclysm quests (obviously, minor spoilers in the video links). These are the kind of quests that I am looking forward to when the expansion pack finally rolls around at the end of this year; Non-standard, quirky and fun. Not so much WoW play lately other than some raiding, some PvP, and some putzing around on my hunter who by the way, has another piece of ICC loot to strap on. One day I might even chant and gem it! If the group permits, I so want to sneak him into Lady Deathwhisper for the bow. No one else needs it right?

Back to the main topic: Another “Keiya’s game replay of the moment” post. I still haven’t had a chance to get some good 1v1 time on. By the time I finish eating and doing whatever around the house after I get home from work, my lovely 2v2 partner is ready to play <3. So this is another 2v2 TP vs TP game on Novice Discord IV. I had a lot of fun playing this one, mostly because I managed to play around with and get a few nukes off towards the end of the match. Also, Viking dancing is kind of fun. Land, fly, land fly…

Ghosts are fun to fiddle around with even though they seem to be fairly micro intensive. I am still pretty fail at this whole micro and rock, paper, scissors thing. At some point in the near future I think I am going to try branching out from my typical 111 banshee rush opener. It’s feeling like a one trick pony at this point. Though to be fair, the practice league maps seem to be all of the novice flavor with the stupid rock blockades in the middle. I guess it helps to fend off early waves but it makes it hard to scout and to rush out any ground units without going for a medivac drop or something like that.

StarCraft II has some crazy fun custom maps out there. We have been playing a series of tower defense maps for the past couple of days. There’s a good classic 50 wave TD map based off of Elemental Tower Defense for Warcraft 3. There were also a couple of good co-op base defense maps available. If I can remember what the name of any of these maps I will edit this post with a link.

Edit: It’s called Standard Tower Defense.

I’ve Been Playing on BNet Too Much

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Somewhat related to my previous post, this comic seemed to resonate with me. We were adventurous this weekend and played a 2v2 co-op game against hard AI opponents. We got curb stomped pretty badly during an early AI rush the first time. Subsequent tries on Saturday and Sunday evening versus the hard AI were successful (though my lovely co-op partner had to come to my rescue several times <3). He shits out cannons and what not and I shit out marines and what not. Together we shit things out.

We also managed to beat a 2v1 co-op game against one AI opponent on insane. Though I am not sure that really counted. We may have uuuh cheesed the AI a bit as shown in the screenshot above. For some reason, the AI doesn’t like attacking Protoss Motherships. I mean, I stashed an entire army of banshees underneath it and the computer just let it float around killing everything?

I can consistently beat the AI on medium solo if I defend against the first wave and don’t flub my opening game; Still don’t get how people build so fast, but I officially consider myself graduated from remedial StarCraft school! I guess I should play games against actual Battle.net people now that I officially don’t suck too much. So I guess the secret to getting better at something is to just do it a whole lot. If anyone is interested, a couple of replays are attached below for the hell of it.

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So anyway, guess what I have been playing in lieu of WoW for most of the week :P. The yearly summer wave of attendance attrition in addition to pre-Cataclysm apathy is sort of killing the 25-man raids as of late (doesn’t help that it’s a busy social period for most folk)s. 25-man ICC didn’t pan out on Friday so we made it a guild 10-man run. Oh, and my stupid loot sponge hunter was invited along and boy did he sponge loot. His gear score went up from 3k to 3.6k! At this rate, all of his green and blue items may be replaced before the expansion. Maybe I can sneak him for Lady Deathwhisper next week. I kind of want that bow >_<.

I have been experimenting with Mumble this weekend. It’s an open source voice chat alternative to Team Speak and Ventrilo. There is a video floating around on YouTube comparing the latency between game chat clients: Mumble’s voice quality is fantastic with almost no latency (I have a bad habit of talking over people because of the chat lag). It doesn’t seem to resource intensive either; But then again, I only have and will probably only have two people on the chat server at any time ever. The client is slightly more finicky to setup though and voices still sounds little roboty every once in a while. I am not sure if it is a server side thing or some setting in the client.

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Also: Are RP servers really that bad? Do horny players really sit in Goldshire and fondle each other’s digital crotches out in public all day long? Out of curiosity in response to this wow.com post, I rolled a human character Saturday morning on Moon Guard. I don’t know, maybe everyone went moved over to another server already? Or maybe Blizzard already started cracking down on people. You know, you know that your realm is pretty damn bad when an employee is assigned to patrol your specific server.

This (screenshot on the right) was the only interesting thing that happened.

The Real ID Forum Shitstorm

Now, I am not all that paranoid of a person, but the new Real ID Blizzard forum announcement just reinforces the fact that I have no plans on ever posting on the WoW forums ever again. All though I am not overly concerned about my real identity there are many WoW players who are and with good reason out of concern for their profession, their families or out of concern for internet stalking: Military personal, medical professionals, legal professionals, government workers.

First of all: I do like and have always liked the idea that all relevant characters on a single account should be visible on any forum post from that same account. Though there are a couple of good gems on the WoW forums most of that shit is either a level 1 trolling or a level 80 trolling about the level 1 not posting on their level 80. If you are that ashamed to post on your main just don’t post it at all.

But that said, I definitely do not feel comfortable with having my real identity attached with my forum account. I have always made some sort of an effort to keep a division between my personal life, my professional life and my gaming life. I am already iffy on Real ID’s in general but this change just steps way over the creepy line. It is unrealistic and I hope Blizzard realizes that sooner than later.

I would have very much preferred if the ID’s were based off of a global avatar, linking your WoW alts and gaming accounts together while retaining anonymity in regards to your real identity. Since it is probably not all that feasible to have several million people picking unique avatars all at once with out uuuh some collusion occurring, what about binding your Real ID name to an existing gaming character? Like for example, Keiya <Proudmoore>. I wouldn’t mind that being my ID across all Blizzard games. There needs to be some sort of middle ground to prevent trolling, something between what we have now and what is proposed.

Edit: Since posting this, Blizzard has responded to a couple of concerns. Article at WoW.com. Also, can we blame Facebook? I am sure that the extreme rise in Facebook usage is at least partially responsible for this decision be it direct or indirect.

Real ID and Privacy

Apologies to anyone whos comment was blocked or unpublished. A significant amount of comment spam was bypassing the CAPTCHA module so I swapped over to Mollom, an anti-spam service similar to Akismet. It works like a champ but unfortunately, it seems to be blocking a few legitimate comments as well. Which, kind of sucks because it is not as if a whole lot of people bother visiting or commenting on this site >_<.

Anyway, Real IDs: I was kind of hoping for something similar to Steam’s community chat system. Or rather, I was kind of hoping for a chat system promoting a global Battle.net avatar linking social communities across games. For security reasons, I’m not comfortable with just doling out my battle.net login email, which is unfortunately needed in order to add Real ID friends. I don’t like the fact that my real name is shown in game and on friends list, I don’t like how people not on my friends list are able to view my name on friends lists and I really don’t like how there is no way to control friends list visibility.

Being able to link your game identity with your real identity within the game isn’t a very good idea. It’s mildly creepy and breaks immersion. I know that it is not that big of a deal (hint: if you don’t like it don’t use it), but it makes me very reluctant to add anyone to my Real ID list who I am not directly associated with outside of the game. I assume that was Blizzard’s original intention, but as mentioned above, I was really hoping for more of a community system.

But all of that aside, I have quite a few co-workers and real life friends scattered across servers. It’s nice being able to contact them in game without having to roll a social alt on another server (talking out of my ass since I don’t think I have ever RL whispered anyone off server yet :P). On the other hand, it is not that hard just to uuuh send someone a text message or IM outside of the game…

Oh, people who are purchasing the new iPhone upgrade: Make sure that you unbind your authenticator so that you don’t get locked out of your account. The authenticator app is tied to the phone’s serial number.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Guess what I will be doing this Saturday morning? I was #5,808 in line and I clicked the very second that it popped. Well, slightly less than the very second (had to select ‘2’ from the dropdown menu). Some of you have fast fingers.

 

Round 2:

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Ah well, it was a nice try. Sold out when I was at abouh 1.8k in line. Keybound the cache clear refresh to a keyboard macro, coordinated on Vent, started refreshing a couple of minutes early, ignored the ticket quantity. Still got about the same position in like 5.8k-ish. Maybe next year!

Oh Shadowmourne

I have been working on the Shadowmourne quest line on my paladin. (Hmm, I say paladin as if I have another high level alt that could use it lol). I completed the turn-in and I completed the 1000 soul collection, but we aren’t quite at the point in our 25-man group where I would be able to complete the next 3 parts.

I am somewhat tempted to just pay a progression guild off to run me through the instance. The problem being: First, I would be saved to the instance that week, meaning that I would miss out on the guild 25-man raid (meh random people). Second, the guilds willing to run people through the quest bosses are charging a buttload of gold. Like, 40k. So not worth paying even close to that amount with Cataclysm looming on the horizon. Especially considering that isn’t even the last step.

Oh, ruminating over swapping this site over from Drupal to WordPress. I love Drupal, but I feel that it no longer suits the needs of this site which is, always has been and most likely always will be a single user blog and little else (but for a massive community based site, Drupal all the way). Oh, doing so would mean having to manually editing quirks out of about 200 posts.

BlizzCon 2010 tickets go up on the 2nd and the 5th of June. Crossing my fingers. MUST GET TICKETS.

The Voice of Deconstructor

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Hey! It’s the guy who voiced XT002-Deconstructor. Apparently the boss is voiced by a dude by the name of Kevin Delaney who had no idea his voice over had become a small WoW pop culture phenomenon. I’ve kind of always wondered who voices certain characters. So there you have it.

Update: More Sims Crap, WoW, Twitter

image_4Sorry, totally not related to anything but, some dude is totally recreating a Sims 3 version of Vice City (as in the city from GTA) using the Create a World tool and that is just pure awesome in my books. Said world needs to include the strip joints somehow.

Speaking of the Create a World tool, I keep meaning to play with it a little more for the sake of creating a custom neighborhood so that my little people have somewhere fun and original to run around. Actually, I kind of want a custom neighborhood to start yet another legacy challenge. If you look hard enough, a couple of really bad half-assed legacy blogs are still buried in the bowels of this site.

The tool itself really isn’t all that difficult to use. I am fairly surprised at that given my experience with world editing tools. They are usually just so…obtuse when it comes to the interface and what not. But then again, I’ve never been willing to soak in enough time to properly learn how to use any of them. I can’t think of anything cool to model a neighborhood after. Maybe I will just create an island with a giant mountain in the center or something? Wait no: I will create “Pen Island” except that, it won’t be shaped like a pen at all and only a small portion, the tip of the peninsula, will be visible on the in game town map (so that it doesn’t get banned off of the exchange :P). The base of the island will contain a massive forrest.

Random WoW bits:

  • The paladin class changes were bumped up by two days. As in, they are tomorrow. I smell all around nerfs and a few shiny new spells.
  • Did this happen to anyone else? I updated Pitbull 4 recently, logged in and all of my settings had been reset to the default. I tried restoring the lua file from a UI backup, but that didn’t work? Do you know how long it takes to redo all of the UI bar settings? Pain in the ass.
  • I wonder if I should go *gasp* holy in Cataclysm? Actually, most of my main spec changes have revolved around guild need. I enjoy playing any of the three specs really, though facerolling has been pretty damned fun. I think I may have found my true calling as a paladin 😛
  • FINALLY WON Bryntroll, the Bone Arbiter. It’s not that it doesn’t drop; Oh it’s dropped around 5 times. I’ve just consistently rolled shittely.
  • Also picked up the tier-10 pants and a few other things. Ugly skirt is ugly.

FYI: I have a Twitter feed, if anyone cares about that sort of thing. It pretty much mirrors anything posted on my Facebook wall +/- a few things. Okay well, it’s little more than a well of boredom as well as a dump for random iPhone pictures.

Operation: Gnomeregan Imminent!

gnomerThere is more information up on worldofwarcraft.com about the retaking of Gnomeregan. Since it’s up and announced, I assume they are planning a mini-patch release fairly soonish, within a month or two. But I mean…can’t one level 80 just raze the place? Epic faction boss isn’t so epic! Looking forward to this event, can’t wait.

Oh by the way, the paladin class previews for Cataclysm are on April 16th (dead last!). I am making a mental note to pay attention to WoW news on that day. I didn’t even know that the class previews were being announced this week. Whoops.