Tag Archives: Guest

Guest Post: Confessions of a noob death knight

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Here’s the thing: I’ve been a mage from day one, when I first started playing WoW a good two years ago. I always liked being a mage in Dungeons & Dragons, so I figured I would like being a mage in WoW. I was right. In fact, I love being a glass cannon. (OK, I don’t love the glass part so much, but I really dig the cannon part.) I’m not a great mage; age and fingers that were broken by judo or baseball have slowed me some. Still, I am a good mage. I hold my own, doing anywhere from 7-12k DPS depending on buffs and what I am watching on TV.

The thing is, as much as I love being a mage, making my own food and teleporting all around, I hate taking forever to queue. I also started thinking, “Hey, there must be more to simulated life than just standing back and blasting things.” I decided to try a new character. Not having the patience to level a character from 1 to 80, I figured I’d go the death knight route. After all, DKs are mage-killers; they are the anti-mage. So after two years of being nothing but a ranged DPS machine, I rolled a DK.

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Guest Post: Confessions of a noob death knight originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: Is your computer ready for Cataclysm?

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The Lich King is dead, your GearScore is 6,000+, and you have enough alts to run your own 25-man ICC. You cannot wait for the upcoming Cataclysm expansion, but along with the new instances, gear and level cap, there are also significantly increased graphics to consider. You may be ready for Cataclysm — but is your computer?

While we have yet to hear official system requirements from Blizzard, we do know from the Cataclysm FAQ that “there will be incremental tweaks and updates to the graphics engine in this expansion. For example, we’ve made improvements to the way that water is rendered. We’ll announce the exact system requirements closer to the expansion’s release.”

This is the first part of a three-part series on getting your computer up to speed for Cataclysm. Today, we will cover how to cheaply upgrade your current system. Part 2 will look at how to build a cost-effective, brand new system that will still run WoW at full settings. Finally, part 3 will focus on building a future-proof monster computer capable of soloing the Blood Queen herself!

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Guest Post: Is your computer ready for Cataclysm? originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: Heroes hunting for screenshots

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Early in August, <Hero Squad> of Bleeding Hollow (US-H) started a screenshot scavenger Hunt to distribute the five vanity items that are awarded when a Shadowmourne is created. The Shadowmourne chest contains five pretty sweet items. (Well, OK, maybe making a portal to Dalaran isn’t exactly the games greatest reward.) A chance at any of these items would have most players bending over backwards, and our raiders are no different.

A few months back, the officers sat down to figure out what to do with these items. We knew that we wanted to do something fun and memorable to hand out the first items. We brainstormed about 10 different types of games but eventually decided on a screenshot scavenger hunt.

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Guest Post: Heroes hunting for screenshots originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: Getting into the WoW Trading Card Game

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Are you someone who plays World of Warcraft and purchases booster boxes of each World of Warcraft Trading Card Game expansion in order to get its loot cards? Do you know how to play the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game? If not, then you are one of many online gamers I’ve heard of who help make the trading card game a hot property but have not discovered that those cards you are packing up and burying in your apartment or house are actually a lot of fun to play with. For those of you who haven’t taken a look at the trading card game at all, I’d highly recommend it.

I have been playing card games since 2003, and the WoW TCG is no exception. I spent over a year writing about the game, as well as playing and working at some of its biggest events (with a short break in 2008 to finish school). It was because of WoW TCG that I ended up getting into the WoW MMO in the first place!

The WoW Trading Card Game has been around since fall 2006 and has continued on through a transition from one company (Upper Deck Entertainment) to another (Cryptozoic). Organized play has had its ups and downs, but the game is starting to get more popular and attendance is once again picking up at events everywhere. However, a recent addition to the weekly tournament at my local comic book store mentioned that he knows plenty of people who buy the cards but never learn how to play.

Why is that?

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Guest Post: Getting into the WoW Trading Card Game originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: The death of in-game interaction

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WoW’s evolution has changed the course of both MMO game design and the landscape of the MMO player base in dramatic ways. By exploring the road most traveled, WoW has led the way from the roots of tabletop pen-and-paper RPGs and early MMO tabletop simulations into MMOs as virtual RPG themeparks.

Despite WoW’s fantastic success on many fronts, in its evolution toward catering to the most common, casual style of play, it’s removed much of the human interaction that made early MMO experiences special. Today’s WoW is slick, seamless and streamlined. There is nothing one player can achieve that another player cannot also relatively easily achieve. Yet while players in today’s WoW maintain that this thinly clad, egalitarian experience is “best,” in reality, what we see is a continuous striving for distinction free from the confines of the game design itself. The ever-present GearScore sniff test has streamlined the need for player interaction to the point that interaction is barely needed at all.

In fact, it might be this very streamlining that has caused this MMO behemoth to slide away from the real magic of the early MMOs, to become a sanitized gaming experience that only barely acknowledges its need for virtual face-to-face gameplay. I miss the real interaction with my fellow players that speaks to the oldest traditions of what spawned MMOs: tabletop RPGs. I want player interactions to drive the game experience, from raiding to crafting to questing. The biggest villains and heroes of an MMO should be players, not pre-scripted heroes and playerless cut scenes. The next big MMO, I hope, can make this happen.

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Guest Post: The death of in-game interaction originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 22 Aug 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: Long exposure WoWtography

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Long exposure photography is an intriguing photographic technique that involves slowing a camera’s shutter speed, thereby allowing light more time to strike the film. The technique often produces otherworldly images in which there is a sharp contrast between stationary and moving objects — perhaps you have seen long exposure photos of cars at night, their headlights melting into long streaks of color. Because long exposure photography often reveals hidden patterns, its applications can go far beyond generating simple eye candy.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to do research on interactive digital media (read: video games) at the University of Rochester, and I thought it might be fun to try some long exposure photography within my favorite game, World of Warcraft. Rather than do real long exposure photography, however (difficult when one has no camera!), I opted to emulate the effect using video clips captured with Fraps and processed with a program called Exposure. Both of these programs have free versions available.

Gallery: Long-exposure WoWtography

Fan of KnivesConsecrationDummyLoot meDeeprun Tram

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Guest Post: Long exposure WoWtography originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: The Azerothian Riddle Hunt

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Welcome to the doldrums of summer! This miserable time of year, when we see interest in raiding melt away as the temperature rises, can be a stressful time for even a well-established guild. A good way to combat the stress is to gather the remaining troops for a bit of a morale boost in the form of a little light-hearted, fun event such as a scavenger hunt. This article provides the able morale officer with everything he or she needs to know to prepare and run one such hunt, a variation called the Azerothian Riddle Hunt.

The Azerothian Riddle Hunt combines 10 cheesy and not-quite-literarily correct rhymes with player knowledge of original Azeroth and the challenge of swift (or not-so-swift) travel around Azeroth, in order to create an event that can be both amusing and challenging. Once unraveled, each rhyme tells the player where to go to answer the question given in the rhyme’s last line.

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Guest Post: The Azerothian Riddle Hunt originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: 32 tricks for Icecrown Citadel

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Icecrown Citadel has been out for eightmonths now, and with the availability of i264 emblem gear and the 30 percent zone buff, it’s become accessible to raiders with a wide range of experience. Some players have downed the bosses 100+ times on various alts, and other players may be just starting out.

Regardless of your experience level, there are always interesting tricks about the fights that people learn over the course of time. Here are 32 of them.

  • Warlocks, time your Seed of Corruption to hit as Bone Spike cast ends, and if everyone’s stacked correctly in melee range, you’ll be top damage on Bone Spikes.
  • During Bone Storm casts, tanks should run to be farthest away from center of raid. Some 90 percent of the time, he’ll target the farthest person away to move to.
  • Any time you have to split your DPS into two groups (whether it’s Thaddius or adds on Lady D or Valithria), an easy way to get balance is to go through Recount by damage done and put Nos. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15 on damage done on one side and the rest on the other side.
  • Spellsteal or Purge the Vampiric Might on fanatics.
  • Boomkin rooting for Darnavan works especially well, but note that he’s immune to Cyclone.

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Guest Post: 32 tricks for Icecrown Citadel originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: Northrend truckers — a tale of WoW OTR

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After spending three years crammed into a call center with 600 reps sitting in quarter-cubes so small I could hear the other reps on all sides of me, I decided it was time to ditch the tech support world and go see America. Four weeks and ,200 later, I had my Class A Commercial Driver’s License, thanks to a truck driving school outside Springfield, Mo.

Before venturing out, I wanted to purchase a decent laptop for gaming (we were attempting to do full clears of Zul’Aman when I decided on my career change). I ended up purchasing a HP Compaq NC8430, after catching it on special. It had the Intel Core 2 Duo T5600, ATI’s Mobility Radeon X1600, and I upgraded the memory to 4GB of DDR2-667. After loading WoW and all my addons, I was happily running around Shattrath at 60 FPS! I also purchased Skyworth’s 19″, 12-volt LCD TV to use as a second monitor and to also watch television on in the few occasions I stopped overnight near a big city (Big Bang Theory is not available online).

I didn’t want to mess with a laptop and a GPS system, so I purchased Microsoft Streets 2006. MS Streets came with a plugin USB GPS that had about a six-foot cord on it along with a suction cup. Through blind luck while surfing the web, I also found Jotto Desk, a very nice laptop for semis that mounts to the base of the passenger seat and has an arm that extends over to the driver seat for easy access. While a bit of a pain to install, the effort was well worth it. The people who invented the Jotto Desks deserve an award or a free case of Bawls or something. Having successfully installed Jotto Desk and mounted my USB GPS to the front windshield, I was almost ready to hit the open road! All I had to figure out now was a way to get internet no matter where in the United States I happened to be.

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Guest Post: Northrend truckers — a tale of WoW OTR originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Guest Post: Guild wars pit friend against friend

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World of Warcraft is a social game. Blizzard made this clear with the recent addition of the Real ID system. I myself have made use of this. Being an officer in several small roleplaying guilds on both Alliance and Horde sides of Cenarion Circle (US), I have found that there is a great bit of planning and organization required in running official guild wars. Currently, the Alliance guild I am an officer in is in a heated battle with a Horde-side guild. Both are roleplaying guilds. Both guilds (in the roleplaying sense) have similar ideas — both are pro-Horde/pro-Alliance, respectively. One may hate the other side more than the other, but the hate is there.

These guild wars bring a certain fun dynamic to the game. Having a sworn nemesis, whether it is for a character of your creation or a friend from an opposing faction, is just a great way to enjoy the game. Plotting someone’s demise, thinking of strategies to take him down? It adds another layer to an already multifaceted world. However, there are a few tips I have noticed that really help with these particular battles. Some things come in handy in a roleplaying context; others focus on fair play, so that people will want to continue to the “war” and not just want to ignore/report your taunts!

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Guest Post: Guild wars pit friend against friend originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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