I was recently playing my hunter in a situation where I could not use my pet because I had to use a special item to mind-control a demon in the Netherstorm, and apparently having a pet and mind-controlling at the same time isn't allowed in the game mechanics. As a beast-mastery hunter, I'm pretty weak without my pet, so I had to use Feign Death a lot to get into position next to the demon. Suddenly I imagined my character as a star in the Warcraft movie, feigning death left and right, and laughing at the demons who fell for it every time. In a movie, certainly, it couldn't be so simple. The plausibility of the plot would require the monsters to figure out something was fishy when the hunter got up from apparent death the first time. Still, I thought if the ability was used once or twice in particularly appropriate moments, it could be really funny and also make the fans go wild, because they would recognize the game mechanics making a cameo in the film. Imagine: the hunter character in the movie is separated from his pet, surrounded by monsters, shot by an arrow and appears to die, only to be fine later on when his friends come to pick up his dead body. Then maybe towards the end, the bad guy feigns death too, and tricks the heroes with their own trick. What other in-game abilities would it ...
Warcraft Rookie: Earn Your Gold
There is a level 16 sword on the auction house that would totally make your warrior uber for the next 2 levels. You have to have this sword. One problem...the bidding has gone higher than the gold in your pocket. What to do? You have two options (and we will assume that gold buying is not one of them): A. Earn the Money. Leave the auction house area and go and try to grind the gold you need before the auction ends. You could sell some items that you normally wouldn't to make up the difference. Heck, if it is that important, sell your bags. B. Beg. You could go up to random strangers and ask for the gold. Or you could bother some new guildies (you are level 16, all your guildies are new guildies!) for the gold. If you chose A, you chose wisely. All new players struggle with money, quests , and, on PvP servers, ganking. Such is the life of a level 16 in Azeroth. If you chose B, you chose very, very unwisely. People who beg for money are often mocked in tells, yells and nearly everywhere else. Your rep is taking a hit that could be hard to recover from. Sure, you might give up this character after 20 levels, but you never know! You don't want the rep of being an annoying beggar following you around. And if you think it won't follow you around and people ...
MMO10 Community backlash
MMO10 Community backlash heads to Global Agenda review score being pulled GameSpot was not so nice to Global Agenda -- a 5.5 out of 10 was fired against the game earlier by the gaming website. However, that didn't stop the Global Agenda community from doing some digging and turning up the reviewer's in-game character. A toonthat only had six hours of play time attached to it, no alliance, and no agency for conquest matches. The effecting evidence was provided by Global Agenda's gamer statistics system -- a pretty robust system that allows anyone to pull up a character's statistics simply by typing in their toonname. Once this evidence came to light, the community began to send e-mails to both the reviewer and GameSpot's Justin Calvert, who has since removed the review. Calvert has apologized (post confirmed by Hi-Rez Studio's Michal Adam) to the Global Agenda community and Hi-Rez Studios, and has reassigned the review to a new writer. GameSpot's internal policy is to spend 30 hours on an MMORPG before publishing a review.
Episode 108: Don’t get your hopes up
We taped our podcast a little early this week, on Wednesday night, and rather than having you wait all the way until Monday for it (not to mention that Pirates' Day will gone by then), we figured we'd post it up for you today). Matt "Matticus" Low was kind enough to join us (he writes the Spiritual Guidance and Raid Rx columns), and while Turpster was on a business trip, he did end up making it to provide us with his usual sparkling insight. We talked about that wacky 2v2 team rating and what it means for Blizzard's Arena system, the Abyssal Maw and what else we've heard about Cataclysm's dungeons and raids, and whether being in a guild really can calm you down (Matt, our only guildleader on the show, says no). has been criticized in the past for some of their design ideas (the work they do, just in terms of an art and gameplay sense, does tend to borrow a lot from what's come before it), but Afrasiabi does the right thing in the end: he lets the work talk for itself. Blizzard may have borrowed the MMO form from a lot of different places, but no one can argue that what they've done with it hasn't turned out to be extremely impressive. Next week, hopefully I will have been able to sit in front of my computer for more than 20 minutes without hurling so that I can ...
Wherein we learn new slang
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Today we're going to hit a bunch of quick, short questions, which means today's edition of The Queue might be a wee bit short compared to some of Allison's epics. Picture above completely unrelated to anything written below. It just looks pretty freaking sweet, doesn't it? ikandiman asked... "I have been trying to get the last Brewfest achievement for my Warlock, but every time I get smashed and jump off the elevator in Shattrath (with my Skyguard's Drape to slow fall) I never get the bloody Drunken Stupor achievement. Had no problem with my mage and paladin. What gives?" I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure the source of the problem is the Skyguard's Drape. You can't use any Slow Fall effects when trying to get that achievement, you need to simply fall. You can use immunities such as Ice Block and Divine Shield, but you can't use things like Levitate, Slow Fall, or items like the Skyguard's Drape. To get that achievement done, I just took all of my characters to the Scryer elevator in Shattrath, not the Aldor elevator. The Scryer elevator is the perfect height so you can basically just walk off the edge, get the achievement, and not even worry about dying. Easy peasy, lemon squeezey. For another really simple location, ...