You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Elf Geekery’ category.
Wandering around Wow Insider this morning just to catch up on all the offline info I’ve been half ignoring over the last… year? Been that long already? Huh… Anywho I found a post about patch 4.3. You can find the post here [link] and I wanted to take a moment to really have a think about the implications of it. Here’s the short of it:
- -Deathwing has a raid! Before most of us have even really cut our teeth on Firelands too…
- -New 5 man dungeons of about ZA/ZG difficulty
- -Cosmetic Armor Skins…bwa?
- -Armor Closet – store all your old armor to free up bank space.
The last patch included a few little things… like a few new hair styles, dailies, new raid all that fun stuff. What sorta bugs me a bit is there was a massive build up for Firelands, including a series of quests to kick it off, before we got started. I don’t know what the timeline is for 4.3 but it seems a little fast and we’ve not gotten a lot about it so far. There’s a little bit of a hint from the article Wow Insider sites for most of it’s info, about AQ (Ok so I just saw it briefly and it was a word I understood), which baring the two dungeons in Wrath and the raid no one got to see during current content we haven’t seen a lot of. We know its there and we might have dallied but nothing serious for the majority of players around these days.
So follow me behind the cut for further discussion on the quality of life stuff… I’ll save the PVE for another post over the weekend.
[Excerpts from a Worgen Adventurer’s Journal]
… I never thought that behind its diminutive Wall Verian Wrynn could see so little of his kingdom but the man must just be that blind. If the ills of Elwynn Forrest aren’t apparent to him then it comes as no shock to me what has befallen the once fertile lands of Westfall. Upon my arrival there I found a grizzly scene. A family and their horse murdered. Investigators from Stormwind surrounded the area and I chose to offer my assistance in the matter. If the changed landscape and the environmental upheaval are anything to show what has changed physically about the area it equally reflects the change in the inhabitants.
While working on a Worgen Druid in the Beta I came across this random book… A Faded Journal. Now this is most certainly a lovely chunk of Lore and I thought I ought to share it with folks. It might change, it may go away… but it’s still rather cool.
Read the Journal after a visit from Inconspicuous Bear
Finally someone gets it!
Recently my guild, Wyrmfoe, got itself into the Cataclysm Beta. I’ve been in about a week and met up with a few interesting issues but it is Beta, if it isn’t broke it will be.
I wanted to start off with an overview of the new Cata starting zone Vas’jir. The area is for 80 to 83 and takes place almost entirely under water. At the center of the lore in the area are three major factions – The Earthen Ring, The Naga and the Minions of the Old Gods. The zone takes place fully under water and features some wonderful new quest designs, beautiful zones, more lore than you can fit in a tuna can, and for us hunters sweet new creatures to tame… or wish we could tame anyway.
So grab your diving helmet and take the plunge behind the cut.
Been a while since the last post blah blah blah…
Summer can get a bit stressful. Its hot, muggy, people do things outdoors away from computers, raids don’t go, rise of alts and all that. Heat can burn you out and so can all this information about Cataclysm. Everyone gets so stoked for what is to come many stop seeing a point to playing until its out.
So sometimes a bit of catharsis is in order. Something that just cheers you up and brightens your day and lets all the stress of botched Halion runs or being stuck once again three men short of a full raid team roll off your back.
One of my favorites (besides playing a game involving wildlife and how many I can hit with Corruption before the first one dies affectionately called the Dot Dot Dead game.) is to go into Scarlet Monastery Cathedral wing and go hug the Scarlet Commander, High Inquisitor, and all their friends. At once. I spent a lot of time in there getting my tail handed to me and it was a pain in the ass. Now its just fun to hop on the ill used paladin alt, smack the rocket boots and the Arcanite Ripper and have some fun.
So, the handful of people who actual read this blog, what do you do to blow off some steam or chase the blues away in WoW?
World of Warcraft, the biggest MMO out there, has dozens of facets for game play and attracts many to its raids, PVP, tournaments, and adventure. But for many there is another aspect, the last three letters on the end of the type of game WoW is. A Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game… ie the RPG part. For many people it is the bread and butter of their WoW experience, for others it’s a terrifying mystical world full of horror stories from Goldshire and thus nothing to dabble in… and yes for some it’s prime griefing material. Be that as it may I enjoy RP in a lot of different ways, and for the last two and a half years WoW was the place for me and my creative self and I had a blast. The hardest part of the entire experience besides getting into the thick of things is just making the character to begin with. Sure there is the character creation screen – class, race, faction, name, looks, gender… but to build an RP toon you have to go beyond the pixils and think about who that person is.
I’m sure many people out there played make-believe… gone beyond that to Dungeons and Dragons or Whitewolf games… what about a school play or even simply playing House. You had a role you fulfilled, a goal for yourself as someone who was more or less not you at all yet held a part of you in their core. Keep this in mind and I’ll take some time to describe some processes, key things to keep in mind, and my personal believes behind the creation of a role-playing character.
I’ll be breaking this into a few posts, just for digestion’s sake and avoidance of ‘wall of text’ syndrome. For starters I’ll go through a few concepts and guide lines to keep in mind during this whole process. These are based solely on my own opinions and experience so you might have other views or approaches and that’s good. In the event you have no idea though, maybe these can be a bit of an inspiration.
There is a phenomenon on the internet. Communities of thousands, millions, and more people… many of which never see one another in person. A community of none yet all. We see these things on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal… thousands of ‘social networking’ sites. Places where we reach out into the internet and try to connect. Now I could get super philosophical about the whole thing… but this is a World of Warcraft Blog so we’ll keep things in the scope of well… Wow.
So I pose the question: What does Azeroth Mean to Me? Not only do I ask myself… but I ask you all 58someod people who have stopped by so far. I appreciate every single one of you by the way so thank you.
All right maybe I’m a bit of a dork about a lot of things…like learning that the National Science Foundation has teamed up with Teachers and Grad Students from several universities to study social interaction in Warcraft [Read WoW.com article or Visit WowLens ] which leads to an add-on to rate your group mates. I find it rather fascinating personally. The social interaction we have in game: the cooperation, coordination, strategical planning and of course back talking (come on you know you /w someone you know in the group ‘I can’t believe this tank/healer/dps’ ) is unlike anything we do in real life on a constant basis. Its unique because over the course of a single day of grinding dungeons you meet dozens if not hundreds of people for 30 or so minutes going from total strangers to either a cohesive team to accomplish a common goal or well… you know a fail PUG.
In school we have random groups for projects of course but we also know most of the people in our class, or by the end of a week in College we have an idea who the overachievers are, the slackers, the people who are just there for the credits and we don’t even know their names. Before the LFG tool we depended on our own server for resources for PUGs and we got to know the good the bad and the… guys we never want to see again. Now its even more of a mixed bag. It is rare to see the same people twice unless you started out with them in the first place or que up a few times with the same group. Has this grab-bag interaction changed the way we interact with people? Has it altered our expectations and perspectives? And another question to pose: is it changing the quality of players in groups for good or ill?
The Misdirect List 