April 2008 Archives

I was surfing through the forums and I came across a forum thread where a Blizzard rep(herein referred to as a 'Blue') had commented. This is a topic I get a lot when I talk to the uneducated about WoW. "It's an advanced game and my computer isn't great". "I am sure Blizzard want to run on the best they can get". All of this and more plague me as 1) a WoW addict and 2) a knowledgeable and educated geek.

In the thread we have a person pointing out, in a really uneducated and generalized way, that all the best PC games now require Windows Vista, this coming from their friend who works in a game shop. No doubt these game makers 'require' Vista Ultimate, with Aero Glass and all the cool(read:useless) features involved. Thankfully Blizzard, that game maker we all love and hate in equal measure, is far brighter en mass and more kind to their customers and fans.

While Nethaera, in her responses, tried to hedge her answers in her first two replies, she finally came out and said what I knew the answer was.

The Expansion is not going to require users to upgrade to Vista. We have some things in the works on the end of graphics, but it's not anything that is going to require this specific upgrade.

There you have it. Let me break it down for you. Wrath of the Lich King will not require Windows Vista. You heard it there first. Or here. Whichever. This if for all the reason I mentioned in my reply, and the reasons mentioned in other's replies. blizzard has always done, and prided themselves in the fact that they make their games playable by as many people as possible, and this could well be the driving force behind over 10 million people playing worldwide.

Blizzard releases not only a Mac copy of the game, but at the same time as the PC version. Blizzard had gone so far as to begin a beta for a Spanish version of the US game to address the Spanish American and South American audience with the game. They made version for Taiwan, China, and Europe, and even made Oceanic specific servers for Australia and New Zealand part of the world.

Why in hell would Blizzard make the biggest mistake in their company's history by making the PC side of Wrath of the Lich King require a version of an OS that most of the employees at the company who makes it won't even run? I know a few employees of Microsoft and not one of them will run Windows Vista. Hell, upon asking today if I should run the 'fix to the Vista OS' as I heard one Microsoft sales person call SP1 today, I was told that if I run Vista yes, but it is not enough of a reason to install Vista if you aren't.

Blizzard can see the warning signs, folks, and they aren't about to ignore the 'Beware, deadly drop ahead' and 'Warning barrier is electrified and may cause death' signs plastered all over the path that leads to Vista. If other game makers want to lower themselves down the dark, lonely hole of Vista and it's myriad problems, that is fine, but I know Blizzard won't lead their customers to like lemmings.

I am an avid reader of the WoW Insider blog, and today, like many before, they showed me the funny behind the game's Forums. This post on WoW Insider, pointing to the humor in this post on the forums, showed the power of the GMs and Moderators on the official forums. They can pull up ticket histories and chat logs, transactions and account history.

But wait! WoW Insider blogger Amanda Dean had her account hacked and the refused to return her stuff. I have heard this result from many people, even my own guildies who were told that Blizzard had no record they had any gear. What? The company that has records of tickets, transactions, and chat logs from months before, they keep all of this but don't have record of gear a player had for several weeks before a hacking? I don't buy it.

So gold farmers get the account, make thousands of gold off the stuff therein, traumatize players and rack up charges on their credit cards, All of this and Blizzard has nothing to say? They have no record of the gear or the possessions? Having observed the IT industry for a long time, I would simply say that I think this is utter crap. Either Blizzard's server people are utter crap and can't maintain documentation worth a damn, or they are lying to customers in order to avoid having to restore gear to too many players.

Sure, there is probably a few who get their stuff back, but overall there is a lot of people who have hacked accounts, in many cases through no fault of their own, and Blizzard disregards their problems like it is nothing. I would call on Blizzard to explain how they can prove all of these things to humiliate a person trying to defraud them, but when a player gets hacked they can't pull up even the basics of what a player was wearing a few days before. Of course, as always, they will likely say nothing, ignoring the demands of their customers, cause god knows there are more where the departing came from!

Thanks to this mention by WoW Insider's Hybrid hating(except for druids) Mike Schramm, we now know that the amazingly funny WoW comic Scout Report, is back. The comic follows a morally corrupt Night Elf Hunter as she travels the world, first with her Children's Week orphan, then as she goes to Ogri'la and convinces some ogres to quest for her. I really did miss this comic and am very happy to see it's return! Other WoW themed comics you might want to check out are Dark Legacy, and By way of Booty Bay.

I was reading this thread on the WoW General forums earlier, and it got my to thinking. What is an acceptable tip? Is there such a thing as tip expectation? What can result from poor tipping? Me? I usually tip 5g or so per service. If I have multiple cuts I am having done on gems, I will pay about 80% per cut, cause there is not the same amount of travel time for each cut that there would be if they were separate events.

The reason I am curious about this is primarily because I now have a number top level crafters. I have 375 in Dragonscale Leatherworking, Armorsmithing, Jewelcrafting and Potions Mastery. Smithing is not really a profitable profession, primarily only used by those who don't Raid and mostly by the smith themselves. Alchemy can be profitable, but Potions Mastery is one of the least profitable of them all, simply because there are all of 3 or 4 potions in TBC. Elixir has far more demand.

Leatherworking can be profitable from the creation of armor kits, but these days it seems only the purple ones are in the highest demand, but honestly I haven't tried to sell and of my Clefthide Leg Armor. Drums are only usable by Leatherworkers, and the bags are the same and pretty easy to farm up. I guess you could sell some if you found a non 70 Leatherworker, but I don't see them the highest in demand.

Of all of my played characters, I see only my two Draenei to have professions I can use to make some cash. Telaan, my Draenei Paladin, has 375 Jewelcrafting as well as over a dozen cuts of blue quality gems including two Meta cuts. This is character has the most potential for profitability, but will it ever make back the over 4000g I have spent on the recipes? My second profit potential character is Traluun, who is currently Enchanter/LW, but will be dropping LW for Inscription in the next expansion.

None of this, though, addresses my points. After discussing this with a few guildmates and in game friends, I would say that overall I will accept tips. However, if I see a person getting a lot of cuts and not tipping, or turning around and seeing that person with those cuts up on the AH, I will set forth a fee. Overall, though, for the majority of my professions and those asking for those services, just as I do with services I ask of others, I will use a tipping system. What do you all think? Do you tip? Do you demand a fee? Will you use a player for a service who demands a fee?

After my recent time off from game, I have found it harder and harder to play the characters I have. My Paladin isn't hot enough my druid too thin and with racials that suck, and my hunter has just horribly boring speech patterns. I am sad to announce that effective immediately, I will be liquidating all of my current characters across most realms and making Horde versions with the same names. Arita will become a Tauren Druid, Medros a Blood Elf Paladin, and Ameland a Troll Hunter.

I will miss my friends on the Alliance side and invite every one of them to join me in the abandonment of the Alliance to the kids who have made the faction unplayable. The Alliance is filled with noobs who can't play their classes, can't PvP worth a damn, and can't follow the rules no matter how clear they are. Hope many times do you need to ask the same moron to not be talk about raid progression, his latest pnwage, or whatever in Say channel before you just want the chance to force him to stfu at the end of a gun?

On that note, it is almost time for work, 2.4.1 has just downloaded, and the realms are offline for an extended maintenance, so I am going to go get ready for work. Ishnu-dal-dieb.