UsefulConcept

Mountain Dew and World of Warcraft go together like cheese and crackers. So it should be no surprise that there is a new drink on the market. Mountain Dew Game Fuel. It is WOW branded either horde or alliance. My wife got the alliance drink a couple days ago and I have to say it tasted pretty good.

One thing I didn't know, is that there is a whole web site dedicated to the drink, with prizes being given out every 15 minutes. The prizes range from Mtn Dew tshirts, hoodies, gaming mice, all the way to an Alienware gaming notebook (given out daily) and trip to Blizcon (given out weekly). When you create an account on this web site you get tokens for doing certain tasks.

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My World Of Warcraft Wishlist for 2009

• First let me say I love WOW and my wife and I have played since beta. I love Northrend, best quests ever. Still I would like to see a few new things done. Since I don't know anyone at Blizzard and I don't know of any other way to submit ideas I am using my blog on New Years Eve. :-)
• Unlimited Ignores. The power to ignore people can't be understated. My standard rule after years of playing the game is to ignore racist/homophobe/asshole people instantly. It turns out there are not that many, they just chat a LOT. By ignoring them it helps the quality of the game so much. However, we are limited in the number of people we can ignore. If you start ignoring gold sellers as well that quickly gets met in a matter of a week. I wish wish wish we had an unlimited number to ignore. There is no good technical reason I can think of to NOT do so. Blizzard has done great tech feats with wow, certainly an ignore list more powerful can be one of them.
• On a related note, shared ignore lists. If I can share my list with my wife (and vice versa) that would be GREAT. Imagine the social change that would happen when people can share their known jerks list.
• Ability to ignore players that are not online. I know that sounds odd, but really it is often someone says something really really bad then logs out. I can't ignore them if they just left. But my ignore system is the ONLY way I can track people I don't want to do future business with.
• Ability to track pvp target names. Who killed me, and who have I killed? This would be a good add-on I suppose. A ganker tracker! Who killed me outside of battleground/arena where I did NO damage. That way I can identify them later for reprisal.
• Ability to filter craftable items to only those things I have mats for. Actually two filters. One filter for craftable things which I have some mats for. Another filter to only show items that I have all mats for. Cooking is a great example of where this would come in handy. Yes I can scroll, but frankly it is a pain.
• Build auctioneer into WOW. Seriously. If we all don't have to scan the AH then it would reduce load on the servers. Just build that functionality into wow. The add-on is great, but it takes 8-15 min of time to scan for my server and it sucks up all kinds of server resources for something I consider a requirement to play the game. Normally I say let an add-on stay an add-on, but in this regard it is special as it effects Blizzard CPU/Bandwidth. Much of that would be mitigated if built in and no longer requiring a scan.
• More world events. Not holidays mind you but some crazy boss invading Darnasus for one weekend only. Powered by a GM. How insanely great would that be. Ya that would be a lot of GM's for all your servers, but hey I still want it anyway. Onyxia just wakes up one day and takes off after Gadget. SWEEET!
• Add more report options. I can right click on chat item to report spam, but not report gold seller. I can't report offensive chat. I see gold selling ALL THE TIME. Let me report it!
• Have ONE gm per server just watching chat in trade channel. Not a big brother thing, but watching for accounts clearly hacked, people selling gold, etc. This has the potential for bad I realize and I suggest it with trepidation, but on the other side the anonymity of the chat now lends itself to people saying pretty horrible things with no accountability. Plus the scammers (selling spectral tiger codes, etc). Do we remember the gambling fad? I see it coming back now in different forms.
• Better scaling with raid pvp events. I have a great pc with a great graphics card. Yet I see lag in Dalaran sometimes, let alone Wintergrasp or raids on Horde towns. See next item for option 2.
• Video config per zone type. Identify zone types that are likely to have more people and let us configure a different video setting. For example in Dalaran I don't need my video settings as high as anywhere else. I get 50-60 fps everywhere except those places where my pc sometimes lags so bad I can't move. Changing our video settings per area may help.
• Guess thats it for now. Thanks for reading. Post your own requests or comments and Happy New Year!

The Darkmoon Faire is upon us and as such its a great time to pick up a few new pets. Specifically frogs. There are two frogs you can buy from the kid running about. One common frog, another rare.

However, the frog I am writing about today is the Jubling. You can't buy it, but rather you must help Morja find him and them get a Jubling of your own.

Now there are a couple items you need to get before you even bother. Dark Iron Ale! You will need two of them. Before the last brewfest it was a pain in the butt to get to the bar inside of Black Rock Depths, but now many people have the trinket that will port you directly there. If you don't want to be bothered with that then buy them off the AH. Maybe 2g each. If you do buy them in the bar in BRD and you are going with a group don't buy em all, make sure to share as you can only buy a limited quantity per instance.

Ok, back to the Jubling.

Find Morja, it should be easy as she is the one bemoaning her lost Jubling.

Next place a Dark Iron Ale on the ground near Morja (just use it). Now wait a minute or so, eventually the Jubling will smell the ale and come hopping over. Now talk to Morja again and she will have a quest for you to give her one more ale. When you do she gives you an unhatched egg. about 7 days later you will have your own Jubling (yes it takes 7 days to hatch). Once you have your Jubling, try putting more Dark Iron Ale on the ground and watch your pet lap it up.

Here is a handy link to to wowhead regarding the quest and some commentary.

I was able to log in to the updated patch at about 10pm last night.  By 1pm I was at 300 inscription and posted all my glyphs.  By 8am (7hrs later)  I had + 1000g and 90 glyphs still on the AH.  Not bad!  However I had all the herbs I needed by picking them, if I had to buy them I can't imagine I would make much money as the prices are sky high.

Some tips for people getting into inscription:

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Just a quick reminder that my contest ends midnight tomorrow. I only have a couple entries, so odds are pretty good for you. Blog about it, comment or do something already. ;-)

Maybe everyone who thought of trying WOW is already playing it?

Its time to hold a contest!  One winner, and anyone can participate.  All to promote my RIAdventure cruise this February.  (social cruise for CF/Flex/AIR geeks and family from Miami to Bahamas)

What is the prize you ask?

A World of Warcraft account (created but not played) with ~ 80 days of prepaid time.  Yup, the game and about 3 months of prepaid time!  It includes the original game as well as the Burning Crusade addition.  If you show up on my server I will even help you get started. :-)

If you ever wanted to see what the hubbub is about, this is a good chance to do so.  I have created the account for you and added the play time, you just need to download the client software (free download) and enter the user/pass I give you and away you go.

Note, this account is already created, so you can't use it for the Zevrah mount.

How do you enter?

Option A:
Every person who posts a comment on this blog post will get one entry.  The comment has to contain 2 things.  Yes you must do BOTH to qualify. (plus post your name and valid email though the email wont show).

1) List your top reason someone should go to RIAdventure.
2) List your top reason you want to try out WOW (world of warcraft).

Option B:
You can get a second entry (for a total of two possible entries) if you blog about the contest and post your answers to the two questions above in your blog post and then link back to this post.  You must comment here with a link to that blog post so I have a way of knowing about it.

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Blizzard is having some issues with billing this weekend. It isn't clear if it is an automated system gone awry, or perhaps a larger issue. The result is that many of us can't log into WOW today. We get an error saying our prepaid time is up.

The issue is we are not paying via prepaid time. Instead we pay monthly, and the last batch of monthly cards are stuck in 'pending' mode. So we can't log in, and can't change anything.

Perhaps most frustrating is that Blizzard has no support on the weekend. Nobody to call or alert. For a game this massive it just makes no sense.

Bad timing too with Warhammer coming out right about now. As for me, I will get some work done and maybe buy Rock Band 2 today. And watch as my wife plays WOW and has no issues logging in and gleefully mocks me while doing it.