Useful Concept - World of Warcraft

Aion Review

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:51:00 -0400

I spent some time at the end of the Aion open beta checking out the game. I have been itching to try a new online game out, and somehow I just found out about Aion last week.

The game itself installed pretty easy. NCSoft has a launcher to manage which game to run, download patches for, etc. So if you have any of their other games I suppose your already part way there.

[More]

Mountain Dew Game Fuel - World of Warcraft Soda!

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:23:00 -0400

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.

[More]

2009 WOW Wishlist

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:33:00 -0400

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!

Jubling Pet - get it today!

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:52:00 -0400

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.

Inscription Money Making

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:30:00 -0400

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:

[More]

Contest Reminder

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:37:00 -0400

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?

RIA, WOW and a Contest!

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:35:00 -0400

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.

[More]

warcraft billing system down?

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:36:00 -0400

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.

Warcraftbloggers Update

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:38:00 -0400

I thought I would spend a few minutes to update everyone on what warcraftbloggers.com has been up to.

I continue to add a number of warcraft related blogs, new and old. Only now people are submitting their blogs to me, which is great. Sometimes it takes a week or so before I get around to adding your requests. Our only qualification for adding a blog is that it is all about WOW and has at least 5 entries.

[More]

Age of Conan MMORPG Review

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:01:00 -0400

Age of Conan Review: Hyborian Adventures

I have been playing Age of Conan for a couple weeks now. I started playing just after it launched. This review is from the point of view of someone who is only level 22 on their main character. So take everything I say with a bit of salt.

First off, comparing this to World of Warcraft is going to be hard. There are some similar aspects, but mostly they made a different kind of MMORPG. Some of which I like, some of which I am unsure about as of yet. But before I get into game mechanics and playability and all that I think I will write a bit about system specs, visuals and such.

I started playing the game with a GeForce 7600. The card was pretty good at the time I bought it and it is above the minimum specs, though not quite at the recommended specs. The game itself had to be run in low visual mode (there are three quick visual settings, and lots of advanced ways totweak visuals). I got 10 fps in some areas, and often times the good looking tiles for a specific floor pattern and such would render right about as I was running on top of it. It looked good, but not great and really was odd visually at times. I can't recommend playing with that card. I decided it was time to use some of my Best Buy gift cards and buy a new graphics card. I looked at the 9600 and an 8800. The 9600 was less money, but in reviewing everything seemed to be not as good as the 8800 with 512MB RAM. I really wishnvidia would have a naming system that made sense to the casual gamer. Bottom line is that the [x]800 series cards are the powerful ones. So I picked up the 8800 GT OC . Turns out it needed TWO power cables to power it, and I thus had to go out again to get some splitters as my power supply had nothing free. That finished I installed the latest drivers and was good to go and less about $270.

The graphics improved dramatically. I am now set on medium, with much farther distance viewing. The visuals are remarkable and my fps is 30-50 depending on the area. One thing that is still a bit slow is when you zone into an area, theNPC's show up a few seconds later (sometimes MANY seconds later). I think this is server lag, and not related to my graphics card. This is really annoying and something I hope they find a way to speed up.

The visuals are pretty realistic. There is no clown colored armor. The landscape looks as it should for a game going for realism. Character creation offers a lot of control and I had a lot of fun reviewing various facial scars and tattoo's I could apply. My first character was a male Assassin and looked the part. My first encounter with a femaleNPC had be a bit surprised. I didn't realize how adult the game would be. By adult I mean a) suggestive and b) language / visuals. I ran the first set of quests with the distinct impression I was going to get laid at some point later in the game. Sweet. Lots of dialog in this game about whores, slavery, etc. You can do some pretty evil things too, though I couldn't get myself to take those quests. :-)

Naturally I had to find out what happens for other character classes and for female characters, so I rolled a female Bear Shaman. She is hot. Her tattoo is 'self check'. Turns out the starter quests are all the same, same place, same characters and far as I could tell same dialog. LAME. She may get laid by the same female NPC as well. So naturally I want to see just how adult the game could get and stripped my character. Screenshot below.

Ok, that out of my system off to play some more. It becomes clear that the game relies on a different sort of mechanic then WOW does. Thats not a bad thing per se , but something to get used to. Instead of one big open world, there are lots of Zones. Starter Beach Zone, Town Zone, all the dungeons are a zone, the solo quest line is a zone. Even the Inn has its own zone. So when zoning it shows a pretty picture and gives you some tips and storyline. The zoning gets a bit old after a while. Mostly when going to the Inn or other buildings with only a few NPCs. Why zone me to a place with only a handful of NPC's? I understand its probably to help with the framerate and such, but still, its distracting, takes time and is hard to get used to for those of us playing games that didn't do such things. Even getting to some islands for nearby quests had us zoning by clicking on a rowboat. sigh.

Something else to note: The starter town, Tortage, is the main zone for people under lvl 20. BUT not all people under 20 can be seen or chatted with. You see, each zone only holds 50 people (that is a number I read on forums, and may be subject to change or inaccuracy). So I may be in a different Tortage instance then my friend if we are not grouped up. So while you do see people running around, its not like your going to see hundreds of people at the auction house for example.

Speaking of Auction House, they have an NPC for that. He is the trader and has an auction system as well as acting as bank and mailbox. Handy to have it all rolled into one. He was broken the first week, but they fixed him right up and I tripped my money the first day by selling green items. Yes, you heard me. They have a similar color code system for items as WOW does. White, Green, Blue, etc. Its a good standard to follow. The auction house didn't have much on it when I have visited thus far. Further the interface isn't very good. I hope some ad-ons help in that regard. In fact, the chat, friends, AH interfaces are all weak. I know the game just launched, but those could have been more polished to start off with.

After finishing some quests and selling off the junk I wanted to do a little dance. So far I haven't found any dance emotes. They do have emotes (took me a while to find how). Something like /emote clap. I haven't spent time to find a list of available emotes, and hopefully they add more over time.

A quick note about combat. Unlike some games, there is no target - attack and go AFK ability with Conan. Instead you press a key to swing your sword or cast a spell. Each and every time. This makes combat more active for sure. In addition you can swing at things your not really targeting, it makes fighting multiple mobs easier most of the time, but also confusing. There is so much activity it isn't clear to me what combo's do most damage, and so on. Did I mention combo's yet? Yes combo's. To fight normally you have three swings. left, up, and right. So they swing at different parts of the bad guy. The bad guy may be defensive to his head, so you swing at his left, etc. Combos are abilities you learn that do more damage and have fun visuals. When you do a combo you first click on the icon (or use the shortcut number) then press the up, left or right swing. So one combo may be called slam and require no follow up keys, others may be followed up by a required swing left and swing right to trigger the combo. That means your always having to pay attention and time the swings properly. My favorite willconk a guy on the head, then shove him back on his ass. If you kill a bad guy with a combo sometimes blood spatters on to your screen. Yes, just like blood spattered screen. Only lasts a few seconds. You can also do afatality , which gives you a buff for a bit. I haven't figured out how I trigger them, maybe a chance on kill with combo? The issue I have with combos is that the descriptions don't give enough detail for me to know (yet) which to do in what order, and sometimes they arelaggy so I feel like I am just mashing keys to kill a bad guy. This may be faster for some, but my attack speed is 3 seconds right now ( I think), so its just sluggish. I think they can do more visually to help track upcoming combo's, activated, and last. As well as track effectiveness. Maybe an ad-on?

So back to questing. You will find two types of quests. Ones you can do with other players, and solo quests. So far the solo quests are related to the story line, and really fun. The quests have good dialog. While you are in the main town each person you talk to has voice acting. The voice acting is even pretty good. It slows things down a bit, but I didn't mind. Once you leave the town then its just text to read, unless its part of the main story line.

The solo quests in Tortage are called nighttime quests. At that point the town changes a bit and you can't group at all. I really enjoyed that. It was like a mini game or mini instance for just me. I think its a great addition.

The other quests can be done in groups or not. I grouped twice in my first 20 levels. The grouping dynamics where ok, but again I am so inexperienced it all went by faster then I could properly keep track. That will change with more experience and learning all the details of the game.

So at this point I have finished the Tortage main area and have moved on to my main city. They game sends you to your home town, which may be different depending on what race you are. Its good to split us up a bit, but what if I want to play with my wife and she is a different race? Speaking of races, there are 3 and all are human. There is no playing as a dwarf or elf or the like.

Now to talk about interface of the game. The mapping is pretty good. The mini map shows arrows to guide you for quests, x marks the spot for specific quest locations and so on. Almost always accurate. I found it VERY helpful as a newbie. The mini map also shows merchant locations, quests available and places you can zone to/from. This really helps make the game playable. Where I had difficulty is with buttons and abilities. There are not a lot of slots to put my combo options, so I found my self having to play around a bit moving things around. Maybe an ad-on will help. My first 3 shortcut slots are taken by left swing, up and right swing. Then the rest are filled with basic combos.

One last quip about interfaces and game resources. The quick launch panel to start the game stinks. It scans my files every time, so its quite slow to load. Also the buttons are all gray, and there is a dark background. So the freaking PLAY button looks like it is grayed out. Small updates to that would help UI so much. Like when the game is actually ready, light up the play button so visually we see it rather then having to read the stupid text. Stop scanning my files every time unless a patch is needed. When I am ready to exit, I press the Esc button, but often I have to push a few times for the damn menu to appear. Lame. All of these are small things, but stuff that needs to be fixed and should have been before launch. Regarding game resources, their website lacks much of anything useful.

[More]

Help WarcraftBloggers Grow!

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:30:00 -0400

WarcraftBloggers.com continues to grow. I get a couple requests a day to add blogs, and usually I get to them right away. I am traveling this week, so will be a bit sow, but I will get to you all.

Something you can do to help the site is tell your friends, blog about it, link to it , add a badge to your blog, etc. The value of warcraftbloggers grows with every new blog added, so send your suggestions as well. It is intended to be a community resource.

Introducing my Bank Alt - Subprime

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:39:00 -0400

I finally got around to making a bank alt. Subprime. He is technically a lvl 1 gnome warrior, but he really is a banker at heart. My wife made him a nice tux outfit. Now I just need to find him a monacle and cufflinks via fishing quest and I am all set.

Wife Swap TV Show Looking for Warcraft Players

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:35:00 -0400

I got a note from someone related to the Wife Swap show. They are looking for a family where the parents play World of Warcraft or other online RPG type games. My wife and I dont' qualify as we have no children.

If you are interested, are married and have at least one kid 7 or older living at home you could be on the show. Details below. OH, if you submit, let em know I sent you as I could get a referral fee.

[More]

Wow Down, time for warcraftbloggers update.

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:27:00 -0400

My realm (magtheridon) is down right now, along with many others. So I figure I will post a quick update on warcraftbloggers.com site (my warcraft blog aggregator).

The site went live just over a week ago. Some quick stats:

[More]

Some Love From World of Warcraft Itself

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:10:00 -0400

I woke up this morning to see that a link to my warcraft bloggers web site has been linked to by no other than worldofwarcraft.com! What great news for a Friday morning. Ok, now back to work.

Here is a short quote:

[More]