Posted on June 29th, 2009 by admin
It looks like we’ve got a sneak peek at what may be the new tier sets when MMO Champion uncovered some gear intended for Paladins, Death Knights, and Warriors. Just in case you didn’t notice, that’s all plate gear and, well, they all look alike. With Patch 3.2 seeing the return of faction-specific armor, a lot of people were thrilled except that most players (including myself) sort of forgot that faction-specific gear such as the old Level 60 PvP sets had shared models across armor types.
The reason most of us didn’t notice was because this wasn’t so apparent back then… the Alliance only had one mail-wearing class and the Horde only had one plate-wearing class. With Shamans and Paladins no longer restricted to one faction and with the introduction of Death Knights in Wrath of the Lich King, more classes appear to share the same item models — there are three plate and two mail classes on both factions now. This has the downside of homogenizing appearance across classes but the upside of having the near-certainty of putting together a visually cohesive set as well as looking different from the enemy faction’s counterparts.
So today’s question is simple: what design philosophy do you think works best for World of Warcraft? Every path has its obvious benefits, of course. What appears to be the most appealing is something we still haven’t seen… faction- and class-specific gear where each class has a completely unique model according to faction. It sounds great on paper but it’s more work for the art team and an itemization nightmare — imagine having to organize those drops in a dungeon! It might be easier to go the Sunwell Plateau route and be done with it! Or heck, do everything Emperor’s New Clothes-style, where everyone goes commando! Good idea? No? So, uh, that was just me? Drat.
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Posted on June 22nd, 2009 by admin
This was so cute we had to share — that future Alliance kid at right is Cara’s son Riley, no doubt owning it up on Daddy’s Death Knight in the battlegrounds. That’s right — the DK who rolled over you with Howling Blast in Wintergrasp yesterday was actually played by a 9.5 month old baby. How’s that burn feel? Cara tells us, and the pic was part of a “WoW you’re a great father” theme for Riley’s first Father’s Day.
From all of us here at WoW.com, here’s a shout out to all of the fathers out there, both Dads of players and Dads who are players themselves. Take a break from taking down Ulduar or grinding out those Argent Tournament quests and make sure to give your Dad a call (and/or the usual tie or socks) today. Or just send him an in-game email for those of you who play with your pops.
Happy Father’s Day!
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Posted on June 18th, 2009 by admin
Your appreciation for Castlevania: Wisps of Dracula by Noblejazan will vary depending on your knowledge and experience with poorly written fan-fiction. The author took an “original story” written by a fan of the game Castlevania, and put it into machinima. Mind you, Noblejazan used an actual fanfiction. The resulting video is somewhere between a hyperspeed parody and a weeping nod to the phenomenon of fanfic.
This video has all the very best tropes. It has senseless tragedy, dashing heroics, an invulnerable, rogue hero, and a hint that the real Mary Sue has yet to be born. (I’m sure Rhonin is just around the corner for the next installment.) The author is careful to pronounce the actual language from his chosen fanfiction, and the movie moves so fast it feels like you’re on a sugar-fueled rollercoaster ride. I especially like the word-art flying across the screen, to help make sure you don’t miss any details.
Although I was a little confused when I first pulled this video up on WarcraftMovies, I laughed out loud when I played the YouTube stream. This video is hilarious work, though I’ll admit I’m not sure of the gimmick could be repeated. It’s definitely worth the few minutes watching.
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Posted on June 16th, 2009 by admin
For the second Tuesday in a row around the same time (9:00-9:30 pm EST-ish), the US Retaliation battlegroup has crashed. Blizzard has confirmed that it’s performing urgent maintenance on the hardware of the affected realms, and they’ll provide an update at 11:00 PM EST/8:00 PM PST. Hmmm. Makes you wonder if whatever caused last week’s crash was accidentally rolled back during server maintenance earlier today.
The following are the affected realms:
Area 52, Auchindoun, Azuremyst, Blade’s Edge, Blood Furnace, Coilfang, Dawnbringer, Exodar, Fizzcrank, Galakrond, Ghostlands, Grizzly Hills, Shattered Halls, Terokkar, The Scryers, The Underbog, Velen, and Zangarmarsh.
My guild’s on Retaliation and has consequently found itself without something to raid for the second Tuesday running. Last week their solution was to take off to Mug’thol and do a level 1 Hogger raid, complete with designated tanks and healers, damage meters, and — to top things off — a bonafide ninja looter of the Malachite drop. Our server might be down, but our hallowed traditions remain.
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Posted on June 14th, 2009 by admin
The World of Warcraft comic train keeps a-rollin’ with the upcoming twentieth issue, with this one focusing on everyone’s favorite pre-Wrath Scourge invasion. Here’s what the official PR solicitation has to say:
The Scourge makes their move and attacks from all fronts intent on taking no prisoners! No longer united, can Varian and Thrall survive the onslaught? And will Valeera once again succumb to her addiction to magical energy?
Oh no, dear readers! Can they? Will she?
I guess you’ll just have to pick up the comic. If you need a quick fix, though, you can check out BlizzPlanet’s scans of the preview that they’ve so graciously provided. At a glance, the art seems to be a bit improved over the Onyxia arc (thankfully) and, possibly more importantly, we’re finally getting into recent and familiar territory. Heck, the comic’s only a few months behind us now! Maybe soon you’ll read about yourself killing Yogg-Saron before you even do it.
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Posted on June 11th, 2009 by admin
As we all know, bacon is the candy of meats, making everything a little better. Unfortunately, there’s only one type of bacon in WoW — the quest reward Hellfire Bacon. So our characters can only eat twenty pieces of bacon, ever, in their entire life. Luckily, Imika of <Enigma> on Windrunner has come up with a fine solution to this problem. When Horde members approach this feast, the ring of bombs around it will explode, searing both the ham and the intruder into light, crispy perfecton. Then a local rogue cuts thin slices of meat from their bellies and leaves it to hang, and voila! Not only do you have bacon, but you’ve got a decent supply of Fjord Fried Orc and Sentient Beef Liver for the next time you crave something unusual.
Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!
Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.
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Posted on June 9th, 2009 by admin
We’ve been getting a lot of glitch screenshots yesterday, so I’m trying to be more picky and only use the most unusual ones. This shot of Wintergrasp from Bundead of <Monolith> on The Sentinels definitely qualifies. The normal tree textures have been replaced with the head of an angry, bald man. Has the Warden program become sentient and started to stalk players through the gamescape? Or is Bundead being followed by the decapitated head of a Lego figurine?
Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!
Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.
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Posted on May 29th, 2009 by admin
We pretty much knew this to be the case, given that it’s exactly what happened two weeks ago, but yes, just in case you haven’t been paying attention, the second and final round of BlizzCon tickets is going on sale this Saturday, and Neth confirms it’ll start at 10a.m. PST again. You’ll have to be ready on the ticket page to jump into the queue at the right time, and then hope they don’t sell out before you’ve gotten a chance to grab yours. The good news is that things probably won’t break down, but the bad news is that they’ll probably go really, really fast, so you’ll have to be lucky to get in line before they close the doors.
And if you don’t make it to the convention, there’s always us: we’re planning on covering the heck out of it yet again here at WoW.com, so even if you’re not in Anaheim, we’ll make you feel like you are. Or if you want to go the streaming video route, we’re sure DirecTV will be happy to take your money as well.
So it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get your purchase done, but there’ll no doubt be a lot of disappointed Blizzard fans no matter what. Good luck to everyone — we’ll see you Saturday at 10 a.m. Pacific.
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Posted on May 26th, 2009 by admin
We had our long-awaited video version of the podcast last weekend, and it was a hoot: Turpster and I dressed up and drank champagne together, Robin Torres showed how to inflate your Frostmourne, Lesley Smith came to us live from England, Duncor showed off his famous gigantic cowboy hat, and Patrick Beja showed that he can out-spiffy us any day. Unfortunately, because of the way we did things, we didn’t end up getting a good recording of the whole thing — you can see a few clips of the beginning over on Ustream, but they only have my camera (and the audio is rough — I didn’t realize it sounded that bad at the time). Dotorion also Frapsed a bit of the beginning, which should give you a little taste of the multi-camera mayhem.
But in the end, it was pretty much a one-time thing you had to be there for live. Lightning in a bottle, if you will. The good news is that even if you didn’t see the show, we’ve still got a treat for you: Turpster premiered a brand new video (put together by our good friend Ninthbatter) that we played at the end of the show, and that you can watch online right now. Turpster has also recently updated his own site, where you can find all the songs he’s ever made, including our WoW Insider Song, and “Just Can’t Wait,” which is a song that he, I, and BigBearButt recorded a while ago before Wrath’s release. So even though you don’t have a new podcast to listen to today, you can tune in there.
We’ll be back next week as normal, going audio-only. We’ll talk more about WoW.com and the changeover (yes, the show is staying the WoW Insider Show for now), and we’re planning to have on our special guest host direct from the Child’s Play auction a few weeks ago to talk about the latest WoW news, as well as whatever else he wants to discuss. Should be great — sorry for not having the show today, but we’ll see you next week.
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Posted on May 25th, 2009 by admin
Update April 30th, 2009: Karatechop’s account has been closed. Read the fully story here.
We first received a tip on a mysterious guild that was blowing through Ulduar’s hardest achievements one after the other, all in one day, about a day or two ago. Their gear and raid experience stated very well that they were in no position to do any of those achievements, but we sort of shrugged and let it pass by. It was odd that these players were barely in Naxxramas gear, and their first recorded Kel’thuzad kill was only two weeks prior to their explosion of Ulduar achievements, but we initially ignored these reports because surely, nobody could be hacking the game. On top of that, the forum threads submitted to us all had so many posts deleted from them that they were completely incomprehensible. There was nothing solid about any of it.
Tips on it are still flooding our mailboxes today and a bit more information has surfaced, so let’s look into it a little, shall we? The guild is The Marvel Family of US-Vek’nilash. The character Karatechop is the one that has attracted the most attention, and you’ll see why in just a moment. If you look over his gear, it’s not that bad, really. Epic tank gear, a lot of it from Naxxramas, so it’s feasible that he could make some progress through Ulduar. It gets weird when you go to his Statistics and/or Achievements panels. Let’s go to his statistics first.
If you can’t make out the numbers there, his largest recorded hit is 353,892,967 damage. That’s just shy of 354
million damage. There are a lot of solo quests in the world that let you put out insane damage (
The Battle for the Undercity for example) but there are none that cause you to do damage in the hundreds of millions. However, there
is something in the game that gives this number some significance. It’s the total health pool of
Flame Leviathan’s hardest hard mode, leaving all four preceeding towers standing. Let’s go take a look at his achievements…
Yep, there she is!
Orbit-uary, leaving all four towers up on Flame Leviathan. Even more absurdly suspiscious is that they apparently did Shutout at the same time. How were they able to do both? Well, they didn’t. Not legitimately. Somehow, Karatechop managed to 1-shot Flame Leviathan.
Flame Leviathan isn’t the only thing that Karatechop massacred, either. His achievement list is highly suspect, to say the least. I’d bet that the list will disappear from his Armory within a day or two, so go ahead and look at them via GuildOx instead. For the bosses he’s recorded as having killed, he has all of the “Beat X boss in under Y minutes” achievements. Why? He one-shotted everything. It’s hard to stay in combat over that amount of time when you can hit things for their full health pool.
There has to be an exploit or something here, right? Surely Blizzard can’t be hacked, right? Well, no. I wouldn’t call what they’re doing an ‘exploit’ in the traditional gaming sense, nor have they hacked Blizzard’s servers. What we’re seeing here is the result of an ‘oops’ by a GM (or developer?) hopefully. The possibility of malicious intent exists, but I have serious doubts anybody would risk their job over this.
What am I talking about, you ask? Let’s look closer at Karatechop’s equipment.
Hey, that’s weird. He has something in his shirt slot, but it’s not displaying properly. Error loading tooltip, huh? Well, alright. That’s fine. This is the internet, our resources are endless. Let’s just look it up
elsewhere. You can see the item ID in the bottom left, and I’ve put the red box around it so you can’t possibly miss it. Item #17, how curious.
Cheater,
indeed. Martin Fury is one of those mysterious, fascinating GM/Developer items that were never meant for player hands. Items you only saw on
Wowhead, WoWDB, or Thottbot. The only way to even have a glimpse of them was via datamining. Karatechop, however, woke up one day to one sitting in his mailbox.
Such is temptation. With infinite power at your fingertips, could you resist using it? Karatechop couldn’t, apparently. As the saying goes, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That can certainly be applied to Karatechop here, but what of the person who awarded it to him? If this is an accident, it’s on the list of most unlikely accidents ever.
If you look at item IDs on most any other item in WoW, a two digit item ID is an amazingly rare thing. Those items just aren’t in the game itself whatsoever. Even items that drop in the earliest content of the game have at least four digits in their item ID. Almost every item after that has at least five digits. This has two. Either this was completely intentional, or a GM’s keyboard stopped working in the middle of typing in an item ID and they sent item #17 to someone instead of, for example, item #17604. And they sent the item off anyway. The chances of this actually being an accident and not deliberate: Very, very low.
No matter how this happened, you can bet a pretty massive internal investigation is happening (or has happened) to find out how it all went down. A member of The Marvel Family posted on his blog about this event, stating that the entire guild has received bans over this even if they weren’t present at any of Karatechop’s miracle raids. How long these bans will last, we don’t know. We can’t ask, either. This event essentially brought the entire population of WoW down on this guy’s blog like a nuke. It’s down for the count.
The whole thing is essentially wrapped up now, the accounts are banned, the item is gone, but it’s certainly a memorable event. It’s not often someone gets their hands on one of those.
Alternate title: Player gifted with Death Note, vows to fix all that is wrong in Azeroth.
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