WRUP: Post 3.3.5 edition
by Elizabeth Harper 
Jun 25th 2010 at 10:00PM
This week is all about
But on to the subject at hand: keep reading for a round-up of what the WoW.com staff is up to this weekend, in game and otherwise. A smattering of them even answered this week's bonus question and tell us about their favorite patch feature.
- Allison Robert (@AllisonRobert): More house painting, more World Cup (USA v. Ghana on Saturday -- be there!), and some dungeon finder fun if my connection cooperates. I'm getting some video footage of 5-man tanking for an upcoming Shifting Perspectives.
- Anne Stickney (@Shadesogrey): Working on something for this year's writing contest, with a little ICC25 thrown in there, too! Favorite part of the patch? Well RS isn't open so I can't even say that yet and Real ID does nothing for me. My tune will change soon as I can scamper in the Sanctum, I am sure. Especially if Halion's penchant for dropping leather bracers is higher than Saurfang's.
- Amy Schley (@wowlawbringer): A second showing of Richard III (hey, it's a really cheap date!), tons of bar prep, and drafting this week's Lawbringer. If I have time for any fun, the resto shammy will continue her journey to 80 (72 already!).
- Brian Wood (@frostheimwhu): I'll be finishing up the tedious Fire Festival stuff. Going to a pig roast for my own RL midsummer festival, then doing the first Wipe Recovery podcast!
- Basil Berntsen (@outdps): I'll be celebrating the first weekend of summer by avoiding anything that requires any effort. So far, my plans include sitting around the house drinking coffee and horsing around with the toddler. My favorite part of the last patch? the 5% increase to the ICC zone buff. :)
- Chase Christian (@madsushi): It's the big Solstice Festival here, so I'll be going to a bacon party in the morning (as awesome as it sounds) and a parade in the afternoon. I might try leveling my death knight now that I've got enough Primordial Saronite for his Shadow's Edge...
- Daniel Whitcomb (@danielwhitcomb): I'll still be fighting Ahune every day for a chance at the scythe on my druid and the frigid frostling on my other 80s. I'm also in the middle of Eastern Kingdoms on my Loremaster quest. I current have most of the south portion done, and am working the Thorium Brotherhood quests in Searing Gorge, then I'll start in on the dwarf lowbie zones.
- Elizabeth Harper (@faience): Diving in for a fresh start on Fallout 3. I've never finished it because I'm easily distracted by shiny objects and then I forget what was happening and I start all over and... repeat as needed. Maybe some WoW, too. Considering revisiting an old Alliance priest.
- Elizabeth Wachowski (@leeatwaterlives): I've expanded the selection of games on my laptop, so I'll probably try playing some Mass Effect 2 or Dead Space.
- Fox Van Allen (@foxvanallen): I'll kick off my weekend by playing my "Choose my Adventure" Paladin character Foxlight. I think he'll be doing some naked mailbox dancing followed up with some Midsummer pole dancing. Saturday, I'm going to the Boston Harbor Islands for some R&R, and on Sunday, it's off to Canobie Lake Park. I'll be spending all moments in between staring at the clearly visible pixels on my newly inferior iPhone 3G as I play more of the strangely addicting Angry Birds. My favorite part about patch 3.3.5: The more forgiving rules with regard to when I can boot all of your damn AFKing asses from my heroics.
- Joe Perez (@Lodurzj): Leveling an alt! My baby paladin just hit level 43 and I'm seeing how far I can get her this weekend. Leveling as protection is ridiculous amounts of fun! Also joining a pirate corp in EVE Online! So I'll likely be flying the old Jolly Roger this weekend at some point as well. As for my favorite feature of the new patch, I'm really loving the new Real ID cross realm/game chat. Some of my more interesting friends play on different servers and getting some of the random whispers I've been getting have been the highlight of the last two days. Also has been nice for cross realm recruiting! Here's a couple gems of the whispers I received last night!
- Kelly Aarons (@Cadistra): Not to sound self-centered, but it ar mah birfday on Thursday, so I'll be seeing friends, family, and Toy Story 3. ;) Also, the new HD came in the mail, so time to get Steam up and running - I'm craving some Zeno Clash!
- Favorite thing about this patch? "NONE MAY ENTER THE MASTER'S SANCTUM! AND WHEN I SAY MASTER, I MEAN ALEXSTRAZA! AND WHEN I SAY SANCTUM, I MEAN RUBY!"
- Matt Low (@matticus): I picked up that Transformers game on steam. Looking forward to giving it a shot this weekend. Otherwise, I'll be buckling down for the summer raiding season and Cataclysm by recruiting extra players Cataclysm.
- Mathew McCurley (@gomatgo): Friday night with @Stoneybaby and the WoW NYC twitter crew at DBA. Much fun will be had. Saturday is a big cleaning day and Sunday I'll be on the Forgotten Island (Staten Island). Oh joy. And my favorite thing about the patch is the inability to play because of the memory leak 64-bit OS bug.
- Matthew Rossi (@matthewwrossi): It's my anniversary. Nuff said.
- Rich Maloy (@stoneybaby): the girlfriend is in Asia this weekend :( but I'm getting together with @gomatgo and the NYC-WoW-Twitter peeps on Friday night. Tweet me or Mat if you want to join us at DBA Friday at 8pm! I'll spend Saturday swearing I'll never drink again. Saturday night on heroic Sindy, followed by Sunday swearing I'll never raid H-Sindy again. Then Sunday night raiding H-Sindy again. My favorite thing about the patch has yet to be released in the wild: Ruby Sanctum.
- Robin Torres (@cosmiclaurel): I'll be at the <It came from the Blog> Midsummer Flamefest, of course! Will you be there?
- Zach Yonzon (@Battlemasters): I doubt I'll have time to play games this weekend ... not the electronic kind, anyway. we found ourselves nanny and house help-less midweek, and my wife and I have been playing Survivor: Home Alone With Two Kids edition. We probably won't win $1 million at the end, but I think we get to keep our sanity.
The weekend is the perfect time to kick back, relax and enjoy some game time. Are you an achievement junkie? Can't get enough raiding? Rolling a new alt? Considering taking the leap into roleplaying? Whatever your favorite way to play World of Warcraft, let us know in the comments what you're playing this weekend!Filed under: WoW Insider Business
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Viper007Bond Jun 25th 2010 10:11PM
It's been really weird seeing and having to learn all of my friend's names, lol. Thankfully I have some addon (or is it built-in) that allows me to set notes on people and remind me of who they are. :)
CaryEverett Jun 26th 2010 6:35AM
*laughs* Actually one of the first things I do when I make a friend is learn their name.
Actually it's made it a lot easier for me to talk to people as me and all my friends have like, 5-6 alts. Sooo now my friendslist is a lot shorter, and I don't have to remember which character belongs to who.
I reckon I'm loving RealID, even if it seems most people aren't.
Ronin Jun 25th 2010 10:15PM
"If you don't like it, you don't have to use it" is a tired response that has lost its bloom already. No, I don't have to use it, but I can (and probably should) let Blizz know why I won't use it.
The thing I _do_ have to do, whether I like it or not, is put up with all the changes made so it could be implemented as "FaceBook in WoW", as it were. Blizz decided unilaterally that what they needed was a way to cash in on the "Social Networking" hype and craze, and they did it by trying to make an MMORPG into a chat-room. As such, they made unnecessary, unasked for and irritating changes to the way chat works in WoW. The result has been that chat and networking has been pushed in our faces, and many of us feel it's been detrimental to the game and to our experience.
Jason Jun 25th 2010 10:21PM
You can always use an addon to make the chat how you want...
MeanGreen Jun 25th 2010 10:23PM
I'm going to agree to disagree with you on this one: I do use the feature but I've also noticed that they created an interface option to return to the old Chat system if users preferred. In addition, for the people that do use it, it has been extremely easy to use and integrated well into the game. I personally enjoy my friends 'broadcast wars' in which jokes fill my lowerleft corner while I do yet another PuG leveling up my Hunter alt.
tag Jun 25th 2010 10:24PM
QQ
Roscoe Jun 25th 2010 10:34PM
You need to stop talking out of your ass. I'm pretty sure most people are stoked they'll be able to keep in touch with people in other realms or games. If people who are stupid and chatting in your five man, sure it might be "detrimental" to your experince, otherwise you are quite literally qqing to look at your own text. Let's be honest, you're just being argumentative for the sake of it.
Drakkenfyre Jun 25th 2010 10:52PM
You should have seen the response when they removed the ability to add friends in StarCraft 2, and you could only add friends one of two ways. Add their Real ID name, or add their Facebook name. That didn't go over well.
One of the theories was they removed normal friend-adding to test those two functions. But if they launch like that. alot of people are going to be pissed.
Ronin Jun 25th 2010 11:08PM
No, the "Classic" chat option doesn't return it to the way it was. All it does is get rid of the always-visible line that you type in. And my dislike isn't primarily over the new look of the chat box-- it's over how chat functions now. If someone whispers me to sell me gold, that becomes the focus of my chat, no matter what I was doing, as one example.
Blizz's vision, as explained by a Blue, was that we'd have all these separate windows open on our screen for each of the various conversations we're having. Therefore they decided we didn't need to have chat stick to whichever channel we manually selected. This has created problems, and again, it's all because someone decided that WoW needed to become a chat client. That's probably great for some people, but for those of us who log on to play the game rather than to use WoW as a way to network with people, it's more of a pain than a pleasure.
Is it the end of the world? No. Does that mean everyone has to pretend they love it? Again, no.
Roscoe, if you're one of the people that likes it, that's fine. That in no way makes any of my points invalid. I'm pretty sure the guy who says, "I disagree with you, so you're talking out of your ass", is the one who's actually talking out of his ass. Or, simply is one.
TR Jun 26th 2010 4:24AM
I completely agree with you. At the very least because it seems that a lot of people seem to be missing the obvious. The ability to talk to one's friends playing other Blizzard games was supposedly already the system when Battle.net debuted; it was the reason Blizzard put forward for merging bnet usernames into or creating a Battle.net account so your info would be shared internally among their products. Sony Online Entertainment and Steam did this ages ago, yet without the need for a seperate program like Real ID. Why not? Because one would only need a seperate program to allow integration with 3rd party services.
Months later we have Blizzard's Real ID requring that info a second time. Most likely to allow this data to be shared with 3rd party social networks like Facebook and Twitter while keeping data specific to Blizzard's seperate and secure. Anyone who deals with creation or administration of extranets or interfacing an in-house chat system with public chat services does this too.
That's not to suggest anything nefarious going on for the future (pun intended), but anyone pretending that it's "just so your friends playing Starcraft II or Diablo III can chat with you" is deluding themselves. It's also not going away so we all should get used to it and not be surprised when WoW activity tracking is available on Facebook, etc. the way it is now via RSS from your Armory page.
TR Jun 26th 2010 4:39AM
@DrakkenFyre
I'm not in the SC II beta, but what you described doesn't surprise me in the least. I also wouldn't be shocked (yet still somewhat surprised) if this is how the feature works upon release. The fastest and most public way to get new subscribers is when friends and friends of friends on Facebook see other people are playing WoW, how often, and what kind of stuff they do. Think about all the invites to Mafia Wars or whatever fad game of the season you've gotten on Facebook. It's also cheaper and has more appeal to the non-WoW world than campy Mr. T commercials.
My parents have never heard of World of Warcraft and their faces go blank when I talk about computer games. But they're all over Facebook and so are their friends. That's the genius behind Real ID, and it'll integrate with if not replace the current WoW Facebook app in the future.
Joseph Smith Jun 26th 2010 12:49PM
@TR: There already is tracking avaliable in facebook. The WoW Facebook app which is direct from Blizz themselves....It does exactly what you suggest and lists all of your activities just like the armory RSS Feed.
And it was out LONG before RealID, so i'm failing to see your connection.
Zanathos Jun 26th 2010 2:27PM
Change happens, learn to live with it
Drakkenfyre Jun 26th 2010 5:21PM
Zanathos, that's an idiotic way of putting it when it comes to privacy.
Example; Your bank decides on all transactions, it will share your full name with the company you purchased items from. Have a debit card? Now all the clerks in that store know your full name. And someone tells you "change happens, deal with it."
Transit Jun 25th 2010 10:31PM
Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.
What exactly is going on in that pic?
I just glanced through what each of the people were doing this weekend, but there was no explanation for what was going on in that pic as far as I could see.
What is going on?
Armenius Jun 25th 2010 10:38PM
They're talking about stalking people with Real ID in the first paragraph, and that's what's happening in the screenshot
Angidget Jun 25th 2010 10:31PM
WoW, reading, writing for the contest and other things, free food... maybe a movie. In other words, same as every other weekend. I can't wait!!
Pallywithash Jun 25th 2010 10:33PM
WAH WAH WAH WAH!!!!
That's all I hear. No matter what Blizzard does, people will whine. If Blizzard brought forth the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, people would still find a way to complain about it.
Ricohardt Jun 25th 2010 10:43PM
I thought he'd be taller, way to fail Blizztivi$ion
:D
peon47 Jun 25th 2010 10:51PM
I think Blizzard pushed the release of Jesus 2.0 back to 2nd quarter, 2011.