Posts with tag Christmas

The holidays are fully upon us, descended around the house and home like the drifting snow the season is famous for. It's been a rough week, and I'm not going to say much. As many of us are parents -- and all of us are human beings with basic emotions like compassion and empathy -- well. Everyone's said nearly everything. We're feeling it, too.

Most of this article was written by Thursday night, so if we seem too jovial... that's because none of us could have known.

Raiding during big holidays can be a bit of a sore spot for many guild masters, raiders, and other members of your raiding guild. When large content patches like Hour of Twilight come out so close to Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year's, and every other holiday I missed that happens in the winter, schedules can get tight and tensions can flare up. The guild leader and a handful of raiders want to push progression, while another contingent of raiders doesn't want to rush home after family gatherings. Many players won't be available at all.

Whether you're a 10- or 25-man raid team, the holidays can put a dent in your progression and the willingness of raiders to put in those extra few hours or cut their raiding time close to family time. Here are a few tips and suggestions for dealing with holiday raiding and guild members who just don't have the fire during the coldest months. Don't let the holidays break up a good thing.

Be accommodating. Guilds and guild leaders need to be accommodating to players during the holidays. Many WoW players are college kids or younger and usually don't have a say where they are going for the holidays, what they are doing with their families, or what their schedules are going to be. If you're a guild that requires sign-outs or sign-ups for raids, make sure that people know early to post their holiday schedules or make it known when they won't be around.

Blizzard's Chris Metzen graced the floors of the San Diego Comic-Con today to talk Blizzard licensing partners and show off some awesome new merchandise coming this year featuring Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo wares. Diablo merchandies looks to include knee-high Diablo socks, a Diablo face belt, new shirts, and two hoodies modeled after Diablo's demon hunter class and the angel Tyrael.

StarCraft's line is expanding with new shirts, a first look at the MegaBloks Viking, a leather wallet, and StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres, which has been confirmed by Metzen to be a novelization of StarCraft: Ghost, the game that was and then never was.

Warcraft's wares continue along a familiar path with a slew of new T-shirts as well as what appears to be a beverage called the Forsaken Elixir of Undead ... I really have no idea, since it's most likely a joke slide. Metzen also previewed the covers for the forthcoming original graphic novels Horde and Alliance, coming out later this year.

[Thanks, Kotaku, for the tip and images.]

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Oh boy, The Queue! Have I told you guys how much I love writing The Queue? When I'm not YouTubing or twittering, some of my most wonderful memories are sitting at my computer and browsing through your questions and ...

Ooooh, looks like someone just put a link into Mumble ...

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Bubble bubble bubble pop. Happy Monday, ya'll.

jamie9966 asked:

At the start of the Burning Crusade, blood elf paladins got their powers by bending the light to their will, through M'uru who they held captive at the time. Since they no longer have M'uru in captivity, where do they now get their power from?

In the beginning, M'uru was the source of the Blood Knights' powers. It was thought to have been stolen, being ripped from the naaru forcibly. I was always a fan of the ruthless, almost sadistic way the blood elves bent the very light to their will because, well, at the time, it fit the race. After it was revealed that the naaru sort of sent M'uru, who full well knew what he was doing by letting the blood elves take some of his power to create the Blood Knights, that sadism sort of fell to the wayside.

Merry Christmas, everyone, from all of us at WoW Insider. It's been an amazing year, and now in the season of giving as we approach a brand new year, I can only give you my thanks. Christmas means a lot to me, not for any reason but that it's wonderful to spend time with family and friends. We all find our own reasons to celebrate this time of year, and for me, Christmas has always been Second Thanksgiving -- I get to revel in the happiness and good will that I've tried to cultivate all year.

Also, Christmas sucks. You know why Christmas sucks? Because my 10-man is all away for the weekend, which means the Omnitron Defense System has to wait. Ugh. I swear, can you guys just forsake your family and friends for the sake of me getting purples? I mean, really. Get in the giving spirit and help me get epics.

How are you guys and gals spending Christmas? What are you most excited about, and have you gotten anyone a really great gift?

Wowhead has given us a few new features for holiday presents. The navigation tabs have been tweaked to showcase some of the features and pages they've been adding recently. There's also a super-cute wallpaper by Noxychu, featuring cartoon avatars of various Wowhead employees.

More interesting, however, is the Completion Tracker, which works with their profiler and client to track your characters' endless quest to 100%. Areas tracked include quests, mounts, pets, and recipes. It's still in beta, but it seems to be working fairly well. It also lets you exclude categories that you may not be working on.

The other feature that Wowhead added is one that I'm honestly not a fan of - the little "share" button at the bottom of blog posts. I know we have it on Wow.com as well, but I still think it would be better not to have it; people are perfectly competent to submit links to Digg or Facebook or whatever without you encouraging them to do it. That's just a personal opinion, though.

Every Christmas I make it a point to log in and catch a few friends and wish them well; some of my guildies and online friends I've made over the past several years are now folks I talk with every day and laugh about all our goings on. I find that Christmas is a good time to take a moment and wish those you've come to know happiness and well wishes.

One thing I like to do every Christmas morning is to take a moment and send someone something in game -- someone who'll actually use it and be pleasantly surprised when they get it. I make an alt, name it something so they won't connect it to me -- and then email them a gift. I'll wrap up the BoE item with some Red Ribboned Wrapping Paper and toss in a Candy Cane or two just for kicks, even though no one is really into RP too much. But it adds to the overall ambiance so it's all good.

This year I think someone is getting a pet from the Argent Tournament. Hopefully someone will send me a bike (I can dream, right?). If you're going to send a secret gift to someone, what are you going to send?

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today.

In the spirit of the holidays, I'm going to throw a little Duke Ellington at ya' as today's listening music. In my prolonged stint as a music major in college (saxophone FTW), I always wanted to play his Nutcracker Suite, but never got the chance. But nonetheless, it's one of my favorite pieces of music -- holiday or otherwise.

Enjoy it as we delve into The Queue today, starting off with a question a lot of folks have been asking.

Many asked...

"What's happening to the podcast?"

It was just on Sunday that we first heard about a Guild Christmas special, and now here it is. The Guild gang have decided that the web series thing isn't really happening with the money, so they're taking the advice of commenters and selling out with six different pieces of merchandise, one for each Guild member. They're actually pretty funny, from a Codex "answer Orb" to a talking Tinkerballa doll to a Vork unbreakable bank (unfortunately, all of the items have been recalled for various reasons). There's some cool guest stars in the mix as well -- see if you can spot Heroes' James Kyson Lee (in a Delorean!) and our buddy Alex Albrecht, along with a few other familiar faces.

Good stuff, and man, The Guild crew is getting really good at making some quality video. No word whether these will show up on Xbox Live at all (they're actually out now on YouTube, so this may just be something the guys did for fun, outside of the Microsoft agreement), but you can watch them all right now above. Merry Christmas, guildies! All I really want for Christmas is a Vork unbreakable bank -- in these troubled times, it's really the safest thing to do with your hard earned money.

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Like The Guild? We do, too! We've got all the episodes of season 3 posted: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and episode 12 above. We've also chatted with all of the folks at BlizzCon, including Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh, and Jeff Lewis and Michele Boyd. And as if that wasn't enough Guild, here's the liveblog of their panel, and the guys were nice enough to stop by our meetup as well. Stay tuned for more Guild here on WoW.com!

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Felicia Day told us back at BlizzCon that she was going to go undercover for a little while as The Guild's latest season wrapped up, but undercover for this woman seems to mean that she's only in two TV shows and prepping for a comic book release. She showed up in last night's Lie to Me episode, singing, and in this interview over at Newsarama from the Video Game Awards with Sandeep Parikh (who himself just showed up in Tiki Bar TV -- slightly NSFW, language) she says she's still working on the unfortunately canceled Dollhouse as well. So that's where Eliza Dushku got her addiction from.

She also says that the Dark Horse published Guild comic book is due out in spring of next year -- Jim Rugg is working on the art right now -- and fans of The Guild may even get a little Christmas present from the show and Microsoft. We'll keep an eye out for that for sure. So even though we're in between seasons (and we assume that season 4 is upcoming next year, even though we haven't heard an official announcement on that yet), there's lots of Guild goodness to go around.

Oxhorn has released a very special Christmas album focused on his WoW-themed music, called Oxhorn's Christmas for Geeks. The album is available both on Amazon and iTunes. Heck, you can even pick it up on Rhapsody and Napster. Oxhorn was pretty thorough to make sure that you could get the album by whichever route you like.

The album has a lot of classic favorites, as well as a boatload of new skits. My favorite is his new version of Hark! Hear the Wails. That has always been one of my very favorite songs by Oxhorn. It does, however, show the signs of being created much, much early in Oxhorn's career. It shows some of the rustiness and coarseness of an artist's early work, and really needed some tuning up. The new version did that fantastically.

Oxhorn's Christmas for Geeks has a resounding 18 tracks. It's split about evenly between skits and songs. I was actually quite impressed by the wide array of musical styles explored by this album. While the lyrics are obvious parodies of popular holiday songs, interpreted in a World of Warcraft style, I think Oxhorn has really done a great job of matching his lyrics to the Christmas theme.

Even if you're not going to rock out to Oxhorn's tunes, it's one hell of a gift for a fellow WoW player.

T for Thunderfury is the epic tale of Baron Soosdon's quest to get Thunderfury for his paladin. When he finally managed this epic feat, needless to say, there was a party.

This video has a similar epic, awesome feel to many of Soosdon's videos. And while it's not technically a machinima, I still enjoyed the camera work and music. Soosdon's just kind of got that flair, and could probably find ways to make an entertaining movie out of a watermelon in a bucket.

Congratulations to the good Baron on accomplishing this feat. Make sure to watch all the way through -- there's a special Christmas shout-out at the end.

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Crygil wants to know: if you could design a new holiday for the game, what would it be? I don't think I've ever heard the question asked before -- holidays are really just optional fun for more players, and Blizzard has always covered the basics (Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving, Halloween, etc.), and even added in some of their own by giving real-world holidays some Azerothian flavor (Midsummer Fire Festival, and of course Brewfest). Are there really any holidays they missed?

I guess Labor Day and Memorial Day are the two biggest ones -- maybe all of the NPCs could take a day off, there could be giant barbeques set up in the capital cities, or players could take a day to remember those fallen in the past wars. Or you could go another route and just make up your own holiday: Grumpyfool of Azjol-Nerub recommends Gnome Appreciation Week (a whole week?), where Azeroth's shortest denizens can get some love of their own. A more recently based holiday might be fun, too -- maybe once a year we could remember Arthas' (it was Arthas, right?) zombie attack on our homeland.

I doubt this is going to be used to determine actual Blizzard policy. Seems more like just a fun thought experiment. But there are definitely some interesting ideas in there -- if Blizzard ever wants to add yet another holiday to the calendar, there are plenty of ideas.

If you're trying to finish up some of your Winter Veil achievements (which are all mandatory if you want to get the Violet Proto-Drake one day), remember that you don't have much time left. Today is the last full day of the holiday. It ends tomorrow (the 2nd) at 6 AM according to the in-game calendar. You have less than 24 hours to get your fill of fruitcake and stock up on Holiday Spices.

If you're trying to finish up your work toward the Merrymaker title, don't forget to check out Amanda Miller's guide to the Winter Veil achievements. The quickest piece of advice, though? If you still need Let It Snow or Bros. Before Ho Ho Ho's, start hitting the revelers every hour on the hour, because your achievements are now in the hands of fate, not your own. Good luck.