Posts with tag Poll

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I'm going to open this one with a personal story. In 2009 at a Blizzcon party, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Russell Brower, and I promptly went all starry-eyed and gushed about how much I loved WoW's music. His face lit up and he said, "Oh you are just the best thing!" and kissed my hand. Then asked me what my favorite was. My answer was immediate, and without hesitation: Black Temple.

Now, let's fast-forward to today, in 2013, almost four years later. Has my answer changed? Maybe. Black Temple is still definitely up there, but I'm not sure it's the out-and-away winner anymore. With Cataclysm many of the zones got updated music, so areas I wasn't super enthused about before suddenly became much more compelling. In the end, the five I've come up with are Grizzly Hills (a perennial favorite), Black Temple (still love it), Ashenvale ("Nightsong" alone makes this nomination), Karazhan (haunted mansion!), and Kun-Lai Summit (mostly for "Way of the Monk," which plays upon entry into the Temple of the White Tiger). Vote on your favorite in the poll, but don't think this is the definitive list. I'm sure there are plenty of zones I've overlooked, so tell us what I've missed in the comments.

Joining a guild has always been a core aspect of World of Warcraft. How to choose the right style of guild can be an especially large hurdle to overcome for new players, but it's something we learn along the way. Players currently have a few resources at their disposal, whether it be the Blizzard Guild Recruitment forums, GuildOx, WoWProgress, or other tools. But there's an oft-forgotten in-game tool that was released back in patch 4.1. What about the in-game Guild Finder?

The options are a bit limited, and the listings depend on the effort put in by guild masters. Let's just say it's a neglected feature on a few fronts. I've used the Guild Finder before, when searching for a casual leveling guild on a new server. Outside of that, I stick to other tools when recruiting or looking for a new guild.

What about you -- do you ever use the in-game Guild Finder? What's your preferred resource for guild recruitment and discovery?

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Classic raiding in vanilla World of Warcraft will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first time in any MMO I had ever played that I actually got to enjoy the full raiding experience. I had stepped into the planes in EverQuest but never got to be a vital member of the team. WoW changed all of that.

For me, Blackwing Lair was probably the pinnacle of class WoW raiding. While Naxxramas was exhilarating and bold with its mechanics, Blackwing Lair felt more like storming the castle. The bosses had some great dialog, the scenery was impressive, and there were awesome healing trinkets that I coveted for years. Let's not forget the epic fight with Nefarion at the end where hunter's broke bows, mages polymorphed friends into grubs, and everyone was cloaked in Onyxia's scales.

Which classic WoW raid was your favorite?

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World of Warcraft has its own take on many of the traditional fantasy tropes and races that were originally part of general fantasy and cultural mythos and the original Dungeons and Dragons. Over time, the WoW versions of orcs, humans, elves, dwarves, and more have grown into their own look, feel, and cultures.

Which race do you think looks the best, with the best aesthetics? Are you partial to the new Horde style of orcish design and ferocity? Do you feel more at home in the serene altitudes of Teldrassil with the night elves? Do you think the new goblin and worgen races just look better based on technology and time or that even the blood elves and draenei still look solid after three full expansions? Maybe you're the last die-hard human fan out there who is ready and willing to put your love of Azeroth's humanity on the line. What do you guys think?

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I was a bit saddened when Blizzard announced that guilds will be hard-capped at 600 members as soon as patch 4.0.1 hits. We're going to have to break up our family into smaller guilds if we want to have new members. And we're going to have to do it soon, because 4.0.1. is on the PTR and could hit any Tuesday now.

Blizzard says it looked at the data and reached the following conclusion:

...we are happy to say that this value covers more than 99.9% of all the active guilds in World of Warcraft

But I believe their data is flawed. Their research cannot have taken into account the many guilds who have split themselves up in order to stay below the 500 member soft cap. For those of you who don't know, if you have a guild with more than 500 members, not all members show up on the roster, so you can't tell how many guildies you have online or even in the guild. It makes things clumsy and time-consuming when you need to promote or kick. Not only that, but there is no rhyme or reason as to who shows up and who doesn't. Recent invites may appear on the roster, whereas people inactive for months may not. So many guilds have chosen to split up and patiently wait for the bug to be fixed. Since there are no alliances and no checkbox for "part of a larger group of guilds" built in to the game, there is no way for Blizzard to gather the appropriate data.

After the break, I'll be going into how this affects <It came from the Blog>, our staff/reader guild that has grown at points up to 1,700 members, and what our plans are for the immediate future. But first, have a poll:

Note: This poll is for entertainment purposes only, of course.

Choose the adventures of the WoW.com staff as we level our characters in <It came from the Blog> on Zangarmarsh (US-PVE-H).

First, the remaining schedule for the week:

• Fox Van Allen as Foxlight, the blood elf paladin: Friday, 8 p.m. EDT
• Michael Sacco as Sahko, the orc warlock, Christian Belt, as Selfloathius, the blood elf warlock, Elizabeth Harper as Faience, the troll shaman, Matthew Rossi as Andrenorton, the troll mage, Michael Gray as Grayfields, the tauren hunter, Adam Holisky as Adammentat, the tauren druid, and Gregg Reece as Yakkowakko, the orc warlock, will be making appearances as they can

We have our marching orders for where we are supposed to be questing for our level ranges, but there are many things to do with our time other than questing. Tell us how we should spend our Choose My Adventure sessions next week. The poll is after the break.

Choose the adventures of the WoW.com staff as we level our characters in <It came from the Blog> on US Zangarmarsh-H.

We're on fire! Armaya sent in the above screenshot of Faience, Elizabeth Harper's shaman. But really, we're not so much on fire, leveling-wise. We are level 11 and above. This makes us just old enough to go into Warsong Gulch, but too young to think of Ragefire Chasm for the next week.

You have already chosen The Barrens for our questing location during these next few levels, so this week's polls will be about adding PvP into the mix and choosing the professions for Amy Schley's rogue. Matthew Rossi is joining us next week and is giving you a chance to choose his class and race. We also have an extra-special, probably meaningless poll that you'll have to click through to see.

We asked you to show us your plushies and many of you sent in entries to both the Plushie in Captivity and Plushie in the Wild contests. We have narrowed down the finalists for you to vote on in each category. Once the votes have been tallied and the winners announced, we'll put all of the entries in the galleries for you to enjoy.

You have until Friday, March 19th to vote for your favorite in each category. Galleries and polls are after the break.

Last week Eyonix started a poll on the forums asking players what they do directly after logging in (all of the options are listed in the picture above). For me, it's no contest -- before I do anything else, I always pop the friends list up to see who's around. The only time this doesn't happen is if I'm logging on in a rush for the night's raid, but I try to limit the number of times that occurs. Reading this poll has made me realize the extent to which I depend on my bank alt for mail and AH-related business; my main very rarely needs to check her mail.

If you're interested in responding to the poll, it'll be running for another day or so, and you can find it here. Because it's on the official forums, you'll be prompted to log in to your forum account before replying.

2009 is coming to a close, and with it, "the aughts," which means we're about to get flooded with list after list of the best of the decade. It's been a raucous ten years for gaming (some, including me, might call it the best ten years in gaming so far), and Crispy Gamer is the first to step up and try to pick the best games we've seen so far. In their Game of the Decade showdown, World of Warcraft is still in the running, up against Bioware's legendary Knights of the Old Republic RPG, as the latest post has readers trying to pick the final four choices. If you think our game is more deserving than KotOR (note that this isn't the MMO, it's the old RPG with your friendly meatbag hater droid, HK-47), you can vote for WoW over on this page until Tuesday at 6pm.

KotOR is a great game, but as a decade-defining game, I'd have to think WoW will pull that one off. After that, though, there's some tough competition: BioShock and Half-Life 2 are up against each other, Halo and Left 4 Dead are facing off in another bracket, and Super Smash Brothers Melee and Shadow of the Colossus (which I guess I need to go play now) are the challengers in the third. I have to say -- as a "Game of the Decade," BioShock and Half-Life 2 are definitely in competition, but if you want to pick a game which has really defined both the online and casual gaming movements of the last ten years? We'll have to see what the readers choose, but I'd have to think World of Warcraft is your game.

[ via BlizzPlanet and kyleorl ]

Ethic at Kill Ten Rats has a post up about something that a lot of you have probably been through: more and more I'm hearing about people returning to the game. I've been playing ever since I signed up a few years ago, but that's really only because I'm writing about it -- I'm pretty ADD when it comes to games, so left on my own, I probably would have walked away from WoW a long time ago. But Blizzard is really good at bringing players back by tweaking the game in exactly the way they woud like. I feel like if I had left, I would have definitely come back in for a while, if not with Burning Crusade than definitely with Wrath.

Of course, Ethic's issues aren't really with deciding to return or not: he's having more issues actually trying to get his old accounts back. There's a laundry list of rules and limits to contend with, between dealing with having or not having the expansions, the limits on the Scroll of Resurrection program and the trial accounts, and dodging all of Blizzard's various limits on how to start and use new accounts to the game. Man -- if I had left and was planning on coming back, and I read Ethic's post, I might not even bother.

But quite a few people have come back, and I'd guess that even though there are confusing things about trying to find your way back into the game, a good number of you have done it. I'd like to know, so here's a poll: how many of you have left and come back, and how many times?

The WoW CMs continue their polling of rare and hard-to-find items: first, we got queried on Mr. Pinchy, and now the forums have a poll about that more recent bounty, the Reins of the Green Proto-drake. As you probably already know, you have to first get revered with the Murloc faction of the Oracles, and then you have to buy a "Mysterious Egg" once every seven days from their quartermaster... that probably hasn't yet given you the mount you want. Personally, I've gotten plenty of Aged Yolks and quite a few noncombat pets, but not my Proto-drake.

And my experience is hardly singular -- according to the poll, a full 55% of respondents have not yet opened up their Cracked Eggs to find the mount. 4% found it on their first try (bastards -- that number seems incredibly high), and almost 14% went for the joke "Oracles?" answer, or maybe just have no idea what the question is about. Obviously this is hardly a scientific poll, so we can't calculate drop rates or anything like that (most database sites put the drop at around 2%, which means on average 50 eggs to a drake, or almost a year of farming), but it's pretty clear that the Proto-drake is a supremely rare commodity.

With the wiping of the official PTR forums, the release of the patch 3.2 PTR notes, and the slew of other new tidbits released yesterday, it's a sure sign that the start of patch 3.2 testing is imminent. I figured this would be a good time to find out whether you, our beloved readers, actually use the PTR (or Public Test Realm) or not.

Now I have to go on the PTR (it's written in tiny print on my WoW.com contract) but I also wander in there because I want to. I'm a journalist purely because I have no patience whatsoever and this is a great way of seeing how the next patch is going to look ahead of time. While I was initially not that excited about 3.2, some of the stuff revealed yesterday has gotten me quite excited.

There seem to be two camps: Team A loves getting online first, seeing all the new content as soon as possible while Team B would rather wait for everything to go live on the real realms. The rest? Well they're not quite sure what a PTR is. Which team are you?

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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Blizzard EU Community Blue Ancilorn has posted a poll over on the EU forums asking players about one of the more prickly pieces of loot in the game: Mr. Pinchy. Usually with loot, Blizzard has been pretty good lately: if there's a piece that you want, there are usually a few different ways to get it, one of which usually requires grinding (i.e. picking up tons of Badges) rather than just getting really, really lucky. But with vanity stuff, it seems like they feel free to just put us at the will of the dice roll, and almost no other pet is more random than Mr. Pinchy. Not only do you need to level fishing (which, admittedly, is much less random than it used to be), and not only do you need to fish up a random item, but then, you need to hit a random choice of five different options. It's a slim chance on a rare chance on a nearly impossible chance.

Which explains why even those who have been trying for him for so long (ahem, me -- as you've probably heard on our podcast) haven't picked him up yet. The biggest percentage in the poll (about 26% of respondents, as of this writing) says they've been trying a lot and haven't gotten him. But strangely enough, the lowest percentage says "an absolutely enormous amount" of effort went into getting him. Which suggests that the people who are getting him are underestimating the amount of time they're putting in -- just how much fishing is "a moderate amount"?

At any rate, it seems like Ancilorn is just asking to be asking. Mr. Pinchy is definitely as much of a vanity item as they come, and there should at least be some items in the game that are very, very rare. It does seem at times that every time I suggest Blizzard won't move on something, they do, but I'd say in this case Mr. Pinchy will stay as rare as he is.