Posts with tag Secrets

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Privacy and information security has never been a more relevant topic than right now. With the revelation that the U.S. and British governments have been engaged in unprecedented worldwide surveillance of our Internet communications and phone calls, the threat to our privacy is very real.

As an officer, you are on both sides of such situations. It's up to you what information to collect about your members and about other guilds. It's also up to you what to keep to yourself, what to share with your guildmates, and what to share with the world. Let's look at some of the privacy issues that officers must face.

Last year, Alex gave us a thorough look at the hidden Karazhan Crypts area, with its massive pile of bones where hundreds of people were thrown down a well, and humans drowned by chaining them upside-down underwater. The crypts were never meant to be explored by players, but WoW has had plenty of other terrifying secrets through the years that are just waiting for us to discover them.

The C'thun Kids Club

Above the leatherworking shop in Goldshire, something is amiss. If you venture there, you will sometimes discover six children, arrayed in a strange pattern. They stand there, silently facing each other. The light music of Elwynn changes to an ominous low rumble or a creepy hum. Every so often you will hear ghostly noises, or even the voice of C'thun himself. Outside of the house, two tiny children's skulls are hidden in the grass.

They have been called the "creepy children," the "demon children," and the "evil children." They also run around Elwynn to Stormwind and back, always in formation. Sometimes they will stop and stare at each other again, or all look in one direction for no apparent reason. Presumably this is just to creep us out even more.

Every week, just at the start of the weekend, we catch up with the WoW Insider staff and ask them, "What are you playing this week?" -- otherwise known as: WRUP. Join us to see what we're up to in and out of game, and catch us in the comments to let us know what you're playing, too!

Welcome to WoW Insider, your source for all sorts of Tips N Trikks(TM) for the World of Warcraft game for your PC or Mac entertainment console. Are you ready for the coolest tricks? And the hottest cheat codes?! We won't tell Mom you're cheating if you don't!

(Radical!)

But hey, enough delay. Let's get to those Tips N Trikks(TM)!

(Tips N Trikks ... to the x-treme!)

In the mystical world of ... Azeroad ... you're tasked with beating all the bad guys and saving the princess. But do you know the best way to kill those bad guys?

• Use spells to attack. Spells cause damage! (Awesome!)
• Use physical abilities to attack. Use that sword, bro! (Whooooooooaaaaaaahhhhhh!)
• And when you need to pause the game, just press the power button! (Coooool Trikks ~)

What's your favorite Tip and/or Trikk? Let us know by writing us at "WoW Insider Tips N Trikks," P.O. Box 20283-B, Alameda, CA 94502. Or you can just leave a comment after the break telling us what you're playing this weekend. And you can read what all these other WoW Insider folks are playing, too! (Maxi-tota-rad!)

Our podcast is back on the air yet again this afternoon -- Turpster will join Amanda Dean, Adam Holisky and I to talk about the biggest posts of the past week, including (but not limited to) why even Priests dislike being Priests, the new race/class combos and how they'll be explained, why Blizzard is so secretive (and why they probably shouldn't be), and what kinds of things we learned from that faction transfer survey. And of course we'll answer your emails -- you can send those along to theshow@wow.com anytime.

It all starts up tomorrow at September 12th, 2009 3:30 PM EDT right over on our Ustream page (or you can tune in on the embedded feed right after the break), so do be sure to join us if you're available. And of course, as usual, we'll probably have a little music during the preshow, and a little fun during the aftershow (where we turn off the recording and just chat with the kind folks in the chat channel about whatever comes up. See you there!

Blizzard is notorious for not announcing release dates or patch days until the very last minute -- if at all. Sites like WoW.com and MMO-Champion have had to develop relationships with people in the know in order to have any idea when a patch is coming out, and even then we usually don't find out for sure until about 12 hours before a patch makes it onto the live servers.

Not all MMORPG companies are so secretive however.

CCP, which runs the hard core space based MMO EVE Online recently had to push back an announced patch -- from Wednesday to Thursday.

What happened when they did this? Fans rejoiced that a bug was being fixed. They cheered because you finally could shoot stuff that was 0 meters away with turrets.

Now in Blizzard's world, at least the one they display to everyone outside of their organization, pushing back an announced patch would be the end of world. Cats and dogs would live together, and fire with the occasional brimstone would rain down upon the Earth. They have said many times that the reason they don't want to announce patch dates is because if they don't hit their target, they are going to upset the fans.

Tom "Kalgan" Chilton, in his interview we posted yesterday, said that one of Blizzard's class designers was the guild leader of one of the world's best known PvP guilds, but he wants to keep him anonymous. Wait, what?

Chilton meant that Blizzard has solid ties into the community, but should it worry us at all that those ties might be a little too close-knit? We already know that Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan has major ties to a guild in the game (he was actually hired by Blizzard from his Everquest raiding guild), and quest designer Alex "Furor" Afrasiabi also comes from a guild that is still active in World of Warcraft. In fact, we've already seen Blizzard get in trouble by their own admission for treating the devs' guilds differently -- is it right for them to keep their guild associations anonymous?

On the one hand, obviously it's much easier to keep the developers' ingame identities anonymous, otherwise they wouldn't be able to play the game at all without getting approached with questions and complaints every time they log on. But on the other hand, not only is there the potential for favoritism in terms of game design, but what if the PvP guild mentioned in the article was one that won an eSports or the Arena realm tournament? Is it right for Blizzard's developers to keep their guild associations anonymous?

Inspired by this forum thread about hidden and mysterious places in Outland, I took to the skies on my windrider to check out some less-traveled places in the expansion. From the empty Horde village above Shattrath, to Challe's Home for Little Tykes, all the way to Skettis, the hidden capital of the Arrakoa, I went on a tour of some of Outland's secrets.

Check out the gallery below to see all the places I found. And while I spent a night touring around, Blizzard spent months making this place. If you've found cool stuff that I didn't include in the Gallery, feel free to drop it in the comments below.

From an out-of-the-way inn my guild uses for meetings, to the time I finally managed to watch a race in the Shimmering Flats, Azeroth has many well-kept secrets. How many times have you stumbled across a location or piece of scenery and wondered what on earth it was there for? Aside from the game's easter eggs, which are fun to track down, some places seem to hold unfulfilled potential.

I've found that RP gives me a whole new outlook on these places; every one suddenly suggests several possible storylines, although I've acquired the habit of dismissing a lot of the empty-looking content by saying "oh, that's only for RPers". Do you think this is true? Are the deserted buildings and empty locations there for RP enjoyment alone, or to lighten the hearts of the players who love running around into every nook and cranny? Have you found a particular spot that surprised or delighted you?