Posts with tag april

April's Brew of the Month has struck, and it's actually pretty fun. Sure, more jokes about bodily functions, but they're acceptable if they're entertaining! This month's definitely qualifies as entertaining. Metok's Bubble Bock is described as being light and uh, bubbly. I suppose you could've guessed that from the name.

Upon drinking the Bubble Bock, now and then you will get a buff called Bloated. After five minutes (or after you click the buff off) your character will burp righteously, and a named Brew Bubble will spawn and wander around aimlessly for awhile before popping. You can target it, but you can't cast things such as Baby Spice on it, unfortunately. The bubble can also merge with other bubbles, so get some friends together and try to make a great big one!

It's actually somewhat interesting that they chose to name this brew a Bock. A brew they describe as light and bubbly would actually be pretty dark, unless I've confused my beers somewhere. Bocks were often used and praised for their nutrient content, because compared to light brews, it could actually keep you fairly sated during fasts and period where high quality food was scarce. A bock was not the best choice for this particular brew! Again, though, I could be totally wrong. I don't even like most beer.

Apparently DC first announced this last October, but it's the first I've heard of it: Garona Halforcen is coming back to World of Warcraft. Garona has been a fan favorite character ever since the early RTS games -- she's a half-orc Rogue who originally assassinated King Llane of the Alliance (under one of Medivh's spells and working unintentionally for the Shadow Council). But she's been MIA for a while -- until now. DC's next World of Warcraft comic, number 18, has Garona reappearing in Azeroth, supposedly working with the Twilight's Hammer, and possibly even secretly aligned with the Scourge.

Not necessarily an auspicious re-entrance, but with Garona, just like Jack Bauer, you never know who she's really working for or why. Blizzard has always made it clear that they were going to have her appear in World of Warcraft -- early in the beta, she was actually the leader of the Rogue Ravenholdt faction, though she was later removed from the manor there. The DC comic drops on April 15, and it wouldn't be a surprise to finally see everyone's favorite half-orc rogue in the game sometime after that.

Author Christie Golden has posted a little more information about the Arthas novel coming next year -- she lists the release date as April of 2009 (Arthas will probably still be alive then -- if "alive" is what he is now), and says that it'll be a nice hardback edition, which should be cool to see. She also says that while they were considering throwing a sample chapter in the BlizzCon goodie bag, all they were able to get in is a little postcard art of the book's cover. Too bad -- it would have been fun reading a little preview of the book while waiting in line to play, say, Diablo III.

And for the Starcraft fans, she's also got a Dark Templar book coming out a month after that, in May 2009. It was supposed to be out sooner, but apparently Arthas' book got pushed forward, and she had to switch up schedules a bit. So two good pieces of extended universe fiction for Blizzard's games to look forward to next year.

[via Blizzplanet]

Gamedaily has the report that Xfire, the online service for gamers (that we have coordinated a few events with in the past), has broken a whopping ten million users. That, you'll probably realize, is just as many as World of Warcraft, and in fact, while Xfire apparently has support for over 1,200 games, World of Warcraft always seems to rank pretty high on the list.

In fact, our friends at Xfire have another number that they've shared with us: in the month of April alone, Xfire users spent 16,000 years online -- that is, if you add up all the time spent online by all the users of the client just in April, you get a time period longer than pretty much the whole history of civilization on Earth. That's huge.

Which makes us wonder just how long players actually spend in WoW -- surely not all WoW players are using Xfire, so the number has to be much bigger than that. At any rate, Xfire is apparently banging, and odds are that WoW is playing a big part.

Tobold reports that in patch 2.1.0 Blizzard is planning on getting rid of gold farmers in just three simple steps. So in patch 2.1.0, you should expect the following:

• The ability to send items, gold, or CoD packages via mail will be removed. You will only be able to send letters via the in-game mail system.
• The ability to freely set prices in the auction house will be removed. Since players could transfer gold by putting up a worthless item for a high-price buyout, the minimum bid and buyout amounts will now be set automatically.
• The ability to transfer gold via the trade window will be removed. However, to allow people to market tradeskills, the trade window will be transformed into a tradeskill window -- allowing the crafter to select a recipe and the buyer to insert materials, for a pre-set fee. When the buyer provides materials and the money, the crafted item winds up directly in the buyer's pack after crafting.

With no ways to transfer gold to potential buyers, the gold farming industry will quickly go out of business. Huzzah to Blizzard for finally solving this problem!

Apparently the fine machinima makers over at Dementia Myndflame have managed to get a sneak preview of the next World of Warcraft expansion. And they've even managed to escape Blizzard HQ with video footage! I could explain the whole thing to you, but, really, that would spoil it -- just watch the video and enjoy!

[Thanks, Clint]

Alert reader Scytherea of Dalaran sends in this breaking news: WoWWiki, a website we all know and love for its comprehensive World of Warcraft information, has transformed into MeoWWiki, a website of comprehensive cat information. Says the website formerly known as WoWWiki:

We are proud to announce that everyone's favourite wiki is now all about the cats of Warcraft!

And if you've ever been through the Blood Elf starting zone, you know there are plenty of varieties of cat in Azeroth.

[Thanks, Scytherea]

The first of April is upon us again which means that for the rest of the day we need to be prepared for any sort of jokes by Blizzard and our fellow players -- and who knows what we can expect. Back in 2005, Blizzard announced the Pandaran Express. And in 2006, they fooled yours truly with a fake Burning Crusade race announcement. (Hey, they announced it on March 31st -- what were we to think?!) And this year? Well, nothing unusual has come from Blizzard yet -- but the day is still young!

So are you prepared to resist the onslaught of April fools' jokes -- or are you planning on playing some jokes of your own?