Posts with tag blue-poster

When I left World of Warcraft, about two years ago, if you wanted to talk to Blizzard, you didn't have many options. You could submit an in-game ticket if you had a problem or post complaints or discussion in the forums and hope for a response. But response time for GMs was typically slow and you could never tell if a Blizzard employee would jump on responding to your forum thread. Having a conversation with a Blizzard employee seemed like a rare thing -- that involved a heck of a lot of luck

And while there's still no way to guarantee a blue response, when I came back to WoW, I was most surprised by how much communicating with Blizzard had changed. These days you can find Blizzard and Blizzard employees on the forums and in-game, of course, but you'll also find them on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Reddit. And they're not just there to talk official Blizzard business (though they certainly answer questions from time to time): you're just as likely to find them chatting and joking, just like anyone else on social networks.

So when you've got a burning question or a game problem that needs addressing, where do you go to talk about it? Do you stick to the classic official channels, or do you launch into a discussion on Twitter?

---

A lot of us lore nerds have been wanting it for a long time, and now we have it: An official place to discuss the lore of the Warcraft universe. Of course, it's technically called the Story Forum, and one of the blue stickies on the forum suggests that this forum is meant to focus on "the publishing division" of Blizzard's creative development (i.e., the novels and manga). Then again, the forum's main welcome sticky states that the forum is for discussing the stories of Warcraft "as told in-game and through the novels, manga, comics, and short stories that Blizzard publishes." So in theory the exact nature of the forum could be considered a bit iffy.

Still, I'm going to go ahead and go by the welcome message and declare it a lore forum. No longer will we have to go searching through pages and pages of flames, rants, and class balance whines to find the lore-based flames, rants, and Garrosh vs. Varian debate threads. Nethaera also revealed that the publishing division plans to look at the Forum discussions to get an idea of what people like and don't like about Warcraft's stories, so if you've been writing an epic rant about Med'an or Rhonin, you may finally have the outlet you've always wanted. You can find the forum here.

If you need extra ammunition before jumping into the discussion yourself, be sure to check out our lore guide, as well as past entries of our Know Your Lore column.

After the jump, you can check out the forum welcome message, as well as some additional words from Nethaera on Blizzard's Creative Development Team and lore resources.

Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the lowdown on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.

Bornakk -- PvP to PvE Realm Conversion: Darrowmere

As part of our continued efforts to balance the World of Warcraft player population across all realms, we will be converting one of our lower-population PvP realms – Darrowmere -- to a Normal PvE realm. For players on Darrowmere, we will be offering Free Character Moves to alternate PvP realms both before and for several weeks after the conversion takes place. This will allow us to continue to support healthy communities on the realms and help new players transition easily into the community.

The conversion will take place on Tuesday, March 9, with the Character Moves opening on March 3 and lasting until April 6. Upon being converted to Normal PvE, Darrowmere will be given the "New Players" flag to ensure an influx of players over the coming weeks.

The following are the destination realms for Free Character Moves off of Darrowmere:
Alterac Mountains of the Nightfall battlegroup is an Eastern time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=1&forumId=68891

Auchindoun of the Retaliation battlegroup is an Eastern time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=75725&sid=1

Malorne of the Vengeance battlegroup is a Central time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11378&sid=1

Vashj of the Whirlwind battlegroup is a Pacific time zone realm
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=36015&sid=1

source

We reported this weekend on Ghostcrawler's self-imposed break from the forums. The response by the majority of the so-called mature fans was quite negative. Many were furious, and rightfully so in my opinion. It appeared that a key source of information for the community was taking leave. Right on the cusp of the Cataclysm alpha/beta, this would have been a terrible time for that to occur. We'd likely be in the dark about changes until they were discovered on the beta/PTR, and even then there would be little to no definitive philosophical discussion about the reasons behind the new content.

Ghostcrawler was apparently touched by the fan support, which you can see both in our post and the forum thread in the role forums. He's come back out and said that he will only be responding to topics he wants, rather than allowing clamoring forum-goers to push him into responding (or not responding).

This has been evident lately in the Shadow Priest QQ going on. When he doesn't respond to what is clearly inappropriate discourse, people get really angry. They think Blizzard is ignoring them, which isn't the case. The role forums are about discussion between players with Ghostcrawler occasionally appearing to offer some insight. Designers read everything on those forums, blue tagged or not.

His exact words, after the break.

Snaboo of Greymane shouted out to the Blizzard posters on the forums. He appreciates that they are being customer focused and social. This elicited positive responses from a handful of blue posters, except Bornakk, who's still grumpy.

Some posters disagreed about the attention the blues pay to the community. That they are slow to respond to "serious" questions or that they seem disrespectful of players. Crygil pointed out that in many cases there are several threads on a particular subject. The blues try to address at least one of them, but aren't able to respond in all of the threads on a single topic.

So there's been a feeling in the air lately that some of the blues have been in a bit of a teasing mood. Sure, that's not neccessarily new, but what is interesting is what exactly they may be teasing us about. For example, here's a recent post in which one Sulmus of Aerie Peak asks for the Greymane Wall to be opened. Zarhym soon jumps in to say that they would be "out of their mind" to open the wall... then follows up with random ellipses. To top it all off, Bornakk and Crygil jump in with silly punctuation of their own.

Now when Alex and I were discussing this the other day, Alex insisted that they were basically admitting that the Greymane wall would be opened, likely in conjunction with the next expansion. He says it's already in the planning stages, and the blues are just waving the knowledge tantalizingly out of sight because they're not allowed to officially announce it yet. Now, at first I wasn't really on board with it, but then I noticed another post Zarhym commented in.

My realm's seen a number of guild instability issues of late, which is something most of us have come to expect with an upcoming expansion. I've found reason to mull over how the virtual world differs from the real world with respect to friendship, backstabbing, greed, betrayal, honor, and how people choose to handle their problems. In my considered opinion it doesn't differ at all, and your experience ingame is largely determined by the network of players assembled around you, whether that alliance is a recognized one in the form of a guild or simply a more informal group of friends.

So, from my own experience and with a hat tip to Pjammer, these are the people you want in your posse for the best possible experience in the game:

We already know that Blizzard is tweaking arena rules to make it much tougher to artificially inflate your rating by win trading or buying high ranked teams in Season 4, but it looks like they're starting to take it one step further, by cracking down on people who indulge in it.

Reports are coming in from the official forums and from other spots around the web of people getting bans or suspensions (generally 72 hours in length) and having their Season 3 arena gear stripped. The bans are even permanent in some cases, such as that of Sinther of Stormscale, whose account was permanently banned when his friend used it to do some win-trading, with the win trading given as the specific reason for his banning. You can read many of these stories and reports in this forum thread.

So when patch 2.4 came out, you might remember a certain line in the patch notes: "Added several new tradeskill items to the new Sunwell Daily faction vendor: Three jewelcrafting recipes to cut gems with spell haste from Dawnstones, Talasite, and Noble Topaz."

Here's the problem: Those recipes actually don't currently exist anywhere in game, or at least haven't found their way to any Jewelcrafters. You can find Quick Dawnstone, Reckless Noble Topaz, and Forceful Talasite on all the WoW item database sites, but the recipes themselves seem to have gone missing, and aren't on Eldara Dawnrunner, nor do they so much as appear to drop from any mob.

Don't worry though, Jewelcrafters, all hope is not lost.

A fairly lengthy thread on the official Bug Report forum today led to the discovery of a problem related to two Rogue skills. Cloak of Shadows and Vanish were both reported by players as simply not working. For whatever reason, rogues were unable to escape the attacks of their opponents in PvP when using these skills.

Reports of problems with Vanish often plague the forums. Most often these issues are caused by client/server latency, as Hortus reminds us, but this time they've identified a separate problem. While not disclosing the nature of the bug, Hortus has informed the rogues in the thread that their feedback has resulted in the discovery of a problem with these two skills and they're currently investigating the issue in hopes of finding a fix.

It's nice to see that players are able to help contribute to fixing the game. If you've had any problems with these skills recently, I'd suggest that you read over the thread and see if your experience adds anything to the discussion.