Posts with tag details

Blizzard provided further details on the much anticipated 3v3 tournament. A mere $20* entry fee per player will give you a shot at the $75,000 grand prize. That's $25,000 a piece (unless you have more players on your team), which is not too shabby. Second place will net your team $30,000 and the third place team will get $15,000. There will also be monetary rewards for regional finalists.

Your entry fee will grant you access to the arena server for the entirety of the six-week qualifying tournament. You will be able to create up to three characters on the server. This tournament will be about skill rather than gear. You may select your weapons and armor from arena and raid epics. You will also be able to select honor-based rewards and enchantments for your items. If you don't like your original selections, respecs and gear will all be free of charge.

We've talked about the happy surprises of Patch 2.3 before, but today I'd like to ask you about some of the tiniest things you notice are different in the game right now, perhaps little bug-fixes or graphical updates -- some kind of change you haven't heard others mention before.

For my part, In the time just before and after Patch 2.3, I was busy working on the Netherwing quests in southeastern Shadowmoon Valley. I was having a great time with them, but a few things annoyed me. As a hunter, my pet wouldn't despawn properly when I summoned the temporary dragon mount that shows up whenever you go to do your daily quests on Netherwing Ledge. Sometimes, when my mount would change from a gryphon to a dragon in mid-flight, and my pet would fall to his death in the chasm below. This has now been fixed! Also I noticed then that everyone who was sitting on their Netherwing mounts on the ground was sitting a little bit tilted off to the side, and now everyone is sitting straight up again! Finally, the Netherwing mounts now trail their glowing nether energy effect as you fly around with them, and it's quite pretty.

Yes, that's a lot of Netherwing details, I know. But all of us notice the changes we happen to be focusing on at the moment, right? What were you focusing on, and what little things did you notice on patch day?

Fresh from the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald comes the news that World of Warcraft, and indeed all massive multiplayer online games, is unethical.

Jonathan Blow, developer of the game Braid, recently spoke at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's FreePlay conference. Some of the things he said about MMO's are interesting, and some of the conclusions he reached seem erroneous to me.

Developers should provide activities that interest players "rather than stringing them along with little pieces of candy so that they'll suffer through terrible game play, but keep playing because they gain levels or new items", he says.

Well, so far so good. I don't really think anyone could disagree with that statement.

Mr Blow believes developers need to think about what their games are teaching players when they reward them for performing certain actions.

"That kind of reward system is very easily turned into a Pavlovian or Skinnerian scheme," he says. "It's considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don't get bored and give up on your game. That's actually exploitation."

Somewhat hyperbolic, but essentially accurate in terms of what the system is doing to get you to keep playing. Is it exploitation? Well, clearly Jonathan thinks so. We'll come back to why I don't agree in a moment.

I love this post on the EU forums: Ahjua complains that as a casual player, it would take him months to grind the items, find the groups, and get the gear necessary to unlock the new Death Knight hero class. With a social life that only lets him play a few hours a night, he'll never get it all done!

Whoops, except that the quest itself hasn't even been invented by Blizzard yet. They haven't said that it requires rep, or gear, or running instances, or really anything at all. We know absolutely nothing about it, and yet this guy feels the need to complain that it's already too hard.

Hopefully, he's just joking (if not, maybe he's just misinformed). But just as I've asked for patience on the PTRs, it's important to realize that everything we heard about this weekend is a long, long way off. In fact, I almost wonder why Blizzard released it so early-- if they've got Zul'Aman, voice chat and guild banks, another raid instance (probably the Sunwell), and maybe even another 5 man coming out before the expansion, why are they trying to get us all excited about Wrath of the Lich King? It's OK to be excited about the new expansion (I am), but it's not OK to pass final judgement on something that hasn't even been created yet. Let Blizzard do their thing, and then when we know details about the quest and what it actually entails-- then it'll be completely fine to complain that it's too hard for casuals.