Posts with tag flavor-text

I've always imagined the content manager of Wowhead as WoW's version of Star Trek's Majel Barrett, the iconic voice of the stream of data we can't help but consult like an oracle. Like Barrett, she sometimes appears in character, here in the game or there among the community blogosphere, but Perculia's primarily known for her steady grip on the fire hose of data represented by the Wowhead database.

No mere data junkie, Perculia brings a trained art historian's sensibilities to curating the game she loves. Ironically, when Blizzard commemorated her devotion to WoW's data earlier this year by naming an item after her, it was a guildmate who discovered its existence and tweeted the link -- yes, a Wowhead link -- to her.

WoW Insider: Perculia's Peculiar Signet -- congratulations! Tell us how Twitter managed to uncover this news before you did!

Perculia: Thanks! I had just finished posting a daily blog to Wowhead News and was settling down to write about new archaeology changes when one of my friends and guildmates, Esoth, sent me a tweet with the Wowhead link. Half-expecting it to be a broken page that required coding, I was pleasantly surprised to see my name on it! To the best of my knowledge, the item had a different name when we first datamined it, which explains why I didn't notice it at first.

I was super-excited and humbled when I clicked on the link; the following outpouring of congratulations on Twitter was similarly heartwarming. It's a fan's dream come true, one of those things everyone secretly thinks about but it's too abstract to think about practically shooting for. It's a lovely cycle where I was recognized for my contributions to the community, and my work in turn was shaped by my pre-Wowhead experiences in Azeroth.

Blizzard has increasingly programmed NPC conversations into the game as a means of adding flavor to the world and personality to the characters with whom you interact, and some of them are just amazing. In the classic game, these conversations started off very simple, with Stormwind children running around driving everyone crazy with arguments over which misbegotten whelp had stolen the other's doll or something like that. In Outland, you could catch performances of stand-up comedy in the World's End Tavern in Shattrath. By Wrath of the Lich King, mortally wounded NPCs insulted each other from separate bunks in Crusader's Pinnacle, and major lore figures argued about interfaction strife at the Argent Tournament. But I think it's tough to argue that Cataclysm hasn't been a million times better.

For my money, it's tough to beat the flavor conversations you tend to hear in goblin outposts (yeah, I've been on a goblin kick lately), including the one above, which occurs in the aftermath of the Azshara quest Mystery of the Sarcen Stone. Finding blood elves and goblins together is a recipe for comedy either way -- the two races could not be more different -- but this is what happens when the blood elves' preening sense of history runs headlong into the goblins' morally questionable pragmatism.

What's your favorite flavor conversation in the game?

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I love gear.

Heck, I'm a warrior. I'm required to love gear. And even more than gear itself I love gear with something cool extra, something like Ash'kandi. Not only is Ash'kandi pretty freaking awesome, not only does it have one of the best models ever (even this far into WoW's life cycle few 2h weapons have even come close to rivaling Ash'kandi's model) but it has neat flavor text that helps establish the weapon's role in the game world. This is Anduin Lothar's sword. This is the sword of the Lion of freaking Azeroth! Possibly the greatest warrior ever to walk the land and here is his sword!

One of the things I love about the new ICC wing opening, in fact, is discovering that flavor text like that is back. Unfortunately, I also discover that sometimes, model and text do not match up so well. We're going to talk about Lich King loot behind the cut, so if you don't want to know don't go any further.

The last few days I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out why I'm not particularly enjoying Patch 3.1 when I'm doing something besides raiding Ulduar. I should be enjoying it! When I first checked it out on the PTR, I was extremely excited about it. The Argent Tournament especially. The whole jousting deal, the Arthurian themes, the potential for story progression, the whole thing. It looked great! Unfortunately... I'm finding it pretty boring.

The Argent Tournament feels lifeless. Completely and utterly lifeless. I say it all of the time, but patch 2.4 was my favorite patch of World of Warcraft thus far, no contest. Patch 2.4 brought me more joy than even the Wrath launch. Not only did it have content for absolutely every aspect of the game, but it also actually changed the world. Storylines progressed in an in-your-face way. Sure, patch 3.1 moved the Ulduar and Yogg-Saron story forward, but would you know it if you didn't read fansites or watch the patch 3.1 cinematic? What's different? What indicator is there that something new is happening in the Storm Peaks?

Axel on LJ points us to an easter egg on the Official WoW page that I can't help think must be fairly old, but I've never seen it before, so here you go: highlighting text under the Warlock and Warrior listings on the class page reveals some funny flavor text.

The US page seems to have been changed from the original above (as of this writing, under Warlocks it says "hey you found some hidden text, there must be some giant conspiracy here"), but the European page shows the original "cool guy/girl" as a recommended player for Warlocks. At least one commenter on the LJ page says this has been around since day one on the main page, and I wouldn't be surprised -- Blizzard is familiar with leaving secrets on the official page for players.